Samsung's fake moon photos and Silicon Valley Bank's collapse

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Samsung faking photos of the moon on its phones, what happened with Silicon Valley Bank, and hottest topic of the season: ChatGPT and AI. This episode was recorded live at SXSW 2023. Further reading: Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon Silicon Valley Bank has failed The tech industry moved fast and broke its most prestigious bank Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT: AI chatbots are rewriting the internet Email us at [email protected] or call us on the Vergecast Hotline at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of overdone brand activations. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. Just to give you a mental image of exactly what that means, I am at the corner of Fourth Street and Congress Avenue, one of the main parts of downtown Austin, and I'm at a Porsche booth. It's this big, beautiful, blue booth with a bunch of Porsches inside. One of them has an inflatable duck sticking out for reasons I don't totally understand. And then, just for fun, out front, there is a roughly 25-foot-tall Optimus Prime statue that is just unbelievably lifelike, right next to an unbelievably lifelike and probably 15-feet-tall King Kong statue. It's the Porsche booth. I don't understand it either, but I do know that I just was forced to move by somebody

• 0:46Speaker 00

  who wanted to take pictures, so I guess it's working. Anyway, we have an awesome show for you today. It's actually an episode we recorded live at South by Southwest at Slack's HQ in Austin. It's a fun show. You give us a live audience, things are gonna get kinda weird. We talk a lot about the moon and your photos of the moon and whether if you use a Samsung phone to take photos of the moon, you're actually taking photos of the moon or photos at all. It gets really heady really fast. We also talk about Silicon Valley Bank and what it means that the source of money for so much of the tech industry feels like it has just disappeared out from under people. We also talk about AI, the other thing everybody's talking about at South by Southwest. ChatGPT and Bard and Bing and prompt engineers and what all of this is gonna mean for the tech industry going forward.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  And then we take a couple of questions. It's all extremely delightful. It's a super fun episode. I'm very excited for you to hear it, but first, I need coffee. South by Southwest is not conducive to getting a lot of sleep. We'll be right back. This is The Vergecast. See you in a second.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  All right, I'm back in the studio. I have coffee. Everything's gonna be okay. So let's get into the episode, shall we? So picture this, it's mid-afternoon, it's like 75 degrees, and everybody in Austin is slowly boiling alive in the sun. We're recording live at Slack HQ, which is on a street corner in downtown Austin. Everybody just had lunch, and Neelai, Alex and I just sat down on a small stage near the back of the festivities. And now, it's Vergecast time.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of enterprise software. It's gonna be a rip-roaring ride through your SaaS business model, which is definitely not at danger because of Silicon Valley Bank. It's great. We're very excited you're here. I'm your friend Neelai. Alex Cranz is here.

• 2:57Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who really loves the moon today.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna get into it. David Pierce is here.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  Hi, I've been awake since 1 a.m. I'm not 100% sure where I am right now.

• 3:05Alex Cranz?

  It was 2 a.m. earlier.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  It's nice to see all of you.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  It's good. David is back. Give a hand for David. He's back after having a child. He was on break. This is your first trip with as new dad?

• 3:18David Pierce?

  Yep. My wife is sending me like once an hour on the hour, like adorable pictures of my child, just to remind me of what I'm missing. It's really, it's fun and great.

• 3:25Nilay Patel?

  The child is gonna be replaced by AI. All right, we gotta start with, I think, the most Vergecast thing that has ever happened in the history of our show, which is like 15 years, and it's the moon.

• 3:38David Pierce?

  So I just wanna say real quick, we had a whole plan for this show, and then like 12 minutes ago, Neelai ends up on Reddit, and he's like, "Did you see the thing about the moon? We have to talk about it."

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  If you are a listener of our show, you know that a core question that we've been asking for several years now is what is a photo? I don't know the answer to that question. Neither does anyone else, it appears. Samsung has an answer, which is, I don't know, we're just gonna copy and paste the moon into the photos. We take a picture of the moon and replace the moon with AI.

• 4:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  The most what is a photo? So when people think they're taking a photo, most people are still trapped in the 1920s paradigm of pushing a button. The shutter goes up, the light hits the film. Then you have to drive to Walgreens in your parents' 92 Honda Civic, hand the film to someone, they do some magic with chemicals, and you get photos back.

• 4:29David Pierce?

  Very specific.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  That's what that's what happens inside your office.

• 4:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Nilay Patel?

  That's correct. That is no longer what has been happening on these phones for years now, right? There's all this computational photography. We're merging frames. The phone is already taking pictures well before you push the button. And so you just get to this place where you have no idea what a photo is. Like, it's impossible to define a photo as a representation of reality, or even light that is happening in the moment. And then there's Samsung.

• 4:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, let me explain what's going on.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  And I'm very, I'm upset about the moon.

• 4:57David Pierce?

  So, yeah, you're just in your feelings right now. So, okay, so Samsung, it's a large company. They make phones. Lots of people own them. This S23 Ultra is like, normally with the Ultra phone, Samsung does like between 1 and 6, like insane things. Yeah. And this time, what they did with the S23 Ultra was say, "You can take photos of the moon." So it has 100x zoom, specifically designed, there's like a moon mode on the S23 Ultra, because that's what people buy phones to do now, is take pictures of the moon. It looks cool. Like, you take a picture of the moon very far away, and it's like, oh, there's like, it renders the moon fairly successfully. Sharply. And very sharply. And there have been companies, namely Huawei, that have tried to do things like this in the past. And what it turned out they were doing is essentially,

• 5:41David Pierce?

  like, understanding that you were taking the picture of a moon, and then like downloading the moon onto your phone, and being like, "Look, here's the picture you took." And Samsung, it turns out, is doing roughly the same thing. So there was this Redditor, I think it was I Break Phones is their name on Reddit. I'm sorry to the Redditor if I'm getting that wrong. So basically what they did to test this was, they downloaded a high-res picture of the moon, and then down-resed it to, I think, 170 by 170. So they have this like teeny tiny little, very sharp picture of the moon. And then they applied a blur to it on purpose, to make the photo blurry. And then they went across the room, and with the Samsung phone, took a picture of this blurry picture, like deliberately blurry picture of the moon that they had downloaded. And zoomed in.

• 6:22David Pierce?

  And zoomed way in at 100x, a picture of a blurry moon. And Samsung's AI processes it for a while, as it does, and pops up this like beautifully sharp, highly rendered picture of the moon. And this person is like, "I didn't even take a picture of the moon. I took a picture of a blurry circle that you decided is the moon, and now here we are." So this has now set off a whole thing where...

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  What is a photo?

• 6:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, and the first comment, there was a, somebody covered this in the very first comment was, "You're better off just downloading from Google Images than taking photos yourself." And it's kind of like, "Yeah, you might be." Like, there's a lot of good pictures of the moon out there, and the theory is basically, Samsung was able to basically train an AI on lots of pictures of the moon, figure out what you're shooting, and just download the moon on top of the blurry photo that it pretends is a sharp photo.

• 7:10Alex Cranz?

  Do you think if we took a picture of somebody with like, face paint, to make their face look like the moon, it would just give us a picture of the moon?

• 7:17David Pierce?

  So, there were people who tried to recreate this with things like ping pong balls and stuff like that, and didn't get it to work. So, there is some line at which-

• 7:25Alex Cranz?

  But they didn't have their face-

• 7:25David Pierce?

  The S23 Ultra goes, "Moon?", and makes it moon. And no one has figured out exactly where it tips there, but it is, Samsung has not acknowledged one way or the other where this is happening, but like, the evidence is super damning, that Samsung is basically saying, "You would like to take a picture of the moon, we can't do that good, so we're gonna download a good one, and you're just gonna have it now."

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here's a number of questions I have for you.

• 7:47Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm losing my mind about this.

• 7:48David Pierce?

  That's all I know, so I have nothing else for you.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  We can all agree that the moon is real.

• 7:54Alex Cranz?

  Can we?

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man, it's Texas, it's South by Southwest, there's like, crystal people walking the streets, I don't know.

• 7:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that's good, we'll start there.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Like, facts, you know, Texas.

• 8:01Alex Cranz?

  Assuming the moon is real.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  Assuming the moon is real.

• 8:04David Pierce?

  Did we land on it?

• 8:04Alex Cranz?

  There's no proof.

• 8:05David Pierce?

  But moon, real.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  Baseline assumption, there is a moon in the sky.

• 8:09David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 8:09Nilay Patel?

  I don't, you know, fine. The moon is tidally locked, the Earth, right? So, when you look at the moon, you're almost always looking at the same thing.

• 8:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so if you think a photo is, "I push the shutter, and it collects light, and then shows me a representation of reality, and you point any camera at the moon, the moon is unchanged."

• 8:31Alex Cranz?

  So, all the photos are similar?

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's not that, it's like, well, you definitely took a photo of the moon.

• 8:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  It's just your camera's better or worse. And if the camera's like, "I know what you're trying to do,"

• 8:41Alex Cranz?

  I got you.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  And it puts the moon there, did it lie?

• 8:44Alex Cranz?

  It's doing you a solid, I think it's like, it's helping you.

• 8:46David Pierce?

  You could argue this is like, a successful feature, that it was-

• 8:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, "I've taken many blurry photos of the moon, I would like this flex. I would like to just show my friends, look at this sick photo I took."

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  But that's, that's the lie, I just want to be clear.

• 8:59Alex Cranz?

  No, because I held it up.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  Now, you are lying.

• 9:01Alex Cranz?

  I held it up, and then I went- And I took the photo, so it counts.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  You held it up and you might as well have been like, Siri, show me the moon.

• 9:07Alex Cranz?

  If I hit the button, it counts, right?

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 9:09Alex Cranz?

  That's what Samsung is saying, and I agree with them.

• 9:11Nilay Patel?

  This is the world historical, what is a photo problem? Well, you can just walk the streets asking people if the moon is real now. First of all, that's incredible. And then you can be like, how do you take a picture of the moon? What is a picture of the moon? What is a photo? What is the moon? And you just keep going down the line and it lands at, well, I can just look at any picture of the moon. And that is a representation of my reality.

• 9:36Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  Whenever I am looking at the moon.

• 9:38Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  Because the, as far as I understand it, the moon remains unchanged.

• 9:41Alex Cranz?

  We found common ground.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  There's a transformer on the backside of the moon, but we haven't photographed that yet.

• 9:47Alex Cranz?

  Don't look back there.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  I just, I don't know how Samsung is gonna address this issue. Because if they wanted to, they could be like, we need to sit down and talk about the nature of reality before we address whether or not we are gluing the moon under your photos.

• 10:01Alex Cranz?

  Why don't they just start downgrading all the photos? You just open it one day and all your photos are terrible.

• 10:06David Pierce?

  They're like, oh, this is what you said you want here. Have your blurry moon photos.

• 10:09Alex Cranz?

  You want the real thing?

• 10:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, garbage moon filter applied. It's like the opposite of that TikTok filter that makes you pretty. It's like, you're just a shit moon now. I mean, this is like, to me fundamentally, all of these cell phone cameras, let's ask this audience this question. I think my iPhone is starting to take, like, not bad photos, objectively very good. They just look fake, right? All the shadows are pulled up way too high, the brights are too bright. There's like all this HDR going on. No one's faces has any contrast in them in any modern cellphone photo. So everyone looks like they have that TikTok filter on all the time. And you take a photo with a normal camera that just opens the shutter and does its thing. You're like, oh, this is, there's like an artisticness to it. Because you as a human being perceive shadows.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  And now your camera is like, fuck shadows.

• 10:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  And like, I'm just starting to tire of like computational photography in this way.

• 11:04David Pierce?

  Well, it's a very like lowest common denominator thing, right? Cause there's like, they did all this work to make sure that you can't take bad photos, right? And that is largely true, like the night modes on the, the Pixel phones are incredible.

• 11:15Alex Cranz?

  I can still take a bad night photo.

• 11:16David Pierce?

  The iPhone stuff is incredible.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, not of the moon.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  I forgot to ask my question to this audience. Are you guys feeling that in the crowd? We're like, it's getting weird. We're getting some head nods.

• 11:24Alex Cranz?

  Everybody here seems to be like, yeah, they're weird now. You're all wrong.

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  The person behind our producer is like, I love my iPhone. He's like, ready to rush the stage. It's fine. I love my iPhone too. But there's a point at which I stopped using my RX 100. Because the iPhone was like really good. And I was like, this is not quite worth all the extra effort. And it's now.

• 11:43Alex Cranz?

  You've gone back.

• 11:44Nilay Patel?

  I've gone back because I'm like, these photos are just looking weird.

• 11:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  And you can't quite turn it off. And I think this moon situation. This is America's greatest crisis.

• 11:54David Pierce?

  The moon situation.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  I have been completely rocked by Samsung putting clip art of the moon on the photos.

• 12:02David Pierce?

  I need Janet Yellen to weigh in on this.

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  Because the moon is unchanged. They're not lying to you. That is what the moon looks like when you take a photo of it.

• 12:10Alex Cranz?

  It's your photo of the moon. All photos are the same photo.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we got a little bit of a lie.

• 12:15Alex Cranz?

  It's not a lie. It's true.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  She thinks it's a real lie. She's like, yes.

• 12:17Alex Cranz?

  Yes, thank you. Thank you for this.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Where's Biden on this?

• 12:20David Pierce?

  It is a lie in the sense that it's not what your camera is seeing. It is what the moon looks like, but that's. I'm trying to take a picture of the moon, not like download a picture of the moon.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  It's only lying when Alex is like, look at this sick photo of the moon I took.

• 12:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  That's when I definitely, okay, we gotta stop talking about this.

• 12:33David Pierce?

  But if you run around with your photos saying, is this the moon? Then, then you're on to something.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  Liam has threatened to make a subscription version of the podcast. That's just me finishing the rants, like trailing off into oblivion. We're thinking about. But I know we have to move on. We have other stuff to talk about. We should talk about this bank. If you didn't walk around talking to people at South by Southwest. Everyone is talking about Silicon Valley Bank. And I just, this is so emblematic of my trip here. Yesterday at JFK Airport, I'm like coming on the flight here. Everyone's chattering about it in line. And this woman was in front of me and she was talking to her friend while she was on a Zoom call. And she was telling her friend, like, I'm on a Zoom call. I'm just talking to you. My camera's off and I'm on mute, which is fine. I have done it too. And then something happens and she holds up her phone. And they were obviously talking at the bank. And she turns on her camera, she unmutes. And then she just loudly says, I have a Bitcoin.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  And then she turned on her camera.

• 13:26Alex Cranz?

  So all she needed to tell.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, I'm definitely going back to South by Southwest. It's been a few years. I have not been in a cra- like, no one even looked. Everyone was like, exclaiming, you have a Bitcoin is like totally normal.

• 13:37David Pierce?

  Did she say it in a proud way? Like, the company is saved. I have a Bitcoin.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  It's like.

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, tell us what's going on at this bank.

• 13:45Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so there's a bank, SVP. They were like one of the main banks for all the founders, all the startups in Silicon Valley. And that's why everybody liked them.

• 13:54David Pierce?

  For like 40 years. They've been like.

• 13:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they've been since 1983. They have been the bank. And everybody has put their money in them. Everybody has put a lot of money into them. But the thing is, most of the people that put money in don't need loans. And that's how banks make money. So SVP was like, well, you know, we're going to diversify. Well, we'll do loans. We'll do a lot of like vineyard, like support.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're diversified because the Valley people like.

• 14:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. So they're like giving money to vineyards and stuff like that. But then they were also like, we're going to buy a lot of bonds and we're going to buy government bonds. And they're nice and stable. This is great. Unless interest rates go up. Then things start to get kind of bad for them. And the interest rates go up, they have a little crunch of like $2 billion in cash and they're like, everybody calm down. We know we don't have this, like, we're getting the money. Don't worry about it. It's fine.

• 14:44Nilay Patel?

  Famously, your bank telling you to calm down inspires calm.

• 14:47Alex Cranz?

  And yeah, it totally worked. It totally worked.

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  Jamie Dimon's like, calm down.

• 14:51Alex Cranz?

  Everybody said, we're fine. This is great. They did not actually. There was a run on the bank. Largely led by a lot of like founders, A16Z, I think, a couple of the other ones. Were like, yes, take all of your money out. They called other people. They said, get all the money out. And they shut down the bank. They just said, nope, hold up. We need to get money to people. We can't do this anymore. So the bank is shut down. It sounds like it's right now, there's an auction happening and another bank is going to buy the bank. So everybody's money will presumably be okay. Hopefully, fingers crossed. Yeah, that one person in her Bitcoin, she's doing great.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  She's fine.

• 15:24Alex Cranz?

  She's fine. So SVP is done. It's done as a bank. It's gone. And it's going to get purchased and somebody's going to be really happy with all they've purchased. And some people are like trying to figure out what happened here. Like, was it because the Fed decided to raise interest rates? Was it because there was this liquidity crunch? Was it because the founders?

• 15:45David Pierce?

  I'm sorry, you're good. Keep going.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  The conspiracy theory is like, it's so close.

• 15:49Alex Cranz?

  Peter Thiel.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 15:53Alex Cranz?

  What if Peter Thiel had the bank run happen so that he can kickstart a new web three financial institution?

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  That's the first question, everybody.

• 16:04Alex Cranz?

  That's my favorite. Unclear, everybody has-

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  That's your favorite, there's more.

• 16:08Alex Cranz?

  No, no, well, that's, that's it.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  Several other options.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  The moon did it.

• 16:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the moon did it. He's up, actually, Peter Thiel is on the moon, he's got a moon base.

• 16:17Nilay Patel?

  You gotta stop invoking his name, man.

• 16:18Alex Cranz?

  It's fine, I'm sorry.

• 16:19Nilay Patel?

  He's gonna show up and shut us down. Alex used to work at Gawker, this is a real thing that happened.

• 16:22Alex Cranz?

  I know, if he kills two companies, wow, I'll be very impressed. But unlikely that's what really happened. What really happened was, everybody panicked. They freaked out, it's like Silicon Valley has a tendency to group think, see, everybody was invested into crypto and now everybody's like, AI is the new crypto, let's go. They, they move in waves, in a big pack, and so the whole pack went, huh huh, we gotta get out of here. And, and the bank died because of the group think.

• 16:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so we, obviously, everyone here is talking about it, the assumption is that some bank will buy it, everyone will be made whole, but this weekend, what people are talking about is, will it be able to make payroll? Uh, our company banks there, our credit cards were shut down, which is deeply funny, uh, mostly because the race to float South by Southwest for Chase points among our staff was out of control. And David and I both lost. Like, I was like, I'll, and already-

• 17:12Alex Cranz?

  It was already done, it was already done. Sunny had already done it. She was like, don't worry, I got you and the points.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  It's done, so that, that's as much as it has hit us so far, but that is a real situation because Silicon Valley Bank, and I was talking to some other founders here, they would give loans to startups-

• 17:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, with just ridiculous backstories. So if you try to go get a loan as a startup, and you're like, here's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna-

• 17:35Alex Cranz?

  You go to Chase.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna charge people money to chat on the internet.

• 17:38Alex Cranz?

  Chase says leave.

• 17:39Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna call our workplace software Slack.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  Can we get a line of credit? Uh, most banks are like, no, that doesn't make any sense. Silicon Valley Bank is like, we know your investors, we know your founders, we know the SaaS business.

• 17:50David Pierce?

  Well, and there's one really important piece to this, is also if it's 1995, the first time you're doing this, right? Like, this is, Silicon Valley Bank started because nobody would give these companies loans, because they were like, what's the internet? Who are you? How does money work? No.

• 18:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:03David Pierce?

  If you don't, you can sell things to humans and we'll give you a loan. And Silicon Valley Bank was the one who showed up and they were like, they did, they did deals in equity. They did deals with founders who couldn't get loans. Otherwise, like they built relationships with.

• 18:16Alex Cranz?

  They would do mortgages for the founders. So the founders can have nice houses.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, and because the founders don't have like stable jobs, right? So they're, they're a financial institution that was designed around this particular innovation cycle.

• 18:27David Pierce?

  Which was really good to them for a really long time.

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  And then when they said, calm down, like everyone bailed because everyone's in group chats together. And I just like the funniest part, uh, it was easy because you can just like push a button and take your money out.

• 18:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they'd made it very, very, like everybody else is like, no, you gotta like wait six weeks.

• 18:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:44Alex Cranz?

  Maybe you'll get your money, maybe we'll take a little off.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  This is a crime of user interface.

• 18:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they made it too good. They made it too easy.

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  If they're, if the user interface of this bank was a little shittier, it would have survived. A lesson for us all.

• 18:55Alex Cranz?

  Be just a little shitty.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  But that piece of the puzzle, when it gets bought by whoever buys it, Chase, Wells Fargo, whatever. That bank is going to have not the risk tolerance of Silicon Valley Bank, which just means the ripple effect into the tech ecosystem is going to carry forward. Like the short term, everyone will get funded and fine. Hopefully the money comes back, fingers crossed.

• 19:15Alex Cranz?

  It sounds like a lot of the payroll is, is starting to come out. Like a lot of people have gone and made partnerships with other banks and stuff to at least get people paid. So it's like a big interruption. A lot of people are working. I bet some of the computers open right now are like trying to figure out what's happening with their money at the bank. But it sounds like hopefully the end of this weekend.

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I just think that medium to long-term change for this industry is A, rates are high, startups are whatever, like the venture dollar is not flowing anyway. And then you've got a financial institution inside of this whole puzzle.

• 19:45Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  That is no longer as open to risk as that bank was.

• 19:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, and that was, I think it was Gary Tan, the CEO of Y Combinator, who was saying basically like the two things that are about to happen are a whole generation of startups are about to die. Which I think might be slightly overstated, but not that much, especially if it takes a long time for this stuff to shake out. And then there's a whole generation of startups that aren't going to get founded because there's just not the money or relationships to do it now. And like, we won't know how true either of those statements are for a long time, which I think is the thing that is nerve wracking to a lot of people right now.

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This is not, I think not as big of a scandal as the moon. America's only ongoing crisis.

• 20:23David Pierce?

  Sure, yeah.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  Is the moon real? But it's big, like it rocked the industry we covered. It's all anybody want to talk about to us. It's all anybody to talk about here. And I, it's that medium to long term. Who is going to accept the risk of being the banking institution for a bunch of founders? I mean, you gotta do something before you sell your company to Google and it's like, we're on a startup, you know? And that ecosystem is like withering.

• 20:44David Pierce?

  Well, and it's so cyclical, right? Cause there was that basically from like the, the sort of recovery from the 2008 crisis until like last year. The single best thing you could do was just throw money at any startup you could find, right? Like everybody was raising money every 15 minutes, uh, which is part of the problem is everybody raised so much money and then was like, oh, we need to actually spend some of that money. And that was part of what caused this problem for Silicon Valley Bank. But now we're entering this phase where it's like, we're still in this awkward phase where it's like, how bad is the economy going to get? How long is it going to last? What are we going to do about it? What does it mean for me? And everybody's just like, I don't know.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 21:14David Pierce?

  So there's like this, this sort of gap period is just of this like unknown length and in this industry that moves so fast. And especially you have all these people who just got laid off. And the theory two months ago was we're about to have this giant wave of new startups. Because there are all these people who used to work at Meta and Amazon and these other companies who were going to go found new companies. And now there's just no money to do it. And now that money situation has gotten even scarier for the people who might hire those people. So it's just like the, the unknowns just like ripple on top of each other here. And there's just no, like, hopefully we get back on Monday and somebody has bought these assets and starts to get better.

• 21:50Nilay Patel?

  And I just want to emphasize this point David's making, which is 2008, right? Last financial crisis, you just put your mind back there. That was one year after the iPhone came out and that was also the year the App Store was introduced. And that wave of like, we're gonna, we lost our jobs. There's a wave of energy in the valley.

• 22:05David Pierce?

  We're gonna make apps.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna build new companies for this opportunity. It's all right there, right? And you, the generation of these massive companies was built in that moment, in that particular economic condition. That's what people thought now. I think this is our next term, we should talk about AI, but like, that's why I think we spent a lot of time last year. Talking about crypto and the metaverse and now why we're talking about AI, like that is the platform shift that people think is coming.

• 22:31David Pierce?

  Well, they're looking for that.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  A next size, yeah.

• 22:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  Or if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you're just ramming what you think.

• 22:36David Pierce?

  Just ramming it in and hoping people like it.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  Brain in a vat. Just get in the vat and look at, I don't have legs, get. I'm Mark Zuckerberg and I need you to be in this. Enjoy Metaverse. You're gonna like it. Get in the, I, I like the Quest 2. The Quest 2 is good.

• 22:53David Pierce?

  Get in the Metaverse is also a pretty good tagline.

• 22:55Nilay Patel?

  Every time I put it on, I think of Mark Zuckerberg's dream, which is that my, I will have no legs and like, experience advertising in this. Just a little cartoon. But that's his bet, right? He, he knows he's controlled by Apple. Every other one else is chasing a Metaverse play because you don't have to pay 30% to Apple or Google to like build in this ecosystem. Yeah. That's where all the crypto energy came from. And you would think, like David's saying, this moment, this particular set of financial conditions, whatever you think the platform shift is, you would give birth to the next.

• 23:24David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  Amazon, Meta, Google, whatever. And maybe not.

• 23:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. In, in like, if this was, you know, 2013 instead of 2023, there would be a 10 new startups built on ChatGPT showing up like every 15 minutes. Like I would be getting pitches in my inbox on, we built a weird chatbot.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  While you were having a baby. Things happen, David. Things happen.

• 23:49David Pierce?

  It did happen.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  It hasn't stopped. And the problem is they can use ChatGPT to write the emails. So it's just a self perpetuating loop.

• 23:57David Pierce?

  Hey, David, back here in the studio. We're gonna take a quick break, which we forgot to do during the live show, and then you'll hear me talk about all the ChatGPT news I missed while I was out. It took three months and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings. We'll be right back.

• 24:47David Pierce?

  All right, we're back with the Vergecast live at South by Southwest. Let's get back into it.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about this. David, you experienced this from the outside. We were in it, obviously, minute to minute. And David's version of, in particular, the Microsoft hype cycle, I think, is very revealing about what it's like to be too online. Go ahead.

• 25:06David Pierce?

  Oh, it was amazing. So, okay, so I had a baby in December, which was like right as ChatGPT was becoming a thing. So I have this distinct memory, like, this was the first time, like, as a person who is in the news business, I, like, read the news 24 hours a day. And if all of you are like that, I'm so, so, so very sorry. But I got to experience the news like a normal person, which is just like, I look at it and then I go do other things. And then I come look at it again later. It was great. But I have this distinct memory of, like, basically going back and trying to catch up on, like, three days of tech news. And I literally saw the story go from Microsoft launches Bing with, like, OpenAI stuff, ChatGPT built in, to ChatGPT is in love with me, to

• 25:46David Pierce?

  Bing is about to take down Google, Google is dying, to where is Tim Cook? Why hasn't Apple said anything yet? To, oh no, Bing is kind of a disaster, to now everybody's kind of out on ChatGPT. It, like, milkshake ducked itself in the time it took me to, like, catch up on my RSS feeds. And it was this very revealing moment that it was like, oh, all of this stuff moves so fast. And ChatGPT in particular is this thing that, like, the first time you try it feels so remarkable that I think everybody just sort of briefly lost their mind for, like, two and a half days. And now we've kind of come back down to earth where it's like, okay, this is a weird thing that's not actually very good.

• 26:24David Pierce?

  Like, I had somebody compare it to self-driving cars, or, like, not that long ago, where they were like, it's, it's a new technology that you can sort of immediately understand where it might go and what it might mean. It's pretty good. The distance between pretty good and really good is decades, and let's wait and see how this actually plays out. But it was just, it was very revealing. And it was like, I went to ChatGPT and was like, my baby is five days old. What should I do with him?

• 26:47Nilay Patel?

  Why did you talk to it like that?

• 26:49David Pierce?

  That's how I talk. That's how you talk to your chat GPT now? And I hit the keys like this. It's like a baby piano, but it's a keyboard. And I just sort of mash it until it tells me, no, this is just me? That's weird. Okay. This is why I can't take three months off.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, data loss is a problem. So two things. One, I'm still coming off Satya Nadella saying the hardest thing any CEO has ever said in an interview to me, which is that he wanted to make Google dance. And that was the hype, right? Like when the CEO of Microsoft is like, I want them to know I made them dance. So a real thing, he looked me in the eyes and he said this. He did, because Bard. He's taken my business down. And I'm not, I don't, I'm not in the search business. You can ask me questions and I will not answer them. So I think that's where that first part of the hype, right? Microsoft is openly going to compete with Google in search.

• 27:34David Pierce?

  And that was the day Google lost like a hundred billion dollars of market value in one day.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  They rushed out Bard.

• 27:38David Pierce?

  Weird, yeah.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  Cause group thing, it just everywhere. So that was truly strange and really interesting. And then to bring it back to the moon.

• 27:45David Pierce?

  Wait, I forgot one part before we get back to the moon.

• 27:47Nilay Patel?

  I just want to talk about the moon. Everything comes back to the moon, which isn't real.

• 27:50David Pierce?

  The one other turn that I really enjoyed that I forgot to mention was the one where Google like raced to announce Bard because it was, felt like it was left behind, which does seem to be real. Like the panic inside of Google seems to be real. But everybody was like, oh no, Bard made a factual error in the first demo. And by like an hour and a half later, it was like Bing gets everything wrong all the time. Maybe this is just how this is.

• 28:12Nilay Patel?

  Bing is like, you should leave your family and kill your neighbors. And everyone's like, actually, Google's might've been right. It's like some dispute there. So the thing I was saying is, uh, chat GPT is fascinating because it is like medium good.

• 28:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  And to bring it back to the moon, no one knows what happens when millions of people get their hands on products. It is the one defining rule of this industry after a decade of covering it. Plus it's like, the companies are like, here's our thing. Here's what it can do. Here's how we think it's going to go. And then they launch it at scale. And then the most unhinged, wacky stuff starts to happen because no one has any control. Like when Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, do you think that in his mind, he was like, and one day Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber will be fighting about their eyebrows? It's like, they don't know, Apple doesn't know that's going to happen. That's all happening on their cameras. There's some iPhone camera engineer now who's like, I gotta figure out the eyebrow lamination AI.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  They're just like losing their minds because people do things with technology that's completely unpredictable.

• 29:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  And so ChatGPT, they built it, they worked it, uh, they got to a place where it works medium good.

• 29:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  And I don't think what anybody realized was being able to fire a canon of mediocre text at any business model is just leads to the most unbelievable crazy outcomes.

• 29:32Alex Cranz?

  Wasn't that just digital media's first big push?

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  No, because the canon, you like, you can hire, you can hire a bunch of people and be like, write a bunch of stuff. The problem is that they remain people.

• 29:44Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  And sometimes they don't want to work, Alex. And sometimes they go to sleep and sometimes they're like, I don't want to write SEO chum for the rest of my life.

• 29:52Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  I have ambition, like whatever.

• 29:54Alex Cranz?

  Oh, nobody wants that.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  ChatGPT is like SEO garbage.

• 29:59Alex Cranz?

  I got you.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  All day.

• 30:00Alex Cranz?

  All day, every day.

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  The number of TikToks that I have seen from some sort of like diet Gary Vaynerchuk, who's like, how to make money with ChatGPT. And the answer is they take our podcast transcripts, they feed them in the ChatGPT, they produce a summary, they have a robot voice, read the summary out loud while another robot puts like just random pictures on it. They make thousands of them a day, they put them on YouTube and they collect pennies like per thousand videos that they make. But it's all automated, so they just at scale start to make thousands of dollars. That's what I mean by you can point a cannon of text at a business model. And like YouTube, Neil Mohan, the new SVP of YouTube, he was not anticipating that a cannon of mediocre text

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  would be fired at YouTube's rev share.

• 30:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  And now he's paying those server costs and he's paying the ingest costs and like, that is nuts. Like even at YouTube's scale, that's enough to move the needle. And all those views, all those minutes of attention at scale are being taken away from real creators. And so you just see this cycle where it's like, oh, you thought we were going to compete with Google. You thought this whole thing was going to happen and you ask the robot questions and it will tell you how many two by fours fit in the back of a Ford Ranger, which is, that was like Microsoft's demo.

• 31:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Nilay Patel?

  And it turns out people do not want to do that. They're like, do you love me?

• 31:22Alex Cranz?

  Are my eyes pretty?

• 31:23Nilay Patel?

  I'll just go to the store. We'll just put two by horse in there until they don't fit anymore. That's fine. Does the robot want a bone at this time? And you get the front page. I saw Kevin Reese last night. He's still just like rocked by this experience he had. Right? And it's like, all anybody wants to do is have someone to talk to. And at the end of it, be like, but we could, and ChatGPT is like, definitely.

• 31:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, those bots have existed before that. I think that's the thing I keep getting confused by ChatGPT is like, I had, I had AIM, I had AOL, and you would talk to the little bots on there. You could have some pretty like, in-depth conversations. It would quickly not make sense, but in your head, in your teenage head, you'd be like, yeah, this makes sense.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Alex Cranz?

  So I don't see like a huge difference between the two.

• 32:08David Pierce?

  I think it's not. And like, I think Smarter Child on AIM is like, a whole generation's first experience with chatbots. And it's the same thing. Like, we've been personifying these things as long as they've existed, right? And it's like, you can, you can hear it say a thing like, you know, the time in Alaska is 6 a.m. And you're like, it's a person that knows me.

• 32:30David Pierce?

  And I think ChatGPT is a real like step change in how good it is and how much stuff it can do. Right? Like, there are, there are things it can do that are genuinely new. And every time that happens, we do it all over again, where we're like, oh my God, this is real. It's sentient. This is happening. And then we turn around and it's like, no, it's just, it's just.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  It's just definitely telling you what you want to hear.

• 32:50David Pierce?

  It's fancy autocorrect, right?

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I will say a robot that will always tell you what you want to hear is like, maybe the end state of humanity.

• 32:58Alex Cranz?

  Very validating.

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  So we ran a piece on, I think LinkedIn is starting to integrate it. Slack is starting to integrate it. A lot of workplace software is starting to integrate it. Notions is starting to integrate it. It all kind of makes sense. Like, what's that classic thing you do in Slack? You're like, how do I file an expense report? And the answer is you can't because the bank has failed. A little bit of an edge case for chat GPT, but like, you know, and like, sometimes I go to a person, but that's like, fine, like I talk to a robot about the turn, I think, is particularly in the social networks. James Vincent wrote about this, this week for us, we're like, your AI on this, on like LinkedIn, we'll start talking to another AI on LinkedIn and they will start like workfluencing each other.

• 33:36Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 33:37Nilay Patel?

  And like, they'll just brand activate themselves into oblivion.

• 33:40Alex Cranz?

  That's how we get Skynet, but for marketing.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then there's this concept out there, uh, called heaven banning. So all of you, I'm sure have been forced to learn about shadow banning from Elon Musk. It's just a word that he just made happen to us. Heaven banning is the opposite concept where instead of have being like reduced in presence, you just flood the user's mentions with AI that makes it seem like they're in a perfect world of agreement.

• 34:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  And then you just silo them into like their AI version of Twitter. Which is kind of like, which is like, that might be Elon Musk's experience on Twitter. Where it's just like millions of bots telling me smart and he's like, I can do whatever I want.

• 34:18David Pierce?

  Would work that a hundred percent like it's a perfect, perfect strategy. Free Elon Musk can for anybody.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  But this is what I mean, if you can fire this cannon of just medium quality text at anything. Yeah. Just weird things start to happen. And I think what we're, we all thought it was going to be search. And it turns out it's all this other weirdness. Well, have you guys seen, uh, have you met any prompt engineers at South by Southwest? Do you, okay, I encourage, they're here. They're floating around in the, in the wings, waiting to pitch their prompt engineering startups to you. And so if you don't know what prompt engineering is, to get chat GPT or Bing or bar or whatever, to do exactly what you want, you can write these very complicated prompts.

• 34:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  And they all have like, I don't know, they all sound like therapy to me, like you're doing robot therapy. Like, imagine that you're successful. Now make me a list of what a successful person on a diet would eat for the next four days, but do it in a gentle way. And it's like, how is this a company? You have a company that makes these, uh, and there's a million of them here. And this is like a weird local maximum in the arc of these. Cause the chat, like chat GPT, OpenAI does not want prompt engineering to exist.

• 35:27Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like, what if we had the most emotional command line interface to all of humanity's knowledge possible? And like, five companies are building front, front ends, and they just like, generate the prompts for you. And like, we should disintermediate that. Like, there should not be a company between you and ChatGPT. It should be us, OpenAI, that builds a good interface for this. But this minute, where prompt engineering is a thing, and I honestly, like, if you're here, just go listen to the pitch. The sincerity, which with people are like, I can computer whisper so much that I made a company. It's amazing. And you're like, can you show me a prompt? And the prompt, they're all like this. So like, imagine that you're an expert, and they tell ChatGPT to be an expert.

• 36:08David Pierce?

  It feels like you always have to whisper it. It's like, it's like slowly petting the computer as it whispers sweet nothings into your ear.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  I just think it's of all of the sort of like startup classes. Every year at South by Southwest, there's like a class of startups that's like really emblematic. And this is the one to me, that it's like, oh, man, like, this is definitely like, they're gonna Sherlock the hell out of you. Or they'll acquire one, and that'll be the end of it. But I think it's, to me, the number of people who are using it, right? The sort of widespread knowledge of what it is, and how you can use it, and the entertaining aspect. And then, the fact that it is still hard to use, because you have an ocean of companies that like, we can make it a little easier to use. That's the gap. It might be the opportunity. But I think it represents what you're saying. It's like, it's not quite good enough.

• 36:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, the UI on top of all of that is unsolved. And it turns out like a blank text box to the internet is not actually a good user interface, because you're just gonna ask it like, what its butt looks like. And that's where this all ends.

• 37:05Nilay Patel?

  They were just not ready for that.

• 37:07David Pierce?

  No. But I think, just to bring it back to search for one second, like, one thing that I've been hearing from a couple of people is that, like, you talk about the cannon firing texts onto the internet. The thing that's gonna happen is now the search engines are indexing all of that. And all that data goes back into the AI. So we're gonna start, we have this crazy circular thing, where like, OpenAI is now building tools that will help you detect the stuff that's made by OpenAI, such that you don't trust it very much, and don't feed it back into your search algorithms. So we're gonna end up at this point where like, if we do this wrong, Bing is going to be literally answering its own questions with its own information

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 37:41David Pierce?

  that is largely wrong, and we're just going to spiral into this insane place.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  But it loves you, David.

• 37:46David Pierce?

  But it loves me so much.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  It wants you to leave your family.

• 37:49David Pierce?

  And it thinks I should leave my wife and child.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  So I think all that's true, it's a Vergecast, I have to talk about it, cover it off like five seconds, 45 minutes. All right. The number of lawsuits that are already happening against stability AI, against Open AI, from people who don't want their data scraped. Yes. is very high. Microsoft's answer to me, and I saw his PR person just like wince when he was like, "Fair use." And I was like, "I can't ruin everyone's day." I don't want to do this right now, man. That's the wrong answer. So there's a bunch of fair use cases about search. The funniest one to bring up is Perfect 10 v. Google, where like the Booby Magazine, Perfect 10 sued Google for lifting its images, and the judge was like, "This just helps people find links to your content."

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  And the American justice system had to really seriously contend with Perfect 10 and what it represents, and that is the foundation of fair use for search engines in this country. That is a true story. Beautiful. That doesn't apply when you're just boosting it, right? The fourth factor of this analysis is are you replacing the market for the original work? Right. Right? So most of the Google fair use cases, most of the search cases are like on that factor or you're not. You're actually creating a market for work. You search Google, they pull data in, they're obviously reusing it, they're remixing it, they might be showing you thumbnails, whatever, but then they're sending you to it.

• 39:06David Pierce?

  Right.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  So they've actually, they've opened your market for the work. They haven't shut it off, they have not replaced your work. Well, man, that's not-

• 39:12David Pierce?

  That's less and less true over time, yeah.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  That's, well, first, like, the number of zero-click searches on Google is going up, so Google keeps you on their pages way more often. Someone from Yelp is about to like jump over a bush and tell us what that exact number is, like we talk about all the time. And then with the AIs, they're just going to answer the question, they are just going to replace the work. So there's, I would say, about a decade of extremely complicated copyright litigation coming up, and it's not just artists think that you can type, make a picture in the style of this artist and replace their work, it's the training data, it's the display of the training data, it's how do you get to keep it? So here's this insane concept in copyright law, it's the ephemeral copy. So everything you do on your computer is a copy.

• 39:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:52Nilay Patel?

  And so in the early days of computers, there was a lawsuit. Some enterprise software company sued some other company that was just installing their software onto computers. They were just buying the software and they're installing it. And they're like, you are not authorized to make that copy. To take it from the disk to the storage, the RAM of the computer, you need a license from us. That was a lawsuit in the eighties. We're like right back in this spot, right? Like, everything that happens on your computer, even just to get a bit from the storage to your display is like 50,000 copies.

• 40:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  And so like the law is basically like, those don't count, they don't exist. You have a training, you're training an AI, necessarily you are making 50,000 copies to point the AI at that database. And there's just no body of law that can contend with it. And it's like, think about judges. Just imagine, close your eyes, like imagine a judge. Everybody?

• 40:45Alex Cranz?

  That's what I do every day.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  Long flowing white wig.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's George Washington. That's what everyone's thinking. We all know it. Have you seen the AI rendering of George Washington? It's hot, by the way. Best use of AI. He has like chin implants. It's great. I spend a lot of time on the internet. But just like imagine a judge having to be like, stability AI is in my courtroom and I have to know what a computer, how a computer works and my decision here will shape the economy for the next 10 years. I don't think it's gonna go well.

• 41:10Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I'm not optimistic about that.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:13David Pierce?

  But all these companies are used to just running fast enough that regulators are never able to keep up. Like, we're just now arguing about the ad market. It's like, these lawsuits will happen in 2062. It's gonna be great. I'm looking forward to it.

• 41:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, copyright law is the only law on the internet. It's the only law in my town. Here in Slack City, 17 USC's.

• 41:36David Pierce?

  Okay, one more break and then we're gonna take some questions from the audience, which miraculously did not all boil and leave in the hot sun. We'll be right back.

• 41:49Speaker 04

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• 42:27David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Let's get to a few questions that we got from the audience at South by Southwest.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  I got one over here. Oh man, we got a Verge t-shirt.

• 42:35Alex Cranz?

  Hell yeah. That's a good fit.

• 42:37Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 42:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so TikTok is at the Expo Center trade show and they're talking about trust and safety, talking about your data in the US, creating jobs in the US. Is that something that is, you know, with recent news, something that they're starting? Or have they been doing that in like other trade shows that have been out there?

• 42:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh no, they've been on a full press tour. And so the CEO has appeared on a bunch of panels. Their COO, Vanessa Papas, has been out and about. They have these things called transparency centers they've opened, which is basically like a, like a kids museum for trust and safety. I don't know how else to describe it. It's like you go to the exhibits and they're like, you moderate some content that's bad. And they're like, this is the room with the data in it. Do you think it's working? Doesn't seem like it's working. I think our time with TikTok is not long for this world is my, it's the rare bipartisan we can be angry at the tech industry and China, and we can irritate all the teenagers in the world. That's just a win for everybody.

• 43:31David Pierce?

  It's such a perfectly unprovable thing in both directions. Like there's no way for TikTok to like successfully, perfectly prove that it is a good steward of your data. And there's also no perfect, good way to prove that it isn't. So everybody's just going to get mad about politics. And you're right, because it's because China and is an easy thing to get everybody riled up against right now. And TikTok is an easy way to get everybody riled up against China. I think you're probably like right or wrong. I think you're probably right that TikTok is not long for our app stores. Yeah.

• 44:01Alex Cranz?

  I mean theoretically, there is a way to prove that they're being bad stewards of data. We just haven't like had the whistleblowers or had that story break, but theoretically it could happen.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  We're like running time. I want to try to take one or two more. Anybody else over here?

• 44:15Speaker 06

  Thank y'all, I appreciate it. Um, this was my first time ever listening to y'all's podcast.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh no.

• 44:19David Pierce?

  I'm so sorry.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  It's always like this. I'm so sorry.

• 44:23David Pierce?

  Sometimes it's longer.

• 44:24Speaker 06

  No, I really enjoyed it. And um, I'm also very, very new to the tech industry as well. So I guess I'm asking, what would be a good way to orientate myself like in the industry and just kind of learn more like absorb more information that I heard. So I can understand like the moon theories a little bit more deeper.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  Can you? All right.

• 44:41Alex Cranz?

  Read the verge.com.

• 44:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, the verge.com is very good.

• 44:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, read the verge.com. David is our like normie anthropologist. He just spent three months amongst the normals.

• 44:49Alex Cranz?

  Tell us, David.

• 44:50David Pierce?

  Okay, this may not be a popular answer, but my actual answer was, has been newsletters. Like I, I became the thing for me was like not somebody who wants to spend every second on Twitter. The real answer is like get weird into Twitter for a while. And then you'll eventually hate Twitter. And that's when you're like fully in the tech industry. Like you've made it when you've come all the way around on Twitter.

• 45:07Alex Cranz?

  If you feel like a bank run is a good idea, you've made it.

• 45:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. But there are, for me, it was like there, there are a bunch of really great tech newsletters out there. We have a couple of them.

• 45:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, command line platformer.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think there's so much happening and most of it is nonsense that like finding a couple of places, you can sort of be in the nonsense as much as you want, but then having a couple of like publications or places or newsletters that you trust to like actually like take a beat and think about it. For me at least, has been super instructive. I feel like it's really easy to just get caught in like the swirl of the new thing that everybody's obsessed with, whether it's like killing Silicon Valley Bank or having sex with AI.

• 45:43Alex Cranz?

  Or the moon.

• 45:44David Pierce?

  But like, yeah.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  That's new? You're only newly obsessed with that? The thing I would say is to David's point, it's focus, right? This industry is really big. Everyone's always talking about the next thing. And you can actually just drill down into one piece and have that be really rewarding. And you just figure out which of that piece, for us, it has historically been like consumer products. And the thing that has been really challenging and fun and interesting these past few years is every product is now a consumer product. Like Slack is a great consumer product that happens to be sold as enterprise software. You just go on and on. The bank software is too easy to use. It's because they made it a consumer product. And I, that little bit of focus, like what's my angle? Like, how do I prove or disprove whatever little? Passionate idea that I have, that's usually been the work for us.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  I think we're, I think we're out of time. We've gone over what a surprise here at the Vergecast. I want to thank Slack for having us here in Slack City. They will not play the Tiger song Rock City as we exit the stage, which I've asked them to do. I don't think that's their vibe, but just, Matt, know that it's been in my head this entire time.

• 46:46David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you so much for listening and thanks to everyone who showed up at the event live. The audience was bigger and cooler than we expected. It was really fun. There's a whole lot more stuff from this conversation on theverge.com, especially about the moon. We put some links in the show notes, but go to theverge.com. We're covering all of this stuff practically every day right now. And if you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or taco recommendations for places I missed and need to go to next year, you can always email us at [email protected] or call the hotline 866 VERGE11. We're going to do a big hotline episode really soon and we might answer your questions in a future episode. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 47:31David Pierce?

  We'll be back on Friday with more of the Verge crew talking about all of the biggest news happening in tech this week, including, I just assume, the moon again. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 47:51Speaker 04

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