Everybody wants to rule the AI world

Summary

The Vergecast – "Everybody wants to rule the AI world"

Date: May 8, 2026
Hosts: Nilay Patel, David Pierce
Key Focus: Power struggles, legal drama, and gadget moves in AI’s wild week

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the tumultuous intersection of technology, lawsuit drama, and the rapidly evolving AI industry, focusing mainly on the high-profile Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial. Nilay Patel and David Pierce explore the messy corporate structures, personal dynamics, and philosophical conflicts that define the current state of leading AI organizations. The conversation weaves in recent tech news, from rumored AI gadgets to nostalgia-fueled game remakes, always with a sharp, irreverent tone and plenty of direct quotes from key figures.

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Main Themes & Segments

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The AI Industry: A Game of Thrones (02:08–07:26)

• The episode kicks off with the Musk vs. OpenAI trial, described as an ongoing saga revealing just how much tech's future is shaped by "how seven guys feel about each other" (02:41).
• Key Quote:
  "The entire AI industry is basically just how seven guys feel about each other."
  – Alex Heath, as paraphrased by hosts (02:41)

Discussion Highlights:

• Dramatic and sometimes comical text messages and journals are becoming potent evidence, thanks to executives documenting everything digitally—fueling ever-messier legal discoveries.
• The team notes that discovery in litigation will become “banana”-level absurd as everyone’s data gets pulled into the open, especially as AI becomes more embedded in executive workflow (04:05–07:09).

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Corporate Paper Trails & Legal Risks in the AI Era (05:25–06:44)

• Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) lauded for his prudence in never leaving a paper trail, in stark contrast to the chatty OpenAI founders.
• Warning that attorney–client privilege can be blown by putting legal advice into AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Courts are even ruling that such sharing voids legal protections (05:03–05:25).
• Quip:
  "This man can only be reached on a phone through cutouts. Yes, that's it."
  – David Pierce on Satya Nadella (06:02)

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The Musk vs. OpenAI Trial: Early History and Key Tensions (07:26–18:13)

• The roots: OpenAI’s founding intertwined with Y Combinator and Sam Altman's complicated financial dealings.
• Allegations fly that Altman and Brockman acted in self-interest, blurring nonprofit and for-profit lines while leveraging Musk’s money.
• Elon Musk’s failed attempt to take control—at one point he proposed folding OpenAI into Tesla. His departure marked by "sore loser energy."
• Messy personal dynamics revealed:
  "Siobhan Zillis, who is the mother of some of his children, is part of OpenAI... She has to go and tell OpenAI that she's also the mother of Elon Musk's children."
  – David Pierce (13:56)
• Quote on Musk’s overconfidence: "One tweet is all it takes."
  – Elon Musk, via Greg Brockman’s journal, as recounted by David Pierce (15:23)

Key Takeaways:

• The trial boils down to trust issues, control, and recurring themes of self-enrichment masked as altruism.
• Both Musk and Altman are painted as unreliable, sometimes in ways that seem both transparent and shady at the same time.

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The "Blip": Sam Altman’s Temporary Firing and the OpenAI Coup (18:22–33:00)

• The chaotic days when Altman was ousted, then rapidly reinstated, are reconstructed through Slack messages and memeworthy texts.
• Staff and board communications reveal confusion, lack of transparency, and surprising informality:
  "All of these people text like children, like just pure children."
  – David Pierce (19:02)
• Iconic meme:
  Sam: Can you indicate directionally good or bad? Satya and others anxious.
  Mira: Directionally very bad.
  (21:14)
• Confusion abounds; Mira Moradi (CTO, briefly CEO) mediates between Altman and the board, sometimes playing both sides.
• Microsoft/Satya Nadella emerges as adult in the room, using the chaos as leverage and threatening to hire the whole OpenAI team if things implode.

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Corporate Dysfunction as the AI Industry Norm (27:52–33:00)

• Board concerns included Altman/Brockman not disclosing financial interests in deals (e.g., with nuclear company Helios); lack of board notification before the surprise launch of ChatGPT, which would alter the industry forever. "The launch of chat with GPT, like, legitimately changed the tech industry forever."
  – Nilay Patel (29:14)
• Debated whether OpenAI’s lack of safety protocols and secrecy justified board fears, but consensus is that nobody anticipated ChatGPT’s explosive impact.

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Quick Hits: Courtroom Vibes & Satya’s Tactics (33:02–34:12)

• Reporter Liz’s courtroom coverage (recommended for its snark and clarity).
• Microsoft's lawyers’ only contribution in trial:
  "And Microsoft wasn't there. And Satya Nadella wasn't there either."
  (33:10)

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AI-First Gadgets: The “ChatGPT Phone” Pipe Dream (37:52–47:55)

• Rumors swirl that OpenAI will make a phone for ChatGPT. The hosts skeptically dissect why, despite the hype, it’s destined to fail:
  • Entrenched nature of iPhone (“good luck” beating it).
  • AI hardware can’t yet deliver on the bold promises of agent-like capabilities.
  • iOS/Android restrictions mean true voice/chat interfaces can’t exist outside Apple/Google’s sandbox.
  • Jony Ive’s involvement adds drama—“from ‘legacy device’ to, well, still just a phone.”
• Natural language interfaces don’t solve for needing “apps” and existing ecosystem; Siri’s failures continue to haunt the concept.

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Apple, AI, and Vaporware Lawsuits (50:22–54:11)

• Discussion of Apple’s $250 million class action settlement for Siri ads that overhyped features that the product absolutely could not deliver.
• "That was an ad with a celebrity that Apple ran for a feature that didn't and doesn't exist... we just shouldn't forget how wild that fact is."
  – Nilay Patel (51:28)
• Apple’s “AI luck” dissected: company bungled AI, but may benefit from yet another paradigm shift without real preparedness.

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Google's Fitbit Air & the Perils of "Google Health" (54:33–62:09)

• Fitbit Air: A $99 screenless tracker with AI features launching alongside the rebrand of the Fitbit app as “Google Health.”
• Hosts praise the device’s focus—but criticize Google’s branding, which may scare users with privacy baggage.
• "Google's software design continues to be just terrific. But the idea of Google Health signs you up for people understanding a different kind of data collection that Google is doing."
  – Nilay Patel (59:18)
• Fear of overreaching data aggregation and wellness advice “that just tells you how terrific you are all day.”

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“Familiar” Home Robots – The Rise of Embodied AI Pets (63:18–67:45)

• New “familiar” robots from iRobot’s veteran Colin Angle: pet-like, non-talking robotic companions meant to facilitate human connection.
• Hosts are both skeptical and a bit creeped out: "It looks like a knockoff Sonic character and I do not mean that as a compliment."
  – Nilay Patel (65:24)
• Robot’s AI only meows/purrs, doesn't talk facts; price rumored to be “similar to pet ownership,” causing laughter and concern.

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Lightning Round: Nostalgia, Gadgets & Tech Culture (69:18–84:05)

• Star Fox Returns: Nintendo remakes Star Fox 64 for a fifth time, complete with a face-tracking VTuber mode—a gift to furries everywhere (71:43–75:22).
• Zach Galifianakis’s Netflix gardening show: Earnest, 15-minute episodes, confusingly wholesome.
• Brendan Carr’s Dummy: A recurring segment lampooning FCC commissioner Carr for opposing broadband equity; segues into sports-rights debates and Packers ownership disclosures.

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Final Lightning: Wild Gadget Claims & More Musk Shenanigans (90:09–96:37)

• Dreamey Announces Everything: Chinese upstart Dreamey shows off a pile of vaporware, from rocket cars (0 to 60 mph in 0.9 seconds?) to modular phones. "Feels like horseshit."
  – Utterance from an engineer evaluating the rocket car (93:18)
• SpaceX AI, X, Xai—Corporate Structures Gone Wild:
  Musk mashes together X, Xai, and SpaceX AI, resulting in one of the most impenetrable and hilarious corporate naming rat’s nests in tech (94:02–95:37).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On AI Industry Drama:
  "A cornucopia of AI guys being dramatic in the world right now."
  – Nilay Patel (02:37)

• On Tech Paper Trails:
  "Now the mother of Elon Musk's children is on the stand... Instead of saying, I don't recall...she would say, it's not in my neurons."
  – David Pierce (14:02)

• On OpenAI’s Board Coup:
  "Can you indicate directionally good or bad?"
  "Directionally very bad."
  – Sam Altman & Mira Moradi (21:14)

• On Gadget Reality:
  "It's a rocket car...You will hit the limits of traction. So you can put all the power to the wheels, but the tires will explode."
  – David Pierce (92:22)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Musk vs. OpenAI trial start: 02:53
• Satya Nadella on staying off the record: 05:48–06:44
• Altman, Y Combinator, and OpenAI conflicts: 08:45–10:18
• Elon tries to fold OpenAI into Tesla: 13:22–15:23
• The OpenAI “blip”—Altman ousting: 19:02–21:49
• Board’s ChatGPT launch concerns: 27:52–33:00
• ChatGPT phone rumors and AI devices: 37:52–47:55
• Apple, Siri lawsuit & vapor features: 50:22–54:11
• Fitbit Air & Google Health: 54:33–62:09
• Home AI “familiar” robot: 63:18–67:45
• Star Fox reboot and fun: 69:52–75:25
• Brendan Carr, FCC, and Packers: 80:40–87:47
• Dreamey’s vaporware extravaganza: 90:09–93:01
• SpaceX AI eats X/XAI: 93:45–95:37

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Final Tone & Takeaways

• The conversation is lively, snarky, and deeply skeptical, but always insightful about the dynamics shaping today’s most powerful tech companies.
• The future of AI isn’t just about smarter widgets or legal victories; it’s a clash of outsized personalities, labyrinthine corporate structures, and a race to own the next interface.
• If you haven’t been following AI news closely, this episode underscores: it’s messy, personal, full of hype—and, more than ever, up for grabs.

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Recommended Further Reading:

• Liveblog and trial analysis by Liz Lopatto on The Verge
• Dreamey’s flagship vaporware recap by Jen Tuohy
• The Verge’s in-depth gadget reviews and Apple AI coverage

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Missed the show? Now you’re caught up—memes, rocket cars, legal drama, and all.

Transcript

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[Nilay Patel]

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Rando Twitch guys who sometimes become CEOs for five minutes. I'm your friend, David Pearce. Neil Aptel is here.

[David Pierce]

Hey, buddy, what's up?

[Nilay Patel]

We're doing AI chaos again. This is just. This is what we do here on the first cast. We talk about how people don't like AI and then we talk about AI. This is what we're here for.

[David Pierce]

If you look at our audience stats, like the website stats, which we don't talk about a lot. Everybody just wants to read about AI guys being extremely dramatic and boy, do

[Nilay Patel]

we have a lot. There's a cornucopia of AI guys being dramatic in the world right now.

[David Pierce]

Alex Heath had a good tweet. He's covering the trial and he goes, the entire AI industry is basically just how seven guys feel about each other. That's really true. It's not wrong.

[Nilay Patel]

And by extension, like the entire United States economy. It's just how seven guys feel about each other. We got a lot to talk about. There's. There's a new Fitbit product that I think you and I both have a bunch of thoughts and questions about. OpenAI is maybe making a chat GPT phone. We got a bunch of stuff to talk about. But we got to start with the trial, right? Elon Musk versus OpenAI continues. This is week two of the trial. I sort of expected it to be less bananas in week two after Elon Musk left the stand. I was wrong.

[David Pierce]

Very wrong. It has only increased in amount of bananas. A bushel, if you will, of bananas. Can I just say this, like, one thing that's been on my mind throughout this entire trial. And maybe it's because, you know, I have like, ex lawyer in me and married to a lawyer. And we think about the lawyer stuff. To make AI good, you have to tell it everything.

[Nilay Patel]

Right? Right.

[David Pierce]

Like, it needs access to all of your email. You gotta write down everything you want. You gotta write these long system prompts, all this stuff, all the context that it needs. We're now watching the fruits of that in discovery in a lawsuit.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, that's such a good theory.

[David Pierce]

Do you know what I mean? Like, Greg Brockman, why did you keep a journal? And his journal is extraordinarily damning. He's like, I shouldn't steal this charity. What are you doing, man? I'm not saying that drove this set of characters to keep the notes and send the text that they sent. I'm very grateful that they did because some of them are, frankly, hilarious. And honestly, a huge part of this vercast is just going to be me and David reading other people's texts to each other. And it's going to be amazing. But we're entering an era where every executive is talking to Claude all day long on their way to work or dumping context into AI systems. And boy, is the next generation of lawsuits going to be amazing. Like, just straightforwardly amazing. And I'll tell you one, there's a reason I brought up Becky. Her law firm just sent around a reminder that when the clients take the legal advice and go ask ChatGPT about it and it loses its privilege.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

And like, courts in New York have, like, ruled on this that if your lawyer sends you something that's like, here's what I think we should do in this case that is protected by attorney client privilege. And then if you, the client, go to ChatGPT and say, hey, what do you think about this thing? My lawyer said, you lose the privilege.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. It's the equivalent of telling someone else. You've now told someone else.

[David Pierce]

And that like on both sides, lawyers are like, oh, I can discover that now. Also, I have to tell my client, like, the next generation of discovery in all these cases is gonna be bananas because everyone is telling their computers everything all the time. And you can just see in this case, like, everyone. Everyone is so online that everything is in the computer. Like Zoolander style. Like, it's in the computer.

[Nilay Patel]

That is a really good theory. And it actually makes me think like one of the funniest characters as we're gonna get to in all of this is Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, who throughout this, who everyone is desperately trying to get to leave a paper trail. And he just refuses.

[David Pierce]

He's like, yes, he's a. He's the public company CEO, the longest tenured, most experienced, you know, multibillion dollar public company CEO. Microsoft is the economy. Like, he can't screw up. This man can only be reached on a phone through cutouts. Yes, that's it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. And he's. They keep being like, I keep. I'm trying to loop him in, I'm trying to get him in. I'm asking him questions, I'm texting him, I'm reaching out. And then, and then every once in a while it's like long pause and it's like, just got off the phone and Satya.

[Ross Miller]

And it's like, you.

[David Pierce]

I get it.

[Nilay Patel]

Satya knows what's well played.

[David Pierce]

But I know that Nadella, just like the rest of them in his interviews, he's like, I talked to copilot every day about my next meeting about this stuff. I love talking to it on a commute. It's. And it's like, oh, that. Get ready, buddy.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I mean, it is funny. Like, it's useful to remember that all of the events that are being discussed in this trial are from somewhere between two and 12 years ago and that a lot has changed even. Even since the most recent stuff in this case, a lot has changed in a lot of people's relationships. So, like, you're right that the stuff that is happening right now, discovery is going to be just outrageous. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

You're wearing one of those bee bracelets that records all of your meetings so you can be a cool startup founder. Guess what happens. Your next deal goes sideways.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Like the audio of all or the transcripts of all your conversations will now it's great. I'm excited. As a reporter, I'm excited. I also refuse to use computers at work even more than ever.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's totally fair. So we should just walk through some of the stuff going on in this trial. But I feel like the stuff that's been the most interesting to me personally has kind of split in two ways. There's either the stuff we've learned about the early days of OpenAI and particularly the circumstances under which Elon Musk ends up leaving. We learned a lot about that this week, particularly from Greg Brockman, who is one of the co founders and is now the president of OpenAI. And then there's also the what happened during what everybody refers to as the blip, the brief period of time where Sam Altman was not the CEO. Should we start with the early days? Because there's a lot of interesting stuff that comes up, bunch of stuff that I didn't know that maybe I just missed in the course of all of this stuff, including things like at the very beginning, OpenAI was going to be part of Y Combinator, where Sam was running Y Combinator, this big VC firm, for a long time. And I think more and more it's becoming clear that a lot of the internal consternation at OpenAI over the years has been all of the stuff that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman did around OpenAI and in the ways in which they were semi sketchily enriching themselves, all while claiming to be have no interest in a nonprofit and just trying to save the world. And if you're Elon Musk, it seems like a really good idea to try to prove as much of that as you possibly can. Right. Is that, is that a fair description of what's going on?

[David Pierce]

I think it's a fair characterization what's going on. You will recall that Sam left his position as CEO of YA Combinator in totally mysterious and extremely sketchy circumstances.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And it is probably because he was double dealing all over the place. And no one has ever really ever come out and said it, but a lot of people have basically been like, if you connect all these dots that I keep leaving everywhere, you will deduce that Sam Altman did a bunch of weird double dealing stuff and is no longer the CEO of Y Combinator. And I think we're starting to see that in this case as well. Which, by the way, is totally in character with the same Altman that is like routinely profiled by everybody, including Ronan Farrow. Like, there's a lot of weird double dealing talking out of Both sides of your mouth, trying to make everyone happy, getting very rich along the way.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And this ends up being really important in the firing of Sam Altman, but also appears to have existed since the very beginning. Right. That they're. They're running this nonprofit, they're starting this thing. They're trying to save the world. And Sam Altman, like, famously didn't take equity in this company, has spent a lot of time talking about how he didn't take equity in this company. And then you. You start to poke at it, and it's like, well, he has equity in that company that is now doing a deal with OpenAI, and he has equity in that company, which is doing a deal with OpenAI. And, like you just there. I think Elon Musk's lawyers have a real vested interest in building a pattern of Sam Altman being unreliable and trying to make himself rich while building a nonprofit on Elon Musk's money. But there are parts of that case that appear to be very straightforwardly compelling from Musk's side of things.

[David Pierce]

There are parts of that case that appear to be very straightforwardly compelling. And I. I'm going to issue the disclaimer, like, criticism of one character in this lawsuit is not praised for the other character.

[Nilay Patel]

Agreed.

[David Pierce]

And both sides get to put on their case. And so when OpenAI's lawyers are putting on their case, Elon looks maximally bad. And when Elon's lawyers are putting in his case, Sam Altman looks maximally bad. And that's the way trial coverage goes. And I say this every time because everyone gets very confused about how we feel when we're just talking about the cases the lawyers are putting on. But the out that I have for Sam and Greg, just in this process, yes, the evidence against him is compelling that they. They basically did a bunch of sage stuff. They are not sly by any stretch of the imagination. They're just out in the open being like, so we're gonna do some, like, circular financing stuff. Like, you know, Greg is, like, leaving himself journal notes. It's like, man, I shouldn't. I shouldn't steal a charity, you know? Like, they know what they're. They're. They are operating out in the open. They're sending Elon these, like, extremely long notes that all start with this, like, stag amount of praise, because everyone's basically afraid of Elon, it seems, and they. They have to be really nice to him to get to one decision. And they keep laying everything out there. There's at no point are they being shady about it. Except that the thing that they're doing seems kind of shady. Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, they're like, we're going to do a shady thing. Elon's like, I don't know. And then that proceeds until they get it done.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, ironically, it's not shady when they're all on the same team, right? And then it's, then it just becomes, you know, we all, we, there's so much money in this that we' going to get rich and it's going to be fine. And this is like what you see in, in we work another thing where there was just an outrageous amount of self dealing. As long as the numbers keep going up and as long as everybody's getting rich, the things people will turn a blind eye to in that realm are outrageous. Right? But then we, we come to the, the, you know, falling out between Elon Musk and the OpenAI team. And I think this is the part where Elon's case kind of even in the very best case scenario looks bad because essentially what it seems like is again, and we said this a little bit last week, there was this big fight over who was going to control OpenAI. Elon Musk demanded everything. He at one point tried to make OpenAI part of Tesla. He said he was going to run OpenAI inside of Tesla in secret and apparently offered Sam Altman a board seat at Tesla. It was like he, he wanted to subsume this whole thing. He, he would say his motivations were to save the world. You, you can feel about that however you want. He lost that fight basically because the, the others teamed up and said giving essentially unilateral control to Elon Musk is, is not the right thing to do. And he took his ball and went home making aggressive threats about starting up a competitor, about how they were going to fail, about how Demisabas, who was running DeepMind, who is like the looming big bad in everybody's mind, which is very funny in retrospect, is going to like ruin the world because OpenAI can't do it. He has such like sore loser energy in this whole split that it's like it just, it just looks bad.

[David Pierce]

There's also some, just extremely weird Elon stuff in the mix. Siobhan Zillis, who is the mother of some of his children, is part of OpenAI. Her job is to take notes basically on what everyone is talking about. But, uh, so there's a lot of notes about what? Brock, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutzkever, and Elon Musk are. Are talking about. And then when Elon leaves, she's still there. She's passing intel back to Elon. And then reports come out that she's had his children. And she has to go and tell OpenAI that she's also the mother of Elon Musk's children.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And everyone is like, what are you talking about?

[Nilay Patel]

Changes the dynamic slightly.

[David Pierce]

It's just like one of the more Elon situations in all of this, that now the mother of his children is on the stand. And even the way that she talks about things in her affect is it's just very Elon on the stand. Instead of saying, I don't recall or I don't remember, she would say, it's not in my neurons.

[Nilay Patel]

I hate that. I gotta tell you, there's something about that that just makes my skin crawl.

[David Pierce]

That when she said it, our entire slack room of reporters tracking the trial, they all typed, it's not in my neurons. Like, at the same time.

[Nilay Patel]

Perfect. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, yeah, this whole thing is just bizarre. And it really does seem like the further we get into this trial, that it is. The outlines of this split were that Elon Musk wanted control of OpenAI. He lost the fight, and he. He went away. He says, there's one thing in 2017, after a discussion about going for profit, which again, is, this is a big piece of this, right? Who wanted to go for profit? And when was Musk for this? Was Musk against this? Did they steal a charity? Like, this is the whole. A big part of the whole thing here. This is Brockman writing this. He says at the end of the meeting, he said, you guys are great, but I could start another AI company tomorrow. One tweet is all it takes, which is A, five years before Elon Musk bought Twitter, there's the whole reason Elon Musk bought Twitter. And B, just a perfect summation of what a sore loser he is in this particular way.

[David Pierce]

I thought this. This one is very interesting to me. There's so much in this that is just about who is the talent and where will they work.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

This is why they're all afraid of Dennis Asadas. He's got Google's resources, He's got Runway. He seems to be attracting the talent. They all think he's very smart. And Elon's like, I'm going to take Andres Karpathy. I'm going to take Ilya Sutskever. I've recruited this person, and it's Just a handful of people at the bleeding edge of this technology.

[Nilay Patel]

Especially at this time, there was, like, a really, really small number of people who were really leading this stuff.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And they were all basically deciding whether they were going to go out on their own or go work for Demis at Google. Like, these are your choices at the time. One tweet is all it takes, really, implies that there's, like, a bunch of AI people you can, like, address via tweet. It's. It's a very odd, empty threat at this moment in time, when so much of the drama is basically, where's Ilya gonna work? Can we keep him away from Demis? And maybe there's more characters in the mix. Maybe there's vastly more AI researchers at that time just waiting for a tweet. But it just struck me as such a classic Elon threat. I can tweet this into existence when every fact that had preceded it indicated that actually, you need to hire one of four people to make this work.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And then. And there's the moment where he hires away Andrej Karpathy to Tesla and he goes back to OpenAI and is like, oh, I have. I have an announcement and a confession. I've hired this guy who is, like, very important and is now, like, a celebrity in the AI world to go work at Tesla, which is a thing that if you care about OpenAI and want it to succeed, you probably don't do.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. At the same time, there's, you know, there's emails in the record now, Sam emailing Elon apologizing for having recruited even one person away for Tesla.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

Like, I'm so sorry about this. There's some real. You know, I'm watching the boys. There's some real Homelander vibes around Elon throughout this entire. You know, everyone's just, like, afraid of him. And then he's. But his. Instead of lasers from his eyes, he has Twitter. Like, that's basically what this feels like at all, at every turn.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, it's more than that, though. There. I wrote down these texts from Ilyas Hutskever, came up where he says, Elon might spend half a day a week with us. I imagined how it will be, and I worry that our work environment can become very stress, and since he'll be bankrolling it, it'll be hard to stop it. Like, you're right, it is. It is fear and flattery in equal measure. And there is this sense of like, we have to take his money to do this thing, but we also have to figure out how to keep him out of it as much as possible, because he will ruin it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And then they're talking about all these conversions and what structure it will be. And the whole time he's like, I'll just take it. Give it to me.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Pierce]

And now we're in this lawsuit, which, by the way, he insistently filed like he's trying to kill OpenAI.

[Nilay Patel]

Elon Musk wanted this lawsuit.

[David Pierce]

This is all happening because he wants it to happen.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, yeah, agreed. So the other thing, which I think is frankly vastly more fun in terms of the things we got to learn is all the stuff that happened during Sam Altman's firing. This very brief couple of days where Sam Altman was fired unceremoniously and kind of out of nowhere. Staged a coup is like a non generous, but not wrong way to say it. A lot of people on the team threatened to quit. It became a whole thing. Gets reinstated as CEO. We learned a bunch about what happened in the midst of this. What jumped out to you, as somebody who covered this in real time, particularly aggressively, was there new stuff that really jumped out to you?

[David Pierce]

All of these people text like children, like just pure children. And I'm not saying I'm like the world's best texter. It's just. You read these texts between Mira and Sam, Mira Moradi, the cto, who was also the CEO for five minutes for all of us. And if you will recall, we broke a lot of news during this time on the Verge, like, Heath and I broke a lot of news throughout all this. And we were texting and calling everyone all the time. Other great reporters broke a lot of news too. Like everyone was talking.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Shout out to Ashley Vance, who now at Core Memory, who, who shows up in the. One of the messages.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, he's like in the screenshots as a notification. Be like, there's going to be a new CEO.

[Nilay Patel]

Uhhuh.

[David Pierce]

Mike Isaac is like, he's doing a victory lap. Because he was. He was correct that Mira Morati tried to lead some of this charge to push Sam out. But everyone was like talking and everyone was reporting. And I just remember my texts were like, very formal, you know, I was like, I'm gonna text somebody and see if we can get some news out of this.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, sir.

[David Pierce]

And it's like, here. Yes, pretty much. And like you're on the back end and you're seeing what they're all saying and they're like, there's chatter, blah, blah, blah. Like it's all in lowercase yeah. No one knows what's going on. There's something about that. You know, it's like, it's always interesting to see the other side of a thing you were even loosely a part of.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I do think that the back and forths between Mira and Sam, as all of this is going on, are maybe the best thing that came out and have led to some really, like, delightful memes. There is, to your point about Mike Isaac, who wrote a story concurrently, as all this was happening, saying that Mira Moradi was one of the people intimately involved with ousting Sam in the first place. Got a lot of criticism for that piece. A lot of people who said that wasn't the case. Turns out it functionally was the case. And on the stand, she said over and over, essentially, like, no, I didn't trust him. No, when he came back, I still didn't trust him. And that's like. That's under oath, what she said.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And meanwhile, as all of this is going on, she seems to be the person Sam is most consistently messaging, trying to get information about what is going on. Because, as we know, he basically, like. A lot of this comes up in that New Yorker piece you're talking about. He just, like, holed up with a couple of his confidants and lawyers and desperately tried to figure out what was going on.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, spent a weekend basically frantically calling and texting everyone. And Mira Muradi is like, a source of his in the room. Uh, and. And the one exchange that has come out that is now, I think, just the most useful meme we've had in a while is texts. Can you indicate directionally good or bad? Satya and others anxious. And Mira just text directionally very bad, which is such a brutal, incredible own.

[David Pierce]

Well, no, it keeps going. And he goes, okay, can you wrap up soon? Lots of pressure for Microsoft for an update. And then Mira replies, sam, this is very bad.

[Nilay Patel]

She's like, no, no, no, you don't understand.

[David Pierce]

There's not an update. Like, you're fired. Yeah, the background here, and I will say this again, criticism of one person in the context of the story has nothing like praise for the other people. Everyone screwed all of this up from top to bottom. The board never communicated why they had taken the step of removing Sam as CEO. They never put out a statement. They never said, here's all the things that went wrong. Here's our evidence for doing this. They had asked Mira to collect evidence of Sam's management trial and these challenges, and Mira had done it. She Testified she didn't know why she was doing it. It's like, no, you definitely. You put him on a pip. Like, we all know what's going on here, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, you want me to prepare a dossier on my boss? That's probably fine.

[David Pierce]

Where did he think this was going? The boss that you had concerns about? You were supposed to document your concerns. And so when the board fired Sam, it was like the shot out of the dark and no one knew why. And there was. All they said was he was not consistently candid in his conversations. This, like, totally opaque thing that could mean anything. And so he's texting her. He's legitimately like, what happened? And I think he thought there was some middle path. And there's this one set of texts here that is just. And again, they're all text like children. Sam says to Mira, can you please tell them, I just want to resolve this, however, and would like to join? And Mira says, they're convinced about their decision and I just want everyone to pay attention to this response which indicates everything about this process and how this company works. And Sam says in response to. They're convinced about their decision for me to be fired or some other thing. And Mira has to confirm, yes, for you to be gone. And Sam just says, okay.

[Nilay Patel]

He's like, so I'm still fired, right?

[David Pierce]

Like, what.

[Nilay Patel]

What decision have they made this time? You can tell no one was communicating successfully at any level of this entire process.

[David Pierce]

No one is communicating. And again, the entire process here is they're communicating through Mira. So both sides are communicating through Mirah. And I think at one point she becomes the CEO of OpenAI.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

So just a lot of back and forth confusion here. And then we have to talk about Emmett Shear being the CEO for five minutes. So Sam texts Mira, can I come in and talk about a path forward with them? Mira says, no, they need more time. Once again, more time for what? Which is just a totally reasonable question. And then Mira says, they walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you and why you can't be the CEO again. We still kind of don't know, right? There's been a lot of reporting, but we still kind of don't know. And then Sam says, can you ask why they've been saying all weekend they want me back? Mira says, they want a new CEO in place. Sam oddly says, can you say you will call back in 10 minutes? And then Mira says, they want to have a new CM place tonight. Not me. Sam says, do they know who can I tell Satya. Is it final? Mira says, trying to add Satya now. Sam says, please still don't want me.

[Nilay Patel]

Somebody is texting Satya a zoom link, and Satya is going, what?

[David Pierce]

It's not happening. And then Mira finally ends all this with New guy is a rando Twitch guy, which is so good.

[Nilay Patel]

That random Twitch guy, by the way, Emmett Shear, who was the CEO of Twitch for a long time, I think by most accounts, like a. Like a good egg in Silicon Valley circles, had a weird moment in the sun as part of this entire story.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I mean, he's enjoying it. I remember again, during this reporting, when they announced it was Emmett Shearer, there was some amount of like, oh, we know him, you know? Sure, yeah, that's a. That's a guy that we were all in, like, the incubator with.

[Nilay Patel]

But wait, the texts keep going here. So Mira says, new guy's rando Twitch guy. And then she says, before Sam can even respond, she goes, they don't want you. And then Sam responds, Emmett with two question marks. She says, yeah, but hold on, I'm pulling Satya now. Like, it's. It's just bananas. And then Mira is telling Sam that she is trying to bring him back, which may or may not be like. It seems very clear. She is, like, engaging in different ways on both sides of this as this is all going down. It's just. It's just bizarre. And then they bring in Satya to try to get him to undo it, because he is. He ends up being like the grown up in the room in a lot of ways, throughout this entire thing. It's all just so insane, man.

[David Pierce]

There's a moment where they're gonna sell the IP to Anthropic and Mira says, they just don't want your hands on AGI, which. Very funny. It's years later. We are no closer to AGI if Sam's hands on it or not. Um, this, by the way, they do finally get Sasha Nadella. Sam goes, does Sasha get on the call? Mira says, yes, with him. Sam says, wait, I have an interesting idea. Mirror goes still with Satya. Just totally sets him aside. You will recall this is where Nadella decided to react to all of this, which I fully believe he regarded as completely juvile and nonsensical and very threatening to the valuations of a lot of companies. A lot of things invested in opi, including his. He was like, I'm just going to hire everybody. Yeah, Microsoft will just hire. You can have whatever shell of OpenAI remains. This is his Famous quote about, we are above them, below them, around them. He's like, I'll just hire everybody. Sam is going to work here now. And that was a bunch of leverage in the middle of this. I mean, this is all very funny because it is just evidence that these things happen in a much more casual way. Like, this isn't lawyers. This is just two people texting each other, obviously being pulled in five different directions, talking to all the same people who are also pulled in five different directions. I'm pretty sure, you know, Musk's attorneys brought this all up to indicate that Sam was unreliable, untrustworthy. At one point, he was fired from OpenAI. I have no idea if this is going to convince a jury that the structure of OpenAI constituted stealing a charity from Elon Musk, who was again and again presented with this exact scheme and didn't read the paperwork.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it does. It really seems like the. The easiest takeaway from all of this is that all of this is just a gigantic mess and that it's like you could make a lot of arguments about how poorly run this company has been throughout this entire process. I will say there are two things that came up in the. Why they fired Sam Altman, bits of testimony that I thought were really interesting. And the. The one was, like, we were talking about this sort of circular set of deals, that there was a sense that the board. Helen Toner, who's also a board member at the time, testified and talked about some of this, that the board felt like it wasn't being properly made aware of all of Sam and Greg's financial entanglements. They made this deal with a company called Helios, which is a nuclear energy company that both Sam and Greg were invested in. That's a weird thing for OpenAI to be spending its time and resources on. And they felt like they maybe weren't properly notified that one reason to make this deal is that it's going to help make Sam and Greg rich. Another one that came up that I thought was really interesting is Siobhan Zillis said this, too, that OpenAI's board was really concerned that it hadn't been notified in advance of ChatGPT being released. Which is totally sensible in retrospect, right? Like, the. The launch of chat with GPT, like, legitimately changed the tech industry forever. Like, it really did. I don't think that's an overstatement at all. I am. I am quite confident that no one at OpenAI, up to and including Sam Altman, knew that was going to happen on the day they shipped ChatGPT.

[David Pierce]

Right? It was a little research preview that they barely announced.

[Nilay Patel]

It was a research preview. They just, they just, they just put it out into the world in a very sort of academic way. They were like, look, we made a thing, test it out, let us know what you think. And then it, it, it caught like wildfire. So the idea that this, that they should have known ahead of time to warn the board that this earth shattering thing is coming strikes me as obvious in retrospect, but sort of implausible at the time.

[David Pierce]

Wait, I can academically argue the other side of this. Okay, I, I tend to agree with you. Google had something that looked very much like ChatGPT in its labs forever.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, we saw remind you it invented all of this technology.

[David Pierce]

The T in ChatGPT is Transformers, which were invented at Google. They're now the Google executive hiding in my bushes to remind me of this.

[Nilay Patel]

Sundar, you can go home now.

[David Pierce]

They say it all the time. They had this technology. They had Transformers. They demoed it in a variety of ways. It never made any sense because they always did it and it increasingly esoteric ways. We'll never forget the IO where Sundar is like, and now I'll have a conversation with Pluto, the planet, about what it's like to be a planet. And no one knew what was going on. And if instead he was just like, look at this chatgpt. Like, everyone would have been like, google has invented the future. You can see that split here in all these texts and emails because everyone's afraid of Demis, who is building the Transformers at Google.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

They've all seen the actual product and the public is like, sundar's talking to Pluto again.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, that's interesting.

[David Pierce]

Right? And they, and they knew Google knew not to release this product to the public. Their own safety culture kept them away from releasing what was at the time like a GPT one or two class model to the public. Like, this is dangerous. There's all this stuff that can go haywire, Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're going to do Pluto demos instead. All of the principles were like, this is the future. Literally, paper is called. Attention is all you need. Right?

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And so I can see, again, I'm making the argument academically because I agree with you that no one knew what would happen. But I can see why a bunch of people immersed in the safety culture of that time were like, everyone knew that you shouldn't do this. OpenAI exists because Google wouldn't do this. And you did it anyway without asking us if you should.

[Nilay Patel]

That's fair. And especially if you come from a safety first perspective, which in theory OpenAI at the time did, you would say, oh, this is a potentially like, problematic thing we're putting out into the world to see what happens. When it's out in the world, you should know that it's coming.

[David Pierce]

Right. This is the thing that Google won't do.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I suppose I buy that argument. I also still think it's true that they, honest to God, did not think anybody would care. Like, I really earnestly believe OpenAI shipped chat. Chat GPT. If you, if you think you're releasing a product that's going to change the world, do you call it ChatGPT?

[David Pierce]

Like, no, no, that's what I'm saying. I agree with you on balance. Like, I think I'm making this argument for the sake of making the argument. I understand. But there was a reason Google did not release this product and then OpenAI did. Now OpenAI was nowhere ready to be a company. They were not ready to commercialize it. They were still chasing AGI, like all this stuff, and now they're a totally different company that, you know, in its heart of hearts wants to be a for profit enterprise competing with Google.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

That company is positioned very differently than the opening eye. That was like, look at our research preview. Right. But I, I understand why the board, which was our job is to keep everything safe and to like pull the ripcord as we get closer to AGI, was like, wait, this is the, this is the one thing the big player in the space wouldn't do.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, no, that's fair. I, I buy that.

[David Pierce]

Wait, can I, can I just add one more thing?

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, please.

[David Pierce]

So I keep forgetting this as well, but Liz is in the courtroom. You should read her live log and her coverage. It's very funny.

[Nilay Patel]

She's so angry.

[David Pierce]

Everyone appears to be very tiresome. Also, this is Liz at her finest. Liz being annoyed that she's watching billionaires to each other is perfect. This is, this is why the Verge exists. Hayden's doing great coverage on the exhibits, but I keep forgetting myself that Microsoft is a party to this case because they had the big investment in OpenAI. And Liz keeps mentioning that every single witness ends with Microsoft's lawyers standing up and saying something like, and Microsoft wasn't there. And then following that up with, and Satya Nadella wasn't there either. And she's like, this is literally the only thing they're adding to this trial.

[Nilay Patel]

So we didn't do that. Right. They're like, nothing to do with this.

[David Pierce]

See you later. Which is a very funny dynamic in this case that I can't get enough of.

[Nilay Patel]

That would be a really fun job as a lawyer. You just stand up, be like. But not. Not me though, right? And they're like, no, not you. And you're like, see ya. No further question.

[David Pierce]

It's very good.

[Nilay Patel]

Pretty good. Yeah. I really hope at some point we get some Satya texts. Some texts.

[David Pierce]

He's too smart for that, man.

[Nilay Patel]

He is. Satya. Satya wouldn't even be caught on a zoom call. It appears so. Kudos to Satya. All right, we should take a break and then we're gonna come back. We got some gadgets to talk about. We'll be right back.

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[Nilay Patel]

All right, we're back. Just as a transition out of OpenAI, we should talk about this rumor slash report that's now floating around that suggests that OpenAI is building a phone for ChatGPT. It's a. It's a. It's A phone GPT. What do you make of this, Nilay?

[David Pierce]

First of all, no. No side quests. I was told Code red. We have to focus now. We're making a phone.

[Nilay Patel]

The.

[David Pierce]

The one product that will not succeed. It just. There's. There's no way it will succeed. It's. It's very hard to disrupt the iPhone. I don't know if you're aware of this, David, killing the iPhone. Uh, good luck.

[Nilay Patel]

I know it's weird. You. It's almost like no. Like no one has tried. Why has no one ever tried to take down the iPhone? It's just sitting there.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean, have you. Have you heard of Windows Phone? It's got this Metro ui. It's beautiful.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay. Can I. Can I make an argument for why you have to do this even though it won't work?

[David Pierce]

Oh, well, no, let's use an exercise.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

Because I have a similar argument.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

You have to make it out of a place of optimism and opportunity. Ooh.

[Nilay Patel]

Here's why it will work.

[David Pierce]

I will do cold realism.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay. Here's why. ChatPhone is a terrific idea that should exist, and I very much look forward to it. If what you need for The AI future is a device that is able to capture everything about you all of the time. You need something that isn't an iPhone. That is not a new idea by me. That is a thing Sam Altman keeps talking about. He loves the iPhone, thinks the iPhone is great, but he thinks the future is constant capture of your context. This is terrific for legal discovery. It's also the idea of AGI right now, right? Like I need to have a thing that is constantly recording so that it can get all the action items from my meetings. I need a camera that is constantly recording so it can tell me what's going on in the world. That requires a different kind of hardware. You can't do it with the iPhone in part because you can't access the hardware in that way because you're not Apple if you're OpenAI. But also you just need a different kind of hardware that operates differently. So you have to build a phone to do the things differently. And you also have to build a phone because everybody owns a phone. And the only way to beat the iPhone is to make a phone that can beat the iPhone. OpenAI has lots of users. ChatGPT is very popular. Maybe lots of people would buy a phone that offers easier access to ChatGPT. The other thing that it offers, and this is, I think the real reason you do this if you're OpenAI and is that the only possibility for an AI first world is to get around the App Store. Apple is systematically removing apps that let you build other apps from the App Store. It is not into the idea of being able to like vibe code on your phone, other apps that work on your phone. That is in fact the whole premise that you would need for an OpenAI phone to work. That all of a sudden I have a device that I can just tell what I want it to do and it can actually spin up local software to do that. For me, if you believe in the agentic future, if you believe that all of this is going to work on the fly and custom GPTs and all this stuff, it has to start from the hardware and you have to start from whole cloth. And that actually having a thing that I just talk to with my voice and it builds its operating system for me on the fly, that has to come from someone other than Apple or Google who will never allow it to be built. So of course OpenAI is going to do it and it's super going to work.

[David Pierce]

Okay, I think my perspective, the more cynical, realist perspective is exactly the same, is exactly the same argument. I'M going to make exactly the same argument to you. I'm going to add two things to it. One, Sam hired Jony. I've to come build hardware at OpenAI. Famously hired Jony. I've the designer of the iPhone and many other legendary products. And they made a video that cost somewhere on the order of $25 billion, where they walked down a street together and went on a date at a coffee shop. And they talked about the phones and laptops as, quote, legacy devices. And the entire promise of this thing was they were going to build something else. And there were rumors that it was headphones, there was rumors that it was a pendant, that it was a puck, that it was a pen, and all the stuff that wasn't a phone, because the phone and the laptop are legacy devices. And I agree with you. Sam thinks you just need a bunch of context and it's seeing the world around you. And then it can run around the web and call you an Uber and do whatever, whatever you think is going to happen. And then the reality, this is my other addition, the reality is that the AI products are not good enough to do that. They can't do the thing that everyone thinks they can do, that everyone wants them to do. No matter how many Mac minis you put in a colo bin and running openclaw for every individual user, you can't actually make this product. Right. And so what are you stuck with? You need a bunch of applications running on something local that ChatGPT can address, that it can control, whether that's through MCP, whether it's through like Google is doing on Samsung phones and literally opening the apps and like virtualized containers and clicking on them. Whether, whatever way you're going to do it, whatever Apple's going to do with Siri, it turns out you need the applications, not just the data, the application. You need to deduce stuff. You need the logic to exist. You can't just write a custom Uber app and be like, now there's Uber. Like, you need them there.

[Nilay Patel]

And even if you can, Uber did that already.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, like you, you just. They're not going to let you be like, you can use the Uber API. The CEO of Uber Dara was just on decoder. He's like, I want my pixels in your face. He said it out loud. Um, so you. What you're stuck with? Yeah, he was like, I want my pixels there. He kept calling them pixels in, like, a very specific way. And I was like, you mean your interface. Okay, I get it. Anyway, and so you Have Jony, I've. You made this big promise about the future of computing and I think maybe Jony I've, who likes to make good products, realized that ChatGPT can't do it. Like the technology cannot deliver the result.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And so what are you going to do? You're going to back into the right solution, which is it's a phone and the phone's going to have apps on it and the AI is going to run around using those apps on the user's behalf because the apps have all the services that people want. And also if you make a thing that's supposed to replace your phone and it doesn't have Instagram on it, people are still going to carry their phones around.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

So what are you going to do? So poor Jony I've is stuck making

[Nilay Patel]

a new iPhone because it's the only thing.

[David Pierce]

Because it's the only. It's. I'm telling you, I'm agreeing with you. This is what you have to do. I'm just saying I could have called it the first day that they sat down in an empty coffee shop and called the phone a legacy device.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

Because at no point has it been clear that any of these LLMs can actually do the thing.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. But yeah, this is, this is what I mean by it's not going to work and you have to do it anyway. Like even this whole accessory ecosystem they're describing requires a base device that Neither Android nor iOS will give them the permissions to be able to do. IOS is not going to just let you attach a third party camera that's recording all the time. It's just not, just not a thing you can do.

[David Pierce]

They might make it themselves. Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

Apple would do it for itself. Well, and this is where like Apple's AI reputation is like annoyingly turning in its favor because it, it screwed up so badly that everybody's like, oh, four dimensional chess. Like Apple is stands to get like, no, Apple screwed this up super bad. And to whatever extent this is going to work out, it is pure dumb luck and not good planning. Let's be so, so, so clear about that. Which I have proof for that we will get to in just a minute. But the idea of having basically a new version of Siri, which we think is coming very soon at wwdc and there was a report this week that one of the features of that Siri might be that you get to pick your own model inside of it becomes hugely powerful. Right. Because Apple is the company with the access to that data and to those services and to those applications. The thing it couldn't figure out how to do was build a model that could manipulate any of them with any kind of success. Now it has this big deal with Google. It's possible it's going to open up so that you can pick ChatGPT or Claude or whatever you want to operate this Siri for you. That becomes a really powerful model. But it's because Apple already did the rest of the iPhone. Right? Like if you, if you just start from whole cloth with here's a model, build the phone, you can't. It just doesn't work. But you don't have another option. This is why, like we've been talking for a decade about how desperate all of these other tech companies are to get past the smartphone. This is why they are desperate to sell you some other kind of hardware that, so that they can get around the platform controls that Google and Apple have and absolutely will not relinquish.

[David Pierce]

Well, they are.

[Nilay Patel]

This is why Mark Zuckerberg tried to do the Metaverse. It's the whole thing.

[David Pierce]

And they all have this belief, which is historically correct, that it's an interface paradigm shift that makes people buy new hardware.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And Apple has written this better than anybody. Right. You go to mouse and keyboards, you get the Mac, you go to click wheels, you get the ipod, you go to the digital crown, obviously you get the watch. This is a staggering display of interface superiority that changed everything forever. But it's very hard to get past the multi touch screen in the phone. And so natural language voice commands look like a thing that get you away from the phone. Like this is an interface step change. We can just do natural language, but you still need Instagram, you need a camera, your kids are running around, you want to take a video of them and it needs to be a great camera. Like it's very hard to compete with the, the most important product in tech history, even if you think the interface is going to change. And Apple is just like, we're just going to bolt it on when it makes sense.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. And we're, we're rapidly realizing that chat as that interface is not the answer. Right. That there, there was a minute where everybody's like, everything you do on every computer forever is going to happen inside of a chat window. And when we need to, we'll just load a browser inside of your chat. It turns out that's awful. User interface. Like we, we got past the command line once and we're doing it again. And Apple already built the other stuff.

[David Pierce]

Well, you know command lines are brittle because if you typed in the wrong thing, they just didn't work. The modern sort of LLM chat interfaces are actually brittle in a different way and it, it's not the, it's not the way everyone's used to. So I'm really opposed to hidden user interface. Like no one ever discovers the user interface. You have to, you should put all the controls on the screen is like my, my point of view, like tell people what they can do and then they'll do it and they'll feel empowered.

[Nilay Patel]

Somebody at Samsung just got promoted when you said that. They're like, put more tool tips on the screen.

[David Pierce]

It's a dog with shoes, it'll help you out.

[Nilay Patel]

More pop ups.

[David Pierce]

And you know there's a big trend in consumer the pendulum swings back and forth. Like the users get more sophisticated, we give them more controls, we let them customize more things and then we've gotten too far and we hide all the buttons again and this just keeps happening. MacOS Tahoe is a perfect example of Apple just believing everyone is stupid. Like we've been shipping the Mac for 50 years, you're all idiots now. Like we've took, we, we've taken all the controls away, we've learned nothing. We, we just think you're a bunch of dumb iPhone users. Right? Like there's something in there that is confusing. Natural language interfaces are kind of the opposite in that you can just say anything you want and it will respond to you. Like it's not brittle in that way. It's not hidden, there's nothing to hide. Like it's all just there. You're like do whatever, like make me a bomb. And it's like sure, maybe I'm allowed to that maybe I'll just lie to you. Like who knows? But they can't actually do all the things you're always saying to them. And people run into that really fast. And I think Apple in particular with the iPhone it like it wanted to over promise on the Siri part of it and say it could do everything and like the models at the time couldn't do it. And only lately with all the agentic stuff and like the building of harnesses and like there's just a method of doing it now that might work and might not work but I don't think you can build a phone or a new device whole cloth out of LLM chatbots because it's still brittle. It's just brittle in a different way that doesn't immediately appear to be brittle. Yeah, like it confuses everyone in thinking that actually is resilient to like, users doing random stuff. But it's actually even more broken because it can't do the things that literally will just like confidently tell you it can do.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. Yeah, it's, it has such an incredibly different kind of structural problem, which is it, it fails without telling you it failed, which is very different than the other kinds of failure.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

On this note, actually, we should, we should talk about the other thing that happened with Siri this week, which is that Apple settled a class action lawsuit for $250 million that is based all around, essentially the promises Apple made about Apple Intelligence and Siri.

[David Pierce]

I didn't even link these two ideas in my brain. This is perfect.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, it's. It, this is, this is what it is. Right. This is. Apple spent whatever it cost to get Gemini and $250 million for a bunch of problematic ads that it made that made promises about phones that didn't exist. Um, let me just really quickly to refresh your memory, play you one of these ads that came out after Apple Intelligence. This became the flagship feature of every Apple device and you couldn't do it. Let me just play this for you. This is the Bella Ramsay party ad.

[Ross Miller]

Siri, what's the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grinnell?

[David Pierce]

You met Zach Wingate at Cafe Grinnell.

[Nilay Patel]

Hey, Zach.

[David Pierce]

Oh, wow.

[Nilay Patel]

I didn't think you'd remember me. Yeah, of course. Since I saw you, I'm like, it's Zach. Nobody looks like Zach doesn't work. Fake feature does not. That was an ad with a celebrity that Apple ran for a feature that didn't and doesn't exist. Like, we, we just shouldn't forget how wild that fact is.

[David Pierce]

I mean, you want to talk about software brain? That ad, by the way, is built, that whole concept is built in the idea that all that data is in one calendar that can. Can go look at.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep. Which no part of that exists in the real world. But anyway, so this, I mean this, this story has been like burning up all over our site this week. Because a people can go and claim money. There's a. If you bought a phone, I think it's basically between like June of 2024 and May of 2025. You can get $25, potentially up to $95. We'll see how it goes. Probably $25. Um, congratulations to everybody on your $25. But this is like, this is a, continues to be a bad look for Apple. This is what I mean by Apple did not successfully stand aside the AI capex problems that other companies have. Apple screwed up so badly that it might actually have turned out okay.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean they sold more Macs than ever because people are running openclaw on them. Like I don't.

[Nilay Patel]

Which Apple also didn't see coming. And they have supply issues. Like this is. This company fell ass backwards into being an AI power player. And. And good on you for falling ass backwards into it. But like, what is it? The. The line was the. The Twitter was a clown car that ran into a gold mine. Like that's Apple and AI in. In such a real way.

[David Pierce]

Absolutely. I mean, you know, WWC is right around the corner. I think we're expecting to see a bunch of this Google deal pay off. I think we're expecting to see the new Siri. I think Apple has understands more than any company. Like how to use a new user interface paradigm to make products. We'll see if John Ternus can pull even more rabbits out of a hat here. But it is true that at that time the conventional wisdom was that chatbots would displace the iPhone and if Apple didn't have an AI narrative that it would be in some kind of existential danger. So they just concocted one. They never shipped it to the point where they're paying millions of dollars out, hundreds of millions of dollars out for making fake ads. And it was all fine because it. The fundamental truth was that the natural language interface was not powerful enough on its own to stand up a competitor to the iPhone.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep. And that is. That's why you have to build a phone. That is the funniest thing here is like strategically OpenAI is doing the exact right thing and it's going to fail. And I bet they know it. But like what you don't. What other choice do you have?

[David Pierce]

Right. Because the other player in phones is also not sitting still.

[Nilay Patel]

No. Also. Also the big bad of OpenAI's entire history.

[David Pierce]

It turns out Demis saw this looms holding a Samsung S26.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

He's just like, have you seen what I did to Bixby? Bixby has lasers coming out of its eyes, smoke coming out of its ears.

[Nilay Patel]

Exactly. Google actually launched a sort of AIE gadget this week, which I'm actually very curious for your take on this. So it's called the Fitbit Air and it is a screenless Fitbit. It's sort of a throwback to the old ideas of Fitbit where it's just a Little like bracelet of a thing that you can wear. They also make one that you can clip. It's a little modular fitness tracker in a very sort of 2012 kind of way. The big pitch here is not that it's a very old Fitbit, but that it connects to a bunch of Google's AI stuff. They've rebranded the Fitbit app as Google Health, which I think is just a horrifically bad idea, but we can talk about that. And the idea is it's this Gemini powered health and fitness thing that can collect all of this data and give it back to you in a sort of AI coach kind of way. The thing is $99. I will say, personally, I am very enthusiastic about the idea of a pretty straightforward screenless fitness tracker. This is actually a thing I have been wanting for a while. Are you still a whoop guy? You're a whoop guy, right?

[David Pierce]

So I need to just be very clear. Yes, I'm wearing the whoop. I've got a whoop. One, it's just like fun to try new products, which is, I hope everybody understands. I love gadgets and technology. And two, Chase gave them out to everyone for free. Everyone's a whoop guy now. Everyone I know who has a Chase credit card has a whoop now because you, they just gave them to you like, like all the Reddits were aflame with like free whoops. So I just got one. I was like, sure, I'll take a free gadget.

[Nilay Patel]

And there's nothing more woot guy than having a Chase Sapphire card. Can I just say, like, that is. That just screams woop guy to me.

[David Pierce]

It's a lifestyle. I have it. It's fun. It's very dumb. Like it, it is a good step tracker. I wear it as a sleep tracker because wearing an Apple Watch when I sleep is like too heavy and like, whatever. So it, it consistently tells me that I haven't slept enough and it's like, yeah, dude, I have a baby.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

What do you think is going to happen here? Oh, I wake up at 5am every morning.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. My Apple watch told me last night that I did a better job than usual and gave me a 58. I was like, great.

[David Pierce]

Things are going well. Yeah. We drag him into the bed every morning between 4:30 and 5 and he punches me in the face until 7am I didn't get restful sleep. You're saying sleep deficit. What a surprise. Yeah. So it's like fun to wear. It's fun to see that side of things, you know, V And I are constantly talking about the wellness tech complex. I get why Google is putting one of these out. The point of these is not the tracking, it's the data analysis and the recommendations that come after the tracking. And if you're Google, you're like, oh, we're just good at that. There's a huge opportunity here to give cheap trackers away to whatever version of RFK's. FDA is going to decide that the secret to health is personal responsibility and tracking. By the way, I'm just doing an impression of V Song right now. Just a straightforward V impression. This is what we talk about like almost every day. And then we're going to do a bunch of data collection and tell you to sleep more and drink less and blah, blah, blah, blah, which is all the whoop AI ever says. Yeah, like, oh, you had one athletic non alcoholic beer. You're in a deficit, like what's happening to me? But I, you can see why Google's doing it because this is, this is them being able to leverage their entire AI stack. Also the thing, look, I mean it's inexpensive for, you know, anything being inexpensive anymore. It's like a hundred bucks. Right. And it has like modular bands. People really liked Fitbits and I think they're going to really like this thing.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I think so too. I think the idea of cheap tracker is smart and good. Right. For all the reasons you just said. I think the idea of I want to wear a thing that counts my steps is good and fine. But actually what people do want is that one extra step. I, I agree with V in that most of these AI coaches are incredibly annoying and, and they just like tell you how terrific you are all day and it's like just, what if you just left me alone? Like, what if you just left me alone and it would be fine. What I don't agree with is the Google health of it all. Um, let me just read you a quote from. This is from Rishi Chandra, who has been at Google a very long time, has run a bunch of products. Was like on the Chromecast team a million years ago.

[David Pierce]

That's when I first met him, was when the Chromecasts were coming out.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. So here's what he says. He says, I know it will be hard for people referring to the rebrand. It was hard for us internally. But as we think about the future, where the health app needs to go. The health app is not going to be specific to Fitbit hardware. We want to be a health coach to an Apple Watch user too. That's why we had to make the brand change. I would argue he just made the opposite case that he should have made. I like to say it's called Google Health A signs you up for a bunch of what I would call Google baggage, which is very real, including the

[David Pierce]

design language of this app.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, absolutely. Which is.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Google's software design continues to be just terrific. But the, the idea of Google Health signs you up for people understanding a different kind of data collection that Google is doing. People are going to start to think, oh, are you going to use this to show me ads and search results? And. And they will. They will promise you up and down that the answer is no. And people won't believe them because the thing is called Google Health. It just has attachments that I don't think Google understands that it has.

[David Pierce]

Well, they're the ads attachments. They are going to use the data as context in your Gemini results.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, oh, absolutely.

[David Pierce]

And that. That's what that buys them.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you remember the. Did you ever watch Parks and Rec?

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

So the. Do you remember the company Grizzle, this, like, mythical bad guy company at the very end of Parks and Recreation? Do you remember this at all?

[Ashley Esqueda]

No.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay. So there's the Grizzle is basically Google. It's. It's this, like, company run by skateboarders that becomes the biggest thing in the world. And they make this case to the main characters in the show where they're like, oh, yeah, here's why we're collecting all your data. So if we detect that you're down, we can, like, direct you to a cup of joe as a pick me up. And if we see that you're having a great day, we can, I don't know, like, direct you. Direct you to your favorite coffee shop to go hang out. And Leslie Knoff, the main character, just goes, so it's a coffee finder app. And he goes, yeah, we're making it with Starbucks. That's what this makes me think of. It's like, this is just. Just that you're just. You're going to take a bunch of things and then you're going to sell it to Starbucks. So they can recommend coffee to me all day, every day, depending on how I feel.

[David Pierce]

You're going to open Gemini and you're going to say, like, I'm hungry. And it's going to say based on your heart rate, you should eat less salt. Like, that's what they want. And then they're going to recommend you whatever. Blue Apron integration. Right.

[Nilay Patel]

Or, like, go to Cava which is ironically sponsoring us in Google Maps right now.

[David Pierce]

What's up? I don't know, man. I get why they're doing it. I understand that. Again, this is every single morning V and I talk about this because I try not to slack our reporters after hours. So I schedule a lot of insane wellness tiktoks to send to V in the morning, and then she's mad at me every morning.

[Nilay Patel]

I was gonna say, I don't know that that's better at 9am everyone's gotten used to it.

[David Pierce]

For me, there's a handful of reporters that get the craziest tiktoks from me, like, spot on the. 9. And I always forget to vary it to seem like I'm a real person. It's always at 9. But every morning, Vy and I talk about more crazy wellness stuff. And all of it is quantified self AI, health coaches, data collection. Data collection, Data collection. And so, of course, it's Google Health because what they get with the brand is data collection. Sure. Everyone knows what's coming. Fitbit being like we're part of the Google family is like, you get the weird conspiracy theory Facebook posts, you know, like, I order Sundar Pichai to not share my Fitbit data with Google. It's like, you don't get that with Google Health.

[Nilay Patel]

It's just Google. Yeah, that's a fair point. I'm. I'm sort of thinking it of it. Next to meta rebranding all of its apps, do you remember when it was like WhatsApp by Facebook?

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And everybody was like, hold on. Facebook owns WhatsApp?

[David Pierce]

Yep.

[Nilay Patel]

And on the one hand, it was like, well, yeah, where you been, guys? But on the other hand, it's like, don't. Don't tell them. What are you doing, Mark? People don't know that. People like WhatsApp and hates Facebook. Don't shove the Facebook logo into the app.

[David Pierce]

What do you do he ever take that advice?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that went great. Anyway, I think there's. There's one other gadget we should talk about before we take a break here, which is this company. Familiar Machines and Magic. Just fabulous name. Founded by Colin Angle, who is the longtime CEO of iRobot, which made the roombas. This is like a guy who knows home things. Just launched a new. I almost called it a device, but it's not. It's like a weird little robot animal called a familiar. Sure. I'm gonna play the brief intro video here, and then I just. I just need your thoughts on what this Is so it's like I would describe this thing to you as a robot alien dog.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

That is also a polar bear.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. What if you made like a lamb look? Ominous.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. They call this thing a familiar again, ominous. Yeah. What do you make of this? They call it basically an embodied AI system. And Colin Angle's whole theory is that these things should be companions. Right. This is not like a smart home controller. That is also adorable. It is explicitly designed to be adorable and to connect with you and to be your best friend. I want to know what you make of this.

[David Pierce]

There's a lot of desire for there to be robots and the humanoid robots don't work, as we've all seen. And so can we get a bunch of training data about navigating a house by making a cute fake dog that your kid can knock over and talk to? Boy, I bet we can.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

That's what I got for you. I would never let this thing in my house. 0% chance I would let this sitting in my house.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm with you. I mean what's funny to me about this is the funniest lesson of Roomba from 20 plus years ago is that people will fall in love with anything. They put a round vacuum on your floor that bumped into the walls and people fell in love with it and became best friends with it. So to then be like, oh, I have to make it look like a dog. Actually feels like you're learning the wrong lesson. That it's like put put robots in people's houses. Let them fall in love with them if they want to. This thing creeps me out. If I'm being completely honest with you. Even if I were into the theory of this, which I'm not, the specifics of this sort of medium sized animal just padding around my house. I've been watching a lot of Sonic the hedgehog recently. My 3 year old is super into Sonic right now. This looks like a knockoff Sonic character and I do not mean that as a compliment.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I see that again. Sinister lamb. Sinister.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Yeah, it's exactly right. Yeah. So I like I'm torn. I'm fascinated by this to see if it technically can do any of the things it is supposed to do. I just am not at all sold on like the thesis behind any of this stuff.

[David Pierce]

Especially because it doesn't actually talk. So it's a. It's LLM based but it make it meows and purrs and they don't talk because by quote by design it will avoid giving factual advice about Things it shouldn't be giving factual advice about. Sure, I agree.

[Nilay Patel]

You can't just say it's a dog. What do you want?

[David Pierce]

So it's gonna. It's gonna patter around and be kind of alive and kind of like a dog, but it. It's gonna meow and purr.

[Nilay Patel]

Does your dog play music? Ours does.

[David Pierce]

By the way, the price is not announced, but angle does say the cost will be, quote, around the same as pet ownership, which, depending on how you count, is millions of dollars.

[Nilay Patel]

I was going to say in my life. So, so, so expensive. Do I need to take it to the vet when it eats grapes?

[David Pierce]

That's your subscription fee. You're going to get a subscription dog. And the point. I think this is just such an interesting quote. The next era of robotics is not about dexterity or human inform. It's about machines that can build and sustain human connection. First of all, I'd point out that there are so many machines that can build and sustain human connection.

[Nilay Patel]

Including vacuum cleaners.

[David Pierce]

Including vacuum cleaners.

[Nilay Patel]

We did that already.

[David Pierce]

Ask any car guy about their car. Like, it's fine. But. Yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated by this thing. I'm fascinated by the fact that one of the. It comes up in everything. One of the use cases is help with wellness activities. Everyone's doing wellness. Yeah. I. Who knows what this thing will be. I. I think it is very funny that it is this big.

[Nilay Patel]

It's a big guy.

[David Pierce]

It's a big guy.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. It's not a tiny little robot wandering around your house. It is. It is like a. It's a guard dog.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Anybody who gets one of these, I am desperate to hear from you if these things ever ship.

[David Pierce]

Final quote. There's enough to it that it's beautiful, wonderful to pet and give a hug to and keep up with you for some definition of alive. It's alive. Hmm.

[Nilay Patel]

So you're saying Anthropic is gonna release one of these very soon, but it

[David Pierce]

can only meow in purr?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, but it is, by some definition of alive. That's how I feel when I wake up in the morning. All right, we should take one more break, and then we're gonna come back, do the lighting round. We'll be right back. 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 need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn [e-mail] studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc

[Ashley Esqueda]

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[Nilay Patel]

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[David Pierce]

on soil and mulch.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

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[Nilay Patel]

Exquisite supply. See homedepot.com pricematch for details. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, unsponsored for flavor. That was like eight dots. In case you were wondering, there are a lot of people tracking the dots. First up, the Hype desk, where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueta come tell us what's cool on the Internet and in the world. Hey guys. Hello Ross. There's a picture in your background that makes me think I know one of the things you want to talk about today. What do you have for us?

[Ross Miller]

Yes, I have manifested this and I am so excited because late last night, out of nowhere, Nintendo announced a new Star Fox game. Or rather a new old one. It's the fifth time they've made the same game and it's still amazing.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm still excited for it. There is just one Star Fox game, right? And they just make it over and over and over and over again.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Well, there's that one we don't talk about with the dinosaurs. We don't talk about that one.

[Nilay Patel]

So what's the deal with this game?

[Ross Miller]

Yes, so it's been rumored for a little bit. One of the first hype desks we ever did. We talked about the Mario movie and how weird it was that Glen Powell was there to play Fox McCloud, the titular star Fox character. And then out of nowhere, Nintendo usually does like surprise, direct announcements, but they give you a day. Heads up. This was 10 minutes. Like literally all my slacks, all my messages, all my little work chats are like, everyone drop what you're doing.

[Nilay Patel]

Watch YouTube.

[Ross Miller]

They're going to announce a new Star Fox out of nowhere.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Yeah.

[Ross Miller]

And sure enough, they did. And I think you already kind of alluded to it, David. Why break a great thing? And it's a remake of star Fox 64, which is itself a kind of definitive edition remake of the original Star Fox. So this is truly the fifth time they've made this game. But it looks amazing. It's got cinematic quality graphics which hit or miss on what you feel about like Fox McCloud looking like an actual Fox now. But it's the same game, it's the same gameplay. From what they're saying, there's a little bit of Nintendo Switch.

[David Pierce]

Do you still do a barrel roll?

[Ross Miller]

You can still do a barrel roll. Hell yes, you can.

[David Pierce]

That's the only important part of this game.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Literally in the direct V made sure you.

[Ross Miller]

So you could do a barrel roll. You could do a somersault. Peppy hair and slippy toad will still bother you to no end in the

[Ashley Esqueda]

middle of your missions. There's still all that cross ship chatter, which is very nice. That's classic Star Fox.

[Ross Miller]

It's great. We're so excited for that.

[Ashley Esqueda]

There's also. Okay, wait. But we have to talk about the defining feature of this game.

[Ross Miller]

Oh, my God, yes.

[Ashley Esqueda]

In my opinion, which is if you use game chat to have your face, like, if it's looking at your face, it basically makes like a vtuber version of Star Fox that tracks with your eyebrows in your mouth and you become starfox.

[David Pierce]

Wait, are you Mo Cap animating the fox or does it make you a furry.

[Ashley Esqueda]

No, no, no.

[Ross Miller]

Yes.

[Ashley Esqueda]

They're both MOCAP animating Fox McCloud. And then you become Fox McCloud, which, to the delight of furries everywhere.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Ross Miller]

It's a virtual fursona onboarding move.

[Ashley Esqueda]

It's a vtuber. A vtuber. A fursona vtuber kind of thing. But really, genuinely, the sound that emanated from me, the joy I felt at the. This is the thing I love about Nintendo. They are so deeply weird and they just do not care. And I. And they don't care about what the community thinks of these, like, very strange, like Alarmo is another really good example of like something where it's like nobody was asking for it and they made this cute little alarm clock and they were just like, it's just cool and we want to do it. And like this is like another example of them just being like, hey, we're just going to be Nintendo on our own. Terms. And this seems really funny and weird and like, we're going to just roll with it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Tomodachi life. Also another great example of, like, the weirdest thing that could possibly come out of Nintendo. And somehow it works.

[Nilay Patel]

I've now been looking at pictures of the new Star Fox for several minutes. I've been ignoring all of what you just said. I'm sure it was great. I can't decide if this is like. Do you remember when they first. They first showed the new, like, real Sonic and everybody freaked out and they had to redo Sonic? Yeah, yeah. This is like. There's a version of this that is that. Because there is something that is slightly horrifying, but this is also the coolest thing I've ever seen in my whole

[Ashley Esqueda]

life because Star Fox is cool.

[Nilay Patel]

He's got the not quite zipped up jacket. Yeah.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Wait till you see James McCloud. He's got the aviators. Like, oh, my God. Like, it's just gonna be really. It's. It's. This is. I'm excited about that.

[Nilay Patel]

It's like Uncanny Valley, parentheses, complimentary. Do you know what I mean?

[Ashley Esqueda]

Yeah.

[Ross Miller]

I keep seeing the tri meme. Like, dlss DLS is off. It is just a little too realistic. And I think I'm gonna get used to it. It took a while. They just redid Donkey Kong's eyes about a year ago for the movie, for the new Donkey Kong game. It was a big deal because they haven't changed that look in forever. I've gotten used to it. I have to believe it's gonna be the same case here. But, yeah, my initial reaction is, that's really real.

[Nilay Patel]

It's really real.

[Ashley Esqueda]

But also, there's the whole generation of kids and Gen Z and kids who have just. They've never played a Star Fox game. Like, they don't know. This is all they're gonna know. And, like, that's fine.

[Nilay Patel]

And now they're gonna think Star Fox is like, a very cool guy who, like, flunked out of the Air Force Academy for partying too hard.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Oh, he did.

[Nilay Patel]

That's the vibe I get.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Here's the thing. He dropped out on purpose because he was too good for the academy. You know what I mean? Like, that's the lore I choose to believe.

[David Pierce]

Okay, so don't Google Star Fox Fursona.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Nope, Nope, don't do that.

[David Pierce]

In an effort to find a GIF of how it looks. Because the first result is a Reddit thread from two years ago about audience overlap within subreddits. And I'll just read the headline. Apparently half of all Star Fox fans are furries.

[Ashley Esqueda]

That number honestly feels quite low when

[David Pierce]

you're like, Nintendo's doing stuff no one asked for. I feel like the data pointed them directly to let the Star Fox fans have Personas.

[Ross Miller]

Some important context here because there's also a very famous fighting game champ, SonicFox, who is a Furry.

[Ashley Esqueda]

He's a Furry.

[Ross Miller]

He's also the number one Mortal Kombat

[Nilay Patel]

player in the world.

[Ross Miller]

I think he still is. He has been for many years. He just happens to be someone who always wears a blue Sonic Fox furry mask.

[David Pierce]

I do feel like in back to back hype desk, we've done Wikifeet in furries.

[Ashley Esqueda]

It's not back to back, but it has happened enough that it might become a regular thing.

[Nilay Patel]

We're finding our stripes. This is great news. What else do you have for us today?

[Ross Miller]

Gardening. We have gardening. Ashley, you wanna talk about this?

[Nilay Patel]

Just the concept of gardening.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Yes. So Zach Galifianakis has a gardening show.

[David Pierce]

The man Loves a Plant show.

[Ashley Esqueda]

I was gonna say this is between true ferns.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, sure.

[Ashley Esqueda]

I'm gonna call it that.

[Ross Miller]

I like that.

[Ashley Esqueda]

It's not between two ferns. It's between true ferns. Which we both thought this was gonna be kind of like a silly, snarky Zach Galifianakis jam where it's like, oh, it's like a funny little garden. No, man. Just really like. And it's like a really wholesome. It's a really wholesome little show on Netflix. I don't understand. I love it. But also, I did not peg Zach Galifianakis for a plant girly.

[Nilay Patel]

So is this one of those things where Netflix was just like, Zach Galifianakis, we'd love you to make a show. And he's like, cool. I'm only gonna do one where I just sit in my garden and talk about plants. And Ted Sarandos is like, okay, kind of.

[Ross Miller]

So. So here's. Here's kind of so. It's directed by Brooke Linder, who also did John Mulaney's Everyone's Live in. Everyone's Live in LA or whatever. So it has a very similar kind of rough vibe. You think it's gonna be Zach Galifianakis being weird, but it's earnest. Every episode is. First off, every episode is 15 minutes long.

[Ashley Esqueda]

15 minutes, super easy.

[Ross Miller]

There's six of them. You can binge the whole thing in 90 minutes. Every episode has three parts. One, he talks to actual farmers about the true history of A tomato or a mushroom or an apple. Every episode's item based. And then the other part of it is he just goofs off with kids. Kids say the darnest thing style of he's just being a clown and just having a good time. Like, it just feels in a weird way like a PG Adult Swim show.

[Ashley Esqueda]

It feels like something you would see on nickelodeon in the 90s at like 4pm yes, sure.

[David Pierce]

Is this because Netflix is doing vertical scrolling video in its mobile app now and they're just like make clips.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Zach, that seems like maybe a strategy that like. Yeah, I would say that would, that would certainly. I mean that would certainly lend itself to that. But it also just feels like if. It genuinely feels like this is like content for like, if kids watch it. Like it's like safe content for them, but also like keeps them in Netflix. I don't like, I don't know, I find stuff like that really fascinating because it's just so odd and it's like maybe a parent would like let. I don't know, like if I saw that, just randomly didn't know what it was and hadn't seen it. I don't know that I'd let my kid watch it. If I was familiar with Zach Galifianakis. But also it is totally appropriate for kids. It's very, actually very educational.

[Ross Miller]

I think he makes a joke about LSD once, but otherwise it is a very G rated show.

[David Pierce]

So just the one LSD joke?

[Ross Miller]

Just the one. Just the one.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Shrek has at least four LSD jokes.

[Ross Miller]

So it seems Shrek is itself an LSD joke. But no, I think it's one of the things we got really surprised by just how earnest he came across in everything. Usually you're used to Zach Galifianak as the character or even the heightened version of himself on camera where he's still being a weird deadpan goof. This is where they constantly show the wrong take for talking or he's talking to his producer off camera. They wanna make it feel very rough, kind of just truly authentic off the cuff. He's laughing at his own jokes and he's just having a good time doing what he does. It's kind of like if you watched Conan o' Brien Must Go, the travel show and every now and then Conan o' Brien just drops a facade. It's that.

[Nilay Patel]

But the whole time that is very Zac Alphenack.

[David Pierce]

This is also giving his character.

[Nilay Patel]

This is also giving like early YouTube when like the Broad City girls were making their web series before they Made Broad City. We're just doing it in reverse now, where like a list celebrity makes webisodes.

[Ashley Esqueda]

We've gone back.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm, I'm, I'm fully here for this. Speaking of Conan, by the way, Zach Galifianakis was on Conan o' Brien's podcast, like, this week, I think, shockingly thoughtful about Internet regulation.

[Ashley Esqueda]

This is how I feel like whenever I see Ben Affleck talking about AI, I'm like, oh, oh, I was unfamiliar with your game, sir.

[David Pierce]

Affleck was like. And then he sold his AI company to Netflix.

[Ashley Esqueda]

I know. And then he sold his AI company.

[Ross Miller]

So what startup does Zach Galifianakis have that's policy based?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Nilay Patel]

Zach Galifianakis is going to run for

[David Pierce]

Congress in 2020, starting another V, like MVNO, like Mint Mobile.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, you know, it's coming between two phones.

[David Pierce]

Between two phones.

[Nilay Patel]

Thank you.

[David Pierce]

Thank you. It just hit. It finally hit.

[Nilay Patel]

That was the funniest thing I've ever said on this podcast.

[Ashley Esqueda]

We can't say anything else. We gotta end on that note. That's incredible.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, I'm gonna go watch that show. 15 minute episodes, by the way. Fabulous. More things should be 15 minutes. Ross Ashley, thank you as always. We'll see you next week. Good to see you.

[Ashley Esqueda]

Bye.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, Nilay, this means it's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. We got an email this week calling it the world's favorite podcast within a podcast. So we're going global, buddy. It's time for Brennan Karz to dummy. What did he do this week, Nilay?

[David Pierce]

He did a lot this week. As always. He did a lot this week. The main thing is that he cheered on the 8th Circuit overturning the FCC's broadband equity rules that passed during the Biden administration, where broadband companies had to try to provide Internet access equitably to people of all kinds of backgrounds. And. And they basically. The court overturned it and Brendan cheered it and said, we don't have to do that. Which is just the most. Brendan Car thing in the world.

[Nilay Patel]

Let's not give people who need Internet Internet hooray.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean, you can talk about lots of ways, but Brendan, there's nothing he loves more than allowing telecom providers to charge higher rates and provide worse service. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's his thing. Like, that's where he came from. Like, it is.

[Nilay Patel]

Well and importantly, not do any work work at all. It's like Brendan is really trying to protect the work life Balance of carrier executives everywhere.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Before the FCC under Brendan became all about speech regulations, every single FCC chair, and I knew them all, was all about bridging the digital divide, closing the homework gap, making sure that rural communities had broadband. And Brendan is like, screw that. Like, we don't need to overbuild. This is one of his favorite phrases. And then he's cheering on these court challenges to, you know, forcing what are essentially monopolies to provide coverage equally to people. So that's just very bad. He's very dumb. This is like, I'm saying it this way without a lot of fire. Cause this is just the most Brendan Carr thing.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, he's like a cartoon character villain in that sense.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. But, like, this is also the. This is the thing I'm used to arguing with, like, GOP FCC commissioners, like our edgy pie. We would argue about this sort of thing. Like, at least he's like, true to form. You know, it's a classic Brendan Carr.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Then the other thing this week that I. I feel the need to issue a disclosure about. A few weeks ago, we mentioned that Brendan had bullied himself into a discussion of whether the NFL should lose its antitrust exemption.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, right.

[David Pierce]

So big sports leagues have an antitrust exemption because the owners all get together and they go collude basically, on prices for broadcast rights.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And so in any normal market, you would have them all compete.

[Nilay Patel]

We call those things cartels. They're not generally allowed.

[David Pierce]

But big sports leagues tend to have these antitrust exemptions. The NFL is maybe the most important one so that the owners can come together and the league can go negotiate for broadcast rights. And there's lots of structures, and you don't necessarily need that one, but that's one we have. So because the owners have now started going to streaming and getting deals, and in particular, the NFL is so expensive to watch legally, there's just a lot of fulmination about breaking the antitrust exemption and making sure that it's not all on streaming, or if it's going to be on streaming, that the local stations can do whatever they want. So the DOJ is investigating this. The Brendan can't help it because he loves muscling his way into any sort of TV dispute. He decided that he's got the power, too, as well. There's going to be Senate hearings about it. Everyone's talking about it. And it's true that fans generally do not like the way that sports broadcast rights are set up right now.

[Nilay Patel]

Agreed.

[David Pierce]

It is expensive. It's complicated A lot of people are sailing the seven Cs, if you know what I mean. So this is my disclosure. The Green Bay packers this week sent a letter to Congress. It's basically a letter that's like, hey, just like, we're a small market team. We're owned by the community. If you upend the economic structure of the NFL, like, we'll be disproportionately impacted. And the last sentence says it as clearly as you can. Put simply, any disruption to the current Sports Broadcasting act model, eliminating our ability to negotiate as the NFL writ large would pose an existential threat to the Green Bay packers and their existence in Green Bay as we know it. This comes the same week as Brendan saying out loud, actually, this inquiry might not lead to any action because there's a lot of pressure. Like, the NFL is full of lobbyists and billionaires and they're like, no, no, you're not going to touch us.

[Nilay Patel]

It is as powerful an organization as we have in America.

[David Pierce]

This is a cultural institution. They're like, you know what? Donald Trump is president. Here's bad bunny. Yeah, like, they just have the authority to do whatever they want in a way that many other places don't have the authority to they want. So I'm sure they're lobbying. Brendan said this week, we're just trying to make sure that we're educated on these issues. It's not clear whether there'll be a regulatory outcome or not. So you just have the NFL speaking with one voice being like, screw you. As corrupt as it gets in the way, the NFL's corrupt. And then you have the packers being like, this might kill the Packers.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm dying to know what your disclosure is here. Is this like, Nei Patel is secretly the backup quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.

[David Pierce]

I don't think anyone would enjoy that. I do think I should be allowed to call both the offense and the defense in the fourth quarter playoff games based on my record in Madden alone, we would have gone to the Super Bowl 500 times in a row anyhow. No, I'm from Wisconsin. I was raised in Wisconsin by my father, a Brett Favre fan, and My family owns 4 shares of the Packers. No way.

[Nilay Patel]

You are the owner of the Green.

[David Pierce]

You know, they every now and again, like, the sports media will run these trolls. It's like packers owner says they're going to trade for. It's always like one guy. Yes. Packers are owned by the community. When they want to raise money to build stadiums, they issue shares which give you nothing. And you Buy them and they hang them on the wall and that's. And you can. You can get some of the worst merch in history at a 20% discount from the pro shop. That's. That's what. And you can vote, but you. It doesn't matter. You can vote on the board of directors of the packers, which I never do. So there's your disclosure. My dad and I each own two shares, the Green Bay Packers.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm now gonna start angling for a change to the Verge ethics policy that says you're not allowed to also own any sports teams.

[David Pierce]

If you wanna come at me for that one, I will take it on the chin. We did a quick post about the packers saying one of the commenters, like, I feel like this put needs a disclosure. And they just meant that I'm a Packers fan. But I like thought about it and I was like, nope. My own foreshadows.

[Nilay Patel]

That's great. Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, the parent company of the Vox.

[David Pierce]

No, we gotta change that one too.

[Nilay Patel]

And Nilay owns the Green Bay Packers.

[David Pierce]

We have to change that disclosure as well. By the way, I didn't even realize this. With the spin out of Versant from Comcast, the NBC investment is. It went with Versant.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, no. Now we have to say Versant is a minority investor.

[David Pierce]

I think Comcast Ventures is still up there somewhere, but NBC is not.

[Nilay Patel]

Interesting.

[David Pierce]

Okay, so there's your disclosure update. I own two shares of the Packers. So does my dad.

[Nilay Patel]

Nilai owns the Green Bay Packers.

[David Pierce]

I own the Green Bay Packers. I'm trying to get the new president of the packers at policy on decoder. And I'm just thinking how funny that episode will be for a variety of

[Nilay Patel]

reasons as your boss answer some questions.

[David Pierce]

That's really good. Anyhow, that's that. Those are. Those are our disclosure updates.

[Nilay Patel]

So this is now your most direct fight with Brendan Carr ever. We're getting closer. The Neil I Brendan showdown inches. Ever close.

[David Pierce]

If Brendan ruins the Green Bay Packers, I will be very upset. I don't think it's going to happen because I think the NFL's ability to lobby on its own behalf is very high.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, they're largely doing fine, I would say.

[David Pierce]

And I also do also think that the streaming landscape and the cost of watching sports is untenable for most people. And actually maybe you should renegotiate and rethink the entire structure that led to those outcomes. And maybe the packers are overplaying it. I'll find out when I ed policy's Boss is the owner of the Green Bay packers interview, Ed Paul. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm willing that into existence here at the end of Brendan Karns, as always, Brendan, if you'd like to talk about any of this, in particular, your absolutely regressive approach to broadband deployment in the United States, which is keeping the Internet from poor people, you're welcome to come on this show. I can tell you that I'm pretty sure we're going to federate Brendan Carr's dummy to one more podcast very soon. It was already on Stephen Robles podcast, but there's another one coming. You might be able to guess what that is. So we're expanding. We're America's favorite podcast within every podcast. Brendan, you're welcome.

[Nilay Patel]

The CIADCU is exploding.

[David Pierce]

That's right. Anyhow, that's been Brennan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast within all the podcasts.

[Nilay Patel]

It's good stuff. All right, my first lightning round item. I would just like to alert everyone to the existence of a company called Dreamey. If you don't know about Dreamy, Jen Tuohy wrote a terrific piece for us about this company. Basically, it's a company out of China that started as a robot vacuum company on kind of a Dyson grind, where they're like, we know how to make a kind of motor. What can we put motor in? And started doing stuff, built robot vacuums, built a pretty successful robot vacuum business, and then decided that the next thing to do is to make everything for everyone everywhere throughout the world as we know it. And last week had a big, huge US Launch event and has basically begun rolling out some of the most spectacular vaporware the world has ever seen. And this just, I just, I'm. I'm like earnestly proud of this company for. With a straight face saying all of the things that it has been saying over the last week or so.

[David Pierce]

Straight up, one of the things they said was, we will turn our CEO into Elon Musk.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, just China's Elon Musk. Just a thing they're saying out loud. They announced, I think like two dozen smartphones in the Aurora line, of course, a bunch of which have weird ideas about things, including one that is a modular phone that you can attach different modules, including a telephoto camera lens to. There's also a satellite communications module. Just. I want to be so clear that none of these things are ever going to exist and if they do, you won't buy them anyway. But I love so Much that a company can get on stage and be like, look at all this weird crap we made. They also made a car, I think.

[David Pierce]

No, no, no. It's not just a car, David. It's a. It's a rocket car.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, right.

[David Pierce]

It's a. It's a rocket car. Yeah. It can do 0 to 60 and they claim 0.9 seconds.

[Nilay Patel]

So literally it would have to be a rocket car.

[David Pierce]

It's a. It's a rocket car. It is. It. I don't understand. I mean, our deck is so straightforward. Andy Hawkins is our transportation reporter. In her. The deck of this piece is the Chinese vacuum company has automotive aspirations, but its claims of rocket boosted acceleration don't add up. It's like. Yeah, I don't think that

[Nilay Patel]

the math ain't math in my friends. Yeah, yeah. They also launched smart rings, smart glasses, a laundry robot. I would say there is no more classic vaporware genre than robot that will fold your laundry. It has been. Somebody has been shipping that since time immemorial. And I believe it will never actually exist in the real world. But Dreamey's making one. They got a bunch of robot vacuums and lawnmowers, all kinds of wild stuff. Like every product you could possibly imagine. Dreamy believes that it will sell you at some point in the very near future. And it's all a bunch of nonsense and I just admire the hell out of it.

[David Pierce]

Can I come back to the rocket car? Sure. It's very important that I come back to Dreamy announcing a rocket car. It's called the next 01 jet edition car. It has Batmobile style fake jet engines on the back. And again, the claim is it can go from 0 to 60 in 0.9 seconds. You can't do that on regular tires. As our transportation editor Andy Hawkins points out, you will hit the limits of traction. So you can put all the power to the wheels, but the tires will explode.

[Nilay Patel]

So they're going to launch this thing briefly into the air as it accelerates.

[David Pierce]

You might have made a top fuel drag car, but you actually just, just made this Kia looking thing with your jet engines on the beach.

[Nilay Patel]

Fantastic.

[David Pierce]

Unless. Unless. The reason that it's jet engines is because they're not driving the wheels. This is what I'm saying.

[Nilay Patel]

They're gonna launch the car into the air. The wheels are not important.

[David Pierce]

The jet engines can just push the car forward. Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

The wheels don't have to turn it off. The wheels are just ancillary.

[David Pierce]

When you talk about the most spectacular vaporware in the history of the. The world.

[Nilay Patel]

It. It honestly, it has a real claim to it. Like there's. There's not a lot of better vaporware. Everybody go check it out. We have a great photo essay of all this stuff. Go read Jen's piece. We'll put it all in the show. Notes. This company is absolutely fascinating, whether it ships or not. I think Dreamy is fascinating and you should go check it out. Nilay, what's your next one?

[David Pierce]

I just want to point out that the Utopian sent an engineer to check out the nebula next 01 jet car and his assessment was, quote, feels like horseshit. Perfect.

[Nilay Patel]

I like the idea that this person was not like an automotive engineer. They're just like a. This is like an H Vac engineer where they're just like, nope, wind doesn't work that way. It's really good.

[David Pierce]

It's very good.

[Nilay Patel]

What's your next one, Nilay?

[David Pierce]

I've got one more. It's just one of my favorite stories of the week. We started with Elon. We're going to end with Elon. Elon, out of the nowhere, just announced that he's further consolidating the SpaceX empire. And Xai, which was its own company, which also contained X, the social platform and everything app that we all use for everything.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. So they. Yeah, they started X, then started Xai. Xai swallowed X. Yep. And it all became Xai.

[David Pierce]

It all became Xai, and then SpaceX swallowed Xai.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And now he's formally dissolving Xai as a company.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

And it's just gonna be part of SpaceX and they're just gonna call it SpaceX AI.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, so wait, the whole thing is now SpaceX AI?

[David Pierce]

Yes. They did not quite announce it. They put out a press release announcing a compute partnership with anthropic in which SpaceX referred to itself as SpaceX AI over and over again in the press release. So that's what we got.

[Nilay Patel]

The whole anthropic thing, by the way, very weird. They're getting all of this compute from. I guess it's called SpaceX AI, but there's like a clause in it that if Elon Musk decides it's bad for the world, they can pull the compute back. Weird stuff going on.

[David Pierce]

Weird stuff going on. It's also not clear if SpaceX itself is called SpaceX AI or just the products. The AI products of SpaceX are an umbrella brand called SpaceX. None of this makes any sense.

[Nilay Patel]

X is a feature of XAI, which is a feature of SpaceX AI. Which is a branch of SpaceX.

[David Pierce]

Yes. And by the way, X, just to be clear, is the everything app that we all do all of our banking and real estate transactions in.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. Pretty soon you might bank with a division, a division within a division within a division of SpaceX.

[David Pierce]

Yes. Which is also selling compute Transphic.

[Nilay Patel]

I love it when you're like, oh,

[David Pierce]

this whole episode started with a long trial about corporate structures. And you end with. And it's called SpaceX AI. It's like, well, we've learned nothing.

[Nilay Patel]

I have no notes.

[David Pierce]

I'm in.

[Nilay Patel]

I will give you a. Just to. Just to button that with a better example of a company doing a good job. Asha Sharma, who is running the Xbox team, now continues to do good, smart things, which is to say, make obvious decisions to make Xboxes less bad. She announced this week that they're getting rid of the copilot AI stuff on the Xbox. They're making some big changes to the platform. They started teasing the universal look across all kinds of different devices. Before we get out of here, just a brief shout to Asha Sharma, who has basically shown up and just systematically reversed all of the bad decisions made by people before her, which is actually a pretty good. Good way to endear yourself to fans of Xbox. And it seems to be going very well. There was a lot of skepticism about Asha Sharma when she took over this team and people are coming around really fast. There's a lot of enthusiasm for what she's been up to recently.

[David Pierce]

I mean, you're just like, I'm taking the AI out of it. Everyone's like, you're the best.

[Ross Miller]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And then. And meanwhile, Microsoft is out here being like, oh, do you know all those MSN widgets that show up in your face every time you open the start menu? We're going to get rid of those too. And everybody's like, oh, my God. God, Microsoft gets it. What if. What if we made our products less horrible? It's like the fate of Windows. I'll take it. All right, we should get out of here. Lots going on on the site. Go, go. Read everything. Liz, literally, as we speak, is still in the courtroom. There are still shenanigans. This trial has weeks left. We got a lot left to do. We'll keep covering it, but we will not be covering it next week because we are off next week. No show Tuesday, no show Friday. We're going to be back with a live show on the 19th after Google. I. Oh, Nilay, you're going to be at IO.

[David Pierce]

I will be at I O TBD

[Nilay Patel]

on connectivity situations, whether we get you on the show or not. But we have some other folks here that are going to help me run through all the news. We're going to talk about all of it. We're going to go live kind of right ish after the keynote on Tuesday. So no Tuesday episode that morning, but we'll be back that afternoon. We're just trying to give everybody a break. There's a lot of stuff coming up. We have some really fun plans that we're going to start to tell you about pretty soon. Lots going on. We just figured we're going to give everybody a week to, like, go stare at trees before the true chaos of developer season gets us all.

[David Pierce]

I'm going to see if I can get my car to go faster than any car has ever gone in the history of the world.

[Nilay Patel]

You're going to put several rockets on your car and see if tires even matter anymore.

[David Pierce]

It's going to be great.

[Nilay Patel]

I love it. Who's undecoted this week?

[David Pierce]

Joanna is on very soon, talking about new things and our new book. And then I will just hint that there is a wave of big interviews coming that I'm very excited about.

[Nilay Patel]

It's gonna be good.

[David Pierce]

All right.

[Nilay Patel]

Remember, as always, you can subscribe to the Verge to get this podcast and all of our podcasts ad free. Theverge.com subscribe that is what makes us ungovernable. They can't mess with us as long as you subscribe. The vergecast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you, what, in two weeks, Nilay Rock and roll.