The Vergecast - ChatGPT explained, the FTC suing Microsoft, and Apple adding encryption to iCloud backups

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, and James Vincent discuss the popularity of ChatGPT. Also: the FTC sues Microsoft to block its Activision Blizzard purchase, Apple is adding end-to-end encryption to iCloud backups, and some gadget news. Further reading: ChatGPT proves AI is finally mainstream — and things are only going to get weirder The FTC is suing Microsoft to block its Activision Blizzard purchase Microsoft reaches 10-year deal with Nintendo for Call of Duty EU sets December 28th, 2024, deadline for all new phones to use USB-C for wired charging The race to build a better Twitter Twitter Blue will reportedly cost more from iPhones to offset ‘hidden 30 percent tax’  Apple is adding end-to-end encryption to iCloud backups   Apple claims a new iMessage can alert you if state-sponsored spies are eavesdropping Tim Cook and Joe Biden came to Arizona to announce plans for American-made chips  Huawei’s latest smartwatch has hidden earbuds inside The $949 price for Dyson’s air-purifying headphones is more absurd than the device itself  Coros Apex 2 and Apex 2 Pro review: slightly short of great Amazon Echo Auto (2nd gen) review: smaller but not smarter How CoinDesk’s FTX scoop left a hole in its corporate overlord Sonos and Ikea made a floor lamp speaker that could be perfect for surround sound Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, James Vincent and Richard Lawler join us. We get into the GPT3 chatbot saga, Apple's new security features, and the FTC is coming after Microsoft for buying Activision. All coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools

means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes. in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data

in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge, where we talk about absolutely nothing and waste your time. Now, the robot put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.

Because you see, I asked, Chat GPT3 to write the intro of the show. Usually you're exuberant. And I said, I said write the intro of the show. And I said to chat GPT3 said to me, hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the Vervechcastle and welcome to the Verge. That's wrong. It's, I mean, it's lazy. Yeah.

And so I told the robot to make it funnier. And then it said, hello and welcome the Vergecast, where we talk about absolutely nothing and waste your time, which is the robot fully telling me to go F myself. I was like, David would do the exact. same if he was here. We basically replaced David. Yeah. Done. See you later, buddy.

Anyway, this is the Verge cast. That was the first and last time we're ever going to let a chat about write the intro. I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Cranes is here. I'm your friend who doesn't believe in AI. Oh, you will by the end of this episode. Richard Lawler is here. Hey, Richard.

Hey, I might be an AI. That's by the end of this episode. We're going to have to take bets. And our senior Verge reporter covering AI, James Vincent is here. Hey, James. Hey, I am pro-A-I. I'm pro-worshipping AI and just getting ahead of that. And you know that, that religion that Lewandowski tried to found, I am the guy who carried that on. You still got it. You still got it. I'm keeping the faith. Do you have like a blue cube in your house with little electric bolts like floating around in, you know, like one of those like AI monuments?

Nilai, do I have a god cube that I worship daily? Geez, man. You know, that is a very insulting question to ask someone of my faith. I'm going to go if that's going to be the tenor of the conversation, obviously. So, fair warning. It is, I believe, 9 p.m. for James in the UK. And he's just drinking. He's, Nancy's drinking.

Which, honestly, it's, you know, it's only 4 p.m. here in New York. Yeah. We could do that. We could be drinking. Next week. It's that kind of week. So we got to talk about chat GPT with James. The FTC sued Mike.

Microsoft to block the Activision deal. The EU did some iPhone charging standard stuff. Elon continues to Elon. There's a bunch of stuff talking about this week. But we have to start with chat GPT3, which has taken the world by storm. You don't know what it is. It is just a chat bot. Yeah.

It just happens to be very good. Yeah. And I will tell you, I mean, I think it's super fun to play with. But the overheated... There's some feelings. People got feelings. Positive and negative. All the way from VC saying this will replace Google

to like fan fiction communities being like once again our art has been plundered by the godless heathens of Silicon Valley and we should shut down the like you pick either one of those. It's just the whole gamut. It's a whole gamut of feelings. So there's a lot of like vergey stuff in here. We should talk about the technology itself, which is super fascinating.

We should talk about Open AI, the company slash research foundation that has made it and published it. And we should talk about all those downstream effects, the angry artists of the world. We should talk about Lenza in this conversation, too, the app that makes profile pictures, people all worked up about. Well, let's just start with what it is. James, what is exactly going on with chat GPT3? So it is just chat GPT rather than chat GPT. Oh, it's GPT 3.5 is the thing inside it.

So, yeah, it is chat GPT, which is a fine-tuned version of an AI bot called chat GPT 3.5, which is self is a version, a sort of an upgrade of GPT3, which is from 2020. So the foundation of this tech has been around for a while. And what OpenAI, the company behind this, decided to do is they fine-tuned the bot on conversational dialogue. And they fed it a bunch of sort of conversational prompts and they got humans to rank the sort of attractiveness, the responsiveness of those prompts. They fed that back into it and it created a new sort of dialogue mode. And then they took that and they put it into a web demo. And that has been like the huge thing. You know, the baseline technology behind this has sort of been around for a while. It's

never been as publicly accessible as this before. And that obviously has created this huge reaction where A, people are seeing what this thing can do for the first time. Be, they're finding new things to do with it. Because, you know, you can get a bunch of AI researchers to play around with a model in a lab. They are never going to be as creative or as chaotic. as the internet en masse, suddenly being like, hey, let's talk to this thing and see what it can do. I've got some real interesting questions. So that has created this explosion where suddenly this thing is everywhere. And I'm, Neil, I'm with you.

I do find it quite exciting. Like, there's lots of caveats that need addressing when we talk about this technology. But the base feeling for me is like, oh man, this is pretty cool. Like, we couldn't do this before. It is doing interesting stuff. I'm into it. Let's see where it goes. Yeah, that to me is that.

The vergiest part of this whole story is what you just described. This underlying technology has been around since 2020. And we have seen very public demos of similar technology. Like at Google I.O. Sundar Pichai has demonstrated Google's riff on large language models like this. And you can go back and watch them. They're very funny. He's like, I'm going to have a conversation with a planet now.

And then for a few minutes, we all just sit there while Sundar's like, what's it like to be Pluto? And a robot is like, it's weird. And everyone's like, what is the purpose of this? But that is the same LLM idea, right, where you feed an AI, a massive amount of language data, a massive corpus of text,

and it learns how to talk to you. Open AI is a different riff, which GPT we've seen. But Google's been doing that demo for a while. Then on top of that, we've already experienced, like, three or four news cycles of serious meaningful controversy around LLMs. In particular, again, at Google with Timit Gibrew, and then there was just the researcher who claimed it was sentient and it was fired for warning Google that their LLM was sentient.

The Timit Gheru is much more, I think, important, less funny, but more important where she was like, I'm publishing papers about the ethics of AI like this. and she claims Google fired her for publishing those papers. This is like a big deal. All I'm saying is we have gone through the gamut with the underlying technology. We've seen the big, hypey demos,

we've seen the ethics controversy, we've seen the engineer who claims it's alive, get fired. Like, there's a lot of peaks and valleys to the story already over the past few years. And what has happened now is that the user interface got good. Yeah.

Right? the user interface, to do this before, right, you had to install a bunch of stuff in your computer, like, you just had to, like, work hard to get to the place where you could type in a prompt. Yeah. Now it's very much, you can just talk to it. Yeah, you log in and you start chatting. Yeah, I mean, it is, it is actually, like,

that is a remarkable advancement in its own way. Yeah. But the underlying tech is not that different than what it was before, is it? No, no. And I think actually, even the UI, the making it conversational. is something that we've been able to do for a while. And I think actually the sort of the thing that has happened is that AI companies have got a little less scared this year. And that there has been some successes with text to image models, specifically stable

diffusion, who disrupted, you know, the status quo within this industry. So you had all these image models like Dolly, which were relatively restricted. Stable diffusion is open source. Anyone can build on it. Anyone can mess around with it. That is having, will have bad consequences. but it's also created a lot of interest and excitement and people have built on it. And I think that gave AI companies some new confidence.

I remember speaking earlier this year to Meta about a chatbot that they put out. And one of the things that one of their exec said to me was like, it's not 2016 anymore when the Microsoft Tate chatbot went online, became a racist asshole in 24 hours and they were pulled off. You know, they were saying, like, yes, that was bad. But A, we've got more guardrails than we used to. and B, we're kind of thinking that this is the best way we advance this stuff. So I think there has been a period of timidity, which in many ways is connected to the criticisms

that came out of Google with the stochastic Parrots paper, which was the one by Tim Nick Gebrough and a few others, Margaret Mitchell, which is, you know, incredibly valuable, important stuff. They, you know, they brought up these issues and they are huge real issues. But I think that made the company sort of stutter for a while. And in 2022, Open AI particularly has been like, you know what, F it. We're just going to put it out there and see what happens. And people in Open AI will be congratulating themselves for this, I'm sure, because they've got so much attention.

They've got so much goodwill out of it. They're burning money doing it. But, you know, it really has moved the conversation forward for better or worse. Can you, before I move on, can you quickly just tell people what a stochastic parrot is and what this paper said? Because I think it underlies the whole controversy. Oh, yeah. To understand this technology, you have to understand that criticism. So there are a lot of points that are made within the paper.

But I think the big thing about it is what is a stochastic parrot? It is a probabilistic machine, right? And this is the big thing, in many ways it's the big thing about the deep learning revolution in general. In that instead of creating a deterministic computer where X does Y does Z does ABC, knocks on like that, you take a. machine that looks at data, that looks for patterns in that data, learns to replicate that data, and then deals probabilities out to you. And that probabilistic nature of AI and of large language models in particular creates all sorts of downstream problems, often to do

with the data that these systems are trained on. Stochastic parrots had a lot, a lot of criticisms about, you know, a lot of problems. I don't, I don't want to frame these people as critics because I feel that that in a way diminishes what they're saying because then you get the critics and the proponents and you're either for or against the technology. These aren't people who are against the technology. They're just people who have things to say about it and, you know, write correct observations to make. But so when you have a probabilistic model, when you say train it on data scrape from the internet, that is going to return all the bad things in that data. And that is stuff like biases. That is, you know, bias against people of color, against women.

It has stereotypes within that. And we know that these models, including chat GPT, these problems are not fixed. They are still replicating these bias issues. So yeah, that's one thing within the paper. But there are others, but I'll leave it at that. Well, so this gets to very much how it works, which we should also just touch on briefly. We're calling it an AI. Yeah.

And it's made by a company called OpenAI. But it's not an AI. But it is not actually AI. And this chat client, it's made. main feature is that it appears to have a sense of state. Yeah. Right? You ask it a question.

It gives you an answer. You ask it a follow-up. It appears to remember what has transpired and answer a follow-up question. That is also a mirage. So talk about how it works. And it's sort of just like guessing the next word of a sentence. And then we should talk about how it's preserving the sense of state to create the impression of a conversation.

Yeah. I mean, so at the basis, a language model, particularly GPD3, is an autocomplete, right? It has looked at this data, it is looked, and it is mapped out in these incredible multidimensional graphs, the proximity of words to one another, essentially. And by doing that, when it looks at how often words appear next to each other, you get this semantic map, which allows you to know that, you know, King is like Queen because they're part of this body called Monarchy, but King also has this connection with man, while Queen has a connection with woman and it, you know, it maps out all this semantic data. And then

essentially you feed it a string of words and then it will predict what will come next. What happens when you turn that into a conversation is that there is a lot of clever behind the scenes stuff, which honestly, I don't quite understand. I don't understand the basic mechanisms of it, but essentially, you know, it turns your question into a prompt in which it tries to predict based on what you've asked it, what the answer would or should or could be. Yeah, so That is the sort of the underlying mechanism there. What you've pointed out, the fact that these systems, particularly chat GPT, have a sense of state, I think that really changes how you interact with them, as you rightly point out, you know,

because you start thinking of it as an entity, not as a sort of a function where you ask it discrete questions and it gives you discrete answers. And I think this sense of state is what led to the Google engineer, Blake Le Moyne, Le Moyne, Yeah. Le Moyne, you know, mistaking this thing for a conscious being of some sort. So a state is very important. It helps the user, right? But it also creates this false sense of personhood. And I think that is going to be a really tricky balance in the future with these models, knowing how to split that divide? I mean, how different is it from Siri or Alexa or something like that? Because I have to admit, the few times I've used chat GPT, it hasn't worked for me. It gave me this whole, I asked it for a story. Right. And he gave me an entire story.

And it was like, and then they killed the dragon. And then they fought Thanos. Right. And I was like, is Thanos the dragon? And it was like, I don't know how to respond to that question. And I was like, but. Oh, no. You just told me all about it.

So it felt like for me so far, my experience with it has been very Alexa, very, very Siri, which is why I'm like, it seems fine. And I haven't been super impressed. But it sounds like you guys have all had like much different stories. Well, so I'll tell you even this little joke about complete the sentence, Welcome to the Verchast. Yeah. query, I had to enter specifically that way.

Yeah. When I said, what is the Vergecast the flagship podcast of? I got a stock answer that says, I cannot search the internet for you. Right. Right. And so there are these like dead ends. And it's like, I don't, that's a weird. Yeah, it's kind of like early days of Google where you like, you'd really think about how

you worded that question. And I know, James, you were talking, you recently wrote a piece where you had a friend who like used it to create a whole new macro. Yeah. An Excel macro. He's a guy who works in higher education. He does a lot of database wrangling as part of his job. But he's not a coder. He's not had a formal training that. He studied English at university. And he was just casually saying, I asked it for an Excel macro about how to extract this sort of selection of dates. And it came up with it. And he got it to work in a matter of minutes. And I just thought, well, that is, that really says something about the accessibility of these systems. There's a piece of the puzzle there that is really important, right? Because the most impressive examples I've seen of this system working are people asking it to write computer programs. Right.

Write me code. Which we think of as a very difficult thing to do. I'm sure all the people actually write code for living listening to this. Like, that's not so hard. But like it, the relationship between human language and computer language is usually mediated by people. Like mostly mediated by people and having a robot that can make that connection for you and take your English language query and spit out working workable code in the language of a choice. The most impressive ones I've seen have all been in C-sharp, which is like a weird Microsoft corner case language, right? That's amazing to me.

And it's because the corpus of text on the internet includes so much code. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And that to me is a fascinating reflection of what you're talking about, which is the inputs reflect the outputs. Yeah. It can do this because there is so much code on the internet. If you were to ask it to do other kinds of things that the internet is not so good at. Like recipes.

Quick, somebody ask it to make a cookie. Give me a cookie recipe. Apparently it's quite good at recipes. There's a lot of recipe text on the internet. Yeah. Yeah, but they usually have the opener where the person has to talk about how the cookies remind them of their grandmother's hands. So this is like you get all the way down stream of it to, well, this is like why people think it's going to replace Google. Yeah.

Right. Which is asking this thing questions returns more interesting answers that are more conversational and are often just the answer. Write me in Excel macro. If you wrote that into Google, you would be flooded with a list of garbage. Yeah. Like Google would basically return to you nothing of value. A bunch of paywalls. Yeah, a bunch of paywalls, a bunch of SEO, spam text, a bunch of articles.

that were like slideshows. Yeah. This actually does not, is not a date sort in Excel. Yeah. This is just, you're trying to get me to buy a book. It's like,

actually, you should just watch this 20 minute video. We got you. And there's a reason that other search products like Stack Overflow and Yelp and all these other things exist. They're more targeted search interfaces

to certain kinds of results. And they built businesses not being gained by Google in that way. Chat, GPT, is like, you ask you a question. It just tells you an answer. with utter confidence. It's like, here is some code you can type into your computer to do a date sort.

And like, maybe it's pure malware. Maybe you're going to hack like an Iranian nuclear reactor. Like, you have no idea what's going to happen. But it's like, here it is. You got it. Like, here's a recipe for a whiskey sour. One cup bleach, please. And it's just like, no, no, like absolutely no hesitation whatsoever.

And I think that is why people are reacting to it. Yeah. Because there's no business model between. you and something that is presented you confidently like an answer, even if the answer is garbage. Yeah. Like, you know, and it's... There's no business model yet. Right.

Right now, it's a burning money. James, how much money does this thing cost to run? Because it seems like they're just lighting VC dollars on fire. Well, I think, Alex, you didn't you do something on this? I remember... I can't remember the figures. Yeah, like, I did the math on it. And basically, each query costs, like, 0.0003 cents.

And so it's costing them about... $3 million a day on average with like they they assume the number of people using it and the number of queries and stuff but probably about $3 million on average and that was based on the pricing for AWS which is where this is all running out of because it has to use a lot of GPUs to do all of this like one I think they said like one GPU would maybe present one word in a couple of minutes so it's having to use like a ton of processing power probably way more than Google does for Google search, which might make... Which explains a lot about Google search, actually.

Use more GPUs. So that, I mean, that to me is really fascinating, right? So as Richard's pointing out, it doesn't make money yet. The costs are high. Yeah. On a long enough timeline, the cost of technology come down, sure. But right now it costs are high. And they're going to have to somehow make this a product.

Yeah. Well, I mean, we're seeing that with Linza, right? Like, Lindsay is this other big AI thing that's using, I think, open source engine. Yeah. Yeah. It's using stable diffusion, which is an open source text to image AI, but also is monetized by the company that funds it. And I say funds it rather than made it because there is a very convoluted sort of licensing scheme going on that the company that is associated with its stability AI has put in place in order to avoid future legal liability. So they fund it, they fund it, but they don't research it and they don't make it technically. Right. But anyway, yeah. And so this other company, Prism, is that the name of it?

Prisma Labs, yeah. Prisma Labs is taken this engine and they've put it into their app. And so if you pay a certain amount of money, you can have little cute digital portraits of yourself and also help them continue to train this AI. Basically, you're, I mean, effectively you're paying them to train their AI. Well, whether they keep the AI, do they keep the data? Do they keep the data for training I know? I feel like this is such a meme within, like, within Twitter that like, oh, tool X is keeping your data for Y. And I, you know, I always.

That's happened in the past. Like, we have seen that happen before where a company is like, yeah, give us your face. Oh, by the way, we're working on facial recognition. Yeah, face tune. Yeah. It wasn't it? It was like the Chinese app. I can't remember.

Yeah. Like, we've definitely seen that. In Prisma Labs, to their credit, has said they told TechCrunch earlier this week, either this week or last week. Yeah. Anyway, to their credit, Prismid Labs did tell TechCrunch that they, they aren't keeping a lot of this data. They are deleting it.

It's going away from their servers. But isn't it still training stable diffusion? Or are they just like... It wouldn't be training stable diffusion. Stable diffusion would be sort of separate from that. And stable diffusion is based on a big database called Lyon, which again is made by a German university. I guess they could be keeping it.

I don't know. My feeling on that is that the bad PR, of finding out an app is keeping your data in order to train its systems would outweigh the cheapness of just buying that data. You know, if you want to get a million faces downloaded to train a facial recognition system, there exists a database called Megaface. You sound like a character from cyberpunk. Do you want to get a million faces?

Do you want a million faces, my friend? If you want to get a million faces, I can get you a million faces. He got a guy. He got a guy with a... I got several million faces back here. You take a look. I got what you need. Come on.

That's one that's worth you have faces. I get your faces. Oh, I got your face, this guy. And, like, Prisma Lab, they found their other ways. I mean, even if they aren't doing the whole, we're going to steal all of your facial recognition data so that we can sell it somewhere else. They are saying you have to sign up for a month of our service. Right, but that's just like Apple App Store. Yeah, it's just like traditional app store.

Yeah. Which is like, we don't want to sell you an app. We don't want to sell you one in an app purchase. We want to make you subscribe to our app and then forget that you're subscribed to our app. So we get at least one more month of money from you. They're going to be so much money. But I think this will be gone pretty soon. This specific iteration of it.

Does anyone remember style transfer? That was like a big AI sort of trend in like 2015, 2016, I want to say. And you know what, Prisma Labs did that? They did that back in the day. I was looking up some old articles I wrote about them because the name was familiar to me. And they used to do these style transfer things where you'd put in a picture and it would make it look like Van Gogh.

or it would make it look like stained glass. And, you know, this was a thing for a while, Facebook did it. You'd see it on people's profile pictures, and it was gone within a month. Yeah. And now it's an Adobe feature. Yeah, it's an Adobe feature. And it's a boring preset thing. And I think AI portraits will probably go that way pretty quickly.

But something next will come. But there's something underlying all of this, which is kind of the cultural controversy of it. So we've talked about where it came from, how it works, the controversy. that importantly, I think the democratization of the technology with easier to use user interfaces. And in the case of Lenza, right, stable diffusion is a thing that you were able, you can today download it and run it on your computer. Yeah. You can just do it if you want. It's hard.

But people don't want to do it. Actually, Apple just released an update that makes Stable Defusion run faster on its phones. Oh, cool. Yeah, which is big. Yeah. Right. And it's like a 40% percent. performance boost in the neural engine on it, like an M2.

Right. Like this is, it's all happening. But it's, here's an app where you can pay four bucks to get some profile pictures. It's actually a much more like democratic. Yeah. Anybody can use it.

That's when I say like that's the vergeous part of the story. It's like you give all the people the tools and then you have no idea what's going to happen. And that's like, that's when I just like am the happiest. What's it called again, James? Chaos? When you give people all the.

Yeah. Sorry. You had a specific word for it in the piece you wrote today about AI. Oh, the overhang. Oh, the overhang. Yeah, so that's not necessarily about access. The phrase is capability overhang, which I love it. It sounds like, I don't know, it sounds like a minor character in a pinch and novel.

Capability Overhang. But it essentially refers to the hidden capabilities of AI systems. It's sort of something that AI researchers get quite excited about and stay up late talking about. when they think about the fact that these models do things that we don't even know that we don't know that they do, right? That there are unknown unknowns about what these things can do. And the point I made in my piece was that although there exists a capability overhang within the research community, there also exists one within the sort of public awareness of this. And 2022, particularly the last couple of months when we've seen tools like chat GPT, we've seen, I mean, remember like crayon,

the AI image generator that was everywhere for a little bit and is now already just sort of like part of the background tapestry of the internet? Yeah, we forgot. These tools. Yeah, we've forgotten. But these tools are just becoming part of everyday life now. And we are now climbing that overhand, the public. We're discovering what these capabilities are.

And I think 2023 is going to be wild for this stuff. And we're going to see a lot of consequences happen as well. That's where we should kind of wrap this up with. because to me, the image-based AI in some way that stuff is harder for a regular person to do, right?

A really good example is Casey Newton used to work at The Virgin. We would illustrate his newsletter with actual designers and illustrators. Like a human being who worked here, most recently Alex Castro, who's a great illustrator, we're like illustrate Casey's newsletter

once a week. Casey now routinely has Dolly illustrate the newsletter. Right. He, like, types a prompt and do it, an image generator and, like, whatever it's done. And there was a moment where that, you know, all the arguments about, there was even, like, a minor controversy about news publications using these tools for illustrations instead of hiring illustrators. But that stuff seems fattish, even though it's harder, right? Even though most people cannot illustrate anything on their own.

That stuff, stylistically, it comes and goes. the usages for those things, like images expire in a way that, you know, like other kinds of formats don't. It's the text side. It's the you wrote me some code. Or I've seen the number of advertising people I have seen who are like, we're going to spam the most marketing text

on the most content marketing blogs that you have ever seen. This is a godsend for the agencies. And it's like, first of all, all of you talk about advertising. is though you're like boning. Like I, there's like,

if you just like are in that world, it's like you got to be less horny about ads. Like I just, that's my advice to all of you. 10% at least. Just like 10% less horny about advertising, please. And then is like, oh,

that's real. Right? Like if you run a small ad agency and you're like hired to sell bottles of water and you need to make the website that's about how great the bottled water is. Nobody's reading it anyway. Nobody's reading it.

anyway. Right. You're kind of like what I mean is a bunch of keywords for Google. Yeah. So when people Google bottled water, they like, Google's like, well, I found the site with a lot of bottled water references on it. I do wonder if it's going to like... Of course, they're definitely not going to hire some like 22 year old kids to do it. They're going to be like, robot, write me bottled water

copy. Right me my SEO copy. And they're going to edit it a little bit and I'm going to put it on their website. And they're already, they see it. They see the value of that completely. Yeah, I wonder if that's actually bigger danger to Google. I will give a little hint about an episode of Decoder that we have, our minds. There's a very famous hustle culture gentleman out in the world.

Yeah. I love him. I've wanted this gentleman on Decoder for a long time. So I've been following him and I got recommended a bunch of his staffers. And one of his staffers has a TikTok. It's like, you know how sometimes you need to write 45 tweets for a campaign? Have you met chat, GPT? And he's like, here's 45 tweets that I wrote.

for this campaign for like our hustle culture product. And it's like, oh, that shit's going to happen. And that to me is more durable, more interesting, more chaotic, more impactful than the image stuff. And I think the image stuff gets all the press because most people can't make images. Right. Obviously most people can make text. But the part where it's, and maybe I'm biased because I make text for a little. And I also apparently talk about nothing on this podcast. But the part where it's like, oh, like.

like most of the texts in the internet is like so Google will find it. And so now we're going to trick the Google robot with our robot. Yeah. It's like, oh, we're in the end times. I love it here. Well, it feels like, I mean, that's what I was like, I think that's where Google has to face a threat. It's not, oh, I can go and chat with this thing and it'll give me results.

It's, oh, other people can go chat with it and it will give them results, thus making Google SEO even more worthless. So James, you have written about Google exploring these models for search. And I feel like the biggest means. of the past week is this is going to replace Google. And you actually wrote, we re-published, repromoted a piece that you wrote a year ago about Google exploring this exact idea and kind of walking away from it. Well, I mean, I don't think they walked away from it forever, because as you have pointed out, they love to demo this stuff, like the conversations with Mum and Lambda,

which are two of their big, large language models, which are sort of their equivalence of GPT3. But they did write this paper in May or June 2021. I can't remember exactly. Where they pointed out a lot of the problems with it. And in my piece, I sort of thought that actually it's problems they faced before. The big one is the confidence in presenting what is potentially false information. Large language models because of their stochastic, their probabilistic nature. They cannot sort fact from fiction reliably. There are probably ways around that. There's ways to build in, I'm sure, a directory of knowledge that it checks against, that it looks for citations with. But there is this problem with confidence. And we saw it actually, I thought, with Google Home.

where you used to ask Google a question, and it was not a Google search, of course. It would just give you the answer. And that UI, that presentation is, to me, the same as chat GPT, because there is confidence, there is no outside sources, and there is often a chance that you will give entirely the wrong response. And it is something that happens a lot. I think these are fixable problems.

I think the question is, does a startup come up with a better search engine, which is probably really janky and probably actually causes a lot of trouble. Do they get that out there before Google itself puts out a version which preserves its credibility? The thing is Google has much more to lose in this scenario, whereas a startup can burn a lot of, like, it can create a lot of goodwill and it can say we're doing something fast, we're going to the moon with this, and it can put out something that is potentially very dangerous and get away with it and maybe scoop Google. I think these things will, there are problems with them, but I think they're,

will be incorporated into search in the next couple of years. And the question for me is whether, who gets that first, basically? What do you think the most interesting use of the technology as it exists today is? Just creating psychosis in its users. I think if you just, if you talk to these things for long enough, you will go mad. There is a reason that guy, that a Google engineer, was like, you know what, it's alive. There's a reason we started the show by joking about an AI religion. One of my favorite books of the last couple of years, I don't know why, sorry, I don't know why I'm doing this.

This is a podcast. Anyway, I'm holding up a book. This is great. I'm holding up a book. It is called Pharmaco AI, and it's by an artist, a writer, K. Alardo McDowell. And it is an extended conversation with GPT3 in which Alardo McDowell sort of reimagines GPT3 as this godhead, as this sort of mythical, divine entity that, drives them mad, basically, over the course of the book, in my opinion. And I think the weirdest and the most wonderful thing is the conversations we're going to have with what is essentially a really weird mirror of ourselves. You know, for better or worse, these things are scraped from the internet, and we can influence them with our feedback. That means they are like us. It is

something that reflects us back to us. And I think that is going to create some really, really strange cultural experiences for everyone. There's another version of GPT. There we have. Right, GPT4 is apparently on the horizon. Oh, yeah. It's on the horizon. What happens with it? James is so excited. I'm sorry.

I did that again. It was great. He did the Mr. Burns of his fingers. That was completely instinctive. I'm so embarrassed by that. I don't know why I did that. What's exciting? Why are you doing this?

Well, it's big up. Well, finally humankind will block up the sun. Don't get shot by a baby. Like, finally I can get it. can get an AI to do my job finally. I can just get drunk on podcasts instead. It's all I've been out trying to do. No, I don't know. I'm excited because I think it's, hopefully it will be as much as a leap forward as GPT3 was from GPT2, which I use both programs. You know, I play around with them. And it was quite a step forward, actually. We don't know when it's going to come out. There were

rumors that it would be the end of this year. It's now looking like it will be early next year. and actually a lot of the rumors were basically about chat GPT, but it's supposed to be much, much bigger, you know, in terms of the parameters, which is the sort of metric by which you measure the size of these and the complexity of these models, actually no one knows anything about it apart from that. There is just a lot of sort of like funny rumors going around that, you know,

GPT4 is, you know, the computational matrix is equal to the complexity of all organic life on Earth, which I believe is Douglas Adams, you know, is that sort of joke, basically. But yeah, that should be early next year. and I'm with NELA. I think this is going to have like a huge influence on jobs. I think this is actually we're going to start seeing

industries change because of this technology very soon. You know, we need to wrap this up, but it's fundamentally interesting about that is, I think in a popular imagination, the automation has always replaced

the blue collar jobs. And to some extent that is true. We're going to, you know, we're going to talk about the TSMC factory that got opened in Arizona. Like, yes, there's a bunch of, like, cars are built by robot arms now.

Yeah. But it turns out the AI is just like, it's coming for ad agencies, right? Just like the way that Excel came for accounting firms. Yeah. And I don't think that anybody has quite yet reckoned for that. The AI is coming for mid-level Excel macro coders, more than it is coming for factory workers, right?

Because if you can just ask a robot to be like, sort some dates and it spits out the code at you, there's actually just kind of like a huge middle class of white-collar work that goes away. And no one can check the AI's work because it's so confident. Well, and it's going to create work, too, right? Like, all of these, every time you do these queries and stuff, somebody somewhere is probably having to comb through some of them and check them and make sure that things are getting labeled properly and that everything's working. That's what you want.

You want to be the AI, the semantic AI data checker. I think that is probably a terrible job. That's a job of the future where you just go through and you check the tags on that chat, GPT. Yep, this person's talking about porn with GPT and I'm here with them. I mean, if you guys answer any capture lately, you know, this is already part of our day-to-day lives. Yeah, that's true. We've been doing it for a long time. This is a fire hydrant.

So we should let you go, James. We should call out. James has his own very good book called Beyond Measure, which is a delight, soon to be excerpted at the verge when it comes out. And I'd say, tell us about your book, James. Oh, it is a history of measurement. It is a sort of, you know, it's a history. It's a science book.

It's a sociology book. It's where do measurements come from? What do people do with them? And why do Americans hate the metric system so much? Those are the three big questions I tackle. It's very good. It's very funny. I have a British copy because I'm fancy.

Oh, dear. I bought it early. I see. I bought an import. Yeah. Like I used to do it was seven inches. I bought an import copy. You know, the US version has a bonus edition of Train and Vane at the very end.

It's not labelling. All right, we've gone on too long. James, thank you so much. Always a pleasure, man. My pleasure. So nice to step in. And yeah, speak to you guys later. Bye, bye, bye.

We'll be right back. We got to talk about, well, we got to talk about Apple. There's all kinds of stuff. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS,

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All right, we're back. Yeah, we're back. You know, Eli, so we're here in the office, Deli and I are, and I saw him hunched over his desk earlier today, just muttering FTC and Activision Blizzard. It sounds like there's some stuff happening with the Microsoft Activision Blizzard deal. Yeah, it's like the least breaking, breaking news of all time. I don't know how else to describe it.

So the FTC filed a lawsuit. Right. There's some details about it that we should talk about it. But Microsoft wants to buy Activision Blizzard. They've wanted to for a while now. Acta Bliss. Acta Bliss. Which makes Call of Duty.

Yeah. They said, we're not going to touch it. We're just going to let it do its thing. We'll promise it. We'll talk about Call of Duty a second. So they make Call of Duty. They make Candy Crush. They make all the Activision Blizzard makes all the money on Candy Crush, by the way.

Phil Spencer was just on Decoder. Talk about why the deal wasn't anti-competitive. Why it was so good. Even though Microsoft keeps buying every studio. Like this is their third gigantic studio that they've got

right. And they obviously make a bunch of other stuff. And so there's all this back and forth specifically around call of duty.

Yes. Right. Sony is like you're going to take call of duty away from the PlayStation gamers rise up. The gamers rose up.

Microsoft is like, no. Phil Spencer, to us, to me, has said many times we're going to put call of duty on

PlayStation as long as there's a call of duty. Then there was this like side light conspiracy theory, which was honestly my favorite conspiracy theory, that they would only do Call of Duty on PlayStation

as like an Xbox GamePast streaming situation. I love it. So Sony would be forced to Trojan horse the GamePast streaming app on the PlayStation that you could stream Call of Duty. So I asked about that. He got all riled up. He was like, no, native code.

And I was like, how long is the deal? Initially, they'd only offered three years. And Phil told me, like, you can't write a contract forever, which is true. Right. Like, this is not legal advice. There's not a legal show. If you're listing the show without your lawyer, you're making a mistake.

Please drive immediately to the nearest lawyer's office to continue listening to the show. I'll just ask GPT. Yeah. Yeah. Should you sign a contract whose term is forever? And I feel like very clearly the answer is no. Even chat GPT will be like, don't do that. Don't do that.

Like no contracts are forever. So fine, I get it. So then Microsoft has been running around these past few weeks trying to appease regulators in this country and in Europe. by saying, okay, we will commit to call of duty for 10 years. Okay. Which is an awful long time. Yeah. Like, they're going to be out of major world conflicts to mine, and they will be fully in the future.

They're already in the future. They're going to have to get rid of, like, all the World War II call of duties are done for. Yeah, they're done. They went to the future, and they went back already. Yeah. Call of Duty is like, they're just going to be out of wars. They're like, whatever. AI Call of Duty is where we're at, 10 years now.

That was not good enough. It was not good enough for the CMA in Europe, which has already said we're going to stop it. We're starting an investigation. And then here, the FTC Federal Trade Commission has basically been rumbling at this for a long time. Yeah, just muttering to itself. Just like we, all this happens. So when I say there's something like, there's a little bit of interest. Yeah.

They filed the suit, the lawsuit. We have not seen the complaint yet. The word on the street is they're not going to release it until Microsoft is like, God, it until Microsoft President Brad Smith is like. sat down with a sniffer of brandy and like read the complaint. He did his little smoking jacket on. But today, the day they said they're going to do this complaint. Oh, they also filed a complaint in their own administrative court, not in federal court.

Okay. Which is like tactically interesting. Like, what do they actually want out of this? Do they actually want to block the deal or just a lot of bluster to get some concession? Who knows? But today, the same day, is the first day of the trial where the FTC has sued to stop meta, Facebook, from buying Within, which makes Supernatural, which I have called the killer app for VR.

It's pretty killer. It's very good. So if you have a quest to, Supernatural is a fitness app. It's Beat Sabre, but you have to, like, sweat. It's Beat Sabre Peloton. Oh, they've added kicking. They added kicking. Yeah, knee strikes.

All right. And there's also boxing. I got some, the boxing is great. I like the boxing. I think I've told the story of VersaSys before. My wife did the boxing in Supernatural one time, grinned the whole time, then took off the headset and said, I'm great at boxing. that's what you want, right?

So this thing's great. It sells a lot of headsets. Chris Milk, the CEO of Within, has been on Decoder. He's like, the supernatural community is like 50, 50 men and women, and it's people over 40, which is not a traditional VR. Right. Like this is the thing. This app initiates people into buying a Quest 2 because it's good. So, Mattis said, screw it.

We buy every other VR game. We're going to buy Supernatural. They went and bought it. FTC sued them. This deal is like teeny tiny. They're buying this thing like 20. bucks. Yeah.

And it's an app for VR headsets. Yeah. A market size of six. Like, they're the biggest fish in a tiny, tiny, tiny pond. If the FCC is going to block that deal, they basically had no choice. But to block. To block the Activision deal. It's like, right?

Obviously, console gaming is much bigger. Activision itself is much bigger. Microsoft very opportunistically swept in because BodyConnic Dat Vision is like. I mean, Activision Blizzard has been facing some bad times for the last. Right. They've, like, numerous allegations of, like, weird sexual misconduct across the company. Yep. A lot of people have been let go for misconduct.

There's a lot of union organizing happening because of the misconduct. I would not want to work there right now. It seems really busy. Yeah. It seems unpleasant. And so Microsoft very openly, like, after this first wave of allegations, they just, like, showed up. And they're like, wouldn't it be great if you didn't run this company anymore? Just give it to us.

Give it to us. And so, like, there's a lot of noise. If you're going to, if you are the FTC and you have to, and you have sued to block Metafermine Supernatural, and by the way, that complaint, you know, I'm anti. I think murderers are bad. But the, the FTC's complaining at is like, we've tried Supernatural. It's a very good. Like, you shouldn't have it, right?

If you buy Supernatural, you will not turn Beatsaber into a proper competitor for Supernatural. And I think rightfully, meta, the Beat Sabre team, we're like, what are you talking about? In what world is Beat Sabre turning into a Peloton? Yeah. Like, no, that's like, what? In the world of the FTC where they want beat saber. They have to find some reason. So they filed this.

We have not read it. They filed it in this administrative court. They have said to Axios or someone has said to Axios, they're not asking to actually, like, block the deal at this time. So the deal might still close. So they've sued to block the deal. So it shouldn't happen. But they've not asked their own administrative court to be like. Yeah.

Don't let him do it. So there's a little nuance in there that I, without having read the complaint that I can't quite tell you about and the complaint's not out yet. But you just get the sense that like the Europeans are definitely on firmer ground when it comes to blocking mergers. That's like what they're good at. Yeah. And the FCC is like we're also fine. And maybe what we want is some intensely hardcore concessions. And this is like calibrated to achieve that result while they go fight this other battle around.

supernatural in court where they, you know, Lena Kahn sells to prove her theory. Because the supernatural, that's not in the administrative law court. That's in court, court, court. Yeah. And, you know, there's other cases against Facebook and others that she has filed. She's the chairwoman of the FCC. She's got novel theories about competition.

And I, again, completely honest, like, I agree with most of her theories. The courts in this country are like, that's new. New ideas, you say. No, thank you. They don't understand what a phone is. They're deeply confused about how some of this technology works. And particularly, like, network effects and, like, how you might lock people in. So, and we're seeing this with Apple and Epic, right?

Like, there's just some baseline confusion about what creates lock-in for a consumer. Yeah. Or where anti-competitive in these markets might come from. And then there's the real problem. And this is particularly true Apple and Epic and some of these other cases where our country in particular for about 40 years has been like mergers, great. Love a merger. Love a merger.

You want to buy some shit? You should buy some shit. Yeah. Right? And so you've got to just overcome a lot of precedent to block a merger. So I just see it like I see where this case is calibrated and I see that the Europeans want to block it too. And we'll just see. I don't know.

Do you think it's going to like, Microsoft is like running out there. And again, you should listen to the conversation I had with Phil about it on Decoder. He made his case. Yeah. Right. And it's very funny when a big company wants to. buy something. The case is always, but we suck. Yeah, we suck so much. Let us buy this so we can be a little better. This market is so competitive. We've been getting our ass kicked. We're nowhere in

mobile games. We need to buy Candy Crush. Yeah. Call of Duty, you can have Call of Duty. The future is mobile, right? Like, go listen to it. It's, Bill is very good. The man was born to be the CEO of Microsoft. He's very, very good at that job. You know, and he's a candid executive. So you go listen to it. But the argument basically boils down to if we don't grow, we die, and all the growth is in mobile. So we have to buy Activision so we can get mobile games. Yeah. And all the stuff we're talking about with our consoles is like kind of a sideline. Do you buy it? I mean, I don't because that's not their biggest market, right? Like Xbox is certainly a big part of Microsoft, but cloud computing is a much bigger part of Microsoft. Yeah. And so for them to say this,

it's just like super disingenuous because like yeah they're a gaming company but they're a cloud company first and foremost even more so than than they're an operating system company or any of these other things like they do cloud computing so to say this is just like some bullshit i feel like i mean i i honestly don't know where this is going to go like this is a this is a big case this is a generationally important an interest case yeah because there's we just have not stopped deals like this as a country i thought it was kind of interesting that we've seen Microsoft go on this spree around the same time that we also saw like one of the biggest kind of halts in vertical integration in the entertainment community

go away, which was the paramount decree that was like from the 30s that they got rid of a couple of years ago. And that paramount decree said, if you are making the movies, you cannot own the theaters because that's really hinky because then you get to control where your movie screen. Yeah. And the exact, like, we're dealing with that issue in streaming and we're dealing with in gaming. If Microsoft is making the game consoles, they probably shouldn't also be making the games because then they control where those games go. And like, it's fundamentally the same thing. But I know that our country has said, yeah, consent paramount's consent decree, don't need it. We're fine. So to abstract that out, it's usually like, you know, vertical versus horizontal

emergence. Right. And so we allow vertical ones or we have for the last 40 years, which is the theaters were the only distribution. Yeah. And if you own all the distribution, you have a lot of power over the studios. And so the studios shouldn't own the theaters because then the other studio, they can unfairly discriminating.

Disney can say you will never see another MGM movie in our theaters again. And we own all the theaters. So like, no, you can't do that. The theaters have to be competitive. You can, like, apply that lesson to the iOS app store. Yeah.

You can apply that lesson to Comcast, like whatever it is, like whoever owns the pipes or the distribution. Here, I think you're saying, like the game console is all. are the distribution. Yeah, the game consoles are the theater, right? Right.

Like, and they have a very robust big business there. If they're making the theaters, they probably shouldn't also be making the content that goes into those theaters. In this case, all of the games at Activision Blizzard, one of the largest gaming companies, not currently owned by Microsoft, like, or Nintendo existing.

One thing that makes it a little more complicated is that generally the consoles are sold at a loss. They're not necessarily profiting on the actual consoles themselves. Because they're profiting on this analogy. They're making the profit on the games. And I guess Microsoft is claiming that they would love to make more money from games. So, of course, they'll sell Call of Duty on PlayStation or Nintendo or Steam. Because everyone wants to play Call of Duty on Switch.

That's what you want. Yeah. By the way, Nintendo happily took the 10-year deal for Call of Duty. Yeah. No complaints filed. No letters to the Senators. They're like, 10 years of Call of Duty on the Switch, we'll take it. Because they don't give shit.

Did that specify what kind of Call-O-Duty? of duty? Like, is it just going to be the mobile gross version that's on your phone? I don't think it matters to Nintendo. I think Nintendo doesn't care. That anybody who owns a console also probably wants to play Mario. Yeah. And they've got an absolute rock solid, legally defensible monopoly on Mario.

And he's never going anywhere except Nintendo consoles. It is very funny that we're like, oh, I don't know if Microsoft can own Call of Duty. And Nintendo is like, we own everything on our platform. And we will destroy. I mean, they're the Apple of this industry, and Microsoft is the Microsoft. But what I want to know is what kind of concessions could the FTC get? And I'm very specific about my needs. I need to be able to use controllers across platforms.

I don't like buying multiple controllers. I don't need dual sense. I don't want to use dual sense. I just want to use my Xbox Elite controller everywhere. So we need to fix that. Lena, if you're listening, step one. I need to be able to use my gaming headsets across every single platform. They need to all be compatible.

We need to fix this. We need the online accounts and friends list to transfer back and forth. Also, the blockchain fixes this. I'm not saying that I'm the last person on Crypto Island now. And now everyone else is running from it, I'm going to die on this hill alone. But the blockchain does fix this. Just saying. So I think those are my concern.

Look, historically on the Vergecast, I have assigned Deeter many articles based on throwaway comments. Richard, welcome to your role is filling in for David. All he's out in print to leave. You got to write the gamers The gamer's bill of rights Like what should the FTC ask for from a gamer's perspective Yes To make this deal go through

Get really nuanced about the skins You're what I'm seeing A gamer's demands You should never have to pay for re-color again ever If it's not a new, completely new design Then you can't tell it I should be able to get whatever colors I want I'm just saying

This is great We gotta do this If you have ideas or interview You can tweet it in You can email him We're gonna put this together or send it to the FTC. Yeah.

I'm never getting an FTC official on the decoder again. Like, it's never going to happen. I think they'll see this and be like, oh, they get it. They get it. This is why we put it in an administrative law court. Look, I'm saying this is a generationally important antitrust case. Like, if they get this one through, what it will signal is, if the FCC wins this, when we say it, if the FCC wins this, if they block this deal, it will signal competition law in the United States is changing. If they lose it, it means either someone,

promised Lena Con, controller interop, which maybe that's all we need. Or it means that, like, we live to fight another day. Yeah. And I will say that in this lame duck period of Congress, the big antitrust bills are on the floor. There's a lot of momentum around them, particularly the App Store interoperability bill. Like, there's stuff, the digital markets act. Like, all this stuff.

There's more antitrust noise happening right now than has happened in a while. This lawsuit's a piece of it. The meta-supernatural case. which again is a very small compared to the Activision deal. But it is a signal of where the government wants to apply pressure. And then there are the bills in Congress. So we'll see. We'll see.

And I mean, other things we saw this week, we should probably talk about kind of related. I'm going to go all the way back to how we talked about the EU is also suing. They're just nuts, man. They're just like eating cheese and been like, we got ideas. We got ideas and you will do them, including Apple, you will have USBC on your phones. and they set a deadline for that this week. December 28th, 2024. Yeah.

So by December 28th, 2024, you will have new phones with USBC for wired charging, including iPhones theoretically. Can I just say something about this? They're Europeans. They can't help themselves. Like, the EU is so needlessly complicated. And we have an amazing international team

that is mostly based in Europe. It's heard from James. John Porter is our reporter who's been working on this story. Yeah. And like he has basically written a version of the headline, European Union mandates USBC for phones 500 times. And we make him do it again.

And we make him do it again and again. Mostly because it's like interesting, we should track the story. We have a responsibility as a journalist to accurately convey. And also because it's traffic gold. Like people see this headline, they lose their minds. Like, how can I click on this twice? And it's like, guys, we've written this story like every other week for four. So he writes, he's excited.

Yeah. We finally have a final official deadline for one new phones sold in the European Union, including future iPhones, will have to use USBC in December 20, 2020, 24. The next paragraph, the new rules will officially enter into force in 20 days times an individual EU member states will then have a maximum of 24 months to write national laws. No. It's like, oh, this still hasn't happened. is it.

He's got, we have to make him do one for every single country. Luxembourg, John, we have to know what Luxembourg voted on. It's like, oh man, this still hasn't happened. It hasn't happened in Belgium. All right. It's done. It's like, all right. This is just like fully ridiculous.

He's got like a map in his house. It's like somewhere, someone in the EU like runs like a like a traffic bait website. And they're like, let's stretch it out. Like we know people love the story. This is long as long as much. 24 months of USBC iPhone clicks. So good. It's good.

So that's the date. That's, that's, theoretically. This implies this sort of 20, 25 iPhone. So that's the iPhone 16? Because it says all new phones have to be using it by 2024. So that's not the shit. The iPhone that gets announced in 2024. We'll have to be USBC.

So right now we're on the 14, which is the iPhone that was announced. 2022. Yeah. So 15 is 2023. And then 16 is 2024. So this will be the iPhone 16 should theoretically be USBC unless they decide to be like, you know what, EU, you don't get a phone this year. That would be amazing. Just never mind.

We'll see. Importantly, you might recall that the UK is no longer in the European Union. Notally, the United States is not. I don't believe China is in the European Union. all gigantic markets for Apple? Unclear of China's in the European Union. I'm not a geologist. Who knows what kind of rock state got going on over there?

That's been a long one. And also, I think James's drinking beer rubbed off of me. But obviously, those are giant markets for Apple. They could make lightning iPhones and USBC iPhones. We don't know what they're going to do. Just that one, they release like 500 of them, limited edition in Germany. And in Brazil, they still have to put the charger in the box. That's true. I got a real taste of careful what you wish for last week. So I went home for Thanksgiving.

Yeah. You know, did the turn motions soothing off on all TVs. First thing. You know, ran around fixing stuff in my parents' house, bought them the new Apple TV remotes. Yeah. So they had the old black ones. They were horrible. Whatever. Did they also have scotch tape on theirs like my mom does? It's a long story. My parents finally shut down their AT&T U-Vers cable boxes. Wow. It's a five-year victory. If you've been listening, you know, I've been working on this for five years. And they switched to the cable company.

Now they're doing all their TV through the Apple TV. Got rid of the cable boxes. Consolidate the remotes by the near remotes. Yeah. Spot near remotes. Just went to Best Buy. I pulled three of them off the shelf. Came home.

Set them up. Off we go. Little do I know that I bought two of the older lightning remotes and one of the new USBC remotes. So I get this is the most bizarre text from my dad who's like, I'm using the kitchen TV. is the plug different? And like just out of context, they're like, what are you talking about?

Like, is the plug in the wall? Did you buy a new TV from Europe? Like, why are you plugging the TV? Like, just leave it. Let's stop it. So I'm like, what do you mean? And he's like, the plugs for the other two rooms work fine, but this one doesn't.

And it's like, yeah, it's like, I'm at work. I'm like, different plan. I'm like, just call me, send me a picture. And he sends me a picture of the bottom around. I'm like, you got to be kidding. Like, I asked for this. I asked for everything to be USBC. and now there's one USBC Apple device in my parents' house.

Just one. And it is just like the crime of the century. Did you try to explain to them they could use their phone as a remote? Because it doesn't work. I told them that they could plug. And when I say this was like a galaxy brain moment, I was like, just use a charger from your Chromebook. And I plug it in their remote. And they're like, will it explode?

Because it's just like not, you're not supposed to do this. Benz and Leon has a lot of evidence to that. might happen. I'm just saying. But it was, I was like, oh, God. I asked, I asked for this. You did. I was like, Apple make it all USBC. And like one out of three. That's what's going to happen with the iPhones. You're going to get both of them iPhones. And for some reason, one will be USBC. And the other will not.

Just dealer's choice. Dad, you can charge with the Chromebook. Mom, you have to go find the remote. Yeah. All right. Other stuff. Richer, what's going on with Elon this week? I feel like it's avert. We could go the entire show without talking about Elon and Twitter. Speed run it. Go. Not nearly as much as there has been before.

Everyone else is trying to build their own Twitter. People who used to work for Twitter. Other tech engineers. Tumblr, of course, Alex is always ready to be the new Twitter. They're ready. And so if you're looking for a better Twitter, there are options. I went back to Black Planet. I've had that account for 20 years.

I'm never leaving. Meanwhile, at Twitter. Elon still somehow needs to try and make money from the company that he now owns. And his plan is this Twitter blue subscription that he thinks everyone will pay for to be verified and to make sure that your tweets actually show up so that people can see them. The latest thing that we've heard is that if you purchase this from your iPhone, it might cost more. That it would cost $7 per month if you subscribe on the web or $11 via the iOS app and one has mentioned Google Play. I guess it doesn't really matter.

But getting around the Apple Commission that way, and that was the whole battle and back and forth that they had that culminated with. Elon going to see Tim Cook and reaching some kind of agreement. So maybe this is the outcome of that. So the public facts of this agreement are now, I think, well known. So Apple had pulled back on its advertising spend like most big companies had done. Because they didn't know what the trust. And they were the biggest advertiser. And they were the biggest advertiser.

Alex Heath has pointed out. Apple spends no money on meta. Just done. So no Instagram, which makes sense. They don't like each other. Yeah. So where's that money going to go? It has gone to Twitter.

So Apple is one of Twitter's biggest accounts. So Apple pulls back their advertising. Elon tweets, don't you support free speech in America? Then there's this weird issue, which we still kind of don't understand, where Apple's like, you've got to comply with our moderation rules to the App Store, or we're going to pull you, or they just remind, as they often do mafia style. They just sat there with a baseball bat. They just drove up in front of the store, holding a rock, and they're like,

mow of those windows. It would sure be a shame. Wouldn't want anything to happen to him. So Elon gets mad. Tim Cook summons Elon. Oh, and Elon gets mad about the 30% tax. Yeah. Yeah.

She's been mad about for a while. He's suddenly discovered. He was like, guys, I have brand new information. There's a 30% tax. We talked about us last week, a bunch of Republican congresspeople get all up in arms. Anti-Trust bill becomes a threat. Tim Cook summons Elon to the spaceship. We don't know what the deal was.

He leaves. But now it's publicly revealed, Apple's ad spending has gone back up. and Elon has agreed to up the price of Twitter blue on iOS 30%. So it's like, oh, you just, Apple's paying you the money in ads, and then you're going to pay it back to them in App Store fees. That is the deal that the most genius business people of our time have constructed. Nailed it. Here's what we're going to do.

We're going to start advertising on Twitter again, increase your revenue. And then when you launch your paid product, which you want to be 50% of Twitter's revenue, 30% of that will come right back to the old spaceship. Yep. Tim's like, all right. You good? I've got to go to some supply chain stuff. On the left.

Like, that appears to be the deal. Yeah. That is all in that the advertising information is directly from Elon. We will see what the price of Twitter Blue is when it comes out, but all indications are. When it returns. When it returns. But all indications are it will be priced at 30% above the web price to account for that fee. And as we all know, most things, Apple collects that fee because most of the money is made on the phone.

Yeah. A beautiful circle. I love it. Like, it's as beautiful a circle as the spaceship itself. I'm sorry. You did it. I did it. The modern economy.

You know what? Let's talk about Apple some more. Let's get away from talking about. Oh, there's good Apple stuff. There's good Apple stuff. Yeah. So Apple announced a bunch of encryption stuff this week, right? Richard, I think you were watching it, like, in it, in the weeds on this.

Yes, this was a bit of a surprise. But it is major, major news. And I'm not sure if everyone, when you see this, if you understand exactly. how big this is, but a lot of the people who pay attention to security and privacy on our devices on the internet see this is one of the biggest announcements that they'll hear, I guess, around this time of the year. What Apple has done is they've announced a number of security announcements, and one of the most impactful ones is an optional program that they're calling advanced data protection. If you opt into it, then it expands the number of data categories,

as they call them, that are protected by end-to-end encryption. And they've always talked about how they have end-to-end encryption on a lot of things so that no one can. really spy on your data, even on Apple's end, if the government asks them to give it up, they can't because they don't have access to it. It can only be decrypted on your device. Right. But that did not apply to iPhone backups. So while something like IMessage might be encrypted into end, and they kept saying that it is, if you or the person your messaging has a backup of their iPhone that is then uploaded to the ICloud servers, if, for example, if somehow someone accessed your account, or if they got a warrant from the government to access it, they could

simply access the unencrypted data very easily. Right. And that won't be possible once this rolls out because, you know, your iPhone backups will be one of the categories that are now protected by encryption, which is just a very significant change. And one, that the FBI, now this has been announced to say that they are not happy about. Yeah. Rather predictably.

Apple famously fought a huge battle with the FBI in 2016. This is San Bernardino shootings, right? Around unlocking the shooter's phone. The FBI has wanted a backdoor and encryption. Apple has famously said no. The most interesting turn of this story, which we need to learn more about, is, what was it last year?

Earlier this year? The CSAM thing? The CSAM thing. That was last year. It was last year. Late last year, they announced these changes to CSAM where it would, if you were backing up a photo on ICloud photos,

it would then scan the photo while it's still on your device, not on Apple's in, not on the servers. And, you know, kind of create a hash of it and try to match that to known child sexual abuse imagery and alert someone if it finds out. And everybody was mad at all. And no and yeah, privacy, security, everyone was very upset about this because it's kind of a, A, it's a slippery slope. Now what you're doing scanning on people's personal devices. B, if those hashes, if someone somehow gets something into the database that's like,

we're looking for government documents. You know, now suddenly your phone is leaking that information. There are a number of bad outcomes here. And now Apple has said that that program is dead. They're not going to do it. Yeah. And I think long-time listeners this show will recall, Apple was real shady about all of that when it rolled it out. They rolled it out.

It wouldn't tell us who the researchers were. All of its communications were like unsourced. They're like, just enjoy it. It's going to be great. Just shut up. They were holding these briefings without telling anybody who anybody was talking to. Yeah.

And they had basically courted all this controversy. And then they said, we're putting it on pause. And the tradeoff, I want to be clear, the tradeoff that Apple was trying to make on paper was a good tradeoff, which is we want to protect your data as much as we can. We want to keep the government and the cops out of our servers. We want to protect your privacy. But we know that bad people do bad things and the category of bad things that everybody agrees on without a shadow of a doubt is CSAM. So we're

going to build in a somehow privacy respecting feature that scans. your phone for this material before it hits our servers. And that that way we can encrypt what's on the servers. We can encrypt iCloud. Yeah. Because Google, Microsoft, every other cloud service is scanning their data stores for C-C. Right. They're all doing it.

Like, and they should. Everyone agrees that this is a bad thing. Apple's like, we want to go one step farther and encrypt the backup so we can't read it. Because our other choice is to do whatever else does and scan iCloud. Yeah. So they're like, okay, we'll move this scanning to you. phone. And again, on paper, this tradeoff makes some kind of sense. Yeah, I think in a vacuum, I think like if you're sitting in a room with a bunch of people who've been working on this

problem for years, which I assume was happening at Apple, you say this and you go, yes, awesome, perfect. And then they didn't actually check with anyone else until right before. I think they reached out to the EFF and a couple other folks right before they were going to do it. And they're like, we're going to do this. And they were all like, cool, you waited way too late. This is a terrible plan and everything about it is bad because you are still fundamentally creating a backdoor into people's devices and anybody with access to this database can really misappropriate it and use it. Yeah. And we have episodes of decoder and the

virtualessling in the controversy of why it was bad. But that was the tradeoff, right? Everyone assumed that Apple is rolling out the scanning feature so they could get to the desired end state of encrypted iCloud. Yeah. It's a year later, they've rolled encrypted iCloud, and they are canceling the phone scanning, which is utterly fascinating to me. And they also added another thing, which I thought was really interesting, because one of the responses to this was, well, if you create this database that is like managed by the government, then other governments can misuse this database.

And one of the things they also announced this week was, like, they claim that iMessage can possibly alert you if state-sponsored spies are eavesdropping? on you. And it's like, okay, so y'all just went hard in the other direction to say, nah, fuck the police. Good. That's Tim Cook. Yeah. That's Tim Cook. When I think of Tim Cook, I think of a man saying fuck the police. Yeah. Immediately. First thing I think of. But that was like kind of surprising to me that they went that hard in the other direction. And I keep thinking about like a lot of these conversations we had last year about this was about China and specifically how China could potentially use this database. And now like we know. So Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal, notable, Virch, expat, Joanna Stern, or mole at the Wall Street Journal. At the journal, they're always detecting that they have a leaker.

The Virgin is infiltrated us once again. But Joanna Stern got the big exclusive with Craig Federigi. You should go watch her video with him. She asked him a question about China, and our man just deferred. Yeah. Did not answer the question about whether ICloud backups in China would be encrypted. In China, the government. the Chinese government effectively controls the iCloud data centers.

Yes. So Apple always kind of making its concessions for the, I've been told China is not in the EU, but always making concessions for its large market. Obviously, there's a lot going on in China recently. We've not talked about it in the show very much. There are large-scale protests about COVID lockdowns. There are protests at the Foxcom factories where Apple makes the phones or Apple production slowdowns for its phones. Just quite a lot going on in China.

And you've seen, you've also seen Apple. make some really deliberate attempts to move away from China, particularly in manufacturing. They've asked Foxconn, they've asked these other manufacturers they work with to move, to get out of there, to like go to India, to go to, I think. Arizona. Arizona. Yes, speaking of. And they're asking them to move to these other places.

And I'm going to use that as a segue to talk about Arizona. Thank you, Richard. Lade that up for me. Because the other big news this week from Apple was that they're going to be. going to start making chips for iPhones in Arizona, these new fabs that TSM just opened. Yeah, so TMC, I want to give TSM credit here. Yes. The person who has dunked on Foxcon lying to the people of Wisconsin the most.

They did not build a big globe. They did not. TSM took a bunch of tax subsidies, lobbied their way into the chips act, which is going into effect. And they have actually built fabs in Arizona. The fabs are going to start producing chips in 2020. the ceremony that we saw with AMD, NVIDIA, Tim Cook, Biden,

they're all there was the installation of fab equipment. It was not golden shovels. I'd love it. Amazing. And they're going to add a second site in 2026. William looks so happy. So just congrats to the SMC for doing a thing they said they were going to do. Yeah.

And they're going to do it. And so Tim Cook has promised that the chips, they're going to make M-Series and A-series chips there. AMD and NVIDIA are going to build chips there. It's a three nanometer node. Yeah. I mean, this is like, this is the stuff that's really hard to make. You know, Intel has, Intel's trying to get their own fabs online so that they can jump into this space. But TSM kind of owns the market on these really small nodes.

And so this is, this is big news because we haven't had a node this small built in the United States in a while. It's primarily been built in Taiwan. And I'm going to be really, like, it should create jobs theoretically. It should make that, like the Chips Act. make more sense. And suddenly, instead of like having to, like,

Intel will have a new resources for hiring, right? Yeah. If this TSMFAB goes online. It's cool news. We sent a reporter named Andy Bly down to cover it, took photos,

the whole thing, go read that report. They actually did it. Yeah, they did it. Now, is it as fun to cover as an empty dome and lies? Bless, more important to the global economy.

From a content perspective, it was pretty much a failure. I think you can say that. I'm like, where's your dome, bro? Yeah. Failure of content, but, you know. Before we get off Apple, I do want to mention they made other security announcements. Like you can use, you'll be able to use hardware keys to secure your ICloud account.

You'll be able to do this kind of key verification, which you're referencing Alex, that will enable that or potentially enable that ability to see if someone's trying to spy on your conversation. It makes it a lot more like signal or like using PGP and email or something like that. So there are other, there are. Also other important security announcements that they made that are there. And they also made a very strange change. They're going to roll out globally this change that rolled out in China during the protests where when you turn on AirDrop, I think, to receive files, you'll only be able to do it for 10 minutes, which makes it a little bit harder to use this strategy that people have been using to distribute, you know, information that the government doesn't want it to get passed around. I just share gritty photos. Oh, my God.

That's it. We were so, we're already over. We have a little bit more segment. Frank. We got a... Liam's losing his mind back here. Don't be nice to Liam. Everyone be nice to Liam.

There's no clock this time. There's just a sense of shame that pervades this room because we are at 90 minutes already. And we have another second here. We're having a great time. We're going to be right back. We got a gadget lightning around. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. This is going to be a lightning. Lightning of lightning. rounds. It's all right. There wasn't a lot of gadgets this week. Go for it. Okay. So first up, this is my favorite thing ever released in the history of the world. Wallway's latest smart watch. This is so tough. Has earbuds in it. So you can be like, oh, I got to listen to this call and just go,

and flip the top of your smart watch. This is just a digital watch. It's not a smart one. This is a black and white segment LCD display. You know, it's got weather. It's got heart rate. I'm calling it smart. It's smart. No, no, no, no, that's just a face. That's just a face. And what is smarter than having built-in earbuds? Wireless earbuds, you can just pop out, stick in your ear.

They announced it on, on Weibo, which is a Chinese network. And they're called the Huawei WatchBuds. They've already launched. Just not in America. Wait, okay. First of all, watchbuds is an incredible name. Second, why would they demo this with this face that's like a nice? 1982 Cassio segmented.

Because it's sick. I will admit they got me. Because they know that I'm the person. Richard, have you already imported it? They were like, yes. They knew who they were. Can we talk about the most important gadget of the week, which is the $950 Dyson combo platter headphones and air purifier like mask?

Liam and I immediately looked, V-Song was in the office today and we looked at her and we're getting it right. She's like, I'm going to try. I want nothing to be reviewed more. Okay, my favorite kinds of companies in the world are companies that have like one piece of technology and they're like, what can we do with it? Dyson's like, here's what we did. We made a fan. Sick ass fan.

The fan can both suck and blow. And for like 10 years, like we're deeply focused on suck. Like, what have you guys seen our vacuums? That's just a fan going this way. And then kind of like recently. What is the other way? They're like, switch that motherfucker to blow. Reverse, baby.

And they're like, here's the fan. Here's the hairdriar. I used it today before the show. It's great. It's incredible. They're like, here's what we do fans. They, for a minute, they're like, we're going to do cars. And then I think they realized, like, cars don't run on fans.

They're like, well, it's not a climate control fan. Does anyone know how to do any other part of the car? They should start doing the hover. The hoverbook is? She did the hovercraft. And now they're like, all right, what's, what can we put a fan into? And they're like headphones. Like, it has to be.

There was a meeting where they're like, what else can we put fans into? The car didn't work. We need an idea. And you know what's really sad? Party speakers were right there. They're coming. And someone was like, I got it. Headphones.

Headphones. And there was a blank stair. in the room and they're like, you just wait and see. But with a mask on the front. And it's, I mean, you just have to see it. I'm buying these so much. You're going to spend $9.49. The best problem of them is that they're vaporware.

The best part of them is that they're vaporware. It says you'll be able to pre-order. You can only, they were announced like a year ago. But you can start pre-ordering next year. Not even there. No, next year. I think that, I think, I think, They've got a shot.

I mean, they're great. This is the only gadget worth buying. I'm just excited to see what else Dyson can put a fan into. I mean, the fact they were like, we're going to do cars. And then they're like, mm, not enough fans. Not enough fans. Or plan for a wind power car. Like air conditioners?

Have you considered the air conditioner? No, no. They just, they're like headphones. Yeah, headphones. This is it. What about shoes? Very good, very good. What else you got?

All right. What else do we got? I believe Allison did a review of the Amazon Echo Auto. I refused to say it the other way. She wasn't a fan. This thing still makes no sense to me. I don't know why you would want an ECHO Auto. One of the bad things was Alexa isn't very helpful in a car.

Because, yeah, Alexa isn't very helpful in a car. There's no smart lights in a car to control. You can just hit a button to play music. Well, so I think what they know is that people have a lot of ideas in cars while they're driving around. Again, on paper, imagine the meeting. Yeah. Like, what do people want to do in the car? They want to play music.

What is the number one use of Alexa? People ask for music. Yes. I don't know how many timers people set in their cars. This is number two. Every time I'm trying to like make that, that get the miles, right? You know, I'm like, all right. Set a timer.

So it's higher for five minutes. They gun it. All right. Fair. We're all different. I've never done that. You should start. I'm going to.

So, like, okay, people want to ask for music. We can add the thing for music. And then maybe when they're driving around, they'll be like, you should buy some paper towels. Oh, I forgot to buy paper towels. Alexa, buy some paper. Like, you can see the thought process. Yeah. And then they remember that nobody actually will ever do that.

It's a real problem. It's a real. Like, it's just bad. I love, like, all of her problems with it where it was like, yeah, Alexa's just stupid to have in a car. They got to add chat GPT to it. Yeah. Or a fan. Or a fan.

It's also like that weird Spotify thing in that you still pretty much need your phone, but you can just do this stuff with your phone. But the Spotify one, you can at least, like, connect to your computer and make a new controller. It had a knob. It had a knob. Yeah. It had the knob. Put a knob on this.

I bet it would have gone up to a seven. Allison would have loved it. Anything with a giant rotary knob always wins for us. Anything. Okay. What are these watches, the Coros Apex 2? Yeah. So V reviewed some new multi-sport watches.

She liked them. They didn't have a knob on them, but she still gave them a seven. They're pretty expensive. But I think the big thing here is that really good battery life. They're really for runners. They're really for people who are like they go outdoors. I'm not familiar with these kinds of people. So I can't say if this is a good purchase for people.

But Victoria does, in fact, go outside on a regular basis. And she seemed to like them. Okay, we got to talk about the symphonesque floor lamp. Symphonisk. It's amazing that they just added legs to it and changed the shade. What if it's taller? I'm so ready to get these. Yeah.

And just be like, everywhere in my home, there are tiny lamp speakers. And I don't know why. I don't know why I feel this way. Because you want your home to be like one of those really fancy rich people's homes where you're like, where's that music coming from? Like when you go to the Apple campus? It's these lambs. And you're like, where is that?

Is that music coming from a rock? Now it's your lamb. So it's $260. The standard lamp seeker is $179. So it's an $80 premium for some legs. So you could just put it on something tall? Yes, this is the choice that you have. Okay.

I am very excited about just the idea. I think the CES is going to be, Richard, I used to cover, like, C. Like, we were in the weeds of CES together in a gadget, like, back in the day. Yeah. Right. Like, I remember, like, when Panis,

or, like, Pioneer and Panasonic with, like, demo plasma TV CES. Like, that's how Richard and I came up. I remember the HD DVD Blu-ray format war that Richard and I covered together. Aw. And so see, when we were on, I was on the plane on the way to CES when they announced that it was over.

I'm not old. We were like, we're like, this is the year of the format war. And they're like, uh, HDVD is dead. They had to tear down the booth at CES is a real thing that happened in the dead of night. While you all were there? Yeah, they were going to, it was going to be the year of the format war. And between HDDD and. in Blu-ray.

And Tashiba said, no, we're done. And then Toshiba just gave up. They got there, they looked around. They're like, what if we just like hung out in Vegas?

And they were torn the dudes down. Same. Honestly, same. I do not judge you one bit to see that. Since then,

there's not been a lot of drama at CS, I would say. But I, CS is always a TV show. Yeah. I would say this is the year where I'm expecting

to see like some interesting TVs and a lot of, like, really wild that most like, film theater ideas. It's common. I would like that. And the,

Like Sonos wireless rears is lamps is like, it's just the beginning. It's just the drop. It works with Sonos, but it's IKEA lamps. Yeah, yeah. They're out ahead of the flood. Yeah. Like this is, well, I think what we're going to see is we've got these engineers who they, we obviously had the pandemic and everybody suddenly was stuck at home. You have these engineers who were at their house all the time.

The stuff that they built is finally coming. It's going to get strange. Just roll with it. And not a single one of them knows what a good lamp looks like. I'm just saying this is like they're out ahead of the CS rush. They announce some stuff. You can't buy it now until January. So it isn't like stocking stuff or stuff.

Although the idea of a speaker lamp in your stocking is incredible. What's that giant eight foot tall box in my... Merry Christmas. What could it be? So they're just out ahead of the flood. Yeah. And I'm telling you this is the first drop of CES crazy. It's coming.

It's the speakers. The year of the speakers in chat GPT. Richard, do you know anything about this DGI Mini 3 drone? I'm in the market for another drone. that I'll never use and this feels like it. I, that's the only thing I think about is buying drums that I never actually fly because I bought a DGI. I don't even remember what the name of it is.

I have a phantom. Oh my God. You're like a Phantom 3 or Phantom 4. You're a maniac. Three, I thought. I bought a Phantom 4 that I ever flew. I sold it when I had a kid. I was like, I got to get ready for this baby.

And Becky's like, I read on the house. And I was like, I sold the drone. That's the verge equivalent of I got rid of the motorcycle for you. these fingers are safe now. I can pick up our child. She's like, great, are you going to help? She's like, I'm making the child. That you can buy and never actually fly anywhere.

Well, this is an expensive drone, though. 859. Yeah, but it's kind of, the remote has a screen. It's a little guy. I have the original mini, which is like just not quite good enough. Yeah. I'm so shocked the DJI is still selling stuff in the United States. Like, they were on the Euro-Chinese.

company Hit List for the long time. Yes, because this is a GGI is a Chinese company, but they're also the only company that makes like good drones. I'm just saying they're a Chinese company whose product is flying cameras. Like, of all the companies, like, huh, this seems like and the American government went, yeah, but I want to

fly my drones. Yeah, they're like, yes, but Hollywood needs these. Have you seen car commercials? What are we going to do? Like helicopters? Absolutely not. Stable diffusion. We got to wrap this up. It's, we're so far over. I mean, wait.

important news somebody just let me know that the amazon kindle scribe is getting a software update so you will no longer just have to email files to yourself when you want to put them on the scribe what can you do instead you can use an app cool i thought i know everybody was really concerned about this i got a lot of emails so that's that's for you guys all a little scoop on the verge cast for the kendall scribe community all four of you excited for the scribe blog you know back in the date like they were would have been a dedicated gadget blog for the Kindlescribe. Yes, 100%. All the things you can do.

Bring it back. All right. That's it. Thanks to James Vincent for joining us. Thanks to Richard for joining us with David out on baby leave. I wonder if he had to sell his drone to have a baby. That's really not how that connection works, but that's how I'm going to start thinking about it.

You'll be hearing a lot from Richard. It's going to be a lot of fun. That's it. By the way, a bunch of cool stuff on the site this week. Liz has a big piece about FTX. Not what you would expect, though. The FTX store is broken by a really actually great crypto news outlet called CoinDesk. Yep.

CoinDesk is owned by a crypto exchange. Oof. So they might have just like knifed themselves. Great story about the politics of tech and journalism and crypto. I mean, it's like a perfect. It's wonderful. But for the FTX story, if you believe what the government might be accusing SBFL of shooting yourself in the foot is kind of on brand. We'll see what happens.

It's very, we'll see how that goes. It's very good. There's actually a great week on the site. Check it all out. We're back on Wednesday. We did, Alex and I talked to Charles Plain Moore about winners and losers and streaming. So we basically did the Go 90 scale.

Yeah. We thought we were going to go 30 minutes. We went 90. Which is perfect. It makes sense. It's beautiful. It was great. So we'll see you on Wednesday.

You can tweet at us. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Richard is at R.J.CC. James is at J.J. Vincent. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you for as long as Twitter is going to last. Tweeted us. We love it.

That's it. That's a richast. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith.

Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.