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- [00:01]
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- [02:16]
Nilay Patel
Welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of unfair questions. We ask them, we steadfastly refuse to answer them. This is what we do here. I'm your friend David Pearce. Neil Aptel is here.
- [02:27]
David Pierce
You know, I've been deposed like two or three times in the course of running the Verge.
- [02:30]
Nilay Patel
Have you really? I've never even thought about that.
- [02:31]
David Pierce
There's a very funny transcript of me being deposed for what? The important one was there was a game streaming service that Sean had called defunct and they sued us saying that they were not defunct and that don't
- [02:49]
Nilay Patel
put it in the newspaper that we're defunct.
- [02:52]
David Pierce
And it's a long story that ends with the judge in Delaware realized that some obscure, obscure law of republication did not have enough precedent, so they allowed the case to go forward so that they could say that us linking to an old story in which we had called the company defunct did not constitute a republication that would then bring it into the statute of limitations. Oh, wow, this took six years.
- [03:14]
Nilay Patel
Goodness.
- [03:15]
David Pierce
It's true that I've been deposed. And it's, you know, because the lawyers are like, just say you don't remember. So it's just an hour of being like, I don't recall.
- [03:24]
Nilay Patel
Which I really. This is, this is where like lawyer Nilai and journalist Nei run into each other in my favorite way. Like you, you, you love to gossip, you love to share information that, you know, you like to be a person who knows things and that you just have to sit there and you're like, I know the correct lawyerly advice is to sit here and say, I can't recall.
- [03:42]
David Pierce
You just don't remember. Whatever happened in the past has escaped
- [03:45]
Nilay Patel
your memory so long ago. Yeah, who's to say?
- [03:48]
David Pierce
Who knows?
- [03:49]
Nilay Patel
That's very good. So we do have a bunch of legal stuff to talk about today. The big news of this week, obviously is Elon Musk versus OpenAI. We talked about kind of the basics of this trial and the run up to it with Liz Lopato on Tuesday. Go listen to that if you haven't yet. We got some unexpectedly spicy early testimony from Elon Musk himself.
- [04:09]
David Pierce
I mean, Elon's. He's been on the stand. He's on the stand as we speak.
- [04:13]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, he is.
- [04:14]
David Pierce
He doesn't like it.
- [04:16]
Nilay Patel
He's not.
- [04:17]
David Pierce
He doesn't like being the main character of the lawsuit that he filed and insistedly drove to trial.
- [04:24]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, you would think this would be the thing that he wanted the whole time. Like, let's just get into this. Actually, we got a lot of stuff to get to today, but this is clearly where we have to start because the dynamic of this is so strange. So Elon Musk was called as the first witness. They spent a couple of days getting a jury together, which was very funny. And we should talk about the witness ways in which the jury came together. But the first witness in this trial is Elon Musk himself. And to your exact point, this should have been the moment he was waiting for. All of this, this obviously losing battle, this weird process of discovery that has been kind of damaging to everybody. This whole lark of a thing Elon Musk has been on, you just have to assume is so that he can get up and publicly say a bunch of rude things about other people in the AI world. And he just he just didn't pull. He just did a bad job.
- [05:15]
David Pierce
Yeah. I mean, everyone thinks they know how a trial will go. I'll remind the audience for the 10 millionth time that the law is not a computer. It's not deterministic. There's no predicting what will happen, especially in front of a jury.
- [05:26]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [05:26]
David Pierce
But you can do yourself some favors. You can be charming and warm and receptive and act like a human being on the stand when you're giving the testimony in the case that you filed and insistently drove to trial.
- [05:38]
Nilay Patel
And also, if you want to win the battle everyone assumes you're going to lose. Doing all of the things you just described strikes me as even more important, like, make the jury like you. Elon becomes a very important part of this whole process.
- [05:48]
David Pierce
It's just very obvious that Elon Musk, in an environment where his money doesn't make him important and away from the social media platform that he controls that algorithmically brings people around to tell them that he. They agree with him, is kind of an uncharming, unpersonable dick. And especially when he's under cross examination from a lawyer who's being paid a lot of money to make him look like a dick, he is not prepared for that circumstance in any way, shape or form. And you can just see it happening on the stand in this trial in ways that are potentially bad for the entire AI industry. Just now, as we're recording, as we sat down to record, OpenAI's lawyers got Elon Musk to admit that Xai distilled OpenAI's models as part of its training.
- [06:40]
Nilay Patel
Oh, wow.
- [06:40]
David Pierce
Distillation is a process where a sort of less powerful model asks a more powerful model, like, what to do. I don't know how else to describe it. That's more or less what's happening. It trains itself by prompting the more powerful model. And you can feel a lot of ways about distillation. Like, Google calls it an attack. Anthropic has anti distillation protocols. And they're all like, you can't steal our property. And I think anyone who is rational or sane or kind is like, but you already stole everything.
- [07:09]
Nilay Patel
Right?
- [07:10]
David Pierce
This is like, distillation is just very funny for these companies to get worked up about.
- [07:14]
Nilay Patel
Yes, but they all do get worked up about it.
- [07:16]
David Pierce
They all get totally worked up about it. They're like, we scraped the entire Internet. We fed them into our huge data centers and took all the energy away. And we didn't pay anyone for any of that. But now you can't distill the model we never ended. Okay, you can have one.
- [07:28]
Nilay Patel
It's like when anthropic source code leaked and they're like, oh, no. And it's like, well, you might have had this coming.
- [07:34]
David Pierce
So there's something very funny about distillation, just generally from that perspective. But you're not supposed to do it. The companies don't want you to do it. And you're especially not supposed to say, OpenAI is horrible and then try to catch up as fast as you can with Xai, and then do it by distilling OpenAI. And so just on the stand, minutes ago, they got him to admit that Xai has distilled OpenAI's models. And he, you know, he's trying to pass it off. He's like, we all do it. Everyone does it. This is how you train a great model. And it's like, no, Most of the companies train their less powerful models on their own more powerful models. This is a scandal. And I just don't think he was ready to walk into these kind of scandals.
- [08:10]
Nilay Patel
Evidently, he wasn't. And it seems like. So Liz Lopato on our team has been in the courtroom through all of this. She's chronicling it all over the website. This is like we invented quick posts as a format just for Liz to live blog things that Elon Musk says in a courtroom. You know what I mean? And so we should just start at the very beginning because this becomes delightful from, like, minute one of jury selection, which is sort of a weird thing to do, right? You.
- [08:40]
David Pierce
You.
- [08:40]
Nilay Patel
You ostensibly need a group of people who are going to be impartial. And the list of things that it is hard for people to be impartial about in this particular case strikes me as, like, astonishingly high. You have to get a bunch of people who are impartial about AI, which is not a thing most people are. You need people who are impartial about Sam Altman, which most people are not. You need people who are impartial about Elon Musk. This is just like. This is a sort of unicorn type of person you're looking for in the jury. And basically, very quickly, Liz seems to have discovered all of the possible jurors don't like Elon Musk.
- [09:15]
David Pierce
People hate Elon Musk. This is what I'm saying. If you get him away from X, a platform he controls that is algorithmically designed to just make him feel cool. Yes. In the real world, people do not like him, and he does not have the charisma to overcome it. And we're just looking at the answers on the juror questionnaire. So these are questionnaires that jurors had to fill out. And admittedly a lot of people are probably just trying to get out of jury duty. Sure.
- [09:41]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. These are not the people who are selected.
- [09:42]
David Pierce
These are, these are just questionnaires.
- [09:44]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [09:45]
David Pierce
And I'll just read you some of the quotes. Elon Musk is a greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage that doesn't, that doesn't seem like he's likely to win that. Sure. Over. Elon Musk is a world class jerk. Another one. I very much dislike Tesla. As a woman of color, I am very aware of the damaging statements and actions Elon Musk has enacted and been a part of. And this keeps going and going and going until the judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who, by the way, is a recurring character on the Virtue cast.
- [10:10]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. She was the judge in the Apple epic trial, right?
- [10:12]
David Pierce
Yep. These cases all get filed in a handful of courts. We have a handful of judges who keep showing up. So YGR is back for Musk Feltman. And she eventually had to say, the reality is that people don't like him. Many people don't like him, but that doesn't mean that Americans nevertheless can't have integrity for the judicial process. So she's basically saying, I trust the jurors that we have selected to set aside their almost universal disdain for Elon Musk that we all feel in this courtroom and do a good job.
- [10:46]
Nilay Patel
Rough, rough. This is a lot, a lot to ask.
- [10:49]
David Pierce
This is before we've even begun, before he's even had a chance to open his mouth. The Doge master has shown up and everyone's like, yeah, we hate that guy.
- [10:57]
Nilay Patel
YGR also, I think, made the, the, the main characters in this story agree to stay off of social media during the trial, which is a wild thing.
- [11:06]
David Pierce
Like, it's because Elon is posting they stole a charity. They. This is going to come up again. He's got these lines that he thinks are going to be the winning lines and you can't just say them to a jury. And he like, OpenAI has like filed motions to strike some of his testimony because he's doing tweets. And so she basically is like, I have to be able to trust you're not going to leave here and corrupt this process.
- [11:30]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [11:30]
David Pierce
So she's told everyone to stop tweeting.
- [11:32]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. So before we get into all of the insane stuff that happened on this stand, I think I want, I want to Try and very briefly explain the two sides of the argument. And I want you to tell me if I, like, more or less have it right as we get into this, because I think it ends up being important again for all the lines Elon Musk says. So the Elon Musk stance is I helped fund and start a thing that I believed is a charity. This whole thing was my idea. I was the driving force behind all of it. And then they stole it from me, essentially. They forced me out, they took my money, and they built this gigantic for profit company on top of it. How dare they do. So is that a reasonable.
- [12:12]
David Pierce
Yeah, that's his version of the argument.
- [12:15]
Nilay Patel
I think that's his version of the argument.
- [12:16]
David Pierce
There's some daylight between what he thinks the argument is and what's in his legal briefs. Yes, sure. And there's a lot of daylight between his argument and what may have actually happened, which is that he just hates these guys.
- [12:29]
Nilay Patel
Right. So the other side of the argument is, as OpenAI is coming up, Elon Musk tries to basically take over the thing for himself. He wants all of the control, he wants all of the board seats. He wants, like, he wants everything. And when he doesn't get what he wants, he decides to, you know, take his ball and go home. Leaves, says, says, screw this. Tries at some point to subsume OpenAI into Tesla because he thinks that's the only way they can take on Google and win at AI. This doesn't work. And he gets angrier and angrier as OpenAI gets more and more successful and thus then decides to sue because he's mad that he didn't get to be in charge of this thing. That is huge. Like, in a real way, the argument on the other side of Elon Musk is he's really mad that Sam Altman is the face of AI and not Elon Musk.
- [13:15]
David Pierce
There's that. And straightforwardly, you didn't read the contract, which also comes up in these cases when we talk about them on the Vergecast over and over and over again. Did you do the reading? And the answer in this case, we now have evidence, is no. Elon insistently did not do the reading.
- [13:33]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it's good stuff. So we, we have a bunch of. There's just a lot of good lines from the testimony. Liz has been in there talking through it all. We pulled some favorites. Nilai, do you wanna start with. Let's just run through the testimony and do some greatest hits here.
- [13:50]
David Pierce
So we're on day three as we record, we're on day three. So Elon's been on the stand for two days of the trial and several hours today. The first day was the direct examination. So if you've ever watched a courtroom drama, you know, this is when your own lawyer shows up and asks you questions about how cool you are. This is the.
- [14:06]
Nilay Patel
This is the time you're supposed to do very well and look very good.
- [14:08]
David Pierce
Right? They're like, how did you. How are you such a genius? And everyone's like, I can't possibly say. And, like, that's. This is what happens. Right? He's like, I'm just a benevolent guy who wants to make cars. And so that first day, he was really flat because there's no conflict. Yesterday, when cross examination began, he just became a raging jerk. And cross is when, you know, you get asked the leading question and the answer is yes or no. And if, you know, they can say, your honor, are. There's hostile witness, and you just have to say yes or no. Like, that whole thing that's cross examination.
- [14:41]
Nilay Patel
They say things like, isn't that right? Over and over and over.
- [14:43]
David Pierce
And you're. And it's designed so that the. The witness is only supposed to say yes or no. Right. And Elon hates this. It's. And it's like he's never watched a single courtroom movie in his life. So at many points, he accuses OpenAI's lawyer of, quote, asking questions that were designed to trick me. And then he answers the questions by saying things like, you mostly do unfair questions. And then obana's lawyer is saying things like, I'm trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best. And Vas just goes, that's not true. And this is just the entire. At one point, Liz writes, he refuses to acknowledge the nature of linear time because.
- [15:23]
Nilay Patel
Oh, yeah. That it was like, before you were not a board member, you were a board member. Yes. And he is like. And he just won't answer the question.
- [15:29]
David Pierce
What's to say? So he's just, like, fighting the basics. Like, we're not even engaging on the basics of whether or not cutting off donations to OpenAI might create pressure on OpenAI, whether Andrej Karpathy, who he had recruited to OpenAI and then to Tesla, whether he asked him to stay at OpenAI. Just these very basic chronology questions. Elon's like, you're mostly unfair. You're mostly trying to trick me.
- [15:53]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And I mean, there's another one of these that's just as good. And this goes to. Did you Read the contract. This is the one that really has stuck out in my brain over the last few days. Um, Elon gets an, an email in 2018 outlining the, the bones of the for profit structure. This is like one of the things actually that has come up in this trial and actually, and I think will end up being important, is how long has it been a, a discussed possibility for OpenAI to be a for profit corporation? Right. Like, there's this old clip that's going around of Sam and Elon talking. And Sam refers to OpenAI as a company. Elon goes, OpenAI is structured as a 501c3 nonprofit. And. And a bunch of people are like, ah. But then it's, it's increasingly clear that conversations about a for profit OpenAI have come up many times. And Elon has acknowledged that he was okay with a version of that. But there's a moment where they, they send him an email outlining the, the corporate structure they're imagining for a for profit version of OpenAI. And he says on the stand that he only read the very first section of it, which is. Hey. He says, I read the highlighted box with important warning, which is amazing. Just, this is very, it sounds very much like the, the way the Trump administration handles Trump, where it's like you have to draw a big red box around the thing you need him to read. Otherwise you just have no idea.
- [17:09]
David Pierce
By the way, the important warning was contributors should consider their investments as donations with no return.
- [17:14]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [17:14]
David Pierce
So he's acknowledged that he's read that part.
- [17:16]
Nilay Patel
Right. Which is, which is important. And then Musk says, I didn't read the fine print. We're going into the fine print of this document. And then OpenAI's lawyer goes, It's a four page document.
- [17:28]
David Pierce
Brutal.
- [17:29]
Nilay Patel
It's so good.
- [17:30]
David Pierce
Brutal. You can just tell he doesn't like being on the stand in this way. Cause he can't ignore your tweet. He can't downrank you. His army of fanboys isn't there to distract with memes. He just has to do it in the lawsuit that he filed and insistently drove to trial. Yeah, Crazy.
- [17:48]
Nilay Patel
It's a four page document. It's just such a good. Like those are one of those moments where you can just imagine, like, he goes back to his law office at the end of the day and it's just like high fiving all the paralegals everywhere. It's good stuff.
- [17:59]
David Pierce
He's got another line here where he says earlier, I don't lose my temper and I don't yell at people. And OpenAI's lawyer takes this as an opportunity to bait him into losing his
- [18:10]
Nilay Patel
temper, which he does very successfully.
- [18:12]
David Pierce
Immediately and successfully. So in the same sequence, he says, I don't think I read this term sheet. I'm not sure I actually read this term sheet. I did not look closely at this term sheet. And then he's been deposed already. So there's already another version of his testimony. OpenAI's lawyer points out that in the previous deposition, Musk didn't say that he'd read the first paragraph and nothing else. And Musk starts yelling at him. I said I didn't look closely. I only read the headline. And it's like, my guy, you can't, you can't be like, I'm very calm. I'm just here to save humanity. I never raise my voice. And then start yelling at the lawyer.
- [18:44]
Nilay Patel
And then at the next turn, you have to start yelling at the lawyer.
- [18:47]
David Pierce
There's another part of this again. This is if you set yourself up to be cross examined, you do have to prepare. It doesn't feel like he prepared for this obvious eventuality. And you can't trickster your way out of it. So if anyone listening has ever done, like mock trial in high school, this one, to me, as a person who did a mock trial in high school, is just so funny because you can see him being the smartest kid in class and it not working.
- [19:16]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [19:17]
David Pierce
So Elon writes an email about DeepMind, and he says, DeepMind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up. Setting it up as a nonprofit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high. So OpenAI's lawyer produces this email. They show it to Elon, they say, those are your words. Yes or no? Elon's response to this. And I'm telling you, if you did mock trial, you understand exactly where this came from in his brain. This is a hypothetical.
- [19:48]
Nilay Patel
Hypothetical.
- [19:55]
David Pierce
What are these your words, yes or no? This is a hypothetical.
- [20:01]
Nilay Patel
He's answering the question, is that a thought you might have had at the time? And what they're saying is, did you write this email that you wrote?
- [20:08]
David Pierce
And so OpenAI's lawyer says, so you thought it might have been a wrong move? Is this what you said? And they had to keep going until Musk admitted that he had written the email, which again, if you've just done the high school mock trial, you know that you've now backed yourself into a fight in which the people judging you, the judge, the jury, the high school guidance counselors who are doing mock trial are like, get over it. Just like, answer the question. Because it's not so bad if you're like, I did write that email. Can I explain what it means? It's very bad if you're like, it's hypothetical. Like, I'm not. I refuse to even acknowledge that you're asking me about this email. And he's just doing this over and over again. Throughout this trial, Liz was basically, as she was live blogging. She was like, this room is so testy and so uncomfortable. I think her line was, if I can't even imagine having this person as a co founder.
- [20:57]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. I mean, the funniest part about all this, and Liz starts her story with this. And also a lot of our commenters and stuff have been saying it, that one of the most remarkable achievements of this testimony is that it makes Sam Altman look really good. Like, Sam Altman is going to come off incredibly reasonable and kind in comparison.
- [21:15]
David Pierce
Maybe. I mean, Elon's.
- [21:17]
Nilay Patel
I mean, we have seen.
- [21:18]
David Pierce
I mean, the thing about trials, and this has happened every time we go to trial. Like, one side gets to go and then the other side gets to go.
- [21:24]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [21:25]
David Pierce
And so this is the part where it just seems very obvious that, you know, Elon is going to get to make his case and it's not going well, but he's going to get to make his case and then Sam's going to show up and it's all going to happen. Yeah. And the pendulum will swing back and forth. But as of right now, Elon is just being argumentative and petty and it, you know, Liz is in the room and she's like, it doesn't seem like a jury is buying this. There's another part of this. This is the most Elon thing in the entire world. He's arguing with the lawyer. He's arguing with, apparently his own lawyer. And so he says, I understand leading questions. That's a leading answer.
- [22:04]
Nilay Patel
I was just about to bring this one up.
- [22:05]
David Pierce
And the judge says, he can lead. He can lead all he wants. Let's remind everyone you are not a lawyer and you've never taken a class in evidence, which is an insane thing for a judge to remind a witness.
- [22:17]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [22:18]
David Pierce
And Musk's response is, I did take Law 101, technically, but, yes, I am not a lawyer. This is a total AI pilled man. Like, he's like, he asked Xai how to do. How to do a direct examination, and now he thinks he's a lawyer.
- [22:36]
Nilay Patel
This is also like, very clearly someone who is used to either being, or at least being treated as the smartest person in every room he's in. And there's even. There's been a bunch of evidence in this trial so far of the other OpenAI founders, like, going way out of their way to tell Musk how terrific he is. And, and that like, every request begins and ends with unbelievable flattery of what a. What a genius he is and what a pleasure it is to be able to just be in a room with Elon Musk talking about AI like, like Greg Brockman, just, just like, makes an ass out of himself being kind to Elon Musk in every single email. And you can just see this is a person who meets somebody who doesn't want Elon Musk's money. Actually is. Is out to defeat Elon Musk in a very specific way that no one ever really is in Elon Musk's orbit. And he just self destructs the face. Yeah.
- [23:27]
David Pierce
He can't do it again. You take him away from his money and his social media platform that he controls, where he has built himself an algorithmic filter bubble of people who think he's great, and you're like, oh, this isn't going well for you.
- [23:40]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [23:41]
David Pierce
At the very end of this, the judge says he was at times difficult. Part of management, from my perspective, is to just get through the testimony. It's bad. This is all bad.
- [23:52]
Nilay Patel
Okay. This is actually, this is where I wanted to end this one. Because what I can't figure out here is this stuff that Judge Gonzalez Rogers, good old YGR is saying seems like stuff I've never heard a judge say in the course of a trial. And again, where so much of this is going to come down to Elon Musk convincing this group of people in the jury that he is a good person trying to save the world. Boy, does that all. All seem to bode very badly for how this is going for Elon Musk so far. The fact that, like, is it as out of pocket for a judge to have to say this stuff during a trial as it seems to me?
- [24:28]
David Pierce
So they sometimes say it. They say it when they have the sovereign citizen guys who come in and they're like, you don't have jurisdiction over me. They say it in that situation, sure. But normally we've all watched all these CEOs appear before Congress. Right. They are way buttoned up because when the person with the power to take your stuff away shows up you back it way down. You're conciliatory. You say, you know, your honor, I'm gonna have to check that out later. Like, he should be playing to the jury, and he's saying things like, they tried to steal a charity, and this case is gonna set a precedent that will let anyone steal a charity. And this is his ex workshop to plaze line. And he's not allowed to say it. And OpenAI is like filing motions to strike his testimony because that's not true. And this is a real. I mean, you can have a lot of feelings about the legal system in the United States of America. You have a lot of feelings about the justice system in the United States of America. It is a structured system. It's designed the way it's designed to at least gesture at fairness. And you can't just steamroll it. That's why you have judges and procedure and rules and lawyers and all this stuff. And he's trying to steamroll it because he steamrolls everything. And he's just running into the reality of he's just a witness on the stand.
- [25:47]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [25:48]
David Pierce
Again, you know, it's going to flip, and they're going to put Sam on the stand. And I'm sure. I'm sure OpenAI's lawyers are going to try to make Sam look great, and Elon's lawyers are going to try to make Sam look horrible. And that's just the way it goes. But right now, what you have is one of the wealthiest men in the world in front of a jury that has pretty clearly indicated statistically they don't like him.
- [26:08]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [26:08]
David Pierce
Being a huge dick. And I just don't know what his plan is.
- [26:11]
Nilay Patel
I don't know that he has the, like, personality qualities to solve that problem on his own. Like the li. Liz kept noting on Today Thursday that he was much more subdued than he has been in the past. Like, clearly, there is somebody giving him the this is not going well for you, buddy note. And yet he can't help himself. Right. Like, this is the third day of this. It's not clear again, since we've.
- [26:37]
David Pierce
This is happening while we're recording. So they've moved on to Jared Birchall, who runs Elon's family office, manages investments. We've already gotten to how many Teslas he has. It's. It's. It's good stuff all the way around.
- [26:48]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it is. Liz's big theory was that this is going to be a trial kind of about a bunch of things that don't make any sense. But there is going to be a lot of stuff that comes out and I think that is already becoming true. Um, there's just like, there's a great moment earlier today where Elon Musk took a long time to acknowledge that his for profit companies are for profit. That's like, it's just what are we doing here?
- [27:11]
David Pierce
It's. None of it makes sense. We have all kinds of coverage on the site. Obviously Liz is in the courtroom. Hayden Field, our senior AI reporter is taking all the documents that are coming out over the course of trial, looking at them, organizing. There's a long post or if you just want to see the evidence that's being entered, you can go look at it. We're going to, I mean it doesn't get bigger than this for us. So we're covering this in every way we can.
- [27:33]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And there's a bunch of other OpenAI swirl happening right now. We should just talk about a couple of the things. I think the biggest one that happened this week is Microsoft and OpenAI essentially walked their deal all the way back. Right. Like Microsoft and OpenAI for years have had this very complicated but very sort of important and lucrative deal by which they share revenue and technology with one another. This is, this is how like Bing became what it was back in 2023. They made Google dance. Neil, I listen, it was, this is the greatest day of Bing's life. Give it, give it its one day. And this was like a really important tie up for both of these companies. Right. Microsoft owns a huge portion of OpenAI because of all of this. This is how OpenAI got a lot of access to technology and compute for a long time. And their big thing was all of this gets sort of wound down and reconsidered once we get to AGI and right. AGI was supposed to be this magical moment that if somebody got to AGI before OpenAI, OpenAI would shut down and would give all of its technology and resources to that company. All of this is nothing. AGI is nothing.
- [28:44]
David Pierce
I can't believe you're not leading with this.
- [28:46]
Nilay Patel
And the, the final acknowledgement of it is their, their deal is now just a normal contract for compute.
- [28:53]
David Pierce
I can't believe you didn't lead with the AGI clause going away. This is the clause that started with if you have, if you make like $100 billion of economic value, that's AGI. And then it got reworked into. We'll put up a panel that will evaluate AGI. They would never say who was on the panel. And I still Believe it should have been like the Pope and Mariah Carey and me, especially now that we have Chicago Pope. Like, that would have been a great panel. Like, I just. Yeah, we could have sold tickets.
- [29:18]
Nilay Patel
Is this digital God? Is. Is that the question? Yeah.
- [29:21]
David Pierce
And that's gone.
- [29:23]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [29:23]
David Pierce
We never even got to learn who they were thinking about for the panel. So in the annals of tech history, who was on the AGI panel? It will just be a forever unsolved mystery.
- [29:33]
Nilay Patel
But in tech circles, this is not because AGI is a fake concept that has no bearing on anything and is completely immeasurable and nonsensical. It's because we're already there. Right. Like, we've been seeing this for a while, that the Marc Andreessens of the world have been out there being like, AI and AGI are already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And other people have decided that it's not about AGI, it's about super intelligence, which is a. Apparently a different thing of equally nebulous definition. But. But, yeah, this whole thing has just fallen apart. And very clearly what this is is OpenAI wanted to be able to go make other deals with other companies and not be tied up with Microsoft in this same way. Also, there have been lingering issues between Microsoft and OpenAI for a long time. Microsoft hired a whole team of people to go do Microsoft's own stuff. A lot of the reporting in the. The story about Sam Altman was in the New Yorker that Ronan Farrow did was about the ways in which these companies have. Have kind of, if not lied to each other, at least not been wholly good partners to one another. And so it's this, the whole thing is just very clearly like, everybody wants out of this. We're moving on. We are now. We are now business contacts who have COMPUTE deals.
- [30:46]
David Pierce
Yeah, they have a. They have a first look exclusivity. So OpenAI products will ship first on Microsoft Azure unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. So you've got to. If you're OpenAI, you've got to use Azure. Unless Microsoft is like, no, that seems boring. Sure.
- [31:04]
Nilay Patel
And then OpenAI turned around and immediately announced a gigantic deal with AWS and has started to say, we are an AWS first product like that. That's our. That's our focus now.
- [31:15]
David Pierce
So as you and I have been talking about on the show for weeks now, it has just become very obvious to everyone that AI is an enterprise product. This is a thing businesses are going to do to automate business processes. In particular, a Lot of businesses are going to write a lot of code with AI in ways that they weren't able to before. And this is all great. And to make that all work and be good, they need access to lots of data. And the businesses already have their data in aws. Yeah, it's where it is. AWS is a huge cloud provider. A lot of businesses use it. It's already there.
- [31:41]
Nilay Patel
Amazon is winning that race and has been for a very long time and
- [31:44]
David Pierce
they're very proud of it. And so Microsoft is like, if you want the coolest AI stuff, you can migrate to Azure. And a lot of people are like, no, we'll just use Anthropic. Amazon spent a lot of money on Anthropic. We'll just use that. And so I think as OpenAI needed to get to an IPO and make more revenue and compete with Anthropic, which is resolutely a B2B company, they needed to get to AWS. I think the weirdness between Microsoft and OpenAI exists in a lot of ways and now it's over and we're just never going to know if Mariah Carey thought the computer was alive. And I'm personally very sad about that, as you can tell, but the decoupling of OpenAI for Microsoft has been in the works forever. To me, this is, it's just very obvious it's happened. OpenAI needs more customers. Being tied to Microsoft does not get them more customers. And unless OpenAI was content to remain Microsoft's research division and let Microsoft go fight for customers, there was no point in being locked to Azure in the way that they were. And I think we're going to see OpenAI be way more aggressive trying to get business customers now that they're on aws. None of this matters to anyone normal for any reason whatsoever. This is the most boring enterprise cloud computing drama that has ever existed in the history of the world.
- [33:01]
Nilay Patel
But it is happening for a specific and important reason, which, again, you and I keep talking about, which is that people, regular, normal human people in their regular, normal lives are increasingly saying they don't want AI.
- [33:14]
David Pierce
Yep.
- [33:15]
Nilay Patel
And. And they're saying it in, in ways big and small. Right there was the, this, this company, Sensor Tower, which does really interesting, like analytics data on the Internet and on mobile apps in particular, came out with a study that says basically uninstall rates for AI apps are way up year over year. Just to give you an example, Claude has the best number. Claude is the best performer of all of the major chatbots. With a 90% increase in uninstalls year over year, ChatGPT is up 257%. And this was measured in particular around all the stuff with the Pentagon and the Department of Defense.
- [33:52]
David Pierce
And wait, let me understand this rate. So uninstalls are up 257%.
- [33:57]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [33:58]
David Pierce
Not 257% of people are installing.
- [34:01]
Nilay Patel
Correct.
- [34:01]
David Pierce
Which is a very Trump like percentage. But the rate of uninstalls has more than doubled, right?
- [34:07]
Nilay Patel
That's right.
- [34:07]
David Pierce
Okay.
- [34:07]
Nilay Patel
And next to that, the rate of downloads is also slowing down. It's going up, but the actual like pace of adoption is slowing really fast. And we're just in this, we're in this fascinating moment where we had a great story on the site this week digging more into this tension that young people feel where they feel obligated to use AI. And so they do. And most people who are like in, in high school and college report using these AI bots all the time and they hate it and they wish they didn't have to. And they feel obligated to. They feel like they're being sold a bill of goods about how if they don't, they'll be left out of the job market and they'll, their world will fall apart on them. But they don't want to use these tools because they understand it to be bad for them to do so. And there is just like this tension is real and, and it is serious. And the thing that ChatGPT has had going for it for a long time is that growth has been ridiculous. Like it is, it is one of the fastest growing pieces of consumer technology in history. There's been a bunch of reporting recently about the fact that ChatGPT still hasn't announced that it has a billion users, which is like a big important milestone that a lot of people have been waiting for and have been, did not expect to be waiting this long for. And like there is just these things are huge, they're very successful. Lots of people use them. All that is true. And yet there is just this mounting evidence that even the people who use it don't like it. And more and more people are finding ways to not use it.
- [35:34]
David Pierce
That billion user, billion weekly active user number is a big deal because people have been waiting for it. But the information first reported and then the Wall Street Journal had the same bit that OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer is saying. We can't withstand the scrutiny of going public right now. Right. The kind of financial reporting we'd have to do. We can't we cannot do right now.
- [35:53]
Nilay Patel
And that as a result she is being in some ways frozen out of her executive roles at the company. Like the tension inside of OpenAI around this stuff appears to be pretty intense.
- [36:03]
David Pierce
That's reporting. I will say. They keep issuing statements signed by both Sam and Sarah saying we love each
- [36:08]
Nilay Patel
other so don't put in the newspaper that we're defunct.
- [36:12]
David Pierce
There's something here that we keep talking about that people keep arguing with us about because the numbers are broadly big. Google announced this quarter that Google search queries have hit an all time high. Great. It is true that people are using the tools at high rates. It's also true that they're making up their minds like the polling data is super clear and everyone in tech has gotten so confused about what data is that they can't see the thing in front of their face which is the experiences in the free consumer products are bad.
- [36:42]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [36:42]
David Pierce
Just straightforwardly bad. The experience of free ChatGPT is bad. It is nothing but like Buzzfeed style engagement prompts now. Like every query ends with have you thought about asking me another question? Like it's like some leading way.
- [36:59]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, the ads are starting to get more intense. The you're hitting limits faster and faster on these tools. Like it's. It is an increasingly bad experience.
- [37:06]
David Pierce
And the bar the reason it became such a fast growing product to begin with is that Google search at that time and to this day is so intensely commercialized and shittified. So as a competitor to that version of Google search which was 95 sponsored posts and an SEO iFied web where we the economic conditions of publishing a recipe require all the poor recipe bloggers to write 2,000 words of personal narrative before the actual recipe. That was all bad. We've written about that at length. Of course the chatbot that we'll just talk to you was a better experience. Of course that thing grew at infinite scale in the beginning and now they have to make money. They're reverting to an inshitified version of the product, loading it with ads, loading it with more engagement prompts, trying to drive user engagement in all kinds of ways that we understand and people are reacting to it. Yeah, it's the same with free Gemini. It's the same with free AI overviews. The yes, it's true they're doing more search queries because you can just ask the thing more open ended questions and it will deliver you an answer. It's also true that AI overviews are generally bad. Yeah.
- [38:16]
Nilay Patel
And you have to do another search to Get a good answer. Like, right?
- [38:18]
David Pierce
And like, no one, it's. I just feel like the tech industry is lost in the data, right? They're, they're, they're looking at these numbers and saying something must be going right. The market is telling us that we're winning. And it's like, also they're telling you that they hate the products.
- [38:30]
Nilay Patel
Tech companies love to talk about this phrase, revealed preferences, as a way out of the tension between people actually liking the product or not. Right. That you say, oh, people are having a bad time on Instagram and it makes them feel bad and it creates issues with mental health and body dysmorphia and all of this stuff. And someone at one of these companies points to a chart that says, well, they keep opening the app, so they must like it. And we. That that idea needs to die. It just, it just needs to die because it is not correct. Because the revealed preference of people using AI is I would like to have a job in the future. And, and the world has spent the last four years telling me that if I don't learn how to use Claude code, I will never get a job. And, and that the world will leave me behind. And so the, the revealed preference is not for these good products. It's, it's to continue to be a functioning member of society. And we just have to get out of this idea that because people use your products and that means they like them. This is the story of social media. We have spent a decade learning with social media that they don't have to be good products to be powerful and to be popular and to be, like, massively used. Like, screw you and your revealed preferences. People, people are saying out loud that they don't like your product and that they feel like they have to use it. And if you as a tech company think that's a victory, you should understand very quickly why everybody hates you. That's why everybody hates you.
- [39:57]
David Pierce
Yeah. I mean it to the extent that, you know, when Meta still had product managers, I think they're firing them all because Meta is firing everybody every week. You know, the joke was always that if Meta was having a bad quarter, a product manager could just turn a knob, increase the ad load and make the number.
- [40:13]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [40:14]
David Pierce
Inside of a tech company, that sort of decision process where it's like, we can just make more money by making the user experience slightly worse for a few weeks is pretty normal. Like, there's a reason it's a joke.
- [40:25]
Nilay Patel
Like, by the way, Meta this week revealed that to be precisely correct. Meta revealed that it lost 20 million users in its, in its family of apps, that meta stopped breaking out which, which app had which many users because I think it would make Facebook in particular look bad. Um, so it, it bundles all of its stuff together and that, that whole number across all of them, which protects anything having kind of a down quarter went down 20 million use. That's a big deal. Do you know what went way, way, way, way up is the amount of money that meta made last quarter. Like a record setting jump. Like they just turned the knob. And they will keep turning the knob.
- [41:07]
David Pierce
You know, the way they did it is super interesting and I'm jealous of the story. So this is a New York Times story by a friend of the virtual trip Mickle, by the way, and Eli Tan. And I'm utterly fascinated with how the ads economy works. I think understanding the money of the Internet helps you understand the Internet. And so I'm always just fascinated by it. And there's this thing that's happening on meta platforms and on Google platforms specifically, where the old way of ad targeting, where you would show up with your ad, which is called creative in the industry of parlance, it's very good. You have to call it creative to make yourself feel good about it. So you'd show up with your ad creative, your video, your picture, whatever it is, and you would say, I made a razor. I like to target this razor at men 18 to 35. Go find them for me. You know who your users are, put this ad in front of them. And they would do it because they have a lot of data. And then you could refine it even more. You'd be like, I think my razor blades are going to sell really well to men 18 or 35 in metro areas who have previously looked at shaving cream and they have a lot of data so they could target it. And you, the advertiser, were trying to go find your audience. Right. And you would, you could run all these experiments or find different ways that's over. The big jump in revenue is that they have flipped the model upside down and they are using AI to look at your ad, to look at your product, and then they're going and finding you, the customers that are most likely to want to look at your ad and buy your product.
- [42:32]
Nilay Patel
Oh, interesting. So you just say, I have shoes. And it is now you used to have to say, I want to sell these shoes to XYZ kind of person.
- [42:40]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [42:40]
Nilay Patel
Now you just say, I have shoes and Meta does the rest for you. Yeah.
- [42:43]
David Pierce
And not even I have Shoes. It's, here's my ad, right?
- [42:46]
Nilay Patel
I made a video like, here's the
- [42:48]
David Pierce
ad I made for shoes and go find me people who are likely to look at this ad and convert into shoe purchasers.
- [42:54]
Nilay Patel
Whoa.
- [42:54]
David Pierce
And so the, the line that the industry is using that I've heard over and over again is the creative is the targeting. So you just make different ads that you think will appeal to different groups and you make dozens of variations and you like, fire em off into the AI ad system. And the AI ad system looks at your ad and says, okay, this video looks like these videos that this group of people is interested. We're going to give this ad them and they're going to go find you the customers. And this is, you can just imagine the next turn, which is, oh, we can edit the ad with AI to make it more effective to the customers that we're finding. Or. And Zuckerberg has said this out loud, don't even show up with the creative. Show up with the product and some money. Give us the money. We'll generate the ads for you and just deliver you results, Right?
- [43:40]
Nilay Patel
Take one picture of the shoes, we'll do the rest, and we'll do the rest.
- [43:43]
David Pierce
And by all accounts, this is a massive success for both Google and Meta that small companies in particular who were never any good at advertising because they're small companies and you can't afford the big agencies that used to sell this kind of data analysis. They're just showing up and being like, find me some customers. And their sales are going through the roof, so they're just dumping more money into the system. And you look at that and you're like, well, that's actually great for a bunch of small companies. And then you also look at it and you're like, this sucks so much.
- [44:11]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it's real.
- [44:11]
David Pierce
Like, it's tearing the ad industry apart. It's certainly devaluing creative across the board. It's subjecting all of us to the creepiest kinds of targeted advertising that have ever existed in the entire history of the world. But then a bunch of small companies are finding more and more customers. I could not tell you. I've been thinking about this story since I read it, since I've been hearing all the ad people say the words, the creative is the targeting, which is a real mind bender because at the end of the day, like, but they also want you to give up the creative. They want you to stop making the ads. I don't know, man. When I say it's enterprise software, when you Say it's enterprise software. It's this. They took the AI tools, they invested in all the AI tools, they built the tools for themselves to run their ad targeting system. And it is by all accounts more successful than any ad targeting system or any advertising platform has ever been in the history of the world, even as the users go down. But it's not like great consumer experiences in any way, shape or form.
- [45:10]
Nilay Patel
The digital God stuff is a marketing scheme to bring customers to your ad targeting system. That is sort of the story of the last 20 years of the Internet and it is just more nakedly that story than ever. But when we get into ad tech, that means it is time to pull the ripcord on whatever we're talking about.
- [45:27]
David Pierce
Get out of here.
- [45:28]
Nilay Patel
Let's turn now to the hype desk. This is where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueta come on and tell us what's cool in the world sometimes. It's sponsored today. It is not. Ross, Ashley, welcome back.
- [45:42]
David Pierce
Hello.
- [45:43]
Ashley Esqueda
Thank you for allowing us to return. I'm surprised you haven't changed the locks, if I'm being honest.
- [45:48]
Nilay Patel
Neil and I have been talking and we've decided that one of your most important jobs on this show is to tell us what TV shows are cool. This is literally just like a thing that Nilai and I both require in our lives at this particular moment. And this is a thing I think you guys can provide for us.
- [46:03]
Ross Miller
Ashley has just the thing for you.
- [46:04]
Ashley Esqueda
I can provide. I can provide. I love television. I will binge watch tv. I'm obsessed right now with Widow's Bay on Apple tv. This is so good. It's a horror comedy. Katie Dippold of Bridesmaids created this. And it is. Matthew Reese is the star. He's the mayor of a small little island town in the northeast called Widow's Bay. And Steven Root is in it as like your resident weird guy. It's got all the things that you want and there's some elements of like, you know, it reminds me so much of Twin Peaks and I think that this generation needs a new. We needed Twin Peaks for this generation.
- [46:47]
Nilay Patel
Is it as weird as Twin Peaks?
- [46:49]
Ross Miller
It is as weird. It's. The other person who's kind of co creating is Hiro Mirai, who did all the Charles Gambino videos.
- [46:56]
Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, he directed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [46:57]
Ross Miller
He did all of Atlanta, basically. So it's that kind of like modern weird.
- [47:02]
Nilay Patel
I will say a kudos to Apple for being the only streaming platform left willing to release things once a week and Actually stick to it. Kudos. And B, this suddenly the Twin Peaks comparison instantly makes it make sense why all of my TV nerd friends have been excited about this show for like months. Like, this is the show all of 2026. Every TV hipster I know, all of whom love Twin Peaks, have been extremely excited for this show.
- [47:28]
Ashley Esqueda
It feels like it hits for me right now.
- [47:30]
Nilay Patel
Fair enough.
- [47:31]
Ashley Esqueda
Like, also, again, kudos to Apple for. I miss the golden age of tv. That was like Richard Pepper's hbo. I miss that era, like a lot. And now I feel like Apple TV has been on such a tear over even just, I mean, like what, five years now? I mean, they're just crushing it. And if you were, if you're a connoisseur of fine television shows, a content person, as it were, if you don't have an Apple TV subscription, you're really missing out. There's so much good sci fi. Like so many good sci fi shows on Apple.
- [48:07]
David Pierce
Yeah. Do you think John Ternus knows them? I've read a lot of coverage from the Hollywood press. It's like, who's this new guy? Will he keep paying us money?
- [48:17]
Ashley Esqueda
Does he know we're down here?
- [48:18]
David Pierce
Yeah, exactly. It's like, yeah. His job is to just ignore it. I think is what everyone wants, wants to have happen here.
- [48:24]
Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, I mean, it is a really good value add for I think the, the subscription stuff, which I, you know, I think that that's the thing that they're wanting to sell is that you know all the subscription services where you have Apple one and it's that like, what is it, 40 something dollars a month where you get like, everything all packaged in there with like Apple news. And so I think that that is, I think Apple TV is the crown jewel of that package, in my opinion.
- [48:50]
Nilay Patel
All right, Ross, what do you have for us?
- [48:51]
Ross Miller
I've got Coyote versus Acme. I am stupidly excited for this. We weren't here last week, but right after the show went up, they dropped a trailer for this movie. And you all may not know about this movie. It has been so long coming. It got finished in 2022 and then immediately shelved by Warner Brothers for a $30 million tax write off. It was one of the three movies that Batgirl, some Scooby thing.
- [49:15]
Ashley Esqueda
But this was a fully finished film.
- [49:17]
Ross Miller
Fully finished, ready to go, completely done.
- [49:20]
Ashley Esqueda
Not like, oh, it still needs post, like production, like visual effects.
- [49:24]
David Pierce
Do I just not know how to do my taxes? It definitely feels like I should be like, I wrote this book. I didn't Publish?
- [49:31]
Ashley Esqueda
Yeah, I'm shelving it and I'm not releasing it. And it's worth $30 million.
- [49:36]
Ross Miller
No one will ever see light of day. But I could tell you it was going to be a million seller. No. So it was one of those movies during kind of the early Zaslav years where they're trying to get the finances figured out. All these filmmakers who had seen it, they're like, this is the next who Framed Roger Rabbit. It's an animated kind of live action hybrid. The plot essentially is Wiley Coyote keeps going after the roadrunner with these Acme products, right? And they've broken every time. So he's fed up and he's finally decided to sue the Acme Corporation.
- [50:03]
Ashley Esqueda
And he hires Will Forte.
- [50:05]
Ross Miller
Will Forte as the down as luck lawyer versus John Cena. Like the super fancy lawyer for Acme Corporation. Like, this is the little guy David versus Goliath story. And of course, this is also now a metatextual read of the movie itself because it has been lingering for three or four years now. There was a couple of near misses. Netflix and Paramount tried to buy it. Warner Brothers said, no, we want $80 million. Finally, I think they just gave up this smaller independent distributor, Ketchup. They've done a lot of little smaller mid tier movies. They picked it up just recently, I think in March for $50 million. And it is finally going to see the light of day in August. The trailer just drops.
- [50:43]
Nilay Patel
Is it funnier if this movie is great or if it's horrible? Like just from a pure. This is the weirdest story ever. Like, is it a better ending if it's like a smash hit or if it sucks?
- [50:55]
Ashley Esqueda
I will be equally satisfied either way.
- [50:58]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I think that's right. It's either a very funny story or like stick it to the man. Coyote versus Acme is awesome. Like it's kind of a win win.
- [51:05]
Ross Miller
It's entertaining either way for us, the viewer at home. But yeah, I mean, it could be another like K pop demon hunters. But they just didn't realize what they had. Like Sony gave it to Netflix for Dirt Cheap and now it's like, shoot. Now we gotta figure out how to like monetize the back end.
- [51:18]
Ashley Esqueda
I will say all of the people on the Internet, I'm gonna. Because I am terminally online and I saw the outcry of people being like, this is terrible. We can't put the Looney Tunes in a vault. You better go see this movie. Like, you better go see this movie. This movie needs to make like $500 million. Like, Like. I don't. It doesn't need to cross a billion. We don't need to. We don't. It doesn't need to be the Mario movie, but it does need. It does need to make a statement, and that requires people to actually go see it. So go see it.
- [51:48]
Nilay Patel
It's a lot to ask in 2026.
- [51:49]
Ashley Esqueda
Oh, yeah, I know, I know. It's like $400 for a movie ticket. Now I understand.
- [51:53]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [51:54]
Nilay Patel
I saw Project Hail Mary the other night alone and it was like $90 all in this rough.
- [51:59]
Ross Miller
But wasn't it gorgeous?
- [52:00]
Nilay Patel
The popcorn was this big, though. It made me very happy.
- [52:03]
Ashley Esqueda
The popcorn supply chain is rough.
- [52:05]
Nilay Patel
Big popcorn. That's for another day. Rox, Ashley, thank you guys so much for being here. We will see you back here next week. We are gonna take a break and then we're gonna come back and we got some more stuff stocked up. Gadget time. We'll be right back.
- [52:19]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [56:01]
Nilay Patel
All right, we're back. Nilay. We have a bunch of gadget news this week, all on a really fun spectrum for me of so a bunch of things that I think you might be really into, and then a bunch of things that I think you may have absolutely no feelings about or interest for. So I've invented a new game and it's called Does Nilay Care about this?
- [56:19]
David Pierce
I love all gadgets. Don't do this to me.
- [56:22]
Nilay Patel
You love. You love all gadgets in theory, right? Like, you love that gadgets exist.
- [56:27]
David Pierce
Yes.
- [56:28]
Nilay Patel
Sometimes you don't care very much about. You're like, I'm so psyched that you're here. I want what's best for you and I hope you live a great life. Just don't talk to me anymore. It's like, that's how you feel about some gadgets. So we have a bunch and I'm just, I'm just gonna name some gadgets and we're either going to talk a
- [56:44]
David Pierce
bunch about it or we're so Mad at me by the end of this. All right, let's do it.
- [56:48]
Nilay Patel
The one I want to start with is. Is, I think probably the gadget of the week. It's the Steam controller. Do you care about the Steam controller?
- [56:55]
David Pierce
Okay, first of all, I need to say I do believe it's the gadget of the week, without question. People were so into the Steam controller on our site this week. I understand why. I intellectually understand why.
- [57:11]
Nilay Patel
Okay, I am going to convince you that you should care very deeply about the Steam controller. But first, let me just play you something that Jay Peters on our team made. He reviewed the Steam controller and he made something for us explaining what this thing is and how it works. Let me just play it for you.
- [57:25]
Jay Peters
Here's the Steam controller, ringing like a telephone. I have in my hands Valve's new Steam controller, which I've been using for about two weeks to play a bunch of games on Steam. It's a great controller for playing games, but there's all sorts of really cool small touches that make the experience even better. Like if you lose the controller, you can just ping it. The controller has nice chimes when you turn it on or off. The included puck that gives you a low latency connection also snaps onto the back of the controller so you can charge it magnetically. You can see a live indicator of that low latency 2.4 GHz connection right from Steam Settings. Here are the back buttons, which open up all sorts of customizations for when I'm playing my games. And I love the quick Access button that opens up a menu so I can connect wireless, wireless headphones or check performance in my games. You can even use a controller to type into text boxes on your computer. Or in a pinch, you can use it as a mouse and keyboard to navigate your BIOS. The Steam Controller will be available on May 4th for $99. I'm probably gonna buy one.
- [58:27]
Nilay Patel
Nilay, this is the thing. Yes, it's a video game controller and yes, you only play Madden, but like, what a good gadget this is.
- [58:35]
David Pierce
It's a great gadget. This is what I'm saying. I understand intellectually, you can use it in a pinch as a mouse and keyboard to adjust your BIO settings. Is perfect.
- [58:41]
Nilay Patel
Yes, it's perfect.
- [58:43]
David Pierce
It's $99. People are complaining about some parts of it. The haptic isn't a trick. Who cares? It's great. It's a perfect gadget. It is very funny that there's no Steam machine because of the RAM crisis. And so they're just doing the controller because that's the thing they can ship.
- [58:58]
Nilay Patel
They're like, we promise we've made these. We just can't sell them, most of them to you yet.
- [59:03]
David Pierce
But I think it's a great gadget. I just, I don't. I'm not a PC gamer. It's just not. It's not for me.
- [59:08]
Nilay Patel
Are you a believer in the theory that, like, maybe game controllers should do more than be game controllers? Like, there's something about what Jay is talking about there that is like, there were those years ago when it was like, maybe you'll use your game controller to also control your cable box and watch tv. The sort of Xbox One theory of the world. Part of me feels like there's something to that, that like, if we're going to do a universal remote in 2026 that can kind of halfway do my TV and my game console and change bio settings on my computer, it should be the Steam controller. This is why I want this thing. I don't even own a Steam deck and I'm like, I'm going to get one of these.
- [59:45]
David Pierce
You want to use it to control your Roku? What's wrong with you? No joy 6 Man, I feel like we have landed as a society on the remotes. For your TV stuff should be as simple as possible and your. Your game controller should be as complicated as possible.
- [60:00]
Nilay Patel
That is fair, right?
- [60:02]
David Pierce
Like, that seems like somebody who has an Apple TV remote and a PS5 controller just permanently next to each other. At no point have I ever sat and been like, they should be the same thing. Like they're just. They're different things.
- [60:14]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. I will say in this particular case, I respect the hell out of the Steam controller for knowing exactly what it is and who it's for, which is just endless customization. Right. Like, this thing is basically not supposed to work out of the box. It obviously will, but it is. It is meant to be tinkered with to death. And this is a thing that the whole Steam ecosystem has done really well over the years. Like, the Steam deck does a really good job of being customizable and having lots of different ways you can do things. You can map buttons to different things. You can run all kinds of software. Like, this thing is a tinkerer's paradise in a way that I think is really cool. And the Steam controller seems to have found a way to do that that is actually even like more user friendly than average in a lot of ways. And like this thing is. You can see why people are excited about this. Right. This is the exact thing you should deliver for this group of people. And I think that's really cool.
- [61:07]
David Pierce
Yeah. Steam knows its audience. You know the thing you were saying earlier about revealed preferences and tech companies getting all confused about their data. Big tech products, the ones that have to move the needle and billions of people, they all treat everyone like they're stupid. Good. Like you don't know what you want. We know what you want.
- [61:21]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [61:22]
David Pierce
2% of people don't like this. Those 2% of people happen to be 100 million people. Who cares? Like that's just how their brains work on the big. The big platforms, the big products and then products that take their own audiences seriously and let them make choices and customize and in user friendly ways. You can just see there's. And there's always love. It's just love.
- [61:41]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [61:42]
David Pierce
And like this is one of those. It's. I understand intellectually, I understand why the same controller is a big deal.
- [61:47]
Nilay Patel
I will say I am substantially less excited about the idea of being able to ring my controller as Jay was. But you know, props to you, Jay, but I do think the thing, and this is a thing you will appreciate as somebody who I'm sure has had to fight with syncing controllers to game consoles. That little puck that just plugs in and snaps on and immediately pairs the controller. Unbelievably good idea.
- [62:09]
David Pierce
Yeah, like fabulous.
- [62:12]
Nilay Patel
I have fought Bluetooth settings so many damn times over the years. Cause I used to. I had a. I had one PS4 controller that I would use on my PS4, but then I would also pair it to my iPad and use it as an iPad controller. And trying to go between those two things.
- [62:28]
David Pierce
What are you doing, man?
- [62:29]
Nilay Patel
Nightmare.
- [62:30]
David Pierce
Why are you trying to live that life spying out a controller?
- [62:33]
Nilay Patel
I don't anymore. I've learned. I have learned the error of my ways and mostly I just don't play games on my iPad anymore because it's not worth the hassle.
- [62:42]
David Pierce
That's the end of that.
- [62:43]
Nilay Patel
All right, I have another gadget for you. Can I interest you in a leak of Samsung's first smart glasses, thrillingly known as the Samsung Galaxy Glasses?
- [62:54]
David Pierce
What are we doing? I'm never going to wear glasses that say Samsung on the temple. It is not going to happen. I don't know anybody who's going to do that.
- [63:04]
Nilay Patel
It's a really good point.
- [63:05]
David Pierce
It's. It's zero percent chance of success.
- [63:08]
Nilay Patel
I think even the bar for Apple putting a logo on the, on the right temple of your face is A super, super high bar. And Apple is much more likely to get there than Samsung ever is.
- [63:19]
David Pierce
I mean, there's a lot of, like, conversation about whether Ray Ban ruined its brand by partnering with Meta. Yeah, Like, Meta needed the Ray Ban brand. No one's putting the Facebook logo on the side of the glasses.
- [63:30]
Nilay Patel
Totally.
- [63:31]
David Pierce
And now people see Ray Bans and they think of creepy glasses.
- [63:34]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [63:34]
David Pierce
V Song wrote a great piece for us this week. She kind of reviewed all of the smart glasses that are available, and she was like, what was redline? All these smart glasses and nothing to do. Yep. These products are fundamentally useless. They're just cameras for your face with a little bit of AI Assistant thrown in the mix so that everyone can claim their AI. I don't know, man.
- [63:51]
Nilay Patel
Well, and it's fascinating because I think the. The thing she has struggled with that I think is everyone's feeling who gets one of these is even. Even if you are actually compelled enough by the idea of a camera on your face to buy these things anyway, which lots of people are. Like, our friend Joanna Stern has a
- [64:05]
David Pierce
pair of these, the meta ones.
- [64:07]
Nilay Patel
Like, eyes open that they're cameras. Like, she's fine with it and that she loves them as a camera. The social cost of wearing these things is climbing so fast that I think that is starting to turn on people. And, like, V was talking about this. She's like, even when people don't notice that I'm wearing them, I know that I'm wearing them, and I start to feel weird. It's like. Like I'm wearing these glasses that I need to see, and I go into a bathroom, and suddenly do I feel the need to, like, apologize to everyone in this bathroom because I'm wearing glasses that I need to see? Because they come in prescriptions now, but they are smart glasses and they do have a camera, and I'm not recording. So, like, there's just. There's such a weird social dynamic to this that the we. The.
- [64:53]
David Pierce
Like.
- [64:53]
Nilay Patel
This is Nilai's theory of wearable bullshit. Right. Like, the killer app needs to be so killer to be worth, individually and as a society, solving these problems. And V's. V's stance is basically like, we're nowhere near it. None of the AI is it. None of the. The cameras aren't yet good enough to be it. Like, there's just nothing here.
- [65:13]
David Pierce
Again, the killer app is names and faces. I will reconsider a lot of my own personal stances about technology and surveillance and invasiveness if you can give me names and faces.
- [65:23]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [65:25]
David Pierce
I still think, and I actually think a lot of people will find that too creepy.
- [65:29]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, they should, because you need to
- [65:32]
David Pierce
build a worldwide facial recognition database. I'm just saying my personal power will increase so dramatically that, you know, I'm open to the idea.
- [65:39]
Nilay Patel
So that's, that's how you get above the curve of Nilai's theory of where
- [65:44]
David Pierce
if you can combine my just general level of wanting to talk to people and being charming with actually the capability of remembering anyone's name at any time, we're going to change a lot of things real fast. The FCC is going to get a lot different. You know what I mean? But, you know, all of these products are inching their way to making that promise and I don't think they're useful enough yet. And I certainly don't think a Samsung clone of a meta product that people are already starting to dislike is going to get them anywhere.
- [66:15]
Nilay Patel
No. And they're all pushing harder and harder towards being AI products.
- [66:18]
David Pierce
Right.
- [66:18]
Nilay Patel
This is like they, they want you to think that the killer app is ongoing access to AI. The camera is an input system, the microphone is an input system, that somehow these are all going to work. And V's stance, and I think most people's at this point is like none of that really works and it's not. And even, even the thesis of it is cool at times. Right? Like it's, it's a neat way to get walking directions when you're, when you're in a city in a certain place. And that is it. And the idea of like occasional glasses, I just don't think works for people. It's just, that's just not a. That's just not going to work. The Samsung glasses, by the way, it sounds like we're not going to have to wait that long to see. They might be announced as soon as Google I O in a few weeks, they're going to cost somewhere between 379 and $499, which is a lot of money. We'll see. They don't have a display. It seems they're camera glasses.
- [67:09]
David Pierce
We all understand these products now.
- [67:11]
Nilay Patel
We really do.
- [67:11]
David Pierce
They're camera glasses. The camera lenses, by the way, are huge. So at least they're doing that. Sure.
- [67:16]
Nilay Patel
Good for them. Speaking of Samsung leaks, there's been some leaks. And by leaks I mostly mean like blocks of metal that someone took pictures of that purport to show the wide foldable phone coming from Samsung. And I bring this up not because I think you are going to care about Samsung's wide foldable.
- [67:38]
David Pierce
Are we doing wide foldable as a category?
- [67:40]
Nilay Patel
This is the thing we're doing wide foldable, which a sucks. Apparently this, this thing, this phone might literally be called the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 wide, which is the worst possible idea. Like we did Fablet.
- [67:54]
David Pierce
No, go for it. Just go for it.
- [67:56]
Nilay Patel
We did Phablet and it was bad and everyone should feel bad. We can't do wide foldable. We just can't.
- [68:02]
David Pierce
Z Fold eight wide. First of all, absolutely sounds like a high school football player.
- [68:07]
Nilay Patel
I was just thinking that too.
- [68:08]
David Pierce
100% no idea what we're doing here. Like, I can hear Jon Gruden screaming Z fold eight wide. Like in my, in my soul. I mean, what else is it? It's a foldable, it's a little squatter and it's going to open up into a basically landscape tablet. Sure.
- [68:22]
Nilay Patel
So the reason I ask is because this also seems to be the ongoing theory about what the iPhone is going to be. That rather than do the sort of tall TV remote when closed, tablet when open, that Apple is also building something that is a little shorter, a little squatter. And this might just be the future of the foldable phone. And I'm curious how you feel about that.
- [68:47]
David Pierce
This is just another category where I intellectually and emotionally want it to win.
- [68:51]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [68:52]
David Pierce
I want there to be great folding phones because I think it's so cool. If you ever unfolded at one of these phones, you're like, oh, this rules. And then the reality is most people who have them don't ever unfold them. We know a lot of people with folding phones, they just don't unfold them because to make them good, you have to make them useful when they're closed. And then you just have a phone and then you have a phone that you can unfold and they don't unfold it because nobody wants a little tablet. Maybe it'll be different when it's iOS and Apple. People are going to be different than the Android people. But. But I don't think it's the shape that's holding anyone back here. I think it is fundamentally unfolding it. You have to have use cases for a bigger screen of that size that isn't just I'm going to watch a video and even I'm going to watch a video. No one is deterred from watching a video at full volume with no headphones at any time on their phones at this point in time.
- [69:48]
Nilay Patel
No. Every time I see somebody on the subway, I was in New York this week, so I Got to spend a lot of time riding the subway, which is when I do a lot of my anthropological technology research.
- [69:57]
David Pierce
That's very important.
- [69:57]
Nilay Patel
I look over people's shoulders and watch them do text messages. And the number of people I clocked watching YouTube videos vertical on their screen. Like, not vertical videos, but like horizontal YouTube videos where it's the, the video at the top and then the, the, you know, feed of related videos at the bottom. Just perfectly happy watching the video with it taking up, you know, a third of the screen. It's like, oh, right. Most people don't care about watching on the biggest screen that they have.
- [70:23]
David Pierce
They're reading the comments like they're, they're in it, Right?
- [70:26]
Nilay Patel
They're just transiently watching videos.
- [70:28]
David Pierce
Yep.
- [70:28]
Nilay Patel
It's fine. This is what we do also.
- [70:30]
David Pierce
Most videos on YouTube, I mean, we're, we're in it. We're in the mix. They're just podcasts, like, whatever.
- [70:34]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, that's exactly right. Uh, yeah. Don't look at our faces.
- [70:38]
David Pierce
It's fine.
- [70:39]
Nilay Patel
Um, did you see, by the way, speaking of size of foldable things, Mark Gurman, who has been reporting the existence of a foldable iPad for, like, forever, now thinks that there is not going to be a foldable iPad. And do. And the thing I don't think I realized until this supposed product was canceled was that it was going to be a 20 inch iPad.
- [70:58]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [70:59]
Nilay Patel
This is a foldable television. And this sounds like you could get nilay on board. Like, give me a 10 inch iPad that turns into a 20 inch iPad. Is like, that's some Nili stuff right there.
- [71:10]
David Pierce
I'm into it. Let's go. Like, give me something other than a phone that turns into a tablet. You know, like, I know how I feel about tablets. I don't use them. That's your answer.
- [71:22]
Nilay Patel
Can I interest you in a phone that turns into a smartwatch? Also known as the new Motorola Razr Ultra, the flip phone of my dreams.
- [71:28]
David Pierce
This thing is real pretty.
- [71:29]
Nilay Patel
It is. It's really nice looking.
- [71:31]
David Pierce
It's really pretty.
- [71:32]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [71:32]
David Pierce
It's still a Motorola phone and it is still utterly confusing software.
- [71:36]
Nilay Patel
It's also more expensive than before.
- [71:38]
David Pierce
They have done the most insane job of just one to one pixel for pixel cloning the iPhone. Camera on this phone?
- [71:48]
Nilay Patel
Yes. Very, very much so.
- [71:50]
David Pierce
Not even an attempt to make it look anything other than the iPhone. Camera.
- [71:53]
Nilay Patel
No, they're fine with it. Allison Johnson, our senior phone reviewer, basically wrote about the Razer Ultra saying, this phone is hot and you shouldn't buy it. And I think that's largely correct. I used a Razer Ultra for a while. Found it to be a cool idea that is like completely wanting in functional software. But then I look at this and it's like they've got the wood finish back, they've got a bunch of nice colors. I like that it closes. I don't know, I still, I still want it. There's something in me that says flip phone is the right answer to everything.
- [72:24]
David Pierce
I ran into somebody with an older Razer a couple weeks ago and they were just thrilled with it, Just loved it. Loved closing it and putting it away and feeling like if they needed to look at a notification on the COVID screen, they could, but they weren't going to do social media on it and to do anything on their phone they had to intentionally unflip it. They loved it.
- [72:43]
Nilay Patel
It's good stuff. Again, purely anecdotal. This is my, my subway riding anthropology. Many more Z flips out there in the world than Z folds people. People seem to be buying more flip phones than fold phones at the moment. And a lot of that I'm sure is price, right? Like the foldable phone is double the price.
- [73:01]
David Pierce
I think a lot of it's price, but I, I just think no one is like, I should get a little tablet. Like, look, I know the tablet people are out there. They're all going to send us emails. I know that pilots love the iPad mini and that there's data showing that back injuries for pilots have dropped precipitously since the iPad came out. I think I picked that one up in David Pogue's Apple 50 book, which is really fun to read. I've been flipping through it. It's great. I get it. There's a market for tablets. I'm just saying most people are not like, I should get a tablet. They're like, I should get a bigger phone. And then they get the biggest phone that they can.
- [73:33]
Nilay Patel
Okay. Which is also maybe the story of the last gadget. I have to ask you about the Asus Rog Zephyrus duo. Can I interest you in a gaming laptop that has a screen and then another screen on top of that screen?
- [73:46]
David Pierce
I've never been more excited about a product in my entire life. This is, this is the one.
- [73:50]
Nilay Patel
Pure Nili.
- [73:50]
David Pierce
Especially because you can make it go up vertically in like this very precarious and also somewhat like scary way, like it looks like it's going to attack you.
- [73:58]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. I mean the one is sort of tipping towards you at the end of this process.
- [74:02]
David Pierce
Yeah. This is. I mean, this is a laptop for someone who's very serious about video games and also trading crypto.
- [74:07]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it has two 16 inch OLEDs. It has an Nvidia 5090 GPU, 16 core Panther Lake chip, all the ports, 32 gigs of RAM, terabyte, SSD, $5500 as configured. Antonio reviewed it and this is he. He basically, he has literally a line in this story that says this is a laptop for nobody. Um, but then the. The ongoing thesis of his review is like, but it kind of rips, dude. Like, it's this computer just. It just kind of rips, dude. Like, I spent all week working on my 13 inch MacBook Air instead of the normal big screen that I have. And you know how sick it would have been to just have another 13 inch screen I could pull up? I would have gotten so much more done.
- [74:58]
David Pierce
Uh, I do love that the keyboard pogo pins onto the bottom screen. Like the number of configurations that you can put this laptop in. Very good. I'm into it. This is the best gadget of the week. Screw your skin controller.
- [75:11]
Nilay Patel
$5,500, that's what you need. Let's do this.
- [75:14]
David Pierce
This is what we need. This is what America needs at this time.
- [75:16]
Nilay Patel
I couldn't agree more. All right, let's take one more break and then we're gonna come back. Stupid Brendan. He did it again.
- [75:25]
David Pierce
Never stops.
- [75:26]
Nilay Patel
We'll be right back.
- [75:29]
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David Pierce
at the Home Depot.
- [76:59]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Now through May 6. Exclusions apply. See homedevot.com Pricematch for details.
- [77:04]
Nilay Patel
Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal everything you
- [77:16]
Jay Peters
need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft
- [77:21]
Nilay Patel
365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. All right, we're back. Nil. I don't even have to ask. It is time once again for America's favorite podcaster. Than a podcast. I know it's time again because the man has escaped containment as he does from time to time. Brendan Carr is a dummy.
- [77:51]
David Pierce
Brandon Car is a dummy.
- [77:59]
Nilay Patel
Thank you to everyone who has reached out telling us how much you love the new official theme song of Brandon Carr's dummy. We've gotten some licensing requests. Yeah, it's, it's. This thing's going to happen there. It's going to be on the Billboard charts. It's going to be a whole thing.
- [78:11]
David Pierce
I want to make sure we. We license the remix, too. Also, keep sending us theme songs. We'll play the other theme songs.
- [78:16]
Nilay Patel
Absolutely.
- [78:16]
David Pierce
It's just we were playing the Gregorian chant so much that it felt that we should just make it official someday.
- [78:22]
Nilay Patel
We're going to do like a, like a Coachella. But every act is just Brendan Carr themes. Oh, no.
- [78:29]
David Pierce
And then he'll try to shut it down.
- [78:30]
Nilay Patel
Oh, we have to do that now. Ne. Why did you say that out loud?
- [78:34]
David Pierce
It's bad news.
- [78:35]
Nilay Patel
Oh, brother. What do you do this week, Brendan?
- [78:37]
David Pierce
You know, he overdid it in the way that he is want to do. I think it's going to backfire. I think I have hope for America this time. He's still a dummy. So, as I'm sure everyone is aware, this past weekend was the White House correspondence dinner. There was an attempted shooting. Although it is becoming less and less clear who shot at what time. Yes, just based on what we know. But somebody did try to break into the correspondence dinner. They did have a gun. Shots were fired. The thing was shut down. Everyone was hustled out of there. Joanna Stern was there. It's just scary all around this whole thing is very scary. It's very bad. Don't do political violence. I'm just gonna keep saying it. Before the dinner, Jimmy Kimmel had done a fake roast of the dinner on his show, and he showed a picture of Melania Trump, and he said this joke that I personally think is very funny. He said, you have the glow of an expectant widow because Trump is not looking so great lately. And that's just a joke about Trump being old. I would point out that the president, when people die, he's like, I hated him anyway. I'm glad the bastard's dead. Like, this is not a man who reveres death. Fine. Anyway, the White House correspondent scenario gets shut down because of this attempted shooting. And people seize on this joke on the right, and they're like, what a tasteless joke. You're calling for an assassination. There's not a reading of that joke in which Jimmy Kimmel is calling for an assassination. Right. This is just pure outrage culture.
- [80:03]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [80:04]
David Pierce
At every possible level.
- [80:06]
Nilay Patel
I mean, it's. It's right there next to. There was. I forget who it was. It was one of the Trump administration officials said something about how, like, there's going to be shots fired at. And everybody's like, she knew. And it's like, no, that's just a thing people say.
- [80:17]
David Pierce
You know, there's entire conspiracy culture online lately. Charles Pulliam Moore wrote about it for us this week that the sort of conspiracy influencers are having the time of their life right now because they've got all these clips. That's a whole separate thing. But the right seized on Jimmy Kimmel making the somewhat anodyne fake roast of a joke. Melania Trump tweeted about how outraged she was. Trump himself tweeted that Kimmel should be fired. And this was all calling for assassination. And the rhetoric is why this happens and blah, blah, blah. And so, of course, Brendan cannot help himself. And he's been wanting to do this. He's been searching for an opportunity to do this. He says, I'm going to take Disney's broadcast licenses for the. I believe it's eight stations they own and operate, and we're going to pull them. We're going to call them back for early renewals. And his claim is this has nothing to do with the president's tweets. It's actually because Disney does dei, and DEI should be illegal, too, which is just a whole other, like, wrong answer by Brendan Carr. But he can't say, I'm doing retaliation because the President's mad. So he's saying, actually, the President was mad about DEI a while ago, so we're doing that one. This is just straightforwardly back.
- [81:20]
Nilay Patel
Isn't it wild that that is the more, like, plausible, acceptable option in his head that he's like, well, I can get away with this one.
- [81:27]
David Pierce
He's not a smart man. This is gonna be a problem anyway. So he's going after the broadcast licenses of ABC stations that are owned and operated by Disney. It is unclear what will happen. I think Disney's actually got some fight in it. You know, they got a new CEO. Josh Mars, the new CEO of Disney. Bipartisan sort of pushback on this. It is rare that I agree with Ted Cruz on this show, but Ted Cruz is like, this is an affront to the First Amendment. The national association of Broadcasters, the lobbying organization of the cable and television industry, they're, like, pushing back and saying, you can't call early renewals like this. You're going to break the system. This is not how we as broadcasters need to operate. This is an organization that I have been very critical of in the past when it comes to telecom policy. They're pushing back. And I think you've just got an American public that is sick of this. Right. That does not want Jimmy Kimmel to be punished for a joke that had nothing to do with the assassination. Like, they're not linked in time. He did a fake roast, and then there was a shooting.
- [82:28]
Nilay Patel
We've been down almost this exact road. And it was like. It was a massively bipartisan group of people being like, you have way overstepped. I mean, this. It is maybe the worst PR move Brendan Carr's FCC has made. And that is a high bar.
- [82:44]
David Pierce
Yeah. And Kimmel is not backing down. They didn't take him off the air this time like they did with the Charlie Kirk shooting. By the way, the audio of the Charlie Kirk shooting is now a TikTok meme. People are using it as a transition.
- [82:55]
Nilay Patel
Like, speaking of things there are conspiracies about.
- [82:57]
David Pierce
Right. But that thing didn't work. Right? Like the. When you try to shut down speech in this way, the backfire is so much worse than just letting it burn itself out, like, over and over again. Particularly with Americans, if you tell them they can't say something, they're just gonna say it. They're gonna take it away from you. They're gonna use it however you want. They're gonna use it. If you particularly like young Americans, if you tell them they can't say something, they're gonna take it away from you. And they're gonna use it however they want. And it absolutely happened to Charlie Kirk, which is Jimmy Kimmel, round one. It's going to happen again this time because Trump looks petty. There's already conspiracies swirling about this shooter and the shooting, and, and people think it was staged. And there's a lot here. And Brendan saying a thing that was disconnected in time is somehow a call for assassination is so nonsensical on its face and so censorious on its face that it will backfire yet again in some other insane way. So that's just one, Brendan. This week, everyone saw this one coming.
- [83:58]
Nilay Patel
Before we switch out of that, I do have one. I have one, like, procedural question on this, which is the late since renewal thing is, at least in theory, a thing that Brendan can do. Right. Like, that is an actual power. The FCC has these license renewals. Okay, you, you made a face, which is why I'm asking, like, is this a real thing he can do to. To initiate these license renewals? Take, potentially take them away? Like, is this a threat he could actually conceivably follow through on in some way?
- [84:27]
David Pierce
I feel like Brendan's nights consist of not being invited to parties and instead, like, going into the basement of the FCC and like, blowing the dust off some. And me, like, what powers aren't we using? Sure. So, like, technically he can, he can do this. Usually it's done in case of emergency or, like, totally egregious behavior. But these licenses were not due for review until 2028. I think on the. The earliest one was 2028, which means
- [84:52]
Nilay Patel
nothing in reality would happen until after a Trump administration.
- [84:55]
David Pierce
Right. So he's pulling an early renewal. He's pulling it forward from when they would come up for review. Right. And that is just so unusual. So, yes, it's a power, but it's a power that's like something really egregiously bad happens. But he's blaming it on dei, which makes no sense to anyone because it's not even, it's not even clear what DEI means in the context of these local news stations. Like, he hasn't made the claim, so he's got to go fight it through. Right. Like, and I think a lot of judges are going to say this looks like obvious retaliation. This thing happened. The President tweeted and you filed the slate. Like, these are. They are now connected in time, even though the joke had nothing to do with the event.
- [85:34]
Ashley Esqueda
Right.
- [85:35]
Nilay Patel
You even have other FCC commissioners telling us that Brandon Carr's full of Shit. Yeah.
- [85:40]
David Pierce
Today, just before we started recording, the FCC had its open meeting and they took questions. Here's Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the fcc and she just said it straight up. We have the tape, we can run it.
- [85:50]
Nilay Patel
This week we saw one of the
- [85:52]
David Pierce
most egregious assaults on the First Amendment by this FCC to date. The White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic and the
- [86:00]
Nilay Patel
FCC answered the call.
- [86:03]
David Pierce
The agency's media bureau directed Disney's eight ABC owned stations to file early license
- [86:10]
Nilay Patel
renewals ahead of schedule, some of which
- [86:13]
David Pierce
are nearly five years before they would otherwise come due. This is a bad record for Brendan Carr when he shows up in front of a court. Yeah, and I do think Disney's gonna fight it. I think the new CEO of Disney has a lot of incentive to fight it. I think the people who work at Disney have a lot of incentive to fight it. And I think that American people are on Disney's side. So you're a dummy, Brendan. You should not have picked this fight, this classic dumb Brendon, by the way. Similarly, Brendan loves the news distortion rule. Like he loves saying you're SNL is news distortion or whatever nonsense he says. He's not a smart man. A bunch of former FCC commissioners and like a radically bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners and chairs and staffers filed a lawsuit this week basically saying we petitioned the FCC to get rid of the news distortion rule because we think it's such a danger to free speech. But Brendan, instead of ruling on it, has sat on the petition. So they filed a lawsuit this week asking a court to force Brendan to issue a ruling on news distortion, on getting rid of it. Because either way they can appeal the ruling, but as long as he sits on it, they can't do anything right.
- [87:22]
Nilay Patel
Which is the source of his power.
- [87:24]
David Pierce
Which is the source of his power.
- [87:25]
Nilay Patel
It's the threat that is the thing.
- [87:27]
David Pierce
Yep. So Mark Fowler, who was a Republican chair of the FCC in the 80s, wrote in a statement, the news distortion policy is a loaded gun that Chairman Carr is using to threaten broadcasters. Until it is repealed, we will not have a free press. That's a Republican, an 80s Republican wrote that about news distortion rule. Tom Wheeler, who we know who's, we've, we've had him on the verge and on the show before. He was the Democratic chair under Obama, said as long as the news distortion policy remains, the FCC chair can continue to misuse it to police perceived media bias. This just keeps going on and on and on. There's Republicans And Democrats. It is the most unlikely coalition of bipartisan telecom regulators you have ever seen in your entire life. They actually pointed out at the end of the. One of the former Republican commissioners said in a statement, when unlikely allies share an opinion, that opinion eclipses party partisanship. You could not find a group of petitioners with more divergent political beliefs than this one. Yet we all agree on one thing. And he goes on to say what they agree on, but I think what they agree on is that Brendan Carr is a dummy.
- [88:27]
Nilay Patel
There's a real, like, you are doing this so badly that you're making everyone who has ever done this look bad.
- [88:34]
David Pierce
Everyone who's ever done this job thinks Brendan is an idiot.
- [88:37]
Nilay Patel
Right. And it's. He's doing it so poorly that it is reflecting poorly on them for previously having done the job.
- [88:44]
David Pierce
I mean, my joke is I keep coming on this. I keep coming on the show. I mean, like, I think the Wall Street Journal editorial page has it, right? And it's like, what is happening to me? But that's basically this lawsuit. It's that kind of bipartisan group of former FCC officials coming together to be like, we don't agree on anything, but we agree this guy has to be stopped. That's. That's very bad. So I'm eager to see how that lawsuit goes, because if Brendan does what we all think he's going to do, which is uphold the news distortion policy, that can go be appealed. And I think that kind of lawsuit will be fascinating to see in a world where the Supreme Court has gotten rid of all of the idea that the courts need to be deferential to agencies. So this is like Brendan wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC. But the other part of Project 2025 chapter is the agencies have no court should be deferential to these agencies whatsoever. And so like, like some of this is coming home. Right. Like some of the inherent contradictions of MAGA world are starting to get laid bare here. We'll see what happens. I do have one more sec update. I'm very sorry.
- [89:46]
Nilay Patel
Oh, my God. We're still doing. There's more.
- [89:49]
David Pierce
So several weeks ago, you remember Brendan just sort of outlawed all the routers in the world. Yeah.
- [89:54]
Nilay Patel
For. For no discernible reason. And on no discernible timeline, he's like, they're so dangerous.
- [89:59]
David Pierce
They're all illegal now.
- [90:00]
Nilay Patel
But the one you have is fine.
- [90:02]
David Pierce
But the one you already have in your house is fine. Who knows what's going on here?
- [90:05]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [90:06]
David Pierce
And then there was some process laid out by which router manufacturers could apply to prove that they were safe. It was totally unclear what that process would be. The one thing that they wanted to demand was, you're going to move router manufacturing to the United States because anything made overseas is inherently dangerous. Sure, sure. So Netgear was the first company to get a, like, a conditional waiver. And it was just utterly unclear what they had said to the Trump administration. It's unclear if Netgear is going to make anything in the United States. Like, we just don't know. And Netgear is not talking. This week, Amazon got waivers for its EERO routers and the routers it's going to use for its LEO satellites. Also unclear. You can go look on the FCC website, at least at the, you know, the sort of questions they were asked. But my understanding of all this is that these companies are filing some paperwork, making some representations that their products are safe in some ways. You can go look at the questionnaires online and then that's going into, like, a black box. And then some combination of, like, what used to be known as the Defense Department and now is the Department of War and dhs, the Department of Homeland Security and FCC are like, reviewing this in some way and then being like, sure you're safe. I don't know. I couldn't tell you what's happening. I don't think any of these companies are ready to manufacture routers in the United States. I don't think you could if you wanted to. And it is unclear. I don't think this is happening. I don't think they're, like, buying bitcoin on the side for Trump. Like, all of the comments on the Netgear post at least were like, it's bribes. And, like, I don't even think that's happening. I think it's a weird black box process that looks a lot like the process that we have for banning drones. And the only difference is there are no big American drone companies, but Netgear is a big American router company and Amazon is a big American router company. And they were able to just do the paperwork and say, we're a big American company. Here's how we are representing. Our supply chain is safe and they've gotten through it. Utterly untransparent, like, totally opaque. And in the Trump administration, with Brendan, who just did this capriciously and Trump and everyone thinks it's Brad, it's so weird. Like, everyone thinks it's bribe, like, all the comments on our post are like, oh, bribes.
- [92:19]
Nilay Patel
The best part about it is, if it's not bribes, what are we even doing? Do you know what I mean? It's actually like, more discernible if it's bribes. Like, you can. You can draw a straight line through this whole story, as long as it is corruption. If it's not corruption, the hell is it? Like, yeah, it's so weird.
- [92:39]
David Pierce
You can just sit here and be like, how serious is this government? You can just look at this process and be like, how serious is the Trump administration about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, about actually securing a bunch of routers and IoT devices? You know, we had the CEO of the UL Underwriters Laboratories on decoder this week, and they were under the Biden administration charged with something called the Cyber Trust program, where they were going to put a safety mark on IoT devices. And Brendan was like, oh, you've got labs in China. China is bad. We're taking this away from you. And they gave the contractor on the Cyber Trust program to a friend of Donald Trump. And you're like, how serious are you? Are you. Are you actually serious about safety? Or are you just using this stuff to do hilarious corruption? And now everyone thinks you're corrupt. So even if you have the best of intentions, even if there's a bunch of well meaning lifelong civil servants earnestly trying to run the program, you've stained it with corruption because you can't explain anything you're doing, because Brendan is an idiot. Anyhow, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on the show, explain literally any of this. Defend literally any of this. We'll make you the time. You can do it before or after the next Vergecast movie night. We'll even do that for you. We'll buy you a ticket to the next movie that we run happily.
- [93:56]
Nilay Patel
We'll play whatever movie you want. Brendan, what kind of movies do you think Brendan likes?
- [93:59]
David Pierce
Oh, I have an answer, but I can't say it out. Lol.
- [94:05]
Nilay Patel
Perfect.
- [94:08]
David Pierce
Anyhow, Brendan, I don't think you have the juice to defend any of this, which is why you, I know you, you read the coverage and you look at the links and the Google searches you do for your own name. But you never come on the show, but you're always welcome, my friend. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.
- [94:22]
Nilay Patel
It's good stuff. All right, I have two lightning round items for you. And first is actually like, mostly a question for you. Um, it's. I have a real. Is this anything kind of question for you. So we, we've spent a lot of time talking about the, the copyright and trademark issues around AI and Taylor Swift as she is want to do is right in the middle of a bunch of interesting stuff right now. Um, there have been all of these issues with people using deep fakes of celebrities to try and sell things, right? Like the, the idea of like it's, it's Taylor Swift trying to engage you in some multi level marketing scheme has become a thing that happens online. So all of these celebrities and all of the platforms are trying to figure out a way to fight this stuff. And then on the side, Taylor Swift in particular is, is going further and further down the road of trying to figure out how to I would say sort of like give herself certain kinds of ownership, it seems so that she can fight these things in a more like straightforwardly legal way. And the thing that happened this week is that Taylor Swift and her team filed for the trademark of two phrases. The phrases are, hey it's Taylor Swift and hey, it's Taylor. And the reason for this, at least according to Taylor Swift team, is that most of these videos that are being deep faked to be Taylor start with her saying, hey, it's Taylor Swift. Go buy this sketchy cryptocurrency. Right? And so their, their idea is we can, by, by trademarking this phrase, we have a much more sort of straight line legal case to take this stuff down. My question for you is, is literally is this anything? Is this going to work for Taylor Swift and is this a thing we're going to start to see people say, right, like there's been lots of questions about copywriting your likeness and what about yourself and your world you can own and how that's protected. But like can you, can you trademark the phrase hey, it's Taylor?
- [96:11]
David Pierce
Sure. I mean you have to use it in commerce. So she has to figure out how to use it in commerce.
- [96:15]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [96:15]
David Pierce
This is the main thing of trademarks is they're designed for trade. It's right there in the name. So she has to do something with hey, it's Taylor.
- [96:25]
Nilay Patel
She has to like sell a line of T shirts that say hey it's Taylor on it. And then she has something.
- [96:29]
David Pierce
No, for her voice. She's got to have something. You know, I mean like there's, there's going to be some weirdness here.
- [96:34]
Nilay Patel
She's going to put out a song that's just her saying, hey, It's Taylor like 300 different ways.
- [96:38]
David Pierce
Yeah, it's something like you have to. You have to associate the thing you're trying to trademark with with something to indicate that it's you. This is the whole point of a trademark. Right. It's supposed to indicate that you buy a Coca Cola, you see the logo, you ascribe the product, the qualities of Coca Cola. There's. There's a whole body of trademark law that's like, this is how markets work.
- [97:00]
Nilay Patel
Sure. Okay.
- [97:01]
David Pierce
And the reason I'm like hammering on this is none of that has anything to do with. I'm trying to prevent deepfakes. Like, you can draw a pretty thin line to. You shouldn't use my voice to do scams. Right. And that's the argument they're making here, that people are doing crypto scams. And it's Taylor saying, hey, it's Taylor. I think you should invest in whatever crypto coin. And that is straightforward trademark and vengeance. So I need a trademark, but it's not, hey, people are making deep fakes of me generally. Or people on X are making the weird sexualized deep fakes of people on X are constantly making of every woman celebrity that has ever existed. Right. That's not going to stop it because
- [97:38]
Nilay Patel
that's just like a void of legal precedent. Right. Like, we still have no idea what to do with that.
- [97:42]
David Pierce
The Take It down act is about to go into effect. There's some state law, like, there's some stuff. There's some international laws. It's a pretty messy field right now because it just has never been able to be done at scale before. And so AI, you know, scale changes everything. AI is changing it. But the Taylor Swift is going to trademark some stuff, is trying to use a body of law that's really designed for commerce to police a kind of computer imagery and synthetic media that might not line up correctly. And I'll make a comparison here, which is. YouTube has rolled out its own likeness program. You and I are both in it, right?
- [98:19]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [98:20]
David Pierce
And it is just private law. Like, it's not the law of the United States. YouTube has made some rules about what you can and cannot do with AI likenesses of people. They will detect those AI likenesses. I had to take a photo of myself and like upload my license, my driver's license, to say, this is me. And then it knows it's me because of the channel. And then if people use my likeness, it will do it and I can send a flag and there's going to be some process. And YouTube has some rules about parody and stuff. And they have just invented YouTube law.
- [98:50]
Nilay Patel
This is like what happened with Content ID a million years ago. Right? All of that.
- [98:53]
David Pierce
So content ID is built on copyright law. This is actually very different.
- [98:56]
Nilay Patel
Oh, interesting.
- [98:57]
David Pierce
Okay. So Content ID is built on copyright law. So, you know, the core of Content id, it's expanded over time, is the music industry. So if you want to use music on YouTube, YouTube can detect that you've used a Justin Bieber song, and then they can say, okay, that's Justin Bieber's song. We're gonna take some of your AdSense revenue and direct it back to Justin Bieber. And this accomplishes the goal of letting you use the Justin Bieber song and keeping the record labels and importantly Justin Bieber. And so Content ID starts there, player, and then it moves on to, okay, you've got all kinds of videos are being reused in all kinds of ways. You've got all kinds of rights holders and content. We can expand it, but it's all built on copyright law. Because the thing copyright law lets you do is say, that's mine, take it down. And likeness law, trademark law isn't quite there. It's not the same. It doesn't have the same thing. Right. Especially likeness is like very state by state. There hasn't been a really national likeness man. So YouTube invented private law. Like. Like, there's how likeness works on YouTube as a platform, and then there's how likeness works in the United States of America. And the policies of YouTube and the policies of the United States of America no longer align. This is one of the weirdest things I think has happened yet on the Internet. And I don't know what's going to happen next, but I think you're going to see celebrities say, hey, we've got to find ways to protect ourselves. And maybe the laws of the United States aren't good enough, or we're going to take shots at it while we pressure the platforms to invent some laws of their own, some content moderation policies of their own along the way until something comes together and this all makes sense. And it is. This is going to be one of the weirdest fronts in all of AI, in all of social policy, because you can get to some really weird outcomes. For example, should Taylor Swift impersonators be illegal? Probably not. But you can quickly get to a
- [100:45]
Nilay Patel
place where, okay, it was my side hustle. If that happens, happens just bad.
- [100:48]
David Pierce
You look good in the bodysuit. Thank you. I've always thought it suits you. It did get a lot cheekier over the course of the tour. I thought,
- [100:58]
Nilay Patel
I'm in A happy relationship. You know what I mean?
- [101:00]
David Pierce
That's just a David Butt joke. I don't think that's the right answer. But you've got to draw that a person doing a Taylor Swift impression and a computer doing a Taylor Swift impression are viewed differently in the eyes of the law in different circumstances. I don't know if you've met the people in Congress. Good luck.
- [101:16]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Okay, so if you're Taylor Swift, you're like, I have to. I just have to try some avenue. Something might work. And I'm sure they're also in heated meetings with YouTube trying to figure this out. This all makes sense. But I can keep saying, hey, it's Taylor for the foreseeable future, and I'll be okay.
- [101:30]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [101:31]
Nilay Patel
Okay, good. All right, you get one more. What's your lightning round item.
- [101:35]
David Pierce
My last one. I just want to say this news to you and then hear you react to it. It. Netflix has pushed out its redesigned app, and the central feature is a vertical video feed called Clips, where it just shows you clips of movies and shows and stuff on Netflix.
- [101:50]
Nilay Patel
Okay. Can I. Can I tell you the, The. The radicalization arc that has been my last seven days on this front? So you. To give you a lot of credit, I would say you. You became a. A total clip zealot and radical sometime last year. You were like, the world exists in 90 second vertical increments. Nothing else matters. Clips for days. Whatever Mr. Beast does, that's what we should be doing is like the stance of Nilai Patel. For a long time, I have fought this fairly aggressively. I think in general, there has been this weird tension. Like, we have thought about Clips as, like, marketing for the podcast. And so we're like, the goal of you watching two minutes of us on Instagram is to then come back and watch or listen to the podcast. And then Ed Elson, who co hosts a couple of podcasts with Scott Galloway and is a writer and podcaster, went on Charlie Wurtzel's podcast at the Atlantic and gave, I would say, almost exactly the speech you've given to me, like 30 or 40 times. And for some reason, for some reason,
- [102:57]
David Pierce
Ed has a British accent.
- [103:00]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, he's. He's very convincing. Thank you.
- [103:02]
David Pierce
He's very charming and he's got the accent. And it totally worked on you.
- [103:05]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And he looked dead into the camera and he said, david, listen. And his. His whole case was, no, this is not. This is not like smaller versions of the thing. The clips are the thing.
- [103:18]
David Pierce
Yep.
- [103:18]
Nilay Patel
And literally in the last, like, seven days, Come to see every one of my feeds differently. Where it's like now, instead of thinking about it as like, oh, I'm seeing, you know, two minutes of a Friends episode. What if. What if that two minutes is the whole thing? Like that. That is the whole thing. That is most people's experience of that thing. And it has totally changed the way I think about everything. Like, there are lots of podcasts out there that many people never consume an entire episode and yet are fans of the podcast because they've watched lots of clips. I could name you some of those podcasts for me that I love and care deeply about the hosts. And I have never once experienced an episode, um, Netflix doing this at like the highest possible end of the spectrum, where it's like, what if you never watched a Bridgerton episode but you saw lots of 90 second clips of Bridgerton is such a, like, mind bending fact. But I've now come around to like, what if most people's experience of Bridgerton is six clips and they love Bridgerton and maybe that's okay.
- [104:16]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [104:17]
Nilay Patel
And maybe Netflix is geniuses.
- [104:19]
David Pierce
So Netflix has a sort of different opportunity in its app. They're just happy if you open their app on mobile. No one does that. Right. They're just thrilled if you. If the number of people who open the Netflix iPhone app goes up.
- [104:34]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And Netflix can do a very straightforward thing, right. Which is show you what amounts to a trailer and then you're like, oh, this seems cool. Just go watch the movie.
- [104:42]
David Pierce
I actually don't know if trailers is the way to go. I think it's. They have to come around the idea that the clips are the content.
- [104:49]
Nilay Patel
I think you're right.
- [104:50]
David Pierce
And if they want people to open the app more, they cannot be focused on whether it's discovery for the actual shows. Netflix has to get to a place where people open the Netflix app and they flip through the clips feed and then they close the Netflix app and they walk away and they're happy with that experience.
- [105:06]
Nilay Patel
And that's a success story for Netflix
- [105:07]
David Pierce
and that is a huge success story for Netflix. And what they are not going to have is an army of clippers and discord channels trying to pump crypto coins stealing Netflix content for the best parts, to pump an infinite amount of stuff into the algorithmic slot machine, which is the thing that TikTok has. Okay. It's very hard to compete with that.
- [105:29]
Nilay Patel
Can I tell you what this makes me think? There are two ways this goes. One is, I would say Netflix and Disney are probably the two with the most unique opportunities. And Disney, by the way, also pursuing this very aggressively. You go to the ESPN app and there is the thing, they call it Verts, which sucks. But it's. It's the same thing. It's just a feed of TikTok Y sports videos. Disney has been talking about doing the same thing in the app. I'm not sure if it's in the Disney plus app or not, but this, this is the idea. And in theory, what you can do is basically lift all the best parts out of TikTok and it's like, well, what if instead of every third video being someone eating junk food in their car to try and sell it to me, it was just the good stuff and it was just, you know, new girl bloopers, which is all I ever want to see on TikTok anyway. What if I could just go to a streaming service and get that experience anyway? Seems really cool. The thing I just described is the pitch for Quibi. This is the problem. I just pitched Quibi to you.
- [106:26]
David Pierce
Sure did.
- [106:27]
Nilay Patel
I don't know. I don't know how to feel about those two things.
- [106:30]
David Pierce
I. Well, Quibi. Quibi's cost structure was so dumb. Quibi is like, what if we spent 5,000 times per minute of video than anyone else's history? Like, that was like Katzenberg like sat down and said these words to me and I was like, I don't straightforwardly,
- [106:44]
Nilay Patel
I don't think that's tick tock, but really expensive.
- [106:47]
David Pierce
Like TikTok's like, what if an army of teenagers worked for free and Katzenberg was like, what if I hired the most expensive people in history to give me stuff they couldn't sell to anyone else? And it's like, I don't. Doesn't seem smart. So that, so whatever, format wise. Yes, you're describing Quibi. I think the difference now for these streamers is the consumption has moved so thoroughly to phones and they are absolutely up against their own movies being pirated onto the social video services.
- [107:17]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, absolutely.
- [107:18]
David Pierce
So if what you're saying is what people are going to discover a Few Good Men all over again by watching it in clips on TikTok, we might as well participate in that economy.
- [107:29]
Nilay Patel
Right?
- [107:30]
David Pierce
I just don't think they're gonna get to the full Quibi where they're like making the vertical shorts that like Drama Box and the other companies are making, because that, that business model is even yet more different.
- [107:42]
Nilay Patel
Well, and this is the beauty of it, right? If you're, if you're Netflix or if you're like, this is the reason I keep coming back to Disney is like, if Disney just wanted to make what amounts to, like, Pixar, TikTok, that is just like an endless stream of stuff. They already have all of the hard stuff to make. They already have all the content. They already have all the movies. And what you're describing is the trick, right? You have to teach these companies that the goal is not to make me go click a button and watch the entirety of A Few Good Men. That that's actually not what we're trying to do here. And if we're not trying to do that, what are we trying to do is still a thing that I'm struggling to figure out.
- [108:18]
David Pierce
It's just take more seconds of attention away from someone else.
- [108:22]
Nilay Patel
Show ads between the videos and show ads.
- [108:24]
David Pierce
And the problem with that is it's every. The business of all this gets way easier when you're stealing everything. So if you're TikTok and you're like, well, we know that armies of clippers are stealing content to build channels and eventually run scams. But, like, a lot of people are watching Lifetime movies this way, this is fine for you because you're not on the hook to Pay anyone. Like, TikTok pays no one anything anyway, right? If you're Disney and you do this, you might be on the hook to pay a bunch of actors a bunch of residuals, right? Like, this is like a problem in your streaming deals. Netflix, I think, not as much. They just own all their stuff and they don't pay anyone. By the way, a disclosure. We made a Netflix show. They certainly didn't pay me anything. Whatever. So I think there's, like, economic problems here that come when you are trying to do the ostensibly right thing and pay people. Whereas, like, TikTok and Instagram are like piracy. Go do it. And again, it's. It's just very hard to compete against an army of people working for free.
- [109:23]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, agreed. We should talk more about clips. I think actually you. We should come back and just, like, spend a long time talking about the clip economy. Because usually I would say, because usually you're. You're wrong about everything. But this one you were right about, and we. We should talk about it.
- [109:41]
David Pierce
We have a big piece on the clip economy coming in in a week or so from Mia, so.
- [109:44]
Nilay Patel
Oh, that's right. Maybe you and Mia and I should. Should just get together and. And hash this out on the Planet Pod for a while. It'll be good. All right. For now, we have gone way over as we are want to do. If you found us on a clip this week, tell us about it. I want to know what clips you're seeing in your feeds. Nei in particular has been hearing from a lot of people that he is appearing more and more in their feeds. Oh, I saw clips of you is a sentence you don't really ever get used to hearing. But for now, we should get out of here. There's a lot going on on the website right now. There's like, Liz's coverage of the trial remains ongoing. There's all kinds of OpenAI stuff happening. We've got a lot of, like, really fun feature y things coming in the next few days. If you haven't read the Attack of the Killer script kiddies on our website this week, it's a delight and it's some of the most unhinged art we've published in a minute. Go read that. It's very good.
- [110:36]
David Pierce
It is one of my favorite illustrations that we ever done.
- [110:38]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it's a really good stuff. Stuff. Nei, what's happening on Dakota this week?
- [110:42]
David Pierce
Dakota this week is the CEO of Uber, Dar Koshawi. I basically was like, how do you run a software company in the age of AI? And he's like, I don't know. We're all figuring out.
- [110:51]
Nilay Patel
That's the chill attitude you hope for.
- [110:55]
David Pierce
I basically, I was like, all of your peers appear to be going crazy. And he's like, they. Yes, but it was good. And Uber announced a bunch of stuff that you can now book a hotel in. In Uber. They're Uber's. They're trying to become an everything app. You should listen to it. It's. Everyone's trying to become the interface for everything because they don't want to get intermediated by AI. You know what I mean? It's. It's. There's a lot going on there.
- [111:17]
Nilay Patel
I'm really excited to have a hundred new ways to book hotels in my future because I've always thought there aren't enough ways to book a hotel. Do you know? Do you know what I mean? Like, thank God someone's giving me a way to book a hotel. Thank goodness. We just finished shooting version history. You and I spent a bunch of time together this week making podcasts. That's all gonna start coming out in a few weeks. Go subscribe to that feed. We did a whole season of smart home stuff, and it was an absolute delight. And one episode ended with me very sweaty, talking very fast in the studio. It's coffee related. We did a keurig episode that involved drinking from a Keurig and I about killed myself.
- [111:52]
David Pierce
I was like did you get a matter enabled cocaine dispenser? Like what are we doing here?
- [111:56]
Nilay Patel
David I did. That's a couple seasons. We need more budget before that starts to happen. That's it for the Vergecast. Remember also to subscribe to the Verge to get all of these podcasts and everything ad free. You get all of our newsletters. You make sure that we can keep sending Liz to courtrooms to write down the insane things that Elon Musk says. This is what we do here and you can support all of it by going to the verge.com subscribe and signing up. Also call the hotline 866 verge11 send us an email vergecasthverge.com we love hearing from you on anything and everything. Send us the clips that you think. Send us clips of shows that you've seen but will never watch. That's what I want clips of. Send them all directly to us. Your favorite shows that you've never watched an episode of. That's what I want to hear about. The Verge Cast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next time. Nilai Rock and roll.
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David Pierce
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