The Vergecast - How Epstein became a tech influencer

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

A new tranche of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails makes one thing painfully clear: Epstein was a central figure in the lives of a lot of big names in tech, and had influence on a surprising number of companies and executives. David and Nilay talk through what we’ve learned from the new emails so far. Then they turn to Anthropic’s spicy new Super Bowl ads about... ads, which caused a big reaction from OpenAI (which is betting big on ads). They also discuss this week’s antitrust hearing about Netflix’s purchase of Warner Bros., the latest in Brendan Carr is a Dummy, Google Home’s big buttons upgrade, and much more. Further reading: Here's how Epstein broke the internet Former Windows 8 boss recruited Epstein to help negotiate his messy Microsoft exit Jeffrey Epstein arranged a meeting with Tim Cook for the former head of Windows The Epstein files  Google co-founder Sergey Brin visited Epstein’s private island and traded emails with Ghislaine Maxwell. It turns out Elon Musk didn’t exactly ‘refuse’ the invite to Jeffrey Epstein’s island.  Will Elon Musk’s emails with Jeffrey Epstein derail his very important year?  Bill Gates says accusations contained in Epstein files are ‘absolutely absurd' Jeffrey Epstein was permanently banned from Xbox Live  ‘We’ve basically funded an elite global pedophile ring since 2015.’  Anthropic says ‘Claude will remain ad-free,’ unlike an unnamed rival Anthropic’s blog post: Claude is a space to think Sam Altman responds to Anthropic’s ‘funny’ Super Bowl ads  OpenAI’s CMO on X Nvidia CEO denies he’s ‘unhappy’ with OpenAI Netflix lands in the middle of a culture war during Senate hearing Everyone is stealing TV  Disney says Josh D’Amaro will replace Bob Iger as CEO  FCC aims to ensure “only living and lawful Americans” get Lifeline benefits Elon Musk is merging SpaceX and xAI to build data centers in space — or so he says  Peloton’s gamble on expensive new hardware has yet to pay off Google Home finally adds support for buttons  Raspberry Pi is raising prices again as memory shortages continue  Valve’s Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing  Aluminium: Why Google’s Android for PC launch may be messy and controversial Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm a friend David Pierce, Neil Epiattel is here. Again, I want to just issue my strong condemnation of J-mail. J-mail is an email service that exists only to give you a way to browse Jeffrey Epstein's emails. There are just, you like to talk about Ph.D. Theses about things like, There's a PhD thesis in there. Everyone is going to be a conspiracy theorist. You thought conspiracy theories ran America before. Anything you want is in there.

And you can turn it into anything. And a lot of it is like, yeah, I guess that was true. Yeah. So unfortunately, this is where we have to start this week. We have a lot of stuff to get to. It's earnings week. So there's been a lot of really interesting news. It's also Super Bowl week.

And there's been a big giant fight about AI Super Bowl ads that I'm excited to get into. Netflix is up. up to stuff. We're doing piracy again. Lots to talk about. Brendan Carr, presumably, still doing Brendan Carr things. He's such a dummy. This is, yeah, great. This can, Brendan? Can I actually say, last week, I said all this stuff about politics on the show, and we got a lot of really nice notes. And I want to thank everybody for the really nice notes. Like, really nice notes. And I sent them around to our team. Thank you. We really appreciate it. And then I got one note that said, you're bad at politics. I can get better politics coverage anywhere. Stick to your lane

where you're good at it, which is Brendan Carr, which is, I, just perfect, like, just a perfect piece of feedback for the Vergecast. Like, don't do politics except for dunking on the FCC. If I, if I could have designed a career for myself, it would have been that email. That's what I want. I agree with you. The state of American politics should be such that we ignore it, except to say, whoever runs the FCC is dumb.

Right. Like, that's the outcome I'm working for. every single day. And with just a small donation to my campaign, you can bring it into reality. Vote Patel. Patel 2028, really gaining steam.

People are talking about it. It's out there. So we do have to start with the Epstein files. This has been the thing of the week. There was another huge millions of emails trunch put out last week.

Everybody has spent the week combing through it. One of the fascinating pieces about this to me, like the reason I bring up J-mail is this has been such an interesting information delivery story because what happened is just the Department of Justice uploaded a billion

insane PDFs to the internet and just left them there. Some of them were overly redacted, some of them were under-redacted. It's been a total disaster. And there's a lot of weird duplicates. Yeah. So you can find the same document unredacted that is redacted, which has led to a lot of confusion. Yes. There's horrifying photos and videos that are uploaded as PDFs that you can just change the extension to. It's not great. I would not say that the Trump administration, the Trump DOJ, has done a good job here. In fact, in many ways, they've done an actively bad job in an effort to punish the victims and hide whatever crimes from the people that are on their team. There's a lot to say. Like, you could, you can come at the Epstein Files on this show, on every show, in every media form,

any which way you want. It's all in there. Yeah. But I think the thing, I guess I wasn't surprised by this so much as sort of dismayed to have it all proven correct. The number of ways in which it turned out that Jeffrey Epstein intersected with the tech community was just staggering. Like this has been sort of the story that has come out over and over is the number of sort of bold-faced big names that interacted with Epstein, including people who have maintained for many years that they had no interaction with him whatsoever. Elon Musk is all over the files. Bill Gates is all over the files. There are lots and lots of these people in tech who appear somewhere between, you know, once or twice and over and over.

Sergey Brin shows up over and over. There's just a lot of this. And I think, I don't know, did the volume of this surprise you at all that Jeffrey Epstein appeared to be in these circles in new ways? I think to me it is like, I've spent too much time looking through these and reading about like how Jeffrey Epstein made his money and how he worked his way into these circles. And there is just so much to learn about the way that this particular kind of rich person circle works. And every single piece of new information you learn about it is just horrifying and depressing.

Yeah, I share that feeling completely. And you and I were talking just before the show. There are a lot of business stories in here, just straightforward, here's what happened when. And it's interesting. And then it's all so icky because of where it came from and why we were. We are seeing it and why Jeffrey Epstein was involved at all with some of these people and why they were talking to him. And I haven't yet parsed out how to separate these things. We're going to talk about Steven Sinovsky and the Microsoft Surface in a second here because the entire story of that device is in Jeffrey Epstein's email.

Yeah. That's weird, right? And there's my general curiosity about Microsoft's business and the failure of that product, which we covered in real time a lot. And then there's, why am I reading the Epstein files? Yeah. And I haven't yet separated those out. Actually, the best thing that I've read about it so far comes from Ryan Broderick, who is a friend of the verge, someone we talked to and hung out with before.

He writes a newsletter called Garbage Day. Ryan, I think it was a buzzfeed, right, where he covered misinformation and disinformation. That's right. He's a lot of different places where he did this. And he just wrote this piece about Epstein and 4chan in particular. And I just want to read a little bit of it. He writes of his coverage. I believed at the time I understood what was going on.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, far right extremists, aided and amplified by Russia's internet research agency and funded by Republican Dark Money, infiltrated fringe online spaces. They weaponized disaffected young men and used sites like Reddit and 4chan to organize a flood of content

that influenced the unthinking algorithms on larger platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But there were always holes in that explanation I could never quite account for. So he's saying things like Gamergate and the flood of Trump memes. Right? He was like, I think he's basically, I thought I knew what's happening.

And then here's the follow-up. After he's examined the files, he says, well, I can't say we have the complete story yet. It does increasingly feel like I was actually, without knowing it, following Jeffrey Epstein around the world the whole time. And if you look at the files, yep, that's the feeling. All of these things, he's like monumental events in cultural, political, internet history. Jeffrey Epstein is there. Peter Thiel suing Gawker, Jeffrey Epstein is saying, I'll help pay for this lawsuit too.

Gamergate organized on 4chan on a board called poll. The founder of 4chan met with Jeffrey Epstein, and that day reopened the politics forum on 4chan. That's nuts. Yeah. And we have a piece about that coming out. That is nuts. If you can trace the decline of Western civilization to that meeting,

that is bananas. Yeah. And you really can, because in the Epstein emails, he's writing to Peter Thiel and he says Brexit was just the beginning we have a return to tribalism counter to globalization

amazing new alliances you and I both agreed zero interest rates are too high finding things on their way to collapse is much easier than finding the next bargain this is these are just the masters of the universe

and they're going to tear it all down and he's everywhere in that mix he's funding crypto the like the Bitcoin community is having an existential crisis right now because like 70% of the initial funding of crypto was Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah.

At the MIT Media Lab. At very early on, he was a big part of actually pushing it to be an ongoing thing with real funding and resources behind it. So, you know, you can read the stuff and there's intellectual curiosity and the people and the products and their services. And then there's just like overwhelming theme that this man, who is so obviously evil and very literally explicit ways was also very busily

engineering the downfall of the Western order and that's crazy like I said you can find any conspiracy theory you want here and people have found a lot of them I mean again going back to the like information retrieval piece of this

there have been every conspiracy theory that anyone has ever had on the internet has been completely vindicated perfectly by the Epstein files and that is not correct by the way like PizzaGate has made sort of a roaring come back in that they're like, oh, all the Republicans were talking about PizzaGate, but actually they're the ones doing Pizza Gate. And it's like, guys, it's the same thing. They're actually, they're actually, people email about pizza sometimes. Like, it's fine.

And there's a million different versions of that thing. But to me, it's, the struggle for all of this has been, right? Like, Jeffrey Epstein, the person was, was horrible. He was at the time of most of these emails, a convicted criminal. And, and, and, what his crimes were known and it only got worse over time. There is this question of like how, in what way are these people who are attached to him implicated, right? There are all these sort of questions about who did and didn't go to the island. Some of which I think we have more clarity on than before.

Some of which we don't. And a lot of things are just emails. And I think one thing that is very clearly true is that Jeffrey Epstein really liked to talk a big game. And part of his thing was convincing everybody that he was at, the center of everything, right? It's the self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's a thing you see in these circles that, like, being the connector is a source of power. And so he had to make himself out to be the connector in order to be the connector. And so it just going into this being like, okay, everyone in here is doing something gross, but the like extent and direction of it is

very hard to place. Just, I don't know, it just leaves me at this sort of bizarre, awful feeling at the end of the process every single time. There's the, I'm a connector. I'm going to talk about everybody all the time aspect of it. And then there's, boy, there are some people that are just live streaming their consciousness to Jeffrey Epstein all the time. And he is their trusted advisor and he's helping them make their career moves. Stevensonovsky is one of them. The former head of Windows is one of them. But there's a lot of them in the mix. I was going to say, let's talk about the Stevensonovsky story because he's sort of the cleanest example of this. Yeah. So, you know, the files come out on a Friday, this latest dump. And we're looking through

them. And very quickly, we found that Steven Sinovsky, whose wife worked for Jeffrey Epstein and is the connective tissue to Bill Gates. There's a lot of weird Bill Gates stuff in here. And Melinda Gates is out there giving interviews about how icked out she was about the whole thing. But the person who introduced them, as far as I know, is Steven Sinovsky's wife, who worked for Jeffrey Epstein. So Bill Gates is in the orbit because of Steven Soski, the former head of Windows and his wife. And in the process of leaving Microsoft, which we reported on, was a pretty messy split. Sinovsky is just forwarding all kinds of emails to Epstein

and asking for all kinds of advice. And it turns out that he had launched the Surface RT and Windows 8 and the surface, the first generation products in Windows 8, and they weren't failing. And he's trying to negotiate his exit from Microsoft. And Jeffrey Epstein is his trusted advisor in that negotiation and telling him how to handle Steve Longer, and Kevin Turner, who's at the time the CEO of Microsoft.

First of all, like, he's breaking his own NDA. Like, I suspect Microsoft is upset about a lot of things here, but they're like, what does Sinovsky do? Like, they now know that Sinovsky leaked a bunch of stuff to Jeffrey Epstein. There's a thread in the files that Tom links to in his piece that is actually, like, divorced of all context, it's just a really fascinating business discussion. Because it is like one of the weird. parts of this for me has just been like, it's a very clear sense that there are a lot of powerful

men of a certain age who just love email. Like, my God, did they love email? Do you know what I mean? In the way that like, there have been, there are sort of generational shifts in how we communicate. And that is the generation of people who like grew up in business emailing like hell on their Blackberries. And you can just see it. But the surface stuff, again, absent all of the external context of the Epstein files, there is so much, like, wild, obviously confidential business dealing happening in that thread that, like you said, Sinovsky just hits forward on and sends Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, the time on here is a little important. Let me go through it. So the service comes out in November 2012, Sinovsky gets booted for Microsoft. And everyone, when we reported on this a lot of the time,

Tom Warren was here at the verge, and he reported on us very deeply. And it was the same time Scott Forstall got fired from Apple, if you remember. And it was just the, the, idea that sort of like the brilliant jerk genius was over and we're going to move on from that era. And we had a lot of coverage of Sinovsky bringing a brilliant jerk genius. And it turns out that there's some of that was true. But actually what was happening underneath it was the surface was completely failing. So on November 3rd, Sinovsky emailed bomber and said, service R. T-sails are a very tough spot. We might be on the verge of, quote, an unrecoverable situation. And it's just this long layout of all the stuff that he needs to do. And he has got

all these ideas. And then like five days later, he's out. He's just like fired. And then he's trying to negotiate his exit in July 2013. And he forwards the entire chain. Like the, can you imagine if you were getting fired and you just had a long email chain of all of the decisions and conversations that were made? And you know, like, you know, I should do, I should forward all this to Jeffrey Epstein. Stephen Sonski, everybody. So we just have all these emails. And the quotes in here are wild. Sinovsky writes, service is about to capture. catastrophically fail in a very public way. We don't know how to explain selling one-tenth the number of devices is the lowest end of the lowest expectation.

Word will get out soon. There's no long-term without this. And he goes on to say, we will be in a spiral very quickly. This project will be labeled, quote, Zune, and this will be a broad failure. So brutal. The impact this has on sales in 2013 will be significant, just as we saw with Zune. Our partners won't carry it. The margins will road.

And pretty soon will be in Rim Playbook territory. So just stray for the playbook to catch. there. So, like, there's just this whole thing where it's like, I, obviously, we covered this. Like, this happened to us in real time. All of these players were talking to us in real time. Yeah. We were reviewing these devices.

This is, you know, the beginning of the verge. This was, this was our heyday in one particular way. And I'm like, very, like, this is the other side of the coin. And I'm reading it on J-mail. And I'm just so icked out by all of it. And I, if you can tell me how to separate those emotions, send me a note, but it's like I kind of, I don't even want to do the coverage because I don't want to engage with the source material or the source of the material. This is what I mean by like the longer you spend in this and the broader the set of names implicated get.

And again, I say implicated in the broadest way. Like Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and not every single person in the Epstein files is implicated as a pedophile. Like it feels important to say that out loud. But the association with Epstein runs a gamut from very bad to very bad. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And the more you get into this and the broader it seems to be and the larger the circles become with this man at the center of it, the harder it is to feel anything other than that

like the world and this part of the world that we cover is run by a bunch of people who don't care about anything but lowering their tax bill. And that is like one of the most interesting things to me that I spent a lot of time reading about last night was these things called grantor retained annuity trusts. which were a specialty of Jeffrey Epstein. So one of the ways he worked his way into rich people circles, the New York Times is a really great piece about sort of where Epstein came from and how he made his money.

His story is very strange. But one of the ways he worked his way into these circles was he was very good at lowering people's tax bills, in particular by doing this very complicated thing that let you set up a trust so that if you had valuable assets that were likely to get much more valuable over time, like most things, like stock in companies, you could find. find a way to essentially put that in a trust for your, for your children, quote unquote, that the government then couldn't tax the same way. So he became like a specialist at this and saved people tons and tons of money and became like

the go-to for this. And there are all these weird stories about like he made a lot of his money by charging people a percentage of the tax money that they saved. So like crazy. Like these private equity people paying him tens of millions of dollars because he's saving them hundreds of millions of dollars on their tax bill. Crazy stuff. And so it puts him at the center of this world

because he is the guy saving these people money. And you look at every single one of these CEOs and it's like, okay, in the best case scenario, the best case, the most generous read of this is that you are happily associating with a known convicted pedophile because he's going to save you some tax money. Yeah.

That's the best read of this situation. Yeah, all these Sinovsky emails happened well after his Florida conviction in 2008. And there's, you know, there's one email in here that we reported on, you know, that the Apple fans are very mad about. But Epstein emails to Sinovsky. Tim Cook is interested in meeting you, but he's worried that you're going to start a thing with Scott Forstall. And it's like, well, he had knowledge of Tim Cook's state of mind. Right?

He's trying to arrange a meeting. And then six months later, there is a meeting between Sinovsky and Tim Cook. Which Sinovsky immediately reports to Jeffrey Epstein. And you're like, well, he tried to arrange a meeting. Like he was in the mix because he's in the mix with everybody all the time. Yep. And that is, yep, you can say that's a wide blast area. But here's this guy, you know, he was convicted.

It was years later. And yet everyone is talking to him or enough people in the degrees of separation are talking to him, that he has knowledge of concerns. Yeah. That he's communicating very clearly without a second's hesitation. There's something here that's sticky. And especially when at the end of all this, Sinovsky, says, I got my settlement, I think it was like $14 million or something, he says, you're going to get paid for it. And it's like, yep, this is the game. By the way, inside baseball journalism, we obviously asked everybody for comment. Nobody's commenting. You know, we don't let, like, PR people be on background. We don't let them be anonymous. So Tom went to Sinovsky. Sanofsky declined, sent us to his crisis PR company, Hiltsik Strategies. Matthew Hiltzik and Hiltzik strategies. By the way, also Jeffrey Epstein's PR guy in the files, getting a vendor payment from Jeff Kavstein, said, can I talk to him

background? We said no, and then he declined to comment. So you just, like the machinations here are everybody wants to anonymously undercut the stories, but if you ask them to put ten toes down and put their names on a statement, they just disappear. Yep. And I think that is, you know, that's us. We're very finicky about that for a lot of reasons. But when Tom said we're not taking a statement, like anonymously you have to put your name on it. I was like, yeah, this is why I'm a jerk to like food delivery companies that want to anonymously give us quotes

about hot dog sales. Like, it's so that we can build up to this. Anyway, that's what you pay for and subscribe to the purge. But I think it's crazy that Sinovsky has the same PR guys I've seen and that person declined to comment for money. It's a tough look.

Yeah. Anyway, I think we should move on from this, but we're going to keep covering this. Yeah, the feedback I'm looking for specifically is there are these business stories in the file, and then there's the nature of the files themselves. And I feel icky about the same way that I feel about hack and leak stories. Like when the Sony hack happened and we did a bunch of stories about Google and Sony and Hollywood doing DRM schemes,

I was like, these were stolen by foreign adversary of the United States to make Sony look bad for publishing that horrible Seth Rogen movie. Do you remember this? This is what happened. Oh, yeah. The interview. Yeah, the interview. Like North Korea decided to embarrass Sony. And then we published some stories out of it because we thought they were. important. It's the same kind of ickiness in a much grander scale. So I'm just open to the feedback.

We can do the stories dead ahead. We can do the stories and apologize all the way through or we can just ignore it all. You let me know where you think we should land because I'm still working it through. Yeah. And there's a lot of putting pieces out there and putting pieces together left to be done. Again, it is an awful lot of just combing through PDFs on a website. Yep. It's weird times. Should we take a break or should we just plow through? Let's take a break. Let's come back. We're going back to some sillier things.

Let's have a moment. Yeah, all right. So let's take a break. Neil and I are going to go do whatever we do during breaks, as everyone likes to imagine. And then we're going to come back. We're going to talk about Super Bowl ads, which are going to be much more fun to talk about. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Two things in this segment that we're going to talk about. But I want to start with Anthropic and OpenAI and this sort of ongoing bizarreness of who is up and who is down in the AI industry. But my first question for you is, have you watched the Claw ads?

I've watched some of them. Okay. So Anthropic put out full. or one minute long Claude ads. I assume one of them is going to be run during the Super Bowl, or maybe they're each, they're going to be run in different markets.

I don't know. But they put them all out on YouTube, and they have caused, I would say, a firestorm. Next to this, Anthropic also published a blog post explaining in pretty aggressive terms why it will never have advertising in Claude.

The blog post is pretty fascinating. It makes a pretty, compelling argument against ads, which I think is very funny. And essentially promises, like, the basic claw chat bot will never have ads. They said that the interactions you have with your AI bots are so personal and context-rich that even the feeling it would give you to have ads in there, even if they were able to handle the data correctly, and even if everything were targeted right, and even if they made all of the correct decisions, that the very existence of ads in these conversations would

change the nature of your conversations, which is an argument I find really interesting. I fully agree with that. I do too. I do too. And this is what I'm going to get into. So these ads come out, this blog post comes out. Notably, neither one of them mentions OpenAI or Chat GPP by name. It's very clearly done at them. But this causes, I don't know, meltdown is maybe too strong a word, but not by much. Sam Altman goes on Twitter and puts out a one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve paragraph essay responding. The CMO of OpenAI responds,

both of them saying this is disingenuous, this is not what ChachyPT is, this is not what our plans are for ads, it's going to be a whole thing. But actually, before we get too far into this, can I just play you one of these ads? This actually works perfectly as an audio thing. So even if you're just listening,

you'll get the idea here. Hit me. It's a guy in a therapist's office, and the therapist is a bot, clearly. How do I communicate better with me? my mom. Great question. Improved communication with your mom can bring you closer. Here are some techniques you can try. Start by listening. Really hear what she's trying to say underneath her words. Build conversation from points of agreement. Find a connection through shared activity.

Perhaps a nature walk. Or if the relationship can't be fixed, find emotional connection with other older women on golden encounters. The mature dating site. that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars. What? Would you like me to create your profile? And then it pops up and it says ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude. It's very good. It's very good.

And it is, I think, if not an exactly accurate representation of what is going on now, it is certainly an accurate representation of what people are afraid is coming. It's an accurate representation sort of abstract. of what it's like to use Google. Yeah. Like not Google AI overviews, but Google search. Right?

Like, it's basically where Google is going to do. And even Google is kind of like we're not doing this AI overview because they know that it's a little twitchy. Like, nobody wants that product. I think it's very smart of Anthropic to advertise a product that everyone

is saying they're not going to build because now no one can build it. Yes. But so this is what I think has been interesting about this. One of the things that Sam Altman says in his Twitter post responding to this is essentially just that why on earth would we build this?

Our users would hate it. He writes, we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. True. And yet, that is the exact

end state of every advertising business. That is, it is the one they are all after. And it's the thing where you go to Amazon and the first 12 products, quote unquote recommended to you are ads or the first bunch of things in search results are ads. It's the thing where you go to Google and most of what's there is ads but it's not super clear what's what. It's the thing where there are sponsored posts in your TikTok feed that are just like what is TikTok if not a bunch of people making ads for you, right? The goal is to make

this stuff more endemic and more native and more ingrained into the content at all times. That That's what the advertisers want. It's what works. It's like, this is the slope that every advertising business eventually goes down because that's where the money is. Wait, I want to actually talk about that for a second, the slope that every advertising business eventually goes down. I don't know that's 100% true.

I don't know that's historically how every advertising business has worked. Before the internet, the advertisers had not totally captured the content. Right? Like, there's a long history here that isn't just the last 20 years. Sure. The thing you're describing, which I would say broadly we can call inshittification, to quote our friend Corey Doctor. By the way, people should listen to that episode. You did one.

It was great. Is Amazon is a monopoly for buying products. And so they insidified it with ads. And the advertisers get to be right in your face when you go to buy a product to Amazon. Google is the only search engine that matters. And so they've inshitiated it with ads in a particular way. Instagram is the only whatever Instagram is. It is now inshitified with ads and whatever.

way. Also, Mark Zuckerberg, in his particular taste about advertising, his platforms are whatever kind of monopoly. They are, and his taste has led them to be whatever kind of thing they are. I think Mark Zuckerberg earnestly believes that really good ads are indistinguishable from content and that that is the right thing to build towards. Sure. I don't know. He's wrong. I think a lot of other people are more cynical about it. I think Mark Zuckerberg might earnestly believe that if he can just make perfect ads, everybody wins. I have this idea that we're, you know, we're going to try to get Zuckerberg on Decoder this year. It's like, you know, you make a list at the beginning of year.

Like, who should we interview? And he's on there. And if we don't do it, my idea is that I'm just going to do it. I'm just going to read the questions I would ask him for an hour. Like, I have an hour's with their questions to ask Mark Zuckerberg. And some of them are like, what do you believe? And then just pause for as long as you think it'll take him to answer. Well, the standard for a Decoder prep doc is if I just read the questions, it should be a good episode.

That's what Kate and Nick and I always talk about. Oh, that's fun. And so I'm like, we should just do it. Like, he can be here or not. Anyhow, I'm just saying those platforms, those experiences you have, are essentially monopolies of format. Right. Like Google and Amazon will claim they compete and certainly Matti thinks it competes with everything under the sun. And we're going to come to Netflix and Netflix is competing with video games.

But like the interaction you are taking, they're kind of all monopolies. Do you know what I mean? Like Amazon's experience is bad. I'm not going to use Amazon really. You can try, and some people do. But in its interface, it's able to insidify itself with advertising. The only reason I bring this up, and I'm pointing at it, is that is not the case with these AI tools right now. They are, except for maybe software coding specifically, and we can talk about cloud code and all that.

But for the general sort of use case of how do I get along better with my mom, which is what's in this ad, they're all pretty much the same. Yeah, there's no moat whatsoever. There's no moat. And so it's funny that Open AI is having this wild overreaction. And I think it's because they're pretty skittish for a lot of reasons. Yeah. And it's because if they even try to do that, obviously people would switch to Gemini or like there's a there's another thing preventing them from insidifying their product in this way.

And it's not just Sam Altman has good ideas or good taste. It's yeah, in an actual competitive market, if you did this, the first thing people would do was click on Gemini instead and get virtually the same experience in a way that Amazon is not virtually the same experience as Google is not virtually the same experience as Instagram and down the line. Right. But at the same time, what all of these companies are desperately trying to do is build that mode, right? When there are no switching costs, and to be fair, this is a much easier thing for Anthropic to do to Open AI than for Open AI to do to Claude, because Open AI is the dominant player. And it's much easier to like poke at the big guy who is sort of winning in some meaningful way.

there's a great line. Open AISCMO, Kate Rausch, I think is how you pronounce it, also posted a response. And there's just a line in there that just says Chad Chupit has more free users in Texas than Claude, parentheses, trademark, has globally. Very good. I don't know if it's true.

It's a great line. I just want to point out this, her tweet, it's a long tweet. It's just so obviously written by Chatchabit. Yes. And it sucks so bad because of it. Yes. 100%.

That's actually a real problem. The next line is real betrayal is in ads. It's control. It's like, that is grammatically nonsense. And also, what? It's like, have you gotten this point where your product writes so badly that I can see it a thousand miles away? And it undercuts your point. That's bad.

But at any rate, I think what these companies are desperate to do is build those moats to make it harder to leave. This is what personal intelligence is about. This is what memory is about. This is what all of the different app store stuff is about. The more you can build around these models that makes them sticky and also importantly increases the switching costs, that's how you get to this. And then the penalty for introducing ads goes down because people can't leave. So they won't. So you can keep making the ads worse. This is what, like, if Amazon, if Walmart.com was a real competitor to Amazon, Amazon would be a better looking website.

Like, it's that simple. And right now, these things are all, you're very right. They're easy to switch between. They are all sort of in meaningful ways indistinguishable from one another. and so Open AI is the one who is forced to say out loud we're doing ads because it needs to explain to people how it's going to make money at some point here for reasons we're going to talk about here in a minute but Anthropic which is a smaller business

with smaller commitments to take over the world and build God is just able to play a slightly different game They just talk about it less they talk it Anthropic things Claude is live Can we just say it out loud? I mean that's true. It's just very obvious that they think Claude is alive and they can't quite bring themselves to admit it. But the way they talk about like their soul documents and like the nature of intelligence, it's like, Daria, do you think it's alive?

Because it sounds like you think it's alive. Yeah. I think if you ask them that you would get a long answer about the nature of sentience that would really, really bum you out and lead you to believe that, yes, in fact, they do think they're super think Claude is alive. So they're just quieter about it, and they are running a B-to-B business fundamentally and the explosion of Claude Code and its capabilities. They've been more focused, right? They've been totally relentlessly focused on Claude as an agent, Claude as a business product.

We've had their executives on our various shows to talk about that stuff. And so they're ahead because they have focused, whereas Open AI has been throwing spaghetti at the wall the whole time. And they have believed that the core technology of ChatGBT, the core technology of their LLM can do everything, and it obviously cannot. Yep. There's a lot there.

The difference is the enterprise focus of Anthropic means they have revenue that's growing in consistent ways, right? And as more and more businesses adopt it and get useful work done with it, which is really happening now, their revenue is growing faster, but also predictably. Whereas Open AI has hired basically every single person from meta, which is funny because Kate Rouch,

the CMO, says, These ads for Anthropics are running are made by a former meta executive. And it's like, dude, your entire team is former meta executives. Uh-huh. Your head of product, Fiji Simo is a former meta executive. She ran Facebook. Literally ran Facebook. What are you talking about?

Yeah. They have to do ads. It's the only thing that can make them the kind of money that will justify the kind of investment they're asking for. And you can see, and this is why I think they're so skittish and why they're totally overreacting. Those ads need to be aggressive. They need to be effective. And they need to take market share away from Google and meta in order to win. Yes. And that means they're going to be aggressive. There's going to be real advertising

these products. And the fact of the matter is, like, historically speaking, the thing that Open AI has showed us, which is that you're going to have a thread at the top and then at the bottom is going to be a relatively separate display ad. We talked about this last week, right? It's like a 20% of the bottom of the screen just shows a display ad that is kind of about the conversation you're having, but is not part of the conversation you're having. That flatly will not convert in the way that Open AI is going to need it to, in the way that if it just the third paragraph was sponsored,

that would hit different. It just would. There is more money in putting it in the third paragraph than in putting it at the bottom of the page. Yeah, I don't want to fall too far down advertising world, but Google is the master of direct intent advertising

where you just search for, by the way, here's a search I've been doing a lot lately, humidifier that doesn't suck. If you can tell me what that is, I'll buy it from you right. I would pay you the affiliate fee. The answer is the one I bought at Costco that I've already bought four of.

Great. And that's how it goes for everybody. And then they all suck. But like you type that into Google. Google's like, here's pictures. Click on one and you're buying it. Right. And there's a lot of money

in making sure that your picture goes first. You've got to take market share away from that. Which, to be clear, is the greatest advertising and commerce business in the history of the world. Well, if you're going to take market share away from that, you have to compete with that very directly. And so I think the reason Open AI is so skittish.

This is really skittish behavior. One, they have to have an advertising product that works, which means the advertising will be obtrusive in your way and try to capture purchase intent. That's just the way it's going to go. And two, if that doesn't work, the other thing that we should talk about is that no one seems to want to give them as much money as they need to do the things that they have promised to do. And now you're trapped, right? you either need to turn on the revenue like fire hose and sell it yourself, or you need to promise your investors or would be investors that the revenue is coming and they should give you enough money to get there. And that money is like on the order of like one trillion dollars.

And I'm just not sure that's going to happen for opening it. I think that the most clear example of this is Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, who has been kind of randomly, repeatedly asked recently whether this mythical $100 billion deal with Open AI is going to come to pass. The sort of context here is Open AI is, by all accounts, A, trying to raise money and B, racing to go public. Open AI and Anthropic both seem desperate to go public this year by all reporting in all accounts. There's a lot of money in it. There's a lot going on. There's some XAI stuff happening there, too. Like, the AI business wants to go public in 2026. in a very real way.

I think because the bubble is going to pop and everybody knows it. And if you can get in before it does, everybody's going to get rich. Yeah. If we were a different kind of show, our episode this week would be, boy, that bubble seems like it's popping.

Yeah, exactly. But Jensen Wong has been asked a bunch of times about this deal that they, like, announced isn't even quite right. They sort of, they alluded to the existence. Well, in the way that, like, open eye in particular announces deals. Like it was last September.

They're like, Nvidia is going to give us $100 billion. Right. And they're like, lock it down, you know? Right. And then there are a bunch of details. It was a letter of intent that they were going to do this, not a like fully signed and detailed agreement. It was up to $100 billion.

So there's just a lot of like squirly things going on. But every time Jensen Wong gets asked about this, it seems abundantly clear he is not interested in giving $100 billion to. And he's walked back in the course of a week. Yeah. Right. It was first, the Wall Street Journal, I believe, reported, this is on thin ice. he's unhappy with the way open eye is being run. And then for some reason, and you have to really be in the weeds of like the minutes,

a minute's reporting here. But there's this very funny trend that is happening where Jensen Wong is just on the streets of Taiwan a lot. He's just always at dinners with other billionaires in Taiwan. And so he's always being caught on the street and being like asked, are you going to give over a hundred billion dollars? Which is just a weird thing. It's just a weird sub-story in this, which is. It just always makes me think of like the paparazzi who asked celebrities, like, who are you dating or whatever, but instead it's Jensen Wong being asked about $100 billion to Open AI.

It's very good. I have no idea what's going on there. But so he got, he had asked and there's this long video each and watch where he's like on the streets of Taiwan walking out of a dinner. And he says, I'm very happy with Sam. I like working with open AI. I love working with Sam. We're going to invest. It's going to be this amount over time. And they're saying, but it was reported you were going to invest $100 billion. And he says it was up to $100 billion over time. So that's already a walkback. And then like a day and a half later, once again, our man walking the streets, just available. They ask him again, and there's another video you can watch. And he says, no, let me be very clear. We were invited to participate in an investment round. And we're excited to participate because we were invited. But we were just invited.

Like it wasn't. I mean, we're happy. We love being invited. And it's like, you've walked this back a lot from we had a signed letter for $100 billion to we love being invited. You know, we might have other plans. Like, this is a very naked shift in tone. And then he was on stage at the Cisco AI summit

where all news happens. Sure. And he says what I think is the most, like, pessimistic thing about AI, you can say in the context of open AI. He said the notion that the software industry is in decline and being replaced by AI is the most illogical thing in the world and time will prove itself. Open AI's entire thing.

is that you can just talk to its magic Jesus robot and it's going to do stuff for you and that you don't need software. And I think a lot of this is people are looking at Claude and OpenClaw, which used to be Moldbot and all this stuff, and like saying, oh, look, it's just writing software for itself. But this was the investment thesis for OpenAI. Was that it would have an all-powerful AGI agent

that would just take action in the world and you would not need another software business. And all of this money, all this investment would be supported by the idea that all of the money that you were paying to other software would go to Open AI. And here's Jensen saying, walking back the big investment thesis that he said he was going to have, and then saying, actually, the thesis itself is the most illogical thing in the world. There's something going on with Open AI.

Yeah. If you just look at this, there's something happening here. And then in the background of this, just another very funny, like, side note, is just Oracle is randomly tweeting throughout this, that it's confident that Open AI can pay its commitments for Oracle data centers and has nothing to do. with anyone else's investments. And everyone's like, Oracle, what's up? Like, is there some reason you're saying this right now? Your shirt that says we're confident opening eyes money is raising a lot of questions

that should be answered by your shirt. And it's like, this is crazy time. Yeah, it's weird. I'm beginning to understand why Larry Allison is like, I should sell some Oracle stock to buy Warner Brothers. Surprisingly chill alternative. It seems like a much better investment than opening I. Yeah.

I mean, it's really interesting too because I think next to this also there's been this news over the last week or so that Amazon is looking at investing up to $50 billion in OpenAI and that Open AI's models could power Alexa and Alexa Plus in some meaningful way, in the same way that Apple and Google just signed this deal. And I think I've heard from a few people is there is a very real anybody but Google energy happening in the AI space right now, where Gemini has made so many huge advances in Google has made these big deals, has made big advances, Google is like a full-stack AI success story right now. And there's a real sense in the rest of the industry. Like, we cannot let Google win, even if it means this sort of weird,

strange bedfellows energy has to happen where we're all invested with our competitors, in our competitors. And it just gets sort of like messy and oroborosi. But they're like, we cannot let Google win. And it's just so fascinating. And Open AI is like, both seems more tenuous than ever and is also, if you were to say, okay, how do I as Amazon prop up somebody other than Google? Like, of course it's open AI. That's where you go. Amazon also, by the way, massively invested in Anthropic. Yeah, Anthropic is running Alexa right now. Yeah. Like, it's just clear. Like, I have heard anthropic executives say they can identify the personality of Claude inside Alexa. Yeah. I think they're going to open AI because it's cheaper. I think if you're

Open AI, you're now in an economy where you can undercut the bigger players. So Anthropics has having a great run. They're not going to lower prices for their investor Amazon. Open AI can be like, what would be cheaper? And what you want is for Alexa to tell people that they're cute and they should keep talking to them to Greece and age. Like, our product is great at that. Again, I think the models are becoming commodities, right? They're all kind of effectively the same. It's easy to switch between them. So now you're, it's what you would hope would happen. They're competing on price. And then they're trying to build other modes. And I think Claudecote is one of those moats. I think Gemini being everywhere is one of those moats. It's going to

be an Apple device as soon. That's a big moat. Maybe an unrecoverable moat. And I just think Open AI, there's a reason it keeps talking about how many users it has. They think that's a moat. And I'm, I don't know, man. My prediction for the year is we don't end the year with Open AI in the same configuration as it is today. Yeah. That feels like a less spicy take kind of every single day. which is just a wild state of affairs, that it's February 5th, and it already feels like it's kind of in the process of coming true. All right, before we take a break,

we should hit on just a couple of weird streaming servicey pieces of news that happened this week. The first one is this Netflix hearing. Did you watch any of this Netflix hearing? I watched so much of this Netflix hearing. Did you? Okay, tell me about it. All I've seen is like the clips that have been passed around.

Tell me about this hearing. So Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing just about the deal to buy Warner Brothers. And they have a bunch of characters there. Notably, David Ellison, who owns Paramount, who desperately wants to buy this thing, doesn't go. He says it won't be helpful. So he sends his CEO, and senators are mad.

I don't know what else to say about this. Now, you all know me. The idea of the number one streaming service buying the number three streaming service usually just lights me up. Like, that's the man I trust stuff. We shouldn't do that. I want more competition.

What are you going to do? I thought you meant you were psyched about it. I was like, yeah, Neil, I famously loves consolidation. If there's one thing I love, particularly when media companies consolidate to my Warner Brothers. I'm like, that's good business right there. That's how we got a 4-3 gray-scale Justice League movie, David. The height, the height of culture in America was 18T paying for a 4-3 gray-scale justice league movie.

Anyhow, so normally you would say, yeah, yell at them about antitrust. Yell at Netflix about consolidation in this industry. And you kind of got a little of it from the senators. particularly Democratic Senator. Corey Booker at one point says, can we get back to antitrust? And the reason he said, can we get back to antitrust,

is our Republican senators live in an alternate reality where Netflix is a total, unstoppable, and they're going to make everyone gay if they buy WarnerBiles. Like, there's no other, like, literally you sum up the concern

that Republican senators had about this deal, and they're like, everything on Netflix, begins and ends with a demand that you be gay and woke now, right? And poor Ted Sarando's a sitting there. I don't know what I know what you're talking about. But he can't say it.

So, you know, he's like, Senator, we have a wide range of content on our service. You know, there's parental controls. And then you have senators, we just run this clip. The Republican Senator looks at him dead in the face and says, you have potentially, and I quote,

the wokenest content in the history of the world. It's very good. Can we just run the clip? Yeah, let's do. So the question before this committee and you come before Congress, why in the world would we give a seal of approval or a thumbs up to make you the largest behemoth on the planet related to content? It seems as though you have engaged in creating not only a monopoly of content potentially, but the wokenest content

in the history of the world. So forgive me if I'm a little concerned. Senator Schmidt, can I just say it would fucking rule if Netflix was like we have the woken content. Like I don't know what that means. I don't what this dude means by woke. Again, my feeling is that we're probably can say woke now. They mean anything that isn't just like nakedly racist or anti-trans. Like, yes. We've moved the bar. Also, like, do you know what was at the top of Netflix all week this week? Was the movie Independence Day from 1996, which just randomly showed up on Netflix. I do want to say this. Independence Day is the wokenest content of the history of the world. I just want to point, it's very important for me to say this out loud. And then, and then I'll let it go.

To believe this, you have to believe that, people don't have phones, right? It's like the load-bearing assumption of this line of argument that it is impossible to watch anything other than Netflix. When in reality, Netflix is so threatened by video games that it is actively trying to make and distribute video games on phones. In reality, Netflix is so threatened by podcasts that it's out there buying podcasts to run on its phones.

Netflix is so threatened by TikTok and YouTube short. that it is turning its mobile app into TikTok. And it's saying out loud that it's doing these things because it has to compete with all the other content that's available. And so, you know, we can argue on antitrust and market definitions and all this. And like, there's a lot to say about all of that. But the reality is people consume everything. Yeah.

And if people don't want the woke Dave Chappelle specials that are currently available on Netflix, the super woke Matt Rife crowdwork specials that are on Netflix, they can just get them somewhere else and they will. And I don't know. And I watched this hearing and I was like, man, we are all just pretending

that literally YouTube doesn't exist. I mean, this is very Brendan Kari, right? The like, there is no television other than late night hosts is like the official stance of Brendan Kars FCC. And in this case,

it is, Netflix is an unstoppable force of culture. And what's funny is Netflix would desperately like to be that. Right? Like there's, There's been all this really funny chatter over the last couple of weeks about the end of Stranger Things. And Stranger Things was like a hit on scales that I think are sort of unprecedented.

There was a time when the, I think it was either four or five most watched things on streaming were Stranger Things seasons. Like crazy huge. And now Stranger Things is over. And this is sparking like an existential crisis within Netflix because it's like, oh, we don't actually have anything anybody cares about. That's why we have to go get Independence Day from 1996 and promote. promoted to our audience again. And like Netflix is very powerful in that sense, but that is not, that is a different kind of power than even what like Disney has, right, which is a huge set of really important, really long living IP. Netflix has never had that. One of the reasons

is trying to buy Warner Brothers is to get that IP for the first time. So there's just this huge disconnect where it's like they said, Josh Hawley said that almost half of its content for kids promotes a transgender ideology agenda, which is just like a transparentlyly insane thing to say. Yeah. By the way, Ted Saranda is sitting there like, how did you get that number? Yeah.

It's like, did you watch things? I guess. Yeah. Are you ranking it? Yeah. You know, there's a part of me that always wants these executives to just assert their

First Amendment rights. And I felt this way about the social media executives during that period where they're all getting hauled in front of Congress. It's like, no, you know, the first amendment says Congress should make no law. regarding freedom of speech, right? Like, you're Congress and I'm not. So, like, shut up. Anyway, make me the CEO of Netflix and I'll do that.

But I just, I see this push from the, you know, the Republican side of the house to punish Netflix for wanting to buy Warner Brothers. And again, number one buying number three, 99% of the time, I think that's bad. Yes. I'm not sure that I think Netflix buying Warner Brothers is good. famously, you know, buying Warner Brothers has killed you. So even as a business decision, I think that's pretty dicey.

Yeah. So you're saying Netflix in exchange for promoting transgender ideology should be forced to buy Warner Brothers and destroy itself as a company. I'm saying that what's naked about it is that Paramount is sitting there. And the thing, the thesis here is we will yell at Netflix, we'll make them seem so woke, whatever that means, that Paramount. We'll buy Warner instead, and we know that they will do what we want. And that is just a backdoor speech regulation. Yep. That is our government putting its thumb on the scale of free speech in America, not based on what the market wants, not based on where the money is going or who's buying what.

Not based on who has a good app that works well at streaming videos, Paramount, I'm looking at you. But instead, based on whatever they think ideologically aligns with what the government wants. And it was not subtle in this hearing at all. It was absolutely not subtle. Why do you have this show? I don't like that show. My constituents don't like this show. And it's like, wow, we should get away from this.

It really, the social media comparison is a really interesting one because it did remind me of all the times they hauled up like Jack Dorsey and just read him tweets they didn't like. Yep. And like, what are you going to do about this? And he would sort of hem and haw and apologize. And it was, I thought that was totally improper then. And what I always wanted one of those CEOs to do is say, okay, we're going to give you a feed without any content moderation. You don't like, are you don't like our content matter? here's here's the fire hose of garbage that you're asking for and then you will beg us to moderate and i think

in this case you know ted sarando's trying to get a multi-billion dollar deal done i understand why he's basically saying nothing uh but a little bit of assertion of first amendment rights from some of these players would go an awful long way and i i think actually the creative community would like to see that from netflix as well and they're not getting it right now but it is pretty naked that at least one side of the house is like we're going to put our thumb on the scale so that Paramount and CBS, which we now perceive to be our ideological counterparts, will win this deal, which is just not how you want business to work in America, like at all. Yeah, agreed. I'm now imagining what the like very specifically tuned right-wing Netflix would look like, and it's just like episodes of alone.

I think it looks an awful lot like Netflix. Fair. There are a lot of college football documentaries floating around on Netflix these days. I mean, again, this is, you know, you could see whatever we want about Netflix. Like, they get a lot of shit for running Dave Chappelle specials. Right? And they are very proud, you know, free speech warriors for that stuff. And, like, they're not getting any credit for it.

And I think this is, everybody should look at that. You don't get credit for it in the end when you cave in that way. Right. We'll see, I mean, we'll see what happens. Again, it's one buying three. It's not great. But I think the reason Hollywood is still in favor of Netflix is they don't think it will be as nakedly.

partisan or in favor of the Trump administration, as paramount seems to be promising it will be. Yeah. Yeah. So next to this, uh, in, in sort of a very funny twist of timing, uh, Disney announced this new CEO, which, uh, I have come to think of as a, as a sort of fake ceremony. Uh, years ago, Bob Iger appointed a, a new CEO, Bob Chepeck and then COVID happened and Bob Iger just sort of ran him out of the room. Uh, and then came back and, and, did a bunch of... I mean, Cheapagg did blow it. Right?

Like, if you piss off an Avenger that bad, the way that he pissed off... But they were also like, Bob, why is no one coming to the theme parks? And he's like, well, have you heard of this disease that's going everywhere around the world? Like, there was some stuff going on. It wasn't great.

But anyway, Bob Eiger now named the new CEO, Josh Diomaro, who was the head of the theme parks. So one thing I've always come to understand is that the fight at Disney is basically between the executives of the different divisions and it's essentially like content versus theme parks is kind of the holy war inside of Disney. And in this case, theme parks won.

Josh Jamarrow is the head of the theme parks. He's been at Disney for a long time, 28 years, overseas the theme parks, overseas resorts, oversees the cruise lines, lots of stuff. And is now going to be tasked with, A, figuring out how to make those continually huge businesses because I think a thing I've seen a bunch after this came out is that actually there is not a sense that Disney World and Disneyland and this physical business is sort of a, you know, rounding error next to all this other stuff Disney does that in many ways it is actually like the main thing Disney has going for it.

Yeah, it is most of Disney's profit, which it wasn't always, but it is now. And it is also the thing Disney has like we, you know, we talk about moats. Like that's a hell of a moat is Disney's ability to do all. of that stuff around every time it makes a movie makes Disney very powerful. And I like, it's going to be a tough change for Disney because Disney is also doing this huge shift with ESPN, which is about to go fully streaming. They made this weird deal with OpenAI. And now people are, you're going to get to do SORA videos in Disney Plus, which is just a thing that I hate and feels like a complete regret move from Disney.

That they're like, we promise to do videos. We'll just put them in a feed over here. Disney's going to turn Disney Plus into TikTok and where you're going to get a bunch of content from, you're going to let Saur generate it. Yeah, you're going to let people turn themselves into Disney characters and that will be that. But Disney, I think, is the other most important company in this space, right? Like, Netflix and Disney sort of run the entertainment business in most meaningful ways. And they're both, I think, going through pretty huge changes this year, which is just going to be fascinating. You know, my thesis about Disney is that they made a big bet on content and trying to be as big as Netflix and paying for content the way Netflix paid for content. And content has been totally devalued.

Yeah. Like everyone's expectation is that you'll pay nothing for it. And I think Disney's saying, well, you can't steal theme parks. If you're in the theme park and you're hungry, you can't pay less money than what we will charge you. And you can just see the prices going up and the elaborate theme park rides and renovations going. up and that is a bigger, safer business than we will make expensive content and distribute it on the internet. And in so doing, compete with Instagram's army of teenagers that work for free. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I keep saying everyone, you have to, all of this industry is built on the

assumption that you're not competing with the thing you're actually competing with. Like, TikTok is right there. Instagram is right there. That's just an army of people working for free. YouTube video podcasts, they look a lot like talk shows, right? They are not making money the way talk show is made, and they are certainly not paying the union rates that the TV networks have to pay for their talk show crews. And so you're just up against this cost structure that will kill you. It will absolutely kill you. And everything is an AG1 ad.

Right. Like, you're up against an industry that is designed to hawk supplements just at a scale never before seen in human history. And you're like, that sucks. We can't pay a bunch. We can't pay Scarlett Johansson, her bill. We're going to do theme parks because the money is still there and it's protected. There's something there.

By the way, I should point out, Super Bowl Week, and we ran a story that I've been dying to run for ages. We had Yanko Ruckers, who used to work with the protocol, write about the streaming boxes that everybody has, like the cheap, generic Android IPTV boxes. And he wrote about the companies, there's Superbox. There's VCTV, which is an amazing name. They all appear to be botnets and malware. But the story I wanted him to get was the people who buy them and the people who sell them. And I will tell you, that story is just. about rage. It is just people who are so mad at the TV industry that they do not care that they're

buying a hardware instantiation of a botnet to steal TV. Like they're like, I don't care about these security problems. I'm not paying this bill. I'm going to buy this weird box and plug it into my TV. And probably my entire network will be compromised. I just don't care. And not only that, there is zero regret or conscience in any of it. There is no feeling of like, I am doing something wrong. And I feel slightly bad about it. It really makes me think of like the sort of peak days of music streaming. Where it was like, this sucks.

I'm being taken advantage of. None of this exists to serve me. It all exists to make someone else a bunch of money. And in most cases, not even the people who made the thing that I like. It all exists to make Ted Sarandos really rich. So screw that guy. I'm going to pirate it. And there is this like it's almost, it's not only is it not regret.

it's almost self-righteous. You know what I mean? There's a line there from someone who's like, what are they doing, come arrest me? And it's like, you just see that dude, like at his doorway

with a shotgun going to be like, I'm watching this game. Like, it doesn't matter. We actually, more inside baseball, we have an amazing illustrator, Kath Virginia, her work is all over the site.

She's so good. And she, the first illustration, you know, the first, the opening scene in the story is a farmer's market where people are buying

these boxes at a farmer's market next to like banana bread. It's a great scene. It's her first illustration illustration was a farmer's market. And I was like, this is good, it's really cute. We need to capture how fucking mad everybody is. Like, there's just an undercurrent of rage in the story. So she went away and thought about it and came back with Calvin peeing on a satellite dish. It's really good. And I was like, yeah, that's, that's it. That'll do it. That's pretty much how America feels about streaming television right. Yeah. It's very good. It's very good. Yeah. And this is what all these companies are up against. You're right. That there is this feeling of the product has gotten worse. It is. It is. It is very good. It's very good. It is very good. It is. gotten more expensive, it has gotten more like piecemeal and stratified. All of this sucks. This is for no one. My only option is piracy. Yep. That is a very hard thing to win back as a as a consumer facing business. Once you've lost a meaningful number of people to that, that's a really hard fight to go. Yeah, you don't deserve my money. It's whoo, it's rough. Yeah. And again, a lot of people in that story quoted as being like, I hope this puts them out of business, which by the way, it means that there won't be the TV to pirate anymore. No one's thought through step two.

But step one, they're very clear on, which is... They already made Independence Day, Neil. I'm good. You know what I mean? And it appears we'll never pay for another independence again. I watched the sequel. It wasn't any good. Yeah, that's fair.

All right, we should take a rate. Go read Yankos piece, by the way. That is one of my favorite things we ran on the site this week. We'll link all this stuff in the show notes, but Yonko's piece is a particular delight from the lead image on down. We should take a break. And then I'm noticing a deeply terrifying amount of Brendan Carr quotes that you put into the Google Doc that we have here.

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screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay.

I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. Neely, I just, I know it's time. We've already talked about how it's time.

It's time, once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr's a dummy. He's such a dummy. We have a theme song. We have a new one. Joe V sent us another one. Can we run it? This just continues to be the greatest thing that's happening.

Here is this week's theme song. Let's just run this intro again, Neelai. Brendan Carr's a dummy. He's such a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dumb. See, it's just a little singer. It's beautiful. We've got to run at the end of the segment, too.

Yeah, absolutely. So I teased this last week because I knew this hearing was coming. So a theme of the Trump administration is being outraged about fraud, which is very funny because it's the Trump administration. Well, you're very mad about other people's fraud. If you can accuse someone of fraud, literally anything is possible. You can invade their cities and towns. You can do whatever you want. even as you and in fact the principle of the Trump administration, Donald Trump himself, does frauds.

I don't want to say about this. I would point out, for example, that the Trump phone is itself a fraud that we cover regularly. But the Trump administration, and we can find fraud, whew, have we, are we dining out tonight, boys? So Brandon Carr holds an entire hearing about something called the Lifeline program, which I am guessing most broadcast listeners don't pay attention to, don't think about, but which is very, very important to lots of people in this country, it is the program that subsidizes phone and broadband bills. So if you are poor, you don't have the means.

You need to be connected. To participate inside need to be connected. The Lifeline program is there for you. And it's basically just a subsidy program. And it's one of those things that works. Like it exists up until Brendan, every FCC chairman talks about protecting it, about funding it. There's some debates on the margins over where the money should come

from those thing called the Universal Service. It's all this stuff. But no one thinks we shouldn't have it. No one thinks it's bad. Except for Brendan. I was going to say. Who showed up this week and decided that the Lifeline program is full of fraud. And he put out a notice to proposed rulemaking where he claims the FCC's office of

Inspector General found that the states that don't, that run their own verification for being eligible for Lifeline are doing massive fraud. And California is doing all the fraud, 81% of the fraud. And they've taken like $5 million in fraud, which in the grand scheme of billion dollar government programs is nothing. But that's enough fraud for you to punish California, which notably is a blue state. So, Brendan, I'll just read the quote, a recent Inspector General Advisory shows lifeline providers received nearly $5 million in federal providers to provide phone internet services

to more than 116,000 dead people in the three opt-out states. Of that, 80% of the scams took place in California. loan, that type of waste fraud and abuse is completely unacceptable. This is a brand-in-ass high horse. California, notably, responds to this, and they say, no, you're just doing the same dumb thing Elon did, which is that you're over-indexing on the amount of time between someone dying and someone being taken off the program. Right?

So, like, there's just a lag time. California's a big state, a lot of people. There's just a lag time in our reporting between someone dying, us being told their dead, and then being removed from the program. Carr's response to this is saying, and I'm going through this anyway, I'm radically changing the eligibility rules for the Lifeline program to make it harder to be in it, which is a way of punishing poor people, punishing minorities. We know this is true. And is, of course, the whole goal. Which is always the goal.

And so you have just the one poor Democratic commissioner remaining on the FCC Anna Gomez, in her quote, by proposing to use the same cruel and punitive eligibility standards recently opposed for Medicaid coverage. the FCC risks excluding large numbers of eligible households from Lifeline, including seniors, people with disabilities, rural residents, and tribal communities that millions rely on to stay connected to work, school, health care, and emergency services. There are ways to fix this. You can think that Lifeline is full of fraud. You can. That's fine.

And like I said, there are lots of debates on how to fund Lifeline and whatever. You have to know Lifeline is important. You have to care about the people that need broadband to participate in society. and your goal has to be those people that we think are alive and rightfully taking part of this program are getting the service they need and we're going to deal with the fraud. Not California is full of waste, fraud, and abuse,

and I'm going to doge it up, and I'm going to make it so that almost no one can get this because I don't like Gavin Newsom, which is 100% what Brandon Carr is doing, and in so doing, I think he's punishing people who desperately need connectivity. I also think the entire point of the FCC should be get this country connected,

and they've utterly felt, across every administration, and they've utterly failed with this. So here we are. Brandon Carr is a dummy. He is going to cut lots of poor people off from internet service and phone service in the name of punishing Gavin Newsom.

I think that is outrageous. I think that's as morally outrageous as all this first amendment stuff. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show. Defend your callous and, quite frankly, un-American behavior. And I'll yell at you a bunch. I think that'll be fun.

I think that'll be a good use of my free speech and a good use of your time as government servant. You can come on, you can ping me. People can tweet at you. I know you listen to the show. But you still haven't shown up. Teher of the Redcast, that's it. That's been Brendan Carr is Dummy, America's favorite podcast.

Brendan Car is a dummy. He's such a dummy. It does. It hits nicely. It's good. It's got real, like, beginning of a scene of Frazier energy to it. And I mean that as a compliment. Yeah.

It's good stuff. All right. Such a dummy. My first lighting round is, I just want to talk about the, the, the ongoing memory crunch and the ways in which that continues to hit everything. Like, I just think this is kind of sneakily the gadget story of the year is can anyone afford to make anything? Did you read that Wall Street Journal story about Apple no longer being the dominant player in the supply chain? Yeah.

It's very good. Yeah. I also just finished the book Apple in China, which I truly cannot recommend highly enough about the way that Apple's entry into China as a manufacturer. country, like, changed the way that China and Taiwan operate and has had massive ramifications of the technology industry. All very interesting. But the two things that happened this week were Raspberry Pi, the, like, simple computer, I have one right here, it's Raspberry Pi, raising their prices again, because it is harder and more expensive to get memory. And Raspberry Pie doesn't need that many things, but it needs a little bit of memory. Like, this is not,

they're not competing with AI boxes to get, you know, giant quantities of memory. for you, but it is so hard to get your hands on anything. I've been hearing from people who are like, you can't get megabytes of memory anymore. Because this stuff is just, it's not being made. And every single bit of it that's being made has already been purchased in giant quantities by some AI company.

But then the other one was Valve. We've talked a lot about the upcoming steam machines. They made this huge announcement last year, really exciting new hardware from Valve. And they put out a new blog post. Notably, when all the steam machine stuff came out, didn't announce prices. And in part, that was,

because of tariffs, which have made everything really complicated last year. There was also starting to be some of this RAM memory crunch. But in this blog post, I'm just going to read you this chunk of it because it is like as honest and brutal as you could possibly ask for. It says, we plan on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then. The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing, especially around steam machine, and Steam frame. Then Valve said its goal of shipping all three products in the first half this year has not changed.

But we have worked to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. There's no way to read that other than we have no idea what is going to happen. Yeah. No, I mean, look, I had to see a Razor on Decoder at CS and I was like, can you predict your pricing for new laptops like through the year? And he's like, I can't predict him through the end of the week. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's nuts.

Yeah. And I think we're, this is hitting bigger and bigger products and bigger and bigger players, right? I think we, like, Apple is a good example. We think about Apple and this other handful of companies as the kinds of companies that have enough leverage and enough resources and enough planning to have made a lot of these decisions ahead of time. And a lot of these companies have, but that's going to run out. Like, we, we are rapidly running at a point where no one is going to be able to get

their hands on memory to sell you a laptop. Like, that's just. coming. Yeah. Or the bubble's going to pop. It's like... Or the... Yeah.

Or there's either going to be a lot of empty data centers or there's going to be a lot of unsellable laptops. Don't know. But it's like this thing, it just keeps ramping up. And we did the holiday spectacular at the end of last year all about this stuff. And the overwhelming consensus is like the solution to this problem takes a long time because it involves building factories. Like either, like you said, there's going to be.

be some giant economic change that all of a sudden these AI companies are not buying this stuff at this kind of volume at this kind of pace. Or it requires standing up a huge amount of volume that actually a lot of these manufacturers don't want to stand up because when the bubble pops, they might not need it. So we're stuck in this scary spot for it seems like a while longer. I agree. This is like one of the gadgets first of the year. Can there be new gadgets? Yeah. It was really funny. I was actually thinking about this the other day. Like sort of by happenstance. Last year, I bought a new laptop. I bought fancy new headphones. I bought a switch to and I bought a camera. And it was just like, it just sort of happened that I bought all of those

things in the span of one year. And looking back, I'm like, good God, I'm glad I upgraded everything in 2025. I like, I like, the economy is on the precipice of collapse. You're like, I'm really glad I convinced myself to buy a Mac Studio. Yeah. Good thing I got to switch too when I did. Great call by me. Yeah. No, really impulse buying this Mac Studio was a great idea now in retrospect. Yeah, but I think like we're going to keep watching that, but it really feels like that just gets worse and worse all the time. Yeah. Scary stuff.

All right, what's your next one? My next one is very funny for a variety of reasons. It's about Peloton, which is just one of the funniest companies around. So V-Song and I have just been chatting for months, and I keep saying like, you were, she covers wearables for us, she covers health and fitness for us. And I keep saying to her, like, you are a wellness reporter. You don't want to be a wellness reporter. but like I keep joking that like the entire podcast economy is held up by AG1.

Like, which you've now mentioned twice on this show. I have a goal. I have a goal for our AG1 coverage run and set it aside. He has a story coming out, which is why it's on my mind. And, you know, RFK Jr. is out there saying like the future of health care for Americans as everyone gets a health wearable.

Dr. Oz this week, this is a true thing. Dr. Oz this week said, we have to just accept the fact that the best way to get health care to rural Americans is with AI avatars, which is just crazy. Like, what are you talking about? Like, we've tried everything to get healthcare to rural Americans, except providing them with health care.

We're out here doing 5G grape surgery with robots, but we're not like, we should just pay for doctors to live in rural areas. Like, there's something about the tech industry right now that is in a collision course with wellness. And I bring this up because Peloton missed its earnings today, he covered it. And at the very end of the earnings hall, the new-ish see of Peloton, Peter Stern announced,

Peloton is no longer a fitness company. It's a wellness company. Here we are. They're this close to being like, we're a lifestyle brand. It's super close. Well, they're partnering with lifestyle brands. They're doing more strength training. And they said they're doing more strength training content

because many more people are on GLP-1s and you need to lift weights when you're on GLP-1. So that's Peloton. So that's all very fun. Like all of that is just, I, this is just me, pre-apologizing to be on the podcast and she has your wellness report because it's here

whatever switch needed to flip that the tech industry is now the wellness industry. I think Pelotam just straight up announcing that it's a wellness company now that sells hardware subscriptions that switch is here. The other very funny thing is that

their bikes aren't selling well. They just upgraded the bikes with cameras in them. The cameras can watch you as you lift weights and do strength training and monitor form and all this stuff. It's basically the old Peloton Guide camera that was out for a while that no one really bought, and they just sort of like integrated it into the tablet. Yeah. So the bikes and treadmills are basically exactly the same. I think the bikes especially are exactly the same bikes. They just have a new Android tablet with this camera attachment on the top.

Like that's all that has happened here. And Peloton will not just sell people the tablet as an upgrade. You have to go buy a new bike. Or a new tread bill. The new tread plus is $6,700. And there's not a trade-in program. You can't send your old one back and have them to nothing. You just have to outright buy it. And they just will not sell you this tablet.

Even though people have gotten, like when they've gotten the new bikes, the tablets come in a different box with a sheet labeled upgrade instructions. So they're like designed to be put on the old bikes. And lots of people who have bought both are like, I can just unplug the USBC cable for my old bike and plug it into the new tablet and it works fine. And they just won't take the money.

Like I would upgrade our Peloton to the new tablet because Becky and I both do the strength workouts on the Peloton. Like we would do it. It would be fun. And like, I'm not going to buy a new bike. And Peloton is sitting here being like, we're going to force you to buy a new bike.

And instead of taking the money that's in front of them to hit their earnings, they're going to be a wellness company. It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard my entire I've never seen a company not understand how people upgrade hardware.

Like, I don't need a new bike. I need a new tablet. Just sell me the tablet. You can sell me the tablet for a lot of money. I was just going to say, even wildly overcharge me for the pieces that I need.

Like, if I need a new pedal, charge me twice what that pedal should cost. Like, fine. It's so dumb. I mean, yeah, I'm not saying something to cost.

I'll pay hundreds of dollars to upgrade the tablet. I've had this bike for a long time that screen is actually cracked on the tablet. Like, let's do it. Yeah. And they're like,

nope, new bike. And I'm like, yeah, I'm super not doing that. But instead, they're going to be a one-less company and target their strength workouts to GLP-1 users. Good times. It's good. It's good stuff. Anyway, if you work at Peloton and you have any insight over whether they're just going to sell the tablets, as they are already packaged to be sold as upgrades. Let us know, because I'm dying. At some point, Peloton's going to break, and they're going to have to sell the upgrades. Because all the Facebook groups are like, yeah, we're just going to wait for you to sell the upgrade. It's very good. It's, it's, it's,

ridiculous. So can I just random brief aside. So right on the other side of this wall behind me is just a little tiny like sort of storage utility room that we've been wanting to repurpose as like an exercise room. So I've been shopping for treadmills. And I have never had a

less pleasant experience than trying to comparison shop treadmills on the internet. First of all, every single display ad I see now is for treadmills. Because I guess it's such it's a like thing you don't buy all that often and they're pretty expensive and when you shop for it, you shop with intent.

So, like, everybody is super incentivized to just pour ads down my throat about it. So I'm getting them everywhere. But also, I don't know if you're aware of this, but according to the internet, every treadmill is exactly the same and they're all terrible. So, like, I literally went to Dix the other day

because I was like, I just need to see some of these with my eyes in person. And then I was like, oh, all of these look the same to me and just left. So I've accomplished nothing. Very good. If anyone has a treadmill, you would like to just put in this room behind me,

that would be fantastic. I'm going to do just a quick pivot on my next one because there's some breaking news on Theverge.com, which is that Bitcoin is kind of in the middle of just totally collapsing. It's been cratering kind of for a while.

It has dropped in a big way over the past week. But just today, like as we're recording, the price of a Bitcoin dropped below $65,000, which for a long time has been seen as kind of like an intellectual floor. That puts it basically

where it was in November of 2021. It gives back all of the gains since the Trump administration. There's a lot of scary stuff happening in the crypto world right now. Bitcoin is believed to be immune to all of this other

stuff that is going on, right? And all this stuff around tariffs and all of the sort of frothiness of the market, Bitcoin is supposed to be the thing that solved for all of this and was immune to all of it. And obviously, it has not been. As as Trump continues to like run roughshod over the financial policy of the United States, that's getting messy. But we're at this moment where like, I have never been sort of a believer in Bitcoin as a thing. I don't think that's, but what this means is that there

is a tremendous amount of money just disappearing. And the thing that happened relatively recently that a lot of people really cheered on in the crypto world was it became legitimized in really important ways. You started to be able to buy Bitcoin ETFs. You started to be more people had more access to Bitcoin and more like regular people and and more sort of traditionally like lowercase C conservative investors were buying into Bitcoin because it was believed that this administration was friendly to it, that it was going to establish some long lasting crypto friendly regulations. And now it's just like it's in a it's in a tailspin. And all the shit coins are gone. Yeah. Bitcoin was I don't remember who it was. We had some decoder guest who, who,

just very confident. I was like, Bitcoin is the alpha and the omega. Like everything can happen, everything else, and Bitcoin will remain because it is the only one that's pure and good.

And maybe you believe that and maybe you don't. But I definitely believe that all the shit coins were just along for the ride. Yes. And they're done. Like,

they're not going to come back. Maybe Ethereum has some other utility. I think Ethereum is the only one that might live in the space of Bitcoin. Yeah. Because it has this other utility associated with it. Yeah.

Like Bitcoin is in its own tier. Ethereum is probably below it in its own tier. And then it's just nothing. Like a bottomless pit of nothing. You don't think Dogecoin is important? I will ask the same question I always ask about Bitcoin. Every time comes up, no one has ever made a case for why you should transact in a Bitcoin. Until today, if you had a Bitcoin, the only rational thing to do was hold it.

And I'm sure today people are still saying you should hold it. But if you could not make a case for actually using a Bitcoin as a current. there is no case to be made for Bitcoin. And the only case that anyone I don't ever really make was you can do crimes with it, which is probably why Jeffrey Epstein was so deeply invested in making sure it happened. Sure. I mean, there are a lot of people in my life who are crypto people. And the ones I've respected all along were just the people who were like,

this is a way I'm going to make money. Like, it's fine. Treat it like an asset class, right? Like, don't stop pretending to me that it is the future of anything on the internet. It is just a way to put. to put money into something and hopefully make some money on that thing. I just had this image of you and like your baby son talking about crypto. And, you know, like, Arthur Lewis being like, we're going to make money.

It's not. Let's just say there is a group chat that I'm in. Okay. At least one of whom listens to this podcast. So hello to you. And some members of that group chat were forced to start a crypto only group chat because the rest of us got tired of listening. to them talking about crypto.

That's great. This is where we are. That's very good. And, but I, to me, it's like, we're at this place now where at least it was supposed to be stable, right? It wasn't the whatever, like, crypto, Bitcoin to the moon, whatever. But this is like, there are real ramifications to this thing, especially that people in, in our world, have spent a decade investing in that just wiped itself out. More, more than a decade. Yeah.

Way more than a decade. We're 15 or even 20 years into. to Bitcoin. I'm just going to point out, like, the idea that it was stable really rested on the idea that it was an asset like gold and not a useful currency. Gold, by the way, absolutely crushing it recently. Well, now you know what you're going to talk to your group chat about when it's I mean, this is the thing, right?

Like, I think the this is going to be, if nothing else, even if the price recovers, this becomes a really useful piece of evidence that actually the thing you thought Bitcoin was. Even if you boiled it all the way down, it's not that. It turns out it's actually nothing. I'm not going to pretend that I'm a finance reporter. One of my group chats is with a world-class finance reporter. She routinely takes me to school.

So, like, I'm not even going to try to pretend. We should, actually. That would be fun. But anyway, that $65,000 mark was viewed as like an important threshold. And it is below that and falling. All I'm saying is the tech industry invented a bunch of stuff that wasn't useful. And Bitcoin was like the number one thing that wasn't used. useful of this whole time.

NFTs weren't useful. They just went away. Crypto broadly, no one can identify a use for crypto. And Bitcoin, except for it's going to get me rich. That's it. That's all anybody had.

There's no reason to transact in Bitcoin. Not to full circle back to Jeffrey Epstein, but it turns out that that's enough for an enormous number of people. And this is the thing that always drove me crazy. Like, just say it's about the money. Like, stop pretending you're about anything else.

Yeah. You know, we, there's just another tangent and I promise I will tell a joke about Google. I swear to you, I will. The beginning is for the AI boom. We got a lot of notes.

It's like, why are you covering this? It's just crypto again. And like, yeah, you know, like you can squint and be like, yep, the GPUs are all the same. It's a bunch of data centers doing a bunch of nothing, right? And we're even at the point now

where, you know, it seems like a bunch of AI CEOs are kind of like begging you to use their products. to support the valuations. And there's, there's some parts of this that rhyme. But right underneath that is like,

oh, it's actually useful. Right. In like some cases in some ways, some people are finding real uses for AI. And that's what makes it different. And I, I just keep coming back. The tech industry for,

after doing smartphones, did not find the next most useful thing. And crypto is just high on my list. I don't know what's going to happen with that, but the idea that no one, no one for a decade has been able to tell me why you should spend a Bitcoin has always been the biggest right flag.

Yep. All right, here's my joke about Google. I'm just going to read the headline. Ready? Google Home finally adds supports for buttons. Okay, this is huge news. Don't undercut this. Is it?

Is it huge news? So, can I just give you a brief bit? All that AI and here we are. My favorite part is Gen Tuwee wrote a story about this and the top of the post is just a finger pressing a button. It's like, well, how else do you illustrate this story? That tech industry. So Jen came on the show on Tuesday to answer a hotline question from somebody who was enraged

because they had bought IKEA buttons that didn't work on their Google home. And Jen was like, it's not you, it's Google. And Jen and I recorded this at like, I think it was like 11 a.m. Monday morning. The show went out on Tuesday. And between then and the launch of the show, Google announced buttons. So does Jen get credit? Does this mean Google's phones are listening to us as we talk and they finally ship the thing?

Who's to say? I think it's very funny that everyone is so excited about these IKEA buttons and they just like didn't work on the box. Super didn't work. It seems like IKEA is scrambling. Yes. It also seems very funny that the major smart home platforms are so bad at the concept of buttons.

Can I show you? Can I show you my Apple Home notification for a button on the door to get out of our house? It's just a button that turns on a light. Okay. So Apple Home does support buttons, but it does not support buttons as toggle switches, right? Okay.

So you can have a button that turns on a light. Right. But that same button cannot then turn that light off. That's why the IKEA buttons are two buttons. Yep. Yeah. So in order, so in one of those buttons, Virchast listeners, no, I have a smart garage opener, right?

So in order to make one of the buttons on the smart control panel, both open and close the garage, I had to write a script in shortcuts. It literally checks the state of the garage door and then does the opposite thing whenever you push the button. No. And it's like, I shouldn't have to do this. Like, there's a lot, there's a trillion dollars of R&D in this phone.

Seriously. You should support toggle buttons. So anyway, I'm proud of Google for arriving here at buttons at all. I would like to convince all of our richest companies in the world to consider the concept of buttons that both turn on and off. Just think about it. It's right there for you.

That seems like a lot. It does seem like a lot. That's what Claude Code is for. I hear Matter is working on that for 2037. It's going to be sick. We should mention one last thing, which we can talk about next week. I picked Google Home buttons.

We needed something light to end on. But it is true that Elon announced that he's going to merge SpaceX and XAI, which means SpaceX will own Twitter. which does feel like a full hour of the Birchcast. It does. So we're going to set that aside. I think at some point in the relatively near future,

we're going to have Liz Lapato come on, and we're all just going to yell at each other about IPOs. And it's going to be our least popular episode ever, but we're going to have a great time. Very good. All right, but for now, we should get out of here. My last one, by the way, is we talked a little bit about aluminum, the Google OS combining Chrome and Android.

Sean Hollister did some great reporting and found some documents that suggests that that is going to, A, take longer and be be messier than you thought. So all of the hopes that you did not get up about aluminium, keep them low. You know what I mean? Like, we're the year 2034 was bandied around several times that piece. It's rough out there.

But all right, we should get out of here. Keep sending us emails. Yeah. We've gotten a lot of feedback on the way we were talking about all the Minnesota stuff last week. I genuinely, you and I both, I think, want to hear how we should keep covering the Epstein stuff, how we should keep. keep covering sort of what this means for the tech industry,

how we cover the business stories inside of it? Like, can we just write about the Surface RT without having to write about the EPSC files? I don't know. By the way, Sinovsky is just tweeting about shipping software right now. No, no thought to what's happening in the background. The amount of posting through it that is happening right now on X in particular is just astonishing.

It's quite a lot. But anyway, that's it for the show. Thank you to all of you for writing in. Thanks to everybody who calls the hotline. got a lot of fun stuff. People have sent me a lot of phone recommendations. Neil, did I tell you about this? I'm beginning a phone journey. I'm tired of my iPhone 16. So I've decided that instead of just getting a new phone like a normal person, I'm going to try every phone I can find. And then like, I'm not a phone reviewer anymore. So I like, I haven't used all the new phones.

So I'm going to go use all the new phones and then presumably never be able to successfully text anyone ever again. That's right. But I'm going to get a new phone and I'm pretty excited. I'm excited for you. The funniest outcome here is if I just buy an iPhone 17. It will piss off everybody, but I'm very excited about it. All right. Keep emailing us, keep calling us. Virgast at the verge.com. 866, Verge11, is the hotline.

The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and the box media podcast network. This show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neelai, rock and roll.