The Vergecast - Apple's HomeView has an app problem

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Starting point is 00:01:27 To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of CarPlay entitlements, which are a thing I know about against my will. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil have to tell us here. Hello, sir. I know so much about CarPlay entitlements. I am so excited to talk more.

Starting point is 00:01:51 I am forcing more Home View talk into the top of this episode because CarPlay is about to become more important in your life, and I think that is so funny. That's the worst. By the way, can I just shout out. Jen Toey is amazing. It was so much fun to have her on the live stream afterwards. And we saw comments that were like, you should let Jen talk more and she's British and polite and you just run over her. I just like talking to Jen a lot.

Starting point is 00:02:13 Yeah. That's it. That's what I've got. Like, it is fun to talk to our reporters who are deep nerds on stuff. And approximately one person in this world wants to talk to me about Z wave and it's Jen. That's it. I can confirm that. I just want you to know.

Starting point is 00:02:27 I just get excited to have another nerd who cares about my nerd. stuff here. Jen does not care about carplay. The only other person who cares about car play as much as me is Joanna Stern, whose Homeview videos were like, car play. And then she like excitedly texted me about it. Yeah. So I'm working on it. We're going to bring it all together. And then we'll make a show that like four people enjoy, but I will have the most time. And all four of them are the hosts of the show. It's a show for no one except the hosts. It's going to be great. I'm excited about it. We have a lot of stuff to get to you today. We have a bunch of AI news. We're going to talk about this thing where people are starting to slink back to X, which I find fascinating.

Starting point is 00:03:06 We've got some SpaceX stuff going on. We've got a lot of, we've got a lot of news to get to. But I do want to start with a little bit of Home View stuff at the top here. We did the live stream on Wednesday about Apple's new smart home entrance play here. But one thing we talked a little bit about and we're a little bit confused by and got some feedback about was the app situation on the Home View. And I would say both that we've had some time to learn about it and read about it and talk to people about it, but also that I feel incredibly vindicated because it is really confusing and essentially makes it no sense. So, Neely, do you just want to, as best you can, sort of lay out the app situation on the Home View as we understand it now?

Starting point is 00:03:44 There is no app situation on the Home View. It's not exactly. It's mostly true. It's so true. The app situation on the Home View is approximately the same app situation. if you went onto Amazon or Alibaba and bought a $299 car play tablet for your car. Yeah, that's basically right.

Starting point is 00:04:06 Yeah. They sell those. You can just get one. They're in the TikTok shop all the time. Yeah. You can just get one. You just like mount it to your car. They sell some that are so big, you just mount them over your vents.

Starting point is 00:04:16 I've always been taken with these. Yeah. One day we'll do an entire episode on just people who own older model Ford F-150s ripping out the entire dash and putting in carplay tablets. There's a whole ecosystem there that I'm fascinated by. That's basically what Apple did here. They made the HomeView. They built some first-party software to do some things.

Starting point is 00:04:35 Yeah. In particular, make FaceTime calls and the Home app. Yeah. It's not totally dissimilar from what you get kind of out of the box with the iPhone, right? It's like you get alarms, you get Apple Calendar, you get the home app, you get messages, you get podcasts. It's sort of the, like, bog standard set of Apple apps are on this thing. Right. But there's no app store, and then there's a bunch of Apple apps that aren't there.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Right. Like if you are an Apple music classical person, which has its own app because classical music is organized and complicated, different ways, that is not available to you. Apple News, a thing you might wish to scroll on your display is the chaos of your family makes French toast around you. Not available here. All of these things are going to be CarPlay apps. And if you will recall, on the day of the Homeview launch, it seemed like what Apple was going to do was take CarPlay. and then like rework it for the HomeView. And instead, it seems like they're just going to force everybody as a CarPlay app into supporting the HomeView.

Starting point is 00:05:34 Yeah, there's a thing in the developer terms that essentially says if you make a CarPlay app, it will work on the Home View. The end. There's like, you barely even have the ability to turn it off. Like if it is in CarPlay, it will be on the Home View. Does this approach make any sense to you? Because I confess this does not make any sense to me. No. First of all, Apple's entire deal is apps.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Yeah. And they're already asking a lot of developers. The iPhone Duo is going to require a lot of developers to support yet another screen size. There's some amount of rumor in the rumor mill about a touchscreen Mac developers. You're going to have to think about that in some new way. I mean, this is a new hardware category for Apple. It is a new way of thinking about how you might interact with Apple devices in your home. And of all of the things you would ask developers,

Starting point is 00:06:23 to do, hey, think about like a true, cool, fun multi-user app for our shared screen in the kitchen. Seems like top of the list, right? This is a new category. And instead, Apple has chained it to the iPhone in a way that means, I mean, they've sold a lot of iPhones, but they've chained it into the iPhone in a way that means you can only ever sell some fraction of the number of iPhones that exist. And so the app model is that and the user model is that. And it's a a lot of iPhones. Don't get me wrong. I think most companies would be happy to sell a significant portion of a fraction of iPhone sales. And I can't imagine somebody who isn't already in the iPhone world is even going to be really looking at this thing. But maybe that's kind of the point, right? Like this thing is an accessory of an iPhone. It's an Apple Watch in a very real way in that it actually, there is no reason whatsoever to buy it separately from owning an iPhone in a way that Like, you can own an iPad and an Android phone and live a life that makes sense.

Starting point is 00:07:24 This doesn't, this will make no sense if you are not an iPhone family. And if you recall, and I know you recall, because you wrote the wired cover story on the first Apple Watch, which I'm still mad at you about it. I do in fact recall. Right, the Apple Watch started as like a remote control for your iPhone apps. Like, that was a lot of the app model for the Apple Watch. This is just a little screen, but the app is actually running on your phone. And over time, is the processor got more efficient.

Starting point is 00:07:50 and more powerful. They brought the apps to the watch. This is why I was basically screaming, where is the computer on the live stream this week? The watch became a computer, and then it started running the applications, and now the watch is a vastly more independent computer, even though it's still connected to your iPhone in a lot of ways. The HomeView does not appear to be a computer, right? It is the model of that first generation Apple Watch, where it's a remote for your phone is right there. And then on top of that, it's very funny. They picked CarPlay is the app model for those little remote control apps. CarPlay, the way to think about CarPlay is that it is just a second monitor for your iPhone.

Starting point is 00:08:27 Yeah. Right. It is screen projection and you plug it in or you wirelessly connect. Your iPhone detects a second monitor that's a CarPlay app and it shares a screen with custom interfaces for the apps that are running on the phone. This is fine in a car. It's also not. Like it isn't fine in a car. And this is the thing.

Starting point is 00:08:45 Like CarPlay, I am the pro CarPlay person. on this podcast by default. I don't think CarPlay is very good, right? Like, this experience is not good. Like, the simplest example for me is Spotify. You don't get anything remotely approaching the full Spotify experience in CarPlay, which makes some sense when you're driving and you should be tapping as little as possible. But if I'm going to have to do the stupid CarPlay search thing where it goes,

Starting point is 00:09:13 what do you want to listen to? Pause, Bing, and then you talk every single time I want to use the Home View. that's awful. Like this is a thing that clearly has enough processing power. It has enough screen. It's going to be plugged in. So it's not like there's a power issue.

Starting point is 00:09:27 You're also not driving. You're not distracted. Right. There is nothing preventing this thing from being a computer except that Apple doesn't allow it to be. And I guess part of it is the way that it's thinking about switching between users.

Starting point is 00:09:41 And if you want to have a bunch of apps logged in to a bunch of different things, like I can see how that model locally would get confusing. But that model's, confusing anyway, and if what you're telling me is that this thing is going to learn to seamlessly switch between car play devices, have you ever tried to switch car play devices? I don't know. This just makes me more concerned than ever that this thing is actually going

Starting point is 00:10:02 to work in a way that works for people. We obviously have to get it and review it. We will see. But here's my big question for you is this is a lot of new hardware from Apple coming out. Right? Where the duo is soon to come out, this thing will come out. There are there's the new Apple TV, hot new hardware from Apple. There are rumors today that there will be a touchscreen MacBook from German. Potentially very soon. Potentially very soon. There's a lot of new hardware from Apple.

Starting point is 00:10:30 It's a big push, right? New CEO is hardware CEO. Here's all the new hardware. And it feels to me like the question we're going to ask it every single turn is, did you get the software right? Right. Did you make the right software decisions? And if I was going to be super rude, I would say none of this hardware is particularly like beyond the industry.

Starting point is 00:10:52 The home view in particular, right? It's like it's an LCD display on a previous generation ship. Sure. But like, yes, you could have made this at any point in the past 100 years, Apple. Sure. I will grant you the duo has a lot of like engineering in it, but foldables have been around for five years. So the wins here are all going to be software wins,

Starting point is 00:11:12 ecosystem wins. Right. And I, it's interesting that all of my questions about all these devices. are around, did we get the software right? Is the ecosystem paying off in the way we wanted to or is actually holding us back? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:24 And I truly do not know the answer to that question. I don't either, but it's been interesting to see the app developer community has raced to support the duo. Apple has gone out of its way to help people do this, but also,

Starting point is 00:11:37 even for a relatively new device that I suspect will not sell in giant numbers just because it's so expensive, app developers are all over this thing. And the app store situation for the duo on day one is going to look great. This is what Apple is good at.

Starting point is 00:11:51 This is Apple's main advantage over Android in particular. I've been using a lot of different size screen Android devices recently. I had the Alexa tablet. We have Google books. And I am just struck over and over by the fact that Google is unwilling or unable or both to convince developers to support non-phone devices. You just can't do it. The keyboard stuff doesn't work very well.

Starting point is 00:12:13 The large screen stuff doesn't work very well. Apple is good at this. and for Apple to come out with something like the HomeView that it ostensibly believes is going to be a big mainstream device. Like Apple gave developers a better story for the Vision Pro than they're giving the Home View. And it just, I'm just confused by this. And I think the long run, it'll probably be like the Apple Watch,

Starting point is 00:12:35 like you just described, right? It starts as an accessory and slowly over time becomes a computer. But that was a new piece of hardware with tons of new ideas and really, really intense constraints. Tiny thing, tiny battery, tiny processor, lots of new stuff going on. This should have none of those problems. Like if ever there was an Apple gadget

Starting point is 00:12:56 to just over horsepower into existence with an app store, it should be the one that is plugged in sitting on your kitchen table. I'm just confused. Like actually the one thing Apple is best at is putting enough processing power and RAM in its computers to make its experiences work. Yeah. Like I think there's two reasons people,

Starting point is 00:13:16 a car play. And I'm like you. I'm like, it's fine. It's there. I use it in our cars, but I don't think it's the best thing ever made. But I think there's two reasons people really like it and are very, very, very vociferous. They'll never buy a car without it. One is just the library of apps. And every time we do like a decoder carplay episode, we get all this email about it. And one always sticks out in my mind. It was a reader who's like, I have a Bible app. The maker of the Bible app is never going to write an Android automotive app and put it in the play store for your weird Android car. Yes.

Starting point is 00:13:45 Right. There's no way to get that app. That big library of app. This is like Instagram on the Windows phone. Mm-hmm. You can make all the Windows phone you want. You know, on Instagram, you're dead. There's some long tail of apps the CarPlay supports, and that means you have that.

Starting point is 00:13:57 And every other alternative does not have the one app you want. Right. So you're back to CarPlay. The second, and I think this is just tremendously important, is that it is using your car's display is just a second monitor. And so all of the logic, all the application is running on your, phone, which has enough processor and enough RAM and a fast cell connection. And so the computer is good.

Starting point is 00:14:21 Yep. Like, that's it. And every carmaker under specs the processor and RAM and everything else in their car. So you can't compete with a new iPhone with any car. You just can't do it. Maybe Rivian and Tesla can do it. But I think everybody has the same questions about performance of those systems over time. Sure.

Starting point is 00:14:41 Apple is like very, they know that this is what they. win on. This is why you have a $300 Apple TV. It has more horsepower than any TV app developer can possibly know what to do with, except for the one or two game vendors who think they're going to make it happen on there, right? Yeah. What are you doing with all that power on the home view? You should just let people run their apps. Yeah. This all the way back around to should this just be an iPad? Yes. We got so much response that essentially amounted to what if Apple had just made a really kickass magsafe mount for the iPad that just worked. I'm like, yeah, that would have been the thing.

Starting point is 00:15:22 Just as for the pixel tablet, you know what I mean? Like, Pixel tablet got everything right. We also missed one detail that a couple of people pointed out that I think is a very big deal, which is that the new Apple TV remote, which is easier to find, is backwards compatible, like a long way back in Apple TVs. So screw the new Apple TV just by the new remote. I think that's what I did with the last Apple TV. They just got me on the remote upgrade cycle.

Starting point is 00:15:48 Remotes and polishing cloth are how Apple really is. I feel like I've upgraded my Apple TV remote more often than my iPad. Shit, that might be true. I agree with that. I've got a lot of Apple TV remotes now that I think about it. It's like those and left AirPods have the other thing I upgrade all the time. All right, we should switch gears. We should talk about some AI news.

Starting point is 00:16:08 The big news of this week was that Google released Gemini 4 Argonne, which is its sort of re-entrance at the frontier of the model race. If you remember for the last, what would you say, three or four months, the scuttlebutt in the AI industry has been that Google fell behind with Fable and with Mythos and all of the stuff that OpenAI and Anthropic were doing, that they were way out in front, and they had essentially left Google behind.

Starting point is 00:16:39 Google then shows up with Gemini for Argon, which it says is just as good as those other models. It's also vastly cheaper and it has sort of announced itself back at the front of the race. Robert Hart on our team also wrote a great piece this week pointing out that meta, which just released a model called Wonderful, which is, I don't like meta. It's wonder. It's Muse Wonder. And then there's the big one, the full one, which is Muse Wonder.

Starting point is 00:17:05 Yeah, but they did Wonderful. And I don't like that. It's like, I just don't like it. Everything about Meta and AI is a little too cute and oddly a little too sexy. Yeah, it's got like a little bit of an ass on it. But anyway, what do you make of some of the news of this week? It does feel like there is this sort of renewed sense of real competition in this space for the first time in a minute, even as all these companies are reckoning with questions about safety and trying to figure out the product stuff. Like this, who is winning at

Starting point is 00:17:36 models race does kind of feel like it's back on. Did you watch Zuckerberg and Alexander Wang on the Cheeky Pint podcast? I mean, everyone wants it. I watched Zuckerberg drink the Guinness. I was going to say, we all saw the meme of him enjoying it, quote unquote, enjoying a beer. I watched bits and pieces of the interview, but not a ton of it. Why? I'm fascinated where Meta is right now.

Starting point is 00:17:55 So I watched most of that interview. As always, it's very fun to watch Zuckerberg talk about communication styles. So I think they asked him about wangs, like tweets with the butts. And Zuckerberg was like, well, you have to be authentic. And I was like, is that, is that actually what you think? Butts are who I am I'm. I was like

Starting point is 00:18:17 authenticity. All right, whatever. Anyway, there's a part of that where Zuck in particular was talking about the bet they made on training their own model.

Starting point is 00:18:26 And Wang was like, we need our own reasoning model and at one point inside of meta that was like frowned upon. And he was like, I think we're going to fail.

Starting point is 00:18:34 I think we're making the wrong bet. And he convinced Suck to do it and we're going to write a $200 billion dollar check. We don't know if this is going to pay off. And Zuck was like, but we have to because we are

Starting point is 00:18:41 a full stacked technology company. We need to control the thing that powers our experiences. And so meta just in like Zuckerberg fashion was like, we're just going to win. We're just going to do this until it's clear that we shouldn't anymore sign our Metaverse. But this, we need to have this technology in order to make Muse work. And the dynamic there that I think is utterly fascinating is they launched the consumer product that people are interested in without the more powerful model. Yeah. And then right. Right. And then now if you pay them money, you'll get Mews Wander and over time, I think they'll figure it out.

Starting point is 00:19:17 But meta is a consumer products company. They're good at it. You can feel a lot of ways about meta. But again, I will come back to the Oculus Quest 2 was a great consumer product. They are good at defining a consumer product, marketing it, making it a good consumer experience. And then ruthlessly and shouldifying it with Instagram ads, whatever it is. But they're good at it. And I think it's very interesting that their priority was launching the. product that was interesting that made investment in the model seem worthwhile. Right? So they need a reasoning model because they want Muse to be more capable, but they need, they were happy to be like, Muse is finished. We can give it to people with the capabilities it has today, and then over time it will get more capabilities.

Starting point is 00:20:01 The same way, I don't know, the iPhone came out, and then they were like OLED screens, and the iPhone changed. And now they're like folding OLED screens and the iPhone changed. Right. But the product, like, made a promise and kept it. I think Google is releasing all these models left and right, and they have no idea what their products should be, right? To the extent that OpenAI and Anthropic have products and market, they've both figured out that their products are enterprise products. They are business software companies, as you keep calling them, and they're more powerful models.

Starting point is 00:20:33 I love that everyone's demo case for all these models is like, it can use Blender so well. And it's like five people in the world need this capability. Yes. I'm sure they're very enthusiastic, but they haven't made the consumer products. And meta is the one that has, like, truly figured out, okay, there's a flywheel here between our consumer product and our massive investment in the models and what that will enable the consumer product to do. And it's great that there's a race on the frontier. But I, and I think that's fun and interesting. I, it's just, man, none of these companies apart from meta have, like, put it forward.

Starting point is 00:21:09 Like, here's a great. Even dots from OpenAI is enterprise software. I saw Casey talking about how much he loves dots the other day. And he's like, I run a business now. When I do business stuff with my dots. And I was like, very few people are in that position. Sure. And that's well and good, right?

Starting point is 00:21:25 The idea, like the idea of these things being business software is good and fine and is going to be very successful. I've been reading Kevin Ruse's book, The AGI Chronicles. It's very good. It's really, really good. And there is a point he makes very near the beginning that, there were kind of two big ideas about AI that are also sort of two big ideas about AI products. And one is, do you make narrow AI to solve narrow problems, right? Like, do you build and train and refine a model to do English to French translation?

Starting point is 00:21:56 You can do it very well, but it is very specific and very narrow. Or do you do the big, huge one model to rule them all approach, which is much harder and requires vastly more compute, but that these researchers found over and over would actually over time outperform the narrow models. And he ties this to Google as a company which looked at AI for a really long time as a way to make its existing products better.

Starting point is 00:22:20 And it's like, okay, we need this new way of doing translation to improve Google Translate. And we can do really great summarization. Oh, that's going to be so useful for Gmail. And they looked at these things and they said, we have a set of products. How can we poke AI at them?

Starting point is 00:22:33 And you can still see that inside of Google. Even now, Gemini, like, is a problem. product, Google is bad at understanding how to talk about Gemini as a product. And so it just exists kind of outside of itself, while most of its energy is focused on how do we put Gemini into your Gmail and into your Google Docs, and how do we beat you over the head with it every time you use one of our products so that we can put AI in there. And in some ways, that makes a lot of sense. You get a huge distribution victory. Google has all of these business clients. Gemini four is much cheaper than some of the other ones, which is a big deal that doesn't get talked about

Starting point is 00:23:10 a lot, but like these frontier models are very expensive and Google is running a promotion where they're, I think, 80% cheaper than the comparative models. Like, that's a big deal. But there is no sense to me. I have no belief that Google is even capable of doing what Mews did, which is one entire new thought about how people are going to use AI. Yeah. Like it's so telling that Google tried to build this thing backwards out of Gmail rather than start with something wholly new. Oh, no, I think it's, it is even worse than that. Google announced Gemini Spark at I.O. Yeah. They announced the product. They had the other product, the browser used product. I forget what was called.

Starting point is 00:23:53 They canceled. Mariner. Yeah. And they, they, they, that's what should be inside of Gmail. Sure. Like what, what do these products, what do agentic products, like truly need? They need access to your email. if you were to break it all down like what is the number one thing they need to be as effective as everyone wants them to be they want your email God Muse is so thirsty about me

Starting point is 00:24:14 Can I just tell you this is a total diversion Can I tell you my favorite new thing that's happening in Muse I play fantasy football I'm in two leagues and every every Monday night I get a report on how the week went and then every Wednesday I get the like waiver report on who picked up and dropped players

Starting point is 00:24:32 so now five days a week, maybe, I get some kind of update from Mews with fantasy football advice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's never asked it to do this. It's pure engagement bait. It's incredible. It just reaches out and it's like, hey, here's who I think you should pick up off the waiver wire. And I'm like, I didn't, you and I have never talked about football. Have you told it to stop doing that? No, I haven't. I'm sort of enjoying it, to be honest. Okay. Well, so meta is good at consumer products. They're good at engagement bait. They're good at making you come back and use the thing again. They're good at notifications. Like, they're good at this. Yeah. Really, really, really

Starting point is 00:25:03 good at this. Talking about AI is so much like talking about a dream you had. Like the stakes are so low for everyone else and for you. It's like, I almost died. No, I didn't. You're fine. You're sitting right here talking about when you were asleep. Anyway, so mine

Starting point is 00:25:20 is constantly digging. Again, I gave it my spam email. So it's always doing the same kind of engagement baby. Hit me. And I told it to stop. I was like, I want you to stop proactively reading my email. I just want updates on the three things that we agreed on, which are mostly like, did I get a class action notice? and did you fill it out?

Starting point is 00:25:34 Just make me the cheapest money you can make. And it won't stop. And I was like, you have to stop. And I was like, I want you to pay me $200 every time you proactively read my email. That's right. And it is still trying to figure it out. Like it is just in the background somewhere at meta, some data center is just spinning cycles trying to figure out how to do this. It has not done more proactive email reading.

Starting point is 00:25:57 Somebody's like, how does this one user used 11 billion tokens? But he hasn't prompted us in- It's still going. It's still every day of him. Like, do you figure out this scheme where you're going to stop for actively reading my email? It's like, I'm still figuring out how to make money. It's really good.

Starting point is 00:26:10 Let me know when you've done it. It's very good. The Roos book is good. It is fun to read. All these people truly hate each other. Kevin had a book party in New York and I saw him speak at it. And he said the book could have been titled, Fuck That guy.

Starting point is 00:26:23 That's a really good. Because like they all truly hate each other. Yep. And it is very true that. that Google in particular has the innovator's dilemma. All of its products are huge. They all throw off a lot of cash. They can't disrupt them too much.

Starting point is 00:26:42 There isn't a business model for consumer AI yet. They haven't figured it out. And so they're trying to just increment all of those products. And they really should just put Gemini in Gmail and be like, if you want to read your email and send you some notifications about what to do. And I think they're terrified of doing that. Right. Whereas the upside for meta, if they get it right, is sky high.

Starting point is 00:27:02 Yeah. So we'll see, but that to me is, I'm just looking at, yes, it's great that the frontier models are pushing out there. It's great that like CNBC in the morning now, like the very straight-laced morning anchors on CNBC are like RSI is coming and then we'll all be dead. Weird. It's weird that that is permeated to consciousness because of the capabilities these models. The products are still not there. And it's, I think it is worth giving meta some credit. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:29 They figured out a consumer product before anyone else did. And if you look at the home view, you're kind of like, well, I know what that thing should look like. Yeah. I have to assume that right now at Google, there is either a furious effort to buy instinct at almost any price or a furious effort to build that exact thing. Because Google has every single bit of necessary infrastructure to have built an AI bot that works in your messaging app and didn't do it and lost. And like, at some point, the bidding war for that company is going to be outrageous. and I suspect that is happening as we speak. Two more quick things we should talk about before we get off the AI train.

Starting point is 00:28:07 One is, are you caught up on this weird story about the Open AI employee, like planting a bug in one of the conference rooms? I don't have anything to say about this story. I just think it's wild. I mean, it's a great story. The part that really got me was he tried to hide it with toilet paper, but tell the rest of the story. Okay, so as I understand it, basically, Open AI discovered that an employee had planted a bug

Starting point is 00:28:30 in one of their conference rooms, ostensibly to record and take trade secrets. This is one of the, like, important conference rooms that not even everybody has access to. They planted it behind the TV in the USB port, which I think is just a really funny way of just totally dooming the idea of USB ports on television. We got to get power from somewhere. It's a really good place to hide a recording device. I'm just saying, like, I'm not condoning it, but if you're going to put it in a room, that's probably the place to put it.

Starting point is 00:29:00 So anyway, this person has been arrested. There's been a bunch of information that has come out about, you know, they booked a one-way plane ticket out of the country. Lots of this story left to tell, I think. But this is also like Open AI is embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple over the allegation that they're stealing trade tickets from Apple. That is like an official part of their interviewing process. Like the secretiveness and the value of those secrets in this industry, I think is just starting to create. a huge mass of these stories. Okay, so first of all, the opening eye guy,

Starting point is 00:29:35 he used his wife's chat GPT account to find ways to hide a recording device. This is the best fact in this entire story. I didn't know that. The FBI found that it was his wife's account, which was obviously tied to him in someone. They'll never catch me. And he was like, what are the best ways to hide a tracking mark?

Starting point is 00:29:54 Like, incredible facts in this story. And then he had booked a flight to Saudi Arabia. Arabia after he'd planted the device. So he was trying to end a one-way ticket with the family back to Saudi Arabia. Just very, very good. And then I mentioned the toilet paper. They found a like a thumb drive size recording device and he had for some reason wrapped it in toilet paper and stuck it in the TV. Yeah. Listen, you're the TV guy. Can you explain this one to me? I feel worse. I do feel. If I walk in and I see a thing in the TV, I assume it's there. If I see a thing in the TV wrapped in toilet paper, now I have questions.

Starting point is 00:30:31 I do feel like there's an element of this where he used his wife's chat sheet account and it hallucinated ideas about how to hide thumb drive. And it was like, no one will ever notice if you're having toilet paper when what he should have done has gotten a label maker and printed out like ETH3 and they're like plug, you know what I mean? That's good. Right? Like some other thing like I lock.

Starting point is 00:30:52 Like he should have printed, you know, the Ilock dongle. Or just write the name in the conference room on it and then plug it in. It does. Yeah. to just assume it's supposed to be there. Yeah, exactly. You just like, whatever the conference room, like, ours at Vox Media were always named up for cities, which is very confusing.

Starting point is 00:31:05 So you would just print, like, Chicago on it and just like plug it in there. It's like, fine. It's like, well, it must belong here. But the number of times at our company when people would be like, I'm in New York City and they're like, yeah, I know. Not new information, guys. But yeah, that's a good story. We'll track that one as it comes.

Starting point is 00:31:25 The one other one really quick is Character AI, which is a company. we haven't talked about a ton on this show, but was one of the early, what if the AI bot was your best friend slash sexual partner kinds of companies? Filed bankruptcy, it turns out, in that process, was under investigations stemming from a kid who committed suicide, not that long after talking with its bot on character AI. This investigation found or was in the middle of finding some pretty alarming stuff. But now in a really interesting way, there are lots of questions. including one of the questions we asked on the site, which is what happens to all of this data now, right? Like what happens in a bankruptcy proceeding is it is basically shipped for parts and sold.

Starting point is 00:32:10 And presumably one of the parts is going to be vast quantities of user data, including about children. This is kind of the first one of these that has gone through this at this sort of scale. We also, I think 404 media had a really good story about the finances. that go into this and just the unbelievable amounts of money that are being burned in all of these companies. But this is like, this is a tiny case study of what I suspect is going to be a lot of companies that burn through a lot of cash and have a lot of user data and are going to just go belly up out of nowhere. Yeah. And, and what happens after that? I don't know that anybody knows yet. Well, Character Eye was kind of doomed in the middle of its story, right? It was started by

Starting point is 00:32:54 Noam Shazir, who was one of the early LLM engineers at Google. It was like, like very frustrated that Google wouldn't do a chatbot. So then he left to do Characteri because he thought everyone was going to fall in love with LMs. And then Google did a reverse aquire, right? And they brought him back. And so like Character AI is like dead man walking because Google just like hired the team out from under it.

Starting point is 00:33:12 Fair, yeah. And so like it was always like, what are you going to do with this? I think that 4-04 docs, the bankruptcy docs that they reported on, they were making like a million dollars in revenue. Like it was like nothing. Yeah. Against all of the spend that they'd take them to start the company. So at some point,

Starting point is 00:33:28 they should have been actively trying to manage what happens since user data because it was it was just abundantly clear when that when Google did the aquiliterer this company was going to die yeah there's no like when I'm talking about there's no consumer products like your kids can illegally bang a chat bot is not a consumer product no but these companies are also in a position of they're running so fast and they're burning so much cash and like every day is an existential crisis in so many ways that uh this will not be the last company that didn't think hard enough about basic stewarding of that stuff. And I think a good question is how valuable is this user data? So the other thing that was on my

Starting point is 00:34:06 mind is like spirit airlines went out of business and there was a auction for their corporate data. Right. Because if you have a bunch of data about ticket booking and flight schedules, an itinerary and overbooking and fee and just like the operations of an airline, that's really valuable if you're trying to train a model that can do other enterprise tasks. You have a bunch of at user data that's like, do you love me? Like, we are, they already, they already stole all of Tumblr. Like, they don't need more of it, you know? And hope.

Starting point is 00:34:35 So, like, I think we're going to find that there's, like, markets for different kinds of data is more and more of these companies go under and we see what happens to more and more of them. But yeah, I mean, there, should there be a federal privacy law that protects user data when companies like this got a business? They probably should. Yeah. Agreed.

Starting point is 00:34:52 All right. That's enough AI talk for one day. Let's get onto something less controversial. which is the state of social media and X. But first, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. Are you a pet owner? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S.

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Starting point is 00:37:27 I actually, I realize I don't know the answer to this question. I check it every day now. There's a lot of AI conversation there, and I think it is important to see primary sources. Every now and again, I will snarkily reply to someone who is racist and remind them I'm from Wisconsin. That's the thing I do. I would say that's a reasonably representative use of X. So that's pretty good. We're going to have this whole conversation.

Starting point is 00:37:52 I just want everyone out. That is my experience of X. Yeah, that's fair. I bring this up because over the last really a couple of months now, there's been this slow, sort of steady drip of people with some. some mix of fiery resolve and their tail between their legs going back to X. If you rewind like three years ago, maybe, four years ago, kind of in the 12 months after Elon Musk bought Twitter and started to ruin it and turn it into X, a lot of people performatively left the platform, announced they were leaving the platform, renounced their

Starting point is 00:38:28 support for this place, and left. I left quietly. This was made, this choice was made easily for me because I left on parental leave in December of 2022, which happened to be a really great time to stop tweeting. And I just, I never, I never posted about it. I just never went back. But I think, like, the verge has explained in public how we feel about X. But then recently, so I think the first one that really came across my radar was Mac Stories, where John and Federico, two of the folks at Mac Stories, decided that they were going to go back to X and start posting. That caused a mini revolt. Not even a mini revolt, right? They lost a bunch of their staff. People got really mad at them. Yeah, full-scale revolt. People were very upset. And then just in the

Starting point is 00:39:14 last week or so, our friend Casey Newton on Platformer wrote that he is now going to start posting on X again. And then our friend John Gruber wrote about basically that X is the thing again. I don't know John's particular stands on posting on X, but he pointed out basically that X is still the best social network. No, wait, hold on. That's not. Sure. Of its kind.

Starting point is 00:39:43 No, well, just compared, in the universe of social networks, in the category of things that look like Twitter. The title of his post is X once again marks the spot. And he basically says, Macedon is a wasteland, blue sky lost. threads is like an empty space filled with people. Right, but what are those things? Those are all things that look like Twitter.

Starting point is 00:40:04 It's like you won the Academy Award for Best Sound Design and a feature film about dinosaurs. Like, yes. Sure. In that, in your category, you might, but Best Social Network is a whole different thing. Sure. Sure. Radically different thing. Sure.

Starting point is 00:40:18 Different Twitter. Between Twitter and the Twitter clones, there was a, there was a, everybody believed they were leaving for something else. Lots of people loudly talked about how they were. were leaving for something else. Again, I'm one of those people. And people are slinking back. Some people. How do you feel about this?

Starting point is 00:40:37 I feel like meta really blew it with threads. They have a legitimately bigger product with more people, and they were so anti-news and anti-real-time feeds that they just lost. Katie and Audepauls calls it the gas leak social network. She's a great writer, business insider. You go on there and it is just the weirdest algorithm with the weirdest engagement bait. People getting things wrong on purpose, left and right. Old tweets from like 100 years ago being reformed for engagement.

Starting point is 00:41:11 Everything that's wrong about meta is just in your face on threads. They have some of the most interesting product design ideas about what a Twitter-like can and should do. I haven't done this yet, but if you're a podcaster, you can have your podcast. podcast card appear between all of your posts on threads. They have some like real time NBA chat stuff going on. Like their product ideas are good. Meta's a good consumer product company. Their algorithm ideas are so weighted to engagement that it doesn't matter.

Starting point is 00:41:40 Yes. And it is by far bigger than X. By far. We'll set Blue Sky and Macedon aside for many minutes. We can come back to them. X has decided to win in one category. And I think this is why everyone's confused in English. hungry, they have decided to win an AI conversation and tangentially venture capital circle

Starting point is 00:42:05 conversation. Sure. If you are a VC and you would like to talk about how smart you are in the company of other VCs, do I have a platform for you? If you are interested in AI and what it can do and being excited about the future of software development, boy, do I have the platform for you. In almost every other case, X is irrelevant. And I was talking to Casey about it because, you know, he, I, you know, he, I,

Starting point is 00:42:26 He and I share a revulsion to X at the beginning. And his point, which I think is valid, and I will come to why I think it's valid, is if you want to cover the AI industry, you have to be in the rooms that they are in. And X is that room, but far in away that room. Okay. If you want to cover almost anything else, you might not have to be in that room. Right. And so all the people that you are talking about are tech journalists who want to talk about AI and converse about AI and like knock the, their ideas around and then go, go home and write about AI or make AI podcast or whatever it is.

Starting point is 00:43:01 Sure. And so all of the principles in the tech industry are on X. That's what they've chosen. And they've chosen it for good reasons or bad reasons. Maybe John Ternis just doesn't want Elon Musk to yell at him. Maybe they all just hate Zuck more than they hate Elon. Right? Like, Blue Sky is not big enough.

Starting point is 00:43:19 Like, fair enough, man. They're making whatever choices they're making. And if you're a reporter, I think it's really important to. go look at primary sources. For better or worse, the primary sources of the conversation are on that platform. This is what I look at every day. I do not feel the need to participate in that conversation. I'm not into giving our work away for free, as people know, especially to people who don't

Starting point is 00:43:42 value my literal existence. And there are a lot of people on X who do not value my existence. My experience with X is racial slurs. That it's just a thing that happens to me when I post on X. Because people hate Wisconsin. They hate Wisconsin. I mean, there's like podcasts and X are a call. called like the Indian question.

Starting point is 00:43:57 Like, we're like 2% of the fucking population. Like, we're fine. Yeah. We're just all smarter and hotter than you. I'm sorry. But like that, that is real. And I have a lot of friends who don't see it. They're not experiencing that part of it.

Starting point is 00:44:12 Sure. I think that's happening here. But I do think if you are a tech journalist, you ought to go look at the primary sources. And if your experience on blue sky is kind of like mine, I, like, started to worry that I was just looking at screenshots of X, like, curated by other people. Yeah, by people who are mad. By people who are mad. And the reason I set those aside is I think those platforms should succeed.

Starting point is 00:44:37 I think that there's some great value in federated social networks and open social networks. And maybe Blue Sky's point is never to run Blue Sky. It's to enable a bunch of other things to operate. Maybe Massaunt's point is to never really be big. It's just to be the network of things that are on activity pub and one day figure out how to interact with Reds, which is just like a holy war. That is all technology. It is not the consumer experience of where are the important people talking.

Starting point is 00:45:02 And in this one field, in tech, they are all talking on X. I understand it. I have a lot of friends besides John and Casey and Federate, all those people who are like, well, I have to go look at it. But here's my counter example. And I'm curious what you think about this. It is, we are 20 days, 19 days away from the midterm elections. X is irrelevant to the election. It is just not a factor in this election.

Starting point is 00:45:28 There was an entire right-wing conspiracy theory about James Taurico. Yeah. Being in a mental institution. In Ohio. In another world, X would have just horsepowered this into existence. Right? We've all experienced this in various elections where the wild fire of an ex-political conspiracy theory became the assignment editor for the entire media. Just didn't happen.

Starting point is 00:45:54 just fizzled. The idea that our candidates are arguing on X or issuing policy positions on X or reacting to X is nowhere in this cycle. And that's the counterpoint. Okay, I fear you just picked the worst example because the Talariko thing did actually kind of escape containment. And it did force the times to do the piece where they went and looked at his ring camera records to make sure that he was home. And like, this one hit. I totally disagree with you. I mean, it's there.

Starting point is 00:46:25 I can show you the coverage. Like, the idea that random people on Twitter get to assign the mainstream media what to do remains in existence. It's just there. It's not nearly as often, but it's still there. And I think one really important. But not in a way that breaks through. Right? Like, in the last presidential election, they're eating the dogs or eating the cats.

Starting point is 00:46:47 Sure. It's just concocted out of nothing on X until it landed in a debate. and then is now like a rap song. I agree with that. And I think the thing that is most bizarre about this moment that we're in is that that kind of doesn't happen anywhere.

Starting point is 00:47:04 Like in a weird way, even as so many other monocultures were breaking, Twitter stayed kind of a monoculture. So Casey's arguing is that Twitter has gotten much smaller. It's much less lucrative than it used to be for sure.

Starting point is 00:47:17 Sure. We can see its financials as part of SpaceX. SpaceX is a public company now. and it's also vastly smaller. Like all, and when you, this is why I reacted so strongly to best social network. The best social network is like Instagram reels. Well, yeah. Yes.

Starting point is 00:47:32 Right. Or TikTok. I think there is a strong argument to be made that neither of those things even resemble social networks. But that is where people are having social media experiences. That's where they're having entertainment experiences. But this is, this is a semantics argument we don't need to have. I take your point.

Starting point is 00:47:48 And I think in a weird way, what actually happened is that we did. didn't replace Twitter with anything, it all just sort of died. And I'm at a point increasingly where like, I use threads more than any of the other ones. I don't really know why. Is that why you're so weird? So blue sky, blue sky is weird because everybody on blue sky is either like in violent agreement or violent disagreement in a way that I find exhausting in both directions.

Starting point is 00:48:17 But everybody's mad all the time. X, I find just like deeply unpleasant all the people on it. Frankly, I find deeply, I just don't have a good time on X and I don't feel any obligation to post there. So whatever. Threads is like the sort of tamest middle ground for me. And that's fine. It's a place to post. People can find it.

Starting point is 00:48:38 But there isn't like I think the idea that you have to go back to X because it is meaningful for most things is true. But the thing about the AI conversation that you're missing is that the AI conversation, is that the AI conversation is the most important. It's the only conversation everybody is having. And that gives X a huge amount of power. They did it on purpose. They made this choice. For sure.

Starting point is 00:49:00 But it's, and for a long time, that was politics, right? Like, they gave huge weight to political conversations. And so they elevated it onto cable news. And now it's just AI because of the people who run it. But the thing is they called that correctly. AI is the most important conversation everyone is having right now. It's the most important conversation political journalists are having right now. now, right? Like, if you can, it is. Like, you're, you're talking about the people on just

Starting point is 00:49:23 offhandedly on CNBC talking about how RSI is going to kill us all. Like, well, that's, their business journal is talking about money. This is what we do. I think we are at a point now where even that one conversation is the closest thing to a universal conversation being had, and it does make X powerful. And I think it's a huge bummer that everybody has allowed themselves to stay on X and do that. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that those, the people on that platform, like they're not there because X is powerful. They're there because their politics have moved in large part the same way

Starting point is 00:49:57 they Elon Musk's did, the same way that Mark Andresen's did, the same way that Mark Andreessen's did, the same way that, like, no one is not there with open eyes, is what I'm saying. And you either do it feeling bad about it or you do it because these are your people and you love it. But it is still powerful in that one way. And that way is very important. I'll make this distinction.

Starting point is 00:50:17 I don't think any normal person should be on X. I don't. I don't think any normal person should be on social media. To be absolutely completely honest with you. And we'll go with text-based Twitter clone social media. There is no audience to build there. There is no community to build there because it's also dispersed and most of it is fake. Like, I cannot sit here and make one good case for why a regular person should join Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads, or Macedon.

Starting point is 00:50:44 Well, as a poster, as a person who, like, makes things. The person who views things, right? Most people are lurkers, right? They're just consuming. There are better things to view on every other platform. Or you can just open Instagram emails. Yeah, read a book. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:50:57 But I think the distinction that is getting lost in this conversation on going back to X is it's a bunch of reporters. Sure. People who are describing this are reporters. Yes. And I understand why Casey's like I didn't do the source building on threads that I was able to do on Twitter. back in the day. That is a universal experience of most reporters I know are having. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:22 Because the sources are there. Yeah. So you just got to go to the party. You just have to be in the room. I think that all of that nuance. Mike Isaac talked a lot about that, by the way. Mike Isaac, a reporter at the New York Times talked a lot about basically building his profile as a reporter by being a reply guy in people's DMs. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Every reporter in that period did that. We all did it. My Twitter DMs back in the day were the place to be. that's different now. The reason I'm making Instagram videos is because everyone sees them.

Starting point is 00:51:54 Right? Like that's just a dynamic that is true. I can talk to my phone camera for two minutes and put it on Instagram and I get a bunch of incoming because even if they're not on blue sky, they're definitely on Instagram. Fine. But I don't think that a bunch of reporters saying

Starting point is 00:52:09 I have to go engage my sources over here is the same kind of endorsement as this platform has regained its vitality. And I think that's actually the error they're all making. If you are in tech and you want to talk about AI with other people who are building and using AI, they're all there. That's where you got to go look at it. You should, reporters should look at primary sources. I believe that with all my heart.

Starting point is 00:52:29 I don't think that means you have to say that, like, it has regained its cultural power in sports because it has not. No, it definitely hasn't. Right. And like, there's something there that it's, this is Casey's argument. It's powerful and it's one vertical because it has gotten smaller. Sure. But all that other stuff didn't go anywhere, did it? Like, I do think it's possible that Threads ends up going down as the biggest fumble in this whole space because it just could have done it.

Starting point is 00:52:58 And there was a really funny thing this week. Connor Hayes, who is like Leeds product at Threads posted. We recently made a change that could increase the posts you see from those who follow. Like, Threads had to make a change to its algorithm. so that when you follow somebody, you will see the things that they post. Like, what are we doing? Like, everybody got so lost in the sauce

Starting point is 00:53:24 of wanting to do this, like, content-based recommendation system from TikTok that they forgot how people want to talk to each other on the internet. And I do think it's possible that threads may have missed its chance here, but it, boy, did it really actually have a chance to be the thing and, and...

Starting point is 00:53:42 In every other vertical, except tech and AI, there's still a chance. Do you think? Meta has a lot of money. They could just get all the sports writers to use threads. That's, you might be right. But I also wonder, like, culturally,

Starting point is 00:53:54 it's now been three years. Maybe we've moved on. Maybe we don't need that thing anymore. I don't know. Look, let me zoom way out. I'm sure people will be mad at me if we're even suggesting that anyone can get any value from X.

Starting point is 00:54:08 Fine. Like, I can't stop a network effect. And I personally do not believe that things go away if you ignore them. Right. And the network effect of the tech executives

Starting point is 00:54:20 and the people building these things is on X. So if you are like, I'm not going to pay attention to you, the network effect will still be there and they'll still have it. That's just reality. But the mainstream audience

Starting point is 00:54:32 is watching video platforms. That is the thing they are doing. And they're watching the video platforms. Like every night and again, I get a video and it's just screenshots of X. And it's like, that's how I'm consuming. I'm still not at X.

Starting point is 00:54:45 I'm just consuming some tweets. That is very powerful, and it's right next to the idea that instead of having a phone, you'll have a little AI Asian Tomogachi. Sure. And I actually think the little video, the scrolly video platform is the center of gravity that will prevent X from ever fully recapturing its magic

Starting point is 00:55:06 and prevent the little AI Tomoguchi from ever supplanting the phone. It's good theory. And like that to me is the real, like, sure. We can all go look at it. We can all go see Greg Josriac and John Turnus posting their home view videos on X because they all want to seem cool in front of Elon, whatever it is. But the views for that actually happen on TikTok and Instagram. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:30 There's a really interesting argument in that that suggests that scrolly vertical video is a more important format than the smartphone. But that's, I'm not ready to get into that yet. I do just want to... With our YouTube in that conversation is a good question. Yeah, fair. I do just want to pick on John Gruber for just one quick second. Sure.

Starting point is 00:55:49 Because he writes in this piece, and I should be clear, I think John Gruber is right about most things. I think he's so, so very wrong about this one thing. He writes, the culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator. Is that your experience of X at all? Again, in the context of like, here's a cool new AI product that can do cool new things, I think any excitement to be found is on X.

Starting point is 00:56:13 Sure. that thing. That's fair. It is AI people cheerleading other AI people, but that is something. Yeah. Sure. Right. And there's something there, especially if you work in and around software, you care a lot

Starting point is 00:56:23 about software as John does, that is exciting and fun. There is more tech conversation that is exciting and fun on those platforms than the other Twitter-like networks. Yeah. That's fair. My experience of X is nothing like an exclusive, inclusive experience. Yeah. It is like really important to say that out loud.

Starting point is 00:56:41 Yeah. Yeah. John Gruber and I are both white dudes. which is a really nice thing to be on Twitter. He also says, without any fanfare, X has demusked its algorithm. And I would say, I'm willing to bet that John Gruber muted Elon Musk and forgot about it and now thinks that is the case, because that is not my experience of X at all. Do you think people should feel bad going back to X?

Starting point is 00:57:04 Like, genuinely, like, do you, if you, what is preventing you from going back and engaging in that in a more real way? You're a reporter. You know these people. I mean, again, I look at it several times a day because it is my job, is our job on this show to go look at primary sources and then talk about them. The fundamental job of being a reporter

Starting point is 00:57:29 is not to report on someone else's reporting, but to go try to find some primary sources. And when we do report on other people's reporting, it's almost always people we trust who we know to have done that job. Right? Like, that's the dynamic. I think that literally the survey,

Starting point is 00:57:44 this we provide here is one, jokes, two, we like each other and people enjoy that. And three, we curate information well. Like those are, I think that's in order of what we do on this podcast. And that third thing is really important. So I want to make sure I go look at the primary sources and see the primary sources. I don't think anyone else has that responsibility. But like actually contributing to that platform like makes me feel bad. And other people can feel differently. Go ahead. Do what you got to do. But there's not, some part where I'm like, oh, I need to look away from this. It's like, no, my job is to look at primary source information.

Starting point is 00:58:21 So I'm going to go seek it out. Great. I buy that. But again, where am I putting my social media effort into making videos? And I'm confident that is a faster way to reach more people that I've never encountered before than the X algorithm. It also puts your hair situation much more front and center in the conversation. Why do you think it's getting crazier?

Starting point is 00:58:44 I just imagine you, like, having a hairdresser on the side and you, like, get your camera up and you're like, more and they make it higher and you're like, more. And they just, that's your Instagram strategy. It's good stuff. All right. We should take one more break. And then we're going to come back. It's time for the lighting round. Be right back.

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Starting point is 01:01:55 You can read the paper, experience a demo, grab the code from outshift.com. That's O-U-T-S-H-I-F-T.com. All right, we're back. It is. I'm not even going to ask. I just, this one I know, this one, Brendan broke containment in my world this week. It's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy.

Starting point is 01:02:22 Brendan Carr's in Dad Rock. So stupid. A little like Chicago-y vibes that time. I like it. It's good. Give me more five-part harmony singing Brendan Carr's name. That's all I'm looking for. That was some yacht rock.

Starting point is 01:02:56 That comes from Bruce Hartley, who said that soft rock has been woefully unrepresented on this podcast. Bruce Hartley, little known fact, played rhythm guitar for Kenny Loggins. You know that name sounds like he did. You really had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie.

Starting point is 01:03:15 All right, Nealai, what did Brendan do this week? I'm curious, what broke contained for you? I've got two, but what did you think? It's got to be the live stream execution. Okay, that's one of them. We have some video of this. So let's just talk about that very quickly. So Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would live

Starting point is 01:03:31 stream and execution, which apparently he didn't tell anyone he was going to announce, including President Trump, who mostly seemed surprised by this information. Bold strategy, Pete. So we ran around and asked all the major social networks if they would carry such an execution because that is against all of their terms of service, including X, which has longstanding policy. And, you know, X is like very narrow and a lot of wild things happen on X. But all of them have a policy against live streaming murder.

Starting point is 01:04:01 Or that kind of violent content in general. Yeah. And so most of the platforms said no. Some of them didn't respond because they didn't want to raise the eye or the president. And then the president was like, that's weird. We're going to look at it. And then they all were like, we're not going to do it. That's what happened.

Starting point is 01:04:20 So Brendan, in the midst of all this, man loves a speech controversy. It goes on CNBC. And CNBC says, are you going to allow a live stream? Excuse me what do you think about this? We have the clip. But you can just run it. Well, I think, look, my understanding is it's not on broadcast TV, so I don't think there's a role for the FC one way or the other there. But I trust Secretary Heggsett.

Starting point is 01:04:39 I mean, he's implementing the laws and the regulations that are, you know, relevant to the Department of War. And I think he's doing a great job. And I trust that he's making the right call on these issues. Is it something that you would allow on broadcast if they wanted to? Look, I mean, ultimately, we're going to defer to Secretary Hegsteth and, you know, his decisions on how to move forward with this. I'm sorry, did he just say I'm going to defer to Secretary Pete Heggen? Seth on whether this is allowed on broadcast networks. First of all, shout out to Carl Kingtonia, buddy,

Starting point is 01:05:09 for asking like the most obvious question. Yeah, you got to love when people ask the question. Like, you're just like, what are you? Great job. Like, you care a lot about content. You're always ranting and raving about the public interest. The networks don't carry the president's speeches live. And you're like, the network executives have to go to jail now.

Starting point is 01:05:26 Should we watch your prosecution? It's like, I don't know. I defer to the military. Weird. And then the idea that Brendan is like, I don't have this power because it's not broadcast television. I can't weigh out on it. Totally belied by the fact that he wants to have the power. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:41 I mean, my, my, I'm not like, my I have no power here. T-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my, I have no power here. I'm on television saying, I don't have any power here, but totally everybody should do it. Yeah, like my boy, you wrote the Project 2025 chapter on speech regulations and how you would use your broadcast power. to control content moderation on platforms. I know you wrote it because your name's on it and I read it. You want to have the power, but you're like, yeah, this one's a hot potato. I don't know if it's in the public interest of broadcasting execution.

Starting point is 01:06:13 I defer to TegSeth. That's also, by the way, that's the thing Brendan Carr says when President Trump has not yet declared he's in favor. Oh, he's a weasel. I mean, what we're describing here is cowardice. Correct. Right. Like, he should be able to say, well, that seems bad.

Starting point is 01:06:30 But he can't because he doesn't know what Trump is going to do. So he deferring to Pete Hegsafe. A lot there. In another world that Trump was like, we're doing this. He'd be like, I'm calling up the heads of every broadcast network and saying they have to run it. Yeah, he'd be like, Jimmy, I'm going to force Jimmy Kimmel to host the execution. Jimmy Kimmel will execute this person. Cowardous, right?

Starting point is 01:06:50 They're like, don't even have the principles. Anyway, Trump called it off. We're not executing someone live. For like a million reasons. I think Trump was actually convinced by members of his own administration. This is a horrible idea for 10 million reasons. Yeah. Including the number of people who would want to copycat it,

Starting point is 01:07:06 including the number of people who would think that this is a sufficient deterrent. There's a lot of reasons where one of the few countries in the world that still does executions. It doesn't actually deter crime. That's a different story. Okay. That's the one that broke containment. Can I talk about the other one? The other one that's on my list that I think is much funnier.

Starting point is 01:07:26 Sure. Okay. SpaceX announced early this week, late last week. that they're going to be a major wireless carrier. Right. They've been sort of threatening to do this for a while. And this is partially Brendan. Okay.

Starting point is 01:07:38 But it's partially just a winding road of Vergecast stuff. Yeah. And incompetent FCC commissioners. From every party is incompetent here. This is the bipartisan Brendan Carr is a dummy. Like Brendan Carr, you are all Brendan Carr, people. So in Trump won. Our We Are All Brendan Carr T-shirt is not.

Starting point is 01:08:00 Like, everyone at the FCC is going to be issued a I am Brendan Carr's shirt, right? Someone AI, that Charlie Kirk's song. Like, let's go for it. All right. In Trump, one, you will recall that T-Mobile wanted to buy Sprint. And everyone thought this a bad idea. We did endless version of cash. We did decoders about it.

Starting point is 01:08:19 How reducing competition in the wireless market from four carriers to three would raise prices and lower service and not be a good outcome. And so the Trump administration, you will recall, engineered a solution in which Timo would be allowed to buy Sprint, and some of Sprint's assets and spectrum would be given to DISH Network to stand up a new network

Starting point is 01:08:40 called Project Genifibis. And this would create fear in the hearts of our network executives, and they would once again compete for your dollars. I will remind you that this did not happen. In no way, shape, or form, did Project Genifivesis meaningfully exist? To the point that when we covered the fact

Starting point is 01:08:58 that it didn't exist, We got on the record emails from DISH network communications people that just said, our network does exist. Yeah. No, we did it. I have it. Look at it. So we said people, it was in Vegas. Eventually it did exist in like in the sense that one mid-range Motorola Android phone could sometimes get it, but it mostly rolled over to 18T's network.

Starting point is 01:09:22 Yeah. They built something. It had a, it had a backstop deals with AT&T and T-Mobile. Whatever. Yeah. A lot of history there if you're a Virtcast fan. Project Gena 5 says the network that was going to do it. Anyway, this failed.

Starting point is 01:09:36 DISH network declared bankruptcy. And then they did the thing that everyone thought they were going to do, which was just hoard spectrum for several years until a value went up and then auction off for money. That is indeed what they did. There is one block of spectrum that they could not get rid of. It was the 800 megahertz and Nextel spectrum. Okay. Because Sprint once bought Nextel.

Starting point is 01:09:55 Right. And it had the IDIN network, which was the like push to talk. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the IdaN spectrum has been sitting around for ages. No one wants it. Again, in all of this Project Gen 5Sys, this noise, this just ends up sitting around. And Dish hasn't been able to sell it forever. So they flipped it to a private equity company called grain management, and guess you bought it?

Starting point is 01:10:18 SpaceX. Of course. For presumably nothing. It's like $8 billion. They bought some other spectrum over the years. Of course, Brendan is just like waiving requirements and auction rules to, to, yeah. Right. He's just making it happen for SpaceX.

Starting point is 01:10:32 And the thing that's funny about this is SpaceX is making all this noise about standing up a major wireless carrier and the stocks of our existing carriers are dropping. And they are freaking out because what does Elon Musk represent for them? Actual competition. Right. The idea that people will like Starlink more than their existing service is just reality for them. Nobody likes their wireless carrier. This is why you need competition in the market. whether or not Elon can actually build a cell network using all of this spectrum that can compete nationally with T-Mobile and AT&T and Verizon without roaming agreements for those companies, which have basically said they're not going to allow them to roam because they don't want real competition. Like, they're afraid.

Starting point is 01:11:15 Oh, yeah. And whether any of that will be cost-effective in the end is, like, irrelevant to the fact that Brendan got to do some waivers and finally get some spectrum sold to his buddy Elon Musk. So we'll see. I'm very curious. I think they have some. interesting plans around using small dishes connected to Starlink and using Starlink as the backhaul for this new network. But they've got to get phones to support their new spectrum. Big question. They say most phones already do, but big question about battery life, performance, coverage, all this stuff. They obviously have to launch 15,000 new satellites, Gen 2 Starlink satellites, to support this new network.

Starting point is 01:11:50 And they've got to build some terrestrial network. This is a lot of network to build. Yeah. While the carriers are like actually afraid for the. first time in their lives. The result, because in Trump won, everyone allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint and destroy competition for ages. This is all Project Geno-Fives' as fault.

Starting point is 01:12:11 We are at Starlink Mobile. If it comes into fruition, is the true Project Gena-Fives-Sys. Yeah. So, okay, there have been rumors for a while now that SpaceX is going to build a phone. Does this make you think it's more or less likely that SpaceX is building a phone? What kind of rebranded mid-range Android phone preloaded with X? They're going to take a Trump phone that no one sold. They're going to buy all of the unused inventory of Trump phone, paint it gray, and call it the SpaceX phone.

Starting point is 01:12:40 It's so sick. We'll see, again, the wireless market needs more competition. And even the presence of a real competitor has these companies shaken in their boots. Yeah. And Starlink SpaceX is... The notion of a competitor is a real thing. especially one with the resources and brand and the history of SpaceX, right? Like, this is not some upstart trying to lay fiber.

Starting point is 01:13:03 This is a company with real resources to go do kind of whatever it decides to do. But then there's also rumors that SpaceX and Tesla are going to merge in some meaningful. Like, this company is going to get way more nuts before it ever figures out how to sell you a smartphone, would be my guess. Yeah. We did an entire decoder on this with Walter Pysick from Lichadventures. He's deep in it That's coming out soon But I just want to call this out

Starting point is 01:13:27 This is We've done a lot of monkeying in the mobile market With Spectrum Over these past 10 years And a lot of it is We're still feeling the aftershocks Of allowing Team Mobile to buy Sprint Which has potentially created this opportunity

Starting point is 01:13:41 But we have never really focused on Are these markets competitive? And maybe this will happen But I suspect Everyone is going to learn That building a network is much more expensive than it seems, enough to have killed Dish Network, as it turns out.

Starting point is 01:13:55 Yeah, although I'm not sure that took that much. But here we are. Project Geno Flaxis. Yeah. All right, take us out of Brendan. All right. Brendan, if you would like to explain any of your special malocation decisions

Starting point is 01:14:06 or your rank cowardice, you're available to join our show. We are not regulated by you here on the internet, so I've been told. So I think we would have a free-flowing and respectful debate. Don't you, Brendan? What could possibly go wrong?

Starting point is 01:14:21 Anyway, that's been Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast for my podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. I feel like that cleanses me of Brendan every time. It's like I'm just immersed in Brendan

Starting point is 01:14:39 and then I am free. We've got to make a Spotify playlist of these games. I agree. All right, my first lightning around item is about smartphone sales. One of the things we've been talking about a bunch on this show is what the rising price

Starting point is 01:14:50 and lowering availability of RAM is doing to the smartphone market, in particular what it's doing to cheap phones, the answer is it's bad for everybody. So Counterpoint, the research firm put out a report this week that said the global smartphone market declined 20% year over year in Q3 of 2026, which is its lowest Q3 level in 14 years. 14 years. Wow.

Starting point is 01:15:14 This is how low smartphones are. A couple of interesting things happened. So everybody is down. I should just say that. But relatively speaking, Samsung and Apple took an even larger share of the smartphone market, up from, let's see, 37% to about 45%. So that's a big jump in two companies owning the smartphone market. Everybody's prices went up.

Starting point is 01:15:38 One thing that Counterpoint found is that there has been robust early demand for the Z-Fold 8, which is really interesting. This, like, this passport-sized foldable thing seems to be the thing. It's working for Samsung. It appears it's going to work for the iPhone duo. It's just interesting that that is actually now starting to turn. Everybody's prices are up. Everybody's focusing on smaller things, but basically the ongoing thing here is just that

Starting point is 01:16:07 cheap phones are completely disappearing. Everybody is getting for, there's a line that says there are prioritizing margins by shifting supply from thinner margin segments to higher return markets and models, which means they are ditching cheap phones and pushing towards more expensive phones. And they're raising the prices on those more expensive phones because they can, because people who pay a lot for their phone will pay a little more for their phone. And I think this market is just getting bleaker and bleaker. And there are a bunch of explanations for it, right? One is the rising costs. One is that I think you can make a good argument that there have not been a lot of interesting phones in the last several years. And so

Starting point is 01:16:43 people are holding onto their phones longer. There are fewer compelling reasons to upgrade. It'll be interesting to see if the foldable thing can flip that. But like the smartphone market had so much relentless growth for so long. And that relentless growth in the enormous scale changed every other tech industry in its wake. Like my laptop, the Google book, exists because of the smartphone supply chain. Like it, it, in every way. And, and that is just quarter by quarter being unwound kind of right in front of our eyes. Yeah, everything is an Android phone. Yeah. And, And now Android phones are more expensive. It's like, yeah, that's the, it is, it is going to come for everybody.

Starting point is 01:17:23 Look, everyone wants there to be the next thing and the next wave of growth. I think this sign of maturity in this smartphone market is actually very healthy. Right. Like, it has not been necessary to upgrade your phone every year, every two years for quite some time. Okay. And unsure sales are down, I think the refurbished market is actually really healthy. Right? Like there's something here where like it's not necessary to get the newest thing.

Starting point is 01:17:49 And we're probably going to see a lot of demand for refurbished, remanufactured, all those devices. All of that attention should go elsewhere. It has all been locked up in the, in app stores and app taxes. A lot of innovation has been held back because the economics of putting an app on a phone have just held back innovation. And we've covered every variant of this for years and years in the show. If something else happens, I think that's good. I've actually been hearing, this is mostly just anecdotal at this point, but I've heard it a few times now that there are people doing hardware startups

Starting point is 01:18:24 who not very long ago couldn't even get their emails answered because these companies were just busy making giant scale smartphones for everybody. And if you weren't in the smartphone business, they would have to redo their tooling and factory systems and it just wasn't worth it. They were all just focused on making phones. that now there is interest and energy and availability to build other stuff. That there is suddenly like manufacturing capacity in this world that there was not,

Starting point is 01:18:51 not very long ago. And it's made some people optimistic that like this stuff is expensive. It's hard to get, especially if you need a lot of RAM, but we can build things in a way that if you weren't building a smartphone, it was very hard to build things not that long ago. Yeah. The danger is that it's easier to build things that are essentially like underpowered Android phones.

Starting point is 01:19:10 Yeah. And then we'll be surrounded by a lot of underpowered Android phones. Feels like that's coming. You got to put all those crappy processors somewhere. That's what I'm saying. It's like, everything's an Android phone. Really cuts both ways, huh? Indeed.

Starting point is 01:19:23 What's your next lightning round item? Agent warfare is here. Yes. What I've been calling the DoorDash problem has arrived at scale. J.P. Morgan Chase, Jamie Diamond, announced that he doesn't want agents running on his platform. Bank of America announced that. we've heard it from Amazon isn't letting Grockbot on.

Starting point is 01:19:42 So Elon is tweeting that he's going to build an Amazon competitor, which is just great. Is that true? I missed that. That happened today. And it got like covered. And it's like, I don't think Elon's going to build an Amazon competitor. I got to be honest with you. I think he likes tweaking Jeff Bezos.

Starting point is 01:19:55 But I don't think he's going to build a logistics network. I really hope he builds it. I hope he calls it Grakazan. And it will just make my life a little bit worse. If you thought the romance authors of America were mad at Amazon, Just you wait until Gragazahn shows up. It's here, right? The idea that agentic commerce is going to upend the world in some way is here.

Starting point is 01:20:20 And I think one of the most fascinating lines of debate here is whether or not your computer is you. And, you know, on the internet, everyone's like, well, it's my computer. It's my agent. I just want to use your website. I can use any way I want. And that's not true. Like, just because it happens on the computer doesn't mean it's not happening. Right.

Starting point is 01:20:40 Like, people are allowed to, like, you can't go to the bank and be like, I'm going to come in here fully naked and just like smash a rubber chicken on the counter a few times. That means you have to give me money. Right. They can be like, no, actually, we prefer you to interact with our staff in a certain way. Private business, yeah. Yeah, right? You can't be like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put together a remote-controlled car.

Starting point is 01:21:02 I'm going to drive it around your bank as many times I want until everyone leaves. I'm going to rob you. Like, it's just like, you know what I'm going to do. you know, sure. Like, I'm going to stand outside the bank with a party speaker until you come out and kiss me. Like, not a choice.

Starting point is 01:21:17 Yet online, it's like, any way I want to use your website is a free for all. Right. And I think agents are going to bring that into the sharpest focus it's ever been. That actually the people on the other side of the internet connection have a say, and they're going to start to find ways to enforce that say.

Starting point is 01:21:35 And I know our listener is going to say, well, it's a cat mask game. I'm going to do this forever. but like that's why you have courts and fines. And that's why all these companies are going to end up with deals. And they're going to have a lot of incentive to both block and respect the blocks of other competitors because there will be economic terms in the middle. And court cases are on the side.

Starting point is 01:21:55 And so I see all this blocking happening. And I guarantee you, like what Bank of America said was we want to make sure that it's safe and we are involved in how this works. And they're going to just write an API for how the agents are going to use the thing. instead of just like clicking around on the website. Because that was always brittle to begin with. And like giving Muse your Bank of America credentials is always

Starting point is 01:22:16 a stupid idea. Well and I mean it's actually I think it's really good and interesting that this is starting with banking and in particular like consumer banking because it is such a perfect version of the problem that's like if Muse goes and drains my

Starting point is 01:22:32 bank account either on purpose or by accident who am I going to yell at? And ultimately who is responsible? So Elon announced day that if Grock bought something and get your permission, he'll refund you. Yeah, Elon Musk lies a lot. That's fair enough. I look forward to him.

Starting point is 01:22:46 What the Tesla Roadster is coming out a decade later, I look forward to getting my money back in 10 years. But Bank of America, it's the sort of thing that like, this makes me think of carriage disputes with cable companies, right? Where if I don't have ESPN on my TV,

Starting point is 01:23:04 my instinct is not to get mad at ESPN. It's to get mad at Comcast for not showing me the stuff that I want to watch. And this is all of the leverage that those companies have over the carriers and the distributors. And if I'm Bank of America, I'm like, okay, these things are going to make mistakes, they're going to take the money,

Starting point is 01:23:19 and people are going to come to us wanting their money back. And they just don't want that smoke, right? And so what they're going to build is a system with controls that says things like, you cannot drain their bank account without authorization. So putting this kind of guardrail on it, this is such an obviously straightforwardly good one to do

Starting point is 01:23:40 that I think it's good to start with this and then work towards the one that are more complicated. Like, should Muse be able to buy things for me on Amazon that I explicitly direct it to buy on Amazon? Interesting question. Should Mews be able to proactively without my knowledge, spend the money in my bank account?

Starting point is 01:23:55 No. Should Mews deliver you an engagement prompt to gamble a little bit more on Kalshi? Right. No. I think, no. I went out. It's the greatest area of all. And so I think we are going to reckon with each one of those individually.

Starting point is 01:24:09 Okay, but here's my thing about the DoorDash problem. Don't we need to rename the DoorDash problem? Because DoorDash appears to have just wholeheartedly embraced the DoorDash problem. Like DoorDash is no problem. They announced, I think like a while ago they announced like a CLI integration for some agents. Okay. You know, all these companies, any company that moves physical products around the world is like, try. Fair.

Starting point is 01:24:29 You know, like it's so hard to build that thing. Yeah. That they're like, yeah, your agent can come and use DoorDash. and we'll just charge you more money because you don't get to see like DoorDash has a huge advertising business Instagram Instagram has a huge advertising business

Starting point is 01:24:40 so they're very much like we'll just charge you we'll just charge you the money we would have lost if you didn't look at our ads. Yeah, true. That's basically where that. But DoorDash is doing the other thing

Starting point is 01:24:50 which is they're trying to build their own agent. Right, sure. Like all their AI stuff is like in the DoorDash app for consumers. And it's like, I don't, I don't think

Starting point is 01:25:01 what people want is the Dash Buddy or whatever it's going Like, I think they want to use whatever agent they want to use. Wait, can I give you a really stupid example of this that I've been thinking about a lot? So there's this place, there's this pizza place near us called Jets. And Jets is like, it's a normal pizza place. It's like a mini chain.

Starting point is 01:25:19 There's a bunch of them. So you can order online. You can call. You can do whatever. But they give you a 15% discount if you text. I don't know why, but you get 15% off your pizza if you text your order. So of course I go to text my order. but remembering how to text my order is impossible because I'm not looking at a menu.

Starting point is 01:25:40 I'm looking at the messages app and I have to remember which type of pizza it is that I want. The sizes that we get like all it just made me realize the beauty of a UI that is a menu that you click on. It's like I want this thing and this thing. When I have to say out loud with no help and no visual cues, what kind of pizza I want, remembering that what I like is an eight corner pizza is impossible for me. And this is just like this is the thing that keeps coming up to me. Every time I do this is like, in theory, I'd like the idea of just being able to text like, hey, get me my usual at Starbucks and it orders my Starbucks for me.

Starting point is 01:26:15 Like that is the flow I'm interested in. In reality, having the picture there that shows the thing that I usually order and having the name of it and having the confirmation of what it is ends up being the whole experience. And it's just like actually UI is. good here in this case. I mean, how many times are you ordering with your family and everyone needs to go look at the laptop together? Right.

Starting point is 01:26:36 Yeah. Oh my God. It's just a thing. Like, yeah. There's a reason that I'm not so worried about phones being displaced by AI. Looking at stuff remains a powerful tool in the human experience. Yep.

Starting point is 01:26:49 And like, we're going to make the screen smaller has not historically been a winning move. No. What can I interest you in a screen that's on your kitchen counter and only car plays your CarPlayhouse. Does that something you'd be interested in? It's like John Ternis announced that the phone would be the new intelligent hub, and I didn't realize how far he was going to take it.

Starting point is 01:27:13 Do you know what I mean? It is sort of true. Apple has been saying, like, the phone is the thing the world revolves around, and I think they meant that much more literally than we realized. Yeah, yeah, truly, it's like, well, that's where the apps are.

Starting point is 01:27:24 So we'll just do car play. The future. Okay, I have one more. more for you, which is mostly just a question, which is how do we feel about super intelligence? So President Trump makes this announcement that it is no longer artificial intelligence, it is super intelligence. And I don't know how to put this, like other than this, like a bunch of cowardly babies, a lot of people in Silicon Valley followed along. They're renaming SpaceX AI, which is a stupid name for a company, to SpaceX SI, which is a stupider name for a company.

Starting point is 01:27:56 Salesforce is out here doing SI stuff. Everybody is just throwing in line with super intelligence. On the one hand, I don't care about this. Artificial intelligence, as I've, we've been talking about this on the podcast for years. The idea

Starting point is 01:28:12 of AI artificial intelligence as this like catch-all term for all the stuff we're talking about is actually wrong and problematic and causes lots of problems and has made it very hard to talk about a lot of this stuff. So like AI as a term I don't think is any good. I mostly just think it's so, such like weak baby nonsense that my guy posts on truth social. It's super intelligence now.

Starting point is 01:28:34 And everybody in Silicon Valley goes, yes. Wait, he did write an executive order with all the power and force of an executive order. Yeah, sure, which I would point out have just about as much legal standing as a post on truth social. Well, if you ask Trump, he can read the constitution with an executive order. Um, here's here. Let me try to. Give you the framework for it. Okay. What you're mad about is the naked and rampant corruption in the tech industry. And this is the best example of it.

Starting point is 01:29:04 It's so in your face. What is the point of being rich and powerful if you're going to do things like this? Do you know what I mean? Like, they don't call it fuck you money for no reason. If I had that much money, I would be such a pain in everybody's ass all the time. And also, I would live on a giant boat and no one would ever hear from me again. What is the point of any of this if you're... Well, they didn't, like, play these games.

Starting point is 01:29:28 They have purchased the government. It just came at this additional cost of a little bit of their dignity. Yeah, that's, that's real. Right. Like, there will be no AI regulations, but you have to call it superintelligence. And they all looked at each other and said, this is going to suck a little bit. Oh, God, I hate that that's what it is. That is what happened.

Starting point is 01:29:48 That's what happened. Oh, that sucks so much. Okay, keep going. I'm just saying, like, the thing you're, the thing you're offended about is corruption. Yes. And this is just the naked, stupid example of corruption. It's right next to Kimberly Guilfoyle got run out of her fake job as Ambassador Grease. Because she asked for $100,000.

Starting point is 01:30:07 If she'd asked for like $100 million, I think it would have been like, good job. Oh, yeah. And like it's like the embarrassing corruption is like truly embarrassing. By the way, it's Susie now, but that was from Drescico, which is Eddie Hazard. Just shout out to my Eddie Hazard fans. But that is what you're mad about. You're mad about how small and shitty it is. Yes.

Starting point is 01:30:32 And it is so small and so shitty. I also think it's a bad term. Like that's the other problem. It's like we didn't, we didn't even improve anything. It's just, we're just saying super now. Yeah, because he doesn't scare people. And it's like, I think it scares people more. Yeah, AI is at least like a term we've had.

Starting point is 01:30:51 Like people have been talking about artificial intelligence for a hundred years. At least it's a thing people understand. understand superintelligence is just literally nothing, which just drives me crazy. But anyway, you're right. Well, they all want it to be super into. Everyone should go read the Kevin Roos book, which is just dead ahead reporting. It's very good. Like just beginning, middle end, here's what all these people said and what they were

Starting point is 01:31:11 thinking about. And it is just very clear that they've been trying to build AGI from the start. And they've had to hide it in like enterprise sales agreements. Very funny. Yeah, agreed. All right. You got one more. What's your last one?

Starting point is 01:31:24 My last one is just like, I just want to say this out loud. There's something very big happening with decompiling software, particularly in video games, where you can take a finished binary and decompile it with AI and then port it to whatever platform you want. Xbox is going to embrace this in some way. Just go for it. But Xbox needs any idea they can. So like, that's fine. By the way, I again remind everyone, Asha Sharma, the CEO of Xbox is from Racine, Wisconsin.

Starting point is 01:31:50 And I continue to have an open invitation to interviewer at my high school. The thing that I've not formally asked Asha or my high school about, but if you can make this happen, we'll make it happen. I'm confident everyone involved could make this happen. I just think that would be really fun. That would be really fun. So Xbox is... There's a lot of copyright law involved in game decomposition. You know, the various VCs on X are like, all software is over now.

Starting point is 01:32:14 Right. I saw something going around that was basically like, everything is going to become open source whether you like it or not. And I was like, first of all, I don't think you have at all reckoned with the implications of that. And second of all, don't we have... like big, broad legal paradigms to prevent that from happening. Again, maybe this is our new catchphrase. Just because it happens on a computer, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Starting point is 01:32:34 Do you know what I mean? Like, it occurred and you can do things about things that occur. So, for example, open source as a concept in the world exists on the framework of copyright law. Yeah. Like those licenses have effect. because you have some property rights in the software you've written, and then you can write a license saying, if you want to modify this, you have to use the same license.

Starting point is 01:33:02 And if you don't, I'm going to sue you for copyright infringement, for contract violation. Like all that comes from the basis of copyright law. So if you're like, everything is open source now, well, boy, have you really made copyright law very powerful? This is just like the dynamic you're in. And like, yes, it might mean you can like look at the code and you can make your own Photoshop.

Starting point is 01:33:24 but Adobe will have something to say. Right. And the copyright law is in the Constitution as a way to create value for people who make things. And I don't think you can run into the courts and be like, well, I was able to do it. So I could see it. So I did it. Screw you, George Washington. Like, it's not going to happen that way.

Starting point is 01:33:42 And so, like, I'm thinking about this a lot because you can really see the tech industry, particularly an X, which is a particular kind of bubble, is just getting away from the reality of things. having cause and effect, particularly if it happens on a computer. Like, I can do this on a computer. So none of your old frameworks apply to me. That's like, oh, that's all going to catch up to you real fast. Yes. Or game decompilation is like the one where I just have not had enough time to formulate all of my thoughts.

Starting point is 01:34:14 But boy, I'm very curious for how people want us to talk about it and how they're thinking about it. But it's the, it is absolutely the one where, you know, we did five. years of Google versus Oracle. Yeah. And all of that was about whether or Google reusing the names of APIs in Java was infringement.

Starting point is 01:34:34 And that's like five years and a billion dollars. Yeah. And this is just like I downloaded and remade Call of Duty. What was it? Structure, sequence and something. Like, even like incredibly arcane acronyms. Yeah. About the organization of API

Starting point is 01:34:50 names. Yeah. I do think there is something really fascinating happening here. people are building all kinds of cool stuff. They're modding games. They're making games available for other platforms that they haven't been available on. It is slightly surprising to me that Xbox is in on this because I have to imagine the gaming industry is going to throw every bit of its weight against this trend. I mean, Microsoft owns all those studios. That's a fair point. They're fine. They're like, no Activision Blizzard, you love this. Like, what are you going to do? Like, they need to get, they need to get those games on, on more platforms.

Starting point is 01:35:25 Yeah. Right. Like they, they have some amount of, and if, if they do it on their terms, they might be in control. Fair. And I think there is something potentially very cool there that you're going to start to see people, like, if every game becomes modable in this way, there is some very cool stuff to be had there. It gets messy in a lot of ways in the ways that you've been describing and others, but the idea of, giving, like bringing the sort of vibe coding energy to video games at this kind of scale is pretty cool. There's a lot of cool stuff that will happen as that happens. Yeah. And,

Starting point is 01:36:01 you know, I'm not saying I'm a particular expert on the dynamics of the game industry, but I'm pretty good at copyright and software. This one is going to be a mess. Yeah. This is, we are looking at decades of lawsuits about whether decompiling any piece of software so you can recompile it any way you want is, acceptable or allowed or copyright infringement. Like a good question. So if I ship you an app, right, the ones and zeros, the binary of that app that I ship you, that's copyright protected, right?

Starting point is 01:36:31 You can copyright, this is my app, here's this thing. The code I wrote to make that app protected by copyright, you can file that. It took a decade of lawsuits to get there, but you can do that. If you decompile my binary and you end up with slightly different code, important question right there. It's probably a derivative work. You can get there, but all of copyright law is like on first impression. And so like, I don't know the answer to that because no court has ruled on.

Starting point is 01:36:59 Right. I think I probably know the answer to it. But you have to have that lawsuit. Yeah. Well, personally, I'm just thrilled to finally have a reason for you to rant about copyright on the Vergecast again. So this is great news. It's been like two weeks. It's trying to unearth the Java lawsuit for my brain.

Starting point is 01:37:15 It's like my own body is trying to protect me. It's like, what do you do? Just fainted instead. All right, well, before we do, let's get out of here. Nilai, who is on Decoder coming up? So we had Ben Jordan today talking about flock, and then we have Walter Picek talking about Starlink, and then Governor J.B. Pritzker from Illinois is on Decoder very soon. I asked him if the Bears are going to stay in Chicago.

Starting point is 01:37:44 I was like, you got to use your platform for the things you can. It's the opening episode. I was like, I, you know, I got to do good job here. I have so much family in Illinois. He's like, you can be, we claim you as part of Illinois. I was like, no, no, no, sir. I'm from Wisconsin. Absolutely not.

Starting point is 01:37:59 It was not what he was expecting to. Did you wear your cheesehead to the interview? I should have revealed my Jordan love jersey. And then there's one coming up that's a big deal. Very excited about it. I'm just going to tease it. It'll be a big one. It's exciting stuff.

Starting point is 01:38:15 We have overhead projectors on version history this weekend. one of the wonkier episodes we've ever done, but it's really fun. And we had an overhead projector just blaring at me in the studio the whole time, so you'll get to watch me get progressively hotter from sitting next to an overhead projector for two hours. It's good stuff.

Starting point is 01:38:34 Remember, you can subscribe to the Verge to get all of our podcasts, all the ones we've been talking about, ad-free, including this one. You get all of our newsletters, you get everything we're doing. Vurge.com slash subscribe. It's the best way to support all of this.

Starting point is 01:38:45 And speaking of support, thank you to everybody who voted for us in the Signal Awards. By the time you're hearing this, the voting is over. I don't know if we won. We'll keep you posted. I hope we won, but mostly I just care about all of you voting for us. And thank you to everybody who did. And if you want to get in touch about all this or anything else,

Starting point is 01:39:01 you can always email us, Virgcast to theverge.com. Call the hotline 866, Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Kajas, Kabir Chopra, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Chalvis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Eli, Brackerel. Hold music.

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