The Apple Car crash

The Verge's Nilay Patel and David Pierce talk through the weird and winding history of Apple's "secret" car project now that it's officially dead. And later, senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner makes her Vergecast debut to catch us up on the arguments made this week in the Supreme Court about online speech and the First Amendment. Further reading: Apple’s electric car project is dead RIP to the Apple Car, we hardly knew ye Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns Supreme Court hears arguments on the future of online speech: all the news The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech Why Uber and Etsy came up so much in the Supreme Court’s social media arguments Google CEO says Gemini AI diversity errors are 'completely unacceptable' TikTok is removing even more songs as music rights battle drags on The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected — until it didn’t Ford offers EV owners free Tesla Supercharger adapters until July Attention English majors: now you can add handwritten notes to Google Docs 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:27Speaker 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.

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• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Apple car.

• 1:04David Pierce?

  In that we've spent a lot of money and it doesn't exist.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  It's The Vergecast, everybody. $10 billion in a decade later, and we have more to show for it than Apple does with the car project. I'm your friend Neelai. David Pierce is here.

• 1:18David Pierce?

  Hi, we're in the studio. This is very exciting.

• 1:20Nilay Patel?

  David and I are together, like they say on cable news, Alex Krantz is off this week. That's what they say all the time.

• 1:26David Pierce?

  That's good, I like it.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  That's just the thing they say. You don't explain it. No further explanation given. Now, Alex is, should we say it?

• 1:33David Pierce?

  She's sick.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  She's sick.

• 1:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, she'll be OK.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:36David Pierce?

  Send Alex nice vibes, any emails.

• 1:39Nilay Patel?

  Happy vibes, Alex. But Lauren Feiner, our new policy reporter, is going to join us in the second segment to talk about the Supreme Court hearing.

• 1:50Nilay Patel?

  Parade of justice about free speech on the internet, which is one of, you know, that's where you come to the show for it.

• 1:56David Pierce?

  What does YouTube weigh, Neelai? How much does YouTube weigh?

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  It's a real thing that came up. We'll get to that, but we should start with news. The news of the week, which is Apple killed their car project.

• 2:10David Pierce?

  After so many almosts and kind ofs and false starts and what, like almost exactly a decade of work, right? So it was, it was gonna be a car kind of like Tesla, and then it was gonna be a self-driving car kind of like Waymo, and then I think it was gonna be a car kind of like a Tesla again, and now it's going to be nothing.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, there are three more twists.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  Were there more? I'm sure there were.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  Then they were gonna focus on making the software for other cars.

• 2:40David Pierce?

  Oh, right.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  That was, that was a weird twist in there. Then they were gonna buy the platform, like an EV platform from Hyundai, and put Apple stuff on top of that, and Hyundai would turn into Foxconn, and Hyundai was like, no, we are a carmaker. We, no, don't do that to us. Then Foxconn was like, we're gonna build cars.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Foxconn. There are like at least 10 more twists and turns in there.

• 3:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, it's really fascinating, though, because I think if you rewind 10 years ago to when this was gonna happen, it was the moment that everybody was saying, all cars will be self-driving, and the world will have completely changed, and everything will be on the road by like 2020.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:19David Pierce?

  And that was that, people earnestly believed that. Uber was saying that, Lyft was saying that, all the car companies were saying that, Elon Musk was saying that. There was this certainty that by 2020, the whole idea of owning a car was going to have disappeared, and there were going to be fleets of robots roaming the streets everywhere.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  And that just could not be further from the truth at this particular moment in time.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  There are some robots roaming the streets of San Francisco.

• 3:43David Pierce?

  There are a few robots. Well, Andy Hawkins, who wrote a couple of great pieces about this this week, made the point that it's actually not that hard at this moment in time to strap a camera to the top of a Toyota Highlander and put it on the road. And that's true. But it's, it is such a fascinating, like, counterfactual of history. If it had gone differently and we had solved kind of those core tenets of self-driving technology, would Apple have released a car? What would it have been? Mostly, I'm just sad that we don't get to see the thing that Apple was building. Like, I feel like Apple has a-

• 4:14Nilay Patel?

  We should back up, because I really wanna talk about what Apple may or may not have been building for quite a long time.

• 4:19David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  But the, the thing we're talking about was Apple sent out a memo to its employees. Just saying, we're shutting down the car project and those employees will be moved to generative AI.

• 4:32David Pierce?

  I believe 2,000 employees was the number that was reported.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  And that project has been both bigger and smaller than that over time. They've been working on this for 10 years. It's one of the worst kept secrets in Silicon Valley. There are Apple cars just driving the streets, collecting training data, you might call it.

• 4:49David Pierce?

  Well, we should say there are Apple owned cars doing that. They are not Apple cars.

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  Apple doesn't do Toyota Highlanders, by the way. They buy Lexuses.

• 4:58David Pierce?

  Oh, you're right. That's true.

• 4:59Nilay Patel?

  I just want to put that.

• 5:00David Pierce?

  Fancy Highlanders.

• 5:01Nilay Patel?

  To fancy your Highlanders than your average self-driving car company. So the project started in the moment David is describing, which is Apple needed its next big thing and Apple-sized markets are hard to come by. So they it was healthcare and cars were the next things that can like move the needle on Apple's revenue. And they decided healthcare, they do a bunch of watch stuff. And then cars always seemed like a lark. But to me, it always seemed like, what are you doing?

• 5:34David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  But it has been 10 years of people coming and going from that division of Apple called Project Titan. And this last turn, they took Kevin Lynch, who ran the watch and said, you're in charge of it. And I think he was like, well,

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  what if I don't do that?

• 5:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, I think Kevin Lynch being the one in charge is a funny example because he launched the Apple Watch and was very much the one who spearheaded that project. And to his credit, was also a big part of how Apple discovered what the Apple Watch was. Right? Because we've talked about many times on this show, the Apple Watch was made because Apple wanted to make a watch. Like that was the beginning of the story. Johnny Ive was like, what if watch? And that's how it started. And so Apple over time figured out what it could be, what it should be, how it could work, who it would be for. And it has worked. Like kudos to that team. They they got there. They figured it out. And my assumption is that the car is sort of the same way where like you're saying, Apple looked around and said, okay, what's a huge market? Oh, cars. Let's make a car. And then at some point, somebody had to sit down and go, what?

• 6:41David Pierce?

  Do we do? What is that?

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  So there's a story that comes up over and over again. It's in some of the reporting today in The Times. We had Trip Mickle on the show a while back. It was in his book about Apple and just sort of the fight between Tim Cook and Johnny Ive in the post-Jobs era. And the story has come up several times now. Johnny Ive built a model of a car with no steering wheel, and he sat Tim Cook down in it, and they pretended they were on a drive while an actor, this is true, an actor pretended to be Siri and pretended to talk to them as they went on their pretend-

• 7:14David Pierce?

  And tell them like the name of restaurants that they were going by and stuff like that. It was supposed to be, that was the interface for the car was Siri, which is terrifying.

• 7:22Nilay Patel?

  I just want everyone to sit with that for a minute and imagine, like these, when you think about Tim Cook, imagine him going on a pretend car ride with Johnny Ive. While an actor does pretend Siri.

• 7:36David Pierce?

  It's the most like CES vaporware demo from a company in China you've never heard of and will never hear from again thing that I've ever heard.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  But it's also like, does Johnny Ive not think Tim Cook has any power of imagination? Because I could be like, here's what it's gonna be like. You're gonna sit in the car, it's gonna drive around, Siri's gonna talk to you. And I don't need that acted out for me.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  I think I get it.

• 7:59David Pierce?

  It doesn't help to have an actor go, "That's a Dwayne Reid."

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I don't need that. It's in the mind's eye, you know? I got it. I just close your eyes. Everybody pull over your cars. Imagine your car's driving itself. Siri, it's like, there's a hospital. Like, that's all you need to do. I think about that moment all the time. It's like, does Johnny Ive think Tim Cook can't imagine the most basic thing you can imagine about a self-driving car?

• 8:26David Pierce?

  There are seats?

• 8:28David Pierce?

  The end.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  I made a beautiful chair for you. Sit in it and pretend it's a car. So that demo apparently convinced them that this is the future of the car, and they wanted to do the big thing.

• 8:40Nilay Patel?

  Which is self-driving Siri car.

• 8:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  No steering wheel, which is, I think, like, that's the Apple-level innovation leap.

• 8:47David Pierce?

  Yes. And I think at that time, that's where, if you're Apple, you say, okay, there is a thing we can do that is different, right? Because if you're Apple and you're just saying, oh, let's make a pretty good SUV, like, that's not what Apple does. But if you believed, as they did at that time, that in a decade, the whole way we experience cars would be different, you can see how you would talk yourself into, oh, it's just gonna be screens you sit in instead of screens. Seriously, like-

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  And we can take 30% of those screens, too.

• 9:18David Pierce?

  Exactly. Like, literally, it's like, the services business in a car is gonna be nuts someday.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  By the way, all the carmakers believe this. This is why GM took CarPlay out of its cars. Like, down the line, the idea that you will roll around in a shopping mall, everyone's very excited about this.

• 9:33David Pierce?

  100%. And I feel like the tension has been, there has been this incredible, sort of, whipsawing hype around self-driving. And it seems like whipsawing strategy inside of Apple as a result. And every once in a while, they've just been like, oh, crap, that's not gonna work. We should just build a car. And then somebody's like, why the hell are we just building a car? And then somebody else is like, but what if it drove itself? And they're like, we're back, baby.

• 9:57Nilay Patel?

  Hire 2,000 engineers. Yeah, that part, that's the other turn that I think is interesting. There's all these rumors, they tried to buy Tesla, they investigated it. I think Elon has, like, said things that Apple has denied over the course of the past decade.

• 10:10David Pierce?

  Well, there was some reporting around this, that Elon, Elon and Tim Cook did have some conversation about it. Apple wasn't interested, and also Elon would only do it if he was made the CEO of Apple, which is just an incredible-

• 10:23Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 10:23David Pierce?

  I have no idea, like, A, perfectly in character for Elon Musk. B, I have no idea if it's true, but I am choosing to believe that that is-

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  It's a very truthy, you know? It just feels good to rattle that. What is true is that Johnny Ive sat Tim Cook down in a pretend car, and they went on a pretend ride, which I just will never, like, that's when you know, like, Tim Cook should be like, so this is your idea? No, we're not doing this.

• 10:47David Pierce?

  And it wasn't even a car, it was like a couch, by all, it was just, it was just a seat.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  It's just very good. I just want everyone, it's fine, I want you to use your imagination to imagine them using their imaginations. Just think about it.

• 11:00David Pierce?

  Do you think there was, like, fake wind?

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  I can't stop thinking about this.

• 11:04David Pierce?

  With somebody scrolling a picture.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, these are not, I would say, mirthful personalities. Like, they were taking all this very seriously.

• 11:13David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  These are two very serious people. Just imagine it, just like, I don't know, like, act it out with your friends. See if you can even get through it.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  I can't get over it. Okay, so then you got, we should buy Tesla, we can't do self-driving technologies there, we should just build a car. And this is when you were like, what does it look like? I cannot stop thinking about the moments when Apple was like, okay, what does a car look like? Because a car in the United States at this point in time looks like a mid-sized crossover.

• 11:46David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  Arguably, the least design-forward shape for a car.

• 11:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, here's a shoe.

• 11:53David Pierce?

  It's just a Subaru. Like, all cars are Subarus now. That's just what it is.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  It's like, old Toyotas were angry robot Subarus, new Toyotas are sort of like mean fish Subarus. Like, it's all the same.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  Slightly racy Subarus.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:08David Pierce?

  Slightly tall Subarus. It's just Subarus all the way down, man.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  And so the idea that Apple's gonna, like, deliver a hot-looking mid-sized crossover is very funny.

• 12:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, very fun. Like, mid-sized crossovers look so much the same that the new Ferrari SUV looks almost exactly like a Buick. Like, there is a new Buick that looks almost exactly like a Ferrari, that looks almost exactly like a Mazda. And it's like, Apple entering this market, I mean, like, design, everyone!

• 12:40David Pierce?

  Well, and to some extent, that is the result of literal decades of work from these companies. And again, some of the reporting around this has been that Apple basically infuriated everybody who came to work on the car because it said, "We're not doing anything the way the car industry has done things. We're gonna, you know, operate from first principles."

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 13:00David Pierce?

  Which you can imagine means there's a meeting run by Johnny Ive, where he's like, "What if the wheels weren't round?" Just as like a thought experiment. What other shape could a wheel be?

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  No, it's Johnny Ive. He'd be like, "The answer must be so simple, it seems obvious." Everyone's like, "Round wheels, dude." Nailed it.

• 13:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. Like, what if it just hovers? And they're like, "No, Johnny, that's not it." But, and, and so, from all the way down, it's like, this is what Tesla experienced too. Like, it turns out there aren't actually all that many ways to make a car. And you can, you can litigate forever whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, the way the regulation works, the way the industry works, the economies of scale. Like, there aren't that many ways to make a car. Uh, and if you try to get weird with it, you make a Cybertruck. There's that. But, Apple basically tried to do a thing that I think it just couldn't do. And again, I wish we had gotten to see what it would look like. I think someone at Apple is, it is their moral responsibility to just like, post the slide deck. Post the keynote file, showing the designs.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  So there is a little bit of reporting in The Times today. There's actually a lot of great senses in this Times piece, but there's the, Mr. I, but this paragraph jumped out. "Mr. Ive and his team of designers threw concepts for a car that would look like a European minivan, such as the Fiat Multiplus 600, which has half a dozen windows and a curving roof. It had no steering wheel and would be controlled by Apple's virtual assistant Siri." So it was a minivan. They made up a car.

• 14:25David Pierce?

  With no steering wheel. Yeah, and there was some reporting in there that one of the like, big innovative things they were gonna do is put a polymer on the sunroof so that you didn't get heat in the sunroof. And it's like, that is the extent to which you are allowed to innovate in cars. Is polymers on the sunroof, right? Like, otherwise, we pretty much did it. For what cars are for now, we've pretty much done it.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  Can I just point out the Fiat 600 Multiplus, uh, looks exactly like a VW bus? Like, it is the most Johnny Ive thing to be like, "So it's a VW bus, but we picked a weirder Fiat version of it."

• 14:56David Pierce?

  It's a European one.

• 14:58Nilay Patel?

  So is the VW bus. No, no, it's a Fiat this time. All of that is just the silliest to me.

• 15:05David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  And I think the reality of what a car is to people, like, Apple's full of car nerds. Like, Eddie Q is on a board of Ferrari. I think Aston Martin has the new version of CarPlay in it because Phil Schiller just, like, went there and was like, "Look, I own so many of these."

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  Just like, "Let's make it happen."

• 15:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, and Johnny Ive is a big car guy. Like, it is very much in the DNA of that company to love cars.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:32David Pierce?

  Wasn't it Jobs who got the, like, the new Mercedes every six months so that he didn't have to have a license plate?

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 15:37David Pierce?

  Uh, yeah, like, that's the, "Make a car without a license plate, Apple." Like, there it is. We did it. But that's, like, I keep coming around to this question of, was this ever going to work? It is so, for Apple, a backwards way of making great products, which is just like, "We found a huge market, let's go do something there."

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:57David Pierce?

  But I do also think if you twist the world a little differently, and self-driving technology is much further along, and the regulation is much further along, and we're doing better at all of that, I think it's not crazy to imagine that at some point we are due for a big reinvention of what a car is.

• 16:12Nilay Patel?

  But also, again, I'm just gonna, I wanna come back to this. Johnny Ive sat Tim Cook down in 2015

• 16:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Nilay Patel?

  in a fake car and said, "What I'd like to do is build a $100,000 bus with no steering wheel." And they were like, "Let's spend 10 years on this." And that is, that's not just backwards, right? That's like, we're not even gonna move the market to, like, we're not even gonna move enough units to make revenue to make this worth it in the end.

• 16:40David Pierce?

  Right. I mean, we just talked the other week on the show about the fact that the market for $100,000 SUVs turns out to not be huge. And it's hurting a lot of companies because everyone who wants a $100,000 electric SUV Already got one and there aren't very many of them.

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  They're doing dumb stuff in their Hummers.

• 16:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  They're not gonna buy, they are not gonna buy a bus.

• 16:59David Pierce?

  No.

• 16:59Nilay Patel?

  And the, the real market for cars is coming down, weighed it back down to earth and to operate at scale. I think you do to sell a hundred thousand dollar car for Apple, you do need it to drive itself. So then you can't get it to drive itself and now you gotta make a fifty thousand dollar car or seventy thousand dollar car. And now you are in just some of the most overheated territory that exists in cars. You're up against luxury, you're up against BMW and Mercedes and Audi, like all those companies, Lexus. You got your own self-driving Lexuses already. Like if you're Apple and you have a self-driving Lexus, you have to be like, can we make something better than the Lexus?

• 17:35David Pierce?

  Did we just do it already?

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you could just buy, Apple could just buy Lexuses, put an Apple logo on them and resell the Lexus in Apple car. And that I think is like a real problem for them.

• 17:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  The thing that I keep coming back to, that same moment 10 years ago, uh, that is when like the height of their weird TV ambitions.

• 17:58David Pierce?

  Well, it was, it was really when Johnny was feeling himself the most. It was like peak Johnny Ive in terms of just having insane ideas about what everything should be. And some of those things were the butterfly keyboard and some of those things were the Apple Watch. And it just like, Apple had a real weird moment for a couple of years there because Johnny Ive was both kind of disengaging and just sort of lobbing insane ideas into Apple's design studio at all times.

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  This is, I believe.

• 18:24David Pierce?

  The most expensive one, I think.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  I believe this is, this moment has been described as when Apple thought it was a fashion company.

• 18:31David Pierce?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  Right, and they had hired a bunch of fashion executives and the sort of like computer nerds were like, you should make the MacBooks thicker and work well. And they're like, what if they had no ports? Sold all the ports back to you at thirty nine dollars a piece and the keyboards didn't work. Oh, also, we're gonna make the phones so thin that they have no battery life, huh? And like that fashion conception of the company was, was real, like that was a real thing that happened at Apple. And this turn lately from the company is much more like, we make computers, like we make so much computers, we made a face computer. Like it's the most, there's nothing fashion about the Vision Pro, except that it looks like a pair of expensive ski goggles. But I don't think that is fashion in the way that

• 19:13David Pierce?

  No.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  The twenty fifteen Apple would have thought about it as fashion.

• 19:16David Pierce?

  Right, Hermes is not making one of those for you anytime soon.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  We did, there was a tweet today of a man who wore the Vision Pro to his wedding.

• 19:28David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  Vee Song showed it to me and she, and the bride is just like, "What are you doing?"

• 19:33David Pierce?

  That's love right there. That is love.

• 19:36Nilay Patel?

  The look on her face is very, it's exactly what you'd expect.

• 19:40David Pierce?

  You could read his vows, though. They'd be right there, right in front of you.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. That would be so-

• 19:44David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying. You could have it on a window. Look at her, look at the vows. She can see her eyes, the googly eyes. I'm in on this.

• 19:50Nilay Patel?

  Don't do this. I don't know. Don't do this. If you're listening to this, David is joking and he's proposing a bad idea. That's not an instruction. Uh, the 2015 Apple, the weird fashion Apple, uh, the thing that was happening like right next in the company at the same time was they were, they were still trying to make good on this promise that Steve Jobs had figured out the TV.

• 20:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 20:18Nilay Patel?

  And so like the thought experiment I've been thinking about since reading about the car getting shut down, it's like, what if they just made a TV?

• 20:24David Pierce?

  Hmm. What if they put all those resources at a television?

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. What if they were just like, "It's a great TV and it has a built-in cable service and you're gonna pay us a monthly fee to have the sickest TV in your house." And like, and it probably would have, uh, taken all the market share from the high end of the TV industry, because that's what Apple does. And they would have had a business, like a real business, selling the thing that people like.

• 20:48David Pierce?

  And ironically, in the same way that the self-driving car world has not gone the direction Apple expected, the TV world has gone exactly the way you would want it to if you're Apple.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:00David Pierce?

  Like TVs are a services business. TVs are sort of slowly inching towards becoming the center of a smart home, which we know Apple is very interested in. TVs are a hub device for lots of other devices. Like, in a way, it actually makes more sense today for Apple to try to build a television than it ever has in the past. Both for Apple's business and just like the world.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:18David Pierce?

  And it is really interesting to think, like, what if they had spent $10 million trying to build the greatest TV the world has ever known? Instead of trying to build a car that actually I don't think there was ever really gonna be any real demand for anyway.

• 21:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, you know, the arguments against TV at that time, uh, were the TV upgrade cycles are too long. And the margins are too low.

• 21:39David Pierce?

  Right.

• 21:40Nilay Patel?

  And it's like- Those are good arguments at the time. Now, it's like, yo, do you know how long the iPad upgrade cycle is? 1,000 years. No one upgrades. And they're like, I have an iPad. It does the three apps I need. Sometimes I can circle things. I'm gonna have this iPad.

• 21:56David Pierce?

  My mom is finally hitting the point where some of her apps won't update on her iPad. So she's starting to think about it. And I was like, okay, how old do you think it is? She was like, I don't know, like, it's probably like, four years old. Eight and a half years old, her iPad. And it's just now to the point where she's like, it's been a little slow for a while, but now there's actually a handful of things I can't do. And I was like, honestly, the fact that you just made it eight and a half years without even really thinking about it on this device is pretty.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's a credit to Apple, right? They do the software updates, the things last, like, all credit to them. But that's very funny. That they were so worried. This is a reason not to do TV. And now it's like, people hold on to their phones for a million years. They hold on to iPads. And all of their revenue is services. And it's like, oh, you could have just had that business. This whole time, you could have had that business instead of allowing, I don't know, Roku to become a huge competitor, instead of allowing Amazon to be the number one provider of cheap TVs to everybody.

• 22:48David Pierce?

  And the ad business on TV is booming, which Apple has been perpetually interested in building a real ad business. Like, it's kind of, it's all sitting there.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  It's just very funny to me to be like, they, all the reasons they didn't do a TV were like, worse reasons to not do something than all the reasons they should not have made a car. Like, I'm sure people are gonna laugh at us that we start talking about the car and we ended up with Apple should make a TV. I think Apple should make a TV, but they should have done it a million years ago. Instead of this thing, which some of the reporting here is fascinating, that one of the reasons they had the car project was because the engineers were bored after doing the watch, wanted the next big thing, and Tim Cook didn't want them to go to Tesla. And it's like, well, if you got a bunch of engineers and you're like, do a fake car, like, you haven't accomplished anything.

• 23:33David Pierce?

  Build me a thing Johnny and I can sit in.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  It's like, there's no, you literally now at this point have not accomplished anything.

• 23:40David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  But even at the time, it's like, all we, all, we're spending money and you not going to Tesla. Is a weird, there's a weird logic in there.

• 23:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Because it's not like they were, they were working on the iPhone the whole time. They were working on a car that wasn't shipping.

• 23:56David Pierce?

  Right. Well, and I also, I, I wonder how much the part of the story that is all these folks being moved to generative AI is actually about just sort of being smart about resources in a complicated time in the economy. I would believe that in almost every case, that it actually makes more sense for Apple to have its highly paid employees working on a thing that everyone agrees is going to be a gigantic growth industry in a lot of ways in the next decade versus kind of continuing on this lark.

• 24:27David Pierce?

  But it's Apple, like Apple can afford to do both those things at the same time if it wanted to. So it does mean that at some point there was someone within Apple who was just like, it's time to call this.

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that person was Tim Cook.

• 24:37David Pierce?

  I think you're probably right.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  I think he's like, I'm no closer to this couch moving than I was before.

• 24:43David Pierce?

  And also Siri, potentially worse than 10 years ago.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  Uh, like, dude, I have put, uh, the chat GPT shortcut on my action button. And it's just like very obvious what Apple should do with Siri.

• 24:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. Kill it and give it to chat GPT.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  They should buy OpenAI. Like, I don't know, Siri just now makes horrifying videos of people lighting things on fire.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's, Siri, show me a picture of my family. And it's like, which is, sorry, I, I just keep, I keep looking at videos generated by Sora, by OpenAI. And I'm like, this shouldn't threaten anyone because all of these videos are slightly terrifying.

• 25:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  You see the one of the guy smoking?

• 25:20David Pierce?

  No.

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  Where he like magics the cigarette up in his hand and it's sort of like lights on fire and then it brings it to his mouth.

• 25:25David Pierce?

  It's badass.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 25:27David Pierce?

  I love that.

• 25:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I just want to read this line from the Time Feast, which again, uh, is full of just cutting asides effectively.

• 25:33David Pierce?

  The story's really good. We'll, we'll put it in the show notes. It's, everyone should read it.

• 25:36Nilay Patel?

  Um, but at the end of it, I mean, just, I'm just gonna read it to you. Apple's dead car project will be survived by its underlying technologies.

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  It's like, oh, now you're just writing an obituary.

• 25:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 25:51David Pierce?

  It was loved by many in the community.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, this is the other cutting line. In your interviews on Wednesday with the New York Times, people who worked on the project praised the decision to shutter it. That's bad.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  Brutal.

• 26:01Nilay Patel?

  That's bad.

• 26:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's a lot. I think it is fascinating to consider, what if they built the other thing? It's fascinating to consider this decision in the context of deciding to launch the Vision Pro.

• 26:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  Which by all accounts, you know, I think some people have given it back. There are some reports on the return rates. There's some, but like, people know what it is now. No more mystery, no more hype balloon. It's a VR headset that some people really like and some people do not. And they have a long way to go for that to become a mainstream project. And it's like, you decided to launch this thing that kind of doesn't work. Just to learn something about what you need to do.

• 26:37David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  And you never shipped one midsize crossover.

• 26:41David Pierce?

  I mean, I actually don't think that's that complicated. And we should move on from this. This is, the Apple car is, uh, going to loom large in my life forever. So I'm sure we'll talk about it again. But I think with the Vision Pro, I see two big differences. One is that it's a thing Apple can just do, right? Like, you can't just put a car on the road and see what happens. Uh, we've seen a bunch of that. It's gone real bad.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:05David Pierce?

  And, uh, Apple, to its credit, not interested in playing that kind of game. But it's also a lower stakes thing for Apple to try to figure out in so many ways, right? It's, it's an ecosystem Apple can control. It's a game it can sort of play on its own at its own pace. You don't have to be responsive to this gigantic car market that is moving in lots of directions all at the same time. Like, I, I had the same thought that both of these things feel like unfinished experiments. And it's interesting that one launched and the other didn't. But it also seems like the experiment that is the Vision Pro is a lot easier to tolerate being a mess than a self-driving car.

• 27:47Nilay Patel?

  Fair, fair, but I just think there's some part of Apple that's very different. Right? That's like, well, let's see what happens, right? Like, that's not Apple. And I think with the Vision Pro, there's like a, there's a gap between how the company's talking about that product as though it is finished in the future and the reality of that product, which is, well, this is as good as it gets. Yeah, agreed. Right? Like, let's see what happens in, like, the Apple Watch. Let's see where this needs to go versus the car, which is just 10 years of... Where it needs to go is away.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should take a break. When we come back, Warren Finer is going to join us and we're going to talk about what happened to Supreme Court this week.

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• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Lauren Feiner here. Welcome, Lauren.

• 29:53Speaker 07

  Thanks.

• 29:54David Pierce?

  First time on The Vergecast?

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, excited about it.

• 29:57Nilay Patel?

  Lauren is our brand-new policy reporter here at The Verge. Very exciting because the policy news is off and running already in 2024, and it's an election year, so welcome.

• 30:07Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  Nope, no pressure.

• 30:10Nilay Patel?

  And when I say the policy news is already up and going, this week, there was a very big Supreme Court hearing about two bills in Texas and Florida that purport to regulate how big platforms can do content moderation. The listeners are not going to be surprised to know that I think both of them are blatantly constitutional because they're government speech regulations at their core, and that's why they're in front of the Supreme Court. Tell us what's going on with that hearing, how it got there, where we are.

• 30:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, so these laws, each of them are a little bit different, but they're both essentially trying to get the tech platforms, you know, think of the major platforms, Meta, Google, YouTube, Twitter, or now X, to regulate, to enforce their policies in ways that would be consistent or not discriminate by viewpoint between different users. So they're basically trying to tell the platforms what they have to host on their sites.

• 31:08David Pierce?

  And the genesis of both of them is like the worries about conservative censorship on social media, right? Is that where both of these came from?

• 31:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, they were enacted in 2021 after Donald Trump notably was kicked off of major platforms after January 6.

• 31:27David Pierce?

  Okay, so it was literally a direct response to that?

• 31:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, pretty direct. But, you know, I think these censorship concerns have been existing in the Republican Party for a while, so I don't think that's necessarily the only thing, but definitely drove a lot more conversation around that.

• 31:41David Pierce?

  Okay. And this case seems like it was made to go to the Supreme Court.

• 31:45Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:46David Pierce?

  Right? Like, this has kind of always been, you've been saying this sort of all along, like, it was destined to be one of the ones.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  Not to get too into the procedural history here, but what you have is a law in Texas and a law in Florida. They're indifferent. Court systems, like they're in different circuits. So I think it was Texas got stayed and Florida got to go through. And then the appeals courts disagreed and then that's how you get to the

• 32:09David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 32:10Nilay Patel?

  The Supreme Court.

• 32:10David Pierce?

  So it's like a who's right about what this should be.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like in this, in this corner of the country, this bill is going through and in this corner of the country, the court's saying it's unconstitutional. You've got a circuit split, you've got a First Amendment problem. Clarence Thomas, would you like a word like?

• 32:25David Pierce?

  And he's been begging for this kind of case for years now.

• 32:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Um, so that actually, I think is the, the piece of the puzzle, I think is the most important. These are conservative states with a conservative, where governors, conservative attorney generals, they're mad that Donald Trump gets kicked off the platforms. And in response, they pass these laws that on their face are like, here are some rules we think the platforms should follow. And then on, in the details are like, and here's how we would like you to moderate Facebook.

• 32:53Speaker 07

  Right, right.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  Which is just, again, straightforwardly a government speech regulation, right? But there, it's conservatives making the government's speech regulation. So in the run up to this, did anybody reckon with that? Cause usually the conservatives don't like a regulation. It's my understanding of conservative principles.

• 33:13Speaker 07

  I mean, you've got a lot of really strange alliances or, you know, just seeing where people stand on this. Because even NetChoice has a lot of conservatives.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  NetChoice is the lobbying firm.

• 33:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, NetChoice is the trade association that represents like pretty much all the major platforms. Um, and they're the ones that have brought this to the Supreme Court essentially. Um, and you know, they have conservatives, um, high up in their organization and, you know, they feel strongly that this shouldn't be law. Um, so I think where you see people netting out on this, uh, varies a lot. Um, it's, you know, no longer something I think that we really see falling on like conservative or liberal. It's really based on, you know, other forms, like is it more populist? Or is it more just like traditional conservative?

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  That's one of the things that I just think is utterly fascinating about this is these platforms are really big. They have the, they have the revenues of a country. Like they, I think Facebook has more revenue like by GDP than like some countries.

• 34:14David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Google definitely does. Like, these are just big, rich companies. They're global. It's hard to think about who or how you could regulate them. They don't have competition, which is weird. Uh, someone from YouTube is gonna like, jump through the wall and be like TikTok. But like, not really, you know? Uh, and then in particular, in the, in the sort of Donald Trump moment, they all took the same action.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  And so it's like, they're not even competing to have like, we have the platform with the most Donald Trump. Like, they all took the same kind of action. And it's like, who would regulate them? And it's ve- it's just, to me, it's particularly strange that you have conservative states who are like, we're gonna just pass regulations about these platforms. And it, I think for most people, that it's counterintuitive, but like you're saying, there's other ways of perceiving these laws. Like, far more populist. Um, obviously, like, hating on big tech companies is very popular in Washington DC.

• 35:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think you're actually seeing like another weird alignment on just like the competition question here. Um, because we've seen some like more, usually more liberal like, um, uh, competition groups saying like, "Hey, you know, we don't necessarily love these laws, but we're concerned about them being struck down." And then what that means for just never being able to regulate the tech companies.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 07

  So I think you have like another weird alignment where you see like more liberal groups saying something like that. Um, and kind of taking, uh, the Republican AG's side, even if they don't totally agree. But just being more fearful about what would happen if, you know, these laws are struck down and what that means for the future of tech regulation in general.

• 35:52David Pierce?

  There's been a lot of that over the last few years, I think, where, where there are some people who are like, "I want regulation, but not this." And then others who are like, "We can't over-regulate, but we have to regulate." It's like, wait.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 36:05David Pierce?

  Everybody's trying to find this like, maybe impossible middle ground that everyone is convinced exists. And you had a great quote in the piece you wrote, leading up to the, the hearing on Monday, where they were basically like, "I've never seen the regulation that does what I think needs to be done, but I'm still convinced that it exists or is possible." And I think we've now spent a long time. Trying to figure out if it's possible and it doesn't necessarily seem like we're any closer to it than we were of like this nuanced, perfect thing that addresses the right things and not the wrong things. And a lot of what they talked about in this hearing was all the wrong things that this, these bills might address if they're put into law. And I don't know, it just all feels like every time we try to do this in a small way, it all becomes

• 36:49David Pierce?

  sort of the size of the universe because that's what happens on these platforms. And everybody just kind of like runs and hides and no one knows who they're going to end up with at the end of it. It's very strange.

• 36:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that's what you saw a lot of the justices struggling with on Monday was just like, where does the, where does this end? Like, if we strike down these laws, can we have no tech regulation then? And I think that's what concerned them about how these cases were brought to them is like, do we have to make like a huge sweeping statement on future regulation? Or can we like tailor this to certain companies and or like certain forms of companies that are really engaged in like expression?

• 37:29David Pierce?

  What was the vibe of the hearing like? I think the Supreme Court justices have been pretty honest over the years about not being the greatest at understanding technology. Like, I think it was Elena Kagan who said like, we're not the nine foremost experts on the internet not that long ago. And

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out that that's bad.

• 37:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, you should try harder.

• 37:51David Pierce?

  Get Gen Z on the Supreme Court now. Let's go.

• 37:53Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, like, you're nine unelected weirdos who get to decide everything about American life? Figure out how to use your phone, man. Like, I don't know.

• 38:01David Pierce?

  I agree. I'm with you. But they're still, and I think part of why we've seen the Supreme Court not take these huge stances yet is because of that. They seem sort of unwilling to make things, make big sweeping gestures.

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  I just don't buy caveman lawyer. Like, figure it out, dude.

• 38:17David Pierce?

  Oh, sure. No. Listen, this is, if we litigate, is the Supreme Court a good idea?

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  How will we use our abundant power? Like, shut up. I don't know. You're there. You're there for life. All right, sorry.

• 38:28David Pierce?

  But what was it, what was it like in the room, like actually kind of watching them ask these questions and try to figure this out in real time? What were the vibes like?

• 38:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I wasn't in the room directly, but just listening to the arguments, I think, and especially compared to last year when we had Gonzalez v. Google, which was a case about Section 230.

• 38:45David Pierce?

  Which the Supreme Court ended up pretty much just punting on. They're like, "Ah, we don't know."

• 38:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think it was those arguments where Kagan said that quote that you said. And, you know, those arguments, you could tell they're really struggling with like, how does the technology work and what are the implications? And so that was a question I had going in, was like, are we going to see the same thing this time? But what First Amendment experts I talked to before the hearing told me were basically like, you know, this is really a case about the First Amendment, whereas like, that was Section 230, that was a little bit more in the weeds. This court, they know the First Amendment. They're pretty strong on the First Amendment. So, you know, I think there was a feeling that they would be on a little bit more stable ground there, just like knowing what they would be talking about or the sorts of questions they should be asking.

• 39:33Speaker 07

  And yeah, it's about the technology and like, how things work, but fundamentally, it's a First Amendment question about, you know, can you regulate businesses around speech? So I think we saw more of that confidence in this hearing compared to the Gonzalez arguments, where, you know, you were more able to see like, they're asking questions that get to the heart of the First Amendment. And yeah, so I think there was more of a sense that they knew what they were coming in here wanting to do. But at the same time, I think they were struggling with figuring out how they were going to rule on this, because the cases came to them as facial challenges, meaning that NetChoice

• 40:15Speaker 07

  is basically asking for kind of an all or nothing ruling here. Like, can you just say like, this category of law is bad? As opposed to saying like, you know, we think that this, these laws as applied to these companies or these circumstances should not be allowed.

• 40:36David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 40:36Speaker 07

  And that would give them a little bit more flexibility. So I think what you saw was the justices kind of prodding at what are the like outward bounds of what we could do here. And, you know, we heard them asking about Etsy and Uber, and it's like, what do these companies have to do with anything? But I think that's where you see them trying to figure out like... Is there a way to do this where we don't preclude any regulation of the tech companies? And like, maybe we focus in on the companies that really are engaged in speech?

• 41:06David Pierce?

  What did Etsy and Uber have to do with anything?

• 41:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think basically they're saying like, you know, can this apply to like any tech company? Like, you know, Etsy has some speech in that, you know, you could leave comments on a seller's site or something like that, or Uber, you can chat with the driver.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  I will just point out, Etsy is one of the most dramatic websites in the entire, like, it is constant moderation.

• 41:31David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, all the time. Casey Newton, a platformer, and Zoe reported out that in the middle of the Israel-Palestine war, Etsy is like moderating whether or not you can sell stuff that says "from the river to the sea" on it. That's a straight content moderation. Like, should the government force a store to carry products it doesn't want to sell? It's like an open question. The justices being like, "What about Etsy?" Is like, no, dude, like Etsy is full of content. It's full of user-generated content that the company moderates.

• 42:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, of course this touches Etsy. And there was a moment in this hearing where there was like some debate about what a website is. And I had the reaction like, well, this is why the verge exists. Like, the Supreme Court is like, "What is a website?" I was like, "Well..."

• 42:18David Pierce?

  You know, like, just comes Kool-Aid Manning into the room. It's like, "I'll tell you."

• 42:22Nilay Patel?

  Our publication was founded the insight that knowing what a website is will be very important to the future of the world. Here we are. And then lawyer for NetChoice was like, "We can just set aside Gmail and these other problems you've raised, because this law definitely covers websites." And I was like, "Gmail's a website. Famously a website." That's how most people experience Gmail. And you just have this like, really fine sort of

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  philosophical delineation of things that all feel like the same thing. And like, the Supreme Court inventing these categories. And it felt to me like they wanted to find a category that was like, "What if we just regulate Facebook?" Right, and I believe they kept calling them the classic social media networks. As though that was like a well-defined.

• 43:13David Pierce?

  It's like in the antitrust thing where all of these fights end up being about market definition.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:17David Pierce?

  It feels like with so much of this stuff, it's just how do you draw the boundaries around this thing? That we can talk about Facebook and Reddit and X and a couple of other things without talking about any comment anyone leaves anywhere on the internet. And it just seems it's so leaky.

• 43:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:37David Pierce?

  As you get down and it just gets, it just gets murkier and murkier as you get bigger. And I think the question of like, can the government tell Facebook how to moderate Facebook? Is again, sort of on its face unconstitutional.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  Right, and by the way, Lauren said facial challenge. Literally that is what that refers to.

• 43:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Like on its face is this law unconstitutional.

• 43:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  And it not as applied or like in this place, the government uses law to do this thing that's bad. Which is the justices, I think, were kind of openly hoping that maybe they could just like kick it back to the court and like do some other stuff or the case be brought in some other way based on some thing that had actually been done. As opposed to this big question of like, speech regulation's good or bad? Because they kind of want to be like, sometimes good?

• 44:18Speaker 07

  Yeah. Also, the courts stopped these laws from going into effect so early on that there's not really a super-developed record for the justices to look at or, you know, to see in the real world like, well, what sort of bad things happened under this law or what sort of good things happened? So, you know, I think some of them were grasping at like, okay, well, what do we even do with this? We don't really know how this will work out.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  We have some clips from the argument of various justices asking what I would call searching existential questions. This bookstore's one is interesting. It's Amy Coney Barrett. What's she trying to ask here?

• 44:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, so Amy Coney Barrett was basically trying to get at like, are... You know, if you're talking about how these platforms organize content, isn't that just a judgment? Like, isn't all organization judgment? So that's what she was trying to get at here. And she was giving the example of a bookstore as kind of an analogy. So we could listen to what she said there.

• 45:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's from the clip.

• 45:15Speaker 08

  They have to present information to a consumer in some sort of organized way and that there's a limited enough amount of information that the consumer can absorb it. And don't all methods of organization reflect some kind of judgment? I mean, could you tell, could Florida enact a law telling bookstores that they have to put everything out by alphabetical order and that they can't organize or put some things closer to the front of the store that they think, you know, their customers will want to buy?

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  So I just want to point out, it is very likely that the Ron DeSantis version of Florida passes a law.

• 45:48David Pierce?

  I was about to say the same thing.

• 45:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, that is totally in character for 2024 Florida.

• 45:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. And eventually they'll ban all books that start with D, like, just for some reason.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's Disney, get them out of here. By the way, DeSantis now on the record saying our "Don't Say Gay" bill went too far because too many books are getting banned. It's like, well, that's what happens, dude.

• 46:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Nilay Patel?

  That's why we don't ban books in America. It's just a thing that happens. So that, to me, right, is if you have any kind of algorithmic, if you have a platform with tons and tons of content, you have any kind of algorithmic filtering, you need, you have to have it, otherwise it'll be a fire hose of everything and that will make your platform unusable. And so the distinction there that I think I struggle with, everybody struggles with, is it makes sense to say you can't tell the bookstore owner how to organize the bookstore. When you get to an algorithm saying, here's some stuff that we think you will engage with, is that like an editorial First Amendment decision? I think the argument some people make is like, that's not. Like, that should at least be transparent

• 46:52Nilay Patel?

  or we should at least give people some control over it or these companies are so powerful that the government does have some interest in being like, here's how those should work. But I, I don't know, like, it seems like when we talk about this realignment, you, you mentioned liberal anti-trust people. That's Tim Wu, who's been on the show. He's the one who's like, these are just algorithms. They're not like a newspaper, regulate away. Where did the court come down on that?

• 47:19Speaker 07

  You know, I think we don't know yet where they fall on it. I think, you know, through that questioning, I think we could infer that Amy Coney Barrett is a little bit skeptical of how organization is different from speech itself. Because she's saying, is an organization a judgment? Mm-hmm. And, you know, we saw Florida's solicitor general, who was arguing this, say like, "Well, you know, the organization is really different here." And he later said, you know, "This is, you know, we're not saying how platforms have to organize their content." But then in kind of the same breath, is talking about how the law does talk about shadow banning, which is inherently organizing content.

• 48:03David Pierce?

  Right. Shadow banning is just taking the book and putting it all the way at the back of the bookstore.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  And importantly, not telling the book.

• 48:09David Pierce?

  Right. Right. Well, and I think, to your point, one of the things that it seems like is being talked about kind of underneath all of this is that it seems like what these bills want is for it to be a lot more work to ban somebody or remove content, and that it should essentially have to be a person who presses the button and then fills out a form about why they press the button.

• 48:31Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:32David Pierce?

  And I think part of the outcome of that would very clearly be to make it harder to do that moderation, just because you can't have an algorithm that just pulls stuff out. You essentially have to document every single time that happens. And also to make it so that it is more transparent, but sort of more arduous in the name of being more transparent. So I think they want to make it look less like a series of algorithms that can make these kinds of decisions, and more like literally people curating a bookstore. And then I think you're having a very different conversation about what all of this looks like. But that's just so far away from how these systems work now. And I think one of the things that the tech companies have argued, right, is that this thing you're arguing for, where there has to be like a person in a room writing a paragraph about every single post that we take off of Facebook, is like preposterous and impossible, right?

• 49:17David Pierce?

  And so it just feels like, I don't know, I don't know how to connect those ideas in my head that we're talking about algorithms, but we're also talking about a person who is like, "Let me tell you why I kicked your post off of Facebook." "You were mean to everybody."

• 49:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, the transparency thing, I think they didn't get into as much in these arguments as the, what are called the must carry provisions, that platforms have to carry certain content. But I think that's definitely an important element of it, too. And I think, you know, you could see why someone would want to know, if they're kicked off a platform, why that happened, or, you know, why something's not being shown to their followers as much. But I think the tech companies would say, like, "That's a huge, like, resource suck." And also, maybe it's going to make it harder for newer entrants to do, to do that, because, you know, yeah, Facebook can tell everyone, "Here's why you were kicked off our platform," but a newer platform is not really going to have the resources to do that.

• 50:13David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, and one of the arguments that has been made, kind of around all of this, is that any of these regulations just entrench the huge platforms that can afford to do this kind of moderation and take on the litigation risk and pay all the lawyers. Whereas if you want to start a new thing, good luck. You're going to get sued by everyone who doesn't like a post that you do.

• 50:30Nilay Patel?

  But this is the alignment problem, again, I don't want to say alignment problem because it's an AI phrase. This is the weird political, like, shuffle that's happening, is like, the conservatives are like, "What if we had a bunch of regulated monopolies?"

• 50:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  So we'll have like, four companies, and they'll just like, "Do what we say." And then a bunch of liberal academics who are like, "We should have more competition." And like, "What if we also did some speech regulations?" And it's like, what is happening?

• 50:54David Pierce?

  Do you hear yourselves, CF?

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, wait, what is going on here? Like, I don't, who are you people? Have you, did you, did you all, like, literally wake up in the wrong house today? Like, I don't understand what's going on. I think we heard a lot of echoes of that split on sort of the right flank of the court. And it's a 6-3 court, so it's like, the whole court is a right flank right now. But you have far more conservative members on that majority, and less conservative members.

• 51:20Nilay Patel?

  And Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas were like, these are common carriers, they have to carry everything. Thomas kept on bringing up Section 230 like over and over again because he hates it so much. Like, he was just like sputtering and everyone's like, that has nothing to do with this. And then you heard Brett Kavanaugh say that, like, to me, like, you know, I'm old, like, the funniest things that would like get said in the Slashdot forums when people would get banned on the Slashdot forums, like, you're censoring me. And somebody like, the government, only the government can censor you. You don't have any First Amendment, right? It's like, this is like old internet forum poster stuff. So Alito is saying, isn't content moderation just another word for censorship? And that's very Orwellian, like,

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  we've like, made this fake name for this horrible thing. And we have a clip of Kavanaugh arguing with Alito and saying, hold on, can we play that clip?

• 52:10Speaker 09

  I just want to follow up on Justice Alito's questions. And I think he asked a good, thought-provoking, important question and used the term Orwellian. When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not private individuals. Maybe people have different conceptions of Orwellian, but the state taking over media, like in some other countries. And in Tornio, we made clear, the court made clear that we don't want to be that, that country.

• 52:40David Pierce?

  In Supreme Court parlance, that's such a sick burden.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  Maybe you have a different definition of Orwellian that's stupid and wrong. Have you actually read George Orwell, sir?

• 52:52David Pierce?

  I think starting an insult with so-and-so asked a very good thoughtful question is amazing.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  And it's your fellow Supreme Court justice.

• 53:02David Pierce?

  Fundamentally misunderstands everything about everything. Yeah.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  So that's, right, there's a, that's weird. Like, that's on the right. And that, you can see that split between, should we use some speech regulations? Should we, like, dress them up? Or should we be the place with the First Amendment? Do you, do you see that, like, indicating how it might go?

• 53:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think...

• 53:25Speaker 07

  I think that, you know, if you're seeing like Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett asking these questions, you know, I think you're probably gonna see the liberal justices aligned i- in some way on those kinds of things. Um, you know, I think maybe we'll still see Alito and Clarence Thomas, uh, out on their own.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  Clarence Thomas is gonna issue a one-page dissent that just says, "Fuck Section 230. Sign Clarence." You know, just like in crayon.

• 53:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I mean, I think that's kind of, it's a somewhat good sign for net choice that, you know, they're seeing these alignments. Um, but at the same time, you know, from, uh, analysis I've seen after the arguments, I think, you know, net choice is maybe not gonna get as sweeping of a decision as they had hoped for, um, because the justices were looking for like, you know, where can we regulate tech companies, or where could we at least leave open the option that that could happen? Um, and like, do we really have to rule in a way that says like, any kind of law like this is like, for sure unconstitutional?

• 54:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, this might be just a stupid procedural question, but is this the kind of thing where net choice can come in and say, "We'd like a gigantic, sweeping, epic decision one way or the other. Like, this is the moment. Gavel down on the internet." And the Supreme Court can say like, "No, but we are gonna do this very tiny thing in the middle."

• 54:49Speaker 07

  Pretty much, exactly.

• 54:51Nilay Patel?

  The Supreme Court loves to do. That's their favorite move.

• 54:53David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  By far, like, in the history of the Supreme Court.

• 54:56David Pierce?

  But I mean, in this case, especially like, net choice is very loudly saying, "This is gigantic." And the Supreme Court can be like, "Shut up. We're still gonna do this tiny thing." They can still do that?

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what ways do you think they could do it, Lauren?

• 55:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, um, from what I've seen, it seems like they could probably just, you know, remand this to the lower courts and say like, "You need to develop a fuller record," or, you know, just kind of give more guidance on, you know, how you should be deciding this. Um, so yeah, they can, they can throw it back to the lower courts and just, you know, kind of, or carve out some middle path of how they want to decide this.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the justices did, in the oral arguments, ask the lawyers from both sides several times, "How would you write this opinion?" Like, just straight up, like, "What, what, what would you do?"

• 55:36David Pierce?

  Here's my laptop. You do it.

• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  Because it is such a fundamentally complicated thing.

• 55:41David Pierce?

  Right.

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  In particular, two state attorneys general, when you're like, "Actually write the rule and enforce it," it's pretty easy to trip them up. And the justices were able to trip them up over and over again. For example, let me come back to noted forum poster Brett Kavanaugh.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  That man is definitely like a poster in his eye. You can feel it. Oh, yeah. There is a great Daily Beast headline that was like, "God help us, Brett Kavanaugh might save the First Amendment." Like, that's his vibe.

• 56:09Nilay Patel?

  Literally, he's reminding them that the First Amendment is about the government. Let me play that clip.

• 56:15Speaker 09

  In your opening remarks, you said, "The design of the First Amendment is to prevent suppression of speech," end quote. And you left out, what I understand to be, three key words in the First Amendment, or to describe the First Amendment. "By the government." Do you agree "by the government" is what the First Amendment is targeting?

• 56:36Speaker 10

  I do agree with that, Your Honor, but I don't agree that there is no First Amendment interest in allowing the people's representatives to promote the free exchange of ideas.

• 56:47David Pierce?

  Another sick burn by Kavanaugh, though. Like, seriously, as Supreme Court shadiness goes, like, he's tearing it up.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:54David Pierce?

  Tearing it up.

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  He's just like, "What are you doing, man?" And that's, again, that's on the right. Like, I think you would expect these kinds of questions from the three liberal justices. They're not, obviously, as motivated by the banning of Donald Trump as some of the conservative justices. And then Kavanaugh is just like, "Hold up." Like, "By the government," like, that's the thing, right? And this argument in response that he got, which is the people's representatives, like, our lawmakers, have some... They should pass laws that allow for the free exchange of ideas, is like, kind of a new argument. Right? Like, the idea that we need government speech regulations so that Facebook doesn't suppress...

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's a winding path of logic that I think is like a hard sell.

• 57:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it seems like no one has figured out how to do this in a clean way. How to pass... Speech laws for the internet that don't run afoul of the First Amendment, but do get the sort of outcomes that people want on the internet.

• 57:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 07

  So, I mean, I don't really know what the answer will be if there is a way to do that.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  But this is such a new problem, right? I mean, I think they talked a lot about newspapers in this case. I think one of the, one of the big open questions is can you regulate Facebook like you would regulate a newspaper?

• 58:14Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:15David Pierce?

  And I don't know what the answer will be, but it seems like no, for lots of reasons. But one of them is that, like, imagine if every single person on earth got the same newspaper. Like, maybe we would think about it differently. And that is fundamentally what something like Facebook is. And it, and, and I guess this is where my favorite quote from the whole thing, was it, was it Alito that asked how much YouTube would weigh if it was a newspaper?

• 58:39Speaker 07

  Oh, I forget who it was.

• 58:40David Pierce?

  I think it was Alito. I could be wrong. But one of them asked, if YouTube was a newspaper, how much would it weigh? Which is, on its face, a totally insane question, but actually kind of, in context, makes sense. Because the question is, like, can we talk about these new things in the way that we talked about these old things?

• 58:55Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:55David Pierce?

  And I, I don't know.

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  The answer, by the way, is 50,000 pounds.

• 59:00David Pierce?

  That's how much YouTube would weigh?

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

  The Washington Post literally has a headline.

• 59:03Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  Here's the headline. Here's how much a YouTube newspaper would weigh, Justice Alito.

• 59:07David Pierce?

  That seems low.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  And they, they calculated it at 50,000 pounds.

• 59:11David Pierce?

  Seems low.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  1 billion words of daily YouTube output.

• 59:14Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 59:15Nilay Patel?

  50,000 pounds. That's the answer.

• 59:17David Pierce?

  I mean, fair enough. They're asking the answer, Justice Alito. It's a big newspaper.

• 59:22Nilay Patel?

  It's just a long article. Like, it's very long. Okay. Continue.

• 59:28David Pierce?

  But no, but I think that's, that's kind of been the central question of a lot of these things, right? Is can we talk about these platforms in the way that we've talked about anything else before them? And nobody seems to know the answer to that, even. Like, what is the precedent we're looking at here? Nobody quite knows.

• 59:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that was kind of a question with the, you know, concept of editorial discretion and, you know, talking about a case that came before that looked at the Miami Herald and can they be compelled to print an op-ed?

• 1:00:02Speaker 07

  And, you know, on the one hand, you could see the similarities to the Miami Herald and Facebook. On the other hand, you might think like, does what Facebook's doing, is that really editorial discretion? There's so much information, like, they're not really parsing through all of it. There's just certain things that are flagged or certain things they're looking at. It's, you know, but does that constitute having like an editorial vision?

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think we can confidently say that Facebook does not have an editorial vision. It's just, just people yelling at each other in neighborhoods and Facebook Marketplace.

• 1:00:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  Those, that's.

• 1:00:35David Pierce?

  But that's not what Facebook is there for, right? Like, that's not, they all, at various points, have tried to do editorial things and it mostly goes quite badly.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We should wrap this up. We don't know what's gonna happen. We're expecting an answer in June.

• 1:00:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, probably in June or before then.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  The one thing that I, that didn't come up, that I, I hope someone mentions to the Supreme Court justices, is that there's actually quite a bit of competition. Like, Donald Trump owns a social network. His reaction to being kicked off the platforms was to start his own platform. If you would like to hear from Donald Trump, you, his tweets are available to you. Right? And like, there are, TikTok does exist and for whatever our government currently wants to think about TikTok. It certainly exists right now. And that, to me, is like, well, if you want the platforms with looser rules, you, you can go get them. They're available to you. And that should be, to me, it seems like that's the solution.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  And I think the thing that is probably frustrating to a bunch of folks is that to build a healthy business with happy customers, you usually have to ban the assholes. Like, that's just how it goes, right? But I don't think YouTube is lacking for conservative voices. I don't think Facebook is lacking for conservative voices. But I, but it doesn't seem like, it seems like the, it seems like our government at every level, the Supreme Court, Congress, whatever, all these hearings, constantly forget that many other platforms exist.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  And sometimes they forget that anything but Twitter exists, right? They're like, ask Mark Zuckerberg about Twitter. Do you see any hint of like, a more expansive scope? Is that why they were talking about Uber and Etsy so much? Or was that just confusion?

• 1:02:19Speaker 07

  I think that's a little bit different. But I think on the question of competition, you know, it makes me think about Ken Buck, the Republican representative, who's actually on his way out of Congress. You know, he was a big champion of new antitrust laws for the tech companies. And he did think about it as like, you know what? I do care about censorship on the internet. But I think the way to fix that is to have more competition on the internet, to have more platforms. And so he dealt, he looked at that question from the lens of competition. But, you know, notably, he's leaving Congress. And, you know, his view isn't shared by maybe the majority of Republicans.

• 1:03:04Speaker 07

  I think there is a contingent that does feel like competition might be the answer. But there hasn't been enough brought on board to make these antitrust reforms be able to pass in the House or the Senate yet. So I think, you know, there is, there are like seedlings of that thought. But I don't know how far that's gotten us yet.

• 1:03:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's why all of the stuff happening simultaneously with these cases and the antitrust cases is so interesting, because they so directly speak to each other.

• 1:03:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34David Pierce?

  For exactly what you're talking about. Like, the, the antitrust cases are about the competition that would theoretically solve some of these problems. And by solving some of these problems in other ways with moderation and things like that, we're actually changing the way that the competitive landscape is going to look on the internet. And so these things are just going to keep spinning around each other, it seems like, for a long time, until somebody plants some kind of regulatory or, you know, I don't know, legal flag. And then a lot of things are going to start to fall out, it seems like. And what I wonder for you before we go is, does this feel like it has a chance to be the moment the Supreme Court sort of plants a flag in some way or another? I think

• 1:04:16David Pierce?

  Clarence Thomas, in particular, has been waiting for his chance for so long now to have strong, loud, aggressive feelings about this in official paperwork. And I think there was some indication that this had the chance to be a moment for the Supreme Court to really have a strong opinion where it has been so wishy-washy in other cases. Coming out of the hearing on Monday, do you have any sense, leaning one way or the other, about whether this is going to end up being kind of small or big?

• 1:04:44Speaker 07

  I think, you know, if they take some sort of middle route, I still think even that will be pretty significant because anything that says, you know, these kinds of tech platforms are allowed to decide what they carry on their platforms, that's a big deal.

• 1:05:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 07

  To have that affirmed by the Supreme Court, if that's what happens. And, you know, at the same time, if the court says, you know, we're going to deal with this little piece of it, but we're not going to deal with these other things, I think that's also a big deal because they're saying, hey, we could still regulate the platforms in these other ways, or we're at least leaving open the possibility that there's a constitutional law here that could be created.

• 1:05:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Speaker 07

  And, you know, we'll see that go up to the Supreme Court at some point, too, probably. But at least, you know, we have a better, we'll have a better sense of what's in the realm of possibility or not.

• 1:05:33David Pierce?

  It does seem like we're due for one of these a year.

• 1:05:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36David Pierce?

  For the rest of our lives.

• 1:05:38Nilay Patel?

  Clarence Thomas being like, "Section 230, get out of my face." He hates it so much. She's giving speeches about how much she hates it.

• 1:05:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  And it's actually like many things with Clarence Thomas. Unclear why. That's not like a fully reasoned argument. All right. We'll be through 30 extra minutes of Donkey and Clarence Thomas in a bonus episode. That'll be coming up. Totally kidding. We've got to take a break, but Lauren's going to stick around. We've got a lightning round. We'll be right back.

• 1:06:35Speaker 05

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• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  We're back. 30 minutes about Clary Toms. Here we go. Has anybody ever called him Clary Toms?

• 1:07:40David Pierce?

  Clary Toms. I think that's the last thing you do when you call him Clary Toms.

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  Look, I am very proud to be American. And I think one of the most American things you can do is make relentless fun of the Supreme Court. They're a bunch of weirdos.

• 1:07:52David Pierce?

  And they'll never see it because they don't know how to use their phones.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it doesn't matter who they are, liberal, conservative. Just make fun of them. Just like, what are you nerds doing? It's great. That's my first amendment right.

• 1:08:05David Pierce?

  Love that.

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  Bring it, Clary. All right.

• 1:08:11Nilay Patel?

  Vote Patel. That's my whole platform. I will roast these nerds every day of my term as your president.

• 1:08:20David Pierce?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:08:23David Pierce?

  The Nag platform.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  It was, you should go listen to the audio of the hearing. It's, it's good. It's important. I just think it's funny to make fun of nerds. Okay, uh, cut that part out. All right, lightning round. There's actually a lot in this lightning round.

• 1:08:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Nilay Patel?

  Lauren, you're our guest. Do you want to go first?

• 1:08:40Speaker 07

  Sure. Um, yeah, so I chose the story about, uh, Google CEO saying that the Gemini AI diversity mishap was completely unacceptable. Um, so I thought this was an interesting story because it's basically, if you hadn't seen, um, uh, Google's Gemini-generated racially diverse Nazis, which, uh,

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 1:09:03Speaker 07

  is, uh, kind of offensive for strange reasons.

• 1:09:08David Pierce?

  I just want to say, we talked about this on last week's show for like 45 minutes, and that is such a better summation than anything else we do.

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  Which is strange for various reasons.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  It's so good. It is. I will say, it is, it's also, it's okay to point out, it is hilarious.

• 1:09:25David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Nilay Patel?

  It is the funniest shit in the entire world.

• 1:09:28David Pierce?

  The fact that it happened is funny. The response was funny. The fact that it went all the way up to Sundar Pichai having to like send a long internal memo about it is funny.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Send out a newsletter that's like, Sundar should be fired.

• 1:09:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Nilay Patel?

  Because of the Black Pope that he made. It's like, dude, everybody just like, just turn the knobs down. All of it's funny. Like, open, some very smart people being the dumbest. And carry on.

• 1:09:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think it is, it's a amusing way that this happened. It also could have happened in a way, less amusing way. So I think we're fortunate that it's something that's funny to talk about. But I think Sundar Pichai is clearly seeing this as like, you know, this could have been way worse. And like, we can't keep having these errors. And it just reminds me how like, you know, OpenAI releasing ChatGPT when it did, just like spurred all of these companies like racing to put out their own, uh, you know, competitors. And like, here we are with this like, kind of, I don't know, maybe this was a product of being rushed and, you know, having something really strange and like uncomfortable happening as a result. And, you know, maybe this is some kind of reset for Google thinking.

• 1:10:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 1:10:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38David Pierce?

  Do you remember that phase where Mark Zuckerberg was just reflexively apologizing for everything?

• 1:10:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43David Pierce?

  There was like a two-year phase where anytime anything happened on the internet, Zuck would like do a video in which he like very earnestly apologized. That to me feels like the Sundar Pichai era we're heading into right now. Where he's just like, whatever is happening, I'm so sorry. We're doing our best. I don't understand how we got here or what weird thing we put into Gemini to make it do this, but I'm so sorry and we'll do better.

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  They were like, robot, be less racist.

• 1:11:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:08Nilay Patel?

  And the robot was like, so not racist that we're racist again. Like, that's what we're doing. Uh, I mean, this is to me, every part of this is funny. So, right, like, Google famously did not release its chatbots because they were afraid of bad outcomes and misalignment and bad things happening. OpenAI, as you point out, released it, Google gets kicked in the butt, they start releasing things left and right. And then you have an entire movement of people called effective accelerationists, who are like, no rules, like, all the AI we can, like, do it. And they're the people who are like, Google went too fast here, their AI is too woke. And it's like, this is the thing you want.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  The thing you want is to just like- But not like that. But not with so many black people. And it's like, you guys should shut up.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, you should stop saying what you're saying. It's very revealing. Because the problem with the other AI is it only made white people and you were cool with that.

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  And now it's like-

• 1:12:05David Pierce?

  Cause progress or something.

• 1:12:06Nilay Patel?

  Now you're like, the AI that only makes black people is like, bad. It's like, you should shut up. You should, you should point out to Google that a, uh, that like a racially diverse picture of Nazis is very funny and probably not the intended outcome. And then you should stop talking about how mad you are about it.

• 1:12:24Nilay Patel?

  I just, I just think you should be quiet.

• 1:12:27David Pierce?

  And also, no one is out here with any actual good ideas about what is supposed to happen in any of these cases.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33David Pierce?

  They're like, I want it to be perfectly historically accurate and also help me dream up new things and create things that no human could ever come up with. And it's like, well, what?

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41Speaker 07

  It kind of just makes you think like, okay, maybe this is a really human thing. Like, how do you program? Like, we want diversity, but not in like historically accurate depictions of Nazis.

• 1:12:53Nilay Patel?

  Do you think there's a whiteboard at Google that's just like labeled the Hamilton conundrum? It's like, should Lin-Manuel Miranda be able to use

• 1:13:03Nilay Patel?

  to make Hamilton 2?

• 1:13:04David Pierce?

  Do you remember that drill tweet from a million years ago where he's like, turning a huge dial that says racism and looking at, and looking at the crowd like, I'm a contestant on the prizes, right? Like, that's what Sundar Pichai is doing.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:13:16David Pierce?

  That's where we are.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  Truly, every part of this is funny. I can't get, and I just, I beg you, if you're like, what I'm mad about is the computer made drawings of black people. Just shut up. It will go better for you over time.

• 1:13:31David Pierce?

  Well, and also to your point about Google being forced to catch up on all of this stuff, you've got to assume Sundar Pichai is also sitting in meetings going, this is why we did this slowly.

• 1:13:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41David Pierce?

  You idiots. Like, because Google has had this technology forever. Like, and, and Google loves to remind you that like, oh, what's the T in GPT? Like, we did that. That's a Google thing that we did. It's Transformers, we made them. And Google was taking it very slowly and then OpenAI just like Yolo'd its way onto the internet. And now here we are. And so, like, and like Mark Zuckerberg made the heel turn to being like, I don't care, I just make glasses now. Like, Sundar's next move is just to be like, yeah, morons, this is what you wanted. Welcome to the world you asked for.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  It might be amazing. It might be the best move Sundar ever did.

• 1:14:18David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  Here's what you wanted, morons.

• 1:14:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  Totally out of character. I can't even imagine him saying the word morons. I'm gonna go get like an AI voice cloner.

• 1:14:30Nilay Patel?

  It'll just be Sundar issuing like devastating burns to people.

• 1:14:35Nilay Patel?

  He's a very polite man. We're working to get him on Decoder, and I hope that we didn't just kill that. We'll see what happens. That whole episode of Decoder will be like, will you say the word moron?

• 1:14:45David Pierce?

  Just get him to say each phoneme, and then we can put it together, and he'll say it.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I've got a lightning round. I forgot to mention, the lightning round is sponsored this week.

• 1:14:53David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:54Nilay Patel?

  But not for money, because no one is that dumb. If you would like to pay us money, this is the only time I will say the name of a sponsor. I will sell my integrity if you sponsor the lightning round for money. But we didn't take money this week. We took an excellent, hilarious tip from our friend Christopher, who is this week's sponsored lightning round, who said, "How did you miss this Smeg news?", which is an incredible sentence.

• 1:15:21David Pierce?

  My Smeg Google Alert's really letting me down.

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  If you recall, Smeg is a maker of quirky refrigerators. You know, the retro refrigerator company.

• 1:15:30David Pierce?

  As you do, yeah.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  They have a collaboration with Fiat. They've made a Fiat 500 with a refrigerator.

• 1:15:39David Pierce?

  What?

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  That's true. It's the Smeg 500. On the Smeg website, here's the first line. "What is a fridge doing underneath the bonnet of a Fiat 500?" "Smeg and Fiat merge, form and function to create an extraordinary item for the Fiat 500 Design Collection, because a refrigerator is not just an electrical appliance, and a bonnet is not just a car part."

• 1:16:05David Pierce?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 07

  This seems like an April Fools joke.

• 1:16:07Nilay Patel?

  Then there's a picture of a Fiat 500, and it says, "An iconic place for food", with an arrow pointing to the trunk of the car. This is all true.

• 1:16:17David Pierce?

  I would like to make T-shirts that have, just on the stomach, the phrase, "An iconic place for food."

• 1:16:23Nilay Patel?

  These two made in Italy brands that already met in 1950s. It's like a meet-cute. They've been trying to get a fridge that...

• 1:16:29David Pierce?

  The Smeg 500 sounds like the last NASCAR race that ever happens.

• 1:16:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35David Pierce?

  You win a fridge at the end.

• 1:16:36Nilay Patel?

  For me, Vittorio... This keeps going, by the way. There's a lot here. Thank you, Christopher, again, for sponsoring Lightning Round with this link. CEO of Smeg, Vittorio Bertezzani, he said, "For me, creating the Smeg 500 was above all a matter of personal honor."

• 1:16:56David Pierce?

  Seriously? This is about my family's legacy?

• 1:17:05Nilay Patel?

  Wait, you're not, that's, you said that as a joke. That is the rest of the quote.

• 1:17:10David Pierce?

  Are you serious?

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  I strongly, I strongly believe in this project that pays tribute to the memory of my grandfather. When he founded Smeg after the Second World War, one of his first collaborations was creating refrigerators with Fiat.

• 1:17:25David Pierce?

  Incredible.

• 1:17:26Nilay Patel?

  It's just a whole, whatever, we'll link to it. Thank you, Christopher, for sponsoring the lightning round with the Smeg 500. No thanks to Smeg, who paid us no money for this.

• 1:17:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:17:37David Pierce?

  I don't know anymore. Mine is, so MWC, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  Barcelona.

• 1:17:43David Pierce?

  Barcelona, was this week. Surprisingly newsy, MWC. John Porter and Allison Johnston are on our team. We're gonna have them on Tuesday's show to give us the whole rundown. But the, the most personally exciting thing that happened was we actually got like a first person demo of the Humane AI pin. The mysterious gadget that I'm only, I'm like 90% it's real.

• 1:18:05Nilay Patel?

  It's real now. Sam Sheffer is like making videos on the streets of New York with it. Sam, by the way, I keep, you show it to me. Bring it, bring it over.

• 1:18:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, come on the show, Sam. We'd love to have you back. The people need it. But Allison got a demo, she got to see some of it work and had a really interesting experience with it. Like, the thing about this pin, I'm desperate to actually test this thing out because it seems like they did a lot of cool technology to it. Like, the projector thing seems to work. She had it take a picture and it identified her as a person with a verge lanyard and all the other stuff in the background. Like, seriously impressive technology going in here. But Allison also sort of landed on the question that I think a lot of us have been asking about this device. It's like, what on earth is any of this for?

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48David Pierce?

  Like, you made a neat thing that does some of the stuff that you said it was gonna do. It also was super slow and I think overheated on the show floor.

• 1:18:55Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 1:18:56David Pierce?

  That's like conference demo stuff, whatever, I'll leave that alone. But she kinda got to the end and was like, why? Why is this?

• 1:19:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it does seem so. You can watch a video of it, of that demo, all the places we post videos.

• 1:19:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think I saw it on our TikTok.

• 1:19:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, find a Sporly video place and look for the first. And it's, she asked a question, 19 seconds go by before the answer. Oh. It's brutal. That's not good.

• 1:19:24David Pierce?

  In which she like made small talk with the person.

• 1:19:27Nilay Patel?

  And then it started talking and interrupted.

• 1:19:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:30Nilay Patel?

  It was like, oh, it's doing. It's like, I don't know about this. She did say, and I think this is a lesson to everyone. She's like, this gadget would be so much cooler if this company wasn't so over barreling serious about itself. Right? Like if you're like, this will change the nature of culture. And it's like, you made a laser that says like your name.

• 1:19:50David Pierce?

  Well, what's funny is like, I think there's been this interesting thing now where we have the Rabbit R1 and we have the Humane AI pin. And they are very much like racing each other to be kind of the nifty AI gadget that everybody's excited about. Rabbit's CEO is just like nakedly out there trying to beat Humane to market, which I think is so funny.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:07David Pierce?

  But they've just played this so differently, right? Where Jesse, the CEO of Rabbit, has been out there basically being like, this is like a silly fun thing that we made. We think it's cool. Let's see what happens. Maybe this will be the future. And you're right. And Humane is actually being like, we have changed the paradigm of your life.

• 1:20:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23David Pierce?

  And they're, they just like seem sad in a room together. And it's like, what, what is happening?

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  I feel like they, everyone is doing a Steve Jobs impression, but they never watched any Steve Jobs videos.

• 1:20:34David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:20:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you mean like, it's like, they're doing an impression of, who was it? It was fast spender Steve Jobs, who's like very, very serious all the time and like very intense. And like the real Steve Jobs is like kind of a goofball.

• 1:20:47David Pierce?

  Yeah. If you go back and watch, I went back for some reason, not that long ago, and watched his first iPad reveal.

• 1:20:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52David Pierce?

  It's the most casual, relaxed, like man sitting on a chair using a web browser is the whole vibe of the thing. And it was, yeah, he would make jokes. He was funny. He was silly. Like that was their whole vibe. Yeah. And now everybody remembers him as this like dictator presenter. It's like.

• 1:21:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, he would get on stage like, so these are our competitors' products. They fucking suck. Look at this piece of shit. Like, here's what I made. It's pretty awesome. Right? And like every, like the humane, I don't know. There's something that's like, everyone's doing an impression of the wrong thing.

• 1:21:22David Pierce?

  Even Apple kind of is increasingly getting serious in a way that feels kind of un-Jobs-y.

• 1:21:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think it's they're doing an impression of those like the Johnny Ive design videos because Johnny didn't like to be on stage.

• 1:21:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Nilay Patel?

  So they would make these videos and be like, what it's made, it's plastic, it's very beautiful. It's like, what are you doing? And it's like, that didn't work. What worked was the other guy who was like, you know, I love his records. Now I put a thousand of them in your pocket, huh?

• 1:21:49David Pierce?

  Pulled the MacBook Air out of a sleeve. It was sick. But anyway, so the Humane pin is supposed to ship, I think, at the end of March is the last thing that we've heard. That has slipped a little, but it's close enough that I think we're gonna get these things for real soon. I bought one. I'm very excited about it.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  I can't believe you bought one.

• 1:22:04David Pierce?

  I have so many questions about why I spent $700 on a Humane AI pin.

• 1:22:12David Pierce?

  But I am fascinated by this thing. And every, every little step I get towards being able to make a phone call with a projector.

• 1:22:19Nilay Patel?

  When you kick your kid out of the house at 18 and be like, I don't have money for college. I hope you hand them the Humane AI pin.

• 1:22:26David Pierce?

  I'll frame it. Be like, this is your gift.

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  This is for you in lieu of a college education. This thing, it takes 19-

• 1:22:33David Pierce?

  Sell this, my son, and go on your way.

• 1:22:36Nilay Patel?

  This thing will describe with medium accuracy what you are currently looking at.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  19 seconds later.

• 1:22:44Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I'm the person wearing the Verge liner. That's me.

• 1:22:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. All right, Neel, what's yours?

• 1:22:50Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I think I, I'm gonna pick two. I'm gonna pick two. I'm sorry. I'm gonna pick two.

• 1:22:57David Pierce?

  I'm shocked.

• 1:22:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, one, I'm gonna start with the fun one.

• 1:23:00David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:23:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay. As you all know, Lauren doesn't know, as David knows, Lauren, you're gonna find out, I have one dream as editor in chief of The Verge, which is for David to file a story to me and for me to mark it up with a red pen. That's all I want. Very old school. Very old school. I also would love a Glasswold conference room where we print out the layout of the magazine and I just move the pages around. We don't have a print magazine, so that dream has long since been, I've just had to let it go. You know, I'm never gonna play professional basketball, I'm never gonna move pages of a print magazine around a Glasswold conference room. The New York Mag people have a conference room in this office, like stare at it all the time. They're just moving pages.

• 1:23:40David Pierce?

  Do you ever go just move pages around, just to see if they notice?

• 1:23:43Nilay Patel?

  Blow up the magazine.

• 1:23:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Nilay Patel?

  The red pen thing. No, one thing I could do is I could have David print out his Google Docs and circle them. Sadly, we don't live in the same place, so...

• 1:23:54David Pierce?

  That's not the reason.

• 1:23:55Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear, that's not the reason I don't allow that. So every time a new stylus gadget comes out, I'm like, is this, is this it? Is this the thing that will enable me to like circle stuff? That's all I want. And in particular, circle David's copy in a red pen. The answer for a decade now has been no. We've tried almost every stylus gadget in this way and they don't work. Google just released an update to Android at MWC where Google Docs on an Android tablet, it's called Project Inkwell, you can now markup with a pen.

• 1:24:29David Pierce?

  That's very exciting.

• 1:24:29Nilay Patel?

  The problem is that this requires you to have an Android tablet. It also requires David to file this copy to me.

• 1:24:38David Pierce?

  Well, you know.

• 1:24:39Nilay Patel?

  Challenging problem.

• 1:24:40David Pierce?

  We're getting there.

• 1:24:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm just thrilled about this.

• 1:24:43David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:44Nilay Patel?

  We're getting an Android tablet, we're gonna demo this on the show. It's going to happen.

• 1:24:48David Pierce?

  I'm excited about it.

• 1:24:48Nilay Patel?

  I can't look, I can't see Liam right now. I imagine he's vigorously agreeing with me that we're gonna do a demo of me circling things live on the Vergecast. That's all I want. This is my dream.

• 1:25:00David Pierce?

  We're gonna do it. I would say, based on the history of Google Docs being good at things, I would not get your hopes super high, but I believe in this dream for you and I want you to have it.

• 1:25:10Nilay Patel?

  If you could just add up the number of things that have to be good for this to go well. Android tablets, conceptually.

• 1:25:18David Pierce?

  The Google Docs app.

• 1:25:20Nilay Patel?

  On the Android tablet. Android tablet stylus. Actually, some of the Samsung stylus are pretty good.

• 1:25:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're getting, they're getting there.

• 1:25:26Nilay Patel?

  But does the S Pen support Google Docs markup on Android?

• 1:25:31David Pierce?

  It's okay. You just import it into Samsung's proprietary document viewer and then export it out.

• 1:25:36Nilay Patel?

  It's such a small dream. Just give it to me. Just figure it out. Take all of that energy. Shut down Jem and I put all those engineers on a circle problem. Be like, we'll do the Hamilton conundrum another day.

• 1:25:44David Pierce?

  Maybe now that the Apple car is gone, everybody's working on generative AI highlights. This could be, what's your other one?

• 1:25:51Nilay Patel?

  It's TikTok. We gotta talk about TikTok.

• 1:25:53David Pierce?

  We should talk about TikTok.

• 1:25:54Nilay Patel?

  So they're in a big fight. I believe tomorrow, as you're listening to this, is the drop dead deadline. So Universal Music Group, which has Taylor Swift, Usher, everybody you can think of. Justin Bieber, I believe. I looked at David right now and it's like your favorite.

• 1:26:09David Pierce?

  I can confirm, yeah. Harry Styles, many others.

• 1:26:13Nilay Patel?

  David, the lead of one of David's stories this week was Justin Bieber, so.

• 1:26:17David Pierce?

  It was good stuff.

• 1:26:18Nilay Patel?

  With a photo of Justin Bieber, I want to point out.

• 1:26:20David Pierce?

  What I'm here for.

• 1:26:21Nilay Patel?

  David put a lot of the Bieber.

• 1:26:23David Pierce?

  I spent.

• 1:26:23Nilay Patel?

  On the Verge dot com this week.

• 1:26:24David Pierce?

  Ninety full minutes on Getty Images, looking at pictures of Justin Bieber in public. It's the best thing I did all week.

• 1:26:29Nilay Patel?

  It's a good story. Anyway, Universal own all the biggest artists you can think of. They're in a fight with TikTok over music licensing. They say TikTok is a bully. They don't want to pay the higher rates. There was a first date. That date came. The music went away. The poor woman on TikTok who has all the jobs, her, her sound is gone.

• 1:26:46David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  And so she's just making sad, like increasingly sad TikToks. Her sound being gone.

• 1:26:51David Pierce?

  It's awful.

• 1:26:53Nilay Patel?

  There's like a lot of this happening on the platform. And tomorrow, I believe that the, the time that you are currently listening to this, Friday. That's what it's called.

• 1:27:03David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:27:05Nilay Patel?

  Is the drop dead date when the rest of it goes and TikTok has already started putting, pulling not just Universal's like own music, but anybody who has a publishing deal with Universal, some of the songwriters that are associated with Universal. So even more music is coming off the platform, which I think TikTok thinks it has the leverage.

• 1:27:22David Pierce?

  Which is wild. I mean, one of the stats that I read, and I think a lot of this is really fuzzy, so who knows? But one of the stats that I read is I think it was something like 30% of the songs, but 80% of the videos with music would suddenly go silent. Like, that's a huge number. That's just most of TikTok.

• 1:27:38Nilay Patel?

  Taylor Swift off of TikTok, you've, it's not great.

• 1:27:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Nilay Patel?

  And I think what TikTok is like. We seem to be fine.

• 1:27:47Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know if that's true. There are no numbers. We were trying to do some more reporting on it.

• 1:27:52David Pierce?

  One thing I've seen that's been really interesting the last few days has been a bunch of up and coming artists who now can't promote their own songs on TikTok.

• 1:28:01Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:28:02David Pierce?

  Basically, like, A, having to figure out a new thing to do, and B, kind of pleading with their audience, like, "Keep watching my stuff. Follow me. Like it so that it stays on your for you page." Because if I can't put my song on it and you're not following me, the algorithm is not gonna serve stuff. And this is a thing artists have said for forever, is that like, when they just make a thing where they talk, it doesn't do as well. So they do covers of well-known songs so that they get put into that part of the algorithm, or they do their own songs that people like so they get served to their fans. But if it's just them talking to camera, that doesn't do as well. Like, just historically, that is a thing I've seen a bunch of artists say on TikTok. And now, it's like, if you're an up and coming artist, the place where people find you is TikTok. And so, I think it's just creating this interesting-

• 1:28:46Nilay Patel?

  And that's TikTok's leverage, right? That's what they're basically saying.

• 1:28:50David Pierce?

  But then Universal's leverage is Taylor Swift.

• 1:28:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:53David Pierce?

  And most of the rest of the music people wanna listen to and do stuff. But it's like, that spectrum is going to affect people in so many messy ways.

• 1:29:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Speaker 07

  Also, though, like, not having music on so many TikToks makes TikTok, like, kind of unusable.

• 1:29:08David Pierce?

  That's totally been my experience now. Like, it's like, one out of every two videos is just awkwardly quiet. And it turned out, watching people do TikTok dances with no music is uncomfortable.

• 1:29:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it takes two, a couple of seconds to register that, like, there's no music. It's not that, like, your volume's too low. Yeah.

• 1:29:26David Pierce?

  It's weird. I totally agree.

• 1:29:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm surprised that, you know, YouTube has a much healthier relationship with the Universal. Like, Universal is like, "We're very mad about Fake Drake and AI," and YouTube is like, "We made some stuff for you. Like, we have a council about AI." Like, I'm surprised that YouTube is not doing more to promote shorts in this moment and to say, like, "All these creators from over here," because that is, right now, their competitive advantage, is they have access to all this music.

• 1:29:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, they've been kind of quietly saying things like, "You know, we continue to be a good partner to the music industry," and stuff like that. But it is weird that, like, Lee Or Cohen, who runs YouTube Music, is not out there being like, "You want music? We have all the music." Like, you're kind of right. This is sort of YouTube's best shot-

• 1:30:06Nilay Patel?

  Instagram has the correct deals with the industry. They're not pushing it. I think Universal is basically like, alright, like, we just won't be on TikTok. That'll be the end of that. And like, we have to figure out a new way to promote artists. But guess what we do? We're a record label.

• 1:30:18David Pierce?

  Yeah. There have been ways before.

• 1:30:20Nilay Patel?

  That's historically how we provide value to the artists. Uh, but we'll see. Tomorrow, I think, will be an interesting day because I think it either gets solved or if they pull out even more, I think it actually drags on for quite a bit longer.

• 1:30:33David Pierce?

  I think you're probably right.

• 1:30:33Nilay Patel?

  Alright, do you have another one or should we just?

• 1:30:35David Pierce?

  We should just get out of here.

• 1:30:36Nilay Patel?

  We should get out of here? You don't want to talk about Wendy's dynamic search pricing? No, they said they weren't going to do it. Uh, alright, we've gone over as always. Lauren, thank you so much for joining the Vergecast.

• 1:30:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:30:45Nilay Patel?

  Uh, really fun. We'll have to have you back soon.

• 1:30:48Speaker 07

  Would love to.

• 1:30:48Nilay Patel?

  Whenever Clary Tom's issues his decision.

• 1:30:51David Pierce?

  It's gonna be a mega chill policy year, so we probably won't have much to talk about, I don't think.

• 1:30:55Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it'll be great. Alright, that's it. Alex will be back next week. That's Vergecast. Talk to you.

• 1:31:03David 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.

• 1:31:23Speaker 11

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• 1:31:54Speaker 12

  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.