Why people really hate AI

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Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com/build. The worst advice I have ever gotten is stay in your lane. I am Rabbit Edson, athlete executive founder, and staying in my lane would have tapped me small. Don't protect other people's comfort at the cost of your growth. This week on Project Swagger, my strategies for embracing your multi-hyphenate existence. Tune in now at Project Swagger, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of the Verge Cast producer job that is now open. I'm a friend David Pierce, Neil, I have to tell you this here. I'm going to apply for that job. I think that job might be easier than my job. We are hiring. 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 Verge Cast with us. You can go to voxmedia.com/jobs, apply, mention Brendan Carr in your cover letter. If you are Brendan Carr, if you're a little bit different from this job, I really think that greatest part of this is Brendan Carr wouldn't get the job. But he would get an interview. Do you know what I mean? We would come in. We're also hiring a supervising producer for Dakota. I would hire Brendan to be the supervising producer for Dakota. That could be fun. Just because that job is run by business and policy show and I would just be at the Yellow and Brenton all day every day. He is good at getting attention on the internet. See what I'm saying? That is the game we all play now. Yeah. Both of those jobs are open. Producer on the Verge Cast, supervising producer on Dakota. We have big plans for us. We want to expand them in lots of ways. We need help. So if you know people, I promise we are not as unpleasant to work with as you would think it would be. We're like mostly as unpleasant as you think. David's not all the way. Well, I'm more in your list and it means that we like, this is why we're a good match. You're a delight and I drive everybody insane and this is like a good balance. It is. It is. In the sense that David does all the work and I do none. That's really how this plays out. It's a great move. If you just sort of cool admit, cool admit man in five minutes before the show starts and like, what's up guys? Yeah. I bet it takes. I haven't done any research on. Let's go. Which in fact brings us to where we should start the show today. We have a lot to talk about. There's some Apple stuff we're going to get to you later. Alice and 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. 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 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 a heavy hitter in this world and has been at OpenAI making much changes. And she sent out this memo, essentially saying OpenAI needs to focus that this company has been on what she called side quests, 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 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. 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? I think, like, what do you make of Fiji Simo's memo here? Is this the right thing for OpenAI to do at this moment? I think so. But I have like two big reactions to this. And they just did this. It's all been just declared a code red. Yeah. Like minutes ago. Like, I don't even think we've settled down. I don't think we've undeclared the code red. It's not over. So what are we doing? What are we, why are we doing it yet? 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? There's a really great line from Fiji Simo in an all hands. So with the team talking about the 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. Like, very good. Perfect. And correct. But I think you're, I mean, this is not your 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. 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 for 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's CEO of applications, she's supposed to make the big consumer product 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 it. It is not occurring. They might be taking market share, but they're not making money. That's the thing. That's, I think, the important distinction. Like, it is, there is no question that chat GPT has been the 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 feelings people have when they use chat GPT are fascinating, but people are using chat GPT. And OpenAI is losing money hand over fist every time you use chat GPT. 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 chat GPT. 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. 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. Even Google kind of has it. Right? They are attempts to do it look way more like slop than not. Yes. 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 wed shaped MacBook error 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. And AI overviews could not get that answer right. Yes. But it's a brutal. Even Google, which is going to 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 going to hurt YouTube in a very real way. They're starting to run surveys on YouTube asking people if they think the videos are ASL up. Oh wow. Because they need to build the 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 all this other stuff. Open AI, they got to 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 about before we started recording about the perception that the Vergehade technology, which is very funny because we employ literal gadget reviewers. And I love technology and I will spend all day and all night talking about high bit rate movie streaming and we'll do spec episodes. 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 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 that people love. And so people are like, no, actually we'd really dislike you. And the data kind of backs it up. 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 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 others 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 pulled 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. Yeah, including AI. And AI is like down there with Democrats generally in the war. It's between ICE and the Democrats, which is just a tough beat for AI right now. 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. But straight like they will just look me in the eye and be like, the problem is a Gen Z hate AI. We don't know what to do about it. There's also this really interesting Pew study from last fall. Like 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 sower on it. People talk about 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. Five said it will improve them. Like this is not there's a certain subset of people out there who are are ambivalent and wait and see and who knows and whatever. To the extent that people have reflexive feelings about this, it is overwhelmingly bad. 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. Like it took a while and there was a.com bubble and there are fits and starts and there is 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. 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. And the second they're like we need to make money now. Jeff Bezos owns a very large boat. You know, like the internet, the way that economy developed overall was just obvious. 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. 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. Yeah. 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 like 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. 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 Metta famously wrote a memo called the ugly, in which he laid out all of the bad things that would happen. And so it's still we connect everyone because we think that's the highest in best use of 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. Like 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 got in 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. But 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 are not sided. You can just see delivering meaningful actual value to consumers. Let's you get away with a lot. The iPhone is the vanguard of moving high-tech manufacturing to China. The Apple built that ecosystem in China. So to Tesla, everyone should go read Apple and China. It's a great book. But you see these two companies in particular kick-started entire industry over there. Why did we allow that to happen? Because the iPhone was great. Because it's great. It's just a great product. And so are smartphones. 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 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 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, VGCMO saying we need to pivot to enterprise encoding because Anthropic is killing us there. And then the VCs are going on podcasts and doing what they do, which is blaming consumers or blaming the media, which I think is bananas. 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. I have. So 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 real cobbler. So you got to just hold him until he's actually asleep. But his eyes are closed and he's you know he's just trying to do an ugly, thrashy thing. Or if you put him down too early, he'll wake up. Did you have to sit there? Yep. What are you going to do when you're sitting there? You're going to watch TikTok on silent. That's what you're going to do while you're sitting there. So I've just might, you don't even wear headphones. You just watch it on silent. Watch it on time. Oh my god. That is fine. And not a 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 30 pm all day. Every day. I can confirm this forever. I feel bad about it. So I ran across this trader called signals and noise. She has a PhD from your Chicago. Which I love because I went there. She's the co-founder of single book scape. Her title says AI text strategist. You go watch a bit. It's we'll link them. They're good. Her name is in here. So if you want to, she 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 podcasts. One of course is all in. Always. Everyone's wondering what that is. And the one I want to start with is The Big Technology Podcast, which is hosted by Alex Cantrowitz, who's a friend of ours. He had Olivia Moore a partner at injuries and horror wits 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 injuries. There's been a lot in the media in the US 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. Like it's using all the water. And then they were like, but Cheshire PT really helps me. And it has like 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. So there's a lot of things - A lot of ideas there, huh? - 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 seems to be the cases that we have the exact reverse, which is that everybody has tried these things. - They're everywhere. - And found them wanting in some meaningful, like you can't avoid these chatbots at this point. Like if you open up Gmail, you get 11 popups 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 to most people, they're going to hemorrhage money. And this to me is just like, this just assumes that all of this is out there and it's like the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. That is not at all my experience with AI right now. - Yeah, no, it's everywhere. I have a different objection to this idea from Olivia Mord, Andrew Snorowicz. And it's the one that the creator made in her video, and I brought this idea to our environmental reporter, Justin Cama, and to me, Asato, who covers the fashion industry and shopping generally for us. Environmental objections do not do shit for the American consumer. - They've never done anything for any, no. - Not one thing. The reason I brought up fashion is fast fashion exists and no one cares about the environmental cost of she and, totally. - Literally no one cares. That's why I'm off the shelves. I am a sucker for a big stupid car. I really am. (laughing) A lot of them. The more cylinders, the better. But let '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. - Yeah. - Someday when you make a country album, I need it to be called I Love My Stupid Mustang. (laughing) - I do love my stupid Mustang. - It's just gonna make me very happy. - I love it the most. I'm just pointing to that, like this idea that the media has convinced everyone that the in particular, the 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. - 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. Ask people how they feel about the paper straws, man. - Yes. - Yes. - Exactly. - 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 the turtles incremental benefit. Like no, that runs 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 Henry Snorwoods, 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 not, right, people are not reading their time. So there's 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. - Yep. So it's not, I'm not popping up on people's feeds and be like, did you know that has a lot of what? No, it's not happening. And even if that was happening, you can just look at 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 roof. Like people make weird decisions when the environmental factor is the main factor. By the way, Asteris, and then we're gonna note about this, EV sales are ticking back up because gas prices are high and the cars are actually better. Maybe that's all gonna 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 asked me about. It's what this creator is pointing out 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, it's our fault. It's you're too stupid. You've been lied to. The tools are amazing and we just have to wait and the objections will be overcome. - Yep. - There's another one as well, which again, this is all an end response. So it's like, I just feel like I'm dunking on a baby, but like we should listen. - At least some parts of the AI ecosystem have decided that this crazy scary doom arisen is the best way to raise money. Where every now and then they come out and they say, all the jobs will be destroyed and profit. Dario says that. This thing is sentient. And investors are like, okay, here's 10 billion. Here's 50 billion. Here's 100 billion. - Now we're blaming the AI founders themselves. - I find this argument to be essentially nonsensical. (laughing) Like because the whole AI will remake the economy, AI will change the way that work gets done. We're gonna have to do universal basic income because nobody's gonna have a job anymore. This was a feature of the rise of all of this stuff for years. - Yep. - 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 have been other lines in all of this. They're like, ugh, in America, we're way over indexed on people liking creative arts. And it's like, yeah, I'm good with that actually. All of these things are fine. And for the longest time, people like Chimoff and podcasts like the All-In Podcast, we're talking in glorious terms about how terrific it was gonna be when AI completely remade the economy. And so now to call that "Dumerism" is just ridiculous. - Yeah, I totally agree. In that worldview, in that worldview is really prevalent. Alex Karp is running around saying, women are gonna 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. - And if that works to raise money, by the way, Chimoff, you're the money. - Guy. (laughing) Oh, like he has money. He's the money. - He's the dumbest money. If this is the sales pitch that works on you, you are the problem. - Well, to be clear, these guys hate Anthropic 'cause they think Anthropic is woke. - It's just sure. - But it's, Sam Altman is just as doomery in this way, right? He's the one running around saying, "Your eyebrows are just gonna rent intelligence "from the cloud and they're gonna 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 are facing the consequences of that messaging and they're blaming the people. - Yep. - And I just keep coming back to the idea that we all knew what was gonna 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 20 or 11. - 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." - So we need to write about technology and culture at the same time. We were like, "What are you talking about?" It's like, "Well, 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. - Yeah. - 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 to putting cameras everywhere in their 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 'cause people wanted the technology. They love it. That's not what's happening here, right? The costs are being imposed. We're gonna take your job away is not the fault of the consumer, 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. - These are the stakes they've drawn for themselves. - 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 here, but we just taped an episode of Dakota with the CEO, 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 So you think so and I was like oh that you don't you're this is just flying over your head Like you have to make some case that there's some benefit right to all of this investment in order for the investment to continue You know who understands it is Sachin Adele he has 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 say we should run this clip. I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission 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 outcomes education outcomes public sector efficiency Private sector competitiveness across all sectors small and large Okay, I have two thoughts on this. Yeah 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 this is correct. I think it's it's it's slightly ironic that it's coming from Sachin Adele as 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 being is not the thing Copilot so far is not the thing Microsoft I think in in less straightforward terms is doing a pretty similar kind of retrenchment that Fiji Simo and open AI 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 Sachin Adele 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 at a 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 yeah, I mean there are as many studies as you can count about whether our businesses are seeing efficiency improvements by adding AI And the answer is basically not yet or no yeah, it's somewhere between no and like yeah It's like it hasn't happened yet It may be there's gonna 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 I means they can make the same products as the big company cheaper and that's just the disruption life side I don't know. Maybe that's gonna 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 no like make it worth it to us. Yeah to what end? What is in this for me and I don't mean to say that It's 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 that I 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 just listen to it once you can develop software You can kind of go into adjacent industries That's a real thing. There's a lot of software running a lot of companies and you can you can widen out Yeah, 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 it's literally the citizens of America who are like I don't like this Right like the the polling is clear and it's not because of the media It's not because of dumerism 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 and I think the hope from a lot of these companies is That something like cloud code Will eventually be a consumer product. I mean you see it now, right? They built co-work out of cloud code to make it a little more accessible They built dispatch out of co-work, which is basically like you can you can run it from a messaging app like that They're trying to make this kind of creative tool Accessible to more people and it's it's gonna work, but that is not a Mainstream that is not an Instagram level use case right? We you and I always like to talk about the sort of foundational Mobile experiences, right? And the 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 Yeah, you can have a lot of feelings whatever we did We just had Dara on the code or boy do people have feelings that we were Yeah, 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. I should be Ubers new tagline. I've said that I said that to Dara I said why once threat set at two Travis Kalnik in our office in Midtown and he just started cracking up He's like I never thought about that Like it's crazy, right? Like you push a button and something happens in the real world and in Ubers case You either it's a camera or a highlighter It's one of the other really or if you're unlucky it's a Model 3 and they'll have the region breaking on you just have a bad time Lot of lot of complaints in the world about Model 3's with the region breaking It's the same with Dora Ashets, whatever like you push about and something happens in real world You order something for Amazon an object comes to your house. That is the thing That the mobile revolution is like truly delivered in a way that had never occurred before and then Instagram and social media We actually wrote a piece about this James here in 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 Sick and so when like digital showed up and phone showed up and all the photographers had their moment He's 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 gonna the feedback loop here is it's the story I've come back will link that story to I've come back to it over and over again just the insight there is so powerful You can't do that without a fun. You can make an Instagram on 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. Yeah, that is an unusual dynamic in like the history of culture Right most people like you copied me. I'm gonna see you But like TikTok is just about widespread replication. These are huge changes the technology brings about I think they're fascinating 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 in our site is like look at how cool this is like we're changing how we live yeah And then AI is like where it's in there and it's like would you like a girlfriend? That's the best idea they have right and it's like most people 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 been dan is to me that the essentially can't see it Yeah, I agree 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 if you've seen something if you're making something if 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 about it Or automating anything I'm serious about this the idea that most people can identify a loop in their lives that is worth automating. Yep I mean we got 50 years of technology development to prove that that is not the case. Yes You just can't do it Productive 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 it to do list So it's like we need to go several levels down into what it 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 866 for no one is the hotline first cast of the verse.com is the email Meal I'd the first calm is where you can send all of your five coding issues We're gonna take a break and then it's it's trifold time. 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LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data. That's where they stand apart from other advice. You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, company revenue. Also, you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn ads boast one of the highest B2B return on ads bed of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. So get your ads in front of the right people and make your B2B strategy work. You can spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com/vergecast. That's LinkedIn.com/vergecast. Terms in condition supply. All right, we're back. Alison Johnson is here. Hi, Alison. Hello. Okay, we're here to talk about trifles and I want to, but I just had one of the strangest parent technology experiences I've ever had. 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. I assume checks them in and out, right? Yeah, I assume every school has apps like this. But like we check them in and out with the 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. They just say, "incident" and have a band-aid in that. Oh, no. I have no other information. Presumably he's alive. I don't know what to do with this. I don't, I either desperately need to know about this and need to leave this podcast right now. Or this is fine and this is information I'm going to wish I never had. Do you think there's a second set of notifications? Like after incident? Like, it's just like, come now. Yeah, it's pretty bad. You got this. That's a phone call when the phone starts ringing. Yeah, 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. I have both, I'm glad to have all this information. Wait, is there incident with a band-aid and incident with a poop emoji? Do you know what I'm saying? 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. But like, it's a real, like how much information are we as people supposed to have? Yeah. This is the dilemma I feel with brain. We give very little of that information and is honestly for the best. I'm like, well, he was alive at the end of the day. Great. That might be the correct answer. Like, call me if I need to get them to the hospital. Otherwise, I'll see you at the end of the day. See now, I'm in a very different place with the older one. But you know, Max is like almost eight and she's in second grade. So now, she comes home from school and I'm like, what happened to you? And she's like, you'll never know. I know, no information will be reflected to you. And so I'm kind of like looking, I'm like waiting for, reject to like get some bright wheel in a slide. You can know the p's and the bm's. With Max, you know, when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, my office was in the basement. Like I did, I did the show from the basement basement. And I was off and down there working and back you would be upstairs. And you couldn't actually yell from the base and all the upstairs. And so we used the walkie-talkie in our Apple Watch all the time. And it was basically just a poop notification sort of like a very expensive. I need you. She put it in. And now this house, you can just yell from his bedroom to the kitchen. Like it's trivial. And I feel bad because we're not walkie-talking about what you've called bm's anymore. Uh-huh. Yeah, you're just, it's important parental communication to just yell. It's happening to each other. Exactly. Yes. Or oh no. Usually. Yeah. 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 trifold in your possession. Yeah. Tell us what happened with the trifold this week. I mean, you have a thing that appears to be a Samsung Galaxy Z. That's a fair point. Yeah. You've been trying to get this phone for months. 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 we'll send us a review unit of a new phone. They did not provide us when this time around. There are reasons for that. Always tell. Yes, exactly. I'm realizing how much of a tell. We tried to get a whole list of trifold. We got to buy one. Went in and out of stock. So fast. Couldn't get one. We turned to eBay. 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. 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 a seller. The thing finally shows up at my door. And I open up this FedEx package. It is a box with like two seals on it. Let's 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 film off of the inner screen. And there were crumbs and little hairs on it. Like. Yeah, yeah. This is not the first time that phone had been like, you know, exposed to air. This is not ideal. It was it was gross. I turn 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 this to say, this is 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 for a little bit. So that was acquiring the trifold. In the meantime, Samsung announced they're not going to make it anymore. I canceled the phone. 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 going to have these good times together. 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 sense is that 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 laying 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 like a Samsung S 25 kind of perfect actually. Right. This is the realest Trump mobile has ever been. Right. Yeah, it like got this phone to work. I set it up. It still asked 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 have 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. A weird Chinese phone with it does have the Play Store if it's Chinese. No, it does not. 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. It's actually kind of perfect. I feel like I have no notes on that. I actually feel like the Trump administration would be like, great job, Alison. Or they would arrest you. Like, I don't know if we should run this podcast. I don't know which government officials gonna show up at my door and arrest me. It could be any number. To do 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? It functions. It won't get on the internet. On the Trump mobile network for some reason. (laughing) 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. It was like, - Sorry, the fact that the Trump mobile say mobile radio data, but will provide you spam calls is also perfect. - It's 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 wifi. So I hotspotted it to the iPhone error that I'm using right now. (laughing) I was like, what do I do? And I just loaded up, you know, the Virgin of web browser and made the window a bunch of different sizes. I was like, cool. - That's right. - For $4,000 later, I can like look at the internet in different ways. - The window on a phone. That honestly, that's a lot of innovation. - Somewhere in there is a truly damning critique of foldable phones, which we should get to. But I do, you guys, I'm assuming we're as surprised as I was about the cancellation of the trifle, right? This was me like your bit. - The last second, Samsung refused to send us a review in it as like one this product's had done. Look, I'm gonna, here's my usual caveat. It is very hard to make money making media on the internet. 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 and businesses and they're all like, please be successful. It's so hard, I'm not gonna 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. It's 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. The owner used what Apple 50, like you can see it. We don't do that, right? Well, you buy from us as our ethics policy where we're huge tricks about it. We're very annoying about it. I'll talk it all the time. And so when the companies won't give us the phone or give our peers at other publications or 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 sanded off. Now, again, I'm not trying to take shots at it. Like lots of people, 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. Sure. And that's a dynamic that exists for a lot of people. And so the second it was like week three of me and the editorial meeting in the morning, they were like, do we have the phone yet? And it was like Samsung was ghosting us other those phone sucks. Allison, what were they telling you about why you couldn't get a phone? I got a lot of polite lines like, oh, you know, we're noting your request and your interest. I was like, okay, great. 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, he made five. I was going to say we're agreed on. That is not about popularity. That's about they made five. 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 phone. No, there's like they they could. There's like a ram shortage. It's their tariffs. Like there's a lot of reasons that are already expensive phone was getting more expensive or harder produced. And maybe you just want to put all the RAM and the S26. But that's not really what they're saying here. Mm hmm. Right. Like they're just like, yep, goodbye. 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 Sam's on originally talked about this. Also, there's real demand for the phone. They would allocate the RAM to this phone. Sure. Like they make all the phones. If you're like, well, people really want to buy triples. We're going to put the components that we can get in the triples and we'll charge with the market conveyor. And instead, they're like, no, on top of that, Oppo launched the Find N6, which they're, it's a zero feel crease, not zero C. You know what I'm saying? You can see it, but you can't feel it. It is very compelling. We have a video of it done. Did it hands on. It is almost creaseless. They're only launching in Asia and Australia. They're not even coming to Europe, let alone the United States. My thesis here, Allison, I'm curious now, you try the triple that may have reviewed all the other folds. I think this might be a dud. I don't think people want folding phones. And I think like 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. Can I just tell you I'm this close to declaring victory over you, Allison? You and I have been fighting flip phones versus folding phones for like two years. And I'm this close. Is this a kind of-- I feel like I'm winning. Like intervention. This is like a-- I'm gotcha. Yeah. No, I wouldn't do that to you because, again, having a Chinese phone with a Trump mobile sim on it, I think I can punish him enough. Right. But even using the phones, you've obviously seen this phone as close as anyone can see it. What do you think? I mean, is this work? I think it's still-- I think it's still playing out. And it's definitely-- 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 in meanwhile, the Chinese brands, I think, are dialing it in a little faster. It kind of seems they have the zero-fill crease. They have a very slim, foldable that is also dust and water resistant. In the US, we have the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which is the dust resistant one. So you can't have quite all together. And 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 $1,800 and $2,000. 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 walk around with one and buy a tiny keyboard for it. I think it'll be a telling moment. I mean, you're my favorite case on this because you have deliberately-- you have bullied yourself into finding use cases for the foldable phone. And I think you've genuinely found some. 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 we were talking about in a moment where all of these companies are struggling desperately. They have their phones not getting more expensive. The idea of this already being twice the price is a problem. 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 preventing these things from becoming mainstream accessible anyway. And then you fold in-- I say this with love, Alice. And most people do not want to tote a logitech keys to go to the coffee shop and do an email 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 maybe-- we've talked a lot over the years about the 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 killer apps for foldables just sitting out there, especially not at this price. I do want to call it the thunderous sideways don't come to watch that keys to go. Very important. Look, I have a little over here. [LAUGHTER] Is that a full-scale keyboard? A full straight apple. I just like keys to go. Richard Lawler, a verch has favorite. Richard Lawler is our senior news editor here at the Verge. He runs our news team. His job is boil down to look at that stuff. And I also say that with love because if I could do any one job at the Verge, I would be very happy. or a JoB news editor, which is just a terrifying reality from Mr. Rattie. - Yes, Richard does it better than Neil I would, just so everyone's taking it. - He does it much better. (laughing) It's still my favorite job. It was the job I had to engage it ages ago. I mean, his job was looking at stuff. He has a pixel-thin fold and we were talking about this. And he was like, "I am the person that this phone is for and I struggle to find reason to use it." 'Cause all day long, I'm meant to be looking at things. - Yep. - And like, on the go, like being able to have a bigger canvas so I can like look at a desktop web page and like about what I'm looking at and like have a slack window open and back and forth. And he's like, "I don't use it." Maybe he doesn't have a larger key stick up. Maybe this is the problem. - See, I gotta sell him on the larger tech. (laughing) The thing that makes me wonder if there's some place that they could hit this market is my parents because I brought home the pixel-thin fold for it 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." I, that is so cool. But it is $2,000. My parents are pixel A series people. They buy, they're $500 phone and they don't want to think about buying a new phone for the next, you know, five years of they can get away with it. And they have their iPad. It's like iPad to FaceTime with a grandchild 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 gonna stick with, you know, these two devices "and it's not ruining my life." - You've brought us to the precipice, Elsa. - Who will take the first leap in predicting what the Apple folding phone will do? - Right. It is for FaceTime being grandchildren. - 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. - Yeah. - The question is whether you unfold it and it is a little iPad. - Right. - And then a big iPhone. - Or it, and, you know, that's a pretty fine distinction. (laughing) - I am just truly, if they make their phone and it is the same kind of compromises the iPhone air, where it gets thinner and lighter in a camera's way worse. Like it's not worth it to me. Like you will reduce the primary utility of my phone to give me an iPad and I don't use my iPad. - Mm-hmm. - It's like, but I might be a very narrow use case. Like maybe it's just big FaceTime as long as anybody wants. I'm looking at this. Like Samsung scared the pants out of Apple for like two years by having big screens first. - Mm-hmm. - 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 reorganized like the tech landscape. Like Samsung became a player because their phones were bigger than Apple's for a couple of years there. - Yeah, that one, that worked. - It worked. And then Apple is like, fine, our phones are big too now. (laughing) I'm not going back to normal. 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 like, what's Apple gonna catch up to? - Yeah. - I think predicting what the iPhone fold might be in the face of Samsung, the trifle didn't work here. I can't tell you the Z Fold 7 is like a phenomenon. Apple is not even, it's like hottest ones and they're not launching it in like one of the bigger markets for Android and the world in Europe. I know, it just seems like this might have come to nothing. - I certainly think that the RAM situation and all those different pressures are like come at a very tough time 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 gonna back off a little bit and just focus on like selling phones and trying to make some money off of that right now. - Yeah, if you're gonna decide to stop selling one thing, this is pretty clearly the one, right? Like, if we need RAMs on the phones the people buy. So we're gonna stop putting it at the, 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. - But that doesn't explain why they didn't want us to review it. I think the phone wasn't very good. - It's super heavy. I will say, and 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, especially like all folded. - Can you unfold it for us, do you have it? - I can, I will say like six times right after this thing came out, Travis, our producer would just slack me in, be like, who is this for? And I think it's a great, that thing is enormous. - I mean, this is like, you know, in the Huawei Tri-Fold came and everyone's been watching that video of it unfolding. Like, I'm having the same reaction to it. Like, what about that thing? - It looks sick. - Boy, I want a unfold, 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. (laughing) - I mean, look, maybe the problem is just the people, like, I'm gonna say this with Android tablets and the people are gonna send me notes. Maybe the problem is people just don't want Android tablets. - That's why we're waiting for the iPhone. - Allison, we just hold up the home screen to the camera again. But 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 the answer. - Oh, it opens up. - And neither is the malware. - It wants access to your network. - Constantly asking, begging for-- - It's like, yeah, financial information by the way that I should know. - Have you considered downloading your banging up? I think, yeah, I think 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 have notes, you know? Like, let it be more of a computer than they do right now. And the other question is like, when Chrome OS becomes aluminum, is it gonna, when I open up a folding phone, am I gonna get that experience or am I gonna continue to get big Android, which is frustrating? You know, I don't know. There's like a number of scenarios that 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. - Yeah, it does seem like the iPhone folds takes are both very high and very low. And 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 that are like, we did better. Is it that or is it, look at this science project that we also made? - 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. (laughing) - Like, there's something there that will just be weird. - Yeah, 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? - So, you know, I'm gonna take it out on tomorrow. I have a whole day planned for it. I wanted to have like a nice, you know, day where we go do some fun stuff. We're gonna go downtown. I'm gonna use my little logitech. He's to go with that. - You're gonna get all its favorite treats. - Exactly. I know. - I see, okay. - 'Cause it's, you know, if they discontinued it, it's, we don't know. - This is so sweet. - How long it has? I'm gonna give it a good like effort and then I don't know what's gonna, what's gonna become of it. - Put it out of its misery. - Yes. (laughs) I hope not. Yeah. All right, well good luck. Thank you for coming on. We're gonna take another break and then Neal and I are gonna come back and presumably yell about free speech for a while. We'll be right back. (upbeat music) - 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 dieticians 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. 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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 UPWORK.com. Upwork.com. When you think about wealth inequality in America, there's probably one man whose name comes to mind. And yes, he did compare America's billionaire era to the Gilded Edge. We're living in a moment where the top 1% owns more wealth in the bottom 93%, where one man, Elon Musk owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households, where, while 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, the billionaire class has seen its wealth increase by a trillion and a half dollars since Trump was elected. How's that? They're doing pretty well. I talk to Senator Bernie Sanders about his latest bill for a wealth tax and his call for a moratorium on AI data centers. Plus, how much he uses AI himself. Today explained every weekday and now on Saturdays 2. Alright, we're back. Time for the lightning round. And Nela, I assume that means it's where we want again, we have to do it. We supposed to say it's unsponsored. Oh yeah, it's unsponsored. For flavor. There you go. Long pause. I want you to imagine like two or three ellipses in a row every time I say that. Is it time? It's time. It's time. You don't have to say it. I feel like 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. It is true. It's not so much the existence of Brendan Carr's, the dummy that makes me sad. It is just the consistency of it. It's just like sometimes you need like a routine breaker in your life. You know what I mean? Yeah. Can Brendan just, just like 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 within podcasts. Brendan Carr is the dummy. This week's The Music Submitted by Julia Mark. Here it is. ♫ Brendan Carr, Brendan Carr, how did he get this far ♫ ♫ Brendan Carr is dummy ♫ Brendan Carr is dumb. Oh my God. Do you ever hear a song and immediately know this is going to be in my head for a long time? I'm going to be lying on my pillow at 2.30 this morning singing. I'm so good. I don't know. Thank you for that. That was incredible. I love the band's stars. They're one of my favorite bands and that just sounds like a, like not a great stars record. That's not what they would do. But it's like, you know what I mean? It's like the song they made just to sort of get the juices flowing. The first thing in the day. Yeah. Like we made a song about Brendan Carr. I'm like, why did you do that? But that was amazing. Oh, I made me so happy. Thank you so much Julia. What do we have this week? We have a lot. We're going to go from that vibe to a very different vibe. Like me being so like happy. It's 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 our end. Oh God. Not for a year. We're going to start here. Okay. It does not appear that anyone knows why. It does not appear that anyone knows how this war went or if it should. And it does not appear that Donald Trump even knows if it's a war. Like the president especially asked Congress to declare war and they keep going back and forth. He keeps saying it's a war. It's all very confusing and bad. I would say media coverage of this war is unlike, for example, the Warner Rack, which was my political aching is like a young college student. We're like, everyone I knew under the age of 500, you know, going to Warner Rack was a bad idea. And the media and the Democrats and everybody was like, we're going that we're doing it freedom fries. And then, you know, the war rack. And this is very bad. I'm just putting this in a context. Right. Like I think what this administration wanted was a bunch of drum pounding war coverage, the way that the Warner Rack got a bunch of drum pounding war coverage. 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. 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 you just run this clip? He is, you know, the alpha in every single realm. That's true. In every single place all across the world. Okay. God, that sucks. 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 the environment. Like an NFL locker room. 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. A PTA meeting. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? Like a plan, 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, not be the alpha room. Any room I'm in, honestly. Um, it's not. It was there and I took it. I don't feel bad about it at all. Uh, so that's just how Brendan encounters Donald Trump. Like he's just, he's just there as a sink of fant to suck up to the bus, which is a bad thing for the primary speech regulator in the United States, especially when a person's story is, is Brendan. But again, just as like an exercise, you can make it, it's like a pretty fun exercise to make a list of rooms in which any president would not be the alpha. Uh, and I, I, I'm just assuring you like a, a kinder garden 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 Marlago where, you know, the alpha dog is telling him what to do from the 14th hole. From the 14th. Yeah. What's on truth, social is like classic rambling out of his mind, truth, social post where he says yet again, and intentionally misleading headline by the fake news media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly stuck down an airport. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal in particular and other low life 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-dimensional people blah, blah, blah, blah. Trump stuff. He's, he's mad at the newspapers saying the war is going poorly or that in 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 a rack war coverage. It's just not happening. Yep. 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 down 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. He goes on to say changing course in their own business interest since trusted legacy media is off on the off time. Well, blah, blah, blah. This like rhymes with him going on Benny Johnson's podcast and telling ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, but it's actually somehow like a less veiled threat than that. This is an open threat. Yeah. And it's dumb and staggering number of ways. First of all, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are not broadcasters. I know. To say this, they're newspapers. They don't have broadcasters licenses. So 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 here are times. And he's taking this Trump criticism of the Times and the journal and turning it to the place where he does have a theory, broadcasters news organizationize. 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. Like this hasn't come up ever. Like a broadcastersion 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 story. But the threats do keep working. The threats do keep working. The chilling effect as we have talked about many times is to some extent the point and he is working. Yeah. And I'll just remind people that 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'll 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 cars. This is why James Tolerica wasn't on the co-bear show. Right. the CBS was effectively chilled from that. And 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 gonna see a lot of that in this upcoming election cycle. The chilling effect of the equal time rule is just gonna be real for the broadcasters in this cycle. So now we have an extension. 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. Right. And because that is patriotism. Because that is patriotism. Being a patriot means loving the war that your country is in. You get that. No matter 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, price and chest pounding coverage and absolute belief that there are weapons of mass destruction, all that stuff that happened in the early 2000s, which was a mistake. And like 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 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 keys. I think he's I think he's misread the room. I'm going to punish a bunch of comedians for making fun of Donald Trump. You can pick up about half of Americans with that. Those are like low-ish stakes. All right, 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 with the first amendment. Stephen Colbert will get lots of views on YouTube. Because saying the thing is not allowed works like. 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 where 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 center for my home state of Wisconsin, is on Fox News criticizing Brendan Carr. And the reason I'm wearing it Ron is again, he's a center for my home state of Wisconsin. Ron is a complete and total idiot. Like he just is. The people of Wisconsin know he's idiot, like everyone knows he knew it. Like this is just not a smart man. And you know, for whatever reason he's going to elected. Like Ron thought the Fox on factor was a great idea. Like, it's Ron. And like even people who vote for Ron are like, he's not the brightest bulb, but he's our guy. Like, that's the vibe, 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 big support of the First Amendment. I do not like the heavy hand of government no matter who's wielding it. So no, I'd 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 constitutional rights. I mean, there's a rousing speech. [LAUGHTER] It's not great. When you are so stupid and you're so addicted to the idea of censorship to please Donald Trump, you're out the dog. You've gotten on the other side of Ron Johnson. Like, maybe 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, now you've definitely gone too far. Yeah. Roll it back. I mean, so much of this is, I think, back to the thing we've talked about before, that a lot of what people like Brendan 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 think were bonkers, but that lots of people would agree with. But when you run into these things, and I think that Kimmel thing was a really interesting kind of early example of this, that was bipartisan against what the Trump administration wanted to do. Like the backlash to that was swift, and it was across the spectrum. And so when you go out and you say he's the alpha in every room, like that is for Donald Trump. 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? Yeah. 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. It's like access, right? And so, but then as that move gets more and more politically problematic, this gets to be a harder game to play. Trump is going to push you out on the ledge and Brendan is out on the ledge. Yes. And I'll actually contrast this. The Verge is like a vest. So we, this week we covered DLSS 5 and we covered the Samsung canceling the trifold. And Tina Winn, our DC reporter, she went to a Pentagon press briefing this week. Yeah. It's big, it's big. It's big purge. The Verge.com. And we're trying to figure out why. Like why did the Pentagon, which famously kicked the traditional press call out in bite Tina? And the answer is they wanted her to see Pete Hegseth take good questions. Huh, right? They were interested in showing that performance off. And they had invited some senior traditional reporters. And Hegseth was basically like, I hate you, why are you here? And then, you know, the front row was like news max and the Mike Lindell show, like some really weird stuff is 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 just got Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Suner Patrionist politicians, actually politicians. No. Like real politicians never shut up. They're everywhere all the time making their, their constituents because you can fire them. Yeah. Like Joe Biden didn't show up and he got fired. Straight forward is that. He just wasn't successful. The number of CEOs I've talked to you on the coder who are like, we couldn't get a hold of anyone in the bad 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. And then we shut up. He was like, look, dude, like we fired him. Politicians get fired. And so you see the government is constantly talking. And they have to earn the respect 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 of the season. 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 minute, or come on to coder and tell me what your decision making process. I need to have you on. You know where I am at. I think the audience wants you to come on. And just to remind you, we're hiring. If you'd like to be a producer of a trust, you can submit your estimate. There's always that's been Brendan Carr as a dummy America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I'm just saying, Brendan, if you go on to coder and not the first cast, you won't get custom theme music. That's just something. It's just something you should think about. I will play the music. All right. Let's actually, you mentioned DLSS. So for my first lightning round item, let's do DLSS. Sure. 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. Everyone loves it when I describe game or technology. (laughing) It's where I live. It's truly the heart of my activity. How does this apply to Madden? Yeah, that's what I got to be. Actually, you make some arguments. Have you ever wanted Madden players to be even hotter than them? All right. DLSS is actually very clever. I think what Nvidia did with DLSS and the entire idea behind his very clever. Basically, if you have Nvidia graphics hard, 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 take the full power of the graphics hard 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. A lot of you get higher resolution, higher frame rates on lower 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. Yeah. So then yesterday Nvidia rolled out DLSS five and basically framed it as an AI filter to make everything look better. And this is not some 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 recognized as bought and paid for in digital foundries are 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. Yeah. You've seen a lot of the same examples I have in sure. They're like, what if there just were no shadows and everything looked kind of like a soap opera from the 1990s? Is that what you would? Yeah. Or what if we upscale faces and we literally change the way these characters that you've come to know and love? Like that people made on purpose to look for people like artists have designed. And by change the way they look, what they mean is a given Instagram model face. It's very ob like they've all been yesified 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 yesified like Matt LaFour. And that's not a floor was like really hot. You see what I'm saying? Like to be fair, Mad LaFour is a good looking man. And you could and you could turn that up to 11 with the power of DLSS five. 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. The AI in general in video games is hot button and controversial. DLSS kind of wasn't. No. It's DLSS five. Right. Like there's been criticism of it. And like certainly people are like lock in concerns because the developers code for DLSS. Like all this whatever. The idea that it had the same sort of slop concerns as AI. Not really in the mix until DLSS five. And the reason is because it's the first time the graphics heart is imposing taste on the video game. So you're talking about shadows going away. You know, that's iPhone HCR. Like the phone adopted a look. This is right next to the what is a photo question. 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 looked and like now there's a tone mapping control. And do you like process zero and highlight like cameras have looks they have aesthetic judgments embedded in them. And your graphics card playing a video game should not right the aesthetic judgment should come from the developer into whatever extent that you want to monkey with the settings should come from you. Your graphics card city in the middle should not be like and everyone has huge boobs, which is kind of like where we're going with this. Yeah. So that is a problem until the rush if you back and to be honest, the frankly hilarious means of deals that's fine. Found it off that have been circulating over the night this week. The memes are very good. And Jensen wrong. The CEO of Nvidia responded to the criticism of this at GTC. They're big conferences 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 channels of how to respond to backlash is not the right answer, particularly gamer backlash. Yeah. You're wrong. Doesn't usually where people don't go, Oh, you're right. Great call. I am wrong. You know, just run off against the gaming community. You like you suck a new stupid. Yeah. You'll take my slap 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 handfisted fashion was that the developers are in control of DLSS 5. So if they choose to use the DLSS 5 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 is just not the way to send that message. No. Especially when you're in video 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. 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 experienced people are having with these tools. I will say if you'll send me DLSS 5 to Yesify David on Riverside, which is what we use with the bird chest. I'll take it. I'm just like if I were like, you know, 60 to 70% hotter this podcast would be unstoppable. This is like this is my two theories. If I could remember everyone's name, politically unstoppable. And if David was just hot, can you imagine God unstoppable. All right. We're going to do one more each. This is how we end up in the manosphere. We're like, I'm like, David, if you just had abs, I'm going to start. It looks maxing and you're going to regret a lot of things that we've done in this show. David, I do. And I've been meaning to tell you this for quite some time. I think you should hit yourself in the face of the hammer. Weirdly you have said that to me before, but in a really different context. What's your next lightning round? I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it once. It's double debunk for my second lightning round. And just two headlines by our reporter Robert Hart who covers AI and culture. It's a great science reporter. One headline is, this is not a fly uploaded to a computer. And a second headline is chat. GMT did not cure a dog's cancer. Okay. I'm familiar with one of those things, but not the other. 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 and to 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 in a banana. Yep. 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 clients. It's like nuts. Like it's just out of control. And basically their evidence is like a video of a computer fly. Like I don't, it's buzzing now. It's 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. And 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 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. And so Robert goes and talks to a bunch of researchers. The researchers like this makes no sense. One of them points out to Robert and this is a real quote. So the fly does not fly, which in the grand scheme of what makes that thing a fly. It's like very important. So he goes back to the company and says, I have all these researchers saying you're full 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 lockback, full in total lockback. Robert, one reporter just went and said, does this make sense to like a bunch of researchers? Researchers all said no. Robert went back to the company and said, no one thinks to speak any sense. And they're like, yeah, we didn't do this. We did not upload a fly to a computer. It's uploading and uploading a fly to a computer is a spectrum. The answer nonsense. The friends who made along the way. Okay. Second one, tragedy we did not cure a dog's cancer. And we'll link to Hank Green here. Hank Green made it. They do 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 short. So he just put it in regular YouTube and called it along, which I think is hilarious. That's very good. Anyway, there's, you know, Silicon Valley bro says that he used tragedy to come up with a vaccine for his dog's cancer. Okay. Okay. Robert looks into this. This is what I did see. I do remember this one. This one every year because it's a dog. Yeah. The local news couldn't resist this one. I'll just read the book. 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. Notice a checkpoint inhibitor designed to help the immune system target tumors, making a difficulty in a vaccine had any effect at all. So like you just don't know. It's just straightforwardly. This is not a real test. So it's like we did this thing and also gave them the solution to their problem. Who knows which one it was. So we just don't know. And then here's this other one for Robert. The vaccine itself was not generated by a chatbot. ChatTVT did not design a create Rosie's treatment. Human researchers did it. Most of the chatbot served as a research assistant helping parse medical literature. Just a full leave on this one. And this one wild everywhere. What a perfect AI story. Is 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. No, a layperson did better research. Sure. It's fine. Kick ass. If that is the truth, great. Why do we have to go pretend that it cured cancer? Like, because everyone wants to feature. And you can farm a lot of clout on X to get everything up by saying things people want to be true. Likes for days, man. Anyway. Robert, poor Robert is just on the debunk case now. This is what he does. Well, with those links up, you can read them. But just be careful over there. - This is what we mean by the way, when we say Neelide just sends people to take talks to date 30 PM. It's just like, the vergest newsroom exists to figure out if what Neelide saw on his timeline is real. - When we're in a process, what we sell here is rigor. And like the first type of rigor is like, is this true? - Yeah. Weirdly relevant question in these runs. - It turns out, yeah. That rigor does not exist on X, the everything out. - 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 looks like a bad sign for the metaverse, then it announced that it was going to shut down VR horizon worlds, which looks like a bad sign for the metaverse. And then it announced it was doing a bunch of layoffs in its reality labs, which looks 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 end of the VR version of a horizon worlds. Everybody hears this and immediately this generates a new round of headlines saying meta is bailing on the metaverse. This became a narrative this week. 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 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 for the first after all. This news just came out today. Thursday is a 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 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 thing would still exist. They're there to trade crypto and try to have AI go fans. Sure. There were, you were in the video we did a while back, right? Exploring it was just a bunch of children. It was so odd. It was such a failure from the jump. Alex Heath, remember Alex Heath was one of the first people at Quest Pro. I still have a Quest Pro sitting over there. And this was like the embodied internet when Mark was going on with the metaverse and they were doing all the demos. And like I would just remember that dude came back from his first briefing and was like, it sucks. And as you know Alex, he can just say it. And if your whole should say it, just say it sucks. (laughing) Yeah, it was always very bad. It was. But 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. It's very good. Meta also doesn't know what AI is for. They keep hiring and firing thousands of people sending the insidolars to make, talk about not having a good consumer AI product. That's your plan dude. Yeah, also by the way, the Rayban meta stuff running straight at that same problem. This, like there are, glass hole murmurings starting to bubble up in a lot of places about how to feel about these glasses. Okay, people do not like seeing those in public. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg's trust deficit is really starting to come to the fore here. I actually want to call out, you know, the one product they had that people loved was supernatural, the fitness at NPR. 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 and people and they liked. V wrote a great story about that community, how mad they are. And then this week, I want to call out to you interview Lena Khan, who as Biden's FTC chair, tried to stop that acquisition, so to stop it. She was way out over her skis and I whenever I knew, she was, 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. She's like, composition leads to better outcomes. So which by the way, again, I feel it's in the birch house. Like my main political viewpoint is like, competition is good for me. And government's huge regulations are bad. So the interview of the NPR this week, our head on is Lena Connors, right? And there's a lot of comments there being like, well, it was such a bad business that I 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. Right. 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 to 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 as a company could have done a million things to better serve its audience in 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 that our comments about. No one ever wants VR and 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 know what happens to a company who Google buys it. I know what happened. I know what happened to Dark Sky when Apple bought it. You know, who also figured out the people who made Dark Sky, who just quit Apple to start a new weather app. Act me weather, great app, big thing. But they were like, we don't want to do this anymore. Like, we're getting crushed. We would like to go back to making a weather app. Yep, yeah. And everyone knew what would happen to SuperNational when meta bought it. So it's true. Lena Khan, 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. Yeah. And my only point is people loved SuperNational. We, but 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 or so far. It's just a community of people who are sad about a virtual reality fitness app. That's, those are the verge keywords. That's us loving technology, right? Yeah. The company never had a chance to take that and turn it into something real. They were subsumed into the meta-borg. They were subservient to total strategy confusion. And now it's dead. And like, I think the quest to is at the buck '99 'cause the meta's blown 'em out the door and they're gonna focus on the rebands. I think you're probably right. And yeah, go read the Lena Khan piece. Go read the other stuff. It's all inside. It's all very good. It's good stuff. The Lena Khan interview 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. Way over to do. This is what we do. I blame Allison. She's not here anymore. So we're gonna 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 Chromio. It is as much fun as we have ever had making this show. I think you're gonna really like it. Charlie Harding, Verge Castintern hosted that with me, helped me figure out the story of the VOCoder with Chromio. We had a blast. It's really good episode. A, listen to the interview that Neil I did on Decoder with Jim Lanzone from Yahoo, which I thought was fascinating. They are what a weird company to do. Weird company. Interesting, innovative, 30 year old internet ideas. Very fun. Who's on Decoder next week? It's a little up in the air. Okay. If the CEO of Superhuman, the Grammarly guy, shows up on Friday, which I think he's gonna do. So as your listening to this, I will know. Then that will be Decoder next week. If not, it'll be somebody else. But as of right now, this is coming up. Again, we keep saying out loud that Shishir has to do this. So he's gonna do it. As of today, he said he's gonna do it. By the time you're listening to this, I will know. We'll say it. And if you wanna get in touch, the email [email protected]. The hotline is 866-verge-1-1. If you want all of our podcasts at free, including all the ones you just talked about, subscribe to Theverge. Theverge.com/subscribe. It's a good website. We like it quite a bit. And I think you will too. The Vergecast is a production of Verge and the Vox Media podcast network. This show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next time. Nealight, take a step. - Record roll. (upbeat music) - Support for the show comes from Virgin Atlantic. Every trip you take is special. That's why for every flight, you need a crew that makes you feel special. Showing up for you like the VIP you are. 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