The Vergecast - The future of EV charging and Hollywood on strike

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss all the gadget news from this week, the state of EV charging for non-Tesla owners, the unions of Hollywood on strike, and much more. Further reading: Beats Studio Pro headphones review: leaning on a legacy The future of EV charging for non-Tesla owners may not be as bad as it looks HP Spectre x360 13.5 vs. Dell XPS 13: which flagship should you buy? Motorola G Stylus 5G (2023) review: a good phone spoiled by bloatware  Framework Laptop 16: our exclusive hands-on OnePlus 12 leaks show a bigger battery and faster charging Logitech buys Stream Deck rival Loupedeck   Tesla reveals Cybertruck size specs as it builds release candidates Meta is giving away its AI tech to try to beat ChatGPT Apple is testing an AI chatbot but has no idea what to do with it The unions of Hollywood are trying to save it from itself Bob Iger’s big ideas for Disney involve cost-cutting at Marvel A real-time reaction to the actors’ strike. TREE LAW Vox Media drops its own CMS Netflix reportedly has around 1.5 million subscribers on its ad tier in the US. The Biden administration is tackling smart devices with a new cybersecurity label  Here’s why 70mm IMAX movies like Oppenheimer need a Palm Pilot to work Your Starbucks order is not ready Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Vergecast, flagship podcast of windshield wipers. Intrammitten, fast speed, the little nozzles that spray. We're going to get into it all on this episode of the Vergecast.

They work. In every episode of the Vergecast from here on out. We're pivoting, guys. We're actually pivoting. What's your favorite brand of washer fluid? Call the hotline. Is it just Windex? Does anyone have a favorite brand?

Actually, I'm dying to know. Is there an iOS versus Android of windshield washer fluid? A hundred percent there is. A hundred percent. Email us. No, no, no. Sorry.

Just email Neli specifically. Please don't email any of the rest of us. The Rain X fan boys are coming. Hi, I'm your friend, Neli. That's David Pierce. Hi. Alex Kranz is here. I'm also here.

I think just windex is fine. Like, I think you just pour that in. It's okay. Just raw windex? Just raw windex. Just that raw? I feel like a mechanic once told me never do that. But I also think he's not here and I don't remember his name.

So it's probably fine. Yeah. If you forget a guy, what he said is definitely wrong. Yeah, that's how this works. All right. Well, go ahead and pour some raw windex into your windshield foot. I'm just dying to, like, on Instagram threads the other day, you know, the platform is rife with engagement bait.

Adam Masseri straight up was like, Android is better than iOS in response to Marquez Brownlee. A million responses. I put that in a quick post on our site just to make a joke about Instagram engagement bait being out of control. And then that post got 40 comments of a lot. Android versus iOS. It's just the easiest thing we can do. I'll say it right now.

Android's better than iOS. Leave a comment on YouTube. Boost that algo. It works every time. I got you. I'm just saying, does that exist for windshield washer fluid? It has to. Because it exists for things like blenders.

You know what exists? Shark versus Vitamix. You can get into it. It exists for like car leather cleaner. Meguiars versus something else. I maybe follow some car detailers. it's like ASMR for me it's just like oh that's so soothing

and they're like this is the one you want to use somebody tells you another one it's garbage Alex are you talking about the videos where they do the like super cut of them just like wiping all the dirt off the cars you know those are always like six different cars that they do that too and it's just a full lie no this is always one car no you're just being lied to is the thing Alex I'm really sorry to be the one

to break this to you David is finally like it's all the same both operating systems are the same here's what I want I want to list of vitriolic consumer product debates. So you got your Xbox versus PlayStation. That's number one. Then I think number two is iOS versus Android.

I think Windows versus Mac is actually falling off. I think that's like no one cares anymore. Like you walk into a room full of people using Windows. I have a Mac and everyone's like, we know. Yeah, they all just sort of shook hands and walked away. Like I think that's basically over. Yeah. Like they all have iPhones.

Yeah. But I think Miele versus Dyson, I would say that's probably one. Oh, that's good. I feel like people have strong opinions about which $600 vacuum cleaner they came for. And all of them are far out done by sharks. I'm just letting you know. All right, that's enough of this. It's the Linux.

But I'm dying to know. This is your engagement bait homework. Leave it in a comment on the post on the site or on YouTube or wherever you're listening. What's your number one silly consumer product battle? And you can't pick iOS versus Android. You can't pick Xbox versus PlayStation or Windows versus Mac. We know. We know.

No, Marvel versus DC. Is that even a fight? No. It's just Marvel versus Zach Snyder's box of movie. Supergirl's cool. I got a reply on threads. It was like, dude really said 18T screwed up its network to make Grayscale Justice League. And I was like, sure did.

Yep. 100% said that. No correct. It's fully stand by it. It's true, too. It's still true. Liam, our producer, has been begging for us to do a segment called Verge Debates, where we just put people on different sides of an argument and make them fight to the death about different things.

So if everyone sends us enough of these holy wars in the tech industry to fight about, Liam's going to get to launch this show and he's going to be so happy. So please send them to us. Furchcastleverge.com. Send them all. We will fight about them. Yeah. Or in the YouTube comments or on the site. You already have the argument. Send it to five of your friends and have them comment too. Let's make this go viral. You know, like, ring that bell. Is that what the kids say?

That's horrible. All right, there's a lot to talk about this week, starting, of course, with the latest photo of the CyberTruck Wiper, which we'll get to. That's how this all started. There's new Beat Studio Pro headphones that are really interesting, actually. There's some charging news from Tesla, really interesting laptop comparisons from Monica that we should get into. Then Hollywood's on strike. Yep. No movies.

Because of streaming services. It just says tree law in all capital letters on the rundown here. to know what that means. Netflix had earnings, then we got a lightning around. So start with some gadgets. It's been a minute since we just sat in gadget world. What do you think? Start with the beats.

Let's do beats first, yeah. I'm fascinated by these headphones. Me too. Why? I'm not. Please explain. Cranz, here's the big question I've been debating for like 36 hours now since I first saw this review.

So the thing about these headphones, they're the Beat Studio Pro headphones, their beats latest over-the-ear headphones. They have some cool upgrades. They have transparency mode. They have lossless USBC. audio, they look exactly the same as the old beats headphones. And Chris Welch, who wrote a review, it's very good. We'll put it in the show notes. You can feel him in this review trying to decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. That it's like there's nothing wrong with this design,

but they look like the old headphones. Is that bad? And I want to know what you guys think. Like, I think this is, Beetz is a very good design. They make good headphones like LeBron James wears them. That's all great. Beets has good reasons for not changing it. Is this like an old design that needs to die or once you nail it, do you just never mess with it again? Ooh, that's interesting. Okay, never mind. These are interesting. Right?

I, like, I want to debate that. Because the feature set is really wild for Apple. Apple supporting lossless USBC audio is bonkers. And it natively supports both iOS and Android. So it is, in most ways, feature-wise, this is the best pair of headphones Apple makes. Yeah. Like, hands down. But do you know where you can't get lossless USBC?

audio off of an iPhone. It's just a wild feature for them to support on these headphones. But I'm utterly fascinating by the fact that beats exists. Apple has stuck with it. It's obviously a big market because they sell so many phones to Android users and they are catering to Android users

with this subbrand and they're building features that are just off to the side of everything they're doing with headphones in Apple. That's how they get you in. You're like, Wow, I really love the USBC. I don't think you buy these headphones for lossless USB. I'm the only person who's going to buy them.

It's me and the Vergecast team. That's correct. That's the list. We now call the listeners part of the team. Virgast listeners and I are going to buy these headphones for lossless USBC audio. No one jumps from there to a pair of AirPods with utterly compressed Bluetooth audio. That's not the path. So it's just the features here are going this way where Apple's doing spatial audio this way.

And its beats gets to be its own little thing. And I think they maybe just don't have designers or Apple doesn't want to pay the money for new tooling on the headphones. Or there's nothing wrong with the design. Don't change it. Like look at the pictures of these headphones and tell me what's wrong with the design. Other than I've seen this before on an older pair of headphones. I mean, they look like beats and beats are inherently kind of ugly.

And I associate with cheapness because remember when the beats used to stick weights in there before Apple owned them, they stick weights in to make them more expensive. But you didn't change that after that happens. So, like, at this point, Beats is Beats, that's the brand. I kind of like that they didn't change it. Because, like, Grados, nobody's out there being like, why aren't the Grados getting a whole new redesign?

Yeah, they're like made of wood. And people like, well, they sound good. That's fine. Carved differently. Yeah. Yeah, I think Apple doesn't want these to get too much attention. I think they bought beats for the music streaming service that turned into Apple Music, they inherited a headphone company, and turning off free money

is just, it's against everything Tim Cook stands for in this world. And so you can just, like, upgrade the headphones and keep selling them at high margins, inside the same case, and what really what you've changed is some chips and some software. You're going to keep doing that forever. I think that's what's happening here. But does Apple want beats to be a world-conquering success? Like, absolutely not. They want AirPods Max to be a world-conquering success.

And it's probably time. I bet they change the design of the AirPods max before they change the design of beats to your phone. But that's all interesting and probably true, but that's like a, that's a business story, right? Does that make the headphones worse in any meaning? Like, should you not buy these headphones as a result of that? That to me is really the question. No, you should still buy them. I mean, I personally think they're ugly, but I will never buy them.

But you would have thought that about the last generation? Yeah, I would have thought that about every generation. Yeah, you're just not a beats person. But if you're, if you are a beats person, I don't see why you should be like, oh, man, I really want like, I want them to look more like Apple headphones or Sony or something. Like Sony changes theirs every few years. And they're always. I'm skipping this generation. I got to wait like five years to create my sonies.

I bought this generation at an airport tech place because I was going on a trip. And I got on the plane and the battery on them is dead. Oh, no. And I can't return them because it was the airport. So I got to go deal with that. They're terrible. But yeah, like, I bought them because the sound was better. I didn't really care about the look of them.

Sure. And they're on your head. It's actually very hard to see headphones that you are wearing. True. It's just one of those facts. But look, these headphones are all really expensive. These are $350. That $350 has gotten you better and better build quality over the years.

So the Sonys that we all talk about, the Bose that we all talk about, the quiet comforts, the money has gotten you better headphones, better build quality, better materials year on year. And with beats, it's like, here they are. The finish gets fingerprints on them the same as they ever did. I just think that to me, the discrepancy in the two Apple headphone ecosystems is utterly fascinating. I love it. And I think the reason the materials are stayed, they're not cheap, but stayed cheap to manufacture because they're already manufactured at scale is because Tim Cook is like 70% margins.

Let's go. That's why I like it. It's so indicative of like Tim Cook's Apple. Like Steve Jobs never would let this happen. Do you think he says let's go in meeting? Let's go. He does it like in the Mario voice. I would pay one million dollars to hear Tim Cook do the Mario voice. Same. Just putting that out there. I don't have it, you know, but I'll get it. We'll figure it out. We'll crowd fund that. All right. Let's talk about some laptops real quick. Lots of laptop news this week. Sean got to play with the framework laptop 16, which is the framework laptop that had. as a discrete, replaceable GPU.

That's really something. Everyone should go watch that video that he made and read his story, by the way, because the joy that man felt in using this computer was so wonderful. It's very cool. I mean, the framework laptop 16 is, like, the most modular laptop I've ever seen, right? And it's big thing is you can actually, can we make modular a verb? You can modular in a discrete GPU. And that's big and exciting, and it seems to work, and it's very cool.

but like you can just feel Sean being like this is the computer I have been dreaming of for so many years and it's it just makes me so happy everyone should go read that story and watch the video I like that it doesn't for a while there there were modular laptops kind of like the area 51m and a bunch of like origin and folks would make their own versions and they all looked the exact same and that they were very deeply ugly and this one looks like a nicer iteration of that it looks like a laptop like it used a framework for doing a good job for doing a good job job of making a modular laptop that looks like a laptop. But not like a gaming, like a cheap gaming laptop. Like for a while there, all the modular ones look like cheap gaming laptops. And now it's like, oh, I mean, this is still not the most attractive thing in the world, but that's what you, that's the exchange you do. You get modular. It's a little less attractive. Yeah. Yeah. Your GPU is two feet long and it weighs 100 pounds. Like you don't have, you're not going to make an attractive computer out of that. But that's okay. It is what it is. And they seem to have gotten almost everything else. about it right, which I think is very cool.

Framework in general, I think, is like a company worth rooting for for a lot of reasons, and I think continues to be delivering on the thing that it said it was going to do, and a lot of people didn't think it could pull off, and I just think that's cool. Let me just read you this sentence in response to that statement. And, David, this is Sean. My only regret is I can't give you any idea how well it works, because Framework broke the fans on the only GPU module in the United States. It's fine.

Prototypes. We were only about it. We were only able to run a few smooth minutes of Eldon Ring before the system began throttling due to the utter lack of cooling. I did enjoy that. The game was so sick and then I burned my house down. So they're shipping another one from Taiwan. I'm just saying it's still a very complicated problem.

Yes. It's a very cool. It is very, I mean, and cooling, that was a good pun you just did by house, didn't there? Because the cooling seems to be the thing. And Sean actually talked to one of the people who worked on the Area 51M. And the big thing is, like, how do we get a GPU into this computer and keep it and the computer cool? And so framework has a different idea about, you know, putting the fans in with the GPU. But that is the question.

Like, that is the thing to solve to make this thing work. And you're right, Neai, we have not successfully actually seen this thing work yet. But I'm still hopeful. Let me have this. It's good progress. Well, there's two things. There's one. Does this one work?

And then there's the whole point of making the discrete GPU with a connector work, which is then you will sell me a new GPU in the future. And that is, I would say, an 80% commitment. 85? It's a vibes commitment, not a we will sell you a GPU that uses this connector and works in this laptop in the future. I think it's notable that he talks a lot about the area if you want him in this. And that one also promised to me and a lot of other folks that there was going to have replaceable GPUs. And people actually tried to file a class action lawsuit because the GPUs never came. They couldn't do it.

They've all settled out of court in arbitration. But like it's a hard project. And if the companies of AMD and VD OEMs have zero desire to do it, it's not going to happen. And right now they have some desire, a little bit, a little bit of its design. Well, and part of the reason that like framework. is because it's a place those companies can put that desire, if that makes sense. Like, it is the one company actually sort of pushing on this so that if you want to do this and you are an executive at AMD or Nvidia or one of these companies, you actually have a

partner with which to spin up a project on some of this stuff. And so much of this kind of stuff that we've seen, this just makes me think of like, you know, the Project Aura at, at... I knew we were coming back to Project Aura. My favorite gadget of all time. I will die on the hill of Project Aura. And I guess I'm already dead because it died a long time ago. But anyway, it's very dead.

It was like these things have just sort of been one-off skunk works in there. And I think just the fact that framework exists and is selling real products to real people puts that further along. It's not going to work forever. Dell was doing it. Alienware was doing it. And there were all these other smaller OEMs who were trying to promise the same thing. This was like 2019 was the last time we saw this. And I think it's no mistake that like heavily involved in this project is AMD.

is Frank Azor who was at Dell at the time and was spearheading that for alienware. And it's a hard, like the cooling is a hard problem that he gets into here. And it's one that they are always pretty reluctant to overcome because these GPUs are just getting hotter and they're getting bigger. And who, like, nobody wants to be like, okay, well, we made it run as good as last years. But it can go in your replaceable laptop. Like, that's a bad buy for people.

So how do they get, like, they have to think from the ground up about that heat situation and that I think is going to be a really tricky to get Nvidia and AMD to do, even with Frank Azers' involvement in this project. I also think there's just a good utility for a framework to exist for almost all these companies because right to repair laws are not going away. They are bipartisan. They're showing up. People want them.

Europe continues to exist somewhat befuddlingly. They seem to want things all the time. I don't know. What's going on over there? You've got feelings about laws. And here's this company that has made this company that has made the most right to repair product. And so I think there's a value in framework continuing to iterate and like push the industry

forward, even if the products aren't successful or whatever, because at some point, the demand for everyone else to figure it out is going to be there. I mean, if it gets successful, that's the win, right? Like, if this thing gets any market share beyond like two people buying it, Sean and myself, that's a win because that means, oh, there's actual appetite and everybody else is going be like, oh, maybe I, everybody besides Apple, Apple, will never, ever do this. Apple won't admit the GPUs exist. Yeah.

It's like, no, no, no, no. You'd be quiet now. But like, I could see a Lenovo or an HP being like, yeah, let's. So, well, two things. One, in order for you and Sean to buy this laptop, they need more than zero functional GPU in the United States. So that's a big, step one. Like, how do we sell two?

We need two. Like, business 101. Two, let's talk about the flip side of it, which is Monica's laptop piece this week, comparing the HV Specter X360 to the Dell Xbox 13. This is the other side of laptop world, like tiny, highly integrated, jewel-like Windows laptops. These are the MacBook Air competitors. These are the MacBook Air competitors. The random people in your life who say, what computer should I buy?

It's these two and the MacBook Air are like the three go-to answers in the world that exist. I will say that she was like She did a versus article and gave them both an eight It's a good Talk about it There's your engagement page I would just looking at this I would lean Specter

I think HP is on a track here That's really fascinating And the screen is 3.2 I like that HP Is always willing to like Do weird stuff in their laptop designs They have been for a while now Remember when they did like wooden laptops

Like they had wooden palm rests? I love it. Like, get quirky. It's fun. No, disagree. Get quirky over there. And then just make a laptop that is good because the Windows world is like severely short on laptops that are just good. But Nelai, while we're talking about this HP laptop, can I read you a sentence?

Yes. Here is the whole sentence. I average just over four hours from continuous use of this OLED device. Four hours. That's just Windows laptop world, man. That is honestly, I believe. to my bones that that is an unacceptable amount of battery life in the year 2023. Like that's so, so, so bad.

And this to me is like where Apple has just absolutely lapped everybody. Like the Spector in particular that Monica reviewed is beautiful. The screen is great. The speakers seem to be good. The video chat stuff is fine. It has some nifty features. Four hours is not enough. Four hours is like I take out my computer when the Wi-Fi starts on my flight from

DC to San Francisco and it's dead before I get to San Francisco. And that doesn't work. Yeah. That's just not, it's a deal breaker for me. And that kills me that that is still the thing that holds back so many of these Windows computers. How much of it can be designed out of? Right. Like Apple, the reason the Apple battery life is so good is because Apple controls every single element of it, including the processor. So they can have it all work together really, really well. Everybody else is using, to some extent, off the shelf parts. Like they have to work with Intel or A.m. to get those processors that work really, really well, and then have all the, like, and Windows and whatever the battery manufacturer is.

Like, that's a lot more complex. This is not me supporting vertical integration, but it has resulted in a lovely laptop. Like, what if Microsoft made its own laptops? Would they get better battery life? Is the surface battery life good? The surface laptop. Yeah. Has different chips.

That's right. They do. So these are, it's older. But I think Monica got like 11 hours. from like a Risen chip in a Surface laptop the last time. But that's, it's rough. Yeah. Right.

It's like saying, it's like saying your Honda Civic, it's better gas mileage than your Porsche. Like it's just like hard to compare. But you're right. The problem is the same, right? The things are not engineered together. And it's tough even for Microsoft.

But it is more fully down to AMD and Intel than it is to Windows. Yeah. Yeah. And that's my read of it. This is where you can lay most of the blame at Intel's feet, like, in a super real way, right? It's like, it is possible for these other devices to get good battery life and run Windows. But they come with all these other sacrifices like you're talking about, such that Intel has

spent so long making sure it is like the Windows thing. Like everything good about Windows is made with Intel in mind. And Intel just can't hack it battery lifewise anymore. It just can't. And it just needs to get its crap together. And it even switched its philosophy on how it designs these things. And it's still so far behind. Oh, man.

Okay, I just looked it up. Okay. How about that? Surface laptop fourth, an AMD chip. Okay. That was 10 hours and 52 minutes. The new one that Monica just reviewed with an Intel chip, seven hours and 51 minutes. We can't be going backwards, guys.

No. Like, I have to give up my headphone jack. I have to give things up in the name of progress. Where is my progress that I'm gaining in losing battery life? This is when I say the Windows versus Mac debate is like it's just falling off the list. Like you can walk into the Windows Users Club with your Mac laptop and they're like, we know your battery life. Shut up.

We have GPUs. I get 10 minutes from this Nvidia GPU. The frustrating part is like I actually think you can have a really interesting like Windows versus Mac OS debate. Like Richard Lawler on our team will occasionally just show up in Slack and drop 650 consecutive messages about how annoying he finds macOS because it doesn't do anything you have to like download apps if you want to move windows around and he's right about that like windows is a much more capable in certain ways operating system than macOS is you can have that debate but like

apple just makes better laptops and it's not close like it's it's probably still true that a like hackintosh macbook air is the best windows laptop at the moment it is harder to do that now it's harder to do that and you still have crap battery life yeah But it's, so do my Windows computer. Whatever. I'm just taking a Specter. I'm buying an anchor USB battery. That's my, look at these laptops.

They're beautiful. They're beautiful. They are beautiful. They are beautiful. And you think they're still where they were. Just go look at Monica's comparison of these two laptops. They are beautiful. Like, Apple should boost some ideas from these hardware designs where Apple just has the opportunity

is like the chips make the MacBook here is just a wisp of a thing now. But these computers are absolutely beautiful. Yeah, the Spector has these like gold accents and this like soft touch thing. It's lovely. It's beautiful. Very into this computer. And for the 20 minutes, you can use it. If we have to plug it into your 10,000-million battery.

Should we talk about speaking of impractical? Yes. Have you, have you, you've looked at it, the Tesla. Speaking of impractor. That's good. That's a good segue. That's very good. You've looked at the windshield.

I would like to be congratulated. Yeah. For not starting the ship. show and ending the show and only on the show talking about this wiper. I guess I did start with the wiper. You just alluded to it. So Tesla had earnings this week. They announced a bunch of stuff. Tesla revenue way up because they keep slashing prices. Their margins are coming down. Elon said they would license full self-driving each other automaker and apparently there's not an automaker interested. He talked about the charging network and that's going to be a source of revenue. So Tesla in a moment of

change, I would just say, right? Lower prices, higher revenue. lower margins, interesting place for Tesla to be, opening up the software stack, fascinating. They said they're doing release candidates of the cyber truck from their factory. You see them rolling around Texas. It's very funny. But I just, you guys, we'll put it in the show notes. Go look on our site. There's a picture of the cyber truck off-roading covered in mud with its big silly wiper

trying to wipe the mud off the windshield. And the wiper sucks. This is an official Tesla press photo. This isn't me concocting some sort of fake biased mud trial because I hate Elon Musk. I'm looking at the photo the company sent us of its wiper supposedly wiping and it fucking sucks. I mean, honestly, A, it doesn't wipe completely. And B, it only even attempts to wipe like 60% of the win. You know what this looks like?

If you are on the passenger side of this truck, you're not seeing anything. Have you ever done the thing when it's cold and you have like snow on your windshield? So you like pull your sleeve over your hand and you just, you do this sort of one big wipe just to get some of the snow off. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes. That's what this windshield wiper does. It's just your, your, jacketed arm just going, that's your windshield. It's just like, I can't believe they release this.

Like, at least Photoshop it. ask mid-journey to be like insert clean windshield. Like whatever you need to do. But this photo is, it's just objectively hilarious how bad the wiper is in Tesla's own photo. I cannot believe we all just let it slide. We're recording a day after this photo came out. And I'm just, I'm flabbergasted that we as a society, this is why Elon bought Twitter. So we couldn't all just clown on this photo.

Like, look, just look at it. I beg you. Look at this photo. This is our country's finest engineering minds. And they're like, I don't know, this wipers fine. It's nuts. Everything else about the cyber truck kind of interesting, right? They made it, it's much smaller.

The packaging is much smaller. So it has a six and a half foot bed in a sub-19-foot frame. A regular pickup truck. My pickup truck is longer than 19 feet. It has a 5-foot-5 foot bed. This one is because it can park in normal garages. I can fit in a normal garage. Do you have a special garage?

No. I, to get the rafter in my garage, you get two inches on a side. It is terrifying, but I'm really good at it now, and now I think I can drive that car anywhere, and I should not. That's not the, that's not accurate. But trucks are getting much longer. Yeah. So this one has a longer bed and a shorter package. Super interesting.

Packaging innovation from Tesla. They're getting better manufacturing it, which is a very complicated thing to manufacture. I'm just saying they have not in any way figured out how to wipe the windshield. Can you? Just not. They haven't solved it. Why is it hard to do? Wipe the windshield?

My car does it quite easily. Yeah, we've solved this problem. We have such good windshield wiper technology now that Tesla is choosing not to use. What is the rationale there besides like we don't want passenger? It's because the windshield is at such an extreme angle and it's so large. Okay. Because big wiper. Well, I have good wiper when you can have big wiper.

It's true. So, again, we've covered this extensive. Elon has said the wiper gives him the most like anxiety about the cyber truck. Because I think mounting standard wipers on that angle for that size, like it does. I think it would be less effective than the one big wiper. How likely is this thing as soon as you get it on the road behind like a gravel truck to just be the most useless windshield? Based on the evidence I have from the companies on marketing materials. It's just wrecked.

I just look at the picture. It's incredible. Everything like I'm curious about this car. I like trucks. I think it would be fun to go really fast in a triangle. I want to see this on a ranch. I want to see this driving through like dealing with cattle, feeding the cattle, big shiny metal thing that will burn at the touch.

Just like. Yeah, how's it going to stick out? Who knows? More questions and answers. Starting grass fires with the reflection. So it's not supposed to ship until late next year, really, but they have started production. So that's like the big news. And then the other news that I think is just surrounding Tesla that's worth talking about.

is the flood of companies that are adopting the NACS charging standard, which is the Tesla plug, abandoning CCS, which is the other garbage plug, quite frankly. It's an unusual case of the right standard winning and turning into a standard versus whatever, like the proprietary thing is going to become the standard. Good on Tesla for making that happen. The mechanics of it, I think, are still really unclear. These companies are signing deals to use this connector. It's not just a standard yet.

unclear how that will work. The Society of Automotive Engineers, they say they're going to make it a standard. You can see how Tesla is sort of being incentivized by government subsidies to enable people to use it in order to get tax rebates on charging network and other things. Tesla hit a point where they say they start charging astronomical fees for you to use this charging standard and companies are forced to pay those fees. Otherwise, they can't have their cars charge? Can Elon do a rug pull on the ECS? I don't think so. I'm reasonably certain that he can't fool every major car manufacturer.

Like maybe one. Like maybe if like Nissan was like, we did it. We'd be like, ah, you picked Shadamo the last time. Like, you know, like, I don't know. Like, you're bad at this. But he's got four GM, Volvo, VW. Like, just down the line, he's got them all. And more signing every day.

So you get the feeling at least in the United States. they're going to end up here and the thing will actually become a standard Electrify America is going to use it and what we're just ending up with right now is like this weird interstitial period where it's Dongletown for cars which is not great

There was a great Andy Hawkins wrote a story about this and had a quote from somebody who said I feel like I'm driving a Betamax which is just a really delightful because you are Neelai correct me if I'm understanding this wrong but this seems like the kind of thing

where the best case scenario, everybody wins, which is that basically we get a charging network that everybody needs, including Tesla, that Tesla doesn't have to build for itself, that works for everybody, thus makes people worry less about range anxiety, thus makes more people buy EVs, thus is good for the government and Tesla and all these other companies. Like, who loses in this? It seems like the part that's sketchy is that a company invented the thing that is becoming the standard, and that that company is Tesla, which is sort of of run by a man who is not famously predictable. But like everything else about this seems like

it's heading in a good direction, right? Am I missing something? I think that's right. I think maybe the people who are the most upset are Tesla shareholders who think that Tesla should be a monopoly. Sure. Right. But even Elon Musk doesn't apparently think Tesla should be a monopoly. But for a minute, if you want an electric car, the only viable choice was a Tesla. Even today, and there are really good EVs out there right now, even today, if you want to try, travel a lot in your EV, you need to buy a Tesla because they have the infrastructure to support that kind of EV travel. Now you don't, right? Because they're just going to open up the charging network and their big moat that made their car the best car is gone or loosening. You can still

argue that they have the best software experience and the best full cell driving, but that's just car stuff now. Before it was like, you buy this car and there are not enough gas stations for you. And that's gone, right, with these deals. So I think Tesla's just in a more competitive environment. It would be like Apple supporting RCS. It's like literally giving up one of your biggest pieces of lock-in willingly. Right. And I really do think that Tesla had to do it because of various basically Biden administration policies that made them do it to get the tax credits in various ways. I think they had to do it because if they didn't, then Ford and GM and whoever else would actually invest in Electrify America would actually make that network possible because they need it to compete.

And I think Ford, Jim Farley, has been on decoder and so we know the charging experience sucks. They have this massive investment in Mustang lockies and F-150 lightnings and all these other EVEs that aren't moving the way they were moving last year with all the tax credits because of the charging network problems. So you just see like, okay, do I want to face off against all the world's biggest automakers who will band together and pick the bad standard? Or do I want to try to make some money off the supercharging network that I've spent tons and tons of money building? and maybe I'll charge higher rates to afford customer. Like, they can play these games. The problem is going to be, and this is really in Andy's piece, the software that makes all this work seamlessly for people is going to be nuts.

Yeah. Right? Like, if you roll up to a supercharger, which doesn't have a screen, and you want to pay for it, you need one app, a Tesla app to pay for it, and you roll up to Electrify America or ChargeNet or whatever, and you need another app and all those are different billing systems and your cars sort of incompatible with everything. Like, ugh.

So I think there's a layer of software. fucking validability that needs to happen here that I don't know it does feel like I have a Jeep with an old deal the C now the old connector the CCS connector I'm like crap I bought the wrong charging station for my garage I got this dumb beta max car it's this feels like a bad time to buy an EV in a way that is the opposite of the intended result right like you buy a new Kia and you're like welcome to dongle town like that sucks this is like that do you remember when everybody was buying combo VCR DVD players this is like this is that moment and then eventually we'll get to somewhere.

We had a good comment on Andy's piece, actually. I can't remember who it was, but somebody was complaining about Dongles, and the response what I thought was really smart was, this isn't like a phone, cars are really big, you can put the adapters almost anywhere. That's fair. They're like, we have trunks and front trunks and glove boxes, like, you'll be fine. And that's probably correct. That is very true.

All right. We've got to take a break. Man, we've been out of gadgets. We've got to take a break. We'll come back. We'll do maybe a little more gadgets than we'll talk about how I will. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Do you have a favorite brand of wipers? Again, I think those detailers will have one. By the way, car detail TikTok, one of my favorite TikToks. Oh, yeah. Could watch it all day long. The people who just like take the little brush to paint the stripe and just do it freehand all the way down like, oh. It's beautiful. And then you're like, don't do that to the car.

Why do you have the skill? Why did the market create the need for this product? A little loopy. All right. Let's talk about Hollywood. But I think the way to talk about Hollywood is to start by talking about AI. Oh, yeah. That works.

There's some AI news. I think that will lead us into the interlocking strikes that have brought Hollywood to its knees, which are. are in their core about AI. But there's a bunch of actual AI news this week. So first, German reported at Bloomberg that Apple has an AI chatbot. They haven't quite figured out what to do with it, which is funny all on its own. I love why they made it, though. They made it because they didn't want their employees using like BART or chat GPT for security reasons.

And so they're like, okay, we'll just make our own. Now we did it. What do we do with it? And then here's the fascinating part. They're running it on Google Cloud. Yes. Yes. Which is just wild.

It makes sense. Like Apple has a bunch of products that could use an LLM, the new keyboard in iOS 17, where it has a language model sort of built into it for better autocrect. By the way, have you seen this conspiracy theory? I don't know what you want to call it, this claim that the key autocorrect in the current iOS keyboard is very bad. And getting worse. And getting worse. Taylor Lorenz made a Instagram video and it like tagged me in it was like, figure this out. And I was like, it seems fine for me.

I don't know how to, it's just a vibe. It is, I can't tell you how many times somebody says, I'm sorry, what did you say? And then I have to go look back and be like, that's not what I typed. You think it's getting worse? It feels like it's getting worse. I'm dying to. Send us an email, leave us a comment if you think it's getting worse. This is a very difficult thing to measure.

Yeah. I have not noticed it, but it seems like Alex has. David, what are you? I definitely have not noticed it getting worse. It seems, it seems fine. Here's my theory. It's the summer and everyone's drinking. I was about to say

this happened to be on the path train today where I was so... Where everyone's hammered. There were some hammered people, but I was sober and it still did it. But it does also happen, seems to happen more when you're having a good time. I'm just saying,

you soak that iPhone in rosé, keyboard doesn't work so well. Conspiracy, but I'm dying to know if people have seen it because I've seen this around. Like I said, Taylor tagged me in a video she made. I've seen other videos about it. But it's like impossible to measure. So we just need a lot of like anic data.

My running hypothesis is that this is kind of along the lines of the my phone is listening to me conspiracy theory in that like you see 700,000 ads a day. And the one that happens to have been perfectly targeted is the only one you pay attention to. Which ironically is a statement about how good targeted ads actually are. But is also the thing that makes people think they're listening. It's like, no, it's just, it's a one in 700,000 chance and you just only notice the one that got it right. This strikes me sort of the same thing. We're like, people type a lot into their phones and these things make mistakes and some of them are weird. The ones that always get me are the people who type a word and it pops up the little autocorrect bubble,

trying to auto correct it to something insane. Yeah. I have not noticed that again on my phone, but there are lots of people who say that it has. It changed what are you doing to water doing? I'm like, that's just, no one talks like that, Apple? People from Pennsylvania. I've taught from there. I'm just assumed.

All right, we started about talking about AI and we ended up with this keyboard thing. Let me know. Let us know. We're dying to know. Yes. I'd love to run the story to ground and the only way we can do it. There's responses. So Apple's building this thing called Ajax are running in Google Cloud.

They are doing LMs in the keyboard. You can see how they would want to plug this thing in the Siri. It is wild. me that Amazon hasn't plugged an LLM into Alexa and Google hasn't plugged one into assistant. Siri, no one's going to be like, oh, no, you change Siri. Like, fine, like, let Siri try to come on to you a little bit. One person is. I don't know who you are, but you're out there and you're going to be really upset.

I'm so sorry. It's amazing to me that at this moment in time, Microsoft has hornier products than Apple. No, that doesn't shock me at all. Microsoft always much more low-key horny than Apple. since the beginning. No, now we got to, no, I disagree. I don't know how to further this conversation. This is our inaugural debate for a future podcast.

I've never wanted to not have a conversation, but also viscerally disagree with you as much as I do right now. I win. He can't argue. I win. I don't, I don't know how to say, that's just wrong. Please don't debate me in the Vergecast emails with this one either, folks. I don't, I don't need it. That's fine.

All I'm saying is, it's weird that. Bing is like, let's do it. I agree with that. The thing that's not weird, you said it's weird that these things haven't been integrated into like Alexa and assistant and Siri yet. They're bad. Like, it's really important to remember that

like, Chad GPT is bad. It's like, it's fascinating and it's interesting and there are so many things you can do with it that are very cool. It's wrong a lot. And I think like, Siri sucks, but is not prone to lying to you. And I think all this stuff that we're reckoning with with like what does it mean that chat gpt exists like what if i asked

syria to turn off bluetooth and the large language model like told me bluetooth doesn't exist and like invented a conspiracy theory about bluetooth and how bluetooth is what my phone is using to listen to me wait i just want to point out that might be a better situation than whatever happens with syri now when it says here's some web results for bluetooth yeah exactly that's not awful like fine spin me a yard about the pirate named Bluetooth. Like, at least it's interesting. Yeah. But I think this is my, this is why I like this Apple story, because like, if you follow

the timeline here, this is what Apple does, right? They let everybody make the products. And then Apple comes in and says, we're the ones who made this good. I think what is very clearly true is that you cannot yet solve all of the problems of these large language models. We just haven't figured out how to do it. And there's no indication really ever that Apple has some like generations ahead a, thing going on. If anything, Apple has been behind on this stuff for a decade. And so I think Apple is

probably in here being like, we can build a better chat GPT. And then they've just built a chat GPT. And they're like, well, shit. Now what do we do with this? And if they can figure out how to make that a product people actually want to use that lives up to like Apple standards and that they can tell a privacy story about, that'll be cool and exciting. I don't see that happening anytime soon. I mean, honestly, at this point was Siri if series response to every query was, let me me spin you a yarn about the pirate coo tree? Yeah, I'd like way better. Maybe that's fine.

Do it. You know, the Amazon side of it and the Google side of it, that makes sense to me why they haven't integrated it, right? That's boring business stuff. Like, Alexa is not a business. They haven't figured out how to make it a business. It's been years. They cut some of the Alexa team earlier.

This year, because there's no path to some huge profitable business. All these queries cost money. So you're like, we're going to make it more expensive to run Alexa against No business is not a good decision. Right. So where you see Amazon investing is like how do we use LLMs on Amazon.com, right? Which is that's the business that actually will make Amazon money in the long run. Right.

Can we make the descriptions of items on Amazon better and richer and more fun to read that will sell more things? Google has the same problem, right? Google Assistant for all of its crowing about how it's the future over the past years. Like Google Assistant is not a business. It's useful. I am the only person that likes Google Home, and it's because the displays have the cool photo feature where they are reflective.

That's it. That's why we were at Google family. So nothing to do with the Google Assistant. No, very little to Google System. I think the hardware is superior hardware to the Amazon hardware because of the photo reflectivity feature, and I think Google Photos is superior backend for photos in the Amazon thing, and fine.

And Google assistance. You may set timers for me, Google. given you've passed the first two doors. You know, like, would it be cool if Google Assistant was more conversational and, like, more useful on that? Sure. But then they have to run an LLN query, which costs infinitely more money than whatever Steam engine Google Assistant is running on now. And is slower and more error prone and harder to guess what it's going to do and harder to sort of manually program. Like, these things are bigger and weirder and wackier.

and I think that's going to make them be much slower for a lot of this stuff. Yeah. And I think especially now as people are getting more used to what LMs can do and can't do, you're just seeing like, oh, these things are like, as you said, David, they're mostly a C plus. Yeah. In some cases, they're getting dumber. Yeah.

When there's that study this week, the chat TV is getting dumber at math, right? Yeah, it's getting worse at math. That's amazing. That's great because we're all bad at math. And it's learning from us. Stupid computer That'll learn you Like why were we ever scared

Where the source material Of course it's going to be fine Yeah I mean and there's the idea of model collapse Did you see this week Wix announced Wix is a website host They announced you could create entire website And deploy it with just a couple of like chat bot prompts

But they were also very clear like Don't just use the copy rewrite It's written by like chat GPT I think. I've got bad news for Wix. People are just going to use the copy. Yes. And then there's a turn in there that is really fascinating to me.

So their demo, the Wix demo, was like an online fitness company or something, some like training company. Like something with classes. Yeah. So they, like I have a company that does trainings, make me a website. And then it's like, it showed picture of like instructors. And it was like, pick an instructor that matches your vibe. And they obviously picked like the coolest one. And then it made a whole website.

And then the next turn was we are also managing the scheduling of your classes. We see you have some open slots. Do you want us to make a social media marketing campaign to get customers for you? And you're like, yes. And it just fired off some Instagram assets or whatever. And it published them and said, it's done using the existing. And it's like at some point, you're not even running the business. Yeah.

And then I saw someone else tweeted at me just pointing out a startup guy who's like, I just published 250,000 words of content to like 45 niche interest websites that I started. They're all just SEO honeypots and I'm making money. And it's like, oh, the canon of C++ content is here. Yeah. At scale, like massive scale. And that's, I, you know, you know how I feel about the web. Come with me to my private web of people.

The robot web continues to grow. So this is actually the next piece of AI news. Meta is giving away its AI stack. It's called Lama. Now it's called Lama 2. They're running it on Azure. It's a Microsoft service. Microsoft's kind of the overall winner, right?

Big investment in Open AI. Open AI is using Azure. Now this partnership with the meta. Microsoft's is a big investor in meta from like way back. Now meta's stack is going to run on Azure. So Microsoft's just like just run it here. Just optimize for our chips and our services and our data centers and we're the winner. Like everyone's just going to pay us the fees.

The fascinating thing about meta is. announcement is they keep claiming that they've open sourced their model, which is fascinating because it already leaked, if you will recall. So META's LLM leaked. People were using it. They're running on laptops. So it's not a great outcome for a variety of reasons, mostly about safety. But that led to a memo inside of Google that said, we have no moat.

These open source models will kill us. Big controversy there. So now META is saying, okay, fine, we're just going to open source the whole thing. But then they didn't actually open source it. They didn't? So the license is not actually an open source license. It's not an official open source license. It doesn't meet the definition.

It has all these restrictions in it. And if you are a big company with over 700 million active users, you don't get to use it at all. Yes. So it's just not open source. That's literally just Google and Apple. And Snap, I think, is the smallest of the companies. Oh, interesting. And I guess like telegram now.

Sure. Sorry, telegram. And they're like, if our competitors wish to use it, they can make a deal with us. And it's like, guys, that's not open source. I love that. Open source asterix. I mean, they keep saying it's open source. It's like, you read the license, it's like not an open source license.

Well, it's just like when Elon Musk keeps saying he's going to open source the Twitter algorithm. And it's like posting some of the code is not the same as open sourcing. Yeah. It's like, you know who the most pedantic nerds of all are or open source nerds? Yeah. Like you say it's open source and you're like, here's our model. And it's like, what community do you think that you are interacting with right now? I would honestly rather have like an open source

officiato read a contract I needed to sign before a contract lawyer. Yeah. Like they will go through everything. They'll find everything. I don't have to worry about it. I'm renting this car. Is it open source? Anyway, we've asked Meta about it.

I'm very curious what the reasoning here is like why they are using this term. It is going to land them in some amount of trouble with like the open source community. But they keep saying it. And I think the reason they're saying it is because they want to be perceived as a provider of models people have a dependency on. But if you're going to do, if you're going to open source, you have to actually do it. You have to actually give the source code to people and let them use it however they want, basically. And that is like, here are a bunch of rules and restrictions. Like the words open source and acceptable use policy are not aligned. Like, those are

not concepts that plug into each other. This is much more along with like the creative comments, where it was like the like on Flickr a million years ago, right? There would be the license that it was like you can use this photo only for your personal use and you have to give credits to the original author. And that's kind of a foundational thing on the internet. That's not open source. Open source means you can have it and do what you want with it, generally speaking. Yeah, open source licenses are copyright licenses are like rooted in the fact that you own the copyright and you're like offering terms of a license. But they are very rarely like conditional in the way that this is conditional. And now we're 40 years into the open source experience.

there are governance bodies that are like, these are the licenses that count and these are the ones that don't. And meta didn't pick one that does, you know? And like, is this biggest deal in the world? It's not the biggest deal in the world. Can I tell the Vurchase audience about open source licenses? I can. And I think meta should be like, we should stop using this word because it just doesn't mean the thing that it's supposed to mean. And that's like, to me, important.

They're going to keep doing it until they get in trouble. Well, that's why the shares are open sources here. I don't know if you know So my fourth title here at the Fox Media Call me the Sheriff Well but I was saying that community Before we noticed it The open source community

It said what are you doing here And I think it's It is important for how software is made That those words continue to mean The thing they're supposed to mean All right I promised we would segue from this AI conversation To the Hollywood AI conversation

Yeah I'm going to figure out a way to segue Okay I can segue this with a question So I've found myself For whatever reason listening to a lot of podcasts about the strikes happening in Hollywood. And the reason I think we should talk about the strike right now is there's a lot of different things floating around, a lot of different arguments being had. There are two separate strikes happening that are

kind of connected and kind of not. And the biggest thing I cannot figure out, and I want you to answer this for me, Kranz, is how much is this actually about AI? Because what the writers have been saying is we don't want at studios to be able to use chat, GBT, and other tools to generate scripts. The actors were saying, we don't want you to be able to use our likenesses and, like, make deepfakes of us to go into movies. And then I listened to all these, like, big wigs in the entertainment business saying, no, that's all sort of a far-off farce. What they're actually arguing about is streaming residuals. Which one is it? Yeah. Streaming residuals are the, like, residuals is the core thing here, because residuals is how the majority of both actors and

writers get paid. Okay. So let's come back to that. Tell me how much AI actually matters first. AI matters because in both cases, they're worried about the potential future use, not the current use, to some extent, to a large extent. And so they're worried about that potential future use, and they want to make sure that the studios don't be assholes further down the line. So for the writers, they're specifically saying, we want certain protections. You can't give us, you can't have chat GPT go come up with the script and then make us write it and then not pay us for coming up with the ideas for the script. like we don't want to have to be using chat GPT prompts to write and and so that's like the core thing there is they they don't want they want AI to be treated as a tool not as like a creative force that can be copyrighted and everything like that but no one is out here thinking that tomorrow chat GPT could write a great script that would turn into a blockbuster mark oh some people yeah the studios are totally I mean they're definitely not correct yeah the studios are very interested in in AI and they're They would love to be able to cut the writers out entirely or just pay writers to edit whatever chat GPT wrote, which they would love to do that and they'd love to do that consistently. And the writers are like, you can't do that yet.

You will probably be able to do that in a few years. And we want to go ahead and just nip that in the butt now. So that's what's happening with the writers. For the actors, it's specifically, right now if you're an actor, you just go get scanned. Like you signed a contract for a new show or something, a new movie. you go and they're going to like scan your face. They're going to scan your body. And then they just take that data and walk away with it.

And right now there's, it's not clear where they take that data. And if you know, hit me up because I'd love to know. But specifically background actors, they're saying, well, we would love to take a background actor's face and scan it and then pay them for that initial scan and never pay them again and use their face however we want forever in our films and TVs. And so background actors are like, like, that's how you get your card. That's how you kind of get into SAG. For some of them, it's not a livelihood, but it keeps the lights on, right?

Like between that and their door dash, side hustle or whatever. And so they obviously don't want to do that. So that's where they're concerned there. Because most of the big actors, like the Matt Damon's, the Killian Murphy's, yes, I saw Oppenheimer. Yeah. You see it in 70mm? No. With a Palm Pilot?

But I saw it with Christopher Nolan. And so I think it's okay if we don't see it on IMAX. I think it's okay. Yeah, flex. So just to put a point on that, so I was thinking about this because have you guys seen the new Indiana Jones movie? No. But they age stuff they do. Yeah, so for the first like 20 minutes of the movie, I guess this is a spoiler alert, but like whatever, it's Indiana Jones.

He's de-aged, like digitally de-aged. And it is both the best. If you think that's a spoiler, don't email us. Go ahead. If you think it's a spoiler, you already have commented on Theverge.com about it. So I understand it. But it's better than any version of that I've seen before, and it's also still pretty bad. And it also clearly still requires Harrison Ford.

So that one was unique, though, because they used Lucas film had tons of footage of him. They had all these dailies from all the other projects, all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones they've used when he was that age. And so they actually used all of that footage to recreate his face. So that's actually maybe closer to the kind of thing you're talking about than most. most of what we've seen in the past. And that one was okay because, like, it was like the stuff, they weren't using it in other things. And for someone of his level, like, they're going to go and make a different deal.

Yeah, presumably he agreed. He's going to have, like, a SAG contract, but he's also going to have this other contract. And they'll make those agreements. This is to protect all those people who don't have these other separate contracts to make sure that they don't get screwed over so that, like, your background actor, you hit it big. and then suddenly you're just popping up all over the place because 20 years ago, somebody got the rights to your face. That's what they're trying to avoid. So what's fascinating about that is the writers are sort of operating in the bounds of existing copyright law?

Yes. Because they write things. Yeah. And you can make copies of it. And the law understands all of that. And so the writers are like, we want to get paid these rates for these. kinds of work. Your face is not a copy of anything. It's just your face. And the idea that you can scan it and that becomes a copy of your face and you've made a copy of your face doesn't exist

anywhere. But it exists in some state level likeness law, right of publicity law. There's no copyright law for your face. This is just a new problem. And so it's, I think Hollywood is going have to invent a solution to this problem that is way ahead of the government of courts or whatever because there's just no answer. You can't go and find the answer to this question inside the wall. And I'm not saying the writers don't have complicated problems of their own, but they're at least inside of something that makes sense that there's a framework for talking about. I'll give you an example.

Just this week, there was a court case where a bunch of photographers had sued first BuzzFeed and then Instagram because BuzzFeed had embedded Instagrams of their photos. So the photographers are taking some photos posts to them Instagram.

BuzzFeed embedded the Instagram posts onto BuzzFeed Facebook articles. And the photographer sued BuzzFeed and Instagram said, this is coffee

infringement. Haven't we had this debate before? I'm getting like real deja listening to you explain this. This happens all the time.

And so the courts over the years, this is a true thing in our law. No one talks about it. If you look at people on the social networks are all like, LLMs are fair use, training this.

This is where we are in reality in 2023. The courts applied what is known as the server test, and they said no copy of this photo was ever made on BuzzFeed. The photo still existed on Instagram servers, and the user's web browser called Instagram servers, thereby the server test, which is now part of the United States copyright law, is there is no copyright infringement. the photographer's losing. But if BuzzFeed had screenshoted that Instagram and put it on its site, it might have been a different fight.

And to the user, there's no difference in those things. Right. Wild. And where is the copy? I'm going to end up saying this on the show a thousand times during this AI battle. Copy her law is about copies. The court in deciding whether embedding an Instagram post on a BuzzFeed article is copyright infringement goes and finds the copy of the photo. and it's on Instagram server

because that's where the photographer themselves put it in accordance with Instagram's terms of service and the court said, nope, BuzzFeed can use it for free because it's on Instagram server and if they had screenshoted it like David said and put it on their thing, which is to you exactly the same experience and in many cases good journalism practice

because Instagram could take a photo down, who knows? Then they might have lost because the copy of the photo would have been on BuzzFeed servers and that is the game. Like, where is the copy? And so the writers on their side, they have copies. They have hundreds of years of copyright law about writing things down and making copies of them and putting them here and who owns what's rights. And then you get to faces and you're like, we just don't do this.

There's a vacuum of this because you can't do it. There's just never been occasion to care about it before. Right. You've made a copy of my face. Oh, that's a photo. Yeah. That's what that is. Right? Or you've made a movie. And like for me to be in your movie, there's some laws about like my life. There's cases about reedits of movies. We've covered because they're complicated. But you've never had the, you took my whole face and now you can use my face as many times as you want.

We have, like we see this sometimes like in Hollywood there is a little bit more law here. Yeah, California state law because of Hollywood exists. Because like Sima Liu, the actor who was in Shang Chi last year for Marvel, before he was a big famous actor, he went out and did all. whole bunch of photos for people, like, just go use them in shutter stock or whatever. And so then now you can go find those and be like, put him, put this big celebrity. Like royalty free. Yeah, this royalty free big celebrity thing. And we've seen this happen a couple of times and then they'll usually be like.

But you can do that. You can't, he can't tell you take him down because they're royalty free stock photos of him. Right. But like. But even that is a photo. That's not his face. Yeah. You haven't made him do something he wasn't doing before.

because you have a digital model of his face. Yeah. And there's just no, as far as I know, there's not like a great framework for that. There's some, in some ones people have come up out of Holcloth. Like that horrible Will Smith movie that they shot at 120 hertz. Do you know what I'm talking about? Gemini, man. If you watch it the intended frame rate, it looks like a CGI demo reel.

It doesn't even look like a real movie. Like, why did you do this? It's like an unreal engine commercial. Yeah. Yeah. For that movie, he signed a deal where I think he owns that model. He didn't want the studio to have it. But he's Will Smith.

He has the leverage to do it. These background actors, they're only way to get leverage is by going on strike. Yeah. And so that's what they're doing. They're all on strike. And it's going to last a while. It seems like everybody's really entrenched in their positions. The producers don't want to give over more money.

Because ultimately this all boils down to money, right? Yeah. Streaming makes a lot of money. Streaming is, we like to talk about, oh, which streamer is going to be on the Go 90 scale. But they all make money. They're all doing pretty okay. Some Netflix, way better than everybody else, right? They're doing great.

Netflix, they roll out the ad tier. Some shows shows one up. Yeah, and Netflix also was one of the first to figure out how to, I don't want to say manipulate, but aggressively use the current contracts to cut down on how much they pay people. And that's what they're trying to get rid of. That's what they're trying to fix. Right. And naturally, Netflix doesn't want to help them on that because they want to keep all the money for themselves.

So Netflix is really interesting. It's time for the disclosure block. We're way late on this. I apologize. We're minutes late to this series of escalating disclosures. One, we made a Netflix show on the EP of that Netflix show. It's called The Future Of You Should Go watch it. Two, our company makes all kinds of other Netflix shows with all the other streamers.

That division of our company is called Box Media Studios. You should watch everything they make and then send us cash in an envelope. Our newsroom is unionized the Writers' Guild of America. I'm in the WGA. Here she is. It's true. She's on strike. I'm not on strike.

I'm not on a contract that is currently on strike. Alex will not be in the background of your movie. That too. Until future notice. And then NBC is one of these companies, Universal. Yeah, NBC Universal is currently... And I own a trunk of box media. We all watch shows from times.

time. They are actually at the heart of a lot of the strike stuff happening this week, NBC Universal. Really? Do tell. Yeah. So this is, we're getting to tree law now. Oh, here we got, tree law. All caps, all caps. This is not lowercase. This is all caps. NBC Universal is one of the many studios that is currently, they're having strikes outside of them. And so picket lines go out there and they march. And it's a real, honest to God, picket line like you see from history. The signs are incredible, by the way. Just as a side note, like an incredible genre of the internet right now is writer and actor picket signs. They're just phenomenal. If you ever wanted to go meet an actor, they might be on a picket line right now and you can go meet them.

But you should also be picketing and like give them water and stuff. So planned picket lines were to happen outside of NBC Universal. They have a whole bunch of trees which provide lovely shade. Those trees are owned by Los Angeles because they're outside of the studio. Those trees were all mysteriously trimmed just before the picket line was supposed to happen. So there was no shade. And it's like 100 degrees in Hollywood right now. And so there was a lot.

NBC Universal said it's just standard. We always trim these trees down to the limbs. The nubs. Yeah. This is totally normal. It's fine. It's not. L.A. is like investigating them because.

Tree law. Tree law. You can't. That's not their trees to go trim in. And it's apparently. really bad to trim those trees to that length in the summertime. That's just cartoon villainy. Seriously.

Like, I was going to say the thing about Netflix, which all the producers are doing cartoon villainy in some way. The true law thing is ridiculous. Netflix's got a pass on this contractual obligation stuff, right? Because if you think back a year ago or two years ago, Netflix was just writing checks. Nobody could match. Oh, yeah. They're like, Shonda Rhymes, here's a billion dollars.

Make as many shows as you can, right? And what has turned is Netflix needed to be profitable. So it stopped writing those checks. It burned a lot of those creators by not renewing their shows. It burned a lot of the fandoms of those shows, but not renewing the shows. It has all this content. No one's making any residuals. And then the most important thing is that all the other companies chase Netflix into that business model.

Yep. So they all felt like they had to compete. They had to outspend Netflix. So for a minute, Netflix is the industry hero because they're writing big checks. And they have a business model that seems to work. And they, I mean, it does because they're profitable. And then at the other end of the rainbow is, oh, the whole industry adopted this business model, the financial structure of how we get paid is now gone because we were addicted to cable reruns and selling internationally into different markets. And now it's all just on HBO Max or Peacock or Netflix or whatever.

Yeah, because these shows are like, if you look at the contract, these shows appear differently in the contract. They don't appear as linear TV. They don't appear as cable TV. And so in order to hit that threshold to start paying higher residuals, they have to make more content. And it's usually like, I think after the second season is when things start to go up, which is why you see so many Netflix shows canceled after the second season because then they don't have to pay increased residuals. But Camico Glenn was an actress on Orange is the New Black. She was a main character on that show. She was in, I think she started in like the second or third season is when she appeared on the show.

in a ton of it, main character making maybe if she's lucky, 50 cents per episode in residuals when like she's a star of the show. And that's most of that cast, which was all primarily people who weren't normally seen on TV. It was a big deal that they all got these roles. And they were all having to work second jobs, third jobs to afford it. And this still are. Like this did not open the world to them and make them all fabulously rich. maybe other shows did if they went, we're lucky and got a network show. But if you're on a streaming show, you're not, like, you cannot support yourself. You have to have a second job, which means you will see an actor you love at Target, and you should be really polite to them because they're probably working. Just be chill. Yeah, it's like Mandy Moore, who is like a huge star and was on This Is Us, which was a giant hit, was talking in an interview, I think this week, about the residuals check that she's been getting from Hulu, which now has This Is Us. And she said there was, one check that was one penny. There was one that was two cents. There was one that was 81 cents.

It's like this is not actual money that these folks are getting. But the thing that I struggle with is if you rewind five years, there were a lot of very smart people who were like waving their hands saying this is unsustainable. Netflix is spending money. It doesn't have. It's in crazy debt. We're due for some consolidation. This is all getting out of control. And for years, everybody just like blissfully danced along and a lot of people made a lot of money off of these streaming services like Shonda Rhymes made a ton of money and employed a lot of people. And so was, were we just always due for this correction? This is just the pendulum swinging to the other side before we get to the middle.

This is totally, because the WGA strike back in 2007 was about residuals then, too, for streaming. They saw this was like totally nascent at this point. I think there were like maybe three web series disclosure. I was actually writing for one of those at the time. Yes. It was lifetime. Netflix Disclosure.

That's so much better than my Joseph and the Amazing Dengar Dream Code disclosure. I wrote one episode. What was it called? The show was called Inspector Mom. Oh, my God. Incredible. Starring Danica McHellar.

Danica. Wow. Yeah. She's lovely. Wow. Yeah. It's fancy. But so back in 2007, it was like us in Battlestar Galactica.

And I want you to be very clear. We were in no way in the same level as Battlestar Galactica. One of those was a hit. Yeah. One of those. you know. The other one you just learned about. But there wasn't a lot, but everybody was super interested in it. And at the time, everybody was doing it as an ultra low budget. And when you're producing these things as ultra low budget, you don't have to pay as much. You can really dick people

around. And you can pay them a lot less. You can play your writers less. You can play your actors less and everything like that. And they're like, this is going to be a whole new thing. We clearly need to make sure our writers get paid. And so that's why they went on strike back in 2007 to to make sure that they were going to get that money. And they were really not as aggressive as they should have been. There was a big argument within the WGA about it at the time. The people who were like, don't worry about it, one. All the other people were like, what did we say for the last 15 years?

And so now we're at this point. Like, they've been waiting for a very long time. This was always probably going to happen. And I think the biggest surprise is that the DGA, the Directors Guild, isn't a part of this. Because so many, I think the reason that. that didn't happen for them. So many of them are also producers. Much more of them, like standard are producers as well.

So they're like, this works for us. We're fine. We can make it work. But they're also, and directors in a very real way, you can't copy their work. Yeah. Like a lot of those big existential questions that are facing the writers and the actors, directors don't have to deal with. And these other ones are having to face that.

Like writers having to face, okay, if the producer, like goes and writes a prompt and sends me that prompt that like writes a prompt chat gpt spit something out he sends that to me who owns the and i write a whole script do i own the copyright to my script does chat gpt own the copyright to the script does the guy who like busted out a quick prompt on the copyright to my script and everything in it and all the the intellectual material like they gave me 150 words and i turned that into a two-hour movie why should the studio get to own that So, again, there's just a long history of concepts that might help you answer that question. I don't know where they're going to land.

What I know is the money that they're looking for, the challenge is that either it doesn't exist the way that it used to or it exists but it's flowing to the CEOs. It's being used to fund vastly more projects than before. So Friends, I think Friends is like the example here. all the people who made friends are rich and they're going to keep being rich and whatever. They're doing great. They're doing great. Seinfeld, another example. They made friends.

They put it on broadcast television. They sold a bunch of ads against that broadcast television. They paid all the actors a million dollars an episode for friends because just that first cut was so valuable with ads and broadcasts television. Everybody watched every Thursday. Then they sold it again to foreign countries and to syndication and the cable networks. Then they sold it a 15th time to Netflix. Then I came off on Netflix and they sold it a 16th time to what is it, Hulu? Where is it now?

I think it's on Peacock now? It's on Peacock, yeah. They sold it to themselves the last time. Well, and it was a big deal. Do you remember how big a deal that was actually because they were leaving a ton of money on the table to bring it back to Peacock as a big bet on what Peacock was? That thing held its value for so long. Right, because it's an asset.

Like it's a very, I don't know, you make a widget and you can sell it however many times. The streaming model is you make a show and you see. sell it once. Yep. Probably to yourself. And then you hope it brings in subscribers. And you kind of end up in this horrible Spotify situation. We're like, okay, you pay me $9 a month.

You play this much Taylor Swift. We're going to divide up the total number of streams. And Taylor Swift gets a penny, but she gets a billion stream. So it's a billion. And like the contract they're negotiating now has to contend with that math versus the we made you a show and you have sold it for dollars over and over and over again. Now it's we made you a show and you're going to sell it for pennies once. We're seeing a big change there.

Like David Zezlov, love to rip on the guy. Cartoonish villain in many ways. But he is big on like a show doesn't work for us or whatever. We can go and sell it again. We saw that with Westworld. And I think we're going to see more of that. Some of it is we need to unload these assets that just aren't doing it for us. Maybe they'll do better on Peacock because nobody subscribes to Peacock except for me.

Maybe they'll do better on Peacock. That's going to save the industry. That's a sign. That's a strike sign right here. But they are thinking about, like, they're starting to think about how we need to sell these things and make more money off of it. The studios are thinking that not just the writers and actors and producers and everybody who are making no money in perpetuity on these projects. So I think we are going to see some changes there.

I think we're going to see kind of a return to some extent of that current, like that TV model from 10, 15 years ago. I don't think it's going to be as lucrative as it was then. It's going to be 2003 again. This is just what we're doing here. I think what we're really going to find out is how powerful the Netflix voting block in the producers' union is, or the producers' guild. That's the real thing because Netflix doesn't want to ever move to that model. They want to have everything owned by them and then never pay you residuals.

A lot of these other studios have been doing this a lot longer, and they're going to be more inclined to go in a different direction. So we're going to see, I'm really curious to see how this ends. I think it's going to be a long time. I think we're in for... We're in for mid-months. Into winter, basically. All right, we've got to take a break. We come back.

We're going to be a lightning around. Here's some more gadgets. Yeah. I talk some CMS. People have asked before. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts.

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We're already over. You get me talking about unions in Hollywood. That's you and copyright. And it's all at the same time. Oh, my God. Poor David. Sorry. David's just been holding up a stopwatch in the background.

Like red cards. Like, stop. Stop, nerds. Please. Nerd car. Going off cliff. All right. Lightning around.

David, you want to start? Sure. So, why I have two? One is just that Andrew Marino and I figured out why there's a Palm Pilot in your favorite IMAX theater and you should go read our story. Very good. The answer turns out to be like very small and slightly boring but also deeply

hilarious and makes me very happy. Can I just say the sourcing in that story is incredible because you keep referring to a well-placed source. it. It's like, I'm not, I'm not going to reveal who it is. It just, it makes it sound like you're reporting in the CIA in the best possible way. I think the truth of the matter is, there aren't that many people who know. Let's just say that. It's, my source is Christopher Nolan. Let's just, let's just do it now. No, I want to talk just very briefly about this new thing called the U.S. Cyber Trustmark, which is basically a label that is going to be affixed to products that

are, I don't know, safe in a cyber security way. And I both want to know what you guys think of the logo, which I have deeply mixed feelings about. To me, it looks like a second tier Turkish soccer team crest. That's the vibe I get here. But it's like a shield with some dots and some lines. Too busy. It's just not great. And this is supposed to connote, like, this is an official government-approved

cyber-secure thing. To me, this strikes me as a good idea in theory, right? Like having a thing that is like this is a secure device that has passed some measure of testing and will not do sketchy things. Great idea. It's along the lines of the like, you know, privacy nutrition labels Apple does in the apps for. Big fan. I don't see any world in which this is enforceable or holds up over time. Threats change, devices change, standards change, things go out of date.

There's always some new hack. and the idea that one of the things they want to do is put a QR code on the box so you can scan the QR code to see if it's up to date and still safe. So actually the badge doesn't mean anything. You have to scan the QR code to see if the badge still applies. I just think this is one of those good ideas that nobody actually thought all the way through. If I was a horrible person, I would go print out a bunch of these fake labels and put them on real products and like Best Buy and then have people. Yeah, when people scan it. Oh, my God.

I don't have the technological know-how, and I'm not that horrible yet, so I won't do this. But, like, it seems like a very easy way to cheat this system and screw over a lot of people. Also, it's ugly. Yeah, it's not beautiful. Yeah, I'm really out of the way. But, like, are they going to make, like, a beautiful label that's, like, insecure Wi-Fi? You know, the UL label is gorgeous. No one knows what that means.

Yeah, I don't know what it means, but I know it's pretty. That's fair. But my thing with this is, I think, like, the, one of the comparisons, that the FCC's Jeff, Jess Rosenwistle made is to like the energy star logo. Yeah. Which is a useful thing, right? And they're talking about this a lot with right to repair stuff too, that you should have these quick visual signals that like this passes some kind of test that I approve of,

right? Like it is energy certified. That's good. The vibes are good, right? And with right to repair, it's like, that's good too. And this one just seems way higher stakes because what you're asking me to do is make like a real problem. diplomatic decision about this thing, whether it is safe or not for me to use, based on this label.

And with that, just would need to come this really complicated enforcement mechanism that I'm not sure is even really possible to do well. I like that even the official mock-up of it from the FCC is hard to read. Like, you have to do some really bad design to be like, yeah, it's also terrible to read. It's, I'm just, it's ugly, and I think you're right. Like, how are you supposed to, nothing is secure. If it's connected to the internet, it's in some way can be hacked. Someone will figure it out.

Yes, I agree with you broadly on that front. That's how I have lived my life. She said with her laptop and phone and smartwatch. That's true. But like, we've now covered enough fly-by-night products. Yeah. I'm thinking of wise, right? where they made claims

are backed up by no one. They're unenforceable because they're backed up by no one. This is a very sort of like, how does a market capitalist government fix problems like this is like, we'll put a nutrition label on it.

And like, this is the answer to every question is like consumers will count calories but for gadgets. But like at least if you put this label on and you lie, people can sue you. That's true.

And that is as much of a corrective as anything. Yeah. I'll give you that. I almost feel like it should be more like the like Surgeon General's warning on a pack of cigarettes that's just like this thing connects to the internet

be worried about that is like that's that feels to me like it would be more immediately productive But the difference between the American Surgeon General warning and like the British one is that we should do the British ones like in Europe the cigarettes just say

this will kill you here it's like surgeon general's warning a bunch of stuff and like over there it's like death Death lurks here. Delicious. Death. You'll never stop thinking about it for the rest of your life if you do this in your 20s.

Neil is just quietly pulling the cigarette out as we speak. Oh my God. It's so good. The first one after a drink. But it'll kill you. All right. I'll stop you. I was like, I don't even smoke and I want a cigarette now.

Have you ever had one of these after a big dinner? Woo! That'll kill you for sure. Steak dinner. Covered in butter. This is the worst. We're sliding around. That's mine.

Neely, what's yours? Wait, I'm sorry, you have four assigned to you here. This podcast has been very long. Pick one. I'm picking one. I'm going to pick the WordPress one. Okay. Yeah.

So our company this week announced that we're switching CMSs. This is so nerdy, but people asked me to talk about it. So if you have been following us since 2011, you know that right now, one of our CMSes that we use is a proprietary CMS called KORUS that we have made a lot of noise about over the decade of this company. Of course, there's a lot of things. If you are a web nerd, you know that the CMS is, it's the database from which we serve the website.

And CMS can do an awful lot of things. At a basic level, the CMS is a text editor and a database of content. And sometimes it's also the front end of the website. So you can separate those things. With our redesign, we decoupled the front end of the website, the thing that you all look at at the verge.com from the back end, which is what we all type in. So now through an API, you go to the verge.com, the API pulls out of the database, whatever, which means you can swap out the back end of the thing.

We already use multiple CMSs to make the Verge all the time. One of our CMSs is Google Sheets, and I promise you every big publisher from the Times on down has content that is served out of Google Sheets. I can confirm this, yeah. It's just a useful, like, it's a really powerful spreadsheet that never goes down. Like, if you need to make that kind of thing, you can do it. When we do our live blogs, we use a CMS called Norcon LiveCenter, which hilariously is, I think most of our clients are like English Premier League blogs. So there's a bunch of features in LiveCenter that I always want to use that make no sense, like a running score tally.

A button that just says goal. Yeah, it's like very funny. I just, I'm dying to use those features. If you can figure them out, we'll do them in the next Apple event. But that's another CMS we use. I think all of you know, I'm excited about Activity Pub. I think plugging a social network into our stack of things. You can see how a threads post and a quick post on our front page are closer in spirit than not.

There's a lot you could do there if you think of that as a CMS. So we're swapping out chorus, which is our main CMS that we write most things in for WordPress, but we're keeping the front end experience of the site because we've decoupled the two things. That's the answer. It's a big emotional decision at our company. a lot of us most of my life's work has been produced in chorus

there it is I feel a way about it but people ask me why it's happening because I saw the access article and it's you want to spend

your developer effort on building new kinds of products not making a word processor in a database that's life and software I keep sending people the video of Steve Jobs

doing a funeral for macOS 9 I don't think this is going over as well as I wanted to but I think it's very funny that's what I got for you all right what's your lightning around

Alex. Omar thought he ordered coffee this week. Okay. And he's like, wait a minute. I don't use the Starbucks app that often. And it was because there was a bug with Starbucks app. And so it told a whole bunch of users that they all ordered coffee this week. Amazing.

Everybody was like, wait a minute, but I didn't. And I just think that's hysterical. Was it the intern? This is my favorite thing that happens. Like when that, what was it, the HBO sent that test email to like millions of people a while ago? Because somebody pressed the wrong thing. It's like when you hit the, when you mean to hit the test button and you, you accidentally hit the send this to everybody button, just know that it always makes me happy

every single time. What they, what they told Omar was earlier today, a push notification from the Starbucks app was sent as an error. So yes, it probably was an intern who was like, boop. Yep. Everybody got coffee. Nobody is getting free coffee out of this. You still have to pay for coffee at Starbucks. I do. It's also like Starbucks should learn from this because this is an incredible marketing thing to do to just randomly ping someone's phone and say your order is ready. It's like the Pavlovian thing that would happen to me where I would just go to Starbucks if I got that notification.

I don't remember ordering Starbucks, but there's like a 60% chance I did. I'm going to go. It would work. I'm just saying Starbucks. I would definitely think that my identity had been stolen. I would have a vastly different response. I need to throw my phone in the ocean right away and call my mom. I would just assume I blacked out and ordered Starbucks.

Yeah, fair enough. I can't believe we just gave Starbucks this idea. I'm so sorry. Talk about engagement, baby. delete the Starbucks app. Did I ever tell you about the time I gave Amazon an idea for an ad that they used and didn't give me credit for and I'm furious about it? You should go on strike.

Yeah, go on strike. Don't give up your ideas. We are way over. We will tell you that story next week. Fair enough. On this, the Vergecast. Some things I want you to read on our site. We have an excerpt of John Romero's autobiography Doom Guy, which is a story of ID Software.

Go read that. It's great story. Good yarn. And then McKenna Kelly wrote an incredible profile of Gigi Sone. and how her nomination to be an FCC commissioner was basically just overturned by weird, dark money in telecom lobbyists. It'll make you angry, but in like a righteous way.

It's good. That's a good feeling. You want to harness that, that feeling. And then on Decoder, I asked the CEO of Squarespace, why anyone should make a website, and I'm pretty sure I sold them a pressure washer. That's a weird one. Those two ideas, I promise they connect.

It was great. Okay, that's it. That's a Ritchcast. And that's a wrap for Vurgecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vorgecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino.

Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.