The Vergecast - The problem with Telegram

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss Telegram CEO being charged in a French criminal investigation over content moderation, Yelp suing Google for antitrust violations, a week in AI-generated nonsense, and more. Telegram says CEO has ‘nothing to hide’ after being arrested in France  French authorities arrest Telegram’s CEO Why the Telegram CEO’s arrest is such a big deal Telegram CEO charged in French criminal investigation Telegram CEO Pavel Durov faces court questioning in France. French prosecutors explain why they arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov How Pavel Durov, Telegram’s Founder, Went From Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg to Wanted Man Can Tech Executives Be Held Responsible for What Happens on Their Platforms? How Telegram played itself Yelp sues Google for antitrust violations TikTok must face a lawsuit for recommending the viral ‘blackout challenge’ California State Assembly passes sweeping AI safety bill Mark Zuckerberg responds to GOP pressure, says Biden pushed to ‘censor’ covid post Google Gemini will let you create AI-generated people again xAI’s new Grok image generator floods X with controversial AI fakes X’s Grok directs to government site after sharing false election info Smart home company Brilliant has found a buyer ESPN ‘Where to Watch’ feature helps find where to stream sporting events Plaud’s NotePin is an AI wearable for summarizing meetings and taking voice notes The maker of the Palma has a new cheaper e-reader The Dyson Airwrap i.d. is a smarter hair curler Snapchat finally launched an iPad app Instagram adds what photos have always needed: words Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event is set for September Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Rich Hasker, the flagship podcast, the Bukes Palmer fan club. Again, might be true. Like, legitimately might be true. I have one. I've bought a lot of dumb gadgets because of David recently.

And I don't know that those are the right decisions. Well, you can't read. We should say that up front. Eli is famously illiterate. I hate reading. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. I love reading, and I think you should do more of it. David Pierce is here.

Hi. Alex Cranes is here. I'm just thinking about reading Rainbow now. You know, it's fun. When you have a small child, you're like, in reading again, that's a real thing. And what Max wants to read with me most is Calvin and Hobbs, which is, I love it. The dream. That rules.

Have you ever tried to read Calvin and Hobbs out loud to another person who doesn't understand the jokes from the literal 1980s. She's like, what's a telephone? Calvin and Hobbs is definitely a cartoon for adults. Like, it is not, the jokes in it and, and, like, the messages in it, I find, like, deep and important and profound now, and I'm, like, very old. And how, I don't know how to explain any of that to a child. Try, try. I just say, if you have a kid and you're like, here's what we can do, we can read comic books together. We were at, I already own all these books, and we were at an estate sale, like, down the street from our house, and we bought the full collection

again, because it was so cheap. And I was like, this is what money is for. Like, this is why you make it to buy all the Calvin Hobbs books, whenever they're available to you. And so she was excited, because we bought all these, what appeared to her to be comic books. I encourage you if you have children to try and just try to read any comics strip. Like, first of all, that's bananas. And then these are like the multi-layers. Like, I'm giggling. And she's like, I don't, is the tiger alive? I don't understand. Get her in on Kathy. Let's see. How she feels about Kathy.

Oh, man. She looked at me very seriously the day, and she goes, my lion never comes alive. And I was like, well, you're growing up, kid. You're in first grade now. Yeah. Work on your imagination, Max. How about that? All right.

There's a lot going on this week. It's kind of a, we're two weeks out from the iPhone event. I keep joking. It's like summer's over. That's where we are. Yep. I candidly have just like end of summer, whatever. Like, that's my brain.

Like, what if I, what if I just shut it down for a couple weeks before we ramp up in the gadget season? But there's still a lot of news. A ton. And all of it is, like, policy news. Like, the legal systems of the world just keep generating PDFs for me to read on a Bukes palma. I mean, literally, it's just everyone trying to do the work that they have to do so that they

can have a long weekend over Labor Day. Like, I'm convinced that this is the same thing that happens, like, right before Thanksgiving. It's just a bunch of people who are like, I need a minute. Let me, let me file all my paperwork. Let me get all the work done. Let me push, publish on the thing and then get out. Like, nothing is going to happen on Friday. Nothing.

Everybody's on vacation. They're like, I did it already. Four-day weekend. And you're listening to this on a Friday. So get ready. We're going to recapitulate everyone else's week of work. If you've done any work today, stop it. I do think, like, the theory falls a little short when we consider France because they don't

do Labor Day. The same Labor Day. Every day in France is Labor Day. That's true. They're like, were you counting on the buses? today, strike. That's not how French people talk. Can I just talk about the Boogs Bomber for one more second?

So governments around the world generate PDFs and it is our job to read them. In broad strokes, that's how I think of the Virch Policy Team's coverage. David made everybody by a Boogs Palmer, right? He came to your house and with threat of violence made you buy an e-ink Android phone. He just knocked on my door, but it was polite. But it happened. Yeah, it happened. The other function of the Verge,

besides responding to government PDFs is making people buy stupid gadgets. I'm very confident in this dynamic. Like, this is how it should be. So I buy a Bukswama, and I'm like, this is how I'm going to do PDF because so much my job is reading PDFs. But then you need another piece of software

because it's not good at anything by itself. No. Because it's just a low-end Android phone with an eag display. So then you've got to get Readwise Reader. And it feels like those two companies should just put it together.

Those are the two things. It's not actually the Bookes Palmer that people want. It's readwise reader on an e-ink screen. 100%. It could not agree more. And like every time Alex and I both go through this, every time we talk to a company that makes e-readers, we say, when are you going to make a decent app for reading things?

And every time we talk to a company that makes a reading app, it's like, why don't you make hardware? And at some point, somebody's going to do it, and it's going to be great because you were exactly correct. Didn't Amazon kind of do it? Right. What I'm arguing, for is lock-in.

I said good software. The word good is so, so, so important in that. That's true. Readwise reader, good software. There's good software out there. Omnivore, free app, good software. Make a thing for it. Or work together with all the company that's making the thing.

Like if you buy the books, you would not know that readwise reader exists and is the thing that unlocks the hardware. Right. Right. I feel like they could just close that loop. Anyway, readwise reader, the thing that you do to it is you upload the PDF and it basically OCRs it into a format that looks good on an e-ing screen, which is great. Only that takes time, and I have no attention span and no patience. And I was like, screw it. I'm just reading this

PDF on my iPad. And that has happened like five times in the row. Yeah. Kevin, when our features editor is constantly dealing with this, because we're always getting like galleys of books and stuff. And every time I get like a PDF of a book that's about to be released that I have to read for whatever reason, I first try to upload it into my Kindle where it doesn't work and looks bad. Then I try to put it in read wise where it doesn't work and looks bad. And then I end up reading it like in Dropbox on my iPad. And I'm like, how is this the best possible solution here? And yet it is. Every time. It's like I've come this close from going from Boog's Palma to buy an iPad mini like pilots around the world. By the way, people now just send us creep shots of pilots

with iPads. It's the best. It's my favorite. Very unexpected outcome of hosting a podcast about technology. But all the pilots look, all the pilots look great. Everyone looks happy with their iPad. Okay, let's talk about some actual techniques. So we've got to talk about Telegram. There's a bunch of other legal stuff that happened this week. And then we got a true lightning round where we're going to try to get through mall to wrap this thing up.

Yep. But we should start with Telegram, which is, I would say, not only the news the week, but the ongoing news of time to come. Because the idea that social or messaging platform owners face criminalized. for what happens on their platforms, it might feel new and shocking because the French government arrested this guy. But it's also been building for a very, very long time that some amount of responsibility for what happens on our platform will be imposed. And our government has wanted to do this, right? I mean, Congress is like, Jack Dorsey, we're going to yell at you for a while. This one, I think, is particularly shocking because of just the facts of what telegram is,

the fact that Pavel Dura of the CEO landed in France on a private jet in the French the reason immediately arrested him. Why land your plane where the people are going to arrest you? His sort of unrepent attitude about what's going on the platform. David, cut us up on the basics. Sure. So basically last Sunday, Pavel Dura, the CEO of Telegram, was arrested, like you said, after landing the PJ in France. Just don't land your PJ there. It's an odd move. You're not connecting. Don't call it PJ. No. Just don't land the PJ is a good. We can make shirts that say just don't land a PJ. That could work. In sky, Pavel. And all we knew at the time was that he was arrested, I believe the French authorities said,

like, in conjunction with an investigation into crimes. It was very vague. But he was arrested. And over the next several days, it came out that essentially what was happening is that he was being arrested based on criminal activity that was happening on telegram. He was not, as far as I understand, being accused of doing the crimes, but of what the French government and out calling complicity in the criminal activity that was happening on Telegram. He has since been charged with a bunch of things, most of which are complicity for things like money laundering and child abuse, child sexual abuse material, all sorts of other internet

crimes. And the overarching theme seems to be, A, a lot of this bad stuff was happening in relative plain sight on Telegram. And B, Telegram not only knew it was hosting this stuff and allowed it, but actively resisted working with governments to help. Yes. I think, again, this is the very beginning of what I think is going to be a very long story, but I think in terms of like the basics of what we know, I think that's kind of where we

are at this moment. Yeah. Am I missing anything? No, those are the basics. Obviously, none of us are experts in French law. If you are an expert in French law, you know, hit us up. We love to talk to you. But the piece of that puzzle that are really important here that I think we can understand

talk about credibly, are one, how Telegram works. Because a lot of people want to impute how other platform works onto Telegram, and they're actually really different. So it's a very common misconception that Telegram is encrypted and is just not. It's not even like secret chats, one-to-one chats, you can push a button and make them encrypted, but that is not the default. Telegram groups are not encrypted. Like, there's nothing inherently secure about telegram. I will tell you, I know a lot of activists who know, who know that there is CSAM on iMessage, that there is bad stuff on signal. And the defense is these are end-to-end encrypted. No one can see the data except the participants.

So Apple knows it's there. People have told them. They have actually built some tools to try to detect it and gotten yelled at that for essentially breaking the encryption. We've talked about that story at length. But fundamentally, it can't see it. So it has this out. These companies have these outs. People are doing bad things in our platforms, but we can't see it so we don't know.

And you should find other ways to catch them. And this is a lot of the argument about end-to-end encryption is the cops want to see the bad stuff. And they want the companies to build them back doors to give the bad stuff to them. And so I think there's a temptation to assume Telegram is operating the same way. And it is not. Right. And I think that is actually the first most important thing. is all the stuff is just happening out in the wide open in Telegram, in these huge channels, in these unencrypted chats,

Telegram can see almost everything that happens unless you press secret chat, which no one is pressing, which only happens between people anyway. And so it is a very unusual service in the sense that it knows. It has the technical ability to know what is happening on service, and lots of people can see what's happening on service. Have you all used Telegram a whole lot? In bits and pieces. Today felt like the wrong day to start. No, I remember using it.

I used it when I went to Taipei at one point just because it was easy to communicate with my friends. And when I got back, COVID hit was living in New York. And so all the protests and stuff were happening. So there was a ton of organizing happening on Telegram. Most miserable experience I've ever had using a chat program. Just awful. Because it is just like it's a chat room. It's just, okay, you're now in a chat room and you're going to go to bed and wake up to

200 new messages in a chat room. And you have no control over that. Actually, you make a good point. Let me just quickly like explain the rough structure of telegram. Because like you're saying, Eli, it is actually instructive for what's happening here. It tells you a lot about the story. Yeah. Yeah.

So there are basically three levels of telegram, which exists, I would say somewhere in the, like, if you imagine the overlapping Venn diagram of like WhatsApp and Discord and like we chat. Like telegram is somewhere in the middle of those three things. So all the way at the top, you have public channels, right? Which is basically like the equivalent of an Instagram feed, right? You post something. Lots of people can see it. It's essentially just a public, like one-way feed.

The middle thing, which I think is probably telegrams like most, I don't know, if not most used and sort of most unique thing is the group chats. And the group chats can have, I think the number is up to 200,000 people in them, which is a crazy number, but is a huge part of the reason that, Telegram has been used for things like political organizing and for huge, like, government communications. It's because you can have that many people literally in a space together. It becomes abject chaos, but it can be really useful.

And then at the bottom of that is one-to-one chat. So you can go all the way from you and I are texting each other to, like, one, two millions inside of Telegram. And there's also, like, there's app stuff going on in there. There are all kinds of, like, plug-in-y things you've. can do inside a telegram. It has some of that like we chat operating systemy dynamic to it, but most of what happens. Truly terrible emojis. Oh, it's not a good looking app in the same way that we chat is not a good looking app, but like it does a lot. Yeah. And so it's, it's very

useful for those reasons. And so the reason most people use it and for our purposes, I think the reason it's particularly interesting right now because of what's going on with Palvederev is really probably the top two things, right? The thing where one, person can communicate with a lot of people very quickly and the sort of giant teaming group chats of up to 200,000 people. Right. So like there's nothing else that works quite that same way on the and to be clear, if you have a one to 200,000 person group chat, it doesn't matter if that's encrypted. Definitionally the thing is leaking, right? Like it's it's it it you're not trying to keep that secret. Like that's not the point of talking to 200,000 people. So there's all these arguments for

why it wouldn't, would not be encrypted. But I think the first thing to just be very clear, on is it's not like the other platforms that are used for political organizing. It's not like the other platforms that are encrypted or claim to be encrypted. It is inherently this broadcast medium. And then the other piece, which is tremendously relevant to all of this, is that it has no content moderation, which is not like a technical decision. That is a policy decision. They've just decided this is going to be fine. It's a free for all. We don't care. We support free speech. And the policy decisions afloat from that get all the way to like how do we treat governments and also just simply get things like ISIS lives on telegram. This is just going to be the app that ISIS uses and people

have known this for a long time. We are going to accept an enormous amount of pornography, including some of the worst pornography, including some child sexual abuse material, perhaps lots of child sexual abuse material. And everyone can just see it. And researchers can just file report after report about the prevalence of this material on telegram and the company is going to do nothing about it. And then that brings you to the actual policy decisions, which is the way they've structured the data on telegram means that if a government wants to issue a warrant or a subpoena, they actually have to issue like 20 in countries across the world in order to get the data and prove the case against the bad people.

And telegrams are very proud of this. And all platforms have kind of like their transparency reports or, you know, in other times, like they've had what's called canaries where they say they have a sentence on the website. It's like, we've never done this, and then they silently change it, get rid of that sentence so people know it happened, but even they haven't disclosed anything. Oh, wow. I know how our government thinks about it. I know how researchers think about it.

I know academics think about it. And once you get to, you know it's happening and you won't even help the cops stop it. You end up with maybe you're responsible for yourself. And that is, that's a lot of steps. You got to get through a lot of steps. I don't think there's any networks in the United States that are anywhere close to that, even though the usual morons are screaming about free speech on telegram. That's just not how it works here.

Like, no one is that stupid. But here, it feels like there was such an active effort to frustrate authorities from prosecuting just straightforwardly criminal behavior that dude landed his PJ and France and got arrested. Yeah. I think we had to find out the case. We got to figure, again, not an expert in French law. Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff, but you know the crimes are happening and you won't even help us stop it. That's where you get that collapse of liability to. We're just going to arrest the CEO of the social network.

Well, and it goes back to the questions of encryption, too, because I think, you know, you. You look at something like iMessage, right, where Apple's stance, right or wrong, believe it or don't believe it, is privacy is more important than everything else. We can't see it, neither can you. Right. We don't even know what's happening. Right. You believe it's happening, but there's no way for us to know what's happening. Right. Agree or disagree, that is a stance.

That is a whole stance. What Telegram has said is the opposite, right? Like all the things you're saying about, we can see it and we're doing nothing about it. They've, like, touted this as part of the point over the years. One of the things that Pavel Daraf has said many times is, like, you can't build a private, secure, safe place for people to talk except for terrorists. And like, again, a bunch of really interesting arguments behind that sentence, but it's not encrypted. And this is the thing that it comes back to, right? It would be a different argument if Telegram were an encrypted app on which all of this stuff was kind of loosely known to be happening, but you couldn't see it.

But, like, you can see it. It's just there. There have been all these researchers in the last few days who are coming out and saying, saying, like the nudify AI apps is one that you see a lot on Telegram. And Willer Remus at the Washington Post wrote a great story about a researcher who was like, I just went and found a bunch of them, just right there. They're just sitting there. It's not like a secret.

This stuff is known. And so it seems like that disconnect between it's just sitting right there. The evidence is in front of us. Like all I have to do is look with my eyes and it's right there. And yet you are willingly obfuscating my ability to do anything. about it. That is, I feel like, the bridge that I've never seen another company cross this way. Well, I think there's the one example is like Kim.com, right? Where he was kind of egregiously ignoring the fact that his, his mega upload site was full of pirated stuff. And then one day

the New Zealand authorities came and said, yeah, you can't do that anymore. And now he's being extradited, like on his extradition tour every couple of years, gets sent to a new country to be extradited. So I think there's like examples of this before. And, um, Pavel, like, why did this guy come to France? Because hadn't he said before? This is the biggest question I have was why land a plane in France. Like, did he said before, like, I'm not going to go to places where they want to arrest me for this stuff and they hate what I'm doing. France. Like, did he miss the Olympics? Maybe he thought they were just distracted. Like, they're coming off the Olympics. He's like, on the stop and get a baguette and a cigarette, you know, see how it goes. Two things about Kim.com.

One, we had the best headline in George history. Kim.com mega uploaded to the United States on copyright charges, which people thought was a body shaming joke and we're like, no, that's the name of the company. I'm sorry, it was just very funny. That whole sequence of events was very funny. Two, copyright law, the only one where we just accept the speech regulation. It is wild to me. You're like, you fired a bunch of Disney movies. Jail.

The entire international community is going to put you in jail all together at the same time. Everyone's like, oh, that's not a problem. Like, Elon Musk is not like justice for Kim.com. Right? And then it's like we're talking about ISIS and CSAM and censorship. We're having a free competition. And it's like, what are you talking about? So there's just a huge disconnect in how we perceive speech regulations, even in this case,

where two people are facing criminal prosecution around the world for, you know, for violating our speech norms. One just happens to be Disney or like Hollywood. And that seems to be fine. So that's just weird. Like, just on its face, Alex, I agree. There's a weirdness there. But the other piece of the puzzle is that even in the States, where we have strong prohibitions against speech regulations in the First Amendment and things like Section 230, which insulate

platform owners for the speech that happens on our platforms, we make a big exception for criminal behavior on your platforms. Like, part of Section 230 is no effect on criminal prosecution. Like, it's the heading. It's like you don't get insulated from crimes. Right. If the people are doing crimes in your platforms and we can connect it to you, we're going to, you are the crimes. That's you. Fasta and Sesta, the exception to 230 that made, basically made talking about sex work illegal on these platforms, it was an anti-trafficking law, but it landed with basically sex workers can't do business on platforms anymore. That is a criminal, that's a criminal statute. We're like, this is illegal now. You'll be responsible for this. You'll be liable for this. And the platforms all take it down.

And most people are sort of fine at that. There's a large controversy brewing about that we don't have time to talk about. But that was the tradeoff that was made in that policy. Here, I think there's just a deep confusion about, A, French law. No, no sense French law. And B, like, how much do you have to know? When do you have to know it? Is Mark Zuckerberg going to go to jail?

Because all of this stuff exists on meta platforms. But they actively try to shut it down. They work with law enforcement. So is it going to jail? If you do slightly less than meta, do you go to jail? If you're Elon Musk, do you go to jail? Right? Like, I don't think we understand the gradation.

And then on top of that, every country on the planet right now is grappling with how to regulate social media and the bad things that happen on social media. And they're all going to come to wildly different answers. And I think all these platform owners are kind of like, okay, this is the tip of the spear. Like, this is the beginning of the end, even though it's so out of the way. of bounds, even though it's so far afield. No one else is doing the telegram is doing it this way. Do you guys consider telegram social media? I always considered it like a chat platform.

What is a photo? Yeah, it's, I basically wanted to just do that at you. What is the social media platform? Like, it's Instagram-y enough in the way that people use it in some ways that I think, I think it counts. Okay. I'm all the way at like anything where you can post. Yeah.

So like a, and that post might go to people you don't know is a social media platform. Yeah. Right. And that's a very loose. So you can, you can find exceptions to that one all over the place. But that's kind of my, my broad definition. Can you post? I like that.

Well, can you post it? And can the person on the other, like, do you have to know the person on the other end of it? So like, by this definition, like, Discord is a social media platform, right? Twitch is a social media platform. Twitch is obviously, in my mind, obviously, YouTube is a social media platform by this definition. So I think that's a broad one. But this basic idea of like, if you run a platform or someone can talk to a lot of strangers, what responsibility do you as a platform owner have?

And pretty much the only responsibility we've decided any of these companies truly have is making sure there's not copyright enrichment. Like is making sure that Hollywood and the music industry are protected. That is pretty much it. Right. And then there's a litany of really bad things that they're, They've decided that they will keep off on their own. And that is it.

That's the answer across the world. Like that's the baseline answer is copyright infringement. And then there's TikTok, which is like, what if we did it anyway? Yeah. But like, I would just point out that that always is where these arguments break down. If you're okay with sending Kim come to jail for copyright infringement, you might have to reconsider how you feel about the other stuff. Or you might have to reconsider it to cover infringement. I just think this stuff is so openly horrible that actively thwarting the authorities should probably land you in some hot water.

But I think the question of who is you in that sentence, right? I think is doing a lot of work in this question because like what we see most of the time is companies get in trouble, right? Like companies get fined or everybody like the government sends things to, like, lawyers. And it's all this sort of entity to entity thing. And so I think the fact that it was like a dude who got arrested for it is so unusual. I mean, it's like if somebody did a bad tweet and Jack Dorsey got arrested like back in the day instead of him going to. Do you know how different our lives would have been if Dorsey could have been arrested for bad tweets? This is what I mean. And I think it's it's, we live in a utopia. I think if you if you like, there's that.

The jails would just be full of Jack Dorsey. But I think... You'd be on a extradition tour. Yeah, exactly. Send him around the world from jail to jail around the world. And I think if you cast this out and in a certain way that it goes, like, you know, we talk about chilling effects of laws all the time. Like, how are you going to feel right now if you're a CEO of a company that is dealing

with any of this? You're like, oh, my God, suddenly not only is my company at risk, but literally I personally personally could go to jail, which I guarantee you is not something most people are thinking about. Yeah. My access to high quality wine and cheese is at risk today. Yeah, exactly. We cannot go to France.

I was like, who are those CEOs? It's like Mark Zuckerberg. What? Elon Musk. They're fine. It's a lot of them, right? Like, you know. What if Andy Jassy could go to jail?

That's what I was going to be my example. Because something bad happened on Twitch. But all of us, like, yes. He should for Amazon Kindle app. Like sooner should go to jail for what happens on YouTube is like a pretty weird jump, right? Yeah. At the same time, all of those companies. actively cooperate with law enforcement all the time.

For sure. In ways good and bad. I think on our lightning around list is like Mark Zuckerberg sending a letter to Jim Jordan in Congress this week saying we cave to the Biden administration too much. I think that letter is like political theater. But like that's what I mean by active cooperation in the government. On both sides, he's saying we cooperate to the Biden administration and now he's cooperating with Jim Jordan saying we cooperate to the Biden administration. And like the big companies, in this country at least, are actively engaged with various governments around the world in various ways. And I think that insulates them from Mark Zuckerberg getting arrested in France.

Here you just have this other thing. It is so different. Like, architecturally and how the app works, user experience-wise, and, you know, the one to 200,000 kind of opportunities you have, moderation-wise, and that they do literally nothing with the worst content anyone can possibly imagine. and then policy-wise in that they have structured it to make it impossible for the authorities to even arrest the people

they can see with their own eyes. And all of that is the middle finger to them in the process. And you just stack all that up. You're like, that is a lot of decisions that land you in French jail. I wonder how it's going to affect Elon

because he'd really been trying to take the same path with X that Derov's been doing of just being like the free speech absolutionist. Is that how you're saying? Oh, I completely disappointed. agree with that. I understand the argument. That's what he wants us all the thing.

Yeah, he's always like, it's all about free speech. And he fundamentally is very different in how he actually does that because he's always like, oh, you want me to take that down? Done. But like, yeah, I mean, his, his definition of free speech and we, you know, look at the tweet is, uh, if people want speech regulations, they should pass laws. And that's how democracy is supposed to work. And I will follow the law. And you're like, you're, that's the weirdest definition of free speech that exists. because you're asking for government speech regulations. And what they have followed historically has been draconian speech laws in other countries.

Yeah, right. Like India has draconian speech laws X complies with them. Brazil has new draconian speech laws and he doesn't like the government so he won't. It's like, it's this weird balance of like actually I'll do whatever I want. But like if I don't want to get into a fight with the government or I like the government there, I'll do what they say. Which is just not a position, right? That is just pure opportunism. And I think the noise around Dirov getting arrested in France is, like, useful for him

in his ongoing quest to be perceived as a free speech martyr. But if you look at his posts lately, you can tell he's like in an intellectual spiral because his position has no center, right? There's actually no ideological commitment to anything. So if you're like, I would wish to defy the government, but I might get arrested. Also, some of this stuff is horrible. also I'm still like I'm suing advertisers for antitrust there's nothing there like there's literally no center there's no intellectual center to that position and you can kind of see him be like

oh crap this is what free speech might actually mean I don't want to I don't want to over intellectualize Elon's you know ketamine musings or whatever the fuck it is but it's like you can you can see it's starting like the pressure welcome to hell is basically what I'm saying like the internal contradictions of owning a platform like X in all of the demands that are placed on that, I think it's starting to wear on them a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I think we should probably move on from this, but the thing that keeps coming up to me

as I read these stories and talk to people about this, there's been a ton of good reporting on this, by the way. Good week for the journalists out there is how much that the sort of legal push against the tech industry is still going along the lines of we have to protect the children. Like so much of this is about the CSAM stuff that's happening. happening on Telegram and the laws that have been passed recently, I think it was, I think it was Britain that passed a law last year that explicitly allows the executives of tech companies to be held personally responsible for CSAM stuff and child safety stuff on their platform in general

if they're told about it and don't do anything about it. Like that's, that's now a law that exists. And this idea of, uh, we have to protect children being like the most bipartisan thing you'll find anywhere on any line of political reasoning. That's how we're getting towards all of this. And it's just fascinating that that continues to be the thing that is like the deeper this goes, the more it's about child safety. That's always the argument for censorship. That's always like the first line of arguments for censorship is we must think of the children. Well, no, it's Hollywood first and then child safety. Yeah, it's never, it's never not Mickey Mouse first. Yeah, Mickey Mouse and then Child Safety almost always, like there's a great Simpsons episode about

that exact thing. And then all of the big fights in the 90s over TV ratings and stuff like that where you had like Clinton. Yeah. And then all these Republicans getting together being like, won't anyone think of these babies? Right. You can get anything done if you can convince people it's about keeping children safe. Yeah. And I agree with you and, you know, Tipper Gore, put the explicit lyrics label on all the CDs. And that was Tipper Gore. Yeah. It was Tipper Gore. Very weird. Tipper Gore versus NWA.

Just imagine how far we've come. It's super weird. But the reason that you do that is if you can make the counter argument seem morally indefensible, you win. Right. Right. But here, I just want to come back to it is really there. Oh, yeah. The CSAM is there.

It's very bad. And so, like, sometimes you just have to say it's there. It's bad, and you have to do something about it. And that's, if you listen to this show or Dakota or read us for years, like, the free speech debate online has raged and we have struggled with it and we've done endless episodes about it. But like, you need an ideological center, right? That's what I'm saying. And it's real, it's there. Like, ISIS is there.

Like, you don't have to overthink it. You just have to make it go away and hold the people responsible for it. And I think here it's like, well, that's an easy line. There are lots of gray areas and lots of much harder lines. That one feels pretty easy to me. Yeah. All right, we should wrap it up. I promise we'll talk about doing other more fun crimes the next section.

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That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T-com slash sell. We're back with more calls. crimes, fun crimes, and I trust crimes. They're less bummer crimes. I don't know if they're more fun crimes. I would say that whimsical crimes in this episode. The Grock AI being so out of control that you can just make like Hillary Clinton do GTA is legitimately very funny to me.

Okay, yeah, fair enough. I'll give you that. Like, I have a lot of deep reservations about deep fakes and what is a photo and lies on the internet and then I'm like it's also hilarious to have Elon Musk go on an ayahuasca journey at the end of it have his deep fake character say I'm starting in soup kitchen which is a real video I watched today it's like oh brother you reperture so brother oh my god I want to tell you uh it's all very good uh with an Elon voice too that all of it's great don't look at it respect the truth photography is Sacraceet.

I laughed. I did law. Let's start with the big one, David. You said, this is the story of segment two. It's Yelp sues Google for antitrust violations. So, okay. Did you guys think that Yelp had already sued Google? Because I definitely thought Yelp sued Google like a long time ago.

Yeah, Yelp at this point is a front for suing Google, right? Is that not how it works? Basically, I think everyone who works at Yelp is just lawyers now. Yes. But anyway, so very recently, earlier this summer, a couple of weeks ago. Google lost its antitrust search trial. We're still in the remedies phase and then there will be appeals and then God only knows. But for now it lost. And so Yelp, clearly emboldened by that fact, filed a suit of its own that basically brings up something that got thrown out of the

last case against Google, which I find really interesting. And essentially the argument is that Google prioritizes its own stuff in Google search results and thus de-prioritizes Yelp and TripAdvisor and other companies like it and has thus killed them. This is an argument we've been hearing forever. This is an argument Yelp has been making loudly forever. Literally, I assumed Yelp had already sued Google. Apparently it hadn't.

And now what Yelp has to be thinking, like Jeremy Soplin, the CEO said, in as many words, the wins on antitrust have shifted, dramatically. So this company clearly senses this is the moment to finally pick the fight. It's been wanting to pick for many years, which I think is very odd given that that particular fight has been thrown out of court in the same search trial that Google just lost. So I'm confused, but also I think it's fascinating. And yet again, like, Google is just up against it, man. Like,

the epic stuff is happening. The search stuff is happening. This is happening. Like, it's just, it just keeps happening for Google. There's an ad tech trial. Yeah. I say that like people know it is. Google has yet another antitrust trial coming up over its ad tech stack, which is the money. Yeah. I mean, wasn't this like Google strategy?

They would spend 20 years fucking around. And then now they're in their find out phase. And that's why they have all the lawyers that they pay a lot of money to. Yeah. I mean, there's something. I agree with Jeremy Stopplement. The winds of antitrust have definitely changed. I'll actually can point to a very

very odd example of this. Luther Lowe, who is Yelp's old policy person recently left Yelp. He's doing all this stuff. I think he's a Ycommodator now. And they did like a meet and greet in D.C. You know, like a little thing. And J.D. Vance, before he was a vice presidential candidate,

showed up at the meet and greet with all the startups talk about how he used to be in ad tech. And he thought big tech was censoring everyone and the woke lab was out of control. And in the middle of all that nonsense, he was like, is doing a good job. Yes.

Weird. Like, weird, right? Like, that's how much the wins of antitrust has changed. He's like, the only person in by administration is doing a good job is Lina Khan. Because we should break up. And really his point was like, because this woke bullshit is out of control. And like, maybe that doesn't all put together, like that puzzle, you put all the pieces together. You're like, that doesn't look like anything.

But he still said it, right? Like, that's where the mindset is, is these companies have too much control and we should take that control away from them and do something else. what the something else is I think all of us are very curious to find out it's clearly going to be something else but you look at Google which is just taking it on the chin lately right in the search

case in the epic case they lost there's and the judge in that case has been very loud like you did it I'm going to do something about it and then the ad tech case which we don't know what's going to happen every trial is kind of a coin flip but we're going to get a documents about Google's money

in that case like it's going to some stuff is going to come out because it's going to be the business side of Google talking about the money. Yeah. And I think Google's image is very cuddly as though the money just appears from nowhere. And that's not true. And that's also the trial. Let's not forget that Google wrote just without any questions, just wrote a check for the maximum possible. Oh my God. I forgot about this. To avoid having a jury trial. Like innocent, you know, innocent until proving guilty, but that's a tough look. Can we just sit on that for one second? This is a real thing. We have a picture of the check on

the website, I believe. They just wrote a check to the Department of Justice for the maximum, like a cashier's check. I believe it's drawn on Wells Fargo. And they're like, here's all of the money we could possibly owe you. We would like to settle the case. Like out of the blue. Yeah. It's incredible.

Just to not have a jury trial. And I mean, it's at Wells Fargo. So it'll take about, what, 12 years before it gets cashed. The blockchain solves this, Alice. Sorry, sorry. Have you heard of lightning? Okay. So back to Yelp.

I think the wins have changed is an opportunity for maybe not to, you know, win like Epic, right? Yelp doesn't have a fortnight in the background to fund all this stuff. But I think maybe to claw out a settlement out of Google. Yeah. To somehow put some pressure on Google to open up and make this go away to appease the Europeans in some way. Whatever you think of Google's relationship with the Internet, it is changing. And I think that, as we've said a million times, that means the Internet's going to change. So you think Yelp wants to be to Google what like the Delta emulator folks have been to Apple,

which is just sort of the one in there just like prying it open slightly. And they're in a position of weakness and going to have to start to make policy changes that are good for you, but also good for everybody. And so Yelp is like, we don't want to break up Google. We just think this is a chance to like extract some of what we want from the company because they're going to decide it's easier to do that. It's kind of necessary for Yelp at this point because they've been struggling for a while, right? Like they have resorted to basically bullying restaurants and stuff and making sure that they're on their platform and everything. Here's what we can do. We can shake down millions of local restaurants or we can get a check from Google, which is.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it kind of feels like what it is for YEL. There are so many companies you can describe with that sentence. Good God. Well, so there are somebody who is on Threads day who posted that I've been more cantankerous lately. Can I just describe my Joker moment broadly? Because I love that these companies are having these fights. I love that the Internet's going to be potentially more open.

I love that at least we're in the season of change. All that's great. I do not for one second believe any of this is truly idealistic, right? I think this is a version of capitalism at play where a lot of very self-interested parties are looking at their own self-interest and they're colliding in weird ways. Great. The reason I say it that way is because a long time ago, I used to cover net neutrality like every other day. And the big player in net neutrality was Netflix. If you will recall, they, Netflix and Reddit were like out in front, like black out the internet, fight for net neutrality. We don't let Comcast throttle us disclosure. Comcast is an investor in this company. And boy, did they not like my net neutrality coverage. Just putting it all out there. And then one year, Reid Hastings was on saying. Asia the Code Conference, so I believe Peter Kafka, and Peter said, you've been really quiet about neutrality lately. And Reid Hastings looked at him and said, yeah, we're so big, it doesn't matter anymore. And I turned into the Joker. That's honest. Wow. And like, fine, right? Like, fine.

And so I, like, the idea that Yelp is an idealistic freedom fighter, or even Delta, even though it's a smaller company, I do think they are pressing their regulatory advantage to open up these platforms. Oh, yeah. But I don't think that, like, they're the, they're going to get theirs, right? And then all bets are off. And I think all of this change is like, who's going to get theirs at the end of this? And so, like, we're going to shake down a bunch of restaurants or shake down Google. It's kind of the best, in my mind, like the best way to understand. Like, everyone's just trying to get paid.

Whether or not the legal system can shift the money around in a more equitable way at the end of all this totally remains to be seen. I truly do not know. In a funny way, what you're arguing for is capitalism working as intended. Yeah, that might be. Everyone fighting for money is what it should be. What we've landed on is nobody can fight for money because Google took it. at all. Yeah.

That's, that's, true capitalism has never been tried, David. I think that's what I'm trying to tell you.

Yeah, what if it was just a street fight for money? Let's find out. Is postmodern capitalism just Google opening its

wallet? Yeah. You have, like, sorry. You come all the, that's the horseshoe theory

of internet capitalism is Google is the planned economy director just handing money to people. I'm not saying

that's not what everybody wants. Okay, so that's Google. We'll see what happens with Yelp and Google, but you can see, like, as we keep saying,

whatever happens to Google is the internet. But you can just see the internet sort of like fracturing around that already. This other one I think is really interesting. It's a weird ruling. TikTok has to face a lawsuit for recommending the blackout challenge. And this is a very, very sad story.

There is a 10-year-old who died doing the blackout challenge. The parents sued TikTok. You know, one of those cases where it's like TikTok didn't make the blackout challenge videos. They didn't, they're, they're not telling you to do it, right? The people are seeing the content on the platform. They're taking the action. A horrible, extremely depressing thing happened. And now we're going to try to hold TikTok liable. And throughout most of this,

we are not holding platforms liable for what the recommendation algorithms do, except we just had a Supreme Court ruling, which said, maybe we should. Like, more or less, maybe we should. So one of the weirdest things about this case is that it's like a puzzle the Supreme Court put itself in. So there were content moderation laws passed in Texas and Florida. They went up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court baseless said, no, these are weird. You're just obviously conservative states being mad at Facebook. But you didn't think about what would happen to other platforms or smaller platforms.

You have to go think about this before you go back and figure it out. The one thing the Supreme Court was very clear about. was that it is protected first party speech when they curate other people's content. Right? So section 230 says you, Facebook are not responsible for a people post on platform mostly. That's their speech, not your speech. The way you moderate that speech and present it to other people is your speech.

So that's protected by the First Amendment. You cannot, the government cannot set content moderation rules because the content moderation itself is speech. Right. Okay. That feels right. Generally, that feels right. That's how you get a market of different platforms.

That's how you end up with a truth, social, and an X, and then whatever kindergarten subreddit rules you want to participate in, right? Like, that's how you get the whole range of expression. The marketing sort of decide how much content moderation they want. The court, the Third Circuit, evaluated in TikTok case, says, well, quote, given the Supreme Court's observation that platforms engage in protected first party speech under the First Amendment, when they curate compilations of other people's content via their expressive algorithms, it follows that doing so amounts to first party speech under Section 230.

So the algorithm is your speech. That means you're liable for your speech. So if you recommend a bunch of Blackout Challenge videos, that's your speech. That's a choice you've made. Now you're liable for your speech. And it's calling that curation, which is really fascinating. So this is just like a long chain of reasoning that ends with, okay, some of this belongs to you. So the government can tell you what to do.

But it belongs to you, so now other people can get mad at you for it. And that, I don't know how that's going to shake out. I don't know if TikTok is the right plaintiff for that. They're TikTok after all. We just talked about Save the Children is a theme. TikTok versus the United States government versus China. That's all in the mix there. Whether or not TikTok can like mount a challenge to this,

kind of a huge precedent to say these algorithms are not only your speech and can be protected from laws and can be protected. from government interference, but also now other people can sue you for what your algorithms do. Yeah, I mean, that like breaks the internet, right? Like, because it doesn't just break TikTok, which arguably should be broken because I hate its algorithm right now. But it breaks, it breaks Facebook. It breaks Google because Google is using an algorithm to recommend search results. Yeah, you're showing me bad stuff is now legally actionable. It's, whoa.

Like, off we go, you know. And like, fine. but I don't think we're ready for that world either. So the other side of the coin, the non-Google side of the coin, also sort of up for grabs because of what's happening in legal system, which just, again, say this to you, I'm trying to have the end of summer here. I'm trying to drink a peanut colada, and the PDFs just keep coming. Non-stop. Killing me. All right, let's do one more PDF, and then we got to get out of here.

The peanut clad is away. This one is a tough one because it's not actually the law yet. And I actually don't know if Gavin Newsom is going to sign this bill, but the California State Assembly passed an AI. safety bill. What's going on in here, David? So it's called the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, which just rolls off the ton. Is that

spell anything? Is that... S-S-I-F-A-I-M-A. No. Sifema. No. All good laws are backernames. Everyone needs to remember this. If your law is not a backronym, it's not a good law. It's just so important to me that everyone... Just get the A-D-D-D-S-Chad-G-B to make a name, man.

Yeah, right? Can you... Like the insane things people have done. I think the people writing this bill weren't fans of AI, though. That's true. They weren't going to have to chat GPT do it. This law, they should have found a way to make it spell out artificial with all the letters. And it would have been amazing. But alas.

It is mostly just called SB 1047. It's an AI safety bill that I would say concerns itself, as we've been talking about, in part with who is responsible for bad things that happen downstream of AI. And it changes the way that companies need to test and train these things. It changes the way that they need to talk to the government. Like it's kind of sweeping, like here's how we want to oversee and think about AI models. There's been a lot of backing and forthing. Open AI kind of came out against it. Anthropic was like, we love it.

Let's change some stuff. There have been a bunch of politicians who are against it, a bunch of politicians who are for it. I agree it seems very debatable whether Gavin Newsom will sign this thing as it currently stands. But it does still feel like a moment that it passed out of the assembly the way that it has. If he signs it, does that just mean like Google, Open AI, a lot of these companies relocate? Well, California is still a huge market. Yeah. Well, that, but also one of the things a lot of the companies have said essentially is why are you making a law to,

make us do what we've already promised to do, which is essentially make sure our AI is not going to destroy the world. And I would argue that's a very funny line of reasoning to be like, we said we're going to be cool. Why are you going to make me be cool is an odd stance? But my sense is, and again, all of this could change, especially as the law continues to change and depending on how it gets implemented, is that a lot of these companies are going to not like it, but we'll figure out a way to play along. I don't think this is the sort of thing that is like going to run anybody out of California. Yeah.

Yeah. Anthropics sent a letter, basically supporting it. And to your point, they're like, yeah. But then you read the letter and like, we should definitely do something. Here's just a line from Anthropics letter. We believe SB 1047, particularly after recent amendments, likely presents a feasible compliance burden for companies like ours in light of the importance of averting catastrophic misuse. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. There's a real chance we want to destroy. the world. So let's do a feasible compliance burden. Whoops. Yeah. I don't know how this plays, you know, Biden had the AI order that just came out, a bunch of companies said they were going to join the AI model board that makes sure their safety testing and releases results. This one feels like in particular Gavin Newsom has to make a decision.

And then that will decide whether a bunch of similar state laws get passed all around the country. Because once California does it, it's like fine. Like, New York will do it tomorrow. Right. Right. Because now you're not making him do anything. Like, you're just like off to the races. And then Alex, your point in the question is like, whether Texas does or doesn't do it, and it doesn't matter because all the researchers are in California anyway. Right. Like, and you have to sell to the California market and then there you go. So I, I'm very confused about this one in the sense that what you really need is a federal law, and that doesn't seem likely, and it's also election season, and who knows what's

going to happen. But it also seems like Newsom kind of doesn't want to sign it. He hasn't said anything. Like, usually when you're the governor of the big state with the first in the nation AI safety bill, you're like pound on the pavement. And here he literally has not said anything to anyone. Like affects who gives him money for his presidential campaign in four years. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's true. I mean, I also think, like, We're in a moment right now where all of the money on planet Earth is being thrown at AI, and there are a lot of very powerful, very rich people who will be happy to yell about you being anti-progress if you sign a bill that does anything perceived to be slowing it down.

And I think it was Open AI that was like, we need a federally driven set of AI policies rather than just a bunch of different state laws about how this, and that's what will really foster innovation. And this is like the same thing everybody says about everything, which is like, we would so, so love to have regulation as long as it's like the perfect regulation and doesn't slow anyone down or cost us any money, but it would be like so good. Like Mark Zuckerberg did this. The crypto industry has been doing this forever. Everybody wants there to be rules until there are rules. And then everybody's like, well, what if there was just like a simpler set of rules that I could just like do? Like, that'd be fine. By the way, in case you're wondering what SB 1047 says,

you have to make it possible to quickly and fully shut the model down. You have to, right, you just need to unplug the Terminator. That seems fine. Yeah. You have to ensure the model is protected against unsafe post-training modifications, which is hard. And then you have to have a testing procedure to see whether a model or distributives are especially at risk of causing critical harm.

So this is a lot. Like, some of that is pretty fuzzy. Some of it is, like, you just have to be able to unplug it. I was like, those last two are super fuzzy. Yeah. Yeah. How do you prove this isn't going to destroy the world is actually a really hard question. What is critical hard?

But I would argue that if you're watching a product and you have to ask that question, we should ask that question a lot. Right? Like Ford doesn't come out with the 2025 Broncos sport and immediately be like, will this destroy the world? Niela, did you watch Oppenheimer? I'm just saying. It's like there's so few products in the world where we're like, what is this going to destroy the world? If you are really crushing as a project manager, you're not going to ask those questions. You're going to be happy you're hitting deadlines.

Hey, you got user stories to collect. You don't have time to worry about that. I'm just like, you know, the TikTokers doing like bottled water. It's not like. All right. By the way, there's just a reminder for me, mental note. There's like two or three TikTok gadget companies and then we should write profiles of. I won't tell you who they are.

But if you have thoughts, email us at the verge. There's one in particular. I'm like, where do they come from? Are there the next anchor? Whoa. Just a little mystery drop. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back.

Letting around part two. The fun one. Huh? The fun one. Unsponsored. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

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Claude. dot AI slash birchcast. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French,

have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who, was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon.

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

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

All right, we're back. In the break, I disclosed to David what company I was thinking of. And Liam immediately said he bought something and now David is writing a profile. It's happening. It's going to happen. But I'm not telling you who it is. Just immediate. It was incredible.

If you can guess, if you send us an email and you guess, maybe something good will happen to you. We'll ship you whatever Liam bought from this. No. All right. Okay. We're doing it this way. We're doing true lightning round, unsponsored. No one can tell us what to do because they haven't paid us any money. What I'm suggesting here is you could pay us money. I don't know how that works, and I probably still won't do what you say. But, you know, live a life of possibility. I have one Vergecast listener slash startup executive, who I will not name, who asked me very seriously recently if we actually want people to sponsor the lightning round or if we enjoy this bit so much that we actually don't want.

people and I was like no to be very clear I like money more than I like bits we will take please sponsor the lightning round can I do an aside about the influencer car this I've been thinking a lot about journals or influencers the whole thing here's the problem that we have um when you give other people money they do what you say people come to our sales team and like will they do what we say and we're kind of like no no it's a real problem with journalism as a whole right now fighting an fight. But there's always a chance. Huh? I do think our enthusiasm for a sponsor of the lightning round might make it the greatest ROI in the history of the version. Like, we will talk about whoever that sponsor is forever, unless they suck, in which case we will see that too. See, you never know.

Life's a game of chance. Roll the dice, people. Sponsor the Lightning Round. All right. True Lightning Round. I'm going to read a headline. We're all going to react to it. We're going to move on. Right? This is the idea? Yeah. Okay, here we go. Google Gemini will let you create AI generated people again. Remember the diverse Nazis? Those were the days. We're back. Google says they fixed it. Only white Nazis now.

Wait, you all talked at length about what is a photo last week with reimagined the pixel. Yeah, I had a bit of a freak out that I still am getting a lot of notes from people about, and I feel very good about that as time goes on. Yeah, I feel, by the way, yes, we're going to defend the sanctity of photography here in the version. I feel nothing about that. My only question is it feels like Google's attitude about this is slightly shifted. Right? Like they diverse Nazis are a thing and they killed it because now they're like,

actually they killed it because a bunch of people were like, we should be able to make diverse Nazis. It would be weird. And they took it down because we don't want anything. I don't know how Gemini is going to work now. But reimagine, they're just like, yeah, let it ride. Right? Like it's more or less their attitude towards it.

Yep. Well, I just, it feels like something has shifted there and I'm not sure what with Google. Was it six months? ago that the Gemini thing first happened. It was like earlier this year, wild how much this has shifted in six months. Because I totally agree with you. There's more safety rules there. Like, Reimagine is not supposed to add a bunch of drugs to, like, I don't think that's what

they want. But you can't add people at all. You can't add people who won't touch people. We don't know how this one's going to work. So there's some shift. I'm saying is there's a shift. It's not the next thing we're going to talk about, which is just a free for all. But there's some little shift inside of Google that says, okay.

the market is willing to accept a little bit more crazy. And like, here we are. Seeing it free for all, X's new GROC image generator floods X with controversial AI fakes. That is a very soft headline. Again, that's, okay, here, little, little quick. We're almost like a little too nice. No, little quick how the internet works thing.

That's actually the SEO optimized headline that goes to Google. Can I read you the headline that's on our website? Ah, this makes more sense, yes. X's new AI image generator will make anything from Taylor Swift and lingerie to Kamala Harris with a gun. Yeah, we should. I don't know. That's what Google wants. Kamala Harris with a gun is all anybody's searching nowadays, let alone the other thing. It's bananas.

Like, again, I've watched hilarious videos of like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in an arm standoff on X. And the underlying technology is called Flux, which is an open source AI system. So even if X added the controls, they've now sort of like opened everyone's eyes to Flux, which is open source, you can just do whatever you want with. And Fluxes, by all accounts, very good. It's very good. You can just go watch the thing. It's just very funny that Grock, like Elon Musk, I mean, he wants to be a famous person, right? He released his own completely out of control deepfake tool on his own platform.

And the number of deepfakes of him are out of control. What was the one you were saying you were seeing before? It's Elon Musk. It's a long video where Elon Musk narrates his ayahuasca journey. there's like a nightmare dream sequence in the middle of it and at the end of it he commits to do like giving way free food to everyone like soup kitchens and also says he's going to build a public transport system

and it is perfect like it is a perfect Elon Muskroll Yeah that's amazing Robot Elon Muskways Deepfakes should be illegal like speaking of laws that are coming Like a lot of people agree that deepfakes should be legal especially non-consensual pornography deepfakes.

This is going to be a weird fight. It's going to be a weird fight. Scarlett Johansson does not want her voice being used by Open AI, right? She's filed that complaint. I do not know how these are going to go because it feels like we just let the cat out of the bag. Talk about feasible compliance. Here we go. Like we have a picture of Mickey Mouse smoking a cigarette on the verge.com today.

Yes. Next one, Smart Home Company Brilliant has found a buyer. David, did you ever have a brilliant? I did briefly. Wow. I knew it. I had one of the earliest, earliest ones I met with our founders, like before they even launched the product and they gave me a prototype of one.

I put it in my wall and then I had a balcony at my apartment and it turned on the balcony light permanently. It just, it wouldn't turn it up. And that was my experience with the first brilliant. Brilliant stuff actually got very good. They made most of their business like going into apartment buildings and stuff. but just never really made it work. Yeah.

What if you had an iPod touch in your wallet controlled all your smart home stuff? Yeah, exactly. And Gen 2E, our brilliant smart home reviewer, reported they were going out of business, which they kind of denied, and then they went out of business, but rescued by those white knights

of American capitalism, private equity. Our people. We love them. The company is now called Brilliant NextGen, which is just brutal. and it seems like what we know so far is that people who had brilliant stuff, their stuff is going to continue to work. What happens after that?

I don't know. The new leadership did say they're going to stop selling direct-to-consumer stuff anywhere other than their website, which I think is a pretty strong signal that they are going further and further into the like selling into new construction business, which makes a certain amount of sense. a lot of these companies, like Amazon has focused a lot on that with Alexa stuff. There's been this big race to be the sort of default choice for professional builders.

I know that when I was still in the rental market, what I looked for in an apartment was a six-year-old unsupported iPod Touch built right into the wall. It's the dream. So I was like, get these non-Ipod touch apartments out of my face. Yeah, but I think it's, this company has always been, I would say, more sort of B to B than like a thing, a regular person would consider buying like you go to home depot and you're going to buy a lutron not this right like i think that's pretty clear uh but it'll be interesting to see if they can get it righted or if this just becomes kind of a slow death for a smart home company yeah i feel like if you have one of

these in your wall you're you're run at the clock on that cloud service continuing to work i kind of that's right yeah all right espn where to watch feature finds were to stream sporting events It's basically a TV guide, but for streaming. That has ever happened to me in my entire life. This is pretty funny. I spent like a lot of yesterday trying to find the catch in this. And I think there's like a big galaxy brain strategy, but also this is just like a good, nice thing for the internet.

ESPN released a thing that just gives you a list of all the games that are being played, which is like a thing that every sports app has, right, except for Apple Sports, which doesn't. But you can go and you can see where all the games are, what the score is, whatever. And now it just has a TV guide thing where you can, it'll say it's playing on MLBTV or it's playing. on TNT or this MLS game is on Apple TV Plus. Like, it just tells you where to stream sports, which seems like a thing that should not

be complicated or need to exist. Or a picture of a pirate ship and a Reddit logo anywhere in this app? Yeah. There's just one that says, parentheses, it's a Russian website against like half of these. You will be extradited. Yeah, exactly. But, like, ESPN did this whole big media day on Wednesday. this week and essentially made clear that it is making this pivot from being a cable channel

to like a sports lifestyle brand. That was how Sarah Fisher at Axios explained it and I think that was really right. They're about to launch a streaming service that shows you all the ESPN stuff, like ESPN, the cable channel is going to be a streaming service. They're part of venue sports. ESPN's whole thing is they're just like, we want you to come to ESPN when you want to watch sports. Even if you go somewhere else because they have the rights, if you open the ESPN app first, we win. right? Because that's how you bet. That's how you get into fantasy, all this stuff. And so ESPN is, like, deep in the weeds of, like, how do we become a destination for all things, sports all the time? And this is both a very good idea in that vein and also just like a useful page that I am going to load every single day for the rest of my life. I have a question. Was this originally supposed to be a venue launch party or something? Because wasn't venue like supposed to launch around now before Fubo killed it? It was.

Slown it down. Sude them. Another antitrust lawsuit in the background of the entire internet economy. Maybe, but Venue was supposed to have everything in it. Venue is the opposite strategy. Right. ESPN is trying to send you to every other service. And then he was like, we're going to buy everything. And Fubo's dead.

And Fubo was like, hold on a minute. ESPN was going to be a part of this. And then, you know, you'd go and you'd look and be like, oh, what should I watch? Oh, it's all on venue. I sure should subscribe to venue. It's a TV guy, but the answer is it one. channel. Just one channel every time. I can see it. But you know what's so telling about the sports industry is it wouldn't have been that way. The thing that is ostensibly the streaming service

for all the sports is not actually the streaming service for all the sports. This is why it's so terrible. Yeah, it's going to be like 60% I think. Yeah, which is fine. And I think venue, if it eventually launches, will be a useful thing that I'm sure I will give too much money to. But like the fact that you can go on here and it will tell you the game is on prime video or that the game is on Apple TV Plus is like a genuine user interface victory. And I also think it makes a lot of sense for ESPN as like a big...

How low our standards have fallen? This is what I mean. TV guide. Literally it's TV guide. All right, we're moving on. David, I feel like that you're going to try to convince some people to buy this thing. I'm telling you already, immediately saying that.

I have it. You have it. The plod. This thing is called the plod note pin. Yeah. And it's, we're just in this phase of everybody launching little tiny voice recorders that then use chat GPT to summarize whatever they hear. Like, they all have bigger ideas, but that's essentially what it is.

This one is just cool because it's like a little, it's a little guy. It's a wearable. It comes with a lanyard and a clip and something else. Oh, and a thing you can wear on your wrist. So the idea is like it's a wearable. You tap it, you talk to it. It summarizes your notes. Is that anything?

I don't know. But this is the thing, right? Like Microsoft Recall is a version of this. The limitless thing, which we've talked about is a version of this. This idea of like, how do we make it easy for you to input all of your stuff into an AI system? And then it will make something out of that for you is like the big new product question for a lot of these companies. I don't know if any of it amounts to anything. I have just been sitting here like yelling thoughts into this thing all day.

And it just keeps transcribing them being like, you need to. to remember that your meeting is in an hour. I'm like, is this useful? What did I get from this? This is like, what were those journals of the pens and the notebooks had the or the live scribe? Yeah. And I wanted to be a live scribe person so bad.

So bad. And now it's a little trashy-bubble device. I look forward to your review. I encourage everyone to wait for the inevitable in the review. The good news is this is a thing AI can actually do, which like summarize a voice to text to summarization, AI is good at all of those steps, unlike so many other things. Like I watched a very funny video of somebody reviewing the brilliant frame AI glasses.

And I got such flashbacks to doing the review of the Humane AI pin, where you're just sitting there asking it really basic questions. He was sitting there holding up like a, I forget what, it was a drink of some kind, I think. And it kept being like, that's a bag of potato chips. He's like, no, it's not. And it's just like, oh yeah, this is where AI is. But summarizing texts, on point. All right.

Again, I look forward to your review. And if you don't have the chart of wearable bullshit in the review, here's what I'm saying. The maker of the Bookes Palmer has a new cheaper e-reader. Don't get it. You don't get it. Wait, you're saying not to get it. Okay, so it's $150.

It's the Books Six Go. And it's their new small, low-budget cheap E-reader that also runs Android. So you think, oh, these are all good things. Oh, it's cheaper than the Books Palma. But I get a wider screen. and that sounds great, then you look at how much RAM it has. And then you look at how much RAM the books Palma has.

Oh my God, it's only two gigs of RAM? Only two gigs of RAM. Don't, like, I've had a couple of books products where they skimp on the RAM and you feel it.

It's real, real rough. Yeah. That's the sort of thing that like on a Kindle, you don't really have to worry about RAM because it's kind of only doing one thing. Yeah. But like,

you're going to accidentally have three apps open at the same time on this thing and it is just going to set itself on fire. Yep. So don't. Like, resist the urge. I know books put more RAM in. Like, it's not that, you're not Apple.

It's cheap. I mean, at this point, we are just directly controlling books' business. I'm trying. We will tell you what to do. All right. Speaking of RAM, it makes no sense. Sure. The Dyson Airwap ID is a new smarter hair curler.

So I put this on here because one is Alex has mentioned to us many, many times. The Dyson Supersonic, that's the hairdriar, and the air wrap, legitimate. gadgets, like insane gadgets. In the classic Dyson mold of We Made a Fan, what can have a fan? And remember when they got all the way to the car? And they're like, no fan. You know, they stopped fans. They got to, they're doing like a hair serum now.

And I was like, where is the fan in this hair serum? Yeah, I'm calling it right now, Dyson, you're way out your lane. Yeah. Fans only. Yep. I really wanted the car to have a fan. Anyway, tell me about the air wrap. Okay, so this is the new air wrap.

They've released a couple of different editions at this point. This one's got a couple of different extensions, one that just is going to suck your hair slightly differently. I probably should explain what an air wrap does after saying that. It sucks your hair. Yeah, the air wrap basically sucks your hair. You're going one of two directions. It sucks your hair in one of two directions. And then you can put hot air on it or cold air on it.

Yeah. And it's magic. And if you have ever tried to curl your hair, or have thought about it. It's horrible. And this makes it easier. It's for those of us who don't want to worry about having hot metal near our faces. Okay.

So I'm going to ask you this question about this one. Yeah. The addition to this one is that it has Bluetooth. It's got an app. What? What? I think the app could probably be, like, you could just not get this and use YouTube or TikTok. It would give you the same thing.

But yeah, it's supposed to kind of guide you through. doing the hair and making sure you're holding it for long enough because a lot of people will just do it once to be like, it looks good. Is this like the smart oven theory where you like, you have a QR code of a hairstyle and then it just like does the settings for you? Yeah, yeah, it kind of walks you through it. I haven't gotten to play with this app, obviously, but that's kind of the idea. It's just supposed to help you make things a little easier through some Bluetooth in. So. Yeah. More gadget. But honestly, the, the extensions for it are the cool part. They're doing like one for curly hair and one for straighter hair. So curly hair people get like more diffusers and stuff, which is very exciting.

And it's just as stupidly expensive as the air wrap was already. And it's worth it. So whatever. Oh, 100%. Somebody in your life is going to ask for one. Get it. I bought one for Becky because Alex has been so high on these things for so long. And for in the spirit of no one knows how to use it. I bought without the Bluetooth. The Bluetooth one was not yet. Also, also if I bought Becky a Bluetooth device, I should be like, no. No, thank you. I'm never, I'm never using this one. functionality. But for like a week, both Becky and Max looked like full Texas cheerleaders. It was great. Just big hair every day. That's how you know somebody gets one. Yeah. And then the weird thing is our air purifiers, like light up every time we use it.

And someone told me it's because of the hot air, like the hair products use, it like lights up their purifiers. Yeah. That would make sense. Your hair spray is you're not, don't breathe that stuff. I mean, it smells great, but don't have it. Here's what I'm saying. Dyson, find more things to put fans in. that's your lane and I fully support it get to a car get to a hovercraft car this is what I'm trying to

this is why your first car failed it wasn't floating on a bed of perfectly produced air your next car they got this I believe in them everybody had such great hair do you think they were like electric motors are kind of like fans right their fans of up blades and they're like we'll do electric motors at scale

I'm dying James Dyson sir James Dyson come on the show, I have only one question for you. It's not worth a full decoder. Did you think electric cars are fans without blades? Yes or no, sir? Just a yes or no. We're going to get James Dyson on the show and we're going to play, can you put a fan in that? We're going to do that for one full hour of the first cast and it's going to be incredible. And I honestly believe he would say yes to doing that with us on the first cast. This is my new goal. Can you put a fan in that with James Dyson?

Gauntlet Throne. Yeah, let's go. Snapchat finally launched an iPad app. good right huh the little like the 13 year olds they're like they can use their iPads now that's great I feel like this belongs in our is this anything hall of fame

Snapchat for iPad right it's like it's a bunch of weird AI gadgets and it's like snatch it on like is this anything but people want is Instagram yeah and they're never going to get it and snap is like

it clearly wants you to use it to like watch snap originals and stories and stuff uh i don't think this is going to be like a super kick-ass messaging system snapchat for the ipad not so sure all right speaking of instagram another classic all-time headline on the verge dot com instagram adds what photos have always needed words it's good yeah i look at a lot of photos and think what if it just had a letter on it Basically, you can now put text on photos in the Instagram editor, which is fine because you could already do that. I was going to say everyone has figured out how to do this anyway. But the fact that Instagram is slowly becoming Canva because Instagram is slowly becoming Craigslist.

Very real. Oh, that's it. Okay. So the reason I put this in here is I was going to ask, are we headed towards a world in which threads and Instagram are just the same thing? Instagram is going to get textie and threads is going to get photosy and they're just going to be the same. But what you're saying is threads is going to become Instagram because Instagram is becoming Craigslist. No, Threads isn't going to become Instagram. Yeah, I think they know that the point of Threads is extremely leading questions about nothing.

And they're just going to keep leaning right into it. I come up with lists of questions to ask threads like every day. It's like, I was walking on the street and I saw a guy wearing headphones. Has anyone seen one of these before? It's like, all day long. Like, I could be the most popular person on Threads. tomorrow, you can just do it all day long. You just look at things.

Like, has anyone ever seen this before? I saw one today, today. A person posted, they were on an airplane and, you know, sometimes they're an airplane and there's compensation coming off the plane. And I don't know who, they were just like, I've never seen this on a plane before and I fly all the time. My plane is wet. And all of the just like millions of replies of people being like, you've never been

on a plane before. That's great. Yeah, a lot of people were asking if she was going to die. And people were like, no, no. But I'm just telling you, the fact that, like, millions of people will fall for the worst engagement bait on threads means we've learned nothing. You know how, like, we just did the, like, you're here because you think people are smarter than Photoshop, you know? And everyone's like, we are. I'm like, I want to show you this picture of condensation on a plane and millions of people bringing one of our biggest tech companies algorithms to its knees over the dumbest engagement bait in the world.

It is fun just as, like, an intellectual exercise to look around and just think, like, what engagement bait a question could I ask? You can just post a picture of anything, like, what is this? Yeah. Like, my water has bubbles in it. How did that happen? This is what we're doing from now on. I'm just, get ready.

It's coming. Anyway, my point is, I think they know that they want that thing. They want a bunch of calm tweets during NBA games, right? Yeah. That's not actually like a visual communication moment, but it's a place for people to engage. And they just want the engagement and they put the ads there. Whether or not that's photos or not, I think they're happy with what they've got. I'm just saying Instagram is becoming a marketing platform.

It already was a marketing platform. And increasingly what they're marketing is small business services. So being able to just put that picture on your yoga studio with the text, it's like yoga class. Like they're just going to do it. And that I think that that's why I was like, it's Canva. Because that's what Canva does for people. Great. Cool.

Soon it will just be AI. Like generate me a photo of a yoga studio. It'll be fine. All right. last one, we've gone this whole time without talking about it. We're just going to talk about for one second in the slide around because I'm confident next week we'll have a full preview. Apple's iPhone 16 launch event is September 9th. It sure is. Glow time, right? That's the tagline. That's got to be for the Siri, right? The Siri effect.

Yeah. Which I'm excited about. Okay. I have, I see this going one of two ways, and I'm curious which you guys think it is. One, this is just another, show. There's going to be some new hardware. They're going to, but all they're going to talk about is how, like, the new, whatever chip inside of the iPhone 16 gives you more AI stuff. Or this is going to be, like, a massive new hardware rev. We're going to get the camera buttons. We're going to get new designs, new colors, all kinds of stuff. Like, I could see this being either incredibly boring or incredibly huge, cool, exciting new.

iPhone year, and I kind of feel like it's nothing between, and it all seems to me it depends on how exciting Apple really thinks Apple intelligence is. I think it'll be between because they threaded that needle at WWDC where they took all the really cool stuff that was going to happen, and they're like, this is happening. A.I. So we're going to be like, button, cool new phones, AI for the rest of the show. That is true. Like, WWDC was actually like very good and totally overshadowed by the weirdness of Apple intelligence. Yeah, I think, you know, they've got to talk about it. It's the thing that's coming next year and this phone will be the bleeding edge of it.

I think the real question is whether they bring those features to the base model phone, for lack of a better word, right? Does the iPhone 16 get Apple intelligence or just the 16 pro? Because only the 15 pro is getting it, right? If the 16 is getting it, the regular 16, that's the big upgrade cycle, and they're going to reintroduce all of the features. because that's they know that general consumers

do not pay attention to WWC right that's the tech audience that's developers Apple releases new iPhone it's gonna have the features coming later this year to be able to tell Syria to do whatever you can tell Siri to do

that's your good morning America yeah we've seen some rumors I think that it was going to come for the 16 right I assume so but I'm just saying that's my guess that like this is that's how they balance that out I'm excited for a bunch of other stuff

I think we're also expecting new watches. New watches. New AirPods, potentially, new AirPods. M4 Mac Mini maybe, right? Is it weird that that is the thing I want by a mile? We're not going to get any computers.

I can keep everything else the same for another year. But an M4 Mac Mini to replace the M1 Mac Mini that is sitting here. I want it so bad. If that is here in two weeks, I don't know. I don't want to pay you guys money. All right, we got to stop.

This was the lighting round. We're going to have a full preview next week. I go do some reporting, think some real thoughts. Preview next. That's next week's episode. That's why we ended the lightning round, the unsponsored lightning round. Tim Cook, you could have, you could have, you could have tried. Could have been you.

Could have been you. Could have been asked you planned. That's actually, that's the big announcement on September. Is that it'll start. Finally, Iverge is here. They're going to put it up. Iverge is real. That's a deep cut.

That's the Verge cast. I want to shout out one big story. We did a deep dive into OpenCe this week. it is a great story with some incredible quotes in it. And also, one of those moments that, like, fills and editor-in-chief hearts with joy, part of our story is we didn't know if OpenC had gotten an SEC investigation notice, and they tried to front-run our story by announcing the notice the day before we published.

Sure did. It was pretty good. Always a win. Go read that story. It's really good. We should also say, by the way, we're off Sunday and Tuesday. The third episode of our productivity series is actually going to run September 8th. So we'll be back Friday to do an iPad preview.

We'll be back Friday. We'll be back Friday to do an Apple preview, and then Sunday with that, and then all kinds of Apple stuff the week after. It's going to be wild. All right. That's it. That's the Redcast. Back on. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

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