The Vergecast - The swaggy AI Pope and Apple headset rumors

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss AI image generators getting better, Apple WWDC 2023 rumors, and the other big stories in tech this week. Further reading: The swagged-out pope is an AI fake — and an early glimpse of a new reality Another hurdle for AI image generators: unicycles It’s so hard to be worried about AI when the shit is so funny. AI-generated video is still in its “demonic phase.” Elon Musk and top AI researchers call for pause on ‘giant AI experiments’ UK rejects idea of dedicated AI regulator. The US government is gearing up for an AI antitrust fight FTC should stop OpenAI from launching new GPT models, says AI policy group Apple’s WWDC 2023 kicks off on June 5th Apple staff reportedly express doubts about mixed-reality headset months ahead of launch Apple Pay Later is finally launching The ugly economics behind Apple’s new Pay Later system  Apple Music Classical is now available from the App Store Disney just laid off the guy it bought Marvel from... but that’s probably a good thing Elon Musk is now the most-followed person on Twitter Twitter is secretly boosting Elon Musk, Dril, and MrBeast for some reason  Google’s ADT partnership finally has a new home security product to show for it Sony’s new ZV-E1 camera is designed to help your vlogs suck less The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

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 Vurchast, the flagship podcast with the Swagged Out Pope. God, I love the Swagged Out Pope so much. If AI ends humanity, but we got Swag Pope, it'll have been fine.

Like, honestly, like, put a sign on Earth that's like, here lies swag pope. Passing aliens, like, just send that message out. Like, you know, there's other civilizations in the universe where, like, why have we never heard from anyone and there's that theory that every civilization gets to about this point and collapses.

We just need to send the message now. If you see Swag Pope, you probably have 25 years left. That was us. We did that. We know something. That's what we leave behind. Drippy Pope, man. It's like just shut it down once you get there. Hi, I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Alex Granz is here. I'm your friend who you don't know if I'm real unless you check how.

many fingers I have in the photos. David Pierce is here. Hi. I'm suddenly realizing I have a puffy jacket upstairs and that like maybe I should have been wearing it for this podcast. Oh, you should have. Absolutely should have.

Now that we've moved into video. I'm so sorry. We all, we got to take, we got to start taking style cues from the Pope. Yeah. Just in general, we should,

I mean, honestly, why have I not been dressed dressing like the head of a church this whole time? Let's talk about the Pope. An amazing sentence to say on this, our technology podcast. This week,

Mid-Journey, which is a generative AI tool that makes images, at least an update. The images can now be vastly more photorealistic. And the first thing that happened was people made images of the Pope just absolutely swagged out in a gigantic white puffy coat. Well, actually, the best part of this is that's the second thing that happened. The first thing that happened was somebody tweeted a generated picture of Donald Trump being arrested that no one fell for.

And actually, it sparked this really interesting thing. about like, oh, look at this fake picture. Someday people are going to fall for these. But it didn't become a thing. And then literally a couple of days later, the Pope swagged out in a giant puffy coat gets everybody. That got it. Yeah.

And this is like the heart of this story. This is like the most verge-casty thing. Why did the information environment know not to fall for Trump being arrested? Even though he's tweeting, I'm about to be arrested. Right. And then everyone, I think, had the same reaction, which is they were scrolling on whatever feed somewhere. and like, you know, the swagged how Pope showed up.

And everyone was like, oh, that rules. And like moved on. Right. And like there are no stakes to falling for it. Right. And so no one applied their like critical thinking skills until later when various writers and people were like, hey, the fake Pope is the portent of doom that we all had to like take a step back. You should go look at these images.

If you haven't seen it, I can't imagine you're listening to the show. James Vincent wrote a great piece. the headline is the swagged out Pope is an AI fake and an early glimpse of the new reality, a perfect verge headline. You should go read that piece. You should go look at the images. They are remarkably realistic. There are some pieces of them

that make it easy to spot like this new version of Mid-Journey. It's kind of like everything's like a little too HDR. Everything kind of looks like the clarity slider and Lightroom has been turned up too far. So they have a style, which is interesting in and of itself. Like you tell Mid-Jurdy, make a thing,

that looks like a real photo and it is like, okay, we've mined Zillow for the most whacked-out H-DR real estate photos that can exist. And that's the style we're using. Well, and one of the things I thought was really interesting is there have been people like with some of these Trump photos that are starting to come out where you can say things like make it look like it came out of a TV camera. And the people making these images are getting better and better at teaching the system how to replicate the weirdness of photos that we see in the world. Because in a weird way, like Instagram has trained us to not notice that a photo isn't real anymore. Like first we had filters and now we have all these incredibly nuanced tools that people can

use to change things. And it's generally true that if you look really, really, really hard, you can figure it out. Right. Like there are telltale signs in like the dynamic range and the contrast and often the hands. But like the argument that you should zoom this photo to 200% and inspect every pixel in order to see if this is real is ridiculous. And we're way past that point. Like the idea that you can just sort of quickly look at it and be like, that's not what faces are, which is what these things were six months ago.

Yeah. We're so far down the road of like this looks like a regular photo that a normal human might have edited to have this kind of style and then posted on the internet. Like we've crossed some Rubicon there. The Poplin is really interesting because his glasses are melting onto his face. Like it's right in front of you. Like you don't have to necessarily, you should go look at his hands. Everyone should go look at this picture. There's a bunch of stuff in it that would tell you.

But the first one is that his glasses are melting into his face. Well, you're too distracted. And you just sort of overlook it on scroll. You're like, I don't know, look at that jacket. And you're just like, miss it. Yeah, the jacket is really, really good. Like, I want that jacket. I wish the jacket existed.

The one that makes it look like, it's got like the little Pope Cumberbun built in. I was like, yes, beautiful, no notes. I don't even care that his glasses are melting into his face. That's just an aesthetic choice for him, I assume. Yeah. And as James points out in his story, there's a couple of other. things too, right? Like the cross he's wearing on a necklace is, is sort of warped and melted, like Salvador's Ali's style. His hand looks crazy with the thing that he's got. Like, if you spend

15 seconds with this photo, you can pretty quickly figure out it's not real. But like, how many photos do you spend 15 seconds staring at going, is this a thing? Like, are we supposed to do that with every picture we see from now on for the rest of our lives? So bring that back around to Donald Trump, right? I don't even think of it as the first thing that happened. Like, of course, the first thing that somebody made with this tool was a photo trunk getting arrested. But it didn't hit. It wasn't resonant in a really unique way. Yeah.

And the swag pope was. Why do you think that is? James makes a couple of arguments that I think are really compelling. His piece is really good. Everybody should read it. But the first thing I think is there is this like hyper realism, I think is the phrase he used that others have used before around celebrities. We're just like used to seeing these people in these odd places with odd.

lighting, doing weird stuff. The Pope in particular is the kind of person who is like massively photographed. He is unusually, I think, for a Pope around like swag all this kind. There's just a picture of the man like signing a Lamborghini. And so it's like it's just in this realm of possibility enough. And then you add on top of that this kind of weird veneer that is all celebrity stuff now. And then attach again, like you said sort of the low stakes of it, right? Like Trump getting arrested is like,

objectively, it's a big deal if it happens. And so it's going to cause most discerning people to at least take a half a beat, be like, is this anything? But like, why would they lie to you about like this sick jacket the Pope is wearing? Right. Like, we're just not conditioned to ask that question. And so I think you put all these things together. And also something like MidJourney is going to do really well with a photo of the Pope or Donald Trump as opposed to like a picture of your neighbor because it has the training data to do this. So it's just, it is able to do these things in such a more convincing way because of kind of both what we're primed to see and what it actually has in its system to work with. I have a related theory, which is that Trump getting arrested

is a sort of thing that is immediately reinforced. Yeah. Like you'd be seeing it other places. Like if that photo existed, the person who runs push alerts at the New York Times would be losing their mind. Right? They're like, just beat the phone again. Just hit him again. Just tell them again. Live updates. There's a, there's a story stream thing on the top. Hit him again. Trump sneezed in handcuffs. Hit him again, right?

Like the post would be doing it and we would have it like, for some reason that we, a tech site would be like, we need to have that. Like the information environment would instantly reinforce that image as being real. And I think we're trained for that to happen. Right. Like we know if something of that scale happens, it will happen a lot. Like at massive scale. And so you see that picture.

You're like, eh, like, there's none of the other signaling. Right. And so then you're like, wait, is this real? The Pope, the Pope wearing a puffer jacket with a built-in coverment. And Alex, I just looked at that picture again. I hadn't noticed that comment. It's like real good. It's so good.

It's real good. The Pope wearing a, like, what is objectively a sick jacket. It is. There's like, actually the New York Times might send a push alert about it. Like, at this point, they just can't help themselves. But it doesn't, it just doesn't come with a signaling. I think you're right. That's that's exactly what it is. Like we're used to kind of looking for that misinformation. We've been primed by like the shark is in the, is in the highway, the flooded highway.

Like we see that video every single time and somebody has to be like, it's fake. So you're used to kind of be like, this is the coolest thing ever. Why is no one talking about it? Oh, because it's fake. Whereas Trump, you're going to go and you're going to immediately look for it. Because if he's being arrested, you're going to want to like message your parents to be like, ha. got him or whatever. Maybe you're going to arrest him and be happy about it. It was all really bad. Here's my question. I posted a video of the swag pope. It's just a TikTok of difference. I mean, it's so, I can't get enough of it. Is the disinformation problem way lower stakes? Right. It's not everyone's worried about the election that's coming up. No, I think it's, I think it's still high stakes because right now we're seeing, we see the same thing with deep fakes. We saw it with Photoshop. Every time we get these new tools. that allow us to kind of recreate reality. The initial things are like fun.

It's like deep fake Keanu Reeves on TikTok just eating a sandwich. Like that's funny. But then somebody is like, okay, well, now I'm going to use a really cool deep fake to make it look like Biden said something really, really horrible to get my base really upset because my base isn't as online as the rest of us are. So they're not as primed to look for that disinformation and react to it appropriately. So it's a lot easier to manipulate those like other groups who aren't as primed as the majority of us looking at the Pope. Yeah. And I think there's also the question of where the line is kind of for us as consumers is really fascinating to me.

Because I think about the like, do you remember that story from a couple of years ago when there were lions on the street in Russia during the pandemic? That one had a full everybody believed it cycle before it became something that was like roundly debunked because it wasn't true. And so that's still kind of under the like we immediately learn to question it, whereas the former president of the United States is about to get arrested, obviously above the line of I immediately need to scrutinize whether this is real or not, right? Yeah. But the best disinformation we've seen has always been the stuff that exists just barely underneath that line. Right. And I think especially as we get to the election, I don't know where the line is, but this question of like, what is higher stakes than you'll look at the jacket this Pope has on. But lower stakes than the former president of the United States got arrested.

And all of these very smart actors from around the world are going to find ways to live just right a smidge underneath that line. And I think it just gets easier and easier to do with some of these tools now. Let me rephrase that question. I think both of you are right in that way. I met like, is it lower stakes? If you did this to a school board member, right? If you swagged out a school board member? Right.

Yeah. If I was like, all right, let's. We're going to swag David out. Right? And like put him and like put you out there. Like we're, you're not going to get the signal. It's the thing you're talking about.

It's like just below the line of instant scrutiny, right? Is it that where the problem is headed? Because that's what it feels like to me. Like this. Yeah. I think. I think it is hilarious. But like I'm thinking about like high school students.

Yes. And maybe it's just there's not enough training data to make weird celebrity photos of your principal. But you can just see where it's going. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there was, I was trying to look up some old celebrity and like an old photo of a celebrity I had in my head that I remember being real. And I was like, I wish I could remember who it was now. It's like Judy Garland or something. I was like, I'm going to go find this photo. I've seen, I can see it in my head. I know it's real. And I went searching for it and it was actually a Photoshop. And I couldn't find an original photo. And I was like, oh, this like idea I've had in my head all of this time was just some dumb misinformation. And I just felt bumped for a little while. And I think that's probably going to be the most common kind of thing. Like, Maybe it's old celebrities or new celebrities, just a little twist.

Just so you're like, you love that photo of them so much. They're the swagged out poke. But it will also be like, okay, well, I can go and make my best friend who I'm no longer friends with because I'm 16 and everything's in the world is ending look really ugly in this dress, even though she never owned that dress. And then everybody's going to make fun of her. That's very specific, Alex. Look, I was a teenage girl.

We know how to bully better than anyone else on the planet. But I think, like, we're going to see a lot more of that. as those tools become easier to use for regular people. So in the middle of this, right, right? The mid-journey is now photorealistic. It is remarkable. You should go look at the images. You should go play with it.

They are starting to close it down. I think they're realizing, like, they need to put some rules around it. So that's happening. There's a big push for that. Then there's the voices, which are pretty accurate. Again, my favorite TikToks of all are presidents

talking about mixing music and arguing about it. It's just like the funniest shit in the entire world. I'm going to end up posting one every week for the rest of my life because they're so funny. But the voice are good. There's one. I'll just post it. But the voices are good. What they can't do yet is make a move.

Right. So if you got really great voices and you can generate an image of the president, you are pretty close to a video of a president saying something bad. And we're just starting to see, okay, we're making videos out of this, right? Like that part of the deep fake cycle where you just type in president Biden saying he hates everyone generates an accurate. looking video of President Biden saying he hates everyone without the sort of like current deep fake remodeling that you have to do. We're not there yet. And we've seen some examples now of AI generated video, which I think James referred to as being in its demonic phase. He's accurate. Yeah, it's, it's either wonderful or horrifying. And I genuinely can't,

like, every time I watch it, I like watch it again and also don't want to ever see it again as long as I live. But there's like, yeah, you can you can type, what is it, Will Smith eating pasta. and it will show you a video of Will Smith eating pasta, but it's horrifying, right? Like, it's, yeah, it just makes me think of salad fingers every time for reasons I can't explain, but that's a reference.

Most of our listeners won't get anyway, so it's fine. But it's really funny because this is the kind of thing you look at, and it's like, oh, this is just silly, right? Like, these are,

like, goofy videos of Joe Rogan fighting a bear that is, like, essentially a cartoon. And then he turns into a bear. Yeah. Like, it's not,

it's not, like, they're crazy, Like, Will Smith eating, go watch the video, Will Smith Eating Post. Yeah, we'll post it in the show notes. Like, they're all great. But you look at them and it's like, okay, this is ultimately harmless. Like, nobody's going to look at this and be like, oh, Joe Rogan actually fought and then became a bear.

But also, like, last summer, we were talking about Dali and Mid Journey in this same way, where everything was very abstract. And it was like, oh, you can see how it thinks this looks like a person. But it doesn't really. And no one would be confused by it. And now here we are. Like, that took six months, essentially, to go from no one would ever confuse this for a person to, like, you have to work pretty hard to not confuse this for a person. And a video's going to come the same way. And that's where I think, like, I don't know, we either enter this place of total nihilism where it's like nothing matters, don't believe anything.

The only real thing is like the stuff right in front of your face and maybe not even that. Or we're going to have to figure out some really complicated systems for how we deal with all of this stuff. Well, I think it's education, right? Like video obviously is more complex than photos, but we've been dealing with this issue as long as kind of photos have been existing. People have been faking photos. And we've even seen it with video, too. People were making fake videos all the time.

And the only thing that's changed is that the tools are way, way more accessible now. So there's going to be a lot more content rather than just a few really good people doing it. And I think the way you counter that is to just educate people, make people the rest of most of us, listening, most of us here talking right now, can pretty much pick this stuff out. Like, we take a moment, we look at it, we know how to do it, because we've educated ourselves. We've learned how to do it. I'm sorry. The premise of this conversation is that all us got taken by a dripped out Pope. Yeah, because, but then you stop and you take a moment. And like once you apply rigor, like we did with the fake Trump photos, we immediately were like,

no, those are fake. And so I think like once people start applying that rigor more frequently, with this stuff, we're going to, like, it won't be quite as bad. And I think that's certainly one of the better ways to deal with it than, like, ban the tools altogether or some of the other weird plans. But I think that's, that's asking a lot of people, right? And we've been through this a few times where, like, we went through this with misinformation on the internet in general, right? And we have a bunch of tools that are making it easier to be smarter and yet everybody

gets taken by most stuff because most of us are primed to think most people are not like it's deliberately lying to us, right? And so getting past that thing has been very hard. And then you talk about like the chat GPT stuff that people believe, even though it is these things are known to lie. They say it confidently and like they know what they're talking about. And I was talking to somebody the other day who was saying, he was like,

I've done more Googling than ever since chat GPT because I have to Google every fact that this thing gives me. And like maybe that's sneakily what Google's doing. They're like, if we make a shitty chatbot, searches will go way up. But that's, it's a lot of, work. And I think the idea that I'm going to like scroll through my TikTok feed or my Instagram feed or whatever and sort of inquire as to the veracity of every single thing in it is just too much to ask of people.

And so you get people like Adobe is saying they're going to come out with these tools for identifying this stuff. And one of Open AIs businesses is going to be showing you what was made by Open A.I., which is like bonkers and backwards and insane. That's good. But it does feel like that stuff is going to come eventually but slowly and we're due for a really weird phase of being tricked by Dripy Popes between now and then. I figured it out.

Snopes can go public and we all invest in Snopes and they just spend forever debunking every single fake. Just call it Snopes GPT and you just send it everything and it says is this real? This is a great idea.

Maybe. So the Adobe thing is really interesting, right? They call it the content authenticity initiative. We've covered it I talked to Scott Belski from Adobe about it before. Their whole thing is, okay, we can verify an image from creation to ingest to distribution. So you take a photo, your camera supports this thing. You put it through Photoshop.

It'll get tagged. And it's basically like a very complicated metadata system. And various social networks will support it so that when Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or whatever displays an image, it will tell you it's real because it's been verified as authentic all the way through the capture chain. I want to believe this will work. I do. It's like, it's a very verge solution to the problem. It's a nice idea.

What if we did good metadata? But like those are the kinds of solutions that the industry can come up with. And they've been, Adobe's been plugging away at that for a minute now. Then there's the sort of policy solutions. A group called the Future of Life Institute published an open letter, calling on AI labs around the world to pause development. Elon Musk signed it.

Alex, I think you were saying Steve Wasdian. signed it. Yeah. Andrew Yang showed up and signed it. You know, Elon signing it. There's a lot of history with Elon and Open AI that's coming out now. It's maybe seems like he just wants him to stop. But we're at that phase, right?

Where there's an open letter there. There's another group has called on the FTC. The Center for AI and Digital Policy filed a complaint with the FTC saying, Open AI should stop launching new models of GPT because of unfair, and deceptive trade practices, which is, seems like a stretch. Yeah, their big theory was like, because these things can put out false information that falls under the auspices of the FTC to regulate it, it's, it's drawing a pretty tenuous line. Yeah.

Like you're saying, there is a lot of momentum for this idea that we just have to stop it because it is getting out of control and we don't know what to do with it, make it stop. Yeah. The UK rejected the idea of a dedicated AI regulator. So, and then there's some sort of antitrust fight. Here's a question, a very vertrous question. Do robots have free speech? Because we do, I think, for a while.

I think the people who program the robots have. Until President DeSantis rides herd over these United States. But we do, right? It's like legal to lie in most cases. It's not legal to like do a fraud and like get money for lying. But like in general, if I wanted to tell you that Aaron Rogers is going to have six great seasons with the New York Chats. Like that's a thing I can say and no one can arrest you for. I'm just lying to you.

Aaron Rogers is outside of your door right now. He's showing up, right? He's the law. But like, it's legal to lie to people. Is it legal for robots to lie to people? Like, I don't know the answer to that question in any way, shape, or form. I'm not sure that government is presently constituted. It's the ability to answer that question in a rational, coherent, or stable way.

So the Writers Guild of America is currently renegotiating their contract with the producers in Hollywood so that They can get a better deal primarily on streaming rights. That's like a whole big deal. We'll do plenty of verge cast about it. Don't worry about it. But they're also talking about AI tools because there's a potential for somebody to just be like, I don't need writers. I'm just going to have the AI write the whole thing.

And they said no. The same way that you don't just like use a Wikipedia entry for a story, we still are the ones writing it. AIs are just tools. And you're allowed to use those tools to maybe enhance. maybe make suggestions, but they cannot be credited. They cannot be, like, treated the same as a writer because they're not, because they're tools. And they also called it kind of inherently plagiarism because of the data it's trained on,

which I thought was really interesting, maybe wrong, but certainly, like, very, very interesting. And I think that approach of, like, these are tools. They are inherently cannot lie. They cannot be credited because they're tools. You don't credit Photoshop. when you go and you do a really cool edit. Like, we don't credit Photoshop whenever we do illustrations on the website. You wouldn't credit Mindfield in the same way.

So I thought that was kind of interesting. So I should disclose the Riders Guild of America is the union that the Vox Media Union is part of. So our newsroom is represented by the writer's skill of America. We're management. So we're not. Yeah. We're just the boot. Also, Comcast is an investor in Vox Media.

Oh, my God. Yeah. And they own NBC. which yeah we talked about Hollywood here it is here's the block comcast is a master in boxing union with NBC Universal Division I'm the executive producer of Netflix show which rules you should go watch it on Netflix that's part of Hollywood and our company has six unions and Rider's Hill of America is one of them Alex Heath lives in LA do we have to disclose that does that is that anything I have seen the Hollywood sign it's not it's remarkably

unremarkable I would say I did not get stars in my eyes It didn't happen. Just got the bunk. So that's fascinating, right? Like this idea of attribution to the robot. Like, can the monkey take a selfie? It's like a real thing. Like, we're going to do it again, but with robots at scale.

And then there's this contingent of people who are like, actually we need to stop it. Yes. Right? We are not ready for this thing to happen. And then I think that conversation entirely flattens out the fact that these systems are all different. Right? And you can get an open AI and a Microsoft and a Google to agree to some safety standards. But there's a lot of like slightly worse ones or weird open source projects that do not have to agree to anything.

And they can still be used to do bad things. And they will, they'll be run by criminals. So like won't do what the laws of various countries tell them to do. And this is just a big swirl of a mess right now. Yeah. At the heart of it, again, is just like a speech question. Like, what are you allowed to do with a computer? Yep.

Are you allowed to instruct the computer to lie to people? Yes. Yes. It seems like the answer is yes. all the time. But I think there's going to be some amount of, all right, the companies, the big companies, the ones that truly democratized the tools are going to be either at a company market level, they're going to put some restrictions in, right?

Like, I think mid-jurney and the rest of the image generators would do well to say, we're going to start ruining faces again. Right? Because that was a conscious decision that they had made before that they wouldn't do faces and they undid it. And like, you can see how as just, industry, they could say, you know what, we're going to start being bad at faces again, because this is getting a little weird until there's like a regulatory system that we understand.

But then you can also see how the government might be like, you know what? We want you to shut it down or like register all your users or worse, like DRM all the pictures. So we know where they all came from. And like there's just a range of options on the table. I think it's, I mean, this is what the verge is made for. Like one publication can talk about all these things that were happening at once. But I do think you're right that to a pretty real extent like the whatever, the horse is out of the barn, the toothpaste is. out of the tube, whatever you want to pick on that one, that like this antitrust argument that

is starting to happen is like people like Lena Conn and Jonathan Cantor are basically saying these things are really expensive to build. They're really expensive to train. And inherently what that does is give too much of the power and control and sort of the ability to make this stuff to these big companies, right? And it's why you look at OpenAI, which got $10 billion from Microsoft. And it's why Microsoft is doing it. It's why Google is doing it. There's just not that many out there. But that's changing really, really, really, really fast. And some of the stuff is starting to get open sourced and the training data is more available. And we're hitting this point where building one of these things from scratch is hard, but you kind of don't have to

anymore. There's just so much infrastructure out there now that if you, like you're saying, if I wanted to just go build a large language model chat bot and have it be horrible, it's a hell of a lot easier than it was 12 months ago. And it's going to be a hell of a lot easier in 12 months than it is right now. I don't see how we can rewind that from here. See, I don't know if that's actually true because of Getty. Getty is a good example of this. They're the professional image library. We use them almost every single publication pays Getty so that we can use their photos.

They are currently suing some of these AIs because they've trained their data on Getty images and didn't pay licenses for it. And what can very easily happen there is Getty can say you have to license our entire data, like all of our images to train your data set. And we're going to charge you thousands and thousands and probably millions of dollars to do so. Or actually, we're just going to build our own generator using our data set. And now we have like our photo monopoly has gotten even larger. And I think that's going to be, we're seeing that with others too. Like people are starting to say, hey, you can't use my artwork to train your data because of plagiarism. We saw that with the WGA accusing like just inherently using what's publicly available as plagiarism.

So I think that fight's still out there and is going to continue to happen primarily in the court. And that's going to be a pretty significant component of this, I think. Yeah. I mean, if there's a more verge story than AI copyright, I don't know what it is. Yeah. You just got very, like the big grin on your face. You got another hour? Let's do it.

Again, the copyright act was like barely functional on the internet, right? Like it barely describes what people do in the internet. It is the thing that governs most of our lives in the internet. It's like the default law. It's the only law that counts. It's like a cliche in our newsroom. Can I ask a question out of a really tortured metaphor that might not work and we can cut it out the show?

What show do you think this is? Of course you should. Is this like the Napster moment of this where it's like everything is free, everything is chaos, take all this stuff that belongs to somebody else, shove it into a pile. You can have it any way you want. And like what you're talking about with Getty, it just made me think of like the RIA coming after people saying you owe $60 billion for the songs that you downloaded. it and they successfully like sued enough people to make them afraid and enough companies to run them

out of business that it sort of reverted back and then it's like okay now we need a different kind of model for that like are we in that first phase now or is this just totally different and I'm making that I think so yeah I mean Neela you you feel you have stronger feelings about copyright than I do and know more about it's all I care about all of my emotions are pointed to copyright what do you think I think that there's a parallel there I don't know if it's a direct Like, the music industry for all of its idiocy had a point, right? Like, you were making copies of the songs and then giving those copies to other people. All right.

Like, at some point, they should have, something was amiss there, right? Like, no one was capturing the value. The artists were working for free. I think many, many years later, my position on should artists work for free has changed from the time when I was like music Napster and the dorm. And that was different, right? The economic condition of the music industry made them unsympathetic at that point in time. Right.

I was like, Metallica's already rich. Like, I'm just taking an understanding from them. Like, screw you, Lars. Right. Now, I think in 2023, there's a lot more sympathy towards people who make things and whether they should be compensated for those things. And what's free and how you give credit? And, like, the younger generations on the internet are just much more attuned to like, oh,

there's value extraction. happens on the internet every single day. And we should, artists should be rich. Like, we're mad at Spotify in general, even though we won't stop using it, because the artists are always grumbling about how they don't get paid enough. And just that sort of economic literacy of the internet is vastly different than an Aster moment. So I think that's one piece of it. The second piece of it, one more technical and I think will result in a number of disastrously hilarious rulings from courts, because at the end of the day, like, yes, it's training data, but the thing they make is not a copy. Right. It's a much less direct line from you burned a CD and gave it to people on the

internet. Like that's a very straight line. How you get from I wrote a screenplay to it generated a different screenplay, maybe potentially with some knowledge of my screenplay is different. There is a copy that's being made in there. Like one of the things that I think we forget about cut all the time is like it's still rooted in atoms, right? It's rooted in the idea of like making copies. That's what it's called. And so there was one. a line of cases that literally had to say every copy that a computer made, it was legal. Like literally copying a program from a disk onto the RAM of a computer was a lawsuit, right? Because it's making a copy.

And so we've kind of just like abstracted away what computers do, which is just constantly make billions of copies all the time for all kinds of reasons. And now we're going to come back, I think, to, okay, to use our images as your training data, you have to copy them all onto your disks. Just step one. Like, was that copy authorized? Did, is that a, is that allowed? Is that legal?

And like, we just haven't had to ask that question in the context of computers for about 20 years. And like, we're just, that's going to be Getty's first argument is like, here's what opening I did. They went to Best Buy. They bought all the Western digital hard drives that existed and copied the, the Getty database onto them. Right.

And it's like, wait, hold on. We're doing that because that's their opening salvo, best theory of the case. Like, just making that. database, is it copyright infringement? And like, we're just going to, I think we're going to go back there in a weird way and maybe never get all the way to. And then we created derivative works of those images by letting a computer predict the next pixel in a sequence.

I can talk about this all day. Can we keep talking about? We should probably move on. Addie and Sarah John and I are like lit up with the copyright story because it's so complicated and so weird and like so many old internet laws are coming back around, right? foundational copyright cases of the internet are kind of like up for grabs in really weird ways. And I think that's going to be, again, because the economic understanding of how the internet works is so different now, they could go another way. Like the copyright cases that allowed Google to exist and make image search happened in a wildly different economic climate.

Yeah, the last time we were doing this, everybody was shouting about how, you know, the internet wants to be free and information wants to be free. And we don't look at it quite like that anymore, generally speaking. Yeah, not even a little bit, right? And like, Google got rich. At the end of the day, Google captured all the value and photographers and musicians and whoever didn't. And like, this is another one of those moments. And I just think that economic understanding of the tradeoff of information wants to be free is a lot, is a lot clearer for people. Yeah.

Last, we should just note this. There was a really well-reported piece in the information this week, claiming that Bard was birthed in conflict at Google, including a researcher leaving the team because he claimed that Bard was trained using chat GPT data through a tool called shared GPT. Google has denied it. They gave a statement to us. We have it on the site. Bard is not trained on any data from shared GPT or chat TPT. It's a very clear denial. But I think it is just worth pointing out, even throughout this conversation, we've mostly talked about startups, right? There's Microsoft on the side, but Open AI is a new company. Mid Journey is a new company.

The big companies are still finding their footing, right? Or they've just bought into it in the case of Microsoft. Right. Yeah. Poor Bard. Okay, here's, let's start. I'm going to wrap this up with two instructions. One, if you work at Google and you're on the Bard team, let that shit be horny.

It'll work. Just horn it up. Just let Bard flirt, man. It's got swag. W. Riz from Bard. It's like, that's put that on the board. And then, two, if you operate a radio telescope of any kind, or anything that can send signals in the deep space.

I'm going to give you this audio clip. Just broadcast it as much as you can. Swag Pope is a portent of doom. You have 25 years left if you see a drippy Pope. Citizens of the Galaxy. Swag Pope is a signal of doom. End message. And if you could just send that to space,

I think we will be doing a surface to all the... It's so weird. A time traveler just showed up and said, I heard. He's right here. Swag Pope is doomed. All right, we've got to take a break. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools. you can take advantage of from payment processing to analytics to website design. Their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, what if I need help, then no worries because you're never left to fend for yourself.

Shopify's award-winning customer support is available 24-7. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time. you could be giving to your customers.

That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply.

All right, we're back. Let's talk about some gadgets or promised gadgets. Soon-to-be gadgets. Gadgets that might also be important of doom. But not for us, for Apple. Just Apple. So WWC was announced this week. June 5th, we will probably send an army of people.

We could do the preview. Like W-SWC is kind of like a known quantity in the base level, right? Yeah. They announce the new versions of iOS, MacOS, TVOS, home OS, all the OSs is, watchOS. and then maybe we usually see a preview of some of new hardware. This year, that piece of the puzzle is loaded with meaning, right? Because people think it's going to be the big mixed reality headset. And there's like a lot of reporting about it in a way that is unusual in tone and unusual in volume, I would say.

Okay, I'm really glad you said that because I was actually trying to remember in prepping for this, if there has ever been a sort of run up to an Apple product quite like this one. Because when the Apple Watch launched, there was a lot of smoke that there was going to be a watch. That's kind of all we knew about it, right? But it feels like as Apple gets ready to come out with its mixed reality headset, which we think is likely to come at WWDC, that we should get into why suddenly there's questions about that. We know a shocking amount about what the thing is going to cost, what it's going to do, what it looks like, how it works, how people at Apple feel about it. Like, is this, can you remember another time when it feels like a product Apple is working on this much? Feels like it has been sort of out there in the world this much ahead of time?

The iPad. Was it? Yeah. Did the iPad have that same, like, sense of just the grimace emoji that seems to be surrounding the mixed reality headset? Well, it did right after because everybody thought the name iPad was stupid. But I actually don't remember if it was there before. No, it definitely had more hopes and dreams. But if you just remember, they had to, like, go to the media.

Like Steve Jobs announced the iPad and he was like, this is the future of newspapers and magazines. So like, and then remember like Rupert Murdoch made the Daily? Oh yeah. RIP the Daily, which was actually great. And the staff of the daily has gone on to do amazing things around the industry. Yeah. Because he assembled like an amazing team to make that. What was it?

It was like an iPad app that updated with news every day. And then it failed because you could turn pages. It was the most like anachronistic thing I think Apple has ever done. It was amazing. They made a print magazine that you could only read on the iPad. It was truly strange, right? But like, because they had made all. all those deals, like a lot of people had awareness of the iPad.

Yeah. And like pre-baked good thoughts about the iPad, like they were rooted in actual experiences. So I would just like rewind you to it. Like, yes, the iPad was that thing where the hype around it was so high and enough people had like sort of used it that there was like a level of doubts. Right. If you remember, it's just a big iPhone was like the.

Totally. That was correct. It turns out. Years later, it's a, it's a big iPhone with some features of the. the Mac and it should just be a Mac remains the gestalt of the iPad. Yep. But this one is different. It's more than that, right?

And I think it's because the iPad was obvious, like in the best possible way. You should make a really big iPhone. People love iPhones. People will love this thing. And there's all kinds of stuff you could do it. You can just imagine where it will go. You can imagine how to make it, right?

Like make the screen bigger and like, whatever. You made a thing that's all screen. Do more screen. Apple now with the mixed reality headset is operating in the context of, well, we have them. They exist as products. There's the MetaQuest Pro sitting right behind me in that shelf there.

It has not been charged in weeks, months, you know, like whatever. You're out on the supernatural? You're not boxing anymore? No, I use the Quest 2 for that. It's lighter and simpler. That's fair. Right? And it doesn't have 90 cameras.

It's not trying to do a thing that no one wants to do. Yeah. Right. It's a game console. I have a P. I have our review unit or the PSV. in the other room and I spent all my chase points on a Logitec racing wheel. And I got to tell you, Grand Turismo in the PSVR2 is the single best experience you can have.

It makes me sick after 20 minutes. But boy, do I want to not be sick again so I can go spend another 20 minutes in it. It's so fun. Right. And like, as game consoles, like that's really cool. I cannot recommend that experience enough. Sean Hollister wrote about it and I immediately figured out how to have this experience of like VR racing game. Because it's so cool.

that's not a market that's big enough for Apple. They've got to do a thing here. So Alex Heath, when he was at the information, broke the price like $3,000. That was his scoop. It's held up so far. And then there's the stack of problems that we just know really well

because of the meta quest two and just the reality of what these problems are. You've got to build a headset that doesn't look ridiculous. Very few people have accomplished this. Maybe no one has accomplished. I would argue zero people have accomplished this. Yeah, they're just familiar now.

They're not not ridiculous. Right. It's like clowns. Like, you know what a clown looks? Like, you're not like, oh my God, my God. Like, no, that's ridiculous, but like a familiar way. Just there. Yeah.

You've got to, it's got to have a processor in it. It's got to have a display system that doesn't suck all the power. It's got to have a bunch of cameras. You've got to process cameras in real time and augment the information. Like, we've done this stack on the Veritas 100 times. The problems here at every level are novel computing problems. Yes. And then you're constrained in power and battery life and all this stuff.

And so Apple's solutions, as far as we understand, are like, external battery. pack. They don't want you to wear it all day, really high price to make it clear this is not a mass consumer product. And then the reporting that has come out over the past few weeks are like, they're searching for a killer app. Mark German said this will have the same curve as the watch. Like, that's their hope. And if you will recall, the watch launched, it was really messy. The battery life was constrained. And then they figured out as a fitness tracker with notifications and now people love it. And also they use their ecosystem lock in ruthlessly to make sure it has no competition for iOS owners, whatever.

But here, it's like, at every layer, there's a novel technology problem, and there's no killer app, because they're not going to do Grand Turismo VR on a $3,000 headset. They're just not going to do it. And also, they suck at games. Like, yes, they have Apple Arcade, but you're, you're, you're, you're just not going to buy a $3,000 headset to play Monument Valley. You know, it's like, it's not going to happen. Well, apparently the thing that they're talking the most about is, uh, I think Tim Cook

keeps calling it co-presence has been the, the thing that's been reported is basically, really great video chat and this feeling like, you know, I can see through your eyes because you're wearing the headset and it's looking out. And that's, that shit's going to make people vomit all over everything all the time. Can you imagine? Yes, 100%. And even to the extent that like that is cool as far as it goes, like I think we've all arrived at a point where we've decided that Google meet and Zoom are pretty good for what they do. And the bar for like, let me get dedicated hardware to have a meeting every single time is so much higher than anybody realizes. And like, this is what meta has been trying to do for a while. They're like, what if instead of having a Zoom meeting,

you had a meeting in Horizons? And you all sat around a table and didn't have legs and made weird faces at each other. It's like, actually no one wants that. Well, I would say Horizons is so hard to use that I don't even know if I don't want that. Right? I know for a fact, I do not want to use their software. Yes. Without question, the idea, I have the remote desktop server on my Mac and they're constantly updating it. Like, every day, it's like a new version of the MetaQuest remote desktop.

It's like, why? Like, shouldn't you spend all your engineering effort on like joining a meeting and not having it crash? Well, so that's kind of the thing, right? And this is what you're talking about about having to solve all these problems simultaneously. Like, have you ever seen the movie The Kingsman? Yeah. Yes.

So do you know the thing in the Kingsman where to have a. meeting, you sit down and you basically put on a pair of like wayfarer sunglasses and immediately around you, you sort of sit at your chair at the table and everybody else is sitting at the same table in other places in the world and their holograms show up with you. So it appears roughly as if you're all sitting at the table. Super into that. That sounds great. Short of that, I suspect almost every experience that isn't that sucks. Okay. And will be more work than it's worth to just talk to your coworkers or friends. What if the mixed reality headset let you have feet?

That's the big winner. That's the winner. $5,000. I mean, exactly has already promised feet. All the brightest minds and technology. To be fair, he said legs. We have not talked about feet yet.

Feet is like, that's a whole separate. Apple's going to go, Apple's going to skip legs and go straight to feet. And you're going to be like, wow. You have no legs, but feet. Yeah. You're just feet and hands. Nothing else. Just like this emoji.

You know the emoji It's just the face with the hands Yeah exactly You're now feet So the Kingsman thing is like That's what everybody wants Yes Right that's a useful analogy for this

That movie is also really funny It's great Everybody should watch it Yeah But every time I see that scene I'm like okay how do you know what chair Everyone's in? How do they know it?

Like they're not Are they all in the same room But the room is empty? No they all Yes They all have the same room I think I could be wrong About this

I haven't seen But do they all Like what if you screw up And everyone says at the head of the table. Wow. Like, just the amount of... There's a lot of lap sitting happening.

The future is sitting on each other's laps by accident. That's what it is. And then you need a picture of them, of their faces, right? And if you're wearing this Apple headset, you've got to recreate that face. So, like, you're just creating this, like, stack of problems that is vastly more expensive and vastly more complicated and vastly less reliable than getting on a plane. Yes. And I think my running theory is if you solve...

60% of that problem, you've made everything worse. And that actually, the only way to do it is to fully all the way completely do it. And I think, like, one of the things that it seems possible that Apple is going to do is basically render big screens as you use these things that I think, rather than try to do some of the AR stuff, it'll just kind of look like you have a big floating screen in front of your face. And that is substantially less exciting, but mitigates some of the, like, crappy, uncanny valley of all of this, I think. But yeah, I just, I have such a hard time imagining that Apple has solved every single one of these problems in its fullest way in order to be able to do this.

And I think it's a real bummer for Apple. Like, if I work at Apple, I'm really, really upset that all of this is coming out because even to the extent that it's going to dull the hype. So this is the reporting. We should bring this all the way back around. This is the reporting, right? This is what you and I are both noticing. One of the stories is the design team didn't want to ship it. And Tim Cook overruled them. Now, obviously, I think every story like this is people will tell you it's too simple. That's not how to actually like it's a big company, lots of process. But like that's a story that somebody wanted told, right?

There's a group of people who thought this isn't ready yet. Yep. We shouldn't do it. There's other stories about people being worried about the price. There's other stories about people saying there's not a killer app and like co-presence like this isn't going to do it. I don't want to knock this, right? Like it's if you can get to AR glasses, which is where Apple wants to go, which is where

meadow wants to go, that is. is the dream. Like, I was just that this is awesome. I really, really, really do. Right. I know it's a killer app for AR glasses is it's faces and names. Like, I was just at the Asmi Awards where the Verge won an award for Best Print Design. It was great. And I was sitting next to Anna Wintour when we won the award for best print design and I screamed. It's a website and that will go down. I mean, it's truly one of the most hilarious achievements of our careers. And I mean that in both senses. It's an achievement, right? The Homeland Series was very complicated. There's a lot of incredible reporting on it. We made a zine. That was really difficult.

It's beautiful. Christian Radkei, our art director, like, did a beautiful job with it. But we won Best Print Award. And like, that's hilarious. And so, like, have it announced or we're sitting next to, like, Condi and Astral. It was, like, hilarious. It was so good. But I was, like, at a thing.

And I was like, look at all these people. I was like, man, if I could just put names to these faces, I'd be like, king of the universe. I'd be on some vote Patel, man. Like, let's do it. And, like, I want that. insurmountable problems all the way to you need a worldwide database of faces and names, which seems bad.

Facebook has it, though. But boy, would I buy that product in one second? But to your point, David, that's 100%. 60% of that product is a $3,000 headset with an external battery pack that doesn't actually do augmented reality,

does pass through video mixed reality. And it just says, like, I think that guy's name is Bill. And it's like, because it's Apple and their privacy thing. It's like super wrong all the time. Exactly.

You can see why there's drama around this product and to some extent, they're actively lowering expectations for it. This is also like probably the most ambitious Apple's been in a while, right? Like Apple's whole MO, I think they even mention it in the New York Times piece about people being nervous and not really wanting this thing to go out, was that Apple usually waits until the market's kind of mature. Like when the Apple Watch came out, Fitbit was already huge. people were wearing these bands all the time. So people were like, oh, yeah, it's a new band, but it's better. The iPhone was the same thing. Smartphones had been around for a while.

They just figured out pension zoom better, laptops, everything. And this time they're like, yeah, this market is not mature. It has not proven itself in any way, shape, or form. We're going to do it anyway. And that's just super unlike Apple. So I would make the comparison to the watch, right? They did create the smartwatch market. Like the pebble existed, but everyone kind of knew that wasn't it, you know?

Yeah. They created a modern smart. phone market. Like, Nokia existed and I'm sure people are going to start saying this angry emails, but like those phones were not mainstream in this country. They were in some cases mainstream in Europe. They took something that was already deeply flawed. Like these were these were other places where it was super, super deeply flawed. And Apple said, we're going to make it perfect. And they did. Right. So Steve Jobs used to be able to put up the photos of the competitor products and be like, look at this. Shit. I fixed it. Right. With the watch,

they were not able to do that. Right. And this is kind of like Tim Cook's legacy is he's pushing them into categories that have not yet been defined. And the watch was a real mess. And the thing with the watch was that it had conviction behind it. This is what Johnny I've wanted to do. We had Trit Mickle on the show. He wrote the great book about Johnny and Tim and the legacy of After Steve there. This is like Johnny I've wanted to do it. It's a product that made sense like intuitively. You're like, do I want a computer on my wrist? And everyone thinks about Dick Tracy. And the answer is yes. Yeah, 100%. They didn't know what it did. should do and the battery life was a mess and the screen was all this stuff but they knew that like

this category should definitely exist and it there's enough value that is like articulable like you can say what the value will be if we get everything right along the way well and even to the extent that they were wrong about what the watch was for which is I think the like legacy of the watch and as we've talked about is that Apple was right about the hardware and totally wrong about what people were going to use it for and it took a few years for them to realize oh this is just fitness and health, right? Like, we can stack other stuff on top of it, but fundamentally what people really want is a better fit bit. So they just built a better fit bit. And now here we are. But they were right to your point, Eli, that like what people wanted was on their wrist. What they wanted on their

wrist, Apple was wrong about. But they were like, we can, we can focus on this space and figure it out. What is not at all clear is if people want stuff on their face. For any amount of time. Like not even a little bit clear. Yeah. Back in the watch days, I had this, like a formula for thinking about it, which is like the more it touches your body, the less you, the more value it has to provide and the less you should care for it. And you can just like, that's a good thing. That's a good thing. And so my, my best example was glasses, right? Glasses are pretty finicky. You have to care for them. You can't break them. If you break them, like, you're really screwed. Like, I worry about losing my contact lenses all the time. Like, right? So there's a lot of care

in there on your body, but the amount of value they provide to you is immense. So you just, like, put up with it. And you don't think about it too much. And then there's like clothes where, depending on your relationship to clothes, if you're the swag pope or you're just like me, you know, there's a big spectrum of how much you might care about your clothes. We have to care for them a lot, but they provide value.

They can feel good about yourself, and the watch was like, it was wrong in a bunch of the variables in the beginning, right? It wasn't useful enough. It was kind of hard to use. It'd care for it a lot. You charge a battery every day. And it was like on your wrist.

And like they just got it wrong in the beginning. Like they really increased the value in health and fitness. They made it easier to care for, right? The battery sort of lasting longer. And like, They aligned that equation such that the watch is like a really good product. Like I really like my Apple Watch Ultra. Um, do I worry that everyone can read every notification that I ever read from like 100 meters

away like I do, but like I still love it. The face computer zone, those equations are just completely out of whack, right? They're like almost all universally hard to use. You have to care for them a lot. You have to put them on your face. And they like, don't do anything. The best thing that you can do in them is play games. And like I, again, if you are a grand tourism person,

go spend all over the money on PSVR 2 and play grant like it is great it is an incredible experience but that's it you know like none of the other stuff is quite there yet and I like I just I should we should come back to this equation around headset time and like try to lay it out if people have thoughts and like what that equation is like what the variables are but like it's a really helpful way of understanding like the second you strap it to your body like you start have to the amount of value you have to deliver, starts going up in a way that is just enormous. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I think one of the interesting things about all of this is that I think Apple has been so successful that it's going to have a really hard time launching this thing, even as it knows and we'll say as many times as it can, this thing is $3,000. It's new.

We're still learning. It's an experiment. Whatever. It's like Apple doesn't get to do that anymore. Right? Like, when was the last time Apple launched something that they didn't claim? was going to like change the course of your life in history. The Apple TV.

See, Josh is like, this hobby and they're still kind of like, ugh. Yeah. I mean, that's a really good example. And I would say if the,

if Apple's mixed reality plans go the way of Apple TV, uh, that's, that's a real rough look. Yeah, they are not allowed to say that this is a hobby. No, even though,

I don't, I don't think it's a hobby. I think it's as so much as it is like, this is a science experiment that they're shipping to you, right? They're like, some people will buy this. It'll be good for some things. But Tim,

is going to get up and he's going to talk about the reality dial, which is an unbelievable name for a thing. It's how you control how much of the world you can see versus how much of a VR thing. And he's going to say things about it being a revolutionary input mechanism on par with the mouse and the touch screen. This is just what Apple does. And I have such a hard time imagining any other pitch. And if they make the classic Apple pitch, I think there's a pretty good chance this ends up in a really weird place. Yeah, I don't think that they can, even the fact that we're hearing this much dissent now in their reporting is like they have to know they can't make it like it does make you wonder if it's strategic if there's like if they're like oh you think

this is dumb let me give you trip mcle's phone number i don't know about that that's very unlike them but it no that's like three takes too clever you know like let's undercut ourselves before but i do think it's reflective of a volume of dissent inside the company like go back i said this so many So go back and watch the Apple Watch introduction. They were so high in their own fumes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right?

Like, Bono was there. Do you remember they said like Christy Turlington was there to talk about running marathons in Africa? Like, it was crazy. And they, they, I'm not saying this product is not successful. Again, I really like mine. I'm just saying like their belief in could they just reassemble the pieces of past success. It was like a Marvel phase three movie.

They're like, remember the Avengers? Here's that movie again. But like with different worse actors. And like, they cannot do that again. And because this product is, it can't support the weight of those expectations. The watch could not support the weight of those expectations. But on the flip side, what Apple needs desperately to do is convince people that this is the future. And especially right now, we're in this moment where I think a lot of people are souring on the whole idea of the metaverse and, you know, AR and VR and VR and VR as.

the next big thing. And we're seeing all these companies. Like, didn't Disney just lay off its whole metaverse division? Got rid of the whole thing. Yeah, like that's not nothing, right? And so now the weight of all this has kind of always been and feels even more so on Apple to say this, this is the thing, right? Like, this is where we are headed. Developers come build for this. Content people come make content for this. So Apple, Apple kind of has to and can't sandbag itself at the same time. Yeah. They're the same position metas in where they've invested too much. time and energy into this thing to give up. They just have to like close their eyes and keep going and hope it turns out fine.

Probably not because that seems like it'd be bad for their bottom line. But what is the pressure to do this? I think it's because they put so much time and effort into it already. They have started and stopped a car company. 40 times. Yeah. Like they don't. They've actually done twice in the recording of this podcast, by the way.

Yeah. Project. Titan has been shut down and restarted twice. Doug Field has gone from Ford to Apple and Tesla five more times. No, I'm just like, for real. Like the, like what is the pressure? It's not meta beating them. Like, I think it's this grand desire to have the next iPhone,

to have the next hardware device that can drive computing forward, the same way the iPhone did, right? Like the iPhone was a C change. It changed how we use our devices. There's a whole generation of people who don't know how to search files on their computer because they've only used their smartphone all this time. And I told you this would happen. You like totally vindicated. And the kids are so confused. Do not tell them what a file tree is. They will not know. But I like that was that was like the major impetus behind this, right?

They wanted to find the next iPhone. And then they've invested in it. And then Silicon Valley, as we've seen, is really prone to group think. And I think it kind of. I don't want to say infected, but it did. It, like, infected Silicon Valley. Everybody was like, we have to have the next mixed reality thing. And then it just so happened that Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg were two of the people totally convinced by that. And now we're going off on this, like, weird path into spatial computing when we're not quite ready for it yet. That's the thing. You know what's the move is Tim Cook should come out at WWDC and be like, look, we thought this was the moment.

We thought it was going to happen. It's not. We're not the world. This isn't ready. It's not done. Because I think if you rewind a couple of years ago when we first started hearing about this, it was very clear to everyone that by now, every other company on Earth was going to have made a headset, right?

And we were going to be in this giant race. Google was going to be out there. HTC was building stuff. HoloLens was going to be huge. There was this big race. And now it is the opposite. It's like we're back in the phase of like, is this actually anything.

And it feels like Apple is about to finish a race. It's kind of not needing to run. at the moment. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like, wouldn't it be better if Apple was like, we've built generative AI tools into iOS? I think at this point, it can't for a lot of reasons, presumably like production and all that stuff.

But even just like from a sort of like the world's perspective of Apple thing, like there's too much out there now. Like the perception is already that this thing is coming late and it's been a problem. And it kind of like, Apple either needs to do what it did with air power, which is be like, never mind, this doesn't work. We'll come back to you later. or it has to ship the thing and just bully everyone into believing in it

until there's actually something good here. I don't necessarily know that it has another move at this point. Even though I think it would be badass if Tim Cook came out and he was like, look, we built this headset, it's rad. I don't want to talk about it because it's not done yet. Like, that would be amazing. Chuck it off stage.

When I think about things Tim Cook is likely to do. I'm not saying it's likely. Canceling a product live on stage. After showing it to you, that's high in the list. It would be badass. though. It'd be really cool. He's like, all right, Jeff, take over. I'm out.

He just sits down, puts it on, and just kicks back on stage. I'm just going to read the rest of the Apple things, and we're going to take a break into a lighting round. iOS 16.4 is here. It has a bunch of new emoji. Importantly, for the six people who care, Google Fi now supports 5G on the iPhone as of 16.4. To you as one of those six people, congratulations.

It was great. I mean, now it's basically now I have AT&T and T-Mobile on my phone, but I can turn the T-Mobile on and off whenever. I want, which is actually really useful if you're the sort of person who are like constantly his phones, like, floating through your life, right? So very cool. Thank you finally for solving this extremely stupid problem. I love it. Also, the new architecture for the home app back again for round two. We'll see. You guys are going to have Jen on the Wednesday show to talk about sidewalk. You should talk about what's going on with Matter too. We are. That's, we, we tease that this

week because we got a hotline question that was like a bunch of other stuff. And then it was like, what's going on with Matter? I was like, we can't do this here, Jen. Like, we have to not, but we're going to do it next week. So stick around. Yeah, because Amazon launched its sidewalk, low range IOT network that's like every Alexa is now a little, little wireless node. It's very cool. But the new architecture and home is out too. So a little smartphone, little smart home stuff going on in the background there. Apple by now pay later is finally launching, which took them forever. It seems like that moment of unrestrained pandemic spending might be over. Yes. So whatever. And also the whole buy now pay later industry might be over. Yeah. And then Apple Music Classical also came out. Yeah, wait, Cranz, I just want to know your thoughts on classical before we take a break because there was a lot of enthusiasm about this app. I've been using it since it came out.

I don't consider myself a classical music fan. But then when we were all talking about it, I guess I am one. Who knew? Yeah, you like classical music? Name five composers. I can, but I'm not going to do that because I don't trust my pronunciation of their names. That was a trick. I really, really like the app.

I wish the regular Apple Music app was actually this, just because I like all the different metadata. I like that I can just look things up by composer and not have a bunch of garbage that I don't care about. Like every time I look up Steven Sondheim in the regular app, it's like, do you want to listen to Steven Sondheim talk? And I'm like, no, I just want to see a list of musicals he wrote. And I can do that with Apple classical music,

not with Sondheim, but with lots of other people like Gershwin. and Rachmaninov and I'm so close to naming a few more for you, David, but I'm not going to do it. You'll just have to stay tuned. I'm writing about it on the website. It's going to be great. Yeah. I always say it's like a pure strategy credit to Apple, right? Like they don't need Apple music to make money.

It's just like not what it does for them. So they can spit out another app and be like, look, classical music lovers, we made you a thing. Like, don't you love it? And like target ever smaller segments of music lovers in a way that like Spotify kind of can't because it can't spoil all the costs. I cannot wait. So that's cool. And then Apple is really high on spatial for classical, as far as I can tell, where it actually makes sense. It sounds fine.

Because you have like an orchestra, you know, all around you. It's fine. I'd rather just listen on a really nice pair of headphones than like spatial audio. But everything about it, I'm really, really digging. I've had way, way, way too much fun with it this week and like forgot how much I liked classical music. So it's a nice rediscovery. I should mention here, by the way, Chris Welch reviewed the Sonos Era 100 and the Sonos Era 300, Air 100, just a stereo speaker. It's great. He likes it. It says it's superior to the Sonus 1.

Era 300, the only other real standalone spatial speaker, apart from the HomePod and whatever Amazon thing. He said it's great. It's spatial. Was it for spatial? Not as great on stereo tracks is the Samos 5, which is a real, that's a real tradeoff in there. Yeah. But one of the reasons that I think Apple's so high classical for spatial is because they can do the thing where the guy sneaks up behind you with the symbol and goes, squash.

It's going to be the oboe player. Slowly coming up behind you. Go over to those reviews. Chris did a great job. There's just a lot. I'm very excited about the Arrow 100. Very excited about the Arrow 100. I'm thinking I might buy a 300

just to like, I feel like I need to give Spatial a shot. I've been so down on it for so long and everyone's like, the new mixes are good. And I'm just like, eh, like maybe adding some new hardware to the mix. When Mariah Carey does a spatial audio mix of baby, then

Neli will buy an era 300. The way Nila's face changed. If Mariah Carey would sneak up behind me, I'd be so happy. Mariah, I don't know if you're listening. If anyone has a radio telescope, pointed it, Mariah Carey. I love you. I've loved you my whole life. All right, we've got to take a break.

If you see the swagged out Pope, let Mariah Carey know I love her. Tell her to get away before doom happens. She needs to know. We got to take the break. We'll be right back to the lightning around. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited.

Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your heart. hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings.

Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend that. less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside

of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a real thing. There's a real estate. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers.

MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. We've got to do a lightning round. There's a lot of news this week. A lot of news. A lot of things. Franz, why don't you start? All right. My big thing this week is

Ike Perlmutter is no longer at Disney. He was the guy who owned Marvel for years and years and years. When Marvel got acquired by Disney, he stayed on. He notoriously was like, people don't want superhero movies with girls in them. We don't need toys with girls on them. That's dumb. That was a perfect impression, by the way. A plus impression. Thank you. I worked really, really hard on it. He had to be slowly forced out because Kevin Vagie and him just didn't get along. And he was trying to make Black Panther and Captain Marvel and Pearl Medal was like, no, we only want white guys.

That's the only thing people will buy at a superhero movie. He was quickly proven wrong with both of those. So it was kind of shocking that he was still at Disney and Marvel, and now he no longer is. Goodbye, Ike. Yeah. He also tried to do a coup with an activist. He did try to do a coup.

It didn't go over well for him. So, like, you know, it's time. He can go off and do other things and have strong feelings about women and people of color on his own time. Yeah. Can I tell you my favorite Disney story of the week? Yes. Have you guys heard about the King Charles Clause? No.

Yes. Oh, that was so good. This is so good. So Governor DeSantis in Florida, mad about Disney, don't say gay, passes a bill to take away Disney's like 50 or 60 year old weird tax exception district,

the Reedy Creek Improvement District. So Disney was like basically a city, right, in this like huge area. And they got to, they ran everything and they were exempted from laws. And like, it's weird.

It's weird to give corporation cities in America. But they had it, They had it for a long time, whatever, Florida. They come out against the don't say gay bill in Florida. DeSantis does his thing, tries to punish them for it. So he passes law. He replaces the people who run this district with like five of his own handpicked people. It comes out yesterday, day before, right before those people took power.

Disney, along with like Vanguard and BlackRock, passed a bunch of bills, giving itself permanent power over the district and completely disempowering the new. new board. So good. And so the new board is literally like, we have no power. Like all we have is the power to maintain the roads. And Disney is like giving itself a 30 year development agreement. It no longer needs approval to build buildings of any height or signed development rights. And then it says if the court finds this agreement is illegally in perpetuity,

we will extend its term by the following. This declaration shall continue in effect until 21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles the Third, King of England, living as of the date of this declaration. And they did it all. And their thing is like, we held meetings.

No one came, like the board held meetings and we passed the resolutions. And no one came or paid attention or told governor to Santas. It was a real Bart losing to Martin and the Simpsons moment. Yeah. Wow. I mean, and so the board is like they,

we have to like sue Disney to get. The power that we're supposed to have back. It's really good. I mean, it is like corporate trickery at its finest, and it's like hard to root for, but I'm like rooting for Disney because it's fun. Like you pick the funnier one and you pick that one. Yeah, it's like if Succession had two more seasons, like that would for sure be a plotline in one of the episodes.

Yeah. That's fantastic. Let me just read this quote. This essentially makes Disney the government. Ron Perry, one of the new board members, appointed by DeSantis said. The board loses for all practical purposes. is the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintain the roads and maintain basic infrastructure? And it's like, oh, they just wrote themselves a contract and signed it.

It said, does anyone object to an empty room? Because it's like so fundamentally unsurious, no one paid any attention and they just got away with it. It's really good. That's like the eye pro motor thing is funny in its way because they just allowed like the cranky old man to stay at Disney. He just laid him off after he tried to do a coup. This is like deeply like you. Like, you went up against Disney's lawyers and you thought they wouldn't. And they didn't.

And they were suspiciously quiet the whole time. Yeah, they were just like, yeah, whatever. It's going to be fine. It's very good. And it was. And they pinged it to King Charles. The King Charles clause is like icing on the cake. It's amazing.

Yeah. It's very good. I have no notes. That's perfect. Mine is that Elon Musk is now the most followed person on Twitter, which is like, fine. Great. Congratulations, Elon Musk. Everyone should quit Twitter.

It's a cesspool. a horrible place and it's only getting worse and everyone should leave. Do you listen to the Massadon episode of Decoder? It's terrific. It's very, very good. Everyone should listen to it. Well, thank you for compliments me. Do you think Massadon is going to survive?

No, Massadon is not the answer. I think Massadon is going to be fine. But I think I have a story on activity pub that's coming in the next couple of weeks because it's the protocol everybody is betting on, right? It's like, they're betting on the open web instead of the, instead of AOL. And like, that's essentially where we're headed, or at least a lot of people think we're headed. And what I've heard from a bunch of people about Mastodon is that Mastodon is probably not going to be like the largest platform in this space, but it's, it was really, really, really important

that Mastodon was there for the last like six months or so, that like, that there was a thing that proved this point that it can and should exist and we can still have what we want in a better way. Even if Mastod doesn't win, it will have like earned its place in history just by being here at this like pivotal moment. Which I think is really interesting. Activity Pub in general is fascinating to me. It's the sort of, how would you describe it? It's like RSS but good. That's one way to think about it. Yeah. I mean, it's essentially, it's just a very simple communication tool. Like, you can build all kinds of stuff on top of it, but fundamentally, it's a way of, it's a structure for taking a type of content and distributing that type of content.

Like, that's really all it is. And then people are building all kinds of social networks on top of it and messaging platforms on top of it. And the idea is I can make a thing. And anywhere that can read that thing, it's closer to email for social media really than anything else, that I make a thing and it can be read and interacted with from lots of places in a standardized way. And that's a better vision than one platform owned by a guy who just wanted to be the most followed person. But the real reason I love this is because this happened right after our friends Casey and Zoe over a platformer reported that there is a secret list of, I think, 35 people on Twitter who are being artificially boosted by the algorithm in order to, I guess,

like, keep them happy. And the list is hilarious. It's like Mr. Beast and Elon Musk, but also drill and cat turd. And it's just this random list of like relatively influential tweeters who are given extra shine on the platform, presumably in order to keep them happy and using the platform. So it's like, Elon Musk put his thumb on the scale such that he is now. now the most followed person on Twitter. Like, congratulations, I suppose. You did it. 44 billion dollars later, you beat Barack Obama.

Twitter is rolling on its API payment structures this week. We're all going to lose our blue checkmarks soon. Yep. Whatever. Do you guys remember a few months ago when we had a big argument about whether we were going to pay $8 a month for Twitter Blue? And Alex Heath vociferously said we're all going to. I don't remember what you two said.

And I said there's absolutely no chance in hell. If I didn't say that, please nobody find the clip and send it to me. Yeah, I'm definitely not going to pay for it. No, of course not. Who, like, it's now, it literally has reached the point. Actually, Cranes, I think this was your case back then and you were right. So kudos. It's embarrassing now to be the person who paid for Twitter blue to the point where they're

going to let you hide your checkmark, even if you pay for Twitter blue. Like, that's how far around this has come. I love it so much. The other piece of the puzzle is the API limits. So there's a free tier. I think it's 1,500 tweets a month. which is nothing. For most apps using this, that's nothing.

Like, we have an auto-tweater built into our CMS. That is not enough for us. Just us, let alone in box media. So, like, a bunch of publications have to figure out, like, are they going to pay to tweet their stories? Ooh. Right. Like, that's just a weird imposition of a cost.

I think the New York Times said it was definitely not going to pay for Twitter Blue for its reporters. I doubt that we are. I think we have better things to spend our money on. I'd rather show money in reporting. Also, it's charging an additional fee for, like, publications and stuff, right? To be verified. Well, you can get your own special verification badge for even more money.

So you can. I mean, the thing that is like whatever is being said today is not the thing that is true tomorrow. Correct. Like the, who knows? Whatever I say today on this podcast about what is happening is definitely not what will be true next week. The big idea is that Twitter is going to start costing money to post. right in a variety of ways whether it's you want to be have your replies seen and you need twitter blue and that's going to cost money or whether you are an app developer or publisher and

you tweet enough that you need API access that's going to cost money and imposing the cost on that side is super weird because there's no value on the other side so if i pay money on the twitter what am i how do i make the money back no one knows i've seen a bunch of creators asking that recently this they're like okay let me get this straight you're going to charge me money to post so that you can put ads next to my post that you take all of the money from. This was Katterd said this. It's not a bunch of creators. It's Elon's number one guy. Yeah, that's right. Old Cat turd. Yeah. And so it's like I'm, you're, you're asking me to pay to do a bunch of work from which you accrue all of the value. Like, that's a bad deal. I'm no economist, but like,

that's a bad deal. Like, there are like cookie shop owners that can do this math. Like no pH. Like a six-year-old, the lemonade stands. Like, let me get it straight. I got to pay the set up shop, and then there's no one to buy the lemonade. You're going to give me $10, and then I'm going to drink the lemonade. That's how this works. So we'll see. I know.

All right, here's, okay, so that's Twitter. We'll see. I think the next inflection point is when they start charging for API access and they take away the checkmarks. Agreed. And I think the line and the curve goes a different. Get ready, Mastodon, is what I'm saying. even if it doesn't survive. It's all tumbler.

Okay, I have two for lighting, one is very fast. The new Sony ZVE1 came out this week. It's like an RX100 with a full frame sensor in it. There's no other way to describe it. Like, it's that model of camera.

Which is literally Neli's dream camera. Like what you just described is everything you've ever wanted your whole way. Yeah, so I have a ZV1. Right, so the camera I'm looking into right now is a Sony ZV1. I have two of them as webcams. They're just like cheaper RX100 class cameras.

They have APSC sensors in them. They're great. I love them. ZVE1, a little bigger, but same physical concept, full frame sensor, interchangeable lenses. Just go watch Becca's video with it. It's so good. It's great. It's such a good idea.

What if we make a full frame camera that kind of just acts like an iPhone? Right? It just like does it all for you. It just like just run and gun, shoot with it. It's so expensive. It's like $2,200 for body only. And I'm like, oh, what I want it really badly. Yeah.

That's how they get you. But go watch that video. because it's really cool. And like for all of our what is a photo conversations and AI video conversations, whatever, cool cameras are still really cool, you know? And like, there's something about this one that just makes me want to go start a YouTube channel. Like, it's a piece of hardware that is like inspiring to think about using. And I think that's really cool. So that's one. Go watch that video. Also, Becca is good and she might have sold me the camera. Yeah, go watch the video. Okay, here's my last one. I just think this is like a very, we talked about matter and smart

it's taken three years since Google invested like hundreds of millions of dollars into ADT, the security company, to compete with Ring. I straight up forgot that happened. Like until I saw this headline, I absolutely forgot that happened. Three years, $450 million. They invested in ADT because they're like, Ring is killing us. And they finally have rolled something out. It's called the self-setup system.

And it just like integrates Google Nest video doorbells and cameras into ADT and gives you a bunch of sensors. You got to pay $25 a month, $24.99 a month. And then you also need a Nest Aware subscription, which is $35 a month. And the starter package is like nobody knows how much it costs. So Jen had to run around like asking executives at Google and ADT. Like how much does this cost? Because you keep saying it's going to be $220. But that's just the introductory price.

And soon it will be $480. No. And it's like, wow. Just all, like the whole nest story landing. in this place, or three years after they spent almost half a billion dollars to invest in this company, they're like, now your nest cameras can alert the cops through your ADT subscription. I just don't know what they're doing. It's like the most expensive, very simple API of all time.

Like, congratulations to everybody involved there. How did that take three years? Nothing in any of this announcement sounds like three years of work. There's just, it sounds very much like they, there's like one person at Google and one person at ADT who talked to each other and they like lost each other's phone numbers for two years. And then we're like, should we do it now? And then they did it. And now here we are. Yeah. Like where's the stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Like, where are the new products? Where's the, it's just like the reason you would invest in coming like ADT is because they like have sales and

service and dealers and that da da and it's like, no, it's just your Google cameras. You already have to hang up by yourself. Like I don't get it. It's super weird. It's just completely emblematic of like Google lack of focus. Yeah. Yeah. But it's out. Jen actually says pricing-wise, it's like compelling once you add up all the services. It's just you got to add up all the services. And the point is you should have a bundle. Thanks. Anyhow, look, I started on the high of the ZVE1.

Yes, I'll spend $2,200 on a body-only full-frame handled camera. That's exciting. No, I will not spend $50 a month on the Nest Aware subscription. Sounds about right. To protect my family. But if you put a full-frame sensor in that Ness cam, you guys back in. For sure. All right.

We're over as always. This is a delight. We should just have like wide ranging philosophical. Wait, that's our show. That's what we do every week. Surprise. We have actually a lot of coverage. We didn't talk about the TikTok band this week.

We talked about it a lot last week. There's a lot more coverage on the site of that. The political alliances are actually shifting. Like Rand Paul came out against it today, siding with a bunch of progressive Democrats. Like that's weird. That's weird. That's weird.

And his argument is like this is a weird imposition on the First Amendment. It's weird. It's weird. Me and Rand Paul together at last. So go look at that coverage because it's important. I think I will just say this in response to some of the like Instagram Reels comments I saw from our clips last week. It's not about China or not China. It's like if the United States government wants to do something like this, they have to make a good case.

They didn't. It's just like pretty flat out like they're not doing that right now. And like, yeah, I feel bad that the Wi-Fi guy didn't know how to ask the question with the Wi-Fi. And there's like 500 people trying to explain to us what he really meant. No. But like he wields the power of the state. So like he has to do a good job. And that's like there's just like a disconnect there where like I think we're all too

sympathetic to people who are making bad decisions about technology. It's like you're going to shut down and have that millions of people use. Anyway, it's all on the site. Addie wrote a great piece. The TikTok ban is a betrayal of the open internet. Go read it. Also very virgy. This has been a very virginy episode.

You should listen to Decoder, Eugene Rochko, the CEO of Massadon. There's a lot of activity pub conversation there. which I swear to you is important. Next week, we're wrapping up our centennial series with the CEO of Hasbro. We talk a lot about Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. And like, there's a lot of controversy in those communities. It's very good. But here's the thing that I learned.

Hasbro, 100 years old, started in 1923 by the Hassanfeld brothers. It's just the Hasbro's. Wait, really? It's the Has. It's like how Adidas is Adi and Doss. They're just two people. It's the Hasbrose. Yeah, but think about 1923.

they're like, oh, we're bros. Like, it's just like it blows your mind. Like, this language didn't exist in 1923. Also, the Hasbro's is like an ice cream shop that I would go to every single day. I'm just going to throw that out there. Yeah, it's very good. That's coming next week. And Wednesday show, what's on the Wednesday show?

Wednesday show we're going to talk about Matter and Sidewalk. We're going to talk about a bunch of Microsoft AI stuff with Tom, part of the sort of ongoing question of like, what is AI actually good for? Microsoft's doing a bunch of interesting stuff, so we're going to dig into that with him. And then we sent Monica Chin out to Times Square. to test a bunch of laptop microphones, and it went so differently than I expected. It was fascinating and really fun. And it's going to be one of those episodes that occasionally sounds terrible, but in the

service of good things. So it's a good one. Journalism. Yeah. All right. I love it. That's it. That's Vodgast.

Back home. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at Vergecast at the verge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan.

The Verge cast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.