The Vergecast - Meta's court losses could be just the beginning

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

We start with some important business: Nilay has a flight to catch, and is very worried he won't catch it. Also, it's Apple's 50th anniversary next week, and we're going to spend the week debating which Apple products are the best Apple products. (Head to the ad-free Vergecast feed to hear our selection show!) But mostly, this episode is about social media. In two key trials this week, juries found social platforms liable not for the content they display but for the actual structure and features of the platform. That could change the way social media companies act, and how users fight back. After that, it's time for the silliness of the router ban, the latest in the chatbot wars, and an update on what's happening with Grammarly's Expert Voices feature. Further reading: Rank your top 50 Apple products Verge subscribers, here’s how to set up ad-free podcasts  The TSA is broken — is privatization next?  What is ICE actually doing at American airports?  Meta misled users about its products’ safety, jury decides  Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case  Social media on trial: tech giants face lawsuits over addiction, safety, and mental health What it was like to watch grieving parents stare down Mark Zuckerberg in court  A bombshell child safety leak changed Meta — for the worse  Internal chats show how social media companies discussed teen engagement  2026 is the year of social media’s legal reckoning  The US government just banned consumer routers made outside the US  The United States router ban, explained FCC green-lights Nexstar's $6.2B merger with rival TV station owner Tegna Cox Communications not liable for pirated music, Supreme Court rules  Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me  North Carolina man pleads guilty to AI music streaming fraud.  Apple is testing a standalone app for its overhauled Siri  OpenAI is planning a desktop ‘superapp’  This is Microsoft’s plan to fix Windows 11  OpenAI just gave up on Sora and its billion-dollar Disney deal The age of piracy ended with LimeWire | Version History 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. You know, I'll tell us here. Hey, buddy. Do you want to do my whole riff about how AI is Bluetooth? I can do it. I got like a hot ten on how AI is Bluetooth. I think you've done this on this show before. I have absolutely done it.

It's like, it's my favorite thing. I'm popping up in diners across the country. I'm like, you know, hey, that's kind of like Bluetooth? Like, everybody knew what Bluetooth is going to be, but they had Bluetooth headsets. They did it. I did it. I really appreciate the extent to which Bluetooth just gets strays all over. the birdcast.

Bluetooth, the sort of thing that is like not that important to most of people's lives, it just makes your headphones work. Oh, I totally just read Bluetooth is totally important to everybody all the time. It's like a magical technology that exists, but also it breaks a little bit. And so you see the limits of human ingenuity. It's technology, baby. All right, we have a lot to do this week. And we're doing it at 10 o'clock in the morning on Thursday, which is, the vibes are

very different when we do the show in the morning because you have somewhere to go, which we're going to talk about in a second because you having somewhere to go is actually news this week right now. We're going to talk about some Apple stuff. Next week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. We are doing a bunch of stuff. We're going to talk about something you and I have been doing to kick off this whole thing. We have some news about meta and YouTube in court on trial. Big important verdicts coming in that we have a lot to talk about.

We have a lot of lightning around stuff to do. A truly remarkable Brendan Carr is a dummy week in store. Get ready. I am particularly excited about this one. But, Eli, first we have to start with you. You have two very important life updates, both of which are very relevant to the Vergecast and not just because they're you.

I'm genuinely serious. You have a flight to get on today. At 5.30 p.m. It's 10 a.m. You have a flight at 5.30. Honest to God, what time are you going to leave to get to the airport? I'm going to leave at 1 p.m.

The airport is half an hour away from my house. So you're going to get there with four hours to spare, basically. Yeah, that's basically my plan. And you are not normally an early to the airport guy. No. You're like a roll in. walk straight through security and onto the plane at the last second. Well, I got to be, I got to be honest.

That's the version of me without children. Fair. The version of me with children is like a newbie. Like no idea what's going on first day. Like, how does a stroller work? Like, that's bad. The version of me without children, real pro, no bags, everything in a kind of a giant backpack that just slides through security in and out.

I like to do one day trips. I know you like to do one day trips. Love them. Because we both have children and we're trying to get back. That person has been utterly disrupted by the TSA. Yeah. So that, you know, everyone knows this. The Department of Homeland Security is shut down.

Airport lines across the country are out of control. There's a big argument over refunding DHS and paying TSA agents once again. It comes down to whether or not ICE agents can wear masks and other things Democrats want. There's some negotiation back and forth. We have a great piece on the site about the push, the Republican push, to privatize the TSA, which was actually part of Project 2025, whether or not all this is going to lead to that at various airports across

the country. And then our excellent reporter, Gabby DeVay, was actually at JFK, figuring out what ICE is doing at the airports, which, spoiler alert, standing around is what they're doing. I mean, because they obviously, you don't want people who are untrained to do security training. So that's a bomb. Like, that's that, you don't want that.

So there's some amount of maybe that will actually start happening as training occurs. All of this means that I'm flying to Chicago today, and I'm going to the airport four hours early, which means we're recording the Verchast in the morning. So if anything breaks this afternoon, you can blame the TSA.

Yeah. Well, not the TSA. They're not getting paid. You can blame the Trump administration holding TSA hostage for the Save America Act, for this like crazy voter ID act. Anyhow, that's where I recorded the Vurchase really. Yeah.

It is just full chaos out there. And it is like, add this to the list of sort of really visceral outcomes of weird political machinations, right? It's the sort of thing that it is like, oh, it is blindingly obvious what all of this chaos is doing because you missed your flight. You know what I mean?

Like, often politics is the sort of thing that happens and it is not all that obvious how it trickles down to like your minute to minute life. This is the kind of thing that is very obvious. And whoever you want to blame for it,

and the answer is kind of everybody. Yeah. It's all bad out there. It is all bad out there. No end in sight is basically the answer. And I mean, I've, we've done the Verchcast and, you know, wrapped up at four. And I have blazed out of here and gotten on a flight to Chicago at 515. Yeah.

It's just a thing you can do. Yep. And that is not what's happening today. By the way, I'm going to Chicago for a fun thing. The American Bar Association invited me to speak at their tech show, which is where they talk about tech and the law. So if you're in Chicago, you're probably listening to this on a Friday. I'm at the ABA tech show.

I'm going to do the keynote and talk about AI and the law and all that stuff. coming together. I'd love to see it. Come say hi. They're like, what do you want to talk about with AI? And I was like, ah, and I have a lot of ideas. So the keynote might be like six hours long. But that's what I'm doing. I think it'll be really fun. And there is a lot going on with AI in the law. Just give you a quick preview. The, I think a lot of people react to the law like it's software code. Because it's like structured language and you like issue commands to a system. But instead of a computer, there's like a judge who's 800 years old whose brain has been cooked by Facebook memes, and those are different things. And so you see how much sort of the AI companies are like,

well, we did it to software. What's some other structured language we can go screw with? And like, the legal system is right there. And like contracts are boring. No one reads those. And yeah, so that's the, that's the talk. If you are in Chicago, you happen to be a lawyer and you want to go to the ABA Tech Show, I'll be there. I'll be there. I love to see it. Love that. It's still weird to me, by the way that people invite you to do like keynote speeches. It's like there's this, like, abstract way that I understand that you are like very important, but you're also just like the, the dofuss I make a podcast with all the time? Do you what I mean? It's just like, it's nice to occasionally remember that other people also like you. And somewhere out there, someone

thinks you're impressive. We're going to see how like 5,000 lawyers feel about me at the end of the speech. Who knows? But we're going to give it a shot. Do you try to sound like a lawyer in front of a bunch of lawyers? Have you thought about like what's the, what's the cadence of speech in front of a bunch of lawyers? Slow, because you gotta fill the time. Hello, welcome to Chicago.

A little bit. I mean, you know, you try to reach people where they are. Look, the idea that I was ever a lawyer is like deeply hilarious to me. Like,

I was not good at this. And so I don't even, I don't pretend that I can do what these folks do. What I think that they want me to talk about is there's a bunch of stuff happening with AI in the worlds that we talk about every day.

And it is, it's hard in every little bubble to see outside the bubble. And in particular, because I have a little bit of background, you know, I'm married to a lawyer, all this stuff. Like, I can see in both sides of the coin a little bit. Yeah, I mean, that's the conversation. But it really, like, if you think AI is doing weird stuff to other industries, it is doing particularly weird stuff to the law.

And you kind of see it bubble out all the time. Yeah. Well, we have a bunch of law stuff to talk about. We too. So this is good warm up for you. But we should talk a little bit about Apple 50. I should say right up front that if you want to hear Mila and I spend the better part of two hours just litigating Apple products and which are the good ones, we have a whole separate episode of the Vergecast that is available for subscribers only. This is, I think, the first time ever we've done a subscriber only.

And I cannot tell you if this is a benefit or a punishment. Unclear. Because it really is two hours of me and David, just fully crashing out, trying to make, not even rank the list, just make all list of 50 Apple products. It is the most,

let's name some guys, Vergecast we've ever done. And I had a blast. And, but if you get three minutes in and you're like, they're just saying the names of laptops to each other, you can turn it off because it doesn't. But like emotionally saying the names of laptops to each other.

Yeah. But anyway, so the reason for that is that this is about to be the 50th anniversary of Apple. Apple is doing a bunch of stuff. David Pogue wrote a very good book. Have you read any of his book, by the way? I've not read his book.

I have a galley. And I know he just did an event with Joanna, which seems like it went really well. Yeah. It's very good. And it is, holy God, is it deep. And it is the kind of book that is like,

if you've read a lot of these Apple history books, there's a lot of stuff in there. But he also found a lot of new stuff. Tells the story kind of from beginning to end in a way that is neat and cool. Good book. Highly recommend it. Apple's doing a lot of stuff.

Tim Cook is like, rocking out to Alicia Keys at Grand Central these days. But one of the things that we're doing for our coverage is we built this very cool ranker. Shout out to Graham Macquarie and our team and the whole design team for putting all this together where you can rank the 50 best Apple products of all time. Is that a very fraught thing for a bunch of reasons? It sure is.

So what you and I did was we went through and our job was to just select the 50, not put them in order, but just take every Apple product that has ever existed and winnow them down to 50. And if you go to the verge.com, I believe starting right now, and we'll put it in the container post with the show notes for this episode, it'll be all over the verge. If you go to the verge.com, you will not be able to miss it for the next week. You can then go in and do the ranking system. And it's actually very cool. You're going to be able to basically have two things pitted against each other. And you will pick the one that you like the best.

And it'll just give you sort of a like, I forget how many thousands of possible. combinations there are. And as a group, we are all going to rank the top 50 together. So you'll get to see the live ranking of how all of these things stack up against each other. It's very cool and very exciting. The ranker is actually really cool. It uses the ELO ranking system, which is designed for chess players. We kind of had to modify a little bit to make it work for 50 Apple products. But basically everything gets a little score and then they go head to head, the scores go up and down, which is why you can watch the live ranking. It's very cool. I sat there looking at an IMAG4 in the original iPod yesterday.

And it's just like, choose. It's like, I can't. You know? There's no getting around that. But you get to see all those mashups together. The hard part was making the list of 50 products. Yeah. Yeah, which again, you can listen to Nelai and I spend a lot of time doing.

But I'm curious, you and I, this is now the third time you and I have sat here and talked about this together. We're not doing this together. I want to know what you think. I have one product specifically in mind that I'm like, I am pretty sure a bunch of people are going to be mad at me about this, that it isn't even on the list. Oh, really? I will put,

we'll put the whole list on the site so you can see what they all are. I don't, me reading 50 Apple products to you in a row is probably not great podcast. But I'm curious, is there anything you think of that is not on the list that you're like, people are going to be pissed. No, there's one that's on the list that every time I saw it when we were testing the ranker.

I was like, why do we pick this one? What is that? It's the Intel Mac Mini. Like, who can get out of here? Right. Like, every time I saw it, You lose.

All right. See, this is why two hours. You can listen to two hours. The Intel Mac Mini is when the Mac Mini became good. Sure. Sure. Mac Mini.

I'm on a Mac Mini right now. Mac Mini rules. Intel Mac Mini? No, God, no. Please. By the way, the other very fun thing you can do in the ranker is you can hit the little about button and read the blurbs. David and I wrote for every single product.

And boy did my friend David and I argue in a Google Sheet. There are like three or four where I found them. it's just like, oh, Nilai deleted mine and then wrote about how much he loved the titanium power book. And that's just what this is. That's what happened. And I was like, I can't do them all. So you could, you see, there's, this rancor is a lot.

Like, there's a lot about David and I's 15-year relationship that's somehow built in this rancor. Very much so. Yeah, we had a blast. I will say the only, the only one that keeps coming to my mind is there's going to be people who are like, why isn't the iPhone 3GS in here? And to all of you, I want to say that's not correct. That makes no sense.

you're wrong and that's fine and I love you. Go rank Apple products. So here's what I want. We're going to put all 50 in a list somewhere. Go do our ranker. But also, if you want to make and send us your own top 50, I want to see them. Yeah.

We'll give you the list and you can just rank them however you want. I want to see all of them and then you and I next week, we're each going to make our lists independently and then we're going to see what everybody on the site does collectively. And then we're just going to fight to the death about it. I don't know what's going to happen.

You're going to do a fifth turn of these 50 Apple products. I'm really excited. I haven't thought about the G3 Power Mac this much since it came out, like since I physically had one in a computer lab in school. At some point in this whole process, I did like three hours of research on Bondi Blue as a concept. It's Prince Bondite. It's it might be. I can't confirm that. But anyway, we're going to have tons of great coverage. The Ranker is just one piece of it. We have a bunch of really fun stories coming. Jason Snell has written some stuff for us. A bunch of other people on staff have written stuff.

It's great. It's going to be a really fun series. Guess who wrote the piece titled, for $200 more you can get a MacBook Air? I won't say, but just take a guess. Who's to say? And did it cause that person a brief existential crisis about the course of their career? Also, who's to say? But yeah, it's good stuff.

I'm very excited about it. I think it's going to be a fun week. We also have a bunch more Apple stuff coming on Tuesday's show. We have a version history about the Macintosh with you and John Gruber and me coming this weekend. It's going to be a very aptly week. Yeah. I'm pretty excited about it. It's being a lot of fun.

And I have some personal news. Do you? Yeah, it's very important. And I realize what people feel when people say, you have some personal news. And I want you to feel that because it rises to that occasion, I think. Okay. You're quitting to be a lawyer. No.

Like hard you turn back to the thing I ran from. No, no, no, the driver board to turn my 5K iMac into a monitor is, it has cleared customs from Shenzhen, where it was made, and is on its way. It's on a UPS truck to my house. What is this piece of equipment? There's lots of them, my friend. When you're like, I'm going to turn my 5K imac into a monitor, you enter a subculture full of people who do this, who buy all of the boards and test them. who have deep ideas about whether or not you want to convert the speakers and the microphone as well. There are companies that specialize in this.

There are model numbers. I spent a full day. So the first thing you do is you've got to open the IMac and figure out the model number of the display in your IMac. I see. Which I think is just what keeps people from doing it because it's like steps. You can't just like do it in an afternoon. You have to take the thing apart and then you have an IMac with a floppy display that has to be tucked in a corner with tape on it. while you order to part from China

and then it takes more than a week to get to your house. Literally, I think this is what kept me from doing it. There's like a lot of these boards. I bought one from what appears to be a company as opposed to some guys. It's a Stone-Taskin R-1820. It can do everything.

It has like a speaker driver in it. You can like redo the speakers. I'm not going to do any of that. But it's the one that doesn't need a fan and it can just run off one H-TMI. So that's what I wanted. I'm very excited about this. I'm probably going to blow up this computer.

Those are the two feelings that I have. Have you done the research on like what kind of labor from you this process is actually going to require? It's super easy. I mean, the hardest part is cutting the adisa that holds the glass to the shell, and it is scary. Like that part sucks. But I did it with a guitar pick. They saw little pizza cutters. Like you can, it's literally a wheel on a handle that you can like pizza cut the display.

It's very cute. But yeah, once you get it open, you just take all the parts out. you figure out what I'm on the board, and you plug in the two cables and you're like, off to the races. Okay, so this is a lot of confidence, which brings me to the most important question, are you willing to live stream yourself doing this in front of? No, no, no, no. And I would like to just issue my conspiracy theory because I love watching a tear-down video. Love it.

It's so my favorite stuff to do. I also love watching, like, the videos where people like sandblast old tools and like fix them up again. Oh, yeah. That's all very good. The thing where it's like, this is rusty and now it's not. It's all works that forever. I mean, I'm like, I should buy a sandblaster. I don't, whatever.

So I love watching Tarynine video, and my conspiracy theory belief is that everybody makes teardown videos buys at least two so they can practice on the first one, so the actual Teradine video is good when they make it. And so we are, I don't have two I hacks to practice on. So we're going to do it. And then, well, you know, we'll talk about it. We'll see if it works. But I sat there with the Studio Display XDR in my cart because there was $100 off

at Amazon. And I was like, I can't, I have to try. I have, I have to give it a shot. You made a lot of promises about $1 off. I did make a lot of promises about $1. But it's already $100 off. Yeah, Amazon has a $100 off. That's interesting.

I came very close. I almost got to peer pressure. But I was like, I got to do it. I got to, I have to try. Well, this is great for you because now it's all upside, right? Either this works and suddenly you've turned RIMAC into a terrific display or, oh, no, whoops, did my best, got to go buy a $3,000 monitor. Yeah, that's kind of how this feels.

I have to say by the. the people out in the ether that I know who you would expect to be buying a $3,300 monitor are all buying it. And everybody seems to love this thing. Yeah, I know. I know how this is going to go for me. But you remember, the first studio display was, it was kind of a mess in certain ways. Like a lot about the screen was really great, but like the webcam really sucked.

It just wasn't a perfectly executed product. No, I think I gave it a thing like a six. Yeah, the feelings about the XDR are like rapturous so far. I don't need to know this information. What I need to do is take apart my 10-year-old IMAG with a little pizza cutter and a guitar pick and put in this like suspiciously sourced driver board that came to my house from China

and then be happy. What could possibly go wrong? This is good. I'm happy for you. I think this is going to go really well. And I'm going to come to your house and live stream it while you do it. It's going to be great.

Whether you like it or not. I'm just saying this is the news. Apple's turning 50, and I'm finally doing the IMAQ project. A lot of people said I wouldn't do it. Here I am. Are these two things connected? No, it was really the like, am I going to carry the $3,200 box past my baby who has to go to college?

Like, I don't think I am. That's where that came. Wait, also, one more Neli life update. Did you actually decide to keep your MacBook Neo? I confess I returned mine. We should just, I should just say this out loud. I took it back. I attempted to give it to Anna, my wife,

because I have a MacBinney and a MacBook Air, and I thus have no use for a MacBook Neo. But I gave it to Anna because she has like a kind of crummy Samsung Chromebook that is like, it works fine for most things, but every once in a while she needs proper Excel, basically, and is like annoyed at using a Chromebook. So I was like, look, here's the Neo. Do you just want this?

And she basically looked at it and was like, I have no use for this. Like she reminded me about whenever you have tried to upgrade Becky's, Kindle and she's just like, what do you mean I already have a Kindle? It does the thing. That was Anna's response to me trying to give her the Neo. So I took the Neo back. I took it back and basically swapped the Neo and an iPhone 16 for an iPhone 17 and a gift card. And now here we are. But you, I think, are potentially keeping the Neo. Today would be the day. Two weeks are up. So it's staying. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to run either open claw or clawed computer you saw it and just have some agents.

and see what happens. I've decided that I have no feelings about Instagram as a platform, especially after the news this week, which we'll talk about. And so I'm like, what if I just automate my social media in some way? Interesting.

I should take some runs at using these tools for actual purposes, not just I set up an agent and made it send me a digest of the news. Like, you know, having done that, I'm like, this means nothing to me. Yeah. Right?

Like, I think it's, It's important for us to use the tools and, like, have deep familiarity with them, particularly so when the CEOs of the companies come on the show, I'm like, I've used your tools and I have thoughts about them. Like, that connection is important to me. Yep. So I think I'm going to use my Neo as like an open claw machine. And I don't know exactly what it means to automate my social media. Like, I'm not going to like automate my blue sky.

My blue sky is where I'm going to just like have feelings, which as you can see. But we generate like a lot of video clips and they need to go to a lot of places. And I'm very curious to see if. can actually make a workflow like that happen on my personal accounts. And what that, just honestly, what that feels like. Because we are up against just like absolute machines that do that all day long. Yeah. And so one, I think we need to like understand how the modern environment works and like what our competitors are doing.

And two, I think there's there's something important about what it feels like to have an agent running that I want to experience, again, outside of the like, I set it up and like, oh, that's neat to like actually try to do a thing. So we're going to see. I think the Neo is that's what it's going to be for, which is absolutely not what Apple is selling a Neo for. No, it's precisely the opposite of what they want to sell. But you need a cheap computer to do it, and I have one. And yeah, I could do it with a mini and, like, you know, screen share into a mini. Sure.

But you like, you put that all together and you're like, you're out of Neo, and you might as well just keep the Neo. I like it. Yeah, we're going to have to check back in on this because I'm particularly curious about how your trust with the thing develops. That's the main thing I'm curious about. Yeah. I've been talking to a lot of people about this. And there is this weird transition you go through where you go from,

I have an agent that I have to sit and watch. And actually it's not saving me any time because I'm babysitting the thing all the way down to like, do I fully completely trust this thing to post to my Instagram? And it works and I don't think about it anymore. Because like that's the success state, right? It's like this thing actually works on my behalf. And it is officially no longer my problem. And the road to get there looks very different for everybody on every individual thing.

And I think for you in particular, I'm very curious to see how far down that path you're actually able to get over time. This is the next segment about how you feel about social platforms. But I think what that's going to run into is do I care about Instagram? Like, can I just be like, robot, do Instagram and not have feelings about that? I don't know. I'm very curious to see how that dynamic plays out. But you're right. The main thing that I want to experience is how much trust.

can you actually put in a system like this? Because I think it's important. I know people have lots of feelings about AI when they listen to the show. They have lots of feelings about AI on the verge in general. But I actually think it's very important for us as reporters

to use the tools. And like this is a tool that I want to do some experiments with some stakes. Oh no, I said stakes. Now the AI editor is going to... Now the grammarily AI is going to make sure that you edit the smart watch headlines good, David.

Anyway, I want to do some experiments with some stakes with, you know, that things can go wrong for real to feel what that's like. Yeah, I like it. All right, speaking of that, let's get into some of the news. Let's take a quick break, and then we're going to come back, and we've got to talk about these social media trials. We'll be right back.

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With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that 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. So the big news of the week, and Nilai, you have been kind of hammering for months about how big this news was going to be, is these two trials, both against meta and in many ways about the concept.

of social media in general that both came to ahead this week. One in New Mexico, one in California. They're different in their actual substance, but in a very real way, this is sort of a referendum moment on not just is social media bad, but how do we litigate the ways in which it is bad? I think we should start with this trial in L.A., right? This feels like the more important one. Would you agree? We should start with the one in LA just because that ruling is against YouTube and meta, particularly Instagram, although most of its other products as well. And the one in New Mexico is very specifically about meta. They have different theories.

And it's important. So they're both important in that the floodgates to sue these companies for making bad products that hurt people are now wide open. And that's why everyone keeps calling them bellwether cases. You see that word in every single news report, including hours that these are bellwether cases. And what that means is a bunch of state attorneys general, a bunch of consumer advocacy groups, a bunch of parents got together and said, what are the cases we can bring against these companies that have the best facts, the most sympathetic plaintiffs, the people got hurt the most, and test this theory of the law. And if we can win, then we can bring a whole bunch of other cases. That's why they're called Bellwether cases. So these are trial balloons.

The one in California, again, the facts are bad. The young woman, she's 20 now. She goes by KGM, just her initials, to protect her identity. The facts are she started using YouTube at age six. She started using Instagram at age nine. She blames these platforms on all kinds of mental health issues, including body dysmorphia. She was asked specifically about them. It was really hard for Instagram and YouTube to put her on the stand and cross-examine her.

They're like, your mental health issues are your issues. This was like never going to go well, right? Like, they were always going to lose these cases. You put Mark Zuckerberg in Admissary and Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, on the stand, and you're like, do your products hurt people? And they're like, no. And then you show them all of these documents where they study teen usage, where they know that there's harm, where they compare their products to cigarettes. And then you have a jury full of regular people. And it's like, how do you feel about Instagram?

Do you think it's good? Do you think it hurt these people or didn't? And there was not a jury in the world that was not going to find them guilty of designing products or something. Well, and it was important that it was a jury, right? Because this case just was different in so many ways from the cases that we've seen before. Again, in the particulars of the facts of the case, in the way that it was constructed in front of a jury, like you're right that Mark Zuckerberg can sit in front of Congress or a judge and say stuff and it can go a lot of ways. But we've seen Mark Zuckerberg talk. He's not going to win over a jury in this case. And there were also, Lauren Feiner did a really great job of covering this case for us. Yeah, she was in the courtroom.

Yeah, she was in the courtroom a lot. And she talked to, like, there were parents of kids who have died and gone through horrible things in large part. And they blame social media for those things. Like, I think you're right that the social media companies were always going to lose this case. But I want to come back to the idea of this. Wait, can I just give you one vignette from Lauren's piece? People should go read it. Lauren has a piece about the parents reacting to Zuckerberg.

It's brutal. It's truly brutal to read. It's just a heartbreaking piece to read because it's a bunch of parents who've lost their children to various harms on social media platform. And there's one parent in that piece who's quoted saying, I saw Mark Zuckerberg's curly hair. My son had curly hair before he killed himself. It was beautiful. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't deserve to have his hair. Like that is just a fully, like, devastating emotional reaction from a parent to seeing the person who had.

they blame for the death of their child. And like, you know, I think, you know, Meta had to make the arguments that it wasn't them. Like, they didn't reach into an individual and do these things. But these cases were about, are the products designed to be addictive, to foster these behaviors? Do you know that you're doing it? Right.

Are you aware that you're causing these harms? And I just don't think there was ever going to be a jury that would look at the evidence presented these cases and say anything. And think about their own experience. with these products and find anything other than, yes, you knew it and you did it anyway. So you've mentioned the product design piece of this. And I want you to like put on your lawyer hat for me for a minute here because like we talk about section 230 on this on this show a lot. And one of the things that came up over and over in all of the discussion about this is like

these companies get out of these trials because they're like, well, we're so sorry for this bad thing that happened to you. Because of section 230, we're actually not responsible for the content posted on our platforms. Right. And a lot of the. stories in Lawrence's story from the parents and a lot of the things that come up are like my kid tried to emulate a video that they watched on YouTube and and harmed themselves or died. And those stories are awful and that's very different from the way that this became litigated. Like these trials as far as I understand and this one in LA in particular went way out of its way to not be about content on the platforms.

Can you explain sort of the legal avenue they went down with these and why it seemed to get away from the Section 230 fight? They needed to get away from the Section 230 fight. And I think there's a lot of consternation about whether Section 230 survives trials like this,

survives this attack. By the way, there are bills in Congress right now that would just straight up repeal Section 230. The idea that we need to regulate the social media companies is bipartisan.

It is enormously popular with the American people. And it just keeps running into both Section 230 and I think very importantly, the First Amendment. Yep. So you just have

that, problem. And I'm calling it a problem because everyone agrees that there should be some control over what social media companies are able to do. And you, you know, I think government's huge regulations are bad. You've heard me say it on the show a million times. You just run into, well, the First Amendment pretty much prevents you from telling them what they have to moderate. Yeah. I can say mean things about you on the Internet. They can say mean things about you. Because of the First Amendment. And then 230 says Facebook is not responsible for the content of what users post on Facebook. So if you go on Facebook and you're like, I hate my neighbor.

They've done something that they think is defamatory. And then Facebook spreads it to 10 million people. The neighbor can sue you, but they can't sue Facebook, even though Facebook is the one that amplified and distributed the message. So this is a real tension. And it connects to the First Amendment very directly, right? If you change Section 230, well, the government is going to make. Facebook liable for a lot of speech. It wasn't liable for before. That's going to change how Facebook moderates. It's going to change how Facebook operates. There are some First Amendment concerns

tied up in that. I think these cases are different. And a lot of people disagree with me. I, you know, Adi Roberts and our policy editor are just like having like a daily crashout about our feelings about tech policy and tech regulation. Because it feels like we've come to a point where everyone understands that the platform internet designed for virality and likes and reach and engagement has done some bad things

and there isn't some market force to fix it. You can't start a new social network and be like, it's just like Instagram, but it's not as engaging. Like, it's not going to work for you. Right. Like, we've seen these attempts. Like, the market isn't correcting the harm. So you've got to do something else. It is unclear

what that's something else is. And I think these cases are, well, we're not going to talk about the content on the platform. We're not going to run head first into the First Amendment in Section 230. We're going to say, when you design the ranking algorithm for the Instagram feed, and you put stuff that is more negative at the top, or you feed engagement by pushing notifications over and over again to young people in particular, you know what you're doing. those are choices you are making that you should be liable for. The really bad analogy, you can argue with this analogy a million different ways, is if I shipped you a print magazine and like the edges of the paper constantly gave you paper cuts,

you would not be like suing me over the speech in the magazine. You'd be like, this product hurts me, right? And it's like kind of that dynamic in these cases. Now, I think a lot of people, Mike Masnick was just on a coder. I think Mike Madison is really smart. He's a great tech policy reporter. He runs tech dirt. He is like, this is a disaster for 230 in the First Amendment.

Right. People are having different reactions to these cases. My view is if you don't do, if you don't put some control, if you don't find some way to make these companies liable for the harm that most people feel that they have caused, then they're just going to keep getting away with it. And I think saying your products cause harm versus the content that other people distribute cause harm, at least lets you get to is your algorithm any good? Right. Can you push these many notifications to young people? Do your teen controls actually work? Do your parental controls actually work?

I think there's some back and forth in there, but, man, I, again, it, the idea that you can go to court and say, we're not liable for a product design because it, contains the speech of other people. It just, to me, it has never passed the smell test. And I think we're going to see a lot of these cases come up. And these companies are going to, they're going to back into a posture where they have to fix the products and not necessarily the moderation. Yeah. I'm not sure how that's going to play out. But that feels like the future of these platforms.

Yeah, it was really fascinating. I went back and was reading a bunch about this case from 2021, Lemon versus Snap, which I either missed entirely at the time. or had just kind of memory hold. Like it was 2021. There's a lot going on to 2021. But that to me is such a fascinating and sort of clean example here where basically, like, Lemon versus Snap was a kid was driving and there was a filter on Snapchat that would show how fast you were going.

And there was a belief that if you could take a picture while the filter showed you going over 100 miles an hour, you would get some kind of achievement inside of Snapchat. they did it. I believe it was 113 was what it showed on the filter when they took the picture, and then they crashed and died. And initially, this case gets thrown out on Section 230 grounds of like, well, this is just content on our platform. You can't hold Snap responsible for it.

And then it turns around and an appeals court says, actually, no, you can be tried for this because this is not, like you said, this is not about the content on the platform. This is about the structural design of the platform that incentivizes this kind of kind of behavior. And actually Snap can be held liable for that. And as far as I understand, that that was the sort of crack in the door that a lot of people in cases like this saw as like, oh, this is, this is now, this is a road we can go down and a case we can win. And like, the lines here are so unclear to me, which is what's really challenging, right? Where like, we've spent a lot

of time talking about our algorithm speech. And I don't have a clean answer to that in head, honestly. Like, is the order in which you present a bunch of things to me protected free speech or not? And should it be messy? So far, pretty protected. So far keeps getting thrown out on 230 grounds. Seems messy. But like in this case, it's worth mentioning that the plaintiff here, KGM, didn't just sue meta. She sued meta and YouTube and TikTok and Snap and settled ahead of the trial with Snap and TikTok. But this is not, this is not a particular fight with a particular mechanism of Instagram. This is pointed at the entirety of the way that social media works, which I think is really

fascinating. And like YouTube had a very funny statement at the end of this, which is, this is from Jose Castanata from Google, who said this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. Wrong. Flatly incorrect. It's just not true. Like nothing about YouTube is not social media.

But there is this thing. Can I stick on that for one second? Sure. That is the nothing-as-anything argument of market definition that all these companies fall back into. You want to sue meta for monopolizing social media. Like, what is social media? Sure.

Is Facebook social media? What is the market for Instagram? Is it videos of dancing people? Or is it how-to videos for small business owners? Nothing exists. And so, I mean, like, they do this all the time. Yeah. And so, you know, Google's saying YouTube is a.

streaming platform not a social media site. It's like, is there even a difference? This is what everyone's watching. Is TikTok a streaming platform and not a social media site? Like, is Instagram? Like, you can't just fall back on nothing is anything all the time. Right. Well, and simultaneously, nothing is anything and everything is everything.

Yeah. Like, you can't, it just doesn't, none of that works. I think they all thought they were going to win because they win so much. And I, these, I, again, I think the tech industry really misunderstands how much people dislike them. So, okay, so this is actually the thing I want to talk most about here is I think you can argue the facts of the case however you want. The idea of is this an assault on free speech or is this a useful different way of talking about what these platforms are? I think is a good and valuable discussion, right?

Like, is your notification system different from my free speech? I would say I tend to be on your side of that, that does not, that passes a smell. for me of like the way that you make auto play happen is different from the content of the video that I'm watching. And it was really interesting that there was a moment where the jury in this LA trial was instructed not to think about the content of videos. Like it was it was made very clear that this is not about the stuff that this person is watching, which is just fascinating in a case like this, that is fundamentally about like what she watched and experienced on social media. But it is like, it is so clear to the point of like, this is about the way the thing works, not about what is on the thing. But then it is just true that everybody hates social media. Like, and so part of me wonder is like, it goes back to the fact that this is a jury trial. It goes back to the fact that there are like dozens or hundreds of these waiting in the wings. There's going to be more of them tried this year. Like, did these tech companies just completely miss the fact that everyone turned on them? Yes. That's not.

I mean, look, there's, there's like two ways you can express your opinions in America. You can vote with your dollars and you vote with your votes. Voting your votes, shaky track record, especially in terms of regulating tech companies. We're not good at. There's no privacy law in America. That is just a straight up disaster. Yeah. Everyone thinks we should have one.

The tech companies have lobbied their way out of it over and over and over again. App Store regulation. Like the states are like, we should do App Store regulation. We should get rid of these Apple taxes. And Apple shows up with like $10 billion in an army of law. and they go away. Like, voting with your votes is just not a thing we're doing well when it comes to regulating tech companies. Okay, we should vote with your dollars. I actually think that would be the preferred outcome, right? Like, you compete in the market and people choose the one that makes them feel good. These companies are all so big and they all own, they don't really compete head to head, right? There's not a competitor to YouTube that's run by Apple. Right. Apple actually try to build an AI product and they just ended up using Google's model. Yeah.

Like there's, there's something about this where they've all retreated to their boxes and they have little like skirmishes, but they don't actually compete, which is why I find that nothing is anything argument always so hollow. It's like if you're like, if you go to a normal person, is YouTube different than Instagram? They're like, yes, it is. And then the lawyer is getting away and they define everything down to nothing as anything. And now no one competes with anybody. Right. But they're not actually competitive. And so the idea that people dislike them is not.

showing up in any numbers. No one's switching away. No one's stopping to use Instagram because they're mad at Mark Zuckerberg. They just keep using it because it is a monopoly in its way. Last week we talked about how there's not a great

consumer AI product and I mean, you probably heard it as much as I did. But ChatGBT is the most popular consumer product in history. You know what it was before? That was the Xbox Connect. Like, whatever.

Sure. People have feelings about the product. Right? AI use is off the charts. It's because it's everywhere in front of everybody all the time. It doesn't mean what you think it means

because there's no market competition where people are like, I'm done with this one, I'm going to buy another one now. Carmakers know about market competition, right? You're like, your car is old and you're going to go buy a new car and maybe you'll stick with the brand you have or maybe you'll buy a different car.

And the products are replaceable in that way. It's just not true for these companies. And so I think they look at their data and they're like, Gemini usage and search is off the charts. people must love it. And you're like, do they? Right. Instagram looks at usage.

And they're like, man, there's more video being uploaded to Instagram Reels every day. People must love it. And it's like, do they? And I think they've missed it. I think they have missed that real people are having real experiences on their platforms. And when you heard a bunch of kids, the parents are going to get mad. And if you hurt enough kids, even if it is statistically not a huge number, you're still going to get a bunch of mad parents who've had similar experiences saying, why aren't you responsible? And they will find a way.

You know, the first case you're talking about that tried this theory was like 2016, 2017. It was Herrick versus Grindr. Oh, yeah. Where a young man sued Grindr because he was like ex-boyfriend had made like 1,100 fake profiles and relentlessly harassed him. And the, you know, the courts found that 230 protected Grindr because it was the speech that was a problem, not the product design.

That was shot one, right? People have just been trying this theory out in finding the edges and the boundaries of, okay, you're not responsible for the content. We'll give you that you're not responsible for the content. You are making the systems that enable the content to hurt people. You should be responsible for them. And again, you get a bunch of parents. They're going to be relentless with this idea.

Like, you and I are both parents. Like, they won't stop. Right. Even, and we hear this from these companies over and over again, if the harm is statistically small. Right? You have 5 billion users. Like, we only hurt 2% of people. That's a lot of people. Yep.

And they will be relentless. And I do think these companies have missed it in their own data. That a lot of people are actually unhappy with the experiences they're having because there's no competition. So you can't switch. Right. So again, I just come back to you, you can vote with your vote. You can vote with your dollars. Maybe you can vote with your attention.

And if none of those systems work, you end up in court. And you end up with some outcomes that, again, I think that the 230 repercussions, the free speech repercussions, will be big, right? These companies will start to moderate and build their systems in different ways. But what other choice do we have? Because I think nothing, I think status quo is not acceptable. Right. So this is where I want to poke the middle ground for you between government free speech regulation is bad and these platforms need to be reined in, right? Because this is the thing. And I think the challenge we have gone through for a long time is that the only, way to pick this fight has run directly into free speech. And so it is it is very hard to,

A, litigate and be like morally defend. But I do think like to your point, one of the things that has changed is that people are more and more aware of A, the bad time they're having on social media platforms and be the lack of recourse they have, both to sue the companies about it, but also like leave, right? Both for sort of addictive property reasons. and also for where else are you going to go reasons, right? Like, network lock-in is a huge, important thing. Yeah. Like, it's where people are.

It becomes very hard to leave, even if you desperately want to. And so all of this stuff is just like, we're at a point now where I think one way to look at these things is to say, okay, this is going to give us an avenue to regulate notifications, which is like one possible outcome of it. It's like we're going to get to have a whole conversation about. No, I actually disagree. Really? Right. Like, the outcome of a. court case in which you lose some money. And right now they haven't lost that much money.

Right. Six million dollars. Yeah. Well, it's $375 million for META in New Mexico. It's three million in total compensatory damages of which META has to pay 70 percent and Google has to pay the rest in California. It's $8. It's $8. There's going to be a punitive award in California. We don't know how much that's going to be. But then there'll be more cases than that will add up. But even the juries in these cases are saying that the punitive damages are not the point. The point is the precedent. Like everyone is crystal clear on the thing they're trying to do. Right. They're opening the floodgates to more litigation. Yeah. So that's

not actually regulatory. Right? They're not saying here's how you should design these systems. What they're saying is your approach to handling your own information. You did your own studies on how this stuff was affecting teenagers and you made these decisions anyway. You are negligent. That's bad.

Yeah, there were all these things that came up in trial about the sort of parallel paths of meta-studying the negative effects that it's platforms had on people and also identifying teenagers as the main source of growth for the platforms. Like that stuff became very damning very quickly of like, oh, this is bad for teens. And then there was an email that I think was like growth colon teens. What you're going to see is these companies are ideally going to make different decisions,

which is just different than a regulatory approach. Sure. Right. Like Europe is like, here's what the button should look like. Have you seen a cookie banner? It should say these words on it. Like there's one whole approach that's happened. in other countries. The United States is different, and for a lot of reasons, we're different.

And so we're saying you made bad decisions or punished. Hopefully that leads you to make different decisions. The thing meta and Google could do is say we're actually never going to make different decisions. We'll just keep eating the losses in court. Yeah, we have a lot of dollars. If it costs, if it costs to be $3 million, every time my kid gets hurt, that is an acceptable outcome. That seems like not what they should do. That seems morally abhorrent. But that's what I mean. Like, it's not regulatory in that way. That's a thing. thing you can you just pay the fine every time sure i don't think they're going to do that i think actually what they're going to do is appeal um by the way the meta statement is very good uh because as

you pointed out uh they sued all the companies so metas says we respectfully disagree at the verdict and will appeal teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app and it's like yeah they didn't yes it's all of them yeah i don't know what you're saying yeah uh and also we remain confident in our record of protecting Keynes online. And it's like, your record's bad.

And in fact, there was evidence that came out in this case that meta in particular has done less work to track that evidence because it knew what was going to come up.

Like, do you remember all those years ago when Mark Zuckerberg said something to the effect of like, the only reason you're mad at us is because we're the ones who do the research

on what's actually going on? All this other bad stuff is happening elsewhere and they just don't know because they choose not to. They just turn a blind eye to it. the lesson meta learned from that was to turn its own blind eye, apparently. Right.

So again, what are some actual regulations that don't run into free speech that might help? A privacy law, like straightforwardly, here's how these companies can use our data to operate their services. That would be good. Algorithmic transparency laws, where they have to publish how their algorithms work. Laws making sure that they do their research and they publish results at research. So there's not a negative incentive. for the research to exist. Right?

And none of this infringes on the free speech of these platforms. It just says you have to make the information and share it with us and then protect our information as you run your services.

We are just not gonna get there. Those are not proposals, like algorithm and transparency proposals come up every year. There are bills in Congress right now. What are we doing? We're not funding the airports. It's like, there's just a roadblock

to the voting with your dollars world that is causing everybody to try to find, other avenues. And so courts are the last avenue. And here we are. And I really do think these companies, I think they thought they were going to win. They have a record of winning. And I think they did not understand how much public opinion has shifted against tech companies, particularly with social media platforms. We'll see. They're going to appeal. Anything can happen. Appeals process is very different. But, you know, the judges are on social media, too.

They also have feelings about all of this. So we'll see. Yeah, it is fascinating. Like, you know, they always talk about jury selection and they're trying to find people who are not biased against the defendant. It's like, boy, I don't know if you can find 12 people who are going to be unbiased against how bad social media has to come. Or how it makes a feel.

Look, I, you know, I'll flip this around. I have very complicated feelings right now about the state of tech regulation. I have very complicated feelings about Brendan Carr in the state of like speech regulation in America. Like, I think government speech regulations are bad. Like, just flatly, I think they're bad. These companies have used the First Amendment as a shield against accountability for every

single decision they've ever made. And at some point, it just enters, like, ludicrous zone where everything is speech. Like, anything that happens on a computer is speech, and no one can ever be accountable for it. And there has to be some recalibration of that. So that we're protecting things that are actual speech and making people accountable for the product decisions they make that affect people's lives. And it's somewhere in there is the right answer. I don't know what it is. I think these cases are going to make a lot of people recalibrate that answer, but I do think everything that happens on a computer or speech has just led us to these outcomes

where these companies are more powerful than ever. They control more speech than ever without any market forces to shape them up. And then there's only going to be one other outcome. And that outcome is the government does stuff. And I think that is the worst possible outcome. So hopefully what you get out of this is a bunch of companies reacting to their own research, making different decisions and actually competing to keep people safe. Yeah. All right. Well, there's more of these cases to come this year. Like you said, we're going to get appeals.

It feels like this floodgate is now open. And what it leads to, I think, kind of remains anybody's guests. So we'll see. But we'll stay on it. We should take a break. And then we're going to come back. Talk about some stupid speech regulation. We'll be right back.

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words like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting 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 dig it. All right, we're back.

It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. For flavor. Long, long ellipses. there. I'm just, can I, can I, can I, can I, can I hype up some sponsorship ideas that are coming? Please. That's it. That's my whole. Love it. So we're sponsored by our upcoming sponsorship ideas. We got to compete with influencer world and we're not going to do it. We got to figure some stuff out. I'm just saying. I love it. Get ready. It's all. It's going to get weird here on the

Vergecast. I'm very excited about it. I don't even have to ask. I've been following the news. I know. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast and then a podcast with some new competition that I'm not even ready to talk about. America's favorite podcast and their podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy this week with theme music by Chris Swick. Brandon Carr is such a stupid dumb dumb dummy. I get real like, what if there was a Nick Jr. show called Brandon Car as a dummy vibes for that. I got postal service. I can see that. Sure. A lot of, I feel like we have a lot of fans who grew up in the same era of music as we did. Yeah, I believe that's right.

We're getting a lot of early 2000s indie on Brennan Carr's Dummy. It's good. I appreciate it. That was very good. All right, we're back. Eli, what did he do this week? Well, first of all, you mentioned the other show. So it turns out our friend Kariswisher has been calling Brennan Carr a moron on her shows every single

week. We have not communicated about this. She's doing it. So she said she's going to do an episode of On With Karas Fischer called Brendan Carr's a Moron. which is very funny independent thought you know convergent evolution

yeah it's really it's like when everybody invented the light ball ball at the same time it's like we all just figured out Brendan Carr right at the same time so I texted Kara and I was like you should just call it

Brennan Carr as a dummy so our podcast within a podcast can infiltrate another podcast she thought it was funny you can post it our threads by we say hey Kara just remind her

at Kara Swisher Renan Carr's a dummy we should do it she will think that's funny as well so we've texted I think I'm going to go on her show. Nice. To do Brennan Carr's a dummy with her.

Perfect. We just have to schedule it. But we were texting my yesterday because it was very funny that she arrived at this conclusion. And she actually said to me, do you think you have a monopoly on calling him dumb? And I was like, no, not at all. Please, by all needs. Brendan Carr's stupidity contains multitudes. I was like, if you just don't do moron, do dummy.

Like, please have it. Licensing fees and zero. Like, like, take them. And yeah, two things this week by our boy, Brendan. There's the one everyone's paying attention to. And then there's the one that's just, it's just, it's just, random being stupid in his particular way. So I'll start with that one very quickly, and then we should talk about router bans.

So there's two big broadcast companies that are emerging, Tegna and Next Star. You have never heard of these companies, but they basically own all the local broadcast stations in America. They're theoretically competitors. There's a law in America that says you can't own more than 39% of the broadcast stations in a specific area. So if you're, you know, wherever you're sitting, the broadcast stations, the TV stations around you, no one person or company can own more than 39% of them. And it's not like goes back and forth. The number has gone up and down over time.

And the idea is that there should be competition in the market for news and entertainment. And if one person owns all of the media you consume, that would be bad. I don't even think this is like controversial, right? Having a monopoly on everything people consume gives you a lot of power. The government would like to preserve some sense of competition instead of doing speech regulations. Okay, 39% is a cap. The problem is that the big companies like merging, and Brendan is nothing but a stature of big companies. So he just went ahead and waived the cap.

He said, next star, tag down merger, I've waived the cap. And even though that the combined company will cover at least 60% of U.S. households, that's fine. And here's this quote. Waving the rule here is consistent with longstanding FCC authorities and doing so, promotes the underlying purpose of the FCC's media regulation by promoting competition, localists and adversity. What? This is just backwards. So Brendan, Mr. I must follow the rules about news distortion when it comes to regulating comedians has said, well, these big companies want to merge.

They're pretty Trump-friendly companies. They just are. You know, they want to merge. They're being very friendly to Trump in particular right now. I've gone ahead and waived the 39% rule. To promote competition. To promote competition. Sure.

Because he says they need to be so big to compete with Facebook. Oh, right. Because fundamentally he's really mad at Disney. Right. What is the line that Disney produces half of the content that people want, which is just like... It's all relentlessly woke or whatever. None of it makes any sense. It's just in Brendan world, this idea that he has to exhum these ancient statutes that allow him to regulate comedians and he must enforce the laws that's written while also waiving the rules so he can pass through a merger.

Like perfect Brendan Carr has had done. In another world, I would have spent all of our time on this. But that is not this world. It is an imperfect world. and Brendan said something much stupider this week. This one's my favorite. Because this isn't stupid in the normal, like, definition of stupid, which is that it's like wrong and bad.

This is like straightforwardly like a thing a stupid person does. You know what I mean? Just out of the blue. It's not like a thing I disagree with. It's just a thing that is stupid. So this week, the FCC issued a national security. determination. It says allowing routers, like Wi-Fi routers to be produced abroad and dominate the U.S. market creates unacceptable economic national security and cybersecurity risks,

and that means no new routers produced abroad will be allowed in the American market unless those companies pass a certification. This is a huge surprise to the industry. Sean Alistair and I spent the week calling router executives. This is not a thing we normally spend our time doing. And asking questions like, did you know this was going to happen? What happens now. And the answers were no, no, and we're going to say anything on the record because we're afraid of the Trump administration. So this is not a normal regulatory moment. Like, you know, I'll just compare it to Biden. But the Biden administration would do anything. And like 50 executives would line up to go on CNBC to be like, this is an infringement on the American way.

Right. The Trump administration capriciously bans all routers for non-specific reasons in ways that will not actually keep anyone safe. And everyone is literally too stared to even issue like a press statement to us that says something anodyne. Like, we are evaluating the thing and blah. Like, I was like, just giving that statement. So it's clear that you're evaluating the ruling and everyone's too afraid to even issue that statement. Yeah, the only statements we were able to get are from companies that are like, oh, we applaud

the push for more security. It's like, cool. Thanks, guys. And again, I would just, I would just compare this to, like, Biden would be like, man, I wish my TV was brighter and like 50 TV manufacturers would show up on television to be like, how dare you? Yeah. Do you believe in liberty? Like, this is not that. This is, we are deathly afraid of the government and we're not saying a word about it. Which is, to be clear, the point. That is the desired outcome of the Trump administration doing this stuff this way.

Yeah. So here's the, here's the upshot of this. All the routers that are currently on sale remain on sale. It's only new routers that don't have existing FCC clearance. Right. So if you're worried about the security of Americans networks, you would not say all routers that are currently on sale remain on sale. And they don't have to be updated. You don't have to do anything to them. The routers you have don't have to be updated. Nope.

So we haven't accomplished any goals. Straightforwardly, we're just saying you have to make routers in the future in the United States for America. But all the routers that are currently being made overseas that have existing FCC certification are fine. So Netgear, TPLink, Cisco, Eero, you name it. all their existing products are fine. Weird. Right? But there's a security.

It's like there's a security risk in the future that I, Brendan Carr, have discovered in the future, but cannot tell you about it. But won't tell you about, have not apparently told any of these companies about. Right. And it only exists on routers that haven't been made yet. They only exist on routers that haven't been made yet. And it's unclear if getting the certification still making the routers overseas is fine. or if you can just bring all the stuff to the United States, including the software on the routers,

and just load the software on the routers in the United States, and that would be fine, even though the software might have a supply chain attack. And, by the way, the certification is a self-certification, so that the companies can just say, here's our stuff. Like, here's how we're going to make these routers we promise it's fine, and the FCC might say that's okay. So even the process of how this will work is totally unclear. We've accomplished approximately nothing

except maybe a bunch of router manufacturers have to make routers in that sense it. That's not that. It's a bunch of router manufacturers have to dream up a bunch of fake plans to make routers in the U.S. And then tell them loudly to the Trump administration

in a way that makes Donald Trump look good. Right. That's the extent of it. You have to write down, we're going to make things in the U.S. Trump did it. Haza. And then everything gets to keep being normal.

Like that's just what this is. We think so. You know, all the attacks that they're calling out, like Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, those attacks happen because our telecom companies, which Brendan Carr is supposed to regulate, had extremely lax security measures and basically outsource everything they do now. And he's not regulating that. Right.

In fact, he's reduced regulations on telecom companies. He has a whole initiative called Delete, Delete, Delete that he's very proud of where he lets telecom companies do whatever they want at cheaper cost. He doesn't care about lowering prices or making speeds faster or keeping us safer. He has just found a way to get a bunch of router manufacturers to say that they're going to build routers in the States of America to comply with this law. What they're actually going to do is nothing and continue making the routers that are still fine overseas while they just wait it out. It's very obvious that they're just going to wait this out in some way. or they will find a way to do final assembly in the United States

in a way that passes muster with these regulations and claim that as a victory. It's just super unclear what any of this will actually accomplish, except he got a headline saying all routers have to be made outside the United States. And he definitely got a headline saying all routers are banned. Yes. Which was very scary, people freaked out. And then you just look at it.

You know, like, actually this directive says nothing. It doesn't even present evidence for the claim that these routers are dangerous. Right. Again, Sean and I are just like calling a router manufacturer. It's a very weird afternoon where we talk to a bunch of router manufacturers. They're all deeply confused. They're all trying to engage the government on this stuff. It's not like this is a new idea, but the United States knows that there are cyber attacks on U.S. soil all the time.

It knows that these networks are vulnerable. It knows, for example, that T.P. Link, the biggest seller of routers in the United States, has, like, huge problems. TBLink was the first to issue a statement. And they're like, we're going to be great, you guys. we're going to super shape up because they have the most to lose. But the reality is that most routers and most people's homes

are delivered to them by telecom companies, by your ISP. And you could just impose this regulation on the ISP and say, keep the routers safe, do as many years of software updates as you can, you are accountable for software patches, and that would accomplish the same goal

as saying we're banning all router manufacturing. And Brendan can't do that because he cannot regulate a telecom company. It's just not in his bones. He will regulate late-night comedies. but he cannot regulate a telecom company. He allowed telecom companies to not even have to tell you what your bill is for. I do think the thing that is funniest about this to me is that there is an actual sort of societal good outcome,

which is that it is true that your router is a potential vector for problems on your internet connection. And if this leads to everyone going in and changing the admin password on their router, the world will be a very slightly better place. Do you know what I mean? Your admin password is probably either admin or 1, 2, 3, 4 on your router. You should change that. You just should. It's just a good idea.

I should not be able to walk into your house and log into your router. And I probably could right now. Just fix that. It's very simple. But like, they could have just issued that as an executive order from the White House being like, could change your router password. That would have been fine. But instead, it's this.

pure nonsense that is the same pure nonsense. Like, Sean wrote a great FAQ for the site about this and compared it to the thing where they got all worried about chips just to basically extract a portion of invidious revenues. Yep. And that's like that. That is the only thing this looks like to me is the same kind of come bow at the feet of the Trump administration and pay us and we will let you continue doing business. It is, it's a shakedown. Like, I don't know how to look at this other than it's a shakedown. It's a shakedown that it will absolutely result in no new routers for a while.

Like existing router models will just keep getting sold, which is probably fine. Yeah. Like the stakes of that are very low. No one is clamoring for Wi-Fi 8. Like, I think it's going to be fine for a couple years. Especially because Brendan isn't making the speeds get faster. Right. I don't know, man.

Like, he can't do this to phones. Like, all the phones are made in China. But that's not a big enough market. And so maybe this is just like a trial balloon, right? You do with routers and you do it laptops and finally you get to phones. And that would be an enormous regulatory overreach for the FCC. But that's Brendan. That's our boy, right?

I must follow the law when it comes to regulating comedians. I cannot. I will just capriciously change the law when it comes to how many stations you can own in a broadcast market. And I've made up a law when it comes to where routers should be made as a way to baby step towards regulating phones directly. That is his end goal is to regulate speech on the internet in whatever form he can get to. It has always been the end goal. It is all these things are baby steps towards it.

As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show. You can come on the show when I go do Brennan Carr's a dummy on Kara's show. I think that would be fun for you. How dare you? Again, you can tweet. I swear to God, Nealai, if you go on Caraswisher's show with Brendan Carr, I will cut you out of the first. We can have her on our show. It's a podcast within a podcast.

We've never specified what podcast it must be within. Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Do you see what I mean? It's module. Whoa. Okay. This is a powerful idea.

Anyone can do Brendan Carr's a dummy. It's open source license. If you want to do Brennan Carr's a dummy on your podcast, please. We welcome it. It's like a, it's a benign virus in the podcast ecosystem. A sports podcast? Mm. You know, Mina Kimes, you want to do Brenna Car's a dummy?

Get it out there. If I can get Pat McAfee to do Brennan Carr's a dummy. We're federating Brendan Carr as a dummy. It's open source, baby. It's beautiful. Anyhow, Brandon, if you want to come on Brendan Carr's a dummy, you want to talk to me on my show. Wait, if Brennan goes on Decoder, is that Brennan Carr's a dummy?

Everything is nothing is what I'm, that's what I'm saying. Nothing is anything. If Brendan Carr goes on Facebook, is that Brendan Carr's a dummy? He's a dummy wherever he is. There's always, Brennan, you're welcome. to see if you can answer questions about any of this. It's not gone well for people lately answering questions. But you can try on this show, on Decoder, on any other show, apparently, on the street.

I welcome it. I would love to chat with you about what qualifications routers in the United States will have that make them safer than routers made other places. You haven't laid it out. But that's been Brennan Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast within any podcast. within all podcasts simultaneously. We are simulcasting Brendan Carr's a dummy to every podcast you listen to. We haven't figured out this technology, but it's going to happen. Yeah.

All right, my first one is an end to a lawsuit. I've been tracking for the last couple of years against this guy named Michael Smith, who did just the most fascinating and I think telling thing about the state of the world. So Michael Smith is this guy from North Carolina who over the course of, I think, seven years, used AI to create hundreds of thousands of songs, uploaded those songs to Spotify, and used AI tools to automatically listen to those hundreds of thousands of songs

hundreds of thousands of times a day. He made himself, I believe the number was like $1.2 million a year in royalties. Again, over many listens and many songs, ends up being caught for this, ends up getting sued, pled guilty this week, and has agreed to pay, it was $8.09 million. So this is the end of a really fascinating road.

This thing has gone for the last couple of years. But he created this kind of like, dare I say, genius scheme in which he used technology to create songs that no human, as far as we know, ever listened to. It was not important that humans ever listened to them because the bots would go and listen to them. and he was just doing royalty arbitrage, basically. He was just extracting money from Spotify

because it has automated systems to pay artists based on how things get listened to. And so he's just pulling money out of the system with this purely automated making and listening to music thing. And my thing is like, I absolutely guarantee you this is happening everywhere on the internet all the time at vastly bigger scale than you can possibly imagine. Like there was this company, this was a couple years ago now that was like starting that they like very loudly pronounced they were going to start making AI generated podcasts.

And they're like, we're going to make thousands of them. And they're each going to get 50 listens. And because there's thousands of them, we're going to make money because it costs us nothing to make them. And we can make them at such unbelievable scale that we're going to make a little bit of money every time. And that's how we make a lot of money. And that like they just above board did the same thing this dude did. Well, the fraud here was having the bots listen to the song. If you were like, I will flood Spotify, the age-inerted music, and that will take listens from other people, but that's the money I made because my cost of production is...

This is like the white noise on Spotify. Everybody has been buying views on social media platforms since time and memory. Oh, can I tell you that actually the twist on this that I love the most? Sure. So, I mean, anybody on any of the social media platforms knows that there's just clips of podcasts everywhere all the time now, right? And there are companies that will shoot a fake podcast with founders and then use the clip and then like buy views for those clips to promote. Like I have the pitch in my inbox from these companies that's like, look at this fake podcast we shot. And I'm like, well, I should do this.

First of all, that's my reaction to this. So if you're watching this is a clip, by the way, please know that is what this is. We don't make a podcast. So these companies, they basically have armies of people in discords doing clips. And they're doing labor arbitrage. Those people are overseas, they're paying them low rates. They're paying them based on views. And the turn is they're not using bots to get views for themselves.

They send bots to the other clippers so that the systems detect those clips and downrank them for having bot views. Whoa. Very good. And so, like, I agree with you that it's happening at massive scale, but it's also happening in ways you would never expect. Yeah. Well, and the thing is it is essentially because it can happen at such incredible scale. Like if I just made a video and bought it 100 million views, it would, you would notice, right? Like there are obvious behavioral things that these platforms can detect and shut down. They would demonetize my video, they would delete the video, whatever. There are lots of tools that exist to prevent that behavior. They don't work all that well, right? Like every time you look and see one of these platforms like ban a bunch of, uh, obvious bot accounts and you see all the celebrity accounts drop precipitously. Like this is just a thing that happens. Everybody has been buying these things for forever. And in that case, it's like, I buy a bunch of followers so that my brand deals get more expensive, which is like one bit of

fakenness removed, right? Like, I'm duping you because you're stupid. It's not bots the whole way down. My bots are just tricking you. That's slightly different. But this is, all of these dots are now just connecting because you are very close to having like 10,000 Android phones in your basement, aren't you? Oh my God. I could. This is the thing. When I say very close, do you have like 5,000 Android phones in your basement constantly scrolling your own social media feeds? Let's just say there's a reason my camera is zoomed specifically the way that it is. No, but but again, it's like the scale of this, not in like a revenue sense, but in the in the fact that so this guy creates accounts on Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube music. He creates.

it's thousands of accounts. Again, all of this is happening individually at such tiny scale that, like, if I'm Spotify, I actually don't care that a few dollars are being allocated in the wrong direction, right? Like, that's a price they're all willing to pay.

It goes under the detection zones. But he did this hundreds of thousands of times because you can completely automate the entire process. It costs him nothing to do it once versus to do it 100,000 times. And so now you have this problem of, okay, I'm not losing $3. I'm losing $3 hundreds of thousands of times.

And that is the kind of thing that I absolutely guarantee you is happening at a scale. Absolutely no one is willing to reckon. Oh, it's all over the place. And it's going to get worse. I'll also point out that is the plot of the movie Office Space, but no one watches that movie for the actual plot. That is the plot of Office Space. That's actually the thing that's happening like burbling under the jokes.

Like that movie is all tone, but there's like a little bit of plot, and that's the plot of Office Space. That's true. But yeah, it is like this is, there are going to be so many lawsuits like this one to come. Kudos to Michael Smith for being an innovator. You know what I mean? What's your next one? I've got another one.

I'm just going to plug version history. So we did version history on LimeWire. Really fun episode. We did with Sarah Jong. And all these like copyright cases about music piracy came up. The Grokster case, Sony versus Betamax. There was a case. week at the Supreme Court that reheated all of it where the music labels sued Cox, the

ISP, Cox Communications, for knowing that music was being pirated on their network and doing nothing about it. And this went all the way to the Supreme Court. How did that go to this? Haven't we litigated this 700,000 different times? How did this end of the Supreme Court? This is, it's the same as the social media trials. Yeah, fair. You litigate and lose, you kind of carve off a different chunk of and you go at it again. So the labels tried it again.

And they had been winning. They had gotten through, I think there was a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and Cox was held liable. They ended up at the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court reheated all of the cases that we talked about in version history on LimeWyer. The Grokster case, the Betamax case. And they found that Cox was not liable for the piracy its users were committing on its network. And it's like a really, if you read the decision, it's Clarence Thomas. And he's like, we're getting a little wild.

saying everyone's liable for everything. Cox simply, this is the quote, Cox simply provided internet access, which is used for many purposes other than copyright infringement. Big one. Yeah. Anyway, that trade organization,

RAA is, of course, disappointed in the court's decision and said, copyright law must create creators and markets from harmful infringement and policymakers should look closely at the impact of this ruling.

And it's like, yeah, do the policymakers are also stealing TV. Like, I don't know how to tell you this. The boomers all have the weird box that streams IPTV to them. And that's our policy makers. Like, sorry, bro. It's rough, dude. It just reminded me that episode of Virgin History, it was really fun to make. And the issues in that continue to be relevant literally to this day at the Supreme Court. It's the kind of thing that it does feel like we are doomed

to litigate forever. And Sarah Jong is doomed to be angry about forever. This is just our life. Yeah, it was a fun episode. Go listen to it. Go watch it. My next one, I'm just, I'm going to wrap a bunch of stuff just into one last lightning round item for me here. And then we're going to end with you because I'm very excited about ending on some grammarly stuff. But it was a big week in chatbots. We have OpenAI trying desperately to focus on the things that are actually working and stop doing all the weird stuff that isn't.

They closed down the SORA app, for which I would say there was very little sadness and constant and concern. The more interesting part of that is when the SORA app went away, evidently so did it's Disney deal, which is very interesting. And I suspect, I don't want to speculate on things I don't know, but it seems to me that there is a turn of reporting left to do there on what was happening to that deal, because we thought it was weird at the time that Disney would sign up to make this deal and invest in Open AI and that this felt odd. And it feels even stranger now. The one turn of reporting we already have is that Disney was surprised. Right. Yeah. And a lot of

this is not, they're not like giving up on the idea of video generation. They're just pulling all of this into chat GPT. There seems to be a real sort of centralizing thing happening. We also had news last week that OpenAI is really invested in building out this like super app out of Chad GPT. This is everybody's idea now. Right. Like this is the thing.

And I think everybody sees what the Claude app has become where they put cloud code into it and then there's co-work into it. And so people are like spending time in there. Now Google is apparently trying to do the same thing with Gemini. OpenAI is trying to do the same thing with ChatGPT. Godly knows what Microsoft is doing. Did you see the thing earlier this week where Microsoft was basically just like, we're so sorry, we're going to refocus on making Windows 11 good.

For the first time ever, our plan is to make Windows 11 something that you like and not have so much co-pilot nonsense in there. So there's just everyone is like flailing to figure out how to package all of this stuff in a way that people actually like. There was also news this week that Apple's big plan for overhauling all of its AI stuff is to have a standalone Siri app that will do a lot of this same stuff, which is like a sort of diametrically different approach

than Apple has taken before. Like Apple has always talked about Siri as this sort of spread across the operating system technology that is like diffused into the phone. And now re-centralizing all of it into an app called Siri would just be a very different way of thinking about what AI means. I think they have to do that because they need to be able

to update that app way faster than the operating system. I actually think it's the right decision, to be clear. I like the the thing claude has done, which is basically turn AI into a bundle of experiences inside of an app, is just how people use technology right now. Like I think that just makes sense. And if you want to eventually have it be the everything everywhere all at once technology, fine, but we're not there yet. So I think it is probably the right approach. It's just going to be very funny for Apple in particular because Siri sucks. Everybody thinks Siri sucks.

And Apple's going to have to be like, here's a Siri app on your phone. Do you want this? And that makes me laugh. They do get to just put it on your home screen by default, which they will do ruthlessly. They also put a U2 album on everybody's phone by default. And that went over super great with everybody. You know what I mean? It's not going to go over super well, I don't think.

But anyway, so this is like, this is the big product innovation now. It's like everybody has tried to do everything. And now what we're actually going to get is a series of these like all in one apps that are trying to create this kind of sticky user behavior. Because the other thing that happens is you. go to Claude Code because Cloud Code is really good, and that makes you use Claude more, which is very useful for Anthropic. Like, that is not a thing that OpenAI has done a good job of building, ironically. And it's not a thing that Google has done a very good job of building.

So we're starting to see this massive consolidation back into all of these AI apps in a way that they're just going to look like apps, which is very interesting. I mean, I think we should just say it again. This is the point you've been making. There is a great use case in the enterprise for AI. It's business software. It's the thing you keep saying. If you run a business, the AI tools can help you,

particularly if your business requires software or automation. Like if you think in loops, if you have software brain, AI is great for you. And a lot of people have software brain. And a lot of businesses require a lot of software. And if you can bring the cost of developing all new software to zero, maybe there will be new kinds of businesses. Software brain.

Software brain is like trying to take over the world. Like what if everything was software brain and just running into reality. And most consumers, even the software people I know in their everyday lives, do not have software brain. Like, you can't? I just, can I read you a Slack message that you wrote?

Because I've been thinking about it ever since. This is last Friday, you, we have a Slack room for our whole editorial team. And you just wrote, I don't know what the story would be, but I feel like we should run, the people do not yearn for automation as a headline. I have thought the phrase, the people do not yearn for automation 16 times a day since that. And it's true.

Like, the people, the people do not yearn for automation. It is not, that's not what we spend most of our time thinking about as normal humans in their lives. If you describe most people's lives as a loop, they will get very mad at you. Yes. Like those, there are lots of movies about how bloodless your life is a loop is. And trying, in fact, to get out of the loop and eat, pray love your way through, you know, or whatever. Like, I mean, you can, what's the Ryan Reynolds movie where he's an NPC? Oh, a free guy?

It's like somewhere on the spectrum of like free guy to fight club is your life is not a loop. Right? And so like if you just try to apply software brain to consumer use cases, you end up demanding that everyone lives an automatable life or, which is never going to work, or you're going to run into the inherent brittleness of AI as it existed. today. Yep. Right, which is, well, Allison is going to test task automation on the S-26, and Geminii is going to take 13 minutes to order an Uber because it's just staring at the Uber app being like, what do I do now and just burning tokens along the way? And so I see what's happening here is there's product market fit in the enterprise. They figured it out. Because if you describe a business as a loop, you have gone a long way towards revolutionizing any business. Yep. And you can do all kinds of business logic. If you are like, you're as a consumer, you're a loop. You're going to order the same yogurt every week. And that's the yogurt you're going to eat.

People are like, go fuck yourself. Like, I, like, absolutely not. And like, I just don't, every technology that tries to automate the consumer experience in that way runs in the same, historically has run into the same problem. And they're all marketed the same way, right? We're going to know everything that's in your fridge so we can tell you what recipe to make. And it just simply does not work. because it turns out you don't log everything that's in your fridge.

Right. So I look at all this stuff and I'm just like, man, the people do not yearn for automation and these tools are just there to automate things, which is great for business and is going to just run into

the brittleness of Alexa and Google Assistant and everything else that has promised to automate your entire life in very specific ways. Yep. It's good stuff. By the way, if you know what the story is, I would still love to run that headline.

Yeah, this does not obviate running that headline, which is still a thing I would like to do. It's a very good headline. And then I can stop thinking about it, which will be very helpful. All right, for our last one here, it's time for you to close a loop that we've been talking about it. You have been, we've talked a lot about what's been going on with Grammarly and it's expert voice.

Was it called Expert Voices? Expert Voices feature that impersonated you and me and lots of other people on the internet. You've been sort of threatening to have Shashir Mirrocha, the CEO of the company. on Decoder. He came on Decoder. How'd it go? It went. So I didn't know Shashir before. I think you did. I know lots of reporters

who've known Shashir in a variety of roles over the years. He used to be the head of products at YouTube. So like, you know, we talked to a lot of Google executives. Like, reporters talk to Google. Like, people knew Shashir. I will just say this. I like people who are honest. I think he's honest.

Like, he says what he's thinking. Yeah, I like Shazir. I've met him many times going all the way back He ran a company called Koda for a long time that I really liked. He is one of those people who has been doing this long enough to understand how it works. And I have always enjoyed talking to him about product stuff. Yeah. And I don't think he was like shady. I think he was telling me what he really thought.

And I appreciate that. And I appreciate that he came on. Obviously, I was like pretty mad at him because he stole my identity. I thought we sat in the pocket there for a minute. I'd actually invited him on the show because he has such an interesting background. Like, he used to work for Larry Page. He used to work for Sundar. He's on the board at Spotify.

I had wanted to have a big conversation about creators and the creator economy and, like, building these platforms. And then he did a thing that I think is coming to the entire creator economy writ large. YouTube is, you know, they reacted to the grammarly stuff by inviting you and me into their likeness detection program. Yeah. Because they know they need a likeness detection program. because people are going to use our likeness on YouTube

left and right without permission and they need to have some system to shut it down. I think you can clone songs and put them on Spotify today. Spotify, you don't even need AI to do it. Every night I just yell at our smart speaker to play lullaby versions of Taylor Swift, and I don't even know where that stuff comes from.

There are just 10,000 albums on Spotify. And are they generally? I don't know. I know it makes them sleep. That's that there's your, there's your Spotify fraud. Yep. Right. Like this thing is going to start happening. It really high rates to lots of people.

So he got, he's in the middle of it. Obviously, he pulled the feature. He said he didn't think the feature was any good. But I, what I took away from that conversation is no one has sought this through. And this stuff is people's livelihoods. And just saying it's attribution when there's no economic upside to that attribution. And then you can clone people left and right. man, it's going to get messy.

Like, creators do not take kindly to losing money from their work on these platforms. They are fighting for every dollar. Like, a small creator gets paid like $3,000 to do a brand deal at small scales. Yeah. Every dollar counts. And so I, you know, I felt like Shashir could take it. Like, he's been in these roles. He's, you know, he has faced the full fury of the YouTube community before.

that role. Yeah. And so there's a little bit of me saying, okay, I'm going to make you answer for everything and a little bit of like, why did you ship this feature? But I think you could take it. I think, I don't know, I don't know how you felt about it. I was in it. I tried to be as fair as I could while, you know, still dealing with the fact that I was

involved. But I felt like that conversation, both sides of that debate were present and like made with as much conviction as could be made. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, my read on it, to be perfectly frank, I think you're angrier about your inclusion in that feature than I was, which was really interesting. But I don't know. I have a certain sort of nihilism about the internet now that I probably need to get over. There are pictures of me wearing AirPods that have been used to sell fake AirPods on Alibaba for 15 years.

I had a friend who sent me a picture of me in a slide on some, like, you know, one of those like pop crave knockoffs about how bad, they were calling them pervert glasses all of the like Raybans and there was a picture of me from the version history episode of Google Glass wearing Google Glass

and sort of looking up like this and they sent it to me and they were like, are you a pervert? I was like, I don't think so. But here we are. But anyway, I think I was struck by the same thing

that it sounds like you were which is that it just doesn't seem like they actually thought this all the way through. Like no one asked the full questions and it reminded me of something Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo said to you, which is basically, that like he thought it was a bummer that Google was forced to react to chat GPT so fast and decided

to react so fast that it didn't actually sit down and think about what it wanted to do. And I think that there is there is so much of that happening in AI right now. The money is so big. The stakes are so high. There is a sense that all of this is moving so fast that if you take two seconds to sit down and think that you will get left behind. And all of these companies are just running themselves. is ragged making huge mistakes

in service of trying to run as fast as they possibly can. And it's like maybe Google should have sat down and thought, oh, how do we want to actually integrate this into our products? Instead of just like scattershot doing everything it possibly could and hoping it would eventually catch up. This felt like sort of the same thing to me,

where they're just like, we have an AI gun, we're going to point it at everything we can because we feel like we have to. Yeah, I mean, I'll connect it to the social media trials we were talking about. These companies are confusing user downloads, with quality over and over and over again. And so, you know, Google looked at lots and lots of people downloading chat ChbT and decided

that they preferred it. And maybe they did prefer, you know, the sort of conversational output of Chatschbti to whatever junked up sponsored 10 Blue Link thing that Google was doing. And maybe they didn't interact to it. But like everybody knows the free version in Chatsubit that most people are using isn't any good. And we'll like consistently just lie to you and make things up or like B2 Syncope. everybody knows it writes. People are, people claim that they see chat,

you keep writing all over the place now because they're used to it. Yeah. And they think it's not good. Google AI overviews, you know, the hot theory is they switch to the cheaper Gemini model to run AI overviews because obviously they need a lower cost. That thing is wrong all the time in a way that I think is hurting Google's reputation. But then you ask Google, they're like, it's got the most take up of all time. And they just consistently are confusing, like, numeric measures.

of success for quality measures of success. And I just think everybody is like, these tools can do a lot of stuff. They can get you to an outcome. You can vibe code, whatever. Is it any good? Like, is this good? Like, do people actually like using the tools?

Do the people whose names were using actually want to be included in this way? And I think that you're right, the mad rush to claim success is just confusing everybody about what success actually is. And it's funny to have this conversation on the cusp of Apple 50.

when you, you know, videos of Steve Jobs, like left and right being like, we won't do stuff to just do it. We do stuff because it's great. And it's like, whoa, this industry has forgotten that lesson. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I don't want to dwell on this too long because people should just go listen to the episode. It's a good decoder. Most decoder's trash, but this is a good.

But there's just one thing. So you had this back and forth with them where you're talking about basically, they went through this immediate backlash to the feature, and they said that people could email and opt them out. And he sort of disagrees with you that what he ends up saying is he decided this was off strategy and shuts it down and all this happened for the lawsuit. But then you say, you say it's off strategy for you. The feature obviously shipped. What made it on strategy at the time he shipped?

And he says this thing that I think is totally fascinating. At the time, the team believed they were doing that. This is from the transcript. They were looking at users and they were focused on a user need, which is, I wish an expert could give me feedback at this moment. I wish my salesperson could give me feedback. I wish my support person could give me feedback. I wish my idol could give me feedback. I wish this expert could give me feedback.

In itself, I think that motivation that users have is a really good one. And I think one that I would encourage experts and creators to lean into. It's a big opportunity. Do you know what never, the word that never ever, ever appears in there is AI. Like, this, he fundamentally misunderstood a human need as an AI product. Like, and this is like, do you remember when Meta launched the thing where you could chat with AI versions of celebrities? Same thing. Like, I want to talk to a celebrity is not an AI feature.

It isn't. And it is actually that disconnect between you have built me an AI solution to a human problem is part of why people don't like AI. This idea that you can simulate human needs and human relationships and human problems and do human things by throwing AI at it with the name Nelai Patel on it is the problem. It's not the solution. It is the problem. If Gramerly built a thing that was like, we will connect you to Nielai Patel who will edit your story for you, I think that's fascinating. Like, what a weird idea. This is the worst cameo clone of all time.

Like, what if cameo, but it's Neely yelling at you that your writing is not good? It's like, that's a product I'm interested in. But the idea that they are looking at this and they're saying, I want more people. I want collaborative tools for humans. And they're saying, we're going to AI fake our way through this and you're going to love it. Is just so fundamentally disconnected from actual reality that it makes me crazy. David, it's software brain. It is.

It is software. It's pure software brain because, you know, his pitch to me was log into our platform and make an AI of yourself by writing down the rules you would use to edit. And I was like, I don't know what those are. And also, why would I do that? Like, what? That's not how I edit. That's not how anybody edits. It's like apart from some very rote things, like put the name of the product in the sentence about the product.

You know, like, once you're past that, you're, there's no way to do rules-based taste. Right. But software brain, with the power of AI, thinks you can do rules-based taste over and over and over again. It thinks you can do rules-based taste. And you can hear the AICOs talk about it. Taste will be the big differentiator.

Yeah. That was the superhuman tagline. Taste will be more valuable than ever. And it's like, yeah, man, that's squishy. It's the thing you can't replicate. And so if you think taste is more valuable than ever, you have got to find a way to actually make it economically valuable. And you cannot say it's rules-based.

And my taste is an app that you can doubt. That doesn't make any sense at all. If you can write down what your taste is, it's not taste. I sat there with a bunch of writer friends all listen to an interview. And we sat there trying to think of rules about how we edit. And you can't. And these are fancy writer people. You just can't do it.

You've got ways. You've got little tricks that you use. When I was a $12 post and gadget blogger, I had a keyboard expansion macro for netbook specs. I wrote those netbook specs like 500 times a day. Does that count? Like, absolutely doesn't count. Anyway, I just, I keep coming back to software brain.

The people do not year in for automation, David. Yep. All right, we should get out of here. You've now said it twice, which means I could use this headline as the title for this episode, but we're not going to. we should get out of here. Real quick, before you have to go get your flight.

Plug Decoder. What's coming? Decoder next week is the CEO of Octa, Todd McKinnon, and the week after that is the CEO of Cisco, Chuck Robbins. This would be fun ones. I like it. Version history this weekend, the 1984 Macintosh with John Gruber, we had a blast making that thing. We had an original Macintosh on the table with us in the studio. It's a very good time. It's a really fun episode.

Apple 50 stuff coming all week. as you're hearing this, the ranker will be live. So go, go rank stuff. Send us your rankings, yell at us about all the things that aren't in there. Send us emails, Virgcast to theverge.com about all this and everything else. Call the hotline 866, verse 1-1. Thank you, as always, for watching and listening. The Vergecast is the production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. Nelai, go catch your flight. Take us out. Rock and roll.