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Support for the show comes from MongoDB. AI assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. But if your data layer is still a bottleneck, what's the point? Instead of wrestling with rigid schemas or translating data formats, MongoDB's native data model mirrors the language LLMs already speak. It ships at the speed of AI, is ACID compliant, and scales to handle massive Fortune 500 workloads. Developers have a word for that kind of reliability. Actually five words. It's a great frickin database. Start building@mongodb.com AI avoiding your unfinished home
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projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app.
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A
Download Today I'm Neil Apitel, editor in chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we've got the first of a two part series on the systems that run the world. I'm talking with Bart Butler, the CTO of Proton, the company that makes private and secure productivity software.
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B
It's impossible to create a backdoor that can only be used by the good guys. No company is going to go to jail for you.
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A
Often the response is, well, if you change the legal foundation here, we will leave. Yeah. How real is that?
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B
It's dead serious. With all due respect to Swiss authorities and everybody else, I think it would be suicidal to continue down this path.
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Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. This series is presented by Comcast Business.
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B
Hello and welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of trade secrets. I'm your friend David Pearce. Neil Epcel is here. Hello, sir.
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A
Hey, how's it going?
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B
How are you? That was tired. You okay?
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A
I just had this wave of like, I spent the early part of my career at the Verge explaining patents to everyone through Apple, and we're like 15 years in and I know I'm going to spend the next part of this journey explaining trade secrets to people. It's come. We're gonna do it.
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B
Yep.
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A
But that was that wait, like the realization had not occurred to me until just this second. And we're gonna emotionally process that together as a family over the next 90 minutes.
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B
You really had like a literal visceral reaction to the phrase trade Secrets just then. That was. That was really great.
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A
We did copyright, we did patents.
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B
I know we're still doing copyright. I don't know if we actually did copyright. We tried to do copyright really hard.
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A
We've reopened copyright in a meaningful way.
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B
Yeah, we're certainly doing it again. Lots to talk about today. We have a bunch of Apple news. We have Apple vs OpenAI, which happened last week, but we haven't really had a chance to talk about it. Lots to get into there. We have a bunch of gadgets. There's some OnePlus stuff. There's teasers just everywhere for everything. But I think we should start with the Apple betas, which came out this week. I am desperate to know you as America's most steadfast avoider of macOS. Tahoe. Have you. Have you upgraded? Are we on Golden Gate now?
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A
It takes a lot for me to upgrade my Macs. They're both production machines. I should upgrade the MacBook Neo, which I bought for no reason. I will do that. I just literally don't ever use that computer. I own it for no reason. It's cute. That's what it is. It's a Tamagotchi that I have.
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B
It is very charming.
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A
Every now and again I have to charge it, you know, so the Macs are hard for me because I don't. I don't. I don't like screwing with the production setups, especially this Mac, the podcast Mac. We just don't touch that one. I did update the phone, which logically makes no sense because the phone is the thing you take everywhere with you in case of emergency.
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B
I was going to say, not an important device to your smartphone.
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A
Yeah, I should have upgraded the Neo first, but I updated the phone. I'm on the Siri beta. It's good. I think some of the animations in iOS 27 can get toned down. There's a lot of flipping around the screen for no reason.
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B
I know there are Siri in particular. It's always doing stuff. The new Siri look at me, like, all the time.
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A
It's just like, not what I need. Apple always tones that stuff down as they get towards release, so take that with a grain of salt. But it works. And I actually think the screen reading is interesting. I don't know if it's good yet. I know every single person with an Android phone is going to tell you that Gemini could do this forever and it's vastly more useful. And it is. I agree with all of those things. I just. Apple was so far behind and then with the power of Google, they have managed to catch up in some meaningful way.
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B
Yep.
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A
Have you been using it?
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B
I have, I've been using it since the first developer beta. Oh, you're way more generally recommend. I've had a really interesting experience with Siri AI in particular, which is that uh, it has felt sort of like all of these new LLM based smart home systems in that the ceiling of what they can do has gone way up. Right. Like they're. David Amell wrote a great piece for us about the new Siri AI and did the thing where I think his example was basically like I'm, I'm looking at a Spotify page that I know they're going on tour, go figure out when they're going on tour and add the ticket sales date to my calendar. And that's, that's like a multi step AI process that I think is ripped basically directly from a Google demo, which is very funny. But it works like that thing works. The ceiling of Siri has gone way up.
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A
It kind of worked for him. He had to say, he had to say magic words in the right order. David's piece is great by the way. Also shout out. David's joining us for like six weeks or so while Allison is out on leave. But I encourage everyone to read that piece because it is true the ceiling is higher. If you issue the right incantation at the right time and, and the system understands it in the right way, you can in fact trigger a multi step agentic workflow.
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B
Yes.
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A
Neat. And then if you don't, it's like I don't know what you're talking about.
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B
Right. So ceiling super high. But basic things that Siri used to do very reliably. So far I have found some of them to be actually substantially less reliable. So like a thing I do all the time, if I'm out walking the dog or in the car or whatever and I need, I have a reminder or just something I want to write down in such a way that I will get back to it. I use Apple reminders for that all the time. It's just like my inbox of stuff on my phone. Um, so I'm constantly saying like, you know, remind me in three hours to switch the laundry though I did this morning, remind me this afternoon to check the dryer vent. Like that's just a thing that happened this morning because I need to check the dryer vents. And that is worse. It is, it is noticeably worse than it was in the past because, and we've talked about this many Times Right. Like it used to be, all of these systems were essentially a series of really elaborate if then statements. And they didn't work for anything except the things that they worked for. But the things that they worked for, they worked for. And, and so you, you learn to understand the boundaries of the thing. And if it was all I needed to do is turn on my lights, it, it would turn on my lights. It wouldn't do anything else, but it would turn on the lights. And I think we're, we're doing a little bit of throwing that stuff out in order to do more complicated stuff with Siri also. And so I've, I've found like I, it. It still seems to set timers fine. That so far has gone very well. But it does things like constantly ask me did you say this or did you say this? And they haven't yet solved the. It needs to start immediately listening again to get your answer. So you have to. I have to dig my phone out and press the button again to make it work. So there's just like all these little things. All the basic interactions of Siri are worse, but the abilities of Siri are vastly better. Maybe.
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A
I mean I hit you with the maybe and we're in the beta and it's like not fair to over judge it. And that's sure we'll see what happens in a few months when it comes out for real.
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B
I.
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A
That replacement of the predictable deterministic system with the vastly, potentially more powerful stochastic Parrot system.
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B
Right.
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A
You can see those edges everywhere all the time. I'll give an example from a totally different product category. We have a Cadillac Vista, a Cadillac ev and it had Google Assistant in it. Like the whole thing runs Google built in. There's no CarPlay which the only thing that happens in the Facebook group for this car is someone being like, Where's CarPlay? The only thing people talk about. So they replaced Google Assistant with Gemini. And okay, here's my favorite example of this. I could probably write a PhD thesis about this specific button in the car. It doesn't have a physical garage door open and close button. There's not one in the headliner. Wherever it's a button on the screen. So it's in the car software. Right?
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B
Right.
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A
You push the button on the screen and it opens and closes the garage door. With Google Assistant, I could just say out loud as we were backing out of the driveway, hey, Google, close the garage door. And this is gold until you've been so lazy that as you are literally backing out of the driveway. You are no longer pressing a button. You're just saying, close the garage. You're like, I'm the king of the world. Like, I have a butler now. Like, whatever. That feeling is amazing. And I have asked executives at gm, I've asked executives at Google. My Google just went off. The garage is already closed. Google. I knew it would happen.
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B
That took a full, like, 10 seconds, too. We're doing great over here, guys.
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A
Anyway, so I've asked executives at Google, I've asked executives at gm, I asked Dieter, what's happening when I say, close the garage door. Is that Google Assistant going to the cloud, by the way? I asked Dieter just to annoy him. He's like, we don't talk about working, but is that going to Google Assistant in the cloud? Because Google Home knows about the garage door opener. It's in that. Or is this thing locally pushing the button on the screen? Because what it should do is just push the button on the screen. Okay. They upgraded to Gemini, which theoretically has like, an MCP server inside the car. Right. Like when you. When you would tell Gemini to change the, you know, the climate control, it literally pops up a bubble that's, like, connecting the climate system. Like, yikes. It wants you to believe that it's, like, operating the car right now. Gemini is like, I don't have permission to do that. It's not secure enough. And I'm like, dude, I'm in the car.
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B
I am the security here. Like, we're good.
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A
Like, here I am. I can see the button. Anybody in this car can push that button. They can just reach forward and push that button. But it's definitely going to the cloud. And it's saying, I cannot accept a cloud command to open. And that's just the brittleness. Like, we've replaced a system that should be able to do all the things you expected it to do with a newly architected system that is simulating what it should be able to do or what it used to be able to do, but actually needs to find all kinds of new pathways to do it. And Siri, the garage rep, is really stupid because I just can push the button. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. But that experience and then having the new Siri for a few days is exactly the same experience. Right? The AIs want to tell you they can do anything at all, and they might have the capability, but in reality, the barriers and roadblocks to actually executing are all over the place.
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B
Yeah, I think that's right. And in A funny way, it is not all that different from the very beginning, early experience people had with Siri, like a generation ago, where there's a set of things that you're like, oh, my God, I can't believe it could do that. That is like, sincerely, moments of. That is incredible. And it, like, Siri has done for me some personal context stuff where it knows what's on my phone and it can find things in my email and it can find things in, like, I can be like, oh, what's the. What's the door code for the Airbnb I'm staying at this weekend? And it can. It just goes and finds that and tells it to me. And that is incredible. Like, that's a literal thing I did and it worked and it's awesome. But for every one of those, I say, remind me to check the dryer vents. And it goes, did you say call the Laura friends? And I'm like, no, I didn't. I super didn't. Siri, what are we doing? And so I think the risk here, as always with Siri, is going to be that people run into the edges without understanding what those edges are. Right. Which is like, when, when all these things first came out, it was pretty easy to understand what it couldn't and couldn't do very quickly. And I actually think in a certain way, the answer to what is this thing good and bad at? Is vastly more complicated now, in part because it's good at so many more things.
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A
It's good at so many more things, but it's not predictably good at anything. Right. And that's just a weird one. There are examples of this just again across ecosystems where, like, search my. I'm late turning in the draft of the decoder book. So I asked Siri, like, go find this contract and see how late I am and how much trouble I'm in. And it, like, did it, you know, like, the answer is, I'm not under arrest yet. But everyone is very worried about the timeline we're gonna get there. Siri didn't say that, by the way. It was just like, you're late. It's good at that when it can be good at that, right? When there's like a string of text it can go look for, or it's indexed all the stuff in the right way. And then there's. I think Apple's going to run into this much more than Google does. A bunch of Google AI technology doing weird stuff is par for the course. Apple shipping this Siri to millions upon millions of People, hundreds of millions of people. And it being rough around the edges is a dangerous zone. And I think that's probably why they waited so long. Yeah, but I'm very curious to see how that broad response is, because enough of it is different. And you mentioned a generation ago with Alexa, people very quickly figured out what it was good at and what it wasn't good at and they stopped trying to do anything else.
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B
Right.
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A
And I have no idea where that boundary is for this Siri once, you know, hundreds of millions of people have it.
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B
Yeah, it's, it's going to be really interesting. And especially given all of the work that's happening with app intents and stuff. Like, I think more than usual, the fate of Siri AI is going to actually be about developers. Because if Instagram can figure out how to plug into Siri in a way that is predictable and useful in that way, that changes things. I don't know that I have.
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A
Instagram will never do that.
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B
Probably not.
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A
Instagram doesn't have an iPad app.
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B
Yeah, that's okay, fair point. But if, if, if Uber can figure out how to do it in a way that's practical and useful, such that I can say, you know, hey Siri, get me an Uber. And it, it works semi reliably, like you can start to turn those things on for people in a way that becomes habit forming really fast. So I'm, I'm actually, I'm still optimistic about what Siri AI could be, but it is, uh, I have been frustrated in the ways that it has actually backtracked in some small ways.
- [15:02]
A
Yeah, the David's again, David Amell's piece is great. Uh, the thing that jumped out to me, I actually saw David in the office, we talked about it for a minute. App developers on iOS are more excited about this than you would expect because small app developers know that people never open their apps.
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B
Oh, that's interesting.
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A
So their hope is that if by integrating with Siri AI it will surface their apps more often, they will get more usage and something good will happen.
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B
That's a really interesting point. That's a good, that's a good theory. I hope that pans out a lot
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A
of optimism in the ecosystem there.
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B
Indeed. You know, where there's not optimism. How's that for a segue in the Apple and OpenAI legal teams these days? We should talk about this lawsuit, right? It's a week old. I still feel like we need to talk about it because I'm still wrapping my head around it. Basically the short version of this lawsuit is Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly basically creating an elaborate system by which Apple employees would quit their job and take material confidential information to OpenAI. There are a couple of specific people named in the suit. There are a couple of OpenAI adjacent companies like IO Jony Ives hardware startup named in the suit. But the idea is essentially there are a bunch of people and a bunch of ways in which hundreds of Apple employees stole information from Apple and took it to OpenAI. I feel like the caveat here is this is the first filing in a lawsuit. There will be presumably much time and much discovery over the next period of time. But you and I have both read this lawsuit. What do you. What do you make of what Apple is alleging here?
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A
This is where I offer you the big sigh. And we talk about trade secret law. The first thing that is absolutely important to say. Every single one of these big tech companies has realized that the complaint in the lawsuit is a thing to be written for the general public.
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B
Yeah.
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A
The audience for this complaint is not the judge. It's not the jury. It's you and me and everybody listening and everybody who might read it and everybody who might write a blog post or do a dramatic reenactment on TikTok. They have all figured out this first step, that the complaint is a narrative. And they all need to sell a narrative. The Department of Justice and the Biden administration figured out their antitrust complaint against Apple needed to be a narrative. We have talked to those officials about that specific thing in that specific way because everybody understands that the technical requirements of the law are irrelevant to the vibes around lawsuits. It's just the way it goes. So Apple wrote this to be read. It is worth reading. It's a fun read. It's a heist movie.
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B
Yeah.
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A
They lay out how a heist was taking place in specific with a bunch of characters. Trang Tan, I think, is the main character. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has some reporting that says even at Apple he was known for playing fast and loose. And the quote is flying too close to the sun.
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B
Interesting. Okay.
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A
Which is pretty good. There's other folks in there. There's a guy who, like, literally connected to the servers when he had left Apple and was downloading all this stuff. And then the problem is the story can be whatever the story is. And it is certain that OpenAI will craft a compelling narrative in return when they file their reply. And it'll look something like Apple was late to AI and to be late and catch up. They're trying to stop us. The Winners like, you know what they're going to say and they're going to write it all out. So we have to wait for that. And then in the middle of that is the actual technical requirements of the law. And I'll just make another OpenAI comparison. We had Musk versus Altman, and that stretched for what, nine, ten months from the first complaints being filed to a jury trial. And then what happened? The statute of limitations had most of the case thrown out.
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B
Right? True.
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A
The technical requirements of the law is actually what won that case for OpenAI in big, meaningful ways. There's other parts of it where they won on the substance, but it was a statute of limitations got most of the case thrown out. Okay. We just have to put ourselves in this framework. The thing that is just particularly funny to me about this is Apple established the boundaries of copyright law and tech against Microsoft in the 90s and 2000s with like the famous look and feel lawsuit where they tried to Copyright the way macOS looked, and they sued Microsoft for having Windows copy it. They sort of lost and they sort of won, but they mostly lost, right? Like, Windows looks like the Mac sure does.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's the way it goes. And when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, Microsoft paid a bunch of money to Apple and they, they tossed out all these claims and they said, we're settling this and moving on because this is dumb. Okay. Well, a bunch of years later, Samsung made a phone that looked an awful lot like the iPhones. And Apple filed a bunch of patent lawsuits against Samsung, against Motorola, everyone except Google, by the way. They did not want to be in a fight with Google over this stuff. They filed the lawsuits against the oems and they fought those to the death. And at one point, they were kind of losing. And Tim Cook was at a code conference and I literally asked him, like from the audience, there's video of me asking him, why are you doing this? And he said, I think the patent licensing schemes for 3G standards are a little out of whack, and this is how we're going to fix them. And I'm like, you're really doing this to fix patent licensing schemes? And he was like, sure. And it was just like, very obviously that. Like, no, he was just mad. And that was cover to fight the fights. Right? And they, they fought them to a bitter end. Right. The patent on slide to unlock. Again, we made an entire video of this. You can watch me being a baby at mwc. I walked around to every booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and did slide to Unlock on every single Android phone and said this is how they're getting around the slide to unlock patent. Yep. And there was technical requirements there, and there are technical requirements now, but the ecosystem responded. Samsung paid what, a billion dollars and essentially got away with it. And if you're Samsung, paying a billion dollars to make the Galaxy line of smartphones is totally worth it. Correct, Totally worth it. So Apple filed this massive intellectual property lawsuit. They upset the ecosystem. For however long they upset the ecosystem. And the end result was there are Android phones. I don't know if you've looked around, there's quite a lot of them.
- [21:20]
B
Yeah, that turned out okay.
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A
So. Okay, so in the 90s, we had a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft based on copyright. I'll point out Windows and Microsoft continue to exist. In the 2000s, 2010s, we had a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Samsung based on patent. Seems worth noting that Samsung and Android continue to exist.
- [21:40]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [21:40]
A
And here we are in the mid-2020s, we have a massive intellectual property lawsuit against OpenAI based in trade secret. Now, the third one, it seems a safe bet that AI will continue to exist. I would be 5050 on whether OpenAI continues to exist.
- [21:55]
B
That was going to be. My next question is, is. I think it's obvious this is not existentially terrifying for the AI business. Boy, does it feel like of all of the companies to not want to be at war with at this moment, I mean, frankly, OpenAI is kind of at war with everybody else in some way already or all the time. Uh, yeah, I mean, this is. OpenAI is, is permanently making hundred billion dollar deals and also in giant fights with everybody all the time.
- [22:22]
A
OpenAI keeps his war with his own executives. They keep leaving.
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B
Yeah, but this is just, this is the last thing OpenAI needs. And I will say, I think one thing that is different about what you just described is Apple has picked a lot of fights about products. This is fundamental. Like, so far, unless OpenAI is very close to shipping a thing that looks an awful lot like the iPhone, this is not about products.
- [22:46]
A
It's about what manufacturing techniques and what Apple has in the pipeline. Sure. It's about products to come. It's about how to make products.
- [22:54]
B
But I, but I just mean even if you, if you paint all of this for Apple in the most sort of negative light and you're like, okay, this company feels threatened and they throw a bunch of their lawyers at their threats to try and make them go away in one way or another, this doesn't feel exactly like that to me, I don't, I don't get the sense that Apple is threatened by OpenAI. And, and there's certainly no Earth shatteringly fabulous AI device that is sitting there threatening Apple at this moment. Unless again, there's something currently being manufactured that is going to blow everybody's minds and we just don't know about it yet.
- [23:26]
A
Well, I think that's the whole game here, right? Apple knows that AI might be an input mechanism that creates a new class of products. Certainly. Jony, I've went to go work with OpenAI to create a new class of products based on this new input mechanism. Johnny, I loves the new input mechanism. He loves a click wheel, he really does. Right, Loves the multitouch, the scroll wheel on the Apple watch, as we all know, revolutionized the entire world. Everybody loves spinning in a circle on the Apple TV remote. I mean the culture really rotated around that one. But Johnny, I like, loves this. So if you're Apple, you're like, okay, he's hired all of our designers, he's hired a bunch of our best manufacturing people. It's like 400, 500 people that they've taken over there. They know what's in our pipeline and they know our suppliers, they know how we do things. And, and now they're trying to steal our stuff. We have evidence at least one of them is trying to steal our stuff. Right? We have evidence at least one of them is trying to steal our stuff. Okay, what are we going to do about that? And you can't file a copyright lawsuit because we don't know what they've taken. It might not be code and they certainly haven't like redeployed the code. It isn't a patent because there are no products yet. So there's no patent infringement. They haven't make, to infringe a patent you have to make, use or sell something, right? So we haven't done anything yet. There's no patent infringement. You're left with trade secrets. And you know, trade secrets are pretty fuzzy. The definition of a trade secret is like, I'm real fuzzy on this. Someone checked me with AI. But the trade secret, as far as I remember is it has to be something with economic value because your competitors don't have it.
- [24:55]
B
Right?
- [24:56]
A
It can't be known, it can't be like public information. And then the really fuzzy one and I, I'm going to end up having to do so much trade secret. This is where the big psy came from. I'm going to do so much trade secret research you have to take reasonable measures to keep it a secret.
- [25:12]
B
This is all over the lawsuit, by the way. Like those three things are all over the lawsuit.
- [25:16]
A
Those are the three elements of a trade secret.
- [25:17]
B
Yeah. A huge amount of this complaint against OpenAI is Apple explaining all of the things it does to try to protect
- [25:24]
A
itself because it's written for the general public. Right. So it has to explain the technical foundation of the law so it can say, and OpenAI went around this stuff.
- [25:32]
B
Right.
- [25:33]
A
And again, Apple pushed copyright law to the limit with Microsoft. It pushed patent law to the limit with Samsung. We're about to be in the middle of Apple pushing trade secret law to the limit. If you worked at Apple and you know how they make the iPhone screen and then you get another job, you can probably help people make an iPhone screen. And if you, particularly if you work not for Apple but you work for Foxconn in China, there might be some supplier agreement. But I don't know if you've looked around, it turns out Foxconn makes things that look like the iPhone screen for lots of other people now, because that is the entire Chinese manufacturing ecosystem and supply chain. And there's books about it. Right. Apple in China is what Patrick McGee. There's literally books about it. You can go read it and you're like, this is just going to happen, Apple, whether they sue OpenAI or not. So again, the lawsuit is great to read. I just look at Apple being like they're going to bring everything to bear to push the cutting edge of trade secret law in their direction. And other big companies that made a lot of money were able to essentially fight them to a draw.
- [26:41]
B
Yeah.
- [26:42]
A
OpenAI is not a big company. It issues a new memo about needing to focus in calling a code red every six weeks on the dot when another executive leaves.
- [26:51]
B
Yes.
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A
And its revenue model is totally uncertain. And up until now, the revenue model has been we're going to compete with Google in search in the consumer market, and we're going to put out a bunch of new devices to compete with Apple by hiring Jony. I've the guy who made Apple devices, what they are to compete with Apple in the consumer space. And Apple's like, what if we killed you?
- [27:09]
B
So you really think it's that simple? This is Apple essentially trying to kill OpenAI in the cradle.
- [27:15]
A
I think. Well, I think Apple hates anything being stolen. I think they, they're the things aren't being stolen by Foxconn or an ecosystem of Chinese companies. They're being stolen by an American company that poached its most well known design executive who then poached a bunch of other stuff.
- [27:30]
B
And it is like deep in the DNA of that company to have an emotional response to that, like over and over. If you take some information out of Apple park, that is maybe the thing that is most likely to quickly bring the full bear of that company down upon you.
- [27:45]
A
Yeah, I mean they are absolutely nuts about security. I left my jacket at Apple park at wwc and one part of the thing and I wanted to just walk from where I was back to the seat I was in and they're like, we're going to have to send four people with you. And I was like, it's a path. Like I can just see the path.
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B
Yeah.
- [28:01]
A
And I just left the jacket there. I was like, this is too much production for me to find a $15, probably the right call denim jacket I bought 10 years ago. And I was like, I just don't want to do this. But that, that's where Apple is. They. I just to put it in that framework, the, the merits of the case are not in this complaint. The merits of the case won't be an OpenAI's reply. It'll be in this long process we're about to go through.
- [28:22]
B
There's also a lot of reaction so far that has said this in, in trade secrets term is a relatively benign set of trade secrets accusations.
- [28:29]
A
But is Apple going to turn the heat up all the way and get themselves in front of a jury and be like, we're at Apple, the company you love. Here's OpenAI, a company in the AI industry which all of you hate and which is foundationally built on unauthorized taking of information. And Apple's the company where artists love to show off how they use Macs to make the songs you've always loved the most. Hey, did you know this music video was shot entirely on iPhone? Like, you know what's going to happen here? Apple is going to bring the full weight of its cultural capital to bear on OpenAI as a proxy for how much stuff the AI industry has taken from people without compensation or permission. And whether or not it's a benign set of trade secrets or whether it's the full catalog of YouTube music on behalf of Suno. OpenAI is going to stand for all of it in this lawsuit.
- [29:18]
B
Interesting. So would you handicap this as likely to go to ground in a real way? Like, is this, is this the kind of thing somebody writes, are checking it all goes away? Or is Apple gunning for we want
- [29:30]
A
to do this in public if OpenAI had a lick of sense, it would write a check and make this go away.
- [29:35]
B
I agree with that.
- [29:36]
A
But does Apple want a check? Does Apple need a check? Does that mean trust OpenAI to keep the promises it's making as it hands over said check? No. So, and I think OpenAI does not want to write that. They want to prove that they did nothing wrong. Because probably they also have the same view of this, which is this is just the normal course of business. Yeah, right. We hired a bunch of people and said, what are you working on? What do you know? Do you know how to make an AI gadget? Because we don't. Right. And they're going to want to fight this to the end.
- [30:07]
B
I mean, to be fair, do you know how to make an AI gadget? Bring us parts from the office to your job interview. Not a normal course of doing business. If that is in fact what happened.
- [30:16]
A
Look, I've been running a small AI hardware startup on the side, and I'm not saying I didn't try it.
- [30:24]
B
Listen, it's good getting if you can get away with it. You know what I mean?
- [30:27]
A
Rather, unfortunately, I've only talked to people who used to work at Humane, so bit of a problem. But yeah, I think they're going to take this one on the ground. This is years and it's years and then years of Appeal and whether OpenAI is stable enough or has the finances enough to just absorb it the way that Samsung could just absorb it and then pay a billion dollars and be like, that was totally worth it. Wide open question.
- [30:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, this one. I suspect we will hear a lot more. We have not, as you said, meaningfully heard a response from OpenAI. We got a comment from OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri last week who said, quote, we have no interest in other companies trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere. Which is just the least you can possibly say in a statement to the Verge about this particular issue.
- [31:11]
A
Yeah, especially when the, you know, the claims and the complaint are like, dude, downloaded all the presentations about how to make circuit boards.
- [31:19]
B
Right.
- [31:19]
A
And it's like, well, maybe you did have an interest in other people.
- [31:24]
B
Yeah, yeah. We're going to come back to this a lot, but for now let's move on because we should talk about gadgets. There's actually an OpenAI gadget worth talking about. So let's get to that. But first, let's take a break.
- [31:36]
A
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- [32:49]
B
This is advertiser content from IBM Cold
- [32:53]
A
Take when it comes to quantum computing,
- [32:56]
B
if you need a million qubits to
- [32:58]
A
calculate anything, it sounds like you need
- [33:01]
B
a quantum computer the size of a football field.
- [33:03]
A
So why are we even trying? My name is Olivia Lanes. I am the global lead for content and education at IBM Quantum. So you will not need a quantum computer the size of a football field. The quantum chip is really, you know,
- [33:21]
B
the size of a stamp.
- [33:23]
A
So the chip itself is never going
- [33:24]
B
to be the size of a football field.
- [33:26]
A
What could be a very large football
- [33:29]
B
is all of the infrastructure that goes
- [33:31]
A
around cooling it, housing the chip, and controlling it. IBM has really been, I think the biggest pioneer in terms of making this technology accessible.
- [33:42]
B
IBM has deployed at this point over
- [33:46]
A
90 quantum computers worldwide.
- [33:49]
B
So if we talk about scaling, I will just say we have a plan.
- [33:54]
A
We have what it takes, engineering and science wise, to make these computers work and to build them up to the scale that we know they will be useful. If you would like to learn more, you can do so@IBM.com quantum bonjour compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator.
- [34:14]
B
How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beach fronts and wait, I'M not done. Stop cutting me up. All right, we're back. We have just a slew of gadget leaks to talk about, but let's start with this OpenAI gadget.
- [34:50]
A
Right?
- [34:50]
B
So this idea of OpenAI's big hardware play has been looming for a while. They released a device this week for Codex that everybody's like, this is the first opening. It's not. This is like a teeny tiny brand integration with a company called Work Louder that makes keyboards. I don't want to talk about that. But there was reporting from Bloomberg that the thing coming out first is going to be a no screen, but sensor and camera having smart speaker, that this is going to be OpenAI's big first device and a ChatGPT thing for presumably your home, but it'll also have a rechargeable battery, smart home controls. This thing seems so incredibly unfocused to me. It's like Alexa, but you can pick it up and carry it around and it has a camera on it, but no screen.
- [35:35]
A
I just want everyone to stop and imagine a team at OpenAI building a full featured smart home platform.
- [35:45]
B
Listen, Matter has solved all of this for us. It's no problem.
- [35:49]
A
I just. What? Just like, what are you doing, man? Google hasn't built a full featured home platform. They've been trying for years. I don't know if anyone has ever looked at the Google home app. Sure. I don't even. That thing doesn't even look vibe coded. A computer would have more coherent and crisp ideas about how to organize that app than whatever it is that Google ships in Google.
- [36:11]
B
It's really true. Fine.
- [36:15]
A
I think based on the constraints of the market, this is the only piece of hardware opening I could ship.
- [36:23]
B
Why do you say that?
- [36:25]
A
We just run down the Meta Glasses problem that we run down every week. If you want to have an AI device that is consistently doing things for you that isn't a phone. And I, I think for a lot of reasons OpenAI cannot make a phone.
- [36:38]
B
I think it's going to, it's going to have. I just want to be on record. I think it will make a thing that is. They may not call it a phone, but it will very obviously be a phone.
- [36:45]
A
A lot of people are about to make phones for that Instagram. That's. Yes, I'm, I'm, I, I'll put. Yeah, that's where my stake is. A lot of people are going to back their way into making phones on Instagram and then realize that they've shipped Windows Phone and then we're all going to see how long it takes for them to realize they shipped Windows Phone. Yes, but if you don't want to ship a phone, you're like another form factor. You're competing with the fact that people have a phone. You have to be smaller than a phone, which means you need less battery, but you still need connectivity, which means you still need a data plan, which means you still need to run that battery down. You still need to decide what happens locally, or if your device is useless without a connection of any kind, which means you need to put processing in RAM and whatever. Your costs have already begun to skyrocket and now you're oneplus and you've gone out of business in the United States. It's just anything that moves is hard for that reason, especially if you want to put cameras and sensors and all that other stuff on it. So, of course we're going to take it home, plug it into the wall. Absolutely. Reduce the challenges of mobility, let whatever processor run as hot as it might need to run so it can do whatever it needs to do locally. And have a fixed connection over your Wi Fi to OpenAI servers, which at least now is solved. Yeah, right. The connectivity issue is solved. If your WI fi goes down, everyone knows nothing works. Right. But I'm on a plane. My device is useless. Unacceptable.
- [38:01]
B
Sure.
- [38:01]
A
Okay. Now we've made an Alexa, right? We've made an alexa device or HomePod or whatever. And then you've got to build the ecosystem around it that does all the other stuff around it, including the smart home ecosystem, because of course, you want to turn off the lights and play music, which are the number one and number two things people do on these devices. Oh, set a timer. And unclear if ChatGPT can reliably count to a hundred, let alone set a timer that operates consistently. So here we go. This is the only solution. And whether or not the ChatGPT platform is being built to work in this environment and these constraints and solve these problems, or whether they are totally focused on writing code and revamping the entire Mac app to be focused on writing code and whatever healthcare initiative they're doing, this is a lot of spaghetti to throw at the wall. And there's no chance that any OpenAI engineer has been tasked with build a full featured smart home platform that can compete with Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa and Home Assistant, which will be every nerd's fallback for this and is happy about it. Right. If you're an OpenAI engineer and you're like, I work at the hottest startup on earth and they're like, make the lights turn on, off, go deal with the matter implementation. Like I quit. Like I'm going to go work in anthropic like everybody else.
- [39:23]
B
I think this existing next to what they've been doing to the ChatGPT app is super fascinating to me because the, the new ChatGPT app, the so called super app is trash. Everybody hates it. It's poorly designed, it doesn't run well. It took a native app and made it a non native app. Like it sucks. It is universally disliked as an attempt to put all of these things together yet again. OpenAI demonstrating it has lots of ability to make very good frontier models and absolutely no product sense. Like this company just cannot figure out how to put this technology in front of people in a way that they like. The only thing it has done is copy Claude a couple of times. Claude code worked and they said, oh, we'll do codecs. And that worked. Like there's just not a lot of evidence that this company knows how to figure out these new kinds of things that you're talking about. But the thing that is so interesting about that app is it kind of deprecates chat. It is, it is very codex centric. The new ChatGPT app and the idea that they're, they're leaning into, okay, we think our technology is for tools. Right. This is not a thing to hang out with. We're getting past the it's novel to talk to a chatbot faz and that just burns money. Anyway. Let's give enterprises enterprise tools. That is clearly the business for this company. That's the business for all of these companies, at least for now and possibly forever. So then to put that next to this, the only thing I can think of is like we talk a lot about New York versus California. Right. I think if you are in or near the OpenAI offices, it might be very possible to convince yourself that a lot of people do just want to sit and talk to their agents all day. That like this is a, this is a thing that is running rampant around startups all over Silicon Valley. The idea of that being something mainstream enough to be a really sort of meaningful hardware play seems dead wrong to me.
- [41:21]
A
Yeah, it's just, it's the same as Siri, it's brittle.
- [41:25]
B
Yeah.
- [41:25]
A
So if your whole idea is to make a beautiful piece of hardware and it will have great far field microphones and whatever we're going to do with the battery to make it portable around your house and then the core Technology in the back end is ChatGPT is there. Well, everyone already knows how that thing is going to work. Like, I don't, I don't have to describe it to you. It's going to be broken in very specific ways. And then when you're like, why'd you do that? It's like, oh, my God, you're so right. You know, like,
- [41:53]
B
that's a great point. Yeah, right.
- [41:55]
A
Like you can just put your phone on the table and have this experience today.
- [41:58]
B
Yes. That we, we have these things. Like, everybody who is like, oh, it's an Alexa. We have Alexas. People have this experience. We have a decade of this experience. And people play music and they set timers and I think what, what even Google and Amazon have run into over the last 12 months is the idea that we're going to plug an LLM into. Into it and suddenly unlock vast new kinds of consumer behavior is not happening. It's just not happening. It's. It's actually slightly worse at turning on the lights. It can answer more complicated questions. That's great. So as a. As a sort of simple information retrieval tool. Great, fine. ChatGPT is not going to win that particular game. It's also less sophisticated in its hardware than Google because Google's been at this a longer time. So, like, what race is there to win? Unless you assume there is this giant group of people out there who desperately want an easier way to talk to ChatGPT all day, and I just don't think that exists.
- [42:59]
A
Well, they do, but they think it's their girlfriend. Kevin Roose, come on down. I'm sorry, buddy. We are. We are friends. I'm just. He knows I tell this shit. I mean, maybe everyone's gonna think we're being overly cynical. And I'm confident we will get those notes from people who think we're being overly cynical. That cynicism is probably born of the fact that we started the Verge at the dawn of the smartphone revolution. And the questions about this new class of devices are exactly the same questions about new smartphone platforms and new operating systems, but maybe with slightly different applications. So when the juju Tablet came out.
- [43:38]
B
Oh, God.
- [43:39]
A
Remember the juju Tablet? Of course, the Crunch Pad. No one remembers this stuff. It ran a thing called Fusion os and it was going to be a. Going to be a revolution. And, boy, did that cause a lot of problems for us as gadget reviewers, including one threatened lawsuit. And we would say, are you going to build an email client? Is your email client going to be as good as Gmail. Right. Because I'm not going to switch away from Gmail as my email provider. And Google made native apps for the other phones. Is your email client going to be as good as Google's native client? Because they're not going to ship a client for your dumb idea. And then these products would die and you would run into, are you going to build an email client? It suddenly becomes this like, defining question for a new generation of smartphones. Okay, are you gonna, Are you gonna have Instagram hate it or love it? Not having Instagram killed Windows Phone people would get those phones and they would say, there's this app I want and it wouldn't be there.
- [44:38]
B
Yeah.
- [44:39]
A
And Microsoft spent a lot of money on app developers. They try to bribe what at the time was known as Facebook into making an Instagram client. They just didn't do it. They had no interest in this. And then nobody wanted a Windows Phone Palm Pre, like down the line, Right? Like, all these things killed new smartphone platforms over and over and over again because they could not meet the table stakes. I'm telling you, for this class of devices. Can you turn the lights on in the kitchen? Is going to be table stakes. Do you have a Spotify app? Do you have a Spotify integration that reliably works? Yeah, and if I don't have Spotify, do you have Apple Music? And if I don't have Apple music, Do you have YouTube music? And if I am an insane person, do you have Tidal? Are you playing Tidal? Losslessly? I have a Sonos system. Can you play Tidal over my Sonos system? Because you're an all powerful AGI robot and all these devices are on my network and you have my credentials and I expect you to just do it. And the answer in every case is going to be no one at OpenAI wants to work on these problems. Oh, I don't think they're stupid. I don't think anybody wants to work on these problems. I think they want to work on true, but AGI, I think they want to work on healthcare. Like, sure.
- [45:47]
B
But it is also true that, like, that some of those things already exist. MCP solves some of those problems. Some of chat GPT's own, you know, integrations solve that problem. Like will, will your Chat GPT smart speaker be able to connect to Spotify? I'm so confident the answer to that will be yes. Will it do a good job?
- [46:05]
A
I'm not confident Google Home can connect to Spotify.
- [46:08]
B
Well, so this is what I was gonna say is you connect to Spotify Is Spotify going to want that to be Chat GPT talking to the Spotify database? Or is it going to be chatgpt talking to the Spotify chatbot that talks to the Spotify? Like, is this product going to work
- [46:22]
A
well and is any of that going to generate enough revenue to be worthwhile to open AI? A company that is lighting money on fire every single day and has no plans to stop. Right.
- [46:33]
B
I mean, this is, this is my thing is, I think on an ongoing basis ChatGPT technology continues to get better. Like GPT Live, the new voice model, which will presumably be behind this is quite good. It, it is, it. It takes turns more naturally, it's more natural to talk to. It doesn't sort of interrupt you and let you interrupt it in weird ways. Like it, it feels better to talk to. I think the idea that that is enough just falls on its face as soon as you put this device in my house for all the reasons that you're talking about. Cause it needs to do things, these things. It's like, like I, I feel like all I talk about with AI is how many things like give great demo and are bad products and, and this is the kind of thing that, yes, there are people who just Enjoy talking to ChatGPT as an end unto itself. I am, I am on record as thinking that is bad for everyone and the world and society, but I understand that those people exist and those people will probably get great utility out of having a thing they can just sort of yammer away to as they walk around the living room. Fine. That is tiny next to the number of people who need this thing to do something. And they will need it to, in fact to do lots of things. And they will expect it to do lots of things. And I just, I'm with you in the sense that I have a hard time seeing how that happens.
- [47:47]
A
And consumers have no economic incentive to overcome failure. Right? Right. Regular people in their homes, they ask Lex to do something, they can't do it, they will never ask it again. They will, they will give up. And they did. Like, we have the data, we, we have the experience. They just gave up on Alexa in meaningful ways outside of timers and music. Okay, in the enterprise context, you keep saying AI is business software. In the enterprise context, there's tons of incentive to overcome failure. We were watching a TikTok clip today. Like, ad agencies are like, we're going to automate all of our meta ad spend with cloud MCP servers. And like, maybe that didn't work for a while. It certainly works now. And that is true. Like, the Internet is automated in massive ways. With AI, businesses are getting automated because the incentive to overcome the failure and the rocky starts and to keep plugging at it. Everyone can see the efficiency gain. Everyone can see the business results. There's a lot of incentive to overcome the failure. A regular person is like, I spent how much money on this weird OpenAI homepod and it doesn't work. I'm just never going to use it again.
- [48:58]
B
Yep, Right.
- [48:59]
A
And like, I. They've got a. This is the Johnny I problem. It's got to do exactly what it says on the tin and a little bit more in a way that's delightful. And AI is maybe not never going to be predictable enough to actually pull that off.
- [49:11]
B
And the. The physical limitations of something like a smart speaker makes that hard, like, genuine kudos to everyone involved if they can figure out how to add that hardware turn that makes it delightful in the way that you're talking about.
- [49:25]
A
Oh, it's supposed to have some mechanical thing that, like, smiles at you. This is the other part of the Gurman report.
- [49:29]
B
That ain't it, buddy.
- [49:30]
A
I gotta tell you, that ain't it some mechanical. It's unclear what it is, but there's some part of it that moves in response to you to, like, make it have emotions.
- [49:39]
B
No, thank you. ChatGPT doesn't have emotions. Never, ever, ever, ever hold.
- [49:46]
A
A lot of people disagree with you on that one, my friend.
- [49:48]
B
They're wrong. Let's move on.
- [49:50]
A
Claude loves me. What are you talking about? All right, no one else does but Claude does. It think all of my ideas are great, and I've been. You know, you're right to call that out.
- [50:05]
B
I've been looking at this the wrong way. Let's start from. Let's start from the basics. Honestly, here's what I recommend. All right, let's move on. That's enough AI gadgets for one day.
- [50:15]
A
Wait, can I say one more thing? I had Claude write an email to my solar panel installer. So I think they went wrong. And I read it and I was like, they will come to my house and tear the solar panels down before they address what I want in this email.
- [50:29]
B
Yep, that sounds great. Yeah, that's. Sometime we should talk about the AI tools that write email drafts and the deeply terrifying things they have taught me about myself. But that's for another day. Two more gadget things we should talk about. One, very quick. Have you looked at the pixel colors? The pixels, as they always do, have leaked to Absolute death.
- [50:49]
A
Of course.
- [50:50]
B
There's a bunch of new Pixel phone colors in particular. You, I feel like, have never really been a phone color guy.
- [50:57]
A
No, I've got an orange iPhone. It's just in a gray case.
- [51:00]
B
Well, yeah, you're like. I feel like in general, you're like,
- [51:02]
A
this is the only one worth buying this year.
- [51:03]
B
Oh, 100%. I mean, I bought the green one, which is also terrific, but the oranges on the Pro was fabulous. But I just want you to look at these pixel colors and tell me if they do anything for you.
- [51:13]
A
Oh, I like this pink a lot.
- [51:15]
B
Yeah, Google's really going for it this year. There's a, There's a pink. There are a couple of shades of green.
- [51:20]
A
Hibiscus.
- [51:21]
B
It's. It's pink. There's a green, there's a black, there's a. There's a light blue that's. Or like a greenish blue that's called fog that I quite like.
- [51:30]
A
I can't. You should say all these names. No, there's Olive. There's Fog. Frost Canyon, which is also known as Dune. No, Pistachio.
- [51:41]
B
I wrote a story recently about the Google home speaker. Um, and I got a request from a comms person at Google who, in this particular case, I won't name, who asked me to change the reference where I called it red to its official name, which is Barry. And I said, no, thank you, I will not do that. Because it's red. It's not. Berry is not a color. Red is a color.
- [52:03]
A
Berries do come in a variety of colors.
- [52:05]
B
Yeah, they sure do. But stupid names aside, these colors look great.
- [52:10]
A
They do great.
- [52:11]
B
Like, I'm into this. I think a pink phone genuinely might really happen. I'm, I'm, I'm psyched about this.
- [52:16]
A
This is finally the thing that will make it switch to a Pixel 11.
- [52:19]
B
This gives. Was it the Nexus 5 that came in that rad red color?
- [52:24]
A
Ugh, yeah. It's like orangey red. We have so many arguments in the office about whether it was orange or red. And if I remember correctly, Josh Polsky was very much, it's red. And I was very much its orange.
- [52:35]
B
I think I would, if memory serves, I would be on Team Red on that one. Yeah. But either way, that phone was hot. And this one kind of looks like it has the same thing going on.
- [52:43]
A
It's got some vibe. I like it.
- [52:44]
B
But the other actual news we should talk about on this front is the OnePlus news from this week. OnePlus essentially announced that it is. It is done attempting to sell phones in the US and Europe. And actually there's been some reporting that this is just the beginning that OnePlus is in the process of pulling out of everywhere except for China. We've been covering this company for the entirety of its existence and there was a time at which OnePlus seemed like it had a shot to be a really powerful upstart brand in the phone market and it just never quite happened. What do you, what do you make of this complete sort of retreat from OnePlus right now?
- [53:22]
A
Well one, I think you have been calling out the end of cheap devices because of Ramageddon for months now.
- [53:27]
B
True. Yeah.
- [53:28]
A
And it is hard to see how this is anything but one culmination of Ramageddon. Right. OnePlus could not compete at the high end. It was not making flagship devices. It was, he was part of like a larger company that makes a bunch of phones.
- [53:44]
B
It's part of Oppo and it's like, has always sort of pretended that it's not part of Oppo.
- [53:48]
A
Yeah.
- [53:49]
B
But is very much part of Oppo. Yeah.
- [53:50]
A
Right. But it, it, it, that whole company was like one tick under the flagships.
- [53:57]
B
Yeah.
- [53:58]
A
Right. And I'm, I'm confident we're gonna have a bunch of Android fans telling me that it actually made flag.
- [54:01]
B
But it, you know, called themselves flagship killers. Like that, that was the idea that they, they could do just as well for less money. And I think when it's just as well for the same amount of money, it probably doesn't work anymore and you
- [54:12]
A
don't have the brand and you're not spending, you know, billions of dollars on computational photography at the bleeding edge. Like. Right, you've got problems structurally and the market never really broke itself down in a way that would support a cheaper player.
- [54:27]
B
True.
- [54:27]
A
Right. Like the smartphone market was either you're spending very little money or a lot of money or you're buying a one year old phone for a medium amount of money. But the sort of like mid range Android phone has always just been hard.
- [54:41]
B
Yes. Kind of forever, that is. No one has ever really successfully pulled that off.
- [54:46]
A
Yeah, I mean like there are a lot of mid range Android phones and every now and again we review whatever Samsung Alpha or Ace or whatever they're called and like, like here's the state of the middle. But the reality is most people want to buy the highest end one or they want to buy the cheapest one.
- [54:59]
B
Right.
- [54:59]
A
And you can just see that play out over and over again. So I think this company just was Always fighting a fight it couldn't win because it was never going to attract an iPhone switcher, at least in the United States. Like that is just the hardest thing in the world to do. Samsung and Google cannot do it. And if you're in the middle, the Pixel exists and Google will happily sell you one. All of the Samsung mid range phones exist and every carrier will be like, do you want this for free? Here you go. And then you're at least in whatever ecosystem there or you want to spend the most amount of money. What are you going to do? How are you going to differentiate?
- [55:31]
B
Right. Do you think carriers are largely to blame here? Because I think a thing we talk about a lot and an email we get a lot when we talk about the phone market is that the US way of buying phones is kind of unlike anywhere else in the world. And I think if you rewind back to the beginning of the OnePlus story, a big part of what it was doing was betting that it could upset that. Right. That rather than having most of your phone experience to be walk into a store, update your contract, trade in your old phone and get a new phone, which is how most people get their phones. And it, it changes the way that phones are subsidized. It changes the way that we pay for them. It changes the what it feels like to pay for a phone because you're not putting down your credit card for $1,200 at a time, but that there was this idea 10 years ago that that was going to go away and actually more and more people were going to start to buy their phones on Amazon and that you could build a direct to consumer phone brand in the United states and that 100% has not happened in any meaningful way at all. And do you think the carriers have just found ways over and over to kill anyone who was trying to do that thing?
- [56:34]
A
I think the carriers have found that and Apple has found that Apple doesn't want you switching. Apple will happily just send you a notification that's like, it's time to upgrade to the iPhone 18, right? Like, here we go. Your ESIM will transfer seamlessly. And if you want to transfer it to an Android phone, you've got to light a candle and do incantations.
- [56:53]
B
We will systematically ruin your life. David Pierce, have you ever tried to do it?
- [56:56]
A
Have you ever tried to turn off imessage? It requires human sacrifice. Yeah. So it's some big combination of that. Carriers are rational. I'm saying rational and no one will believe me, but carriers have rational economic Incentives to make things as easy and cheap as possible. And taking you from an iPhone to the next iPhone requires almost no customer service on their part. Taking you from an iPhone to a OnePlus phone is a bunch of angry phone calls and maybe a return and then maybe a switch to an iPhone. And that's all just costs that layers up. They don't care. They're like, have you ever wanted to experience even slower 5G? Experience the power of ATT? Like that's all they care about. So I think, yes, the carriers have a chokehold on the market. Apple has a chokehold on the market. There's no incentive to change. And making a phone that on the edges has slightly different options and widgets and Oxygen OS compared to Samsung, Galaxy OS compared to iOS, like no consumer cares about that stuff. Or at least not at, not at the rates they need to if you're not so much cheaper.
- [58:04]
B
Right. So I'm thinking about this in context of what we were just talking about with OpenAI being one of the companies that is probably going to make something that, you know, looks and feels and smells like a phone. This kind of suggests that if you're not, frankly, Apple or Samsung or one of the three or four biggest companies in the world with enough money to brute force your way into this, that the phone market in the US is essentially sona. There's just no room for anybody else.
- [58:33]
A
Well, so it depends on what companies are talking about. If SpaceX buys T Mobile and Starlink makes a phone.
- [58:40]
B
Interesting.
- [58:42]
A
Right. And that phone has Instagram. I mean, yeah, because quite honestly, Elon Musk is a creeper and I think he's going to want Instagram on that phone.
- [58:52]
B
Buying a carrier, yes, is a shortcut to getting your phone into a carrier store. But like OnePlus probably could have bought T Mobile and that might have worked, I don't know.
- [59:02]
A
But like, it's. That, it's. I don't think if this is just a prediction, there's not going to be a device that has an AI based input mechanism so powerful and compelling that it overcomes a phone. Right.
- [59:17]
B
And the whole giant ecosystem of apps and accessories and carriers and everything that comes with phone now that whole system is so mature now.
- [59:28]
A
Yes, we're agreeing. Like I'm saying phone to wrap all of that.
- [59:31]
B
Sure, yeah, yeah, right.
- [59:33]
A
Like you, you want to plug the weird Bluetooth dongle into the seat back of the thing because you have AirPods because they work best with your iPhone. Boy, is that a whole ecosystem that OpenAI's gadget has to overcome. Right? Like, is OpenAI's gadget going to work as well with your AirPods as everything else? Well, then you've got to get new headphones and maybe they won't work as well with your Delta seatback Bluetooth dongle. Like, you've got to break everything. And phones were able to break everything. Right. Famously, BlackBerry realized that the iPhone was competing with laptops, not BlackBerry. And they were dead. Right. Like, they knew what the problem was. And OpenAI still has to compete with the iPhone. OnePlus still has to compete with the iPhone. And I don't mean just the iPhone. I mean the very concept of the mature flagship smartphone with a whole ass ecosystem all the way around it. Samsung has one of those. Google to some extent has one of those. Are obviously big players in China that have fully mature ecosystems that include cars in China.
- [60:28]
B
Yeah, yeah, Right.
- [60:29]
A
Like you want to ship an AI gadget, you're like, well, my car also runs the same operating system as my phone in China.
- [60:34]
B
Yeah. How are people going to navigate to where they're going on my AI gadget?
- [60:39]
A
Yeah. So I, I think this is just one. One part of this is Ramageddon. You can't be so much cheaper that it's sustainable. And the other part of it is, boy, what are, what are we taking sales away from?
- [60:49]
B
Yeah, we should take a break here. But I think the thing you just said that you have to break everything is such a clarifying reason that the entire AI industry is acting the way that it is. Because that, that is the stakes and that is the wall you have to climb to do the thing that they are all promising they will do in order to change everything about how we do everything.
- [61:11]
A
But it's not the wall you have to climb. In enterprise, in business, software.
- [61:14]
B
Right. That's a much smaller wall.
- [61:16]
A
That's why they're all running towards it.
- [61:18]
B
Yeah, totally. All right, let's take one more break, then we're getting back. We'll do a lightning round. We'll be right back. What is happening?
- [61:24]
A
What am I seeing? This is not real. Like, what is that unexplainable? The show about everything we don't know is coming to Netflix.
- [61:36]
B
Come on, you're not serious, right?
- [61:38]
A
It's real. Oh, my gosh, I'm freaking out. We'll still be getting into all the
- [61:43]
B
huge questions that can take over your life. Are there different ways that humans might be dead? Do we live inside of an enormous black hole?
- [61:53]
A
Why do we cry?
- [61:55]
B
What if I eat it?
- [61:58]
A
But now we're going to be able to show you all sorts of things we never could before. You really have no choice but to just let your mind go wild. Unexplainable is going to have new video
- [62:10]
B
episodes every Monday on Netflix, with new
- [62:13]
A
audio episodes still dropping every Monday and Wednesday. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
- [62:20]
B
Everybody asked if the chicken or the
- [62:22]
A
egg came first or second, the egg or the chicken. Nobody knows what was there. The beginning. What came first? Unexplainable.
- [62:31]
B
A podcast from Vox now on Netflix.
- [62:35]
A
Is Kamala Harris running for president again?
- [62:38]
B
Listen, I might, I might.
- [62:41]
A
I'm thinking about it. But does anybody want that?
- [62:46]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do.
- [62:48]
A
Well, I don't see why not.
- [62:49]
B
Absolutely.
- [62:50]
A
I think Kamala Harris should run for president again. I don't think there are no, never
- [62:54]
B
be a woman president in the United States.
- [62:56]
A
Now, wait, wait, wait. You can't just walk away on that. Tell us why. I know it's still early to talk about 2028, but as we build to our post Trump future, it seems to be a big question about the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris leads all of the presidential polling. So does this mean that the person who led the ticket in 2024 is going to lead the party again in 2028? The campaign needs to be called Bye Bye Biden. It's just a tainted brand. Do you think from a donor community largely that there's any appetite for a Harris return?
- [63:29]
B
I don't.
- [63:30]
A
I'm Esteed Hernton and this is America. Actually, catch us Every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.
- [63:38]
B
It all started with Call me maybe.
- [63:40]
A
Over 10 years ago, we created Switched
- [63:42]
B
On Pop to listen closer, uncovering the song craft behind even the glossiest of pop hits. Since then, we've released almost 500 episodes. We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Call Me maybe herself, Carly Rae Jepsen. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie harding. And on July 14, switched on pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix. Now you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts, but now you'll be able to watch us each week, breaking down the sounds of the moment, digging into musical minutiae with your favorite artists, and offering questionable dad jokes. As always, we're kicking off our Netflix
- [64:26]
A
debut with a four part series on
- [64:28]
B
the art of the song with help from artists, producers, and songwriters like Aaron Dessner, Audrey Hobert, Trevor Horne, Cypress Hill, and Tayla Parks, Stream switched on, pop on Netflix, and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday, starting on July 14th. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. We somehow can't stop doing this stupid thing. Brandon Car is a dummy. Are you.
- [65:11]
A
Is it going to happen?
- [65:11]
B
Just incredibly stupid. You stupid lover. Welcome back, dummy.
- [65:27]
A
A lot there.
- [65:28]
B
So the. The backstory to this, if you didn't listen to last week's episode, is Ryan Mueller sent in a Brandon Carr as a dummy theme. Um, Neil, I was very rude to him because it sounded like this was the build to a drop, and there was no drop. Ryan resubmitted a drop, and Travis, our producer, that was the drop. Travis agreed that we need to play the whole thing.
- [65:48]
A
I mean, that was quite a drop.
- [65:50]
B
Ryan's back. I think Ryan has. Has righted the ship here.
- [65:52]
A
We're.
- [65:53]
B
We're okay now.
- [65:54]
A
Some real elements of Prince's bat dance in there. I want to just call that out.
- [65:58]
B
Yep.
- [66:00]
A
And get quite a drop.
- [66:01]
B
It was. Yeah, it was something. I'm feeling things right now. Uh, what did Brendan do this week?
- [66:05]
A
Neil, I'm still coming down.
- [66:08]
B
Honestly, this is all so much more than Brendan deserves, but it's okay. We do it. We do it for. For ourselves and for each other.
- [66:15]
A
I'm gonna be so paranoid tomorrow. Okay. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Okay. He did a lot of dumb stuff this week. Let's start with the basics.
- [66:23]
B
Okay.
- [66:24]
A
You know, is it dumb to take bribes as a public official? David?
- [66:28]
B
Generally, yes. This is a trick question.
- [66:31]
A
Okay. Yeah. All right. Brendan took what amounts to $125,000 bribe. There's no other way to say it. So Paramount and CBS were merging as part of that whole family dynamic. This needed to pass FCC review because CBS owns a bunch of broadcast stations. And during all this, both Brendan and another FCC commissioner, Olivia Trustee, who's also a Republican, accepted tickets to various Scalas at the Kennedy Center. Olivia trustees tickets gifted to her by Paramount were worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica. Brendan's private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other Paramount and CBS executives. $125,000 ticket. So that's a quarter million. Quarter million dollars.
- [67:16]
B
This is all happening as they're in theory debating whether to let this merger happen.
- [67:23]
A
Yes.
- [67:24]
B
So in normal times, just the fact that Brendan Is there. In the skybox would be a huge scandal.
- [67:31]
A
Yes.
- [67:32]
B
Just for zero dollars. Just his existence in the room with this man at this time. Huge scandal. And, and, and yet here we are.
- [67:42]
A
If you remember, there was, like, a scandal when, like, Clinton got a haircut on, like, the tarmac of Air Force One. Like, it doesn't, you know, like, there's like. Yeah, there was a time when the appearance of a conflict of interest would be a scandal, even if no such conflict existed. And by the way, that's the standard for most public officials and lawyers. When you take the bar exam and you have to do the. The professional ethics exam, the. The thing that you learn is anything that creates the appearance of a conflict of interest is against the rules, because the appearance is what undermines trust in the system that is gone broadly over the past decade. And now the standard from the Trump administration and Trump family is, we're telling you, we're doing bribes. So that's okay. It's all out in the open. I mean, you literally hear them say this all the time.
- [68:33]
B
Yeah.
- [68:33]
A
Oh, yeah, it's all out in the open. So it's fine. And so here Brendan is taking a quarter million dollars in tickets from companies whose activities he directly oversees, whose merger he can approve. And it's fine because he's doing it all in the open. And basically, every ethics expert that talked to ProPublica was like, he should recuse himself from all these decisions because there's no way he can maintain the appearance of impartiality.
- [68:57]
B
Of course not.
- [68:59]
A
There's a lawyer. They quoted an ethics lawyer from the White House, Treasury Department, and the SEC during the presidencies of H.W. bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. And she goes, this is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that's what I would say. I don't understand what they were thinking.
- [69:14]
B
This is somebody who would know, I would say is about as qualified as you could possibly be on this particular subject.
- [69:20]
A
Yeah. So obviously, Paramount, Warner Brothers murder is still under review. There's a antitrust review of that. We'll come to that. That's. There's more of that to come. But here, Brendan just took bribes because he's a dummy. And he doesn't understand that taking bribes creates the appearance, if not the actual conflict of interest from which he is supposed to accuse himself.
- [69:41]
B
Oh, I don't think that gives Brendan enough credit. I think he might know those things. He just doesn't care one teeny tiny bit.
- [69:47]
A
Again, the standard has moved from the appearance of a conflict to, what if we did bribes out in the open. What if you brought Brendan Coin? It's. That's where we are. Okay. The other thing which is worth talking about because we have brought up a bunch, is the FCC is fast coming up on a vote, which may or may not be illegal unto itself, about whether individual companies can own more than 39% of broadcast licenses in an area which is a rule enshrined by Congress that Brendan thinks he can just overcome with a vote.
- [70:17]
B
Yeah.
- [70:18]
A
He wrote an op ed in Breitbart, of all places. And I just want to call it out because when.
- [70:26]
B
When Breitbart is the number one publication that will accept your op ed, things have gone awry.
- [70:31]
A
Well, the Wall Street Journal editorial board hates him, so they wouldn't take it. And you're. And then you're just kind of running the New York Post. That doesn't seem right. And you end up in Breitbart. And his argument here is the cap basically prevents anyone from owning so many TV stations that you can broadcast programming to more than 39% of households. This worked when this was all about local broadcasters employing local journalists. But I will restore trust to the news by letting single companies own all kinds of broadcast stations more than 39%, because then they'll be able to compete with streaming.
- [71:05]
B
I'm going to make Sinclair so powerful it can take on YouTube. Is I, Brendan Carr, am going to make Sinclair so powerful that that competition will reign.
- [71:19]
A
See what I mean? This is the argument. I'm just going to read it today. The broadcast gap is not protecting local broadcasters, is preventing them from gaining the same scale that their competitors are free to enjoy. It's doing the opposite of what the FCC intended. I don't know if you have looked around. No one can compete with YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. In fact, on this show, we've talked about Netflix beginning to panic and turn itself into YouTube because these things have massive scale. But. And the cost structures of those platforms are utterly dependent on an army of teenagers working for free. Something that all of us are forced to ignore every time we talk about these businesses. Because if you point it out, everyone gets really squirrely about the fact that they're probably doomed in the long run because they have to pay to make things. You can make the broadcasters as big as you want. You can have one guy own every broadcast station in the country.
- [72:14]
B
And we're rapidly heading that direction.
- [72:16]
A
It appears they still have to pay the news anchors.
- [72:19]
B
Yeah.
- [72:19]
A
And probably what they're going to do is stop paying them and have AI read you the local news. And that still won't restore trust in the news and that still won't let them compete with YouTube, which again enjoys the greatest business model in world history, which is having an army of teenagers make everything for free.
- [72:35]
B
I find myself in this segment from time to time trying to sort of piece a bunch of Brendan Carr logic together. And it makes my head spin because you can't possibly hold all of these ideas in your head at the same time. And, and I have come to realize that, oh, he doesn't. He holds no ideas in his head at any time.
- [72:54]
A
There's only one idea in his head which is toting up to power and using the government's ability to restrain speech or consolidate speech to his own advantage. And I'm telling you, all of this is a trial balloon for regulating speech on the Internet. He is finding the ways to use the FCC's power or grow the FCC's power. In this case, casting a vote that will override a provision in a law passed by Congress in order to say I have more authority over the speech that is transmitted to you. And his argument here, when it comes to broadcast news, our country could do with a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting from communities across the countries. What is the mechanism that letting a monopoly run by private equity own more TV stations will create more jobs for local reporters? Can you draw a line from one thing to the next thing?
- [73:48]
B
No. The. The actual answer we know for sure would be precisely 180 degrees. The opposite of what he's describing.
- [73:56]
A
Yes, more programming will be nationalized, completely
- [73:59]
B
decorporatize all of this. That's the answer. And in fact, he's going to just happily create the opposite of what he
- [74:06]
A
says he's about to create anyway you can. The comment periods and all these things are open. The votes are open. These are these. This is your government. You can talk to it. He hasn't. He can't stop you yet. I encourage you to leave the comments. I encourage you to tell Brendan, one, bribes are bad and two, overcoming these rules and not looking at the real problem, which is massive consolidation across all of our media. A little shortsighted. He's a dummy and he won't get it and it's in his own interest to never get it. But Brendan, if you want to come and actually make an argument in a real journalistic forum, not the op ed pages of BrightPark.com, you're welcome to come on this show, you're welcome to come on Decoder. We can call Rupert and see if he'll let us duke it out in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. The only place where Rupert Murdoch and I are on the same side, at least when it comes to this. Very little else. But when it comes to this. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's dummy. America's favorite Podcast with us podcast.
- [75:09]
B
So I have a lightning round item which is that I have an emoji I need to tell you about. And I'm actually curious before we get into this, do you have a sort of all purpose emoji that is like, how you react to most things?
- [75:20]
A
Okay, I have two, but they're rude.
- [75:21]
B
Okay, perfect.
- [75:24]
A
Okay. I use green check mark a lot, which is just the rudest emoji.
- [75:29]
B
It is. That's very.
- [75:30]
A
Yep, yep, yep. It's great.
- [75:35]
B
That's like a thumbs up, but ruder.
- [75:38]
A
I switch from the thumbs up to green check mark and I. Every time I send it, I start
- [75:42]
B
laughing because that has such putting a period at the end of your text message energy using the green. Oh, I don't like that at all.
- [75:48]
A
This has come to an end. That's the. That's. That's the signal that I'm trying to send. And I send it without any remorse.
- [75:57]
B
Okay. That is actually a pretty good case because a thing that is very hard to do is to say, this conversation is over, like, we have accomplished all of our goals. I love you, I hope you're great. Let's not talk anymore. It's very hard to do. The green check mark gets it done.
- [76:14]
A
That's what I'm saying. Check. And then you just turn off your video and you're gone. See what I did there? It's amazing. It works every time.
- [76:21]
B
That's really good.
- [76:22]
A
Okay, so there's that. And then melting face is just the classic. Sure, you gotta get a melting face. It is.
- [76:29]
B
That is probably the single most communicative emoji that exists. Mine is the raise hands. I use the raise hands emoji for everything.
- [76:37]
A
That's pretty good.
- [76:37]
B
Raise hands is. Got it. Raised hands is. Thanks. Raise hands is awesome. Raise hands just accomplishes many of my goals. But there's a new one called Cracked Face that I think is going to potentially replace a lot of emojis for a lot of people. So Unicode put out a bunch of new emojis as they want to do. The emoji making process is sort of fascinating. We'll go into that another time. But they're one of the new emojis is called cracking face and it is precisely what it sounds like. It's a, it's a yellow smiling face with a sort of gentle smile. It's like the slightly smiling face emoji, but it is cracking all over. I think that can mean just about anything you would like it to mean. I look at cracking face as a perfect replacement for melting face, which is like, oh God, everything is, everything is terrible. Cracking face is also kind of like a cracking face could also mean it could replace the skull dead emoji. This is a very good, very powerful all purpose emoji that I'm really excited about.
- [77:38]
A
I would say. As our company goes through what can only be described as a divorce, I would have used cracking face almost every single day this week. Yeah.
- [77:46]
B
Yes. It just. To me, this cracking face is just kind of a. It's all too much emoji.
- [77:53]
A
Yeah.
- [77:53]
B
That's just like I can't even. In an emoji is the crack face. And I'm, I'm pretty excited about it.
- [77:58]
A
Also, if you look at our quick post and then you accidentally click on cracking face, it zooms out at you as the picture expand and then you can do it one more time to zoom again and it's, it's pretty good as a thing that's just sort of coming at you.
- [78:10]
B
Yeah. Yeah. It looks a little like the thing from the Fantastic Four. If anyone references any. For anybody. Um, there are a bunch of new emoji coming. There's. There's a butterfly. There are some sideways thumbs, which is also a very funny conversation. Under possibility, uh, there's a pickle because that's great. Uh, there's a meteor. There's a bunch of stuff. But I just. Cracking face emoji I think is about to revolutionize the way I text message and I'm, I'm very excited about it.
- [78:37]
A
So very importantly, are these the Unicode standard emojis? Are these apples? Are they Googles? A lot going on here.
- [78:46]
B
Yeah, these are Unicode emojis, which means they will inevitably be sort of weirdly bastardized in many ways. I in particular look forward to what the blobby Android cracking face looks like. Samsung will do some weird stuff with it. It's going to be strange, but I think it's going to do the job. I'm pretty excited about it. It's another reason I like raised hands, by the way. Everybody, everybody does the same thing with raised hands. We're all good with it.
- [79:11]
A
You can't misinterpret green check mark.
- [79:14]
B
Nope. This person hates Me and is finished with me is the only possible takeaway.
- [79:19]
A
I understand what you're saying and do not wish to receive any further information. It's pretty good.
- [79:25]
B
All right, what's your next lightning round?
- [79:27]
A
We're. It feels like we have another new segment coming called Nikita Beer is going through it. So Nikita Beer is the head of product at X the Everything app in which I do all of my banking.
- [79:38]
B
Well, obviously all of my DMs too.
- [79:40]
A
Who doesn't?
- [79:41]
B
Yeah.
- [79:42]
A
Was it last week or the week before he posted? Hey, we. We did this experiment and we realized if we take all of the influencers out of the platform, people like it
- [79:49]
B
more and use it more precisely. Yes.
- [79:51]
A
Which is the thing that everybody knows.
- [79:52]
B
Yep. And they did the other study that found that all of the video on the platform was stolen. Great, great, great stuff going on on X.
- [80:00]
A
So this week they realized that not showing your post to the people who follow you is bad. And post in showing you just exclusively rage bait made people unhappy.
- [80:13]
B
Who could have seen that coming?
- [80:14]
A
We're rolling out a small tweak to boost visibility of your posts to people who follow you back. We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less in your replies. This resulted in the reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don't recognize.
- [80:26]
B
Yep.
- [80:27]
A
What a surprise.
- [80:28]
B
Well said.
- [80:30]
A
Twitter hasn't been around for over a decade. No one who worked at Twitter ever had this insight before.
- [80:35]
B
Well, so this is what's so funny. There is a long standing truism about a lot of these social algorithms. Is that the strongest signal you can have is if you and I follow each other.
- [80:46]
A
Yeah.
- [80:47]
B
Like it, it. It signifies so many positives and about our interests, about our relationship, about the overlap between us. Like if you and I being mutuals is such a powerful signal and X was just like, ah, who cares?
- [81:01]
A
Well, I mean they, I mean first of all, they, they fired everybody. So everybody who knew how anything worked is gone from Twitter, which is now X the Everything app.
- [81:09]
B
The phrase we noticed this data was missing from the algo is very funny.
- [81:13]
A
Deeply, deeply hilarious.
- [81:15]
B
No one has looked in four years and now we finally looked.
- [81:19]
A
There are like entire teams at Twitter that were like ent entirely focused on this. They threw, they fired them all, they reset the algorithm and they realized purely prioritizing engagement led you to bad outcomes. And then in particular with X the Everything app, you know, you can pay to be verified and have a rev share letting those people run wild to make as much Money as they want resulted in a site that was bad and overrun by Nazis. And now Nikita Beer every week is slowly rolling it back. He's slowly rediscovering and things that people who worked at Twitter for ages and ages knew. Again, I will point out, I will say this as many times. We need to say this criticism of the current administration as EDX is in no way praise for the people who ran Twitter who mostly failed and ran a bad company. So bad, in fact, that Elon Musk could show up and say, can I pay some money for it? And the board of directors had no response. They're like, well, that's better than anything we can think of. And they walked away. So, again, criticism of the Elon administration in no way praised for the previous administration. But I do know a lot of people worked at Twitter thinking about how to make the site feel good in order to drive growth. X made it feel bad. And their. Their business has essentially collapsed. And we know this because it's part of SpaceX now, and SpaceX is a public company. And we could read it in the S1 filings.
- [82:41]
B
It's very good. When we talked about Nikita last week, we got a couple of emails from people who, I would say in. In not quite as many words, accused him of being kind of a product grifter. This is a guy who has sort of invented and sold the same company a couple of times and is now doing this job at X. Clearly very skilled at a. At a certain kind of product making, does not seem to be having a super good time. His new, very, very visible job.
- [83:08]
A
Well, he's got the same problem as anybody who works for Trump has. Right. So he can be like, I fixed this thing in this obvious way that will make one person unhappy. And that person will tweet at Elon and Elon be like, I'm looking into it, and then the fix will go away. And this has happened several times now for Nikita and everyone else at Product, the same way that, you know, ICE announced they're not going to do traffic stops because they're murdering people in the street. And Trump is like, no, I love traffic stops. And now they're back. And, like, that's going to be what keeps happening to X. The everything applies because anything that makes it harder for lies and racism to travel on the platform affects one guy in negative ways.
- [83:49]
B
Sure does. It's tough out there. Okay. I have, I have.
- [83:53]
A
That guy is David Pierce.
- [83:55]
B
Yeah, this is the. The X reach is for me in particular. I almost accidentally tweeted the other day thinking it was threads and had a real sort of terrifying moment. I was like, this is not.
- [84:06]
A
I'm so throttled on X that I should tweet every day. Like, I have a fake blue check mark. There's just like a legacy blue check mark. And I can tweet and literally zero people will see it. That's amazing because I don't pay for reach. And obviously we're us and we criticize. Like they've just turned the knob. There's a knob in Nikita's office labeled Nilai and it's at zero.
- [84:28]
B
That's kind of nice, actually. It's like keeping a journal.
- [84:30]
A
There's a part of me that just wants to just start tweeting every day, like as much as I can. Yeah, it's pretty good.
- [84:38]
B
I have a blog post to tell you about.
- [84:40]
A
Okay.
- [84:41]
B
From a new substacker, apparently just brand, brand new substack from Demis Asabas.
- [84:47]
A
Oh, sure.
- [84:47]
B
Yeah. The Nobel Prize winning CEO of Google DeepMind is now mostly a substacker. He wrote a blog post this week about basically the. A framework for how to regulate frontier AI models and calling for, you know, collaboration between the government and these labs to really make sure we can all handle this responsibly. As AGI. I don't care about any of that. I just need to read you a sentence that is going to cause you emotional pain. Are you ready for this?
- [85:16]
A
Yeah.
- [85:16]
B
Okay. This is from the first paragraph of this blog post. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realize we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. Nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity. Does that sound familiar to you, my friend?
- [85:33]
A
That's his line. That's his move.
- [85:35]
B
This is a thing now. He said this at IO you had what I can only call just a full on crash out about it. And then he decided that was a good. That was a bar. I should keep using that. So. So we're. We're doing the foothills of the singularity now. This is. This is a thing. Ne.
- [85:53]
A
So is the singularity a mountain. Foothills implies that we're like among the. The. The mountain. Right. We're among the foothills.
- [86:02]
B
Right. Because the foothills were already going up a little bit. Right. But there's. There's more to come.
- [86:06]
A
I'm asking this because a phrase that AI researchers love to use right now is hill climbing. Yeah. Like we had Mustafa Suleiman from Microsoft on decoder and he. I was like, are we getting there? And he's like, well, we're seeing the hill climbing. And so I wonder if Demis is like, well, that must mean we're in the foothills.
- [86:22]
B
We're climbing the hill to get to the mountain.
- [86:24]
A
We're doing hill climbing. Hill climbing has a definition. I'm sure all the AI people are going to tell me exactly what it is. I'm just saying. I think one word led to another word.
- [86:32]
B
Yes.
- [86:33]
A
And now we're just saying it over and over again.
- [86:36]
B
But, like, but the.
- [86:37]
A
The implication here, by the way, is that the Singularity is nigh.
- [86:40]
B
Yes.
- [86:41]
A
And that we should regulate AI before it kills us all, which is doomerism. And it is just. Google can't do doomerism the same way Anthropic can do doomerism. Like, they don't. I don't think they have the credibility to do Dorism. Like, if Google woke up tomorrow and was like, we're afraid we're gonna kill everyone, that would have a very different valence than, like, Anthropic's whole deal. Do you know what I mean?
- [87:06]
B
The. The Don't Be evil company becomes the Don't Kill Everyone company.
- [87:10]
A
You know what I mean? Like, and everyone would be like, but you run YouTube. Like, what are you gonna. Should you stop. Should you stop the Internet economy for a minute before you kill us all? Whereas anthropic is like, fable is so powerful that we stopped it. Everyone's like, cool, Can Claude still do stuff? And they're like, yeah, because that's our only business.
- [87:32]
B
Yeah. There is some of that energy in this blog post that it's basically like, please regulate us, because we don't know how and we won't and we need you to tell us what is and isn't okay so that we don't have to figure that out for ourselves, because we are in the foothills of the
- [87:47]
A
Singularity again, which just really implies they're going to kill us all.
- [87:51]
B
I can't really does.
- [87:53]
A
And by the way, Google will not really tell you what the Singularity is. Like, I've asked Sundar Patrai and he's like, dennis and I argue about that all the time. I'm like, did you come to a conclusion? You can go watch that interview. It's unclear. Yeah. Uh, Mustafa is like, there's a difference between AGI and the Singularity and superintelligence. You can watch him try to parse that. Unclear what it means to be in the foothills of the Singularity.
- [88:17]
B
Yep.
- [88:18]
A
And also seems bad. Just this week, a researcher at DeepMind published a lengthy essay being like every promise that Google made when they bought DeepMind to not do military applications is gone, is wiped out. And in the middle of this essay, which we will link to, he says the LLMs still hallucinate and are still brittle in knowable ways and it's not clear if we're going to get from here to there. Yep, that's not the foothills of the Singularity. And in fact the truth of whether or not the LLMs can actually get there, whether all of this hill climbing will result in a model that remembers things in a meaningful way and doesn't just have like huge context windows up for grabs. Yeah, completely up for grabs. And I still think the answer is no. I've been wrong about sort of like general progress. So I will take it. But I, I still think language is not intelligence. And LLMs talking to themselves at rapid rates is not just going to horsepower intelligence into being.
- [89:19]
B
Yeah, I tend to agree. I mean, yeah, I was thinking about this, that we've, we've been hearing these AI companies for so long talk about essentially linear progress, right? That it's like the graph has gone like this. And as long as it keeps going like this forever and ever and ever, we're going to hit these unbelievable things. And I think frankly the graph has gone like this longer than either you or I would have predicted a couple of years ago. That still does not in any way suggest that we're due for another century of that kind of progress.
- [89:46]
A
Look, I know a lot of people who talk a lot. They don't get smarter.
- [89:51]
B
That's in fact we get dumber generally as this podcast goes along. Speaking of which, do you have one more you want to do before we get out of here?
- [89:57]
A
Very quickly, I just want to play this clip. We mentioned Paramount earlier. The states now have sued. A bunch of states have sued Paramount to block the Warner merger. Their lead trial counsel was on cnbc. I just want to play this clip. This is Jeffrey Kessler, the lead trial counselor for Paramount Skydance, responding to the lawsuit from 12 state attorneys general saying that this would be anti competitive.
- [90:21]
B
This is an anti, anti trust case. To stop a merger, the merger has to be anti competitive. This merger is pro competitive. Anybody who knows the entertainment industry knows it is in deep trouble. Linear television is in deep trouble because of streaming and because of court cutting. Theatrical is in deep trouble because of the advent of streaming and what it has done. This merger is designed to make a stronger linear television company, to make a stronger theatrical producer and to create a True competitor in streaming that could go toe to toe with a Netflix or a Disney or a Prime.
- [91:12]
A
All right, David, I'm just dying for you to react to that.
- [91:16]
B
I mean, this. This is the same argument as we should make Sinclair very powerful so it can take on YouTube.
- [91:22]
A
It's interesting that Brendan Carr was in David Ellison's box for a quarter million dollars, huh?
- [91:28]
B
Yeah. Like you. You and I have spent a lot of time over the years, you. You more than me, railing it against all of the times that somebody has acquired Time Warner in order to go compete in one way or another, and they end up laying off a bunch of people. And it always fails. This is. We have tried this thing. Like, even if the logic of what he just said held and it doesn't, to be super clear, we've literally run that theory to ground over and over and over and over and over under every. Under every Republican administration we've ever had in this country. We have done that many times, and it never works. We're going to take two shitty companies and it's going to make one great company is literally not how it works.
- [92:10]
A
I do just want to focus on the things he said were in decline. So first he's like, everything's fucked. Right? That's his. He's like, this is pro competitive. I just want to point out no one's watching linear television and no one's going to the movie theater, which is true. Whether or not you're going to go see the Odyssey or not. It's like, true that no one's going to the movie theater. Right. Certainly you're not watching linear television. You're watching us, probably on YouTube. This is the problem. We deliver our content to YouTube for effectively free. The army of teenagers is just looming over all of this, and no one can say it. He didn't say YouTube and TikTok. Right. He said Netflix and Disney and Prime. But the problem is that TikTok doesn't pay anyone for the content on their platform. And people like it better than the garbage on Paramount. Plus, what are you gonna do with that? You're gonna buy Batman? Is Batman gonna fix it? This is. It's so nonsense because no one can just say the thing that is killing them out loud. Instagram doesn't pay for content.
- [93:13]
B
Right.
- [93:13]
A
So our business model is F'd because they pay high rates. And I would like more artists and filmmakers and the people who play the violin in the background of the Christopher Nolan movies. I want all those people to get paid lots and lots of money to make art. But none of these companies can look at the problem that they have, which is their competitors, their actual competitors. The apps on your phone that you actually open do not pay for content. And none of them have an answer to it. Except we should buy more stuff. Right, because that will fix a linear television.
- [93:46]
B
Right? We're going to make our costs go way up, and that's how we'll compete.
- [93:53]
A
Just to be 100% on the nose. That was Quibi's argument.
- [93:59]
B
Oh, it was. What if we spent way more money? Really, genuinely was Quibi's argument.
- [94:04]
A
What if we spent more money on the content and you could see it on your phone, man.
- [94:07]
B
Justice for Quibi.
- [94:08]
A
They were right. And also the wrongest.
- [94:11]
B
I know. But at least Quibi deserved one outrageously overpriced merger before it all fell apart. You know what I mean? Like, if you're, if you're going to make all those arguments, you deserve to be acquired for some stupid amount of money before they should have bought Time War. Yes, exactly. And then let it all collapse in.
- [94:28]
A
By the way, it's not. We keep saying Time Warner. It's. It's Warner Brothers Discovery now.
- [94:33]
B
It is now. It's still time.
- [94:34]
A
Or as I call it, WB Disco.
- [94:38]
B
It's pretty good. That's what they should have called it, to be honest. All right, we should get out of here. Nilai, what's on decoder this week?
- [94:44]
A
So today, as we record on Thursday, everyone should listen to it. It's the CTO of Proton, Bart Butler. We talked a lot about privacy and building encrypted versions of docs and fighting the EU government. It's. It's really good.
- [94:55]
B
Proton's a fascinating company.
- [94:57]
A
Super fascinating company. Really enjoy that conversation. Pushed a lot on the edges of where trust actually comes from. If you're interested in, like, Apple encryption and all those fights, this episode is like in the weeds of it, because he doesn't work at Apple, he works at Proton. He has a way different view, but the problems are all exactly the same. So go listen to that one. And then on Monday, we have Jo Leor, who is a superstar, talking about her new book, the Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which is like Verge Strike Zone.
- [95:21]
B
Does this suggest you've read the book? Is it as good as I assume it is?
- [95:24]
A
It is very dense. It's very good if you're. If it's the sort of thing that. That speaks to you. It's, it's, it's very good. But it's very much like if you Try to run the country by just measuring everyone and doing opinion polls and, like, make it autonomous. Like, if you're just like, yeah, we'll just, like, measure and do the middle, you, like, lose what makes the country good. And it's so. It's. It's basically a book about measuring and what measuring can't tell you, which is like, total Verge strike zone. It's great.
- [95:50]
B
I love that. That's gonna be fun. Version History, the season finale is this Sunday. It's about the Clapper. It is as much fun as we've ever had making an episode of Version History. Also, you and I spent a bunch of this week recording Version History. We've got a whole new season in the can. I think it's the most fun we've ever had doing this show, and we made some very good episodes. So please go subscribe to that. We're like, dangerously close to 10,000 subscribers on our still very new YouTube channel. So please, I beg of you, go subscribe to version history on YouTube with every single one of your bot accounts. That's all I require. I think that's it. That's all the. That's all the stuff I have right there. There's so much stuff. There's luck.
- [96:32]
A
We're going to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, and that will let us finally compete with Prime, a company which is owned by Amazon and utterly subsidized by Amazon.
- [96:43]
B
Version History. Brothers Discovery is coming, a streaming service
- [96:46]
A
that flippantly made a movie about Melania Trump in order to get preferential treatment for its giant e commerce operation. What are we doing?
- [96:56]
B
It's really fun to just say the whole sentence, you know what I mean? In addition to subscribing to The Version History YouTube channel, the other thing you should do is subscribe to the Verge. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one and Version History and Decoder. It gets you all of our newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of dumb things that Brandon Carr does. Everything. Theverge.com subscribe go subscribe. And if you have thoughts, questions, feedback, you want to know what emoji you should use to be as cruel to people as Nilai is, send us an email. Vergecast. The verge.com, call the hotline 866- Verge-11. We love hearing from you. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Starchuk, and Aaron Lacasio. We will see you next week Nilay green.
- [97:39]
A
Check mark.