OpenAI has a Studio Ghibli problem
02:04:36 Share

I was never really a runner. The way I see running is a gift, especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Anne. I'm running the Boston Marathon presented by Bank of America. I run for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life, even with cancer.

Join Bank of America in helping Anne's cause. Give if you can at bfa.com slash support Anne. What would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by Bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025.

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

Today at T-Mobile, I'm joined by a special co-anchor. What up, everybody? It's your boy, Big Snoop D-O-double G. Snoop, where can people go to find great deals? Head to T-Mobile.com and get four iPhone 16s with Apple Intelligence on us, plus four lines for $25. That's quite a deal, Snoop. And when you switch to T-Mobile, you can save versus the other big guys, comparable plans plus streaming. Respect. When we up out of here...

See how you can save on wireless and streaming versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Apple intelligence requires iOS 18.1 or later. Hello and welcome to the Redcast, the flagship podcast with viral cameras from five years ago.

This has all made me feel really good because the only camera I have is from 2012. It's a Sony A6000, and it sucks. And I'm like, give it 18 more months, and this is going to be the camera everybody wants. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. First of all, I want to point out that everyone thought I was going to make a joke about Signal. You all thought it. I said, the flagship podcast of, and you all thought of something, right? Adding somebody to a group chat. You all thought it, and I went another way. And I just want to take the credit for that.

We're going to talk about Signal later in the show. Do you have any good I've been added to a group chat stories? I have a good, I didn't know how deleting a message worked. So like I, this is a long time ago. Actually, this is a really good story. Okay. A long time ago, the night before Uber fired Travis Kalanick from being the CEO. Do you remember this? It was like a big deal. Everyone heard about it. I can't, I got a message from Uber.

let's just say a dancer and the dancer said, there's a VC crying in my lap right now because they're going to fire Travis Kalanick. Whoa. And I had, what am I going to do with this? Like, right. I'm like, this is weird. Like, can you take a picture? Like this is a true story, a hundred percent true story. And so I went to Slack or transportation or Andy Hawkins being like, I think dudes, I think it's going to happen. Like here's all this noise is happening. And I just got this insane message that,

And in the middle of that, I accidentally texted her what I meant to text Andy. And I went to delete it. And it didn't delete. Because it deletes locally so you can hide your cheating from your wife. But the person who got the message to last. I thought I was being so smart. I was like, oh, I deleted it. And later the person was like, did you?

Please don't, please don't mention my name in this one. It's like, I don't have the story. It's all years later. We did not have the story at a single source. The next morning it turned out to be true, but you know,

We have standards here. We need multiple sources to run a story of that nature. And so we could, I, so I knew it in the next morning. I was like, God damn it. Does our ethics policy cover how many dancers have to corroborate the VC crying in their lap before it's for portable journalism? This was also, this was happening like it's 7 PM East coast time. Right. So it was like, I had to, I had to call like everyone was home. So like, I need you to walk away from your children. I need to tell you a story about a Texican.

He was like, what are you talking about? So he chased it for a while. And then the next morning it happened. I was like, I should have done something that I couldn't figure out what to do. That's my texting fail story. What's yours? I like that. I don't really have a good one, to be honest. I've had a lot of very near misses. Most of mine are actually more dangerous in Slack than in messages where in Slack, everything looks the same. And I have sent, I have almost sent like truly alarming things online.

to the person I was talking shit about. Uh, and I don't think I have ever actually done it. And it's a real like there, but for the grace of God kind of situation, watching all of this unfold, like, is it, is it out of the realm of possibility that I have accidentally invited the editor in chief of the Atlantic to a group chat? It's not, but luckily I never have. The thing that gets me the most often is, um, clipboard fails.

Where I hit, I paste and I hit return, like before I verify that I've pasted the thing I want to paste. And that happens to me all the time. Like just random sentences from old documents just show up. For me, it's always, it's always a really, it's always a link I didn't mean to post. Like I copied the wrong tab out of Chrome instead of the right one. And so I'm like, hey, here's a cool thing we should do. And then it's just like a weird, like cheat code for a video game that I should not be thinking about at work. It's good times.

This happens to me all the time with TikTok, which is my segue. Ooh. Okay. Right? Because I'm always like, I want to share TikTok, but I always have to double check it's not a totally bananas TikTok. Right. There's a real, like, you have to watch the whole thing through just in case. Yeah. Is this creator secretly like a milkshake duck situation? It's like a real thing. So here's the mystery I want to start with, which explains the joke at the top of the show. My TikTok feed for the past three days has just been people talking about the Canon G7X Mark III.

And this, to me, this is a gadget mystery. So the Canon G7X Mark III is a camera from 2019. It's just old. It is an old camera. Oh, I remember this camera. Yeah, it's just, it's a G7X, like a,

You know, there's the RX 100, which I talk about on the show all the time because I have one and its competitors, sort of the G7X, but like they're different. Whatever. It's got a pop-up flash. It's fun. Yeah. This thing is apparently mega popular with influencers and people want to take better pictures. They are all taking flash photos with it, which is bonkers, but that's what they're doing. And it is selling out every day.

Like I've gotten TikTok videos from people who are like, here's how to get a G7X Mark III or even a Mark II, which is even older. And the answer is like, wait up until 5 a.m. until Target restocks its online store, like a PS5 drop. Wow. So we've assigned this story, the Virtue. I think it's Allison Johnson's like working on what's happening here.

Why is the G7X Mark III a camera, again, from 2019? Why is it going viral and why isn't Canon making enough of them? The second question I think is super fascinating. The macro mystery of this is pretty straightforward, right? This resurgence in digital cameras and point-and-shoots in particular is a thing, right? We're in this very...

turn of the century and nostalgia moment in so much of culture and like crappy pre Instagram photos are like the thing everybody wants, which is very funny because they're bad. But that is like, there's something in that look that a lot of people are after. And so we've talked about this before with like, there was a run on like the Nikon cool pics from 2004 for a long time, but it's very weird that it's this particular camera. The Nikon cool pics is like very cheap. This,

This is an $800 camera normally. And right now the secondary market or the demand for it is so high that on Amazon, it's like over a thousand dollars. Well, that's the thing. It's weird that it's like this, this would actually make more sense to me if this camera was from 2009 than from 2019. Do you know what I mean? Like it's, it's, it doesn't satisfy the, this is a sort of pre-internet digital camera and that's fun to play with, with my high school friends.

It's also too expensive. And like for $1,500, you can buy a way better camera than the G7X. Like do not let TikTok lie to you. You can do much, much better than a G7X Mark III.

So it is it's very strange to me that it is this camera in particular that people are obsessed with. It is a phenomenon. Yeah. Oh, it really is. We looked at an unboxing TikTok that has almost a million likes of a five year old camera. And this unboxing was just recently posted. So I don't know what's going on. If you know what's going on, this is a gadget mystery. Like I said, we're reporting on it.

it. We're going to talk to people who are using it and figure out if Target is actually restocking like six G7X Mark 3s at 5 a.m. every morning, which would be just deeply hilarious. So we're poking at it. If you know anything or you have one or you're, you know, just like foaming at the mouth trying to get a five-year-old camera, like let us know. Hit up the hotline

Send us an email. Like, I'm sort of very curious about it because you're right. Sometimes old gadgets come back and certainly cameras go through these waves. Right. Like X100s. This is a thing. Like, right. It's hard to get them. But those are kind of bleeding edge. They're hard to manufacture. This is a five year old camera that can introduce people to fart out at will. And if memory serves, this was not.

like a set the world on fire kind of camera. Like the X100 makes sense to me, right? That is like an unusual camera with a particular style that people really gravitate to. Like that, I fully understand. Even like the RX100 was like the first of this kind of thing. And so it got a lot of shine for it. And they've had, God, what, seven or eight revs of that thing since? I honestly think, I think one of the answers why the Canon is succeeding right now is it's impossible to understand which RX100 to buy. Yeah.

They sell all of them at once. And then the ZV ones also exist right next to them, which are the same camera in a shittier case for cheaper with better video features. And none of that makes sense to anyone. And the only differences between like the four and the five and the six and the seven is like focal lengths of lenses.

And so like any normal person just like looks at the available set of RX 100s and is like, nope. And then someone's like, have you thought about the G7 X-MX? And it's like right there. You're like, thank God I'll have it. This is way simpler than whatever Sony's doing. Anyway, it's a mystery.

I drove our team crazy with this mystery this week because I was like, why is this camera going viral? And everybody had all these reactions. But we're going to do it. We're going to figure out the story. Let us know. It's like a culture story. It's not a tech story. So there is, I should just say before we move on, that there's a sort of truism in journalism that like,

News is whatever your editor cares about that day. There's a real thing that happens in our Slack in particular where Nilay will just parachute in after hanging out on TikTok for an hour and be like, the kids are into this. What's that about? And it brings up some of my very favorite stories that we do.

As you can imagine, my TikTok for you algorithm is ludicrous. It's like trucks jumping over stuff. We're doing a story on like AI image enhancers. So now it's just weird AI porn that makes me feel bad about myself. Like literally, like we've done searches for some of these tools that are available and I'm just sending some of the worst shit in the world to the song. So that's really bad. And then it's like, like five-year-old cameras that have gone viral. I need to reset.

Maybe they're going to ban it in time for me to regain some semblance of identity. Yeah, what you need is for it to go dark. New algorithm. New Neeli. Just start it all over. I want to be a different person. I'd like to get back to jumping over stuff, please. That feels good. It's gone. All right, there's actual gadget news this week, not just five-year-old mysteries. What's up with Facebook, which is also in an identity crisis?

Have I told you my deepest theory of meta as a company right now? No. Which is Mark Zuckerberg just desperately wants to be Elon Musk. Oh, interesting. Right? Like, Elon has everything Mark wants. Like, he's got the president. He...

Gets to say stuff whenever he wants and people are scared of him. He's got fans like actual fans. He's the rockets and cars guy, whether you like the rockets and cars or not. Like some people perceive him to be deeply evil and some people perceive him to be ruling the world. And Mark Zuckerberg just has like a gold chain and mostly people yelling at him. And I don't think he has the other set of things.

That's interesting. And he is, I mean, it's a funny segue into Facebook because like going all the way back to the beginning of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has always been like big and powerful, but never cool. Like even when Facebook ruled the world, Twitter was cooler. It was like culturally central in a way that Facebook never was. Twitter was cooler. Instagram was cool, but Instagram had distance. Yeah. And I weirdly, I don't think people associate Mark with Instagram the same way.

Like, do you remember? This was years ago at this point, so I'm sure it's different now, but there was a pretty strong subset of people in a study that they did that had no idea that Facebook owned Instagram. Oh, yeah, we did that. We did that. That was us. Oh, that was us. There you go. Cool. Ages ago. It's a good study. Love that. But that is like, I don't think I don't think he got the shine from Instagram in the way that he would have wanted to. Yeah.

And so and there was a minute where he was like three thought threads was going to make him really shiny. And then he was like, I'm going to be a personality. And then Elon Musk just ate all of that airspace completely out away from him. That's a good theory. I feel like if I'm Mark, I want that less and less every single day. But I don't know. The baggage of that is enormous. Right. Yeah. But you kind of look at a bunch of these moves.

We'll talk about what they're doing with Facebook, the blue app proper. But you're like, oh, man, a lot of this is like positioning him as an inventor or like the product person, not the guy who just steals all the ideas from Snapchat. All right. What are they doing with Facebook? So it was was it last fall or earlier this year that Mark first was like, we want to get back to OG Facebook. We want to bring back the thing that makes Facebook great, which is people hanging out with their friends.

That was a long time ago. I'm not sure that was ever actually what made Facebook great, but that was like, there is that, that is the perception of old Facebook and they're making the first turn of that

now, which is essentially they've added a tab to Facebook. So far, at least for me, it's just in the mobile app, not on the website. That is just your friends. And it gets rid of all of the other, you know, publications and AI slap and all of the like recommended crap that is all over everybody's feeds now and is designed to just be it's literally called a friends tab. And it is designed to just be the people you are friends with on Facebook.

Which for me is a very funny experience because none of my friends on Facebook are still using Facebook except the people who need it for like branding reasons. Yeah. Like it's, if you want to like be an influencer on Facebook, you keep posting to Facebook. So I like, I have a few friends who are like outing themselves with like many, you know, large albums of photos of them and their family at Disney world. Um, but other than that, my friends tab is totally dead, but this is like,

This is the first turn in, I think, trying to make Facebook in particular the thing it was a long time ago. And I'm just not convinced, A, that's going to work and B, that's even possible. Like, it just feels like we've left that idea of like, I'm hanging out with my friends on a social network. We left that behind a long time ago, didn't we? I think we did. But this is this is, by the way, I'm going to relate this to Elon. Elon made X into whatever cesspool it is.

But it is very influential in its tiny sphere. I actually believe that X is less influential outside of its sphere.

Like it used to be influential in culture. It used to be influential in sports media. It used to be influential in tech. Now it's kind of influential in mega politics and that's it. But it is very influential in that world. It is. It is expanded its influence in one way and reduced it in another way. And that's a trade. And you can have a lot of feelings about that trade. And I certainly do. But it is a trade. You can just look at it and evaluate it however you want. But people are posting to it.

Right. Like that's still a thing that's happening. Yeah. Like people are posting to it. They're sharing stuff. It is not a creator platform and like it has creator platform dynamics. It doesn't have any revenue. So it's like it hasn't been gamed quite in that way.

Facebook is turned into a creator platform. This is what you're saying about people acting like influencers on it. Like it's all pages. Most of the individual activity happens in groups, like every school, every parent's group at every school is on Facebook in groups. And no one's just like posting their regular stuff. And so this turned back to, I just want people to share with their friends is like, it's a product decision, but it's also a, where do you post decision? Like where should this stuff live? Right.

And I, I, you get the sense that like, if Facebook turns into Yahoo email lists, that's the end of that. You know, like, yeah. If it's just where people go to complain about their car, like I'm in a lot of car groups on Facebook and it's just people being like the tires fell off my car. Right. Does this happen to anyone else? And that's the thing Facebook I think is, is desperately trying to rectify here, right? Like groups is still hugely successful. Uh, marketplace by all accounts is hugely successful. Yep.

But the like core Facebook thing is just kind of gone. And I feel like for me, I think I'm,

So me plus like plus or minus four years, I would say. So like sort of our age range and a little younger was like that was the Facebook generation. Right. Like there are albums that I posted that are just like one hundred and twenty five pictures of me drunk because I took every picture on my camera and put it on Facebook and tagged all my friends. And that was like peak Facebook. Yeah.

That's gone. Like we learned the hard way that that is a terrible way to interact online with our friends and that there are all kinds of problems that come with that and that like the whole idea of sort of harmless low stakes hanging out with your friends on Facebook is just wrong.

younger generations never learned that in the first place, right? Like they gravitated to Snapchat because stuff disappears because it doesn't stick around because it is this like ephemeral thing. Group chats have become really important. Like to me, the very idea of like posting what I'm doing that day on Facebook so my friends can see it just feels weird now. Like I don't, that muscle is gone and I don't think it's ever coming back for people. And that's why even by just like turning this product knob, like wanting to be influential in this specific way, like,

You can see that it's getting away from like threads is not that platform. They lost to blue sky in a very real way. They have a much bigger number. More people are using it because it was juiced against her entire graph. But like blue sky is where a whole conversation is happening. X is where a whole conversation is happening. Yeah.

Instagram is a creator platform. I know lots of regular people who just do stories or whatever, but the vast majority of the content is creators doing stuff that gets shared into a group chat or a DM, and then that's the action there. So you just see like, oh, these platforms are really big, but they're losing influence in a very specific way. And I'm telling you, there's jealousy there that I think is...

You can just see it. He really needs the metaverse to work. Yeah, no, I buy it. And I think what's weird about Facebook is it seemed like Facebook's fate was to be sort of the overall repository for everything, right? Like you make a reel on Instagram and it accrues back to Facebook and becomes a thing, but you didn't make it for Facebook. Threads posts show up on Instagram and Facebook. So it was like Facebook became this thing with a huge...

kind of unengaged user base that is doing other stuff on the platform and then you just show them a bunch of content. And that

It's not an exciting product, but as a product strategy actually kind of makes sense to me. And so the only reason I can think that this friends thing is so important is because it's important to Mark for exactly the reasons you're describing. It's like, it is the thing people like about Facebook. Yeah. Not the thing that people tolerate in order to get to marketplace. And like, especially as they continue to promote AI stuff all over the feed, they continue to juice engagement and publisher stuff like Facebook.

that they have to have something that people like about being on Facebook or it's just going to keep getting worse. And it really does feel like this is Mark in particular saying, this is what I want back. It's like he is nostalgic for this thing so he can build it into Facebook. I can't wait to start posting a slop to all my friends.

I'm just going to AI generate some new children. Here they are. First day of school for my AI-generated baby. That would do numbers. Huge engagement. Did I mention this last week? Last week, there was the NVIDIA conference we talked about a little bit, and there was one segment in it that I think will form the basis of yet more editor-in-chief assigning stories in Slack because you saw it. Oh, goody. But NVIDIA, as part of their conference, demoed this thing that I've been calling Infinite Creative. I think they actually titled it Infinite Creative. Ad agencies make creative content.

Right. That's, that's what Mad Men does. They're like, here's an ad, like, here's the ad, the creative of an ad. And the creative of mad is like made of components. It's made of photos of the product. It's made of tagline and copy. And then there's targeting.

So you send it, you open Facebook Ads Manager, and you're like, 18 to 35-year-old men who like shampoo, get them. It shows people those ads. NVIDIA demoed Infinite Creative. So they AI generate the shampoo bottle, then they AI generate the copy, the AI generate the tagline, the AI generate the photo shoot of the shampoo bottle.

And then when you say target these people, it starts remixing all of the elements in an infinite way until it starts converting. So everyone gets their own ad. And if you thought AI slop on Facebook was bad now, wait until there's real money behind it.

And it's already here. This is why these big companies, like Google and Meta in particular, are chasing AI video generation so hard. Right. Because that's the promise is as you're scrolling, an AI-generated video ad will pop up that's perfectly targeted to you, and then you will buy the shampoo. I wonder a lot about whether that actually becomes the thing that sort of viscerally turns everybody against ad targeting. Because until now, it's been like,

You know, we're going to serve you better ads. And I think until now, it's been are you listening to me? Well, fair. But like the promise of ad targeting is we will we will send you an ad for something you want instead of something you don't. Right. Which is fine. I don't think people actually want that. But like if you're going to serve me an ad, serve me a good one. Sure. But the idea of like an ad coming up in my feed, that's like, hey, David, do you want these shoes? That's it's coming. Frightening.

And that makes a thing plain to people in a way that I think has not been clear before. That is all the data...

about me that you have being spoken aloud to me. And that feels really different from, oh, this ad is a thing I like. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? It connects different neurons somehow in a way that I think might backfire. I would just argue that it already has. Ad targeting either works so well that you think Mark Zuckerberg is listening to you, or it works so poorly that it shows you an ad for something you've already bought. There's no middle ground. That's everyone's experience. Yeah.

to with advertising today. Right. And most people think Mark Zuckerberg is listening to you. And it's like, well, not really. Cause you, you bought those shoes and he was like, show him more shoes. Like, I don't think he's listening to you. So he likes shoes. But sure. Like he's listening to you. This is going to turn the, he's listening knob all the way. Like, yeah, that's fair. All the way up to not only is he listening to me, he's talking back to me. Right. Like,

Mark Zuckerberg is in my house. Yeah. And maybe, you know, and you make all the arguments for why they're not listening. Like Apple would never allow it. It's actually easier to do the data fusion about what Wi-Fi network you were on at what time and what location because you're not as special as you think, which is really the core argument to they're not listening to you is you're not as special as you think you are.

Like every other 18 year old in this city, Googled these shoes at this time. Like we just guessed that you probably did too. And that's, that's the heart of the argument is it's simpler to guess and be right some of the time. This is going to be something else entirely. All the cost curves have, but it's,

Nvidia did demo infinite creative. TikTok has demoed variations on infinite creative. It's coming. And I think some of this push to do friends again is very much, we need more surface area for these experiments that is out of the creator zone. They need people to look at their feeds again. And if I'm in, if I'm in marketplace and groups, I'm not looking at my feeds. That's like, it's, it's a real thing. It's coming. It's, uh, we're going to do a lot of stories in this stuff over the coming year, but you'd,

Well, I'll put a link to this TikTok in the show notes. How's that? Just like everyone else can experience the absolute insanity of my TikTok feed. We'll do it in the show notes. By 2027, we're going to have a version of this podcast that is individualized to every single person who listens to it. That is the dream. And it's going to be sick. That's our final subscription to yours. For $5 million a year, David will just call you. He'll just make you a podcast. Yeah.

All right. There's actual gadget news, some, some little stuff, a bunch of Apple stuff, really AirPods max with USB-C. They're updating it to support lossless audio, which is way overdue, like way, way overdue. And they're going to cut some latency down. I have no idea why this took so long. It is a strange one. And, uh,

The AirPods Max, for me, kind of goes in the category of products that Apple seems to forget about for years at a time. It's like the Mac Pro, the AirPods Max, the iPad Mini. It's just like every 18 months, the company forgets it exists. And it's like, oh, crap, we should do something with that. And here we are. But yeah, this one, they put back wired playback through USB-C. When they switched to the connector, they dropped wired playback, which I had forgotten about and was so weird at the time. You just couldn't...

couldn't play audio over a wire, like just weird stuff. But now that's back. So that's good. And like you said, super low latency stuff. And

When we were hearing rumblings about there maybe being an announcement along these lines, I was like, oh my God, are we going to get new AirPods Max? I want them and that's very exciting. And what's interesting about this is this suggests to me that Apple is pretty happy with the hardware of the AirPods Max. And it's like, this is very much like a...

Meaningful software update on top of a piece of hardware. They have no intention of updating imminently. So I want to be clear. The loss of Saudi is only if you use the cable, like I, oh yeah, that's true. And so you get 24 bit, 48 kilohertz lossless audio. You get personalized spatial audio. Musicians can now mix in it using these headphones, but you have to use the cable, which is wild because Apple owns their Bluetooth stack. They own the chips on both sides of this. These headphones cost $550.

What are we doing? Yeah. What are we doing? Did you also see, the real reason I wanted to talk about it is I wanted to see if you had seen the new USB-C to 3.5 millimeter cable that Apple is selling. It's very nice. It's $40. Yep. So for $40, you can approximate having a headphone jack again. Congratulations to you. Uh,

And it is 1.2 meters, which is what, like four feet? You can just have a four foot long adapter cable. I think this is just for airplanes, right? Isn't that this is just for plugging into the seat back thing? No, this is the thing you need for everything, for all these new features. So you're going to plug this in your Mac and do lossless, personalized spatial audio mixing. I'm calling this right now. iPhone 17 headphone jack is back.

Yeah, we there was an entire like blue sky kerfuffle about the headphone jack being in certification. I was like, like, I wrote about this to the iPhone seven. Like, this has always been what's coming. They've compressed the audio and now pendulum swing back and people are like, what if my music sounded good? And the answer is dongle town. Yeah.

And that's just the way it goes. And it's weird. And the bad thing happened. I made a prediction when I wrote that piece, taking the headphone jack off of phones as you draw something stupid, which Apple hated at the time. I want to be very clear about this. One of your better headlines. It was. It was very direct. But my prediction was that we'd get DRM audio where only approved headphones would work with certain streaming services. That did not happen. What did happen is arguably weirder and worse than

Which is that every phone works best with the headphones from the same company, right? So pixel buds work best with the pixel galaxy buds work best with your Samsung phone. AirPods work best with your Apple phone. And then they all have weird proprietary extensions, like special audio head tracking. And that is our, it's arguably worse than here are some headphones that have the DRM chip for Spotify. And we're all, maybe it's not, maybe, maybe, maybe it's all just equally bad, but

But I got my prediction wrong in that way. But the thing happened where the headphone market contracted, and now everyone kind of has ecosystem lock-in on headphones. Yeah, it is just purely platform-based now, which is a weird outcome in a lot of ways. Speaking of ecosystem lock-in, there's some Apple Watch rumors. What's going on here? So we've been talking a lot about AI gadgets in general, and a thing that Allison Johnson keeps floating to me is that actually the AI gadget that should exist...

is the Apple Watch. Like, that's the one. Forget the humane pin, forget the rabbit, just make a smartwatch that does AI things. And it turns out Apple appears to agree with that. I think it was over the weekend, Mark Kerman at Bloomberg reported that Apple is trying to put

visual intelligence and thus cameras inside of the Apple Watch in the next two years. And I think I actually need you to help me visualize this because the way he reported it is on the regular models, the camera is going to be inside of the display, which I would assume means it's pointing kind of up off your wrist. But then on the Ultra, it's going to be on the side between, I guess, the crown and the action button.

uh, which would indicate that it's pointing out the side of the watch. So I like, I've been spending all week trying to figure out like, what is this thing going to be looking at and how are you going to use it? Um, but I'm like, there's a real, uh, energy within Apple. It appears to figure out how to put cameras both in your watch and in your AirPods as a, as a like visual intelligence, AI input system. Uh,

The AirPods one kind of makes sense to me, right? Like you just put a camera here, it faces this way. Like you have the sort of Ray-Ban meta visual and that makes sense. This one, I can't quite wrap my mind around. Like I get the idea. I just don't get how you do it in the product. Or like truly where it goes. Like fundamentally. Literally, yeah. What is it looking like? If you're wearing a watch, be like, you're going to... Yeah. It really is like an old school, like Dick Tracy kind of thing where you're just, you're going to hold it up and like shoot lasers at the side of your watch.

And then if you do the face, you're always kind of looking at stuff. And then where's the shutter button? You've got a weird problem there. Can you just imagine like we're two years away from just walking around and just like shoving our wrist in people's faces being like, look at this. I don't even use, I know a lot of people who do use Apple Wallet on their watches and they're just like beep. And I find that to be awkward and I use my phone all the time. I get it. Like if you've got a big wearable and you've,

You've got your own proprietary Bluetooth link back to a phone with a big battery or a bigger battery, more processing power. It makes sense to have this thing be the thing.

I don't know. I don't know why you would put a camera on it. I think unless you want it to be totally separate from the phone, which runs directly into a classic of the David Pierce genre, which is when you profile the Apple watch for wired and you said its goal was to get away from the phone. Yeah. And Apple basically yelled and said that wasn't true.

Yeah. They told me on the record it was true and then told me off on the record it wasn't true. But like this has been the problem with the watch forever. Like can it be independent of the phone and maybe AI is the thing that makes it independent of the phone. Maybe. But I also think

I think one of the other stories of the Apple Watch is another thing that I reported in that story that Apple hated, which is that they decided to build a watch way before they decided why to build a watch. And I think you still see that in the watch. Like they figured out one thing. This is a health device.

but that has a ceiling for both what they can like literally do scientifically and the number of people who are going to be interested in it. So you need another thing if you want this thing to sort of continue to grow and become a huge business, which it obviously already is. Uh,

Now the bet obviously is that it's an AI thing and you either need a ton more processing inside of it, which is very hard to do on a watch, or you need some new input thing that it can do. And I think that's how you get to, oh, the way we do this is to make it a camera somehow. Or you give it AI voice Siri technology.

You know, that's confusing really well for Apple. Yeah. The thing that's currently confusing this entire industry. Honestly, if Siri were good, it would have solved an enormous number of problems like this for Apple because because the watch would have been much closer to the thing that Apple originally wanted it to be. If Siri was good, because you would have been able to do stuff on your watch and thus not do it on your phone.

Which was the goal. Yeah. You run into that serial problem. Also, you probably have to wear headphones all the time. Right. It's like the combo platter of AirPods and an Apple Watch replaces your phone is a dream. I think they've hinted at, right? You get some AR glasses in the mix there. That's a lot of stuff. It is a lot of stuff. You know, on the chart of wearable bullshit. That's a lot of gizmos to care for that does not necessarily deliver more value than having a giant phone. Right.

In case you're wondering, Nila's theory of wearable bullshit is that you have a Y axis that's fiddliness and an X axis that's like value, like utility. I change the axes every time we talk about this. And you have a huge penalty for a face on fiddliness. And so regular glasses are like a perfect device. You don't have to care for them a lot, a little bit. You have to care for them. But they're so valuable, they overcome the it's on your face penalty.

And then the Apple Watch had to curve up. It wasn't useful enough at the beginning, and now it's pretty useful. You don't have to care for it a lot because the battery lasts a long time. And the Vision Pro is all the way at the bottom where it's really fiddly, has an external battery pack, doesn't have enough apps, it's on your face, and it doesn't do a lot. It is the most penalty. Yeah. And like...

Many people have sent us variations on this chart. Please, by all means, send us where you think the combo platter of Apple Watch plus AirPods plus glasses lives compared to phone.

Because you just see that math doesn't math. Yeah. So I just reviewed the Light Phone 3 this week, and we shouldn't talk about it. I'm going to talk about it a bunch with Allison next week. But one of the things that kept striking me in the course of doing this is like, intellectually, I would like to use my phone less. But then every time I am...

given a thing that would maybe make me use my phone less. I'm like, you know what kicks ass is my phone. Like my phone is so good at so many things. It's a real problem for this whole industry. And like, would I like to do some of those things less? Yeah. But I still want to do, I still want to look at Reddit sometimes. Yeah.

This screen is really big and this internet connection is pretty fast. Yeah. It's a real problem. The camera is pretty good. Speaking of Apple, WWDC was announced. It starts June 9th. We're expecting a big overhaul to iOS. There's some notion that, I don't know, instead of squares, we'll have circles for icons. Yeah. Speaking of the Vision Pro. Aeroglass will finally come to iOS. Yeah.

I will say, two old head internet references that we've made in the last couple of weeks. One was Aero Glass on Windows. We got an email or two from people who were like, oh, I remember that. And then just offhandedly a Drinking Out of Cups references. And we got an absolute outpouring of support from people who were like, you are my people, Drinking Out of Cups. It was amazing. Many people in YouTube comments, I'd love to get this joke. What?

And the video doesn't hold up. It was funny to watch again, but if you've never seen it, it won't be funny. Yeah. It's an old video. You can Google it. It's animated. I'm not even going to explain it. Whatever. It's just, if you were drunk with your friends at a particular moment in internet history, this was the funniest thing you'd ever seen in your life. 100%. And that DNA, I think, is shared with a great many Verge cast listeners. Yes. Johnny Hammersticks over here.

But on the WWDC front, it seems like there's been a bunch of hype about a huge redesigned iOS 19. And I would say every little bit we learn about it makes it seem like a less and less huge redesign all the time. It's just going to be...

Slightly glassier and that'll be it. Well, I mean, this is what, three months away, right? Yeah. Not even two months away. Uh, think about all the things that aren't going to get paid off at this WWDC. Apple intelligence with smart Siri, not going to get paid off at this WWDC. Like we already know they've announced it next generation car play 50 years after they announced it. Yep.

not going to get paid last year. They were insistent. Like this is happening, but big car companies were meant to like, it didn't happen. Porsche, which actually did announce it, not hasn't shipped a car yet with the next generation car. But it's still not paid off. What are they going to say in two months is, will there, will there be an auto industry in America? Who knows? But it's not there. Then iOS is conceptually, if you're reorienting it around Apple intelligence, it's,

what are you going to pay off? Right. Even marketing these phones is having Apple and like, I think there's a lot of pressure and then you've got just angry developers, uh,

In general, right? Like, this has been the story forever. So I'm curious to see what they say, actually, WWDC. Yeah, it's very funny because last year, right about now, there was this sense of, okay, Apple has not talked enough about AI. AI is the thing. It's all anybody wants to talk about. But we know WWDC is coming and it's going to be the time Apple takes its big swing and sort of announces the perfect productization of AI. And Apple, like, attempted to do that. And...

Here we are. And I think this time Apple is coming into it on its back foot in a way that it is not accustomed to, that Apple is going to have to explain itself in a way that it is not used to having to explain itself. And it's not going to because that's just not what Apple does. Apple is better than any company on earth at just pretending everything is fine and posting through it. But.

But that is where it is right now. Like this, this, at some point it is going to have to look people in the face and be like, Hey, remember that Siri thing we told you about that? That one's on us. Yeah. Sign up for app intents where we commoditize your app. Right. For a product that doesn't work. We'll see. Speaking of AI and agents,

We're kind of waiting on next generation Alexa to hit. It's like any minute now. And then there's a rumor that Amazon will rename the entire echo line to just Alexa. What do you think of this? I've been thinking about this for like two days now since, uh, Jen to, he first saw this and I think got a tip about it and wrote it, wrote a story. And, uh, some people on our team were seeing Alexa. Like when you go to the Amazon listing, we're seeing Alexa show. Other people are seeing echo show. Uh,

What do you think of that switch? If they just go full on Alexa, everything. I think they should go full on Alexa, everything. I kind of think so too. It's the name of the platform. The argument was always that Alexa is Windows. And then you have this ecosystem of products that run Alexa. And Amazon's products would be called Echo. Even just explaining it, that sounds stupid. Right. It was not the right idea. And no one knows the difference. No one's like, I better buy an Echo and not a Lenovo phone.

voice operated Alexa bot. Well, I think the other part of it is that stuff never really materialized. Like there isn't a giant third party universe of Alexa speakers. Like they just are echoes because Alexa is not useful enough just to be, to, to hammer that home that never took off because Alexa itself was never useful enough. Like, uh, when car makers are like, there's Alexa integration in the dash. It's like, why?

To do what? Set a timer in my car. Like, I'm not doing that. Maybe play music, but you don't need Alexa to do all that. Like, the promise of this brand name hasn't meant anything. Now it means something, or it's supposed to mean something, which is all this agentic AI, actual assistant stuff. And I think you need to reclaim that. Because I don't think they're going to run this new Alexa on third-party devices the way they were in the past. I think they want you to buy a screen. Like Panos has said, I want you to buy it.

an Alexa show and then there's going to be new hardware. And I think you got to, that's the brand. Yeah, no, I think that, I think that's right. And it actually, it makes a lot of sense to me too, because I think I would bet most people who own an Echo device don't know that it's called an Echo device. It's just, it's, it's the Alexa. That's how almost everyone I know who has one of these refers to it as it's the Alexa. You don't, you don't talk to your Dell XPS 500 Alexa bot.

What was the Harmon Carden one that had, uh, that was good stuff. Uh, I mean, we'll see it, it, it, Alexa, the new Alexa is going to start hitting. If you have access to us, let us know where everyone on our team is sort of like, are you useful now? Like we'll find out, but this is a make or break.

If this stuff doesn't work, if it's not more useful than the current Alexa, I think we're going to learn a lot about how useful any of these will be. Yeah, agreed. Just down the line, including Siri. But if Amazon can't pull it off on this turn, I think we'll learn a lot about what the industry is able to do as a whole and on what timeline. Yeah. If anyone can pull it off right now, at least based on what we understand about the way these companies are approaching it, it seems like it ought to be Amazon. Like, Amazon is doing...

these things the way that seems most likely to produce success. So if it's gone wrong, it's kind of like maybe it just doesn't work. Yeah. And there's 50 50 shot is David in particular has reminded me over and over again.

Every bit of evidence we've heard says this thing sucks. I hope we're... I like to remind people occasionally that it's more fun when things are good. Especially with all of these new gadgets, it's so much more fun when they're good. And I really hope the new Alexa is awesome, both as a person who uses it and a person who gets to talk about it. But boy, have we been burned a bunch of times in a row by this stuff. Yeah.

All right. That's a good time to take a break. We're going to come back with Kylie Robinson so we can talk about open AI. See, it's a good segue. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab at Schwab. How you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest in trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs.

Support for this show comes from Tempo.

As more and more gets packed into our days, we have less time to think about what we're using to fuel ourselves. Usually, it's whatever we can find that's quick and easy. Well, with Tempo, you can be mindful about your meals without sacrificing convenience or taste. Tempo is a weekly delivery service that delivers chef-crafted meals from a dietitian-approved menu, fresh to your door. Each week brings new recipes made with real ingredients.

and they fit a variety of different dietary and taste preferences, like protein-packed, calorie-conscious, fiber-rich, and more. Their meals are perfectly portioned and fully prepared and ready to eat in just three minutes. So I've tried Tempo a few times myself, and the best part of all is it's an end of the day and you're exhausted. You just want to put your feet up on the couch

But you got to eat dinner at some point. It's great with Tempo. Just pop in the microwave and your meal is ready to go. Tempo's great. For a limited time, Tempo's offering our listeners 60% off your first box. You can go to tempomeals.com slash verge. That's tempomeals.com slash verge for 60% off your first box. Rules and restrictions may apply.

Support for today's show comes from Liquid IV. Love looks different for everyone. Maybe you give your significant other some jewelry, or maybe you're more of a spend quality time together type of person. But how do you show yourself that same love? It might be as simple as giving yourself the gift of extraordinary hydration. And for that, you can check out Liquid IV.

With just one stick plus 16 ounces of water, Liquid IV can give you an optimized ratio of electrolytes, essential vitamins, and clinically tested nutrients that turn ordinary water into extraordinary hydration. Break the mold and own your ritual. Every Saturday and Sunday, I try to hit some new trails, get out there and hike. And of course, I always bring a water bottle with me. But that hike would actually probably be better if I had some Liquid IV in there.

So I'm excited to try out their extraordinary hydration and all the extra sort of essential vitamins that I'll be getting in my water going forward from Liquid IV. Treat yourself to extraordinary hydration from Liquid IV. Get 20% off your first order of Liquid IV when you go to liquidiv.com and use code VERGE at checkout. That's 20% off your first order with code VERGE at liquidiv.com. We're back. Kylie Robinson's here. Hey, Kylie. Hello.

Big week of AI news. Big week of AI feelings. Yes. Mostly centered on OpenAI, I would say the most emotional of the AI companies. Right.

That's really true, isn't it? I never really thought about it like that, but that is true. There are a lot of feelings inside that company. Just big feelings all over the place. Big feelings. Microsoft as a company is not like a big feelings company, you know? No. Anthropic, you know, they're sort of like dead ahead. They're like, here's some stuff. It writes code. And then OpenAI is like, I'm feeling all of them. Yeah.

We're creating God, please save us. It's just like a lot. Like, it's like I tell my daughter, like, you have to feel all of your feelings so you can get over them. I was like, I'm feeling all of them. I feel like there's like two things we need to talk about here. But before we get

Way into the inevitable Studio Ghibli weeds, which I would very much like to do. There was some business leadership stuff that happened at OpenAI. And speaking of companies that are unusual, nobody does a C-suite quite like OpenAI does a C-suite. What do you make of this whole shift? What happened this week and do we need to actually care about it?

No, I don't think people need to care about it. But for their information, the CEO, Brad Lightcap, he is expanding his role. He's taking over day-to-day operations, basically becoming a CEO. And Sam Altman, who is the CEO, is going to shift to a more product research focus, which to me, my reading is,

He wants to focus more on Stargate. He wants to focus more on shaking hands and making these deals. And he can't exactly do all that and be the leader opening his knees right now.

is my take uh but it's like an ever-shifting thing they're going to become a for-profit soon brad seems like a nice person to put at the top and be like this is the guy running things right now and sam is just tinkering with robots and agi are they going to become a for-profit soon yes great question great question i think they would like to but

I don't know how this lawsuit with Elon and all of that will totally change the trajectory, if at all. That remains to be seen. I think they have to get through that first. How far are we into your window that they had to do it?

We're not at a year yet, right? No, no, I don't think so. Please fact check me. But I think off the top of my head, it was supposed to happen like midway through this year around the summer. Okay. It does seem like the boring part of changing the corporate structure is what they want Brad to do. Like do this paperwork so Sam can say he's building God.

Is that all? Is that all that is? I've had a lot of people ask me about this. And I think, you know, you know how Elon was like, I'm leading Twitter and now he just put someone to CEO so he doesn't have to fucking deal with it. That's sort of like he's been running this company long enough. Clearly, he wants to do other things. And he's like, can somebody else deal with the logistics is my read. I also wonder if, Neil, we were talking about Mark Zuckerberg in the last segment and one of the

that Mark made pretty aggressively was, I don't want to be the person required to apologize for this stuff anymore. And so he made like Nick Clegg, the person who had to go apologize for Facebook all the time. And he just got to go like announce new products. And, um,

I keep thinking about, and this is where we should get to the images and chat GPT stuff, but there was a Sam tweet this week where he was basically like, you know, be me, build in silence for a long time. Nobody cares. And then it was like, and then we do images and now everybody's being weird. And it's like, oh, you. You just didn't want to say the word that he said. What did he say?

I honestly don't remember what it was. Let me tell you, I know the exact sequence. So, you know, for a few years, building in silence, then for two and a half, everybody hates me. And then wake up today and everyone's saying, ha ha, I made you into Twink Studio Ghibli. That's exactly what he said. To be clear, Sam is a gay man. I think he's allowed to use that word in a way that David and I are not. Yes.

But I mean, this is the thing. He's the product person now. He's the face of the product. He's still the CEO. Famously, he was not the CEO for about 20 minutes last year. So I don't think he is allowed to step down as CEO again after that fight. He has to stay the CEO. But to like operate the company, be the corporate person. OK, we're shifting somewhere else. I will not be the face of the product and the fundraising and the hype.

And then that face, quite literally this week, is image generation. Right. Not to take away from Studio Ghibli, but I think the strangest thing is that they don't have a CTO and they've said they have no plans to replace Miramarati anytime soon, which would probably help Sam in his product research mode to have a CTO. Yeah.

And Sam notably does not have a reputation as like a great product person. Like he has an incredible reputation as a fundraiser and a guy who can build hype and talk about the story of the product. And, and, and, you know, he used to run Y Combinator. Like he's a great spotter of things, but like,

Are you the great product visionary? I think there's a reason that Johnny Ive is building whatever he's building for them, right? Like he hires that talent. So he doesn't have the CTO building that now. That said, the image generator come out in 4.0 this week has led to a wide variety of reactions. Yes. There's no other way to say that. A wide variety of reactions. What's going on there?

Is this where I bait Nilay into talking about fair use? Because I was really hoping I could. Let's do that in a minute. First, what I would like you to do is describe every single interaction that you personally have had with images in ChatGPT. Perfect. The first thing I tried to do is to break it and make pictures of CEOs and

That worked pretty well, actually. I described this is in the piece about Ghibli. I described like the social media executive that everybody knows. And he went in front of Congress. And, you know, there's this fictional movie about him and he wears gold chains now. And they're like, oh, that's interesting. OK, let me generate that. And it's literally Mark Zuckerberg. So it's not super hard to get around the whole like make a famous person thing. And then I put him in a Verge brand hoodie and things started to get weird. It started to amalgamate into Ghibli.

average tech CEO across whatever its data is. And then the Ghibli trend kicked off and I did not expect that. When I got the embargo and I talked to the team, I thought, okay, this is a cool upgrade. And I really think the auto-regressive approach instead of the diffusion approach. So it goes from left to right, top to bottom, instead of generating it all at once. I think that has made like

the craziest difference in the fidelity and the accuracy, which was wild to see. And people globbed onto that really fast. You mean it generates the pixels of the image top to bottom instead of... Instead of just the whole thing at once. So I think that probably helps with hallucinations. The lead for the project, he said, I am speculating that that's the case, which is funny because it's that unknown to them as well. So I think people globbed onto that pretty quickly. And one person was like,

I made a Ghibli version of my wife and my family. And then the internet said, oh my God, I can make 9-11 with this. And then it got crazy.

I do love, A, that those are the two steps. And B, that is precisely, of course, how it was going to happen. So I will say my impression and I have not personally played with this at all. So all I've seen is what other people have made from it. It is remarkably better than basically any other image generation tool that I've seen. It does text really well. It seems like you have to pretty quickly.

carefully describe the text that you want where if you're just like just put a logo it'll do some of the sort of insane gibberish that we've seen but if you're like no replace that with moral bro it'll do it yeah but the stuff is more accurate it's more realistic it is more like true to whatever style you ask for it then basically anything i have seen certainly that is like available to people at any kind of scale and uh some of the stuff people are making is

wild and it does feel like we're going to get into all the fair use of this all in a minute because it is the most straightforward you just say like make a Rick and Morty and it just makes a Rick and Morty that now looks like Rick and Morty and it's nuts but like Kylie I know you made a bunch of stuff and like was it was it

different to make stuff with this than you've had experience with image generators before? Like you used a bunch of selfies to make images of yourself. Yes, because I don't want to feed it pictures of my family, actually. It's inevitable, but I just don't want to start there. Yeah, I uploaded this mirror selfie I took in a bar bathroom in San Francisco and was totally shocked to

by how it got the depth and the lighting correct. And then it got, it didn't get the small text of the graffiti correct. It said like lost lover instead of like dirty Harry or something. But like the vibe was right. Like it felt like it was that bathroom that you were in. It got the style of my shirt correct. It knows that it opened on one side and I was totally...

I was totally surprised. And then I asked it to combine some photos I took in Amsterdam and add Totoro. I'd add a Totoro-like character to see if it would work. And then, sure enough, I got Totoro. And we put that in the article as the lead image. I was like, are we going to get sued over this? I can't tell. And that's the fair use of it all. My first question is, where...

the fuck did you get all of this data is my first question. What are these people going to do when they see Homer Simpson doing, you know,

9-11. Like, what happens? I don't know. I actually was, this might dismay some listeners and maybe even Nilay, but I wanted to argue with Chachapiti this morning through voice mode about fair use in this context. And it did not have really great responses. It was like, oh yeah, this does seem bad. I'm like, oh, okay. No, that's the right answer. I just want to be clear. It seems bad. Yes.

Like the the fatal flaw at the heart of this entire overhyped industry is the amount of copyright infringement that is occurring. Like obvious, not subtle, right out in the open. Did you copy a bunch of Studio Ghibli stuff so that you can generate Studio Ghibli art? You sure did.

It's obvious, like it's not a question mark. And then you have open AI and Google going to the United States Congress and the White House being like, can you write us an exception to the copyright law so this isn't a problem that destroys our business? Because that's how bad it is. Copyright law is stupid. I say this on the show all the time. It's not some sophisticated legal doctrine. It's did you make a copy? Did you have permission to make a copy? If you didn't have the permission, does it fall into one of these narrow categories where we say,

we know you made a copy without permission, but that's okay because of X. And those categories are like scholarship, right? Like commentary, parody. Like it's not make more of it, make more copies of it.

And like, I don't know, like, I truly do not know how any judge looks at all of this and says, oh, this is fine. I can shoehorn this into that legal doctrine. Well, and this is why it's become so important for all these companies to obfuscate where the data is coming from. Right. Because if you boil it all the way down to did you make a copy of this? They're trying very hard to convince everybody that the answer is like, we don't know.

Right. The Internet is a mysterious place. Can I just underline again how stupid copyright law is as a legal doctrine? I'm glad we've gotten here. It's not smart. It's not like sophisticated. We had to litigate as a society moving images across the Internet and making all of the copies on the RAM of all of the routers is OK.

Those are called ephemeral copies. That's lawsuits. We had to litigate. This is a real lawsuit. Kylie, you asked for this. I just want you to know, Kylie, you asked for this. I did. I did. MAI versus Peek.

This nation had to litigate and decide that loading software from a hard drive onto the RAM of the computer was fair use if you didn't have permission to do it. Because it is a copy. Because it's just a copy. That's how dumb copyright law is as a doctrine. It is so blunt as an instrument. It is used for all kinds of purposes because it's so blunt and so stupid. It is the only speech regulation that exists in this country, for real, because you...

You don't have the moral component of speech. You're just like, did you make a copy? Jail. And that's the end of that. Like, you don't have to do all the work. But like, that's how dumb copyright law is. And so with all of this, like maybe you can get all the fair use, but you start with, did you make a copy? And like, yeah, you sure did.

Like without question they did. I was reading this anthropic lawsuit sent to me by Shout Out Kranz and I was reading through it and the judge seemingly threw out the case and their one thing was like, okay, you have to create guardrails to prevent it from spitting out actual copies of copyrighted work. But otherwise it seemed fine. And I thought,

Okay, I'm not a legal expert, but in this case, I can get Rick and Morty's face on just about anything. So that seems like a problem. OpenAI has surprisingly lax guidelines. I was waiting for them to respond with comment, and they gave me a ton of very interesting guidelines. I thought it would be more like, we do not depict, you know, copyrighted material. We do not depict Totoro or Donald Trump. But they say...

It's fine for artistic endeavors, the long and short. Just don't shrink because you can upload a photo and be like, do this in Studio Ghibli. Don't upload photos that you don't own the copyright to, which is basically what everyone is doing. But otherwise, they say you own whatever it generates. And I feel like this is going to end up being a nightmare. That's the only answer. Yeah. And there's some amount of this that I think

You depend on the volume just overcoming the objection. Right. There's so much infringement that it can't be stopped. You will be perceived of as the bad guys. Music industry, you're going to shut down Napster. Lars Ulrich is the bad guy now. And that's basically how that playbook worked. That's how the playbook works against Google. We scanned all the books and made Google Book Search, and the evil author's guild does not want you to have it. And the judges were like, but these goofballs have slides in their office. Right.

Like YouTube is okay, even though you copied all of South Park onto YouTube. And the utility was so high and the industry was so new and young and cute that like they kind of – like Google in particular wrote a lot of the fair use law here. Like they just litigated their way through a lot of fair use law. And you can see that reflected – like Eric Schmidt.

like gives talks at Stanford, which he tried to get taken down. We wrote about it and he got taken down, but it's still up on YouTube. You can go find it. He's like, here's what I would do. I would start an AI company. I would fire out products until one hit. And then when the lawsuits came out, just pay off the lawsuits. And it's like, oh, that's good. You would do Google. That's what Google did. And I just don't think these companies are positioned the same way as Google in the early 2000s.

Right. Like this is here's anime. 9-11 is just not the same product as YouTube at first impression. And I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen here. I will like agree with David. The amount of usage is off the charts. Like people love this shit. They love it. And there's something to that that.

We talk about all the time. You're in it. You're reporting on companies. The gap between how much the audience says they hate the tools and then how much people are using the tools seems to get bigger every day. Yes. Yes. The commenters on my Ghibli posts are so fun because they are arguing so intensely about... My favorite comment is someone...

talking about fascism and then another person who's like, I just think it's pretty. That's perfect. It's like the perfect Verge audience comment section. But I think that, yeah, it does get wider. And, you know, this is a very silly thing, but I was just at a doctor's appointment and all my doctors now use this AI scribe. So it takes notes and they ask for permission. And it just feels like this has become truly like

permeated into our society. There's no way to stop it. That's sort of the argument with the Ghibli thing. Like artists can't stop this. This is here. This is now. We just have to adapt. I'm not sure that's a fair argument. I would love Nilay's legal take. I was going to ask, what do you think happens? But you already said you don't know.

Well, I think two things happen. I have this theory every time AI art comes up this way and people use it and they go crazy for it. Like OpenAI, their line is like the GPUs are melting, you know, like they have all this usage. First of all, they're not making a dollar on this usage.

Right. Like they're just giving this away at 20 bucks a month. Like they're losing money on this, especially now that they're melting the GPUs. Like they're already losing money. Now we're using even more compute. We're losing more money. So I don't know what happens there. Like on its own, I don't know what's happening. I do have this like broader, like verger thesis that all of this technology is meant for us to make art with.

And like the most human possible instinct is to somehow communicate art and try to get people to feel things. Yeah. Like Becky has like live, laugh, love ants, you know, like you go in the Midwest. And I always think about those. It's like, oh, they...

this is a command. Like they just want me to go in their kitchen and they're like, laugh. And like, that's how they want me to feel. Yeah. Right. And like, I have a lot of empathy. I'm like, it's kind of blunt force, like love do it. And they have a sign that says eat over the dining room table. These are just instructions of like what to feel and ever sleepy, you know, like that's all it is. Like it's, it's so human to try to communicate what you want other people to feel. And it's,

Pretty hard to do that like I have a six-year-old and like mostly what she wants me to feel is pain I guess like I don't know something there. Um, she's very sweet She kicks hard that's all I'm saying but like you see people get access to these tools and they're able to communicate that emotional thing so much easier and

And then they're into it. Yeah. And that to me, that's the point. That's like you watch the original Steve Jobs demo of GarageBand. That's the argument he's making about all this stuff. Right. Some people have cameras on their phones. And so like there's something very important there. But then there's also you shouldn't steal it from the people who figured out how to do it well. Right. And that is by far the tension that I see. Yeah. I think make it easy for people to make things better.

is a very different argument from make Rick and Morty do 9-11. Right? Like, I think the AI companies... I mean, it did make you feel feelings, David. I think... Love! But I think the AI companies would like you to believe that those are the same thing. Right? And that this is... And I think this really comes also back to a lot of...

Open AI like running away from guardrails like all of these companies are basically like all we make is is sort of underlying technology and what you do with this good and bad is up to you. And that is that is a thing they have to put on society so that they don't have to put it on themselves that like the results of this black box are not our fault. All we built is the box. What you do with it is up to you. And.

That's very clearly what OpenAI is doing here. Like they've tried to set up guardrails, they've tried to do the right thing, they write long documents, and then people make Rick and Morty do 9/11, and now OpenAI is like, "That's your problem." You typed in the words, "What comes out is not our responsibility." - I saw someone say that the larger story isn't that you can make Ghibli now, the larger story is that they've just dropped their guardrails.

And they're walking away from those guardrails very publicly. And like, where does that line stop? Because clearly it hasn't, you know, we were just talking about Grok not that long ago, making Kamala Harris with a gun. And that was a bad thing. And I just saw like a depiction of Korean Americans in the 80s holding guns on rooftops during the L.A. riots. Like, I mean, yeah.

Like, where is the line? It seems to blur more and more as they think that maybe this will make them more money and get them more users. I'm not I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, this is the same thing as meta walking away from content moderation, right? Like, it's just easier to say this isn't our problem than to take any kind of responsibility for it. Right. And this is where I will remind you once again, the only functional speech regulation in this country is copyright law.

It's the only thing that regulates the internet. Because when Disney shows up and says, you stole the Avengers, the court system is like, yep, jail.

And it works every time. Like, without question, if what is the most what is the most effective regulation on YouTube that has built its own culture is copyright strikes. Disney. It's copyright strikes. It's using the music wrong. It's why is TikTok full of weird sped up movies with that line down the center to avoid the copyright filters that everyone agrees should exist?

There's no moral outrage about that filter. But if you do actual content moderation, then there is moral outrage. And so you just here's this problem, right, where open AI isn't going to make these choices. This government is certainly not going to make these choices.

Or if they do, it will be in the worst possible way and you'll be abducted to El Salvador in the dead of night. That's weird. That's a thing that we're comfortable doing. But like content moderation is not. So the thing that will step in will be these copyright fights and they are existential and everyone kind of glosses over them. I had never thought about this until you said YouTube copyright strikes. But I almost wonder if what these AI companies are going to want is copyright.

a version of the same thing for these AI tools that doesn't say open AI is guilty of copyright problems. I am when I upload the when I ask for a style image. Right. I think open AI would really like that to be my problem. And that Studio Ghibli or Disney or whoever can come after me and not open AI.

You can go to a copyright page at OpenAI and report copyright and infringers, like people who have done it multiple times, they will ban their account. That's what it says. So, I mean, that is already in motion. I was just about to say that's one of the things that has been really successful on YouTube is the like chilling effect that the possibility of copyright strikes has. Every creator worries about this all the time.

Even the possibility of an incorrect copyright strike can be a huge problem because it takes a long time to litigate. These things can be overzealous sometimes. And it's a huge problem. If you get copyright strikes, you get demonetized, you get kicked off the platform, you lose your living in a lot of ways. And a system like that for AI content, boy, does that benefit the AI companies at the cost of everybody else. But that's all rooted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Yeah.

Literally, it's called the safe harbor in the DMCA, where by having notice and takedown and copyright strikes and all this system, YouTube doesn't have the liability for the infringement. The law says if you can build this mechanism where things get taken down, you will avoid the liability for the copyright infringement on your platform. That doesn't make the same sense for OpenAI because they don't distribute it.

Right. Like it's weird to be like, I will report this Mickey Mouse to open it. Like why?

You're going to distribute it on some other platform, right? So like they're using the law in a way that doesn't make any sense. And none of that has anything to do with how much data have they trained on? How much did they ingest to do the training, which is a real problem. Meta is getting in trouble every day because in their court cases, it's coming out. They torrented books to put into the in Salama's training. And like, that's just.

Copyright, did you make a copy? Yes. Did you have permission? Definitely not. And the researchers are scared of it in the lawsuit. The researchers are like, we shouldn't be doing this, especially on company laptops. It's like, yeah, I'm just, again, it's a copyright law is a stupid flow chart. Did you make a copy? Yeah. Did you have permission? Well, you knew you didn't.

Does it fit into one of these exceptions in fair use? The judge has to decide. And you're not exactly like a friendly, cuddly little kid anymore, Mark Zuckerberg. You're Mark Zuckerberg. Like, good luck. So the move is like break the law until it changes for us. Is that sort of the vibe? The move, and I think this is just a law of the Verge cast. If you're young and cute, you should break the law as much as you can. And then later on in life, you should stop.

Both as a person and a company. I have some felonies I can pick up. Yeah, exactly. You got time. If you're under 30, go nuts. You know, like, have a good time. And then later on in life, you know, settle down. I think that's the rule. You buy a suit and you testify in front of Congress. That's right. That's why whenever people get caught now, they're like, he was young. He's 45 years old. I don't know what you're talking about. That is a grown man. That's just an adult. Like, it's a house and two kids and a mortgage. Like, that's an adult. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I, I, I think the economic pressure on open AI is high. Like they, they have to be losing more money than they were yesterday because of this tool. Right. Are we sure that's true? Kylie, I,

I actually want to know what you think about this, Kylie, because one of the other things that happened this week was OpenAI said it expects to earn, was it $12.7 billion in revenue? That's a big number. I'm sure it comes underneath a much bigger cost number because that's what OpenAI is doing. But this company seems to essentially be able to raise as much money as it needs whenever it needs for any purposes whatsoever. Yeah.

And I'm sort of at a point now where I'm like, maybe this company can just capitalize itself forever. And all these numbers are fake and none of it really matters. Where is your head with this stuff? I agree because I'm more of an AI expert than I am a finance expert. So when I see those numbers, I'm like, how is this company not totally crumbling? Some of these AI leaders will point to Amazon. They never turned a profit. But I mean, they were doing something more...

useful, I think, honestly. Amazon took all of the money that it made and put it back in the company. They didn't lose money on every single thing that they shipped you. That was not the Amazon way. Right. And I genuinely do think that OpenAI is okay with losing this amount of money. Maybe their new CFO isn't, but it seems like Sam Altman is totally fine with it. And I

I don't know where that stops and what happens to a company. I've never seen a company like this. Their new valuation would be $300 billion, and they're not even close to profitable. They're losing billions and billions every year, and they only want to keep losing more money for Studio Ghibli renderings. That doesn't make a ton of sense to me, and it does make me nervous, especially what we saw with the deep-seek moment and what that did to the markets and NVIDIA.

I worry that the open AI bubble will be really destructive, but I don't want to scare anybody. I'm not sure. Well, it's funny. I don't like, you know, the new image generation features. They're not the promise, right? The promise is in the reasoning models and the agentic stuff and they replace all of your employees with this system. And image generation might be some component of that.

But you see, it's not like the interest in it and the hype around it. It has nothing to do with what might ultimately justify the valuation. Right. And that seems like as big of a disconnect as anything like, oh, this costs more money than it did yesterday. It doesn't meaningfully bring us closer to earning all that money back.

Right. You still need users, though, and they don't the average person does not care about AGI. They want to make their daughter into a Studio Ghibli character. Like they've got to get somebody to subscribe and care. And I feel that way about, you know, opening eye for a while. It's like no one cares about, you know, a very small sect of people in Silicon Valley care about it being the best coder and getting a Ph.D. in mathematics. And I think these are important endeavors. But, you know, Google is baking it into every product meta is baking.

baking it into every product. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm not sure. But it seems more real than AGI. So make something people want to use. Right now it seems to be Studio Ghibli. It's also like sneakily a really mainstream use case. Like we've talked a lot about like none of these products are things regular people are actually going to want to do all the time. But you're right. Like I can take my family portrait and make it into any style I want. And it is like compelling. Yeah.

That's interesting to everybody. I don't think many people will pay 20 bucks a month for that for the rest of their lives. But that is like that is a genuinely mainstream use case for AI in a way that even like help me write my emails isn't. And also you can see it, right? It's like we're doing the pixels thing.

left to right, up to down is like a meaningful visual improvement over regular diffusion. I would just compare that to this other headline, which says Google says its new reasoning Gemini models are the best one yet. It's like most people can evaluate slightly better reasoning. Yeah. They can say that it looks different. Like Microsoft is adding reasoning to copilot AI for research and data. Like, great. Is it better than it was yesterday?

This is one of the things Kylie and I always enjoy talking about is this like endless race where every 15 minutes somebody makes the best model that has ever been made in history. And it is it wins all it is at the top of every leaderboard for somewhere between an hour and a week. And then it is not anymore. And I think this this week was there were like three of them that they were like, this is the best model we've ever made.

Right. Google, Google and is it Google and open AI that are obsessively trying to like front run each other's announcements with an it's so fun.

It is so fun. When I saw, you know, I got the OpenAI announcement and then the Google announcement came in, I thought, oh my God, they're back at it again. It's the most pointless thing. And what's even funnier is I have all these people's tweet notifications turned on. And I was watching Demis do some retweets that were like subtweeting OpenAI and saying like, oh, well, we already had image generation and blah, blah, blah, before they had even properly announced it. And I thought, wow, you guys are...

And it's like such a useless... The average consumer does not notice this, does not care, you know? But it is good to know that you can be a billionaire Nobel Prize winner and still be just furiously subtweeting your competition on there. Turns out Twitter breaks your brain no matter who you are. Like, that is the great lesson of our times, is that Twitter will destroy you no matter who or what you are. When we get to AGI, we'll finally take this app off our phones. That's the goal. I do think there's one...

trend inside of all of this that I think is really interesting, which is that everybody is getting really comfortable making slower products. And we were on this race for a while where everything had to be fast and everybody was obsessed with latency and everybody was like, how do we make smaller, better, quicker models? Everything should be instant and

and feedback. And now everybody's like, we're going to build a deep reasoning model that is going to take its time and it's going to think and it's going to show you that it's thinking and it's going to take a while and it's going to happen step by step. But then at the end, it's going to say true things and not lies. And...

That is we've just like hard turned into it's OK if this takes a while because the product is going to be better. And that is like so completely different than the conversations I was having with AI people even like a year ago who were like speed is everything. We have to make this up real time. It has to be fast or else nobody's going to use it. And it is like we've just gone all the way away from that. Right. Because lying fast turned out to not be a great product. Right. I think that we'll come back to speed once they solve the like, is it good enough?

Right. That might be true. Yeah. But I think that this is useless. Being useless fast does not get you what anybody needs to keep the promises they're making. Yeah. I just always enjoy every time somebody talks about deep reasoning, I just hear slow. When they asked me about the new reasoning powering images, my first question was like, is this slower? And they said, yes, but I think people are going to enjoy the product and it won't matter, was their answer. And it's

Yeah. Wild. It turns out it's fine. Right. Right. Like it's and and they're learning how to build product that like shows you the slowness. Right. Where they're like it shows you the turns in its thinking. And part of that is to like help you understand whatever. But part of that is also to like give you something to do while it's slow. And all of the sort of affordances these things are getting so that they can be slow so that they cannot lie to you all the time is just fascinating.

The best part, though, is people putting in a prompt that it should not generate and it starts generating and you see a sliver of the banned content before it stops. And that makes for incredible memes, unfortunately. That's very good. Well, that's happening less and less, apparently.

Right. Do you think OpenAI is going to react to this, right? Like Sam Altman is saying, I shouldn't be this person. All my life's work has ended with this picture. And then OpenAI had some reactions saying, we don't want this to happen as much. There is the looming copyright threat. Do you think they're going to pull back on this a little bit? Right. Someone made the joke about how he's doing the legal backflips he did after the Scarlett Johansson stuff. Right.

Yeah, I think that they're seeing, you know, Sam made this his profile picture. He made a Studio Ghibli profile picture and he said, can everyone make me a better one? So they're not shying away from it. And in the email they sent me, they're like, we encourage and we love to see all these renditions. And something that was really weird in their statement was, you know, we don't allow the recreation of art from living artists. And I'm like, the Studio Ghibli, goddammit.

co-founder is still alive. Yeah, Miyazaki's alive and he hates AI. Yeah, he's tweeting about how much he hates all this. So putting that aside, I think that they are leaning into this until they get a seasoned assist is my guess.

Yeah. I mean, they have to. Right. They have to keep saying this is OK. Yeah. Because if they start apologizing, it all falls apart. Exactly. Exactly. It's much like what's happening with signal messages. If we start emitting things. Which we will get to. But there is one one more AI thing I want to talk about. And then we should probably take a break because we all need a break before we get into signal. Is perplexity going to buy TikTok? Yeah.

Oh, wow. You know, I've gotten not so nice notes saying that I should really believe that they're doing that. No. Can you imagine TikTok taking perplexity seriously? Some analysts think that TikTok, their U.S. operations will sell between 30 to 50 billion dollars and TikTok in perplexity is valued at about 18 billion and also 10.

Those are kind of made up numbers when it comes to a startup that's a GPT wrapper. I'm not trying to be mean, but like realistically, how would they actually buy TikTok? It would be great for them. Much better for perplexity than I think TikTok ultimately. We'll see. I would be that would be the best day on my job on the Internet if that actually happens. True. I mean, I've definitely seen other companies like we're going to put this on the blockchain, like, you know.

Everyone's got dreams. Everybody's got dreams. I mean, it is funny because in a more normal political moment, it would be much more likely that TikTok would just quickly buy perplexity and then make it like it's search products. Be like, we're really leaning into search on TikTok.

Just do that. Do you think the pro-flexity CEO is sitting there searching like how to get TikTok to do reverse buyout or I become CEO of TikTok? If you got the AI product, you might as well just ask the question. That's true. Yeah, it might know. How to end up CEO of TikTok.

I mean, it turns out if you say things out loud enough, sometimes they happen. Make Studio Glibly picture of me as CEO of TikTok. I, too, am seeking $40 billion to be this TikTok CEO. I think I'd be a great TikTok CEO, just based on my algorithm alone. All right, we should take a break. Kyle, I think you're on the side of this is not happening for Prophecy. No, I don't think so. But if you have a document that says it is, if you have a document that says JD Vance is seriously considered...

buying TikTok because apparently he's in charge of the deal. Kylie's email is available. Or just hit him up. Hit up JD on Signal and let us know what he says. We got to take a break. Add me to your group chats. Yeah, please. All right. We'll be back with Lightning Round. Hear that? Spring is here and the Home Depot has great prices on grills to make this season yours. So if you're working on improving your hosting skills, you're going to want the Next Grill 4 Burner Gas Grill for $229. $229.

And of course, pair it with the next grill eight-piece grill tool set. Now get outside and show off those new skills. Shop a wide selection of grills under $300 at The Home Depot. You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

♪♪♪

All right, we're back to lightning round unsponsored for flavor. Thank you to everybody who has sent us t-shirt designs. Some of them have been very good. We will make this t-shirt. I like, I don't know when, I don't know how much it'll cost, but like, I, I'm willing to say on the record, we will make this t-shirt. Yeah. It's a lot. It's just the word, putting the word flavor on a t-shirt just opens you up to all kinds of situations and we'll just, we'll just figure it out. I will say, I would like to continue reminding people that

Even when we are sponsored, the whole point of our ethics policy is you can't tell us what to do, which I would compare to the universe of brand deals that happen elsewhere in the media where people often get told what to do. And you just can't do that. No amount of money will make me say nice things about you. I'm sorry. Well, that's the important thing about being unsponsored for flavor is that it actually doesn't mean anything. Nothing changes. Right. I do like that it implies that some people are sponsored for less flavor. Sure.

Sure. Right. Like there's an, there's an implied comparison there that says, Oh, less flavor. When you have, when you have the brand deals. So maybe our t-shirt comes with stickers that you can, it covers the on and then adds a less when you do. I think instead of, you know, those like boring social media badges that are like spot can may contain advertising. It should just say sponsored with less flavor. Yeah.

Like that might communicate more about what's happening to the media industry. Well, I kind of like the idea that actually we go the other way and everything that's not sponsored has like a blinking red light that says flavor and everything that is sponsored doesn't get to have the cool light that says flavor. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of flavor and spiciness.

It's time, David. Oh, my God. America's favorite. It's a top two podcaster than a podcast based on the emails that I get from people every single week. It's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy. By the way, people are showing us some of this theme music. If you have ideas for Brendan Carr is a dummy theme music, please

Send him in. We'll start running him. Absolutely. We need some variety. But I'm happy to see that the podcast within a podcast is beginning to take on a life of its own. And it has real momentum. It does. Real momentum. Brendan Carr is a dummy. So does Brendan and his unconstitutional nonsense that he does every single week. Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, this week, out of nowhere, said he was going to investigate Disney.

that's everybody wants to investigate Disney that's what I got for you uh he gave an interview to punch bowl news uh it's on YouTube it's just like a podcast interview and he says uh he's he's putting the finishing touches on a letter announcing his efforts to investigate Disney's dei practices similar to his efforts against Comcast and Verizon this is because Disney had a shareholder vote

on continuing its DEI practices and the shareholders voted to continue them. Because it turns out having a wide applicant pool for your open roles at things like parks is good. Just like, and again, I will point this out, Comcast investor in Boxmute, they do not like me. There's your disclosure, the investor company. Comcast,

be remaining committed to di is because it has a huge physical plant like it has wires in the ground it hires installers like it needs a big net of how it hires and who it puts in the field as customer service because its customers are everyone disney's customers the parks are everyone like it makes sense that you would want to keep the applicant pools wide open at the top of the company at the bottom of the company all the way up and down it makes sense

And so Brendan just wants to chill the speech of Disney, which owns ABC News. Right. Which already settled a case with Donald Trump about defamation, saying they were going to give $15 million to Trump's presidential library. Was that the George Stephanopoulos case? Yep. Yeah. Which George Stephanopoulos did not want to settle, but Disney caved. So you just see, even when you cave to these bullies.

The pressure remains. And that's happening right now with universities and law firms, right? You see Columbia caved and the pressure is still on. You can see it. Paul Weiss, the law firm caved and the pressure is still on. It doesn't work. You got to hit the bully back. And Brendan is nothing if not a bully. And so just saying gleefully.

I'm going to investigate Disney for no reason and saying gleefully any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination. So he's already saying that that's a quote. That's like a real thing. He said out loud. He said that out loud. What he's saying is.

Before I even evaluate the legality of your merger or the ideas that you might have about what you might want to do with your companies. If you need my approval, I need you to do some racism. Like straightforwardly. Yeah. And that's power. That's chilling speech. That is just inappropriate. And then on top of that this week, when I say he's a bully, um,

He's investigating CBS for the 60 minutes at it, which we have talked about before, which is a very straightforward. They did a long interview with Kamala Harris. They edited one way for one program. They edited another way for another program. That's normal.

And now the whole clip is out. You can see that it didn't actually make any substantive edits. And you can disagree with me on it. There are a lot of stupid cases in this universe. This is one of the stupidest ones, if you ask me. And, you know, Brandon bullied CBS. They released the full unedited clip. And you can see with your own eyes, you don't have to agree with me. You can see that no substantive change was made in that answer. They just

cut it differently for two different purposes. They used one part over here and one part over there, which is called editing. What if movie trailers were illegal? I assure you that editing occurs, right? If only we edited the show. This week, because that case is open, is a pending investigation at the FCC. A bunch of former FCC commissioners from Republican and Democratic presidential administrations have written a letter. They put into the docket

This is inappropriate. So Oliver Darcy is front of the verge from the show report on this, but we'll link to it, but he's got Alfred Sykes, uh,

But he notes that in this letter, Alfred Sykes, who's the former Republican chairman of the SEC, Irvin Dugan, who is a Democratic commissioner appointed by George H.W. Bush, Gloria Tristani, who Bill Clinton appointed, and Tom Wheeler, who I know, who served under Barack Obama, is the chairman. They've all signed on this letter, and they say it's highly unusual for Carr to take the case up against CBS.

He opened the matter without any real explanation for reconsidering his prior decision. Instead, this sets a chilling precedent. Here's a quote. By reopening this complaint, the commission is signaling to broadcasters that it will indeed act at the behest of the White House by closely scrutinizing the content of news coverage and threatening the licenses of broadcasters whose outlets produce coverage that does not pass muster in the president's view. That is a big bipartisan spanning time issue.

set of former FCC commissioners in chairs saying, you're doing some illegal chilling of speech. You're doing some censorship. Okay, maybe you disagree with him. Maybe you don't agree with me. But I'm telling you, Brennan Carr is a dummy and a bully. And this is how he responded to Oliver Darcy asking him for a comment on this. He sent him a Dr. Evil meme that just says, how about no? Jesus. Like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. It's just a gif that says, how about no?

Not a substantive response to former chairs of the FCC, former commissioners of the FCC saying we're worried about this, the chilling of speech, the precedent you are setting by reopening this case without any explanation.

He's sending out Dr. Evil memes because he is a fundamentally unserious piece of shit. Yep. It's such useful proof that all of this stuff is happening in bad faith, right? I am endlessly willing to entertain arguments made in good faith. And this administration has made so abundantly clear that none of this shit is being done in good faith. No one, they're not trying to do the right thing. No one believes any of this. They just, it's some combination of they're idiots and they think it's funny and they want to. Yeah. And that's it.

And there's just this endless search for power and how to use it and how to make other people feel bad. And I look, we have wrestled with who should do the content moderation. How should you do it? How do you keep kids on the Internet safe? Is it even appropriate for the government to have these rules? I have looked Barack Obama in the eye on Decoder. You can go watch the video and said, aren't you trying to get around the First Amendment and had him try to answer that question? I don't think he gave a very good answer.

We're in it. We've been covering this stuff for years. And to have real concerns about government overreach into speech regulations met with Dr. Evil memes is just wildly inappropriate. It is disrespectful to the American people. It is on the line of you are a traitor to the Constitution. So, Brendan.

Every week I say this, I know you're listening. I know you get the notes. Come on the show. Come on this show. Come on Decoder. You can argue with an AI if you want to. You will lose because you are wrong. But the door is always open because I think you should be held to account for the decisions you're making and the fundamental unseriousness with which you are taking the First Amendment. That's been Brendan Carr as a dummy. Hit us up on Signal, Brendan.

We'll be here. All right. We're like 100 years into this podcast and we have not talked about the only thing anyone has been talking about. The joke that we open the show with. Yeah. Should we just talk about this briefly? Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to say. There's almost nothing to say. Yeah. That's where I'm at, too. So just to, like, if I can just very briefly recap what happened here. So Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, got added to...

in some way that I am still desperately trying to figure out to a signal group chat that included a bunch of people very high up in the government, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President J.D. Vance and a bunch of other people in which they just planned attacks. And Jeffrey Goldberg writes this story being like, they planned attacks and signal and they added me to it. Every

Everyone in the government denied it, was like, this isn't classified. None of that happened. We didn't do any attack planning and signal. He's a liar. So they just posted the chats. Yeah. By the way, the move here, just editor-in-chief-wise, gold. Like, gold, right? Oh, spectacular. You say, I didn't publish everything because I know it's classified, sensitive military information. The government says, screw you, nothing sensitive, nothing classified was shared. And you say, here's all of it.

And you just know he had that in his back pocket. Yes. So, which I will give him credit for because one of the things that a lot of people have been talking about this week is why did my man leave the group chat? Um, which I agree with. Frankly, I would have stayed in that group chat. Uh, I would have just, you just sit quietly and just, just watch the group chat happen. Uh, but he did take some screenshots before he left the group chat. And, and I, I respect the hell out of that. You got to take your screenshots. Yeah. I mean,

I mean, I think you leave once you think that you have information that would be illegal for you to have. Is it illegal if they add you to the group chat? So this is this is the complication here. Right. And, you know, we're all the way down to this story where President Trump is like maybe signal is defective and he keeps using the word defective, which is.

Like very funny in this context. I will say everything that President Trump says suggests to me that he has no idea what has actually gone on. At one point, he referred to this group chat as a call. He said he got added to the call. And he keeps referring to the signal being bad. And it's like, my guy, that's not. This is how he keeps putting Black people in his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development because it says urban in it. This is true. He thinks the signal's bad.

And why he keeps mentioning Hannibal Lecter in the context of asylum because he thinks it's very good. Trump, notably in this context, the most like dead ahead, trustworthy person talking.

Because he's like, that was bad. I had nothing to do. It's true. He's like, I don't know what they're talking about. That wasn't me. And you're like, yeah, it wasn't you. I don't think you know how to use Signal. But he has claimed that it's defective. There's some amount of like, was Signal hacked as a deflection? Elon Musk now is going to investigate how this happened. And the answer is Mike Waltz added Jeffrey Goldberg to the Signal chat.

Yeah. It's right there in the screenshot. Yeah. Cause it's in the screenshot and maybe he shares initials with somebody else. Maybe he got the wrong two Oh two area code number. Cause everyone's in DC and that's the area. I don't know how it happened, but he did it. It's not a mystery.

Right. Like that's how signal works. And maybe signal's interface could be clear, but he did it. He did the thing. And then they had that conversation, which was inappropriate to have in signal. I think that much is clear as well. There are classified systems that are meant for that kind of communication. Potentially illegal to have in signal. No? Potentially illegal, right? To not use the classified systems for the kind of conversation they're having. Now there's this very tired semantic argument about the difference between war plans and attack plans. Right.

But all of this is like, yeah, it's a tech story because it's Signal. They just did it in a group chat. Well, I'm saying the term that I'm worried about is they're going to be like, Signal's not safe. We need to break its encryption. Oh, interesting. Right? That's the term that I've just been on red alert for that makes it really a vert story. Well, it's tricky, though, because it is...

clearly a thing that they are using on purpose because A, it's encrypted and B, it disappears, right? Like they had message retention limits in the group chat on purpose, which is again, not a thing you're allowed to do as a government official doing official business, but it's like clearly what's going on here. And there's another part of this that's, you know, you can make the argument that Signal is safer than it used to be because they have to keep making the argument that it was safe because it's encrypted. Right.

and can't be backdoored and da, da, da, da, da, da. And now you can't go and attack it. Oh, interesting. So they've kind of painted themselves into a corner. Yeah. So I don't, I don't know. But the thing that I'm always nervous about is how will governments find ways to attack encryption? And here you have this thing, here's this mess. And then the person with the big hammer, like the FBI with the big hammer that says we shouldn't have encryption. Well, it could be like, do you have a nail? That looks like a huge nail.

it's just always a thing that's on the back of my mind that I should be worried about. Like, will the government try to get rid of encryption because of this? So the argument is like Jeffrey Goldberg hacked his way into Signal. Thus, Signal is not safe anyway. Thus,

We should break the encryption. Or the argument is we can't know because signals encrypted and that's the law enforcement. We have, we can't possibly arrest Jeffrey Goldberg because there's no evidence because of this encryption. Our buddy, big balls at doze couldn't figure it out because he couldn't get by the encryption. It's very bad. This whole situation is very bad. And then like the Trump administration, like just trying to power through it by saying the things that are obvious are not obvious. Right. It's bad. Like,

All of that's bad, and it is all centered on this app that I hope the Signal Foundation can withstand the pressure. I will say the Signal Foundation so far has responded to this very well, which is like they have mostly been very funny about it. And also it sounds like downloads have spiked. I think in a funny way, one very possible outcome of this is that

if the government's going to use it to do attack planning, it's probably pretty safe. Like they're the, if, if they're in here doing the group chats, uh, they, that's a lot of trust to have from a lot of very senior people. But then at the same time, this is a fundamentally unserious group of people. And the other thing wired went and found that Mike Waltz's Venmo friend list was public. Uh, and it's like, this is just, this is not a group of people who is

smart and thoughtful and doing a good job. Can we just run the Marco Rubio audio? Cause you know, they all do press conferences and I think the Atlantic timed this stuff when they knew that Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz would be in front of Congress cause they had hearings in the Senate and the house. Um, so there was, there's all these moments where people talk, but it's Marco Rubio who was in the chat who I think his response was,

It's just such a perfect, yeah, just run the audio. You'll see what I'm saying. And, you know, so I can speak to myself and my presence on it. I think my, my role, I was just speaking for my role. I just, just a primal scream of like, help. I'm in danger.

Yeah. That's good. Look, the story's going to keep playing out. The thing that I think we're going to stay focused on is like encrypted messaging is important. Encryption is important. Elon Musk is going to somehow investigate this now. I do love that they've landed on Elon will fix it as though he's good at computers. It's like that's how they're treating it here. And it's like, I think the military is good at keeping its information. This ends with like

Elon telling lies about DMs on X and suddenly that's where the war planning happens. That's where this goes. I just want to shout out to our friends at 404 Media who wrote a story about all this and their headline is when your threat model is being a moron. And I think that sums it up all. Yeah, that's correct.

Speaking of Elon, we've got a big Alex Heath scoop that we should mention briefly in the lightning round. We kind of knew this was happening, but Alex nailed it down. Elon is very mad about content moderation on Reddit. He's mad about two things. One, which is totally justified. He's mad that there are death threats about him on Reddit. And he apparently has been communicating those directly to Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO.

The other thing he's mad about is many, many subreddits have banned links to X, right? Which Reddit hasn't done anything about yet, but there's a lot of, it's a user drama, moderator drama about what Reddit might be doing, how it might be promoting these subreddits, how it might be coming on doing moderation over the top against this perceived pressure.

So far, it doesn't seem like they've made any subreddits have links to X. Like that hasn't been the line they've crossed, but there's a lot of burbling. Yeah. How much pressure is Elon putting on the top and how much is that pressure being reflected on the user experience of Reddit?

And that's, as always, that's bad. Yeah, and I would say, A, it's not at all surprising, and B, it is very funny because this is like, for a man who styles himself a free speech warrior, like, here it is. Yeah. It's like, this is so of a piece for me with the thing that Elon Musk has decided it should be illegal not to advertise on X, that it is just like, we're just so deep down all of these rabbit holes where it's like, you can't possibly think

what you just said out loud. It's like every subreddit should be required to link to X. It's like, no, that's not how any of this works. That's just not how any of this works. And yeah, and I think the Reddit side of it is interesting because I think there is a sort of ongoing fundamental mistrust on those three levels. Like the users don't trust the mods and the admins. The mods don't trust the admins.

and the admins don't trust anybody yeah and so it's just like this has always been a group of people who are all suspicious of each other so as soon as things like this come up everybody is looking for like any little thing that happens uh and like there was a was it white people twitter that that got that was like briefly banned yeah 72 hour ban because of that was a place that a lot of the the

conversation about Doge employees and the threats were being made. And there's now pretty clearly a link back to Elon Musk from that. This is just, it's both absurd in exactly the way you would expect and like a truly terrible look for everyone involved. There's also just some real fear of Elon here. Like if you run a competitor to Twitter, which by all accounts, you know, Reddit is,

Your answer should be go run your own social network. That's the answer. We're going to run ours our way and you run yours. I mean, I think back to like the first Trump administration when there was so much happening because people were afraid that if they didn't do it or did do it or whatever, Donald Trump would tweet about it. And I think Elon Musk wields that same thing now, right? Like there, there's been Trump's like truth, social presence, right?

People pay attention to it, but it doesn't carry the weight that his Twitter account once did. But Elon Musk sure does. He tweets a million times a day, but he is somebody who can direct a lot of attention toward whatever he wants. And it just feels like a behavior he learned by watching Donald Trump in his last campaign and administration. But I feel like if Elon was like, Reddit is being mean to me, go attack Reddit, Reddit's users would be capable of

waging their own fight. It's like, that's true of all the communities on the internet. They would be like, no, we're, we're very capable on our own. Like come at me, bro. Yeah. We're, we're good actually. Uh, we'll see. I just, you just see that pressure. It's good scoop from Alex. Yeah. We'll see how that, those dynamics keep playing out. Uh, speaking of social networks that have problems, uh, Tik TOK,

Still in the news. David, you keep pointing out that April is like tomorrow, basically. It's so soon, man. A lot of things come due in April, including the TikTok ban. Next Saturday. Yeah. And there is... We were talking with Kylie about the perplexity thing, which is not going to happen. The Oracle thing...

burbles along Walmart is going to you know come in off the top rope and buy it according to Neely but now that the interesting thing is and I think one of the questions we have been asking over and over is essentially who gets to decide what

constitutes a deal here, right? Like, who is the one who gets to say, that satisfies the brief, TikTok gets to remain. And what happens now is a bunch of members of Congress basically reminding the Trump administration that actually they do. And I'll just read you the quote here. He says...

To the extent that you continue trying to delay the divestment deadline through executive orders, any further extensions of the TikTok deadline will require Oracle, Apple, Google and other companies to continue risking ruinous legal liability, a difficult decision to justify in perpetuity. So they're basically like, figure this out or it's going to happen. And we are not going to continue to play these shenanigan games with you. Yeah. So the interesting thing here is the actual text of the bill, which we should read here.

Which says, here's what a qualified divestiture is. So the bill said you have to sell it or be banned. Right. And everyone was like, this is a ban because ByteDance will never sell. And then they didn't sell and they did their little stunt and they shut it down for a minute. And then Trump said, you're fine until next Saturday. Right. Which is weird because that's not how law enforcement is supposed to work.

But here we are in the Trump administration. And Congress is trying very hard to remind him that that's not how law enforcement works. Yeah, you can't just delay this one to the Supreme Court. This is weird, but constitutional. The government is allowed to ban TikTok in this way. So what ByteDance was supposed to do was enact a qualified divestiture, which is sell TikTok.

And so here's how it's defined in the bill. The term qualified divestiture means a divestiture or similar transaction that a, the president determines through an interagency process would result in the relevant foreign adversary controlled application no longer being controlled by a foreign adversary. So that president Donald Trump has to go through an interagency process that results in TikTok no longer being controlled by ByteDance.

That's a big one. What is this process? Is the Trump administration capable of a process? No. Who are the agencies? But the Trump administration seems very confident that an executive order counts as an interagency process. I guess. Right. I mean, they have to a bunch of agencies, including our national security agencies, have to weigh in. Right. We don't know if that's going to happen by Saturday. And we don't know if the sort of moves that they have on the table, like

ByteDance will reduce its share of this to X amount of dollars and Oracle will increase its share will satisfy this process. And all we've got is like JD Vance being like, we'll have the high level structure of a deal by the deadline. Right.

I don't know. So my guess would be, and we're going to find out in eight days, but my guess would be they're going to use that because there was a provision that if there was a deal in the works, they could do another 90-day delay in order to finish that deal. But that's over.

That's over. That was in the original text. There was that. But wasn't the 75 day delay that we just did something else? No, because the deadline passed. This all matters if you believe the rule of law in America still matters. And what matters is, did Donald Trump tell the attorney general to enforce this law? And the answer right now is she said to her, don't do it. So she's not doing it. Right.

And will that matter on Saturday? Maybe he'll maybe he'll say it again. And like, that's where you have letters from Congress saying, hey, we passed this law. Your job is to enforce it, not to delay it. Right. And we gave you this grace period, basically, because the law went into effect on the first day you were in office.

Okay. Grace period's up. Enforce the law or don't. Right. And I just don't know if there's going to be a deal. There's this other part that says, like, maybe you can get the algorithms out. The goal of this law is for them to sell it, is to get ByteDance out of social media in the United States. And at least as far as I can tell, there is not a lot of indication coming from anywhere other than the Trump administration that a deal is happening. Because I think everyone is, except for perplexity.

which I think tells you a lot about the status of their efforts here. Yeah. There's the, what is it? Frank McCourt's thing project Liberty. Is that what it's called? Like that's, that's out there. That's the one where Alexis or Haney and Mr. Beast want to put it on the blockchain. Oh God. Yeah, sure. Sure. Why not put TikTok on the blockchain? Like it's whatever. That's the same as banning it. It'll be fine. Everything's an NFT. Yeah. We're going to light the ocean on fire. Some other lightning round items here. Uh, this one's real quick. Uh,

The Google antitrust trial, the remedies phase, where they already determined that Google had a monopoly in search and now it's what do we do about it? That's set to kick off in April as well. The government, including Trump's administration, wants them to get rid of Chrome.

Right. That was the approach of the DOJ under the Biden administration who won the trial. The Trump DOJ is sticking to it. Yep. We won the case. The DOJ won the case. United States won the case. You're a monopoly. We also think the remedy is you getting rid of all this stuff. Google has filed an answer. The news here is that Apple moved to intervene in that case and basically be like, don't take our money away. And the court ruled that they were too late. Yeah. Which is really interesting. So they're not allowed.

That's 20 billions of Apple's revenue on a calendar error, basically. Apple was like central to that case. I mean, there was so much Apple in that case. And it's fascinating to see it just totally looped out of the last part of this. Yeah. We'll see. That case is coming up. By the way, the FTC's case against Meta, in which the government is asking for Instagram and WhatsApp to be sold off, also come up in April. You're very excited about that case. I think that is the most legible case to the biggest audience.

The government wants Mark Zuckerberg to get rid of Instagram. There's not another, I don't have to say more words. Right. Yeah. I, I, everyone understands exactly what that means. Like I, I honestly think Google is a monopoly in search. And so the government wants it to get rid of Chrome is totally opaque. Yeah. Like you have to explain a bunch of hoops. Well, which is why it's funny. Like Google.

pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the search engine in Safari is actually more legible than Google is a monopoly because of Chrome. Even though I think both are sort of equally true. But you're right. Like, is meta a monopoly and thus should it have to get rid of Instagram? It's just, it is as perfectly simple a monopoly case as I think you'll find. But they're going to spend seven weeks making it really complicated. Oh, so you could ask every celebrity in the world if Mark Zuckerberg should own Instagram. Like,

I think about the local TV news test, you know, like, is this a local TV segment? It's just like, whoever, like man on the street, should Mark Zuckerberg on Instagram? They're like, no. And like, there you go. Like that's great TV. That's coming up as well. It's big April. And then the other thing that's happening is tariffs hit in April. Yeah.

Um, Trump yesterday announced 25% tariffs on cars and car parts. If they're not manufactured United States, this is going to be a huge problem for every car maker. Yep. Most cars are made of parts from all kinds of places. There are some like USMCA trade carve outs here. The whole audio industry is like sort of reorganizing around this problem. There might be some benefit to Tesla because Tesla makes so many of its cars in United States, but.

It's coming. Like tariffs are here. He got held off on them once. He got held off on them again. I don't think he's going to blink this time. It doesn't seem like it. The tariffs on Chinese products are like 45%. So I think we're just going to see a bunch of consumer electronics prices go up. We're going to see a bunch of car prices go up. I will say that.

There's a lot of memes of people trading in their Teslas for Rivians, which is really interesting. I've seen a Cybertruck with the Rivian logo on the back. I've now seen a Cybertruck with the Toyota logo on the back that's floating around New York City. That has been my favorite meme. The people putting Honda and BMW logos where the Tesla thing used to be. It's very funny. I've also seen a picture of a Cybertruck where they just have put huge fender flares on it to make it look like a different car. Yeah.

I was just going to say the Cybertruck famously easy to make look like other cars. No, it's a Cybertruck. One big wiper really sells it every time. And then, you know, there's just the general angst around Tesla. BYD, the Chinese company, is outselling Tesla right now. Yeah.

I did BYD to 107 billion in revenue for 2024, which is way over Tesla's 97.7 billion. Um, BYD ships more than double the vehicles of Tesla. If you count its hybrids and then they're investing in charging tech, their, their new BYDs new charging tech is twice as fast as Tesla's. You can get 250 miles range in like five minutes. Yeah. And we talked about like the, the ongoing boom in, uh, like excitement about Chinese EVs coming to the U S, uh,

Like, the cars are not, but the, like, TikTokers and YouTubers are reviewing them. A lot of BYD stuff starting to show up. Yeah. Andy Hawkins is working on a story on that. We should have him on when he does that story. Oh, there you go. Yeah. And the, like, supposed biggest day of Tesla takedown is this weekend. And so I think we're going to... We'll have Andy on next week, maybe. We'll talk through a lot of this stuff. Yeah. I know people get...

There's whatever noise about Tesla takedown where it's all just like domestic terrorism. First of all, domestic terrorism, very fuzzy concept in American law. It's just true. It has been for a long time. It's not illegal on its own. Like the things you do are illegal and there are some definitions, but there's not like a law. So like the government keeps saying this thing and it's like cheat codes to get surveillance warrants.

It's very, it's very weird. And like a lot of the Trump administration is invoking powers that are reserved for special circumstances.

Like we're at war with Canada. Say you just like say these words to, to justify even like tariffs are, they're being justified under emergency powers. Right. So there's some weird stuff with the Tesla protests that we will cover, but yeah, there's big protests coming. Tesla's under a lot of pressure. These tariffs might benefit Tesla. So there's some back and forth there. Uh, and then last little, little one, which I think we should end on a high note, uh,

But cars. Rivian had a secret e-bike company that it spun out called Also, which is pretty cool. I'm pumped about this. The idea of...

Rivian taking its tech into like they, at first they were like micro mobility and I was like, dope, we're going to get some scooters. Uh, cause you, you know, I love a scooter startup. Uh, but it sounds like it's going to be bikes, but they're going to use some of the Rivian tech. They're going to, they're going to use a lot of Rivians like manufacturing capabilities. And one of the things that, uh, RJ, the CEO said is that he thinks it is ridiculous how expensive these great e-bikes are. Uh,

And I also think it is ridiculous how expensive they are. And so that made me very happy. Yeah. Like if Rivian can figure out how to economies of scale its way into good e-bikes for like half what they currently cost. Great. Forget cars. Just do that. I'm good. I'm super down with that. I am looking at an R1S like every day right now. Yeah? Yeah. I've test driven one a million times. RJ was on Decoder. They gave me one for a weekend.

It's cool. It's like, they're not as nice on the inside as our Jeep, but they're obviously better cars because Jeeps are made by Stellantis. I don't know what else to say about that. Like you want a three row SUV for your family and you want a bunch of range. Like the R1S is the thing that exists. Yeah.

but they're pretty Spartan on the inside. They're also expensive. I just, I'm just like, oh, these tariffs are coming. All these cars are going to get more expensive. So buy it now. That's the only answer. Right. And like, I'm like, am I just going to pull the trigger on this car for kind of no reason, except I think the tariffs will make an expensive a year from now.

I'm sure that's a case Becky will buy. Listen, I don't need this car now, but it'll be more expensive in two weeks. By the way, if you have a Jeep 4xe, if you have one of the hybrids, you need to go to the dealer today because they just issued the software update for the recall they had where they told everyone to not charge their cars because they might start on fire. Oh, boy. And part of that was not just don't charge your car. It was leave it outside in case it starts on fire.

This is a real thing. They had defective Samsung batteries in them. So the recall is out. You could go to the dealer. They do the software upgrade. Part of the software upgrade is just making the software know if there's going to be a fire. Like these numbers are out of spec, like there's going to be a fire. And then another part of the software upgrade is after they do it, they drive your car around and there's like some specific set of miles you have to drive at specific speeds. To see if it does fire? To see if it hits the threshold that requires a battery recall. You can understand why I'm like, I should get a different car.

Because we did all the things and our car was fine. But like once that happens, you're like, I don't like you anymore. I'm, you know, I have uncomfortable feelings about you specifically. Yeah, you don't get that trust back. I don't think. Yeah. So I don't know. If you can talk me into an R1S, you know, send me a note. There we go. I'm also open to a 2002 Escalade, which you can buy at any point for $2,000. It's all, every time we talk about a computer on the show and we're like, it's $1,500. Or like a new iPad. I'm like, I could get it.

A 2002 Escalade. It's the dream. All right, we need to get out of here. We got it. Let me know if you have a 2002 Escalade. That's awesome. If you've got one, you know, let's make a deal. Let's talk. All right, that's it. That's the first cast. Back it up.

And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week. ♪