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- [00:01]
Podcast Host (Ad Read)
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- [00:34]
Robert Arzon
Burn your five pound weights. I'm Robert Arzon. I'm an athlete and fitness instructor. And I am telling you, unless you have been limited to lighter weights by a medical professional, they're honestly inexcusable. You need to be lifting heavy. And I'm talking especially to the women out there. Toned arms. What can your body do this week on Project Swagger. What heavy means and rules to bring into your routine? Listen, now,
- [01:04]
Ashley Esqueta
More and more Americans are finding themselves taking care of their kids and their parents at the same time. Well, you know, I joke that there's
- [01:13]
Robert Arzon
a dark game which I was playing.
- [01:15]
Ashley Esqueta
Which family member will I disappoint today? How to care for others without burning out in the process. That's this week on Explain it to me. Find new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:34]
Nilay Patel
Welcome to the first cast, the flagship podcast of the Long Blockchain Corporation, which until this week was the silliest thing a company has done in recent memory to capitalize on wild technology trends. This, you will remember, is when Long Island Iced Tea rebranded as the Long Blockchain Corporation in order to make a bunch of money. And it worked. This is what we do now. I'm your friend, David Pearson. Neil Aptel is here. Hey, buddy.
- [01:59]
Neal Agarwal
Hello.
- [01:59]
Nilay Patel
So the news on this one. Let's just get right into this one. This is, I think, the silliest thing that has happened in the tech industry in a minute, and I'm very excited about it, was that Allbirds, which most people would know as a shoe company, which also kind of came up at a really interesting time in the tech industry when all you had to do was convince a bunch of people that you were a tech company.
- [02:18]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah.
- [02:19]
Nilay Patel
And they would just give you lots of money. So Allbirds, a shoe company, got like a tech company valuation. It was one point valued at $4 billion. They had a huge office in San Francisco. They were going to reshape footwear. I don't know, they were gonna do something. And then everybody realized they were a shoe company. And it all kind of fell apart. And then this week decided that no, they are not a shoe company. They are an AI company. And guess what, Nilay, it worked. Their stock briefly went up. I think it was over 700% at one point. It has settled back down a bit, but it's still way up, even over where it was a few days ago. But because their, their big plan, as I understand it, is to get GPUs and rent them for you. They're just going to go get some compute and rent it to other people. Which I would point out is everyone's idea for the future of technology right now.
- [03:13]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah.
- [03:14]
Nilay Patel
It's also still a shoe company. It's all. It's even. It's not even a shoe company.
- [03:17]
Neal Agarwal
No, they're selling the shoe company.
- [03:19]
Nilay Patel
It's like the shell of a shoe company.
- [03:20]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah, they're selling off the name Allbirds and their assets, which is, are the shoes and the ability to make shoes for $39 million to a company called
- [03:30]
Nilay Patel
American Exchange after they once worth 4 billion.
- [03:33]
Neal Agarwal
Just, just closing all their stores. And then the shell, the public shell company that was Allbirds is being renamed to New Bird AI.
- [03:44]
Nilay Patel
It's fantastic.
- [03:45]
Neal Agarwal
Which will be, quote, a fully integrated GPU as a service, an AI native cloud solutions provider. And I just want to point out this is real. They are initializing GPU as a service as gpus.
- [04:01]
Nilay Patel
Why don't. I don't like that. So gpuaas.
- [04:06]
Neal Agarwal
Gpus, baby.
- [04:08]
Nilay Patel
Ugh. The capitalization alone in the acronym hottest category on Tinder. You're not wrong. You go to Palo Alto, that's going to get you some swipes.
- [04:20]
Neal Agarwal
Newbird AI expects to use the initial capital from this sale to acquire Hyper Performance GPS assets, or GPU ass, if you will, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity. This is so dumb.
- [04:35]
Nilay Patel
It is. Well, it's not even. It's not even dumb. It's worse than dumb. It's nothing. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is. This is the most nonsensical sort of buzzword capitalization we've seen in a while. And you and I were not around in covering this stuff in the early dot com days, but a few people have compared this to that when like in the mid-90s, if you just did anything but you put dot com at the end of your company, it signaled to a bunch of investors on Wall street that, oh, they know the Internet and they just like want to be next to that thing so they will pour money into your business. This sounds stupid and it sounds like anyone Paying attention would not possibly fall for this over and over again. And yet, historically speaking, everyone has fallen for this over and over again. Everybody piled into mobile. When mobile was becoming a thing, it was a joke on the show Silicon Valley, the Molo, so the mobile, local, social and solo mo. And then we did it all again with Crypto, and we did it all again with Web3. And now we are doing it maybe at the biggest scale ever with AI. If you just say you're AI.
- [05:37]
Neal Agarwal
I mean, actually, the funniest thing about this is that their scale is so small as to be useless. They're selling the company, the actual shoe company, for $39 million, and they're going to raise $50 million from an unnamed investor. If you would wish to name yourself investor, please call us and let us know who you are. And I will tell you that you are blowing $50 million to your face. So they're going to have a total of $89 million to compete with Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure and Nvidia's weird circular finance Neo clouds. What are you doing? Like, Sam Altman is like, here's what I need all of the money in the world to build Stargate. And they're like, we have $89 million worth of GPUs, which at today's prices is six GPUs.
- [06:25]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, this is I. None of it makes any sense, but it sex tupled the stock price. Job done. Like, if you ever want an indication that all of this is just nonsense to juice money out of dumb investors, here it is. I present to you, new birds AI as a serious.
- [06:49]
Neal Agarwal
Richard Lawler, who wrote this story, has a line in here. We asked Wharton professor Gad Allen about the news and he said calling this a pivot gives all birds too much credit. By the way, this thing you're pointing out about being confused about what were tech companies sort of in the explosion of tech companies when the Verge started, quite frankly, this is WeWork. Like, WeWork ran around calling itself a tech company and everyone woke up one day and was like, so you own a bunch of real estate. Where's the tech company part? And they had to talk about, like, elevating the world's consciousness with co working or whatever was in the rest one that collapsed. It was Blue Bottle Coffee, if you'll remember that. It is Warby Parker. The thing that makes a tech company a tech company is either you are Apple or Google and you're able to extract monopoly rents on your platform, which is very lucrative. And I highly recommend it Very few people have managed to pull this off. Or you have zero marginal cost for the next thing that you make because you're a software company and you can just distribute Infinity software to people for $0. And shoes are neither of those things. They sure aren't. And when you try to make things that aren't tech company things and the tech company things, you end up with subscription offerings that drive people bananas. Like, absolutely bananas full of rage. And your companies fail and this happens over. You end up drming the coffee machines. You know what I mean? Like, that's where you get to. And you just see, like, you can't make everything software. I keep going on and on that software brain. And this is just. They tried to make shoes into software and they now they're new bird AI.
- [08:24]
Nilay Patel
Yep. It's sure. So the. The reason we have a lot of news to get to, by the way, there's actually a lot going on. This is kind of a lightning roundy episode because there's no sort of big giant new thing that happened, but there's a lot to talk about.
- [08:37]
Neal Agarwal
Everything's crazy. The Vergecast.
- [08:39]
Nilay Patel
Everything's crazy. Don't be afraid. Welcome to the Vergecast. I think there's some broader AI thing happening right now, and I just want to kind of talk through it. And I think Allbirds is a useful place to start because it is such a silly version of, I think the way in which all of this is getting away from everybody, that there is a sense of like, oh, I have to be in AI because it is. It is the thing. And nobody knows what that thing is. Nobody knows whether a shoe company can be the thing. But it's like the FOMO in a certain way is now so intense that all you have to do is stand on a street corner and say AI, and people will buy your stock. But I think the other thing that has been happening this week is on a very different note is, is this stuff with Sam Altman. And there have been these repeated attacks on Sam Altman's house and. And against him and these threats against him. And there's just. We've talked a lot about the vibe difference in AI, right? And the way that companies talk about what they're building versus the way that the users perceive it versus the way that sort of the world is receiving all of this from these companies and from this industry and in a bunch of different directions. It feels like all of this is coming to a head right at the same time. And there's some interesting data out this week to support that theory that we should talk about. But I don't know. You're sort of in the wind in this industry in a lot of the same ways that I am. Are you. Are you feeling this right now as much as I am?
- [10:09]
Neal Agarwal
I am. And I think we've been talking about it on this show for a while, on the verge for a while. It does feel like it has come to some kind of head this week, specifically because the. The person who threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house had said, quote, we should be Luigi ing some tech CEOs. And I want to talk about that and what that means. And that's a lot to unpack there. I do think it is important to say, and I said this clearly on Decoder this week, too, that violence is unacceptable. Political violence is unacceptable. You can be as mad at Sam Altman as you want. It's unacceptable to wish violence upon him or his family. At the same time, I also think it is unacceptable how helpless people feel. And I think the people in power ought to take a real hard look at that, because those ideas are all connected. These outbursts are coming from a feeling, a place of helplessness. And I think that's as unacceptable as the violence itself. So just to say it, I hope that's clear. We're going to talk about it. But I just don't want anyone to ever think that we're condoning violence in that way. I think the Verge is an anti war, anti violence publication. We've been that way for a long time. We're going to stay that way. Saying we should be Luigi ing some tech CEOs and then attacking Sam Altman. It is very bad for the tech industry to find its leaders occupying the same moral space as healthcare CEOs. Yep. Like, on whatever scale of cool CEOs there are, which maybe is all in the gutter, like, maybe there's no more scale of cool CEOs. The reaction that the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare got was shocking to a lot of people. And then we saw it in our audience. We saw it in the wider culture. There are a lot of people like, yeah, that's it.
- [11:56]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
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Neal Agarwal
Right. Like, these people are all monsters. They've all profited from our pain. Fine. And we have sent Miya Sato to cover the Luigi Nanjiani trial. And you see that dynamic playing out. That is not where tech CEOs have been historically.
- [12:12]
Nilay Patel
No. Like, not even very long ago, it was the opposite.
- [12:16]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah. And the idea that they had something to say that was interesting about remaking the world or innovation or design. We have Long had tech CEOs on our website. We have had conferences within the code conference used to exist. A decoder exists. And the tenor of how people reacted in particular to technology CEOs used to be one of excitement because they liked the idea that people were building things. And now it is the same in some cases as healthcare CEOs. It is one of being exploited and taken advantage of and being made to feel helpless. And I could connect that to AI. I think we will. I think there's a lot of data connecting that directly to AI. But I also think it's, you know, it's the way that all of them insist that everyone is stupid except for them.
- [13:06]
Nilay Patel
Right.
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Neal Agarwal
And that they should be in charge of the world in very specific ways. And I, man, that just seems like a miss to me. You know, it seems like telling everyone that you are smarter than them and you should. They should be deferential to you because you know how to do everything in one tweet. That's rough. And then we all use the products. I think the thing that these companies all fail to understand is that the truth outs because people use the products and they have real experiences with these products. And you cannot hide from bad products.
- [13:38]
Nilay Patel
Yep. I mean, and I think it's hard for me to figure out how much of this is specifically an AI thing because the other sort of running theme under a lot of this is this incredible ongoing recognition of what social media in particular is doing to us and the algorithmic timelines and the ways in which people are starting to feel like they're being used by products and not the other way around that I think. I don't. I suspect it'll be really obvious in 10 years what it was that did this. But it's not obvious to me right now. But it feels like at some point in the last 18 months, the sense of this is mostly a good experience on the Internet has turned for most people. And, and I, I don't think it's everybody. I don't even know if it's like the, the sort of prevailing thought is the same for, for individual people about how they feel about individual labs. But the percentage of conversations that I have with people at, in all walks of my life where they are fundamentally about. I don't like my experience with technology and the Internet and devices and social media. And there is this sense that all of these things are being forced upon me rather than look at this cool thing that is available to me for free. And all I have to do is look at some ads that has completely shifted. And, and I think a lot of the reasons frankly are the same. Right. There's, there's also like big capitalism things going on and people are mad at the government for a lot of really good reasons. Like it's very hard to put all of this stuff together. But AI is just the frothiest possible version of this thing. And it's also the one that these people are trying the hardest to make feel the biggest. Right. Like nobody is out there being like, TikTok is going to become so powerful that everyone will stay at home, watch it all day and we'll need universal basic income. But that is like precisely what Sam Altman has been saying about AI for years.
- [15:32]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah.
- [15:33]
Nilay Patel
And, and so it's just like it, that's such an obvious like tip of the spear of what I think is probably a bundle of feelings about a bundle of things. But it is, it is just too easy to sort of stick it all into AI.
- [15:47]
Neal Agarwal
You know, I think you can say that people's negative emotions on social media have come to one kind of head. Right. There's literally trials these companies are losing where they're being held liable for negligently making teenagers feel bad and do harm to themselves. That's a lot we, you know, and there's a lot of ways to feel about that. But I, I would offer you that on balance, social media has made a lot of people feel empowered.
- [16:13]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
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Neal Agarwal
Right. You're, you're connected to whatever's happening in your community, good or bad. You're connected to what's happening in your local school district, good or bad. You can tell what my experiences with social media are like.
- [16:23]
Nilay Patel
But you can also like find a big audience of people for the things
- [16:26]
Neal Agarwal
that you can find a big audience. You can, you can wish to be a YouTuber and start being a YouTuber tomorrow.
- [16:31]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [16:31]
Neal Agarwal
We know lots of people who feel this way. You can, you can build careers that were not possible because there's at least one class of gatekeepers that were removed. I think that is cool. Like I, there's a lot of trade offs in there and everyone knows how I feel about social media and the creator economy and all that stuff. But like the idea that somewhere in there is empowerment is really important, like tremendously important. I have something to say and I'm going to open TikTok and this app and capcut and the video editing features of TikTok are going to help me say it and then maybe I'll pull the slot machine and maybe 10 million people will see what I have to say. There's something there that even if you think there's a lot of negative to come from social media, that one piece makes a lot of people feel empowered. My favorite is the pressure washing businesses where you're like, I've got nothing but a pressure washer and a dream. I'm going to advertise my pressure washing business by just making ASMR videos of pressure washing. And now I have customers. Yep. Something in there is empowering.
- [17:39]
Nilay Patel
And then you get the people who get so successful that they do the pressure washing for free for the content.
- [17:44]
Neal Agarwal
Yep.
- [17:44]
Nilay Patel
There's a whole fascinating. Yeah, there's that.
- [17:46]
Neal Agarwal
There's a whole group of people that, that run around their communities just mowing unkempt lawns for the content. And I'm like, this is great. Like something in there is good.
- [17:55]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [17:56]
Neal Agarwal
And I think that's like worth protecting. Even as you try to make the parts that are bad go away or minimize those or whatever you do. I think people's reaction to AI is not to feel empowered, it is to feel like something will be taken away from them. And we have the data here. We have study after study. There's one from Gallup that was just the New York Times. There's a new big study from Stanford that we should talk about. There's the Quinn Impact study. There's an NBC News poll. There's a lot of this now that in particular kind of shows that the more young people use AI, the angrier and more upset and more anxious they become. And if you're this industry, you have to look at that and say, oh, we have a huge problem on our hands. This is why people are putting us in the same moral category as healthcare CEOs. We are running around saying we're going to take everyone's job and we need to rethink the social contract. And I need every electron that has ever been produced in the history of the world to fund my data centers. And you can't buy one stick of ram. And also we're going to take your jobs away. Oh, but by the way, you should love us. Like, I don't think you get to do all of that.
- [19:02]
Nilay Patel
No. And, and not only that, there is also this ongoing fear mongering of if you don't get on board and start using these tools, you'll just be left behind. So I think like one of the things that comes up in, in the, the poll, you're Talking about that, the New York Times wrote a really great story about Gen Z's AI use. And they all have this feeling of like, well, I don't want, want to use it because I think it's making me stupid and I don't want it to replace me. And by the way, the idea of extended AI use leading to cognitive decline is seeping into public consciousness in a very real way. Like that is starting to be accepted as truth in a way that I think is really fascinating. But at the same time, these people are like, I'm also being told by my professors and the world that if I don't get on board, if I'm not the AI person, I'm never going to get a job at my company. So there's this sense of AI is going to replace me, but without AI, I don't have a chance anyway that like, how would you not feel helpless? Like you're, you're truly sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't. And that just feels bad.
- [20:09]
Neal Agarwal
I mean, I'm just going to read you the stats. 22% of Gen Z feels excitement about AI. That's a decline from last year. Only 18% feel hopefulness, which is also a decline from last year. 31% of Gen Z, according to this Gallup poll, feels anger. 42% feel anxiety. Those numbers are miserable. They're also not a secret. The industry knows this. The tech executives I talk to all know this. Policymakers I talk to all know this.
- [20:39]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [20:40]
Neal Agarwal
And I, you know, I think like allbirds being like, it's a pivot to AI. We're call, like, we're calling it on shoes to rent 25 GPUs to whoever will take them. Like there's just like a amount of fraudulence in the economy that you can see that that's an obvious scam. And yet it's working.
- [20:58]
Nilay Patel
Right?
- [20:59]
Neal Agarwal
And I think the value people perceive from the actual tools is mixed. Like the polling is showing you it's mixed. Yeah.
- [21:06]
Nilay Patel
There's a great stat from this Stanford study that just said this is basically on particularly pertaining to how people do their jobs. It says 73% of experts expect a positive impact compared to just 23% of the public. 73% of AI experts think AI is going to fundamentally be good for your job. 23% of the public like that. That is as big a disconnect in perception as you're going to find on almost anything almost anywhere. You and I have talked a lot about this in the past and I think a theory we both share is like, most people just have experience with these products that suggest they're not that good. Does that account for a 50 point gap to you?
- [21:51]
Neal Agarwal
I think Americans don't like being told what to do. Do you know what I mean? Would say more like 73% of us AI experts say that technology's impact on jobs are positive. Who are us AI experts? It's a bunch of consultants that Deloitte like, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's people who walk into your company and say, we can automate this and you better use it is what you're describing. And this is the future and we can see how much money we'll get in billing your company because we're going to convince your boss that the data isn't ready for AI.
- [22:24]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [22:24]
Neal Agarwal
And so you'd better make some cuts so we can do some data migration to make the data ready for AI. Get by the way, I'm saying this because I get this pitch in my inbox every single day how to get your data ready. Like when you run a business podcast, you get a lot of bad consulting pitches. I get a lot of bad consulting pitches.
- [22:40]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Mine are all people just being like, put all your data in markdown files so that your agents can navigate it.
- [22:46]
Neal Agarwal
I mean, there's just something there that's like, isn't the point of AI that you can just read all the databases without help? But all these people are being told what to do. Yeah, they're being told that this thing will fix problems or revolutionize the economy or provide universal baseline income. And then in their lives, I suspect most of them are experiencing free ChatGPT at home and copilot at work. And these products are just not very good. I don't think anybody's out there trying to defend the quality or performance of free ChatGPT, that is the majority of users. I don't think anyone's out there really trying to defend the quality of Google's AI overviews. They're just not very good, you know, and that's what people are experiencing. People open their social media feeds, which again, I think used to provide a sense of empowerment, and they are confronted with AI slop. Right. They're confronted with this output, with this like never ending series of scams. No one knows if you can trust a picture anymore because the industry just failed to accomplish any kind of metadata labeling. And like, why would you feel good about this? Every other big technology trend has been bottoms up. It's been led by people who are like this is exciting as opposed to being top down in this way. And then the characters pushing the top down change by and large are not cuddlebugs. They're not making the case. They're saying this is happening and if it doesn't happen we'll lose to China. And also we've taken over the government and gotten rid of everyone's healthcare and, and you're all stupid except for me. And like what are you doing? Like how do you expect to fix that? You can't fix it by buying TBPN for $200 million and saying they're going to handle your marketing. You have to fix it by you know like winning people over. And that's why I think you, when you propose that we do this segment you're like should we just call the top of AI? Like I don't know, like business wise if this is the top. But I do know that public perception wise, something is over for the tech industry.
- [24:45]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And it increasingly to me seems like that divide is not fixable and it's possible that I'm wrong and it's possible there will be some version of these products that is so mainstream good and useful that it'll work. But I increasingly don't see it. I mean you look at all of these trends, right? There's been all this stuff this week with uh, Anthropic basically neutering Claude in order to make it work better with the amount of compute that it has. And these companies are desperately trying to figure out how to make any money at all or at least lose less money before they go public. So the, the products in a lot of ways are actively getting more expensive and worse simultaneously like they're, they're sort of in shidifying in real time. As these companies have to figure out how to make some money, they're also getting more and more aggressive about like trying to take your whole life inside of them. OpenAI is just nakedly calling it a super app and they're like we want you to live our entire, your entire life inside of Chat GPT. There is just all of the business incentives that these companies have are actually against make the best product. Right. And it's like that's, that is not how you win the hearts and minds of people that you have to win. And I think that the only thing I can surmise, and I think this has been true for a while and continues to be true, is that the people who are truly AI pilled are still so AI pilled that they earnestly believe the line. It's happening whether you like it or not. And the only responsible thing to do is get on board. I think a lot of, like, a lot of people would. Would look you in the eye with all of your best intentions in mind and say that to you. And I think those people are wrong. And, And I, I think, I think that is about to be pulled, like, further and further apart all the time. And this is the thing that has happened for me this week is I've just gone from, like, I. I don't. I don't know how you come back from somebody saying we need to be luigiing the tech CEOs and getting like, pretty broad support from a lot of corners of the Internet. Yeah, like, that's. That's a line that is very hard to uncross.
- [26:49]
Neal Agarwal
The moment for me that I like really had to sit and think about was how hard we had to moderate our comments on the stories about the attacks on Sam Alden. And I, you know, I. We have a. I love our audience. We have a good audience. Usually our audience is pretty anti violence. Usually our audience is pretty anti war. This. We. We were like, oh, we gotta do it. We're gonna. We're. This is not the publication we wanna run. This is not the audience we wanna have. This is not the image we wanna promote. And like, when it's the tech audience turning on you in this way, something bad's happening. And you know, you see these guys, you see Mark Andreessen is blaming the media. Marc Andreessen famously is out there on podcasts saying, you should have no introspection whatsoever. Right.
- [27:34]
Nilay Patel
Because our ancestors didn't, which is just a lie.
- [27:37]
Neal Agarwal
They're not motivated to think about this very hard. Yeah, like, literally he's saying, I refuse to think about the consequences of my actions or have any interiority whatsoever. That is not the right approach for somebody with money and power. Right. If you're going to take over the world, I think people would like to think that their leaders are thoughtful. Historically, that usually works better than I am the Mad King. And I have no introspection, even as everyone hates me. And the only thing I can say is, the media is lying to you about everything and we need to control the message. It's not going to work. How many times on the show do we talk about Brandon Carr? And he's like railing about how he will censor every local news station in the world. We're gonna talk about it again this week. Cause he's doing it again and I'M pointing out the people are on social media talking to themselves. They are not under your thrall in this way. And you can see that they've lost it and they've decided that everyone listens to the media and it's like, nope, they're listening to you and they are making up their minds. They're listening to you and they're using your products and they are making up their minds. Casey Newton had a good piece in Platform last week. Kyle Chaika had a good piece in the New Yorker this week. Just pointing out that Sam Altman calling for an end to the overheated rhetoric is true. Yes. We should drop the overheated rhetoric. Also, that means Sam should stop saying that he's going to take everyone's job away.
- [29:06]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [29:07]
Neal Agarwal
Like it came from one side of the equation, not the whole thing. I don't know, man. I agree. I don't know if it's the top economically. I think there's a lot more money to be made and boy, are these folks good at making money. But I think I keep coming back to this. I'm going to get in trouble for it. Again, the products are speaking loudly and if you don't show people why they should love the thing you're making such that they demand the change themselves, they're gonna fight you.
- [29:35]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [29:35]
Neal Agarwal
And if you make them feel helpless, which I think a lot of people feel helpless right now, bad things are gonna happen. Yeah.
- [29:41]
Nilay Patel
All right. Well, we, we should, we should switch gears in this. But I, I just wanna offer you one more example before we take a break, which is Reese Witherspoon, our girl. Reese, who I would say among celebrities in the world is about as like, universally liked as, as anybody. She's Reese Witherspoon. Like, if you, if you hate Reese Witherspoon, don't me about it. You know what I mean? So Reese goes on threads, I, I think on Wednesday of this week, and posts this video of her in her kitchen making a smoothie. It's very like, influencery. And she says, I've decided it's time the AI revolution has begun and I need to learn as much as I possibly can about AI and share it all with you. Basically says women don't want to be left behind. So do you want to learn with me and the comments, I would say about a hundred to one amount to. Oh, girl, no, don't. Don't do this. Roxane Gay replies. Oh, Rhys, absolutely not. Is this sponsored content? Because it feels very scripted. I want to know less About AI but thanks. Oh, Rhys, did the body snatchers get you? This is like. Like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these. And this is about as, like, earnest, let's embrace AI Thing as you're going to find from anybody. And just reflexively, the o. Overwhelming response is like, this is so bad. You can't possibly be serious. What. What is happening here?
- [31:00]
Neal Agarwal
Like, it's the same as crypto. That. What you're describing is when people are like, I'm. I'm Tom Brady, and I'm here to sell you Solana. Or like, whatever he was selling, whatever SBF's coin was.
- [31:10]
Nilay Patel
But I think with crypto, at least. At least there was. If. If you dug a little, you could sort of understand that they were just getting paid for it. Right? Like, yes, they didn't disclose that they were getting paid for it. And, yes, that became a whole thing and whatever, but I don't think most people really believed that Tom Brady, like, loved crypto and thought it was an important backbone to the Internet. AI Is like, we're going to change your way of life. And Reese Witherspoon is like, let's talk about it. And everybody's like, let's not. Reese. I don't. Let's. Let's go back to the book club. Not about AI Yeah.
- [31:44]
Neal Agarwal
It's also just like, you know, I vibe coded some nonsense this week. I know you did, too. I know you're talking to people about what they're making. Like, it's the best part about AI Is how small it is actually. Right. Like, if you're a regular person, like, the best thing that can happen with AI is, like, you can make something for yourself that maybe you weren't able to make before. And that is. I keep coming back to this. That's empowering. And, like, boy, have we gotten far away from that. Like, most people cannot. They're not going to pay however much in tokens to have that experience. And I think everyone's just missing it. Like, how do you get people to feel great about it? You empower them. You don't put Reese Witherspoon on threads being like, let's do some prompts together. Like, no, absolutely not.
- [32:31]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Reese Witherspoon's Prompt Club is not an idea whose time has come. All right, we should take a break. Then we're gonna come back, we're gonna do the hype desk. We're gonna just barrel through some more news. Cause there's a lot going on. We'll be right back.
- [32:45]
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Neal Agarwal
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- [35:18]
Nilay Patel
Welcome back. It's time now for the segment where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueta come on and tell us what's cool in the world and on the Internet. It's time for the Hype Desk. Ross Ashley, welcome back. Great to have you guys.
- [35:31]
Robert Arzon
Hello.
- [35:31]
Ross Miller
Hey. Hello.
- [35:33]
Nilay Patel
Neil, do you want to. This is the last time you get to give the speech. Do you want to give the speech?
- [35:36]
Neal Agarwal
So, as you know, Ross and Ashley do not work at the Verge. They're. They're influencers. I feel influenced. So per our precious ethics policy, you can't buy me and David, but you can buy them. And so eventually, we're going to get to the one line which is, you can't buy us, but you can buy them.
- [35:52]
Nilay Patel
It's pretty good.
- [35:53]
Neal Agarwal
See it?
- [35:53]
Ross Miller
I like it.
- [35:54]
Neal Agarwal
Today we're unsponsored for flavor, so it's fine. But you understand what we're trying to do here.
- [35:59]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [36:00]
Neal Agarwal
Ashley, I think this is your story.
- [36:01]
Ashley Esqueta
I think it is. Yeah. I'm building a new computer. And this. I was very fortunate that a friend sold me a 5070 ti, like, at reasonable, like, MSRP. And I was very excited for that until I started putting together the rest of it and remembered that the RAM apocalypse is happening. And the. I have built my own computer since 1999. I remember having an old beige PC I was very proud of.
- [36:34]
Nilay Patel
Nice.
- [36:34]
Ashley Esqueta
That I built. And I hate buying. I hate pre buying them. And so I want them to look exactly how I want them to look. And so imagine my shock when I went to go buy two sticks of. Two sticks of 48 gigs of RAM and it was $1,200.
- [36:51]
Neal Agarwal
Oh, my God. Oh, wow.
- [36:53]
Ashley Esqueta
I felt like there was maybe almost an aneurysm, a pre aneurysm moment where I was just like, ugh. And so this is where it gets kind of weird because everything's always weird when it has to do with me. It never can be normal. The Rampocalypse is weird enough and horrible enough, but I made a joke on my Instagram saying, like, oh, I'm gonna start selling feet pics now. Like, ha, ha. And somebody DMed me and said, actually, you already have a Wikifeet page. And I was like, stop. No, this can't be. I'm not important enough for this. And so, yeah, I went and looked at the Wikifeet page. First of all, very insulted to find out that I have a 4.4 score. Wait.
- [37:35]
Nilay Patel
Out of 5? Out of 10?
- [37:36]
Ashley Esqueta
Out of 5. I have great feet. And I'm.
- [37:39]
Neal Agarwal
Is this like the Uber ranking when you look at your own Uber?
- [37:41]
Ashley Esqueta
Yeah, if it's under like, 5, it's bad.
- [37:45]
Nilay Patel
I'm pretty sure a 4.4 on Uber gets you fired, though. Like, it's just if you get to about 4.2.
- [37:49]
Neal Agarwal
You get kicked off. No, you get fired as a writer. You don't get fired as a.
- [37:53]
Ashley Esqueta
Get fired as a writer, you can't ride anymore. So this, I'm like, this is deeply upsetting. I was very insulted by that. But my favorite thing was there's one of the pictures, they have like comments and one of the comments on the picture was I have a tattoo on my ankle and someone described it as graffiti on the Mona Lisa. Which like,
- [38:16]
Neal Agarwal
so we started with, we built a PC and we ended with what amounts to an invitation for people to go juice your Wikifeet ranking, guys. This is what happens.
- [38:25]
Ashley Esqueta
Do you need a five star ranking?
- [38:27]
Neal Agarwal
Please do we think this is gonna get you enough cash to buy two sticks of ramp.
- [38:32]
Nilay Patel
The Rampocalypse comes for us all.
- [38:34]
Ashley Esqueta
Yeah, it's brilliant.
- [38:35]
Nilay Patel
Well, I don't have a single segue out of Wikifeet. So, Ross, what do you have for us?
- [38:39]
Ross Miller
I've been thinking, what can I do to transition out of this? I cannot feet to walking. Walking to festivals. I'm gonna talk about Coachella, but here's a spoiler. I did not go to Coachella. I never go to Coachella. I love the Coachella livestream. And this year they went 4k on all the streams. They've got the multi view so it feels like you're watching, you know, if you do Premier League or the Olympics on Peacock. Same idea. You can watch them all at once. You can jump between the audio. They do a fast channel now it's just radio. But I will say there was one thing that felt very different this year. And I don't know how quite to put it, but I feel like more than I've ever seen in the past is the headline artists played to the cameras more than they did to the audience. They've been doing a lot of like really nice 4K live streaming for a while. The main stage has been doing that. But this is the first year where I saw a lot of songs that they were clearly directed just for the camera themselves. Like Trent Reznor and his wife Maraquin. They did nine Inch Noise. They had this amazing performance closer. And if you are in the crowd, you cannot see what was happening. But they had a full choreographed concert. They had camera people right up to Trent's face, heavy on the bokeh effect. I think it was 24 frames per second. This year they really wanted to make it look like concert footage, like from a documentary.
- [39:49]
Ashley Esqueta
Do you think that that's because they're going to release it? As like a. Like a purchasable, like, buy Coachella.
- [39:55]
Ross Miller
I think that every year. But no, I think it's just because they know these are the breakout clips that are going to travel. Because, like, Coachella's biggest marketing thing is FOMO, right? Like, they've sold out 120,000 people every day the weekend, sold out tickets. In many ways, I think it's just like, hey, aren't you sad you're not here? Look how cool it is. And I'm looking at this going, this is the best seat in the house. I have air conditioning. I do not have to be in crowds. I'm just enjoying a really good sound bar. But no, it's like, it's the favorite thing to do. And it just surprised me how much they've really upped the production. And I didn't even realize until just doing research for this, how long YouTube has been the livestream partner. Like, this is just a thing they've been doing for over a decade now. And we talk over and over again, like, you know, obviously YouTube's getting the Oscars coming up soon too. And, like, they've just been laying the groundwork for all these, like, premium streaming tools with tv, with Coachella. And I cannot recommend enough. It's weekend two. Please just put it on the background and learn some new music.
- [40:53]
Nilay Patel
Okay, Ross. The two things that I feel like were all over the Internet were that the nine inch noise set was unbelievable. Like, generationally incredible. I haven't seen it. Um, and then there are, I would say, a lot of very conflicted feelings about Justin Bieber. What did you think of Justin Bieber's set?
- [41:10]
Ross Miller
Okay, so I earned. Okay, so for people who do not know, Justin Bieber did a full set, but it was a lot looser. And then toward the end, this is the part that's been really viral. He just opens up his laptop and he starts playing YouTube clips. But to do that, he literally just goes to YouTube.com and he searches for them.
- [41:26]
Neal Agarwal
Everyone has to do brand deals, Ross.
- [41:28]
Ross Miller
That's what I'm thinking. I don't. I think a lot of people are calling it lazy, and I don't think it's lazy. If anything, bieber came from YouTube. He's discovered, like, his story is so indebted into the YouTube history. I actually thought it was very poignant. I do question, was that a Bieber a thought? Or did Google go, hey, I've got a great idea for you, and it's a great integration.
- [41:47]
Neal Agarwal
Can I tell you one of our most Popular stories on the entire site all week has been the debunk of the conspiracy theory. And that in order to play his old songs, Bieber had to do the
- [41:58]
Nilay Patel
YouTube thing because he sold his catalog.
- [42:00]
Neal Agarwal
Because he'd sold his catalog to, like, private equity for hundreds of millions of dollars.
- [42:05]
Ross Miller
That is so silly.
- [42:06]
Neal Agarwal
And so there's this conspiracy theory that he was forced into, like, karaoke, and it's like, no, like, one. Everybody's got lawyers. The people who own the catalog are thrilled when this stuff happens because the value of the catalog goes up. And also this. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And so we. We wrote a debunk. We got all the quotes in it, all the. And it has just been at the top of the site all week.
- [42:29]
Ashley Esqueta
People want to know.
- [42:29]
Ross Miller
It's amazing.
- [42:31]
Ashley Esqueta
You're doing the good work. That's good journalism.
- [42:34]
Neal Agarwal
It's something. Go to the Justin Bieber story. Yelled the editor in chief. You remember, Ross, every now and again I have ideas.
- [42:43]
Nilay Patel
I will tell you. I am choosing to believe that that was authentic because you're a Belieber. And you're choosing to believe the moment that he went up an octave singing Baby and sound like sounded like his old self, magic happened.
- [42:56]
Neal Agarwal
You were just like, I just want my youth back.
- [42:58]
Nilay Patel
The Internet was changed. I want to be who I was when Baby came out. And so does Justin Bieber.
- [43:04]
Ashley Esqueta
Yeah, I think we all do.
- [43:06]
Neal Agarwal
That's 15 beavers ago.
- [43:08]
Ashley Esqueta
Don't we all want to be who
- [43:09]
Nilay Patel
we were when Baby came out?
- [43:12]
Ashley Esqueta
When YouTube was but a butta Baby.
- [43:14]
Nilay Patel
Exactly. Those were the days. All right, Ross, Ashley, thank you so much. Always great to have you here.
- [43:19]
Ross Miller
Always great to be here.
- [43:20]
Nilay Patel
See you again next week. That's it for the hype desk. All right, thank you again, Ross and Ashley. Neelai, let's just lightning round our way through the end of this show. Does it sound. Does it sound good to you? Yeah. Okay, so Lightning round one, we're just gonna. We're just gonna barrel through a bunch of news. Um, we should probably start with Ticketmaster, which we sort of left off with at an odd point, which is that Ticketmaster Alive Nation had settled with the DOJ in its case about whether Ticketmaster Live Nation is a monopoly. It's a fascinating, interesting case, but it. It looked like it might go away, and then it didn't. And it kept going because a bunch of state attorneys general decided to keep prosecuting this case, and they. They won.
- [44:05]
Neal Agarwal
I like that you got attorneys general right on the first go. I appreciate you, David.
- [44:08]
Nilay Patel
Listen, I've been working with you a while. This is. This is what we do now.
- [44:11]
Neal Agarwal
Man. Talk about people feeling helpless. The Trump administration corruptly settling the most obvious antitrust lawsuit in the history of the world. This is bad. But, yeah, that's true. The states kept it going, and I think everyone knew what would happen. Are you even remotely surprised? They were found liable on two counts of being a monopoly. Not a legal monopoly, I should say. There's still no remedies, and the judge should still break them up. We're just very much at. They illegally monopolize the market for live event ticketing, and they tie their concert promotion business together with the use of their venues, which is illegal. And so if you don't know, I mean, everyone knows how Ticketmaster works, but if you, like, run a theater, let's say, David, I ran a small theater and we had to keep it going. We had to put on one last great show, which I think is a movie everybody would watch. It's also the plot of the Muppets movie. And we're like, all right, we gotta get some acts in here. The problem is that Ticketmaster would literally run the business that sells tickets. The Ticketmaster part that everyone thinks of, they run Live Nation, which owns competing venues, and they are the artists contract with to promote their shows.
- [45:18]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [45:18]
Neal Agarwal
So I'm like, hey, I. You know, who do I. Billie Eilish
- [45:22]
Nilay Patel
is one who keeps coming up.
- [45:23]
Neal Agarwal
Billy.
- [45:24]
Nilay Patel
Billy's gonna headline our night saving event. She would do that for us.
- [45:28]
Neal Agarwal
Right. Like, I was thinking about Justin Bieber. I really want Justin Bieber to show up and just watch YouTube with the audience for a while.
- [45:34]
Nilay Patel
Hell yeah, dude.
- [45:36]
Neal Agarwal
Right? And in the case you saw, like, the CEO of Barclays center and the CEO of Live Nation argue on the phone, and the threat was, if you don't extend your ticketing deal, we'll take our artists to the other venue across town. And that is just straightforwardly illegal. That is just cartoon villain stuff. And there was no chance they weren't going to be found liable by a jury of regular people who deal with this.
- [46:02]
Ashley Esqueta
Yeah.
- [46:02]
Neal Agarwal
Anyhow, we don't know what's gonna happen next. You know, I continue to believe that, like, the intense monopolization and control of the American economy is a root cause of helplessness. So just score one for the good guys.
- [46:13]
Nilay Patel
Absolutely.
- [46:14]
Neal Agarwal
You know, this case took a long time. The Trump DOJ corruptly tried to leave because, like, Kellyanne Conway was lobbying for Ticketmaster. The state's got it done. And I I, I, there's some glimmer of hope that you, you can fight off the, the big bads.
- [46:29]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it definitely remains to be seen how this thing will actually end, but I am not surprised, but still sort of surprised that they lost this.
- [46:40]
Neal Agarwal
I mean, who knows? I mean, they're going to appeal all kinds of dumb stuff.
- [46:43]
Nilay Patel
It's a long way from over.
- [46:44]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah, we're trying very hard to get some of like, Live Nation is not going to come on our show. So we're trying very hard to get the competitors to come on the shows to be like, okay, you've got this ruling. How much change can you make right away so that while the appeals process happens, some other kind of change can actually take root.
- [46:59]
Nilay Patel
Oh, that's interesting. Can you, like, make cultural music business change in this weird, sort of chilling.
- [47:07]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah, you've got this weird moment in time before Clarence Thomas has to weigh in on the pricing of Billie Eilish tickets. What can, what can you get done before that happens? Because who knows what happens in that case?
- [47:17]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, yeah, we, we've already talked about it. But Justin Bieber, you, you are welcome anytime. I loved it. Justin bieber can play YouTube videos at me as much as he wants. These are the rules. All right, next up on the list, the sort of ongoing MacBook Neo effect in the world has caused a bunch of action from Microsoft in a really fascinating way. Tom Warren, fresh from parental leave, wrote a really great piece for us last week arguing that actually the MacBook Neo is a very good thing for Windows because Microsoft is nothing if not a fast follower. I would argue that that piece is very funny because what Tom describes as Microsoft's fast follows are a series of things that just didn't work. Microsoft has a history of fast following with products that aren't successful and. But in this case, the thing it does seem to have inspired Microsoft to do is push much harder for students and try to make Windows better. I put this in here because I think you are as fascinated by what is happening with the Neo as I am.
- [48:20]
Neal Agarwal
The hottest gadget in the world is an iPhone chip running macOS.
- [48:24]
Nilay Patel
Isn't that nuts?
- [48:26]
Neal Agarwal
It just bears repeating. It's an iPhone chip that runs Mac os. You unnerf the chip and let people do computer stuff with it for real and everyone loses their minds.
- [48:38]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Do you, what do you make of the sort of Microsoft response here? Like, do you think, can this company actually sort of pull up its bootstraps and compete here?
- [48:50]
Neal Agarwal
It's hard to talk about Microsoft's response Here without talking about Microsoft and OpenAI.
- [48:55]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [48:55]
Neal Agarwal
I think Microsoft remember that when they introduced Bing and Nadella was like, literally said to me, I want to make Google dance. Like, they were riding high on what they thought was an interface revolution that would let them just upend mobile and search and computers. And, boy, did that relationship not turn out how they wanted.
- [49:17]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [49:18]
Neal Agarwal
At all. Like, just this week, you know, OpenAI leaked another memo about focus, which is hilarious, because the thing that is distracting OpenAI is how many memos they write about having to focus every week. Another executive is like, it's time to buckle down again. I said, and it's like, didn't your boss say that last week? Okay. But in that memo, it's like the CFO of OpenAI, it says, we're now on AWS, which is what our customers wanted always. And it's like, yikes. Like, Azure was the provider for OpenAI. And it literally says, azure was great to help us get started, but we're now where we need to be on aws. And it's like this whole thing fell apart for Microsoft in very specific ways. And I bring all that up as a foundation because I think they really thought copilot PCs were gonna be the thing.
- [50:04]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I think so, too.
- [50:05]
Neal Agarwal
That you would just talk to your. They ran the ads. You're just gonna talk to your computer. It's gonna do stuff for you. And it turns out none of that worked. Like, Antonio tested all that. And then Antonio tested a 599 MacBook Neo, which is an iPhone chip running bog standard macOS, and it's the hottest gadget that anyone has going right now.
- [50:21]
Nilay Patel
I would just say. I would only tweak what you just said very slightly, which is to say none of it worked. And everybody hated it.
- [50:29]
Neal Agarwal
Hated it.
- [50:30]
Nilay Patel
Like, the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Microsoft shoving Copilot onto every single surface of every single Windows computer has been, like, so sweeping and so huge that Microsoft almost immediately started unwinding it. Like, this company not that long ago was. Was loudly and proudly betting the company on Copilot being everything to everybody forever, and is now just quietly pulling buttons off the screen.
- [50:56]
Neal Agarwal
Yep. And saying that they're doing it.
- [50:58]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And they're like, we're gonna, you know, relax the experience and bring it back, and we're gonna make everything feel a little better and less in your face, and we're gonna get it out of, like, the stupid text editing software. Like, we don't need Copilot in all these places. Microsoft. It's gonna be fine. But yeah, this, this thing, Microsoft, I think, I think you're right. I think it thought that it had the answer and all it had left to do was put it everywhere. And now I think it maybe knows it doesn't have the answer at all and is going to flail pretty spectacularly as a result.
- [51:32]
Neal Agarwal
I mean just the fact that the agentic computing revolution is not really consumer software yet like in any real way, like go do a bunch of tasks for me is just a thing that costs a billion dollars in tokens now. Sure. Like you can't make that a consumer problem Also I don't think people think in loops in that specific way.
- [51:51]
Nilay Patel
It's also happening on Mac Studios and Mac Minis. Like no, like, like importantly people are not running openclaw on their Windows computers, they're running them on Macs. And there was also news this week about Microsoft, you know, trying to figure out how to do openclaw type computer UC things through Copilot, which is sort of an obviously good idea if you're Microsoft. And they should have been doing this a while ago. But like it, it is just they've lost every possible version of this advantage so far. It's wild to me.
- [52:21]
Neal Agarwal
Right. Especially because sort of the price performance of Windows is backwards compared to a Mac Mini or now a MacBook Neo. I think they can get that back. Right. They're starting to deeply discount some Windows PCs. Like Best Buy is going to sell an IdeaPad Slim 3X for 499. It's got a Snapdragon in there. Like maybe the battery life will be good. Walmart's going to do a 16 inch HP OmniBook 3. Why are they all threes for 429? Like they're, they're going to discount and they're going to, they're going to make it compelling price wise. I think price performance ratio is going to draw people to Macs because Macs have a performance advantage. And then it's also when you boot up a Mac, like all you have to do is tell Apple one time that you don't want Apple intelligence and it's not in your face and it's just a, it's just a blank canvas for you to do stuff on that occasionally reminds you to use Apple pay because Apple can't help itself. Yep. But you can. Like Windows is not that experience right now. No.
- [53:21]
Nilay Patel
And I think to Microsoft's credit, I think the right thing to do is to holistically take a look at Windows and say okay, how have we lost the plot on this a little bit. I would just say the history of Windows getting that right for long periods of time is not super strong.
- [53:41]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah. And I think as we just heard from Ashley, like the other thing people wanted to do with Windows was build gaming PCs and now you can't because
- [53:51]
Nilay Patel
of AI perfect segue like we were talking about with Ross and Ashley. The pricing apocalypse continues to apocalypse. There was a bunch of news on this front this week and I think I pulled a few of these out because they are like exceedingly mainstream things. Right. We talked, we've talked in the past about like building gaming PCs or Raspberry PIs or things that are less sort of in most people's day to day life. But like Samsung is making Galaxy Phones more expensive for RAM reasons because memory is expensive. Microsoft is hiking the price of the Surface Pro and the Surface Laptop. Meta raised the price of the quest 3. All. All of this is just. This stuff is too expensive. The prices keep going up. YouTube Premium got more expensive this week.
- [54:40]
Neal Agarwal
That sucks.
- [54:41]
Nilay Patel
That's not a memory problem, that just sucks.
- [54:44]
Neal Agarwal
That one particularly sucks.
- [54:46]
Nilay Patel
Wait, why? I agree, but I want to know why you're mad.
- [54:49]
Neal Agarwal
YouTube Premium, not YouTube TV. I sort of understand the pricing dynamics of YouTube TV.
- [54:54]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [54:54]
Neal Agarwal
Right. There's a bunch of big companies that spend a bunch of money on content and YouTube has to pay them just like a cable system has to pay them. YouTube Premium is just turning off the ads on YouTube and the ads on YouTube make YouTube a lot of money. They do not make the creators a lot of money. And YouTube does not pay creators high enough rates to subsist. They all have to do brand deals. I've keep rant about this like almost every weekend. Like the YouTube economy, the cost structures are so upside down that all these creators basically have to run little ad agencies and more power to them. Go do it. It's a hard business to run and a lot of them are real successful at it. But YouTube raising the rates to turn off the ads only benefits YouTube. Like straightforwardly, the creators are not gonna get more money. And that sucks. Like at least when YouTube TV raises the rates, I'm like, yeah, like some Hollywood masters of the universe smoked cigars in a room and they demanded more money and they got it.
- [55:48]
Nilay Patel
YouTube's in a fight with Disney. It's like, that's what it's like.
- [55:51]
Neal Agarwal
I hope you all kill each other. Like whatever happens, you know, it's like, whatever, that's fine. YouTube Premium Raising the rates is. Oh, they want more people on the ad tiers because they're going to shove more mid roll ads onto other people's videos and that money will not go to the creators. And if YouTube would just say we wanted to make sure that some creators can be sustainable without having to do brand deals and this rate increase will help us do that, I would calm down, but I just know Google's lining its pockets. There is a report this week that says, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal meta is on pace to become a bigger digital ad provider than Google and the pressure is coming for YouTube. And so I, I, I'm, I'm just so, I'm very cynical about YouTube raising their rates on premium because up until recently I think it was the single best bargain in media.
- [56:37]
Nilay Patel
I totally agree. I have, I've been saying that for years and for the longest time the two responses we get on that, which I always enjoy, are, are you insane? Ads are fine. And whatever my blow my browser blocks ads. It's not even a big deal.
- [56:52]
Neal Agarwal
Well, get ready. Cause guess who owns your browser, my friend.
- [56:55]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, exactly. But no, I agree. I think YouTube Premium, especially because it comes with YouTube Music, it comes with some good features like YouTube Premium as a sort of holistic entertainment experience is very good. And I, I read this exactly the same way that you do. This is not YouTube saying we want to do a better job of distributing money to an increasingly large number of creators who are doing an increasingly important amount of work. This is YouTube saying we are underpriced and we're going to spend more money on it. I mean this is how I feel
- [57:28]
Neal Agarwal
about ads because the ads are more lucrative. We've seen every single streaming provider realize that if they turn on ads they can make more money. And I think YouTube sees the same dynamic.
- [57:39]
Nilay Patel
Here we are, they're gonna, they're doing the same thing Netflix is. They are going to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until you go back to watching ads.
- [57:45]
Neal Agarwal
Ads.
- [57:46]
Nilay Patel
And if you don't go back to watching ads, that's fine. They are going to absolutely figure out the top of what you are willing to pay in order to not watch ads. Which I think for you, Neal I. Patel is like thousands of dollars.
- [57:56]
Neal Agarwal
My parents are on my, I shouldn't say this cause I'll like, they'll figure it out. My parents are on the Google family plan that gives them my YouTube Premium and it like lapsed the other week and my, my mother called me in like a sheer panic. She's like I saw an ad on YouTube.
- [58:14]
Nilay Patel
I so my, my wife is one of seven kids, and her siblings and her parents have all had, I would say, sort of a light competition to get into the limited slots on my Google family plan, which is the most important piece of leverage I have over everyone in my family.
- [58:32]
Neal Agarwal
You should be rotating them in and out.
- [58:33]
Nilay Patel
I think that's probably right.
- [58:34]
Neal Agarwal
Who's been most helpful this week?
- [58:36]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, like a MySpace top eight situation. Like, like, I will bless you with YouTube Premium until. Until you wrong me.
- [58:42]
Neal Agarwal
We need a babysitter. Huh?
- [58:44]
Nilay Patel
That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Especially at this price. Dear God. No one's gonna be able to afford it for very long. All right, we should take one more break and then we're gonna go back and it's time for Brendan. It is time for the lightning round. We'll be right back.
- [58:58]
Robert Arzon
Honest to God, like, skinny, I wanna be jacked without context. Tone and sculpt are rooted in diet culture. We're inheriting a lot of nonsense that makes specifically women feel like they have to shrink in order to expand. And I'm just saying, no, let's just, like, lift heavy and, like, take up space. That's the expansion. I'm Reben Arson, and this week on Project Swagger, I break down the strategies that helped me build confidence and feel at home in my body, especially at to two babies. Listen now at Project Swagger wherever you get your podcasts.
- [59:35]
Ashley Esqueta
I'm Mitch, first two time Indigo Champion, Championship MVP and forward for the US Women's National Team. Before I went pro, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in psychology, which comes in handy more than you think. Any athlete pursuing greatness knows there's a certain mentality you have to have. What people don't know is what that cost. In my podcast, Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I sit down with the best athletes in the world and explore the psychology, mindset, and unseen battles on the path to greatness.
- [60:06]
Robert Arzon
So take a seat and learn from the Confessions of an elite athlete on
- [60:10]
Ashley Esqueta
YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [60:23]
Podcast Host (Ad Read)
From Iran to Venezuela to China, what
- [60:26]
Neal Agarwal
is driving President Trump's foreign policy? Both Russia and China are big losers if there's a transition in the nature of the of the Iranian government, which, again, is why I think we have to see this campaign through. I'm Jake Sullivan. And I'm John Finer, and we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, Trump's former national security adviser, HR McMaster and deputy national Security Advisor Matt Pottinger join us. The episode's out now.
- [60:55]
Podcast Host (Ad Read)
Search for and follow the long game
- [60:57]
Neal Agarwal
wherever you get your podcasts.
- [61:03]
Nilay Patel
All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Or I guess in this case, lightning round part two. Still unsponsored, still full of flavor. Neil, I assume. I mean, listen, I know it's. It's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I hate that he keeps doing this to me. It is time for Brandon Carr as a dummy. We got a dumb car. His name is Brandon. Hope he goes away is when he gotta make a decision. He's bound to make it in the dumbest way anyone else would be better. His communication about what we say and brand a car. Is the dummy bent to tell. I'll take it right away.
- [61:48]
Neal Agarwal
I'd like to think both Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs would have appreciated that.
- [61:52]
Nilay Patel
I think so. I have also never hoped so much that we get a copyright strike on YouTube for that. That's from Billy in Santa Fe. Thank you, Billy. We also just a little teaser. We're g. We have some fun. Brendan Carame Theme music news coming. Yeah, but not this week, Nilai, what did he do this week?
- [62:09]
Neal Agarwal
He did a lot this week. We're at the point now in the Brendan ecosystem where people send us stuff and I have to choose what idiotic stuff he did spoiled. For Brendan Joyce, it's a lot. You know, he climbed a cell tower for no reason. He does this all the time with, like a hard hat, really, to prove that he's a man of the people. He loves it. Brendan Carr, 2,000ft in the air, just waving, being like, I'm helping your cell service all the time, and then people send me these pictures. There's a nothing he did this week we're going to talk about later because it's not technically something he did. It's the absence of doing. So we'll come back to that. This week I want to talk about two things in particular. One is just very dumb. It's the logical conclusion of a thing we've been talking about here on Brennan Karas Adami, America's favorite podcast and podcast for over a year now. And the other thing is so dumb that it might be smart. Which. Where do you want to start?
- [63:03]
Nilay Patel
Let's. Let's do the dumb thing first. Let's just get the dumb thing out of the way.
- [63:06]
Neal Agarwal
Okay. So Brendan, his main authority that he loves to wield to become America's top censor, to be the number one enemy of free speech America. The authority that he wields is. Is authority over local broadcast, radio and television. So he's always threatening to take your licenses away. Right.
- [63:26]
Nilay Patel
Which we should remind people in 2026 is like a teeny, tiny power.
- [63:30]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah. Because everyone's watching TikTok.
- [63:33]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Over the air. Television, not that important come for us, Brendan.
- [63:38]
Neal Agarwal
I haven't broadcast over an airwave in my life and I never will. Right. Like, but that's his power, and he wields it with impunity. And the, you know, local broadcasters don't have a lot of money or time and they tend to cave. ABC kind of caved with Jimmy Kimmel. Like, this is what happens. So as part of that power, he is also very favorable towards big companies he likes. So he allowed Nextar and Tegna, two companies that own an awful lot of TV stations, to merge against the FCC's own rules, which say there should be competition in local broadcasting. So you get a multiplicity of viewpoints. He allowed these companies to merge, and now they own a lot of local news stations. A lot of local news stations. And what is nexstar going to do? They're going to replace the national news programming from abc, NBC, cbs, and Fox with their own programming from News Nation.
- [64:34]
Nilay Patel
Oh, God.
- [64:34]
Neal Agarwal
So if you are like Brendan Carr and you keep running around saying, I need to let these things merge so there's more viewpoints and conservatives aren't held in contempt by the mainstream media and you got to compete with Google, I need to let these companies be bigger. You've allowed these companies to be bigger. You've broken the SEC's own rules about media ownership. And now NewsNation will be part of the default broadcast news that millions of Americans receive every night. Good work, Brendan. I mean, it's so dumb. It's exactly what everyone said would happen.
- [65:05]
Nilay Patel
It's also exactly what he wants.
- [65:07]
Neal Agarwal
That's what he wants. He's a censor. He removed some voices and he's allowing these companies to promote other voices. They obviously say they're going to have favorable news coverage to continue to get favors from the Trump administration. You just see it playing out exactly as everyone said it would. And Brendan, along the way is like, this is competition for Google, which makes no sense anyway. I look forward to News Nation's programming continuing to sink the ratings of local news, just as CBS News pivot to whatever it is they're doing has absolutely cratered their ratings because Americans are not stupid.
- [65:40]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [65:42]
Neal Agarwal
So that's one then.
- [65:44]
Nilay Patel
He did a good. He did a good thing.
- [65:46]
Neal Agarwal
I don't know.
- [65:47]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [65:47]
Neal Agarwal
I don't know. Because again, Brendan is not a savvy operator. He has just managed to twist himself into a circle. That sounds good, but I suspect it will come to nothing.
- [66:01]
Nilay Patel
He's had a couple of like, what's the Onion headline? The worst person, you know, has a good point. Like, Brendan has, I would say, sort of walked ass backwards into a couple of those so far. Is this another one of those?
- [66:12]
Neal Agarwal
This is definitely another one of those. And it is very much like it's another sort of let them fight situation. Or no, I guess it's Alien versus Predator. You know, whoever wins, we lose. So the NFL, as you know, is addicted to money and they keep moving games to streaming services because they know that people have streaming services and they don't have local antennas and increasingly they don't have cable. So the NFL is just kind of like chasing the money. And they historically, for years and years of decades, have had an antitrust exemption which allows NFL teams to come together as a single unit and cooperate on pricing. So all. Every NFL team is a different company. The league, obviously, is the league, and they all agree to the rules, but they're all different companies. So they should compete for things like broadcast rights and payments. But they have an antitrust exemption that says you are allowed to come together and essentially collude on pricing.
- [67:13]
Nilay Patel
They're essentially a legal cartel. Is like the way it's been established.
- [67:15]
Neal Agarwal
And the idea was, you know, in the 60s or whenever this past that everyone loves the NFL, we want to put the games on TV, we're going to give them an antitrust exemption so they can go deal with the networks, like, as a group. And everyone gets paid and everyone's happy and everyone gets their games. And for a variety of reasons, this kind of no longer makes sense in 2026. Right? Like maybe you want there to. There's more providers, right? There's not just the three big networks who are jockeying for position and maybe one espn. There's like a lot of streaming service providers. There's a lot of companies. There's a YouTube and a TikTok and whoever else that exists. And so basically what it feels like to people is in order to watch every NFL game, you've got to spend thousands of dollars a year now, now, because even your local market team might be on prime one day and ESPN streaming another day. And like, whatever it is that's happening that's taking this away from your local
- [68:08]
Nilay Patel
broadcast stations, and the NFL seems to have a vested interest in increasing that over time. Right? Like, they're talking about Going to more games, more streaming services like the NFL has really enjoyed the process of finding more places to give them money for football games.
- [68:23]
Neal Agarwal
The greed of the NFL knows no bets. Yeah. By the way, I still, I want to just say this clearly for our audience. The 16 game NFL season was perfect and they are going to continue ruining it until they ruin the NFL. Just laying it out there.
- [68:35]
Nilay Patel
I may have never agreed with you as strongly as I do on that particular take. But anyway, so what did Brendan do?
- [68:41]
Neal Agarwal
So Brendan is not even involved in this, right? He's, he's not involved in this. He runs the Federal Communications Commission. The Department of Justice is investigating the NFL and wondering if the antitrust exemption still holds water when the goal, the policy goal of getting games on TVs in a way that was cost effective for everybody has been subverted by the rise of streaming services. So the DOJ is investigating the league to see whether the antitrust exemption is still relevant. Brendan can't stay away from this because some broadcasters are involved. And he just keeps running around being like, I think there's a point at which the NFL reaches a tipping point where they're sticking too many games down a paywall. In which case it really raises a lot of questions about the scope of the antitrust exemption. He's so stupid. He's smart. He has nothing to do with this. He's just threatening the NFL because he kind of can.
- [69:34]
Nilay Patel
But like, I think, I think, I agree. Like, I think he's, I think he's right. Like, wouldn't it be great if we could all watch more football games for free? He's like, yeah, I would. Brendan.
- [69:41]
Neal Agarwal
I agree. Okay, so then here's where it gets particularly done. Again, these are not savvy operators in this administration. You know, you know, he used to run the doj. Pam Bondi. These are not savvy operators across the board. Pam Bondi, who by the way, forced out her head of the antitrust division because she wanted to settle the Ticketmaster case. And Gail Slater, who ran the antitrust division, didn't guess what just happened. Not savvy operators across the board here. The problem they have is they can take the antitrust exemption away from the league, but the league is composed of billionaires who have every single incentive to find another structure that still gets them all paid.
- [70:20]
Nilay Patel
Right?
- [70:21]
Neal Agarwal
And these structures exist all through sports. F1 is owned by Liberty Media. The teams are companies, but Liberty Media owns the broadcast rights and recently took them and sold them to Apple. Do you think the NFL is going to Be like, oh, shit, we lost our antitrust exemption. Nothing to be done.
- [70:43]
Nilay Patel
We'll just compete and make things cheaper for everybody.
- [70:46]
Neal Agarwal
What do you think is going to happen? Yeah, and I think the streaming providers are all very excited to lose the antitrust exemption and watch the NFL walk away from broadcast television entirely, because that is what's going to happen here. And so Brendan is, like, latched onto this fight because he thinks he can force the NFL to put more games on broadcast television for free. And I. I'm just telling you, Brendan, it is. You know, I'm not a prediction markets person, but if I was to put money on the NFL defeating you in this way, I would put money on the NFL defeating you in this way.
- [71:26]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Will the NFL decide to make less money is not typically a winning bet.
- [71:31]
Neal Agarwal
They are not going to be bullied into putting more games on TV for free. It is absolutely not going to happen. The demand for the NFL is so high that if they have to put everything behind a paywall, they will find a way to do it. And, you know, you can feel about that however you want. You can sail the stormy seas, my friends. I know you're taking those bites, but I'm just telling you, Brendan wants to be a man of the people here. He wants to wave the flag 2000ft in the air on a cell tower and say he's going to make the NFL free again. And I. I just think Roger Goodell can take him. That's all I'm saying. You just get the sense that NFL owners. Can you imagine going up to Jerry Jones and being like, here's what you want to do? Make less money. Good luck.
- [72:15]
Nilay Patel
A lot of good guys in this fight, I would say, really, a lot of. A lot of heartwarming stories. Real, real underdog situation. The NFL versus the US Government.
- [72:23]
Neal Agarwal
It's. It's rough. We'll see what happens. But my. My prediction is that Brendan has. He's come around to say a thing that everyone wants without thinking through for one second how to actually get that result.
- [72:35]
Nilay Patel
You can just say things. Nilay, it's been a week filled with. You can just say things.
- [72:39]
Neal Agarwal
Oh, no, not my antitrust exemption. That allows me to bargain collectively with local TV broadcasters. I'm sure Amazon doesn't have $110 billion to pay for the next deal all by itself.
- [72:53]
Nilay Patel
I will say the funniest possible outcome of this is like, you know how many years everybody's been like, apple should just buy Netflix. What if Apple just bought the NFL?
- [73:00]
Neal Agarwal
Do you see what I mean, it
- [73:02]
Nilay Patel
could just do it. Oh, brother. All right, Is that, Is this all Brendan did this week?
- [73:09]
Neal Agarwal
That's been Brendan Carr's dummy. I mean, it's not all he did this week. Again, he also did nothing in a very specific way. Which we will come to.
- [73:16]
Nilay Patel
We will.
- [73:17]
Neal Agarwal
But Brendan, as always, if you can explain your actions or even how you think the mechanics, just straightforwardly, ice cold, you know, facts only, how you think taking the antitrust exemption away will make the TV more free, you can call me. I'm available. You can come on this show, you can come on any show. Fight me in the street. Brendan, I await your call. That's been. Brendan Carr's a dummy. America's favorite podcast. From that podcast.
- [73:39]
Nilay Patel
Okay, onto the lightning round. My first one, I have a news story and I have a question. The news story is that Amazon bought a company called Globalstar and is basically trying to juice its satellite Internet ambitions. Global Star, I would say, is like a Starlink competitor nobody talks about. Is that a fair thing to say?
- [74:03]
Neal Agarwal
No, no, no, I don't think it's that fair. No, no. Global Star is a tiny company whose main thing is that they provide satellite connectivity to Apple for the iPhone and the Apple launch.
- [74:15]
Nilay Patel
Fair.
- [74:15]
Neal Agarwal
Okay. They have like 20 satellites.
- [74:18]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. So this, this ends up being an interesting part of this deal is that Amazon and Apple, which was an investor in Globalstar, now have a deal by which Amazon is going to provide satellite Internet to various Apple devices. That's pretty interesting. But I think the bigger picture here is Amazon is very clearly trying to sort of build a spring for its LEO satellite business. Amazon has been at this for a while. First it was called Project Kuiper, now it's leo. It is trying to build a Starlink sized Internet satellite business. Fine. I get why you would do this. If you want to jumpstart that, it makes sense. I have spent a lot of time reading about this. This is a big deal for Amazon. They spent more than $11 billion on it. I think there are some regulatory questions about whether this deal will get through. But. But I find myself increasingly wondering, who cares about satellite Internet? Like, we talk a lot about this with iPhones and stuff and like, as a, as a backup communications tool. I think it's really interesting. Right? Like the. Apple made a big deal out of it with the Apple Watch Ultra as a. You can get satellite messaging and satellite calls as a sort of emergency tool. I think that's great. Totally get why that exists. I also understand why Better Plane wifi is a good Good and valuable idea that should exist. And I support there being satellites in space to make that better. Beyond that, it seems like every experience we have had with satellite Internet so far suggests that it is really useful to people in places that are otherwise inaccessible to broadband Internet. Right. Very rural places. Places that companies have historically not been willing to like, dig trenches, to lay fiber. Again, really good, really valuable thing. I just don't totally understand why a company like Amazon is willing to invest this much time and energy in even the combination of those things, which seems relatively small to me. Like, am I missing some big, huge satellite Internet vision here?
- [76:18]
Neal Agarwal
Can I give you a cynical answer and then like a thoughtful answer?
- [76:22]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, go. Cynical.
- [76:23]
Neal Agarwal
Cynical answer is that Jeff Bezos has a rocket company and he needs a customer.
- [76:27]
Nilay Patel
Okay, fair, sure. You gotta put something into space.
- [76:30]
Neal Agarwal
Just like StarLink is basically SpaceX biggest customer. There's some reporting, I believe, in the information, you know, we're awaiting the SpaceX IPO and we're going to get their financials and there's some early reporting and the information, I believe that that Starlink is like the only profitable part of SpaceX and the rest of it is like a money holder the government subsidizes, which I think won't surprise most people, but we're about to find out. For real.
- [76:51]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [76:52]
Neal Agarwal
So that's the very cynical answer, is like, you build a rocket company, you need a customer. Did you have you heard of Amazon? Sure. Like there they are. So I think that's very cynical. I think also in Amazon's character is to spend a bunch of money in infrastructure in the hopes that something happens. And that is like the AWS story. And if you run Amazon, you've got fleets of trucks and drivers. They're all in places where there's maybe not great cell service or Internet, or maybe you don't want to be beholden to the AT&T verizons of the world. And now you've got your own network, like in the sky. You can run it however you want. A lot of packages moving all over the world. You're Amazon. You don't have to do all these deals and all these places to get content. Okay, there's something there.
- [77:34]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [77:35]
Neal Agarwal
Then you got your first customer in Apple. And so you're like, you're going to build leo, you're going to add Global Stars Spectrum, because Global Star owns some spectrum. Again, it's not a lot of satellites and they're not the same as Starlink in any way, shape or form. Like, LEO is closer to Starlink, the Global Star Network is device to satellite connection, so it is for iPhones. But now you've got a big customer in Apple which probably didn't want to continue propping up Global Star just for one feature and definitely did not want to take Starlink's terms. Sure. I think Apple and Elon are in a real rough place right now. There's reporting this week that Apple threatened to pull Grok from the App Store over the AI deepfake stuff.
- [78:14]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And then didn't, which is ridiculous. But that is neither here nor there
- [78:18]
Neal Agarwal
because again, this is a rough dynamic between these companies. Yeah. So I don't think they want to be in Starling Spocket. So they stood up and they already have a deal with Amazon and Amazon is a much more normal company to deal with. I'm not saying it's totally normal, but a much more normal company to deal with. So you've got a big customer in Apple already. You have the potential of a big customer in the rest of Amazon and you're, you know, your founder has a rocket company.
- [78:42]
Nilay Patel
I gotta say, none of that adds up to that much for me, I don't think.
- [78:46]
Neal Agarwal
I mean, it seems like new forms of connectivity are important to a lot of people as you think about the world globally. Have you ever tried starlink? I had Starlink for a while in the woods when we lived upstate in the woodstream in the pandemic. And I wrote this story where I was like, look, I would have needed to put up like an 80 foot tower to have this thing clear trees. And if you have one tree branch in the way at that time, this was years and years ago, Strang was like a little iffy and now it's like better because there's more satellites in the sky. Thomas Ricker, our deputy editor in Europe, is a committed van lifer and this dude loves his Starlink. And every time he writes about Starlink being good, the audience screams at him. And he's, this is my point about great products winning out. He's like, there's no competition. There's nothing that can do what Starlink does for me. And there's a lot of people who feel that way. I have a lot of family in rural Illinois. My wife's family is all farmers and they're like, get me off a Hughesnet, get me a Starlink, let's do this thing. That network is starting to get congested. It's slowing down, they're changing the prices. Stuff is happening with Starlink that reminds everybody of every ISP they've ever had. But there's still no head up competition. So I'm sort of excited for Bezos, you know what kind of contest it is, you know what they're measuring. You know what that rocket looks like. Let's go get it.
- [80:04]
Nilay Patel
Sure. I mean, and I guess there's a. There's something to the. The same thing that animated Google and Meta trying to do this for many years. They had, you know, everybody did like balloon WI fi and Meta did planes that had would fly around with WI fi.
- [80:20]
Neal Agarwal
Like Meta straight up lied to our face. Casey Newton went and looked at one of those planes and they lied to him about whether it landed.
- [80:27]
Nilay Patel
Oh, cool. Great.
- [80:28]
Neal Agarwal
I don't think he's ever forgiven that company for being lied to. You in that way.
- [80:30]
Nilay Patel
He probably shouldn't have. That's good. But there's something to. Okay, if we can connect more people, more of the time, they'll use our services. And I guess you can make the same kind of case with Amazon, both with its like Amazon.com, but also all of its other stuff. So fine. This just feels like a particularly huge bet on a relatively small version of that. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is, maybe there is some big giant, ambitious thing that we don't know about inside of the Global Star acquisition, but a big tie up with Apple at the very least, I think goes a long way if you know the truth about satellite Internet and you want to tell me what the big idea is here that I'm missing. Versecastheverers.com I want to hear from you, Mila. What's your next one?
- [81:20]
Neal Agarwal
All right, this is my. Brendan did nothing and it was still stupid. Okay, so a couple weeks ago, the FCC banned all foreign made routers for the United States, which is all routers. And so routers that were already on sale were allowed to stay on sale. And then you needed to get an exemption from the fcc, which amounted to filing a formal plan committing to build your routers in the United States. And so all these companies scrambled. Sean Holster and I did a bunch of reporting. We called all the router companies. They all did, no comments because they're all a little terrified and scared and no one wants to cross the Trump administration. I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know what this was. The idea was if you make a router outside the United States, it is inherently a security risk. And so you have to make in the United States, except for the routers, you're Already making. Which are fine and you don't have to update them.
- [82:06]
Nilay Patel
Right. They actually didn't ban routers. They banned theoretical future routers.
- [82:11]
Neal Agarwal
Yeah, but everyone interpreted this as all routers are not banned.
- [82:14]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [82:14]
Neal Agarwal
Okay. So we're waiting to see what happens. Like, what is the process for getting one of these exemptions? Are these router makers going to commit to making the routers in the United States? Like, how's this going to work? Well, the way it worked is that Netgear up and announced out of nowhere that it has been given a specific determination that its devices do not pose risks to US national security. Out of nowhere, just like, here we go. We filed it with the sec because they're a public company. CEO made a statement. Netgear, famously, their routers were primarily targeted in the Volt Typhoon incident. Like, they have security problems that have been exploited at massive scale. They said nothing about preventing these problems in the future. They said nothing about building the routers in the United States. They said nothing except we have this approval. So Sean, because Sean Haser can be a dog with a bone and I love him for it, asked Netgear and the FCC whether Netgear had submitted such a plan to manufacture routers in the United States, whether they had submitted the required description of planned capital expenditures, financing, or other investments dedicated to US Manufacturing, which is also required. And they've said nothing at all, in any way, shape or form. And hilariously, the approval they've granted is not model numbers. It's like model names. So here's the list. It's Nighthawk Consumer Mesh, mobile and standalone routers, the R, the Rax, the MK, the Mr. The Orbi, mesh and standalone routers and cable gateways. Does this mean Netgear can make a new router? Just call it a Nighthawk?
- [83:53]
Nilay Patel
Sure sounds like it.
- [83:54]
Neal Agarwal
I don't know. Can just any new orbi count? I don't know. Like, completely insane. Like, the worst process that anyone has ever put forth. It's all Brendan. And they've said not one word about what. What they've done to ensure that these routers are not a national security risk. And we have been asking over and over again, because that's what we do. We just ask over and over again for statements on the record, and no one is saying a word.
- [84:24]
Nilay Patel
It's also just abundantly clear that this didn't happen in any meaningful way, because it couldn't possibly have happened this quickly. Like, the ban was the last week of March, which was like, two and a half weeks ago. Call it three weeks ago, just to be generous. Three weeks ago. That was three weeks ago. And. And this very clearly caught everyone in the industry by surprise. And. And so the idea that Netgear had time to put together a comprehensive thing that was actually properly investigated by the FCC is just impossible. It's just impossible. There is no way real process was run in three weeks in order to get out.
- [85:09]
Neal Agarwal
There's no way the Pentagon bought every single Nighthawk available and did a comprehensive battery of security tests to say they were safe for national security.
- [85:19]
Nilay Patel
Or even a Google search that would have suggested that they are extremely not.
- [85:25]
Neal Agarwal
I don't know the last line of Sean's story. We'll link it. We asked Netgear if it has voluntarily improved its security in any way. We have not yet received a response. Response. I encourage the listener, the viewer, you ask Netgear if they've committed to manufacturing United States or what they've done to improve their security for their routers, which have been targeted at scale by Chinese hacking groups because they haven't told us. So we might as well crowdsource it.
- [85:49]
Ross Miller
Love it.
- [85:51]
Nilay Patel
All right, my last one is very quick and is mostly just a short update. The Trump phone continues to seem slightly more real every day. And Eli, you know we made that
- [86:01]
Neal Agarwal
image as the Trump friend real. It's a meter. And we made it as a static image because we just assumed the needle would always stay at no. And we ticked it up a couple weeks ago.
- [86:09]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it's like it's, it's getting there. It is. It is not a 90 on the go 90 scale anymore. It's like an 88 and a half. Yeah. My favorite part about this, this is mostly shout out to Dom Preston on our team who has heroically stayed on this beat far longer than any sane person would. Dom basically caught an in progress rollout of the new Trump Mobile website and, and basically like Bug fixed it in real time by writing about it on our website. And one of the things that he found, he wrote a really good story about it. We'll link to it in the show notes. But one of the things that he found is new photos, a new design for the phone, which he saw first on a zoom call with a Trump Mobile executive I think in February. He was on the show talking about it at the time. The phone has a new design. It does not sort of scream any other particular phone. It does look a lot like the HTC U24 Pro.
- [87:05]
Neal Agarwal
It screams HTC U24 Pro. What are you talking about? Does it okay, it's an HTC U24 Pro.
- [87:12]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, no, you're right, it kind of does. It's really.
- [87:14]
Neal Agarwal
I'm putting my fake dollars on the line here.
- [87:17]
Nilay Patel
It has a different camera bump, but you could. You could fake your way around the camera bump. But at any rate, this. This phone is now gold. They've made one, I would say, terrific design decision, which is that the enormous T and then subscript one that was on the back, that took up like a third of the back of the phone is now gone. And all that's left is the words Trump Mobile twice on the back, which is a very Trump thing to do. And a sort of weird American flag.
- [87:48]
Neal Agarwal
No, it's a very weird American flag. Uh, our commenters caught this. It's an American flag that only has 11 stripes. Like two colonies have been deleted.
- [87:58]
Nilay Patel
It is, in fact, not an American flag. It is like a Trump Mobile flag. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
- [88:04]
Neal Agarwal
Unless you count the words Trump Mobile as the last stripe, in which case it still works. But I would not say a designer did that with intention.
- [88:13]
Nilay Patel
No, but, yeah. Anyway, we have reached a point again where I desperately want this phone to exist because it will make for tremendously fun reviewing and. And content process. And it might, like, if it might exist. Will they. Will they sell six of them? Will they be vastly more expensive than anyone has promised on that team? They still claim it's $499, but now they're calling that a promotional price. Like, this thing is going to be a disaster. But I hope to God they ship at least one so that I can hear about it.
- [88:50]
Neal Agarwal
Oh, I mean, what's the phrase? Tremendous content.
- [88:53]
Nilay Patel
Tremendous content.
- [88:54]
Neal Agarwal
Tremendous content. One of my favorite tech TikTokers is Carter PCs. I don't know if you're a Carter PCs fan. I've been trying to get him on decoder. Tell me about how his business actually works. Nice. So go tag him. But he has been doing hilarious posts on the Trump phone, and I literally am just excited for the phone to come out so that we can review it, because I think we'll have a great time. But then. So I can watch those videos.
- [89:14]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, normally, like Verge infighting is like, who gets to review really cool products? This is going to be the stupidest product that 12 people on our team have ever wanted to review.
- [89:24]
Neal Agarwal
Every week people are like, why do you keep paying attention to this? And then like, another group of people in our comments are like, they have to. This is their Foxconn. I'm like, no, we've committed to this bit.
- [89:32]
Nilay Patel
Now we have to see it all the way through. It's a lot. This is what we've signed up for. Do you want to do your last one before we go?
- [89:39]
Neal Agarwal
Just a brief call out. I think it's just one of the most interesting stories we've published in a minute. Alyssa Weil, who is one of our fellows for a minute, she was a great sort of science writer. She was on our team for half a minute, just as a fellow for a short duration. She wrote a piece called Did Neuralink make the Wrong Bet? And I know that all of you are thinking that it was just like a we're just out to slam Neuralink, but no, uh, the piece is about the brain computer interface community moving on from one style of interface to the next one. And Neuralink has started investing in it too. So Neuralink was speech to motor, which still has a lot of proponents and a lot of people are very happy with them. And that's what they want. That's where your brain moves a cursor on a computer screen. And they've now moved to. To speech, where your brain directly generates speech. And this is just one of those, like, ultra cutting edge. How do we build the technology that's gonna help the most people at the most accessible price in the simplest way and with the least invasive surgery? And she's a really good reporter. This story cooked for a long time. There's a ton of reporting in it. And it was just one of those where I read it and like, your feelings about Elon and Neurlink aside, you're like, oh, a lot of people are trying to solve an impossible problem and the approach on how to do it the best way is not settled. And like, I just think that's when the Verge is at its best. So I just want to call it this story because it's really fun to read. There's like very smart people in the comments, like, being like, here's the next layer of analysis, which is really interesting. And then there's people freaking out about Elon as you would get. But to me, this actually has nothing to do with Elon. It's how do you build a product like this? Yeah, how is it supposed to work? And there's. There's not consensus, which I think is super interesting.
- [91:21]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, like what. What do we want from this is such a. Is a really interesting underlying thesis of that story. It is really good. You should read it. We'll link to it in the show notes. I'll put a gift link to that in the show notes. So even if you're not a Verge subscriber, you can go read that one. All right, we should get out of here quick. Version History Plug the season of Version History is over, so we're taking a break to make the next season. The next season is going to be all smart home stuff, and the six episodes we're going to do are the Philips Hue, the Roomba, the Nest Thermostat, the Logitech Harmony Remote, the Clapper, which is maybe the most excited I've ever been about a Version History episode, and the Keurig Coffee Maker. It's going to be a really fun season. You're doing a couple of episodes. Gen 2 is going to be in a bunch of them. We got really fun guest plan. It's going to be really fun series if you want to have questions or be in that show or tell us stories that you remember about any of those things, or you want to just give us feedback on all of our feelings about AI and everything. As always, the hotline is 866-Verge11. The email is vergecasthege.com hit us up about everything, especially about the Clapper because that episode is going to be 16 hours long and I could not be more excited. Nilai, what's on Decoder this week?
- [92:33]
Neal Agarwal
So I don't know if you're paying attention to AI news virtualistener, but this week Adobe announced that you can control all of Creative Cloud by just prompting it. They called it Interface Revolution. And then canva announced the AI 2.0 update where you can also just prompt Canva now and it'll do stuff. And Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, who's the founder of Canva, is on Dakota this week. She is like very smart. She's a designer, she's a founder, she has a great accent, great conversation. Decoder has been on a run of just me yelling at people. This one is like, let's talk about design. Like everyone needed a break. You know, that's good.
- [93:13]
Nilay Patel
It's good stuff that's coming out on Monday. Yeah, love it very much. Looking forward to it. All right. And as always, if you subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe you get this podcast, all of our other podcasts, everything ad free, plus all of our newsletters. Plus you don't need gift links. You can just read theverge.com all the time. It's the coolest website. It's what I do all the time. I open all of our links 10 different times.
- [93:33]
Neal Agarwal
Just a reminder, the subscription is. No one can tell us what to do.
- [93:36]
Nilay Patel
Exactly.
- [93:37]
Neal Agarwal
It's the thing I hold dearest to my heart.
- [93:39]
Ross Miller
I love it. All right.
- [93:40]
Nilay Patel
The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neelai.
- [93:49]
Neal Agarwal
Rock and roll.