Why people really hate AI

Summary

The Vergecast – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Why people really hate AI
Date: March 20, 2026
Hosts: David Pierce, Nilay Patel, Allison Johnson

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Overview

In this lively and incisive episode, The Vergecast team dives into a topic dominating tech and culture conversations: Why people seem to really dislike AI. Hosts David Pierce and Nilay Patel analyze recent OpenAI business maneuvers, public polling, and the chasm between industry enthusiasm and consumer skepticism. They critique the tech world's messaging, examine comparisons to past tech revolutions, and debunk viral AI myths. Later, Allison Johnson joins to recount her bizarre quest to acquire Samsung’s ill-fated Galaxy Z Tri Fold, offering a candid look at the folding phone market’s struggles.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. OpenAI Refocuses: Internal Drama & Consumer Struggles

• Timestamps: 03:28–10:22

• OpenAI’s internal memo from leader Fiji Simo called for “focus,” urging the company to pivot away from scattered projects and zero in on enterprise and coding applications.

  • This comes after Sam Altman's “code red” alert and mounting concern over lack of a profitable consumer AI use case.
  • Nilay frames it: “ChatGPT...has been an enormous success. Right. Like tons of people use it. ... OpenAI is losing money hand over fist every time you use ChatGPT.” (06:56)

• The industry is paralyzed: Despite huge usage, there’s no “worthwhile consumer AI business.” Even giants like Google struggle, as evidenced by unreliable search responses in AI Overviews.

2. Why Do People Dislike AI? The Data & The Disconnect

• Timestamps: 10:22–16:20

• Recent polls show a broad public wariness:

  • NBC News: 57% believe the risks of AI outweigh the benefits.
  • Pew: Over half think AI will worsen creativity and relationships.

• David compares the failure of AI to ignite genuine mainstream enthusiasm to the rapid adoption of the web and smartphones:

  • “The Internet promised a huge amount of change, and it was just adopted. ... There wasn’t this level of confusion.” (12:39)
  • Facebook and YouTube succeeded because the value was obvious and immediate; AI hasn’t found its Instagram or iPhone moment.

• Nilay: “They have not given back a product that makes people feel the way that the Internet made them feel or the smartphone made them feel or YouTube made them feel.” (17:44)

3. Tech Industry Narrative: From Environmental Concerns to Doomerism

• Timestamps: 17:50–28:08

• Addressing VC claims—especially from Andreessen Horowitz’s Olivia Moore—that media-fueled environmental fears drive anti-AI sentiment, hosts push back:

  • David: “Environmental objections do not do shit for the American consumer.” (21:34)
  • Convenience always wins over ecological worries (see: fast fashion, big cars, disposable straws).

• Hosts dispute the idea that “doomerism” (AI will destroy jobs/society) is media-driven. Instead, industry self-promotion of “world-changing” potential bred anxieties—and now, ironically, companies blame consumers for their own messaging backfiring.

• “They're facing the consequences of that messaging, and they're blaming the people.” (27:37)

4. Enterprise Is Not Enough: The Need for a Consumer 'Hit'

• Timestamps: 30:36–38:08

• Even in B2B, large-scale productivity or value gains are elusive. Companies burn resources for ambiguous benefit, fueling skepticism at both community and business levels.

• Satya Nadella’s Davos quote: AI companies need “social permission” to justify resources—something they haven’t earned: “You have to make some case that there's some benefit to all of this investment in order for the investment to continue.” (30:36)

• Nilay stress-tests common "AI as productivity tool" narratives:

  • “Most people don't have a to do list system...We need to go several levels down into what it is to be a person in the world.” (38:44)

5. Folding Phones: The Life and Death of the Samsung Galaxy Z Tri Fold

• Timestamps: 42:10–68:09

• Allison Johnson hilariously recounts her effort to acquire a Tri Fold for review:

  • She buys a suspicious device (crumbs and hairs included) off eBay, ultimately getting it to work with a Trump Mobile SIM.
  • The unit turns out to be a Chinese version, sans Google Play store, stuck in a liminal, semi-functional state.
  • Meanwhile, Samsung quietly cancels the Tri Fold, selling only “five” units (jokingly), with mainstream reviewers locked out in favor of creators and influencers.

• Roundtable assesses the broader state of the foldable market:

  • Issues: Price, battery life, lack of killer use case, rushed or limited launches—especially in the US.
  • “Somewhere in there is a truly damning critique of foldable phones...” (51:34)
  • Speculation on possible Apple foldable—a potential tipping point or a “science project” fizzle.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI’s mass appeal:
  “They have not given back a product that makes people feel the way that the Internet made them feel or the smartphone made them feel or YouTube made them feel.” – Nilay Patel (17:44)

• On AI not being worth the price:
  “These things are not far away from the users. It's just that people find them, use them, and at the very least find them not worth $20 a month.” – Nilay Patel (20:19)

• On Silicon Valley’s blame game:
  “This is one big attempt, like one big narrative from in particular, AI VCs who are saying, it's not our fault. You're too stupid.” – David Pierce (25:25)

• On foldables’ struggles:
  “We don't know. This is so sweet how long it has. Yeah. I'm going to give it a good, like, effort and then I don't know what's going to become of it.” – Allison Johnson on her Tri Fold’s fate (68:26)

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Key Segment Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------------------------|--------------| | OpenAI memo, enterprise focus, consumer AI struggles | 03:28–10:22 | | Public perception, polling, comparisons to past tech | 10:22–16:20 | | VC/industry/press blame game (AI slop, doomerism) | 17:50–28:08 | | Business software, missing consumer hit, Satya Nadella quote | 30:36–38:08 | | Listeners invited to suggest AI use cases | 38:08–39:19 | | Allison’s Tri Fold odyssey, foldable market critique | 42:10–68:09 |

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Additional Lightning Round Highlights

• Timestamps: 72:10–107:18
• "Brendan Carr is a Dummy" podcast-in-a-podcast: Mocking FCC commissioner for political posturing and threats against critical news organizations, tying in free speech anxieties.
• Tech meme debunking:
  • Debates around Nvidia’s DLSS5 and the imposition of “AI slop” on PC games.
  • High-profile AI urban legends (chatbots curing dog cancer, uploading a fly’s brain) debunked.
• Meta’s “Horizon Worlds” reversals: Company keeps a failed VR Metaverse experience alive for PR optics.

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Tone and Style

The hosts maintain their signature mix of sharp analysis, irreverence, and cultural references. They’re candid (even brutal) about industry missteps, often with pointed humor—frequently poking fun at tech execs, VC “logic,” and their own parenting misadventures.

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For New Listeners

This episode is especially valuable for anyone grappling with the disconnect between how tech insiders hype AI and how regular people actually feel about it. It also provides a revealing snapshot of both the volatility inside tech’s biggest companies and the importance of real consumer excitement in tech’s success—or failure.

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Contact & Further Reading

• Hotline: 866-VERGE11
• Email: [e-mail]
• Ad-free & more: theverge.com/subscribe
• Related Reading:
  • Allison Johnson's trifold saga
  • Robert Hart's AI mythbusting
  • Version History podcast, "Vocoder" episode
  • Interview with Jim Lanzone (Yahoo) on Decoder

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Transcript

[Host/Announcer]

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, slack workflows and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com vergecast we all need to retool how we build software. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, user unified platform that gets out of your way. It's ACID compliant, enterprise ready and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start [e-mail] Build

[Nilay Patel]

Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation.

[David Pierce]

Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your docs, your permits, your moves,

[Nilay Patel]

AI levels, up your pitch it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let's flex those tools. Draft, design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Learn [e-mail] do that with Acrobat. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vergecast producer job that is now open. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neelai Patel is here.

[David Pierce]

I'm going to apply for that job. I think that job to be easier than my job.

[Nilay Patel]

We are hiring. I, I, I want to get this out of the way, right up top. Because we haven't mentioned it on the show yet because we are terrible people. We are hiring a producer to come work on the Vergecast with us. You can go to voxmedia.com jobs apply. Mention Brendan Carr in your cover letter

[David Pierce]

if you are Brendan Carr for this job.

[Nilay Patel]

I really, I think the greatest part of this is Brendan Carr wouldn't get the job, but he would get an interview. Do you know what I mean? Like, we would come in, I would

[David Pierce]

hire Brendan, you know, we're also hiring a supervising producer for Decoder. I would hire Brendan to be the supervising producer for Decoder.

[Nilay Patel]

That could be fun.

[David Pierce]

Just because that job is like run my business and policy show and I would just yell at Brendan all day, every day.

[Nilay Patel]

He is good at getting attention on the Internet.

[David Pierce]

See what I'm saying?

[Nilay Patel]

And that is the game we all play now.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. But anyway, both of those jobs are open producer on the Vergecast, supervising producer on Decoder. We have big plans for shows. We want to expand them in lots of ways. So we need help.

[Nilay Patel]

Help. So if you know people, I promise we are not as unpleasant to work with as you would think we would be. We're, like, mostly as unpleasant as you think. It's not. Not all the way. Well, I'm more. Near, less. Do you know what I mean? So we, like, this is why we're a good match. You're. You're a delight. And I drive everybody insane. And this is like. This is like a good balance we strike.

[David Pierce]

It is. It is. I, in. In the sense that David does all the work and I do none. That's really how this plays out.

[Nilay Patel]

It's a great move. You just sort of Kool Aid. Kool Aid, man. In five minutes before the show starts, and you're like, what's up, guys?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I have a bunch of hot takes I haven't done any research on. Let's go.

[Nilay Patel]

Which in fact brings us to where we should start the show today. We have. We have a lot to talk about. There's some Apple stuff we're going to get to later. Allison Johnson is going to come on and talk about the unbelievably brief life and death of the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold and her bizarre experiences with that phone. I'm very excited about that. But first, there's sort of a big picture thing going on here. But the specific bit of news this week that I think has been on a lot of people's minds was this memo that went around inside of OpenAI from Fiji Simo, who is the CEO of Applications at OpenAI, which is a hilarious title that means nothing. But Fiji Simo is like a big deal. She ran Facebook. At Facebook, she was the CEO of Instacart. Like, she's. She's a heavy hitter in this world and has been at OpenAI making a bunch of changes. And she sent out this Memo essentially saying OpenAI needs to focus that this company has been on what she called sidequests, which is a pretty accurate representation of what's been going on. Like, OpenAI has launched every single thing you can think of over the last two years, and she's basically like, we need to stop doing all of that and focus really aggressively on enterprise and Coding use cases because that, that is where the product market fit is. That's what we need to do. We need to pull back on all of this stuff and focus on those things. And in there somewhere, I think is the bones of a bigger conversation being had right now about how people feel about AI and whether AI is going to continue to grow in the way that these companies need it to grow.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And I just think, I don't know, we can talk about this from a bunch of different angles. But I'm curious, like, how do you respond to the OpenAI thing? Like, what do you make of Fiji? Simo's memo here. Is this the right thing for OpenAI to do at this moment?

[David Pierce]

I think so. But I have like two big reactions to this. One, they just did this. Sam Altman just declared a code Red. Yeah, like minutes ago. Like, I, like, I don't even think we've like settled down. I don't think we've undeclared the code red. It's not over. So what are we doing? What do we, why, why are we doing again? Did it not work the first time? Did it not take like literally? Did people not get the code red memo? So we're sending a different memo with different words to see if that one hits.

[Nilay Patel]

There's a really great line from Fiji, Simo in an all hands with the team talking about this stuff. Somebody I guess asked her, is this a code Red? And she goes, we are very much acting as if it's a code Red. I don't think necessarily declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense. Very good, perfect and correct. But I think you're, I mean this is not, you're right that this is not news to OpenAI or at the very least it shouldn't be news to OpenAI that this is the move.

[David Pierce]

Well, this is, I think this is my second reaction to this. OpenAI is stuck. Fiji is supposed to be the one making the big consumer product. They hired her because she ran Facebook which has ads. They hired a million ads people from Meta. There are so many people at meta from OpenAI that in meta all hands, they talk about losing people to OpenAI. Sam kicked himself to run the lab to do research and pretty much raise money to make digital Jesus or whatever he thinks he's doing. And Fiji CEO of applications, she's supposed to make the big consumer product that, that does it. That takes market share away from Google Search, the most lucrative business in the history of technology. And they're not doing is not occurring. They might be Taking market share but they're not making money.

[Nilay Patel]

That's the thing. That's I think the important distinction. Like it is, there is no question that ChatGPT has been an enormous success. Right. Like tons of people use it. And we're going to get into the way that people feel about that. Which is what I really want to talk about here. The, the feelings people have when they use chatgpt are fascinating. But people are using chatgpt and OpenAI is losing money hand over fist every time you use ChatGPT. And I think it's increasingly clear what this company has realized is there is no path from that to suddenly we make money on ChatGPT. They're trying ads, they've tried shopping, they've tried all the things that you would try. And it appears all indications are we're not running towards profitability here.

[David Pierce]

Right. You hire the person from the big scaled consumer Internet business to do that again. You hire Fiji from CMO to do it again. And she is the one writing the memo acting as though it's a code red saying we have to pivot to enterprise because that is the opportunity. The story here is that no one has figured out the worthwhile consumer AI business. No one.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

Even Google kind of hasn't. Right. Like their attempts to do it look way more like slop than not.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

AI Overviews is just so frequently wrong now that it's becoming a joke. We are planning our Apple 50 package and I asked it yesterday, when did the wedge shaped MacBook Air come out? Which is just a fact. You can know. Yeah. There's a lot of ways to find out when that one came out.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And AI overviews could not get that answer right.

[Nilay Patel]

Yikes.

[David Pierce]

That's brutal. Like even Google, which is gonna do the best job here because it already has the scaled consumer business that's making a lot of money and has a lot of advertisers. They are hurting their own product. They're gonna hurt YouTube in a very real way. They're starting to run surveys on YouTube asking people if they think that the videos are AI slop.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh wow.

[David Pierce]

Because they need to build a detector like there's something going on with Google. But they already have a big business that's winning and they have Google Cloud and they have all this other stuff. OpenAI. They gotta make a business. It's existential for them. They need to make more money than they are spending or Sam has to keep raising money forever. And that is pretty shaky. And so I think absent a big consumer hit this whole industry is paralyzed and starting to kind of lash out that people don't love them more. Like you were talking right before we started recording about the perception that the Verge hates technology, which is very funny because we employ literal gadget reviewers and like, I love technology and I will spend all day and all night talking about high bit rate movie streaming and we'll do like spec episodes. Like, what. What do people think we're doing here? The problem is people have conflated tech with AI and AI has not come up with a consumer use case that people love. They. They really have not. Like, none of these companies have really come up with that thing in this way, or at least in a way that makes money. And now the industry is starting to feel that pressure because they're asking for so much. Data centers everywhere. No more RAM for anybody. Weird ideas about what GPUs should do to video games. They're way over their skis in terms of what they're asking for. And they haven't made a product people love. And so people are like, no, actually we'd really dislike you. And the data kind of backs it up.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I mean, there was this one NBC News poll a week or so ago that I've seen a bunch of people talking about. That is essentially the question was basically, how do you, how do you weigh the risks and rewards of AI? Basically, like, is it. Is it net good or net bad? And with the caveat that polls are always messy, people think that it's bad. This is just one thing from it. It says 57% said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefit, compared to 34% who said the opposite. A plurality of voters view AI negatively and don't believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology. That is not unclear evidence. This poll is fascinating, by the way, because they also polled people about, like, how do you feel about Gavin Newsom and ICE and the Democratic Party? And just a lot of things sort of in the ether right now. And it's like, people are psyched about Pope Leo. People are psyched about Stephen Colbert. And like, everything else sucks, including AI.

[David Pierce]

And AI is like down there with Democrats generally in the war, it's between

[Nilay Patel]

ICE and the Democrats, which is just a tough beat for AI right now.

[David Pierce]

That's really bad. And I've talked to executives at the biggest companies in tech who are like, Gen Z hates AI and that's our problem. Yeah, like straight, like, they will just look me in the eye. And be like, the problem is that Gen Z hates AI. We don't know what to do about it.

[Nilay Patel]

There was also this really interesting Pew study from last fall. Like, this is. This is a building set of data, right. That we've been getting real scientific research about how people feel about AI for a while now. And it's kind of been like this the whole time. It's not like people are starting to sour on it. People talk about, you know, the trough of disillusionment. It's just been like this pretty much the whole time. But in this Pew study, 53% of people said AI will worsen people's ability to think creatively, compared to 16% who said it will improve this. Far more people said AI will worsen rather than improve people's ability to form meaningful relationships. 50% said it will worsen them. 5 said it will improve them. Like, this is not. There's a. There's a certain subset of people out there who are ambivalent and wait and see and who knows and whatever. But, like, to the extent that people have reflexive feelings about this, it is overwhelmingly bad.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And I want to make the comparison to two other things, because the scale of change that AI might bring is huge, but it's not without precedent. So the Internet promised a huge amount of change, and it was just adopted. You didn't have to try. Do you know what I mean? Like, it took a while, and there was a dot com bubble and there were fits and starts, and there was a lot of silly ideas going on with the Internet, but people, by and large just started using it. And a bunch of companies were able to make a lot of money along the way. And there wasn't this level of confusion.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Do you know what I mean? Like, Amazon chose not to make money for a long time. Very publicly, very loudly said, we're not making money because we're going to build all this infrastructure.

[Nilay Patel]

But.

[David Pierce]

And the second they were like, we need to make money now. Jeff Bezos owns a very large boat. You know, like the, the, the Internet, the way that economy developed overall was. It was just obvious.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

It was the same with smartphones and apps. And you can feel a lot of ways about mobile, you can feel a lot of ways about social media, you can feel a lot of ways about Mark Zuckerberg, you can feel a lot of ways about the Apple Tax. Like, that economy developed and you did not have to convince people to buy smartphones.

[Nilay Patel]

Facebook is actually my favorite example of this. People raced to join Facebook, like, raced to get on it. Because we eventually figured out the downstream effects and there were all kinds of problems and all that stuff. But, like, the initial value proposition of here's why this will make your life better was so clear to so many people that the minute their college would allow them to, they started pouring their lives into the platform.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, it was so straightforward, a good proposition, that everybody just ran for it. And I've been doing all this research for version history, our other podcast, which people should go listen to, that has led me back to, like, the days of the radio and the early days of the phone. And yes, there are small panics about what those things will do to the world, but overwhelmingly, most of those new technologies were going to solve world peace. That these were the things that when they bring us together, everything will be wonderful now and we will never have problems because we can just communicate seriously. This is like, these are real, pervasive beliefs that radio will make the world a meaningfully better place.

[David Pierce]

Yes, connecting everybody is the goal, and there will be some negative consequences, some externalities, but we need to connect everybody anyway. Andrew Bosworth at Meta famously wrote a memo called the Ugly in which he laid out all of the bad things that would happen and said, still, we connect everyone because we think that's the highest and best use of the technology. You can feel a lot of ways about that memo. A lot of people have felt a lot of ways about that memo. And his point always has been, no, I was just laying it out. These are the stakes and these are the consequences. And we believe in what we're doing anyway because we think we're going to make the world a better place. This is the line from Silicon Valley. It's Gavin Belson saying, I don't want anyone else making the world a better place before I do. Yes, that's Silicon Valley. But everyone believed in this stuff. I can make this even more narrow. YouTube is basically built on widespread copyright infringement.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Like, those industries did not like this that we were. YouTube took all this stuff. The same as the AI industry is kind of built on widespread copyright infringement. But YouTube was so useful and so good and so obvious that everyone sided with them in a way that they're not siding with the AI industry. Right. You can just see delivering meaningful actual value to consumers lets you get away with a lot.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

The iPhone is the. You know, it's the vanguard of moving high tech manufacturing to China. Apple built that ecosystem in China. So did Tesla. Everyone should go read Apple in China. It's a great book, but you See, these two companies in particular kickstarted an entire industry over there. Why did we allow that to happen? Because the iPhone is great. Because it's great. It's just a great product. And so are smartphones. And my point here is the AI industry is staring at these polls that say everyone hates them, and it's because they are asking for so much. And you can quantify that in a million ways. They're asking for a lot of power. They're asking for a lot of land to build data centers. They are asking for every stick of RAM that has ever existed in the history of the world. They're asking to scan every book without payment. They're asking for my identity to run Grammarly. Like, whatever it is that they're asking for, they're doing it without permission, and they're asking for a lot. And they have not given back a product that makes people feel the way that the Internet made them feel or the smartphone made them feel or YouTube made them feel. It just doesn't exist yet. And so instead of reacting to that by building great products, Fiji CMO saying we need to pivot to enterprise encoding because anthropic is killing us there. And then the VCs are going on podcasts and. And doing what they do, which is blaming consumers or blaming the media, which I think is bananas.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Have you been deep in the weeds of the VC podcast this week? I feel like you've been talking to me about VC podcasts more than usual.

[David Pierce]

I have. So here's what. Here's what happens. I feel so bad for our team. What happens is at night I try to put the baby to sleep and he's a real cuddler, so you gotta just hold him until he's like, actually asleep, but his eyes are closed and he's, you know, he's just trying to do in that wiggly thrashy thing where if you put him down too early, he'll wake up. You got to sit there.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

What are you going to do when you're sitting there? You're. You watch TikTok on silent. That's what you're going to do while you're sitting there. So I've just. My.

[Nilay Patel]

But you don't even wear headphones. You just watch it on silent.

[David Pierce]

I just watch it on silent.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, my God.

[David Pierce]

It's fine. And on dim. Silent. It is a weird way to experience TikTok, but it's what I do. And our poor team just gets TikToks at like 8:30pm all day, every day.

[Nilay Patel]

I Can confirm this forever.

[David Pierce]

I feel bad about it. So I ran across this creator called Signals and Noise. She has a PhD from University of Chicago, which I love because I went there. She's the co founder of something called Bookscape. Her title says AI Tech Strategist. You go watch her videos, we'll link them, they're good. Her name is in here, so if you want to. If you want to tell me what your name is, I'd happy to say her name, but it's hard to find your actual name. And she's called that two Podcast One, of course, is all in with Tremont always. Everyone's going to know what that is. And the one I want to start with is the big Technology podcast, which is hosted by Alex Hanshowitz, who's a friend of ours. He had Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz on, and she called out this clip, this reaction that in particular VCs are starting to have to the negative messaging around AI. So I want to actually just play the same clip from the big Technology podcast. This is Olivia Moore, who's a partner at Andreessen.

[Advertiser/Guest Voice]

There's been a lot in the media in the U.S. more broadly, these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology. I was just talking with someone this morning who is not in the tech industry, and they were saying the same lines like, AI is evil, it's going to watch us, it's using all the water. And then they were like, but ChatGPT really helps me and it has great answers. And so I think part of it is a timing thing of we just need these products to kind of saturate the mainstream consumer and they can realize the value.

[Nilay Patel]

So there's a lot of things in

[David Pierce]

there, a lot of ideas there, huh?

[Nilay Patel]

We can talk about the water another time. This assumes in a certain way that these products exist and are out there, right? And the only thing that we're missing is adoption. And I would actually say what, what seems to be the case is that we have the exact reverse, which is that everybody has tried these things everywhere and found them wanting in some meaningful. Like you can't avoid these chatbots at that. At this point, like if you open up gmail, you get 11 pop ups reminding you how to Gemini in your Gmail. These things are not far away from the users. It's just that people find them, use them, and at the very least find them not worth $20 a month. Right. Like, for the purposes of this conversation, we don't even have to litigate whether the products are any good. They're not worth $20 a month to most people. And until they are worth $20 a month, they're going to hemorrhage money. And this, this to me is just like. This just assumes that all of this is out there. And it's like the, the, you know, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. That is not at all my experience with AI right now.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, no, it's everywhere. I have a different objection to this, to this idea from Olivia Moore at Andreessen Horowitz. And it's. It's the one that the creator made in her video. And I brought this idea to our environmental reporter Justine Kalma, and to Miya Sato, who covers the fashion industry and shopping generally for us. Environmental objections do not do shit for the American consumer.

[Nilay Patel]

They've never done anything for any.

[David Pierce]

No, not one thing. Like, the reason I brought up fashion is fast, fashion exists, and no one cares about the environmental cost of Shein. Totally, literally no one cares. That stuff is flying off the shelves. I am a sucker for a big stupid car. I really am. I love them. The more cylinders, the better. Light em up. Lots of people in this country know every inch of the environmental cost of big stupid cars. We've been talking about it forever. I have an ev. I will tell you, my EV is a much more pleasant thing to drive than my stupid Mustang. But I love my stupid Mustang. Right. Like there's. It just doesn't work. Like you're watching what's happening in EV sales right now. If you cared about the environment, you would buy an ev. You would not buy it. The dumbest trucks that you can buy, which is what Americans are addicted to buying.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Someday when you make a country album, I need it to be called I Love my Stupid Mustang.

[David Pierce]

I do love my stupid Mustang.

[Nilay Patel]

It's just going to make me very happy.

[David Pierce]

I love it the most. I'm just pointing this out, like this idea that the media has convinced everyone that the in particular water cost of AI is so high that you should hate it is just totally divorced from the reality of how people react to environmental messaging at all.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, at all. In fact, I would argue that the do the right thing versus do the convenient thing is an easier trade for people to get over to do the convenient thing than almost anything else with environment. Like, many times the, you know, do I give up my private data in exchange for some convenience? Like, people have more feelings about that than will I burn the world down for some convenience. Like, behavior suggests that we will happily burn the world down if it gets me my clothes, 10 minutes.

[David Pierce]

Ask people how they feel about the paper straws, man.

[Allison Johnson]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, exactly.

[David Pierce]

And, like, the paper straws might not be helping anything, but, like, the idea that you should, like, have suffer some minor inconvenience to make some incremental benefit. Like, no. Everyone's like, I hate these straws. It is so easy to overcome the environmental roadblock, the moral sense that your actions will help the environment or hurt the environment. You just need a great product. That's literally it or a more convenient product. And so here you have a partner at Andreessenorowitz, which is effectively now just a VC for defense contractors, saying, people hate this technology because the media is lying to them. And first of all, the media that most people consume, as we have talked about over and over on the show, is not. It's right that people are not reading New York Times. They're just opening TikTok. They're watching the algorithmic media that is being delivered to them by big tech companies that have a huge vested interest in, as you're saying, distributing AI tools to them.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

So it's not. I'm not popping up on people's feeds and being like, did you know it has a lot of water? No. It's like, just not happening. And even if. Even if that was happening, you can just look at, you know, the. The weird dip in EV sales after the incentives went away and people rushing to buy gas cars, even though gas prices are through the roo. People make weird decisions when the environmental factor is the main factor, by the way, asterisk. I know we're going to get notes about this. EV sales are ticking back up because gas prices are high and that cars are actually better. And maybe that's all going to equalize. But it's not the environmental concern that is driving consumer behavior in the car market or in the fashion market or anywhere else where you have environmental concerns that should shift the market. And that's what I asked Justine about. That's what it asked me about. It's what this creator is pointing out in her video. You can get over. The point I'm trying to make is you can overcome the environmental concern really, really easily. So this is one big attempt, like one big narrative from in particular, AIVCs who are saying, it's not our fault. You're too stupid.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

You've been lied to. The tools are amazing. And we just have to wait and the objections will be overcome. There's another one as well, which, again, this is all an instrument. So it's like, I just feel like I'm dunking on a baby. But, like, we should listen to it.

[Nilay Patel]

At least some parts of the AI

[Allison Johnson]

ecosystem have decided that this crazy, scary

[Nilay Patel]

doomerism is the best way to raise money.

[Allison Johnson]

Where every now and then they come

[Nilay Patel]

out and they say, all the jobs will be destroyed. Anthropic. You know, Dario says that this thing

[Allison Johnson]

is sentient and investors are like, okay,

[Nilay Patel]

here's 10 billion, here's 50 billion, here's 100 billion.

[David Pierce]

Now we're blaming the AI founders themselves.

[Nilay Patel]

I find this argument to be essentially nonsensical. Like, because a. The whole AI will remake the economy. AI will change the way that work gets done. We're going to have to do universal basic income because nobody's going to have a job anymore. This was a feature of the rise of all of this stuff for years until. Until a bunch of people went, wait, that sounds horrible. I don't want that. I like my job. I enjoy doing my job. Please don't automate my job away with AI slop. And there was. There have been other lines in all of this. They're like, ugh, in America, we're. We're way over indexed on people liking creative arts. It's like, yeah, I'm good with that, actually. Like, all of these things are fine. And for the longest time, people like Chamath and podcasts, like the all in podcast, were talking in. In glorious terms about how terrific it was going to be when AI completely remade the economy. And so now to call that doomerism is just ridiculous.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I totally agree in that worldview. And that worldview is really prevalent. Alex Karp is running around saying women are going to lose their political power, and it's men who work with their hands who will suddenly have the economic power because AI will replace all of your dumb woke laptop work or whatever he wants to say.

[Nilay Patel]

And if that works to raise money. By the way, Chamath, you're the money guy.

[David Pierce]

Oh, like, he has the money.

[Nilay Patel]

He has the money.

[David Pierce]

He's the dumbest money.

[Nilay Patel]

If this is the sales pitch that works on you, you are the problem.

[David Pierce]

Well, to be clear, these guys hate anthropic because they think anthropic is woke.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure, but it's.

[David Pierce]

Sam Altman is just as doomery in this way. Right? He's the one running around saying, everyone's just going to rent intelligence from the cloud and they're going to build AGI. Like, there's something here where their own messaging is the problem. And they've convinced people that all of the jobs are going away, and now they're facing the consequences of that messaging, and they're blaming the people. And I just keep coming back to the idea that we all knew what was going to happen when you put a camera on every phone in every pocket in the world. We at the Verge have been writing about the effects of that at every level from the very beginning. Like, the whole Verge is kind of founded on the insight that phones would be a big deal. And it was, like, not obvious in 2011.

[Nilay Patel]

It's very funny to tell people that in retrospect. Cause it's like, oh, congratulations. You thought phones might be important. Like, great job. But I'm like, no, it wasn't guaranteed. Right.

[David Pierce]

The idea that we needed to write about technology and culture at the same time, we were like, what are you talking about? It's like, well, the whole. They're all the same. And now here we are. We did it anyway. Because people were like, I love having this phone in my pocket. I love having this camera with me all the time. And you can just. We have written the stories. You draw a straight line from that to, like, the Black Lives Matter movement, to these huge, like, social changes around. Everyone should have a camera all the time. These big conversations about surveillance and surveillance, those are all the costs of putting cameras everywhere in the way that we put them everywhere. Those are enormous costs. I think we're reckoning with those costs now in real ways. But it all happened because people wanted the technology. They love it. That's not what's happening here. Right. The costs are being imposed. We are going to take your job away. Is not the fault of the consumer.

[Nilay Patel]

Right?

[David Pierce]

Right. It might be the fault of Dario, it might be the fault of Sam Altman, but the only way the investment pays off is if you remake the economy with AI. It's the only way that the mobile investment paid off.

[Nilay Patel]

These are the stakes they've drawn for themselves.

[David Pierce]

And I just. I'm flabbergasted that they don't see that they haven't made a great consumer product. That's the thing that will change us. I actually. We had a couple weeks from now, people hear it, but we just taped an episode of Dakota with the CEO of Cisco. Cisco sells the stuff that goes in data centers. And I was asking about this, and I was like, you know, like, if you just said the data center had Netflix in It people would be happy. Like, that's where the movies come from. And he started laughing. He was like, you think so? And I was like, oh, that you don't. This is just flying over your head. Like you have to make some case that there's some benefit to all of this investment in order for the investment to continue. You know who understands it is Satya Nadella. He was at Davos, of all places, and he said that the AI companies need to get, quote, social permission, which is amazing for a company like Microsoft to say, we should run this clip.

[Nilay Patel]

I would say we will quickly lose even the social mission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens. If these tokens are not improving health

[David Pierce]

outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private

[Nilay Patel]

sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large. Okay, I have two thoughts on this.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

One, Davos, famously a place a bunch of billionaires fly on their private jets to talk about how to save the environment. Perfect. Two, this is right. This is correct. I think it's slightly ironic that it's coming from Satya Nadella, someone who has spent the last few years flailing pretty aggressively to try to find the use case he's describing, and it hasn't gone well. Bing is not the thing. Copilot so far is not the thing. Microsoft, I think, in less straightforward terms, is doing a pretty similar kind of retrenchment that fidgets HIMO and OpenAI are talking about that they're like, what if we just approach AI as a business software? And that. That has been. You and I have both been on this podcast saying AI is business software. The business of AI is B2B SaaS software, and has been for a long time. And there are like, we're gonna. We've been threatening to do an episode about the SaaS apocalypse for a while, and I think we should, because I think there are actually really interesting disruptive things that AI is going to do to business software. That is not how you get to where all of these companies want to go. And I think Satya Nadella is right that the risks that they run by not making this appealing to consumers are also going to backfire in business. Right. Because they are. They are incurring such a reputational hit and a sort of reflexive problem with AI that people are developing that is going to make it harder to even build business tools that do AI things.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. I mean, there are as many studies as you can count about whether or not businesses are seeing efficiency improvements by adding AI and the answer is basically not yet or no.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's somewhere between no and like,

[David Pierce]

yeah, it's like it hasn't happened yet. And maybe there's going to be a new set of companies that come up and they're built on the cost models of having a bunch of AI agents instead of a bunch of engineers. And that means they can make the same product as the big company cheaper. And that's just the disruption life cycle. I don't know. Maybe that's going to happen. Has it happened yet? It certainly has not happened yet. And so you're just seeing, okay, we're asking for all of this energy, we're asking for all of this data center displacement and all these communities. The communities are basically saying no, like, make it worth it to us.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. To what end? What is in this for me?

[David Pierce]

And I don't mean to say that AI is like, totally useless. I think it's still pretty brittle. As we have discussed on the show many, many times, you can. You can run into the walls of things AI cannot do. But we know now that at least when it comes to software development, it has tremendous value. That is causing a bunch of consternation in that community you just had Paul Ford on. I think that conversation is brilliant. People should listen to it. Once you can develop software, you can kind of go into adjacent industries. It's a real thing. There's a lot of software running a lot of companies, and you can widen out, but that doesn't mean you can do everything, and it doesn't mean you can eat the whole world. And I just see this gap where everybody in that industry is like, why doesn't Wired like tech anymore? Or why does the Verge hate technology? And it's like, no, it's literally the citizens of America who are like, I don't like this.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

Like, the polling is clear. And it's not because of the media. It's not because of Doomerism. It's because you're asking for so much and you haven't delivered a great consumer product. You've delivered some very compelling enterprise products. Yeah, that's not enough.

[Nilay Patel]

And I think the hope from a lot of these companies is that something like Claude Code will eventually be a consumer product. I mean, you see it now, right? They built Cowork out of Claude Code to make it a little more accessible. They built Dispatch out of Cowork, which is basically like, you can. You can run it from a messaging app. Like, they're trying to make this kind of creative tool accessible to more people and it's going to work. But that is not a mainstream, that is not an Instagram level use case. Right. You and I always like to talk about the sort of foundational mobile experiences. Right. And the two you always bring up, which I think are right, are Uber and Instagram that are like things you couldn't do on a phone that the technology on a phone enabled that changed the way we do life. That's the stakes. And there is nothing remotely approaching that for normal people living their normal lives.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, you can have a lot of feelings about Uber. We did. We just had Dara on decoder. Boy, do people have feelings about Uber.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

But the fact that you can be almost anywhere in the world, push a button and have a Toyota Camry appear is just bananas. That is just a remarkable thing that happened because of the mobile revolution.

[Nilay Patel]

That should be Uber's new tagline.

[David Pierce]

I've said that. I said, I said that to Dara. I said, well, I once said that to Travis Kalanick in our office in Midtown. And he just started cracking up. He's like, I never thought about that way. Like, it's crazy, right? Like you push a button and something happens in the real world. And in Uber's case, either it's, it's a Camry or a Highlander. It's one or the other, really. Or if you're unlucky, it's a Model 3 and they'll have the regen breaking on and you'll just have a bad time. A lot of complaints in uber world about model 3s with regen breaking. It's the same with doordash. It's whatever. Like you push a button, something happens in the real world. You order something from Amazon, an object comes to your house. That is the thing that the mobile revolution truly delivered in a way that had never occurred before. And then Instagram and social media, we actually wrote a piece about this. James Fearham, our first creative director, wrote a piece about this way at the beginning. James is an old film photographer. He used to shoot the windsurfing championships hanging off a helicopter on film.

[Nilay Patel]

Sick.

[David Pierce]

And so when digital showed up and phone showed up and all the photographers had their moment, he was like, I so happy about this. Like, I never want to be worried that my film is gone and I missed the shot. Again, it's digital. Like, he had this totally interesting, wonderful perspective. And his reaction to Instagram was, it is so insanely powerful to put the distribution next to the camera. Right? You're going, the feedback loop here is, it's the story. I've come back. We'll link that story too. I've come back to it over and over again. Just the insight there is so powerful. You can't do that without a phone. You can make an Instagram on a desktop computer, but the camera part doesn't exist. And so most people will never close the gap. Instagram brought those things right next to each other. I think TikTok brought those things right next to each other. The dominant language of TikTok is replication. You see a trend and you make it yourself. That is an unusual dynamic in the history of culture. Most people are like, you copied me. I'm sue you. Right. But, like, TikTok is just about widespread replication. These are huge changes that technology brings about. I think they're fascinating. I think it's pretty hard to make the argument that we don't like technology because this is what we talk about all the time on the show. And our site is like, look at how cool this is. Like, we're changing how we live.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And then AI is like, it's in there. And it's like, would you like a girlfriend? That's the best idea they have.

[Nilay Patel]

Right?

[David Pierce]

And it's like, most people are like, no, that's pretty weird. And my friend who does have an AI girlfriend is getting weirder by the day. And it's like, it's bananas to me that this industry can't see it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, agreed. All right, we should move on from this. But I will say I am curious if you have used or have an inkling to what these use cases are. If you've seen something, if you're making something, if there is a thing that you're betting on as, like, the mainstream consumer use case, I desperately want to hear about it. And if it has to do with vibe coding, I don't want to hear

[David Pierce]

about it anymore or automating anything. I'm serious about this. The idea that most people can identify a loop in their lives that is worth automating.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

I mean, we got 50 years of technology development to prove that that is not the case.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

You just can't do it.

[Nilay Patel]

Productivity, like, for me, as a productivity nerd, AI has been so fun because it is going to remap everyone's to do list system. Most people don't have a to do list system. So it's like we need to go several levels down into what it is is like to be a person in the world. But genuinely, if you have a theory on what that is, I want to hear about it. 8.66version 1.1 is the hotline. FirstCastheferge.com is the email. NeilTheverge.com is where you can send all of your vibe coding ideas. We're gonna take a break and then it's trifold time. We'll be right back.

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[Allison Johnson]

All of them.

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[Nilay Patel]

All right, we're back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.

[Allison Johnson]

Hello.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, I. We're here to talk about Trifolds, and I want to. But I just had one of the strangest parent technology experiences I've ever had in my. This is happening to me in real time, and I just need to talk this out with both of you who have young children. So our three year old is in preschool, and for the first time, we're using the Bright Wheel app. Do you guys know what this is? I don't know.

[David Pierce]

I assume it checks them in and out, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I assume every school has apps like this, but, like, we. We check them in and out with a QR code. They send us pictures throughout the day. They send us, like, information about what they're doing, all this stuff. And a few minutes ago, I got three separate notifications. I don't know if you can see this here that just say incident and have a band aid emoji. Oh, no, I. I have. I have no other information. Presumably he's alive. I don't know what to. Like, what. What do I. What do I do with this? This is like, I don't. I either desperately need to know about this and need to leave this right now, or this is fine, and this is information I'm going to wish I never had.

[David Pierce]

Do you think there's like a second set of notifications, like, after incident?

[Nilay Patel]

Like, it's just like, come now.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, like, it's pretty bad. You guys.

[Allison Johnson]

That's a phone call when the phone starts ringing.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

So all of this is to say this was. Luckily, this is like 20 minutes ago, so presumably everyone has recovered, but I may suddenly leave this podcast. Modern parenting is very strange. This is like, I have both. I'm glad to have all this.

[David Pierce]

Is there incident with a band aid and then, like, incident with a poop emoji? Do you know what I'm saying? I don't know.

[Nilay Patel]

This is my first. Well, so there is. There's potty colon P and there's potty colon bm. So I know the ones and twos.

[David Pierce]

I see.

[Nilay Patel]

But like, this, it's a real. Like, how much information are we as people supposed to have? Do you know what I mean?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, this is.

[Nilay Patel]

This is the dilemma. I feel With Bright, we get very

[Allison Johnson]

little of that information and is honestly for the best. I'm like, well, he was alive at the end of the day.

[David Pierce]

Great.

[Allison Johnson]

I think that's.

[Nilay Patel]

That might be the correct answer. Like, call me if I need to get them to the hospital, and otherwise I'll see them at the end of the day.

[David Pierce]

It'll be fine. See, now I'm in a very different place with the older one. So, you know, Max is, like, almost 8, and she's in second grade. So now it's just. She comes home from school. I'm like, what happened to me? She's like, you'll never know. No information will be provided to you. And so I'm kind of, like, looking. I'm, like, waiting for Jack to, like, get some bright wheel in his life.

[Nilay Patel]

You can know the P's and the bms.

[David Pierce]

It's gonna. With Max. You know, when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, like, my office was in the basement. Like, I did. I did the show from the basement basement. And I was often down there working, and Becky would be upstairs, and you couldn't actually yell from the basement all the way upstairs. And so we used the walkie talkie on our Apple watch all the time. And it was basically just a poop notification. So, like a very expensive, like, I need you. She pooped again. And now this house. You can. You can just yell from his bedroom to the kitchen. Like, it's trivial. And I feel bad because we're not walkie talkie about what you've called DMs anymore.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's important parental communication to just yell. It's happening to each other exactly three times a day. Yes.

[David Pierce]

Or, oh, no,

[Nilay Patel]

I need new pants. Like, it's a whole thing. All right, Allison, you have what has become a precious object just in the last few days. This is now rare phone contraband, which is you have a Samsung Galaxy Z Tri Fold in your possession.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Tell us what happened with the Tri fold this week.

[David Pierce]

I mean, you have a thing that appears to be Samsung gossip.

[Nilay Patel]

That's a fair point.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah. Tbd.

[Nilay Patel]

You have been trying to get this phone for months.

[Allison Johnson]

Yes. We have been on a whole journey trying to get one wrote about it all in very great detail on the site. But the basics are like Samsung pr, you know, typically will send us a review unit of a new phone. They did not provide us one this time around. There are reasons for that.

[David Pierce]

Always a tell.

[Allison Johnson]

Yes, exactly. And I'm realizing how much of a tell. So we tried to get A hold of this trifold. We're like, we gotta buy one. Went in and out of stock, like, so fast. Couldn't get one. We turned to ebay, you know, found someone selling a trifold for a small fortune and ordered it. And in the meantime, I had to fly all over the world to go see phones. And so none of us really clocked that it hadn't shipped when it was supposed to. So this was like, red flag number one. We go back and forth with the seller. The thing finally shows up at my door, and. And I open up this FedEx package. It is a box with, like, two seals on it that say, like, do not accept if this has been tampered with. And it's, like, very clearly been tampered with. So I was like, this is very strange. Not usually how I receive a new phone. Opened it up, took the. The film off of the. The inner screen, and there were crumbs and little hairs on, like, yeah, yeah. This is not the first time that phone had been, like, you know, exposed to air.

[Nilay Patel]

This is not ideal.

[Allison Johnson]

It was. It was gross. I turned the phone on. It's already set up. Which was also a very large red flag. Also not how phones are typically shipped to a. To a customer. All that is to say, this was a very weird experience. I was sketched out. The phone immediately asked for a whole bunch of permissions, and I was like, deny factory reset. And then I turned it off, and I, like, didn't want to touch it

[Nilay Patel]

for a little bit.

[Allison Johnson]

So that was acquiring the trifold. In the meantime, Samsung announced they're not going to make it anymore.

[Nilay Patel]

They canceled the phone?

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, they just up and canceled it. Like, I've been on this journey to get this stupid phone, and all of a sudden I'm like, well, this is our. This is the end of our relationship. I thought we were at the beginning, we were gonna have these good times together. So. So here I have this phone, and just the funniest part is that it. When I powered it back on after resetting it and coming to my senses, it. It wanted a SIM card to set it up. Also strange to me, I've never had a phone insist on a SIM card. And I was like, well, I don't have one lying around. I don't really trust it. And then the light bulb went off. I was like, I have this Trump Mobile SIM that is just languishing in. In like, a Samsung S25.

[Nilay Patel]

It's kind of perfect, actually, right?

[David Pierce]

This is the realest Trump Mobile has ever been Right.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Allison Johnson]

It, like, got this. This phone to work. I set it up. It still asks for a lot of weird permissions, but I think these are just. The thing is, we have. The serial number is a phone sold in China, and the ebay seller claimed it was a Taiwan model, which is a different serial number. This is where the weirdness is coming in, I think. So this is why I'm getting. Some of these apps that are loaded on the phone are just in one UI in China, which is. I. I've never seen them. I don't think it's like a malware infested, you know, taking time bomb of a phone, but it is running on Trump Mobile, and that's like the weirdest combination of phone and network.

[David Pierce]

A weird Chinese phone with it. Does it have the Play Store if it's Chinese?

[Allison Johnson]

No, it does not.

[David Pierce]

So a weird Chinese trifold with no Google Play Store Play services because they're not allowed in China. Running on Trump Mobile is an unholy combination. Like, you should light a candle or something.

[Nilay Patel]

It's actually kind of perfect. I feel like I have no notes on that. And I actually feel like the Trump administration would be like, great job, Allison,

[David Pierce]

or they would arrest you. Like, I don't know if we should run this podcast.

[Allison Johnson]

I don't know which government official is going to show up at my door and arrest me. It could be any number.

[Nilay Patel]

It's true for any number of countries. It's a lot of possibilities. So how far have you gotten with this phone? Is it like. Is it actually up and running for you now?

[Allison Johnson]

It functions. It. It won't get on the. It won't get on the Internet on the Trump Mobile network for some reason. I. It'll receive a spam phone call. The phone started. I was in the other room yesterday, and the phone started ringing, and it was honestly like a horror movie. I was like, oh, sorry.

[David Pierce]

The fact that the Trump Mobile SIM won't provide you data, but we'll provide you spam calls is also perfect.

[Nilay Patel]

It's perfect.

[Allison Johnson]

Perfect, yes. Yeah. It doesn't do the thing that you pay $50 a month for, but you can have a spam call. So it does not have the Internet. I don't trust it enough to put it on my home WI fi. So I hotspotted it to the iPhone air that I'm using right now. I was like, what do I do? And I just loaded up, you know, the Verge in a web browser and. And made this. The window a bunch of different sizes. I was like, cool.

[David Pierce]

That's what you do.

[Allison Johnson]

$4,000 later, I can, like, look at

[David Pierce]

the Internet and resizing a window on a phone that, honestly, that's. That's a lot of innovation.

[Nilay Patel]

So somewhere in there is a truly damning critique of foldable phones, which we should get to. But I do. You guys, I'm assuming, were as surprised as I was about the cancellation of the Trifold.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

This was a bit.

[David Pierce]

The second Samsung refused to send us a review unit, I was like, 1. This product's a dud. I mean, look, I'm gonna. Here's my usual caveat. It is very hard to make money making media on the Internet. Sure. And there's a lot of creators out there and a lot of influencers and like, go make your bag. Do it how you gotta do it. They just make a different thing than we make. And so my criticism here is not of people in their businesses and their audience, like, please be successful. It's so hard. I'm not going to fault you for trying to make money on YouTube or Instagram or whatever. It's so hard. It's a huge tell when only the influencers and creators get the phone. Sure. Because they're so reliant on brand deals, they're so reliant on access in very specific ways that these companies can put them on rails. You can actually see it right now with Apple. Apple is putting a bunch of influencers on rails. Interviews about Apple 50. You can see it. We don't do that. Right. What you buy from us is our ethics policy. We're huge jerks about it. We're very annoying about it. Talk it all the time. And so when the companies won't give us the phone or give our peers at other publications who have the same or similar ethics policies, when it's hard for traditional reviewers to get the phone, you always know it is a tell every single time. Because it means the product isn't good enough and the coverage has to be standardized off. Now, again, I'm not trying to take shots at any. Lots of influencers got the phone. They can feel however they want. I'm just saying that's the reason I think it's a tell. Because we don't have to do what you say.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

And that's a dynamic that exists for a lot of people. And so the second it was like week three of me in the editorial meeting in the morning being like, do we have the phone yet? And it was like Samsung was ghosting us. Although this phone sucks.

[Nilay Patel]

Allison, what were they telling you about why you couldn't get a phone.

[Allison Johnson]

I got. I got a lot of polite, you know, lines like, oh, you know, we're noting your request and your interest. I was like, okay, great. You know, and I teased out a little more information about, you know, they were sent very few review units and they were going to try and give me a heads up when it went back on sale and it sold out before anybody could be like, hey, right,

[David Pierce]

because it made five.

[Nilay Patel]

I was going to say, we're all agreed on that is not about popularity. That's about they made five.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah, yeah. Which is when I started to suspect something about this. I was like, if they wanted to sell this phone, they could sell the phone. Like, they would just make more phones.

[David Pierce]

Now there's. Look, they. They could. There's like a RAM shortage. There are tariffs. There's a lot of reasons that an already expensive phone was getting more expensive or harder to produce. And maybe you just want to put all the ram in the S26, but that's not really what they're saying here, right? Like, they're just like, yep, goodbye.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, yeah. They're framing it as, like, this was a nifty concept that we decided to show off for a little while. And that is. That feels very disingenuous with how Samsung originally talked about this.

[David Pierce]

Also, if there's real demand for the phone, they would allocate the RAM to this phone. Do you know what I mean? Like, they make all the phones. If you're like, well, people really want to buy tri folds, we're going to put the components that we can get in the tri folds and we'll charge what the market can bear. And instead they're like, no. On top of that, oppo launched the Find N6, which it's a zero feel crease, not zero C. You get what I'm saying? You can see it, but you can't feel. Is very compelling. We have a video of it. Dom did it. Hands on. It is almost creaseless. They're only launching it in Asia and Australia. They're not even coming to Europe, let alone the United States. My thesis here. Alison, I'm curious. Now that you tried the tri fold, I know you've reviewed all the other folds. I think this might be a dud. I don't think people want folding phones. And I think my little phone gets bigger. Might still be compelling, but my big phone gets even bigger and my big phone gets three times as big. I don't know.

[Nilay Patel]

Can I just tell you, I am this close to Declaring victory over you, Alison.

[Allison Johnson]

Oh, no.

[Nilay Patel]

You and I have been fighting flip phones versus folding phones for like two years. And I'm, I'm this close.

[Allison Johnson]

Is this feeling like I'm winning, like intervention? Is this like. Yeah, no, I wouldn't do that.

[David Pierce]

I wouldn't do that to you because again, having a Chinese phone with a Trump mobile SIM on it I think is punishment enough.

[Allison Johnson]

Right.

[David Pierce]

But Allison, you've been using the phone phones. You've obviously seen this phone as close as anyone can see it. What do you think? I mean, it's just. Did this work?

[Allison Johnson]

I think it's still, I think it's still playing out. And it's definitely, you know, we're seeing in real time companies be like, what should this kind of phone be shaped like? What's the limit of how big it can be versus how annoying it is to carry around versus how expensive it is? Like, the trifold is almost $3,000 if you could actually buy one. So. And meanwhile, you know, the Chinese brands, I think are dialing it in a little faster. It kind of seems they have the, you know, the zero fill crease. They have a very slim foldable that is also dust and water resistant. We in the U.S. we have the, the Pixel 10 ProFold, which is the dust resistant one. So you can't have like quite all together. And I think there's, you know, I think companies are really, for many reasons hesitant to jump into the US Especially with a phone that's going to cost somewhere between 1800 and $2000. So I don't know. I think some of these companies, it sort of feels like we're in a place where they're treading water and they kind of want to see what this Apple foldable that we will potentially probably maybe see towards the end of the year is going to look like. And we're such an iPhone centric market. I think that could be a big moment for folding phones, or it's the moment we find out that nobody wanted these things and it was just a fun little project for me to, to walk around with one and buy a tiny keyboard for it. I think it'll be a telling moment.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, you're my favorite case on this because you have kind of deliberately, you have bullied yourself into finding use cases for the foldable phone. And I think you've genuinely found some. Like there are, it's not that there aren't things that the foldable phone makes better, it's just that they're still very expensive. And I think like we were talking about in a moment where all of these companies are struggling desperately to have their phones not getting more expensive. The idea of this already being twice the price is a problem, right? We've spent. I mean, how long has the fold been out? Five years now. We've been waiting for the price on these things to come down, and it just has not. It just hasn't. And now there's this upward pressure on phones that is like, preventing these things from becoming mainstream, accessible anyway. And then you fold in. I. I say this with love, Alison. Most people do not want to tote a Logitech keys to go to the coffee shop and do email on. On the table while they drink their coffee. That just. It just doesn't feel like somewhere in there. And part of me wonders if. If maybe, you know, we've. We've talked a lot over the years about the sort of cultural differences in phone markets, that maybe there are reasons that people will use phones differently in Asia or in Brazil or in some of these other markets that have very different phone needs than the US does, that they'll start to take off. But for me, right now, I don't look around and have any reason to think there are sort of killer apps for foldables just sitting out there, especially not at this price.

[David Pierce]

I do want to call out the thunderous sideways dunk on the Logitech keys. Two go. Very important. Look, I have one over here and it rules.

[Allison Johnson]

It's a beautiful little keyboard.

[David Pierce]

Total stray at the Logitech. Keys to go. Richard Lawler, vergecast's favorite Richard Lawler is our senior news editor here at the Verge. He runs our news team. His job is boiled down to looking at stuff. And I also say that with love, because if I could do any one job at the Verge, it would be a news editor, which is just a terrifying reality for most of our team.

[Nilay Patel]

Richard does it better than Nilay would.

[David Pierce]

Just so everyone's clear, he does a much better job. It is still my favorite job. It was the job I had at Engadget ages ago. I mean, his job is looking at stuff. He has a Pixel tenfold. And we were talking about this and he was like, I am the person that this phone is for and I struggle to find reasons to use it because all day long I'm meant to be looking at things and on the go, being able to have the bigger canvas so I can, like, look at a desktop webpage and, like, evaluate what I'm looking at and, like, have a slack window open and back and Forth. And he's like, I don't. I don't use it. Maybe he doesn't have a logitech keys to go. Maybe this is the problem.

[Allison Johnson]

See, I gotta sell him on the logitech. The. The thing that. That makes me wonder if there's some place that they could hit this market is my parents, because I brought home the Pixel 10 ProFold for that was kind of my home. My phone I used over Christmas and I opened it up and my mom was like, I want that phone. That is so cool. But it is $2,000. My parents are Pixel A series people. They buy their $500 phone and they don't want to think about buying a new phone for the next, you know, five years. If they can get away with it and they have their iPad, it's like iPad to FaceTime with a grandchildren and then phone. And if those things could be the same device, I wonder if there's a world where they'd be like, okay, yeah, I'm willing to spend more on this phone and it's going to replace the iPad. Or if it just ends up being like, no, that's $2,000. I'm going to stick with, you know, these two devices and it's not ruining my life.

[David Pierce]

You've brought us to the precipice, Allison. I know who will take the first leap in predicting what the Apple folding phone will do, right?

[Allison Johnson]

It is for FaceTiming grandchildren.

[David Pierce]

If that's all it is, you can unfold it and run two iPhone apps side by side and then maybe like a big FaceTime. Either it will be a huge hit or the biggest flop in Apple history.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

The question is whether you unfold it and it is a little iPad.

[Nilay Patel]

Right? Or a big iPhone or.

[David Pierce]

And you know, that's a pretty fine distinction lately. I am just truly, if. If they make that phone and it is the same kind of compromise as the iPhone air where it gets thinner and lighter and the camera is way worse. It's not worth it to me. You will have reduced the primary utility of my phone to give me an iPad. And I don't use my iPad. It's like. But I might be a very narrow use case. Like, maybe it's just big FaceTime is all anybody wants. I'm looking at this. Samsung scared the pants out of Apple for like two years by having big screens first. And there's like a lot of, like, internal tech company emails from various court cases where like, Apple is like, literally freaking out that Samsung has big screens on phones and is Taking market share away. And it. It reorganized, like, the tech landscape. Like, Samsung became a player because their phones were bigger than Apple's for a couple years there.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that one. That worked.

[David Pierce]

It worked. And then Apple was like, fine, our phones are big too now. Back to normal. And you would think. I think this is what Samsung thought, that the Fold would be, like, the biggest screen of all. And I don't think that's playing out the way that they thought it would. And so what's Apple gonna catch up to? I don't know. I think predicting what the iPhone fold might be in the face of Samsung. The Trifold didn't work here. I can't tell you. The Z fold 7 is, like, a phenomenon. Oppo is not even. It's, like, hottest ones. They're not launching it in, like, one of the bigger markets for Android in the world, in Europe. I don't know. It just seems like this might have come to nothing.

[Allison Johnson]

I certainly think that the. The RAM situation and all those different pressures are, like, come at a very tough time.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Allison Johnson]

For foldables, when it's sort of like, okay, we're figuring out some of this technology. We haven't figured out how to make it cheaper, and all of the pressure is leading to more expensive phones now. So I can see how you'd maybe ease off of, like, okay, well, this cool thing that we're trying to push forward on, we're going to back off a little bit and just focus on, like, selling phones and trying to make some money off of that right now.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's. If you're gonna decide to stop selling one thing, this is pretty clearly the one. Right. Like, yeah, if we need rams on the phones, the people buy. So we're gonna stop putting it at, like, it might just freeze the tiny bit of this market that does exist for a while because you just have to put the rams in something else.

[David Pierce]

But that doesn't explain why they didn't want us to review it. I think the phone wasn't very good.

[Allison Johnson]

It's super heavy. I. I will say. And I. I played with it at ces. I don't know. My takeaway then wasn't like, wow, what a heavy phone. But maybe it's just having it, you know, especially, like, all folded.

[David Pierce]

Can you unfold it for us? Do you have it?

[Nilay Patel]

I can, I will say, like, six times right after this thing came out. Travis, our producer, would just slack me and be like, who is this for?

[David Pierce]

And I think it's.

[Nilay Patel]

It's a.

[David Pierce]

It's.

[Nilay Patel]

That Thing is enormous.

[David Pierce]

I mean, this is like, you know, when the. The Huawei trifold came and everyone just kept watching that video of it unfolding. Like, I'm having the same reaction to it. Like, look at that thing.

[Nilay Patel]

It looks sick.

[David Pierce]

Boy, I want to unfold that a lot.

[Allison Johnson]

I mean, it's real thin. You hold it like this. You're like, this is a lightweight tablet, and you fold it up and you're like, God, this is a heavy phone.

[David Pierce]

I mean, look, maybe the problem is just the people. Like, I know I'm going to say this about Android tablets and the people are going to send me notes. Maybe the problem is people just don't want Android tablets.

[Allison Johnson]

That's why we're waiting for the I fold.

[Nilay Patel]

Allison, will you just hold up the home screen to the camera again? You can tell from this home screen that no one has done the job of figuring out what Android is supposed to look like when you open your phone up, because all they do is they take Android and they just make it real stretchy. Like, that's not. That is not the answer. And neither is the malware.

[David Pierce]

It wants access to your network.

[Allison Johnson]

Constantly asking, begging for.

[David Pierce]

It's like, do you have any financial information, by the way, that I should.

[Allison Johnson]

Have you considered downloading your banking app? I think, yeah. I think the. The other side of this is, like, I've experienced all the wonkiness of using Android on the big screen of a phone, and I. I have notes, you know, like, let it be more of a computer than. Than they do right now. And the other question is, like, when Chrome OS becomes aluminium, is it going to. When I open up a folding phone, am I going to get that experience or am I going to continue to get big Android? Which is frustrating. You know, I. I don't know. There's, like, a number of scenarios that could. Could play out or start to play out this year, and, like, we're gonna have to wait and see. It's an annoying reality.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it does seem like the. The iPhone fold stakes are both very high and very low in that respect. Like, this is not. This is Apple going to sort of try to do the, like, prove the market thing, but there is no market. And it's just, is this the Vision Pro or is this the ipod, right, where they put up the slide of all the ugly ones and they're like, we did better. Is it that? Or is it. Look at this science project that we also made.

[David Pierce]

Right. I'm just saying, if you're, like, triumphantly like, all these ones turn in Android tablets, but the iPhone fold, turns into an iPad. It's, like, cool. Like there's something there that will just be weird.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Allison Johnson]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Indeed. All right, we need to take a break. Allison, how long do you intend to use this thing before you, like, throw it out of a window to avoid whatever is happening to you?

[Allison Johnson]

So, you know, I'm gonna take it out on tomorrow. I have a whole day planned for it. I want it to have, like, a nice, you know, day where we go do some fun stuff. We're gonna go downtown. I'm going to use my, my little Logitech keys to go.

[Nilay Patel]

You're going to give it all its favorite treats.

[Allison Johnson]

Exactly. I know, because it's, you know, if they discontinued it, it's. We don't know. This is so sweet how long it has. Yeah. I'm going to give it a good, like, effort and then I don't know what's going to. What's going to become of it.

[Nilay Patel]

Put it out of its misery. Yes.

[Allison Johnson]

I hope not. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, well, good luck. Thank you for coming on. We're gonna take another break and then Neil and I are gonna come back and presumably yell about free speech for a while. We'll be right back.

[Host/Announcer]

Support for this show comes from Factor. Somewhere between the first warm weekend and the fourth of July, eating well stops feeling optional. Luckily, you can keep eating healthy with well prepared meals from Factor. Factor prepares meals designed by dyke dietitians and crafted by chefs. Ready in two minutes. No planning, no cooking. With 100 rotating weekly meals to keep things fresh and delicious, Factor makes meals that fit your goals and schedule. No refined sugars, no artificial sweeteners, and no refined seed oils. And all of this can help you eat healthier and manage your calorie intake. Plus, the new Muscle Pro collection supports strength and recovery. Perfect if you're getting back into a workout routine, head to factor meals.com verge50off and use code verge50OFF to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year Offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with factor. Support for this show comes from Upwork. Every business wants to make a profit, and with profit comes growth. But successfully scaling a business takes the right expertise at the right time. Upwork can help grow teams quickly by bringing in specialized freelancers so you can move faster and take the business to the next level. Upwork is a one stop platform to find, hire and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing and business operations. Upwork can help grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 plus categories. You can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster and scale support up or down without committing to full time headcount. You can visit Upwork.com right now to post your job for free and connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upwell o r k.com upwork.com.

[David Pierce]

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[David Pierce]

Ew.

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[Nilay Patel]

All right, we're back. Time for the lightning round. And Neil, I assume that means it's we're we. Once again, we have to do that.

[David Pierce]

We're supposed to say, it's unsponsored for flavor.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, yeah, it's unsponsored for flavor.

[David Pierce]

There you go.

[Nilay Patel]

Long pause. I want you to imagine like two or three ellipses in a row every time I say that. Uh, is it time?

[David Pierce]

It's time. It's time. You don't have to. David. We're at the point now where Brendan is so dumb that people, like, jump out of bushes to tell me how stupid he is.

[Nilay Patel]

It is true. It's not so much the existence of Brandon Carr as a dummy that makes me sad. It is just the consistency of it. It's just like sometimes you need like a. Like a routine breaker in your life. You know what I mean?

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Can Brendan just. Just like, what? What if one time you just came on here and you're like, brendan, this amazing smart thing. Do you know how great that would be for the Verge cast if you were like, three cheers for Brent. Anyway, it is time once again for America's favorite podcast. With their podcasts, Brendan Carr is a Dummy. This week's theme Music submitted by Julia. Mark, Here it is.

[David Pierce]

Brendan Carr.

[Allison Johnson]

Brendan Carr.

[David Pierce]

How did he get this far?

[Allison Johnson]

Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[David Pierce]

Brendan Carr is a dummy. Oh my God.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you ever hear a song and immediately know this is going to be a my head for a long time? I'm going to be lying on my pillow at 2:30 this morning singing.

[David Pierce]

Julia, I don't know. Thank you for that. That was incredible. I love the band Stars. Like they're one of my favorite bands. And that just sounds like a very like not a great stars record because that's not what they would do. But it's like, you know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

It's like the song they made just to sort of get the juices flowing first thing in the day.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Like they were like we made a song about like, why did you do that? But that was amazing. Oh, it made me so happy. Thank you so much.

[Nilay Patel]

Julia. What do we have this week?

[David Pierce]

We have a lot. We're gonna go from that vibe to a very different vibe. Like me being so, like happy to me being so upset. All in one. All in one go. So here's just some facts. The United States is currently engaged in a war in Iran.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh God. Not for start here.

[David Pierce]

You were going to start here. It does not appear that anyone knows why. It does not appear that anyone knows how this war will end or if it should. And it does not appear that Donald Trump even knows if it's a war. You know what I mean? Like the President's supposed to ask Congress to declare war and they keep going back and forth and he keeps saying it's war. It's all very confusing and bad. I would say media coverage of this war is unlike, for example, the war in Iraq, which was my political awakening as a young college student where everyone I knew under the age of 500 knew that going to war in Iraq was a bad idea. And the media and the Democrats and everybody was like, we're doing it. Freedom fries. And then the war in Iraq. And this is very bad. I'm just putting this in a context, right. I think what this administration wanted was a bunch of drum pounding war coverage the way that the war in Iraq got a bunch of drum pounding war coverage. And they're not getting it because again, everyone's like, is it a war? And there's just confusion. Why did we go to war? Confusion. How do we end the war? Confusion. This is all fun. I think this is driving Donald Trump crazy. So Brendan last week was at Mar a Lago where presumably he encountered Donald Trump we actually have a clip of how Brendan describes Donald Trump. This is on a podcast he was on called Pod Force One. Can we just run this clip?

[Nilay Patel]

He is, you know, the Alpha in every single realm.

[David Pierce]

That's true.

[Nilay Patel]

In every single place all across the world.

[David Pierce]

Okay.

[Nilay Patel]

God, that sucks.

[David Pierce]

That sucks so bad. First of all, just as an exercise for the listener, it's very easy to make a list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the alpha. Like my daughter's second grade classroom. It's almost impossible to be the Alpha in that environment.

[Nilay Patel]

Like an NFL locker room.

[David Pierce]

I don't know about that. You're powerful if the people think you're powerful. Like, this is like the theory of true power, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Like a PTA meeting.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? Like a Planned Parenthood board meeting. Like, I don't think he's the most powerful person in that room. Like, there's. You can come up with like an infinite list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the most powerful person in the room, would not be the Alpha room. Any room I'm in, honestly, it was there and I took it. I don't feel bad about it at all. So that's just how Brendan encounters Donald Trump. Like, he's just, he's just there as a sycophant to suck up to the bus, which is a bad thing for the primary speech regulator in the United States, especially one as censorious is Brendan. But again, just as like an exercise, you can make a. It's like a pretty fun exercise to make a list of rooms in which any president would not be the alpha. And I'm just assuring you, like a kindergarten would be one of those rooms. Like, it's trivial to make this list. Okay. I bring this up because, you know, Brendan's at Mar a Lago, where, you know, the alpha dog is telling him what to do.

[Nilay Patel]

From the 14th hole.

[David Pierce]

From the 14th hole, yeah. And Trump puts on Truth Social, this, like, classic rambling out of his mind Truth Social Post, where he says, yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the fake news media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly stuck down in an airport. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal in particular, and other low quote papers and media actually want us to lose the war. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts. They are truly second demented people. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah Trump stuff. He's mad at the newspaper saying the war is going poorly, or that the United States is incurring any losses, or that the United States has made errors in the war like bombing a school. He doesn't like the coverage of the war. He's not getting Iraq war coverage. It's just not happening.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

How does Brendan react to this? He says broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortion, also known as the fake news, have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest and they will lose their licenses if they do not. And he goes on to say changing course in their own business interest since trust and legacy media is not falling on an all time low blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Nilay Patel]

This like rhymes with him going on Benny Johnson's podcast and telling ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, but is actually somehow like a veiled threat than that this

[David Pierce]

is an open threat and it's dumb in a staggering number of ways. First of all, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are not broadcasters. I don't know how else to say this. They're newspapers. They don't have broadcast licenses to the extent that they make audio and video programming. They distribute them over the Internet where Brendan has no authority whatsoever. So he's taking this Trump shot at the Wall Street Journal, which I will remind you is owned by Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times. And he's taken this Trump criticism of the Times in the Journal and turning it to the place where he does have authority, Broadcast news organization. He doesn't really even have authority over that. He has this idea that he can use the concept of a license renewal to affect the news coverage by saying you're doing news distortion. This is a totally unproven theory. This hasn't come up ever. Like a broadcast station hasn't had its license denied in like a long time. And if he does it, it's going to be a court case. It's unproven that he has this authority.

[Nilay Patel]

But the threats do keep working.

[David Pierce]

The threats do keep working.

[Nilay Patel]

The chilling effect, as we have talked about many times, is to some extent the point and is working.

[David Pierce]

Yep. And I'll just remind people the chilling effect is this concept in First Amendment law that just by threatening enforcement, you stop the speech from ever happening. Right. People are afraid that they will be punished for the speech. They never say the thing out loud. And that is happening all over the place. The chilling effect is super real in the American media right now, especially for the broadcasters who keep running into Brennan Carr. This is why James Tall Rico wasn't on the Colbert Show.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

The CBS was effectively chilled from that in whatever way. That that actually happened. The chilling effect worked there. They made the decision, but it was because they were afraid of enforcement. And I think we're going to see a lot of that in this upcoming election cycle. The chilling effect of the equal time rule is just going to be real for the broadcasters in the cycle. So now we have an extension of this. Brendan has this perceived power of the news distortion rule. And he's saying his interpretation of that is broadcasters must operate in the public interest. And what Donald Trump thinks is that the public interest is positive coverage of the war.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. Cause that is patriotism.

[David Pierce]

Because that is patriotism.

[Nilay Patel]

Being a patriot means loving the war that your country is in, no matter

[David Pierce]

why we started it, or how it will end, or how much it will cost, or whether there's an end in sight. And again, just because my frame of reference is the war in Iraq, that's what they want, right? They just want freedom fries and chest pounding coverage and an absolute belief that there are weapons of mass destruction. All that stuff that happened in the early 2000s, which was a mistake. And to the extent that anyone's learned a lesson, that lesson has sort of been learned and they're not getting that coverage. And so now Brendan is saying broadcasters must operate in the public interest, even if that means not critically covering a war that the majority of Americans do not like. So this is Brendan being very stupid, right? Like, I think he's out over his skis. I think he's. I think he's misread the room. I'm gonna punish a bunch of comedians for making fun of Donald Trump. You can pick up about half of Americans with that.

[Nilay Patel]

It's also like lowish stakes, right?

[David Pierce]

I don't think it's great. I think I will be outraged about the First Amendment. You know, lots of people will be outraged about the First Amendment. Stephen Colbert will get lots of views on YouTube because saying the thing is not allowed works. But you can pick up about half Americans by saying, don't make fun of the president. Sure. Another party, when you get to don't do negative coverage of the war or the government will punish you, you've made like a critical miscalculation. You are so stupid, Brendan. And you've come all the way back around where Ron Johnson, who's a senator from my home state of Wisconsin, is on Fox News criticizing Brennan Carr. And the reason I'm bringing up Ron is again, he's senator for my home state of Wisconsin. Ron is a complete and total idiot. Like, he just is. Like the people of Wisconsin know, he's an idiot. Like, everyone knows he's an idiot. Like, this is just not a smart man. And, you know, for whatever reason, he keeps getting elected. Like, Ron thought the Foxconn factory was a great idea. You know what I mean? Like, and even people who vote for Ron are like, he's not the brightest bulb, but he's our guy. Like, that's the vibe around Ron. Wisconsin. Here's Senator Ron Johnson on Fox News after being asked about Brendan Carr threatening the broadcast licenses of news organizations that aren't sufficiently patriotic. I'm a big supporter of the First Amendment. I do not like the heavy hand of government, no matter who's wielding it. So, no, I would rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible. And really, the federal government's role is to protect our freedoms, protect our. Our constitutional rights.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, there's a rousing speech.

[David Pierce]

It's not great. When you are so stupid and you're so, so addicted to the idea of censorship to please Donald Trump, your alpha dog, you've gotten on the other side, a Ron Johnson. Like, I can't. Maybe it's just because I'm from Wisconsin. Like, I can't even describe how, like, totally out in the wilderness Brendan is this week. Like, no one thinks that what he's doing is the right thing to do, except maybe Donald Trump, because Donald Trump hates negative media coverage of his war. There's no coming back. There's not going to be positive coverage of the war. Like, the American people do not like this war. And I think Brendan is on the cusp of making a mistake here that kind of reveals just how hollow all of his threats actually are. Because once he punishes a news organization for negative coverage of the war or says he'll do it or comes close to actually doing it, I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, including Senator Ron Johnson, are going to say, no, you've definitely gone too far. Roll it back.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, so much of this is, I think, back to the thing we talked about before, that a lot of what people like Brennan Carr say publicly is for an audience of one, and that one is Donald Trump as what Trump wants to hear and what resonates with the public get further and further apart. That becomes a more dangerous game. Right? Because like you said for a long time, you could come out and say bonkers things that lots of people would think were bonkers, but that lots of people would agree with. But when you run into these things, and I think the Kimmel Thing was a. Was a really interesting kind of early example of this that are. That was. That was bipartisan against what the Trump administration wanted to do. Like, the, the backlash to that was swift, and it was across the spectrum. And when, so when, when you go out and you say he's the alpha in every room, like, that is for Donald Trump. That is. That is so that he will see it. That is 100% what that is for. Because it will score you points with him. Because he likes hearing people say nice things about him on television. Like, there's been all these really interesting stories about people getting Trump's phone number. Have you seen all this? That you can just, with two minutes of work, get Trump's phone number and he answers and you can call him and he says a bunch of nonsense and people print it because they think it's cool that he answered their phone call. Right. Like, that is fundamentally how you win points with Trump is like access. Right. And so. But then as. As that move gets more and more politically problematic, this gets to be a harder game to play.

[David Pierce]

Trump is going to push you out on the ledge. And Brendan is out on the ledge.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes.

[David Pierce]

And I'll actually contrast this. You know, the Verge is like, vast. So we, you know, this week we covered DLSS5 and we covered the Samsung canceling the Trifold. And Tina Nguyen, our DC reporter, she went to a Pentagon press briefing this week. Yeah, like, it's a big. It's a big verge. The verge.com and we're trying to, like, figure out why, like, why did the Pentagon, which famously kicked the traditional press, were out, invite Tina. And the answer is they wanted her to see Pete Hegseth take good questions.

[Nilay Patel]

Huh?

[David Pierce]

Right. They were interested in showing that performance off and they had invited some senior traditional reporters. And Hexag was basically like, I hate you. Why are you here? And then, you know, the front row was like Newsmax and the Mike Lindell show, like, some really weird stuff was in the front row. And they wanted Tina there for her to see. Like, these press briefings are real. Because it's very important that any government, especially our government, like, do that show for the press. Like, I always describe Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Suner Pichai's politicians. They're not actually politicians.

[Nilay Patel]

No.

[David Pierce]

Like, real politicians never shut up. They're everywhere all the time, making their case to their constituents, because you can fire them. Like, Joe Biden didn't show up and he got fired. Straightforward as that. He just wasn't accessible the number of CEOs I've talked to on Decoder who are like, we couldn't get a hold of anyone in the Biden administration and so whatever, like, at least Trump picks up the phone. Like, that's a real dynamic. I think it's a real dynamic for any number of voters. Like, where was this guy? He just disappeared. Then we showed up, he was like, looked old, like we fired him. Politicians get fired. And so you see, the government is just like constantly talking and they have to earn the respect of, of not a captive press. Brendan doesn't understand he's undoing the thing that gives them legitimacy with this stuff. And I really do think Trump has pushed him on the sledge and he can't back off it because Trump is the alpha in every single room that he's in anyway. Brendan, I've once again called you a coward as loudly and as clearly as I can. I'll do it one more time. Brendan, I think you're a coward. If you want to come on the show and defend these moves, defend your relentless attacks in the First Amendment or come on Decoder and tell me about your decision making process. Happy to have you on. You know where I'm at. I think the audience wants you to come on. And just a reminder, we're hiring. So if you'd like to be a producer in the Vergecast, you can submit your resume. As always, that's been Brennan Carr, dummy. America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm just saying, Brendan, if you go on Decoder and not the Vergecast, you won't get custom theme music. That's just something. It's just something you should think about.

[David Pierce]

Oh, we'll play the music.

[Allison Johnson]

All right, let's.

[Nilay Patel]

Actually, you mentioned dlss, so for my first lightning round item, let's. Let's do dlss. You, I know, have been practicing to describe to the people what DLSS is. And if I'm being completely honest, I'm not fully confident in my ability to do it. So can you describe what DLSS is? And then I will describe why it has caused such a ruckus this week.

[David Pierce]

Everyone loves it when I describe gamer technology. It's where I live. It's truly the heart of my expertise.

[Nilay Patel]

How does this apply to Madden?

[David Pierce]

That's what I got for you, actually. You can make some arguments. Have you ever wanted Madden players to be even hotter than. All right, dlss, actually, very clever. I think what Nvidia did with DLSS and the entire idea behind it is very clever. Basically, if you have an Nvidia graphics card. Your game can render frames at lower resolution and then pass it through dlss, which uses AI to upscale the games so you don't have to take the full power of the graphics card to render. It's, you know, 140 frames per second at high resolution. You can get the performance out. And then DLSS upscales the graphics to higher resolution. And this is more efficient in a lot of different ways. Allows you to get higher resolution, higher frame rates on lower end graphics, hard. Again, I think it's a very clever use of the technology and until yesterday was not the world's most controversial thing Nvidia had ever done.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. So then yesterday, Nvidia rolled out DLSS5 and basically framed it as an AI filter to make everything look better. And this is not some, you know, big future thing that's going to make games look better. This is not like a new version of the Unreal Engine. This is saying all your games look like shit and we're going to use AI to make them look great. And I'm not really overstating the way that it was presented very much in that. So this comes out, and it comes out in a really interesting way. There was a Digital Foundry video that I think a lot of people recognize as bought and paid for. And Digital Foundry is a really important voice in the gaming community that made a lot of people feel bad about all this stuff. But also there was this sense that Nvidia is just railroading all of our games with AI, whether you like it or not. And there is also, next to that, the fact that a lot of the stuff just doesn't look very good.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

You've seen a lot of the same examples I have. I'm sure they're like, what if there just were no shadows and everything looked kind of like a. Like a soap opera from the 1990s. Is that what you want?

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Or what if we upscale faces and we literally change the way these characters that you've come to know and love look? Right.

[Nilay Patel]

That people made on purpose to look

[David Pierce]

like people like artists have designed.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And by changing the way they look, what they mean is like, give them Instagram model face. It's very odd. Like they've all been yassified in real ways. And again, I just want to point out in particular, the coach models in Madden are very bad. And I would accept a fully yassified,

[Nilay Patel]

like Matt LaFleur in Madden if Malleur was like, really hot.

[David Pierce]

You see what I'm saying?

[Nilay Patel]

Like, to be fair, Maleur is a good looking Matt.

[David Pierce]

So he's like, and you could turn that up to 11 with the power of DLSS5. I just put it out there. I think the really interesting thing here is yes, Nvidia is just like the big bully. They're doing whatever they want. AI in general in video games is hot button and controversial. DLSS kind of wasn't

[Nilay Patel]

DLSS5, right.

[David Pierce]

Like there's been criticism of it and like certainly people have like lock in concerns because the developers code for dlss, like all this, whatever. But the idea that it had the same sort of slop concerns as AI not really in the mix until DLSS5. And the reason is because it's the first time the graphics card is imposing taste on a video game. So you're talking about shadows going away. You know that's iPhone HDR. Like the phone adopts look.

[Nilay Patel]

This is right next to the what is a photo question.

[David Pierce]

It's right next to what is a photo. It's right next to the iPhone has a look and people don't like the look. And we've talked for years about how we prefer the pixels look and like now a tone mapping control. And do you like Process Zero and Halide? Like cameras have looks, they have aesthetic judgments embedded in them. And your graphics card playing a video game should not.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

The aesthetic judgment should come from the developer and to whatever extent that you want to monkey with the settings should come from you. Your graphics card sitting in the middle should not be like, and everyone has huge boobs. Which is kind of like where we're going with this. And I don't think Nvidia saw that as a problem until the, the, the rush of feedback and to be honest, the frankly hilarious memes of DLSS5 on and off that have been circulating over the Internet this week.

[Nilay Patel]

The memes are very good. And Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, responded to the criticism of this at gtc, their big conference this week. Basically, well, he said, I'll just read this to you. He says, well, first of all, they're completely wrong. Which I will just say in the, in the annals of how to respond to backlash is not, not the right answer.

[David Pierce]

Particularly gamer backlash.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, you're wrong doesn't usually work. People don't go, oh, you're right, great call. I am wrong.

[David Pierce]

You don't just run up against the gaming community and be like, you suck and you're stupid. Yeah, you'll take my slop and you'll like it. Gamers, yeah, very confusing. I'm not sure why he said that or took that approach. The point he was trying to make in ham fisted fashion was that the developers are in control of DLSS5. So if they choose to use the DLSS5 SDK and enable it, they have some control over what it looks like at the end of the process. And maybe they were just showing the most dramatic examples for the purpose of a keynote. But first of all, you're completely wrong. It's just not the way to send that message, especially when you're Nvidia and it's getting ever harder to buy one of your video cards to play video games because you're selling them all to AI companies that people hate. Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, again, it goes back to. There is this fundamental disconnect between the stuff that is being built with AI inside of it and the experience people are having with these tools.

[David Pierce]

I will say if you'll sell me DLSS5 to yassify David on Riverside, which is what we used to make the bird chest, I'll take it.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm just like, if, if I were like, you know, 60 to 70% hotter, this podcast would be unstoppable.

[David Pierce]

This is like this. These are my two theories. If I could remember everyone's name politically unstoppable. And if David was just hot, can you imagine?

[Nilay Patel]

Unstoppable. All right, we're going to do one more each. So we're going to do.

[David Pierce]

This is how we end up in the manosphere. We're like. I'm like, David, if you just had

[Nilay Patel]

abs, I'm going to. I'm going to start looks maxing and you're going to regret a lot of things that we've done on this show, David.

[David Pierce]

I do, and I've been meaning to tell you this for quite some time. I think you should hit yourself in the face with a hammer every day.

[Nilay Patel]

Weirdly, you have said that to me before, but in a really different context. What's your next lightning round?

[David Pierce]

All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do two at once there. It's. It's double debunk for my second lightning round. And it's just two headlines by our reporter Robert Hart, who covers AI and culture. He's a great science reporter. One headline is, this is not a fly uploaded to a computer. And a second headline is chatgpt did not cure a dog's cancer.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, I'm, I'm familiar with one of those things, but not the other.

[David Pierce]

Well, if you spend any time on the Everything app X, you know, the world famous Everything. App X. The amount of wild AI hype that gets laundered into, like, the SEO factories of the world, into outrageous headlines that have nothing to do with even the claims on X that cycle is alive and well. Most famously, this is me saying, they did not do robot surgery on a banana.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

Okay. This is happening with AI at scale because the hype machine is out of control. So one of them is there is a research group called Eon that just put out a post being like, we have uploaded a fly to a computer. This is what it says. And this goes everywhere. There's headlines like, the SEO machine takes off. You know, people are reposting it for cloud. It's like nuts. Like, just out of control. And basically their evidence is like a video of a computer fly. Like, I don't.

[Nilay Patel]

It's buzzing now.

[David Pierce]

So Robert looks at this, we look at it, and Robert runs around, starts talking to researchers like, could you do this? Look at the evidence they provided. Is this real? By the way, the research group in question, the claim, we think this fly is conscious in a limited sense. It can smell, see, taste, et cetera. And he described the system as kind of an MVP or minimal viable product of an uploaded animal. These are not words that make sense. You cannot have any. An MVP of life. You know, like, I love product manager Speak. Decoder is basically just like, what do you mean, product managers? And like, this is nothing. So Robert goes and talks to a bunch of researchers. The researchers are like, this makes no sense. One of them points out to Robert, and this is a real quote. Also, the fly does not fly, which in the grand scheme of what makes a thing a fly is, like, very important. So he goes back to the company and says, I have all these researchers saying, you're full of shit. And the company concedes to Robert. This is not a perfect replica of a fly. I don't think of uploading an animal as a binary concept, describing, quote, different levels of upload and admitting that we don't know how much biology is required to capture the information that matters. So just full walk back. Full in, total walk. Robert. One reporter just went and said, does this make sense to a bunch of researchers? The researchers all said, no. Robert went back to the company and said, no one thinks this makes any sense. And they're like, yep, we didn't do this. We did not want a fly to a computer. Uploading a fly to a computer is a spectrum. That's the answer. Nonsense.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the friends we made along the way. Eli.

[David Pierce]

Okay, second one. ChatGPT did not cure a dog's cancer. And we'll link to Hank Green here. Hank Green made a video about this. Also a really good debunk. The funniest part of this video is he tried to make YouTube short, but it was too long for a short, so he just put it in regular YouTube and called it a long, which I think is hilarious. It's very good. Anyway, there's, you know, Silicon Valley bro says that he used ChatGPT to come up with a vaccine for his dog's cancer. Okay, okay. Robert looks into this one.

[Nilay Patel]

I did see.

[David Pierce]

I do remember this one everywhere. Because it's a dog. You know, it's the local news. Couldn't resist this one. Robert looks into this. I'm just gonna read the quote. Not only was Rosie not cured of cancer, it's not clear that the vaccine was responsible for the improvement. The personalized treatment was administered alongside another form of immunotherapy known as a checkpoint inhibitor, designed to help the immune system target tumors, making it difficult to know if the vaccine had any effect at all. So, like, you just don't know. Like, just straightforwardly, this is not a real test. You don't know.

[Nilay Patel]

So it's like we did this thing and also gave them the thing that works, the solution to their problem. Who knows which one it was?

[David Pierce]

So we just don't know. And then here's just the other line from Robert. The vaccine itself was not generated by a chatbot. ChatGPT did not design or create Rosie's treatment. Human researchers did. At most, the chatbot served as a research assistant, helping parse medical literature. Just a full debunk in this one. And this one went wild everywhere.

[Nilay Patel]

What a perfect AI story. Because the thing that actually might have happened is very cool and very exciting and like a genuinely exciting use of technology. This helped a researcher do better research and solve problems.

[David Pierce]

No, a layperson did better research.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure, fine, Kick ass if that. If that is the truth, great. Why do we have to go pretend that it it cured cancer?

[David Pierce]

Like, because everyone wants it to be curious true. And you can farm a lot of clout on X, the everything app by saying things people want to be true.

[Nilay Patel]

Likes for days, man.

[David Pierce]

Anyway, Robert, poor Robert, is just on the debunk case now. This is what he does. We'll throw his links up. You can read them, but just be careful over there.

[Nilay Patel]

This is what we mean, by the way, when we say Nilai just sends people TikToks at 8:30pm it's just like the Verge's newsroom exists to figure out if what Nilai saw on his timeline is real.

[David Pierce]

What we sell here is rigor. And the first step of rigor is, is this true?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, weirdly relevant question in the terms,

[David Pierce]

it turns out that rigor does not exist on X, the Everything app.

[Nilay Patel]

That's very true. All right, my last one, and I think this is an appropriate place to end, is that Meta continues to do the funniest possible things with the Metaverse. So we've been tracking all the ways in which the Metaverse is not working for a very long time. Meta announced a while ago that it was splitting Horizon Worlds and its VR efforts, which looked like a bad sign for the Metaverse. Then it announced that it was going to shut down VR Horizon Worlds, which looked like a bad sign for the Metaverse. And then it announced it was doing a bunch of layoffs in its Reality Labs, which looked like a bad sign for the Metaverse. And then Meta put a date on the actual end of the VR Horizon Worlds experience. It was June 15th. Was the news this week that is going to be the end of VR in, like, the. The end of the VR version of Horizon Worlds. Everybody hears this, and immediately this generates a new round of headlines saying, meta is bailing on the Metaverse. This. This, like, became a narrative this week. Yeah, we've been tracking this for forever. There was actually no new information except a date, but everybody saw this as, oh, Meta is winding down the Metaverse. Is Meta going to change its name back to Facebook? What is this company is. Is completely giving up. So Meta does what I can only assume is a complete reaction to this narrative and decides it's not going to shut down the VR after all. This is. This news just came out today, Thursday, as we're recording this, and in an AMA on Instagram, because this is how Meta disseminates news. Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of the company, said that they're going to keep the existing VR worlds and that it would be available to download, quote, for the foreseeable future. And he. What he said was the fans who reached out, like yourself, who really care about it, are the reason that they're going to keep it around. I would like to say a. There are none of those people or else this. This thing would still exist.

[David Pierce]

They exist. They're there to trade crypto and try to have AI girlfriends. Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

There were we. We.

[David Pierce]

You.

[Nilay Patel]

You were in the video. We did a while back. Right. Exploring it, and it was just a bunch of children.

[David Pierce]

It was so odd. It was. It was such a failure from the jump. Alex Heath, remember, you remember Alex Heath was one of the first people that had a Quest Pro. I still have a Quest Pro sitting over there. And this was like the embodied Internet. When Mark was going on with Metaverse and they were doing all the demos, and I just remember that dude came back from his first briefing and was like, it sucks. And I was like, you know, Alex, you can just say it if you're Holt, just say it. Just say it sucks. Yeah, it was always very bad.

[Nilay Patel]

It was. But it is, it is now the funniest possible outcome because Meta is now forced to continue to support this bad product because if they kill it, everyone will think they've given up on the Metaverse. And they cannot appear to have given up on the Metaverse because the company is called Meta. And that is hysterical.

[David Pierce]

It's very good. Meta also doesn't know what AI is for. They keep hiring and firing thousands of people, spending millions of dollars to make. Talk about not having a good consumer AI product. What's your plan, dude?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, also, by the way, the Ray Ban Meta stuff running straight at that same problem. There are glass hole murmurings starting to bubble up in a lot of places about how to feel about these glasses.

[David Pierce]

Oh, yeah, people do not like seeing those in public. Mark Zuckerberg's trust deficit is really starting to come to the fore here. I actually want to call out. The one product they had that people loved was Supernatural, the fitness app in VR. And they shut that down. It's like the existing content is still there, but they're not making new content. They fire all the instructors across. People really liked V, wrote a great story about that community, how mad they are. And then this week, I want to call out, she interviewed Lina Kahn, who, as Biden's FTC chair, tried to stop that acquisition, sued to stop it. She was way out over skis. And I went over and knew she was just trying to push the envelope, like, the government should stop more acquisitions. And her theory of the case was always, if this market is not competitive, it will die. Right? She's like, competition leads to better outcomes. Which, by the way, again, if you listen to the Vergecast, like, my main political viewpoint is like, competition is good for the economy and government. Huge regulations are bad. So V interviewed Lena Khan this week. Our head behind his. Lena Khan was right. And there's a lot of comments there being like, well, it was such a bad business, Meta couldn't keep it running. The problem is the market for that stuff. Was never competitive. Supernatural only had to do whatever served Meta's interests.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

And Meta, you can see, is strategically confused about everything. If Supernatural was a business that ran on the quest and the quest was confused, they might have gone to the Vision Pro. They might have gone to a cheaper, different VR headset. The VR headset technology is basically commodity at this point. Right. Like meta's selling the Quest 2 for a buck 99 right now. They could have made their own hardware. I mean, I think they're trying to blow it out to shut it down, but, like, It's a buck 99 right now. Like, Supernatural is a company could have done a million things to better serve its audience and its community that now feels completely abandoned, that knew that they would get abandoned the second Meta bought them. So there's this raging argument in our comments about no one ever wants VR and blah, blah, blah. And like, I think that's all pointed at Meta and the argument really is, well, you know what happens when the acquisition happens. I, I know what happens to a company when Google buys it. I know what happened. I know what happened to Dark sky when Apple bought it. It. You know who also figured out the people who made Dark sky, who just quit Apple to start a new weather app.

[Nilay Patel]

Acme Weather. Great app, Big fan.

[David Pierce]

But they were like, we, we don't want to do this anymore. Like, we're getting crushed.

[Nilay Patel]

We would like to go back to making a weather app. Yep.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And everyone knew what would happen to Supernatural when, when Meta bought it. So it's true. Lena Khan, she, she pushed the boundary of the law and the argument was not great. And she lost, but she was trying to avoid an outcome that everyone could see clearly. That happened immediately. And my only point is people loved Supernatural. The theme of this episode is when consumers love something you can get away with a lot. People loved that app. They loved that experience. You can go read that story. V wrote it. It is one of my favorite stories of the year so far. It's just a community of people who are sad about a virtual reality fitness app. Those are the Verge keywords. That's us loving technology, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And that company never had a chance to take that, that and turn it into something real.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

They were subsumed into the, the Meta Borg. They were subservient to total strategy confusion, and now it's dead. And like, I, I, I think the quest 2 is at a buck 99 because Meta's blown them out the door and they're going to focus on the rebounds.

[Nilay Patel]

I think you're probably right.

[David Pierce]

And yeah, go read, go read the Lina Khan piece. Go read the other stuff. It's all inside. It's all very good.

[Nilay Patel]

It's good stuff. The, the Lena Khan interview is, is, is good. She continues to be a smart person who knows what she's doing. I would say. All right, we should get out of here. We've gone way over, way over. This is what we do. I blame Allison. She's not here anymore. So we're going to blame Allison for this, not Ron Johnson, who I would also like to blame for this. Two bits of plugging before we go. Well, three actually. Number one, apply to be our producer, Voxmedia.com jobs come help us make the show shorter. Number two, version history. This week is the episode about the vocoder. It is. With the band Chromeo. It is not as much fun as we have ever had making this show. I think you're gonna really like it. Charlie Harding, Vergecast intern, hosted that with me, helped me, helped me figure out the story of the vocoder with Chromio. We had a blast. It's a really good episode. A listen to the interview that Nilay did on Decoder with Jim Lanzone from Yahoo, which I thought was fascinating. They are. What a weird company to do.

[David Pierce]

Weird company.

[Nilay Patel]

Interesting, innovative, 30 year old Internet ideas. Very fun. Who's on Decoder next week?

[David Pierce]

It's a little up in the air.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

If the CEO of Superhuman, the Grammarly guy, shows up on Friday, which I think he's gonna do, so as you're listening to this, I will know then that one will be Decoder next week. If not it'll be somebody else. But as of right now they say he's coming up again.

[Nilay Patel]

We keep saying out loud that Shishir has to do this.

[David Pierce]

So he's gonna do it as of today. He said he's going to do it. By the time you're listening to this, I will, I will know.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm excited. And if you want to get in touch, the email is vergecasthevirge.com the hotline is 866-verge11. If you want all of our podcasts ad free, including all the ones we just talked about, subscribe to the Verge theverge.com subscribe It's a good website. We like it quite a bit and I think you will too. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larcher. Chuck, we will see you next time Nili, take us out.

[David Pierce]

Rock and roll.

[Advertiser Voice]

Once upon a dismal day, Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray. Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision.

[Allison Johnson]

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[Advertiser Voice]

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[David Pierce]

Create the video in the vampire theme

[Host/Announcer]

and make it the funniest.

[Advertiser Voice]

It went viral. Bob's business a revival. Now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to [e-mail] Once Upon a dismal day, Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray. Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision.

[Allison Johnson]

That bad.

[Advertiser Voice]

Maybe vamp it up a tad. I have an idea. Bob launched Canva and got into gear.

[David Pierce]

Create the video in the vampire theme

[Host/Announcer]

and make it the funniest.

[Advertiser Voice]

I mean it went viral. Bob's business a revival. Now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to [e-mail].