The Vergecast - Ring's adorable surveillance hellscape

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Did you see Ring's Super Bowl ad and see happy puppies reunited with their owners? Or did you see the seeds of a complete, always-on surveillance nightmare coming for us all? David and Nilay discuss which is the right answer, why so many people don't want to trust tech companies, and why Ring might not care much about the difference. After that, the hosts discuss the ads coming to ChatGPT, the surprising number of AI executives quitting their jobs and issuing dire warnings on the way out, and the fake ad for OpenAI gadgets. In the lightning round, it's time for an extra long Brendan Carr is a Dummy, the latest Ferrari EV, the future of Siri, and more. Further reading: Jeffrey Epstein’s digital cleanup crew  Jeffrey Epstein might not have created /pol/, but he helped carry out its mission Amazon Ring’s lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance  Wyze is sticking it to Ring Sen. Markey calls on Amazon to “discontinue” Ring monitoring features Ring’s new Search Party feature is on by default; should you opt out? Ring launches upgraded cameras with Retinal Vision 4K recording What the Guthrie case reveals about your ‘deleted’ doorbell footage  FBI releases recovered footage from Nancy Guthrie’s Nest cam  OpenAI’s first hardware slips to 2027 OpenAI’s supposedly ‘leaked’ Super Bowl ad with ear buds and a shiny orb was a hoax  Two more xAI co-founders are among those leaving after the SpaceX merger  OpenAI reportedly disbanded its Mission Alignment team OpenAI fired exec who opposed ‘adult mode’  Read an Anthropic AI safety lead's exit letter: 'The world is in peril' Opinion | I Left My Job at OpenAI. Putting Ads on ChatGPT Was the Last Straw.  What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either ChatGPT’s cheapest options now show you ads  Here are the brands bringing ads to ChatGPT  Claude gets more free features to capitalize on ChatGPT ads Ex-OpenAI researcher has “deep reservations” about its approach to ads Brendan Carr is a Dummy theme submitted by Michiel Vanhoudt on BlueSky FTC says it’s ‘not the speech police’ in letter warning Apple News about its alleged promotion of left-leaning outlets Ferrari’s first EV will have an interior designed by Jony Ive  Here’s what the Ferrari Luce’s buttons, switches, and knobs sound like. The early reviews of the Rivian R2 are starting to roll in Live Nation’s monopoly trial is reportedly fracturing Trump’s Justice Department  YouTube is coming to the Apple Vision Pro Apple keeps hitting bumps with its overhauled Siri  The iPhone 17e could launch soon with MagSafe and an A19 chip  Apple might let you use ChatGPT from CarPlay  Paramount ups its offer for Warner Bros. Discovery, again Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The opposite tells here. Hey, buddy. What's up? How do you feel about using the full surveillance industry to find your pets? This is why I don't have pets. Get them out of my face. Too complicated. The moral quandary of pet ownership is...

We do a lot of moral quandary in the show, I will say. I, you know, do you really own a dog? Let's talk about it. Yeah, you just... You don't. Let it poop inside your house for a while. At least that's my current experience. Lots going on this week.

We have some Super Bowl follow-up to do. The Packers weren't in it because they never are, so that sucks for you. Patriots did lose, which was important, I think, for America. Agreed. The world is a little brighter now that the Patriots lost the Super Bowl. We have a lot of surveillance camera stuff to talk about. We have some opening eye news to talk about. We have some hardware that doesn't exist.

We have some hardware that might someday exist. We have lots to talk about. But I think we should probably start the same place we started last week, which is unfortunately with the Epstein files. You asked in particular people to give us feedback on how we're talking about this stuff, how we're covering this stuff, what they want to see, what's interesting. What did you hear? What are the vibes been like?

I would divide this feedback into two discrete categories. There's the one I care about a lot, which is the actual people talking to us. So you just look at the comments on YouTube. You can, you shouldn't look at our email directly, Pam Bondi, but I will tell you it is in our email, and it's people emailing us and saying, keep doing this. It's important. We appreciate your approach to it. We want the stories. Your quandary about the source and the mechanism by which the material is being released.

You can set that aside. We understand. Sure. So we're going to keep talking about it. Then there is just the data. And the data says people desperately want David and I. talk about your real estate.

Like the numbers are higher and we can't quite explain why. We don't do a lot of data-driven content decision-making at the verge, which is why I haven't started a fully automated like Android bot farm overseas to manipulate YouTube.

I should. Every good content creator who cares about their numbers does this. You've come to meetings with that idea. Yeah. Can somebody buy 100 Android phones and just do a bot farm for me? that would be great.

We don't do a lot of that here. Famously, our reporters don't get page views, like all the stuff we don't do. But in this case, it was particularly notable that there was the qualitative feedback from actual people that we care about a lot that said, please do the stories. And then there was just the straight views

and downloads on the podcast. And so, all right, that's enough signal. I'll mention two that are important to me, two Epstein stories we cover this week that are very important to me that I think are very vergy in their scope. One, and this has come out in every version of the Epstein files that has been released so far. Jeffrey Epstein cared about SEO a lot, just a lot.

And he employed people to manage his Google presence. He employed people to go on Wikipedia and clean up his bio. He did offensive SEO. He was all over it. His digital footprint was a thing he cared about. And he had people constantly emailing him, telling him how they were. We're cleaning up his digital footprint. Right.

And to be clear, by cleaning up, you mean Jeffrey Epstein is a criminal and a pedophile. Was at the top of the rankings? Yep. And Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time and energy and money trying to move that down in the rankings. Yes. And he was seating stories with oppositional links. Again, monitoring Wikipedia and making sure Wikipedia, there was like edit wars about his entry, taking out negative information about himself from the internet.

There are a bunch of really fascinating back and forth with, reporters from people in his orbit who are basically like yelling at reporters and threatening them in order to get them to remove stuff from stories and then reporting it back to Epstein saying, look, we did it. We got your name out of this story. Mia Sato and our team has a great story about this. There's one back and forth in particular

where the report back says they didn't know I was working for you. They don't know that we're talking. And so you just see there's this, we kind of hint at it all the time, right? We spend a lot of time talking to comms people and PR people. And I love writing a spicy response to what is obviously like a secret legal demand and then looping our lawyers on it. It's one of the funner parts of my job that no one ever gets to see. I really do enjoy it. There's a lot of that in our world that you all never see.

You should never see, right? We're just pushing back on people who want to shade our stories in some way. And then you see how effectively Jeffrey Epstein was using that as a weapon, not just to shade the coverage, but connecting the dot. all the way to his own search results, to SEO. And so that's just a straightforwardly of her story. And Mia did a great job. We've been making Mia cover SEO for a while. She's the one who wrote all the content goblin stories for us

about like the SEO industry, the last days of disco before AI showed up. That was a huge package she did for us. She saw this and was like, oh, I see what's happening here. So this story is great because she has so much depth. Yeah. And I think on that front, we talked a bunch last week about how one of the odd things about these files is how just sort of plainly they lay bare how all of this stuff works. Right?

Like we talked a lot about Steven Sinovsky, who was running Windows at Microsoft and his negotiations for his package when he left Microsoft is like, it's the sort of thing nobody ever talks about in the way that they are willing to email their colleagues about it. And so you just see a different version of it. And this was so striking to me for the same reason that you see with no, no spin, no, nothing, just a perfectly completely laid bare plan for how to spin up

a bunch of essentially fake websites designed to launder somebody's reputation. And there's, Mia has links and an explanation to this about like somebody who is basically buying and hosting domain names, starting fake websites, filling them with a specific kind of content, all in the name of gaming

the SEO algorithms to move stuff up and down to their liking. And this is, I would remind you, a game that Google has said for decades is unwinnable and doesn't exist and no one is trying to do it. And it is just so fabulously clear that this is a game that everybody plays and can win with enough money and resources. And it's just, this is the sort of thing. You just don't get to see it laid out in front of you like this. Yeah, you never get to see the vendor talking directly

to the client saying, I spent all this money. Here's exactly what we did and here's how well it worked. Yeah. And, you know, that's a goldmine if you are researching the dynamics of information on the internet. So that's one big story. Again, me, I did an incredible job here, just because we forced her to cover Ressia for a year. Like her understanding that space, I think, really comes through in this story. So that's one. The other one that I would point people to, last week I mentioned sort of in passing that Epstein had a connection to 4chan and in particular slash poll, the politics board.

And so we thought about who can explain this? There's so much history. So we asked Kat Tanbarsh, who used to be an amazing misinformation, misinformation reporter at NBC News. She now writes a newsletter called Spitfire News, which is very good. you should subscribe to it. So we asked her to just write about the connections between Epstein, Christopher Poole, who ran Fortran, his name is Mute, his handle, and pull. And the dynamics between all of that, between Gamergate, between the first Trump campaign.

And you can see there's a straight line in Epstein's support for eugenics, and his hatred of women, and his weird ideas about just how to destabilize the country. there's a lot of Steve Bannon in the mix who understood early that you could weaponize form culture and turn it into the culture war and then turn that in the politics and then here we are in 2026.

So it's not as straight of a line as people have painted. You can't say that they had a meeting and the next day the thing happened. But in the emails, you can see, yep, they definitely met. Epstein said, I really like this guy. I think he's so bright.

I drove him home and then a series of things unfolded where everyone's goals were being met. And that, to me, is maybe the most undercovered story of our time that, you know, there's always this push that you shouldn't take what happens on the internet seriously. The Twitter isn't real life. And to some extent, that's real. Like, the reality outs, like the truth outs for people. They go live their lives.

They move their meat sacks of their bodies around in real space. You can't tweet everything. And you can't overcome the metaphysics of reality with Twitter. But, boy, you can come close. Yeah. And you can see, like, just as you're saying about SEO, you see them talking about it, nakedly, openly, cynically, pushing the ball forward while everyone else is, you know, saying very sincere things about the nature of content moderation.

And like the systems are being gamed at every level. And Epstein's right in the middle of it. So that story is also, I think, very good, very vergi. Katz did a great job. So those are the two I wanted to call it this week. We're going to have more. again, you know, I value people writing to us and saying things to us more than I value the data. But in this case, it's both.

Like, clearly both says that we should cover this more. There's more to be said here. And in particular, Epstein as a force in the digital world is, like, overwhelming. Yeah. You can just see that he clocked it. He figured it out early. And then all of these people came to him for advice. And then his money influenced a bunch of platform dynamics and tech dynamics across the board.

Yeah. And that this group understood the power of the internet to move their own awful worldviews into the norm in like really structured and deliberate ways. Like you read that thing from Ryan Broderick last week who writes the garbage news letter who's basically saying, I've been covering misinformation and the alt right for decades. And I'm realizing that I may have just been following Jeffrey Epstein around. Like, the more we learn about these files, the more it feels like that is the case. Yeah, it's in there. And, you know, there's more to come, assuming our Department of Justice does the thing they're legally mandated to do by act of Congress. There's more to come.

I suspect we're going to cover this for quite a while. Yeah. And I think folks should go read the stories. We'll link them in the show notes. But the, yeah, the particulars of how all of this works, I think, is it continues to be the hardest thing to mine of all of this. and our team's been doing a really good job because there's just so much. And like we talked about last week, it's just this unordered dump of PDFs. And if you want to, you can read almost anything you want into it.

And so trying to go through and be like, okay, what is real? What is conspiracy? What is stuff that Jeffrey Epstein, who had a lot of reasons to vastly overstate his own importance, it's hard to parcel out. But there is just like the raw data of this, the more we start to put the piece of together is like a very different version of the history of sort of the modern internet than I think people are used to. And that's even just looking at through the slice of what's here.

Like, we don't know what happened at the parties. We don't know what happened at the dinners. We don't know what happened on the island. We don't know how happened on the plane. Like, we don't know what happened on the phone. There's just a universe of stuff we don't know. But what we can just see paints a very different picture of the history of the culture and the internet colliding in this specific way.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, by the way, I have one for you. You and I were talking about this briefly on the show last week, and then we talked about it afterwards. And I went out and assigned it. The equal signs. Oh, yeah. And the weird things that feel like censored redactions, but kind of clearly aren't.

We're chasing that down. I'm not going to give it away. But I think by next week we will have a good answer. We will have a story about what's going on with equal signs. Oh, that's awesome. I'm so glad you assigned that story. Yeah, I was like, I'm the king now. Am I the editor-in-chief?

Can I just do this? That's what happened. I love this. That's what all my meetings are like, can I do this? To be clear, everyone, most of the time people say no, and then Eli does it anyway. That's the dynamic here. I had a good call today with it, a long-time tech exec.

And he was saying the way to think about open claw and these AI agents is like, what if, like, don't think about it like you have one employee. about like you have a whole team and like how much more in control you would feel. And I was like, I don't know, man. I have a whole team. I look at my phone and I was like, what happened now? What are you talking about? Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Let's move on for this. We're going to keep covering the upscene stuff. I think this story is a long ways from being over even in our zone. So we'll keep talking about it. But for now, let's talk about a different kind of surveillance. A different scandal.

A different scandal. So the beginning of this, I think, is there was a Super Bowl ad that Ring ran about a feature called Search Party. And I'm going to describe this in the most milk-toast way, and then we're going to get into it. Search Party is a feature that is designed to help people find their dogs. That's it. If your dog runs away, you can activate the whole neighborhood of cameras to help you find your dog. I'm just going to share my screen with you real quick, and I'm going to play this ad because it's 30 seconds long,

and I just watched it again, and it is really something special. This is Milo. Pets are family, but every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launched, more than a dog a day.

has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at Raine.com. So, Neil, I don't see the problem. What a lovely ad about how to find your dog. I don't know. So Jamie was on Decoder not so long ago talking about this,

and I would characterize that conversation. It is very pleasant. I like Jamie. He's very smart. And also just me for an hour being like, is this dystopia? Are you describing dystopia? And we just went back and forth on that.

And do you have a ring camera? I do. We were grandfathered into the one on our front door when we bought this house. And it has actually been a really interesting process of deciding whether we want to keep it. It's fascinating to me that this is a moral quandary. We have ring cameras at our house. They're good. There's a product.

They work. And that's fine. Do you have the neighbor's app or do you have neighbors' notifications turn on in the ring app? No, I turn, I turned them off because it made me feel icky, to be completely honest. So we have them on. Again, I don't think you should feel moral quandaries about this. Like, I'm very curious. You know, I have the get out of jail free card of like, I'm a tech reporter.

I have to pay attention. But like, it's fine. You can just turn on. It's anonymized. And at least where I live, there are only two things that show up in the neighbors happen. Was that an explosion by far and away, number one? Just all day long, people asking if things are explosions. Couldn't tell you why, but that is it.

Are they ever explosions? Sometimes. Okay. Like once a year, there's an explosion. Okay. Right? Like, I don't know what to tell you. Once a year at the con ed plant, a transformer blows.

You know, like, the rest of the time, it's like, nope, big truck. Yep. It's almost always big truck or nothing. Like, nothing is a shockingly popular answer. And then that replies are always like, you know, hilarious lies. Like, yes, it was an explosion. Like, go in your basement now. Like, I actually asked you.

me about this, he's like, yep, a lot of people asking about explosions in the data. Okay. And then the other thing is my dog is lost. That's it. That's all day long, people are like, I lost my dog or like, I saw a dog. Here's a dog. Here's a pet. Whatever.

And so you can see how anyone looking at what people are talking about and sharing their footage about would get to, we should just automate the process of saying we see a dog. Sure. And I just want to say that, like, if you are, your concerns about the surveillance apparatus are valid.

Like, that's, everyone's listening to this. They're already yelling at me. I'm just saying the, the logical, like, outside of the world we live in,

conclusion from why do people hit share on video footage in our app? Sure. One, again, I cannot overstate this, is, is this an explosion?

Like, if they could solve that problem, maybe they, they should have started there, honestly. And then two is, my dog, is lost where I saw a dog.

And you can see how you would just get there. You would just very quickly arrive at we should push a button and let people be like, here are some dogs. Right. Sure. And I don't, I'm only pointing that out because it is the reality of the platform. That's the thing people are doing. It's also the sort of feature that in a vacuum, no one's going to have a problem with, right?

Like, can I, all at once reach out to all of my neighbors to see if any of them have found my dog? near 100% approval rate on that idea that big. And again, this is what people are already doing in the app. Now, in different neighborhoods, Boyd, you run into different things people are doing that cause all kinds of problems. Right. Is this an explosion?

Did you see my dog? Right. On the scale of moral quandary. We got a lot of, this is a teenager in a hoodie. They're probably a criminal. There you go. Yeah. I saw a guy looking at my car.

It comes up in the data. A lot of that. I'm mad. The delivery person for my food order didn't look like a citizen is one that is rising in the rankings. This is all bad stuff that you can do once you have this level of surveillance. And Ring has been in the mix of this problem since the day it was founded. Because Jamie, who again, smart person was founded the company, famously founded it on Shark Tank as DoorBot. Like, very compelling story.

Very compelling actor. Founder talk, the whole thing. Since the first day, he's been like, this is to fight crime. Yeah. He's never wavered. He's never been, he's never, he didn't find, it wasn't like he had to find product market fit.

He's like, why did I make this video camera to fight crime? Like, straight up, his pitch has been surveillance from the beginning. And on Dakota into Gen 2E, the last time I talked to Jen Toey at the launch of the last round of doorbells, he's like, if you put enough of these in certain neighborhoods, we will zero out crime. And he and I spent an hour. talking about that. And next week we'll have a Decoder episode

just really unpacking that conversation one more time. So I won't go into it too much here. But he and I spent an hour being like, what do you mean if you have enough cameras who are zero crime? What is the mechanism by which

these cameras will bring crime to zero? And the answer is, well, people will know there are cameras so that it will misbehave. And, you know, to some extent, it's we're going to share the footage with law enforcement. No, please.

That gives James Zoodoff so much less credit than he should. get for the aggressiveness with which he wants to give all of your. They keep signing deals with police officers, with police departments. This is a feature or not a bug. Like, actually, can I play you one more 30-second thing? So, why is a smart home competitor to ring, which hilariously has a whole bunch of its own security issues and privacy issues, got a lot of credit after this ring ad came

out and sparked a lot of people's fears. Because immediately, like, you look at that at and it's like, oh, replace dogs with anything else, and this is a horrifying dystopian hellscape that you've just described. I am confident there is a reason that Ring launched this feature with dogs. Do you know what I mean? But anyway, so Wise makes this thing. Let me just play you this 30 seconds, because I think it is a useful and important piece of the equation here.

This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, 10 million of them go missing. And the ways we look for them haven't changed in years. except for all of these. But what if we could make finding one lost dog require the computational power of a small dictator-led nation-same?

Search party from Reef. All right, you get the idea. I get the idea. Can I just point out, why has had massive security issues? Yeah, don't buy wise. And like, strangers can control your wisecams over the internet.

Don't do that. Yeah, I'll just, like, cameras outside your house. Yeah, you got weird surveillance problems. We're gonna talk about how complicated all that will make you feel. Do not put cameras in your house. Don't do it. I completely agree. The number of, like,

feel-good clips I watch of, like, babies breaking out of their cribs and going to the kitchen to, like, get juice. It's like, first, you feel great. You're like, this is very funny. That baby jumped out of a grave. You're like, why is there a camera in your house? Why is there an internet camera in your house? Why is there one in your kitchen? Why is there one in your living room?

Why is there one all the way from the baby's crib to the kid? What are you doing? And there's no way to, like, reach through your phone and disconnect the camera, but I want to take. Yeah, for a fee, Nila and I will come to your house and slylyly disconnect all of your cameras. I have a lot to say about the fact that the baby monitor camera, that we bought got discontinued, and now the only one you can buy from the same brand has a Wi-Fi option

and that it in it. And they know it's bad, so there's a hardware switch on the camera. Oh, wild. But I'm like, I don't even want to do. Don't put a camera in house. Yeah. Just don't do that.

But anyway, to the point of this ad, like, I think if you're Jamie and Ring, that wise video is not a good burn because you're like, yeah, that actually is exactly what we're trying. That's what we're doing. Yeah, they, again, he will tell you. He will, he, he, he,

look, I like people who are honest. Yeah. Right. And Jamie is very honest. He's like, I started this company to fight crime and I'm going to do it with pervasive video surveillance.

He's not hiding the ball. No. I think he's a little annoyed that the nature of law enforcement and how people feel about the police using their data right now are radically different than when he found it in like 2012

or 2013. It was back then. Right. The nature of all this has changed that his point of view has not. But again, all of this stuff is, it's a feature or not a bug, right? And I think to your point

about them being honest, I think the challenge here is that everyone is able to make those decisions for themselves, right? Like, is the possibility of, is lowering the possibility of someone breaking into your house worth the intrusiveness of having a camera? I think reasonable people can disagree on where you land on that. The other thing that's happening is my camera is also watching you. And so what we've now created is this big society-wide problem that not all of society gets to participate in. And I think that has been

the part that Ring has not done a good job of reckoning with. It's like, sure. Would I consent to you lighting up my camera in order to find your dog? Sure. Fine. Is it unbelievably obvious

to me what opting me into that automatically does and what you can very clearly do next with that exact same technology? Like, yes, of course. And do we as reasonable consumers in the year 2026 have any reason to believe tech executives when they tell us they'll never do the bad thing. No. So like,

I'm at this point now where I struggle with this because I don't know how to reckon with the fact that my block is filled with these things. And if my dog ever gets out, I will be grateful for the fact that most people on my block probably didn't know to turn this feature off. But I also sort of feel like I should go door to door until everybody to turn this feature off. I have this theory about just what is happening in our politics right now. It was, uh, I think about it a lot. Right now, we are convinced, like culturally convinced that our actions do not affect other people. You just see it everywhere.

Interesting. You see it in, there's a rise in measles cases. Why? Because we've decided our actions don't affect other people, even though they very clearly, like all over the place. And ring cameras are an incredible example of this, where the cameras in my house are fine. they're fine. Sure.

And I can turn them on and off and whatever, but they, to your point, they're taking video of you. And so my cameras can invade your rights. But me turning that on

has no impact on me. So here's this button in, you know, an app distributed by Amazon on the hardware that Amazon owns, where you have like a moral quandary that is,

should I affect someone else's rights? And I would just say American culture in 2026 does not equip people to think about that well. Yeah, true. Like, it just, it's just, you kind of, you see, once you, like, start looking for it, like, do you believe that all of us working together is a better solution or problem

than everyone working individually? Like, do my actions affect you and should that have any impact on how I behave? It's just no, no. The answer is no one wants to think about it. Like, please open TikTok and move on. And you just, I think this button is very challenging for people for that reason. because your individual decision will never affect you. Right.

It will affect other people. And the collective decisions of other people will affect you. But you have no agency here, really. And I don't know how to reconcile that. But to your point, if you lose your dog, maybe this will be helpful. There's a reason they're starting with dogs. At the same time, Savannah Guthrie's mother was kidnapped. Yeah.

And everyone was like, where's the doorbell footage? And she didn't have a nest subscription on her nest cam. And everyone thought it was lost. And it turns out that the way the NEST cams work meant some data was sent to Google at some point and Google was able to recover it. We should talk about the mechanics of that because that's equally confusing. But the fact that the FBI then released the footage that Google had was, I would say, widely celebrated. Yeah. This was deemed to be a win by Nest and by law enforcement and by the existence of these cameras.

And you know, somewhere Jamie Simeonoff is like, I told you. That's it. This is what this is what this is for. But to me, it's like, I don't know. I also reacted to both of those things, the ways you just described. And I think having those, you can't hold both ideas in your head at the same time. You just can't have it both ways. Either this stuff is too problematic and too invasive and we need ways to roll it back and not have it be this kind of incredible, ongoing, permanently stored surveillance complex that can find anybody at any time.

time. Or it's awesome that this piece of information about what happened and Nancy Guthrie is coming out and might help solve a crime. You can't have it both ways. Well, you can, you can, you can't. You can. So, you know, 20 years ago, CCTV cameras became absolutely prevalent in England. Like, this is a 20-year-old story. And there was a controversy about just the number of private CCTV cameras. And this is like the old technology, right? This isn't even like, digital internet technology. This is closed circuit. There's tapes in the back of the convenience store. And they were everywhere. And there was a privacy debate in that country at that time. And you end up with a series of regulations and laws and social norms. And I don't know that it

has worked out. I don't know that it's any different. But there's one other path, right, which is to say we should have privacy laws. Like the way the government accesses the private surveillance footage on everyone's front door is regulated in some way and transparent in some way. And there's things the police can't do. And that is just not where we are in America as a society right now. Like, we're not going to have some fulsome debate about what it means that everyone has a camera and the cops want all the footage all the time.

Especially because so many people no longer trust the intentions, the methods, or even their interactions with the police. Like, just that's not where we are. Right. So the idea that you're going to have some good faith debate outside of a high-profile true crime story, it seems lost, right? So now these companies are going to do

whatever they want, and it seems like what they're going to do is chase the check. And the United States government is going to write a lot of checks. Yeah, house by house, we are neatly solving

a law enforcement problem. Yeah, there's the one middle path. And you could write that law. You could write a privacy. Right? You could say you can't light this up all the time. There's a million ways to do this.

And maybe not everyone will be happy with any of those ways. I think the failure is no one is even proposing them. And even if you did propose them, no one believes that any of them will pass into law or be effective. Right.

What do you make of the Nancy Guthrie thing before we move on and get out of this? You know, I keep hearing a lot of cliches. Like, you're only paying for access to your data, but it is true that the Google cameras

work differently than the Ring cameras work differently than the Wise cameras work differently than the Arlo cameras. And Google system in particular, we don't know which camera she had. So this is, like, depending on which generation of Ness camera you had, that works slightly differently.

but it seems very much like you always get a few days of data for free but a few days of video history for free and so there was emotional alert the data was sent to Google and it just didn't get overwritten and so the only real insight we have into what happened here was of course

from Cash Patel who was not a reliable narrator who said they recovered the footage from quote residual data located in back end systems I think Google should explain exactly what that means I think you have a right to know if you're a NEST customer exactly how residual your data is to what level

on what back-end systems. But our best guess, given the way the Nest camera system works, is that the video went up because you do get some amount for free, and it just had not been overwritten. And given the high-profile nature of this case, Google assigned some engineers to go get it. I don't know this. I'm just saying this is the logical result of what they're saying. Yes. I think Google should absolutely have to explain if your data goes away. And Ring, you know, again, they're trying to claw their way back into everyone's good graces, said to Jen, we have no idea what the words residual data mean, because that's not how their system works. Right. And I believe them, right? Like, it's,

it's purely a system architecture question of what you're doing here. But, but yeah, I agree. I mean, the way Google and the FBI make it sound is that it was like, like, this is like the 1970s and somebody like left the VHS in the room without meaning to. And that is like, if that is how it works, that's because Google made a deliberate choice in how it stores and eventually deletes and eventually overrides the data on its servers. And A, the idea that that data still existed and B, that it was clearly in relatively short oritable retrievable by Google is just wild. And again, like, I think it is possible in this case to both think it's

good that this information is out there, and I'm glad that there is this clue as to what happened in Nancy Guthrie. It is also, like, deeply weird and alarming that this was possible. Yeah. I mean, again, I think all of these companies owe us way more explanations about what's going out through data. I think they should be required to give us those explanations by law. That's what a privacy law would do. Yeah. And I think law enforcement needs far more guardrails how they access our data. And that is, especially in the Trump administration, who, that's a long way. away from being reality. There are no more guardrails for these companies. And so, yep, I have a problem with Ring. I also have a problem with Clearview AI. Sure. Like, I have a lot of problems with a lot of

the systems that are being deployed against us. I'm not making apologies for Ring. I just think, I know that company and what they care about. They're designed to be like, we will stop crime with video surveillance. And so, you know, yes, every camera kind of works this way. Yes, you can complicate this by talking about Nancy Guthrie. But if you don't want to participate in that mission, you can actually make a market decision, right? You can be like, I'm going to buy one from a company that isn't like, we're here to zero at crime. That is a choice you can make with your dollars. But if you're the door dasher who has to go up to someone's door to bring them food and they get to take a picture of you and post it wondering if you're a citizen, you have made zero market

decisions. Yeah. And this is what I mean. Your choices affect other people and really not yourself. And that's a weird thing. That's a weird problem. App design. Yeah. Right? How are you going to communicate this in a switchbox in an app? It is also just a weird problem in our society right now that no one really has the tools to evaluate that kind of choice. And you're actually pushed away from thinking about those choices in that way right now. Again, this is big and small.

But once you see it, it's everywhere. And these cameras are like a particular instantiation of that that just happened to be a gadget. So we're going to talk about the British guys. Yeah, indeed. All right. We should get off of this. I think we will keep coming back to all of this. I'm going to go make sure the camera on my ring is not running.

But we should take a rake, and then we're going to go back. We're going to talk about some other gadgets that don't exist and some other gadgets that might. 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.

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We've talked a lot on the show and we've been waiting for Open AI to release its hardware. Open AI is working on something with Johnny L. potentially many somethings. There has been rumors. There's been reporting. There's been a lot of stuff out there. And then this week there was a weird leak that started as a Reddit thread from a supposedly disgruntled employee explaining why they were mad that their Super Bowl ad about Open AI hardware didn't go on the Super Bowl. And then they quote unquote leaked this ad.

Have you seen this ad? This is a crypto scam. Can we just start with, I'm not 100% crypto. scam positive, you know, but I've seen a lot of photoshopps in my time. This is a crypto scam. When in doubt, crypto scam is a non-incorrect way to live your life at this point in time? Especially the way it worked. Because they leaked it and then there was like, what, there was like a file name on a server.

And then someone was like, I've discovered the file name on a server. It got all the way to Alexis O'Hanning me like Reddit, cracked it again. Yeah. Crypto scam. All of that just reads Crypto scam to me. I'm not sure where the crypto scam was. Yeah. But just that sequence of events where a bunch of people were a little too smart, a little too fast,

crypto scam. Somewhere in there, Elon Musk asked you for your Bitcoin is like, that's the turn. But the ad, I think, is sort of fascinating. It's Alexander Scarsgaard wearing... It's AI, Alexander Scarsguard. Sorry, fake Alexander Scarsguard. Very convincing fake Alexander Scarsguard. wearing what what look like sort of open ear headphones

and where and playing with this little orb called dime. Again, all of this is fake. Everyone at Open AI has said it's fake to the point where it would be wild for this to be true. No, it's definitely, it's definitely, the whole thing is fake all the way up and down. But this, this ad ostensibly showing Open AI's hardware, really kind of caught on in a really funny way. Did you believe this ad the first time you said? saw it. No. No. No. Because again, look, I've seen a lot of Photoshop. Like the, my scam detection ability is, is under threat every day because of slot. But the thing here where there was

like a Reddit post for an account that had never existed before and then the people in the Reddit figured it out so fast. And then there was a full ad that was leaked with a celebrity in it that wasn't run because opening I chickened out because of the meta executives who worked at it. Like, you just look at all that, like, none of that happened. Right. Like, zero percent of this went down. Yeah. Especially if you have ever watched Johnny Ive introduce a product ever in history,

which we have done a lot. He does not make an ad where nothing is said. True. And there's a moment at the very end where AI Alexander Scarsgaard picks this thing up and does a sort of like checking his teeth face into it that is just so immediately, tonally incorrect that it's like this, why would, Why would even the person trying to fake this out do this? This was apparently a pretty elaborate procedure to try and fake this.

They were sending people proposals to feature this ad. Really interesting thing. But I just found this whole ad so fascinating. And it very clearly, to me, points to people are so desperately curious, A, what any of this AI hardware is going to be. and B, they're so deeply skeptical of this being anything that immediately there was this very funny feedback

that was like, of course this is real and of course it's this stupid. So I read this more, and we should talk about the AI industry as a whole. I read this more as like Open AI's own actual ad during the Super Bowl wasn't any good. And the Anthropic ads were really good on Twitter

and then in a room where people were actually watching the Super Bowl, they played nothing. None of it hit in. room. Like, you just, no one's paying enough attention to these ads. Like, the best ad was the Coinbase ad where they just did karaoke to Backstreet Boys. Yep.

Because at least got everyone's attention. And then you know what happened when they showed the Coinbase logo, at least in the party I was at? Everyone groaned and said, fuck Coinbase. Sounds bad right. But everyone's saying a Backstreet Boys song for a minute. By the way, in the ad industry, that's called a pattern breaker. Do you know that?

Oh. And they're very successful. And they're good at this, right? So, like, whatever. Like, but what you saw was the actual. chat chTP ad isn't any good. The chat chbt product, because it's about to get ads in it,

people think it's about to get shittier in some way. And then as we have talked about so much, like Claude and Claude code are having this incredible moment. And open ad doesn't seem to be poised to compete with that anyway, except to try to light up ads to compete with Google search.

Right. And so I looked at this whole kerfuffle as like, in order for this hoax to work, in order for this crypto scam to sell one Bitcoin or whatever the hell they're trying to do, uh,

you had to believe, that there was a better ad on the shelf. And that was believable. You had to believe that there was an ad executive somewhere at Open AI who was furious that his better ad was shelved in favor of the thing they actually ran. And if you didn't, if you don't believe that,

then of course this is a hoax. If you look at the state of the advertising, you're like, yeah, that's possible. And then you, or Alex's, you're tweeting this ad. Yeah, fair. Meanwhile, the actual Open AI hardware news of the week is that it appears OpenAI's actual hardware launch has slipped to next year.

I'm just going to keep pointing out the all-knowing voice assistant that can do things for you is a long way way. Even if you're the biggest open cloth fan in the world, that thing is a million miles away from being a mass consumer product. Yes.

And it is increasingly clear that everyone including Johnny Ive might know that. But let's talk about some of the weirdness going on in this. space right now because you just alluded to this, but one of the things that has been happening all week is a bunch of people have been leaving high-profile jobs at AI companies and sort of sounding alarms behind them. An Open AI executive left and wrote a sort of scathing essay in the New York Times about

how problematic it was that ads are going to be in chat GPT, an anthropic safety person left and wrote a similarly sort of catastrophic thing about the state of AI and where we're all headed. Not similarly. I'm mad about ads is one thing. This dude wrote, quote, the world is in peril. All right. Yeah, that's worse. There is a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding at this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world lest we face the consequences. I would say that's a little different that I'm mad about ads and chat she was. It's a little worse.

I would agree with that. And then the other thing is this big group of XAI people left. And I think there's a chance that that one belongs off to the side because XAI just became part of SpaceX.

There's going to be a lot of corporate changes. A bunch of people presumably just got very rich from this thing which created the largest private company I think in America or maybe even the world. but there is something happening here where an increasing number of important people are finding cause to sound the alarm

about what's going on with AI. Do you make anything of all of this happening at the same time? Well, you keep saying that this is my pet theory, but I think this is real. I think this is an important thing to believe. I already know where this is going and I hate it. I think Anthropic thinks clot is alive.

Like, I really do. Like, and I think this might be shared at other labs. Andthropic is like particularly kind of hinting that they think Claude is live. They just did a big New Yorker profile called What is Claude? Anthropic doesn't know either. And it's like, dude, it's an L. I know what it is. But they think it's live.

And they keep running these tests on it. And it keeps surprising them in different ways. And yes, Claude is very powerful. And yes, if you give it a vending machine, it will sell everyone a tungsten cube for a dollar or like whatever mistakes it's going to make. And yes, they release reports on skewing. But, like, there's something in this industry where they have decided, the people who work in the industry sort of collectively have decided that they're touching consciousness. Maybe not human consciousness, but consciousness of a kind. I don't know how to evaluate that.

I just see it, right? Like, particularly, I think Anthropic Thanks Claude is alive. Because they keep hinting it. They keep talking about it. It's alive. They don't say it the way that Sam Altman is like, we're going to do AGI. Right. They just keep hinting at it.

So if you're there, right, of course your safety researchers are like, well, you're doing stuff to make money with the thing that's alive that might kill us all. We should stop until we figure out how to make it not kill us all. And then you see that happening at OpenAI, which has to make way more money way faster because they don't have the enterprise business that Anthropic has. And they're just disbanding their, quote, mission alignment team and their head of platform safety is now the head futurist. And it's like, well, what do you think is going to happen in the future such that your head of safety has to be the head futurist? Oh, it's going to kill us all. And like, I don't want to buy into doomerism. I think I'm personally still the most skeptical person about AI that I encounter on a regular basis.

But this industry right now is marked by a sense that the people who work there are afraid of the capabilities that they've created. And they do not think there's sufficient controls. Right. There is a measure of true belief that you have to have to quit your job in this way. Which is a weird thing, right? Because it's not, it would be one thing. they were like, I'm quitting my job because I think Sam Altman is a, you know, a scam artist who is just bilking people out of money and is going to ruin the economy. That's not what these people are saying.

They're saying essentially, we've created God and we're not doing enough to rein it in. You're not going to make more on the speaking circuit given that talk than you are like cashing in your own tropics stock. I'm sure that's true. And I think this is, to be fair, a sort of long tradition in the tech industry. People left Facebook saying this same kind of thing. People left Google Tristan Harris made a whole life. He did make more money in the speaking circuit. Oh, no question. Out of saying essentially the same things.

Like, we have created this thing that is very powerful and we are neither honest about nor reckoning with the consequences. And we're seeing, you know, we haven't really talked about the fact that meta is on trial. Adam Ossaria was on the stand this week.

And there is just a lot of documentation coming out of meta that proves that they knew what they were doing to people. So this is the thing that I struggle with, right? Like, A, the people who have come out and loudly said this have been proven right historically in the tech industry over and over and over and over again. We should have believed Tristan Harris quicker than we did.

He eventually helped make a documentary that I didn't like very much, but that's beside the point. The idea that these people were coming out saying, we have built a machine that is changing the way that people live their lives and we're not talking about it enough. Like if we had recognized that at a bigger level about Google and Facebook much sooner, things might have been different in better ways. And so part of me looks at this and is like, okay, maybe. maybe what we need to do is take these people at their word, that they see what they've built more clearly than we do

because they see the dashboards, they see what's happening, they see how people are using these things. And this is why I bring up the ads thing too, right? It's like the people alarmed about putting ads in the experience are the ones who are seeing the kinds of information that people are giving to chat GPT. And you put this next to like everybody's up in arms about OpenAI retiring GPT40, which is like the truly,

sycophantic thing that everybody turned into their best friend. And it's like, that stuff is real. And I think, I think we do need to reckon with it. And I have to remind myself sometimes that even though I'm confident that AI is not nearly as good as the people wanting to sell it to me say that it is, it's still good enough that it is causing people to do these kinds of things and make these kinds of trades. And we should worry about those things. And so I'm just stuck in this thing of like, I don't believe it's as good as any of these people say that it is. But maybe that doesn't matter because maybe the people are still doing the things that are scary, even if the tech is not as good as Sam Altman says that it is.

Well, it's good enough to cause harm. Yeah, yeah, well said. That much is true. It's obviously true at this point. It's good enough to cause harm. Yeah. Is it going to destroy humanity? Like, probably not yet.

But is it doing a lot of harm? I've watched so many AI cats do the electrobreakers dance that I'm very concerned about humanity. It is just convincing every time. It is really ironic that that would be how it would do it. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's much more likely to, like, bore us all to death with cat videos or, like, entertain us all to death with cat videos than it is to just truly like...

Yeah, it will dull in our critical thinking skills until it can con us in anything. And that, by the way, is kind of how Claude works. So who knows. What I'm seeing is a bunch of people who see the technology getting commercialized, who understand the incentives that commercialization will create, particularly advertising, and who are saying, hey, we... have stopped being as careful as we should be. And I think that, this is the tipping point. Yeah. Right. These, these things are going from being research projects or things that you can give

a TED talk about to actual products that are being deployed that now need to return on the massive investments that have been made into them. And that means the commercial pressure is arriving. And you can see in some of these notes and some of these letters, these people who are quitting loudly are saying, we're not making the right decisions. I raised the flags and I was overruled. But opening I just fired an executive who opposed adult mode. Right? You said, we should not let this thing make erotica. And you can see, like, why you would raise that objection, right?

You can see why you would not want these systems to do that because you look at that headline, and I went and read a Reddit thread about it, like, in the chat GP form. And the first response was the reason I used to rock is because it'll write erotica for me. And it's like, oh, this is bad. Like, you can have whatever, you know, high and mighty approach to AI that you want. and then hundreds of millions of people are using the tools, and the tools are being guided by commercial imperatives, not moral imperatives.

And we're not good at that right now. We are certainly not good at not making the money. Like, again, as a society, we are going to make all the money that can be made. And I think that's underneath it, less than, like, pure dumerism. It's, we've gone from being idealistic about it to being commercial about it. And those incentives really, really change the game with the technology. that is, again, at least good enough to do harm. Yeah. And this is why we keep talking about ads in chat GPT as such a sort of seminal moment in that transition.

And that was, there was some news about that this week. The first ads started rolling out in chat GPT. OpenAI announced who the first advertisers were going to be. I spent a long time trying to get Chad GPT to show me an ad and it hasn't yet. I even asked Chad GPT, what kind of questions could I ask you that are likely to show an ad? And then I asked all those questions and it showed me zero ads because AI. is a good technology. I'm like, show me ads, Chad GPT,

and it's like, ah, you're good. Everything's fine. But I think you're right that like this is, this is the turn towards a different kind of road of commercializing your product. And it's like we talked about last week that Open AI has said it has lots of values. It has, it has stated all of the ways in which

it is not going to use ads and advertising to change the nature of your conversations to chat, GPT. And I think one of the things, a lot of these people are saying is A, those two things are impossible to separate. And B, all of your incentives are to mess up

my conversations to chat GPT in order to make more money. Yeah. And some of the initial advertisers are really interesting. It's like some normal stuff, you know, Target, William Sonoma, hello fresh. It's like these are advertisers. You're going to ask about a product and it's going to offer you a product. Fine.

Already, like, this is the beginning of a road that ends in a very different place. Yeah. Where all of a sudden, what you have is, is a giant set of advertisers who want to be in front of you in as, as sort of narratively normal way as possible.

They're going to want to be as seamless and integrated and feel like they are part of the conversation that you're having with chat GPT. And so HelloFresh is going to come in and be, I'm going to ask it to cook and it's going to be like, oh, you're so tired. Why don't just get Hello Fresh? It's right there. Well, also, importantly, you know,

all of these people are ex-Meta people. Fiji Simo ran Facebook. Yeah. Like, it's all meta people up and down running ads at Open AI and building them into tax GBT. And they all know that they do not make their money

at meta or at Google from the big, fancy, blue chip advertisers. The brands you just listed are not the majority of the money on the big platforms. It is bottom of the funnel, long-tail, ultra-targeted Instagram crap. And so if you are running a business

where you need to peel maybe a hundred percent of Google search revenue to pay back the trillions of dollars that Sam Altman has gone out and raised, you're going to have to get those advertisers and you're going to have to put them right in front of people. And that is not going to be as fun as, you know, Target. It's going to be a lot shittier in, like, a lot of different ways.

Like, are you ready for Shark Ninja to be in your house in this way? Because it's coming. And that entire sort of direct response QVCE world that we can see on the social platforms, if they want to make the money, they're going to have to do that product. And who knows? Who knows how that's going to work?

Yeah, I just want to read you something from HelloFresh about this. This is a LinkedIn post from Patrick Saul, who does marketing at HelloFresh, and goes into basically, why are we doing this? Why we think it's important? And one of the things he says is it's meeting high intent moments.

And he writes, when someone asks an AI for help planning a weekly menu or managing a busy family schedule, they aren't just browsing, they're solving a problem, By exploring the space, we are positioning our brands at the exact moment of intent. We're not just showing an ad. We are offering a solution to the what's for dinner dilemma at the moment it's being asked.

And he describes this as a thing that might come up when you ask about meal planning. And like, you can just imagine the ways in this immediately goes sideways, right? You have people who have been talking to chat GPT about being tired or the mental health issues they're going through or the actual health issues are going through that they're uploading to chat GPT health. And you have an advertiser who comes in and says, well, don't worry about cooking. We know you've, we know you've had a hard day. We know you're tired. We know you're going through all this stuff. Why not just,

why not just offload all of the work of cooking to this great company? Hello Fresh they can do it. That's like, that's a good ass advertisement. Like, that would work. And that's the thing is like every single incentive inside of this product is going to be to use all of that information that people are giving to this incredibly personal, incredibly personalized, incredibly real seeming to lots of people tool. And essentially weaponize it to sell you stuff.

Yeah. In a way that is actually, potentially more powerful than this set of data Google has ever had and the set of tools that it has to put that in front of you. Have you had this happen to you in Gemini yet? No. So, you know, Google does personal intelligence now

where they're happy to know about you. Yeah. And the other day, I was trying to fix a sink. And Gemini was like, well, you're a 45-year-old guy who likes to do home improvement projects. You could just replace the whole sink instead of the carpet cartridge.

And I was like, you shut your goddamn room. And it's coming. Oh, I don't like that at all. Now, to be fair, Open Eye has said they will not mix this data. their ads do not yet mix the data, but the incentives are there. Even the advertisers want that. Like, this is the thing.

This is the hello fresh marketing person saying this is the thing we're after. And Google's going to give it to them. Yeah. Their competitor is going to give it to them. Open ad either has to invent digital god. They've got to do AGI or they have to take, I think, 100% of Google search revenue to pay down Sam Altman's loans. Who knows what's going to happen here? Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, if you see a chat GPT ad, screenshot it. and send it to us. Vergecats at theVirgin. I'm serious. I want to see all of them. Also, if you work in Anthropic and you can tell us

whether Anthropic thinks Claude is alive, let me know, because I, I'm just saying. And if your email involves starting with the question, well, it depends on what you mean by a live. If you're one of the cranks, she wants me to interview in LLM,

like, you get out of my face. Like, I get those every day. Like, the number of people are like, have you interviewed Bing to see if it's like, I'm not doing it. But if you can tell me if Dario thinks and Claude is live. You can't interview Bing.

Nobody ever asked you to interview an Excel spreadsheet. That's not how it works. I will, one day I'm just going to come on the show and I read the back and forth ad with a guy who asked me in an interview bang. And I was like, I think you're, I think you need to step away from your AI, sir, and he got super mad at me. Yeah. Anyway, send us the ads. I want to see all of them. The weirder, the better. And if you, if you want to send me your hello fresh referral so that we can both get some free stuff, I'm down. Let's do that. We're going to take a break. Then we're going to go

back. We got a lightning video. That's how we're going to break the ethics policy. For free meals, I'll do almost anything, is the honest truth about where I come from, journalistically. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and

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Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. It's time for the leading round. Unsponsored for flavor. We keep forgetting to say that. I feel it's important to say. It is very important to say.

Especially after I just told everyone to send me free me. So, Neelai, I'm looking at the Google Doc we use to plan out this show. And I have to say there is a segment in here that is called Brendan Carr is a dummy that we do from time to time. This might be the longest set of links you have ever put in. So let's just say it's time for presumably a very long version of America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. He's such a dummy. Okay.

Our thanks to, I believe it's pronounced McKeel, who sent that to us on Blue Sky. It's Suna. That's AI music, but it rules. It rules. A thing you should know is if you ever want to know, like, exactly what is David's music taste? Like, that just there was like alarmingly close to it. It's gray-suited government regulators

being taken down by AI Pop Punk. There is also a full version of that song that we will link to in the show notes because it is, it is spectacular. Thank you to everyone to keep sending us theme songs. We're going to keep running them, obviously. This feedback loop is very strong. about incentives.

All right, Brendan did a lot this week. And we're going to start, you know, like it's a Brendan side swipe. But to me, it's the biggest one of them all. So if you've been paying attention, a lot of people ask us to talk about this. The Trump administration came for the biggest controller of speech in America. The thing that dominates all of our conversations all day long, that sets the cultural tone. The Trump administration this week came for Apple News. You know, Apple News.

You talk all day. Everyone, the agenda is set by Apple News. The broadcast channel Apple News. Yeah. So there was a study by the Media Research Council, which is very conservative, sort of right-leaning media watchdog. And the study is bad. We'll get into why it's bad.

But they looked at, of the 600-some Apple News stories at the top of Apple News or some period of time, most of them were by, quote, left-leaning outlets. And there were no, quote, conservative or right-leaning outlets on here. Now, if you've ever opened Apple News in your life, you know a couple of things. One, this product is for dead people.

Like, only old people use Apple News. And, like, a lot of old people use Apple News. Like, a lot. We should say, disclosure, Neilie Patel is one of them. Yeah, I'm one of them. Disclosure, the Verge is available in Apple News. Like, if you're a subscriber to Apple News Plus,

you get past our paywall. Like, the media industry is addicted to Apple. Apple News, like in a very real way. A real thing the Verge staff is used to is you just showing up at random hours of the day and dropping in an Apple News link that doesn't work for anybody because you were reading a news story. Well, I'll get to this in a minute. There's a reason why it's specifically just like three outlets I do that for. So there's a study.

Media Research Council does this study. This study gets picked up by the New York Post, which is like Apple News is horribly biased. And then the machine starts to turn. and Andrew Ferguson, the chair of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, sends a legal threat to Tim Cook that he, of course, posts on X, saying, we are going to investigate Apple News

for suppressing conservative news, which is not a thing the Federal Trade Commission can do. And I know it's not a thing they can do because in that letter, Ferguson says, we are not the speech police. But I'm curious about the speech through promoting. What?

And so the mechanism, by which the FTC believes it can be the speech police is the terms of service of Apple News may or may not suggest to people that this is unbiased and won't promote left-leaning outlets. That's not anywhere in the terms of service. I was going to say, I can't imagine there's a thing in there that is like, don't worry, conservatives, we got you too. Right. But Andrew Ferguson sends us a letter saying there's consumer deception because of the Federal Trade Commission. They're going to look into whether Apple is playing fair in the market with Apple News, which again, and I know this for a fact, is mostly read by very old people.

Like the demos of Apple News, you're just not worried about it. It's extreme, it's just boomers. That's what it is. It's very popular, and it pays out a lot of money to publishers, so publishers care an awful lot about Apple News. There are publications in this world, big famous ones, were like the majority of their revenue is Apple News. And we just don't talk. It's like the same as Google search, but we just can't talk about it.

Like if you break the cone of silence, like maybe Apple will take the money away from you. She just can't talk about it. But I always talk about everything because I think it should. So I guess. Okay. So Ferguson does this. So then we get Brendan who can't stay away from a speech controversy tweeting the FCC chairman, Ferguson is exactly right.

Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act. I want to be 100% clear, Brendan. Apple has every right in the world to publish whatever it wants any way it wants. That is the First Amendment. I will remind you, it is the first one. It's the first one. The government should make no law or selecting the freedom of speech. Apple absolutely can make any collection of stories at once and publish them and say,

this is Apple News today. Of course it can. Secondarily, there's no violation of the FTC Act found. Right. Right. It absolutely has a right to suppress conservative viewpoints if it wants, which is not even doing. Again, we will come to that in one second. But in violation of the FTC Act is not a thing.

There's no part of the FTC Act that says you have to publish all viewpoints. Like, absolutely not. You can't find it. If you can find me in this actually language, you send it to me. The thin read that everyone is standing on here is they've discovered somewhere in Apple's terms of service, a promise. that it will do everything fairly in Apple News. And then they have found this study by this media watchdog group that has organized outlets,

according to some political taxonomy that we do not quite understand. Sure. That says the right-wing news sources are suppressed. Now, the reason that I keep saying will come back to what Apple News actually is, is if you open Apple News, the outlets at the top of the app are routinely Reuters, the AP, CBS News, which you could now very much argue as a conservative outlet. And most importantly, and this is why everyone keeps getting Apple news links from me, the Wall Street Journal. Because do you know who the biggest newspaper publisher that participates in Apple News is?

News Corp. In 2022, NewsCorp signed a deal with Apple News saying it is a significant part of our revenue mix, Apple News. Do you know what doesn't participate? The New York Times. Do you know what just stopped participating? CNN. Oh, interesting. So the reason that our team keeps getting Apple news links from me is because the fact that

The fastest way for me to read the Wall Street Journal is to see a journal link and then send it to Apple News where I can just get the story out because they're the key news partner of Apple News. Yeah. They're the reason Apple News is a good deal. It's actually cheaper to get Apple News than it is to just pay for the Wall Street Journal. And I have Apple One. So it's just there for me all the time. It's just like the fastest way for me to get this thing done. And so you're looking at this entire sequence of events where Brendan has said, a quote,

Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act. Not one part of that sentence is true. Apple, first of all, has every right to publish whatever kind of newspaper it wants. And that's what Apple News is. It is the top of Apple News is editorially curated. I've met that team before. It's a bunch of old magazine editors. And they pick and choose.

They really do pick and choose. They choose the best, most even-handed coverage of the things they think are the most important. And if you look, it is almost always big legacy news organizations whose standards and sourcing they trust, right? who meet the bar. It, CBS, ABC, Fox News is in there from time to time. Reuters, the AP, the Wall Street Journal, those are the sources they often pick at the top of Apple News because the boomer audience trusts them too, right?

Like, keep that in mind. One scroll down from that, this thing is all for you, right? It is all algorithm recommendations based on what you've clicked before, and that's a huge range of sources. So you can't even argue with that because now you're running the same problem the saying meta is suppressing conservative, which is like everyone has there an algorithm, and you're actually just telling yourself.

Once rolled down from that is my favorite part of Apple News, which is trending, which is the clearest glimpse into what this platform is and who it's for that I can offer you. Let me just show you what's trending. The number one trending story on Apple News, as I've looked at this, and this is true every time I look. The number one trending story is from Fox News. It's about a tattoo that was seen in the Nancy Guthrie video. Possible tattoo seen an answer you got through video.

It may help ID subject. Says former profiler. Just some Fox News slap. I mean, that's a perfect number one aggregator news story. Yep. Number two. Anywhere you look, I bet that's the top thing right now. Number two.

CNBC. Psychology expert, colon. The number one phrase to shut down a manipulator. Sure. Number two story at Apple News. Number three is the athletic, which is at the wild start of the biathlon, infidelity, credit card fraud, and reallocated metals. Damn, I want to read all of those.

Number four. I need Apple. Former NFL players. Number four is People Magazine. Former NFL player's wife reveals what you don't see after retirement. This is just boomer slop. Like, you can see it's in the trending topics. Apple News is the magazine rack at the grocery store.

Yes. It is the thing that it is is not the coolest thing Apple makes. Number two, a couple hours ago, a self magazine, nine simple exercises to improve your balance. Do you know who needs that? Do you know who needs that? I mean, me, to be fair. Okay, so this is all just dumb, right? This is just pure posturing left and right.

If Apple had an ounce of self-respect, it would tell the government, in this case, like, go away. Yeah. What I'm worried about is Apple no longer has an ounce of self-respect. And so what I've been thinking about, actually, in this context, weirdly, is Steve Jobs. Not because I think I know what Steve Jobs would do, not because I have some vision of how Steve Jobs would, like, punch Donald Trump in the face,

although I believe I've seen that AI slot video as well. But because of a thing Steve Jobs actually said all the time, which is that Apple stands at the center of technology and the liberal arts. I threatened David with a clip. So I think we actually have a clip of him saying this at one of the many, many events that he said. There's the literal sign behind him. Can we run the clip? So I've said this before.

I thought it was worth repeating. It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. If you're just listening to this, he gave this speech like a bunch of times, and he would always stand in front of a literal street sign at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, right? And the whole tech industry has forgotten about the intersection. We're just doing technology. And we're all very confused about how governments and systems and societies work, because no one reads the liberal arts anymore. They just ask a had to summarize it for them.

This is the moment, right? If you believe that you built the richest company in the world on that insight, which he did, right? He built products people love. He built a company that people trust. He turned it into one of the richest companies in the world. That's the insight. He's saying out loud, that's the insight. And this is the moment to say our taste is not up for grabs for government pressure, right?

our ability to say to our audience in our news product, we, with our taste, with a bunch of fancy magazine editors that they have hired to run Apple News, we're going to pick the sources of information that we think are good at the top, and then all the rest can be algorithmic and trending stories about how to not fall over, like, whatever the audience there needs. But at the top, we're going to use our judgment. And your weird media watchdog group can't just hop, skip, and jump into government pressure about our judgment. That's what it means to have the liberal arts embedded in your product. Like, I really mean that.

And by the way, that is the case Apple has made for Apple News in the past. Like, we actually know for sure that Apple believes that is part of the value proposition of Apple News. That is like when Google News and Apple News were competing and when people were like, well, why is Apple even in this game? It talked a lot about the fact that this is people and this is taste and this is Apple. And that actually we are doing a thing here on. purpose that matters.

Like, we know that that is what Apple believes, or at least believed, about this product. Yeah, and I, by the way, I don't mean liberal arts in the sense of, like, liberals and Democrats. Like, little L. liberal arts, liberal democracy, like having a sense of culture, like in the most basic way, like thinking about how other people treat one another. Like, the humanities, the Steve Jobs is saying it. He doesn't mean Democrats. He means studying art and culture right next to science and engineering and putting those things together. This is the moment, right, to say to the government, we have made no promises in our

terms of service about conservative news, and we think you have no place in impinging on our judgment. Now, here's the problem. Do you think Tim Cook is going to do that? No. No. A lot of recent history suggests Tim Cook is not going to do that. He's not going to do that. And I think that is a tragedy. Yeah. Because he would be the winner if he did. Right? Like, by all rights, he could just very, Apple could publish a letter tomorrow saying our terms of the FTC Act, you cannot read our terms of service such that we have violated the FTC Act with the top six stories in Apple News. But is he going to cave? Is he going to make sure there's more Breitbart in Apple News or whatever other source that you think is conservative enough to count? Maybe. I think that's really bad. Like, especially in your partners already News Corp in the Wall Street Journal and CBS News. Like, they're there. Fox News is there. I'm just saying,

Brennan Carr's a dummy. Every sentence about Apple has no rights to express conservative speech in violation of the SEC Act is purely wrong. That is maybe the single dumbest thing Brendan has ever published. And it's because he knows it might work.

He knows it might work. He knows this company might cave. Yep. And this is the pressure they can apply. And the flip side is, Tim Cook keeps caving and it keeps getting him nothing. Nothing.

Nothing. They just keep coming for him. Yeah. And Apple is one of the company. companies in this world that is big enough to stand up. And I hope they do here. I really hope they do here. This is also such an easy, obvious win.

Can I, by the way, can I complicate this with the flip side of this, which is really interesting? So this is the media research council, right, which published this report that got picked up by the post, which immediately became government policy. That's just how it works now. The flip side of this is, there was a big merger of ad agencies. And part of that merger, Andrew Ferguson, said, this merger can go through. but you have to stop relying on this company called NewsGuard,

which rates the trustworthiness of media brands to decide where to put ads. Because that means you're not putting ads on conservative websites. And NewsGuard, you know, people have problems in NewsGuard. But they were just straightforwardly like, here's the reporting standards, here are the sourcing standards, like here's how accurate they are, here's how many scathing polemics about whatever they publish. They had a rubric. And you could look at the rubric.

And the big ad agencies were saying, okay, like we want our, We're going to put ads near more trustworthy things. We picked this independent, neutral observer, and the FTC went and crushed them. Basically took their business away because they want to make sure the money can flow to conservative news outlets that didn't meet the standards. So at the one hand, you have,

based on nothing more than this one media research council report, a threat against Apple, the biggest company in the world, one of the biggest companies in the world. And on the other hand, you have a very similar organization saying, here's what you can trust, you can't, that the FTC is trying to crush because it might take dollars away. And so they have sued the FTC for free speech violations

and saying this merger condition is actually a violation of free speech rights. Super fascinating. Like, you can just see the hypocrisy of the Trump administration is laid bare in how they treat the media ranking organizations. It's a lot. Yeah.

By the way, the Wall Street Journal. It's funny how often I'm like, I am pointing to Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it's rough. And honestly, this isn't even the end of the branding car stuff. this week. He's also mad at the view. I'm going to give you 30 seconds

to tell me why Brendan Carr is mad at the view because then I'm going to stop caring and we're going to move on. Okay, so as we know, Brennan Carr fully believes that broadcast television, the only speech in America that matters, except apparently for Apple News. If you are an old person and you're considering media in this country, Brendan, it wants to be in your face. He wants to control

what you see. So he had this rule, the equal time rule that has fallen into oblivion because everyone's just watching TikTok anyway. And he has decided, he's going to enforce it very vigorously. So first he pointed this gun at Saturday Night Live, because Kamala Harris won't Saturday Night Live.

And it turns out Saturday Night very good at this because they know they're a comedy show, right? So comedy shows, there's no exceptions, and they actually, NBC had given Trump equal time. Right. So now, last week, I think we talked to a Brandkhar pointed this gun at late-night talk show hosts, which they can't quite claim that they're a bona fide news program, right?

And news programs get an exception. If you're a news program, you don't have to give equal time to both parties. Right. So the talk show host would have Democrats on and Brennan said, we're going to investigate you if you don't have an equal number of Republicans on. And talk shows are like, but there are interviews and also no one cares. But that's one, right?

He's pushing the boundary on talk show host, whether they get the news exception. This week, he has launched an investigation into ABC's The View, because the Texas Senate candidate James Thalierco appeared on the show. This is ridiculous. First of all, The View is part of ABC News. Yeah. Like, it is straightforwardly a news program. It is run by the news division at ABC.

You can think it's a bad news program. You can answer a news program that prioritizes nonsensical debate and conflict over actual news, but it is a news program. That is the thing that it is meant to do. You could think that. One could think that. In the process of selling the book pitch that I pitched for Decoder, I've often talked about how I want to appear on the view, and I think I just close that door as hard as thing. But whatever. It's a news program.

It's straightforwardly a news program. There's nothing about it that isn't news. It's just a bunch of people talking on the news all the long. He's going to crash and burn on this if Disney fights back. Right. Is Disney going to fight back? I don't know. Brendan keeps pushing the boundary.

This is so stupid. First of all, no one's watching this stuff. You know when they're watching it? They're watching it on YouTube. They're watching it in clips on TikTok that are pirated by the Android-powered bot forms that I think. think we should get. They're not watching in a broadcast.

And it's right next to all of these candidates having an infinity amount of their own time to capture. Ted Cruz has a podcast, for God's sake. That's how I know speech regulation America is completely out whack. Sorry, it's a really bad podcast. Just nonsensical. Anyway, he is trying to say that the view is not news enough to qualify for the news exemption to the equal time rule.

It is 2026. What are we talking about? Yeah. He's so stupid. It does put Disney in a very funny position of either it has to fight against the Trump administration or just publicly drag the view as aggressively as possible. I mean, we should not be in a position right now with the amount of media we have and the access to media we have where we are trying to draw lines about where the boundary of the news is.

Right? Yeah. Like I want to draw some boundaries. I think we make the news. I think a bunch of influencers don't. Is that a good use of my time to argue that every day? It is absolutely the worst use of my time to argue that every day. We just need to make better news.

The government stepping into ABC's face and saying, this isn't news enough, we're going to punish you for not making it news enough. Hoo, that's rough. You should feel very bad about that. Again, I remind everybody that the politics you hear me express the most are that government speech regulations are bad and free market competition is good, which is why I find myself agreeing with the Wall Street Journal during this segment all the time.

Brendan, as always, you are welcome to come on this show, to come on Decoder and try to defend any of this idiocy, especially that boneheaded tweet about Apple not being free to suppress conservative news and violation of the FTC Act. Every word of which is wrong. Every single word of which is wrong. I welcome it. I would love debate, a fulsome debate. At the end, maybe we could fight a little bit. Just an invitation I have for you, Brennan Carr. That has been Brennan Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

a true epic of a podcast without a podcast this time. Let's blow through the rest of the lightning round here because we need to get you out of here on time. My first lightning round is that for everyone who is like shut up about all this other stuff, talk about gadgets,

I have bad news and good news. The bad news is there just haven't been any. The good news is it's about to be gadget season again. Samsung confirmed that there's an unpacked coming later this month. We're going to get some new phones. There's already been some leaks about those phones that suggest that maybe not the most interesting set of phones

is about to come out. But we're about to get a bunch of new Samsung phones. The iPhone 17E is also potentially coming. The Google Pixel 10A is also coming soon. It's about to be a really interesting round of new, somewhere between like the mass market phones everybody buys and the like slightly cheaper phones that some people get. If you had Apple's last quarter, why are you doing a 17E?

They should be like, it's a $7,000 pro phone. Like that's the thing that they sell. Yeah, 100%. Anyway, all of that is coming. We're also potentially about to get new iPads, which I think is very exciting. I reviewed the base iPad last year, and my read on it was essentially,

this is the first time the base iPad is not the one you should buy because it is full of such outdated hardware that actually it's going to run out on you before it should. Like, you should buy an iPad planning on it lasting you seven years, and the current base iPad won't. especially if you believe that there is ever going to be any useful future for AI. But the running reporting right now, mostly for Mark German at Bloomberg, is that that's coming. It's going to get to big upgrades.

So we should get a good round of gadgets coming soon. What we are not getting is better Siri. So I'm reporting again from Mark German at Bloomberg that Apple is continuing to work on this revamped Siri that is going to be better and smarter and largely powered by Gemini, but that it has been pushed back a point release and is now going to be part of the May software launch, not March, which was what we had been hearing for some time. This is, I would say, a small bummer and a large heaping of not at all surprising.

Yeah, it's not all surprising. I think every one of the big smart homemakers has had trouble integrating the powerful voice system, with the needs to not be broken automation control. And Syria right now is very much automation control. Yes. And so I don't know. I mean, Google's gotten better.

I would say my Gemini smart home stuff has gotten better. But Apple is not in the business of breaking stuff. No. Not the way that Google will just break stuff. And not the way that Amazon is just broken stuff. And Apple is also about to, the timing of this, I think, is really interesting because Apple's going to put this thing out in May. And then in June has to explain to developers,

how to use it. Right? And so the big thing that Apple has been talking about is all of this contextual awareness that it's going to have, it's going to know about all the other apps in your phone,

it's going to be able to use those apps for you. Like, Apple needs to ship a version of that that works in some meaningful way. They're not sure being on me. If it wants to get developers on board. It doesn't need all of that to exist, but it needs Siri to be good. Do you know what I mean?

I think we're at the point where... Siri is so constrained right now. Siri is timers and music. And they can get there and add a dash of like you can talk to about other stuff. So I agree with that except I think even the very basic features of Siri have progressed. It is still fine at setting timers. But like Siri as a as a voice recognition machine has gotten noticeably worse for me over the last, let's say, two years. This is also like there are a lot of people who keep wondering why the autocorrect on the iOS keyboard feels like it's getting worse.

Yeah. It's because it is. And it's because of all of this underlying technology Apple is working out. So, like, all of that stuff needs to be demonstrated as, like, a step change forward if Apple is going to say, this is the future of the interface, get on board to developers. And it is running out of time to prove that. I just want to point out is a minor pushback. Apple blew it with AI. Yes.

No AI. They shipped liquid glass, which looks like butts. And they had the biggest quarter in their history. Sure. Just one of those things. Like, they're insulated because of the phone upgrade cycle. They're going to get more things wrong than right. And they're just going to keep selling phones because of what I believe to be I message lock-in,

although the data shows that I'm not correct, but I believe it's iMessage Lock-in. No, I think that's right. And I think there is a real chance that what Apple does at this year's WWDC is not show everybody the thrilling future of AI, but basically start to pretend that none of it exists. Yeah, that's right. And just bury all of that under really technical language of features in the Notes app, which maybe is what it should have on all along. I mean, that's what they did last year, right?

I'm just saying I think this year what you're going to get is it's Siri. You can still do timers and music. And now when you ask it questions, it doesn't kick you out to a web search right away. Yeah. Because knowing what's going on your phone and controlling apps in your phone, they're nowhere close. So you're describing perplexity, basically. Like if the new series is perplexity, that may be job done for Apple.

Yeah. In this moment, that might be all they can do, but it might be all they need to do. Yeah, that's very possible. It's very possible. All right, what's your next one? All right, I got two cars and a YouTube. What do you want? Let's do cars first.

All right. You may have seen this week Ferrari unveiled not its whole first TV, but just the inside of its first TV. She's called the Luce. Sheens Light. The code name, by the way, was Electrica, which is way better. Oh, that's way better. I don't know what they're doing.

Why is there? This is a conversation for another day. Everybody's doing stupid names for their EVs, and I would like them to stop. Electric has like a great name for a Ferrari. Anyway, interior designed by one Mr. Johnny Ive. And Mike Mattis and a whole bunch of other, Mark Newsom, like, you know, love from.

Johnny Ives company. They designed the interior. So a big party, a bunch of people went, a bunch of people we know were there. Johnny Eft did an unveiling and then it was just like the interior components arranged around a room

so like the steering wheel and the display were in one part of the room and like the center console is another and like the vents were in yet a third and people were just like milling around and doing this stuff. Very good. The video is very, very compelling

because of Johnny had video about how much he likes designing switch gear which should just be a genre onto itself. I get Spotify, just play me that playlist would be very happy. Yeah. It's so cool. It looks,

Nothing like a Ferrari. James Baram, who's the first creative record of The Verge, actually said this looks more like a Porsche, and I agree with him. It's all very round, very eye-fony. Obviously, it's Ive. But here's the thing. It's like not touch screens.

It's all digital displays connected to hardware controls. And as you use the hardware controls, like the displays around the controls change and light up in different ways. So like the center screen is on a pivot. You can pivot towards the driver, pivot towards passenger. And at the top is a circle display that often looks like a clock. and has real needles in it.

And if you push the button, the whole display changes and it turns like a stopwatch you can do lap times. It's like this, the sickest interaction you can think of. Wait, I like this now. It's very good.

My immediate reaction looking at a picture of this was like it looks like a very fancy like F1 racing simulator with a giant ass iPad. And I was like, really, Johnny?

Yeah, that's kind of what it looks like. This is what you're doing. Again, there's a part of me that's like none of this is Ferrari. Like, it's not the point of a Ferrari. No, it's not. But I do love the idea of connecting it back to physical controls.

Yeah. And he was very clear. He gave interviews. I think Alex Heath interviewed him. Tim Stevens, who writes for us all the time, interviewed him. And he was like,

it's a car. I'm there to drive the car. I don't want to look at a screen and touch the screen, which is fascinating. Because if you remember, all of the Apple car rumors was that he wanted to get rid of the steering wheel,

have full autonomy, and then, like, do something else inside the car, right? This was the dream. Yeah. And so it's fascinating to see him abandon, basically all the ideas we'd heard about for the Apple car

for the very tactile, it's all switch gears and buttons and clicky magnet vents in a Ferrari. The thing that I'm saddest about, if you look at this, it's very cool, right? You can see a lot of Johnny Ivan here. And Ive is particularly good at accessible design. Like, accessible in every sense of work. Like, accessible for people of different abilities,

but also just like the point of the iPhone is that everyone has one. Rich or poor, everybody has the same kind of iPhone, right? Yeah. And you're like, oh, this is only for like five people. True. And it just makes me, that makes me a little sad.

Like, Ive is at his best when he's addressing millions of people. And here it's like six guys are going to be able for this car. So what you're saying

is you want Johnny Ive to do the next Camry. Yeah, if he had, yeah, this was a Kia. Yeah. You'd be like, though this is the future of cars.

And I think that was the opportunity with the Apple car. And I'm dying to know how many ideas moved from the Apple car to this. I'm dying to know if there are other ideas to bring these ideas to life.

Very quickly, a bunch of Chinese manufacturers are going to copy all. It's all going to happen. But, you know, there's that thing where you'd see an I've designed. And we'd talk so much about care and polish. And you're like, oh, the thing that's amazing with this is that millions of people will have these products. They will experience this level of design and care.

And here, it's like, it's beautiful. Yeah. You're never going to see one. Most people will never be able to flip one of these switches. Does the car industry have the kind of fast follow thing that we see in tech all the time? that like if Johnny I've did this for Apple, the thing I would say in response to what you just said is, well, the good news is everybody's going to copy this. And in two years, this will be some of the ideas here will at least be sort of normalized across the industry because that's what happened. Does that happen in cars? Like if does Ferrari do something and then it just sort of trickles down into like three years from now, Volvo's will look like this? There's a lot of pictures of like Mazas that look exactly like Ferraris right now. Or Ferraris that looks exactly like Mazdas. Okay. You can find those.

This is such a carnered thing For a long time BMW Had this thing called the Bengal butt They're a designer named Chris Bangal. Yep Chris Bangal is one of those controversial designers in BMW history And he designed this like lid of the trunk

Of the 7 series in like the early 2000 I want to say And now every car has that And so BMW Mercedes if you look at them The reason their cars always look so bananas And they're getting increasingly more bananas Is because they get fast followed so fast. everybody wants to look like a German luxury car.

And that dynamic is changing in some ways. You know, I think that the sort of like newer Hyundai's and Kia's in particular, they're like they're charting their own weird retro futuristic course. But there is a time when like, yep, within a year, every car looks like whatever B&W sedan. Interesting. I don't know if it's not going to happen with the Ferrari. And we don't know what the outside of the Luce looks like yet.

People have suspicions, but nobody actually knows. I just, I am encouraged by the idea that a lot of car designers will look at you I've and say, oh, he doesn't think touchscreen everything is the future of cars. Maybe I should change my life. The whole industry, the whole industry already thinks that. Like, the car designers across the industry have been like, oh, this is dumb. Have you seen cars, though?

Motorized door handles, because they're killing people. I mean, that, yeah. That was bad. The industry, the pendulum is way on its way back. Like Hyundai, Kia, Volvo, a bunch of car makers like, yeah, we need the buttons back. Okay. That makes me happy. Yeah. All right, do

your YouTube, and then we'll end on mine and we'll out of here. What's your last one? Big news. Huge, huge, huge news. YouTube is coming to the Applevision Pro. Huge news for six people. Well, look, first of all, YouTube has the biggest library of 360 content anywhere.

Sure. And so it was always a huge miss that Apple did not have access to YouTube. Because what are you going to do? Like, when I reviewed the Applevision Pro, I was like, can I use YouTube? That's where all the stuff is. They're like, maybe. Yeah. And they kind of shaded it. because some of that content is really old. Like there's been 360 video on YouTube forever. Yeah.

I interviewed Michelle Obama on YouTube 10 years ago in 360. Like that's a long time ago. Yeah. So that content exists. You can go look at it. You can get it. I think also YouTube wants to get people making the content again. Because Android XR is coming out soon.

Right. And so it's on the Applevision Pro. It's just a way to get a headline. You can upload some 360 content to this platform. You should try it. And then that's how you get it. a trickle of new content for Android XR. That's my big strategic think of this,

but I just think it's very funny. Finally, now there's YouTube app for the VisionPro. That's a good take. It was always kind of a deliberate burn that it wasn't there because YouTube is everywhere. Part of YouTube's whole thing is that is everywhere that is available to look at stuff, you can find YouTube.

And so to not be on the Vision Pro was clearly a choice. So I think your take is probably right, that they're now in the position of being like, okay, we want to incentivize people to make this kind of stuff, we might as well start somewhere. Well, to be fair,

they're already in the quest and all these other headsets. They just weren't on the Vision Pro. Yeah, but like the people who bought Vision Pro and the true believers in this content are like, that is one overlapping circle. Oh yeah, and there's been like weird third party YouTube.

Like that was the first wave of apps. It was like, well, this YouTube app. Right. But I think it's, I think they're just trying to cede some content ahead of Android X-R. Yeah. All right, before we go, I have just a very boring

but obligatory update on the Paramount Netflix War to buy Warner Bros. Somehow this has become my cross to bear is that every time somebody does a weird boring thing I have to tell you about it on this show. Although I will say I am enjoying the extent to which the Ellisons are just like,

well, if we have more money, which is what happened this time. So Paramount, where we are basically is Warner Brothers keeps telling its shareholders not to accept Paramount buying them because they would like to be bought by Netflix. Everyone is very clear that Warner Brothers would like to be owned by Netflix, and Netflix would like to own Warner Brothers.

And Paramount just keeps coming in and just like hucking dollar bills at everybody hoping that that works. So what happened this time is Paramount is now offering to pay the $2.8 billion termination fee that would go if the Netflix deal didn't happen. So they're just handing over $2.8 billion more dollars. And they're offering a $25. per share. They call it a ticking fee, which pays to shareholders and Warner Brothers discovery for each quarter the transaction doesn't close after this year. So they're basically saying

the money's going to go up. Every quarter, the transaction doesn't close, which just incentivizes everybody to not take the deal, which is so funny. But anyway, all of this is happening while there's a lot of like political machinations going on, the Ellison's meeting with the Trump administration and like everybody's trying to convince everybody else. No, the machinations are even, are even funnier than you think. Have you seen the latest update today? No.

So Sarandos met with Trump, the CEO of Netflix. The Ellison's event with Trump. Trump was, I believe, on ABC News last night, and he said, everyone's paying attention to me. I must be very important. I'm going to stay out of this one and let the Department of Justice handle it. So you can just flatter his way. You can just flatter Trump and is sitting it out.

It's good. It's really good. And then you're like, oh, who runs the Department of Justice? Oh, it's Pam Bondi. That'll go well. Who's her antitrust chief? Oh, Gail Slater, the antitrust chief at the Department of Justice, just quit because she was about to take Live Nation ticket master to trial. And Kellyanne Conway has successfully lobbied potentially the government had dropping that case over Gail Slater's objection and she quit over it.

Wow. This is true. This is all in the background of this. Trump is saying, I'm going to let the Department of Justice to handle it. And the Department of Justice and a trust chief just quit because it appears the ticket master has corruptly lobbied its way out of that trial. So there's going to be no one to stop this deal, potentially no one to approve this deal. In either direction? Yeah. There's just, it's good. It's perfect. No one is going to own anyone. You know Ted Sarandos gave Trump and Emmy or some shit.

Like it's like, who knows what happened? But he's like, I'm out. I'm not paying attention. anymore. Unreal. Yeah. So this chaos will continue. But just the extent to which the Ellisons have all of the money and no idea how to win this fight is just great. I just want to say this one more time.

Just put yourself in this position. You are Larry Ellison. All of your wealth is Oracle stock. Oracle stock is AI stock. And you are desperate to sell your AI stock to buy Warner Brothers.

Do you, Larry Ellison, believe that your AI stock is going up or down if what you think a better trade is, is to sell it and buy Warner Brothers? Just ask yourself, does Larry Ellison think we're in a bubble based on the fact that he wants to sell his Oracle stock and buy Warner Brothers? A thing that has killed every other acquirer for over 20 years. Do you want, do you want to buy the AI bubble or do you want Friends reruns? This is, this is where we are in 2020. You can, you can, you can evaluate that any way you want. But if you had, if you today owned Oracle stock, would you think it was a good idea to sell it to buy Warner Brothers? Wait, no, no, no, no.

I'm going to put this in even simpler fashion. Do you, would you rather bet on the AI industry continuing to go up the way that it is? Or would you rather, do you want to bet on the success? of the Harry Potter HBO show coming out next year. That's what I want to hear about. Firstcast to theverse.com. Tell us which of those you would rather bet on. There's a lot of ways to come at the AI bubble,

but I want to sell my Oracle stock to my Warner Brothers is one of them. Yes, it's a tough beat. Personally, I'm out on either one. I'm going to go to Paramount Plus and keep watching Mission Impossible movies. It's going to be fine. All right, we should get out of here.

We've gone way over, as we are wanted to do. I'm weird in reddened car for this one pretty succinctly this time. Anytime you want, Brendan. If you read about any of this in Apple News, please send Nelai the link because he can open it. I can't. I don't want to hear about it. But that's it. That's it for the Vergecast.

Remember, as always, to get this podcast ad-free and to support everything that we do to make Neelai utterly ungovernable. The best thing you can do is subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. You get ad-free podcasts. You get all of our subscriber newsletters. You get all of our everything else. It's the best thing you can do to be part of this whole family and thing that we're building.

We also love hearing from you. Keep hitting us up with ideas about how we can be talking about the stuff in the Epstein files, how you feel about the ring and Wise and Nancy Guthrie's stuff. It's all messy, and we're sorting through it all in real time here and on the website. So keep getting at us. The hotline is 866, Verge 1-1. The email is Vergecast at the verge.com. Send Neely all of your Apple news links at Nealai at theverge.com.

The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larch. We will see you next week. Meek, Nilai, rock and roll.