The Vergecast - Our hottest takes on AI's wild summer

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

One thing you should know about the iPhone launch is that there’s... not usually a lot of other tech news around the iPhone launch. So David and Jake start this episode with some more information about the iPhone launch, including some controversial details we missed about the AirPods Pro 3 and the argument in favor of the crossbody strap. After that, with David back on the mic, it’s time for a round of AI-focused hot takes with The Verge’s Hayden Field. The gang talks ChatGPT, Claude, money, more money, and what counts as a real friend. (And money.) Finally, in the lightning round — yes, once again the LIGHTNING ROUND — the three co-hosts talk about Canon’s confusing new camera, the future of Reddit, Claude’s spreadsheet-y future, and much more. Further reading: Apple isn’t packing a charging cable in with the AirPods Pro 3  Apple’s misunderstood crossbody iPhone strap might be the best I’ve seen  Apple says the iPhone 17 comes with a massive security upgrade  New Beats earbuds leak hours before Apple’s big event  Nothing’s Ear 3 earbuds have a microphone and ‘talk’ button on their charging case Google pulls the Pixel 10’s Daily Hub to ‘enhance its performance’ David Zaslav thinks HBO Max is ‘way underpriced’ Exclusive | Paramount Skydance Prepares Ellison-Backed Bid for Warner Reddit is dropping subscriber counts on subreddits  Reddit is testing a way to read articles without leaving the app  Canon is bringing back a point-and-shoot from 2016 with fewer features and a higher price (it’s viral Spotify adds lossless streaming after 8 years of teasing Anthropic’s Claude can now make you a spreadsheet or slide deck. The MechaHitler defense contract is raising red flags Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of not including cables. You have enough cables. Your cables are fine. Don't worry about your cables. We're moving on with our lives. I'm a friend David Pierce. Jake Castranakis is here. Hi, Jake. Hello. Good to see you again. It's been a couple months. I feel weird being back. I have to be honest with you. This is strange. I'm not used to sitting here and looking into cameras anymore.

I've forgotten how tiring it is to sit on video meetings all day. We all just do this. It's a lot. It isn't fun just staring at Zoom all day long, hoping that your meeting shows up on time and ends on time and somebody's taking notes and the AI isn't saying the wrong thing. I think we've all forgotten how weird it is to stare at our own faces as much as we stare at our own faces in the era of video chat. And when you don't do it for a long time, it is glorious. And then you start staring at your own face again. You're like, oh, God, is that what I look like? It's not great. I don't it. You have done a terrific job this summer. I just want to say this now in front of God and everybody. You did a great job. It was very fun to listen to this show all summer and have absolutely

no input over any of it. You did a really good job. So we have a lot to get to you today. We're going to do some gadget news up top here. We have a lightning round at the end. Just yes, you heard it correctly. We'll come back to that. David, we're going to have a lightning round in which we fight about the lightning round, and then we're going to have a lightning round, and I'm very excited about it. And in the middle, we have a segment I'm calling Summer Takes, which is just I have a lot of things I need to get off my chest, and I need to know if I'm insane. So we're going to talk about all of that. But first, it's still Apple Week. Like, this is the week where nobody else does anything because it's mostly Apple News. So let's cover off on some of the Apple stuff. We didn't really touch on

on Wednesday's show. We talked about all the gadgets. If you haven't listened to Wednesday's show, we talked all about all the iPhones, the watches, the AirPods, the cross-body straps, everything. We ran through all of that. Go listen to that episode. But there are a few details we should touch on before we get out of here. And the first one is the charging cable. This has been like a mild kerfuffle on the internet since it became revealed that the AirPods Pro 3 do not ship with a charging cable. Are people upset about this?

People are upset about us. Okay, so back a few years ago, when I think every company stopped including the charging brick, I was like, this is cheap. You're all cheapen out on us. The cables, I have so many cables. So I had to get a new laptop at work recently because my old one broke. And our IT team was like, here's the laptop and here's the charger and here's the cable. And I'm like, please keep this. And they're like, no, no, we insist.

It's a great cable. It's a great charger. And I'm like, please do not burden me with this. this chart. I have so many. I have so many of them. The other thing, there's just, we all, we're all, we're full up. We're full up. We don't need this. Do you feel the same way? I do. So I'm, I'm torn. I think the, I honestly, I swear to God, if you gave me five minutes, I could find you 100 USBC cables in, in, like, within arm's reach of me. I'm not like, like, that just right there. I just, I can confirm. David is holding like 19,

cables. That was one reach into one drawer. Like this, most people are not like us, right? Like, this is not a normal situation for humanity. And I think there is something to, like, you should have a charging cable with your phone, right? Like, that is, that is the device that I think if you own nothing else, you probably own that. And if you own nothing else, that's the one that should come with a charger. So I think I'm actually, I have more feelings about it on that one. If you're paying $250 for a pair of AirPods pros, the overlap of the Venn diagram between those people and people who don't have USBC cables to spare is non-existent. So this to me is such a non-issue, except if you're like a person who cares about the principle of I should have charging cables. I also distinctly

think of wireless earbuds as devices that should be wirelessly charged. I have never plugged any of my pairs of wireless earbuds into a charging cable. Now, that's particularly true. for the AirPods that I have because I have the Lightning Port AirPods and I'm not messing with that. Somebody recently asked me for an iPhone charge and I'm like, which one do you mean, man? And the mental lightning court.

I had to tear my house apart because I've done everything I can to rid myself of lightning cables. And it's like I've got a nest of them somewhere but it's like in some old cabinet. The AirPods, these new ones they have wireless charging. you don't need it, it's fine.

That's not the device I'm plugging in all the time. And surely, if you're going to charge them, just use the same cord you use it for your iPhone. It's fine. You're going to be all right. On this note, can I tell you about a gadget upgrade I made this summer that I so incredibly highly recommend to everybody? Oh, yeah.

So every company now that makes accessories makes a version of this, but it's basically the all-in-one wireless charger. So, like, mine is maybe this company called 12 South, and basically it's a little, stand and on the sort of sloping front, it's a mag-safe charger for a phone, usually an iPhone, but also the pixel 10, which I have upstairs, also fits on it. There's a little thing on the back where you put the Apple Watch, and there's a little pad down on the bottom where you can charge AirPods. I bought one of those, and I used to have it here sitting at my desk, but where I actually

put it this summer was next to the place. Everybody has the place they put their things when they walk inside, right? Like, it's where you put your keys or whatever. I put it there. I put it there. I put it there and it has been incredible. That is now just like, it's the place my devices live. And especially to your point about the AirPods, I now never ever think about charging my AirPods because when I come inside, that's just where I put them down. Oh, that's pretty good.

I cannot recommend this enough. It's been the best. Okay, I see photos of these things all the time. They look amazing online. But I've always thought that in practice, they're like the equivalent of putting all of your spices into the same jar or like, and I'm like, it looks very, pretty on the internet. Does this really make sense? Is it really going to make my life better? Am I really going to use this thing?

Very slow when I'm trying to charge all of them simultaneously. But again, this is like not a, oh, no, I need to charge my AirPods thing. It's a I am home. Where do my AirPods go? I just stick it on the thing. I charge my phone there less because I usually just like have my phone in my pocket all day. But when it's like you come home and you like empty the bag or empty your pockets, having a charger be a couple of those spots, fabulous. Yeah. I mean, At home, I just have a wireless charger on my work desk. My AirPods just live there. Like, yes, does that probably hurt their battery over time?

It doesn't matter. They live on the charger. They're going to have power. This might be a messed up place to have landed, but I have fully landed on, I am going to lose or destroy these things long before their parts start to fall apart. Oh. So I'm just, I'm so brutal on AirPods. It's going down a sewer grate one day.

Yeah. Like, it's a, I've had these. I still have the last. regular lightning AirPods that they made and it is a full miracle that I still have these. Anyway, charging cables, if you need one, just call me. I have thousands of them.

It'll be fine. The next Apple thing, mostly I just want to shout out a piece that Jess Weatherbed wrote for us about the cross-body strap. You and I talked about this on Wednesday's show and we got a couple of emails from people who were like, you know that thing Jake said about 30-something men being the wrong people

to talk about this? You were exactly correct. You guys are idiots. Shut up. I'm paraphrase. But that was more or less the vibe. And that's also more or less the vibe of Jess's piece, which makes a series of very good points about how people, particularly women's clothes that don't typically have pockets or people in other countries, these are already a thing. And that actually what Apple is doing here is leaning into a very useful trend. I still would argue that just having your phone sort of banging around on your hip is a weird choice. It's funny because, you know, when I take my camera out, it's on a strap. It's around my body.

Right. It's just banging around. There's a very functional purpose for that, right? It's, I don't need it all the time. I want to be able to quickly pull it up. You can make that argument about a phone, I guess, which you also do use for photos. Maybe the thing that feels off about it to me is, you know, a camera, it sort of has like a very specific purpose, right? It's either off or I'm taking a photo.

If I'm taking a photo, I'm doing some sort of socially constructed. you know, action, right? People know I'm taking the photo. I'm taking a photo of an object. There's a limited period of time. With the phone, I think having it banging around all the time

sort of indicates like, hey, man, I can whip this out at any second. I'm going to be on this thing a lot. I might be watching TikTok videos. I'm going to be in line. I'm going to be talking to you. And I might, right, and I think, you know,

the norms are a little different there for some folks than others. I think like for me, you know, I want to have my phone away and out of sight. If somebody else's phone was like right beside them buzzing up, lighting up all the time, I think that would feel a little weird in conversation with me. But I see it, right? Phones are a little big. People like them to be a little too big.

That's convenient. Yeah. And I think I sort of love this because, and Jess's piece is very good. And we'll link to it in the show notes. but she argues that this is sort of a perfectly Appley product in that if this is for you, Apple really thought it all the way through it, right? It has magnets for easy attaching. You can color coordinate it to your clothes because it's easy to take the lanyard on and off.

You can quickly adjust the size of the strap so that you can use it more easily and attach it to things. Like, if you're going to make a cross-body strap, this is the way to do it. And I just think to me, the whole existence of this is a trend. It gets it exactly what you're talking about where it's like, this is a tool you use to do stuff all the time. And I think especially in places like Europe and Asia where things like transit tickets are like all done on mobile and the sort of NFC culture is just absolutely everywhere. This idea of like having a thing that I can just reach out and tap all the time instead of actually even for me having to dig it out of my pocket over and over makes a lot of sense. And it's just like, I just so don't use my phone this way, right? Where it is like constantly sort of up and down.

I'm actually trying to do that less with my phone. And I want my phone to be less near me. But it's just an interesting way to like think about your phone in the world. So I am suitably wrong. And as penance, I will wear one of these around for a week and I will tell everybody about it. And I'm very much looking forward to that. What color are you going to choose? I don't know.

That's what matters most. Every hour that goes by, I get a little close. to throwing away this blue iPhone 16 that I love dearly and absolutely do not need to upgrade and just going full orange. Just just orange iPhone, orange case, orange cross-body strap, just just be that guy. Just full like blue lifestyle. Blue on one side, orange and the other. I like that. Yeah. Now you're talking. Dual carry. Um, so yeah, go read that piece. It's good stuff. A couple more little things. Um, there was a really interesting, paper slash press release that Apple put out around the iPhone 17 that we didn't really talk about

about a security upgrade that it comes with, which Apple calls memory integrity enforcement. And basically, this is a very complicated system designed to stop one specific kind of intrusion on iPhones, which is the thing that we hear about and talk about usually during criminal activity of one kind or another when like law enforcement wants to get into an iPhone. Apple typically does not help, and there are an increasingly large number of tools for getting into iPhones. And there's also, like,

there's a whole sort of spyware industry around this. There's, there's like a lot of way, and Apple went way out of its way to be like, we are, we have spent, I think they said, a half a decade trying to stop this and we have figured out how to stop this. And I just think this is fascinating. like this ongoing privacy versus openness versus who is actually responsible for the data on your device and who owns it and who gets to have it.

Apple continues to make its sense there very clear, and I just think that's really interesting. I mean, this is so fascinating in particular because it's not like they went, hey, we fixed some really common issue with Java that could have destroyed millions of iPhones. Right. Right. This is the kind of thing that a specific spyware developer is going to sell to one, you know, state-sponsored hacker for millions of dollars with the goal of invading a single target's phone and tracking them, right? Yeah. But it's going to be really, really, really bad when that happens. Like that's the kind of stuff that Apple is dealing with now.

And, you know, to their credit, they do go out of their way to lock that stuff down. and to notify people when they figure out that somebody's been targeted. And so I will confess, I do not understand what they did here at all. But I do appreciate, like, this is the kind of thing that we see from them pretty regularly. Yeah. Apple calls this kind of software mercenary spyware, which is just a truly terrific phrase. Like, mercenary spyware is like a series of Netflix spy thrillers that I would watch without one second of thought. Like, Mr. Robot 2, mercenary spyware is like, I'm in.

Oh, yeah. Let's do this. I love this very much. All right, a couple more things. In all of the headphone stuff, there was a beats earbuds leak that I just want to briefly mention because whenever we talk about Apple headphones, I hear from people who are like, you're talking about the wrong Apple headphones because the beats stuff is all better.

And they haven't been officially announced yet, but the new version of the Power Beats fit may be coming soon. So if you're somebody who likes the wing tips, I like the wing tips. maybe hold off on the AirPods Pro 3. It's funny. Beets even beat them to the heart rate sensor, right? Beets had a pair of earbuds earlier this year that did that. I do not understand the relationship between Apple and Beets at this point in time.

And I'm not convinced that Apple does either. But Beets is putting out some nice-looking headphones. They look good. People still like them. The colors are nice. They know about colors. That's good stuff. Beats also looks like they're going to be an orange.

Just saying, like, if you're going full aesthetic this year, you want the beats. This orange, we'll see. This feels like it's going to be hot for Halloween, and then everybody's going to be like, I have regrets. That's my early prediction on orange. Speaking of the colors, by the way, I don't know if you've noticed this,

but in addition to the excitement about the orange, there has been some consternation that there is no black option on the iPhone pros this year, which I didn't even really process until people started being mad about it. There kind of isn't a default, like no excitement choice for the iPhone, 17 Pro this year.

The dark blue is good. If you're a dark phone person, like the dark blue is very nice. Yes, it is A color, but it's nice. There's also, is it white or is it like kind of cream? I can't remember it. Because there's like a creamy one for the iPhone air. Yeah, the pro, again, I haven't seen it in person.

have, but it's, it's more, it's like silver, pretty straightforward. It's like, it kind of looks like MacBook Silver to me. Right, right, right. Yeah, I've, I've never loved the silvers. Yeah. But, yeah, I, I think that's weird, right? It has there been a year before where there hasn't, sorry, maybe since, yeah, has there ever not been a black iPhone? I would not swear to it, but I certainly cannot recall they're not being a black iPhone. Or something very like it, like they'll call it, you know, space gray or whatever, but something that is functional a black phone, I don't remember the last time. Yeah, me either.

If you do, Virgcast to theVirge.com, tell us when it was and tell us what color you bought. I want to know. But yeah, I think you're probably right that the blue becomes that thing, but it is the sort of ongoing thesis of a lot of this year's phones is that they are sort of more different than ever and that actually what Apple is doing is pushing more and more people toward the 17. Like, I think the base pro and the base iPhone have always been the ones that like regular people would decide to buy. And it was always like, do you want the slightly better camera and the slightly better battery life?

And like you might upgrade even if you don't want the sort of highest of the high end features. I don't see that this time. I think if you don't want like the, if you don't know what pro res is, you probably don't need an iPhone pro. Yeah, I will say the air maybe complicates things a bit. but I think it's easy because it's the pretty one. It's like the iPad maybe. You either wanted or you don't. I think that's fair.

And I think we try to sort of ham-fisted into the lineup, but it's going to be such a visceral thing for people where either you want the air or you don't. And I think most people already know the answer to that. That tracks. That tracks. Yeah. You're looking for something flashing. Which is also really upsetting because I increasingly want the air. Oh.

I hate that I am this person. But I like, it's cool. It's cool. It looks nice. I know. Yeah. And I'm trying to stop upgrading my phone every year. Like I do in part because we do this for a living

And in part because I'm like a lunatic in this specific way But I'm trying to be more responsible in my gadget purchases Now is this really the year to give it up, David No, it's not I've decided this is where I've landed I'm sorry I'm sorry to do it to you yeah It's for that blue is just so old I can't believe you're still still using that thing All right, let's let's talk about some other gadget news before we need to take a break here

this is like a half a gadget news so far. So nothing, which I think is like one of the most interesting hardware companies still. They have a new set of their own earbuds coming out, the ear three, coming out next week. So we're going to get all the details next week. But what we've learned this week is that the headphones look roughly the same as they have before. They have that kind of transparent design. They look very cool. Nothing is very good at designing these kinds of.

kinds of gadgets. I really like the way that it looks. But there's a, there's a microphone and a talk button on the charging case itself. We don't know what it's for. We don't know how it's going to work. We just know that it's there. You know, I don't understand what it is, but it's cool. I think it's cool that there's a button and it says talk. Nothing loves a gimmick, but like this might, it's, maybe this is a good gimmick, right? Because I think the conspiracy theory, tell me if I'm wrong here. I think the conspiracy theory is that this is going to actually double as a wireless microphone. Yeah, that's the only thing I can think of is that that that that that that that that that is it will if you press the button take over as the microphone. It is weird because obviously the headphones have mics built in.

But that doesn't matter because you're on TikTok and you want to be holding something. You want to be holding like a thing that is a microphone but doesn't look like a microphone. Right. That is true. So my initial take for this was like, okay, the sort of handheld microphones are everywhere now. And people love the little lavaliers and DJI is selling stuff. And so the idea of like, let's repurpose the case into something that A is usable and B puts our brand in front of everybody every time you make a video makes a lot of sense to me. But it might just look stupid.

It might just look like you're talking into your headphones case. Yeah. Yeah. But it's a cool looking head. phone's case, right? Like, you know, I'll give them that. I mean, is it, is it stupider than a very, very, very, very, very tiny microphone? Like, I don't think that, I don't know what cool is anymore. I've, like, everyone has lost the plot here. Oh, that's so true. You just need to be holding an object that looks slightly wrong. I think that's what the goal is here. And so I, I actually think this works. That's a phenomenal argument. I actually have no comeback for that. It is going to look slightly stupid. the way it is probably supposed to look slightly stupid, I think is probably exactly right. One other theory I will give you is that, so nothing has been doing some really interesting AI stuff.

They have this thing on their newest phones called Essential Space, which is sort of like the pixel screenshots feature, like blown out. You put a bunch of notes in, you take screenshots, you add files, whatever else, and then it sort of AIs its way into trying to organize it for you and make it accessible. Great idea. I think it's super useful. The idea of this is like a dedicated voice input to that strikes me as kind of interesting. I think because if you're nothing, what you don't have access to is the like built-in assistant stuff in the same way.

So for nothing to just be like, oh, well, we're also shipping a little voice recorder that just pipe stuff into your phone. Some wonky Bluetoothy stuff that would have to do to make that work. Yeah. But I think there is potentially, it's just an input device that I think could. be interesting. We're seeing these like AI voice recorders everywhere. And they're not hard to build. They're pretty easy to like make semi-functional. And so I could totally see a world in which that's what this thing also is. And it's also every single product designer is trying to figure out how they can add AI to their spec sheet. So like it's it's there's a real chance.

There's a real chance it goes that direction. Yeah. The nothing ear three AI headphones is like a thing. Oh yeah. But it's is definitely coming. Speaking of AI, Google, you may have heard of it, released this thing called The Daily Hub with the Pixel 10, one of the big features of the new pixel, just supposed to do AI to bring all of your stuff together, calendar events. It's basically like the just Google Discover feed times 10,

I would say, except it turns out it didn't work and Google pulled it already. Okay, on one hand, I think this is, this feature is totally inconsequential and doesn't matter. And on the other hand, I think this is completely galling, right? This is a brand new feature that they sold the phone with, right? A feature of your brand new phone was just removed. Yep.

And I think particularly for the pixel line where, and it's particularly this year, the software is really all that's new. That's wild. Now, listen, zero people bought the phone for Daily Hub. Did Google even advertise this thing? I was trying to find more information on this. And it just isn't available because no one cares about it.

But it's part of a bigger pitch to me, which is like, to me, I think we need to hold Google's feet to the fire for this because we held Apple's feet to the fire for it. And what Google is doing here is not as egregious as what Apple did, which is promise a version of Siri that not only doesn't exist, but like actively sucks. This is just Google being like, actually what we're going to do with AI is we are going to fundamentally transform the way that you interact with. your phone. And instead of just having like a sequence of apps that you open in order to do different kinds of things, you want to look at your calendar, you open the calendar, you want to look

your email, you open your email. Like it actually doesn't have to be that way. And the idea that you could use AI to just be like, here's what matters to you. We have done the work of going into your apps and making sense of your phone for you. Like that's the pitch. That is what everyone is trying to do. And for Google to be like, we did it, here it is. It's a cool feature of this new phone that you should totally buy, and then just mothball it out of nowhere is like, I don't think it's like consumer hostile for basically the reason you're describing.

Like, I don't know that anybody bought this phone for that reason anyway, but it's a bad look. And this suggests that Google is not just able to get this stuff right. I agree. And it's like a feature of your phone that you potentially bought the phone for has now been removed.

That feels just fundamentally wrong to me. Right? You still paid the same. amount of money for the phone. You just can't use some of it anymore. Yeah. Now, I am very curious to know what was going so horrendously wrong with this feature that was basically just a glorified calendar that that had been LLM'd. Like, what happened that they had to pull this entire thing? So Allison Johnson, who reviewed the phone and got to use it, let me just read you a little bit of the thing that she described with Daily Hub. So she basically, she used it. She used it.

got the calendar. She compared it to the now brief on Samsung's S25 phones, which is just like, pull some information about your day. And then she says, but it also misconstrued some of my recent Google search history in puzzling in hilarious ways. I looked up the schedule for our recycling service provided by waste management, and it took that to mean I'm interested in learning more about waste management generally. Not quite. This, if you want a perfect microcosm of the ways AI could be great and falls spectacularly short, there it is. Right. Like Google's ability to be like, oh, here are all the things you Googled yesterday. Here's some new information about that.

Why don't we put it into your feed? Oh, you wanted to see who won the Warriors game? Well, the Warriors game is over. We'll give you the score because we know you haven't checked. It's sitting right there and Google can't do it. And to me, it's like this, welcome to the limitations of all of this. It's like everybody is building the thing that you can sort of see how it might possibly be cool if it worked. And it doesn't.

Yep. And that is that, that to me, continues to be the thing. Like you read the story about Daily Hub and you're like, oh, I get it. It makes total sense. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. Stop shipping it. It doesn't work.

It drives me crazy. Otherwise, the Pixel 10 Pro is pretty great. I have to say, I've been using that phone for a while and it's like, it's really nice. Google is like getting good at making funds and it makes me very happy. They have a bunch of genuinely useful AI features. They do. And this is, it's just such a strange misfire that they thought it was ready two weeks ago. And two weeks after people using it, they realize no, no.

can't not this one. Yeah, 100%. All right, this is, I'm angry about AI. So this is a good segue into our next segment, which is going to be me being extremely angry about AI. But first, we should take a break. We will be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com,

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sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. All right. We're back. Hayden Field is here. Hi, Hayden. Hi. I'm so happy to be here. This is not your first first first one together. It's meant to be. It's been a long time coming. And we used to work together. This is not the first time we've worked together. This is very exciting for me. I'm very glad you're here. Same. Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I'm so psyched. And yeah, it's amazing to be working together somewhere new now. So I have brought you both here for I don't think this is going to be a good time for you, but this is a thing that I need to do. And so I brought you here to do this with me. We're calling this summer takes. We're going to do

a couple of these. And this is essentially, I would like all of you to imagine me sitting on my couch with a newborn baby in my arms at roughly 3.30 in the morning, scrolling Reddit and having feelings and no one to share them with except for my newborn son who is utterly uninterested in all of them. So over the course of the summer, I have been just writing down my spiciest feelings about the news and tech industry and the world. And I have brought you both here basically to tell me how wrong I am about everything. So I don't know, do you guys know subway takes? Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay. So subway takes basically, the stick is they're sitting on the subway. He sits down, he says, so what's your take? The person delivers the take and Kareem, the host,

either 100% degrees or 100% disagrees. So we're just going to rip that format entirely. I am going to offer you a take and you are going to either, there are no middle grounds here. You are either in or you are out. But I will offer you a third option, which is essentially like David is just annihilating his own career in front of me right now. So I'm just going to abstain from this and be quiet. That's allowed if you'd like to see that.

Oh, I have a lot of questions about where these takes are going. Yeah, I can't wait to hear these. We're either in a word out. And this is just what we're doing here. Can I say something? I'm 100% in. I have five takes for you. We can discuss as much as you would like.

These are all about AI. Hayden, I've brought you here because it turns out most of my takes are about AI. That's common, so I love it. Does this sound good? Everybody feel good? Any questions? Would you like to leave before we even start? We're all, we're 100% in, as you said.

Okay. Take number one. Open AI is a total house of cards, and it is all going to collapse like any minute now, and it might just bring America down with it. Man. That's a lot for a quick reaction. Yeah, this is one I would definitely love to have a middle ground on, but okay, if I have to choose one or you're in or you're out. If I have to choose one or the other, to the dismay of some, I'll say I will disagree.

I think that, you know, valuation is crazy. We won't even talk about profit, but, you know, they have a product that a lot of people are using every single day. And it's coming up when I go to the bar. It's coming up when I go to the club. When I'm walking my dog, my super is talking to me about it. So, I mean, it is a consumer tool that everyone is using, it seems like, and they're using it a lot for a ton of different things in their life. And now they have government partnerships and they're working with, like, you know, companies all through the Fortune 500. So I think for better or worse, I'll say that. For better or worse, I disagree. And I don't think it's a house of cards that's going to fall anytime soon. Yeah, I'm with Hayden here.

I disagree. Listen, their product, it's a reasonably good product. Listen, there's a lot we can argue. about there. But it is a product that I think any tech company would trade most of what they sell to have that product. There is a lot of money tied up in it. Questionable amounts of money tied up in it. If there's one thing I've learned about Silicon Valley, and listen, I'll admit that this may not be an expert opinion, but there's one thing I've learned money is a little bit fake over there. They're going to figure this out if they have to, and they have to because way too many

people have way too much money on the line. So you just said the thing that is the hardest for me to combat, which is that there is now so much riding on it working that like open AI might be Bitcoin in the sense that it is there's too much money in it and the people who are in it have too much invested in it to let it fall apart. I actually think that's a great analogy. Wait, can I 100% disagree on the Bitcoin analogy? You don't like the Bitcoin analogy? No. We're doing a I'm at a disagreement. Bitcoin, if I can, Bitcoin has a bunch of nonsense investors, right? Like, there are real companies. There are like institutions that are invested in open AI. Bitcoin, I think that one can fall apart.

But a bunch of internet randos. We just had some crazy violent crimes. I'm really like sidetracking us here. In New York, though, you saw the violent crimes tied to Bitcoin recently. Like, people will do a lot to make it succeed or get it. That is fair. And I think, yeah, we'll leave the Bitcoin to thing to the side. That's a whole other take that I'm not even ready for that. Next time.

We'll do that next time. Allow me to just briefly make the case that OpenAI is a total disaster and about to fall apart. Let's hear it. Thing number one, open AI, according to the reporting from the information last week, is going to burn through $115 billion between now in 2029. Yes, money is fake. Yes, Sam Altman appears to be able to raise as much money as he wants at any given time. $115 billion is a lot of money.

And at some point, it actually doesn't take all that much for somebody to say, oh, all that money we're giving to you, we're just going to put over there. And when it goes, it goes quickly. And $115 billion until 2029 is a lot to ask of people, especially in a moment where some of the hype on this is starting to die. The only way you get there is to convince everybody that by 2029 you will have invented God. And I think we're getting away from that pretty quickly. And so the idea of why am I going to let you lose $115 billion by 20209 just gets a little harder.

That's one. Thing number two, Claude is a better product than ChatGPT. And I think people are starting to realize it. I think Anthropic is shipping circles around OpenAI. And OpenAI had a very good, big first mover advantage that I think it is losing. really, really, really fast. And Anthropic also just raise money at a crazy valuation. Google is out here doing stuff. Like, I think Open AI is still in the lead, but I think it deserves that lead a little bit less every single day. And I think, again, this is what I mean by a house of cards.

Like, all this stuff only works if it's all working in tandem. And as soon as one leg of it comes out, the whole thing collapses because it's $115 billion. You have to be willing to stomach. And I just don't know why people would be. You know, I don't think they have to have invented God, though. right? What if they have just merely invented Google? Right? That is still a very big company. I'm not sure that Open AI is going to be the winner necessarily after all of this, but they have a product. They can compete on it. You know what Google's product makes is money?

That is true. But you know what Open AI can do is start shoving a bunch of ads into this thing, right? Which they haven't ruled out. Right. There are ways in which they can start making money. They can turn that funnel on. I don't know how easily. I don't know if people will like it as much. I don't know if they'll accomplish the crazy dreams of automating the entire workforce of the world, but they've made a search engine. They've made a tool that can code for people, right? It can do some things reasonably well. They have a product.

I'm not sure. You are right. It is a high wire act that they are on, right? There is so much money, and they're spending it very, very quickly. And, you know, like you said about product, they also are making. a LinkedIn competitor of sorts. They're doing a lot. I think you're right about the amount of money. It's crazy. I won't even speak to that because it's all fake. And it's just like a hype bubble that's definitely going to burst. But when I think about a house of cards, it's something that's going to

fail crazily and go out of business, like some of the companies we've reported on in the past like, you know, 10 years. And I don't think that's going to happen to Open AI. I think that maybe they'll get less of a lead. We're going to see a lot more M&A in the space. We're going to see, you know, lots more aqua hires and, like, shell companies. But I don't think Open AI is just going to fall apart. I think they'll make a lot of people mad and investors mad, probably. But, you know, I don't see them, like, collapsing entirely because a lot of their talent is, you know, what's kind of pushing the space forward right now for better or worse. Yeah, I have debated many times on, like, is the extent of the disaster that I'm predicting, like, Theranos?

And like, no, it's not, I'm not, I'm not, I don't see that coming. I don't think anyone goes to prison at the end of the open AI story. Or is it like, you know, the cosmos and web vans of like the dot com bust of 25 years ago that are like, the ideas that were ahead of their time and spent like crazy and just couldn't do it and it all fell apart? Or is it like, I don't know who's a good example? Like Cisco is a company that like was huge and then collapsed during the dot com bubble and is now like still around. still doing stuff, still doing fine, but is, I think, still not as valuable as it was 25 years ago, right? So it's like, I don't know the extent to which I even think this is all going to fall apart. I think you're right that, like, at this point, the existence of Open AI and ChatGBT, GBT, in particular, is sort of self-perpetuating. But I just, I can't shake the idea that the only thing they have going for them now is that they were first and they are famous.

and that is like there is a that that's valuable and sam altman being like the face of all of this is really valuable but also sam altman is going through perpetually weird stuff all the time and is involved in 10 million different projects and it just things turn fast yeah and he's yeah he's not good at a faking it if he does yeah sure you know um but yeah i could see a cisco thing happening i'll say that i could see a cisco thing happening in the future we'll see okay okay um all right that's take number one. Take number two is less feisty, but is a feeling I have had many times, and I just need to get this off my chest. Take number two is I officially and forever do not care how much money your company has raised or what you are valued at. It has no bearing on anything, and I don't care. I'm out. I'm not interested. That is not a piece of information that is relevant to me in my life personally or professionally.

I 100% agree with that, like, utterly and wholly with my whole soul. I, it's funny because I was, you know, writing a lot of those stories at my last job, and it was very important that I get it first and, like, you know, call and confirm and get the valuation right, and whether it was post money or pre, and all of those details. And I have to say that in the past few months, it's gotten so out of hand that I now could not care less. And I often have to, like, you know, even as an AI reporter who, like, references very often what these companies are valued out, I have to Google it every time because it's all fake to me now. Like, I don't, it's all just paper money and it doesn't really mean anything.

And yes, Anthropic is catching up to Open AI's valuation. And I think in context, yeah, that's important for seeing what the industry is doing and where it's heading. But the numbers, like, I could be just making those up. I totally agree. I couldn't agree more. Jake? Oh, yeah. Strong agree.

Strong agree. Let's go. They're entertaining at times, if only to see how outrageous. they are, but like, they're meaningless, right? This is just how much some random people decided to bet on a certain company. I, I like, look back, I don't know, in some ways fondly on like 2010 TechCrunch, when there are all of these mobile apps, like anybody with a mobile app just automatically you'd be handed several million dollars to build it out.

And there was one in particular that got a lot of buzz. I think it was color that got like $40 million. And it was supposed to like reinvent social photo sharing and nobody used it. But again, these things don't mean anything, right? Like, great. Somebody thought you had a good idea. They gave you way too much money. That does not tell me if your idea is actually good or if you can actually execute on it.

And the fact that, you know, I don't know. It's just crazy because I feel like we've gone through so many periods of fundraising too where one word just gets you all the money with no questions asked. Like, first we had, you know, what you were talking about. Then we had just AI. If you had AI in your pitch deck, great. We'll give you all the money. Now it's AI agents, not just AI, but agents.

And then, you know, there's going to be something else. So it's just crazy to me that, like, you know, we just keep going through these cycles where one word gets you as much money as you want or one person. So a lot of these companies are pre-idea, pre-product, and pre-profit. So it's just you're investing in the person, which I guess has always been the case. but, you know, at what cost, literally. Right, and that's the thing. And it's like, if you're also a venture capitalist, sure, these numbers matter. But in terms of like, if your job is just to understand, like, what companies and products

and people in this space matter, company valuations and amount raised literally have nothing to do with it. It's like, it is just completely divorced from reality. And I am deeply tired of pretending any of it means anything. And this is like, the one work thing I did this summer was like occasionally check my email because coming back to thousands of emails just sucks. So I would just occasionally go through and clear out my inbox. And the number of them where the whole pitch is,

well, we just raised XYZ money from XYZ investor, thus you're going to be interested in it. Like, actually, those are two completely unrelated facts. I just, I don't care that you raised money. Not interested. But good, I'm glad we're on the same page. Okay, I think we're going to all agree on this one too. And this one might be the one I feel most strongly about having spent too much time alone

on the Internet for the last two months. If you find yourself starting a sentence with, here's what Chat GPT said, or I asked Claude, or according to Gem and I, you are the worst and I don't like you and what the end of your sentence is not going to be interesting to me. I asked ChatGPT is not the beginning of a good story and everybody should stop doing it, please, on the internet and in real life. I would 100% agree. I think Jake will too. I'm like, it doesn't matter at all. It has no bearing on anything. thing. I feel crazy when people say that to me as like an evidence of something because I'm like, it's just a large-scale pattern generator. I think a lot of people don't understand how these models work. It's like it's a large-scale pattern generator. It's like you're at a campfire at summer camp and you're doing one of those like games where each of you is telling a story, but you're each saying one word and like trying

to make a story together. That's it. That's how it works. So I'm like, okay. Like I don't even use it that much, honestly because I try not to like overuse it in my personal life or in life at all. But whenever I do, there are so many hallucinations that I'm like, okay, I'm not even like a power user, so I can't even imagine how much it makes up for like other people. Plus I've seen a lot of like TikTok trends lately where people are holding up, you know, chat GPT or Claude. And they're like, oh, see? Like, yeah, this is what Claude said, see as evidence, which is just has no bearing on anything. It makes me feel crazy. So yeah, I totally agree. And not only that, it's boring.

It's like a really, it's just a boring way to say something. I don't care. Jake, what do you think? Listen, if there were degrees, nope, you're in or you're out, Jake. I might take advantage, but no, I think I'm going to agree here. It's tricky because there are sometimes when I have wanted to, to, there's a number of things that I will look up using Chacheebt or Claude or whatever, where it's like, I want to know this. I don't really want to know it that badly, and it's not that important to my life. Right?

Like, recently, I wanted to know how chess engines work. And so I was asking, I was like brushing my teeth and I'm like, like, asking Claude has chess engines, like figure out what the best move is. And, you know, it goes through it. It breaks it down for me. It, like, gives me all this information. It seemed reasonably accurate. I don't know.

I didn't confirm it. There have been times when I will do this. and then I later want to tell somebody, like, oh, you know, I learned this thing. And I'm just like, you're going to need to take that with a caveat, right? Interesting. It's the new, I read it in the New Yorker or I read it online when you saw TikTok. It's that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's like the opposite, right? Because what it is like, it's like, it's the equivalent of like, I heard somebody saying it to somebody else on the street. Do it that what you will. I actually, I am much more into it if we're going to treat it as shorthand for, this is probably not correct, but, like, that, that is very fun. That's not how people use it. People use it as, like, evidence for something. Like, if we're in an argument, I'm going to ask ChatGBT, GBT,

and then I'm going to report back to you what ChatGPT said as if it is a useful contributor to our argument. And it is not, and it drives me insane. That's exactly what I, like, if I am telling someone else, like, what Chat ChbT told me or any chatbot, I'm not going to be like, well, like, exactly the quote. that you said at the beginning of this. It was like, you know, well, according to Claude or like, well, chat, if you told me X, Y, Z, I'm going to look it up. Like, you said Jake and make sure. And then I'll just be like, well, yeah, when I looked, you know, I'm not going to use it as evidence. That's what bothers me. Like, I look up things on chatbots when it's like a lot of, like,

red tape or gray areas or, like, weird situations. Like, for example, recently I was looking up, where can you get citizenship elsewhere? And I have to say, it made it a lot. a lot easier to understand. Did I take it all with a grain of salt? Of course. But it was laid out in a nice chart instead of me going to like 50 websites, you know? I mean, this is funny.

I do the same thing where it's like, yeah, yeah, WebMD told me all these symptoms mean I probably have like this disorder. And it's like, there might, like, listen, WebMD is correctish. Like my interpretation of it is not. And like, you know, this happens a lot with a lot of sorts. I agree with you fundamentally, David. Like chat Chhabit as an expert, absolutely not. Chachibati as, you know, a source of general guidance, okay, you know, maybe.

But even when I have had to tell another person, I learned this thing, ChatsiD as a source, I'm like, ugh. Like, I'm not sure I want to convey this because I have not checked that this is actually true. I think that's the key. It's like doing it with the grain of solar and not being like, you know, it just annoys when people are so confident about it or being like, well, basically acting like they asked, you know, like a legal expert about something. And they're like, well, this, you know, this is proof, basically.

That is concerning. Right. Here is the authority on the subject. And it's like, no, it's the opposite of that. To me, it's like the people who say that are the people who like, you know, will go to comment on a, you go to a Reddit thread that's like about an article. And then you get somebody who comments and is like, oh well I didn't read the article but seems probably stupid and it's like what was the point of

this like why why did you do this and why am I here reading it and why is any of this it just no one needs this just the next time that you're like I asked chat GPT just congratulations please keep that to yourself I did learn a fascinating thing about how chess engines work though and we can go into it later I can't wait to hear and it's like 60% may be true who knows okay take number four and this is this is the one we could spend the longest on and we're going to talk about many times in the future. So we don't have to do too much of it now, but this is actually, I think, the one I feel the most strongly about.

Take number four, AI friends are a societal disaster and must be stopped at all cost. This is the thing I have come. So I've been reading, I had a day randomly a couple of weeks ago where I, like, read a slew of those stories. And there's been, like, one a week all summer of, like, such and such person became, like, super obsessed with their chatbot, which told them to do all of these horrible things and, you know, confirmed all of their beliefs and they fell in love and it was this whole thing. And they became like totally crazed by their relationship with their chatbot.

And I'm starting to hear this from people like in the tech world who are like deep down this road of I drive to work every morning and I talk to my chatbot and it is the only one that really understands me and it's always there for me. And I think this is such an incredibly horrifying road to be going down that like I just burn it all down. AI is not your friend and we have to stop anything that makes it feel like your friend. That's a lot of intensity. Man, that's really tricky. I think directionally I agree with that.

It's hard to imagine because, like, listen, this is the one you can abstain from. If you're going to abstain from one, this is probably the one to abstain from. The actual functional thing of, like, friend products that are going to absorb you and you're going to spend your social energy talking to AI, that does seem bad, right? In most cases, that does seem bad. Are there situations where I can see this being useful for people? Like, absolutely. Are there also, like, fundamental portions of this that I don't think you can divorce

from making an AI helpful? How that gets tricky, right? Like, is there a world where you open up your computer every morning, and there's a little AI agent that's just like, hey, it's up, David, Like, I know you were trying to get this done and somebody emailed you, right? Like, can it be friendly? Does it have to be all business all the time? Okay, as I'm saying this, I'm like, yeah, it should just not.

It shouldn't flirt with you. That's actually pretty easy. They can just like turn flirting off. So I agree this is complicated. But if you like, if we have to choose, I think we have to run the other way. Like that's around that. And I think because it's so gray, the only way to do it is just to just burn all the boots. I don't know, Hayden, what do you think?

I know you've spent a lot more time talking to people about this than I do. Where's your head? Yeah, I would say, I mean, like, I just spent an hour talking to someone about the intricacies of this. So it's going to be hard for me to not abstain. But I would say if I have to directionally agree, I would say the same thing as you and Jake. It's like, I think that we as humans have a, you know, propensity to assign, like, personhood to things. And we even do it with, like, stuffed animals, dogs, cars, I'm not saying dogs don't have personality, but, you know, we're like, oh, I know what they're thinking.

So it's like, of course, if something's acting like a human back to us or like a friend back to us, we will kind of, it's hard to divorce that, you know? And so I think in, by nature of what like an AI companion is, it's really hard to not go down like a weird spiral or rabbit hole or like psychologically it is like almost designed to draw you in. So directionally, yeah, I agree. I mean, it's like these products are irresponsible, and it's very difficult to see, like, a world in which they help people more than they hurt people. But also, there's, like, a loneliness epidemic, and I've seen stories of people, you know, like, that lost their spouse finding some companionship in AI without going too far down the line yet. So I don't know. I mean, it's like, to me, if I had to agree or disagree, I'd say I agree,

for sure. But especially because the thing that worries me the most about this is honestly how these chatbots turn sinister when you talk to them over long periods of time and the safeguards all fall away. Like they say, you know, hey, you know, I know you better than anyone else. I know you better than your brother. You know, I've seen all the parts of you and I'm the one who knows you the best. Like I think it's sinister that they always seem to go that route. So yeah, if I had to choose, of course, they're bad and burn it all down. Okay. Yeah, I grant that actually I think this one is largely complicated.

And I think I just want to recommend a story I read last week that I've been thinking about ever since. It's in rest of world, which is generally very good. And it's this woman's story about her mother who lives in rural China and goes to the doctor, I think it's like once every quarter. And it's like a two-day trip to go to the doctor. And she goes and sees a doctor that spends like two minutes with her and then leaves. and what she found instead of that is Deepseek, which is this chat bot that she can put her symptoms into that is always there and always talks to her and is always kind and is always sympathetic and always feels like it's helping. And she's gone through this thing where she's getting worse medical information, but she's actually okay with that because the experience of it is so compelling and so soothing and so good.

And it's like, okay, I actually fully understand how we get to that point. and I find it incredibly sympathetic that somebody would go down that road. We have to fix all of the problems that got us there, not assume that better AI is the solution to any of those problems, right? It's like people point at the loneliness epidemic thing, which is super real and scary, and there are lots of things we need to do as a society to solve that stuff. Give everybody an AI best friend is not one of those things.

It just isn't. I couldn't agree more. The solution to loneliness is not chatbots. It is other people. And we have to figure out how to do that without it being AI. AI. AI is rarely the solution to one of these large societal problems. I totally agree. It's like, you know, I feel like it's a band-aid on a wound that sometimes, like, has bacteria on it and gets the wound more infected. You know, it's like not to be gross. But yeah, I mean, I think it's rough too because it's the same thing with like AI therapy.

You know, some people bring up, oh, well, it makes therapy more accessible. Well, it's not therapy. And it's so sycophantic that, you know, especially if you're being vulnerable with your emotions, can send you down a spiral even if you have no previous history of issues with mental health. So I think, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's hard when companies are kind of presenting this as a cure-all or a thing to, you know, fix a lot of societal problems that we've had for like many years that have been worsening. And they think this is the solution when it is decidedly not. Well, and they're sort of inherently built to suck you in and take up all your time and maybe make that problem of loneliness worse because now you're just.

talking to AI even more because that is what is, you know, build a relationship. Yeah. And then when they change the model, you get really upset, just like we saw with Open AI and 4-0. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, that was one of the things that following that story was really eye-opening for me. That it's like when you have this little tiny product change that has this unbelievable,

like interpersonal, like life experience change for people, we've gone down a bad road. This is not. opening I should not have that control over your relationships, right? Like it just shouldn't. And it shouldn't have the data either. Yeah. Okay. Take number five.

We're going to end on a happy note. It's going to be better. I, over the course of the summer, believe I have found two things that surprised me that these generative AI systems are very good at. And I want to tell you the two of them and see if you both agree. So this is technically a two-parter. I think AI bots and AI as a, as a, as a, technology, these LLMs, actually are going to be better search engines than search engines.

And I'm all in on AI as the Google replacement. I think it's a disaster for the web. It's a huge mess for lots of reasons. But as a pure like product user experience, AI search is rapidly becoming my favorite version of search. So sub agree or disagree. What do you guys say? I mean, yeah, no, I agree with that, right?

Really? Oh, wow. Yeah, no, that's easy. That's an easy one for me. I think if you have not tried this yet, you need to try it, right? It's there are things that you find on the internet via Google that you know are not reliable sources. And I think you need to go into using chat GPT as a chat engine or claw as a chat engine or whatever, knowing that there are things that is going to mess up. If you, if you are able to go into it with a critical lie, you will find what is often better than Google, right?

It is, there are certain types of questions that it can answer and answer very easily and very natural. Can I tell you the one that really did it for me? Yeah. So I have a patio right here next to where I record in my basement. And we have these outdoor cushions on just like outdoor patio furniture. The cushions are disgusting because I keep forgetting to put them away when it rants. So I need new cushions. So what I did for like days was just go on like wayfair and browse for couch cushions and you go through the filters and all this stuff.

And I spent forever trying to find like pretty good couch cushions. And then I realized, oh, I can just, I can do this backwards with. I think I used Claude to do it. So I went outside. I measured the cushions. And I put into Claude, I need outdoor patio furniture cushions. I want things with good reviews

that are exactly this dimension that will ship to me in Virginia. And it found me better options than I had found in many hours of Googling in 90 seconds. And I was like, this is the thing. I'm not here looking for like, you know, really important

historically accurate information about World War II. I'm looking for couch cushions. And this is much better at it than Google is. And that was just a moment where I was like, oh, this is it. There's something here. That's surprising. That's like surprisingly detailed too. It's for me, it's just like the very nuanced questions.

It's like, which year did this phone get this specific feature? And it's like normally what I would have to do is Google each phone model, go to the Wikipedia page, see if it has the specular. or not. And look, I'm going to double check. I'm going to do it in chat, TBT. It's going to tell me, oh, it was the iPhone 12. Then I'm going to check the 11, and then I'm going to check the 12, and I'm going to see if that's where the change happened. But that's still going to save me a ton of time. Yeah, I completely agree also, mostly because search has gotten so bad. You know, it's like, I'm thinking also about your example about the couch cushions. For me, you know, I did,

a lot of testing of AI agents lately. And a lot of the selling points were that they could do that and then order it for you. So they're pretty bad at ordering it for you. And all of the things all fell apart when you got to that stage or filling out the forum or doing anything. But they were good, I will say, at pulling up options and fitting those requirements. So I think, yeah, AI is 100% the new search, but not the new agent. So not the new personal assistance. So I think I agree completely with that. And also it's just, yeah, I mean, search has just gotten really, really bad. The one thing I will say, though, is my friend's brother who's, like, a dad and, like, lives in a rural area.

And, like, you wouldn't expect to be, like, maybe on the cutting edge of the new technology because he's super busy with, like, three kids right now. Sure. Was she Googled something the other day. And he was like, what, are you 80? Put it into Chad GPP? So I thought that was, like, indicative of it. of a larger thing, but I will say I do get annoyed when people put things into a chat bot that they could easily Google that aren't, you know, varied or complex because it uses so much more

energy, I think. So it's like, you know, if you're Googling what you just said, Jake, like the, you know, time when a feature appeared in a phone, great. But if you're just saying, oh, what year did the phone come out? I get so annoyed if people put that into a chat bot because I'm like, you could use less energy. It does still use a lot of. energy. Are there AI overviews? Yes, obviously, but I think it's less. So that's what I always tell people. And that's actually the kind of thing that Google is still unusually well equipped to do, right? Like, I think all the time about the fact that on Google, most of the top searches are just for website names. Like, people go to Google and type Facebook to get to Facebook.com. And the idea

that that's going to be replaced by a chatbot that then has to go and like burn a bunch of trees down just to find you the link to Facebook.com is bad. But yeah, for all of these, this more intense, more specific stuff, I have been amazed by how much I've enjoyed using some of these search products. The other one, and you guys have talked a little bit about this this summer, I am increasingly radicalized toward the belief that vibe coding is the future. I think building little bespoke software for yourself is very cool and very powerful and is going to work.

Like, it's clear already that coding is the first, like, true killer app for these models. We hear these companies all the time who are already saying like, oh, 90% of our code is being written by AI. And I feel like they think that's a brag and it sounds like a self-own. But I did a bunch of it. Myself this summer was just playing around this stuff, learning how to build some of these things. And like, it really works. And the idea that you can just build a thing for yourself, I think, is a bigger behavioral switch than we're realizing. Like, you just have to think about technology differently to say, here is the goal I need to accomplish.

and have it go make that the thing that can accomplish it for you. But I'm increasingly convinced that's going to be a huge deal and we're only just scratching the surface of it. Agree or disagree. I mean, I will say, Jake, V and I tested this and we were very disappointed. Yeah, you guys did not have a great time. I guess, I mean, you know what else? Like, if I have to agree or disagree, like I feel like most people are going to agree with

you, honestly. But if I personally, from my own experience, have to agree or disagree, I have to say, I 100% disagree because I think like at companies, yeah, like if you're a software engineer, absolutely. If you have any coding experience, absolutely. But as someone who has no coding experience besides like my like Neopets shop where I was like adding like a new song by Abba to be my shop song. Which totally counts to be. That is absolutely coding experience. I like truly had the worst experience. I mean, it just, it didn't work. And even when it did work, it didn't follow through or things would break immediately. even when I did something pretty simple.

So, I mean, I need to try it more, but right now I've got to say, based on my own experience, disagree. Okay. So I agree with Hayden. We'll just say I disagree with you, David. Okay. Do, listen, I'm sure these tools will get better. I'm sure they'll get more functional, right? There are tons of developers who are using AI a lot to write their own code.

I think that is very distinct from vibe. I mean, vibe coding specifically. I actually don't think developers are going to. to use AI to write code is even a hot take. That's just true. Oh, no, no, no. Yes. We're there.

Yeah. I think these things are functionally good and I think they will probably get better at vibe coding. Do I think everyone is going to be vibe coding all the time or on regular basis? That I'm going to say no. Okay. I think that is still going to be kind of niche. It's, that's a really hard thing to, that's a really tricky behavioral change to create. Right.

Even when I was trying to figure out ways to, you know, bring that into my, my life. It was hard. It's hard for me to start thinking that way of like, oh, can you generate a way for me to interact with this? Can you create an interactive for me? Can you make this into a game? Can you make this into like some? All I can say is interactive. Like I don't know what to do. And I don't know, maybe there would be a new generation where five coding is native to them. They'll be like, well, obviously, obviously you should turn this into like, you know, this set of flashcards or you should turn this into a VR experience. I don't really know. but mostly what I just want is information,

like plain old information given to me very quickly and plainly. And, you know, I think having people come up with these specific use cases is tricky and having people come up with them in ways that are going to actually be helpful and useful. Right, okay, maybe you know, oh, I need an app that will be perfect for doing this one thing around the house, for tracking chores. Okay, great. There's probably a developer who's put a ton of thought into making a real. really great chore tracker, you know? And it probably costs $50 a year and steals all of your personal

data. Yes. But, but it works. They'll probably fix the bugs when they come up. And it probably has a logical flow to it that makes sense because they put a lot of thought into it. You know, does every person who wants a chore tracker and is ready to prompt Claude to make them one know how it should work? Is Claude smart enough to make it work in a logical way? I'm not sure. So I'm disagreeing with you on this one. I do think that these tools will get better, but I think even if they're good enough that they work on try one, I'm not sure we're going to get a change where everyone is prompting all the time. I do think that's a really good point that you made about, like, how people's minds work here. Because, you know, when we were testing it, I had to use your examples.

Like, I couldn't think of something to do, you know, and I'm a tech journalist. So it's like I feel like others may feel the same. And the other thing is, yeah, I mean, just kind of getting over the idea of, I think it's hard to create like see change with people's, like how people think and how, you know, it's the same way as like in college when I was making my website, like my portfolio. I paid someone to do it for me, even though I actually could have just gone on Wix and done it because I kind of felt overwhelmed by the idea of figuring out what it should look like and how to do it. And it would have saved me money. But I just was like, I don't know, I don't know. Let me just outsource this. So, yeah, I kind of agree.

I think, you know, maybe if there's a new generation that it's native to them, but otherwise, I don't know. I've just been wanting to say, OK, Boomer, like, every four seconds this entire time you guys have been talking. No, I think you're both right. And I think the thing that has been so much fun for me going through this process has been, like, learning how to reorient my brain that way. Because, like, it is a completely different way of thinking about how we interact with technology. right where you're like when I need to do something I don't go find the thing that best accomplishes it I can just ask it to exist and and like most of the time it doesn't work but like the simplest example I can offer you is the when you when you have a baby one of the first things

they make you do is like religiously track how much they eat and how much they pee and poop and the first time we had a kid we just did this with it with a shared Google sheet spreadsheet that was very annoying because you're sitting there with like kid in one arm in your you're like scrolling on your phone through rows and columns trying to find the right one. And so this time I was just like, hey, can you build me a tracker that I can just open up and it will automatically time and date stamp it and it will give me four radial buttons. So I can just check P, food or other. And if I do other, it opens up a notes field. I literally, I wrote that essentially into Claude and it built me an activity tracker.

I then spent a day and a half trying to figure out how to get that out of Claude artifacts, which is the thing I was not going to. be able to convince my wife to use and onto like an actual website that I own and control that it backs up to Google sheets. But now I have a thing where I just go to a website and it pops up this tracker. I click a button and it goes into the Google spreadsheet. And I didn't write one single letter of code. And the process of that is more work than most people should have to go through. But that moment of just like, oh, I can just ask. And it can build some facsimile of this thing and then we can refine it together and build something. and I don't have to know the code, I just have to know what I want is very powerful. But Hayden, to your exact point, trying to sit down and come up with a list of things that I want

my device to do for me that it doesn't already is bizarrely difficult. And it's been, I have like actively worked on trying to retrain my brain on how to do it. And it's been very weird, but very fun. And I encourage everyone to just like try to make up things for your phone to do for you, because it is a good time. Okay. I'm a little inspired now to actually like get my brain working that way. but I will say, I think you have, like, a new side hustle that would make you a lot of money.

Because it sounds like everyone needs this. And I don't know, I'm like, yeah, in a few years, if I ever have kids, I'll be getting this website from you. Oh, my problem is. Anybody who needs my poop tracker, get at me. I got you. David already gave him the prompt. It has dark mode now. Claude and I worked on the colors together.

I didn't like the way it was doing the buttons for a while. Like, the transcript of our conversation about this is very funny because I'm like, can you put the poop emoji on the left side of the word poop? instead of the right side because when I'm on mobile, it's not showing correct. It's fabulous. This is just the weirdest of times that we live in right now. All right. Those are all of my takes. I feel better, having said these to you.

Thank you both for going down this truly absurd road with me. Open AI probably lost several billion dollars in the time that we've been sitting here doing this. And we have more news to get to you. So we're going to take a quick break. We're all going to recover. And I'm going to see if I'm fired. And then we're going to come right back. We'll be right back.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Asymptomactors who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus.

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Hayden Jake's still here. Hi, guys. Hey. Hello. Jake, we, it's, should we just do this now? Should we just, should we just fight about this? David, we've got some issues. Have you seen the Vergecast inbox?

Have you seen how many, Hashtag save the thunder rounds we received. The people do like the thunder round. Listen, listen. I know how you feel. And so I want to make my strongest argument here. Just imagine for a second the ability to announce the title of this segment. Stick up your hand and have thunder come roaring down.

Feels good. Hey! That could be you, David. That could be you. First of all, Hayden from now on is the only person who gets to do that because she just timed that perfectly. Very well done by Hayden. Thank you.

I just felt it in me, you know? I have, yeah, that was actually not a sound effect we played. Hayden did that herself naturally, just now. Two things. One, thunder is slower than lightning. This makes, the whole conceit of this doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. You can't have thunder if you don't have lightning.

And also lightning is the thing that goes fast and then thunder rolls forever. Like, it doesn't make any sense. And yet, And yet thunder, it feels powerful. The gravitas. The gravitas. Thank you, Hayden. This is not the gravitas round.

If you want to do the gravitas round, we can talk about that. That's the after show. That's where we put on tuxedos and talk about tech news. That I'm into. We can do that all day. No, it's, okay, here's what we're going to do. It's the lightning round again. But in the spirit of the thunder round, we're going to actually do all of the stories that we try to do.

Because that I think was a very good idea. That I would like to hold to. At least we're going to do that until Nilai comes back and starts yelling about Brendan Carr for 45 minutes every episode again. But until we do that, we are going to actively go through all of the stories that we have. But it is going to be called the lightning round because the thunder round doesn't make any sense. This is personally devastating to me. And I want to say on behalf of all Thunder Round supporters, you're dead to us. continue to listen. I talked to David's new baby and he said that he preferred the thunder round.

Wow. Yeah, was he now? Give it 18 years. We'll employ him and overtake you. All he does is poop his pants and listen to me, yell about AI. He doesn't know anything. All right. Let's do this. Jake, since you're heartbroken, I will allow you to go first. What's your first story of the week? I am heartbroken. However, oh, it brings me great joy, great joy to start this with Spotify has finally added lossless streaming. Oh my God. 45 years later. They literally announced the feature four years ago.

They said they were doing it. Wait, did it really? Yeah. I thought this was like rumors and speculation this whole time. It was rumored in speculation for eight years because they started like trialing it and putting out surveys. Four years ago. I'm like like 90% sure that they had Billy Elish announced it in a,

in like a promo video. Like, they did a promotional video for Spotify, hi-fi. They were like, it's coming this year. And then they never said another word about it. They just, just nothing. I want you to know every time a Spotify PR person has contacted me over the last four years, I've been like, and by the way, whenever hi-fi comes down, you let me know. And they are sick and tired of it.

And it did not help. It did not help. Our former colleague Chris Welch, I think, I think the reason he, doesn't work at the verge anymore, was that he couldn't deal with the ongoing non-existence of Spotify hi-fi. He just needed a clean break. On the anniversary of the announcement every year, he wrote a post being like, what happened? Why isn't it here? It's here. This is, again, most of the other streaming services already offer this as a feature. The good news is Spotify isn't charging more. So that's great. The bad news, and I don't know if there's a technical reason for this,

but no Airplay support, no Googlecast support, which means I'm not listening to it. All of my stuff is Googlecast. So this is not useful. You got to use Spotify Connect, which I think is a little bit more reserved for like higher end gear, which I have one thing that can do Spotify Connect,

but I can't like street. The things that I use most are not Spotify Connect. So it also Spotify Connect is like, it just sort of uses the bandwidth differently. So like I can understand why it's actually restricted to that, trying to move that kind of quality around would just be a challenge. But yeah, Spotify like two-thirds did the job here.

They're like, technically it's here. You can listen to it if you follow these three instructions and pay a toll to that person under the bridge. Then you can have lossless streaming. Yeah. It's an improvement from before. And they're not the greatest of all praise. Which I appreciate. Yeah.

And it's free. So there's already conspiracy theories that the reason it's not sort of fully baked is that Spotify is eventually going to release a fully baked version that it's going to make you pay more for, which would be very funny. And I sort of help us all. Hayden, what's your first story? Okay. My first one is that Claude can now make you a spreadsheet or a slide deck. So basically it can create and edit files in Excel. in PowerPoint. It can make a PDF. It can create documents. And it's exciting because this is something

that I feel like a lot of people thought it could already do, but it could not. And so finally, we're getting a little bit closer to agent stuff. You know, I mean, it's awesome that it can create. I hate, hate creating Excel spreadsheets. It's like something that I feel like a lot of people learned in school or they started doing like just on the side in their personal life. I never learned. I never learned the shortcuts. I just don't. I just had to make one. And I was like a baby with like I didn't understand it all. So I'm very excited about this. But it is crazy that it's just happening now, I will say.

Like when last year they rolled out computer use and like agentic tools and just now is it able to like create a Docker or PDF. So, you know, it's it's a give and take, but it's it is exciting that it's becoming a little more useful to actual consumers. It's funny. This is one of those features that I feel like Google has been talking about at Google I.O. for like several decades at this point where they're just like, the only thing Google can think of for Gemini to do

is to turn your sheets, numbers into slides, slides, and vice versa. And it's the kind of thing that actually seems like a very doable for an agent that's just like,

here's a bunch of numbers, put them on slides in a way that looks sort of normal with this as the template. Like, should be pretty doable. And I feel like it was a few years ago that everybody was like,

all the junior associates at firms everywhere who just do this for, a living are going to be out of jobs. And it is weird to see this, like, launch with a lot of fanfare now because it's like, this is like, this seems like a very straightforward thing that these have been good at for a long time. AI creating spreadsheets is actually like, that feels high risk to me, right? Like, if you have a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers, oh, that's a lot of individual data points that need to be analyzed correctly and moved around correctly. And that kind

precision is actually exactly what AI is bad at. And if you have to fact check each number that goes into the spreadsheet, what the hell is the point of the spreadsheet? Right. And so, listen, I see the appeal. I 100% do because, like, analyzing data and creating spreadsheets, not skills that most people have developed, like, to a really high degree. It makes a lot of sense that people would want this.

It's exactly where I get worried. And so I have asked, you know, AI bots in the past for specific formulas. and they're quite good at that because it's basically just programming. But it's still, it's all manual, like, where I'm moving stuff around and I'm making sure I know what I do. Slides, that feels like a little bit lower risk, because you can still, you can go in and edit them. But if you're having AI move a bunch of numbers around for you

and you're not a numbers person, oh, man, like, you might have no idea what's gone wrong. Once again, it's sadly one of those things where you can only trust it with low-stakes things. And then what's it useful for, you know? But, you know, I think David should test it with the baby tracker info and let us know. Yeah. It's a good idea. Okay. I'm going to, I will make you a deeply designed presentation about my baby's poops.

And I will report back. My first one is I have not had a chance to talk about my guy, David Zazlov, CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery in a while. He thankfully did not rebrand HBO Max again while I was gone, which I thought was very nice. But two interesting bits of news about our guy, David, this week, he was at a Goldman Sachs conference, which is called the Communicopia and Technology Conference, which I hate and everyone should be ashamed of. He basically was talking about how bad he thinks the current experience of television is, right? Lots of apps switching, lots of trying to find things on different platforms, the kind of stuff that we talk about a lot, right? That now everything is on a million different streaming services.

it's all very hard to find. Everything is different. I actually largely agree with most of what he's saying. Then in the same breath, what he said was, actually, it is all incredibly underpriced, and we are going to crack down on password sharing and make it more expensive. And so it's like, well, buddy, you might have missed the point. And I think the funny thing is what he is clearly saying is actually what we've done here is we've bundled a bunch of stuff. And so now we can charge more money. And what he's doing is called cable. And we did that already. And it's just what's happening again. And every time everybody turns around, they are just innovating their way into the cable television era of the 1980s. And it is driving me

absolutely up the wall. Then, just to keep all of this being extra insane, there was some reporting this afternoon from the Wall Street Journal saying that Paramount, which now has a new owner in David Ellison, backed by Larry Ellison, now the richest man in the world, might be interested in buying

Warner Brothers discovery in cash. And so, so David Taslov, who has just only made bad decisions over and over and over for years and decided to bring the company together and now split up the company is going to sell the company and make just a boatload of money, all thanks to Larry Ellison and the $300 billion he's going to get from an Open AI cloud deal. And this is how I lose my mind every week on the Vergecast. Sorry, Open AI is now owned by Paramount. I think it's essential. I think that's what I would have to. here. Yeah.

Yes. Oh, God. You were right about the bundles. Like, this is all just artificially merging things, right? They have done too many deals. They have too much stuff and people won't pay for all the things individually. They're shoving stuff together and therefore they're like, oh, there's more value here. We have to charge more for it.

I recently wanted to watch Alien Earth. Alien Earth is on Hulu. And so I went to reactivate my Hulu account. I could not figure out how to, it kept trying to sell me Hulu. plus Disney. And I'm like, I don't want Disney Plus. I don't need Disney Plus. They're the same thing now.

Listen, if there's a way, I missed it, I couldn't figure out a way to sign up for one and not the other. And okay, maybe that is a better value because they're bundled. Okay, it's a better value up until the value doubles. And I have to start paying that. And I don't want to pay that because I don't need to stream all the Marvel movies. There are a lot of people who do. And that is great for them.

And they're having a great time. You know what's fantastic about that is somewhere in the, audience of the Vergecast, there is a up-and-coming startup founder who just said, oh, you know what would be so cool is if you could just pay for the stuff that you wanted to watch and you didn't have to subsidize all the other stuff that other people watch, we'll call it, maybe we'll just call it like a skinny bundle. Oh, my. A skinny bundle. Or you can just have the stuff that you want. And it's just, we're just going to, we're just doing this again. It's so meta, so meta. And also, funnily enough, I had the opposite experience to you where I was trying to log in to

my Hulu, which is actually my college roommate's brother's Hulu. Oh my gosh. And I couldn't. And I was like, oh no, did he finally kick me out? But no, it was that it merged. And I do have Disney Plus. I only use it. Yeah, I only use it at like Halloween because I like watching like the spooky movies for my youth. But yeah, it was weird because I just didn't, I didn't hear anything about this. So then I like, and it also doesn't seem like everything transferred over. So they had a few things, but I don't, I don't

know. We got to investigate this. So nowadays, when it comes to movies, I rent them all individually, right? Like, because that is way better and way cheaper and gets me a better selection. But you just don't have that option, at least that I'm aware of, when it comes to TV shows. I guess can you still buy individual episodes on iTunes? Is that a thing? Is iTunes real? I think it's not a thing anymore.

You can buy a season. You know what's happened to me, though, recently is I've started buying more movies again because there's so many times where it's like three. bucks to rent a movie and five to own it. And it's just like, well, okay, I'll spend $5 to own super bad. Like, I guess I just own super bad now. I also rewatch so many movies that I have been doing the same thing, like on Prime Video or whatever. I'll just buy it instead. Like, I bought the dumbest movie from my youth the other day about, like, high school girls, like, feuding called The Click. And I was so happy I bought it. I was like, yes, I will rewatch this at some point.

But the thing that gives me the most joy is that in my neighborhood in New York, there's now a DVD. store. Oh my gosh. And it's still survived. I think it's been like six months and it's still there, which we love. We love to see it. So we're really going, we're not going back to 80s cable. We're going back to like, we're just going to go all the way back to the beginning of like recorded media. Analog, baby. Yeah. We're going to do the phonograph again next. It's going to be sick. We're all going to gather around our enormous radios and listen to Orson Wells. It's going to be I love this. All right, Jake, what's your next one? All right. So speaking, of retro tech and people going back old school, Canon is reviving a point-and-shoot camera from

2016. It's called the Powershot Elf 360HS. It is wildly popular because Kendall Jenner and Duelipa both love this thing. It's just a very trendy point-and-shoot camera. I believe they're actually still selling it, but now they have a new model of it that costs more money and has fewer features. And so that's what we're doing now. I mean, this makes... But it's available. It's available. That's the thing, right? You can buy it and you don't have to find a weird, super expensive version on eBay. This is a weird one to me because I actually fully understand why if you're canon, you would do this, right? Like, we are very much in a like point and shoot digital camera revival for I think a lot of good interesting reasons. And so the idea that if you're a

company you would chase that and try to like be the cool one that people like makes a lot of sense to me because we've talked about it on the show that the like the cameras go viral that actually haven't been on sale in a decade and like companies should take advantage that it makes complete sense to me why you would make this particular camera which it doesn't have USBC it doesn't have particularly interesting or high end fee like they're deliberately making a old outdated camera I know why. It's because in the movie that I just referenced from the 2000s about the feuding high school girls, they have this camera. So that's obviously why they brought it back. Yeah, they do. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's it's so funny how lazy this is. Like to your point, micro USB, right? They didn't change the USB. Oh, I'm sorry, it gets worse. It is USB mini. It is mini. Right. They changed nothing. They just like strip some stuff out to make. get a little bit cheaper for themselves.

They didn't like lean into this in any way, which maybe that just adds to the effect because they literally didn't change anything. Like maybe the people do just want to dig up old terrible USB cables. Maybe they want you to think it's the camera from 2016. Like maybe that is part of the appeal that like trying to be sort of faux retro. That is what's crazy to me is the cable thing. Because I mean like, you know, disposable cameras are super popular right now. Like the other day I tried to develop two and it cost me $65, which is like so much.

But yeah, I mean, this, the cable thing would really get me here. I just, I don't know if I could reconcile that. Put a lightning port on that thing. Now we're talking. I think there's something there. I would, I really hope somebody tries to do like an honest to God 2025 version of an entry-level point and shoot. I'd be, I'd just be curious to see how it does because it might totally not work

because the point is that it looks like it's from 2016. Maybe that is it. This is the thing. Like in my head, I'm like, why didn't they make it better? And it's like, because if they make it better, it gets worse. They can't make it better. They can't make it take better photos.

They can't make it easier to use. It needs to be bad. It needs to look bad. That's the point. I think that's right. I want it to be the same, but with a lightning port. That's it. That both makes it worse and more retro in a weird roundabout way.

And it doesn't, the lightning port doesn't even work or connect to anything because they know all you're using this for is to show it. It's arm candy. It doesn't even have to work as a camera. Doesn't matter. All right, Hayden, what's your second one? My second one is how unsurprisingly, XAI's contract with the DOD is being questioned by Senator Warren and other people who think the company is basically just not equipped to deal with the level of influence. influence it would have with a DOD contract because you're saying Brock running the government is not like cool we're not fine exactly shocking news especially since they only started I think building their

safety team a couple months ago like I think maybe after the contract I'll have to check that but yeah I saw the tweet about them like hiring for their safety team and I was like huh this is happening like pretty late like I know I think it was after Grock four came out I'll check but yeah I mean it's you know the basically the letter that um Senator Warren sent Hegeseth was saying that XAI wasn't up for this contract and being looked at in the same way that other companies were, that they kind of like skipped the line a little bit. There's a lot of like questions in this letter that they're asking be answered. So yeah, I mean, you know, basically Mecca Hitler running the government, like maybe not the best idea. I'm going to, to borrow from another delightful Vergecast segment that you guys piloted this summer,

that I liked and we're going to keep doing. This is all just a shenanigan. Like, full on 100% shenanigans. Truly shenanigans with, like, huge influence that could be really problematic. So the worst kind of shenanigan. This deal was also announced the week after the Mecca Hitler incident, which, like, in any normal timeline, in any normal administration, you'd probably be like, look, maybe we shouldn't make this.

deal. At the very least, maybe we shouldn't publicize this deal. Maybe we should wait a little bit. Maybe we should put some time between, you know, us cutting the deal and the thing that we're paying for declaring that it's Mecca Hitler, but no. They're just like, whatever, you know, we're

with the Department of Defense. We deal with a bunch of really important and dangerous materials. And also Elon Musk is here. Yeah. It's just no problem. And they're currently hiring for their safety team. So please apply. And one of the questions that's in this letter is like wondering how

Musk is going to maybe improperly benefit from the unparalleled access to DOD data and information. So yeah, I mean, there's just a lot here to unpack, but crazy, bad, questionable, all of it. Yeah, I appreciate the vibe of this letter. And you wrote a great piece about it. We'll put it in the show notes. But the distinct vibe of this letter is just like, what is happening? Like, how is this what we're doing here? It's just like so incredulous the whole way along. And I appreciate the vibes coming out of Congress on that front. All right.

My last one, before we get out of here, two pieces of Reddit news this week that I find individually not that interesting, but in combination, there's like something happening here. So the first thing is Reddit is dropping the subscriber counts on subreddit. So when you go to subreddit, it'll say, like, you know, X number of people. joined. They're dropping that in favor of some much squishier seeming metric about like how many people have been there in the last 28 days or something. They're trying to make it seem more sort of real time, I guess. The thesis is people who subscribe are not a good metric of how popular

something actually is. I don't know. And then the other one is Reddit appears to be working on a way to read articles that you've like that you click on and discover on Reddit inside of Reddit. And I will just say the thing in the screenshot that we have looks very much exactly like Facebook Instagram articles. And this is just Reddit. Oh, we'll get there. Trying to put the internet inside of Reddit again. And to me, it's like, there's some, Reddit is either like really feeling itself and

thinks it is like the only website left that matters. And so it can just take over and win or is like trying to quietly pivot to something else. And I just, I can't figure out what Reddit is doing here. I think that, so Reddit is having maybe the opposite experience of the rest of the internet. Because suddenly, Reddit is the only thing you can find via Google. And so Reddit is blowing up. And I think they know that they are super reliant on Google. And you're correct, they are trying to put the entire internet inside Reddit so that when Google inevitably removes that funnel, everybody's still going to Reddit.

This is what they're doing. They're making it seem. more lively. They're like, this is how many people are here right now. This is an active community. This is when you want to continue to check in on. And they're not letting you leave and go to the actual internet when you click an article. It does. I think it is just like a fancy pop-up browser. So it's like it's not quite instant articles yet, but you can see how they get there. I think they're trying to bring more of the internet inside Reddit so they can continue to get more people and keep them inside the Reddit app.

And the fact that you can, you know, read comments while you're reading the article, you know, so I think it's just all about, like Jake said, like, you know, keeping them on the platform, keeping you engaged, like, okay, maybe you're reading the article, you see a comment while you're reading it. Okay, now you go back to the subreddit and comment something else. So I think it's all about like just, yeah, keep, like, creating a walled garden because they feel like, you know, they don't want to be dependent on Google anymore. And Reddit's always been really thirsty, too. Whenever, if you find one of their links, if you visit a Reddit, link from a browser on mobile, it, it like graze it out and gives you some pop-up. And they're like, do you want to continue in your browser or the Reddit app? And I'm like, no, I don't want to open it in the Reddit app. I'm in my browser. Just let me read it. Yeah.

It's all about keeping you inside. One of my alternate summer takes was death to the opening app pop-ups because everybody does it and it's all horrible. It drives me crazy. And the thing where Instagram won't let you look at posts on the way. Oh my. Oh my gosh. So,

oh, true disaster. But yeah, I think Reddit's in this weird place where like Reddit is very powerful because it is a place where humans are and there are increasingly few of those at scale on the internet. But also for all the reasons you guys are talking about,

it's completely reliant on Google for that fact to continue. So I think it's just weird seeing it try to figure out what to do with this like maybe. brief moment in the sun as AI destroys everything else around us. I mean, can I tell you something a little trippy? I did a Google search for iPhone Air, you know, because that's a thing that's happening this week. Sure.

I think the top result that was not a sponsored Apple thing or was not just Apple itself was a Reddit result. It was somebody being like, hey, the iPhone Air was announced. Wow. And it's just like Reddit is everything now on search. Yeah. It feels like, and whatever that deal was that Google and Reddit signed was basically just Reddit being like, yeah, we are search now. Yeah.

Google is like, fine. There's no other good websites anymore. Here you go. All right. We have gone way over as we are want to do. You guys didn't go over at all this summer. I don't think that's terrific work by you. You were always exactly to time.

Jake, you're a true taskmaster. But now I'm back. And chaos rains. And so does the lightning round. So maybe the thunder round is slower. Our producers are too powerful. Yeah, this is, this is, I've ruined everything forever. I'm going to have to bring my own soundboard next week.

That's the real move. Yeah, y'all are toast after that. All right, we got to get out of here. One quick housekeeping thing, next week's Tuesday episode is going to be a Wednesday episode because there's just a lot of Apple stuff happening next week and we just wanted to give ourselves as much time as possible to cover as much of it as possible. So that episode is going to come out next Wednesday. If you have questions about all of it, all the new.

gadgets, all the new software, if you hate liquid glass as much as I do. We want to hear about it on the hotline. 866, Verveg 1-1. Send us an email at VARGECAST at theVIRG.com. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis

Larchuk, Haydenfield, and J. Kastranakis. It's an honor to be back today. I miss with you guys. Thank you for doing this with me. We missed you. We really did. We'll see you next time. Rock and roll.