The Vergecast - The Cybertruck lives, and so does OpenAI

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss the Tesla Cybertruck event, the latest with OpenAI leadership, and what Elon Musk and Bob Iger said at Dealbook Summit 2023. Getting close — but not too close — to the Tesla Cybertruck Tesla Cybertruck delivery event: Elon Musk hands over the first trucks to customers Elon Musk tells advertisers: ‘Go fuck yourself’ Sam Altman is back, so what’s next for OpenAI and ChatGPT? Interview: Sam Altman on being fired and rehired by OpenAI  ChatGPT is winning the future — but what future is that?  Ikea debuts a trio of affordable smart home sensors DealBook Summit 2023: Elon Musk, Bob Iger, and more How to find your 2023 Spotify Wrapped 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 Vergecast. America's number one source of Cybertruck Wiper News. And it's all thanks to readers like you. That's actually true now, I think. I think that we spoke into existence

that we are the world's number one source of cyber truck wiper news. Yeah, people believe us. The thing is we still don't know the answer to this question. Not at all. We'll get into it, though. I'm your friend, Neelai. David Pierce is here. Hello.

Alex Trans is here. I'm your friend who wishes they used a crossbow. like checked it with a crossbow. I wanted to see, how does it withstand crossbow fire, the cyber truck? Well, we know the answer now. Not crossbows, just all the... Oh, I see. Just...

Yeah. We know a regular bow and error. Yeah, I want like crossbows, catapults. Alex, one of the reasons that I know that, like, I like you and we're friends, is that no part of me would be surprised if that was a reveal that you're, like, sick with a crossbow. Like, nothing... I wouldn't blink if you just, like, pulled a crossbow out from under... underneath the table and we're like, just like this.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what I do on my off time. Yeah. Practice with my crossbow. Axe throwing crossbows. I am actually really good with an axe throw. Like the axe throwing, knife throwing terrible. Axe throwing, it's like, I got it.

All right. Well, let's explain why we're talking about this. There's quite a lot of news this week, but we are coming to you directly after the Tesla Cybertruck launch event, which was very odd. That itself followed. Elon Musk at the Deal Book conference yesterday, which was even we're even we're literally live reacting to you post-Cibertruck reveal in which we learned nothing. I want to be very clear.

It was a 25-minute event. It started 25 minutes late after playing an enormous amount of just ominous ambient music. That was strange. Elon comes out. They go through the cyber truck spec. Here's how much it can pull. It can pull more than a Ford F-150 lightning and a Rivian and an F-350 diesel. Great.

They threw a baseball at it. Poorly. The first time, friends missed. Yes. And then the second time he was just like, hit. It was very weak. Yeah. But the windows didn't shatter this time.

They were happy about it. Well, yeah. If you're throwing at that, like, he threw it like I throw a ball. I'm terrible at throwing a ball. And he was just like, I sincerely believe that if you threw a baseball at that speed at my car. window. It would not break. That's kind of what I said. I was like, I've seen Honda Civics withstand more impact than this. Yeah. And it was just so funny because it was clearly that moment was, it's sort of set up to be like a big applause moment because it was, I think,

he said four years ago, which is nuts that this was four years ago the first time this happened. Franz got up there and threw a ball at a supposedly baseball proof window. No, no, be clear. He threw a metal ball at a supposedly bulletproof window. Oh, okay. That's a good. distinction. Yeah. And it, it shattered. And then he did it again and the other window shattered.

Yeah. Incredible moment in product history. Oh, it was fantastic. It was one of the great, like, live demos or a disaster moments. I really enjoyed it. But he sets this up as this sort of redemptive moment four years later. And like, kudos to them for, you know, laughing about this. But then didn't rerun the test.

Yeah. He had him lob a baseball at the window. And he missed the first time. he hit like the underneath of the window. And then, yeah, like Alex is saying, sort of gently lobbed it. You can really tell that this man did not want to do this thing. No.

And it was the funniest part was they got to the end and he didn't get any of the like applause breaks or laughs or anything he was hoping for. And he was just like, it's good is my point. I was like, all right. And the ball bounced on the ground at one point, very, very, like higher than I would expect a baseball to bounce. So I'm now a ball. Well, look, there are now 10 owners.

of a cyber truck. We have been told. Yeah. They were not allowed to drive their own cyber trucks away. So the event happens, and we can talk about all the specs and whatever. We've got some pricing now for the cyber truck, which is interesting. But the event ends with Elon one by one shaking a person's hand and putting them in a cyber truck in the passenger seat and having them driven away. Did you guys recognize anybody? I saw Alexis O'Hanian was the one person I recognized, the Reddit co-founder and husband of Serrini Williams.

I'm sure there were other people in this world that I should have known. Did you guys see any faces you recognize other than Alexis? No, I didn't catch Alexis. He took a cyber truck? Yeah, Alexis with like big like Wolverine mutton chops got into a cyber truck. It was a cool look. Do you think they were real or do you think he was like in disguise? Sneaky Alexis getting his cyber truck.

Yeah. What I caught was that after the second one, Elon was visibly annoyed that he had to keep shaking people's hands. people wanted hugs. And he said on the camera, well, it's a delivery event because I think he knew that people were watching a live stream of just 10 people

getting their hand shook and driven away. And he said it like three more times. He's like, well, this is what's going to keep happening. And then he tried to end it early. After nine, I think, he was like, well, we're done.

And someone was like, there's one one. And he had to shake one more hand. And these people are getting rushed off stage. I think only one family got like the picture. Yeah. Whatever. It doesn't matter.

It was an, odd event. Wait, did you notice that nobody could figure out how to get into the car? This was my favorite part of the whole thing. That was great. He kept having to tell people, I think almost every single person who got into the car had trouble figuring out how to open the passenger side door to get in. And at first, he was saying things like, oh, you just press the end.

And then they would sort of figure it out. And then by the end, he just sort of reflexively was going, just press the button on the top as they're walking over to the thing and they would press it and get in. And it's just, this just makes me so happy. Like, the Tesla has lots of interesting ideas about cars and just exclusively bad ideas about how to get into them. And it just makes me happy that the cyber truck continues that apace. Yeah. But it was great.

It was great. And hopefully we'll see these actually around. What we did not learn was whether the wiper blade is one blade or two in a line. Shameful. I've received so many photos now. And I think I've been clear about my theory. Yeah. You've assigned someone to go even.

We sent someone to the Tesla show. Andy Hawkins went with our photographer, Amelia Crails. I told Andy that I would pay his bail if he got arrested for lifting the wiper up and he chickened out. Fine. But I've now, people have just reinterpreted what they think I mean by Is It Two Wipers? One person wrote me an email that said, I prefer the Two Wiper Design on a regular card. I was like, that's not. Most people do.

So does the free market. Like, I don't know what to tell you. Wait, but let's just take this back, Nealai. What is your current belief about the cyber truck wiper? Because like you said, we've gotten, I would say, like, the 10 best pictures we've ever gotten of the cyber truck wiper in the last eight days. Most of them, thanks to VirchCats listeners. So thank you to everyone who sent those in.

What is your current belief about the cyber truck wiper? I think it might be one wiper. I think it might be one extremely weird custom wiper blade. I don't know for sure. I've now seen reporting of other people who have seen the truck in a, in YouTube videos, like Tesla fans confidently saying it's two wipers in a line. And I've asked, do you know or do you, do you know? And got no response.

So I don't know. But now that someone owns, I'm sure Alexis has like an NDA about this truck. But I'm definitely going to write him a note. It would be like, can you pick up this whiper? Because no one knows. No one knows. And it is the most enduring mystery about this truck. Like, did Tesla make a very fast triangle?

They did. Is it so fast that it can out-accelerate a Porsche 9-11 while towing a Porsche 9-11? Yes, that's very cool. Is it bulletproof? Who knows? Sort of... The bottom is? We saw someone firing a...

Tommy gun into the side of it during this event. So if you're a 1920s mobster, like, you're good to go. Can it withstand Joe Rogan firing a metal-tipped armor-piercing arrow at the sign? Sure can. We know that answer. How do the wipers work? Remains a deep and defining mystery about this vehicle. We've seen photos, like overhead photos, of extremely muddy and dirty Teslas.

Just a huge... And they're just a huge, dirty spot. I've seen videos of extremely muddy Tesla's parked at hotels where it is obvious the passenger could not see very well and they've reached their hand over the side and wiped off the mud manually. There was an argument in our comments over whether or not the Ford F150 actually wipes proportionally less of the windshield than the cyber truck. And I had to be like, look, here's one thing I know for sure. maybe the cyber truck proportionally mathematically covers more of the windshield than the F-150. No passenger in my F-150 has ever reached over the side and wiped off some more of the windshield. It is just such a bonkers design problem that they've created for themselves.

And now it's here. So eventually the mystery will expire, right? Eventually this will all be over and we'll know it's one wiper or two. I just think it's amazing that for weeks now, we've propelled a number of tech and car enthusiasts into not knowing because no one knows. I'm really excited. We're going to find out. One thing we do know, we do know some pricing. So the base model, which is available in 2025.

Oh. And we should have point out we were at the launch event in 2023. In 2023, the base model in 2025 is $60,990, $61,000. That's significantly more than we thought, right? It was supposed to be $49, so it's crept up about $10,000, $11,000. But inflation has like... Yeah, thanks, Biden. Yeah, thanks Biden.

You know he did it just so he could say inflation. Biden made inflation happen. We'll get to that. That's going to have a 250-mile range, 6.5 seconds, 060. The all-wheel drive model, which should deliver next year. It says delivery in 2024. By the way, big difference between available in 2025 and delivery in 2024. I would tell you, based on what we know of the model three and the cheap model three, just sort of never arriving.

Go for the delivery in 2024 model. This base model rear-wheel drive. Don't buy it. Just buy any other, just be like whatever. I'll buy another truck. And if that thing ever comes out. You just keep leasing trucks until the cyber truck actually comes out and you can buy it. Yeah.

This one is here to anchor the price for. Yeah. One of your three-year periods, it will finally be available. There was a meeting at Tesla where they were deciding what copy to put in the website. And they put delivery in 2024 for the all-wheel drive and for the cyber beast. And then someone was like, what do we say about the base model? And they all looked at each other and brainstormed words, possible in 2025. apparently in 2025.

And they went with available. Seemingly in 2020. So then the all-wheel drive, which I think is the true base model, that's $80,000, $79,9-90. Delivered in 2024, 340 miles of range, 4.1 seconds, 0 to 60. You'll note they don't list the top speed on the illusory base model, but this one has 112 mile an hour top speed, 600 horsepower, 7,400 pound feet of torque and 11,000 pounds of torque. Just big silly truck numbers. Yeah.

And then the cyber beast. Yeah. The beast. That was my brother's high school nickname. He got it as a tattoo. He no longer has that tattoo. Wow. We call him the beast.

Well, now we're going to call him the cyber beast. I'm not doing that. This is $100,000. $99,000,000, slightly lower range. 320 miles, much faster to 1.6 seconds, 130 miles on top speed, 845 horsepower, 10,000 times. a fork. I'm guessing, it's hard to know. I'm guessing that this is the triple motor one. Okay. I'm guessing. I don't know. There are no specs. It doesn't quite tell you what happens.

Oh, do you think it's got one of those like mufflers, the speakers in the mufflers? Well, Tesla's make sounds. You know, they can do it. You can make like the... Yeah, but the Beast has like a special edition one. It's just growling at you. Yeah, the whole time. If I know anything about Tesla, they will make it make growling sounds when it runs. So this is all of the new information that we have. is this much specs and this much pricing. And then Elon being like, it's good at truck stuff,

which they really insisted upon. Right. Right. It's good at work stuff. It's good at towing. At one point, he was like, as you all know,

a tractor pull is the most important metric for a truck. Is it? That's exactly. I was like, is it? Is that? Is it? And they demonstrated that a Tesla can pull a sled

loaded down with weight much farther than other trucks. How was the braking? Like, that's what I care about at a tractor pull. I don't do those. But if I'm pulling a trailer, I do care about, like... If you're pulling an actual trailer. Yeah.

You want good brakes. Yeah. You want it to, like, not have it slam into you and stuff. Well, if I know anything about Tesla's, we're all going to learn something about the Cybertrucks brakes. Regular Tesla is because they use regenerative braking so much to recapture energy. They often have weird brake issues. That's just a thing.

I have two questions about this. this cyber truck being for truck stuff thing that I've been thinking about since they started talking about this. And the first is like, why frame it that way if you're Tesla? On the one hand, there are a lot of people who do not do truck stuff with their trucks who buy trucks anyway. On the other hand, competing for the truck stuff market is probably more complicated than just being like, look, we built this cool new thing with a big truck bed. It's something completely different. It will do like light truck stuff, but not full truck stuff. But fundamentally, like he kept saying over and over their tagline is the future should look like the future, which is very funny

and doesn't mean anything. And he said something to the effect of like this is going to change the look of the road. Like, why not call this a different thing as opposed to talking to a bunch of people who probably don't want a car that looks like this, don't want an electric car right now, and just aren't really the Tesla target market at all. I just don't, I don't get that part of this. Yeah. It's kind of like an El Camino. That's like where it's existing in the truck ecosystem, right? Is that too mean? That's too mean. I mean, it's a truck. It's as big as an F-150. An El Camino is a very different, I think they should bring back the El Camino. If you're listening to this, an EV El-L-Camino Camino, I think, would we welcome on America's roads. Talk about changing the look of the roads.

This, I think, is different. I think if you already make the best-selling car in the country, the Model Y, to move the needle, you've got to make something else that's really popular. Yeah. And the Ford F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America for the last 400 years. Like, the first job that Chat GBT is going to take is the writing the press release that says the Ford F-150 is, once again, America's best-selling vehicle. Like, I've gotten that press release every year that I've been alive. And that's great for Ford.

But it is the biggest car market in the country. It's the most ferocious. It is where the prices have steadily gone up. If you want to sell a $100,000 car, you're selling a truck. That's just the way it's going. You're selling a giant SUV or a pickup truck. Most of the people buying those trucks, like just regular consumers, are they actually buying it to be a truck or are they buying it

to be a truck? You are the one from Texas, Alex. You tell me. I tend to feel it's the other. I know a lot of people who buy trucks because they need them to haul. My friend called me their day and was like, I'm hauling a mare. I'm hauling a bear? Mayor. Mayor.

But Siri thought it was mayor. And I was like, is Eric Adams in your car? What's happening? You need an F-350 to haul Eric Adams. Yeah. He comes with a lot of baggage. Yay! That was good.

Yeah, like, I feel like the majority of people I see who just want a truck, want a truck, just because it's like, it's cool, it's fun. It's neat to drive. And sometimes you're like, well, I got to move a bunch of crap. And now I can. I mean, I own a pickup truck for these reasons. That's why my mom has one. Yeah. The most people need to do is, like, they have a pile of dirt in their backyard that they would like to not be in their backyard anymore.

And that's, like, the most truck stuff, I think a lot of truck owners get into. Yeah. No, when we, in the pandemic, we moved to the country and I had to take my own trash to it once a week. And I convinced myself that owning a pickup truck was the only solution to this problem. I mean. And now I don't, now I don't live in the country. And I still own a pickup truck. And I haven't figured out why.

But I know that we're not getting rid of it. Do you need to do some sod work or something? No, we don't have, no, we live in a very urban area. This is fully incompatible with the area I live in now. And yet we still have it. That said, look, a lot of people like pickup trucks, and you can have a lot of feelings about that. Are they appropriate cars for most places? No.

Depends. Right. Do cars need to be this big? At one point in the cyber truck event, Elon said, if you get into a fight with another car, you will win. And he showed a car crashing into a type of truck. Isn't that bad? And our transportation reporter, Andy Hawkins, who has. been on a tear pointing out that cars are too big.

They're too dangerous. They're dangerous to other pedestrians, especially when they start going this fast. They're incredibly dangerous to other cars. That's not a good thing. Yeah. Like, we used to have a Thunderbird, 66 Thunderbird when I was a kid and stuff. And it was really cool.

And if you got it in an accident, you were totally fine. And now, but like the knowledge was if you got in an accident with a modern car, you would annihilate it. And that's actually horrible. And then you'd also get batted around inside the car and just ping pong. And I'm like, there was not a lot of, a lot of safety discussion at this event. And that was a little concerning for me, given that they have a giant stainless steel box they're putting on the road. Yeah. Like, what are crumple zones like on this thing?

Because everybody else is like, crumple zones, they should do that. And this guy's like, you know what? Small arms fire. In a cyber truck, you crumple everything. They did show some crash testing. We will see, who knows, right? A million who knows questions. but back to David's point, which is why market this thing as a truck. People love them. It's because it's the last market, the last big section in the market to go get. I think they could have picked one or two others, right? Luxury SUVs that are not the Model X, which is a little long in the tooth,

that's a big market that's growing. Who knows if you can build an EV in that form factor. But this, I think they wanted to build this because it is the statement piece. It is the big bold design. They're not counting on it winning, which I think they've now said on some earnings calls. Like the model Y is the volume

Tesla. It's going to keep doing what it's doing. Even as they're slashing prices left and right. This is the one that's going to be the Halo car. Yeah, there's a way to look at this that it's like the successor to the roadster in a pretty real way. That this is like

the car hardly anybody has but reliably turns heads when you see it on the street. And in that sense, I sort of buy it. But I just keep coming back to this idea of like, if you are a person who like uses the hell out of your truck, what on earth would compel you to buy a cyber truck at this moment of time? I just don't know that there are good answers. This is where we have to talk about Elon and Dealbook. We should not dwell on. Yeah. Okay. No, we should. You're right. And David, like, does not want to talk about this. I don't. I super don't. But we should. But you can't actually right now,

divorce Tesla the car company from Elon Musk the man, which is a real problem. So in some academic argument about market share and products, you're like, why would you make this product? Why is your market this way? And you can like come to an answer. And part of the answer right now is why would you buy a car from Elon Musk? Like there's some enormous segment of the population that is just over his antics, over his weird racist and anti-Semitic tweets.

Just over him, right? And what we saw. But to be fair. There's also a chunk of people on the exact opposite end of that spectrum who will follow him to the ends of the earth and buy anything he tells them to buy. Yeah. Like he could have a podcast selling them supplements and they would buy the supplements. I think that group is substantially smaller than it was 24 months ago. I also don't think they have $100,000 to spend the cyber truck.

I just want to be very clear, right? Because the people you need to spend the money are often very educated. And this is like a real problem for Elon. Like he lives in a Twitter bubble and he thinks the Twitter bubble is real. And he thinks the thing that gets him engagement on Twitter will get him engagement in real life. And then he goes to conferences. Like we saw him this week, the deal book conference with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and he delivers what are like bangers on Twitter. It's dead silence.

It was just like Twitter come to life. and then the silence afterwards was so, like every time he'd do a punchline and he'd ape to the camera and be like, eh? And it's just like crickets. Yeah. Our transportation reporter, Umar, pointed out that he would often deliver the punchlines twice. And the second time he got the pity laugh, which is a, if you go watch it again, it's a very real dynamic. I mean, that joke that Twitter, that thing, that Twitter isn't real life, his appearance at Deal Book was just, oh, Twitter's not real life. like fully encapsulated in that event.

And so we should talk about what he said. There's a few things that are just worth pulling apart. The first and most important is that advertisers are leaving Twitter after yet more of Musk's antics and weird anti-Semitism. And Media Matters had a report about ads showing up next to bad content. The advertisers started leaving because that's what advertisers do whenever there are brand safety concerns on any platforms. I would just offer you the example of something called the adpocalypse on YouTube, which was exactly this thing. And Susan Wojcicki, who was the CEO of YouTube at the time, did not tell a bunch of advertisers to go fuck themselves. They like actively tried to fix it.

Elon's response was to look at the deal book audience and say, if you think you can blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. And he was like, Bob, if you're here, meaning Bob Eiger, go fuck yourself. I don't know. Like, again, it's not, I don't sell the ads for us. It's not my side of the house. I'm fairly confident at the people who sold our ads

announced at a conference. Their clients can go fuck themselves. Like, I don't think the advertisers are coming back. And then he follows up with this advertising boycott will kill the company and the world will know it. We will document it. And I think Andrew followed up by asking

isn't that a bad thing? And he's like, Earth will know. Yeah. He really thinks that everyone is going to come out and save X. He was very, that was one thing he was very clear on. He constantly corrected Andrew on calling it X versus Twitter. And he really thinks that like the uproar will save X. And it's like, no, but the uproar caused this to happen.

Everybody's leaving because there was an uproar because everybody's mad at you. Yeah, I mean, we have talked about in the show. There was a time when Twitter was a particular kind of monopoly, and no matter what the company did, and that I will issue our disclaimer again, criticism of Elon Musk, a CEO of Twitter is no way praise for the previous administration of Twitter who did a horrible job running this company. But they had a kind of monopoly where no matter how badly they screwed up, everyone kept coming back to Twitter. And I'm pretty sure Elon thought that he was buying that monopoly. Yes. Because if I was addicted to cigarettes, I'm not saying I ever was, and I bought a cigarette company, I'd be like, this rules. Everyone's addicted to my product just as much as I am.

And then everyone was like, now you are an asshole and we vape now. And that is more or less what has happened to Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, it's wild how even a year ago that seemed like a reasonable bet, right? I think there was a time when it looked like for all of the chaos, and for all of the bad stuff, everybody was just going to kind of hold their nose

and keep using Twitter. Because to some extent, there was nowhere to go. And to a potentially larger extent, the chaos and the fun are so close to each other on Twitter that you can ramp up one and kind of accidentally ramp up the... Like, the mess is the point. And I think, like 12 months ago, I'm sure, on this show, we were having this same debate.

And to me at this point, I think, it feels like a foregone conclusion that at some point or another X is going to go away in a pretty real way. I don't know if the company is going to die just because he has so much money, he could float the thing forever if he felt like it. He's got investors. He has to pay off. Like there's a lot going on there. Yeah. But I also get the increasing sense that he is trying to set it up in such a way that if X goes away, goes out of business,

to clear's bankruptcy, whatever it turns out to be. He wants to be a murder. And he wants to have, that will be his like full proof positive that the world is against him and has gone woke and everything is a disaster. And now he kind of wins coming and going, right? It's either like a business victory or a moral victory or it's kind of a moral victory on either side, no matter what happens. He's trying to set up this thing that I find very strange. I mean, it's not that strange because it's a pretty common playbook now. Like this was the exact same playbook Trump has and continues to have.

And I think it's just a really, it's difficult to counter. And I think that's why it's really, like, useful and deeply irritating. Let me make the distinction for you, a comparison and a distinction. Okay. You're right. It's the same playbook. Yeah. Very different dudes.

The election was lost. Everyone is corrupt. It was stolen from me. The bad forces came and took this away from me. That's voting with your votes. Yep. Very few people get to make that argument when it's voting with your dollars. That's true.

And so Elon is not making the argument that these woke corporations are no longer buying advertising to spite him. And it is very hard to tell anyone, particularly Americans, that they have an obligation to spend money. It is just not a thing you can do in this country. Culturally, just not a thing you can do to say, you have to spend money, advertising dollars on this platform because it's important that this thing exists. And most people are like, what?

You can't tell me how to spend my money. That was like the immediate reaction on social media in our own like. comments and stuff. Everybody's just like, no, it's my money. Oh yeah. No, it's very, like, we talk a lot about free speech on the show. And like when it's anything but money, like everyone immediately sees the gray areas. There's like nuance. When it's like, you have to spend money. People are like, no, I don't. No, no, sir. No, thank you. Yeah. Go fuck yourself. And it's like, you're just watching him run into this, right? Like, he had this argument about Tesla's at the double conference as well, where he was like, I think Andrew asked him,

Are you worried that your tweets and your antics are going to hurt the company? He said, no, we make the best car. If you want the best car, you have to buy a Tesla, which is debatable, but it is a market-driven argument. Right. Right? We're putting our product in the market, and if people are going to look at an evaluation, and maybe they'll evaluate me, but really, they're going to want the best car, and they're going to pick my car. We make the best-selling car.

Okay. You're competing in the market. You're weighing all the variables. With Twitter, it's like, if you don't advertise here, you're destroying America. And it's like, that's just not how that works. That's just a weird argument, man. And to say, like, my product is objectively worse or my product is not what the market demands for me or what the market says it wants and not buying it anyway is the problem.

I don't know, man. Like, it's just odd. And, like, what's going to happen right next to it is Threads is going to light up advertising. We're going to go to a holiday season where TikTok and Amazon and Google and meta are all in Q4. They all have salespeople with real real. relationships, they all have content moderation teams, and they're going to say every dollar you were spending on Twitter, you should spend that dollar here, and we'll treat you nicely. We won't tell you to fuck off.

Yeah. Like, we'll send you some swag, whatever salespeople, but I don't know. I don't know. This works. It's swag. It's just t-shirts from company to company floating around. And poor Linda Yaccarino, like, her job is to run this playbook, and she can't because her boss has just told all these people to F off.

I that will kill the company and this attempt to run the martyr playbook it will fail because you just cannot be a martyr because people didn't buy your shit you you can't be a like a musician and be like people didn't buy my album the world is corrupt like it no I mean a lot of musicians do disagree with that well sure but it never hits it never hits it never works I like this is going to sound like I'm joking but I'm not it's because no one else is trying to trying hard enough. Like, the thing Elon Musk is doing is making it his life's mission to tell everyone how X is the last bastion of free speech. Anything against X is against free speech. Like, Lindy Akarino's tweet said, like, what was it? X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of free speech and Main Street, which, like, what on earth does that mean? Yeah. No idea what that means. It's pure nonsense. But we're now in this position where, like, he, I, by the way, can I just point out, Speech notably free on main streets. You can find the main street in your town and stand on that corner and do whatever you want.

Like that's the whole point. That's the whole idea. Yeah. But you can yell. Cops arrest me. And the cops will be like, no. It depends on how many clothes you're wearing. That's true.

They'll be like, one nipples fine. But he's going to be able to do this whole thing and get to the end of this process and say, by killing X, you have killed free speech. in America. And it's a ridiculous argument, but he has said it so many times that at this point some people are going to believe him. And it's just going to be ridiculous. Like Donald Trump says it about truth social, that it is, and nobody believes him. Like, part of it is, Elon took this thing that was so much bigger and destroyed it so much faster that in a funny way, it's going to make his argument more credible as he does this. Like, he's going to be able to track those two things against each other in a way that is absolutely unrelated to the truth of

the world. But it's it's going to work for him for some people. You've also got Twitter brain saying that. Like I think like maybe maybe people on Twitter like his fans on Twitter will probably believe that. I don't think anybody else out in the general world is going to be like, man, can you believe what happened? He was right. There's something to it. Yeah. Like some stuff he says, sure. I don't think you can make the Donald Trump comparison you made a few minutes ago and then make that argument. I mean, they're both, they both, they both have very passionate groups of followers and those passionate followers are going to follow them regardless of what they say. And they're both really, really good at that. And then they use that very vocal, small group of followers as,

as, as, as, as, as, as, as, as barriers to, to all other discourse and all other, like, actual reality. That's what he's really good at. That's, that's what Trump's really. good at. And it's interesting to watch it first play out in politics and now in tech. Yeah. It's kind of a bummer. But it's also interesting. It is definitely a bummer. I think the world might be better off that Twitter is on the decline as we go into an election year. Just putting that out there. Yeah. I'm not saying that the ends justify the means. Yeah. I think the means have been very

destructive. Lots of people lost our jobs. Like all of it's been bad. Racism and anti-Semitism. Skyrocketing on platform. In no way. am I saying that the means have been appropriate or effective. I just think this argument that he represents free speech while he's suing media matters for criticizing him. Like, this is the stuff that just begins to fall in deaf ears. Yeah. Like over and over and over again. And I think that when we talk about Tesla, like, he has to sell more cars. And his antics with Twitter are actively making people not want to give him money, whether that's advertisers, whether it's car customers, whatever it is, the last monopoly he has is actually SpaceX.

Yeah. And it's a really good one. It's a really good one. Like there's no, the United Launch Alliance is nowhere close to shipping a Ford F150 Lightning. Like, you know, where there's like any other choice. There's no pole star in the rocket business. Yeah. I don't know, Bezos is out here kind of doing stuff.

Blue Origin is like lingering. Bezos can't put a payload in the space. He can put like four rich people into space. But like subspace. It's not even like full space. He's like, my girlfriend's in the sky. Like, that's what he can do. Like, maybe he'll get there.

It's a long way away before SpaceX has real competition. And that's like, you can think about that any way you want. But Tesla has real competition and Twitter has real competition. And in both cases, he's reacting very differently. And I just think as we go into an election year, as things get more heated on social media, his decisions about what he amplifies, what he moderates, all this stuff, and whether not the platform

is a safe place for advertisers because advertisers want brand safety, I think you're right. I think there's not a world in which a year from now, we are talking about a Twitter, the company that exists in the form that even this diminished company exists right now. Yeah.

One more thing I'll say. All right, we've officially talked too much about this, so do this quickly. It's just copyright law. I promise you. It's just me talking about copyright law. So Sorkin asked him about AI. Oh.

Go watch this clip. Add a quick posted tech turret write-up of this clip. It is amazing. Sorgon's like AI. It's a lot of training data. You have a lot of training data. Like these copyright lawsuits might just end it all. And Musk looks at Andrew and says, by the time these lawsuits come to a conclusion, we'll have a digital god.

And you should ask him. And it's like, I know Andrew, you know, like he's a pretty rational guy. And he's just like, what? What are you talking about? He's like, by the time these lawsuits get sorted out, we'll have a digital god and it won't matter. And that was the end. Like, there's nothing more you can do with that statement. Like, he's like, AI will have become a god.

And so copyright lawsuits, who cares? And it's like, dude, those lawsuits are going to take like two or three years? Digital gods right around the corner. He's ascending as we speak. It's. Okay, Nelai, digital god. base model cyber truck, which comes first. That's tough. That's tough. I've got to go digital god on this one.

I mean, honestly. I would agree. And I think if you're working at one of these generative AI companies, you're hoping it's digital god too because these copyright lawsuits are an existential threat. And the cyber truck, you know, it's just a truck. Get them ascending. Get going. Everyone would open the eyes, like furiously ordering a base model cyber truck right now. All right, David's right.

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It feels like we should update everybody and what's going on with Open AI this week. Yeah. It feels like there was a run of instantly obsolete emergency podcasts last week. Including our own. It was a great podcast. It was 24 hours. It was obsolete. We did our best.

I enjoyed listen to it. Yeah. It was fun. People liked it. Instantly obsolete. So here's what we know and we can kind of unpack what we think it means. Because there's some stuff we don't know. What we know is that Sam Altman is officially back as CEO.

He is not on the board of directors. Ilya, the chief scientist, does not appear to be working at opening high again. is not on the new board of directors. Craig Bachman, the president is back as president. The new board of directors has begun. Brett Taylor, the former CEO of Salesforce, on the board, former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. Has interesting ideas about women.

Yes, he thinks are bad at math. I mean, I have said I'm bad at math on this very podcast. That's true. I'm sorry to all other women. There are many women who are excellent at math. I'm okay. Yeah. But Larry's some weird ideas, but he's apparently been in the mix.

as an adult. And then Adam DeAngelo, who was on the old board, one of the guys who voted to remove Sam and Greg in the first place. Yeah. And apparently Adam, they've like, Adam and Sam have like hung out. Cool. So the new board of directors, its job is to make the actual board of directors and fill out this board. And then Microsoft is taking an observer seat. And Microsoft will not tell us who was taking that seat.

We have asked and they said, we're not. We're not going to tell you. it could just be some like guy or girl at Microsoft? I think the only rational answer is Kevin Scott, the head of AI at Microsoft. But for some reason, Microsoft. I don't know this. Yeah. I'm just saying if I had to look at Microsoft.

Maybe they're all on vacation. They haven't decided yet. It's not Phil Spencer. Is it possible? Microsoft doesn't know? I mean, I just keep going back to, so where we left our emergency podcast was we thought that Sam and Greg were Microsoft employees, who were going to. to start a new thing at Microsoft.

And that was the thing that became most instantly obsolete. Yep. Because suddenly it became very clear that actually they were probably going back to OpenAI, and it was never really official. But then Satina della does a round of media interviews in which, I don't want to say it didn't sound like he knew what was going on, but it kind of sounded like he didn't know what was going on. It was, it got to the point where it was moving so fast that it seemed like even he,

the person who was, by all accounts, kind of brokering this whole thing, was caught off guard by some of the turns of it. Yes. I can call her in some there. Okay. I think there was a notion that Nadella was trying to make it happen. I think that ultimately he was involved in some conversations. But we now know that Airbnb CEO of Brian Chesky, who is a friend of Sam, Emmett Shear, who's a former CEO of Twitch, who became the interim CEO of OpenAI for five minutes.

And Larry Summers and some other folks, they were the ones actually really good. mediating this conversation. And Nadella was just like around because he wanted to protect Microsoft's interest. The other thing I know is that that round of media tours is our fault. Straight up. Interesting.

That's our fault. It's because Alex and I reported that Sam and Greg were trying to go back to Open AI after Microsoft had made its big announcement. So Microsoft made its big announcement. They're all going to come work at Microsoft. We're going to start a new AI thing. If the stock goes up, then we report.

maybe this won't happen. And now there's like instability. We got jittery investors. And of course, Nadella goes on CNBC and Bloomberg to say it's all good. Like doesn't matter which way's happening. Microsoft is moving forward with Sam Altman, which was very much his message. And he kept saying, and I thought this was just the funniest thing, he kept saying irrespective of configuration, which just sounds like he was announcing plug and play device drivers.

Yeah, it doesn't matter. Irrespective of how your dip switches are set. Like, we will find this USB device. We will find Simon. He's not wrong. It doesn't matter what order you put the cards in with PCI Express 4. It's like irrespective who can figure it. He just kept saying it.

It was amazing. So I think that was that, right? Like, we had, because of our reporting, we had made it clear, like, this isn't a done deal. And so I think he was compelled to go out and say, yeah, I actually don't know what's going on. Like, it's going to land one way or the other, but our investment in Open AI is safe because either we will take all of these employees

at very high rates, which is a massive investment for Microsoft to make to protect this investment, or we'll find a way to keep working with Open AI. And they asked him, and it was Emily Chang and Bloomberg, asked him, who will be the CEO of Open AI tomorrow? And he looked exhausted.

And he said, that's for the board to decide. I don't know, man. Oh, he also did. He also did on with Carous Swisher. And it was, it was, you know, I interviewed a lot of CEOs. Sometimes CEOs just have a thing they're going to say, and he said the thing in all three places. Yeah.

But I know that what was happening there was the market thought that this thing was a done deal, and it became quickly apparent that it was actually not a done deal and actively trying to go the other way. Which it did. Which in the end it did. And Microsoft seems very happy. Sam notably, like, tweeted my thanks to Satya for his support. So I think everybody wanted this to happen. And I think at one point, Nadella said to Kara or I'm like, surprises are bad. Like, we don't want to be surprised like this anyway.

We will fix the governance of the company. So you've got the board observer seat, which again, I don't know who it will be. Yeah. But it just feels like you want that to be Kevin Scott, your head of AI, or maybe Brad Smith or their chief legal officer. like that's what you want in that spot. Just some PM. But I don't think you get, I personally do not think you put Sacha there.

Yeah. I think you need a little bit of distance from the company to claim that you're not running the company. So if you put your famous high profile CEO on this board, now you've just got another another part of Microsoft, which I think Microsoft wants to keep a little bit of that distance. That's what we know so far. Then there's this weirdness where Alex Heath got a quick interview with Sam Altman and Miram Marotti, the former CTO who was the first interim CEO who is now the CTO again. You did it.

Yes, nailed it. Just so you know, that was like the third take of that. And, you know, Alex is like, what should I ask? It was like, only one question. Like, why did you get fired? And Alex asked this question five times in a row, and there's no answer to this question. That continues to kind of baffle me. I could understand why the board wasn't saying anything, but like, why isn't he?

I don't know. We do know that the board has been talking. I think Helen Toner, who's a member of the board, has been talking to folks saying, like, we feel confident in our decision, all the stuff. It is abundantly clear that these ideas that it was about safety or that there was a new model that could destroy the world or do basic math. It's one or the other. It's do basic math or destroy the world. Same thing. But, like, the notion that that spooked the board and they had to get rid of Sam so they could put in their own person, none of that appears to be true.

Like, no one on either side is saying this was the reason. It really comes down to interpersonal conflicts between a group of four people and Sam Altman. And I think the board basically thinks, like, they couldn't control him. And then whenever they tried, he would do something to get out of it. Yeah. And there will be an investigation, we are told. I think the results of that investigation should likely be made public, given the dollar amounts and investors and employees involved. Oh, we're going to find out anyway.

Even for opening eyes employees, you need to make that investigation. Why did this happen to us, right? Yeah. I think there's skittishness on both sides there, and we'll see. And that's another job of this new board run by Brett Taylor is to run that investigation. I think my question is if it was something like we're upset that he's moving too fast, he's being too commercial, which seemed from the beginning to be one of the issues there, particularly like his conflict with Helen Toner, was particularly about that and how she'd written a paper about that.

If that's the case and they come back and they say, oh, we found that was the reason why. What do they do? Because they now have a board that is very much for commercialization. They now have their biggest investor in an observer's seat on that board. And the guy who was doing all of that that they had conflict with is now still CEO of the company. Like what happens then? Well, they're gone. They've wiped their hands of this.

By the way, that Helen Turner paper is worth reading. we'll link to it in the show notes or something. The part that everyone is up with it, apparently Sam was up in arms about is she just points out that the industry had been very cautious until the success of chat GPT and then everyone started moving really fast.

And they had abandoned the caution in favor of whatever commercial outcomes they could see. Which is exactly what happened. Which is exactly what happened. And it's actually really hard to read a criticism of Open AI into it. She's just like compare and contrast. Like we had, you know, they're very famously anthropics split from open AI over safety concerns.

And they're like, they waited, but everyone else rushed. Yeah. After we had our success. That's true. Right. Well, and what's funny about that is there's a version of that story that I think is true that says open AI didn't do that on purpose. Right. Like, I think what Microsoft did with Bing was just ruthlessly capitalistic, right?

They just said, like, I got to figure out how to make money off of that. this, and that's what they did. But like today, Thursday, as we're recording this, is the one-year anniversary of the chat GPT launch. And like, the thing we know beyond a shadow of a doubt at this point is that no one at OpenAI or Microsoft or anywhere launched Chat-GPT thinking it was going to take over the world. There was this like long-term plan that everybody was on.

And it's funny, if you rewind back to pre-Chat-GPT and sort of asked a bunch of people at these companies what they thought. the future of AI was going to look like. They all would have been more or less right, just wrong about the timeline. And then chat GPT happened and everybody went, oh, crap, this stuff that we've been working on in the background towards this interesting long future, we have to do today. And that's what Google did? It was like the, what was it, the code red within Google that Sergey and Larry put up.

Microsoft starts running. Everybody just starts running. And it did it. It lit this fire in the tech industry that took it down a bunch of how do we make money off of AI questions from people who had previously been saying, we have to do this carefully, we have to be thoughtful about this, we have to be smart about this. But it all happened by accident. It's the weirdest sort of twist of fate that it wasn't like somebody launched the revolutionary product knowing it was the revolutionary product and like turned everything on its

head. It's just like somebody just like farted out a blog post and then the world changed. Like it's nuts. Well, yeah, that's the chat GPT sign of it, which is. You should read David's piece. It's the fastest growing consumer product. We should reckon with it. But, you know, Satchanedelle did look me in the eye and say, I want Google to know I made them dance. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Like, he was headed that way regardless, right? Yeah, but I don't think he would have gotten there in February of 2023. Right. I don't know. He did make the giant investment, right? Yeah. It's hard to know, but, like, Microsoft was doing co-pilots already. They had started doing this stuff in a very small way.

Yeah. And I think the part of it where the stack overflows of the world were just overrun with, oh, this is better if I just asking AI to do it. And that's a real thing that's going on. Yeah. Maybe that would have happened anyway, but the sort of like, I'll have it write my resume for me. Like, just sort of like whatever's going to go on with the LLMs. And you shouldn't, by the way, have it write your resume. Well, no, it'll hallucinate some great stuff. That's, if it's going to be fact checked, you shouldn't. If it's not, do it. Yeah. It makes me look good. And that's actually the part of your piece, David, that I think is the most resonant

for me, which is now we have these tools and everyone thinks they're going to change everything. I am personally still stuck at, yeah, but they're not very good yet. Like, they're good at some things. Programming a computer. Everyone constantly telling me they're great at this in a way that is revolutionary. And that's because it's programming computers effectively just delivering instructions, right? Right. Make me a set of instructions such that some input in the computer generates some output. Yeah, that's a deterministic task. You can like set an AI to it. Many people have done it before. The internet is full of this knowledge. You can get there. Write me a new idea, something like inherently creative. I still think they fall down all the time. These non-deterministic tasks, they fall down all the time.

Yeah. And I continue to point out, all these companies are one copyright decision away from, from, just not existing. And that's, and like no one, it's just like, well, let's just not look at that time bomb. Yeah. That seems, yeah. Yeah, I love it. As a person who loves to do that sort of thing, just be like, oh, I'm not going to worry about that for now.

Put my blinders on and go straight ahead. Yeah, that car's on fire. It's fine. Don't worry about it. There was a great, Cori Docterot, the author and EFF activist who's been on the show a few times, wrote a really good thing this week that I'll try and make sure we link to in the show It's basically saying he quoted this guy named Lee Vintel who talks about this concept of Critahype, which is basically taking the sort of truths that the most optimistic people who are

usually the people making products, believing that they're going to be right and then covering it with Hellscapes is the way he describes it. So it's like to talk about this world in which AI takes over everything and ruins everything assumes that AI is going to get as good as some of these people say that it is, which they have a massive vested interest in doing. And so, like, it's the digital god thing, right? Like, just to talk about whether we think a digital god is a good idea or a bad idea is to assume that it's going to happen.

And there is just no evidence in the AI that exists now that we are headed toward that place anytime soon. And this is like what Open AI talks about with the artificial general intelligence and AGI and this idea that like we're on the brink of something that is like you're talking about, Neelai, creative and thoughtful and human and better than us at everything. And there's just no reason to believe right now in the world that we live in that that that's actually coming. And it's like, Corey's piece was very smart. And I've been thinking about it all week because it's like we have to criticize the thing that exists, not the thing that the people who make the thing exists promise us is coming someday soon. Well, and I think what's really interesting about that is it ignores the stuff that it, the harms and stuff, like the actual concern you should have right now about it, which is the stuff we talk about all the time, how it's destroying the internet. Like, that's happening right now.

Yeah. This second somebody is having it write garbage and publishing it on a website. And that gets totally ignored to talk about. This week, Sports Illustrated got caught publishing AI generated SEO affiliate garbage. Then they took it down. and they blamed a company. And, like, we didn't know they were using AI. And then somebody looked up the company on LinkedIn.

And, like, literally the company is described as using AI and ML to do SEO affiliate cards. And it's like, I don't know, man. I think Advon Commerce, the AIML commerce company was probably going to use AI and ML to make your commerce articles. They actually asked AI what company should be higher for this. It was the most circular excuse in the world. But that's happening. Like story media institutions are chasing just the bottom of the barrel SEO content in a way that will pollute Google and well in the internet. Lots of sort of just like mid-level creatives are going to lose their jobs over this stuff at the place it is now.

David, your point about we can't criticize what's to come is like our oldest rule in reviewing products is you review what comes in the box. Yeah. And when the company promises a software update will fix it, you just, we always say, all right, let us know. comes out. We're not going to review this promise against the promise. Sorry. So harsh. Sorry.

We are. Sorry. They just put out a next product. Yeah. That's a great example, actually. Yeah. We're like, we will not review a product against the promise of a software update. And Opel's like, here's a new camera.

No software updates for you. Oh. That's brutal. Yeah. And so here we are with the LLMs and some of them are good and some of their bad. And like, they all have different capabilities. But GBT. for right now is not a threat

to the world. Yeah. I agree with that. Just a threat to bloggers. It's just a threat to the people who make affiliate commerce links. And our ability to do functional Google searches. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to see it like in YouTube and we're seeing into those other mediums too, right? Like just the ability

to make, to generate mass amounts of garbage into a world that is largely driven by algorithms that are predisposed to that garbage because they're algorithms and they think like computers, just the way this garbage is which being generated does. Like, it's just this weird, gross snake eating its tail.

And we all have to sit in it. I need to. I'm assigning myself a story. So I have this idea that you can make a list of all of Google's platforms. And then you can make a list of all of Google's tools. And you can just draw a line from one to the other and be like, here's the problem. You know, like, you can draw a line from the pixel camera using AI to do photos to YouTube. It has a rule that's like you need to.

to disclose the AI in the video. And you're like, well, have you guys talked? And they're like, no. That should be the headline. This is a column that you just described in the line called, have these guys talked? And it's just literally drawing a line between any Google platform and any Google tool. Like Google Docs now lets you do AI generated thing. And it's like, you go talk to the search team.

And they're like, do you know about this? And they're like, huh. It's just like a big circle. And like every part of Google has this problem, which I think is utterly fascinating. And that's just one company that runs both platforms. Another one, just this last week, the Bard team extended Bard such that you can just give it a YouTube video and it will summarize it for you. You know, like if it's a recipe, it'll just like pull out the recipe. Does the creator get a YouTube view when that happens?

Does YouTube know about that? Does YouTube know? that's weird right like the YouTube is an economy like it is the gold standard in creator platforms for people can make a living and Bard's like

what if we just pull everything off of it and summarize the videos for people little 12 year olds watching like reading Mr. Beast videos in Bard now he needs to start feeding Mr. Beast videos to Bard and Bard be like this is not a good use of your time Google summarized this video

No Eli you just described a decoder series and you know how much I love talking about. Have you guys talked? You just bring two people in and you just say, have you guys talked? And then you just leave. And it's like a big brother style. We just record them with security cameras for an hour. And that's decoder. It's perfect. It's just us making different parts of Google talk to each other. You could run that show for a decade. This is one of my favorite stories about early verge, just like us learning how to do reporting. how everything worked. And remember early Verges, like early in life cycle all these companies too. Yeah.

So there was just one time where basically we told Google that they had scheduled two events on the same day. Because they didn't talk. And we didn't, we were babies.

So we were like, did you, do you have the same? Is that okay? Is that how we normally? And they're like, no, we have to talk to each other. I'm like, are we in trouble?

But no, they were just Google so big and sprawling that the two teams hadn't talked, and they had both scheduled events in the same day. Oh, boy. And it was us. We had told them. Yeah. It was very good. Have you talked the extension of Decoder coming soon to a podcast player?

All right, we should take a break. We're going to come back. We'll do a lightning round. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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By not sponsoring the Lightning Round, you are blackmailing. Stop it. And I, you know, the woke mind virus is overtaken America, and that's why the Lightning Round does not have a sponsor. And that's the first cast. possibly forever There you got All right Alex What's you got

Okay so I'm going to continue our theme Of talking a little bit of boardroom Boardroom drama That's David's favorite Yeah David Get excited Okay but this one is fun

Because it's Disney And what actually happens here Could really affect Disney Because So there's an activist of Esther His name is Nelson Peltz And he is really good friends With Ike Pearlmutter

And Ike Pearlmutter used to run Marvel back in the day. He got fired earlier this year. Another guy with ideas. And boy, does he have a lot of ideas? He was like, you know what? We don't need women. Not a fan of them.

Yeah. Yeah, you know, he didn't want a Black Widow movie. He didn't want a Captain Marvel movie, a Black Panther movie. He didn't think any of it works. He's like, you know what you need? You need a bunch of scrapping young white guys out there doing stuff. I feel like we're learning something else about Ike Promoter. We are, yeah.

Interesting. But they're very good friends. Ike was fired earlier this year from Disney by Bob Iger, they are not friends. Nelson Peltz is an activist investor trying to get two board seats on the Disney board because he's mad at everything. And the Disney board is like, you just want to bring Ike back. And all the voting shares you're using, like 78% of the voting shares you're using,

are Ike's voting shares? No. So there's a little fight there. And right now there is ammunition. There's a lot of garbage. Bob Iger was also at that deal book conference. And he talked about it. And he was like, yeah, Captain Marvel didn't work because we didn't have.

have enough, like, essentially adults in the room. We didn't have enough executives watching over this. We've been making bad films. And in the case of the Marvels, it was really interesting to hear him say that, given that there were a lot of reasons that movie struggled. Yeah. Box offices down across the board this year. There was a strike.

Yeah, they couldn't promote the movie. They just straight up couldn't promote the movie. And part of it was like, yeah, it had a mess. It was a messy production. They did have to go back and do a whole bunch of reshoots. and the back third of the film is like not as good as the first two parts. That's brutal. Like, it is true.

But also, they've been releasing a ton of garbage for the last few years. The fatigue is set in. And so for them to be like, oh, that one just didn't work because we didn't try hard enough was really interesting for him to say. And so now he's like, don't worry, we're going to try harder. And that's not what you need to be saying when you've got activist investors breathing down your neck, particularly activist investors who think it's a lot. particularly activist investors who think it's a mistake that you've made all these films starring women.

And Peltz is in the mix, right, with Cheapak. So you got your duel in Bobbs. Yeah, a lot of box. So you had Bob Iger, he ends up to Chappac. The pandemic hits. He doesn't like how Chappek is running anything. He brings himself back. Brings himself back.

But somewhere in there, right, Nelson Peltz shows up and causes trouble for Disney along the way. Yeah, because he's been friends with Ike for the way. this whole time. So he's been really supportive of Ike and and supportive of like kind of Ike's way of doing things. And so he's really wanted a seat on that board. He's wanted to maintain a seat on that board. And he and Iger don't like each other. And we saw that at the deal book conference. Andrew was that kept asking him, tell me about pelts. What's going on with him? He's like, don't worry about it. It's fine. Really blowing him off there. So it's going to be really

interesting to see how they go about this. And I think it is very concerning when you have the largest media company in the world. And you've got these guys who have a really strong reputation for not liking half of the population of the world, wanting to go back and wanting a seat at the table to dictate kind of how that company operates and including the kind of films they make. For me, as a woman, not my favorite thing to see, but it's happening. So we'll see how it lands. It's also true, I mean, I agree with you, but it is also true Disney is not doing great.

That's true, too. Yeah, Disney is not doing great. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Iger likes to put everything on JPEC, and I think that's stupid. Yeah, that clock has run out. He's been back long enough. Yeah, he's been back way too long for that. I think there is a lot of problems with that company, and there's a lot of different reasons for that.

I saw a really great story the other day about how Disney Plus was kind of like antithetical to the way that Disney has always done business, because Disney's business has always been circular. Every single thing builds, gets you to go buy something else that Disney makes, right? and when you put suddenly everything in one spot, why are you going anywhere else? It's a great deal for us, the consumer. It's a terrible deal for Disney. And Disney's got to figure out a weight out of that. And their ideas, okay, well, we're going to put more into our parks.

We're going to make them bigger. We're going to make them more fun. Make them more accessible. They changed a whole lot of the rules there to, like, kind of get all those park goers happy again because that was one of the things JPEC really screwed up. Was he pissed off all of those? He raised all the prices. Yeah, he raised the prices.

He changed, like, how you can. get into the park and stuff like that. So like, Iger's got a lot of work to do, and I don't think he's moving fast enough. Interesting. I think he's got to move a lot faster, and he's also got to start, like, letting off the reins. And more importantly, like, trusting your directors, trusting your writers, trusting the creatives you hire to do their job, the fact that he was like, oh, yeah, we just didn't have enough executives watching over the marvels is a wild statement to make because one of the big reasons that Marvel has been struggling is that there's one guy at the top, Kevin Fagie, and he stretched too thin. And he was like kind of, he had a mightest touch.

He could fix anything. And he can't fix everything. Like, delegate my man. So there needs to be a lot more delegation over there. Can I tell you a story about Decoder really quickly? I had IBM's head of quantum computing on Decoder this week. I don't know when that episode, but it's coming on. At the very end, I was like, what do you think of those Antmen movies?

And it was just like, ugh. I just letting you know. Brutal. They should get Jerry Chow watching this. I will say as a person who was just a Disney World. They have not lowered the prices, my friend. I bought a $35 bubble wand. And boy, did we not get $35 in value out of that thing.

Not even a little bit. No. Also, Disney World, very entertaining because, you know, people from all walks of life are there. Yeah. And there's a monorail. which is like public transit and washing big people in MAGA hats, like happily ride the train is like very entertaining. And you're like, wait, this train doesn't work nearly as well as it should.

It's like really doesn't. It's really not great. I would describe it. My sister is like a Disney adult and she can like work the app and she knows the vocabulary to get you in the lines. You were in all your lines and lightning lanes. It was incredible. No adult should ever say to another adult, have you checked your My Genie Plus? That should not happen.

But it does when you go to this. But you're like, oh, this is the most like incredible technocratic neoliberal bureaucracy in the world. Like if you can work the system, the world is your oyster. There's a sheen of light corruption that makes everything a little exciting. Yeah. You're like, is Bradley Cooper here? Does he have to stand in mind? Did you get the little band?

Oh, we had the band. The band flew off my wrist during Guardians of the Galaxy and I caught it. That is, by the way, one of the best roller coasters ever been in my entire life. Incredible. And then somehow I lost the band during Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a slow boat ride. No idea. No idea. Not the one where you're doing like a spiral.

No idea how I lost it on that one. And I caught it during Guardians. Very cool. Loved every minute of it. But Max was happy. Do they make you a guardian if you catch it in midair? They're just like Chris Pratt comes out and he's like, you did it. No, that's how the ride starts is your guardian, basically.

No. Right kind of. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's a ride. There's a story. The thing is the story comes to its conclusion during the roller coaster while everyone is screaming and they're blasting 80s music at you. So I have no idea what, I wrote it twice.

And I'm like, what happens? The first time I wrote it, I was maybe really enjoying. It was, you know, it was kind of an April 20th kind of day for me. Would you say you were in the magic kingdom? I was in the magic kingdom. And I didn't enjoy it very much because I spent the entire time being like, What if my glasses fly off? I just spent like this, and the video of me was just holding my glass.

Just be more careful. Yeah. Second time I just didn't wear it. It was good. And the Toronto Riders was good. It was fun, but you're just like in this place. We're like, oh, this is what you want. The taxes are very high.

The services are available, but somewhat mediocre. Sometimes they just carry a man out. And if you can work this app, you can get health insurance. Yes. Like Disney World. It's really good health insurance. I was not the most fun at Disney World. Everyone's like, yes, we understand that you have ideas about politics.

But it was very fun. We had a good time. And the Enterprise Wi-Fi Network is W-Land-TWDC, which it has been, apparently, for over a decade. What? It's like this at every Disney property, and Disney employees were posting on threads at me that it is so cumbersome that they install network devices in their house so they can get on the corporate network instead of using the BPN. All very good. I like to think that Disney World has so many devices on the Wi-Fi. They can never change the network name.

Like, they have to walk around the entire park, like hitting the reset button. All very good. All right, David, what's your lighting round? That was mine. I'll just do that one. Deli went to Disney World. Yeah. Very, very, I just like, I'm now imagining Neelai with like his 16-inch MacBook Pro,

just like sitting in line for a roller coaster. Waiting for Open AI news to break. A real thing that I thought was going to happen. Yeah. Have you ever been on the phone with a source? Like, is this going to get wrapped up tonight? Because I have to go to Disney World in a morning. It's a cool line, honestly.

I support it. Mine is just to, as I occasionally do, implore every website and app and person on earth to do your version of Spotify Rapt. So Spotify Rapt came out this week. This is the week of like everybody gets their year in review stuff. YouTube music did it. Apple Music did it. has Reddit's come out yet? Reddit does one every year. I haven't seen mine. I don't know if it came yet. Spotify is out. Pocketcasts. My podcast app did one. All kinds of stuff coming out.

This is my favorite genre of thing on the internet. I saw somebody who just posted one that was like a screenshot of their Chrome history, just showing all the web pages they go to the most. I was like, my browser should have this. I want my email to show me, like who I email the most. Should your browser have this? It does. Like it or not? Like it has that information. It might as well show it to me in a funny way. I just think everything that exists, like, Mike, I want, like, Google Calendar wrapped at the end of every year, just to tell me, like. That's so brutal. That's depressing. I don't want that. Like, David, who have you talked shit about in Slack most this year? Oh, Slack should do that. That would actually be great. This is what I'm saying. Didn't Slack used to?

I feel like there used to be a way where you could just see, like, who talks the most. No, this is like a weird enterprise privacy nightmare debate where like your Slack administrator could see who the biggest user of Slack was in your organization. Oh, yeah. And people are like, this is a privacy violation. And I was like, no, you work at a company, bro. You don't have privacy in the company stuff. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no.

Yeah. Shut it down. All right. My last, my real lightning round item, which is not about my trip to Disney World. Technocratic, neoliberal nightmare of Disney World. No, it's the Epic versus Google trial. So the Epic versus Google NHS trials ongoing. That, again, is about Fortnite and billing on app stores.

This is the sequel to the Apple One. We mentioned this during the, while we were covering the Apple One, I think we've mentioned the show since then. Apple case was very straightforward. Apple doesn't allow other app stores. They require you to use their billing system, this whole thing. There's no emails except Apple executives being like, this is stupid, go away. And so like Epic had to concoct this entire case about Apple and its monopoly and lock-in.

And you can believe it or not. Google is an ecosystem provider. They have lots and lots of deals. They have lots and lots of relationships. They have hardware vendors. They have hardware vendors trying to differentiate their products. There is a ton of evidence about how Google makes deals in this case. and how people try to make deals with Google.

And it is not pretty. And I think that's like the thing that we have learned throughout this entire case and throughout the DOJ case with Google is Google does a lot of dealmaking. So the one that came out this week that is, I think, really, really revealing is Activision tried to start its own mobile game app store on Android. So Activision proposed with Epic and with the company that makes Clash of Clan super solid. they would start their own app store on Android. It would be Steam for Android.

And they called this Project Boston, and they were running it with one track, and they had another track with Google that was just give us $100 million and we won't do this. And Google just paid them the money because they don't want competition for their app store on Android. And you can link our story.

There's all these emails about it and whether they're really going to do it and whether Google is really afraid of it. But Google paid them the money to foreclose the competition. And that there's just a lot of, lot of that in this case because there are so many companies in the Android ecosystem that are trying to get leverage over one another and Google sitting in the middle of it.

You can put that right next to, hey, you know, Apple Maps is pretty good lately. Right? Like Apple had to build a competitor to Google Maps for all kinds of reasons, and they made a really good one, and there's a lot of conversation lately about how it is superior to Google Maps. And I think if you live in the right places, particularly for driving directions for turn by turn, vastly superior. to Google Maps. I agree. It's really good now. Okay, well, if Apple wants to make a competitor

a Google product, they can definitely do it. And they definitely have the install base to do it. And Google does not want that to happen to search and pays Apple the money. And you can put that right next to, Blizzard said, we might start an app store, and Google said, we don't want you to do that. Pay them the money. And we're just, I don't want to tell you.

Like, I think most people think that the world they live in is not done by handshakes in backroom deals. Or maybe they do now. Maybe Gen Z, is wiser to the ways of the internet. They all watch Hamilton, so they all know. Is it Hamilton or suits? Both.

If you want to know how the world works, two shows. Those are the two shows. Core to the, you're under. No, I think there has been, at least on the internet, the idea that the internet is democratizing, that the distribution is free and open and equal. And then you get to these app stores, and you get to these mobile platforms,

and that has instantly broken down. Yeah. So read that on the site. It is really, really illuminating coverage about how all this stuff works. And then when the trial is over, we will have Sean on and he can synthesize what he's learned. But it is like gleeful coverage from the courtroom from Sean. Oh, yeah. This one, the USV Google was so locked down and so redacted and so carefully in everything that anyone revealed about anything.

This one is the opposite. They're just like everybody is just throwing signed contracts like into the wind every morning in the courtroom. Like you really get the sense that the discovery process here has been a joyful one for a lot of people. Yeah. I'm really just bummed. I haven't come up with an idea that Google will pay me not to do. Honestly, it really feels like if you just go, like, park your car in Google's parking lot and just start going, maybe I'll open an app store. Someone will just like fire a money cannon into your car. Yeah.

Let's head out. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's interesting about that point, David, is, you know, US v. Google, the United States government, doing an antitrust case. They need to be buttoned up. They were in a very buttoned up courtroom. The United States government right now does not have a great history of pursuing these cases or a lot of pressure on them. They're making a very complicated argument about search lock in.

Epic is just like, F, go fuck yourselves. Straight up. That is Tim Sweeney's attitude towards others. This is a moral mission for him as well as an economic one. And then you have the ecosystem that is never happy with these players and a constant looking for every little ounce of leverage. And you're right, the tenor of this case is very different because Epic has already gone. They have nothing to lose. Right.

You get the definite sense that even if they lose, they're prepared to lose having landed a bunch of punches against Google. And that is pretty clearly the tactic here. And so far, I think it's working. Like, I don't know if they'll win the case, but boy, have they made Google look bad over and over and over here. Yeah. What's interesting to me, just as a person who looks at how our website is doing, is when they are up against Apple, like, every one of our stories was a hit. And here we're with Google, like, with the evidence that the store, like, the shenanigans afoot. And we have to sell the stories a little bit harder.

And I think that just speaks to honestly how many people have iPhones versus how many people care about how Android works, but I will remind you that Android is the most used operating system on the planet and how Google manages it affects basically how computing is done. Yep. And so, like, all these little shenanigans have, like, massive downstream effects across the entire Android ecosystem. Because if Google stops making money in this way, their case for making Android the open source operating system goes a little sideways.

So, I'm, like I said, you should read Sean Scott. It is very fun. I enjoy catching up on it every day. This is why we invented story streams with like the quick, like, it's all happening. And then we will have Sean at the conclusion on trial, which will be soon, I think, we'll have Sean on to talk about it. Yeah. All right. We have gone long.

I got to go through rocks at a triangle. But not too hard. Neely's about to get arrested. I'm watching the social video team make comparison videos of the metal ball versus the baseball. It's very good. Go on TikTok and look at that. Thank you to everybody who's been posting about your Spotify wrapped with the Vergecast and with Decoder. We love it.

We've also got a lot of emails from people telling us about Spotify Rapp, which is great. We love it. Our hotline episode next week, David's buying advice. Yeah, we're doing a whole, we got a bunch of questions kind of organically from people who are like, I'm trying to figure out what to buy, or I'm trying to buy this thing or this thing. So we're going to do a whole bunch of those. We're just going to grab a bunch of folks and sit around and try to help people buy stuff for the holidays.

So if you have holiday questions, email us, Virgcast atavorgia.com, which you can do about all of your feelings in general, but also buying. questions or call the hotline 866 verge 11 send them all in we're going to answer a whole bunch of them on next month they show well all right that's it that's it that's a rich cast back home and that's a wrap for verge cast this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866 verge one one the verge is a production of the verge and box media podcast network the show is produced by andrew merino and leom james this episode was mixed and edited by zander adams and that's it we'll see you next week