The AIs are officially out of control

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss ChatGPT and Gemini updates, Walmart acquiring Vizio, Apple's Sports app, and more. Further reading: Google cut a deal with Reddit for AI training data Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis Google’s open-source Gemma AI models draw from the research behind Gemini ChatGPT spat out gibberish for many users overnight before OpenAI fixed it One month with Microsoft’s AI vision of the future: Copilot Pro Gemini, Gemma, Goose. OpenAI can’t register ‘GPT’ as a trademark — yet Artificial investment Walmart to acquire Vizio in $2.3 billion deal Echo Hub review: a simple, customizable smart home control panel Samsung details a host of audio upgrades coming to its phones, tablets, and TVs Apple says the iPhone 15’s battery got better — but won’t say how Rice is not included in Apple’s official guidance for a wet phone One of the last small-ish Android phones looks like it's going the way of the iPhone Mini OnePlus is getting back into the smartwatch game The Garmin Forerunner 165 could be a great budget running watch Sony’s PlayStation Portal hacked to run emulated PSP games Framework is selling a cheap modular laptop Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes Apple launches Apple Sports app with scores and betting odds Apple is already defending iMessage against tomorrow’s quantum computing attacks IBM quantum computing updates: System Two and Heron Microsoft and Intel strike a custom chip manufacturing deal Rivian says it is laying off 10 percent of its workforce as EV woes deepen Ford slashes Mustang Mach-E prices again as EV price war enters its second year The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. 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.

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• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchest, the flagship podcast of Google's latest AI model, which at this point is just an alphabet soup collection of letters designed to be sold on Amazon.

• 1:09Alex Cranz?

  The next one will be Greg.

• 1:10Nilay Patel?

  Greg.

• 1:11Alex Cranz?

  Or perhaps Gregory.

• 1:12Nilay Patel?

  Steve.

• 1:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no, it's gotta be a G.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  It's gotta be a G.

• 1:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Nilay Patel?

  Glinda.

• 1:18Alex Cranz?

  There we go, Glinda. Yeah.

• 1:19David Pierce?

  Glinda's fun. That even has some like magical possibilities. Glinda's very good.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I went straight musical theater with it.

• 1:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Let's be honest.

• 1:26David Pierce?

  But I like Greg. Let's just go very straightforward. Greg and Gary.

• 1:31David Pierce?

  I love this.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Jeff. Complicated.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  Fancy Jeff. Google's latest transformer model. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here.

• 1:41David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Al Trans is here.

• 1:43Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Quite a lot of news going on in the world of AI. This section is labeled in the rundown as the AI is going insane, y'all. So we've got a lot to talk about there. And then not one, but two lightning rounds today.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  We're still on the hunt for lightning round sponsors here on The Vergecast.

• 2:02David Pierce?

  Two opportunities today.

• 2:04Alex Cranz?

  I was hoping there was gonna be like some audio just then, just like lightning noises.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Alex Cranz?

  But there was more like a pew pew pew. That was my lightning noise in my head just now.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Like a DJ horn?

• 2:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  If you sponsor a lightning round, I will say your name and play a DJ horn sound effect.

• 2:21Alex Cranz?

  It's compelling.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  You can do it. You just have to email Liam at theverge.com with a picture of your money and we'll take it from there.

• 2:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  I think that's how sales work. I don't know. I'm not an influencer. All right, let's talk about the AI. It is a little out of hand what is happening with the large language models out there on the internet. There's some news, though, some actual news today in the world of AI that I think is very important. We just talked a lot about how AI is rewiring the internet, how the incentives to make new content on the open web are changing because the AI companies are training on that data. There's all kinds of lawsuits and recriminations. And then in the middle of it, Reddit announced a deal with Google today where Google is gonna train its AI systems on what Steve Hoffman, the CEO of Reddit, keeps referring to as the Reddit Corpus.

• 3:11Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  Which is honestly a great academic word, but I think if you walked up to the average Reddit user and was like, "Today you've contributed to the Corpus," I don't know it would land.

• 3:23Alex Cranz?

  No, it wouldn't.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Corpus.

• 3:26Alex Cranz?

  I don't wanna be there. Take me out. Take me out.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  I love the Vision Pro Sub Corpus. That's how I think about Reddit. This is a huge deal, though.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  It is, and I think it's kind of the end, or if not the end, then almost the end of this very long road that Reddit has been on, where Reddit kind of belatedly discovered that the best business it has is it is a source of amazing data on everything and that it has become like a known hack that if you wanna Google something and get good, human-based information, you just add Reddit to the end of it and it will dump you into a subreddit where inevitably people are discussing whatever you wanna talk about and it's helpful. Reddit has been fighting with OpenAI about this. Reddit has been sort of loosely threatening to go public for like three years now. And the idea now, I think, we're sort of assuming Reddit

• 4:20David Pierce?

  is going to file its S1 to officially go public any day now. So you've got to figure that Reddit was desperate to make a deal for a lot of money to be like, look how important Reddit is. And it opens up just an infinite number of messy side effects and sort of knock on situations that we should talk about. But I think, A, the fact that it's this much money, which is a lot.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  Wait, is it?

• 4:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's 60 million a year.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  60 million a year?

• 4:50David Pierce?

  That's a lot of money.

• 4:52Alex Cranz?

  I mean, for Google, that's like a sneeze.

• 4:55David Pierce?

  Sure, Reddit is not Google.

• 4:59Alex Cranz?

  For Reddit, it probably is.

• 5:01David Pierce?

  So Reddit's Reddit's revenue the last few years, I'm gonna, you know, average a bunch of real numbers, is somewhere in the range of like $450 million a year. So that's a big jump in revenue for one deal for your data that in theory doesn't change anything else. And this also means Reddit can go and demand a similar deal from OpenAI. Like, you've got to figure, every one of these companies is going to try and make a bunch of these deals, because if you're Reddit, you're saying, well, if Google has our data and OpenAI doesn't, Google has a real leg up. And so they're going to make the same kind of offer to OpenAI, they're going to make the same kind of offer to Anthropic. Like, you can see a world in which pretty quickly, a third, half of revenues coming to Reddit comes from these deals. That's big money.

• 5:46Nilay Patel?

  So I have a lot of questions about this. I think $60 million is almost an existential number for the internet. If you're Google, you desperately need people to put new information on the web where Google Search can find it. The incentives to do that right now.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  With any amount of quality. Or diet. Near zero. Like zero, like the, the most effective thing you can do on the web today is either set up an e-commerce website. So you can get people to buy stuff without paying Apple transaction fees. I know this because the CEOs of Wix and Squarespace and all these other companies come on Decoder and I say, why should anyone make a website? And they say, e-commerce. Right. Every time. That's why people make websites now. The other reason to make a website is to do SEO chum content marketing for dental practices or whatever else nonsense that happens, right? To game Google because you're doing content marketing for some e-commerce website. Like that, those are the things.

• 6:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  If you happen to search, like just something dumb, like how to install a baby seat in a car, you get car dealership websites because that.

• 6:59Alex Cranz?

  That's why you type in Reddit.

• 7:00Nilay Patel?

  That's why you type in Reddit.

• 7:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  So if you're Google and you're like, well, the incentives we made for the web have turned the web into garbage. We should make sure Reddit continues to exist and the value you place on that deal is $60 million. I would argue that's not nearly enough. Because for Google, it's nothing. That is a percentage of the money they are paying Apple just to be the default search engine. And I, I, that, I get it that Reddit's not big, but when Reddit's the only good result in Google, it feels like that number should be much higher.

• 7:34Alex Cranz?

  I think it's like Reddit probably didn't push hard enough, right? Like they kind of had Reddit over a barrel.

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. Reddit has no leverage.

• 7:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  Against the noise because Google can also be like, we're also just taking everything.

• 7:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  Which is what OpenAI have also done. So I just, there's something in that number. I don't know. I think we gotta wait for the actual S1 that we gotta see Reddit's actual financials when it actually becomes a public company. All of that is yet to be discovered, but you just see this number. And it's like, oh, that's not nearly enough if you're the last place human beings actually answer questions on the internet in a way that's discoverable to search engines.

• 8:09David Pierce?

  Let me offer the flip side of that argument.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:11David Pierce?

  Which is that maybe Reddit is the only company with leverage in these arguments.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:15David Pierce?

  Which is that Google knows, I guarantee you firsthand, Google knows how important Reddit is to the business of Google search. The fact that Reddit's search product is bad, and so people don't just go to Reddit and search, they go to Google and search Reddit, is a lot of money for Google. Like, no one at Google is unclear about how important Reddit results are to its business.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:41David Pierce?

  And Reddit has been loudly fighting against OpenAI and others. They were early to block the GPT bot to not let OpenAI crawl its stuff. So if not Reddit, then who? If Reddit can't come in and say, you actually need our data more than we need to be part of your system that doesn't deliver any value back to us anyway? Who can say that?

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  I agree with you, but I think the important part of this puzzle is that for Google search to exist, it needs to create a situation in which there are 10,000 Reddits. And right now, it has created a situation in which there is but one.

• 9:19David Pierce?

  And maybe not even one for long.

• 9:21Nilay Patel?

  And maybe not even one for long, but there's a bunch of forums like, uh, Neil is gonna complain about his own theater system again. You ready for this?

• 9:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Nilay Patel?

  I have a hot ass Sony receiver. It's brand new. I love it. It's easy 3000 yes, I could talk about it all day and night. When you turn on its core feature, it makes a hissing sound.

• 9:39Alex Cranz?

  Hate that.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm in, I'm in the forums. I'm on that AVS forum thread. I know what's going on. I called my dealer and I sent him links to the AVS forums. But that's like a huge problem, right? The company that runs AVS forum is small, it is not big. Google, there's not, there's not some huge set of home theater websites that are finding me this information, right? It's a bunch of people who bought this one extremely sick product that has this one problem that are talking about it in a forum and Google has to find it. And if Google extracts a value from that and delivers me an AI summary of that thread and says, call this number and this firmware patch or whatever, then that

• 10:23Nilay Patel?

  forum's need to, then Google's extracting value from that company without giving it back. And that can happen to a thousand companies. It can happen to just Reddit. But you just, this cycle, this is the first time we've got a number of what Google thinks this is worth. And this cycle that we're in, I think is going to either push that number way, way down, which is very bad, or it will result in more and more people demanding ever bigger numbers, because there's nowhere else for Google to get the raw data it needs to function from. And you put all that in the context of Reddit, which just pissed off a bunch of its users, but shoved that in the rearview mirror as fast as it could.

• 11:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  Because it needs to be a real company that makes money and they were like, fine. And I think the company has come through that. We should talk about that at length in the context of this. But that's Reddit. On the other side of that is Google. And Google has to look at all of these lawsuits. New York Times versus OpenAI, Getty versus Stability, we can go down the list. And every time Google makes a deal like this, all it is doing is signaling the world, oh, there's money here. There should be money here. And all of those lawsuits get more and more expensive. And I don't know, I just look at this and I'm like, oh, this is the beginning. This is the end of the beginning of this phase.

• 11:38Alex Cranz?

  But it is like, it's explicitly for AI. It's not for the search part of it. Like, Google still has.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  No, Reddit's search is going to be Google's Vertex AI now. So there's going to be a Google-powered AI search in Reddit now, which is cool.

• 11:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  I feel like Redditors are going to have a lot of feelings about that once that rolls out actually inside of Reddit.

• 11:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm curious to see if it. Works. Like, I think Google's kind of internal website searches aren't nearly as powerful oftentimes. I mean,

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  So said one of the proprietors of the verge.com, which has a Google-powered website.

• 12:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's not always, it's fine, but it's not always like, great. I don't know. I know how the Reddit one works. I'm like, nah.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  Can any robot contend with the corpus of Reddit?

• 12:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Hmm. Probably.

• 12:24David Pierce?

  No, nor can any human or any group of humans. But no, I think the flip side of this, I think, is that Google is also desperately trying to figure out how to get the AI nonsense out of search, which in theory makes Reddit even more important to Google over time. So not only does Google ship this money to Reddit, it actually has, I would argue, a stronger incentive than ever to push Reddit search results to the top of search results. And one of the things that happened in this deal is that Reddit is now giving Google programmatic access to things like conversations that are moving very quickly and are really interesting,

• 13:05David Pierce?

  or comments and post counts and all the kind of underlying metadata that you don't get just by scraping a page once a day or once an hour or whatever. And by being able to actually like pipe Reddit into Google, I think if I'm Steve Huffman, not only am I betting that you're going to write me a check for $60 million a year, you're going to have more and more reasons over time to highlight Reddit stuff in Google search when most things are being driven down because it's all turning into AI crap.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that worth way more than $60 million?

• 13:37Alex Cranz?

  No, but my question is, that feels like a bad, like Reddit already has struggled to monetize its traffic, right? It's really bad at monetizing its traffic. And so now if it gets more traffic and it's only getting $60 million a year, That actually feels like a bad gamble for Reddit because now it can't monetize the increased traffic and instead it's just going to increase server fees.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'll say. I don't think we know the answer. I am desperate to know what our listeners think.

• 14:05Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  This is like a great hotline prompt. Who do you think is the winner of this deal? Is it Google or is it Reddit? Because I think Reddit is a big winner and I think over time, Google is staring down the barrel of its demise because it used to be, the internet used to be search and social. Those were the two great traffic sources. And if, you could tell if a publication was organized around search or if it was organized around social because the ones that were organized around social were insane. Just to people. Like, if you were like, I'm optimized, I've optimized this website for Facebook traffic, you'd be like, I hope you're okay. Like, I hope, I hope you're having a good day.

• 14:43Alex Cranz?

  You're just putting mayonnaise on a countertop.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just straight. It's just like, here's what we do. We're gonna get a watermelon. We're gonna get two guys in lab coats and we're gonna put rubber bands on the watermelon and then everyone will have to sit around talking about what that means. This is a real thing we lived through. BuzzFeed was worth over a billion dollars because it was organized around social media in that way. If you take Google and you say, our search product, like David is saying, is not organized around real-time social conversations on these various platforms. Something very different is gonna happen. And I, there's, there's a conflation there of what used to be search and social into one kind of thing. And I think that means Google is now hopelessly dependent on social platforms to be good at things

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  like getting rid of AI, to be good at doing things like, like centering human conversations in real time versus the AI chum that we all live in on the web every day. I don't know. I don't know. I just, I'm just seeing the beginning of a dependency for Google that is not great. But maybe, maybe actually this is going to improve Google search in a way that we'd all like it to improve.

• 15:48Alex Cranz?

  Anytime the power swings, I'm delighted. And it feels like right now the power is swinging perhaps away from Google and its bajillion G-named AI services.

• 15:59David Pierce?

  It's just not clear who it's swinging to, right? I think that's the strangest part.

• 16:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's just swinging.

• 16:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, it just feels like it's, it's just sort of dangling in the air right now. And it's like, who is going to be the next powerful thing? And it's just so not clear.

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  And it's theverge.com where just a series of blog posts about expensive receivers, I believe, will save the media.

• 16:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's it. That's all you need.

• 16:24Nilay Patel?

  It has this feature called 360 spatial sound mapping. It's so cool. It just-

• 16:27Alex Cranz?

  Who sneaks up behind you in this?

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna make a list, by the way, of Atmos tracks where the guitarist is sneaking up behind you.

• 16:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just guitarists.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  I have, well, all of them feature a percussionist sneaking up behind you. No one has any other ideas. You know that, you know that website TV Tropes?

• 16:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Nilay Patel?

  I could make one today called Spatial Audio Tropes. And guy with maracas behind you is number one on the list. Like, is there like percussive enhancement to a song?

• 16:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:58Nilay Patel?

  Like a fill or an accent?

• 16:59Alex Cranz?

  Just a little castaneta coming-

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  Behind you. Get back there.

• 17:03Alex Cranz?

  Just creeping up.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  Just goodbye. You want to do a hi-hat fill? Back of the room, buddy. It's just every day I think about. The song Fade Into You by Mazzy Star is a spatial audio travesty.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  Just telling you.

• 17:21Alex Cranz?

  You should do a review of it.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  That is a very small, it's a beautiful, I love that song. It's a very small intimate track, right?

• 17:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  In spatial audio, it's like, what if these motherfuckers are all around you? Anyway, sorry. 360 spatial sound mapping.

• 17:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  It listens to speakers in your room and it, it moves them to their ideal placements.

• 17:42Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  It's very cool.

• 17:43Alex Cranz?

  That is cool.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  This is a completely irrelevant product for-

• 17:47Alex Cranz?

  Anyway, Google.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  -100% of the audience. Power moving, Google. Good, good Alex.

• 17:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. Google. They, they got all those, those companies with G names.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  They have all those companies with G names. Here's the thing about the AI. All of this presumes that these systems work and work well and work reliably, which has not been the case this week. David, can you run us through it?

• 18:09David Pierce?

  Oh, no. I was really afraid you were gonna ask me. I feel like I'm gonna get canceled just by attempting to explain what's going on here.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  There's a reason I asked the whitest man on this podcast to do this.

• 18:18David Pierce?

  That's fair. Okay, so you can now use Gemini to generate images.

• 18:26David Pierce?

  And what appears to have happened is that Google went out of its way to make sure that those images being generated would be diverse and not fall into the same biases that we've seen from a lot of image generators over time, which tend to basically prey on, like, the lowest basis stereotypes in really ugly ways. So Google seems to have gone out of its way to go the other way and be diverse in its representation of all things. Some people got very mad because then when you start doing things like, say, "Show me a picture of some Nazis," it shows you a substantially more diverse set of Nazis than you might expect to see.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  It is very funny that we made you say this out loud.

• 19:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  It shows you, like, black and brown Nazis.

• 19:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was definitely like a poster. It was just like the biggest educational poster you might see in a...

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  Like fake diversity.

• 19:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, like a fake diversity poster you see at certain companies and like, you're like, "Oh, that's not real." And now they're Nazis.

• 19:28David Pierce?

  It's the group of friends sitting on the quad on the front of every college brochure.

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  I just want to be very clear that when I attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it got into trouble for photoshopping that poster.

• 19:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  That was a real thing that happened to Madison.

• 19:43Alex Cranz?

  And if they just waited a while, they could have used Gemini.

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  Open eye do it. So the idea that when you prompt one of these AI systems to produce a picture of a successful person, they have in the past been significantly biased and produced pictures of white men.

• 20:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  For that prompt.

• 20:05Alex Cranz?

  Because the training data is often significantly biased. The people making it are biased because we all exist in a society and have innate biases that influence everything we do. And if you're, the people you hire all share those biases, it trickles down.

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  But to, if you swing the knob all the way back the other way, and you're like, show me a literal 1930s Nazi. And it's like, here's a group of happy black and brown women in Nazi regalia.

• 20:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  That also seems wrong.

• 20:36Alex Cranz?

  It did it also for senators. They asked for senators in the 1800s. And it was like, look at all these women.

• 20:44Alex Cranz?

  We weren't senators in the 1800s.

• 20:46David Pierce?

  So I saw prompts floating around where it's also clearly trying to sort of pick moments to just not do entirely. Like, someone on our staff looked up Vikings, just tried to ask for a picture of Vikings, and it wouldn't do it. I think if, at least for a while, if you asked it to generate you a picture of a white person, it wouldn't do it. But if you asked it to generate a picture of a black person, it would do it. And so it's just chaos in the worst, weirdest way. And I think it has started this, like, bizarre culture war that is in a lot of corners, sort of totally disingenuous. Like, there are a lot of people running around being like, Gemini doesn't want to show you white people. And that's absurd.

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just going to read you the two headlines that I think summarize this entire story.

• 21:24David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  These are from our site. "Google apologizes for, quote, 'missing the mark after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis.'" And then, just a little bit later, "Google pauses Gemini's ability to generate AI images after diversity errors." Because I don't think there's a right answer here.

• 21:42Alex Cranz?

  There isn't.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  You are always going to drive into the heart of the extremely stupid culture war in this country if you allow a thing to generate images of people, and then users can describe what those people look like.

• 21:54Alex Cranz?

  It's weird.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  There's no way to avoid it.

• 21:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's weird, though, to, like, just create a tool that contributes to culture, and then go, wait, wait, wait, wait, we don't actually want it to contribute to culture. And it's like, no, you've created a generative tool to, like, generate text and images, which are inherently culture. So to just be like, no, we're going to tap out of that, like, you can't actually do that.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I actually think this is maybe the...

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  Like philosophical heart.

• 22:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  Of the generative AI problem, where you get a bunch of VCs saying things like, "In the future, there won't be movies. You'll just say, put Robert Downey Jr. and a handful of Chrissies.

• 22:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  And make another Avengers movie for me, and we won't need movie." And it's like, well, you'll just end up with, actually, at this point, you'll end up with just another Marvel movie.

• 22:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're all the same, but you won't end up with anything new. And the point of making art and having creative people express themselves is to have new ideas.

• 23:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  And all of these systems can only statistically average the past. And then if you try to, like, make it so that the art doesn't provoke any feelings in you.

• 23:10Alex Cranz?

  Then it's not art.

• 23:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's not that. You end up in a place where you just end up provoking different feelings. Because where people in any picture you show a person provoke some feelings. I always think about this. And I know we all have these people in our family. You know, when you walk into the kitchen? And some extremely well-meaning auntie is just like, "Put the word 'family' up in the kitchen. Live, laugh, love." I am, I mean, it's very funny, and I.

• 23:39Alex Cranz?

  It's cute.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  If you, if you look at me dressed in all black, like, you know that this is not my personal aesthetic. All that is, though, is someone desperately trying to get you to feel a feeling, and they lack the, like, it's just a command. They're like, "I'll just put these words here. In this room, you should feel family. God damn it, fam." And they just, like, glue it on the wall, and it's like, "That's what you should feel in here." And that, there's something pure about it.

• 24:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Nilay Patel?

  Some of those people may have some other ways of getting you to feel those feelings, but that's why that happens.

• 24:10Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 24:10Nilay Patel?

  You look at generative AI, and it's like, you just type in the thing, and it's like, "I desperately want someone to feel a feeling, and I'll just generate this art, and then I'll show it to you."

• 24:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Nilay Patel?

  And like, there, there's a huge disconnect there, where people do not feel about AI art, what the people who make it feel.

• 24:27Alex Cranz?

  I mean, we're seeing this in the fandom community, to the point where, like, fans are calling on authors to reject AI fan art, because they're like, "It's not genuine. It's not coming from a, from a, from an authentic place."

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:42Alex Cranz?

  And if it can't be authentic, AI is inherently inauthentic, which isn't true. I don't think generative AI is inherently inauthentic, but the people driving the propagation of it.

• 24:53Alex Cranz?

  Kind of are, right? And so like, it's trickling down to create this, to take this really cool, potentially like, useful and fascinating tool for people who can't draw for shit, but do want to like, put themselves out there and dumbing it down and saying, no, you can't do that. Like, this is actually just Microsoft, or Google, or whatever. It's business, and it's not real. And that's kind of sucks. Like, that these people have driven, or these, I guess, these VCs and big stakeholders at these companies have driven this potentially really fascinating artistic tool into such a business place so quickly, that the people who should adopt it and love it and adore it are instinctively saying, fuck off.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  I completely agree with you. And I think the thing that is funniest about this, and make no mistake, this set of Gemini errors is some of the funniest stuff that has ever happened with these tools. Because it's just a big company being like, what if we make a tool that lets everyone make art? And then being like, oh shit, the people made art. Because in almost any other context, producing an image of racially diverse Nazis qualifies as very subversive art.

• 26:03Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  In this context, it is a mistake.

• 26:06Alex Cranz?

  Hysterical mistake.

• 26:07Nilay Patel?

  Like, a very stupid mistake.

• 26:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Nilay Patel?

  And there's just no way to square that at scale.

• 26:12David Pierce?

  But I think that's the point, right? Like, we just have not answered the question of what it's supposed to happen here. Right? Like, if you type into Gemini, show me a picture of the founding fathers. What is the right answer? Like, sincerely, what is the right answer?

• 26:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Let me offer you the hit musical, Hamilton, in which a picture of the founding fathers was a very subversively redrawn to be a group of black people who spoke to each other in the form of rap battles. And I think Hamilton has been contextualized and recontextualized a thousand times since it came out. But because it is art... It is meant to be contextualized and recontextualized in that way. When people ask Google a question, their expectation is that they will get an answer that is not meant to be recontextualized. There's a, David, I think you're right, there's a gap there. Like, what is supposed to happen here? And when it, the answer is a picture? There's, there isn't a right answer, as we have talked about to death on the show.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  I did just Google, what is art? It was just a dictionary response from Oxford Languages.

• 27:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. What did Gemini have to say?

• 27:21Alex Cranz?

  This was just regular Google.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  I will say that I asked Gemini to review the Vision Pro today, just to see what happened. And it, it came up with a list of what I would call, I would categorize as concern trolling privacy questions.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  It was like, you should be worried about eye tracking. It's like, good job, Google.

• 27:38Alex Cranz?

  Thanks.

• 27:38David Pierce?

  Can I just say one thing that's really wild about this to me? Like, just looking at the prompts people are talking about, like, uh, show me an image of a 1943 German soldier, uh, show me a picture of an American woman, uh, show me a picture of the founding fathers. You know what those are, is search queries?

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 27:56David Pierce?

  This is the insane thing that we're doing is, and, and Google, I think, is more guilty of this than most. It's trying to smush two things together and pretend that they're the same, when I am looking for a piece of information that exists. Like, I would argue the right answer to, show me a picture of the founding fathers, is like, find a picture of the founding fathers on Wikipedia and return that as the answer. Like, that feels like the closest thing to the right answer that we have, to me. But if you go into this thing, which explicitly fabricates things that don't exist, and you expect it to give you something truthful and real and historically accurate, you're just out of your mind.

• 28:31Alex Cranz?

  Do you know what it's bringing back? Do you remember, this came up earlier this week, because when I was a little kid, I was told by my Spanish teacher, that people in, in Spain, who speak with a Spanish accent, they speak with a lisp. Which isn't true. They pronounce it-

• 28:47Nilay Patel?

  It's just a different accent.

• 28:48Alex Cranz?

  It's just a different accent. But I believed that until like this week when a Spanish speaking colleague was like, you know, that's not real, right? And you're-

• 28:58David Pierce?

  Aren't you the one who said Barcelona on a call?

• 29:00Alex Cranz?

  Barcelona?

• 29:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, that was you. Okay.

• 29:01Alex Cranz?

  That's how you say it. You say it Barcelona. I said it correctly. But then the person pointed out, they're like, that's not actually a list. And I was like, okay, cool. Wait, I was lied to by my teacher in like, the 90s, pre like internet, pre like-

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Alex Cranz?

  Like, there was a time where you would just go and you would be like, this is a real thing. And no one could tell you otherwise, because it wasn't in the encyclopedia. There was no internet to just go look. And so you'd be like, okay. And we're just like, we just boomeranged back there immediately.

• 29:29Nilay Patel?

  Where the AI systems can just confidently lie to you.

• 29:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  Here's my segue.

• 29:33Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:34Nilay Patel?

  What if instead of lying to you, they just do unexplainable gibberish for about eight hours?

• 29:40Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that also happened pre-internet.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 29:44Alex Cranz?

  Talk to someone, be, oh, that's, oh, you're a child.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  No, but in this case, OpenAI just did gibberish-

• 29:50Alex Cranz?

  It did.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  For eight hours. And I believe they have not explained what was actually going on in ChatGPT.

• 29:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, the answer seems to be just some unknown weird error. And I think the most likely candidate that I've heard is that they rolled out something new or were testing something that had an unexpected effect. And they were able to roll it back pretty fast. So I think that's a reasonably likely outcome. But oh, my God, it's so funny.

• 30:15Alex Cranz?

  It's so funny.

• 30:17David Pierce?

  Like, somebody asked for a biography of the Jackson family. And you should all read the screenshot. We'll put it in the post with the links. But it goes from sort of making sense at the top to just slowly losing the plot. And by the end, can I just read you the last paragraph?

• 30:33Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 30:33David Pierce?

  Okay. So the heading of this very last paragraph is, Miss Iainus, unkissed, Michael Janet Germain. Number one, a Pandora's of global stooves and prolific shipyard premises. Schwittonly, the sparkle of Turmar on the crest has as much to do with the golver of the moon paths as it shifts from follow. Tabled from blush romance and stuck to the design, Heniels and denoted Oms filled a niche morsel of global house novi from the incubent. I just want to point out, I read that perfectly.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it is really well done. There was not a retake there.

• 31:08David Pierce?

  Just completely lost everything. Like, it lost English, it lost syntax, it lost the plot of what it was talking about. It just completely derailed itself.

• 31:19Alex Cranz?

  It did sound, it did make sense when you said it, though. Like, I feel like I understood a lot more about the Jackson family.

• 31:26David Pierce?

  The Heniels and denoted Oms.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that is Vogon poetry from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

• 31:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's, there's something that that sounds exactly like, and I'm pretty sure it's Vogon poetry from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Unclear why OpenAI was generating this. All I'm saying is that if you want to turn over the mechanism of culture to these systems, they should not do that from time to time.

• 31:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:56Alex Cranz?

  I mean, humans sometimes do that. Don't, don't, don't.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  But you can at least be like, well, Gary's having a bad day.

• 32:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Gary's having a bad day and drink too much. That's why you sounded like that.

• 32:07Nilay Patel?

  I sound like that when I drink too much.

• 32:09Alex Cranz?

  I was like, that's what I sound like when I drink too much. It did highlight for me that, like, even the people who make these things don't fully understand how they work. And they've said that, like, they've all been pretty open about that. They're like, yeah, we've got this cool thing. We don't entirely understand it, but we're releasing it into the wild. Go forth and enjoy it. And like, that's what happens when you don't entirely understand the thing you're releasing into the wild. Sometimes it's gonna forsooth Gandervort Soother.

• 32:40Alex Cranz?

  There we go, yeah.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  Some good.

• 32:41Alex Cranz?

  I was just a little chat GPT myself.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  All right, speaking of pure gibberish, we should mention that Google's names for its products are pure gibberish.

• 32:49Alex Cranz?

  I hate them. I

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 32:51Alex Cranz?

  I just, I gotta, I just, I gotta, I gotta get this out. If, if somebody came out tomorrow and if we'd use the same nomenclature for chat GPT, and somebody tomorrow is like, we're gonna do a smaller, lower left chat GPT thing, it would have to be called like Chuck, or like Charlene. Like, it's just like, there's no relation between these two.

• 33:12David Pierce?

  This is my virtual assistant, Chaz.

• 33:14Alex Cranz?

  Chaz, yeah. Like, what the hell is this? And it's like, okay, why is it a woman's name? Well, it has, like, it starts with a G, that's it. That's, that's all you got? You couldn't, like, stay in the Zodiac? As Gemini, I was already offended you stole my name, but like

• 33:29David Pierce?

  Such a Gemini thing to say.

• 33:31Alex Cranz?

  Excuse me. Stole my sign. But yeah, still, basically, I have a lot of identity attached to it because Geminis are apparently the Antichrist. But like, we have to defend ourselves. But then to just be like, Gemma, which is like explicitly a woman's name, a lovely woman's name, feels like, one, you're gendering it, two, you're gendering like the free, less good one. And it's like, hey, don't do that. Stop.

• 34:00David Pierce?

  It's a bummer for a bunch of reasons. I totally agree. And I mean, you think about, we went from the era of Siri, Alexa, Cortana, these like explicitly gendered assistants that were problematic for that reason and a bunch of others.

• 34:13Alex Cranz?

  Cortana was named after a Halo character, to be fair.

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Amazon explicitly and aggressively gender selects it to be honest, which is very weird.

• 34:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. But then, we, we were, we were heading towards, I think, a slightly better place where like, I still think it's ridiculous that we've allowed GPT to just become a thing, people say. Like, it just upsets me greatly that that's in the language now. But chat GPT, not a gendered thing, not a very good product name, but not a gendered thing. Uh, Bard, nah. But then Gemini, not a gendered thing unless you have strong feelings about the Zodiac.

• 34:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Copilot.

• 34:50David Pierce?

  Copilot, same thing. And so it was like, okay, we're getting, we're getting towards thinking of these as products, not people, which is the right strategy. And then, yeah, I agree. Gemma is a big bummer back in the wrong direction.

• 35:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so no one can keep track of them?

• 35:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  On top of that.

• 35:05Alex Cranz?

  How many, how many, can, can anybody name all of the current flavors of Gemini?

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  Gemini Advanced Workplace.

• 35:13Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 35:13David Pierce?

  No, that's a subscription that gets you Gemini Nano. No, sorry, Gemini Ultra. But there's Gemini Ultra Pro and Nano. There's Gemma 2B and 7B. But coming soon, there's Gemini 1.5, which is in Gemini 1.5 Pro, which is different from Gemini 1.0 Pro. Gemini Ultra will eventually be Gemini 1.5 also. And I've lost it. That was as far as I can go. But then there's Gemini.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Well done.

• 35:38Alex Cranz?

  I wanted to clap.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  There's Gemini in several things. There's Gemini in Vertex, which is different from Gemini in the Gemini that you experienced. I can't, it just, you know that thing where you like, wish you could replace the 90s song lyrics in your brain with like useful information? This is how I feel about Gemini. Like, knowing this is making my life worse.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  I still remember the, the names of almost every single HTC phone. I can't remember people's faces and names, but I can, I can just rattle off the spec sheet.

• 36:05David Pierce?

  Oh, the Droid heiress. That's sick.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  128 gigahertz processor. It's like a real, I know it. It's in my heart.

• 36:12Alex Cranz?

  Kind of a cool phone.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  A cool phone. I can still do Netbooks. Intel had 1.3 gigahertz processors and the, and 128.

• 36:21Alex Cranz?

  But you can't do all the Gemini's.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  Can't do all the Gemini's.

• 36:23Alex Cranz?

  Gotta go to David for that.

• 36:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. This has been a very heavy first segment. We've had everything. We've had the future of the internet.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  We've had Manuel Miranda.

• 36:36Nilay Patel?

  It's just everyone, just pull over the car, listen to these ads, just breathe. We're back with not one, but two lightning rounds. We'll be right back.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 37:17Speaker 06

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web. Like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 37:42Speaker 07

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• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Now, before I went to break, I mentioned advertising.

• 38:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Nilay Patel?

  Which I only do in the context of asking you, begging you really, to sponsor the lightning round. Which, again, we have yet to do. But if you do it, I will, you can buy my very integrity.

• 38:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  Just say, just pay the money, is what I'm saying. But I'm aware that many listeners of our show have had some issues with our other advertising over which we have no control. But I'm happy to report that David, mostly, and Leon have gone and done some investigating and the problem of the repeat ads at least should be resolved. Correct me if I'm wrong.

• 38:56David Pierce?

  If you keep getting, I was, I mean, I'm gonna say, if you keep getting them, let us know. But like, oh, boy, do you already. So if it keeps happening, get at me and we'll keep fighting the good fight. But hopefully it should start to get better.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  By the way, is that ever evidence that your phones are not listening to you?

• 39:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, right?

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  Because if they were, they would stop.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  No, that's just ad tech gone wrong, much like the AIs.

• 39:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  Just going off the rails. The ad tech is just off the rails. So we're trying to get it fixed. All right, lightning rounds doubled up. My idea was that we would just do everything on the list as fast as we could. But then David reminded me that I am the host of the show and do not have that ability. That's correct.

• 39:41Alex Cranz?

  We can't do a four hour podcast today.

• 39:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, but I think Alex, you and I could do four hours on your lightning round item. What is?

• 39:50Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent. So we talked about it briefly last week, but Vizio is definitely being acquired by Walmart for $2.3 billion and they were really, really, really explicit that it's for the ad tech.

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, speaking of ad tech.

• 40:05Alex Cranz?

  Like, it was not like, well, we love these TVs and just want to like improve our in-house brand and make everything better. It was this good ad tech, y'all. We're gonna, we're gonna make some money. And I believe even Vizio said Walmart's approach is aligned with Vizio's mission and vision. And our technology will help bring a scaled, connected TV advertising platform to Walmart Connect. So get excited. If you're a Walmart Connect fan.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  Can I try?

• 40:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  To put this in context.

• 40:39Alex Cranz?

  Attempt.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  That isn't bad.

• 40:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Nilay Patel?

  I can't, but let me try.

• 40:43Alex Cranz?

  I want to try. I want to hear it. I want to hear the attempt.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  So we think of the big advertising companies out there on the internet as being Google and Meta. I think largely Google and Meta are the big ad companies in the internet. Then there's a host of smaller ad tech vendors that don't have the technical ability to not play the same ad 500 times in a row.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Just putting that out there as a piece of information for you. The category of advertising provider that is most competing with Google and Meta right now is not the small ad tech companies. It's retail ad networks from Amazon and Walmart and Best Buy and others. So the retailers have started to form their own advertising situations. In particular, Amazon is one of the biggest competitors to Google and Meta out there right now in terms of that. They're growing real fast, but big companies like Best Buy and Walmart and what have you, Target are all building these systems as well. So you go to walmart.com, a lot of what you see is basically advertising. Yep.

• 41:43Nilay Patel?

  You don't perceive it that way, but I think if you go to Amazon, you definitely have started to perceive it that way. Amazon would also love to show you more and more ads everywhere you go and do tracking and conversion. So instead of buying ads from Meta to run on Instagram that convert you into a sale on a website or a sale on Amazon, Amazon is running the ads everywhere and converting you at higher rates on its own.

• 42:06David Pierce?

  And buying Whole Foods.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  And buying Whole Foods.

• 42:09David Pierce?

  It's all, it's literally, that is essentially the same thing.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. So you just see what's, what's happening, right? At the end of, at the end of this version of the internet is just someone's got to buy something. Like that is how the internet is organized. And the pressure to actually get you to buy things is going up and up and up. As this version of the internet comes to whatever conclusion it's going to come to. And you can see that all over the place, that you're being pushed towards actually spending money as opposed to taking VC subsidized free things everywhere. So if you're Walmart and you have a big retail ad network and you're looking at Amazon, which literally owns football and everything else and has home hubs in your house. You're like, how do we get more money into our advertising system?

• 42:56Nilay Patel?

  We need to get on TVs. Yep. We need a TV ad network. So we're going to buy Vizio, which is the TV we sell the most of. And we can say to our retail ad network customers, now you can place an ad for diapers, not only on walmart.com, but we can sell you inventory on TVs too, because we do all this tracking on the TV system. Is that good?

• 43:18Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if I was an advertiser, that's super compelling as just a regular person who wants less advertising.

• 43:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, turn off the wifi on your TV.

• 43:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  That's the answer.

• 43:26Alex Cranz?

  Less, less compelling.

• 43:28Nilay Patel?

  But that is 100% the pressure on all these companies. And if you're Walmart, you're like, oh, we can't just give the entire advertising ecosystem over to Amazon. And that is very much where Amazon is going.

• 43:40Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  And you, I talked to these CMOs, I talked to these folks out in the world, I have the Munch Decoder, and they're all just looking at it, and they're like, connected TV is the thing. It is the next piece of the advertising puzzle that is going to sort itself out.

• 43:55David Pierce?

  It's a billboard in your house.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 43:57David Pierce?

  Is increasingly the way it's being looked at.

• 43:59Nilay Patel?

  And there's, well, there's telly, right? Or that has literally a billboard in your house.

• 44:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. And all, the only thing they're doing differently is just saying the quiet part loud. They're, they're just like, look, you want to look at some ads, we'll give you the TV for free. And you can either make that deal, or you can pay for the TV and look at ads. Like, every day that goes by, I think telly is a better and better idea, because it's happening to you either way. And you might as well get the TV for free.

• 44:24Alex Cranz?

  I reject that. I, like, I mean, is my, my LG TV currently connected to the internet? Yes. Do I get a weird, like, little banner ad at the bottom every time I turn my TV on?

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 44:36Alex Cranz?

  It's usually like-

• 44:37Nilay Patel?

  Connected to the internet.

• 44:38Alex Cranz?

  That's the thing. I'm just gonna go, after this call, I'm gonna go, uh, disconnect it. Because I'm just like-

• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  You did a mime of an ethernet cable. Is your TV on ethernet?

• 44:46Alex Cranz?

  You know what? I need, like, good connections. I want, I want everything connected.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  My, I'm sorry, my TV's on ethernet. I don't know why. It shouldn't be on the internet, but it has to be if I want to watch Bravia Core, Sony's premium, 80 megabits per second internet.

• 44:59David Pierce?

  For streaming.

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  It has four movies on it. The other day, I, I was effectively forced to watch Zero Dark 30 on Bravia Core, because it's the only movie that's available. And then I'm pretty sure, when Max wasn't eating breakfast the next morning, I did some CIA shit to her. Like, straight up, I was like, your behavior will determine how you're treated. I'm like, she's eating apples. That's what happens when you watch Zero Dark 30 on Bravia Core in crystal clear quality.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  They didn't buy the lightning round. I just really, I just really like high bit rate streams.

• 45:29Alex Cranz?

  Do you get an advertiser on Sony?

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Alex Cranz?

  For the CIA?

• 45:33Nilay Patel?

  Watch a movie about torture.

• 45:35Alex Cranz?

  Is the CIA advertised?

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  I do turn it off.

• 45:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:40Nilay Patel?

  In my Eero profiles when I'm not using the built in apps.

• 45:43Alex Cranz?

  That's smart.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  Because I don't want the TV talking about me.

• 45:45Alex Cranz?

  I should, I should do that.

• 45:46David Pierce?

  Mine is the only thing blocked on my network is my, my Vizio TV, actually.

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  Do you still get packets? My LG TV just hammers that firewall with packets, even if it's not allowed to.

• 45:59Alex Cranz?

  They love to talk.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, come on.

• 46:01Alex Cranz?

  Who are you talking to? The advertisers?

• 46:04Alex Cranz?

  They want to know all about what you did last night. It was nothing. I watched K-dramas and smoked a lot of weed. That's, that's all I did. Enjoy that fact, LG.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  The local bodega owners are not like in the connected TV market.

• 46:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're, they're screwed, man. Like, just send me one and I'd be, I'd be on, on my way. Just some tacos.

• 46:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  I feel really, Vizio, we did a lot of coverage of Vizio.

• 46:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  I wrote a feature about Vizio. We had Matt McCray, who was the old CTO of Vizio on the show many, many, many times. They, they tried to get into every big market they could get into, whether it were phones, laptops. We talked about this last week. And to have them become just a commodity screen advertising vendor.

• 46:43Alex Cranz?

  I mean.

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  Is pretty sad.

• 46:44Alex Cranz?

  I don't know if it's that sad because to some extent, Vizio was pretty prescient on this stuff. Like, they were, they were one of the first into advertising. That's why Lay Echo, I love it. One of them was because of the advertising tech. Like, it was always, Vizio was really good at this. They figured it out before a lot of other people. And then took forever to get acquired by someone who could actually.

• 47:06David Pierce?

  Because they were being investigated for the shady stuff they were doing.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:10Alex Cranz?

  Like I said.

• 47:11David Pierce?

  They were so early in learning how to trick you into getting the weird data.

• 47:14Alex Cranz?

  They were like.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  But let me, let me give you the counter example to this.

• 47:17Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  This is the longest lightning round item in there. This is why we can't.

• 47:19Alex Cranz?

  Sorry. Yeah.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  But let me give you the counter example of this. You can feel a lot of ways about Meta. You can feel a lot of ways about Google. They took all of the excess profit of their actual functional advertising businesses and invented a lot of stuff.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  Like just straight up.

• 47:37Alex Cranz?

  That's fair.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, Google's like, I don't know, the cars should drive themselves.

• 47:41Alex Cranz?

  Pixel phones, that's a thing.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  And then Google's like, ah, that didn't work, and they kill it. Like, Google. Meta's like, we should do Reality Labs. Legs. We invented legs in the metaverse, everybody. We did it. It took $20 billion. Like, all of that excess cash that their advertising put out, it made them give services for free, or largely free. It, they invested in a bunch of core internet infrastructure technology.

• 48:03Alex Cranz?

  Let them buy into a monopoly on the iPhone.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Let them buy into monopoly. Like, you can, like I said, you can feel a lot of ways about those companies.

• 48:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  But all of the excess advertising profits they made built consumer products that people value.

• 48:15Alex Cranz?

  What did Vizio use it for?

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  Right, this is what I'm saying.

• 48:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  Right. The idea of Vizio is, we'll do all these excess profits from television advertising, and then we'll, like, make really good laptops, or we'll make really good, and they just didn't do the things.

• 48:27Alex Cranz?

  They didn't even start, they're like, even the TVs got worse.

• 48:30Nilay Patel?

  Even the TVs got worse.

• 48:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we had so many commenters last week reach out, be like, yeah, I had a Vizio TV, I loved it, but then it sucked. And I'm like, oh, that, that's a bummer.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  There, there's something there that is just, is just sad.

• 48:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, Eli, it's, it's super telling that the end of that idea was not, uh, Vizio said, we're gonna take your advertising dollars and use them to make the TVs better. Which is what it should have been. Like, that's actually a reasonable trade that reasonable people might make. Right? Like, I, I will, I will sign up for some version of this advertising network that is coming to me anyway, in exchange for a better and/or cheaper television. And that is like a flywheel that kind of works. And Vizio just went, never mind, we're just gonna keep all of that money, and we're gonna keep making the TVs worse. And this is what Roku is doing, this is what the Prime TV, TVs are starting to do. Like, cheap TVs that are supported by advertising are not getting better, they're getting worse. And that sucks.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  All right. This is my hard pivot to my lightning round item. Which is once again complaining about my Frame TV.

• 49:31David Pierce?

  Oh, God.

• 49:32Alex Cranz?

  Speaking of sucky TVs.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  I've just bought a lot of stuff for this house. I just have thoughts about all of it.

• 49:36David Pierce?

  The good news about this one is it was very expensive. So you really played this perfectly.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, so no, my lightning round item is actually Samsung is expanding OraCast support across most of its devices. We haven't talked a lot about OraCast on the show. At CES, I went and visited JBL, which has OraCast support across its line. OraCast is one of the coolest standards. Like, we make a lot of fun of Bluetooth on the show generally. OraCast is maybe the coolest upgrade to Bluetooth I've seen in a long time. So it is completely vendor agnostic. People, you have devices that support OraCast on Bluetooth. You just push the button, they all just start playing the same music. And I've seen this demoed now across brands. I've seen this demoed across speakers. JBL's demo was they just

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  had speakers in a living room, some travel Bluetooth speakers, their new speaker that can do both Google Assistant and Alexa on the same device, which is really cool. And they just put them all in the room and they pushed all the, they pushed buttons and the Bluetooth speakers, the little travel JBL Bluetooth speakers, became the rears in a home theater situation.

• 50:42Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that's cool.

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  It's cool.

• 50:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's just cool that they, like, they're, they're able to do this using a standard. It's not some proprietary stuff. And the idea is that you should be able to do it with all the speakers you have in your house. Very cool. So Samsung is bringing OraCast to tons of its products. And then, of course, the TVs are getting 360 Reality Audio in case you need.

• 51:02Alex Cranz?

  Is, is the Frame TV gonna get OraCast?

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  So the Frame TV is the weirdest kind of product. I could write 10,000 words about the Frame TV and I-

• 51:13Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna have to at some point.

• 51:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm obsessed with the, the existence of the Frame TV. The popular, the Frame TV is an old panel.

• 51:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's one of the reasons, like, they mark it up is they take an old cheap panel-

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're just, they're just-

• 51:24Alex Cranz?

  Put a cool bezel on it, bam.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  So they do some cool backlight stuff. So it goes to sleep mode, the display dims, it's matte. They've got the art store.

• 51:30Alex Cranz?

  You just said something nice about the Frame TV.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  There is a, there is a little bit of work in the Frame TV that makes people want it.

• 51:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  Because people watch TikTok, they don't watch their TV, so they just want the artwork. Here's the thing that is driving me bananas about the Frame TV right now. When you turn it off, it is not actually off. It goes into art mode, which is its special art mode. So then when you turn it off, it goes all the way off. And then when you turn it back on again, it comes all the way back on.

• 51:57Alex Cranz?

  No art mode.

• 51:58Nilay Patel?

  Very confusing.

• 51:59Alex Cranz?

  So you have to go, to get to art mode, you have to power on once and power on twice.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  None of this matters if you're a normal human being.

• 52:06David Pierce?

  Wait, it's like the thing where you pull the light switch once and it turns on. You pull it again and it dims and then again and it's off. But then if you pull it again, it goes all the way on. That's a perfectly normal setup. That's exactly how that should work.

• 52:17Alex Cranz?

  It's confusing.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  But none of this matters if you're a normal human being who buys a Frame TV and puts it on while using the Samsung Frame. If you buy any third-party Frame, it is more than likely that you will cover up the actual sensors that make the Frame TV work, which is of course what we did.

• 52:33Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  There is now a $99 dongle from DecoFrames.com. It is an external, it's called the SRS2. It's huge. It's just a sensor dongle for the Frame TV. No, people hate it. You have to run another wired TV and then put a dongle out in the room because you've covered up at the sensors. So then you might think, if you're like me, what you're gonna do is you are already, of course, running a Raspberry Pi with Homebridge. You'll just put ties in into Homebridge and control the Frame TV using the other sensors that you might have in your house. And then you'll realize that Samsung has taken the art mode API out of the 2022 and up Frame TVs. So you cannot just tell the thing to turn on in art mode.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  You have to tell it to turn on, running into the problem in which your wife keeps watching the horrible couples therapy show on Showtime, and she keeps turning the TV off at night. So that when it turns on at 8:30 in the morning, when your thermostat in your bedroom detects motion, it turns on and starts playing couples therapy at you. This is very bad. And the solution to this problem is, there's only two. One, you can take the Frame off your TV. But Samsung doesn't sell a Black Frame. Or you have to tell your wife, who is a divorce lawyer, that she's turning off the TV wrong.

• 53:46Alex Cranz?

  How you doing, buddy?

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. I just, the TV is just off all the time. Like, we don't know what to do.

• 53:53Alex Cranz?

  Just don't use it anymore.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  We've reached an end past. Like, I'm just turning the thing on manually in the morning and leaving the house.

• 53:59Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't like home assistant change the channel for you?

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  There's no channel, because art mode is not a channel or an input. It is off.

• 54:06Alex Cranz?

  Has somebody made like a third-party art mode?

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  It's just like a USB stick.

• 54:12Alex Cranz?

  It's like, I just wanted to get like as janky as possible for you.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. And I, no one knows why they took the API out of, if all they need to do is put the endpoint back on, so you can just say go into Artwork.

• 54:22Alex Cranz?

  Maybe it was a bug. Maybe somebody just didn't realize.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  You can sort of fake it.

• 54:25Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 54:26Nilay Patel?

  Because you can tell Homebridge, this is very dumb.

• 54:31Alex Cranz?

  I love this.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  You can create a virtual power button.

• 54:34Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  And have HomeKit push it.

• 54:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  But then you have to guess how the TV was turned off at night.

• 54:40Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 54:41Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. All this is bad. Oracast is good. Frame TV. Nightmare situation.

• 54:47David Pierce?

  Neelai, I just, I just, before we move on, I just want to congratulate you. In, in the long history of the Vergecast, you have made what I would call many of Neelai's niche complaints. That was the most niche complaint I have ever, the total addressable market of that complaint is just Neelai.

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  Frame TV owner. Every Frame TV owner has this problem.

• 55:08Alex Cranz?

  They all use Homebridge.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Go on to the Frame TV sub corpus of Reddit, and you will see an infinite number of people. There are people in this world who have bought bulk fiber optic cable to read, to trick, and mirrors to trick the sensors of the Frame TV into seeing light.

• 55:28Alex Cranz?

  That has to be more expensive than the $90 dongle.

• 55:30David Pierce?

  Also defeats the purpose of the beautiful television that doesn't look like a television.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  No, no, because they're drilling holes into the frame, poking the little fiber optic cable out of the frame, then running the fiber optic cable to the sensor where it shines, and this is a quote from the sub corpus post, "into a disco ball of little mirrors that they've made, so that the, the, you can, the sensor can detect the change in light." Because otherwise you have to have the dumb sensor dongle out in the world.

• 55:56David Pierce?

  Okay, that solution kicks ass. That's awesome.

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  It rules. It rules. I've posted this onto the, onto the website.

• 56:02Alex Cranz?

  Are you gonna build a disco ball?

• 56:04Nilay Patel?

  I've thought, our frame is metal, so it's like drill, it's not great. I don't know what to do. But I will tell you, one option is not, you're turning off the TV wrong.

• 56:14Alex Cranz?

  No, you, you, nope, can't do that.

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  It's not, not appropriate.

• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  The TV turning on, playing couples therapy is also not acceptable.

• 56:27Alex Cranz?

  There's just no winning.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, Pierce wants your light.

• 56:31David Pierce?

  Mine is a better screen you can hang on your wall that instead of causing you infinite grief will solve quite a bit of your grief. It's the Amazon Echo Hub, which was announced a while ago and the reviews of it are starting to come out and it's starting to ship. I love this thing and it is also like deeply funny that the Echo Hub needs to exist. It's just a screen that you put on your wall to use to control your smart home. It is, it is the simplest thing you could imagine. Amazon basically took like a Fire tablet or an Echo Show and just took all the features out of it, except the buttons for controlling your lights. And then it was like, do you want this to hang on your wall? And everybody said,

• 57:11David Pierce?

  yes, I do. And Jen Tooe reviewed it, really liked it, said it has like totally fit into her life and her family's. And to me, this is just like, we, we need to finally get past the idea that, oh, an app for your smartphone is the solution to this problem. Like, no, it's not. Buttons on my wall are the solution to this problem. Those buttons can be on the screen, that's fine. But like, voice assistants, ain't it? Apps on my phone, ain't it? Like, we need new systems for this stuff. And kudos to Amazon for having actually pushed at that.

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  Which do you think is gonna like, affect more marriages? The frame TV situation? Or the existence of the hub?

• 57:55David Pierce?

  Oh, it's the existence of the Echo Hub. The number of, of beleaguered partners of smart home nerds who now don't have to like, okay, so my sister lives in a home with someone who is big into the smart home and she had to memorize the names of her lamps so that she could tell Alexa which ones to turn on. And it's like, there's the living room lamp, but then there's the big living room lamp. And if you just ask for one and not the other, you're good. And this is terrible. But you know what's great is when you can walk up to the wall and flip a switch. And I will happily exchange that switch for a button. But a person can figure out how to use it. And that is terrific.

• 58:35Alex Cranz?

  I had to get one of those like hue light buttons back in the day for when I had a roommate. Because after multiple times of me accidentally turning off all the lights in the bathroom while she was in the shower.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  It's not good.

• 58:47Alex Cranz?

  Not good.

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  We should actually just have Jen on the show so she can describe how her family deals with her job.

• 58:52Alex Cranz?

  Carefully.

• 58:53Nilay Patel?

  Because literally her teenage children are like, we are just gonna live in the dark. We're not gonna try to figure out how to turn the lights in the house.

• 58:59David Pierce?

  There's a whole lot of Jen on the show the next two weeks, by the way, so get excited.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, here's the thing about this hub that I am thinking about.

• 59:08Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't sit flush? It sticks out a little?

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  It sticks out a little. You gotta power all the, all the normal stuff up on the screen wall. It's a product made for the Matter smart home standard, but Matter isn't good enough to support this product. Cause what you want is a bunch of smart home stuff in your house and you're like, okay, I control most of it with my Android phone, with Google Home, or I control it with HomeKit on my phone, on my iOS phone. And then I bought this awesome screen from Amazon and it's also a great smart home controller. And the reality of this product is like, it's great if all of your shit's in Alexa.

• 59:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  It does have a Zigbee radio, right? It's a Matter control. It is.

• 59:43Alex Cranz?

  It's got like a ton of stuff. Yeah.

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  The way you want it to work, like the way I'd want it to work, I do everything at HomeKit. Because the idea of getting anyone else in my family to do any, to open another app besides Control Center is not happening.

• 59:59Alex Cranz?

  I feel like, I feel like you'll probably, like, somebody will have a solution pretty quickly for HomeKit users and other folks to use this thing through Matter. Cause Matter kinda sucks, but like Homebridge.

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  But Matter should be the thing.

• 1:00:13Alex Cranz?

  It should be, but it's.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, like you should, you should be setting everything up in any one of these ecosystems. And then you're like, I've added a Matter device that can see all those rooms and see all those devices. And it, it, we're so close. I feel like Jen writes the we're so close with Matter story, like it's the heart of every story about these devices.

• 1:00:32Alex Cranz?

  She like sighs as she writes it. She's like, oh, we're so.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  She actually has an automation setup where she just sighs loudly into a microphone and ChatGPT writes the Matter isn't quite there yet story. It's very good. All right, we should take another break and we're back with a non gadget lightning round. This one will have fewer frame TVs in it, I promise you. We'll be right back.

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• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Let me tell you about Tyson, the software that powers the frame.

• 1:02:28David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  We were so close.

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, I could write 10,000 words about what the frame TV represents in our culture.

• 1:02:35Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna happen at some point.

• 1:02:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna be like, Neela, you can't work at all for the next week. Just write 10,000 words on Vizio.

• 1:02:42David Pierce?

  I'm just, I like the one for me, one for them thing. You're like, okay, I wrote, welcome to hell Elon. A lot of people read that. That was great. Now I'm gonna write a feature of Tyson. This one's for me. I've heard this.

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  I write to David, David at theverge.com. If you'd like me to write 10,000 words about the frame TV.

• 1:02:59David Pierce?

  Please do.

• 1:03:01David Pierce?

  Yes, please.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna say this. I think the Frame TV is Samsung's most important product.

• 1:03:07Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think you're right.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  It is. It is by far. It is the one that they invented. They invent, like, they didn't. It's not a copy of anything. You, I know some Samsung people, they invented a lot of stuff. For example, Samsung invented the concept of taking fake photos of the moon. Very important concept. But the Frame TV they just invented. There wasn't a thing, and then they made a thing, and then the thing is very successful. Other companies are copying the thing, but it is, as a cultural object that people desire, the Frame TV is top of the list for Samsung.

• 1:03:36Alex Cranz?

  Remember when it was in the MoMA?

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  That and the weird bespoke appliances they make.

• 1:03:41David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  People like those, but whatever. All right. Non-gadget lightning round. David, I think yours, we've got an hour to do on this one. Go ahead.

• 1:03:51David Pierce?

  Yes, easily an hour to do on this one. So.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  We're bad at lightning.

• 1:03:55David Pierce?

  I know. This one, actually, I don't think will be that long, and I am desperate to hear people's feedback, because I have been hearing people's feedback nonstop for two days, and I'm just a glutton for punishment. Apple launched an app called Apple Sports, which is a very simple app for seeing sports scores. It's not a very good app. It's missing a lot of sports. It shows lineups in a sort of deranged, nonsensical way. But it does, in fact, for some sports, sometimes, show scores. And there is either less to this app than I think, and it's just kind of a weird side project that, like, Eddie Q found on somebody's computer and shipped,

• 1:04:37David Pierce?

  or this is a harbinger of huge things to come. And I posited that there are two things that are possible for Apple Sports. One is that Apple is about to make even more big moves into sports streaming, which I think there are lots of reasons for, and we can talk about. The other one is that this is the app you would launch if you wanted to get into betting in interesting ways. One of the controversial things that has been in this app so far is you can see betting odds for all the games that you're looking at, which is powered by DraftKings, I would point out. You can turn it off in Settings, but it's on by default. And I posited that this is what it would look like if Apple were to very slowly start getting into sports gambling.

• 1:05:18David Pierce?

  And many hundreds of people have told me how dumb I am for that take, and I continue to believe that I'm correct.

• 1:05:24Alex Cranz?

  I feel like you're probably correct, but also, like, that's the worst. Thing? I don't want you to be correct.

• 1:05:30David Pierce?

  So, but this is what I want to talk about because I think that the the Overton window on sports gambling has moved so far that the idea that this is somehow against Apple's brand to do is just no longer the truth. And I like sports gambling is just life. It's just mainstream life now.

• 1:05:51Alex Cranz?

  I saw the 60 Minutes episode about this a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:05:54David Pierce?

  Oh, really?

• 1:05:55Alex Cranz?

  It's true. Nilay had to listen to me talk about it at the office.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  One of the things about working with Alex that I think the listener should know is every now and again, she comes up all revved up on 60 Minutes.

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, it's just very confusing. It is. It is very much like working with a like a hot-headed retiree.

• 1:06:13Alex Cranz?

  Then I take my Metamucil and have a nap. It's great.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  Dedicated viewer of 60 Minutes, which does make some very good journalism.

• 1:06:21Alex Cranz?

  Sometimes.

• 1:06:21Nilay Patel?

  For some people.

• 1:06:24Nilay Patel?

  But it's it's true that 60 Minutes did do gambling is bad. It's a very addictive. I agree. If you are Tim Cook and you're looking at declining sales, you're looking at burgeoning services revenue, dude, what is the ultimate services business? Just taking money from people.

• 1:06:40David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:06:41Nilay Patel?

  Just just directly extracting money from people. Give us some money and maybe this machine will give you some money back, but not all the time. In fact, not most of the time. And if you're in Las Vegas, you're standing in a monument to how little money the machine will give back to you. And people still give money to the machine. And you have to imagine Tim Cook's stance. He sat in the sphere, looking at Bono going, I gotta get in on this. And then we have the sports app.

• 1:07:07Alex Cranz?

  Isn't gambling not allowed in the App Store?

• 1:07:12Alex Cranz?

  Like, is there weirdness about this?

• 1:07:14Nilay Patel?

  It depends.

• 1:07:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's like, there's a line.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  So FanDuel and DraftKings are in the App Store, right? You just get those apps. So it depends. Like, so FanDuel and DraftKings are just in the App Store. You can just do it. It's legal in some states. I think Apple doesn't. Apple has some weird lines about what it allows when it's legal and not legal.

• 1:07:33Alex Cranz?

  But if I just wanted to play the digital slots.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Nope. Games of chance are not allowed in the app.

• 1:07:40Alex Cranz?

  And that feels weird to me. Like, it feels disingenuous. If you're gonna, if you're gonna let gambling happen.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, so here's, I think we should make this distinction right now.

• 1:07:50Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:07:51Nilay Patel?

  And David, I think this is my pushback on your, this is Apple getting into gambling. Even when gambling is morally frowned upon, right? When it was not legal in most places and whatever, the newspapers would print the lines.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  Left and right. Old school football announcers at the end of blowouts would be like, only a handful of people are interested in this field goal. And they were making very direct references to like whether your bookie is gonna show up and break your arm.

• 1:08:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  That's basically what they were doing. So it was always part of, it's always been part of sports culture. So to have a scores app where you can see odds is not at all a departure from what the local newspaper in Racine, Wisconsin did when I was growing up.

• 1:08:35Nilay Patel?

  But powered by DraftKings in an app store where it is part of the mainstream culture, where if you're trying to grow your services revenue, boy, that seems like a big, big pot of money.

• 1:08:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44David Pierce?

  And also, if you, if you launched a newspaper in which one of the only two things you could do was look at the betting odds, don't you think you'd maybe think of that slightly differently?

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, like the, the New York Times owns The Athletic. The Athletic will straight up be like run articles that are like, here's how to bet today.

• 1:09:01David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:09:02Alex Cranz?

  Were the, I know some of the, the scores and stuff weren't accurate. Were the sports odds, were the odds accurate in the Apple app?

• 1:09:10David Pierce?

  I haven't checked, to be honest. I, I have not heard complaints that they're not, but I, I couldn't tell you.

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  John Gruber had a piece where he pointed out that DraftKings has weird odds. Cause they're all, because it's, it's gambling.

• 1:09:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Nilay Patel?

  Like they, they, odds are set by oddsmakers. People have different ideas. I think it is fascinating that they made this app. I think it's rushed because they needed to get out before the MLS season kicked off, which they own.

• 1:09:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  So they have a huge opportunity to promote their own sports app ahead of it. Is this anything other than a toy for? Eddie Q remains unclear.

• 1:09:42Alex Cranz?

  Or is Tim Cook your new bookie?

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  I love the idea of Tim.

• 1:09:46Alex Cranz?

  In my head, in my head, he's wearing like a little hat. Do bookies still wear little hats?

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  No, Tim Cook as a bookie would be an absolutely terrifying character.

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  Like, oh, yeah.

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  No hat, no costume, just actually Tim Cook in his sweater being like, go get the money.

• 1:10:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, he's the guy you like are in your house and you turn around and he's just been standing there for who knows how long. Like, that's Tim Cook.

• 1:10:09Alex Cranz?

  The person who plays him in the film adaptation would win an Oscar immediately for their portrayal.

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  No, he's not in your house. The heavies are in the house. Tim Cook is the guy where he's like.

• 1:10:18Alex Cranz?

  He's on the phone with you.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  The heavies grab you, they throw you into the back of the van. You get thrown out of the van and you're in a very nice restaurant where he's quietly eating melon. And he's like, sit down and have some melon. And then like in that moment, it becomes very clear to you that you're going to die.

• 1:10:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:10:33Nilay Patel?

  And you better, you can either enjoy the melon and die, or you can not enjoy the melon or die. But the, whether or not you're dying has been long since determined.

• 1:10:41Alex Cranz?

  All because you use the sports app.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  And that's how Tim Cook gets, extracts excellent pricing on OLED screens.

• 1:10:46David Pierce?

  Enjoy the melon and die is a show that Apple TV plus would run for sure. No, but we should move on. But my, my only point is that I think people are overestimating the gap between where Apple is now and the Apple that just more or less runs a betting service. Like the stuff you're describing, the only difference between the digital slots that Apple won't let you do and the ones that it will let you do is that you can pay money to win virtual stuff, but you can't pay money to make actual money. And I don't think that's that big a gap. Like, do you want to play Monopoly Go and pour all of your money into getting more turns in Monopoly Go? Do you know what that is? That's gambling. You just can't win anything.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's loot boxes.

• 1:11:27David Pierce?

  That's loot boxes. That is the same thing, except there's no actual real world monetary upside for you. And I think the, the gap between that and them saying, oh, just place your bet with Apple Pay is like this small. It's this small.

• 1:11:42Alex Cranz?

  DraftKings out there negotiating less than a 30% cut.

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  Are you kidding? DraftKings is a 50% cut. That's what they call the melon cut.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  There's no way. All right. What's your, what's your non gadget lightning round?

• 1:11:58Alex Cranz?

  It's still on the Apple front and that's because Apple has just announced that they're doing post quantum cryptography for iMessage. So all of our international listeners, I'm sorry, this doesn't apply to you. Enjoy your WhatsApp and other, other services and continue to wonder why we all care about iMessage here in the US. But for, for, for US users, this is kind of exciting. They're claiming it is more secure than Signals post quantum cryptography that it rolled out a couple of months ago. Unclear. They, you'll, you'll enjoy this. They, they also created their own like metrics for security. And they said, well, Signals a level two, but we're a level three.

• 1:12:41Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, love to put yourself on the good metric that you've made up.

• 1:12:45David Pierce?

  Classic unmarked graph.

• 1:12:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I was just like, I was like, beautiful.

• 1:12:49David Pierce?

  Just imagine a line that just says, security. And Apple is up high and the other ones are lower, but there's no labels on any of the graphs.

• 1:12:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's, that's it. Yeah, that, that's it. It's, it is exciting because as we get closer to quantum computers actually doing something, which will one day happen, like it's going to happen. All the cryptography we have now will not hold up. You'll be able to just like brute force a lot of things one, one day. And so introducing post quantum cryptography is kind of necessary for a lot of people. So it's exciting to see Apple doing that. But also we need to talk to like some security researchers. There's a lot more to be done here because Apple was just like, we did it. Everybody's like.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  This is two announcements from Apple this week on the same, with the same sort of valence. One is we've defeated quantum computers, which well done. We, I'm, I've come in first in a race that I've made up.

• 1:13:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  And then two, they announced that the iPhone 15 battery performs better than expected, but they didn't say how well they expected it or how much better than it's expected.

• 1:13:50Alex Cranz?

  You know, they're going to drop a chart. You can just determine your own accesses for it.

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's going to be great. But this, this was just like kind of a cool thing. I think quantum cryptography is going to become more important.

• 1:14:02Alex Cranz?

  In the next 10 years, 20 years, whenever quantum computing actually becomes useful. But for now, it's just like, okay, that's nice.

• 1:14:08Nilay Patel?

  You should, by the way, if you're really interested in this, we'll link to this. We just had the head of IBM Quantum Research on Decoder. We actually talked about whether or not you need a post-quantum cryptography. And his answer was like, I wouldn't worry about it.

• 1:14:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like, it's not a big deal right now, but it's still like, that's cool.

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24David Pierce?

  Did you ask Neelai on Decoder when I need to start actually learning what a quantum computer is?

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  I did. I also asked him how he feels about the movie Amman and the Lost Quantum Mania. And he wasn't positive.

• 1:14:39David Pierce?

  Seems right.

• 1:14:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  He was like, I'm happy people are thinking about quantum. It's like, but I don't think there are entire civilizations. It's a very good answer. It was very politic.

• 1:14:50David Pierce?

  I got as far with quantum computing as like, it can be both positive and negative at the same time. And somehow that lets it store a lot of data. And I just went, well, I don't get that. And that's the last thing I learned about quantum.

• 1:15:01Alex Cranz?

  Somebody said.

• 1:15:02Nilay Patel?

  Go, we'll link to it. It's a good app. He's very charming.

• 1:15:04David Pierce?

  Okay, cool. I'll listen.

• 1:15:05Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. All right, my lightning rounds. Kind of some weird EV news. So Rivian is laying off 10% of its workforce. Ford is cutting Mach E prices. We're kind of in the second round of like the EV price wars. At any moment, Tesla is going to start giving away Model 3s like they're Echo Dots.

• 1:15:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27David Pierce?

  They're gonna show you Walmart ads and they'll give you a free car for it.

• 1:15:31Nilay Patel?

  It feels like it's not so far off. Especially if Tesla gets it self-driving first, advertising the car is coming. Twitter's got a sell head somehow.

• 1:15:42Nilay Patel?

  It does, it does feel like the overwhelming demand for Tesla Model Ys and 3s in the middle of the pandemic confused everyone into thinking that all anyone wanted was electric cars. And it was like over. And so they all overproduced. And then in particular for Rivian, I think this is really interesting. You know, the R1T is a great truck. It's like a fun truck to drive and the R1S is a nice SUV. They're they're so similar, it's hard to actually talk about them as they're different cars. Like one's an SUV and one's a truck, but they're

• 1:16:14Alex Cranz?

  It's basically just like a camper shell was put on really, really nicely.

• 1:16:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Nilay Patel?

  But like, well, in an extremely well done way. The people who have R1Ss love R1Ss.

• 1:16:22Alex Cranz?

  Pristine camper shell.

• 1:16:24Nilay Patel?

  But there's a reason there are ones like they're the same platform, very, very similar vehicles. They're also hella expensive, right? They're like $100,000 at the top end trims. So Rivian just has this problem where they thought they had infinite demand for these for EVs. And then pickup trucks, really expensive pickup trucks, were selling like hotcakes in the pandemic. So they were just like, oh, this is great. This is working. We'll over invest in this. And then all of that cooled off. Even the pickup truck market is like way down right now. Like if you are the sort of person who thinks about buying a Ram truck, you can just you just get one in a way that you could not even a few years ago. And so I think Rivian is just stuck because they don't have a cheaper car,

• 1:17:07Nilay Patel?

  which they're about to introduce the R2, which I think will be really interesting and exciting. And hopefully is cheaper. And then Ford has the Lightning and the Mach-E. And I think every person who wanted to buy a Lightning or a Mach-E has purchased those cars and they got nothing else. And I think we're just at a moment where there were there are so many vaporware cars for a minute. And now there's like not enough kinds of cars. And like, we're still in this, we're still in the middle of what you would call the vaporware cycle. Because all the other cars we're supposed to fill out the market aren't there. So people aren't even cross shopping EVs or cross shopping like too expensive platinum lightnings against other trucks that are on deep discount because they've been sitting in lots for forever.

• 1:17:50Alex Cranz?

  And the and the companies are all like heavily lobbying the EPA right now, right?

• 1:17:55Nilay Patel?

  To reduce the the restrictions that force them to basically selling.

• 1:17:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're like, we, nobody's buying them. We don't actually want to make as many as we said we wanted to.

• 1:18:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and also interest rates are high and all this stuff. But I think in particular for Rivian, they just ran out of potential buyers for $100,000 pickup trucks.

• 1:18:11Alex Cranz?

  There does seem like there's like a cap on the number of people who do that.

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Alex Cranz?

  Seems like a, there's a really obvious cap for that.

• 1:18:20David Pierce?

  Is there a bigger thing going on with just general EV interest not rising as fast as people thought? Like, there was that interesting line from RJ Scrange, the CEO, said during the earnings report, he said, his quote was, "How do we get the 93% of the market that's not buying an EV to get excited about the product?" Which is not a problem, I think, anyone in 2020 would have thought we would have in 2024.

• 1:18:46Nilay Patel?

  Because the only car on the market in 2020 was Tesla, and there was apparently infinite demand for the Tesla Model 3.

• 1:18:54David Pierce?

  That's what I mean. But so are we, are we at a point where they've run out of people to buy $100,000 cars? Or are we at a point where they've run out of people who want to buy EVs?

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  So there, there are basically no head-up competitors to the Model 3 in the Y. There's the Mustang Mach-E.

• 1:19:08David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  Which is in a price war with Tesla, because Tesla keeps lowering its prices. And, you know, you can feel about the Mach-E however you want, but that's a weird place to be, right? Where you're driving towards the bottom. And if, I think people who are interested in Teslas are not actually cross-shopping with Ford. Like, Tesla's still a very unique kind of buyer. And you, I know people are gonna say it's morally irresponsible to give you all, but people who buy Teslas buy Teslas and they like them. That is just a fact.

• 1:19:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Nilay Patel?

  Then, everything else is like crazy expensive. The Honda Prologue is out. We have a review of the Honda Prologue on the site this week. It seems like a great car. It's based on the Chevy Blazer, which had a stop sale on it, but Honda insists they've done their own software, so the Prologue will not have these problems. But you're really looking at like a pretty small number of head-up competitors to the 3 in the Y. And there are some, right? Polestar exists, like, you can go down the line, but they're all pretty small-scale competitors. They're not like...

• 1:20:05Alex Cranz?

  When do we get like a Dodge Neon dash E?

• 1:20:09Nilay Patel?

  So I think the Volvo EX30 will be. It won't be that cheap.

• 1:20:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Nilay Patel?

  But it's a small EV that people seem really hyped about.

• 1:20:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  So I just think like we're in a weird part of the market where the upstart car companies are all too expensive. And then there aren't any, there aren't, down here, there are just like not a lot.

• 1:20:23Alex Cranz?

  It's like the traditional car companies took all the wrong lessons from the success of Tesla.

• 1:20:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Alex Cranz?

  Just like every single lesson, they're like, no.

• 1:20:32Nilay Patel?

  Except make the software good.

• 1:20:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Nilay Patel?

  They forgot that one.

• 1:20:35David Pierce?

  I will say that down the street from me, there's a Hyundai dealership and over the last six months. So the dealership is in the middle and then they have a big parking lot on one side and a big parking lot on the other side. They ripped up one whole parking lot to put in a bunch of EV chargers. And now basically the only thing on the lot is IONIQ stuff.

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, actually this you, the IONIQ five and the rest of them. They're the, obviously the exception.

• 1:20:59David Pierce?

  Yeah. And well, and now they're doing the same thing to the other side. It's like, it's Hyundai Kia is like, they are convinced they are going to solve this problem.

• 1:21:07Nilay Patel?

  But you look at where they're playing, they're playing in mainstream segments at mainstream prices. Right? They're, they are not $100,000 super trucks.

• 1:21:15David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:21:15Nilay Patel?

  Even the EV nine, which is the big three row SUV. Not, it's not $100,000. Like it is, it's expensive, but it's not out of the reach of most SUV buyers. Like it's just priced competitively.

• 1:21:26David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  And that, that feels like the, I feel like I'm saying something very obvious, like make the most popular kinds of products and price them competitively.

• 1:21:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. No, that's not the lesson.

• 1:21:37Nilay Patel?

  $100,000 super truck. Got it.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. I just think, I think we're in a really weird moment in the EV transition. But also if you're in the market for an EV, like not a horrible time to buy one.

• 1:21:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. Terrible time to buy a hybrid though. All of a sudden it's impossible to find a hybrid. My dad has been shopping for a hybrid for a while and everybody wants the new Prius Prime because it's like finally nice looking. And it turns out they're essentially impossible to get your hands on. It's crazy.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. As somebody who owns a plug-in hybrid that only gets 25 miles of range, I will say that is not enough. You want 50.

• 1:22:10Alex Cranz?

  That's not enough.

• 1:22:11Nilay Patel?

  If our car had 50, we would just keep it forever.

• 1:22:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14Nilay Patel?

  But it doesn't. So the second there is one that gets.

• 1:22:17Alex Cranz?

  I'm all gas, man. I'm all in on gas.

• 1:22:21Nilay Patel?

  I'm pouring oil on my salt every day. I'm from Texas.

• 1:22:25Alex Cranz?

  I love Texas. Frackin's awesome.

• 1:22:28David Pierce?

  It's okay. I just ride Lime scooters. So between Alex and me, we're good to go.

• 1:22:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we balance out.

• 1:22:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, there's a bunch of other news here. Fubo was suing Fox and Disney. I mean, that's just a sentence I said.

• 1:22:38Alex Cranz?

  But also it was like, it was gonna happen.

• 1:22:40David Pierce?

  Can I just say, by the way, that the fact that Spulu has just become the agreed upon name for this service?

• 1:22:46Alex Cranz?

  We have to stop that.

• 1:22:47Nilay Patel?

  It's Sports Hulu. I want to be clear about what people are saying.

• 1:22:50David Pierce?

  Sports Hulu. And A, Alex Krantz called this first, so Alex wins.

• 1:22:55Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 1:22:55David Pierce?

  But B, it's just, everybody just calls it Spulu now, which makes me think it might be called Spulu for real. And we cannot allow that to happen.

• 1:23:02Alex Cranz?

  I know. It's gonna be called Sports Max.

• 1:23:05Nilay Patel?

  It should just be called ESPN.

• 1:23:08David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:23:08Nilay Patel?

  It will be ridiculous if they don't call it ESPN.

• 1:23:11Alex Cranz?

  ESPN Max, sponsored by Hulu.

• 1:23:16Nilay Patel?

  If they start a giant sports streaming service and they don't just call it ESPN, they will have made such a gigantic error. Like, you're looking at one of the most legendary brands in watching sports that has ever existed. And it's like, the people at Fox Sports are like, well, you can't, it's gotta, it's gotta indicate that it's Fox Sports as well. And it's like, no, it doesn't. You can just have a tile.

• 1:23:41David Pierce?

  Somebody posted the other day a screenshot of like a promotional thing for them to sign up for a streaming service. And it was Hulu with live TV with Paramount Plus with Showtime. That was the official name.

• 1:23:52Alex Cranz?

  It's so good.

• 1:23:53David Pierce?

  What have we done here?

• 1:23:55Nilay Patel?

  It's all very bad. All right, we gotta wrap this up. We've gone way over. Uh, I want to call it two stories. One, we have a look back at Spike Jonze, her, the movie her, which is all about falling in love with AI. It's very good. You should go read the look back. You should watch the movie. It still holds up. Uh, and then we sent a reporter to King of the Hammers, which is a big silly off-road race. Burning Man for off-road vehicles. Uh, she got to ride in the Ford Switchgear, the EV F1, the EV F150 off-roady thing. This is what I want to trade my Raptor for. And so I'm very excited about the story. Uh, and also there's pictures of a Cybertruck trying off-road, one of which broke itself. So. That piece will link to the thing. And then some big news.

• 1:24:38Nilay Patel?

  We'll be at South by Southwest doing the show live on the Vox Media Podcast Network stage. That will happen March 8. Well, more detail soon. There's other stuff coming. There's gonna be Decoder, which will be very good. There's some other people. It's gonna be good. So if you're going to South by Southwest, come see us on March 8. David, what's happening next week on the Tuesday show?

• 1:24:57David Pierce?

  We are gonna talk about Flip, this weird new shopping app. Mia Sato and our team basically like ruined her life to become an influencer on Flip. And she told us her story. It's really good. And then Becca and Viren from our video team came on to talk about the Fuji X106, which is the internet's favorite camera in a way I still don't totally understand. So we got into the weeds of all of that.

• 1:25:20Alex Cranz?

  It's so cool.

• 1:25:20David Pierce?

  It's good stuff.

• 1:25:21Alex Cranz?

  I want it.

• 1:25:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If I could buy every camera, I'd buy every camera.

• 1:25:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, same.

• 1:25:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. We've gone just way over. If anyone knows the people at Samsung who control the art mode endpoint in Tizen, talk to this guy. All right, that's it. That's for chest. Rock and roll.

• 1:25:42David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:26:03Speaker 08

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.

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