The Vergecast - Rabbit, Humane, and the iPad

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss this week's tech and gadget news. Further reading: Rabbit R1 review: an unfinished, unhelpful AI gadget  The Rabbit R1’s first software update addresses its dismal battery life - The Verge  Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along TikTok and Universal Music Group end feud with new agreement  Microsoft’s OpenAI investment was triggered by Google fears, emails reveal Peloton announces new round of layoffs as CEO quits Elon Musk goes ‘absolutely hard core’ in another round of Tesla layoffs  Tesla layoffs hit Supercharger team just as it’s poised to take over EV charging LinkedIn is the latest company to get in on gaming  Pixel 8A leak reveals $499 starting price Beats announces Solo 4 headphones and $79.99 Solo Buds Beats Solo 4 review: playing both sides  Walmart is about to launch a 4K Chromecast that’s also a smart speaker SwitchBot S10 review: with plumbing hookups, this robovac and mop is actually hands-free iOS 17.5 beta lets you keep Find My on during iPhone repairs Razer made a million dollars selling a mask with RGB, and the FTC is not pleased Instagram’s updated algorithm prioritizes original content instead of rip-offs  Meta is “exploring” algorithm changes on Threads. 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 Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Vergecast. The flagship podcast of David finally admitting it's just a three. That's what we're known for here. Just being broken down and saying, you know what? Three. I'm your friend, Eli.

This is Alex Kranz. I'm thinking what a two is. That's on fire. David Pierce is here. The Verge's very own three, David Pierce. Yeah, let's listen. I've heard worse. I'll take it.

No, David, you're a 10 in all of our hearts, especially now that you've admitted the truth. Lots to talk about the show. David reviewed the Rabbit R1, which that's the whole show. That's two hours right there. We have what we're calling a money round. There's a bunch of money news we talked about, including LinkedIn adding games when you think about money.

A bunch of gadget stuff. There's some pixel 8A leaks. There's an iPad event next week. or what we assume is an iPad event next week. We got to talk about that. We could do some preview of that. And then, of course, the Lightning Round. The Virgin is very un-Lighting Round.

Still woefully unsponsored. Very upsetting. Pixar should sponsor it. Yeah, see, any number of companies. Lightning McQueen Round. Come on. It's right there. As a man who, for obvious financial reasons, needs to sell his Raptor,

the Ford Lightning is right there. It's true. Just right there. Alex, I haven't talked to you about this yet. We have to get rid of the pickup truck. It was my mountain adventure pandemic binky pickup truck. And you're like, you live far too close to New York now to own a pickup truck. Yeah, it is incompatible with my neighborhood.

Can you like, how many points is a turn in the street? I'm just knocking over houses. I'm just like, whatever, I'll pay the fine. No one has a post box anymore. Yeah, it's all over. But I'm just saying, we didn't call it the Raptor. round. We could.

Jim Farley, CEO Ford was clearly in charge the podcast marketing budget. We will name the lightning round after any car. I'm not above that. For a price, I would call this the Kia Forte round.

And it would be no problem. Okay, never mind. Yeah, that's fine. Again, the conceit of the lightning round is it goes fast. It actually never goes fast. Anyway, we're going to get to it. The Kia Forte around. I'm telling me. It's right there. That's a music term, I think that... It goes okay, and then...

We have to stop this. You can steal it. You can steal the lightning around. But we're going to be there in like 45 minutes. Between now and then, you can convince your CMO to sponsor. Give us a call. There we go. Liam is waiting for you.

All right, let's start with the news. The News. The Rabbit R1 was released. David, you went to the party. You talked about it last week on the show, how you felt about the thing. This week, you've written a review. I don't think if people in the Verchast audience are paying attention in the gadget ecosystem, I don't think your review is surprising because there was no embargo, people just got them,

it was only people who bought them that had them, they were just talking about it. The problems have been obvious the whole time. And I think Marquez was like, this product is almost unreviewable. It is so broken. But you did it. You actually reviewed it. You gave it the score, the full Verge organized review treatment. It didn't seem to go well.

didn't go well. It's been a very funny experience because I think coming at this after the humane experience, which was sort of a normal, like, high-end gadget review experience where they give it to a group of people. It's under embargo. It's a very sort of secretive thing. People are not talking about it on social. There's like not tons of sort of real-time feedback coming from people. And then this comes out and Rabbit just hands it out to hundreds and then the day after what seemed to be thousands of people. Like I picked mine up at that event last Tuesday night. and people started getting theirs in the mail, like on Wednesday. And these are just users.

Like, I bought one. I bought one in order to get it to review. Everybody who has one bought one. And it turns out a bunch of people who have spent months being really excited about this thing that has been super hyped as like a cool way to use AI to get stuff done and feels like the future and a Star Trek communicator. And then you take it out and you say, order me a ride. And it says, this app is going to take a long time to load and then fails.

Turns out that sucks. And so it's been a really interesting experience over the last, what, nine days since it came out watching people go through basically the same process I have, which is you start with, oh, this thing is fun, it's cute, it's whimsical, it's adorable, and then you use it for a couple of very straightforward things, and it does those things okay. For days, it didn't know what time it was. Mine would tell me the time if I asked, but it was three hours off. and because Rabbit's AI is like trying to be very clever, it wouldn't let you set the time zone manually. It also, you would ask it the weather and it would just invent a place for it to be.

There were a couple of people in the office at the verge who have seen this and were asking it. And I at one point asked three times in a row sitting in my basement in Washington, D.C., and it gave me the weather for New York, Philadelphia, and Budapest. No. Three times in a row.

The third one's a wild card. Yeah, it's like, all right. At least the other ones were former capitals of the United States. Maybe it just really enjoys like... Like Budapest never, I think. George Washington never went to Budapest. As far as I'm aware. As far as I can tell.

Yeah. Yeah, I can't even think of what the similarity between those three cities is. Well, I'm saying, three of them are former capitals, seats of the United States government. Two of them. No. No. That thing you just did ascribes way too much thought and intelligence to what is actually happening on this. They're just places where Ben Franklin was hammered.

That's fine. It was Ben Franklin hammered. in boot-up. But yeah, so I go through this whole process and by the time I'm actually sitting down to be like, what is the story of this device? It's both that it is so woefully underbaked. Like they've been promising really interesting stuff since the beginning, right? And we made a lot of fun of Humane for a year for just the weirdness of that device.

But Rabbit just kind of came out and they were just like, here's the thing. Here's what it does. It's a fun toy. It's $200. And it's like, okay, that actually, that might be something. And they just didn't do it. They just didn't build the thing they told us they were going to build it. So I'm going to ask the same question I asked about the humane pin, which a lot of

listeners have just been asking us, as though we know, why did they ship this this way? I have a lot of theories about this. I don't, the answer is I don't know. And I will see, the most specific answer is I don't know why they shipped it now and not in three months. Like I can tell you why they shipped it now and not in 12 months, uh, because inventory is expensive. You have to make decisions on what you buy and when way in advance. And actually to like make a bunch of stuff and then stick it in a warehouse and then update it, repackage it and ship it is like wildly expensive. And so the like once you've started the logistics train, it's really,

really, really hard to stop it. So I think that's the simplest reason. It's like everybody made this date call a long time ago and didn't finish building the thing before it had to ship. And rather than eat the like very real cost of delaying it a few months, they just shipped the unfinished thing and said big stuff coming in the summer. But both Humane and Rabbit have been out there being like, oh yeah, tons of stuff coming. Jesse Liu, the CEO of Rabbit, stood in front of the screen showing the roadmap. And it has this big long list of stuff that absolutely needed to be there on. day one that is coming quote unquote this summer. While I was using the device on Tuesday,

they shipped a big software update that fixed the time zone thing. So my rabbit now reliably knows what time it is, which is very exciting. And like kind of fixed the weather. It doesn't give me Budapest anymore, but it also gives me like 20 miles from my house. So we're like, we're getting there. And that, but that's the kind of stuff. Oh, it also fixed the unbelievably disastrous battery life that this thing had. Like if I sat here and just used it for 60 minutes, it died. And if I just turned it on, put it on my desk and didn't touch it, it would die in six hours. I mean, it was unbelievably bad. And it's much better now. It still is like a one day device, even if you don't touch it at all, which is still pretty bad. But it's better. But this is the

stuff that is just like literally inexcusable to ship to people who paid for your device. And I'm sensitive to all of the business reasons that that is hard to guess. AI's changing really fast. These companies don't have infinite amounts of money and supply chain victories, but you just can't, you just can't do it. I mean, people have lobbed a lot of, like, really negative assessments at Jesse Liu since this thing came out and it's been kind of a boondoggle for him, right? Like, a lot of people are resurfacing the fact that he was formerly CEO of a company that promised NFTs in the Metaverse didn't deliver on that, and then kind of moved over, which is not a really great look for him. And it's just like, and I've heard the accusations on Reddit just flying fast,

right, saying that this was a grift, that everybody was just kind of like misled into this thing that was clearly like a beta product that they had no intention of thinking was real. And I don't, like, there's no reporting behind any of this. This is just rumors, but the rumors are furious. Yeah, like, Jesse is a grifter thing is a very real thing that is floating out there. I think, I forget what the name of the law is, but it's. never ascribed to malice, what can be described by incompetence, right? Like, that's what this is to me. Like, this is just a startup that made a bunch of really big promises and didn't pull

it off. That explains everything that is happening here, right? And I think, frankly, like, that was the NFT thing. Everybody got really excited about this huge thing that was happening. Thought it was going to be really cool. Thought they could buy it. That I just... Some of it was grifting.

Almost all of it. I just came from an event where they had an NFT wall and everyone was like, ew. Sure. Now, a lot of people were not saying, ew, back then. Yeah, because they were at the top of the pyramid. I mean, we were. Yes, I would point out that the verge staff almost universally was saying. Yes.

Oh, I agree. Ew. And then there was Richard Lawler who was saying, you, but also in the way that suggested I told you so. Like, he was like pre, I told you so. Before they even announced what NFT meant, Richard was like, mm-mm. I told you so. Those were the two reactions on our staff. Look, I'm much more inclined to believe this is some, like, hardware startup disaster.

At $1.99, it's, like, hard to grift anyone. I mean, if you're broke ass and you were like, this is going to be my cool gadget. Yeah, $199. Like, like, a lot, some people just feel that. I'm just saying, if you're, if you're like in the grifter game, you're trying to make more money than that at a pop, you know? The thing that gets me is a lot of that conversation is related to just the reality of these products. there were tear downs of the humane AI pin and the Rabbit R1 from I Fix It this week.

They're Android phones. That's what they are. And people took that to be a sign of the Gryft. That's not a sign. This thing is just running Android on a chip set that you can get. But so is your TV. Right.

But in the Rabbit interface is really just an Android app. And you like smash those ideas together. Like this thing is broken. It doesn't quite work. And it's really just Android phone. This is a Gryft. And I think it's actually quite important to pull those ideas apart.

I agree. Because like you just said, Alex, almost everything is an Android phone. Yeah, like your fridge probably is also an Android phone. Everything is a time bomb. Everything is just waiting to unleash Bixby upon you. Everything can run an APK if you try hard enough. That's actually, whatever that, that's a law.

Alex's law. That's Alex's law. You can horsepower an APK in almost anything these days. It would be shocking to me if this thing wasn't running Android or some commodity, smartphone hardware. Like, that's what's cheap. At a buck 99, again, like, maybe an easier thing for them to have done would have been to buy a bunch of, like, used Galaxy A-series phones and put their app on it, because then at least they would have told the time reliably.

Well. Like, it's weird. Like, the thing that I can't quite wrap my head around is, like, if you're going to build on top of the existing thing, which almost everybody does, why didn't you get the easy parts for free? like why didn't you get i know what time it is or i can do a GPS look up to pull the weather that stuff is all in the operating system like not being able to tell the time is actually like i can't quite wrap my head around even if you install like the most open source version of aosp android open source project on the most open dev hardware that exists it's not like clock

doesn't come for the ride yeah and that's the part i don't get it's like all the the energy got focused on the hard part and they didn't take the free stuff for free. Yeah, it was like they're doing too much. Like nobody was there just going, no, y'all, we're doing too much. Let's scale it back. We got this really kick-ass hardware because like in your piece, you talked about it. The hardware is nice. It's cool.

I tried one this week. It was really cool to handle. I expected the buttons to be more, I expected everything to be softer. Yeah. Like the soft touch plastic, but it wasn't. That was a bummer. I forgot where I was going. My new startup is 100% buying used Galaxy A Series phones, installing chat GPT on them and being like, this is the future.

Yeah. Which is more or less the piece, Allison wrote this week. But that's the part. David, did they talk to you about this? Has Jesse said anything about it? I know they put out one statement in response to people leaking their APK saying, like, this isn't going to work on your Android phone. It calls our cloud services. Our open-sourced version of Android is heavily because all the stuff you would say.

but there's just a part where not getting the basics for free is just really weird to me. There's a real fake it till you make it thing happening with this that I think is what a lot of people on the internet are responding to, right? Like that quote unquote source code leak

basically showed that rather than use some fancy AI thing, Rabbit is actually just using this software called Playwright, which is a very well-known automation software. It's like if you have a website that you want test it out to see what works and what doesn't and if all the links go to the right place and so on and so forth.

That's just like a thing a business can run. I think it's owned by Microsoft. This is well-known technology. It is like not hard to teach a computer to use a website, right? And the idea that that's all Rabbit is doing really rubbed some people the wrong way. But I think in general, these companies feel like they have to do the whole thing and really reinvent the wheel or else you're just a smartphone. and we're in this moment now where I think the next phase of this will be starting to push the two things back towards each other a little bit more. We're going to get smartphones that do more sort of one-touch AI stuff.

We're going to get devices that are more connected to your phone. But if I'm rabbit or humane, you rewind even a couple of years. And what they're all saying is we have to do our own thing, build our own platform, own the whole experience ourselves, because that's the only way for us to be successful. And I think if you start with that assumption, that is how you run into, holy God, this is so much harder to do all of this than we thought. And it's how you end up with devices like these. Like I think you can't take the Android clock because people look at it and be like, that's the Android clock. Why don't I just use my phone?

You could just not show the clock to people. Yeah. You change the UI? Yeah. I'm not talking about the old HTC flippy clock widget. Although if they brought that back, that would be sick. That would be sick. I mean, that thing was iconic.

So good. What is the most iconic Android widget of all time? It's the HDC. Flippy Clock. You cannot convince me otherwise. I would agree. Or the circle clock from the T-Mobile G1. No, no, it's the flippy clock.

The flippy clock? When I think Android, I think of that with like the background and everything they have. Yeah, that weird cartoon-y vibe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beautiful. Let's just talk about all the Android funds now and how you can start a startup shipping all the Android phones. But honestly, I think part of that is related, right? You're two years ago, you're starting this thing.

You could say, all right, we're going to ship an AI app. for people's phones. And then you run right into and then Apple and Google won't let us because that threatens their business. Right. And we're now in literal, direct, exact, precise competition

with those companies and the other best funded companies on planet Earth. Right, but now you can't, like all the antitrust stuff that has happened, alternative apps or all this stuff, now you can. Like I kind of fully expect to see

a wave of startups that are like rabbit but an app. Right? without all the hardware and noise to say, like, you can just run this on iPhone now because Apple can't stop me, or at least in the EU. I don't know what's going to happen with Google in that particular way, but at least in the EU, Apple now has to allow these alternative apps or all the stuff. And that is interesting to me. I don't know if it'll work. I don't know if Apple's just going to Sherlock everybody at WWC this year.

But it feels like the rabbit and the humane caught a moment in a vibe when they were, no one could build an app like this on the app. Like Apple just wouldn't let you ship that app. I'm confident, especially because they can probably buy stuff and Apple wouldn't get a cut of that money. There's a million reasons why Apple wouldn't let you ship that app. Yeah, I think that's right. Well, also, it would have been a crappy app. Yeah, it wouldn't have worked for you. Yeah, right?

Like the talent and what we really saw, the real success of the R1, the reason it's a three and not a one or a two is because the hardware is nice. Because the hardware is nice. Yeah, they did this core and the user interface. is pretty. It's not always pleasant. Yeah. It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. But no, you're right. Yeah, right. Like, there was some genuinely good stuff there. And one had nothing to do with Rabbit. It frankly, seems primarily a teenage engineering did the good parts. And, yeah, like, they just never would have made it as an app. Yeah. And their whole thing was, we want to be the next Apple, which is enormously

ambitious on an easy day. And their climate is. is like godly ambitious. Yeah, the fact that DoorDash just doesn't work on this thing and Uber just doesn't work and Spotify is broken. It's like, yeah, you could say it should just be an app. But those apps tend to work on phones. Yeah. You can get food from DoorDash on phones.

Pretty successfully. 100% of the time, DoorDash is like, your order is completed. The fact that they shipped it broken with those integrations, Jesse, I think he tweeted, he's like, my hope for this round of review is a six. He actually tweeted the number that you're open before. And it's like, wow.

Did you use your product before you shipped it? Like not giving yourself the seven is incredible. Right? You're like, world of no sevens, I'm not an eight, I'm a six. It's tough. That's rough. Yeah. Well, I think about it, like the Phil Libben,

who used to be the CEO of Evernote, and then was an investor who's not running, which is that cool, like, video chat app. he said to me once a couple of years ago, and I may have said this on the show before it, but I think about it all the time. He said, when I look at a product, my question is always,

is this primitive or is this stupid? Because you can't fix stupid, but primitive usually gets better, right? He was like if you, and he was like the first iPhone, like perfect primitive. The thing barely worked. But the minute you looked at it,

you were like, oh, there is something inside of this. But if he was like, if I don't have that reaction to this, If there is no good version of this, it's just stupid. And I think where I've come to is like, I think rabbit might be stupid in a way that I think humane is just kind of primitive, right?

Really? And I'm happy to have this argument with you and I would love to have this argument with you. I am still convinced that the idea of a, like a wearable, on-body device that is easier to access than your phone is something. I don't know how big that something is going to be. I would bet money it doesn't have a laser projector involved.

at all, but like there is some teeny tiny nugget of AI wearable that I still find compelling. A handheld device that isn't my phone that does everything my phone tries to do, but worse, I don't see it. And maybe there is some technological AI miracle coming that makes these large action model agents work. And if so, I look forward to being proven wrong on this one. but like I don't see the runway for the R1 from what it is now to something that is like genuinely interesting and different from my phone so that I will carry both of them. I just don't see it. Let me pull apart one idea in there and then I can disagree with you about the rest.

Okay. You mentioned large action models, which we have not really talked about in the context of the R1. But when you think about these products and how their companies are talking about them, Humane a bunch of stargazy, navel-gazy phones are ruining your life. Yeah. Right. Like just stuff. Whatever that vibe is from Humane, big thinks, thought leader stuff.

Rabbit is like, we made a large action model that will use computers for you on your behalf if you give us your login information, which is a very, like, small idea in practicality. huge idea in the world, right? It's the idea of you will have an agent, but the actual idea is really quite small, which is why they could fake it with Playwright, which is just like user testing software, right? Yeah. They're running a bot farm. They got 100 sausages waving at 100 Android phones somewhere, just using computers for you. I mean, like, that is so much closer to true than it should be. Like, I just, like, that's a joke, but you're not all that far from describing what Rabbit is actually doing here. Right, but I'm saying on the, on the, on,

On the split, right, if your idea is, is it primitive or stupid, the idea that, okay, we're going to automate the use of a bunch of websites. And we're starting with, like, a commercially existing tool that already automates websites for you. And we're going to just try to, like, fake it there until this large action model idea is ready. And then we're just, like, going to do a bunch of computer vision and horsepower our way through the web. That's the point, right? but they're nowhere on that journey except to have used some commercially available user testing software.

Poorly, but I would add. Like, they attempted to use it, but they didn't do it. And that's where I land, right? It's not, there's one thing where it's like, okay, we tried to do something and didn't quite do it. And then there's another one that's, we promised you we were going to do it and just didn't. And like, that's pretty hard to come back from.

And then, but I'm saying, well, then what Humane is selling is like, you do not need a phone. Your phone's killing you. And we know it because we, invented it, which is an amazing thing. Beautiful. You want to be there. Those cigarettes were ruining you.

I know this because I am Dr. Tobacco. Please try this jewel, which is the story of jewel, right? 100%, by the story of Jewel is they hired a bunch of tobacco scientists. But Humane is like, we got you hooked and now we're going to break it by selling you our pin. That promise is like even more nascent, right? Like the technology doesn't work. But it also might be the wrong promise.

what I'm hammering on here, right? Like the idea of the software agent that will go use software on your behalf seems more achievable than we're gonna fully replace your phone. Oh, I think that's right. I think I have in the course of several weeks of talking to people kind of in and around Humane

and reviewing this device, I think even Humane is slowly starting to give up on that vision. Interesting. I think if you gave them a time machine and let them go back 12 months ago, they would not start to tell the story about how your phone is killing you

and we need to take away from your phone. I think they realize how deeply weird their entire marketing strategy was for a long time. And even if you look at what they've done publicly, like they've tried to sort of chill a little bit, which I think it's going to good. But again, I do agree, and this is, I think, the most consistent piece of feedback

we get every time we cover one of these devices is people saying, why would I use this over my phone? And the answer is you wouldn't, and you're not going to anytime soon. And that just is what it is, right? And so I think if we just assume that as like ground truth, and at this point I do, right?

And I think that's why the humane price is so absurd. $699 plus a subscription for a phone number and a text messaging system, neither of which are attached to your actual phone number, is like preposterous. But still, like, boil it down even further. And it's just like the thing that device is, seems closer to being something to me

than what the R1 is. I just, I think they're both stupid. That honestly might be true. Yeah, like, I don't think either one is primitive. I think they're both. I think David is just trying to justify giving one a four and one of three. No, I get, I totally understand the three and the four.

I was telling somebody at the office earlier today because I edited that review and I looked at that three and I was like, well, you know, the humane pen like promised a bunch of stuff and badly delivered. Rabbit promised a bunch of stuff it didn't deliver at all. Didn't do any of it.

But it didn't catch on fire or physically harm David. That's true. I feel like we got a re-covering. No, I think you could make a fair argument that they both should have been threes. There's no version of the argument that they both should have been fours,

which is why I gave it a three. Like, I, there's no, I hemmed in hawed on the AI pin and this one was easier. And frankly, I think the simplest way to look at it is just price. And realistically, for what these things do, they're both too expensive. And I think what $200 means to somebody versus what $700 means to somebody, I don't know.

If you're buying one of these things, you have disposable income anyway. Like, I don't know. I am perfectly happy for everyone to yell at me about the score. I feel very good about this score. I feel fine about this score. What I'm getting at is the rabbit, it's like a toy, right? It's $1.99. You can have it.

It's broken. I buy so much broken tech garbage all the time. Same. Sure. But the idea of the human thing that you're going to, wear it. It's going to be in your body. This is the part where I just disagree with you, right? That's fine. I think that will just be a watch.

Yes. If it's going to be anything else, it'll be the meta glasses. But like the little Star Trek communicator badge on my curve of wearable bullshit. It's like, boy, I better hope I'm wearing a shirt today. It's like... Star Trek

exists in a world where there are no toilets. I'm also always wearing a shirt. I don't know why I pick that one. I'm not like I'm not doing Baywatch, you know? Slow run, but it's just like that thing. Like it is demanding in a particular way that you adjust your wardrobe around it. And I, there's just a part of me,

it's like that's the part that's destined to fail. Maybe. Right? It goes here. Maybe. I think the answer is it's going to be lots of things. Like I think, I think a watch is going to work for lots of people.

I think glasses will work for some people. They're not going to work for me. As somebody who doesn't wear glasses or contacts, the idea of wearing a pair of glasses all day it's just a non-starter for me. Like, I'm not going to do it. All right, Mr. Fancy Pants with the nice eyeballs. Sorry, sorry, y'all.

The next time I see you, I'm shining my iPhone flashlight. I don't know if that's going to hurt you or anything. I just don't feel good. Yeah, I appreciate that. But no, I think the answer can be lots of things, right? And I think the breast-pin communicator thing is also kind of weird. My honest bet is that the first thing is going to be headphones. Like, I really sincerely believe that we're due for, like, a giant explosion of AI stuff into your headphones.

And it's going to solve a lot of problems. Apple is going to get to that faster. Taking notes as you say that. I said this on Tuesday's show, but my absolutely baseless, unreported conspiracy theory is that the AirPods, Macs are going to be AI products. And that's why it's been so long since they've been updated. Oh, no, it's going to be the pros. No, the Maxes are big. They can have a big battery.

Yeah, but, like, I don't know. I remember the first time I put in AirPods, and I just asked my phone to do something through the headphones, and I was like, oh, this is magic. And, like, if you can do that, like, consistently and regularly. But I think also to the other, if you pull that out further, what we were all really seeking is a voice assistant. Yeah.

Yeah, like AI is the buzzword, but actually we're just all revisiting the voice assistant. And our run does it horribly. Like, sassy. The R1 is so sassy. Every time I asked it something, it was like, hold on, let me think about it. And I'm like, well, I paid for you. I mean, I didn't, Parker did, but still.

Chop, chop. I paid. It's an nightmare restaurant customer. I am absolutely. I paid for this. One of my favorites is when you ask it to do something it can't do. Normally it'll say, like, I'm unable to do that. And then every once in a while, it will just say, I cannot set a timer.

I'm like, all right. Excuse me. Dang. Look, I like the idea that Apple is going to subsume this entire market. WWC is coming up. I've heard now a drumbeat of AI, AI, AI, AI. I've heard someone actually say to me, Tim Cook is putting a lot of pressure on himself to deliver AI at this WWC.

That's a real sentence I heard from someone, who knows. You've got to make Siri good. Yeah. Like, let's not kid ourselves. And I think that's going to be hard because the problem is, yes, largely, language models are very good at making these assistants loquacious, but they don't make them smart. Yeah.

Like, there's still the core problem of we don't know how to regularly interact with a voice assistant in like a comfortable and normal way, because you're still going to be like, hey, can you say it? And you do the, you know, you do the voice, your Siri voice. What's your Siri voice, Neely? Oh, I don't. You don't have one? I've remapped the action button on my phone to chat, GPT, which is equally frustrating.

But do you have to do like a special voice, like an intonation to get. it to respond to you properly? No, I, uh, we do it to the Google assistant in our house. What's your Google assistant voice? Loud. Just loud. Just shouting across the house. I'm not going to do it because they're going to let off everyone's. David, what's yours? Mine's very sort of monotone and, and careful. Yeah, you're talking to the robot like a robot. I'm always just like Siri. Please remind me tomorrow at 9 a.m. to take out the trash before the trash arrives. And then it says, and then it always is like, got it. Added reminder. And I say, thanks. And it goes, I can't help you with that. Cool. That's pretty good. I just want to put a point on the Siri thing, because I've

spent a lot of time getting like emails and posts from people being like, Apple's going to do this. Do you all know how long Apple has spent trying to make Siri good? And do you know how bad Siri is? It's real bad. And not only would Apple have to take the state of the art. in AI and put it inside of Siri, it would have to make the state of the art in AI much, much, much, much better in order to do the things that we are asking for. Like there, there is no extant proof in the universe right now that it is possible to build the kind of high quality assistant we're looking for. Like, Siri will get better when they plug in a large language model. That just seems to be true. It will, it won't be good just because Apple does that. Yeah.

Yeah. The thing that I've been, knocking around in my head. As I read these reviews of these devices, I think about what's coming at this next set of developer conferences. Google I.O. is happening around the corner. Confident, we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff from Google at Google I.O., right? Microsoft Build is coming out. We're going to see another round of AI stuff.

There's a rumor out in the world that we're going to see GPT5 soon. Who knows? We're going to see another version of this. What all of them have to show us is whether these things are getting intelligent. because right now all they've shown us is they can fire out a bunch of language. Yeah. Loquacious, not intelligent. And like, I know people who talk a lot.

It's like, I'm really good at being loquacious and not intelligent. And I think that turn remains, it just, we'll see. Well, it's just not there yet. Right. And I, you know, you can, Sam Altman today was like, I'll spend as much money as it takes to build AGI and it'll be worth it. And it's like, dude, it's like, I can get. on a horse and be like fly and throw money at the horse. Like there's no proof

that this thing can do that thing. Like you haven't gotten there yet and you haven't even like demonstrated that you're on the right pathway. I'm sorry, I'm still seeing you riding a horse throwing money at its head. Fly! Fly! God damn you! I hate horses.

I had a girlfriend in high school with a horse and I realized I was very allergic to the horse. Didn't you ride into your wedding on a horse? I did. Did you just sort of make it money off of the horse while you rode into wedding? I was just screaming,

fly, goddain. That's funny. If you're a horse person and you're listening to Birdchast, first of all, how? What Venn diagram led you to us? Please let us know. You can email us at Alex Krantz at the Briggs.com.

But also, we love you. But also, yeah. I'm sorry that personally, it's the horse thing for me is a real problem. Anyway, we've got to take a break. That's a good, as good a place to end as any. We'll be right back with the money ground.

We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along?

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Whatnot.com slash sell. We're back with the money round. When I was in college, there was a parking garage by my house. And it had a big sign that said cash lane. And my friends and I, we were like, we got to make that cool somehow. We're in the cash lane. If you can figure it out, let me know. I don't know if that parking garage is still there, but I'll might have been torn down.

It was 20 years ago. Also, if you would like to generate an AI image of Neli in the cash lane, and send it my way. I would very much appreciate that. Please do it. And if you run a bank and you'd like to sponsor this, the cash lane round.

That's cool. I feel like the banks aren't really promoting the idea of cash anymore. They're not fans. I don't use cash. If you run Cash app and you are Jack Doris, you should just come on the show.

We have a number of questions for you, sir. All right, money round. there's kind of a lot of money floating around. Let's stay in the AI for one second. A bunch of sort of like search AI money move in. The one Google's antitrust

trial, which we have not talked a lot about because it has been very shrouded in secrecy. We have talked about that. Google has done a good job sort of shrouding its trial and secrecy. It is now barreling towards closing arguments in the search antitrust trial. Like today, right? Yeah. So we're covering that and a bunch

of documents have been released because it's very news organizations have basically been like filing motions with the court being like, this is crazy. You've got to release the evidence in this case. So the New York Times and others have been filing motions to get evidence unsealed in this case. A bunch of those motions gone through. A bunch of documents sort of flooding out here at the end before closing arguments. The thing that I think is most important, we can talk about some other stuff, is that we now have the number for how much Google has paid Apple to be the default search placement on the iPhone. it is $20 billion in 2022.

I'll be the default search engine on the iPhone. Which is crazy. That is a crazy amount of money. Like so much money. Like more money than either of the two companies we just talked about in the first round. Like, have. Or we'll ever make, probably.

So the argument here is if you're running a search engine, if you have AI ideas, you just need a lot of data. and Google gets a lot of data from iPhone searchers who are clicking on things or picking results. That helps them pick better results. Obviously helps them serve a lot of ads. It's worth a lot of money. Do we think that Google is making money

on the $20 billion that pays Apple? Yes. It's a rev share. This is the thing that a lot of people miss about all of this. This is not just like a flat fee that Google pays to Apple. I don't know the exact details of it, but from a lot of what we got in the trial, Google is sharing revenue with iPhone using people with Apple. So if I'm searching on my iPhone,

Apple is getting a percentage of that revenue from me every time I use Google. Google wouldn't do this if it wasn't profitable at this time. Sure. Google's market share is so large and so substantial. And a big part of the case that Google is making is Apple saying, we picked it because it is the best search engine. and not because there is some financial agreement. Separately also, there is a very lucrative financial agreement.

But this is a giant victory for both Apple and Google. And I think the idea that's out there that Apple kind of has Google over a barrel is just not true. So two things there. One, if it's a rev share, that means Apple's making a bunch of money on Google's ad tracking, which seems challenging for Apple to defend. Oh, yeah, at the same time that Apple is running around talking about how insecure Android is for precisely that same reason.

Yeah. So Apple's just collecting much of money on the revenue Google makes through Google Search, which is entirely advertising-based. Weird. Just weird. Fully weird to consider. Second, it is beneficial for Google

to keep any competitor's way. I mean, that's the heart of this trial, right? is if Apple picked Bing, whatever, there would instantly be another search engine at scale. And Google cannot afford that. So, yeah, sure, it's making a deal that works for everybody and it's probably making some money. But I suspect, even if it was losing some money, it would be worth it to keep another search engine from emerging. Oh, yeah, Satya and Adela remember last, whatever that was, last fall, it feels like ancient history now, got on the stand and said he would have done it for free just to get the queries coming.

from iPhone users because better queries would have meant better results would have meant better ad placements would have meant more expensive ads

would have meant more queries and on and on and on and on it goes and basically offered this whole thing you can keep all the money Apple. We just want the searches

and Apple said no and that was a total non-starter for them and you're totally right like obviously it's a huge victory for Google to get this and it's why

at least according in the testimony we've heard Apple's share of that revenue has gone up over time. But still, like, Google is not in the habit of losing $20 billion to maintain its place as the dominant search engine that everybody uses. That's just, it just hasn't had to make that choice yet. And I don't think this is that choice. Yeah, Google just likes losing money in other weird ways.

Right. Google likes to throw money at, like, roller skating executives trying to build self-driving cars. Yeah. Not search ads. I was really surprised, though, by the part where they said that Apple's, like, or the 2020 payments that Google paid was 17.5% of Apple's operating income, that seems like an awful lot. It's nuts.

Am I, like, misunderstanding the numbers there? Do I not understand business? I mean, that essentially means a fifth of Apple's profit is coming from this deal, because Apple is pure profit. And Apple would tell you it's not. all the money that they put into making the iPhone terrific is what makes that come from. But that's like a bunch of mealy mouth nonsense.

It is pure profit to Apple and it accounts for a huge amount of the money that that company makes. Yeah, and that's just wild. It's so much money. Like, that Apple is that dependent on Google. I don't know if it's dependency.

Yeah, I think that's where I'm like, do I understand business correctly? Well, it is in that if it went away, It would be a dependency. And maybe this trial will lead to some outcome in which it changes and the money changes in different ways. But I think what it actually speaks to is the phone market slowing down. Apple itself is looking for whatever next thing will exist.

Right. They just spent $10 billion on the car and shut it down. They spent half of that Google money trying to build the car. One year of Google money. Literally the equivalent of Apple getting on a horse and screaming fly. It just didn't work. Didn't work. You can't get in a mid-sized crossover and be like, don't have a steering wheel.

Like, you can't do it. What Apple is addicted to is monetizing every interaction you have on the phone. Yeah. Right. And this has just led the company into more and more perilous waters because that means a bunch of people are now mad at Apple all the time, including a much European regulators, including our Department of Justice, whatever it is. But the fact that Apple makes as much money as it does when people merely search for things in the web browser, it's insane. It's brutal. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that was the really surprising part. You're just, anytime you type in, you're helping Apple make a shit ton of money. Right. And maybe that's fine. Apple's free to run. It's business how it wants. But you can see that the chain reaction of Apple saying it's our phone and every single thing, you do on our phone should generate revenue for us.

As the backstop to the upgrade cycles are slowing, the phone market overall is contracting, all that stuff. They hedged it by saying, okay, we're going to, everything on your phone is not being monetized. We're going to be aggressive with app developers. We're going to have this deal with Google. Everything. We're going to shut down ads with app tracking transparency, which is maybe a good thing, but then we're going to move the entire market of app install ads to the app store,

and the app stores gets getting really weird. All of those things are just them monetizing the software on the phone or the experiences you have on the phone. I think this trial has shown us, this is real. This is a real pressure Apple feels, and they're collecting a bunch of money from Google for the thing most people do on the phone most of the time, which is just like search for things in the web browser. And then on the flip side, more documents from the trial reveal Microsoft is like terrified of this. and they're looking at Google's investments in AI and what they can accomplish there.

They freak out, and that's why they go invest in OpenAI. Yep. Which you just see, like Google is at the center of a lot of things happening in tech right now because they're just throwing money around. Google did have a good quarter this last quarter. They did well. Turns out people are still using Google Search.

But you can see the threat it's under, and you can see Google turning the revenue lever on Google search to have it make money instead of be good. Yep. More documents from the trial. We should, Ed Zittron wrote this up. The title was The Man Who Killed Google Search. And basically the thesis, that story, which we'll link to, is the revenue teams at Google came to search and said, we need to make more revenue on search.

The search team was like, no, search is pure, and the search team lost. Yeah. And we've all felt it. We've all felt it. Yeah. Very keenly. Well, I think one of the things that has come up a bunch in this trial that Ed also points out in his piece is that the question of what does good search look like is so mealy and hard to put your finger on that literally what you are like goaling your team against changes the way that you do business, right? So if you, if you're Google and you say, okay, the thing that we are going to measure is number of search queries.

the main thing we are going to do is make search queries go up. Like Sundar Pichai always talks about this when he was running Chrome, right? That the goal was the fastest web browser. And they built a bunch of things around that, but that was the goal. And so if you run towards the fastest web browser, you build a certain kind of web browser. If you run towards do the most searches, you're actually not incentivized to make the search engine great because it means people will actually search less because they found what they needed faster. But in a certain way, you also say, okay, if we get people to do more searches, it must mean people like Google,

because they're doing more searches. And both of those things are true, and yet they're completely mutually exclusive. And I think this is what, in a lot of ways, seems to have happened to Google as they got to the point where they were like, okay, we make money when people do searches. We need people to do more searches.

And so they started spending money on deals like with Apple and Mozilla and others. They started changing the way that the pages work and the results were delivered in order to get people to do more searches. And that just sends you down a really ugly road. You make people do more searches, but it actually, you don't care about the experience as long as people are doing more searches. And that's just that, that's what the

thing that I think feels bad to people. It's the, what's Corey Docter O call it and shitification? I hate that word, but it's a really good word. I wish he'd come up with a better term. It's a, it's a very useful, like, construct, but it's an awful word. I love it. Have you ever tried to type it? I can't, I have never once typed it successfully on the first try. No, by the time I get to around being like, I should type this, like 15 people have said it or typed it before I do. That's true. Because it's the default response to anything getting worse, whether it counts or not. Because specifically what Corey means is that most web platforms products start by delivering a surplus of value to you because they're all losing money at the beginning.

Then they take away that value from their advertisers, right? They squeeze advertisers for dollars. Then that lever was fully pulled. And then they'd look at you. and they turn the knob away from you, right? And that's just the cycle of the subsidized web platform. Yeah, and that's what's Google stuff. Yeah.

And you can just see it with Google search. Like, first they squeeze the advertisers, and then that is not great. So now it's you. You know, the Google product recommendations, the house fresh people, they're starting to get more expensive. So you search for a product on Google, and they're starting to recommend you slightly more expensive products.

That part, like, shocked me. Because they did a really good bar graph there. I was just really impressed with the bar graph. And everything was, like, red and orange and showing it was really expensive. And then the house freshwoods is at the very bottom. Bright green, smallest bar. We're always the cheapest. And it's like, respect it.

It turns out a fan blowing air through a filter is not necessarily an expensive product. We'll link to all of this stuff. But the point of this is, like, Google's dominance of the ecosystem, actually extends in every direction, right? It's pushing Microsoft to invest in Open AI. One of the documents here is Satya Nadella forwarding an email from Kevin Scott, the head of AI, explaining that Google's getting better at stuff, to the CFO of Microsoft. I mean, like, this is why I want to invest in Open AI.

Like, this is the reason. Here's my, as the CEO, justification to you as the CFO of spending $13 billion over the next few years to compete with Google because we see the opening and we're behind. And on the other side, you see Apple, just, again,

a huge percentage of their incoming revenue, which is pure profit, basically, because they're not doing anything. Like, that's a danger zone for them. If this trial ends in some different thing happening, like Apple starts to go off course.

Yeah. Which is crazy to think about it. Well, I think the thing that strikes me there is, like, we've always talked, Everybody talks a lot about how clever Apple is and how good it is at making money and how good its products are and how its products have really driven it to this place where it's really good at making money. Does this kind of like prove that wrong, the fact that they were making so much money off essentially doing nothing? It's like hard to begrudge Apple for being like.

Free money is free money. You know? Free money is nice. But like it just feels to me like no one eats for free in Tim Cook's house. It does seem a little bit like the vibe of Apple has shifted from like a bunch of geniuses around those blonde wood tables designing stuff to like a handful of unbelievably good negotiators winning deals. And like that is the sort of mental picture that I have of Apple now is just like Eddie Q

and Craig Federigi just like rolling into rooms being like, what's up losers? I win. On a segue. I would point out that this is the other antitrust trial. Yes. Right? That specific thing. How much power does Apple have?

That's the DOJ case against Apple. We'll see. I don't know how that one's going to go. But that thing, the vibe you are describing, Eddie Q shows up to Hollywood, passes out in your board room, and you still have to give them a deal. Like, there's reporting that happened. I'm not just making it out.

I don't know if that's true. There's reporting that that's happened before. And you still have to make the deal. That's just Apple's power being expressed. Okay. So that's Apple. That's the money stuff. That's the Apple, Google, Microsoft money stuff.

Other money stuff. Less fun. Less exciting. Peloton, which V just wrote a big profile of, which was very prescient now. She's like, what's up with Peloton? The answer is the CEO is quitting and they're laying off hundreds more people. Which is weird. So the CEO Barry McCarthy joined Peloton.

His whole thing was that he was like a Netflix guy. Yeah. And Peloton's a subscription service. going to do a good job at the subscription service. He did not do that. Nope. He is laying off 15% of the staff, which is about 400 people around the world. That's the fifth round of layoffs. Well, he's leaving.

And by the way, last quarter, he said on the earnings call, we're done with layoffs, and the ship is turning. He was wrong. Very wrong. Extremely wrong. And then he's leaving. he took over from the founder who was a little more chaotic. He was supposed to be the adult. And now... It's two board members are now in charge,

which is like, that's never a good sign when it's like, yeah, two board members are going to be in charge until we find a new CEO. Yeah. That's rough. Yeah, that's he just got clipped. Yeah. Yikes.

So we'll see what happens about athon. It's obviously very sticky. People love it. The instructors are famous. You should go read V's piece. It kind of lays out what's happening here. We'll relink it. It was a few weeks ago.

Again, she saw this future coming. By the way, Barry McCarthy has never responded to request to be on Decoder, and I suspect now he never will. I know why. I will say just two thoughts on that. One, I think reading the comments of that Peloton story was really interesting because the number of people who drew a direct line from the existence of Apple Fitness Plus to the demise of Peloton is really fascinating. I have no data on how successful Apple Fitness Plus is, but just, purely anecdotally speaking, like in my life and the people I know, it's gone very well.

Fitness plus? Yeah, it's like it's out there. It's like a thing people know about it. It's not that expensive. It's on your device. People who are like buying Apple watches are prone to like that kind of thing anyway. It gives you the classes. It just seems like Peloton maybe thought it had a moat that it didn't, I think.

Yeah. And add that to the, they got very excited because everybody bought one during the pandemic. and they said, oh, maybe this will be our demand forever, which was just an insane thing to decide at that particular moment in time. But it's just interesting that I think the question about Peloton has always been, how do you take a thing that is by all accounts

very good and people really like and botch it so spectacularly? And I think maybe I have underrated the extent to which it has been kind of eaten alive by some of the other products out there. Yeah, I mean, I think connected fitness is a thing. V has written about it. People want these products.

Peloton is a gold standard brand, though. It is. People love Peloton. I feel like the people who are using Apple Fitness are not necessarily the same people who use Peloton. The people who use Apple Fitness are like me, where every three months I'm like, this is the time. I'm going to start working out all the time

and become a total gym rat in my house. That's who's using Apple Fitness, right? It's people who are like, this is easy. I can just hop into this. Peloton is like, I'm going to spend thousands of dollars on this equipment. I'm going to have it in my home, and I'm going to use it. And pay a subscription fee.

Yeah, and pay a subscription fee. I think those are very kind of different audiences. That could be. Peloton is also stupidly expensive and has remained stupidly expensive for way too long. Yeah, it's like $45 a month for our subscription. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I can pay for 10 HBO Maxes.

And I will. It's not even true. At this point, it's like one and a half HPAX's. Speaking of boards that should take a hard look at the CEO, um... I already know. who you're talking about. Elon has gone quote absolutely hardcore with

Tesla layoffs. He fired the entire supercharger team including the people who are in charge of refurbishing and installing new superchargers which seems very bad because everyone just signed up to use their connector. Well you heard the NACS connector. For why he did

this. Why did he do this? So the rumor is that the head of the supercharger unit said no I like push back on the number of layoffs that she was asked to do. And he was like, no, you're fired too, everybody on your team to prove a point to the rest of the team. That was some of the reporting we saw this week. And the point is no one can do a good job as someone.

Yeah. Like, I think it was, it sounds like the piece was mainly about how he was really just pushing himself out there. And he's like, he's in charge and just reasserting his authority after being at Twitter all this time and coming back in and being like, do what I say. And if you don't want to do what I say, you're gone. And so's your team. Well, that's a long-running Elon Musk trend of wanting to be the shiny face on everything and demanding to sort of disappear for a long time and then come back and exert total control and then disappear for a long time again.

That tracks with a lot of what we've heard about his management style over the years. Is there something I'm missing in the why Tesla would slow down its investment in superchargers? Because everything I've understood about this company, and I do not. proclaimed to be an expert in Tesla, would suggest that actually the supercharger network is one of the things it should be investing in the most. Right, especially because now there's expanding demand for it. Right. Right.

Like, if you get Rivian and Ford and all these other companies, like using it, BMD, like, you can't name a company in North America that's not about to use NACS and sign a supercharge deal. If they're all coming online, the demand for supercharging is going to go up and they're going to pay you money to use it. Does Elon Musk just not want to be a gas station mogul? Is that just where we're landing? I think that's why this theory that he did it to exert his dominance essentially is so popular because it doesn't make sense. But then you'll hear the rumor about how Elon always wants to be in charge. And it starts, that theory makes a little sense. Andy and I did an entire episode on Tesla on Decoder this week. So just go listen to that. We can move off it. But we didn't talk about

superchargers enough. on that episode, I think. And this to me is like, you take your greatest advantage and you're like, stop. Yeah, it's just bonkers. Yeah. It makes no logical sense. Like, if you ask people, like, yes, people love the fact that the cars get over there updates and have fart mode and all this stuff.

What is the real reason people buy Tesla when they're in the EV market? Charging network. Yeah. And like, you just literally no one's working out. Like if one breaks right now, it's unclear who will come and fix it. Yep. Weird. Just a weird.

And they canceled a bunch? as well too, right? Yeah. So I saw a tweet this morning, I think, that was like, I wonder how many charging startups will trace their founding day to whatever it was, April 30th of 2024. And like, feels kind of, feels kind of right. Somebody, somebody has to show up and solve this problem in order to make electric vehicles work.

And it is increasingly unclear who that's going to be. I think, so my, I saw that tweet too. And I was like, zero. Like, this is an incredibly. enormously expensive to business to be. You got to go buy real estate. You got to buy a shitload of electricity. You got to work with everything.

Like software problems. The stuff does break. Just like the capital expenditure to do this is so high. Like there's a reason Electroify America is the big one. It's because Volkswagen had diesel gate and that was their make good. That's why Electrify America exists. I'm surprised like Shell and Exxon aren't just being like, yeah, all right, we'll do this. Like just diversifying into it.

Somewhere the CEO of Wawa is. drawing up a pitch right now. Yeah. Like, Bucky's already has superchargers, actually. Buckees should win. I'm good with Buckees just like owning electric charging infrastructure in the United States.

I feel like I super know why Shell and Exxon aren't getting into the EV charging games. Yeah, yeah, they don't want anyone to use. They're at my house right now, keeping me from sawing the raptor. They're like, this gets eight miles to the gallon and you're going to have it forever. Yeah. See, I hope the C of Exxon's at my house right now.

I have a number of questions for you too, sir. All right, let's take a break. We're going to wrap this whole thing up with the lightning around. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns.

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There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. complex and unprecedented the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers 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. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit earlier. early this morning, and we assess that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over.

Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for

the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority.

That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig it. Okay, we're back. I need to apologize to everyone. At the top of the show, I said we were going to talk about gaming coming to LinkedIn, which I know everyone was on the edge of their seat. I forgot to put that in the money round because that's where all LinkedIn discussion goes, per the bylaws of the United States.

Yeah. Anyway, they're adding mobile games to LinkedIn. Did you see the guy, by the way, who posted the thing on LinkedIn proposing and saying, here's what it taught me about B2B sales. Yes. He was proposing to his, like, fiancee, like on a beach. Yeah. And it was a picture of him proposing, and he says,

here's what it, here's the experience taught me about B2B sales. I thought for the longest time that was a joke, I think it was actually real. And it is, it has, it has broken me in a way that I cannot describe that that is a thing that someone did on the internet. Did you learn anything about B2B sales? No, or proposing. I came away with nothing.

Yeah, you're a person. person who proposed. I did. I did it on LinkedIn, actually. We were playing LinkedIn dames together. I just said, let's get married. What I learned about that was

I should know that the answer is yes before I do it. That was the big secret to B2B sales for me. And that your proposal should involve a lot of one sentence paragraphs that are like vaguely motivational.

Yeah. Well, as a person who introduced David to his wife, I can tell you what I know on B2 sales, which is be hammered on a boat and just shove David into a girl. You're going to have a baby sometime. It works. That's 100% what happened.

Literally, that is the story. Here's what I learned about B2B sales. You need a lot of tequila. That tracks, that tracks. Also, the bigger the boat, the better. Yeah. That's why I know about B2 sales. Absolutely.

I mean, honestly, both of those are probably good sales tactics. I was like, yeah, just in general, those are good sales tactics. Anyway, LinkedIn is a mobile games for this platform in an effort to make it stickier because the only idea people have on how to make things sticky and have you come back to them is casual mobile games. Consider this. LinkedIn doesn't need to be sticky. That's what I'm trying to get at.

Like LinkedIn, buddies, you're doing fine. People need a job, they go on LinkedIn. They don't need a job. They don't use LinkedIn. It works. If you find yourself in life being like, I got to get back on pinpoint. And like open, you know, like, re-evaluate.

Throw your phone into the ocean. What if it's actually really good? What if it's like whortle? You can only play each game once per day and after your daily session, you'll get access to your metrics. So it is whirdle. It's whirdle. They made a wordle. Can you imagine?

Like, there's all these people now who are like, you know, I wake up in the morning. I do connections. I do whirdle. It's like a huge success story for the time. It's great job by them. I think if I ever found myself at a coffee shop and somebody was like, hold on, I got to do cross-climb for the day. I'm going to go.

Yeah. I'm going to leave. Oh, you know too much about B2B sales. We're not going on four days. It's like ultimate red flag. Did we find out if the woman he proposed to said yes? I'm assuming she said yes. I don't know. Because if like the last thing he learned about B2B sales was like, don't take no for an answer,

that's not great. Oh, rough. It's rough. All right. So I promise you we talked about Link. in gaming, and we have in a matter of speaking. Yeah, you can do it if you want. All right.

I was really stalling in the hopes that Jim Farley, CEO, Ford would call in to sponsor the Lightning Round. He did not. Mostly because we published the show after we recorded, so he didn't know I was waiting for that. There's that. And I didn't text him. Jim, quick question.

This Lightning Round needs to be sponsored by Horse Girls because of the incredible slander that we brought to them earlier in the show. I think we need to give them this one. They got it. It's all you girls. There was a second one in law school. I think it really cemented the situation for me. I wasn't a great person for many years.

Then, after mastering B2B sales, I got married. There you go. All right, lighting around. This is important. This one's important. There is an Apple event next week. Yes. By all accounts, this is new iPads.

David, you wrote a spicy headline this week. The last thing the iPad needs is a spec bump. Yeah, I'd say this is more than a spec bump. We're going to eat OLED iPads. Spec bump. This is like my dream spec bump. Sure. You and Liam are both going to be psyched,

and everyone else on Earth is going to say, what is OLED? I don't care. Leave me alone. Aw. No, I think, I mean, we've been asking this, what is the iPad for and what is Apple trying to do with it question for a while? And I was on the, they just need to make the iPad a touchscreen laptop train

for a long time. I'm now off that train because the MacBook Air is that thing. Like, it's not a touchscreen, but it is a damn good laptop. It is the laptop. People who want laptops should buy. Problem solved. The iPad needs to figure out the other thing that it wants to be. Yeah.

And what's interesting is it seems like, and again, I'm like a little bit kind of making a mountain out of a molehill here. But if you just look at the invite to the Apple event, it's called let loose. and it is just, it's just an Apple pencil. It's not like hiding that it's an Apple pencil. It just is an Apple pencil. And to me, it's like, okay, if Apple wants this to work, the thing that it needs to focus on is accessories.

Like, take the idea of the iPad as just, it's a screen, and you can attach every other piece of the device that you want to it and take it off as you need it or don't. And Apple has gone like an inch down this road. They have two different keyboards for different kinds of people who want different kinds of keyboards. There's the pencil. Do you remember when they had the smart connector

that no one ever used because Apple never opened it up to anybody? That was the thing. Apple is like this close to being a really interesting modular accessory system around this really great tablet and it just,

it needs to stop worrying about having more processing power because it already, it has had too much processing power for like six years. Like no one is using all of the power of their iPad. In part because they can,

can't because there's not enough powerful software to do it, but also because you're not giving people the literal physical tools they need to make the most out of this device. So I think as we go into this event, I'm like, whatever, I'm sure I'll end up buying an OLED iPad because that is like a sickness I have in my life. Because you love black levels. I do. Infinite contrast. We all are going to do that. But like I just, I don't know, I feel like I'm, we've all sort of gone blue in the face yelling like what is an iPad actually for somewhere Dieter? bone is like shaking his fists at our podcast right now. But I just like, Apple's like right there.

And it's like, just go, go finish the thing. Make me some accessories. Build the iPad out. So two things. Rumor is they're going to put an M-4 chip in these iPads. Massive increase in processing power. The thing does not need. Second, they need to change the software.

That's actually what it needs. The hardware ecosystem around it, whatever. Make accessory manufacturers, make more stuff. To make any of that worthwhile, you need more software capabilities. And they can't do that because WWC is until June. Right. You need it the next version of iOS. What can they show us besides an OLED screen?

An M4 processor. Right, and a chip die diagram of the M4 being like, look at this neural engine. Read it and weep. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of understanding. labeled graphs. Yeah. There's going to be, oh, there's a pencil, and it's going to have replaceable nubs. But like cooler replaceable nubs than the current pencil has, and there's an aluminum magic keyboard.

That's also not software. The rumor from Mark German, the rumor from Mark German at Bloomberg is that it will lean into being a laptop, or the pro will lean into being a laptop. I mean, I expect a full model refresh. Like the iPad model range right now is out of control. So they should end with an iPad that is cheap that makes sense for students, an iPad Air that is like the mainstream one, an iPad Pro that is expensive and has all the stuff. Yeah. Sure.

That's theoretically what they have now, but it's all very blurry. And then a pencil that works with everything, one assumes, and maybe some of these keyboard cases and whatever else that work with everything. I hope it still has a lightning port in the eraser. The base one. Yeah. I just hope that they just whiff it. on a port.

There's like one last lightning port. Yeah, you're just like, what? Oh my God. I just think the future of the iPad Pro should be, this is a modular Mac. And you should just let the iPad, the base model iPad be like, this runs Disney Plus.

I just want to point out that you sort of like, you just literally hand waved away, the iPad that everyone buys and uses. I think people buy the cheap one. That's what I'm saying. The iPad Pro is not the most important iPad. by a million miles. Yeah.

But again, I think the cheap one runs Disney Plus. Sure. I think that's what it's for. Like, here's the cheapest TV in your house. Fine. The iPad. No, there's a Westing house you got it for like $90. That's exactly.

You signed up for a bank account at Chase and they gave you a TV. Sure. But like that's what I mean. Portable. Portable TV. But like, yeah, this is like, here's this content consumption device that occasionally lets you tap out an email. It's like, that's,

the base model iPad. I don't, fine. Like, let that thing be this weird appliance. I'm just saying for everything else to solve that problem of, like, what is this for? Actually, should just be a Mac. Like, they should just let you run Mac apps on it at this point. Like, why not? I do agree with that. I don't think it should be exclusively that, but I think that is one thing it ought to do, right? In the way that you can now run some iOS and iPad apps on your Mac, it should, it should, it should pull in both directions at this point. Yeah. I don't think Apple will ever let it go because then they will have made a touchscreen Mac by accident. And that really implicates a lot of things about everything they've ever said.

But I just don't know why you wouldn't converge the iPad Pro and like the cheapest Macbook Pro. Because one time years ago they said they will never do that. And now like we'll really like ruthlessly mock them when they do it. I mean Apple says they're not going to do things until they do it all That's true. I do think if you look at your Mac and you think about what it would be like to use MacOS as a touchscreen,

it's a nightmare. Like, just think about the amount of time you spend in a menu bar and how it would feel on a 9.7 inch screen to try to poke at those little icons in the corner, like bad times. Oh, no, no, no.

It's a great time. I'm checking out this product right now from INAO. I think that's how you say it. Ienao. They do like little handheld game consoles. and they have one called the Flip DS, and it's got Microsoft built in. Yeah.

It's just the tiny DS-shaped Windows machine. Oh, no. And the only way I can, like, turn it on, because hardware-wise, gorgeous. Don't worry. Reviews are coming. Software-wise, it's just Windows, and they didn't really do anything. So, and there's no keyboard. So you have to, like, I have to use my pinky.

I can't use my regular finger. I have to use my pinky to, like, hit a button to turn on a, a keyboard and then it's beautiful. It works every time it takes 20 minutes. I love it. That's the Apple experience I'm looking for. That's what I want from Apple too. Everyone should let me have like a tiny tiny screens that I've used my pinky to work on. Yeah. And every time you push that button, Apple makes $20. Yeah. We all win. All right. Lighting around. Crance, what you got? Okay. Do you guys remember, do you remember when Razor made, made their mask? They made like three masks.

Oh, sorry. Do you remember when they made the Zephyr? Yes. And it was kind of see-through and it had the RGB. They actually, they appeared at our tenure. And they refused to answer any questions about the medical backing of this device. Yeah. And shocker, they didn't have backing.

This mask, they said had like in 95 grade filters and stuff. That was just a lie. or it was not the truth. Maybe a lie is too hard. N95 grade is an amazing phrase. It's like it's not N95. It's like N95-ish. Yeah.

And that's not anything. Like that's just that's just not a thing, you know? And so they are now being required to fork over $1.1 million in refunds to customers. and I think the real question here is who are the people who bought the Zephyr mask and are now getting their one point, their refund because you did that? Yeah, that means like thousands of people bought that thing. Wasn't it only like 100 bucks? It was more expensive than that. Oh, okay. Oh, no, it started at $100, yeah. So, but still, you bought it. And I haven't seen you wear it.

I feel like if that many people bought it, I would have seen at least one on the street. The only one I ever saw was at our 10-year party, and it was the razor guy wearing it. Yeah. And Cameron and our health reporter at the time, Nicole Wetzman, who, by the way, joined the verge before the pandemic, and then was our health reporter during a global pandemic. Like right before the pandemic. I feel like every time I see Nicole for the rest of my life, I'm so sorry. Anyway, but Nicole was there, and she was like, so is this. certified? Is it actually?

Over and over again. And they're like, we'll get to it. It was a very weird moment in our party, I must say. It was super weird. When you think about the verge party, you think about our health reporters being like, are you lying? That's what, and then there's tequila. Yeah. I mean, that was exactly the party. It was great. Weird product. Weird product, weird moment in the global history. To be like this RGB N95 is a fake.

It had like speakers in it. It was a very odd. God, it was see-through. That was the part that was... It really is a very specific artifact of a very specific time, that thing. You will look at that thing, and you will always know exactly when it came out and exactly who made it

and exactly what happened to it. It tells a whole story. All right, I have a lightning round item here. Yeah, it's about Instagram algorithm updates and what it means and a TikTok ban. But then I'm just looking at this headline that says Google is building a fart button into Android. and it is they're putting a soundboard into the phone app of Android.

Yes. So you get what are called audio emoji so that you can just play them during phone calls. Oh, I shouldn't have that power. You get clapping, laughing, crying, which is a literal sad trombone, partying, a drum sting, which is tch, and then a fart sound. This is, and I want to not be hyperbolic here. This is the worst idea I've ever heard from a technology company, maybe ever in history. It's like, do you remember when Google's last idea about the phone was like, we'll have the robot make reservations for you?

They're like, no, no, no, dude. Like, you should be able to womp, womp your friends in the middle of a phone call. I love that you can just be on a phone call and like, that's great. This is also, it's very good. What this reminds me of is, like, you know when Apple rolled out the reactions thing in FaceTime? And so everybody was, you would like do the, an accent on a thumbs up on camera. And it would, in some horrifically inappropriate moment, do like fireworks explosions behind you or like a really happy thumbs up or whatever. This is going to be that because I guarantee you Google is going to put this button in a place that is too easy to find.

And people are going to be having like, you know, hard conversations with their boss or their family or whatever. and all of a sudden, their face is going to tap a button of their phone and it's going to go, wah, wop. Like, this is not a good idea. I love it. Like, the fact that we haven't had soundboards built into the default dialers. It's just, why weren't we doing that? Audio emojis.

Just in case you wanted to make sure no one ever makes phone calls ever again, here's this. It's very good. I'm hoping they demo this onstage at I.O. Like, if they take a huge chunk of time at I.O. to be like, we've invented audio emojis. You can make farts sounds during phone calls. Hyper-realistic farts sounds. This is what it's for.

Surprise and delight your customer. This is why we make the technology. Billions of dollars have gone into the mobile phone supply chain, the software, the open-source development of Android itself, billions of dollars, thousands of years of human effort, you know, cumulatively. We built these networks. 5G is a phenomenon. And now you can just make.

fart sounds. Yeah. You don't even have to use your mouth. Like innovation. Yeah. I love it. Can I tell yet one more story from my youth? Yeah.

Is it a fart story? No. Well, it is in its way. Adjacent. Okay. I had a remote controlled speaker that made swear words and fart sounds. Yes. And I super hid one in the balcony of the room that we had our high school morning meeting

from. And just ruined that meeting for weeks. It's good work. I mean, that's what you're supposed to. I got suspended from high school, like, a lot. Like, all-time record. But, like, for good cause. My dad was like, are you going to go to school?

And I was like, well, I'm getting good grades. He was like, fine. You're just like, that was the trade in my asshole. You got good grades. My dad was like, I'll talk to your principal again. Yeah. It was a small town. It was a private school.

There was nowhere for me to go. All right. I think that's the first cast. Stay in school, kids. Love a fart button. Try hard. No, that's it. That's our podcast.

Next week is going to be a huge week. We got an Apple event. We got this. We're going to find out what's going to happen with the iPad. This Google trial closing arguments are today. We're going to hear a lot about what's happening very soon because that's a bench trial. A lot of tech news is coming. And then soon after that, I.O. starts and developer season is off to the races.

So take a breath. Pull over in your car. Just think about what it means to be a large action model. It means nothing. It actually doesn't mean anything at this point in time. It's a three. I had to work so hard not to make a fart noise. That silence.

See that would have been perfect. Oh, my God. All right. That's it. That's for our chest. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1.

The Verge is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.