Mark Zuckerberg has an Instagzam

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Vergecast

Episode: Mark Zuckerberg has an Instagzam
Date: August 14, 2026
Hosts: David Pierce, Nilay Patel (with cameo from staff/guest commentators)
Podcast: The Vergecast (The Verge)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into two of tech’s most attention-grabbing stories of the week: Instagram's controversial new logo redesign—dubbed "Instagazam" by the hosts—and Mark Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word AI manifesto, "The Future Is For Everyone." The hosts analyze the design flop, parse the philosophical and regulatory arguments in Zuckerberg’s letter, and round off with lively discussion of AI watermarking, user counts, creator economics, cheap phone crises, and more. The episode is full of sharp insights, plenty of good-natured sarcasm, and memorable critiques.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Instagram’s Logo Redesign: The "Instagazam" Debacle

Timestamps: [02:03]–[12:35]

• Headline: Instagram refreshed its iconic wordmark after 10+ years, but the reaction is overwhelmingly negative.

• Process Critique:

  • Nilay and David discuss that logo redesigns often come from internal boredom rather than necessity or technological needs.
  • Many iconic brands get “itchy” and tinker needlessly, often to bad result.
    • “There’s just something that happens when you’re like, I've been staring at this logo for too long. I need to change it.” – Nilay Patel [03:23]

• No Real Justification:

  • The new Instagram wordmark lacks a clear reason or design justification; the official rationale is simply that it’s been a decade.
  • Marketing language in Meta’s design blog is ridiculed for being generic:
    • ("Our new word mark elevates simplicity, creativity and connection...") – Nilay Patel [07:13]

• Host Reactions:

  • “The logo is hideous, by the way. For anyone who has not yet seen it, I encourage you to really spend some time with it.” – Nilay Patel [05:57]
  • “You can’t be the classic logo until it’s gone.” – David Pierce [05:09]
  • Joking about the design: “It says Instagasm.” – David Pierce [06:15]
  • Comparing logo redesign strategies to the infamous 2008 "Pepsi Universe" branding document, lampooning the overwrought corporate justifications for new logos.

• Bigger Trend:

  • The hosts identify a movement toward “Blanding”—dumbing interesting logos down to interchangeable, boring sans-serif fonts.
  • “In Instagram’s case, they just ruined one of the letters and that’s apparently design.” – Nilay Patel [12:21]

Memorable Moment

• Extended riff about the Mandela Effect and Shaquille O’Neal starring in "Instagazam" [06:17]

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2. Mark Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto: "The Future Is For Everyone"

Timestamps: [12:35]–[33:02]

• Overview: Zuckerberg releases a lengthy treatise on AI where he argues universal access to advanced AI is inherently good and that checks and balances will emerge if "everyone gets superintelligent agents."

• Hosts’ Critique:

  • Both Nilay and David find the document philosophically naïve—akin to "freshman year" political science.
    • “It’s a lot of big ideas that basically are like, magic genies will change the structure of the world. What will we do now? Weird.” – David Pierce [13:37]
  • They highlight Zuckerberg’s apparent ignorance of collective action problems—the idea that if everyone acts in pure self-interest, society suffers.
  • Analogy: Zuckerberg’s thinking is compared to NRA arguments—if everyone has a gun, there will be no gun violence. The hosts call this logic "flatly wrong."
    • “If you give people offensive cyber capabilities and you’re like, naturally this will lead to checks and balances—you are completely off your rocker.” – David Pierce [21:11]

• Best Quotes:

  • “He has no evidence for any of his ideas.” – David Pierce [29:21]
  • “His argument is maybe [rules] shouldn’t exist because we'll just give it to everybody and it’ll be fine.” – Nilay Patel [32:46]

• Other Points Discussed:

  • The tension with other AI leaders (e.g., Dario Amodei from Anthropic).
  • Zuckerberg’s examples (AI baking assistants for kids; superintelligent lawyers) are deemed trivial compared to the scale of risks and infrastructure.
  • Export controls, AI model distillation (“should distillation be legal?”), and the economic and regulatory race with China.
  • Critiques that Zuckerberg’s arguments ignore 100+ years of context about managing technological and societal risk.

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3. AI Content Watermarking and Authenticity

Timestamps: [36:01]–[48:23]

• Anthropic’s Claude AI Watermark:

  • Discussion of the new invisible watermark for AI-generated text.
  • Explained as a statistical “nudging” of word choices—hard for humans to perceive, but detectable in aggregate.
  • The biggest challenge: Standards fragmentation (“there are 15 standards now”).
    • “Are we just doing this again?” – Nilay Patel [37:15]

• Corporate Motives:

  • The hosts believe watermarking is not about pure transparency but about teaching users to tolerate, even appreciate, AI content:
    • “It’s like a reveal. It’s like they pull the cloth off at the end and you’re like, it was Claude all along.” – David Pierce [38:21]

• Wider Crisis of Trust:

  • Discussion moves to how Apple plans to mark “reference images” as real.
  • Increasing instability and cynicism as people begin to assume everything is fake unless proven real.

• Cultural Shift Example:

  • Fantasy football podcast anecdote: A faked athlete image fooled everyone last training camp, but this year, everyone assumes all images are fake.
    • “The speed with which we have all had to make that change just continues to blow my mind.” – Nilay Patel [49:05]

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4. AI in the Music Industry and Platform Economics

Timestamps: [50:25]–[62:43]

• Spotify & AI Personas:

  • Spotify removes AI-persona tracks from recommendations, reflecting broad user dislike/distrust of AI-generated music.
  • The “tingly feeling” of realizing a song you like is generated by AI.

• AI Music Scandals:

  • The Phoenix Flexen debacle: AI song initially claimed to be human, then semi-admitted as AI.
  • D’Addario guitar company controversy: Confusing and contradictory messaging about AI music in advertising.

• Industry Backlash:

  • The CEO of Fender, Bud Cole, likens learning to play covers to “analog AI”—earning the hosts’ scorn for this dismissal of musical artistry.

• Host Perspective:

  • Nilay is open to AI as a tool in music, but draws a line at “prompting Suno and generating a song” as not artistic.
  • David explains why music is always the “vanguard” of these debates: it’s infinitely consumable, closed ecosystem, highly litigious.

Memorable Quotes

• “The idea that playing the same notes means you’re playing the same song is bananas.” – Nilay Patel [54:35]
• “Music industry is so litigious and so protective of its value… these issues will get figured out in music first—in maybe annoying ways, maybe the wrong ways.” – David Pierce [60:10]

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5. Lightning Round

Timestamps: [67:37]–[94:41]

• Brendan Carr, the FCC, and American Manufacturing

  • Mocking the FCC’s self-congratulation for “reshoring” American tech manufacturing; in practical terms, most "American-made" products are still heavily dependent on Chinese components.
  • Sean Hollister’s reporting finds Chinese drones and cameras still widely available, despite supposed bans.

• Numbers or Lies: AI User Counts

  • Google and OpenAI each claim 1 billion users (Gemini and ChatGPT).
  • The hosts unpack how Google’s figure, reliant on Android devices and background integrations, is not “cheating”—it’s just how scale works when you own distribution.

• YouTube Raises Monetization Bar

  • YouTube increases Partner Program requirements: 1,000 subs, 8,000 watch hours, or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days—a huge hurdle for small creators.
  • Consequence: Brand deals become more critical; creators’ dependency on platforms increases.
  • Motivation: Stemming the flood of low-quality/AI-generated content gaming the system.

• Affordable Phone Market Shrinking

  • “Ramageddon” update: Sales of phones under $100 have dropped 64% YoY; low-cost smartphone makers are being wiped out, mainly due to soaring RAM costs.

• Flock’s Surveillance Cameras Face Regulatory Disgust

  • Flock’s CEO admits they “waited for someone to tell us what to do” on surveillance, then steamrolled ahead due to lack of regulation.
  • The ACLU slams new changes as PR-focused, not protecting real harm.

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• “The logo is hideous, by the way. For anyone who has not yet seen it, I encourage you to really spend some time with it.” — Nilay Patel [05:57]
• “If you give people offensive cyber capabilities and you’re like, naturally this will lead to checks and balances—you are completely off your rocker.” — David Pierce [21:11]
• “He has no evidence for any of his ideas.” — David Pierce [29:21]
• “It’s like a reveal. It’s like they pull the cloth off at the end and you’re like, it was Claude all along.” — David Pierce [38:21]
• “The speed with which we have all had to make that change just continues to blow my mind.” — Nilay Patel [49:05]
• “The idea that playing the same notes means you’re playing the same song is bananas.” — Nilay Patel [54:35]
• “Music industry is so litigious and so protective of its value… these issues will get figured out in music first—in maybe annoying ways, maybe the wrong ways.” — David Pierce [60:10]
• “Letting the government track your movements without permission is just… what are you doing? That doesn’t seem right in any way, shape or form.” — David Pierce [93:12]

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Key Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:03]–[12:35] Instagram Logo Redesign ("Instagazam”)
• [12:35]–[33:02] Zuckerberg’s AI Manifesto
• [36:01]–[48:23] AI Watermarking & Content Authenticity
• [50:25]–[62:43] AI in Music Industry & Platform Creator Economics
• [67:37]–[94:41] Lightning Round: FCC, AI user counts, Creator Earnings, Cheap Phones, Flock surveillance

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Conclusion

This episode is a whirlwind tour through tech culture’s latest big, weird moves and exposes how hype, regulation, and legacy all entangle in today’s tech industry. The banter between Nilay and David is both barbed and brilliant, mixing deep analysis with relentless wit—whether roasting branding nonsense, parsing Silicon Valley manifestos, or lamenting the slow extinction of cheap gadgets. If you’re interested in how technology, society, and design collide (often messily), this is a must-listen episode.

Transcript

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[Nilay Patel]

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Instagrism, the new hot social network that launched this week. I'm your friend David Pearce. Neil Aptel is here.

[David Pierce]

What's up?

[Nilay Patel]

This is just a hot start to the Vergecast for us.

[David Pierce]

We're doing great. It's either the best one or the roughest one we've ever had.

[Nilay Patel]

So this I'm frankly very excited that I'm here because I'm going on Parental leave any minute now. Tomorrow is my last possible last day. I am just disappearing into the wilderness for a while. There has been so much wild crap on the Internet this week that I was going to be very sad if I left before I had a chance to, like, have a lot of feelings here on the Vergecast with you about AI. Yeah, but we're here. We're going to do this, but we have to start with Instagram. Instagazam.

[David Pierce]

We were putting together the rundown and trying to organize all these AI ideas, and then Adam and announced a new Instagram logo. And I was like, well, there's a full hour of our show. And the only reason that he gave for why there's a new Instagram logo was it's been about 10 years. It's time for a new one.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, I'm. I'm glad you started with this, because I. This is a question I have, actually, for you in particular. I have had many jobs in media. I have never actually been at a job in the middle of a logo redesign. I left the Verge right before one redesign and came back kind of right after one. You have done a bunch of redesigns, and the only thing I can think of in. In these moments, when you are at a company for a long time, you're doing one thing is just maybe you get itchy. Like, the people at Gap were like, I've been looking at this logo for too long. Let's change it. And they do that at Cracker Barrel and they do that at Jaguar, and, like, it's mostly all bad, but there. There is. Is there just something that happens when you're like, I've been staring at this logo for too long. I need to change it.

[David Pierce]

There's a little bit of that. It's a great way to get attention. Sure. They in the attention can be good or bad. The CEO of Crackle Barrel got fired,

[Nilay Patel]

so that one goes in the bad column.

[David Pierce]

Roll the dice, Adam. Let's see what happens next. Coke changed their logo and some of the design of, I think, the Coke Zero cans. And everyone's like, dude, that's just the Marlboro logo. Like, what are we doing here?

[Nilay Patel]

This was, like, very recently.

[David Pierce]

Very recently.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

That's all very funny. This one, I can't quite tell. Our redesigns, we've always done around format shifts. So the original Verge logo had a bunch of serifs in it. It was designed for, like, a desktop website. Then we went to mobile. Everything got small. The fine details were getting obliterated. So we made A change. And then we made another change recently with this last redesign, because that old logo was really blocky. It was hard to lock up in all these places. We wanted to go all these other directions with our design and colors. And so there was some reason. There was some external force that was pushing you on the old logo. Can't do all the things you want to do with your design system in the future. There's also the general. You can't bring back the old logo in a flurry of happiness if you never take it away.

[Nilay Patel]

For sure.

[David Pierce]

This is just a thing. Right.

[Nilay Patel]

You can't be the classic logo until it's gone.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. You can't have loud parts if you don't have quiet parts. And sometimes you just got to take the old logo away. I don't know if any of that is happening for Instagram. Adam has talked about, you know, the Instagram app is going to change. It's going to be more flexible, there'll be more AI. But none of that appears today. There's no external force pushing Instagram to be different. It really does appear that they just got a little bored. They haven't said anything else about it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, there's a. There's a really sort of flowery post on the Design it meta blog about this that I expected to be the place that is, like, as we lean into new paradigms, like, all the stuff you're talking about. None of that.

[David Pierce]

I have to make this work on AI glasses.

[Nilay Patel]

None of that. They just say it's been over 10 years since we refreshed our brand identity.

[David Pierce]

That's.

[Nilay Patel]

That's the explanation. Uh, and then it goes into a bunch of flowery nonsense. Um, the thing that is actually most striking about all of this, to me, the logo is hideous, by the way. Uh, for anyone who has not yet seen it, I encourage you to really spend some time with it. Well, I'm sure you're seeing it here. Going to talk a lot about it.

[David Pierce]

It says Instagasm.

[Nilay Patel]

It says Instagaz. Shaquille o' Neal starring in Instagazam.

[David Pierce]

And there. There's some part that was. Who's the other guy in the Mandela effect version of that?

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, Sinbad.

[David Pierce]

This is the Sinbad version of Instagram. This is the bad timeline.

[Nilay Patel]

Exactly.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Go ahead. You. You react first. And I'll say, but the.

[Nilay Patel]

But the theory behind this is, like, I keep looking for the reason that they did this, right? And I think even if you land on logos, that not a lot of people are going to, like, Everybody's going to have issues with change, especially to something. I think Instagram's script qualifies as, like, a genuinely iconic wordmark.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Like, I think.

[Nilay Patel]

I think most people of. Of the Instagram generation could, like, close their eyes and write the Instagram wordmark relatively successfully. It's that that cursive lettering has been around for forever. It looks really great. I fundamentally disagree with the premise that it looks old, except that it's cursive, like, fine, whatever, I don't know. But anyway, they, they, they go through and I just pulled two quotes from this blog post that strike me as ridiculous, frankly. It says, our new word mark elevates simplicity, creativity and connection, and was important to craft a mark that still makes Instagram feel like Instagram while introducing something to carry us into the future. That sentence, word for word, minus the proper nouns, is what everyone says every time they change their logo for any reason. We want Coca Cola to still feel like Coca Cola while introducing something to carry us into the. This is. This is. The only reason anybody changes a logo is because they're like, what do we. Is it the future? Drives me crazy. Anyway, here's a quote from Jasmine Probst, the director of product design at Instagram. I do not feel bad making fun of this quote because there is just absolutely no chance Jasmine Probst actually said this out loud. It says, script reflects individuality, so referencing that felt right. The new wordmark is bolder and simpler with touches of unexpectedness. It cues individual expression, a personal voice, both of which have always been core to Instagram. What?

[David Pierce]

Like, it's.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

We.

[David Pierce]

We.

[Nilay Patel]

We took boring Sarah sans serif font and made a couple of the letters bad individuality.

[David Pierce]

We made this harder to read.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

I agree.

[David Pierce]

The existing Instagram logo is iconic. It means a lot of things to a lot of people. When you change your logo, you change all those relationships. Everyone is always mad at you, and every designer in the world has now been trained to be like that. Feedback doesn't matter. We know it's right in our hearts.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And that's 100. And miseri put this on threads and I was like, show me your hot takes. I again, absent some reason to do this, which they have not said, this feels like an unforced error.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And it honestly feels like this entire new Instagram logo is the human designers at Meta getting one over on Mark Zuckerberg before he replaces them with AI. Like, right before they get clipped, they're like, all right, we're going to set up one time bomb and then you're going to. Your robots are going to have to fix it. Mark Musespark is going to fix it. You go ahead, buddy. You have a good. The other thing I want to say, which is very important to me, is that it doesn't matter how good or bad your logo redesign is, it doesn't matter how good or bad your brand guidelines are. Your design system is. Every single design presentation is fundamentally the pepsi universe from 2008. Do you remember? Do you know about the pepsi universe from 2008?

[Nilay Patel]

I think so, but I'm going to Google this.

[David Pierce]

As you talk, there is a PDF that has just been floating around the Internet for years, since 2008. And it is like a logo redesign and brand strategy document for Pepsi that cost millions upon millions of dollars. This is the rumor and it is the most insane description of Pepsi with charts and graphs that you have ever seen in your life. And every time I see any other design document, I'm like, oh, it's the Pepsi Universe.

[Nilay Patel]

This is pretty spectacular. The title of this document is Breathtaking in all caps. The Pepsi DNA finds its origin in the dynamic of perimeter oscillations. We'll link to this in the show notes. It's fabulous. And everyone should experience this document.

[David Pierce]

So this is a page from the Pepsi Universe document called Breathtaking Creation of Identity, Gravitational pull. And it says attraction theory, the Pepsi proposition. And it begins with typical light path, which is a star shining on the earth. And then it goes on to show you the gravitational pull of the Pepsi logo pulling the light away from Earth. And that's. That's why you should have a new Pepsi logo.

[Nilay Patel]

This is insane.

[David Pierce]

It is incredible.

[Nilay Patel]

So the bottom of this page, on the left side, it has relativity of space and time. And on the right it has Pepsi Proposition. Pepsi aisle.

[David Pierce]

What are we doing? When you're in the Pepsi aisle, the new logo will bend. Light will bend you towards it. I'm confident the Instagram people, we're doing something different. You should. This entire document is worth this. Scroll through it. It's one of my favorite design documents in the entire world. But every time I see one of these in logo redesigns, I think about the Pepsi universe and how you have to just dress up any logo redesign with the most obtuse nonsense in the world. So props to Instagram for not doing that, for just saying generic stuff. No, props for taking an iconic logo and making it say Instagasm.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's not great. It also makes me think, was it the Airbnb redesign a while back? That made everybody think, oh, we're getting back to an old era of design. We're going to do a little more skeuomorphism, a little more physicality. We're entering it into an augmented reality world. We need things that feel like objects again. I was sort of excited about that era of design and boy, is this. Not that I think you could argue this is. I mean, and we've been on a run in the tech industry for like a decade now of just everybody taking interesting, colorful, cool logos and just dumbing them down to a sans serif font like this. Every company has done this.

[David Pierce]

It has a name. It's called Blanding.

[Nilay Patel]

Is it really?

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

I like that. That is a good thing.

[David Pierce]

Very good.

[Nilay Patel]

And it is a bummer that this continues apace. Except in Instagram's case, they just ruined one of the letters and that's apparently design. It's bad stuff.

[David Pierce]

Have an instagasm on Meta platform sync.

[Nilay Patel]

Don't give them that idea.

[David Pierce]

I don't. You.

[Nilay Patel]

This is not branding I'm ready for. Okay, the other weird thing that happened at Meta this week is the other thing I want to talk about, which is Mark Zuckerberg 6500 word manifesto about the future of AI. It's called the Future is for Everyone. Have you read this?

[David Pierce]

I have read this.

[Nilay Patel]

I have a few specific things that I want you to react to, but first I just want your overall thoughts on Mark's thoughts on AI.

[David Pierce]

Liz wrote a piece on this. This was really good this week. And they're searching for a headline. And my suggested headline was, mark Zuckerberg should have finished Harvard because if he had just completed the course of his studies in the humanities, he would have maybe realized that he was having like third year soc level thoughts about the world. There's an argument that you gotta write the stuff to be dumb now, right? The kids can't read anymore, so you gotta dumb it way down to be like, votes good, dictator bad. Like, maybe that's. Maybe he wrote it for an audience.

[Nilay Patel]

China, frowny face emoji.

[David Pierce]

I can no longer read. But that's how it comes across. Like, it's a lot of big ideas that basically are like, magic genies will change the structure of the world. What will we do now? Weird. That's weird. Just as a thesis and then what should we do about it? The political philosophy underneath it is freshman year. And I think that's very strange and I think it's symptomatic of the tech industry right now that they have not Done the reading.

[Nilay Patel]

Say more on that. Because this, this is actually the, the big picture thing. I think if you, if you were to boil Zuck's manifesto down to one big idea, it's that he believes that giving everyone access to the best possible AI is a good thing on its face. Right? He talks about checks and balances, he talks about democratization. He has this idea that no one should be in control. And if everyone is in control, it will, it will be better because everyone will check against each other. Everybody gets to personalize things for themselves. And this is like, I also had this moment of like, as science major, you im, you read a bunch of books about how that fails. And we have spent the last 20 years of Facebook watching how that fails. And it just like it was so striking to me that this guy is still so convicted of the idea that if you just give everyone access to everything and to each other, it will, it will inevitably universally be a good thing. And I don't know if that's what you're thinking about. As you say, I wish he'd done the rest of the reading, but that was my reaction to God, I wish he had done the rest of the reading.

[David Pierce]

The reason that we didn't go with Mark Zuckerberg shouldn't have finished Harvard as the headline was furious pushback from our team that it does not track that completing a course of education at Harvard makes you a good person. Those aren't one to one, sure, as we can see by many elites in our society. But I share the frustration. I feel the same frustration that you're describing here, which is the entire history of political philosophy in the west, in the east, like everywhere is, boy, there are these things called collective action problems where if you act in your own interest and I act in my own interest, actually we will lower our collective results. And the collective action problems just exist across society. USPC is a collective action problem, right? It took government regulation to make Apple put USB C on its phone because they could get more individual benefit to Apple by selling lightning connectors to you, the consumer. And actually we had to be like, no, you have to do what everyone else is doing. And that increases our collective benefit. There's like, they're everywhere you look in society, collective action problems. And mostly the past, I don't know, 20 years, particularly on the right, has been an absolute denial that collective action problems. Vaccines are a collective action problem. They only really work if everybody gets them. But I don't. I, I'm crazy and I'm just going to eat Steak and sauerkraut instead. And whatever is going to happen. Is whatever going to happen. This is a description of a political philosophy from Mark Zuckerberg that is in denial of collective action problems that says if everyone is maximally free, then we will all have the best outcomes. We talked about this. There's some parts of this manifesto that he first published in the Wall Street Journal. And his big, you know, his big example that always drives me crazy is, if I have a super intelligent lawyer, I'll win every case. But if we both have super intelligent lawyers, justice will be more efficient. And none of that is true.

[Nilay Patel]

No.

[David Pierce]

Just flatly, that is not how lawyers work. Especially extremely intelligent lawyers actually slow everything down. And Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers do that all the time. And so there's just a part of this where it is ignorant of the entire history of how do you organize and govern a society? Because the main thing you are trying to do when you organize and govern a society is get people to work in their collective interest to solve collective action problems.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And that, I realize, is a tech podcast, and that is deeply in the weeds. That is what all these guys are charging at with AI who should regulate. AI is fundamentally a collective action problem. Right. If we all act in our interest, we will destroy the world. So someone has to make us act in our collective interest. Who will that be? And Mark's answer is, well, it should be someone, but I don't want it to be anyone. And I just. I can't square that at all.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, he's. He's very clear. Like Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic. His name is nowhere in this, but it is everywhere in this.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Because Dario has been out there very loudly saying, essentially, we've got it, we'll take care of it. Don't worry, we can be trusted. No one else can be trusted, including the government. And that has made a lot of people feel a lot of feelings. Mark is very clearly arguing against Daario and that whole theory of the case that the people who make the AI are the ones who should be able to control how it is regulated and used and the guardrails on which we put it. Mark sort of wants government intervention, but. But not too, like, just the right amount. And he wants everybody to just kind of be cool. There's a lot of, like, everybody should just be cool about this, and it'll be fine in this letter. But I just want to. I. I don't want to dwell on this for too long. I actually encourage people to read it, it's, it's relatively readable for all the reasons you said, Nilay.

[David Pierce]

And it's, it's written for sixth graders.

[Nilay Patel]

It's, it's written for sixth graders. And there are chunks of it, I think, to be charitable to Mark Zuckerberg, that it immediately becomes very clear are not his area of expertise, like scientific discovery. No offense to Mark Zuckerberg. He, he, this does not come off like somebody who understands the scientific discovery, but there are things that he is deeply immersed in and I think knows very well. Um, and I just want to read a couple of them to you and, and see how you respond. He writes, your agent will work 247 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more. It will free up time for the things you enjoy and help you accomplish more than you could otherwise. Right next to that. My daughter loves to bake, so my agent plans personalized recipes for us to make together each weekend, orders the ingredients, and then offers suggestions as we're baking. How does this make you feel, Nilay?

[David Pierce]

I have mixed emotions about that one. I, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot of baking that happens in our house. And it's, we. It's not hard. Americans have been baking for years without the assistance of data centers. It's just like, not that hard. The idea that you're baking an infinite series of personalized recipes is interesting on its face. The idea that the ingredients will show up if you're on a busy household, interesting. None of this requires the level of investment. None of this justifies. We're going to build data centers without permission across the country. And that's the disconnect here.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, you're. You're describing software, not the, the future of humanity. I will say I find this much more palatable than the idea that Sam Altman tweeted a while ago about the personalized podcast that'll tell your kid about the day that they're going to have in the car on the way to school, which I find, I mean, truly, like 10 out of 10 dystopian that, like, don't talk to your kid about the day. Have it play their personalized podcast instead.

[David Pierce]

Every parent responded to that with, no, the kid in the backseat of the car who just starts talking to you is actually one of the great joys of parenting.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the whole thing. Yeah, okay. Anyway, next one. We talked about this a little bit already, but here's how he leads into his lawyer example. People in institutions with competing Interests naturally check and balance each other to lead toward positive outcomes. And the best and most realistic path to building a positive AI future is by delivering superintelligence to everyone. Do you buy this theory?

[David Pierce]

This is flatly wrong. And I, I don't mean to say it's flatly wrong that not everyone should have a. A magic genie that can do whatever they want, improve their relationships in some way. You go ahead and, and put your magic robot in everyone's relationship, and let's see what happens. The idea that necessarily giving everyone the same capability will lead to checks and balances is wrong on its face. I know this because Instagram exists and Facebook exists, and everyone has the same broadcast capability to millions upon millions of people on the social platforms that Mark himself runs. And his entire life is a series of moderation controversies, of CSAM scandals, of misinformation scandals. He had to set up a Supreme Court to deal with all the moderation scandals. And he hated it because they keep telling him that everything is more complicated than he wants it to be. And he has essentially sidelined it because he'd rather be the dictator. And that's just that. That's just social media, which is an intractable problem no one can solve. If you give people offensive cyber capabilities and you're like, naturally this will lead to checks and balances, you are completely off your rocker. Some people need more capabilities than others, and some things should be flatly illegal. That's fine. Like, that's. This is what I mean about a sixth grade level. This is sixth grade philosophy. If everybody has a gun, there will be no more gun violence in America.

[Nilay Patel]

I will tell you, I have thought a lot about the idea that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. In the context of the way a lot of people are talking about AI. And it is. I mean, that's Zuckerberg's entire argument. That's not even a disingenuous reading of the argument. That is the argument that if. If you have AI, the only way to defeat you is if I have AI. Like, literally. Okay, I, I'm just. I will. I will use Mark Zuckerberg's words to prove my point. Uh, he says, over time, I expect that widely deployed AI models with strong cybersecurity capabilities will lead to systems that are more secure, not less. This will be definitively true once superintelligence enables most of the world's code to be verifiably secure.

[David Pierce]

Verifiably secure is doing an awful lot

[Nilay Patel]

of work right Now, a lot of work. And also the. The tacit assumption that there will be no more holes for the. We're going to get AI that is so good that it can patch all the holes, but not AI that is good enough to find new ones is just ins.

[David Pierce]

It just.

[Nilay Patel]

That doesn't make any sense.

[David Pierce]

It doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't account for social engineering, which is a actual exploit vector that many AI systems have been able to use, including the ones that have broken out of their sandboxes in various ways in recent weeks, including Meta's own AI, which you can believe whether it did or it didn't, or if Meta just felt left out, you know, like everyone else's AI is breaking out of the sandbox like ours did, too. Yep, there's a little bit of that going on here. But the idea that it's just the code that is the vulnerability and not the systems or structures or human beings around the code that are the vulnerability, it doesn't even factor into the analysis here. And that makes no sense, which is fundamentally no sense.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep, Totally agree. Okay, I'm just. I'm just going to do two more. I have. I have 15 here, but we're just. I'm just going to do two more. This one I just chose for you. Specifically, it says export controls on silicon have been successful for slowing the progress of foreign labs during this critical period. So it is the right strategic move to continue those. Any policy that slows American model releases even by a month could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead. China, bad nilay.

[David Pierce]

It's funny because we're going to get to this later. Our government here in the United States is touting the fact that banning Chinese drones has resulted in a surge of drone manufacturing in the United States. And we will come to the truth of that later in the show in America's favorite podcast, podcast, Export controls have been successful so far, but it's not like China's going to sit there and not invest in chip making and chip design or steal our chip IP or find any number of ways to make their own chips, and so we should continue those. But anything that slows down America creating these new offensive capabilities that might break containment and cause havoc all on their own, well, we can't have that. Because even though we know that China will react to us trying to slow them down, we must proceed like there's just something confused in there, where, again, it's a collective action problem. If what you actually had was cooperation between rivals, to make sure that problem doesn't escalate out of control. You. You might have good outcomes. You might have nuclear non proliferation. A real. There's like. Right. There's like dozens and dozens of years of political and military strategy here to not kill everyone in the world. That is just not even mentioned here. Yep. Okay. There's just a part of this where it's, you know, tech people love first principles, and it's like, great. You did first principles. You know, there's like a hundred years of principles built on top of them. Right. Of how great powers should interact. He should have finished Harvard. That's all I'm saying.

[Nilay Patel]

According to Marc Andreessen, looking backwards is not useful. You should. No introspection. Always look ahead. Okay, here's the last one. And this is the purest Nilai bait in the whole manifesto. He's talking about distillation, which has been very controversial. The idea that you can essentially use a model to train another model. It's. It's how a lot of people think that Chinese models have gotten so good so fast. Very hot topic in this space. Should distillation be legal? Mark Zuckerberg writes, the ability for models to learn from other models is an important principle of how the open source EcoSystem works. All AI models are derived from human knowledge. Some have tried to frame distillation as harmful, but I think it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe. This is how the world works. And the US will not be able to lead if we restrict ourselves on this front. This is Mark Zuckerberg saying, you have to make it legal for us to do everything that we've been doing with AI models.

[David Pierce]

The distillation discourse is very funny to me. It just fills me with a kind of joy. Sure, because everyone is mad about the thing they did. Right. If you're anthropic, you're mad about distillation. Well, you stole all the books in the world. Yeah.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

What?

[David Pierce]

What do you want? Fine. You got nothing to say? The principle that you need to learn from what you can observe is just a bedrock. Applies to humans, computers that retain perfect copies of everything that they've ever ingested. And in many cases with these models can spit out perfect copies of everything they've ever ingested. Totally changes the game in terms of what, who should get compensated for what, and who has permission to ingest what. And Mark doesn't care. Like this computer is the same as me is also a fundamental thought that exists throughout this entire framework.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. And throughout the Entire AI industry. Right. Like the, the, the fundamental goodness of computers and bonkers ness of humans is a real thing that is just burbling.

[David Pierce]

You leave my robot girlfriend alone, said Mark Zuckerberg.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm sure she's very nice. Okay, I, I have a bunch more. He goes on a whole tangent about rsi, which essentially describes AI that can competitive stress injury. Exactly. It's, it's, it's when AI can start to train itself, essentially you set it loose and it is able to train itself on how to get better. There are a lot of things that become possible when that happens. These things can theoretically improve very quickly. That's also how we get to like Terminator stuff. So he goes on this whole long discursion about how we should allot compute to the RSI models so that they can get better, but we have to give humans more compute because that's, it's, it's like all of this is insane. You should just read it just to understand his theory of the world as much as anything, which is that humans are fundamentally all great and if you just shove them all together, everything will be fine. Like meta.

[David Pierce]

I went to a school for nerds. Extreme nerds. The motto, the unofficial motto of the University of Chicago, literally, they make T shirts is where fun goes to die. I loved it there. Could not be happier with my education there. And I, a number of professors had two cliches in all my political science classes. One, where's your evidence? This is what they would just say. You would say some nonsense and they would say, where's your evidence? And then you would have to be a big nerd and you have to, like, produce your books and do it. Mark has no evidence for any of his ideas. The second one, much more actionable. An exercise you can do. If you, like me, are screaming in your car at Mark Zuckerberg. Try to write the law that puts any of this into practice. Write the rule that says we have to somehow slow down China by, by limiting chip exports. But we can't let American models fall behind in any way, shape or form. We have to allow distillation, but we have to protect the value. Everyone should get as much superintelligence as they want to do as much baking as they can. But they also have to use their superintelligence to make sure the bad guy next door is somehow not doing offensive cyber attacks. Just write it down. Just write down your law, pass it. Go to the United States Senate. Get a number of dead people to show up, you know, and be like this is. Here's the rule. I'm giving it to you. Mark Zuckerberg's lobbyists are certainly trying to do that today. He has not shown us what they are proposing in any way, shape or form. He's given us this freshman year nonsense. But write the rules down. Yeah, that's actually my number one response to this was to rewind my brain to when I was in college. And I would have professors say, write the rule that you're describing. Make it work.

[Nilay Patel]

I think this is why everybody is so obsessed with the idea of government review of frontier models, because that is, at least in theory, one thing you can do. And there are so many things in this space that are not actually things you can do. But when does the government review models? How do they review those models? What does that review look like? Who's in charge? That is all actually tractable stuff in a. In a way that is very unusual. And the AI industry stance is, we'll do it voluntarily. Don't worry about it. We're all just going to be cool. Everything's going to be fine. We don't need laws. We will. We will volunteer to do this. And that will be. That will be enough. That will be sufficient. Because I think they're deathly afraid that the minute somebody tries to write a law, it is going to accidentally or intentionally cause them vast quantities of pain that no one even saw coming.

[David Pierce]

This was the Biden administration which said, you're bleeding edge models. You have to tell us what they're capable of. There's some transparency around them. It was not a lot. They all fought against it. So they all went to Trump's inauguration because he took away all the rules. And the Trump administration has quickly realized it's going to impose some of the exact same controls the Biden administration imposed, if not more, in additional controls. And again, the. The. When I say write a law, it's not. Frontier labs should be forbidden from doing offensive cyber attacks. That's not a rule. You can't. You got to write it down. You got to define a frontier lab. You have to define offensive cyber attacks. You have to say what it means to not do them right. That route's very, very challenging. So all these platitudes are great, all these predictions about how it's going to be amazing when there's super intelligence having your relationship for you. Amazing. I couldn't be. I love reading science fiction. Show me the rules, Mark. Because I don't think they exist.

[Nilay Patel]

And I think his argument generally is maybe they shouldn't because we'll just give it to everybody and it'll be fine. Don't even worry about it.

[David Pierce]

And that has never caused any problems,

[Nilay Patel]

ever, including on meta platforms. How could he know? He's never seen this before.

[David Pierce]

I'm having an instagasm. Sorry.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, we should take a break.

[David Pierce]

That was it. It's your last episode before you have a baby. It's my last episode ever.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm having an Instacasm is the title of this episode. It's going to be fantastic. I can't wait. We're going to take a break and we're going to go back. And unfortunately for all of us, we're talking more a I We'll be right back.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

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[David Pierce]

Quick gut check how many of your

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

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[Nilay Patel]

All right, we're back. Nei we have, we have more AI shenanigans to talk about today. The the unfortunate theme of this show is everybody has bad ideas about AI this week, which is fun for me because I get to get all of my feelings out and then go on parental leave. But for you, you get to just stew in everybody's bad ideas about AI. But I want to start with an idea that I have not decided whether it's good or bad yet. And it's Claude's new watermark for AI generated text. The idea here is, is Anthropic is rolling out a new tool by which it will invisibly watermark text created with Claude. I have, I have done more research than was necessary on this and I find it fascinating. We can get into it. The idea is that it will be then detectable by the AI detectors. They're also going to embed information in images. They're trying to be more transparent about what is and is not generated by AI. This seems like a good thing in the way that all of these ideas seem like good ideas. We've also once again, it seems, run into the XKCD comic of there are 14 standards. Let's come up with a new standard problem. There are 15 standards. Is this just, are we just doing this again?

[David Pierce]

The most important thing to know is that all of the labs have realized people don't like AI content. And they especially do not like AI content when they're not told it's AI content and you can see it on your own feeds. Somebody posts something and the immediate response is this is AI and it doesn't matter what that thing is.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And they all knew this was coming. They did essentially nothing about it. And now the backlash is here. Everyone hates them. Right. They're polling worse than ice. No one wants your data centers. You gotta do something. And so we're gonna do lots and lots of watermarking ideas so that you can see the AI content and hopefully you can see that you like some of it. Which is the unremarked flip side of all of these efforts.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, that's interesting. They're like, no, it's AI and it's good.

[David Pierce]

You loved it, didn't you? Mmm, we'll see about that.

[Nilay Patel]

That's really interesting. So you don't think this is sheer sort of corporate responsibility, these companies trying to be good guys? You're like, they want you to be tricked and then have your mind blown by the fact that you've been tricked.

[David Pierce]

It's like a reveal. It's like they pull the cloth off at the end and you're like, it was clawed all along. Some of that is in there, I think. I think there's also just the notion that maybe you'll opt into a feed full of all AI contact, which is a dream they all have wrong.

[Nilay Patel]

Just tell you right now, no.

[David Pierce]

Half of them have tried it and mostly they have failed. But that's the meta structure of this, right?

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

The.

[David Pierce]

The reaction to AI content in almost every case is negative and we need to label it because everyone. There's a disinformation crisis across the world and a misinformation crisis across the world. And so the labels will help us get there. How are we going to do this? And is not a problem that was solved yet. I'm dying to know if Anthropic asked Claude how to watermark Claude's text, because this system seems so complicated to me. Did you get all the way down to red lists and green lists?

[Nilay Patel]

I did, I did.

[David Pierce]

Can you, can you, can you explain this to me? Because I'm not sure I quite understand it.

[Nilay Patel]

I can try. So, first of all, shout out to our commenters who immediately found this, this great video from a couple of years ago that links to a University of Maryland paper from a couple of years ago digging into this idea. So the idea, as I understand it, is watermark is actually sort of the wrong term. Watermark connotes that there is some thing invisibly embedded in the text, like a special character or some kind of underlying metadata that says this is generated with AI. This is not that. To the best of my understanding, what this is is basically, if you think of an AI system as next word prediction, which a lot of people don't like to, but it is fundamentally what's Going on. It looks a bunch of words and says, what's the next one? It is essentially going to up and down rank certain answers to what the next word might be. And the way that they talk about this in this paper is you have a red grit list and a green list. So like Neil, I went to the. There are a bunch of words that could come after that, right? So like store football game. And then there's a bunch that it would never be like, I don't know, Taylor Swift concert. You, you love Taylor Swift.

[David Pierce]

I'm just kidding. That's sad.

[Nilay Patel]

But so the idea is then you, you essentially break these things into all the things that could possibly be and you up rank some and you downrank some in order to create a certain kind of slightly slanted version of the output. So there, there are going to be words that the text doesn't use. It's going to use certain words more often, but it is basically up ranking and downranking certain answers to the question and then it's able to over time. The way they use red and green is like you take all the possible answers, split them into red group and green group and you only use the green group or you mostly use the green group in the actual text that you're predicting. Then if you go back and you say, oh, that's so weird, this is four paragraphs of it, always picked the green one. Suddenly you have an incredibly high likelihood that this thing was generated by AI. And that's essentially the idea is rather than embed some extra character. This is why anthropic is able to say if you copy and paste the text, it will carry with it because it is the text itself, the way that it was predicted and the order in which and the types of words that are actually used are the ones that reveal that it was created by AI. The paper is fascinating. It's, it's deep and weird, but it, it seems to work and it especially works on long text. And, and that's a big deal because one of the things that Claude even will do in this case they say is not do a great job with short text. One of their like cautions is if the text isn't long enough, it may not be reliable. But with like multi paragraph stuff, you're going to get to the point where statistically it is incredibly unlikely that a human would have written this same set of things in exactly the way that we have slightly geared Claude to do.

[David Pierce]

Did you feel the same glimmer of recognition when you read this description that I Did maybe.

[Nilay Patel]

No, tell me.

[David Pierce]

This is how people detect that things are AI. I mean, yeah, why would a lot of M dashes, it's like literally the thing that everyone online is always doing. Like, you know, it's, that's not AI, that's just common sense. Like whatever that thing is that you are always doing with AI content. Now, where you see the fake AI

[Nilay Patel]

influencer on TikTok, here's my honest answer. Colon.

[David Pierce]

They're too shiny. That's clutch. You know, like AI video people. Like AI avatars are, they're too glossy in like a very specific way. It's like, oh, this is the thing that I do. Like, there's something about this that I just find fascinating. It also means it won't work unless the model providers sign onto it. So here's another collective action problem. Claude's list of green words is made by Anthropic. They probably won't release them. Right. This is Anthropic is particularly closed. They're probably not going to tell you what, what words or what tokens Claude has.

[Nilay Patel]

They'll tell like the pangrams of the world. But they, they're maybe they're very unlikely to share it with everyone.

[David Pierce]

That's even that to me feels like a hard baby fair. So only Claude text is detectable and ChatGPT text is not detectable. Now you have an imbalance of power and it is an OpenAI's interest to never, ever use Claude's detection system.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

And if you take text out of Claude and put it into ChatGPT, it immediately breaks the whole thing.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

Like this is, these are not hard systems to get around unless everyone agrees that these are the systems.

[David Pierce]

So, yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I applaud Anthropic for being like forthright. That mountains of text spamming every text box on the Internet is a problem and you should be able to have a detector that can just disregard it, straightforwardly disregard it or say, are you, you're a real person. You've been shoving a lot of AI text into LinkedIn lately. Would you like to pay us some extra money? Because that's gonna happen.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I also wonder, I mean, to your point about the, the already overused words in AI tools, it's going to be very hard for them to do this in a way that is actually imperceptible. And they say that it is imperceptible. The paper it's based on says it is imperceptible, that you can do this with very little extra Compute very little extra time and very little degradation of the output. Everything we see from AI generated text suggests that that is probably not the case, that what this thing is going to do is it's going to develop a new set of ticks that are going to make it even easier for humans to recognize AI written text, that are going to make it weirder and harder for Claude to know what to do with that.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I think walls of AI generated text are so inherently disrespectful that I kind of don't care about this one.

[Nilay Patel]

Fair.

[David Pierce]

Like you can see it. It's not hard to see it. I don't want to read it. No one wants to read it. Fine. Like, hopefully Anthropic is successful with this and, and people learn to not do it because everyone's looking for detectors. It's the multimedia stuff that is way more dangerous, way more widespread in a lot of ways and way more fractured in terms of detecting it, how the watermarks work and in particular how the platforms display that information. So there's code, I think, in the Latest betas of iOS called Apple Reference Image, where if you take a photo with an iPhone, it will mark it as the reference image and say these are the actual pixels, which is already funny because there's so much computational photography going on in an iPhone. And whether or not they're the actual pixels is challenging. Wwc, when Apple started showing off their AI edits, background remover, changing poses, all the stuff you can do, I asked them if they were going to use some of the watermarking standards that we already have, C2PA, synth ID. I think they said they were going to use Synth id, which is Google's, but it sounds like they're, they're going at it the other way. They're also going to mark the real image, which is not an approach many people have taken thus far. But you want that real image to travel around and be marked as real and you want the AI edited image or the AI generated image to also travel around and be marked as AI. Somewhere in there are some real fuzzy lines, right? Yeah. Even the noise reduction on an iPhone now is like an AI powered situation. So these are very fuzzy lines of where the AI takes over and what makes an AI image or not. But everyone is labeling and no one is picking the same labeling standards. And none of the platforms have agreed on how to display the information.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And this, when you say this, is just segments about bad ideas about AI. The reality that people don't like this stuff has just like hit them in the face and they weren't ready, and they did not have a unified plan in any way, shape, or form to handle it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And I think from Apple's perspective, the idea of we're going to mark the real one makes a lot of sense to me, because that, in a certain way, might be the more controllable outcome for Apple. Right. Like, it's actually. It's a bleak state of affairs, but it makes a certain kind of sense if you think we're going to get to the point where you should assume that everything that's not marked real is fake. And if we're in a moment where no one is going to agree on how we mark things fake, it's easier to be the one who says, well, we can be the arbiters of what is real. And that is just a weird societal switch that I feel like we are making. And again, it makes sense for Apple. Apple can actually verify whether this thing was made on an iPhone and is probably vastly easier in many cases than trying to verify whether something was generated with AI. Yeah, weird state of affairs. Like, maybe. Maybe we're not going to have an AI feed. We're going to have a real feed. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is. That's the mental shift we're all having to make and I think are kind of making in real time from all of this is probably real to all of this is probably fake.

[David Pierce]

Oh. I mean, we wrote that story ages ago. Sarah Jong wrote it for us. The headline was, no one's ready for this. We'll link to it in the show notes. And the. The mental shift in society to I'm probably looking at something fake when presented with a photo or a video is totally destabilizing. And it. It already is destabilizing.

[Nilay Patel]

I listen to a fantasy football podcast, Shout out the Ringer Fantasy football Podcast and Last Training Camp. So a thing that happens at the beginning of every NFL season is all the teams go to training camp and you see all the players for the first time in several months. And last year, everybody got fooled by a picture of Debo Samuel. Doesn't matter who Deebo Samuel is, but somebody had edited the photo to make him look really fat, and it became a news story before everybody realized it was fake. This year, everyone assumes every picture of every player is fake. It's just the most fascinating shift that, like, in 12 months, they've gone from instinctively believing the photo they saw on Twitter to assuming it's fake and actually having to go back and Verify before discovering that, oh, no, he's actually fat and out of shape. And this is going to be a big problem for the NFL season. And it's just the speed with which we have all had to make that change just kind of continues to blow my mind.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And this is. I mean, there's market demand for provenance information embedded. It's the time of capture from the sensor. Great. So Apple's going to do it and it's going to go up to private cloud compute and generate an id, and someone is going to have to respect the ID that Apple embeds in the photo and display the information. Do you think that that is X, the Everything app? Right. This is. This is where it falls down.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Jess Weatherbed has written about C2PA, which is the competing standard here, over and over again. C2PA doesn't work very well. It can be defeated pretty easily. And the other problem with it is that no one respects it.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And I don't just mean they don't respect it because it's bad and they look down on it. I mean, no one displays the information. You have to go to another website and, like, paste an image into it and run the detector check. And this is all nonsense. And no one's ever going to do it.

[Nilay Patel]

Completely defeats the whole purpose.

[David Pierce]

The platforms that are doing it are kind of interesting. So Spotify announced it's not going to recommend music from AI Personas this week because they know that their customers do not like it when AI artists show up in their feeds and their recommendations and they want music from other real people.

[Nilay Patel]

This goes back to exactly what you were saying, too, about people not wanting to be tricked. There is, I think a lot of people have had the experience of having AI music appear in their algorithms for one reason or another. Shows up in a playlist, it shows up on your Discover Weekly, whatever. You get 30 seconds into it and then you start to get that kind of tingly feeling that this is AI. Or worse, you like it. And then you discover it was AI. And I have watched a lot of people go through that experience in various ways where, like, oh, this song is a bop. And then you're like, oh, my God, it's AI. And that feels bad on so many levels.

[David Pierce]

I mean, we just had an entire news cycle in the music industry about rubbers.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, yeah.

[David Pierce]

By Phoenix Flexen. He's a real person with. It's obviously an AI track. And first they denied it was AI and then it was obviously AI, and now they've been admitting that more and more of it is they're going to get to the end, which is. Yes, we just opened Suno and told it to make a Smith song.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep. And then.

[David Pierce]

And I pretended to sing a Smith song.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, have you been tracking this d', Addario, the guitar company thing? Can you explain this one to me? I have not followed this one as closely.

[David Pierce]

Dadrio, which is. Excuse me, they make all the guitar strings. If you have ever played the guitar in your life, you ended up with a pack of Dadrio guitar strings. They made an ad and guitar people thought the music in the ad was AI and then their first denial was that it was a real song and they just recreated it with AI which is incredible.

[Nilay Patel]

That doesn't even mean anything.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

And then they just issued a full walk back and apology and said they believe in real music. This is an incredible problem for the company that makes guitar strings. I'm confident they make other things. Someone is going to correct me and be like, they're the biggest manufacturer of violas. I don't know what it is. I played guitar and they're the guitar string company and they should probably lean into being the analog guitar string company and not have AI anywhere in their process. They threw someone on their bus. We didn't want to do this. It just happened that the music was recreated with AI Got it. This is right next to the CEO of Fender describing having bandmates as analog and then having to do a full walk back. You were following him much more closely.

[Nilay Patel]

So, okay, this guy's name is Bud Cole. He's the CEO Offender. Unbelievable name for the CEO Offender to be named Bud Cole. I imagine him sitting on a stage playing blues guitar. He gave an interview, I believe in May to the magazine T3. And he said, among other things, I think AI has existed in music as long as there's been recorded music. Which. What?

[David Pierce]

Sure, Bud.

[Nilay Patel]

And then he says, I actually believe cover music has been sort of analog AI for a long time. I listened to a lot of REM U2, the Smiths and the Cure. And at some point I got sick of just listening to them. I wanted to play it, so I learned to play guitar. To compare that to AI is so fundamentally insane. And this goes. I mean, this goes back to what you were saying about the difference between humans and computers. Right. Like it's. It's one thing to say I listened to a bunch of Smith songs and so I learned how to play a Smith song on the guitar. The idea just. Just at a very simple way. The idea that I play the same notes and am thus playing the same song is bananas. And anyone who has ever heard a song, a song knows that to be true. But then this guy, I think, without meaning to, is basically denigrating every music artist ever in the history of music, which is a wild thing for the Fender CEO to do. But he. He basically is like, we are going to free people up from the nightmare of having to learn other music and play with bandmates and just create whatever they want to.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. This is, by the way, the same thing that the CEO of SUNO has said over and over again.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, but only one of them is trying to sell me guitars like Suno's, at least trying to sell me AI software. Like, I get why they would say that Bud Cole has guitars to sell me.

[David Pierce]

If you listen to a lot of REM, YouTube, the Smiths and the Cure, and you want to play it. Yeah, it is true that it's important to learn to play the guitar. You also definitely need to buy a delay pedal. And so I think that is a probably a better expansion opportunity for Fender. You know, like, here's the Johnny Marr sound from How Soon Is Now. No one has ever been able to figure it out. AI will figure it out for you. That would have almost made sense. This does not.

[Nilay Patel]

No.

[David Pierce]

Suno, by the way, also under fire. And they've unveiled download song caps now because they know that there's mass exports of SUNO music flooding platforms. They're under fire, actually. Ashley Carman, former star Verge reporter Ashley Carman now at Bloomberg, just did an entire profile of suno, including interview with the CEO over at Bloomberg with Lucas Shaw. That piece is great. They know that they're in trouble. Like, they have to meaningfully participate in the music industry in some way. They just signed a deal with bmg. They've got other deals in the works. They're in copyright hell because everyone's suing them. But the music industry secretly loves suno. They're percolating all over the music industry all the time because artists who do know how to play their instruments, who do know stuff, still find it interesting and easy to prompt SUNO to give them a sketch. And then sometimes that sketch just ends up on the tracks. And I think the trick is, when is that deception? When is that garbage? When is that slop? And when is that something meaningfully new and interesting? And I don't know that there's an answer across the board? And all of these companies have just rushed forward to be like, this is the future without accounting at all for are we deceiving people? How will they know? And are they going to hate us for it?

[Nilay Patel]

My most maybe controversial opinion on this front is that I actually think the line is somewhere in the middle. Like, we're going to hear from a lot of people watching and listening to this who are like, the answer is clear. As soon as you use any AI tool, it is tainted and ruined and I'm out. And I respect that opinion. I just don't agree with it. Right. I think to the extent that AI is software, which is a thing that I believe. Can you use software to make music? Sure.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Right. Like, people.

[Nilay Patel]

People freaked out when we started making computer music because you could make a drum kit in GarageBand. Like, I don't think that makes it not music anymore. If you want to disagree with that, that's fine. But I do think that is the interesting conversation in AI to have. And in a funny way, like, you talk a lot on this show about how music always is at the front of every technology question. It is so perfectly suited to have this discussion about. Like, I think. I think most reasonable people will agree that typing a sentence into Suno and generating a song is not an artistic expression. Some people think that it is. Suno CEO certainly thinks that it is. I do not and you will not convince me otherwise. Somewhere in between there and you are not allowed to open your computer is the right answer. And I think it's actually going to be really interesting to watch the music industry from all sides. The creatives, the platforms, like Spotify. On this front you mentioned the Personas thing. They're very clear that this is not about AI generated music. This is about AI Personas, people, artists who are wholly AI creations. In part because Spotify can't figure out how to detect or litigate what makes AI music. Because that would require Spotify to make a decision about when a music becomes a piece of AI generated work. And nobody knows. And we should really figure it out. We should really figure it out. Like as. As people, as societies, as businesses. Like that is the question in front of so many people. And it really does feel like the music industry is just the deepest in it right now, but it's kind of coming for everybody.

[David Pierce]

The music industry is. Is always at the vanguard, like I'm always saying, for a few reasons. One, everyone always listens to songs over and over again. So Hollywood streamers. You might have watched Infinity War 50 times. That is the most anyone has ever watched. Infinity War. Sure. Do you know what I mean? That's the Max, Most people watch that movie once or twice and that's it. And then you watch clips on it bootlegged on TikTok for the rest of your life. But you've consumed that movie once or twice. Your favorite show, even if you're a massive weirdo like David and you're just streaming the office 247 in the background of everything you do all the time, like, you're only watching that. So much music is infinitely consumable. I have probably listened to London Calling by the Clash 10,000 times. High Fidelity is on Netflix, so I keep watching it by accident.

[Nilay Patel]

By accident for sure. That's not like a perfect Nilai movie. Definitely not.

[David Pierce]

You just like watch too. It's in. Takes place in Chicago. I can't get enough of it. Nick Hornby, who wrote High Fidelity in one of his other books, he wrote that he has listened to Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen every day of his life.

[Nilay Patel]

Wow.

[David Pierce]

Infinitely consumable material. Like, there are songs like this for lots of people, right? There's music like this for lots of people. So you have over and over and over again, you have the opportunity to sell the same product over again. It is also mostly a closed ecosystem. There's only a handful of record labels, there's only a handful of distributors, a handful of big agents at this point. There's only one artist in the world, her name is Taylor Swift. And they all are repeat players. So they're all doing deals with each other all the time. And if they overdo it, they won't get a deal the next time. So they're motivated to make long term deals. And then the music industry is so litigious and so protective of its value because of these other two qualities that they sue people if you screw them in a way that Hollywood doesn't. And so you just have this machine that figures out how to make music worth money over and over and over again because the catalogs are worth something. If you buy one of the big catalogs from Neil Young or someone, that's worth a lot of money to you in a way that buying the entire back catalog of Warner Brothers when it eventually crashes into the ocean might not be worth anything to you. And so all of this means that these issues will get figured out in music first in maybe annoying ways, maybe the wrong ways. But there will be some set of answers. And I think one of those answers looks like Suno has to put the labels on it. If Suno generates a song with vocals, the vocals will be tagged as not a real person because People particularly hate that. On and on and on. And Spotify will take pressure from Universal and BMG and whoever else to label the stuff generated by Suno in very specific ways because the human artists won't participate with Spotify. And on and on and on it goes because it's a closed ecosystem that knows how to make money. And then whatever happens there will come to YouTube and Disney plus and TikTok because the model will exist in music. And this is a prediction. I'm not saying this will definitely happen, but there's a reason why everything happens in music.

[Nilay Patel]

First, it's a good theory. Do you remember that phase of music in like the mid aughts when the first 25 seconds of every song was all the producers saying their producer tag, like, and you just get six of them in a row. And it would always end with like DJ Khaled just being like DJ Khaled. Like, that was. It was great.

[David Pierce]

Another one, Another.

[Nilay Patel]

Right, we're gonna get that. But with like AI labels at the beginning, where it's just, at the very beginning of every song, it's just gonna be like Suno. And that's how every song is gonna start.

[David Pierce]

The Suno producer tag is actually great. I'm actually one. I'm shocked there's not a DJ calling himself Suno already.

[Nilay Patel]

True.

[David Pierce]

Just take the credit for it. And the second it was producer tags and for a hot minute, my friend, it was face tattoos. If you recall, the SoundCloud rappers and their face tattoos, just to stand out from the crowd, were a real thing in whatever the AI version of face tattoos. It's coming for us.

[Nilay Patel]

Unfortunately, it might be face tattoos. We should take a break and then get to the lighting round. But I do, I just want to leave us with one more piece of evidence in the. Everybody knows this is a problem. Bit of the story here, which is from Mike Minton, the chief product officer at Twitch. Uh, Twitch just rolled out a new thing where they basically are starting to train Amazon's models from Twitch content. Uh, they made it opt out. Which means that by default everyone on Twitch is being used in this program unless they go to opt out. He was asked, why not make it opt in? What if a very simple thing to do is just let people choose to be part of this or not. And his answer is if it was opt in, nobody would opt in.

[David Pierce]

They know the true nature of all opt in.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I mean, yeah.

[David Pierce]

Will you opt in a targeted advertisement?

[Nilay Patel]

Do you want this bad thing? Yeah, they like, this is my point. They, they, they know, right. Like it is increasingly clear to all of these companies that people do not want this and they are in a position of either having to make hard decisions or run afoul of Wall street and the economy in a very real way. And I like, I don't envy the people in that position frankly, but boy are they just making user hostile decision after user hostile decision.

[David Pierce]

You know, I'm not up on the nature of the relationship between Twitch creators and Twitch the platform. I'm guessing it's as testy as the nature of all platforms and creators. We're going to come to some YouTube changes in the lightning round. If my prediction is that the music industry figures out some labeling and attribution stuff first. My prediction right next to that and is YouTube undergoes some sort of AI training creator crisis first. Right? Because they have basically opted all their creators into trading and they're making it harder to make money and somewhere in there is a very angry swirl.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, every. I mean it is, it is now I think basically beyond doubt that YouTube was a foundational part of the training data for every AI model. Every.

[David Pierce]

Yep.

[Nilay Patel]

And boy have creators not had their full say about that. Well, let's get to some of that stuff. Let's take a break. Then we're gonna come back. We're the lighting around. We'll be right back.

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If there's anything we've heard about this

[David Pierce]

entire summer, no matter where we go

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

or who we talk to, it's about gas prices.

[David Pierce]

I want to show you. Sign. Look at these gas prices. They're ridiculous. I don't drive as much. I think they're just skyrocketing day in, day out.

[Nilay Patel]

Gas prices are up since Donald Trump started his war with Iran.

[David Pierce]

But how much does a little pain

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

at the pump actually affect people's vote?

[David Pierce]

Who is telling the truth and who is going to represent us and do something about it?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

And if gas is still near $4

[David Pierce]

a gallon come November, is it game over for Donald Trump and the Republicans? The most important is you can't deny the reality that Americans feel people see what they're paying. You know, Trump trying to not recognize what people are struggling with and then to ignore the severity of it is just not a winning strategy.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

That's this week on America.

[David Pierce]

Actually, catch us Every Saturday on YouTube

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

or wherever you get your podcast ass.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, we're back. It is time now for the lightning round, beginning with I get to escape this. I just realized I don't have to do this for a while. But you have to every week. And this week, America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Car is a dummy.

[David Pierce]

Brendan Car. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[Nilay Patel]

Brendan Car is a dummy. Brendan.

[David Pierce]

Brendan Car is a dummy. Friend and car is dummy. Friend and car is dummy. Friend and car is dummy. Friend and car is dummy.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, that's from Rich Stroffolino, who sent this in with the caveat that it is, quote, bad in a distinctly human way.

[David Pierce]

It does seem like you drank a lot and opened the soundboard, but in, like a fun synthwave way, you know?

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

David, I got a surprise for you. You know you're having a baby. I hired you a new night nurse. His name's Brendan. He's coming to your house.

[Nilay Patel]

He's just gonna sit with my baby in one arm and on the phone with, like, Comcast in the other from 8pm to 4am he's just gonna look at your shoulder.

[David Pierce]

Like, you can't say that every single day.

[Nilay Patel]

He's gonna yell at the late night TV while he sits there with my baby. That's not funny.

[David Pierce]

I mean, it's pretty good.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm down. I'm ready for this.

[David Pierce]

He's coming to your house.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, God, no. Thank you.

[David Pierce]

What do you do this week, Brendan Carr? This week is, it's a complicated deal. It's not the usual we are banning speech and being a traitor to the First Amendment Brennan Carr segment. So I'm just letting you know there's a switch up. This week the FCC has taken to tweeting proudly about how shotgun banning different things has led to a resurgence of manufacturing in America.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh sure, that's exciting.

[David Pierce]

They tweeted Made in America. Following the FCC's action to ban imports of new models of foreign produced drones. There's been $5 billion in US drone investment, thousands of new American jobs, a new US factory, square footage. Read more. And then actually this is particularly good. They retweeted Rapid Response 47, which is an official White House account that posted a bootleg clip of Fox News visiting a Michigan drone startup called Ag3Labs. Perfect, perfect. Just a little copyright infringement thrown in the mix there. Love it. Can't be happier about it. They also tweeted economic independence under Brendan carr, FCC we have taken action alongside the executive branch to ensure that America is not reliant on hostile foreign nations for drones, routers, advanced robotics or power inverters. They tweeted a link to a study about the manufacturer power inverters in America, which is going to hit some high number. They forgot to note that the research note that they tweeted also pointed out that they would be vastly more expensive than the Chinese power inverters we were on before. This is all very good.

[Nilay Patel]

Fabulous.

[David Pierce]

So this is on its face, great. Right. We've banned Chinese products or Chinese components. That has led to a resurgence in American manufacturing, which is one of the biggest policy goals of this administration. And, and then you scratch at it and you're like, oh, none of this, none of this is actually happening. And it's right there, it's right up there with tariffs. I think this rhymes with we're going to put tariffs on all this stuff and that will move manufacturing back to America, which has basically not happened.

[Nilay Patel]

No, instead it just made everything more expensive.

[David Pierce]

Made everything more expensive and the tariffs got knocked out. So as Sean Hollister on our team has been pointing out over and over again, these bans are first of all fundamentally Ineffective. If you want to buy a DJI drone today, you can. These manufacturers are finding ways to get these products onto shelves. Sean is basically the compliance officer for the United States of America right now. He was finding stuff and sending it to the FCC and saying, isn't this illegal? And the FCC keeps not responding on the record.

[Nilay Patel]

Perfect.

[David Pierce]

And I'm just pointing out that if they had any stones, Brendan, they would respond on the record with a name, spokesperson, per our background policy, instead of just saying some stuff we can't print pointing it out. That is the state of the reporting right now. Sean Alister. Every day is like, I bought another illegal Chinese camera. Do you have anything to say about this?

[Nilay Patel]

Look at all these drones in my house now.

[David Pierce]

And every day the FCC has nothing we can print to say about it.

[Nilay Patel]

Perfect.

[David Pierce]

And then the things vanishly disappear from Amazon shelves. This is a real dynamic that is happening. We're going to report it all out. I'm just putting a little pressure on our nation's government to respond to the record. The other thing is that even these companies that claim to be doing all this investment in manufacturing all these devices in the United States are not actually doing it because what they're really doing is importing components through other channels to get to the United States and doing final assembly here in the United States. I know this because we just had Evan Smith, the CEO of Altana, on decoder. Altana is a startup that does massive supply chain tracking and data. They just make it easier for goods to move around the world. They built huge platforms that everyone uses that can track everything. And I asked him specifically if manufacturing is moving back to the United States. And he specifically responded with respect to drones, here's what Evan Smith said about drone manufacturing in America. The Chinese control roughly 90% of the relevant value chain components for autonomous systems. So even if you have a US startup that's saying, hey, we're making everything here in America, no you're not. You're assembling component parts to make an AIR or land based drone. And you're saying, made in America. Yep. Here's flying. And here's our nation's government being like, look at these cool lies.

[Nilay Patel]

So what we have in America is like we have screwdrivers. Everything else comes from China. Here in America we have the screwdriver.

[Guest or Additional Commentator]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And look, you can say it is our goal to move component manufacturing, component supplies closer to America or in America specifically. There's a lot of that going on. There's a lot of shipping to Mexico or Canada, which have different relationships with China and then shipping to the United States a slightly more finished product and maybe you can get around it. And the Trump administration wants that to talk to you. Like, there's all this stuff happening, right? There's, there are rules and the company's trying to get around the rules. And all this is fine. Like this is the nature of the system. None of this has resulted in true American manufacturing end to end of these products. There's is some investment occurring, but we haven't actually achieved the goal. And we can tout the investment. But the shotgun approach to banning things left and right, the FCC just banned roombas and they didn't actually notice until Sean noticed that the rule is that they banned roombas.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And like this is where we are with Brendan Carr's fcc. We're doing big First Amendment violations with speech. We're issuing laws that make no sense in regards to broadcasters and how much broadcasters can be owned by a single company. We're doing corrupt favors for Trump cronies left and right. And then over here we're issuing blanket bans based on national security that are not achieving their outcomes and then openly lying about the outcomes being achieved. And you don't have to look too far to see if the outcomes are being achieved. You just have to look on Amazon to see if you can buy a DJI Phantom. And the answer is you can. And it boggles the mind that Brendan thinks everyone is as stupid as he is because you can just see that he banned foreign made routers and a bunch of router companies said, whoa, hold on, can we get an exception? And he gave him exceptions. And the mechanism of that, still a little unclear, but based on everything I know about the Trump administration suggests only one of two possibilities. And neither of them are fully above board. No. Anyhow, Brendan, if you can answer how any of this works or how you're going to move component manufacturing back to America, or whether the router ban is effective in the slightest, please join the show. We'd love to have you on. I have a long list of questions for you. At this point, my AI will ask them politely of you.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, he's upstairs. I can just go get him.

[David Pierce]

Watching TV at David's side.

[Nilay Patel]

He's just hanging out.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Also, if you have babysitting availability, I would love. I'll pay you above market rate. Anyhow, Brendan, that's been. Brendan Carr is a dummy. America's favorite podcast winning podcast. Brendon Carr is a dummy. I will say we have the other Brendan Carr's Adami theme song that we love that I've asked that we license and there's a big debate on our team because it's obviously AI made true. You want to have a real emotional breakdown. There's a hot Brandon Cars. A dummy theme song. Yeah, I feel nothing about it. I think we should wait again.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, I have a lightning round item for you, Neal.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

This is a segment that we're going to do one of because I'm, I'm leaving for a while. It's called Numbers or Lies and everyone should stop it. As you may recall, I had a long obsession with my running thesis that everybody's view count is nonsense and that views don't matter and they're all lies and you should never believe them all. Um, I had a similar experience this week with two companies, OpenAI and Google, both declaring that they have reached a billion users. So Sundar Pichai tweeted this week that Google Gemini now has a billion users. Big, huge, incredible number. Uh, last week, OpenAI kind of buried in a blog post that ChatGPT had hit a billion users. But I went found like reported that out, managed to confirm that like, yes, they have in fact hit a billion users. This has started kind of a firestorm all over the Internet because does it, does it make like emotional sense to you that a billion people use Gemini every month? Like, does it, does it feel popular in that sense?

[David Pierce]

It just depends on how us centric your worldview is. Okay, explain cuz Google is just available in many, many, many more countries than ChatGPT.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, I mean, that's definitely true, but I think people's immediate reaction to this, which I think is largely correct and also just really interesting, was there is no way Gemini is as popular as ChatGPT. It's just impossible. Even their numbers are different. Google reported a billion monthly users. ChatGPT apparently hit that number a while ago. They wouldn't tell me more specifically than a while ago. Uh, but they had a million. A billion weekly users a couple of weeks ago in July. So monthly versus weekly is. Is meaningful. But I would say historically speaking, not like orders of magnitude different necessarily. Um, but it just, it feels wrong to people in this space that a billion people use both of these products and so everybody starts essentially accusing Google of cheating. Uh, there's this because like a lot of these people come from one. One way you might use Gemini is by owning an Android phone, right? Like if you have a recent Android phone, you have used Gemini by accident. It just happens. It happens all the time and you count as a user. Gemini is in Chrome constantly asking you to do stuff. There's the Gemini app. So, like, Google has gone way out of its way to say that. No, the. The Gemini that pops up to help you do stuff in Gmail does not count, but an Android phone does. And on the one hand, that's fair enough, right? Like, you're using the assistant as it is intended to be used, but everybody is like, this doesn't count. All of these billion people had to go get ChatGPT and use it on purpose. You're cheating. And like, to me, it's like, well, kind of.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, they certainly didn't have to work as hard. But you're also describing all of Google's strategic advantage in this space all at once.

[David Pierce]

Google's distribution advantage was a huge advantage. Is not cheating.

[Nilay Patel]

Exactly. And yeah, so I. I have just been. I have been so caught up in this that, like, essentially what Google's saying is a lot of people own Android phones, which is true, but it also makes Gemini really popular. Like, it. It. Both of those things are true at the same time. And I think, you know, we talked a lot about Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean and this sort of shakeup in the AI industry. You did a decoder this week. The. The headline was basically like, does Google even want to win an AI?

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

And.

[Nilay Patel]

And this. This feels right next to that to me that it's like, actually Google isn't even playing the same game that OpenAI is playing. And I think it. That drives everybody crazy who, like, really wants to watch the. The model benchmarks compete with each other, and Google's just over here being, like, buddies. We got the third best model and Android and we are going to win.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And we have everyone's training data and we own YouTube.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Bloomberg ran a piece this week that's just like, Google is killing the web. Right. Because there's like, the search traffic has gone down and one. It's nice to be. Right. It's nice to be validated in this way.

[Nilay Patel]

Did they name you specifically?

[David Pierce]

I actually, I didn't read that. I just saw the headline. I was like, well, here we go. Like, at this point, this headline exists every single day.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And it is just abundantly clear to me that Google has moved on from wanting to fight the same fights as everybody else. Right. Like, publishers can be mad at Google all day and all night. They've got YouTube, and eventually YouTube creators will be mad at Google all day and all night. But where are you going to go, which is what they basically said to publishers for 500 years. And ChatGPT can say they have more users. Google's like, we have Android. And this is just how Google works. It's probably the reason Google doesn't always appear to have its foot on the gas. Right. And they don't feel that competitive pressure in the same way. But they've also won.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. They don't have competition in the same way.

[David Pierce]

Like, It's.

[Nilay Patel]

It's not OpenAI. ChatGPT is not competitive with Google in the way that I think OpenAI would like you to think that it is.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean, again, how long ago was it when Satya Nadella said he was going to make Google dance on decoder? No one danced.

[Nilay Patel]

Nope.

[David Pierce]

There was. There was no. I mean, there was some dancing in the sense that, like, all the executives are different, but not in the sense that, like, one point of market share moved.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Pierce]

I'll actually connect this to my lightning round item, which I hinted at earlier. YouTube has made it vastly harder to get into the partner program and make money on YouTube. So we've said this over and over and over again. The vast majority of creators do not make their money from the platforms.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Wait.

[David Pierce]

They make their money from brand deals. The platforms are notorious for not really paying anyone for content. The gold standard of paying creators for content is YouTube and the YouTube Partner Program and the Rev share. And you can have a really big debate about, if YouTube started today, would they have the same payment terms to creators? Because when they started out early, it was a little bit more idealistic of the time. It wasn't clear that everyone would win in the same way or that they'd be so dominant in the same way. And so the partner program has been historically quite generous compared to what TikTok has or what Instagram has, which is nothing.

[Nilay Patel]

I was gonna say not. Not actually generous, but certainly relatively generous.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Against that floor.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Instagram is nothing. There's some amount on TikTok. And then YouTube is like, compared to that, the most generous any platform has ever been.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Until now. Right. Because there's a surge of creators and YouTube is paying out more money from its spot to more creators. And so they've just made it harder to get into the partner program. So you now need at least 1,000 subscribers and 8,000 qualified watch hours over the past year. These are almost impossible numbers for a small creator to hit out the gate.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, 8,000 watch hours is a big. Is a big number.

[David Pierce]

This is. This is a double or this is my favorite one. 20 million shorts views in the last 90 days.

[Nilay Patel]

Good Lord.

[David Pierce]

That is the only way to do that as a new creator is to pump so much garbage into the feedback that you collect as many views as possible.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that's like hundreds of thousands of Shorts views every single day. Always, forever.

[David Pierce]

Just 90 days to get into the program.

[Nilay Patel]

No, but I mean, but then, but then you have to, you have to maintain a super high number like that usually to stay in the program.

[David Pierce]

You have to maintain 10 million shorts views over 90 days to earn money from the shorts creators pool, which is a different pool of money. But if you don't hit that, you don't fall out of the program. Okay, All I'm saying is if you're a new creator, getting into the money now basically requires you to front a bunch of money, right? You have to, you have to make a bunch of videos for extremely free for quite a while to hit any of these numbers. 8,000 watch hours is a, is a lot, right? If you're a new creator, getting to a thousand subscribers is already challenging. 8,000 watch hours is even more challenging. You do the math. Every one of those people has to watch you for eight hours. There's just something here that suggests to me YouTube is not just making it harder to make money with them. They, they're trying to radically shrink the amount of money they actually pay out, even though the amount of content coming out of the platform is going up. And there's a lot of analysis here that says this is because of an influx of AI content. Right. Under the previous requirements, you could probably just flood the platform with a bunch of AI content, hit the previous numbers and go.

[Nilay Patel]

And that has in fact become like a, a noted public strategy of a lot of creators.

[David Pierce]

This is an arbitrage opportunity all day long. And by the way, the number of people automating Instagram in this way is like off the charts. Oh yeah, everywhere, all the time. But Instagram doesn't pay out any money, so Instagram doesn't care. YouTube pays out money, so they have to care. And their response is to make it vastly harder to make money on YouTube. Now, existing creators aren't going to be affected by this. Like I say, every creator gets their wings when they make a video about how mad at YouTube they are. And they all do it. They all turn into beautiful business butterflies when they make the video about how YouTube is a monster that they can't get away from. But something is going to come here. Something is going to happen when a cohort of new creators shows up to make money on YouTube and they discover that it's effectively impossible. And actually what they should do is go get brand deals.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right?

[David Pierce]

Right. The, the pressure to go get brand deals and be a niche creator is going to go up because the actual programmatic money you can get from YouTube is now harder to get.

[Nilay Patel]

Aren't we kind of already there though?

[David Pierce]

Like, that's going to turn YouTube into Instagram in a more meaningful way.

[Nilay Patel]

That's interesting. I guess that's true. And then it becomes, it actually wrests some of the control away from YouTube because a big part of YouTube's appeal for a long time has been it is a place you can actually make money.

[Medical/Pharmaceutical Ad Voice]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

Like we've, we've talked about this many times on the show. A lot of people use a lot of platforms, but they feel like YouTube is their most important one because it is the thing that pays the money. And, and even if it's not all of your money, that thing is still meaningful. And I, I think you're right that even. Because one of the pieces of feedback I've seen to this all week is a bunch of people being like, well, I don't care. I don't make any money from like 10 million shorts views like that and a nickel will buy you a soda. You know what I mean? But I think we're, we're in a position now where, like, it actually, that may be YouTube testing the where you're gonna go theory in a, in a pretty powerful way.

[David Pierce]

Right. And it's, it's right next to. Eventually a bunch of creators are going to find out that Google trained on their content and they're going to be unhappy about it because they will want payment. These platforms just don't pay creators. They don't pay creators enough. And it's turning everything into advertising. And I can rant and rave about that like I usually do, but everyone's heard before. What do you got, David?

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, I have a brief Ramageddon update for you.

[David Pierce]

Oh, nice.

[Nilay Patel]

Things are bad. They prices continue to go up. We talked about the Pixel 11 prices on the live stream on Wednesday. Everybody should watch that. But there was a really interesting bit of data from a research institution called Counterpoint about cheap phones. One of the things we've talked about a bunch on the show is the possibility that the market for inexpensive phones is essentially going to evaporate because you just can't make cheap phones anymore. And what Counterpoint found is that sales of phones under a hundred dollars, which are crucially important to lots of people all around the world, dropped 64% year over year in, in the second quarter of this year. And essentially the. The main thing that happened is everybody but Samsung and Motorola just can't be in the market anymore. So the, the others portion of the. The chart here, it's basically like Samsung, Motorola, everybody else. The everybody else portion of it dropped by about half because there, there are just. Aren't companies that can afford to float these things anymore. If you're Samsung on Motorola, you can shrink your margins, you can make your money somewhere else, you can do things to stay in the cheap phone market. But if you are a manufacturer of cheap phones, who mostly makes cheap phones, there is essentially not a path forward for you at this moment in time. It's just. It's bad on so many levels. But we're at a point now where, like, if you, if you make a phone that costs a hundred dollars, most of that sales price for not. Not just like material price, most of that sales price is going to be eaten up by even the, like, meager amount of RAM in the phone if you can get your hands on it. So, like this, this is an industry and a price tier of gadgets in general. We have wondered if it would survive this. And increasingly the answer just looks like no.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I think it's gone by the end of the year. I think these are gone. Yeah, I think there's probably still some stock on some shelves. But none of these companies are motivated to go figure this out right now.

[Nilay Patel]

No. And it's. And it's even. It's hard to even, like, be mad at them about that. It's just. It's a horrible business idea to go spend $70 on RAM and try to charge $90 for your phone. Don't do that. That's called bad business. But it's bad out there, dude.

[David Pierce]

If anyone wants to report out a story about, like, weed dealers and the crisis and burner phones, just saying, that's pretty good. It's probably something.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

You're a young reporter on the make. Give me a call.

[Nilay Patel]

The thing like at the counter at CVS is now $300.

[David Pierce]

Those, like, blue phones. What are you gonna do when you can't get a burner?

[Nilay Patel]

It's pretty good.

[David Pierce]

There's a lot.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, what's yours?

[David Pierce]

I guarantee you there's a young reporter in New York City who can get that story too.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, absolutely. Go buy every burner in New York City, Neil. I will pay for them personally.

[David Pierce]

I got a good one Lauren Feiner reported this one. This week, she interviewed the CEO of Flock, which makes the license plate cameras.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, everybody's least favorite company on earth right now, I would say.

[David Pierce]

And so Flock has the same problem as the AI companies, the data center companies. They need to. They need to go make everyone love them. Unlike the AI companies, the data center companies, they can't just, like, show up in your local community and be like, we'll buy your electricity for you. Just, like, let us have a data center. But they're not flush with cash the same way. So the CEO of Flock said to Lauren, we thought that there would be some regulation around surveillance that would tell us what to do. And we were wrong about that. So Garrett Langley with.

[Nilay Patel]

By the way, with the. The parenthetical implied there being. So we went and did a bunch of surveillance.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

So we went super hard at surveillance because no one was here to stop us.

[David Pierce]

Garrett Langley to Lauren. He's seen firsthand how slowly the regulatory process can move. It's such an obvious way to curb abuse, he said of the tool that lets agency administrators require case numbers before searching the worldwide surveillance drag that he built. And I said, fine. You know what? I think that's right. We got it wrong. We should make case numbers a requirement. This is. This is. He's going to make people love him this way.

[Nilay Patel]

This is so bonkers, dude. Like, I think the whole Flock thing is. Is absurd. Like, the idea that a company came along that made Ring look sort of benevolent and neighborly is bananas to me. And this is what Flock has done. They're like, look, we have horrible dystopia cameras. This is fine. Right? And everybody's like, no, thank you. This doesn't even, like, tell me when there's a package at my house. It just sucks. And so to come in and be like, oh, we didn't do anything because we were waiting for somebody to tell us to stop, and so we never did. Is so. Like, even. Even his apology is so grossly saying the quiet part loud that it just really bums me out.

[David Pierce]

He's like, american democracy didn't stop us, but you all hate us.

[Nilay Patel]

Right?

[David Pierce]

So we've added some fields to the database.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, you want an argument against capitalism? Like, there's a damn good one. There it is right there.

[David Pierce]

The ACLU released an analysis of the changes, and it says, quote, they appear more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms these products create. Yeah, very good. Langley has been a fighter in the past, but everyone. I mean, he's Called D Flock, a terroristic group.

[Nilay Patel]

Woof.

[David Pierce]

And they just have a database of where flock cameras are. So he's walking back. He's going to be a real cuddlebug now. He got a bunch of things wrong. But I had a friend text me and say you're all about data centers being the thing that realigns left and right in America and brings people together in midterms. Flock cameras and surveillance is the other one. Keep an eye on it. And I think that might be true. There's a political article about it this week and the headline was something like Work boots and Subarus come together in a protest flock. It's a great headline.

[Nilay Patel]

That is good. It has really. Flock, I feel like just in the last couple of weeks has really broken a certain kind of containment and I feel like everyone is aware of what it is doing now in a way that I think, I think your friend might be right.

[David Pierce]

Letting the government track your movements without permission is just what are you doing? That doesn't seem right in any way, shape or form.

[Nilay Patel]

Well said. All right, on that note, I got a baby to have. We need to get out of here. Neil, who's on decoder next week.

[David Pierce]

Decoder next week is Ben Smith, the editor in chief of Semaphore. They're launching a big new thing called Silicon Valley in the world. He keeps describing their event series as Davos with follow up questions, which is very good. It's very good. We talked about publishing. We talked about the army of teenagers working for free on platforms. Semaphore uniquely big website, spends a lot of money. One of the few without a paywall. So we just talked about the. I've had a lot of media people on Dakota recently.

[Nilay Patel]

Ben also not short of opinions about the future of DNA.

[David Pierce]

Ben is absolutely not short of opinions. That was a really fun conversation.

[Nilay Patel]

He's a good hang. Looking forward to that one. Also go listen to the decoder from this Thursday with Hayden about the Google stuff and AI. Hayden's done a lot of really good reporting on what's going on with Google's AI teams. She has really good perspective. That's a good episode. All right, we need to get out of here. Ne. You're, you're, you're alone for six weeks. Are you this. Are you going to. Are you going to be okay? Jake's going to be doing a lot of stuff. We have a really fun run of guest hosts.

[David Pierce]

Don't worry, it won't just be me answered that question. He's like, Jake will fix it. Jake.

[Nilay Patel]

Jake will be here to keep Nilay company.

[David Pierce]

That'll be great.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm gonna. Yeah, it was super fun last summer. It's insane that it was last summer that I did this already.

[David Pierce]

I was also gone last summer.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, you were also gone last summer. We had Hot Girl Vergecast summer. It went fabulously. And now we're gonna have. I don't know what this one's gonna be called.

[David Pierce]

I'm just gonna crash out with other people who are like, what are you doing? People listen to this show.

[Nilay Patel]

I will tell you, if they launch a foldable iPhone, there is a 100% chance I am going to bully my way onto that live stream with a baby. It's going to be rad. I'm excited about it. Until then, a reminder, as always, the best way to get in touch with us about all of this and everything. If you have knocked down a Flock camera recently and you want to tell us about it, email us verscastheburge.com, call the hotline 866 verge11 and the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to The Verge. The Verge.com subscribe subscribe. It gets you all of our newsletters, all of our coverage of Google and Flock and insane things that Mark Zuckerberg says and everything else the verge.com subscribe thank you in advance. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. I'm gonna be gone, but we've recorded a bunch of stuff so things that we have made already are going to keep appearing. We actually have a couple of really fun episodes coming up at the beginning of next week that I think folks are really going to like. I am just going to sit and listen to them loudly in my living room and I'm very excited about it.

[David Pierce]

We're going to miss you, buddy.

[Nilay Patel]

I know. I'll miss you too. Give me. Give me a good one so I can leave.

[David Pierce]

Rock and roll. Hey guys.

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