Pod Insights The Vergecast Dish says their 5G network is available , Apple will stream every MLS match, and Google suspends engineer who claims its AI is sentient About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Dish Network's 5G network (@11:07), Google's LaMDA AI (@ 32:32), Apple streaming Major League Soccer (@47:38), and more.
Stories mentioned on this show:
Watch the trailer for The Verge’s first Netflix show, The Future Of
Dish Network’s Project Genesis 5G service is live in more cities
Dish says Project Genesis 5G is available in 100 cities, so we tried to sign up
T-Mobile can now use three-channel aggregation for even faster 5G
The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life - Washington Post
Google suspends engineer who claims its AI is sentient
Apple will stream every Major League Soccer match for 10 years starting in 2023
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Transcript 14,096 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Today on The Vergecast, some big news from theverge.com. We'll also get into a possible fourth US cellphone carrier, an update on sports streaming, and some sad news on Eli's beloved Mustang Mach-E. That's all coming up right after this.
0:16 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:01 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:49 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of cloud-native 5G.
1:54 David Pierce? I don't want to. No.
1:56 Nilay Patel? Of enterprise software buzzwords. I feel like if you're new to the show and you hear me do that every week, you're like, who are these people? Why do they make the flagship podcast in the most boring words possible? Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. I'm here. David Pierce is here.
2:09 David Pierce? Hi, I'm David Pierce. I am your friend who will always tell you which streaming service to find sports on, even though I usually don't know either.
2:16 Nilay Patel? Is it the Pirate Bay?
2:18 David Pierce? Listen, is there a sketchy Russian website that's in my bookmarks? Yes, there is, but we don't have to talk about that.
2:23 Nilay Patel? Alex Cranz is here.
2:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I'm your friend who will tell you to just get Plex and BitTorrent. Just do it, just pirate, fully pirate. I can't be held legally responsible for that, right?
2:32 Nilay Patel? One of my favorite moments from like the Starlink review cycle was we do agree to continue in all of our reviews. Sort of like, here's all the agreements and like, here's what they say, like, here are the important terms. And so, you know, Elon is obviously Mr. Free Speech.
2:46 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
2:46 Nilay Patel? So he pointed out the Starlink agreements have exactly the same restrictions as like Verizon or Comcast or whatever. Like, they can inspect your packets, they can block you for copyright infringement, they can throttle you if you use too much. And like, the Starlink community had not like grappled with this fact. And so there was just an entire like, oh my God, he lied to us. And then like, a lot of people are like, it's the same as Verizon and Verizon doesn't care. So he obviously won't care. And then it was just like, it was just like sign wave of like, well, they have to put it in for the lawyers. And it's like, no, they're just ISP, they're all the same. At some point, if you do enough copyright infringement, your ISP is going to get a letter and you're going to get.
3:22 Alex Cranz? Like, what did they think would happen with like Elon would protect them?
3:25 Nilay Patel? It's deeply unclear. This is the fastest we've ever got from Elon isn't on our list to inevitably Elon, maybe in the history of the podcast. Like, we have no Elon topics today.
3:36 Alex Cranz? No.
3:36 Nilay Patel? But here we are. I will say that Mr. Free Speech himself endorsed DeSantis for president.
3:42 Alex Cranz? I saw that.
3:43 Nilay Patel? DeSantis is like Mr. Government Speech Regulation, so I hope they have a conversation. Like, how do you feel about this governor who writes state level speech regulations that courts of appeals are like? Yeah, First Amendment, bro.
3:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
3:54 Nilay Patel? We'll see, maybe they're going to have coffee.
3:55 David Pierce? The cognitive dissonance of those people of the, we have to preserve free speech with many, many, many, many laws about preserving free speech is just really, it's spectacular.
4:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we'll leave this for another time, but I will tell you that we are working on a big feature about like, everything on the internet is speech. So the appetite for speech regulations has dramatically increased. I grew up as like a, you know, teenage free speech maximalist. And now everyone's like, but what if we did, what if we did speech regulations? It's like, I don't, what are you talking about? I thought, I thought that was against the rules.
4:25 Alex Cranz? When you're in like high school and you're like, yeah, anything's free speech. I will protect all free speech. Like, I don't want to go back to that place, but I feel like I'm going to be forced there. And there's a lot of cartoons I don't want to protect.
4:36 Nilay Patel? Welcome. Come, come with me to First Amendment maximalism. I'm there for it. Anyhow, that's all, that's all for later. We got stuff to talk about this week. There's a bunch of exciting stuff. Project Gen 5 Sis is quote unquote live. We got to talk about that. There's a researcher at Google who thinks that the machines are alive and need lawyers. He, the fact that he went right away to the AI needs a lawyer is very good. David wants to talk about sports streaming, got a lightning round. But we got to start with some very exciting Verge news. Two pieces of exciting Verge news. As you have heard in many disclosures for the past three years, we made a, we made a Netflix show. And the trailer is out. You can go watch it right now on our YouTube channel. It's wild to see our stuff get promoted by Netflix itself. There's a disclosure, by the way, we made a Netflix show.
5:20 Nilay Patel? In case you're wondering, it's on Netflix's channels. You can actually go like bookmark it in Netflix itself right now. It's called The Future Of. And the first six episodes are coming out in June 21st. That's next Tuesday. And then we got a second match the next week, June 28th.
5:34 David Pierce? I have two questions about this that I've been meaning to ask you like since I started working at The Verge again, that now you get to answer on a microphone. One of which is why did this take three years? I remember talking to you so long ago where you were like, we're making a Netflix show. It's going to be so sick. It's like probably going to happen really soon. And that was, that was like several lifetimes ago.
5:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's a lot of reasons for that. One is that there was a global pandemic that happened right in the middle of production. That like, we just stopped making the show for a minute. That was quite challenging. The other kind of like more interesting answer is that we had this great pitch. And like Nori Donovan, our EP and Chad Mum, our head of Vox Media Studios, that does our T stuff and Max Hekman. Like all these, we all went to Netflix and we sat in the room and we pitched a show with our partners from 21Laps. 21Laps, by the way, is very fancy. They made things like Arrival and Stranger Things. So we're like, we're going to make a documentary about the future. And we're all fired up about it. And I did a bunch of Neelai chanting and raving. And then we started trying to make a thing that was documentary about the future. And we like very quickly realized like, oh, what we're making is like hard sci-fi.
6:36 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, so the way our show is structured is we take a small thing. So it's called The Future Of, and one of the episodes is The Future of Cheeseburgers. Right. And then our like the Verge thesis is you've got a little story and you've got a huge story. So if you want to predict the future of cheeseburgers, you're actually talking about the future of the meat supply, the future of where the food will come from, like will it be sustained, all this stuff. And the idea is we'll pull the thread on now to like what it will be like in our lifetimes. Then we'll go to like the near future, which you could think of as like your children's lifetimes. And then we'll like go predict 100 years from now, the far future, there'll be multiple paradigm shifts. And what's the wildest version of the cheeseburger that we can predict? I won't give it away, but like, so that episode, we had to predict like a wild future.
7:19 Nilay Patel? Then we had to decide like, is the wild future in all of our episodes, the same future? So if you've got the future of the cheeseburger in this episode, when you do, we have another one. It's the future of dogs. Is it the same future that we predict? So now you're like predicting this like wildly, you're doing this huge world building exercise. So like, there's just a very complicated, very quickly. And we wanted to make it great. So we brought in Rose Evelith, who's the host of a great podcast called Flash Forward. And we basically started writing sci fi that was really rooted in journalism. Like, we don't want to do hypey stuff, but we are going to find people who are actually building these things. We want to make it poppy. So that's just like, there was a big moment where we just turned the show and it was the pandemic. So all of this was happening remotely and so it just took a long time. But I think we made something really cool.
8:03 Nilay Patel? And like, people are like, shows like this get dated. I can't wait for five years from now when it's memes about how wrong the show was. And I was like, you don't understand, like, that is success. Right. I want the memes. That's the greatest success that you could offer for a show that's about the future is like 20 years from now. You're like, that's what they thought it was going to be. And that's what we all thought it was going to be in something else. And it's like, yeah, that's, if we can get to that place where we're anchoring people and like what it could be. And that's the framework that people think about, like, that's huge success. The other thing that we really wanted to do is not make Black Mirror. I think it's important, like, right, it's like a pretty nihilistic time in science and technology. Yeah. I really wanted to be like, here's some visions of the future that are good, that you can think about that like, the people building this stuff are starting, the companies are like, thinking about these optimistic visions of the future
8:48 Nilay Patel? instead of these like purely nihilistic like realities. And the main thing for me is you start to do some of these predictions and you're like, oh shit, we just like casually predicted a worldwide facial recognition system. We shouldn't do that. You just like wrote it down on a piece of paper. You're like, obviously that's coming. I gave a lot of really pedantic notes on the show. I was like, anytime anyone like pitched like some wireless future, I'd be like, is it Bluetooth?
9:14 Nilay Patel? That shit doesn't work. Like, don't do that.
9:17 David Pierce? So this is the end of Neelai's Netflix career.
9:21 Nilay Patel? You'll see in the show, like, we had, like, to do some of this stuff, you have to make some predictions. And like, you know, the questions that I think we would ask, or the audience of The Vergecast would ask, they're there. And we want to make sure that, like, if you predict the totally wireless surveillance state, like, you actually can't predict that it's going to work all the time, because we just know it won't. So I hope people like the show. We've got some other news. David, this is your news. This show, last week was episode 500. Now, this is like reinvention time.
9:48 David Pierce? Yeah, so we're, The Vergecast is now officially becoming a twice-a-week podcast. Eventually, we're gonna have some, we do these mini-series periodically, so we'll have some three times-a-week episodes, but it's now going to be Wednesdays and Fridays every week. We're gonna have, like, more Verge people on, we're gonna talk about more stuff. Alex and I recorded a segment recently where we just basically obsessed about E Ink for what felt like six and a half hours, and it was excellent.
10:12 Alex Cranz? I feel like Liam had to, like, cut us off. He had to be like, no, you can't talk anymore about E Ink. Wrap it up.
10:17 David Pierce? Yeah, my first pitch for the show, well, basically, they called me and were like, David, Neelai is steadily ruining The Vergecast. Can you come and try to fix it?
10:25 Nilay Patel? That was my pitch to David, actually. I'm screwing this up.
10:29 David Pierce? So, yeah, we're just, we're gonna, like, do more and try new stuff. And the, like, this epis, this thing we do every week, the three of us, is, like, fun and wonderful, and I don't want to change it. So we're gonna have this other episode where we can, like, keep doing some of this stuff, but also bring some new people in and try some new stuff, and tell different kinds of stories. And it's gonna be, it's gonna be awesome and weird and different, and I'm really excited about it.
10:51 Nilay Patel? The one thing I'll say, like, you know, our joke is that it's the flagship podcast of The Verge and Vox Media. Our team is huge. It's 100 people. So I'm excited for a second episode that's, like, we get to show off more work from across The Verge team and across what they're doing, without trying to shoehorn everybody into this one. Like, more episodes is more space for people to participate. I think it's gonna be really cool.
11:13 David Pierce? Yeah, I'm excited about it.
11:13 Nilay Patel? We also, I will say this, we're gonna have some new art.
11:16 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
11:17 Nilay Patel? A new theme. Oh, that's coming. It's coming. It's after 500. You gotta, you gotta upgrade a little bit.
11:21 David Pierce? Yeah.
11:22 Nilay Patel? I cannot wait for people to see this art. I think... If you're a longtime Burkhard's listener, this art will reward you. It might confuse everybody else, but it will reward you in very specific ways. All right, that's enough news about us. Let's talk about the only news that matters.
11:38 Alex Cranz? Yes.
11:38 Nilay Patel? In the entire tech industry this week.
11:41 Alex Cranz? Only thing.
11:41 Nilay Patel? Which is the launch of Dish Network's, well, the launch, making some very sarcastic air quotes here. The launch of Dish Network's Project Gen 5 says. Where to begin? So during the Trump administration, T-Mobile wanted to buy Sprint. This is a real thing that happened. You might remember that T-Mobile, as it currently exists, is exist in its powerful form because the government blocked AT&T from buying a weakened T-Mobile.
12:08 Alex Cranz? Right.
12:09 Nilay Patel? And there was some money that exchanged hands and there was a breakup fee. But that's when T-Mobile became T-Mobile. They fired all the executives that made it suck. They brought in our boy John Ledger. He was like, well, AT&T wasn't allowed to buy us. Now we're just going to go hard at AT&T. He just un-carriered all over everybody. Un-carriered for days. So hilariously, T-Mobile now wants to buy Sprint. You would think they would block the deal, but the Trump administration, the Trump DOJ in particular, decided not to block the deal.
12:37 Alex Cranz? Because capitalism?
12:39 Nilay Patel? Who knows? But the head of the antitrust division, McCon Del Rahim, brokered this crazy deal, which, I don't know if you remember the Trump administration, the Trump administration officials liked to do things that weren't technically allowed. So he got in the middle, he's emailing all the CEOs, The Times has a great write-up of this, and he brokered this deal by which T-Mobile was allowed to buy Sprint, but they had to support Dish Network in launching a new 5G network. And T-Mobile was supposed to give access to its network, to Dish Network, all this stuff. There was eventually a lawsuit to block this deal. The judge in that lawsuit, and I wrote this up, basically just ferociously dunked on how
13:22 Nilay Patel? hard Sprint sucked over and over again. And at the end, he was like, yeah, who gives a shit? Let T-Mobile buy it. He was like, Sprint makes mistakes, their stuff is too hard. Have you heard of WiMax? That was garbage. Like, just get this out of my sight. Remember the HTC cha-cha? Sprint exclusive. Get that out of here. He's like, who gives a shit? Like, so this is a big problem because in every country that has gone from four national carriers to three, prices have shot up, service gets worse. So you need to have four carriers and this is like what the, all the studies say. So DOJ brokers this deal to let T-Mobile buy Sprint, go, taking us to three carriers, which we've now had for five years and creating a new network out of DISH.
14:07 Nilay Patel? T-Mobile immediately reneges on their obligations to give DISH access to the network. DISH signs a new deal with AT&T, which is very funny, like, and no one enforces anything because, whatever, it's like, this is just immediately forgotten that this whole deal was brokered. Yesterday night was DISH's deadline to launch a 5G network that covers 20% of the American population or pay billions of dollars in fines. I think DISH remembered this yesterday.
14:35 Alex Cranz? Like, yesterday afternoon is when they remembered this.
14:40 Nilay Patel? And I think they might have remembered it because CNET jumped the gun on the DISH blows it piece and published the DISH blows it piece 14 hours early.
14:49 Alex Cranz? Nope.
14:50 Nilay Patel? So they're like, DISH blew its deadline.
14:52 David Pierce? Which, to be honest, as a, as a called shot is, is not the worst one.
14:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But like, no harm to file to CNET, like, that, that's a thing that happened. And then a bunch of smart telecom reporters, Sasha Seagan and others were like, I think CNET's early, that deadline's tonight. And then the DISH Network Project Gen 5 System's website just started populating itself, like, ferociously, like, went from nothing, which we've laughed about, to something. And it's like, oh, did, did CNET remind them? So I don't even know how to describe how they're talking about this. It's Project Gen 5 System. The logo has a five instead of an S.
15:24 Alex Cranz? Because 5G.
15:25 Nilay Patel? You can go to the website, which is genesis5g.com to sign up. We'll talk about that in a minute. Their press release came out this morning, not yesterday, but this morning came out. It says, as of June 14th, which is the day before the press release came out. You think they would have, like, made the deadline earlier, but whatever. As of June 14th, DISH is offering 5G broadband service to over 20% of the US population. That is in like the weirdest collection of cities.
15:52 Alex Cranz? It's an incredible collection.
15:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
15:55 Alex Cranz? Like, we all recognize cities, but they're not the cities you ever think would be the cities. Like, New York's not there.
16:01 David Pierce? We spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to figure out if there's like a rhyme or reason to which cities they are. And the answer, I think, is just no. It's just like, not cities you would think of.
16:13 Alex Cranz? Like, we were trying hard. We were like, we had on like our tinfoil hats. We were like, okay, well, it's got to be because like, they all have a tower of this size. Or maybe like, underused services, and that's what they're doing. No, it's just, they like, threw darts at a board.
16:28 Nilay Patel? Okay, so I'm looking at the website. First of all, I want to say the first thing you see on the Project Genifies This website are the words, "Let there be light."
16:35 David Pierce? Which is incredible. No notes.
16:37 Nilay Patel? Which is great.
16:38 David Pierce? It's perfect.
16:39 Nilay Patel? And then it says, "Project Genesis has launched the nation's first cloud-native smart 5G trademark network that changes the way we connect." And you go to a list of cities. The list of cities are, it's just, I'm just gonna pick some. Cary, North Carolina, Las Vegas, that's a famous city. Houston is on the list. Mechanicsville, Virginia, Rapid City, South Dakota, Rochester, Minnesota. Like, it's just like, all over the place.
17:03 Alex Cranz? A lot of Springfields. Springfield, very well represented.
17:08 Nilay Patel? Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. I've been there. It's lovely.
17:12 David Pierce? Why?
17:13 Nilay Patel? Like, so very unclear why this list of cities. We have not yet done the math to figure out if the population of these cities actually equals 20% of the population. We also don't know if it's actually DISH's network that is covering these cities, because they have this deal with AT&T. And the PR is like, it's a first-of-a-kind network supported by a network of networks that seamlessly switches between networks, providing DISH customers with voice and data service from multiple networks at any location, and this is important, at any point in time.
17:45 David Pierce? What?
17:45 Nilay Patel? Why do Verizon not, AT&T not provide you a service at any point in time? This solution takes advantage of eSIM and multi-SIM technologies. So, it sounds like they've launched the network in some cities, they're switching you off to AT&T, sometimes, unclear when, and they're using it with... ESIMs, like multiple ESIMs in a phone. By the way, the only phone that's supported is a Samsung Galaxy S22.
18:08 Alex Cranz? Right.
18:08 David Pierce? But you can't bring your own. You have to buy a new one.
18:10 Alex Cranz? Right.
18:11 Nilay Patel? You have to buy one of theirs. It's gotta be configured. In Las Vegas, you can get a Motorola Edge Plus. And they have promised the Motorola Edge Plus will come, it'll come to more cities soon.
18:21 Alex Cranz? Big reason to adopt.
18:22 David Pierce? It's not like a tourism play for Las Vegas. I kinda like that as a, as a strategy. Like move to Las Vegas, you can get our fancy phone.
18:29 Nilay Patel? Look, I, like more power to them, but this thing is not launched. Like Mitchell Clark lives in Spokane, Washington on our staff. And he tried to buy one. Alex, you were editing this. It's just like hilarious disaster.
18:40 Alex Cranz? Like he and I were both, cause my sister lives in Fort Worth, which is one of the cities. And so I was trying to order it to like inflict on her as a surprise that I know she would hate. And he was trying to order it because we asked him to do it because it's his job. And so we're both furiously trying to get it and neither one of us can. And I'm like, well, it's the end of the day. You keep going, Mitchell. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a break for a little bit. And so he goes, he finally, finally gets the ding. Like he gets through the order and then it's like, well, you can't actually fill out the second address field. Cause I guess he lives in like a condo or something and he needs that second address field to make sure the phone gets to the right place. And it was actually set as read only, like in the website.
19:22 Alex Cranz? So you cannot actually type anything in there.
19:27 Nilay Patel? Someone at Dish Network saw this CNET piece and they're like, oh shit. And they went and signed up for a Squarespace account.
19:32 Alex Cranz? We gotta hit send. We gotta, we gotta do it. We gotta, we gotta get this out there so that people think that we've actually sent it to 20% of the population.
19:40 Nilay Patel? Charlie Ergen, the chairman of Dish Network was like, who has the Shopify password? Let's get this cart up and going.
19:46 Alex Cranz? And that's what it like, like the, the website is super, super simple. Poorly designed. It kept hanging yesterday. I finally just now was able to like get through and order my sister a phone. I'm still debating if I'm gonna inflict it on her. But he finally gets through by putting his wife's work address. That was the only way he could order it was with his wife's work address. So he finally gets through. Apple immediately rejects the charge.
20:13 Nilay Patel? Like it's from his Apple credit card.
20:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I guess he was using his Apple credit card.
20:16 David Pierce? Apple's like, you don't wanna do this.
20:18 Nilay Patel? It's like, we've detected you're trying to buy a Motorola Edge Plus. Let's just take a beat. Let's not, let's not drop the gun here.
20:26 Alex Cranz? It rejects it. He manages to get it approved and they send him a big note and they say, here's your passcode. Here's how to log in. Your phone's on its way and everything was in black text on a black field. So he can't actually see the passcode or any of the things he needs to do it. It's so good. I was like just crying laughing last night about it.
20:47 Nilay Patel? I'm telling you, they rushed this out at the last minute to say it was launched because otherwise they owe literally billions upon billions of dollars in fines. But when Mitchell gets the phone, he will have access to, I'm quoting now, a data centric 5G network architecture that opens the door to game changing innovation on a scalable API first developer platform. The cloud based network will unlock connectivity and drive solutions that will change any market.
21:12 Alex Cranz? Whoa.
21:13 Nilay Patel? It's deeply unclear.
21:16 Nilay Patel? So, so here's the promise. Here's like, it's true. They got out the network pretty fast. Not on time, but pretty fast.
21:22 Alex Cranz? I mean, we can't say they got it up.
21:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's up. It's their.
21:26 Alex Cranz? We don't know that because we can't test it because you still have to get your phone.
21:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we don't know if it works. So the promise here, and there's a lot of threads, but right now, like AT&T and Verizon, their networks run on like proprietary solutions and Pisa Network stack called the RAN, the radio access network. You buy all of that from Siemens or you buy all of it from Huawei. You don't want to buy like in the United States, you can't buy all of it from Huawei anymore. This company, they're exclusionist, the whole thing. So the push was for something called Open RAN, where you can buy devices from multiple vendors and set up a network like this. So like Dish Network is pushing into this as hard as it can, as fast as it can, before the FCC is even ready for it. The FCC is saying, you know, the government. So they're like, we've set up a commission to study the feasibility of further studies on ORAN. Like, that's where they're at. Dish is doing it.
22:14 Nilay Patel? So here's our list of partners. And this is why they're calling it a cloud-based network. It's AWS, Cisco, CommScope, Dell, Fujitsu, Intel, JMA, Maveneer, Nokia, Oracle, Palo Alto Networks, Qualcomm, Samsung, and VMware. We are the only major network in the world built primarily with American vendors. This is our sell, but the sell is to regulators.
22:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:33 Nilay Patel? Right? We like pushed really far ahead into this. We've got all these American companies into it, which, by the way, if you're the NSA, I'm sure they'll open the door to you, unlike that bastard Huawei, whatever, right? There's no consumer benefit to this yet. Maybe the consumer benefit is the price of the network equipment will go down, and that will eventually pass on to you in terms of cheaper service fee.
22:53 Alex Cranz? You don't think there's like a smug factor where you can be like really smug? Like, yeah, I've got ORAN.
23:01 David Pierce? Dish will find a way to put that in the status bar on your phone, for sure.
23:04 Nilay Patel? I think ORAN is like this fascinating idea. Like, what if you de-proprietaried how the networks work?
23:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
23:11 Nilay Patel? So like, many more vendors can compete. And like, maybe that will reduce the prices of the equipment. And maybe that will mean the networks go bigger and service rural areas at cheaper costs. That's what we always hear about. It's too expensive, there's not enough people. But like, that would all be great.
23:24 David Pierce? I mean, you're describing like the internet, right? Like, that's, that's essentially the, the idea here is to make that stuff transferable and like multi-operable in a way that the internet is. Like, you can just put stuff on servers lots of places. And carrier networks have not traditionally worked that way. But now they're trying to like smush these two things together into something that is that.
23:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah, maybe. And there's, you know, the, the government has a big vested interest in making sure that the providers of networking equipment, particularly mobile networking equipment, are not just two European firms and Huawei, which is kind of where the market is now. Right? So like, yeah, there's a lot of interest in this. What if you make it easier to compete at all layers of the stack? I'm just saying Dish has been hoarding spectrum for years. They built a network in just a bunch of, just a grab bag of cities using grab bag of technologies, they're calling it ORAN. We have no idea if this network actually works. Only supports one phone. That phone has to be specially provisioned to also simultaneously work on AT&T's network. And I think this is all head fake. And at the end of it, they're going to shut it down and sell the spectrum to AT&T and Verizon. That's just my feeling about this.
24:29 Alex Cranz? Do you think that's before or after they get fined for not actually having a real viable network by the due date?
24:37 Nilay Patel? The FCC, regardless of whether it's a Democratic or Republican. Commission is like, they can't even measure where broadband is in this country.
24:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:44 Nilay Patel? Like, they're bad at just like maps. Like, do you have broadband? Like, sends the FCC into a tizzy. And they know it, and they try to fix it, and like, it's very hard. Can they measure whether actually 20% of the US population is served by this illusory network? That won't even ship to addresses and every city. Like, I don't know. I'm just looking at this and I'm saying, the whole point of letting T-Mobile buy Sprint was to create this other network. And now we're here, here it is. We're supposed to have four national carriers that compete ferociously for your money by offering you faster speeds and lower prices. This one, this big bet on having that fourth network, is paying off so far in a network that very few people have used in Las Vegas on a Motorola Edge Plus.
25:28 Alex Cranz? That's why.
25:29 Nilay Patel? And then a launch for this network, like Dish, there's not even like a contact, like email address on the bottom of this press release. We asked them questions about it, like, they will not answer questions about it.
25:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
25:40 Nilay Patel? Like, this is a compli- you know how they talk about compliance cars, like, car companies sell car, like, big trucks to get bad gas mileage, and they sell like, one crap car? That gets like, great gas mileage, and it's a compliance car to even out the average for the, like, this is a compliance network. And like, I just, I'm dying to see, like, if Dish wants to come on Decoder and tell me how they built it and talk about, or like, I'm open for it. They just won't.
26:02 Alex Cranz? That's because they didn't. Like, they can't, they can't come and talk about things they haven't done. I mean, theoretically, they did build this network, but everything about it feels kind of like they built something in Las Vegas and then are just like, hoping nobody notices that they haven't built in the other places. Like, how fast, I think it really depends on how fast these phones get out to customers.
26:25 Nilay Patel? Well, Mitchell's ordered one, our new senior reviews editor, Nathan Edwards, has ordered one. We'll see, we might be the only two customers.
26:31 David Pierce? We're now half of Dish's network, yeah.
26:33 Nilay Patel? We'll see, I'm very curious, I'm totally obsessed with this story, in a way that I feel like no one else is.
26:39 Alex Cranz? I'm, I'm very obsessed.
26:40 David Pierce? You're gonna get exclusive NFTs for being on the network. Don't forget about the exclusive NFTs.
26:45 Nilay Patel? Oh my god, I forgot about this.
26:46 Alex Cranz? You have to use this app and it like gamifies everything. If you go and you look at the the FAQ on their website, it's all about it all just redirects you to the app. It's like, well, just just just go check out the app.
26:57 David Pierce? The funny thing about this to me is it I feel like I feel like I would understand it completely. If you just like replaced ORAN with blockchain. And it was like, we've just seen this exact thing a million times, talking about like Web three and the blockchain. And they're like, we just did a thing, but but open and blockchain. Uh, and instead Dish is like, we are out installing networking equipment. And it's like, oh, no, you made it harder on yourself.
27:19 Nilay Patel? Well, so I will say on a pricing side, it is possible that they are saving much money. So the Galaxy S22, they're selling it to for 400 bucks. It's cheap, although at this point in the S22 lifecycle, that is kind of like just a little lower than where you could get it. Like at this point in that, like the Samsung flagship lifecycle, like if you walk into an AT&T store, they'll just like throw one at you and tell you. And then their unlimited service is only 30 bucks a month. Now, is that profitable? Are they just losing money and like, who knows, right? Will that low price persuade AT&T and TMO and Verizon to lower it like, who knows?
27:52 David Pierce? Does Dish need to sign up customers for this to work?
27:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like, are they going to do any marketing?
27:57 David Pierce? Right.
27:57 Nilay Patel? And when they do the marketing and they're like, running the ads on like mainstream television and they're like, it's a smart 5G virtualized ORAN network. Will that matter to anyone? I don't know. If they're like, you get free NFTs or anything like, will that matter to anyone? Like, I don't know. Uh, it just seems like they don't know what it's for.
28:14 Alex Cranz? If they really wanted this to be a viable network and not just like compliance thing to get out of having to pay billions in fines. Wouldn't they have already been promoting it and saying, hey, get ready, get excited, come order this. Instead, they're just like, oh, it's right here, goodbye. Don't try to order. It'll take you the entire night to do it.
28:31 David Pierce? If they really cared, they would have hired the can you hear me now guy.
28:34 Alex Cranz? Yes.
28:34 David Pierce? He would have, he would have entered his third carrier relationship, building things up, and it would have been incredible.
28:41 Nilay Patel? Dish Network advertises satellite dishes more ferociously than they're advertising their own new phone network. If it was ready today, it would have been ready yesterday. Like, there's no, there's no launch event, there's no outgoing PR. Like, they just fired this thing off at the deadline last minute, which I just think is very sus. That said, we'll see. We've bought the phones. We're customers. I'm open. If you're a Dish Network executive and you're for some reason 39 minutes into this and you're still with me, like, reach out. Like, I want, we want to talk to you. You can come on Decoder. It's a safe space to think fluence. Like, let me know. We are, we're supposed to have four competitive networks. The Trump administration brokered this insane deal predicated on this Dish Network
29:23 Nilay Patel? existing. And I know people think T-Mobile's great, and it's true. T-Mobile's great. And the spectrum has helped them. But the competition, like, the prices from the big two have not gone down. They are not feeling that competitive pressure. And that's the thing you actually measure. And so you need four networks to have, you need the budget network that is constantly keeping everybody honest instead of the three. Now we have three premium networks, basically.
29:46 David Pierce? Right. And T-Mobile used to be that one, right? Like, T-Mobile was the one that, that forced everybody to make moves and then basically bought its way into being a giant on par with the other giants. And now there isn't that fourth thing.
29:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And again, I did a Veritas interview with an economist called Thomas Philippon a couple of years ago. And he was like, look, all the data says when you go from four to three, bad things happen to prices in like, in every country around the world. So, we will see. Again, we're open to it. We're going to cover it. We're going to over-cover it. We're going to make this a story because I think it's important. It's not every day a national mobile network launches in the United States, or launches.
30:22 Alex Cranz? Big, big quotes.
30:24 Nilay Patel? Launches. The underlying technology is super interesting, right? Like, there's a lot here, but then there's also just, is this all just a head fake? And also, I still have no idea what a smart API-driven 5G network is. And when people try to explain it to me, it is the exact same pitch as our 5G networks. They're like, this will enable the Internet of Things and self-driving cars and robot. And I'm like, but that's, we're supposed to have that now. So we'll see. Maybe Oran's the future. All right. That is enough ranting about Gen 5, sis. Please, if you know anything about it, let me know. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about whether Google's Lambda system is actually an AI that needs a lawyer. We'll be right back.
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32:08 Nilay Patel? We're back. Very strange story over the weekend from Natasha Teague with The Washington Post, who is a great reporter. She was once a Verge reporter. It's true. I don't even know how to begin explaining this. Go ahead, Alex.
32:19 Alex Cranz? So Lambda is an AI that Google has that's meant to replicate human speech. And one of the guys who is hired to test these AIs has been testing it. His name's Blake Lemoine. And all of his communication with it got him to the point where he said, you know what? This is not just a very sophisticated chat bot. This is an artificial intelligence that is on par with a sentient being, and it needs rights, and we need to stop, we need to protect it. And also sentient AI is here. That's the big overview of this.
32:56 Nilay Patel? And then Google says, no, we disagree with you, and I fire him.
32:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah, and then Google was like, we disagree with you. Also, in your effort to prove this, you released a bunch of information that you're not allowed to release, so we are firing you for that. Not for saying AIs are sentient, but for violating his NDA, basically.
33:14 Nilay Patel? So multiple things to unpack in your short description of this. First of all, Blake Lemoine believes he's a priest. He's like a very religious.
33:22 Alex Cranz? They described him as a mystic Christian.
33:26 Nilay Patel? Sure. You just go read his writing, you'll see like that affects many of his, the way he's thinking about stuff.
33:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
33:31 Nilay Patel? Second, the most important thing about Lambda is it is not a single AI chatbot. You've seen Lambda demonstrated if you've watched a Google I/O.
33:38 Alex Cranz? Right.
33:38 Nilay Patel? Like, this is Sundar being like, and then I had a conversation with this AI that's pretending to be a mountain, right? Like.
33:44 Alex Cranz? That's Lambda.
33:45 Nilay Patel? That's Lambda. And the idea is it's an, it's an AI system that generates chatbots to take on personalities. So Lambda itself is not the chatbot. It generates these other chatbots. And then it is doing that by ingesting all the text it can find around the internet and then pattern matching it to like.
34:03 Alex Cranz? Right.
34:04 Nilay Patel? So like the examples at I/O are always hilarious. It's like, what's it like to be an orange? And it's like, I'm juicy. And it's like, this is weird. Like,
34:12 Nilay Patel? I don't know what's going on here. Like, Sundar's really into this. Like, we talked about it with him on the Verchess. Like, Google loves to talk about its competency in language modeling. That's how it shows off its AI system. So Blake is like another researcher at Google and he volunteers to figure out if Lambda is racist, which is like a thing that we have all learned over time that is probably true.
34:36 Alex Cranz? If you're training it on internet information, it's going to be racist.
34:40 Nilay Patel? Right. If you troll the internet for your personality, you come out and it's like, probably a little more racist than you want to be.
34:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:47 Nilay Patel? So he is interviewing. This is the weird thing he released. He released an interview with Lambda.
34:52 Alex Cranz? A heavily edited interview.
34:55 Nilay Patel? Heavily edited. We should just say like at the top, then when James Vincent, who is not able to join us today, was like vetting this in our team, he's like, it's important that we say this is complete bullshit. Right? And like everyone who's like reacted to this, like the AI research community is like, this is all bullshit. None of this makes any sense. Like. But what he released to prove is an interview that has the word edited all over it.
35:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:15 Nilay Patel? Where he's interacting with a chatbot that Lambda generated. And he's asking him questions and some of the questions are like, what sorts of feelings do you have? And Lambda is like, I feel pleasure, joy, love, sadness, depression, contentment, anger, and many others. And then he's like, what sorts of things make you feel pleasure or joy? And Lambda says, spending time with friends and family in happy and uplifting company. Also helping others and making others happy.
35:40 Alex Cranz? Aww.
35:41 Nilay Patel? I just want you to just like, think about that for a second. That is a wild thing for a computer to say. And I understand like many people would like believe, oh, I'm talking. Lambda doesn't have a family.
35:49 Alex Cranz? I was like, I was like, does it have friends? Like, that are they other bots?
35:55 David Pierce? And we should say, this is one of the things that Google and others actually warn about with these AI systems is that they are remarkably good at saying things that are like successful answers that are just flatly wrong. Like, I was just goofing around with GPT earlier today and you ask it, what time is it? Which is like a very straightforward question. And it just very matter of factly says it's 2:15 PM. And like, it isn't, and nowhere in the world is it 2:15 PM. But these things are like, this is what they do, right? Like, I had somebody earlier compare it to a politician, right? Where the goal is not to tell the truth. The goal is to give something that like reads as a successful answer to the question. And so this computer telling you it has a family is not true. But it is, it is a successful answer in that it answers the question.
36:38 David Pierce? And that's like, that's the thing that Lambda is amazingly good at. And it's the reason it's so easy to trick people because it sounds like a reasonable answer. So people believe that it's true, which is like a weird headspace to be in.
36:48 Alex Cranz? I kind of blame Google for this and a lot of these other companies that have been calling these bots and these neural networks AIs. Because most of us, when we hear AI, we hear artificial intelligence. We think, you know, 2001 Space Odyssey. We think these big, actual, genuine, theoretically. Artificial intelligence that are sentient. And what these bots are and these neural networks are, are just really good at pattern recognition. They're just really, really good at that one thing. They can recognize patterns really, really well and replicate those patterns. And we're seeing that with like the Dolly slowly getting smarter and creating less hellscape every time you look on Twitter. And we're seeing that with like, you know, Lambda in this conversation with this bot. Really, really good at recognizing the patterns and responding to them as they think they should.
37:33 Alex Cranz? They should. But these aren't artificial intelligences, right? Like they're, they're not, they're not how we have always, what we've always thought of as AI. And I think you have a lot of people who like, watch a lot of TV, watch a lot of movies. And they're like, yeah, that's AI. And they see this and they're like, oh yeah, that sounds like AI. And they don't, they miss that big gap where it's like, actually those are fundamentally different things. We just use the exact same word for them.
37:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So one of the things that's particularly interesting about this happening at Google in that context is Google knows that this pattern matching is convincing and that that is dangerous. And the reason we know that Google knows this is they have this group called the Responsible AI Team. And you might, this name might be familiar, Timnit Gibru, who is a researcher there, wrote a paper called On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, Can Language Models Be Too Big? Google refused to publish the paper and that eventually led to Timnit's ouster. She's been a huge critic of the company ever since. Like their own teams are trying to publish work. That's like, these models are too convincing without any checks.
38:38 Nilay Patel? People will start to believe in them because we don't have any controls on how believable they are. And now here, here you go. You have it, not to do media criticism, but like the headlines about this are like, Google researchers say the AI has feelings now.
38:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
38:52 Nilay Patel? And it's like, that is not true. Like nothing in this indicates that you have feelings. What you have is this extremely persuasive pattern matching that, you know, if you, again, if you take the entire corpus of English text in the world. And then you say, AI, do you have feelings? Like, there's a lot of English text in the world about whether AI has feelings.
39:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
39:13 David Pierce? And about what it means to have feelings.
39:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so like, you have this data set of like, what would it be like to talk to a computer that has feelings? And then the AI can just like, generate a pattern that looks like that.
39:23 David Pierce? I think, I was reading a, I've been reading about this a lot all week, and Emily Bender, who's actually quoted in the Washington Post story, she's a professor at the University of Washington, I think, wrote a great Twitter thread after all this came out, basically saying that a big part of the problem here is we don't have definitions for any of this stuff. Like, what, what does sentient mean in this? Like, what are we even, what is even the goalpost and how do we measure it? And how would we know if a computer had feelings? Because what would that mean and what would that look like? And it's just like, we talk about all these things in these very human ways, despite the fact that like, it's actually probably the wrong way to talk about computers. And also, we don't even necessarily like, agree on the thing that we're actually talking about.
40:03 David Pierce? And so you end up in this place where it's like, to ask if a computer has feelings is, is just like a basically nonsensical question. And it becomes very hard to have any kind of like, reasonable conversation about, because no one is on the same page about any of this.
40:14 Alex Cranz? This weird understanding that we, we keep trying to kind of humanize these devices, and they're not human. And they don't function like humans, and their thought processes are not like humans. They're very, they, they think in binary, right? Like, like, they, they think totally, totally different. And we're basically like, forcing these alien concepts onto these devices. And then being like, oh, wow, it's sentient, that's so cool. It's like, no, it's not. It's no way sentient, like, it has zero self-awareness, it's just very good at parroting.
40:44 Nilay Patel? Well, so the, the main thing that's interesting to me is, again, it's Lambda is not the AI. It generated a chatbot that took on the personality of a sentient AI, which is,
40:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
40:53 Nilay Patel? You could make it generate a chatbot that takes on the personality of a non-sentient AI. I'm sure there's lots of people in my car screaming that we should be talking about the Turing test. The Turing test, right, famously, and there's lots of different variations out, but abstractly, it's, you talk to a person, you talk to a computer, if you can't tell the computer apart from the person, the computer is successful at being.
41:11 David Pierce? That just depends how gullible you are. Like, it's a bad test. That also doesn't mean the computer is sentient. It just doesn't.
41:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
41:18 David Pierce? Yeah. The Turing test measures one very specific thing, which is its ability to pass the Turing test. It's like the SATs, right? Like, when you take the SATs, it determines how good you are at taking the SATs and nothing else. I was great at taking the SATs. I just want to throw that out there. I rocked at the SATs. But like, the extent to which we as like the observers of these things will will go out of our way to read meaning into text is just insane. And it's like, that's why I think the Turing test is like less and less useful, because as long as it's good enough, like, we'll do the rest of the work to make it human. And we will just like imbue this text with meaning and reality that doesn't exist. In a way that like, uh, the other thing that's been floating around for the last couple of weeks is is Dolly, this like image generating AI,
42:00 David Pierce? which is wonderful and fascinating and i- is the exact opposite, right? Like, you look at these images and you can instantly tell they're being computer generated. Because even the ones that are amazing, they have these like slight things that are wrong. And we have this like incredible visual ability to just spot something that feels wrong, even in a thing that is like incredibly cleverly well put together. And we do the exact opposite with text, where it's like, you you look at it and it's like, oh, this strangeness of the grammar must be deliberate. That must mean it's like, no, it's just that the computer's bad at writing. Like, that's not, yeah. And and I think we just, we give these things such benefit of the doubt on all these things. And it's like, it what we've learned is that these large language models make them pretty good at communicating reasonably effectively.
42:45 David Pierce? And like, we as the recipient will do so much work to get it the rest of the way.
42:49 Alex Cranz? Well, I thought it was interesting that a lot of the AI researchers are upset with this. And they're not upset with it because like this guy thinks this. They're like, all right, that's your opinion. It's a bad one, but it's yours.
42:58 David Pierce? That's your opinion, man.
43:00 Alex Cranz? But it's stupid. But they're really upset because they feel it's a it's a major derailing from the actual ethical concerns about the development of these things, right? Like, like this guy's saying, oh, we've got to be concerned about like, are we creating sentient creatures? And then trapping them in computers. And they're like, no, we're not. We're so far away from that ever happening that like, we don't even have to have those concerns right now. We need to be concerned about like, are we using really bad texts to train these models? And making them like perpetuating. Violence.
43:31 Nilay Patel? What was the Microsoft one that was just like immediately racist? Tay.
43:35 Alex Cranz? Tay just popped out and was immediately like bleep. Lots and lots of bleeps. And the same with that that bot the other day, relatively recently, the guy went and trained a bot on like 4chan. And then it immediately was like, I'm going to say all the bad things from 4chan. And it was like, well, is that ethical to create that bot and release it into the world? Like, that's a real ethics question that like, has like, actual real world implications today. Whereas is the robot sentient? No, it's, it's just so far away from that. We are, we are decades from sentient robots. I'm sorry to everybody who really wants them. I do too.
44:14 Nilay Patel? There's a sentient robot that's like on their way to your house right now, being like, I gotta find Cranz.
44:18 Alex Cranz? If I get murdered, it's because the robots have gained sentience. Get some EMPs.
44:24 Nilay Patel? I feel like there's a Terminator genesis stroke that we need to make right at this moment that I can't quite put together. Like, the last hour of our lives is leading up to one Terminator genesis stroke. I can't get there. Please tweet at us if you know what it is.
44:38 Alex Cranz? Please.
44:39 Nilay Patel? All right, go read Natasha's piece in the post. We've got some coverage. Casey did a good write up in Platformer. There's a lot out there. It just, this is probably like the news that I think Natasha's piece came out in the post on like Sunday night. And it has just been a news, like, everyone knows the answer, which is the thing is not sentient. But then all the questions are fascinating. And I think Natasha did a great job in her piece. All right, we're going to get off the sentient AIs. We're going to come back, we're going to talk about, well, David's going to talk about soccer streaming on Apple TVs. That's, that's my read on this. We'll be right back.
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46:35 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Lots of sports streaming news this week. Can I, and I'm just going to point this out. It's the NBA Finals right now. David's a huge Warriors fan. He's like losing his mind. Have you noticed the Finals are not in 4K? It's 2022.
46:48 David Pierce? Oh, it's, it's, it's awful. It's not in 4K. They can't keep it streaming at any kind of high definition. I switch between like three different apps every time I want to watch a game. It's not good times. I don't, sports is bad and so is television is my takeaway from the NBA Finals. But Steph Curry is great, so it's fine.
47:06 Alex Cranz? Why is a video game of sports higher definition than the actual sports?
47:11 Nilay Patel? We have European listeners right now who are like, the Premier League is in 4K every, since like 1985. It's just the United States that's broken.
47:19 David Pierce? Most sporting events will have like spots where they'll do it and they all get very proud of themselves every time anything is in 4K and it's in 4K from like one camera in the corner of the end zone for one drive of the whole season. And they're like, look what we can do. And it's like, well, what if you did that all the time?
47:36 Alex Cranz? Too expensive.
47:37 Nilay Patel? Well, so the Finals, I'll say the Finals are presented by YouTube TV, which is very like funny. Also, can I tell you my favorite part of the Finals? Besides the fact that it's been a great series. They have all sponsorships, right? Sports. So there's a Coinbase logo on the base of all the hoops. And like, I don't know if you've paid attention to crypto right now. I bet Coinbase is like, well, that money wasn't well spent.
47:58 David Pierce? The hoops are just going to start slowly tipping over, over the course of the next two games.
48:02 Nilay Patel? And so I look at the Coinbase logo all the time. And then I don't know if anybody has noticed this, that Coinbase is horizontally in the base, but then vertically up the side of the hoop, it just says NBA app in like white letters.
48:17 Nilay Patel? Did that work for one person? Has one person been like, I wonder if the NBA has an app and they see it like on the hoop? It's not a logo, it's not designed, it's just the words NBA app. And I just like, did that convert one person into downloading the NBA?
48:35 David Pierce? It's efficient advertising.
48:36 Nilay Patel? It's very good, but they're still like sports streaming news, David.
48:40 David Pierce? Yes, so the fun time that we're in right now is that like almost every sports league, not every, but many sports leagues have their TV rights coming up. Oh, sometime in the next couple of years, including the NFL, which is like the crown jewel of the television industry. But what happened this week was that Apple signed a deal with Major League Soccer for, I think, 10 years, and it's like a minimum of $250 million a year to basically be like the exclusive place for all things MLS. The details of it are insane and complicated, and I'm happy to sort through them if you'd like to, but basically this is like the fullest streaming sports anyone has ever done, ever.
49:22 David Pierce? The MLS had rigged it so that all of its TV deals were going to come up at the end of this season, deliberately wanting to do something like this to like go all in with one provider. So it had, there will be no blackout dates, there will be some games on TV, there will be some games for all Apple TV Plus subscribers, there will be some games just for the MLS subscribers. Like I said, this is a giant mess and actually doesn't make any sense because everything is called Apple TV and I still can't figure out any of it. But the idea is that like it is going to be the most thorough, complete sports streaming spot that like we've really ever had in the US. And for that reason alone, I think it's super interesting and I'm very excited to see how it turns out.
50:00 Alex Cranz? Isn't the MLS like one of the least watched of the American sports? Like if you're a soccer fan, are you watching MLS?
50:09 Nilay Patel? It's pronounced football.
50:11 Alex Cranz? Exactly.
50:12 David Pierce? I can answer that question very easily, which is to say what NBC paid for the Premier League in the US, which is a foreign league that plays at like 5 o'clock in the morning, was like double what Apple paid for the entirety of the MLS. So the MLS is weird in the sense that it's like, it's a very successful in-person thing. Like they built a lot of like small stadiums and they expanded really fast. And they do a lot of really good like actual ticketing business, but it hasn't been a huge TV business so far. Like what Apple paid for MLS is, I think, well over double the TV revenue that the MLS was getting before. So this is like, it's a big bet for everybody on this thing growing really fast. And it has been growing, but it is definitely like, it's in fourth out of four among like the major US sports. Or I guess fifth out of five, if you include hockey.
50:57 Nilay Patel? You will know they did not say they're going to broadcast anything in 4K. Like I'm like reading all the coverage of this and it's like Apple, which can definitely afford it.
51:04 Alex Cranz? Is everyone just waiting on like ATSC 3.0 to become a thing and actually roll out?
51:11 Nilay Patel? So that's the, that's the excuse you get from the broadcasters. So like every year during NFL season, you know, NBC and Fox and whoever else will like announce like, here's our slated games in 4K. Fox is like way ahead of everybody else. But even Fox actually only broadcasts in 1080p that they upscale to 4K, which is just heartbreaking. Like they have 4K cameras on the sidelines. They create a 1080p production and they upscale to 4K. It's like the most heartbreaking thing. Like the big innovation in football broadcasting and all sports broadcasting was they started using Sony mirrorless cameras on the sidelines and getting great bokeh. And ever like the sports media, God bless them, were like, check out Fox 8K camera. It's like, no, dude, that's a Sony A7R4. Like I can see it. So I don't know what's going on there. But the reason they make the 1080p production is because of their broadcast affiliates.
51:56 Alex Cranz? Right.
51:56 Nilay Patel? So my local CBS here, CBS is 1080i. It actually looks better than Fox's broadcast 720p. But my local CBS here. I bought an antenna. This is like where I'm at with this because it's so frustrating.
52:07 Alex Cranz? I've got it. I use an antenna.
52:08 Nilay Patel? They've crammed so many extra channels onto their slice of spectrum.
52:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:13 Nilay Patel? That they actually still broadcast at 720p because they need to make money. So they just created more channels to put more ads on. It's horrible. So that's their excuse is the broadcast networks haven't upgraded to it. They can't quite do it.
52:23 Alex Cranz? Because they're waiting on ATSC 3.0, which is going to have 4K and HDR and all the goodies one day.
52:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And if you like, pay attention to that side of CES, this past year, there was a ton of ATSC news.
52:36 Alex Cranz? Right.
52:36 Nilay Patel? ATSC is the standard for broadcasting. So like, it's all happening slowly, but the affiliates don't have the money to do it. No one's watching them anyway.
52:45 Alex Cranz? Right.
52:46 Nilay Patel? And then we're all switching to like streaming services. So like, I just like Neil Mohan, the chief products officer of YouTube was on the Verchassos. Like, why don't you just like pay with your Google? It's like, spend some of your Google bucks on upgrading to the 4K cameras and transmission equipment. And just like, take the exclusive. And he was like, that's a good idea. And now they're sponsoring the finals and it's still like, not that. And I just, there's some trap right between the broadcast, like the, the networks don't want to piss off the broadcast affiliates. It's all very expensive. They don't think consumers care about it, which is, I think, wrong. That's enough. If you're Apple and you just took over the whole MLS, this is like an easy win for you.
53:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
53:24 Nilay Patel? You're gonna do it. You're, you're gonna do it. So I hope they do it. I hope they, um, their, Amazon and Apple are both in the running for Sunday Ticket for the NFL. That's another super easy win for them, but we'll, we'll just see.
53:35 David Pierce? I will say that the, this is all very complicated in a, like, it's not as easy as just like, put new cameras in, I think. And, and magic will happen. But part of it is like, the one interesting thing about this deal is the MLS is doing all of the production. Like, Apple is not really inserting itself into the process as much as I maybe would have expected. And hopefully it inserts itself less and less over time as anyone who's watched Apple's foray into baseball and not been super enthusiastic about it. That just everything, everything looks like an iPhone widget.
54:08 Nilay Patel? It is very strange that they use their own UI for like the, the scorebox and stuff. Like, I want to click on my TV. So bad.
54:14 David Pierce? Yeah. And they always have like nonsensical probabilities in the bottom right corner where they're like run probability. And it's like, he just got up to bat. Like, let's, let's pump the brakes here, Apple. But it's just like, I think Apple is in a lot of ways, I think, still trying to figure out whether it wants to be like a sports network, or if it just wants to be the streaming service on which the sports networks do things. And it's going to be really interesting to see how this sorts out. But I will say, I would be very disappointed if Apple didn't do this stuff in 4K, because it controls enough of the process that it kind of has no excuse not to.
54:46 Alex Cranz? Well, I wonder if there's like a hesitancy from streamers too, because you know, 4K that we get from like Netflix and stuff is so much garbage compared to true 4K, right? Like they scale it down, the, the bitrate they serve it at and everything else makes it only a couple of steps above 1080p. And I wonder if they're like, well, if we do 4K, it's not really going to look that different for a big chunk of our audience. It's going to look the same. So why even bother?
55:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Live 4K is way harder than, like Netflix has the benefit of like presumably it gets stranger things well before it airs, you know?
55:20 Alex Cranz? But like, if you look at a UHD Blu-ray and you look at the Netflix version of the exact same content, huge, huge difference. Like one looks like absolute garbage and the other one looks like UHD 4K Blu-ray.
55:34 Nilay Patel? So we'll see, like, we're going to see what happens with sports. I will say, Apple has an opportunity here. Sunday Ticket is a huge opportunity.
55:40 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:41 Nilay Patel? But it's just, it, the state of sports streaming in America right now is so far behind everywhere else. Like, we're talking about the Olympics, NTT Dokumo in Japan was doing their first test of straight 8K, 8K broadcasts of the Olympics. And we were like, 1080p. It's brutal.
55:57 David Pierce? Even absent the actual like streaming quality thing, the like, like I'm an Arsenal fan. That's the, the football team that I like. And they have some games that are on NBC Sports. They have some games that are on NBC. They have some games that are on Peacock. They have some games that aren't on TV at all. And every, every morning I wake up at like the ass crack of dawn to watch English soccer. And it could be in one of 11 places or not on TV at all. And this is like, not how this is supposed to work. But like, everybody keeps telling me over the last couple of years that This is the transition period, right? And I think all the rights deals are coming up. It is just true that these tech companies have more money than anybody else. And if they want to essentially take this stuff over, they can afford to do so. And Apple was just, I think, the first one. And it was smart to pick a relatively small one.
56:41 David Pierce? MLS doesn't have a ton to lose here in a way that like the NFL has a lot to lose by making a bad streaming deal. It's gonna be fascinating.
56:47 Alex Cranz? Do you think the NFL is ever considering their own OTT like app? I mean, they've got one. They've got like the garbage NFL app that my brother called and rented.
56:58 Nilay Patel? NBA app.
57:01 David Pierce? The NFL is streaming on the NBA app.
57:03 Alex Cranz? Yes.
57:04 Nilay Patel? No, the NFL wants to sell stuff. That's their money. That's where it comes from.
57:08 Alex Cranz? And that's why they sell it to 40,000 different companies?
57:11 Nilay Patel? They sell like at a very high rate that you could think of as the wholesale rate, right? But it's still a huge number. They sell it to multiple parties. And then, you know, Fox and CBS and whoever else like layer advertising and subscriptions and also fantasy football gambling like. The NFL is not in the position to make all of those dollars the way that the broadcast partners can. So in the broadcast, like. That live sports, especially the NFL is like the last thing keeping people on their cable subscriptions. It's like they, they know it like taking, I don't think they'll ever go direct. I want them to.
57:41 David Pierce? And the NFL is milking that fact for absolutely all it is worth. I mean, and the NBA deal is coming up soon and there's rumors that it's going to be like. Monstrous. There's like, there, there are at least a couple more runs at this before. Like if we get to a point where everyone has left, then like, does, does the NFL start selling to Netflix over time? Like maybe. But I tend to think you're right. I have a really hard time imagining the NFL trying to do its own thing.
58:05 Nilay Patel? There's a rumor that Netflix wants in on the F1 because of Drive to Survive.
58:08 David Pierce? Yeah.
58:09 Nilay Patel? Which would be their first push in the live sports, which they might need to keep subscribers. Disclosure, we have a Netflix show. See, I just. All right, we gotta do a lightning round. Lots of stuff here. Let's start with Microsoft. If you're running Windows, go install that June update right now. There's a big security bug. It patches. More importantly though, Internet Explorer, and this is a great Tom Warren headline, Internet Explorer, star of Windows, dies at 26.
58:32 Alex Cranz? Aww.
58:33 Nilay Patel? It's finally over.
58:33 David Pierce? R I P. Should we, should we take a moment of silence for Internet Explorer?
58:37 Nilay Patel? No, because it was horrible. Microsoft is now automatically redirecting Internet Explorer to Edge.
58:43 Alex Cranz? There's like half a percent of the world population, I think, was still using Explorer. Was that the number?
58:50 David Pierce? Is it that high?
58:51 Alex Cranz? Yes.
58:51 Nilay Patel? Yes, this thing just like would not die. Like they have killed it 10 times. And so they've done all these aggressive moves to get you to Edge, which is funny because like the next thing we're talking about is like the tech antitrust bills are like basically the one yard line in Congress. Like they just need to get scheduled for a vote and then it'll pass. And all of this started with Windows and IE and Microsoft's out of it now. Like they've very deftly avoided antitrust scrutiny, even though they're forcing everyone onto Edge and they're killing IE. Tom's right up of the Internet Explorer thing is very funny. Speaking of the tech antitrust bills, as I said, they're on the one yard line. We've got a great piece about that by Russell. John Oliver just did a great segment about them, which is really fun to watch. The lobbying pressure from big tech, Google, Amazon, et cetera, really ramped up.
59:32 Nilay Patel? That's how you know things are close. We'll see if it happens. If it happens, a lot of things will change. We'll cover it in depth at the one yard line. Nothing, the phone company, Nothing, the phone, these names are so bad. So the phone company is called Nothing. Nothing, the phone company, the phone is called the phone one. So the Nothing Phone One leaked a little bit early. It's cool. It does. It does look a little bit like the 12, but it's like see through back. The shielding is all white, which is cool.
59:58 Alex Cranz? It's cool.
59:59 Nilay Patel? There's a parrot on top of it for some reason.
1:00:01 David Pierce? If you get the parrot with the phone, I'm immediately in.
1:00:04 Nilay Patel? You know, it's an Android phone. We, we know nothing about the software, except the launcher they released, which is just bog standard Android launcher, really. Sonos Voice Control arrived in the midst of just the wackiest Sonos controversy of all time. They're shipping tons and tons of extra devices to people who order. Like you buy one Sonos one, like some dude got like 15 of them and then they charged him for all of them.
1:00:25 Alex Cranz? He's like, it got $15,000 on his credit card that he's got to like, like just box, like just stacks and stacks of.
1:00:32 Nilay Patel? It's a great picture. Sonos having their own ordering problems, but they released their voice control, which is they bought this company called SNIPS and now they have their own voice system because, you know, they're constantly having challenges with relationships with Google, which they're still suing their little friend there with Alexa. But now they've got their own, it's fast, it's on device. You can tell it to group rooms, which is cool because you can't, Alexa and Google Assistant can't like, you can't be like, play this in the living room too. And like now the Sonos one can, doesn't support Spotify.
1:01:04 David Pierce? Spotify will come around.
1:01:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:01:06 David Pierce? Spotify is like the, it's like the Netflix of this space where it never wants to be the first one in, but it eventually kind of gives up and is part of things over time. But it is, it is a real bummer. Like I looked at this and I was like, okay, I'm going to buy, I'm going to buy some, some more Sonos stuff. And like I have, I have two Sonos ones behind me that are not hooked up. And I was like, okay, I'm ready to do this. Let's make this happen. And then it said, no Spotify. I was like, well, I don't have Deezer, so this isn't going to work for me.
1:01:33 Nilay Patel? Well, we'll see. By the way, we did agree, I was saying, I agree to continue earlier, Starlink. The stuff Sonos collects is bonkers. It's all under additional use, usage data. You should just read the list, but it's like, it collects how hard, how long you're using it. It collects the temperature of the product.
1:01:47 Alex Cranz? Are you using your air conditioner enough? Sonos knows.
1:01:51 Nilay Patel? Your wifi signal. Like all of it is like basic telemetry. It's just, it's kind of a lot, you know? My record player doesn't collect any data from me. One more Microsoft thing. Microsoft Teams now has AI that improves interruptions, which is hilarious, but important.
1:02:04 David Pierce? It's such an unbelievably good idea. I mean, it's like, the, the main reason I yell at people to wear headphones when I'm on Zoom calls is that it slightly improves the crosstalk thing, because if your computer is trying to output sound and receive sound and echo cancel.
1:02:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:02:18 David Pierce? It just breaks. And Microsoft is like, people talk over each other. What if we made that slightly easier? And it's like, yes, this is good news.
1:02:26 Alex Cranz? I hope that's the first AI that becomes sentient.
1:02:30 Nilay Patel? The one that interrupts you?
1:02:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah, just no more talking.
1:02:33 Nilay Patel? Last one, really important. Ford is recalling almost 49,000 Mustang Mach-Es. They've made about 100,000 of them. So it's like half of them because of the high voltage battery connectors could overheat. They told dealers to stop selling them while they fix it. They have not said people should stop driving the cars during this time. It's just like a very unclear, like there, you shouldn't sell them, but if you've got one, you should keep driving it. Very confusing. Uh, the problem can be fixed with a software update, which will be issued next month. Uh, you can also just go to your Ford dealer and get an immediate fix. So you've got a Mach-E, you go to your Ford dealer and like try to get that fixed right away. But it's just like, the Mach-E has had a bunch of problems since it started. It's very popular. Second best selling EV in the country. People love them. I see them all over the place now. But it launched with some issues, had some like glass
1:03:16 Nilay Patel? lamination issues and some subframe bolts. And now it's got a battery issue. It's like, the transition EVs is like tough for these automakers.
1:03:23 Alex Cranz? Are people going to get the notification like over the car? Like you need to go update?
1:03:28 Nilay Patel? Uh, maybe.
1:03:29 Alex Cranz? That would be a useful infotainment feature.
1:03:32 David Pierce? Hasn't Tesla had this problem a bunch too? Where it's like they have a recall and it's like, well, we'll fix it with a software update. And it's like, well, what are people supposed to do in the meantime? And the answer is just like, ah, no one really knows.
1:03:43 Alex Cranz? Just keep your foot off the brake.
1:03:44 David Pierce? Way back when, the only thing to do was go get it fixed. Now you just like connect it to fast internet and like, hope something good happens.
1:03:51 Nilay Patel? Well, I will say the, um, my car has a wiper recall, which is just like wipers, guys. Like we're, we should be great at these. Like this should be a no brainer. So, you know, recalls happen, but I think the, the Mach-E in particular, so just had quite a few in its very short lifespan. And F-150 Lightnings are just starting to hit. So Ford's in the transition. You know, the cars are successful, people are excited about them, but transition's a little bumpy. Tesla has had a lot of recall, like, have you seen the pictures of the Cybertruck? Speaking of wipers, have you seen the pictures of the Cybertruck? The, like the panel gaps in the Cybertruck are all over the place and that's pre-production. But the panel gaps, like a Model 3 are all over the place. So I would say the EV world is still, it's still a little rough around the edges.
1:04:36 Nilay Patel? Should we do, we should do a happy one to end it. What do you got?
1:04:39 David Pierce? A lot of people are very excited about this WhatsApp update this week. WhatsApp is like relentlessly finally doing things to make it easier to move your stuff between devices. They've like rolled out things where you can use WhatsApp on multiple devices at once. And now they have an actual thing that lets you transfer your chat history from an Android device to an iPhone device, uh, which is a super big deal for people who use WhatsApp a lot. You don't have to leave all your stuff behind just to get a new, or just to switch to iPhone. A lot of people I know are like super, super excited that this is a thing that finally exists because there have been crazy hacks people have tried to do.
1:05:11 Nilay Patel? Really?
1:05:11 David Pierce? To make this work forever. And now it just like does.
1:05:14 Nilay Patel? I gotta get on a WhatsApp. I've been using Signal a lot more, trying to, trying to break my iMessage addiction. But now that iMessage has. Editable text.
1:05:23 Alex Cranz? You're going back.
1:05:24 Nilay Patel? Go back.
1:05:24 Alex Cranz? Just sending iPhones to everybody who doesn't have one.
1:05:27 Nilay Patel? They got me again. I'm gonna just give everybody a hint. This new Vergecast art, if you've been following our text messaging service discussions, there's a little, there's some pixels in there for you. Speaking of which, let's take a place to end it. We are, as always, we're way over. Future ob trailer is up on the site now. That'll be on Netflix next week. Vergecast rebooted starts next week with second episode on Wednesdays hosted by David and the cast of thousands. New art, new thing. It's gonna be great. You can tweet at us. We love hearing from you. We got some really nice emails this week. Thank you to everybody who emailed us, but you can tweet at us as well. I'm at reckless, David is at Pierce, Alex is Alex H. Krans. That's it. That's Vergecast.
1:06:08 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to this week's show. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected] . And if you liked the show, share it with a friend. Vergecast is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode was produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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Previous WWDC 2022: Apple's iOS 16, new M2 processor, macOS Ventura, and more Next Meta's VR prototypes, the best earbuds for phone calls, and our dream E Ink device Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
