The Vergecast - The AIs are officially out of control

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss ChatGPT and Gemini updates, Walmart acquiring Vizio, Apple's Sports app, and more. Further reading: Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis  Google’s open-source Gemma AI models draw from the research behind Gemini ChatGPT spat out gibberish for many users overnight before OpenAI fixed it One month with Microsoft’s AI vision of the future: Copilot Pro Gemini, Gemma, Goose.  OpenAI can’t register ‘GPT’ as a trademark — yet Artificial investment Walmart to acquire Vizio in $2.3 billion deal Echo Hub review: a simple, customizable smart home control panel Samsung details a host of audio upgrades coming to its phones, tablets, and TVs Apple says the iPhone 15’s battery got better — but won’t say how Rice is not included in Apple’s official guidance for a wet phone One of the last small-ish Android phones looks like it's going the way of the iPhone Mini  OnePlus is getting back into the smartwatch game The Garmin Forerunner 165 could be a great budget running watch  Sony’s PlayStation Portal hacked to run emulated PSP games Framework is selling a cheap modular laptop  Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes Apple launches Apple Sports app with scores and betting odds  Apple is already defending iMessage against tomorrow’s quantum computing attacks  IBM quantum computing updates: System Two and Heron Microsoft and Intel strike a custom chip manufacturing deal Rivian says it is laying off 10 percent of its workforce as EV woes deepen Ford slashes Mustang Mach-E prices again as EV price war enters its second year The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Google's latest AI model, which at this point is just an alphabet soup collection of letters

designed to be sold on Amazon. The next one will be Greg? Greg. Or perhaps Gregory. Steve. Yeah, no, it's got to be a G. It's got to be a G. Glinda.

There we go, Glenda. Yeah. Glinda's fun. That even has some, like, magical possibilities. Glinda's very good. Yeah, I went straight musical theater with it. Yeah, let's be honest. But I like Greg.

Let's just go very straightforward. Greg and Gary. I love this. Jeff. Complicated. Fancy Jeff. Google's latest transformer model. Hi, I'm Neil.

I'm your friend. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Tran's here. Hello. Quite a lot of news going on in the world of AI. This section is labeled in the rundown as the AI is going insane, y'all. So we've got a lot to talk about there.

And then not one, but two lightning rounds today. We're still on the hunt for lightning around sponsors here on the Vergecast. Two opportunities today. I was hoping there was going to be some audio just then, just some lightning noises. Yeah. But there was more of like a peepiopi-p-p-or. That was my lightning noise in my head just now. Like a DJ horn?

Yeah. Yeah. If you sponsor lighting around, I will say your name and play a DJ horn sound effect. This is compelling. You can do it. You just have to email Liam at theverge.com with a picture of your money. And we'll take it from there. Yeah.

I think that's how sales work. I don't know. I'm not an influencer. All right, let's talk about the AI. It is a little out of hand what is happening with the large language models out there on the internet. There's some news, though, some actual news today in the world of AI that I think is very important. We just talked a lot about how AI is rewiring the internet, how the incentives to make new content on the open, Web are changing because the AI companies are training on that data.

There's all kinds of lawsuits and recriminations. And then in the middle of it, Reddit announced a deal with Google today where Google is going to train its AI systems on what Steve Hoffman, the CEO of Reddit, keeps referring to as the Reddit corpus, which is honestly a great academic word. But I think if you walked up to the average Reddit user and was like, today you've contributed to the corpus. I don't know it would land. No, it wouldn't.

Welcome to the corpus. I don't want to be there. Take me out. Take me out. I love the Vision Pro subcorpus. That's how I think about Reddit. This is a huge deal, though. It is.

And I think it's kind of the end, or if not the end, then almost the end of this very long road that Reddit has been on, where Reddit kind of belatedly discovered that the best business it has is it is a source of amazing data on. everything and that it has become like a known hack that if you want to Google something and get good human-based information, you just add Reddit to the end of it and it will dump you into a subreddit where inevitably people are discussing whatever you want to talk about and it's helpful. Reddit has been fighting with OpenAI about this. Reddit has been sort of loosely threatening to go public for like three years now. And the idea now, I think we're sort of assuming Reddit is going to file its S1 to officially go public any day now. So you've got to figure that Reddit was desperate to make a deal for a lot of money to be like, look how important Reddit is. And it

opens up just an infinite number of messy side effects and sort of knock-on situations that we should talk about. But I think, A, the fact that it's this much money, which is a lot. Wait, is it? Yeah, it's $60 million a year? 60 million a year. that's a lot of money. I mean, for Google, that's like a sneeze. Sure, Reddit is not Google. For Reddit, it probably is a decent. So Reddit's revenue the last few years, I'm going to, you know, average a bunch of real numbers,

is somewhere in the range of like $450 million a year. So that's a big jump in revenue for one deal for your data that in theory doesn't change anything else. And this also means Reddit can go and demand a similar deal from OpenAI. Like you've got to figure every one of these companies is going to try and make a bunch of these deals. Because if you're Reddit, you're saying, well, if Google has our data and Open AI doesn't, Google has a real leg up. And so they're going to make the same kind of offer to Open AI. They're going to make the same kind of offer to Anthropic. Like you can see a world in which pretty quickly a third half of revenues coming to Reddit comes from these deals.

That's big money. So I have a lot of questions about this. I think $60 million is almost an existential number for the internet. If you're Google, you desperately need people to put new information on the web where Google search can find it. The incentives to do that right now with any amount of quality are near zero. Like zero. Like the most effective thing you can do on the web today, is either set up an e-commerce website so you can get people to buy stuff without paying Apple transaction fees.

I know this because the CEOs of Wix and Squarespace and all these other companies come on Decoder and I say, why should anyone make a website? And they say e-commerce. Right. Every time. That's why people make websites now. The other reason to make a website is to do SEO chum content marketing for dental practices or whatever else nonsense that happens. It's a game Google because you're doing content marketing for some e-commerce website. Those are the things. If you happen to search just something dumb, like how to install a baby seat in a car, you get car dealership websites. That's why you type in Reddit.

That's why you type in Reddit. So if you're Google and you're like, well, the incentives we made for the web have turned the web into garbage, we should make sure Reddit continues to exist. and the value you place on that deal is $60 million. I would argue that's not nearly enough. Because for Google, it's nothing. That is a percentage of the money they are paying Apple just to be the default search engine. And I get it that the Reddit's not big, but when Reddit's the only good result in Google, it feels like that number should be much higher. I think it's like Reddit probably didn't push hard enough, right?

Like they kind of had Reddit over a barrel. Right. Reddit has no leverage against the noise because Google can also be like, we're also just taking everything. Yeah. Which is what opening I have those have done. So I just, there's something in that number. I don't know. I think we got to wait for the actual S-1 that we got to see Reddit's actual financials when it actually becomes a public company.

All that is yet to be discovered. But you just see this number. And it's like, oh, that's not nearly enough. If you're the last place human beings actually answer questions in the internet in a way that's discoverable to search engines. Let me offer the flip side of that argument, which is that maybe Reddit is the only company with leverage in these arguments. Which is that Google knows, I guarantee you firsthand, Google knows how important Reddit is to the business of Google search. The fact that Reddit's search product is bad, and so people don't just go to Reddit and search. They go to Google and search Reddit is a lot of money for Google.

Like, no one at Google is unclear about how important Reddit results are to its business. Yeah. And Reddit has been loudly fighting against OpenAI and others. They were early to block the GPT bot to not let Open AI crawl its stuff. So if not Reddit, then who? If Reddit can't come in and say, you actually need our data more than we need to be part of your system that doesn't deliver any value back to us anyway, who can say that? I agree with you, but I think the important part of this puzzle is that for Google search to exist, it needs to create a situation in which there are 10,000 Redits. And right now it has created a situation in which there is but one.

And maybe not even one for long. Maybe not even one for long. But there's a bunch of forums like, Eli is going to complain about his own theater system again. You're ready for this? I have a hot ass Sony receiver. It's brand new. I love it. It's easy 3,000 yes.

I could talk about it all day and night. When you turn on its core feature, it makes a hissing sound. I hate that. I'm in the forums. I'm on that ABS forum thread. I know what's going on. I called my dealer and I sent him links to the ABS forms. But that's like a huge problem, right?

The company runs ABS forum is small. It is not big. Google, there's not some huge set of home theater websites that are finding me this information, right? It's a bunch of people who bought this one extremely sick product that has this one problem that are talking about it in a forum and Google has to find it. And if Google extracts a value from that and delivers me an AI summary of that thread and says, call this number and this firmware patch or whatever, then that forums need

to, then Google is extracting value from that company without giving you back. And that can happen to a thousand companies. It can happen to just Reddit. it, but you just, this cycle, this is the first time we've got a number of what Google thinks this is worth. And this cycle that we're in, I think is going to either push that number way, way down, which is very bad, or it will result in more and more people demanding ever bigger numbers because there's nowhere else for Google to get the raw data it needs to function from.

And you put all that in the context of Reddit, which just pissed off a bunch of its users, but shove that in the rearview mirror as fast as it could. Because it needs to be a real company that makes money and they were like fine. And I think the company has come through that. We should talk about that at length in the context of this.

But that's Reddit. On the other side of that is Google. And Google has to look at all of these lawsuits. New York Times versus Open AI. Getty versus Stability. We'd go down the list. And every time Google makes a deal like this, all it is doing is signaling the world,

oh, there's money here. There should be money here, and all of those lawsuits get more and more expensive. And I don't know. I just look at this and I'm like, oh, this is the beginning. This is the end of the beginning of this phase. But it is like it's explicitly for AI. It's not for the search part of it. Like Google still has.

No, Reddit search is going to be Google's vertex AI now. So there's going to be a Google powered AI search in Reddit now, which is cool. Yeah. I feel like Redditors are going to have a lot of feelings about that once that rolls out actually inside of Reddit. Yeah, I'm curious to see if it works. Like, I think Google's kind of internal website searches aren't nearly as powerful oftentimes. I mean, the internal. The proprietors of the verge.com, which has a Google powered website.

Yeah, it's not always, it's fine, but it's not always like great. I don't know. I know how the Reddit one works. I'm like, no. Can any robot contend with the corpus of Reddit? Yeah. No. Probably.

Nor can any human or any group of humans. But no, I think the flip side of this, I think, is that Google is also desperately trying to figure out how to get the AI nonsense out of search, which in theory makes Reddit even more important to Google over time. So not only does Google ship this money to Reddit, it actually has, I would argue, a stronger incentive than ever to push Reddit search results to the top of search results. And one of the things that happened in this deal is that Reddit is now giving Google programmatic access to things like conversations that are moving very quickly and are really interesting or comments and post counts and all the kind of underlying metadata that you don't get just by scraping a page once a day or once an hour or whatever. And by being able to actually like pipe Reddit into Google, I think if I'm Steve Huffman, not only am I betting that you're going to write me a check for $60 million a year, you're going to write me a check for $60 million a year. you're going to have more and more reasons over time to highlight Reddit stuff in Google search when most things are being driven down

because it's all turning into AI crap. Isn't that worth way more than $60 million? No, my question is that feels like a bad, like Reddit already has struggled to monetize its traffic, right? It's really bad at monetizing its traffic. And so now if it gets more traffic and it's only getting $60 million a year, that actually feels like a bad

gamble for Reddit because now it can't monetize the increased traffic and instead it's just going to increase server fees. Here's what I'll say. I don't think we know the answer. I am desperate to know what our listeners think. Yes. This is like a great hotline prompt. Who do you think is the winner of this deal?

Is it Google or is it Reddit? Because I think Reddit is a big winner and I think over time Google is staring down the barrel of its demise because it used to be the internet used to be search and social. Those were the two great traffic sources. And if you could tell if a publication was organized around search or if it was organized around social, because the ones that were organized around social were insane. Just to be one. If you were like, I've optimized this website for Facebook traffic, you'd be like, I hope you're okay. Like, I hope you're having a good day.

Just putting mayonnaise on a countertop. Yeah, it's just straight. It's just like, here's what we do. We're going to get a watermelon. We're going to get two guys in lab coats. and we'll put rubber bands in the watermelon, and then everyone will have to sit around talking about what that means.

This is a real thing we lived through. BuzzFeed was worth over a billion dollars because it was organized around social media in that way. If you take Google and you say our search product, like David is saying, it's now organized around real-time social conversations on these various platforms, something very different is going to happen.

And there's a conflation there of what used to be search and social into one kind of thing. And I think that means Google is now hopelessly dependent on social platforms to be good at things like getting rid of AI, to be good at doing things like like centering human conversations in real time

versus the AI chum that we all live in on the web every day. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just seeing the beginning of a dependency for Google that is not great. But maybe actually this is going to improve Google search in a way that we'd all like it to improve. Anytime the power swings, I'm delighted. And it feels like right now the power is swinging perhaps away from Google.

And it's a bigillion G-named AI services. It's just not clear who it's swinging too, right? I think that's the strangest part. Yeah, it's just swinging. Yeah, it just feels like it's just sort of dangling in the air right now. And it's like who is going to be the next powerful thing? And it's just so not clear. And it's the verge.com where just a series of blog posts

about expensive receivers, I believe, will save the media. Yeah, that's it. That's all you need. It has this feature called 360 spatial sound mapping. It's so cool. Who sneaks up behind you in this? I'm going to make a list, by the way, of Atmos tracks where the guitarist is sneaking up behind you. Yeah, just guitarists.

Well, all of them feature a precaution is sneaking up behind you. No one has any other ideas. You know that website TV tropes? Yeah. I could make one today called spatial audio tropes. and guy with Maracca's behind you is number one on the list. Like, is there, like, percussive enhancement to a song?

Yeah. Like a fill or an accent. Just a little castanetta coming in. Behind you. Get back there. Just creeping up. Just goodbye. You want to do a hi-hat, Phil?

Back of the room, buddy. Just every day I think about. The song Fade Into You by Mazzy Star is a spatial audio travesty. I'm just telling you. You should do a review of it in- That is a very small, it's a beautiful, I love that song.

It's a very small, intimate track. Right? Yeah. In spatial audio, it's like, what if these motherfuckers are all around here? Anyway, sorry. 360 spatial sound mapping.

Yeah. It listens to speakers in your room and it moves them to their ideal placements. Okay. It's very cool. That is cool. This is a completely

irrelevant product for, Anyway, Google. 100% of the audience. Power moving. Google. Good, good Alex. Yeah, yeah. Google.

They got all those companies with G names. They do. How about those companies with G names? Here's the thing about the AI. All of this presumes that these systems work and work well and work reliably. Which has not been the case this week. David, can you run us through it? Oh, no.

I was really afraid you were going to ask me. I feel like I'm going to get canceled just by attempting to explain what's going on here. There's a reason I asked the whitest man on his podcast. to do this? That's fair. Okay, so you can now use Gemini to generate images. And what appears to have happened is that Google went out of its way to make sure that those images being generated would be diverse and not fall into the same biases that we've seen

from a lot of image generators over time, which tend to basically prey on like the lowest basis stereotypes in really ugly ways. So Google seems to have gone out of its way to go the other way and be diverse in its representation of all things. Some people got very mad because then when you start doing things like, say, show me a picture of some Nazis. It shows you a substantially more diverse set of Nazis than you might expect to see. It is very funny that we made you say this out loud.

It shows you like black and brown Nazis. Yeah, it was definitely like a poster. It was just like the biggest. educational poster you might see in a like fake diversity yeah yeah like like a fake diversity poster you see at certain companies and like you're like oh that's not real and now they're Nazis it's the group of friends sitting on the quad on the front of every college yeah I just want to be very clear that when I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison it got into trouble for photoshopping that poster yeah that was a real thing that happened to Madison and if they just waited a while they could have used Open eye to do it. So the idea that when you prompt one of these AI systems to produce a picture of a successful person, they have in the past been significantly biased and produced pictures of white men for that prompt. Because the training data is often significantly biased. The people making it are biased because we all exist in a society and have innate biases that influence everything we do.

And if the people you hire all share those biases, it trickles down. But if you swing the knob all the way back the other way and you're like, show me a literal 1930s Nazi. And it's like, here's a group of happy black and brown women in Nazi regalia. Yeah. That also seems wrong. It did it also for senators. They asked for senators in the 1800s. And it was like, look at all these women.

We weren't senators. in the 1800s. So I saw prompts floating around where it's also clearly trying to sort of pick moments to just not do entirely. Like someone on our staff looked up Vikings, just tried to ask for a picture of Vikings, and it wouldn't do it. I think at least for a while, if you asked it to generate you a picture of a white person, it wouldn't do it.

But if you asked it to generate a picture of a black person, it would do it. And so it's just chaos in the worst, weirdest way. And I think it has started this, like, bizarre culture war that is in a lot of corner. are sort of totally disingenuous. There are a lot of people running around being like, Gemini, doesn't want to show you white people. And that's absurd. So I'm just going to read you the two headlines that I think summarize this entire

story. Sure. These are from our site. Google apologizes for, quote, missing the mark after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis. And then just a little bit later, Google pauses Gemini's ability to generate AI images after diversity errors. Because I don't think there's a right answer here.

There is. You are always going to drive into the heart of the. extremely stupid culture war in this country, if you allow a thing to generate images of people and then users can describe what those people look like. There's no way to avoid it. Yeah, it's weird, though, to like just create a tool that contributes to culture and then go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, we don't actually want it to contribute to culture. And it's like, no, you've created a generative tool to like generate text and images,

which are inherently culture. So to just be like, no, we're going to tap out of that. Like, you can't actually do that. Yeah. I actually think this is maybe the like philosophical heart. Yeah. The generative AI problem where you get a bunch of ECs saying things like, in the future there won't be movies.

You'll just say put Robert Downey Jr. And a handful of Chris's and make another event. dangerous movie for me and we all need movie and it's like well you'll just end up with actually at this point you'll end up with just another Marvel movie yeah they're all the same but you want it up with anything new and the point of making art and having creative people express themselves is to have new ideas yeah in all of these systems can only statistically average the past and then if you try to like make it so that the art doesn't provoke any feelings in you then it's not art well it's not that you end up in a place

where you just end up provoking different feelings because where people in any picture you show a person provokes some feelings. I always think about this. And I know we all have these people in our family. You know when you walk into the kitchen and some extremely well-meaning auntie is just like put the word family up in the kitchen,

live, laugh, love. I am, I mean, it's very funny. And I, if you look at me dressed in all black, You know that this is not my personal aesthetic. All that is, though, is someone desperately trying to get you to feel a feeling, and they lack the, like, it's just a command. They're like, I'll just put these words here. In this room, you should feel family. God damn it.

And they just like glue it on the wall. And it's like, that's what you should feel in here. And there's something pure about it. Yeah. Some of those people may have some other ways of getting you feel those feelings, but that's why that happens. Right. You look at generative AI, and it's like you just type it. in the thing. And it's like, I desperately want someone to feel a feeling. And I don't, I'll just

generate this art and then I'll show it to you. Yeah. And like, there's a huge disconnect there where people do not feel about AI art what the people who make it feel. I mean, we're seeing this in the fandom community to the point where like fans are calling on authors to reject AI fan art because they're like, it's not genuine. It's not coming from a authentic place. And if you can't be authentic, AI is inherently inauthentic. Which isn't true. I don't think generative AI is inherently inauthentic.

But the people driving the propagation of it kind of are, right? And so, like, it's trickling down to create this, to take this really cool and potentially, like, useful and fascinating tool for people who can't draw for shit, but do want to, like, put themselves out there. and dumbing it down and saying, no, you can't do that. Like, this is actually just Microsoft or Google or whatever. It's business and it's not real. And that's kind of sucks. Like that these people have driven, or I guess these VCs and big stakeholders at these companies have driven this potentially really fascinating artistic tool into such a business place so quickly

that the people who should adopt it and love it and adore it are instinctively saying fuck off. I completely agree with you. And I think the thing that is funniest about this. And make no mistake, this set of Gemini errors is some of the funniest stuff that has ever happened with these tools. Because it's just a big company being like, what if we make a tool that lets everyone make art? And then being like, oh shit, the people made art. Because in almost any other context, producing an image of racially diverse Nazis qualifies as very subversive art. Yes.

In this context, it is a mistake. It's hysterical mistake. Like a very stupid mistake. Yeah. And there's just no way to square that at scale. But I think that's the point, right? Like we just have not answered the question of what it's supposed to happen here. Right.

Like if you type into Gemini, show me a picture of the founding fathers. What is the right answer? Like sincerely, what is the right answer? Yeah. Let me offer you the hit musical Hamilton in which a picture of the founding fathers. was a very subversively redrawn to be a group of black people who spoke to each other in the form of rap battles. And you, I think Hamilton has been contextualized and recontextualized a thousand times since it came out. But because it is art, it is meant to be contextualized and recontextualized in that way.

When people ask Google a question, their expectation is that they will get an answer that is not meant to be recontextualized. David, I think you're right, there's a gap there. Like, what is supposed to happen here? And when the answer is a picture, there isn't a right answer, as we have talked about to death on the show. I did just Google what is art. It was just a dictionary response from Oxford languages. Oh, good. What did Gemini have to say?

Oh, this was just regular Google. I will say that I asked Gemini to review the Vision Pro today, just see what happened. And it came up with a list of what I would categorize. I would categorize as concern trolling privacy questions. That's awesome. It was like, you should be worried about eye tracking. It's like, good job, Google. Thanks.

Can I just say one thing that's really wild about this? I mean, like, just looking at the prompts people are talking about, like, show me an image of a 1943 German soldier, show me a picture of an American woman, show me a picture of the founding fathers. You know what those are as search queries? Like, this is the insane thing that we're doing is, and Google, I think, is more good. guilty of this than most. It's trying to smush two things together and pretend that they're the same when I am looking for a piece of information that exists. Like, I would argue the right answer to show me a picture of the Founding Fathers is like, find a picture of the Founding Fathers on Wikipedia

and return that as the answer. Like, that feels like the closest thing to the right answer that we have to me. But if you go into this thing, which explicitly fabricates things that don't exist, and you expect it to give you something truthful and real and historically accurate? You're just out of your mind. Do you know what it's bringing back? Do you remember this came up earlier this week because when I was a little kid, I was told by my Spanish teacher that people in Spain who speak with a Spanish accent, they speak with a lisp, which isn't true.

They pronounce it. It's just a different accent. It's just a different accent. But I believe that until like this week when a Spanish speaking colleague was like, You know that's not real, right? Aren't you the one who said Bartholona on a call? Bartholona? I did.

That's how you say it. You said Bartholona. I said it correctly. But then the person pointed out there like, that's not actually a list. But I was like, okay, cool. Wait, I was lied to by my teacher in like the 90s pre like internet. Pre like internet. There was a time where you would just go and you would be like, this is a real thing.

And no one could tell you otherwise because it wasn't in the encyclopedia. There was no internet to just go look. And so you'd be like, okay, and we're just like, we're just boomerangued back there immediately. Where the AI systems can just confidently lie to you. Yeah. Here's my segue. Mm-hmm. What if, instead of lying to you, they just do unexplainable gibberish for about eight hours.

Yeah. I mean, that also happened pre-internet. You just talk to someone, be, oh, that's, oh, you're a child. No, but in this case, Open AI just did gibberish for eight hours. And I believe they have not explained what was actually. going on chat, GPT. Yeah, the answer seems to be just some unknown weird error. And I think the most likely candidate that I've heard is that they rolled out something new or retesting something that had an unexpected effect and they were able to roll it back pretty fast. So I think that's a reasonably

likely outcome. But oh my God, it's so funny. So funny. Like somebody asked for a biography of the Jackson family and you should all read the screenshot. We'll put it in the post with the links. But it goes from sort of making sense at the top to just slowly losing the plot and by the end, can I just read you the last paragraph? Yes. Okay. So the heading of this very last paragraph is Miss Iannis unkissed Michael Janet Germain. Number one, a Pandorus of global stoves and prolific shipyard premises.

Schwittantly, the sparkle of Turamar on the crest has as much to do with the gulver of the moon paths as it shifts from follow. debuted from blushed rowance and stuck to the design, Henneals and denoted Oms filled a niche morsel of Global House Novi from the Incubent. I just want to point out I read that perfectly. Yeah, it was really well done. There was not a retake there. It just completely lost everything. Like it lost English.

It lost syntax. It lost the plot of what it was talking about. It just completely derailed itself. It did sound, it did make sense when you said it though. Like I feel like I. understood a lot more about the Jackson family. The Henneals and denoted Oams. I feel like that is Vogon poetry from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Yeah. It's like. There's something that that sounds exactly like, and I'm pretty sure it's Vogue on poetry from the Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy. Unclear why Open AI was generating this. All I'm saying is that if you want to turn over the mechanism of culture to these systems, they should not do that from time to time. Yeah.

I mean, humans sometimes do that. Don't, don't, don't. But you can at least be like, well, Gary's having a bad day. Yeah, Gary's having a bad day and drink too much. That's why you sounded like that. I sound like that when I drink too much. I was like, that's what I sound like when I drink too much. It did highlight for me that like even the people who make these things don't fully understand how they work.

And they've said that, like, they've all been pretty open about that. They're like, yeah, we've got this cool thing. we don't entirely understand it, but we're releasing it into the wild, go forth and enjoy it. And like, that's what happens when you don't entirely understand the thing you're releasing into the wild.

Sometimes it's going to forsooth, Gandavort soother. There we go, yeah. Some good. I was just a little chat GPT myself. All right.

Speaking of pure gibberish, we should mention that Google's names for its products are pure gibberish. I hate them. All right. Get into it. I just, I got it, I just, I got to get this out.

If, if somebody came out tomorrow and if we use the same nomenclature for chat GPT and somebody tomorrow is like, we're going to do a smaller, lower left chat GPT thing, it would have to be called like Chuck or like Charlene. Like, it's just like there's no relation between these two. This is my virtual assistant, Chaz. Chas, yeah, like, what the hell is this? And it's like, okay, why is it a woman's name? It has, like, it starts with a G.

That's it. That's all you got. You couldn't, like, stay in the zodiac. As a Jim and I, I was already offended. You stole my name, but like. Such a Gemini thing to say. Excuse me. Stole my sign.

But, yeah, still, basically, I have a lot of identity attached to it because Jimonize are apparently the Antichrist. But, like, we have to defend ourselves. But then to just be like, Gemma, which is, like, explicitly a woman's name, a lovely woman's name, feels like when you're gendering it. to you're gendering like the free less good one. And it's like, hey, don't do that. Stop.

It's a bummer for a bunch of reasons. I totally agree. And I mean, you think about we went from the era of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, these like explicitly gendered assistants that were problematic for that reason and a bunch of others. Cortana was named after a Halo character, to be fair. Uh, Amazon explicitly and aggressively gender selects it to be aware, which is very weird. Yeah. But then we were, we were heading towards, I think, a slightly better place where, like, I still think it's ridiculous that we've allowed GPT to just become a thing people say.

Like, it just upsets me greatly that that's in the language now. But chat GPT, not a gendered thing, not a very good product name, but not a gendered thing. Uh, barred. Yeah. But then Gemini, not a gendered thing. thing unless you have strong feelings about the Zodiac. Yeah. Co-pilot.

Same thing. And so it was like, okay, we're getting towards thinking of these as products, not people, which is the right strategy. And then, yeah, I agree. Gemma is a big bummer back in the wrong direction. Yeah. Also, no one can keep track of them. Yeah.

On top of that. How many, how many, can anybody name all of the current flavors of Gemini? Gemini Advanced Workplace. Okay. No, that's a subscription that gets you Gemini. Nano. No, sorry, Gemini Ultra, Pro, and Nano. There's Gemma 2B and 7B. But coming soon, there's Gemini 1.5, which is in Gemini 1.5 Pro, which is different from Gemini 1.0 Pro. Gemini Ultra will eventually be Gemini 1.5 also. And I've lost it. That was as far as I can go.

But then there's Gemini in several things. There's Gemini in Vertex, which is different from Gemini in the Gemini that you experience. I can't. It just, you know that thing where you like wish you could replace the 90s song lyrics in your brain with like useful information. This is how I feel about Gemini. Like knowing this is making my life worse. I still remember the the names of almost every single HTC phone. I can't remember people's faces and names, but I can, I can just rattle off the spec sheet. Oh, the droid heiress.

That's sick. 128, good megahertz processor. It's like a real, I know it. It's in my heart. Kind of a cool phone. Kind of a cool phone. I can still do netbooks. Intel had 1.3 gigahertz processors and the, and one-two-old.

But you can't do all the Jiminize. Can't do all the Geminiis. Got to go to David for that. All right, we got to take a break. This has been a very heavy first segment. We've had everything. We've had the future of the internet. We should have Linwell Miranda.

Just everyone, just pull over the car, listen to these ads. Just breathe. We're going back with not one but two lightning rounds. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing,

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Yeah. Which I only do in the context of asking you, begging you really, to sponsor the landing round. Which, again, we have yet to do. But if you do it, I will almost, you can buy my very integrity. Yeah. Just pay the money is what I'm saying. But I'm aware that many listeners of our show have had some issues with our other advertising over which we have no control.

But I'm happy to report that David mostly and Leon have gone and done some investigating. And the problem of the repeat ads at least should be resolved. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you keep getting, I was, I mean, I'm going to say if you keep getting them, let us know. but like, oh boy, do you already. So if it keeps happening, get at me and we'll keep fighting the good fight, but hopefully it should start to get better. By the way, is that ever evidence that your phones are not listening to you?

Yeah, right? Because if they were, they would stop. No, that's just ad tech gone wrong. Much like the AIs. Yeah. Just going off the rails. The ad tech is just off the rails. So we're trying to get it fixed.

All right, lightning rounds doubled up. My idea was that we would just do everything on the list as fast as we could, but then David reminded me that I am the host of the show and do not have that ability. That's correct. We can't do a four-hour podcast today. All right. But I think, Alex, you and I could do four hours on your lightning round item. What is? 100%.

So we talked about it briefly last week, but Vizio is definitely being acquired by Walmart for $2.3 billion. And they were really, really, really explicit that it's for the ad tech. Speaking about tech. Like it was not like, well, we love these TVs and just want to like improve our in-house brand and make everything better. It was this good ad tech, y'all. We're going to make some money. And I believe even Vizio said Walmart's approach is aligned with Vizio's mission and vision.

And our technology will help bring a scaled, connected TV advertising platform to Walmart connect. So get excited. If you're a Walmart Connect fan. Can I try to put this in context? Attempt. That isn't bad. Yeah.

I can't. I want to try. I want to hear it. I want to hear the attempt. So we think of the big advertising companies out there on the internet as being Google and meta, I think largely. Google and meta are the big ad companies in the internet. Then there's a host of smaller ad tech vendors. vendors that don't have the technical ability to not play the same ad 500 times in a row.

Just putting that out there is a piece of information for you. The category of advertising provider that is most competing with Google and Meta right now is not the small ad tech companies. It's retail ad networks from Amazon and Walmart and Best Buy and others. So the retailers have started to form their own advertising situations. in particular, Amazon is one of the biggest competitors to Google and meta out there right now in terms of that. They're growing real fast, but big company is like Best Buy and Walmart and what have you. Target are all building these systems as well.

So you go to Walmart.com, a lot of what you see is basically advertising. Yep. You don't perceive it that way, but I think if you go to Amazon, you definitely have started to perceive it that way. Amazon would also love to show you more and more ads everywhere you go and do tracking and conversion. So instead of buying ads from meta to run on Instagram that convert you into a sale on a website or a sale on Amazon, Amazon is running the ads everywhere and converting you at higher rates on its own platform. And buying Whole Foods. And buying Whole Foods. It's literally, that is essentially the same thing.

Right. So you just see what's happening. At the end of this version of the internet is just someone's got to buy something. That is how the internet is organized. And the pressure to actually get you to buy things. is going up and up and up as this version of the internet comes to whatever conclusion is going to come to. And you can see that all over the place that you're being pushed towards actually spending money as opposed to taking VC subsidized free things everywhere.

So if you're Walmart and you have a big retail ad network and you're looking at Amazon, which literally owns football and everything else and has home hubs in your house, You're like, how do we get more money into our advertising system? We need to get on TVs. Yep. We need a TV ad network. So we're going to buy Vizio, which is the TV we sell the most of. And we can say to our retail ad network customers, now you can place an ad for diapers not only on walmart.com, but we can sell you inventory on TVs too because we do all this tracking on the TV system.

Is that good? I mean, if I was an advertiser that's super compelling as just a regular person who wants less advertising. Yeah, turn off the Wi-Fi on your TV. That's the answer to that question. Less, less compelling. But that is 100% the pressure on all these companies. And if you're Walmart, you're like, oh, we can't just give the entire advertising ecosystem over to Amazon. And that is very much where Amazon is going.

Yep. And I talk to these CMOs. I talk to these folks out in the world. I have them on decoder. and they're all just looking at it, and they're like connected TV is the thing. It is the next piece of the advertising puzzle that is going to sort itself out. It's a billboard in your house. It's increasingly the way it's being looked at.

And there's where there's telly, right, that has literally a billboard in your house. Yeah. And the only thing they're doing differently is just saying the quiet part loud. They're just like, look, you want to look at some ads. We'll give you the TV for free. And you can either make that deal or you can pay for the TV and look at ads. Like every day that goes by, I think Telly is a better and better idea because it's happening to you either way. And you might as well get the TV for free.

I reject that. I like, I mean, is my LGTV currently connected to the internet? Yes. Do I get a weird like little banner ad at the bottom every time I turn my TV on? Why? It's usually like. That's the thing. I'm just going to go after this call.

I'm going to go disconnect it because I'm just like, wait. You did a mime of an Ethernet cable. Is your TV on Ethernet? You know what? I need like good connections. I want everything. My TV's on Ethernet. I don't know why.

It shouldn't be on the Internet. But it has to be if I want to watch Bravia Core. Sony's premium 80 megabits per second. It has four movies on it. The other day I was effectively forced to watch Zero Dark 30 on Bravia Core because it's the only movie that's available. And then I'm pretty sure when Max wasn't eating breakfast the next morning, I did some CIA shit to her.

Like straight up, I was like, your behavior will determine how you're treated. I'm like, she's eating apples. That's what happens we watch Zyardark 30 and Bravia Corps in crystal clear, apologies. They didn't buy the letting land. I just really like high-bed rate streams. Do you get an advertisement on Sony? Yeah.

For the CIA. Watch a movie about torture. It was a CIA advertisement. I do turn it off in my ERO profiles when I'm not using the built-in apps. That's smart. I don't want the TV talking about me. I should, I should do that. Mine is the only thing blocked on my network is my, my Vizio TV, actually.

Do you still get packets? My LGTV just hammers that firewall with packets, even if it's not allowed to. They love to talk. Yeah, it's just like, come on. Who are you talking to? The advertisers? They want to know all about what you did last night. It was nothing.

I watched K-Dramas and smoked a lot of weed. That's all I did. Enjoy that fact, LG. The local bodega owner. are not like in the connected TV market. Yeah, they're screwed, man. Like, just send me one and I'd be, I'd be on my way, just some tacos. Yeah.

Oh, my God. I feel really, Vizio, we did a lot of coverage of Vizio. Yeah. I wrote a feature about Vizio. We had Matt McRae, who was the old CTO Vizio on the show many, many, many times. They tried to get into every big market they could get into. Was it worth? Phones, laptop.

We talked about this last week. And to have them become just a commodity screen advertising vendor. I mean, is pretty sad. I don't know if it's that sad because to some extent Vizio was pretty prescient on this stuff. Like, they were one of the first into advertising. That's why Le Echo,

I love it. One of them was because of the advertising tech. Like it was always, Vizio was really good at this. They figured it out before a lot of other people and then took forever to get acquired by someone who could actually afford it. Because they were being investigated for the shady stuff they were doing. Yeah.

Like I said, they were so early in learning how to. trick you into giving them your data. They were like... But let me give you the counter example to this. Okay. This is the longest lightning rat item in that. This is why we can't do a lot of example.

Yeah. But let me give the counter example of this. You can feel a lot of ways about meta. You can feel a lot of ways about Google. They took all of the excess profit of their actual functional advertising businesses and invented a lot of stuff. Like just straight up. That's fair.

Like Google's like, I don't know. The car should drive themselves. Pixel phones. That's a thing. And then Google. was like, ah, that didn't work and they killed it. Like Google. Meta's like, we should do reality labs.

Legs. We invented legs in the Metaverse, everybody. We did it. It took $20 billion. Like all of that excess cash that their advertising put out, it made them give services for free or largely free. They invested in a bunch of core internet infrastructure technology. Let them buy into a monopoly on the iPhone. Let them buy into monopoly.

Like you can, like I said, you can feel a lot of ways about those companies. Yeah. But all of the excess advertising profits they made. built consumer products and people value. What did Vizio use it's for? This is what I'm saying. Yeah. Right. The idea of Vizio's will do all these excess profits from television advertising and then we'll make

really good laptops or we'll make really good phones. And they just didn't do the things. They didn't even start, like even the TV's got worse. Even the TVs got worse. Yeah, we had so many commenters last week, reach out, be like, yeah, I had a Vizio TV. I loved it, but then it sucked. And I'm like, oh, that's a bummer. There's something there that is just sad.

Yeah. Eli, it's super telling that the end of that idea was not, Vizio said, we're going to take your advertising dollars and use them to make the TVs better, which is what it should have been. Like, that's actually a reasonable trade that reasonable people might make, right? Like, I will, I will sign up for some version of this advertising network that is coming to me anyway in exchange for a better and or cheaper television. And that is like a flywheel that kind of works. and Vizio just went, never mind, we're just going to keep all of that money and we're going to keep making the TVs worse

and this is what Roku is doing, this is what the Prime TV TVs are starting to do. Like, cheap TVs that are supported by advertising are not getting better, they're getting worse. And that sucks. All right. This is my hard pivot to my lightning round item, which is once again complaining about my frame TV.

Speaking of sucky TV. Can you tell that I've just bought a lot of stuff for this house? I just have thoughts about all of it. The good news about this one is it was very expensive. So you really played this perfectly. Well, so no, my lightning round item is actually Samsung is expanding Oricast support across most of its devices. We haven't talked a lot about OroCast on the show. At C.S, I went and visited JBL, which has OroCast support across its line.

Orocast is one of the coolest standards. Like, we make a lot of fun of Bluetooth on the show generally. Oricast is maybe the coolest upgrade to Bluetooth I've seen in a long time. So it is completely vendor agnostic. You have devices that support or cast on Bluetooth. You just push the button. They all just start playing the same music. And I've seen this demoed now across brands.

I've seen this demo across speakers. JBL's demo was they just had speakers in a living room. Some travel Bluetooth speakers. Their new speaker that can do both Google Assistant and Alexa on the same device, which is really cool. And they just put them all in the room and they pushed buttons. and the Bluetooth speakers, the little travel JBL Bluetooth speakers, became the rears in a home theater situation.

Okay, that's cool. It's cool. Yeah. Like, that's just cool. They're able to do this using a standard. It's not some proprietary stuff. And the idea is that you should be able to do it with all the speakers you have in your house. Very cool.

So, Samsung is bringing ORACAST to tons of its products. And then, of course, the TVs are getting 360 reality audio in case you need. Is the frame TV going to get ORACAST? So the frame TV is the weirdest kind of product. I could write 10,000 words by the frame TV. You're going to have to at some point. I'm obsessed with the existence of the frame TV. The frame TV is an old panel.

Yeah. That's one of the reasons they mark it up is they take an old cheap panel. Yeah, they're just put a cool bezel on it. So they do some cool backlight stuff. So it goes to sleep mode. The display dims. It's mad. They've got the art store.

You just said something nice about the frame TV. There is a little bit of work in the frame TV that makes people want it. Yeah. Because people watch TikTok. They don't watch their TV, so they just want the artwork. Here's the thing that is driving me bananas about the frame TV right now. When you turn it off, it is not actually off. It goes into art mode, which is its special art mode.

So then when you turn it off, it goes all the way off. And then when you turn it back on again, it comes all the way back on. No art mode. Very confusing. So you have to go, to get to art mode, you have to power. on once, the power on twice. None of this matters if you are a normal human being. Wait, it's like the thing where you pull the light switch once and it turns on, you pull it

again and it dims and then again and it's off, but then if you pull it again, it goes all the way on. That's a perfectly normal setup. That's exactly how that should work. It's confusing. But none of this matters if you're a normal human being who buys a frame TV and puts out of the wall using the Samsung frame. If you buy any third party frame, it is more than likely that you will cover up the actual

sensors that make the frame TV work. Which is of course what we did. Yes. There is now a $99.9 dongle from Decoframes.com. It is an external. It's called the SRS2. It's huge. It's just a sensor dongle for the frame TV.

No, people hate it. You have to run another wire to TV and then put a dongle out in the room because you've covered up at the sensors. So then you might think, if you're like me, what you're going to do is you are already, of course, running a Raspberry Pi with Homebridge. You'll just put Tysen into Homebridge and control the frame TV using the other sensors that you might have in your hands. And then you'll realize that Samsung has taken the art mode API out of the 2022 and upframe TVs. So you cannot just tell the thing to turn on an art mode. You have to tell it to turn on running into the problem in which your wife keeps watching the horrible couples therapy show on showtime. And she keeps turning the TV off at night so that when it turns on at 8.30 in the morning, when your thermostat in your bedroom detects motion, it turns on and starts playing couples therapy at you.

This is very bad. And the solution to this problem is, there's only two. One, you can take the frame off your TV, but Samsung doesn't sell a black frame, or you have to tell your wife, who is a divorce lawyer, that she's turning off the TV wrong. How you doing, buddy? It's bad. The TV is just off all the time. We don't know what to do. We've reached an impasse.

I'm just turning the thing on manually in the morning and leaving that house. Couldn't like Home Assistant change the channel for you? There's no channel because art mode is not a channel or an input. It is off. Has somebody made like a third-party art mode? It's just like a USB stick. It's like, I just wanted to get like as janky as possible for you. It's bad.

And no one knows why they took the API out of it. If all they need to do is put the endpoint back on so you can just say go into art mode. Maybe it was a bug. Maybe somebody just realized. You can sort of fake it. Uh-huh. Because you can tell. Homebridge.

This is very dumb. You can create a virtual power button. Yeah. And have HomeKit push it. Yes. But then you have to guess how the TV was turned off at night. Beautiful. It's bad.

All this is bad. Forecast is good. Frame TV. Bad. Nightmare situation. Neil, I just, before we move on, I just want to congratulate you. In the long history of the Vergecast, you have made what I would call many of Milai's niche complaints. That was the.

Most niche complaint. I have ever. The total addressable market of that complaint is just me like. It's every frame TV owner. Every frame TV owner has to go on to the frame TV subcorpus of Reddit and you will see an infinite number of people. There are people in this world who have bought bulk fiber optic cable to read to trick in mirrors to trick the sensors of the frame TV into seeing light. That has to be more expensive than the $90 dongle. Also, defeats the purpose of the beautiful television that doesn't look like a television.

No, no, because they're drilling holes into the frame, poking the little fiber optic cable out of the frame, then running the fiber optic cable to the sensor where it shines, and this is a quote from the sub corpus post, into a disco ball of little mirrors that they've made so that the sensor can detect the change in light. Because otherwise you have to have the dumb sensor dongle out in the world. That solution kicks ass.

It's awesome. It rules. I've posted this onto the website. Are you going to build a disco ball? I've thought our frame is metal. It's like drill. It's not great. I don't know what to do.

But I will tell you one option is not you're turning off the TV wrong. No. It's tough one. Nope. We can't do that. It's not appropriate. The TV turning on a morning playing couples therapy at us. Also not.

acceptable. There's just no winning that one. Pierce wants your light here. Mine is a better screen you can hang on your wall that instead of causing you infinite grief will solve quite a bit of your grief. It's the Amazon Echo Hub, which was announced a while ago, and the reviews of it are starting to come out, and it's starting to ship. I love this thing.

And it is also, like, deeply funny that the Echo Hub needs to exist. It's just a screen that you put on your wall to use to control your smart. home. It is the simplest thing you could imagine. Amazon basically took like a fire tablet or an Echo Show and just took all the features out of it except the buttons for controlling your lights. And then it was like, do you want this to hang on your wall? And everybody said, yes, I do. And Gentooe reviewed it, really liked it, said it has like totally fit into her life and her families. And to me, this is just like, we need to finally get past the idea that, oh, An app for your smartphone is the solution to this problem.

Like, no, it's not. Buttons on my wall are the solution to this problem. Those buttons can be on screen. That's fine. But, like, voice assistance ain't it. Apps on my phone ain't it. Like, we need new systems for this stuff. And kudos to Amazon for having actually pushed at that.

Which do you think is going to, like, affect more marriages? The frame TV situation or the existence of the hub? Oh, it's the existence of the Echo Hub. The number of beleaguered partners of smart home nerds who now don't have to, like, okay, so my sister lives in a home with someone who is big into the smart home, and she had to memorize the names of her lamps so that she could tell Alexa which ones to turn on. And it's like, there's the living room lamp, but then there's the big living room lamp. And if you just ask for one and not the other, you're getting, and this is terrible.

But you know what's great is when you can walk up to the wall. and flip a switch. And I will happily exchange that switch for a button, but a person can figure out how to use it, and that is terrific. I had to get one of those like hue light buttons back in the day for when I had a roommate, because after multiple times of me accidentally

turning off all the lights in the bathroom while she was in the shower, uh, it's not good. Not good. We should actually just have Jen on the show so she can describe how her family deals with her job. Carefully. Because literally her teenage children are,

like we are just going to live in the dark. We're not going to try to figure out how to... There's a whole lot of Jen on the show the next two weeks, by the way, so get excited. Here's the thing about this hub that I'm thinking about. It doesn't sit flush? It sticks out a little. It sticks out a little. You got to power all this, all the normal stuff of putting a screen the wall.

It's a product made for the Matter smart home standard, but Matter isn't good enough to support this product. Because what you want is a bunch of smart home stuff in your house, and you're like, okay, I control most of it with my Android phone with Google Home, or I control it with HomeKit on my phone, my iOS phone. And then I bought this awesome screen from Amazon. And it's also a great smart home controller.

And the reality of this product is like, it's great if all of your shits in Alexa. Yeah. It does have a Zigby radio, right? It's a matter control. It is. It's got like a ton of the future. Of stuff.

Yeah. The way you want it to work, like the way I'd want it to work, I do everything at HomeKit because the idea of getting anyone else in my family to open another app besides control center is not happening. I feel like somebody will have a solution pretty quickly for HomeKit users and other folks to use this thing through matter. Because Matter kind of sucks, but like HomeBridge. But matter should be the thing.

It should be. Right. Like you should be setting everything up in any one of these ecosystems. And then you're like, I've added a Matter device that can see all those rooms. and see all those devices and we're so close. I feel like Jen writes that we're so close with Matters story. It's the heart of every story about these devices.

She like sighs as she writes as she says, oh, we're so. She actually has an automation setup where she just sighs loudly into a microphone and chat Shibati writes. The matter isn't quite fair yet story. It's very good. All right, we should take another break. And we're back with a non-gatchet lightning round. This one will have fewer friend TVs in it, I promise you.

We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid-compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era.

Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean?

For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected?

officials and what it means to the people. So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin.

Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus, and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning,

and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. Let me tell you about Tyson, the software that powers the frame. We were so close.

I'm telling you I could write 10,000 words. What the frame TV represents in our culture. It's going to happen at some point. Yeah. We're going to be like, Neela, you can't work at all for the next week. Just write 10,000 words on Vizio. I like the like one for me, one for them thing.

You're like, okay, I wrote Welcome to Hell Elon. A lot of people read that. That was great. Now I'm going to write a feature of them. This is for me. I've heard this. I write to David. David at the verge.

If you'd like me to write 10,000 words with the frame TV. Please do. Yes, please. I'm just going to say this. I think the frame TV is Samsung's most important product. I think you're right. It is by far. It is the one that they invented.

It's not a copy of anything. I know some Samsung people. They invented a lot of stuff. For example, Samsung invented the concept of taking fake photos of the moon. Very important concept. But the frame TV, they just invented. There wasn't a thing, and then they made a thing, and then the thing is very successful. Other companies are copying the thing.

But it is as a cultural object that people desire, the frame TV is top of the list for Samson. Remember when it was in the MoMA? That and the weird bespoke appliances they make? Oh, yeah. People like those. But whatever. All right. Non-gadget lightning round.

David, I think yours, we've got an hour to do on this one. Go ahead. Yes, easily an hour to do on this one. So. We're bad at, like, lightning. I know. This one actually, I don't think will be that long. And I am desperate to hear people's feedback because I have been hearing people's feedback nonstop for two days. And I'm just a glutton for punishment. Apple luncheon app called Apple Sports, which is a very simple app for

seeing sports scores. It's not a very good app. It's missing a lot of sports. It shows lineups in a sort of deranged, nonsensical way. But it does, in fact, for some sports, sometimes show scores. And there is either less to this app than I think, and it's just kind of a weird side project that like Eddie Q found on somebody's computer and shipped, or this is a harbinger of huge things to come. And I posited that there are two things that are possible for Apple sports.

One is that Apple is about to make even more big moves into sports streaming, which I think there are lots of reasons. for and we can talk about. The other one is that this is the app you would launch if you wanted to get into betting in interesting ways. One of the controversial things that has been in this app so far is you can see betting odds for all the games that you're looking at, which is powered by Draft Kings, I would point out, you can turn it off in settings, but it's on by default. And I posited that this is what it would look like if Apple were to very slowly start getting into sports gambling. And many hundreds of people have told me how dumb I am for that take, and I

continue to believe that I'm correct. I feel like you're probably correct, but also like, that's the worst thing. I don't want you to be correct. So, but this is what I want to talk about, because I think that the, the Overton window on sports gambling has moved so far that the idea that this is somehow against Apple's brand to do is just no longer the truth. And I like, sports gambling is just life. It's just mainstream life now. I saw the 60 Minutes episode. about this a couple of weeks ago. Oh, really? Was there one?

I had to listen to me talk about it at the office. One of the things about working with Alex that I think the listener should know is every now and again, she comes up all revved up on 60 minutes. It's just like, it's just very confusing. It is very much like working with a like a hot-headed retiree. Then I take my metamucal and have a nap. It's great.

A dedicated viewer of 60 minutes, which does make some very good journalism. Sometimes. For some people. But it's true. It's 60 minutes to do it. Gambling is bad. It's very addictive. I agree.

If you are Tim Cook and you're looking at declining sales, you know, emerging services revenue, dude, what is the ultimate services business? Just taking money from people. Just directly extracting money from people. Give us some money. And maybe this machine will give you some money back. But not all the time. In fact, not most of the time.

And if you're in Las Vegas, you're standing in a market. You're standing in a monument to how little money the machine will give back to you, and people still give money to the machine. And you have to imagine Tim Cook stands. He sat in the sphere looking at Bono going, I got to get in on this. And then we have the sports app. Isn't gambling not allowed in the app store? Like, is there weirdness about this? It depends.

Yeah, there's like, there's a little lines. So Fandle and draft games from the app store, right? You can just get those apps. So it depends. So Fanduel and Draft Kings are just in the App Store. You can just do it. It's legal in some states. I think Apple doesn't,

Apple has some weird lines about what it allows when it's legal and not legal. But if I just wanted to play the digital slots. Nope. Games of chance are not allowed in the app store. And that feels weird to me. Like, it feels disingenuous. If you're going to, if you're going to let gambling happen. Well, so here's, I think we should make this distinction right now.

Okay. And David, I think this is my pushback on your, this is applicating and the gambling. Even when gambling was morally frowned upon, right? When it was not legal in most places and whatever, the newspapers would print the lines. Sure. Left and right. Old school football announcers at the end of blowouts would be like, only a handful of people are interested in this field goal. And they were making very direct references to like whether your bookie is going to show up and break your arm.

Yeah. That's basically what they were doing. So it was always part of it's always been part of sports culture. So to have a scores app where you can see odds is not at all a departure from what the local newspaper in Racine, Wisconsin did when I was growing up. But powered by draft kings in an app store where it is part of the mainstream culture, where if you're trying to grow your services revenue, boy, that seems like a big, big pot of money. Yeah. And also, if you launched a newspaper in which one of the only two things you could do was look at the betting odds, don't you think you'd maybe think of that slightly differently? Well, I don't know.

Like the New York Times owns the Athletic. The athletic will straight up run articles that are like, here's how to bet today. Sure. Were the, I know some of the scores and stuff weren't accurate. Were the sports odds? Were the odds accurate in the Apple App? I haven't checked, to be honest. I have not heard complaints that they're not.

but I couldn't tell you. John Gruber out of piece where we pointed out that Traff Kings has weird odds. Because it's gambling. Yeah. Odds are set by odds makers. People have different ideas. I think it is fascinating that they made this app. I think it's rushed because they needed to get out before the MLS season kicked off, which they own.

Right. So they have a huge opportunity to promote their own sports app ahead of it. Is this anything other than a toy for that EQ? Remains unclear. Or is Tim Cook your new bookie? I love the idea of Tim. In my head, in my head, he's wearing like a little hat. Do Buckees still wear little hats?

No, Tim Cook as a Buckee would be an absolutely terrifying character. Like, oh yeah. No hat, no costume. Just actually Tim Cook in his sweater being like, go get the money. Yeah, he's the guy you like are in your house and you turn around and he's just been standing there for who knows how long. Like that's Tim Cook. The person who plays him in the film adaptation would win an Oscar. immediately for their portrayal.

No, he's not in your house. The heavies are in the house. Tim Cook is the guy where he's like, the heavies grab you, they throw you into the back of the van, you get thrown out of the van, and you're in a very nice restaurant where he's quietly eating melon.

And he's like, sit down and have some melon. And then like in that moment, it becomes very clear to you that you're going to die. Yeah. Right. And you can either enjoy the melon

and die or you can not enjoy the melon or die, but whether or not you're dying has been long since determined. All because he, use the sports app. And that's how Tim Cook extracts excellent pricing on OLED screens. Enjoy the melon and die as a show that Apple TV Plus would run for sure.

No, but we should move on. But my only point is that I think people are overestimating the gap between where Apple is now and the Apple that just more or less runs a betting service. Like the stuff you're describing, the only difference between the digital slots that Apple won't let you do and the ones that it will let you do is that you can. can pay money to win virtual stuff, but you can't pay money to make actual money. And I don't think that's that big a gap. Like, do you want to play Monopoly Go and pour all of your money into getting more turns in Monopoly Go? Do you know what that is? That's gambling. You just can't

win anything. Yeah, that's loop boxes. That's loot boxes. That is the same thing except there's no actual real world monetary upside for you. And I think the gap between that and them saying, oh, just place your bet with Apple Pay is like this small. It's this small. It's this small. draft king's out there negotiating less than a 30% cut. Are you kidding? There's a 50% cut. That's what they call the melon cut. There's no way.

All right. What's your non-gadget lightning round? It's still on the Apple front. And that's because Apple has just announced that they're doing post-quantum cryptography for iMessage. So all of our international listeners, I'm sorry, this doesn't apply to you. enjoy your WhatsApp and other services and continue to wonder why we all care about I message here in the U.S. But for U.S. users, it's kind of exciting. They're claiming it is more secure than signals post-quantum cryptography that it rolled out a couple of months ago.

Unclear. You'll enjoy this. They also created their own metrics for security. And they said, well, signals are level two. but we're a level three. Ooh, love to put yourself on the good metric that you've made up. Classic unmarked graph. Yeah, I was like, beautiful.

Just imagine a line that just says security and Apple is up high and the other ones are lower, but there's no labels on any of the graphs. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, that's it. It is exciting because as we get closer to quantum computers actually doing something, which will one day happen, like it's going to happen. All the cryptography we have now will not hold up. You'll be able to just brute force a lot of things one day.

And so introducing post-quantum cryptography is kind of necessary for a lot of people. So it's exciting to see Apple doing that. But also we need to talk to like some security researchers. There's a lot more to be done here because Apple is just like, we did it. Everybody's like. This is two announcements from Apple this week with the same sort of valence. One is we've defeated quantum computers, which well done. I've come in first in a race that I've made up.

And then two, they announced that the iPhone 15 battery performs better than expected. But they didn't say how well they expected it or how much better than its expectation. You know, they're going to drop a chart. You can just determine your own axes for it. Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be great. But this was just like kind of a cool thing. I think quantum cryptography is going to become more important in the next 10 years, 20 years, whenever quantum computing actually becomes useful.

But for now, it's just like, okay, that's nice. By the way, if you're interested in this, we'll link to this. We just had the head of IBM quantum research on Decoder. We actually talked about whether or not you need a post-quantum cryptography. And his answer was like, I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah. It's not a big deal right now, but it's still like, that's cool. Yeah.

Did you ask Neli on Decoder when I need to start actually learning what a quantum computer is? I did. I also asked him how he feels about the movie, Ant Man in the Lost Quantum Mania. And it wasn't positive. Seems right. Yeah. He was like, I'm happy people are thinking about quantum computing. He's like, but I don't think there are our entire civilization.

It's a very good answer. It was a very politic. I got as far with quantum computing as like it can be both positive and negative at the same time. And somehow that lets it store a lot of data. And I just don't, well, I don't get that. And that's the last thing I learned about quantum computing. Somebody said, keep it. Go, we'll link that he go.

It's a good episode. He's very charming. Okay, cool. I'll listen to it. It's very good. All right. My lighting rounds, kind of some weird EV news. So Rivian is laying off 10% of its workforce.

Ford is cutting mock E prices. We're kind of in the second round of like the EV price scores. At any moment, Tesla is going to start giving away Model 3s like their echo dots. Yeah. They're going to show you Walmart ads and they'll give you a free car for it. It feels like it's not so far off. especially if Tesla gets itself driving first, advertising the car is coming.

Twitter's got a cell head somehow. It does feel like the overwhelming demand for Tesla model Ys and threes in the middle of the pandemic confused everyone into thinking that all anyone wanted was electric cars and it was over. And so they all overproduced. And then in particular for Rivian,

I think this is really interesting. You know, the R1T is a great truck. It's like a fun truck to drive, and the R1S is a nice SUV. They're so similar. It's hard to actually talk about them as they're different cars. Like, one's an SUV and one's a truck, but they're... It's basically just like a camper shell was put on really, really nicely. Yeah.

Yeah. But like, well, in an extremely well-done way. People of R1S's love R1S's. Pristine camper shell. But there's a reason there are ones. Like they're the same platform, very, very similar vehicles. They're also hella expensive, right? They're like $100,000 at the top end trims.

So Rivian just has this problem where they thought they had infinite demand for these, for EVs. And then pickup trucks, really expensive pickup trucks, were selling like hotcakes in the pandemic. So they were just like, oh, this is great. This is working. We'll overinvest in this. And then all of that cooled off. Even the pickup truck market is like way down right now. Like if you are the sort of person who thinks about buying a RAM truck, you can just get one.

that you could not even a few years ago. So I think Reveen is just stuck because they don't have a cheaper car, which they're about to introduce the R2, which I think will be really interesting and exciting and hopefully is cheaper. And then Ford has the Lightning and the Maki. And I think every person who wanted to buy a Lightning or Amaki has purchased those cars, and they got nothing else. And I think we're just at a moment where there were so many vaporware cars for a minute.

And now there's like not enough kinds of cars. and like we're still in the middle of what you would call the vaporware cycle because all the other cars we're supposed to fill out the market aren't there so people aren't even cross-shopping EVs or cross-shopping like two expensive platinum lightenings against other trucks that are on deep discount because they've been sitting in lots for forever and the companies are all like heavily lobbying the EPA right now right to reduce the restrictions that force them in basically selling EVs yeah they're like Nobody's buying them.

We don't actually want to make as many as we said we want to do. Yeah. And also interest rates are high and all this stuff. But I think in particular for Rivian, they just ran out of potential buyers for $100,000 pickup trucks. There does seem like there's like a cap on the number of people who do that. Yeah. Seems like there's a really obvious cap for that. Is there a bigger thing going on with just general EV interests not rising as fast as people thought?

Like, there was that interesting. line from RJ Scrange, the CEO said during the earnings report, he said, his quote was, how do we get the 93% of the market that's not buying an EV to get excited about the product, which is not a problem I think anyone in 2020 would have thought we would have in 2020. Because the only car in the market in 2020 was Tesla. And there was apparently infinite demand for the Tesla Model 3. That's what I mean. But so are we at a point where they've run out of people to buy $100,000 cars, or are we at a point where they've

run out of people who want to buy EVs? So there are basically no head-up competitors to the Model 3 and the Y. There's the Mustang Makii, which is in a price war with Tesla, because Tesla keeps lowering its prices. And you can feel about the Maki however

you want, but that's a weird place to be where you're driving towards the bottom. And if I think people who are interested in Tesla, they're not actually cross-shopping with Ford. like Tesla's still a very unique kind of buyer and you I know people are going to say it's morally irresponsible

to give you a lot of them but people who buy Tesla's buy Tesla's and they like them that's just a fact then everything else is like crazy expensive the Honda Prolog is out we have a review of the Honda Prolog on the site this week it seems like a great car is based in the Chevy Blazer which had a stop sale on it but Honda insists they've done their own software so the prolog will not have these problems but you're really looking at like a pretty small number of head-up competitors to the three in the Y. And there are some, right? Pull Star exists. You can go down the line, but they're all pretty small-scale competitors. They're not like...

When do we get like a Dodge Neon dash E? So I think the Volvo X30 will be... It won't be that cheap, but it's a small EV that people seem really hype about. Yeah. So I just think like we're in a weird part of the market where the upstart car companies are all too expensive. And then there aren't any, there aren't down here. There are just like not a lot of companies. It's like the traditional car companies took all the wrong lessons from the success of Tesla. Yeah. Just like every single lesson, they're like, no. Except make the software good.

Yeah. They forgot that one. I will say that down the street for me, there's a Hyundai dealership. And over the last six months, so the dealership is in the middle, and then they have a big parking lot on one side and a big parking lot on the other side. They ripped up one whole parking lot to put in a bunch of EV chargers. And now basically the only thing on the lot is ionic stuff. Oh, yeah.

Actually, this, you, the Ionic 5 and the rest of it. to them. They're obviously the exception. Yeah. And now they're doing the same thing to the other side. It's like, Hyundai Kia is like, they are convinced they're going to solve this problem.

But you look at where they're playing. They're playing in mainstream segments at mainstream prices. Right. They're not $100,000 super trucks. Right. Even the EV 9, which is the big three row SUV, not, it's not $100,000.

Like, it is expensive, but it's not out of the reach of most SUV buyers. Like, it's just priced competitively. Right. And that feels like the, I feel like I'm saying something very obvious. Like, make the most popular kinds of products and price them competitively. No, that's not the lesson.

$100,000 super truck. Got it. There you go. So we'll see. I just think we're in a really weird moment in the EV transition. But also, if you're in the market for an EV, like not a horrible time to buy one. Yeah. Terrible time to buy a hybrid, though. Yeah. All of a sudden, it's impossible to find a hybrid. My dad has been

shopping for a hybrid for a while and everybody wants the new Prius Prime because it's like finally nice looking and it turns out they're essentially impossible to get your hands on it's crazy yeah as somebody who owns a plug-in hybrid that only gets 25 minutes of range I will say that is not enough you want 50 that's not enough if our car had 50 we would just keep it forever yeah but it doesn't so the second there is one that gets I'm all gas man I'm all in on gas I'm doing I'm pouring oil I solve every day. I'm from Texas. I love Texas.

Fracken's awesome. It's okay. I just ride lime scooters. So between Alex and me, we're good to go. Yeah, we balance out. All right.

There's a bunch of other news here. Fubo was suing Fox and Disney. I mean, that's just a sentence, I said. But it also was like, it was going to happen. Can I just say,

by the way, the fact that Spooloo has just become the agreed-upon name for this service? We have to stop that. Sports Hulu. I want to be clear about what people are saying. Yeah, right.

Sports Hulu. And A, Alex Kranz called this first, so Alex wins. Thank you. But B, it's just everybody just calls it Spoooo-Loo now, which makes me think it might be called Spoo-Loo for real, and we cannot allow that to happen. It's going to be called Sports Max. It should just be called ESPN. Yes.

It will be ridiculous if they don't call it ESPN. ESPN Max, sponsored by Hulu. If they start a giant sports streaming service and they don't just call it ESPN, they will have made such a gigantic error. Like, you are looking at one of the most legendary brands in watching sports that has ever existed. And it's like, the people at Fox Sports are like, well, you can't. It's got to, it's got to indicate that it's Fox Sports as well.

And it's like, no, it doesn't. You can just have a tile. Somebody posted the other day a screenshot of like a promotional thing for them to sign up for a streaming service. And it was Hulu with Live TV with Paramount Plus with Showtime. It is the official. name. It's so good. It's like, what have we done here? It's all very bad.

All right, we got to wrap this up. We've gone way over. I want to call it two stories. One, we have a look back at Spike Jones Her, the movie Her, which is all about falling in love with the AI. It's very good. You should go read the look back. You should watch the movie. It still holds up. And then we

sent a reporter to King of the Hammers. There's a big silly off-road race. It's Burning Man for off-road vehicles. She got to ride in the Ford's switch gear, the EVF1, the EVF150 off-roody thing. This is what I want to trade my after and for. So I'm very excited about the story.

And also there's pictures of a cyber truck trying off-road, one of which broke itself. So that piece will link to the thing. And then it's big news. We get South by Southwest doing the show live on the Vox Media Podcast Network stage. That will happen March 8th. We'll have more detail soon. There's other stuff coming. There's going to be a decoder, which will be very good.

There's some other people. It's going to be good. So if you're going to South by Southwest, come see us on March 8th. David, what's happening next week on the Tuesday show? We are going to talk about Flip, this weird new shopping app. Miyasato on our team basically like ruined her life to become an influencer on Flip. And she told us her story. It's really good.

And then Becca and Viren from our video team came on to talk about the Fuji X1006, which is the internet's favorite camera in a way. I still don't totally understand. It's so cool. It's good stuff. want it. Yeah. If I could buy every camera, I buy every camera. Yeah, same. All right, that's it. We've gone just way over. If anyone knows the people at Samsung who control the art mode endpoint and ties them, talk to this guy. All right, that's it. That's for chest.

And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.