The problem with Telegram

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss Telegram CEO being charged in a French criminal investigation over content moderation, Yelp suing Google for antitrust violations, a week in AI-generated nonsense, and more. Telegram says CEO has ‘nothing to hide’ after being arrested in France French authorities arrest Telegram’s CEO Why the Telegram CEO’s arrest is such a big deal Telegram CEO charged in French criminal investigation Telegram CEO Pavel Durov faces court questioning in France. French prosecutors explain why they arrested Telegram CEO Pavel Durov How Pavel Durov, Telegram’s Founder, Went From Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg to Wanted Man Can Tech Executives Be Held Responsible for What Happens on Their Platforms? How Telegram played itself Yelp sues Google for antitrust violations TikTok must face a lawsuit for recommending the viral ‘blackout challenge’ California State Assembly passes sweeping AI safety bill Mark Zuckerberg responds to GOP pressure, says Biden pushed to ‘censor’ covid post Google Gemini will let you create AI-generated people again xAI’s new Grok image generator floods X with controversial AI fakes X’s Grok directs to government site after sharing false election info Smart home company Brilliant has found a buyer ESPN ‘Where to Watch’ feature helps find where to stream sporting events Plaud’s NotePin is an AI wearable for summarizing meetings and taking voice notes The maker of the Palma has a new cheaper e-reader The Dyson Airwrap i.d. is a smarter hair curler Snapchat finally launched an iPad app Instagram adds what photos have always needed: words Apple’s iPhone 16 launch event is set for September 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

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• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchess, the flagship podcast, the Boogs Palma Fan Club.

• 1:06David Pierce?

  Again, might be true, like legitimately might be true.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  I have one. I've bought a lot of dumb gadgets because of David recently.

• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know that those are the right decisions.

• 1:21David Pierce?

  Well, you can't read. We should say that upfront. Neelai is famously illiterate.

• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  I hate reading. Hi, I'm your friend Neelai. I love reading and I think you should do more of it. David Pierce is here.

• 1:33David Pierce?

  Hi.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Alex Cranz is here.

• 1:35Alex Cranz?

  I'm just thinking about reading Rainbow now.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's fun when you have a small child, you're like, in reading again? That's a real thing. And what Max wants to read with me most is Calvin and Hobbes, which is, I love it.

• 1:47David Pierce?

  The dream.

• 1:48Alex Cranz?

  That rules.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever tried to read Calvin and Hobbes out loud to another person who doesn't understand the jokes from the literal 1980s? She's like, what's a telephone?

• 2:00David Pierce?

  Kavanaugh Hobbs is definitely a cartoon for adults. Like it is not.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:04David Pierce?

  The jokes in it and, and like the messages in it, I find like deep and important and profound now. And I'm like very old and the, it how, I don't know how to explain any of that to a child.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  Try, try. I just, if you have a kid and you're like, here's what we can do. We can read comic books together. We were at, I already own all these books and we were at an estate sale, like down the street from our house. And we bought the full collection again, because it was so cheap. And I was like, this is what money is for. Like this is why you make it to buy all the Calvin Hobbs books whenever they're available to you.

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  Um, and so she was excited because we bought all these, what appeared to her to be comic books. Um, I encourage you, if you have children to try and just try to read any comic strip. Like first of all, that's bananas. And then these are like the multi layers. Like I'm giggling and she's like, I don't. Is the, is the tiger alive? I don't understand.

• 2:52Alex Cranz?

  Get her in on Kathy.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  And she looked at me.

• 2:55Alex Cranz?

  How she feels about Kathy.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. Um, uh, she looked at me very seriously the other day and she goes, my lion never comes alive. And I was like, well, you're a grown up kid. You're in first grade now.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  Yeah. Work on your imagination, Max. How about that?

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  All right. There's a lot going on this week. It's kind of a, we're two weeks out from the iPhone event. It's, I keep joking. It's like summer's over. That's where we are.

• 3:19David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  I candidly have just like end of summer, whatever. Like that's my brain. Like what if I, what if I just shut it down for a couple of weeks before we ramp up into gadget season? But there's still a lot of news.

• 3:31Alex Cranz?

  A ton.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  And all of it is like policy news, like the, the, the legal systems of the world just keep generating PDFs for me to read on a Boox Palma.

• 3:38David Pierce?

  I mean, literally it's just everyone trying to do the work that they have to do so that they can have a long weekend over Labor Day. Like I'm convinced that's, this is the same thing that happens like right before Thanksgiving. It's just a bunch of people who are like, I need a minute. Let me, let me file all my paperwork. Let me get all the work done. Let me push publish on the thing and then get out. Like nothing is going to happen on Friday. Nothing. Everybody's on vacation. They're like, I did it already. Four day weekend.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  And you're listening to this on a Friday. So get ready.

• 4:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  We're going to recapitulate everyone else's week of work.

• 4:11David Pierce?

  Today. Stop it.

• 4:12Alex Cranz?

  I, I do think like the, the theory falls a little short when we consider France, because they don't do Labor Day, the same.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  I mean, every day in France is Labor Day.

• 4:21Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  They're like, were you counting on the buses today? Uh, strike. Can I just talk about the Bookspammer for one more second? So governments around the world generate PDFs and it is our job to read them. In broad strokes, that's how I think of the Verge policy team's coverage. David made everybody buy a Bookspammer, right? He came to your house and with threat of violence made you buy an e-ink Android phone.

• 4:47Alex Cranz?

  He just knocked on my door, but it was polite.

• 4:49Nilay Patel?

  But it happened.

• 4:50Alex Cranz?

  It happened.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  The other function of the Verge, besides responding to government PDFs, is making people buy stupid gadgets. I'm very confident in this dynamic, like this is how it should be. So I buy a Bookspammer and I'm like, this is how I'm going to do PDFs because so much of my job is reading PDFs. But then you need another piece of software because it's not good at anything by itself.

• 5:11Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  Because it's just a low-end Android phone with an e-ink display. So then you got to get Readwise Reader. And it feels like those two companies should just put it together. Like those are the two things. It's not actually the Bookspammer that people want. It's Readwise Reader on an e-ink screen.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  100%. Could not agree more. And, and like every time Alex and I both go through this, every time we talk to a company that makes e-readers, we say, when are you going to make a decent app for reading things? And every time we talk to a company that makes a reading app, it's like, why don't you make hardware? And at some point, somebody's going to do it and it's going to be great because you're exactly correct.

• 5:50Alex Cranz?

  Didn't Amazon kind of do it?

• 5:51Nilay Patel?

  Right, this is, what I'm arguing for is lock-in.

• 5:54David Pierce?

  I said good software. The word good is so, so, so important in that. Readwise Reader, good software. There's good software out there. Omnivore, free app, good software. Make a, make a thing for it.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Or, or work together with other company that's making the thing. Like if you buy the books, you would not know that Readwise Reader exists and is the thing that unlocks the hardware.

• 6:16David Pierce?

  Right, right.

• 6:17Nilay Patel?

  I feel like they could just close that loop. Anyway, Readwise Reader, the thing that you do to it is you upload the PDF and it basically OCRs it into a format that looks good on an e-ink screen. Which is great, only that takes time and I have no attention span and no patience. And I was like, screw it. I'm just reading this PDF on my iPad and that has happened like five times in a row.

• 6:35David Pierce?

  Yeah. Kevin, when our features editor is constantly dealing with this, because we're always getting like galleys of books and stuff. And every time I get like a PDF of a book that's about to be released that I have to read for whatever reason, I first try to upload it to my Kindle where it doesn't work and looks bad. Then I try to put it in Readwise where it doesn't work and looks bad. And then I end up reading it like in Dropbox on my iPad. And I'm like, how is this the best possible solution here?

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  And yet it is. It every time. It's like, I've come this close from going from Books Palma to buy an iPad mini, like pilots around the world. By the way, people now just send us creep shots of pilots with iPads.

• 7:15David Pierce?

  It's the best. It's my favorite.

• 7:17Nilay Patel?

  Very unexpected outcome of hosting a podcast about technology. But you look, all the pilots look great. Everyone looks happy with their iPad. Okay, let's talk about some actual techniques. So we've got to talk about Telegram. There's a bunch of other legal stuff that happened this week and then we got a true lightning round where we're going to try to get through them all to wrap this thing up.

• 7:37David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  But we should start with Telegram, which is, I would say, not only news of the week, but the ongoing news of time to come. Because the idea that the social or messaging platform owners face criminal liability for what happens on their platforms, it might feel new and shocking because the French government arrested this guy, but it's also been building for a very, very long time that some amount of responsibility for what happens on our platform will be imposed. And our government has wanted to do this, right? I mean, Congress is like, Jack Dorsey, we're going to yell at you for a while. This one, I think, is particularly shocking because of just the facts of what Telegram is, the fact that Pavel Durov, the CEO, landed in France on a private jet and the French authorities immediately arrested him. Why land your plane where the people are going to arrest you?

• 8:24Nilay Patel?

  His sort of unrepentant attitude about what's going on on the platform. David, catch us up on the basics.

• 8:28David Pierce?

  Sure. So basically, last Sunday, Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, was arrested, like you said, after landing the PJ in France.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  Just don't land your PJ there.

• 8:40David Pierce?

  It's, it's, it's an odd move.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  Connecting.

• 8:41David Pierce?

  Don't call it PJ. Just don't land the PJ. This is a good, we can make shirts that say, just don't land the PJ. That could work.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  Stay in the sky, Pavel.

• 8:51David Pierce?

  And all we knew at the time was that he was arrested, I believe the French authorities said, like, in conjunction with an investigation into crimes. It was very vague, but he was arrested. And over the next several days, it came out that essentially what was happening is that he was being arrested based on criminal activity that was happening on Telegram. He was not, as far as I understand, being accused of doing the crimes, but of what the French government ended up calling complicity in the criminal activity that was happening on Telegram. He has since been charged with a bunch of things, most of which are complicity for things like money laundering and child abuse, child sexual abuse material, all sorts of other internet crimes.

• 9:35David Pierce?

  And the overarching theme seems to be, A, a lot of this bad stuff was happening in relative plain sight on Telegram. And B, Telegram not only knew it was hosting this stuff and allowed it, but actively resisted working with governments to help.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 9:56David Pierce?

  I think, again, this is the very beginning of what I think is going to be a very long story, but I think in terms of like, the basics of what we know, I think that's kind of where we are at this moment. Yeah. Am I missing anything?

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  No, those are the basics. Obviously, none of us are experts in French law. If you are an expert in French law, you know, hit us up. We'd love to talk to you.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  But the pieces of that puzzle that are really important here that I think we can understand and talk about credibly are one, how Telegram works. Because a lot of people want to impute how other platform works onto Telegram and they're actually really different. So it's a very common misconception that Telegram is encrypted and it's just not. It's not even like secret chats, one-to-one chats, you can push a button and make them encrypted, but that is not the default. Right. Telegram groups are not encrypted. Like, there's nothing inherently secure about Telegram. Like, I will tell you, I know a lot of activists who know, who know that there is CSAM on iMessage, that there is bad stuff on Signal.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  And the defense is these are end-to-end encrypted. No one can see the data except the participants. So Apple knows it's there. People have told them. They have actually built some tools to try to detect it and gotten yelled at for essentially breaking the encryption. We've talked about that story at length. But fundamentally, it can't see it. So it has this out. Like, these companies have these outs. Like, people are using, doing bad things on our platforms, but we can't see it, so we don't know. And you should find other ways to catch them. Right? And this is a lot of the argument about end-to-end encryption is the cops want to see the bad stuff. And they want the companies to build them backdoors to give the bad stuff to them. And so I think there's a temptation to assume Telegram is operating the same way, and it

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  is not. Right? And I think that is actually the first, most important thing, is all this stuff is just happening out in the wide open in Telegram, in these huge channels, in these unencrypted chats. Telegram can see almost everything that happens unless you press secret chat, which no one is pressing, and it only happens between people, anyway. And so it is a very unusual service in the sense that it knows. It has the technical ability to know what is happening on service, and lots of people can see what's happening on service.

• 12:12Alex Cranz?

  Have you all used Telegram a whole lot?

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  In bits and pieces. Today, today felt like the wrong day to start.

• 12:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. No, I like, I remember using it. I used it when I went to Taipei at one point, just because it was easy to communicate with my friends. And when I got back, COVID hit, was living in New York, and so all the protests and stuff were happening. So there was a ton of organizing happening on Telegram. Most miserable experience I've ever had using a chat program. Just awful, because it is just like, it's a chat room. It's just, okay, you're now in a chat room and you're gonna go to bed and wake up to 200 new messages in a chat room. And you have no control over that.

• 12:50David Pierce?

  It actually, you make a good point. Let me just quickly like, explain the rough structure of Telegram. Because like you were saying, Neelai, it is, it is actually instructive for what's happening here.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  It tells you a lot about the story.

• 12:58David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, so there are, there are basically three levels of Telegram, uh, which exists, I would say somewhere in the, like, if you imagine the overlapping Venn diagram of like, WhatsApp and Discord and like WeChat. Like Telegram is somewhere in the middle of those three things. So all the way at the top, you have public channels, right? Which is basically like, the equivalent of an Instagram feed, right? You, you post something, lots of people can see it. It's a, it's essentially just a public, like, one-way feed. The middle thing, which I think is probably Telegram's like, most, I don't know, if not most used and sort of most unique thing, is the group chats. And the group chats can have, I think the number is up to 200,000 people in them, which

• 13:41David Pierce?

  is a crazy number, but is, is a huge part of the reason that Telegram has been used for things like political organizing and for huge, like, government communications. It's because you can have that many people literally in a space together. It becomes abject chaos, but it can be really useful. And then, at the bottom of that, is one-to-one chat. So you can go all the way from, you and I are texting each other to, like, one, two millions inside of Telegram. Uh, and there's also like, there's, there's app stuff going on in there. There are all kinds of like, plugin-y things you can do inside of Telegram. It has some of that, like, WeChat operating system-y dynamic to it, but most of what happens...

• 14:23Alex Cranz?

  Truly terrible emojis.

• 14:24David Pierce?

  Oh, it's not a good-looking app, in the same way that WeChat is not a good-looking app, but like, it does a lot. And so it's, it's very useful for those reasons. And so, the reason most people use it, and for our purposes, I think the reason it's particularly interesting right now, because of what's going on with Palvadurov, is really probably the top two things, right? The thing where one person can communicate with a lot of people very quickly, and the sort of giant, teeming group chats of up to 200,000 people.

• 14:53Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 14:53David Pierce?

  So like, there's nothing else that works quite that same way on the internet.

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  And to be clear, if you have a one-to-200,000-person group chat, no, it doesn't matter if that's encrypted. Definitionally, the thing is leaking, right? Yeah. It's, it, it, you're not trying to keep that secret. Like, that's not the point of talking to 200,000 people. So there's all these arguments for why it wouldn't, would not be encrypted. But I, I think the first thing to just be very clear on is it's not like the other platforms that are used for political organizing. It's not like the other platforms that are encrypted or claim to be encrypted. It is inherently this broadcast medium. And then the other piece, which is tremendously relevant to all of this, is that it has, that has no content moderation, which is not like a technical decision. That is a policy decision. They've just decided this is going to be fine. It's a free for all. We don't care.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  We support free speech. And the policy decisions that flow from that get all the way to like, how do we treat governments? And also just simply get things like ISIS lives on Telegram. This is just going to be the app that ISIS uses. And people have known this for a long time. We are going to accept an enormous amount of pornography, including some of the worst pornography, including some child sexual abuse material, perhaps lots of child sexual abuse material. And everyone can just see it and researchers can just file report after report about this, the prevalence of this material on Telegram. And the company is going to do nothing about it. And then that brings you to the actual policy decisions, which is the way they've structured the data on Telegram means that if a government wants to issue a warrant or a subpoena, they actually have to issue like 20. Right.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  In countries across the world in order to get the data and prove the case against the bad people. And Telegram is very proud of this and all platforms have, you know, kind of like their transparency reports or, you know, in other times, like they've had what's called canaries, where they, they say, they have a sentence on their website. It's like, we've never done this. And then they silently change it to get rid of that sentence. So people know it happened, but even they haven't disclosed anything. Oh, wow. Telegram's one is like, we just never give it up any data. Everyone can see all the bad things on our platforms. They want to catch the bad people and we have made it so you cannot, you can't do it. Right. Like, it's so hard to do it. No government has ever managed to do this. And I think that is the liability.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  Again, I don't really know French law, but I, I know how our government thinks about it and how researchers think about it and academics think about it. And once you get to, you know, it's happening and you won't even help the cops stop it. You end up with maybe you're responsible for yourself. And that is, that's a lot of steps. You gotta get through a lot of steps. I don't think there's any networks in the United States that are anywhere close to that, even though the usual morons are screaming about free speech on Telegram. That's just not how it works here. Like, no one is that stupid. But here, it feels like there was such an active effort to frustrate authorities from prosecuting just straightforwardly criminal behavior,

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  that dude landed his PJ in France and got arrested.

• 17:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Nilay Patel?

  I think we gotta find out the case. We gotta figure, again, not an expert in French law. Like, there's, there's a whole bunch of stuff, but the, you know the crimes are happening and you won't even help us stop it. That's where you, you get that collapse of liability to we're just gonna arrest the CEO of the social network.

• 18:05David Pierce?

  Well, and it goes back to the questions of encryption, too, because I think you, you look at something like iMessage, right? Where Apple's stance, right or wrong, believe it or don't believe it, is privacy is more important than everything else. We can't see it, neither can you, right?

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we don't even know it's happening.

• 18:21David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  You believe it's happening, but there's no way for us to know it's happening.

• 18:24David Pierce?

  Right. Agree or disagree, that is a stance. That is a whole stance. What Telegram has said is, is the opposite, right? Like, all the things you're saying about we can see it and we're doing nothing about it, they've like touted this as part of the point over the years. And one of the things that Pavel Durov has said many times is like, you can't build a, a private, secure, safe place for people to talk, except for terrorists. And like, again, a bunch of really interesting arguments behind that sentence, but it's not encrypted. And this is the thing that it comes back to, right? Is it would be a different argument if Telegram were an encrypted app on which all of this stuff was kind of loosely known to be happening, but you couldn't see it. But like, you can see it. It's just, it's just there.

• 19:06David Pierce?

  There have been all these researchers in the last few days who are coming out and saying, like, the, the Nudify AI apps is one that you see a lot on, on Telegram. And Will Arremus at the Washington Post wrote a great story about a researcher who was like, I just went and found a bunch of them, just right there. They're just sitting there. It's not like a secret. This stuff is known. And so it, it seems like that disconnect between it's just sitting right there, the, the evidence is, that is in front of us. Like, all I have to do is look with my eyes and it's right there.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  And yet you are willingly obfuscating my ability to do anything about it. That is, I feel like, the bridge that I've never seen another company cross this way. Yeah.

• 19:43Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think there's the one example is like Kim.com, right? Where he was kind of egregiously ignoring the fact that his, his mega upload site was full of pirated stuff. And then one day they, the New Zealand authorities came and said, yeah, you can't do that anymore. And now he's being extradited, like on his extradition tour every couple of years. Gets sent to a new country to be extradited. So I think there's like examples of this before. And Pavel, I like, why did this guy come to France? Cause hadn't he said before?

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  This is the biggest question I have on this. Why land a plane in France?

• 20:18Alex Cranz?

  Like, he'd said before, like, I'm not going to go to the places where they want to arrest me for this stuff and they hate what I'm doing. France, like, did he miss the Olympics?

• 20:27Nilay Patel?

  Maybe he thought they were just distracted, like they're coming off the Olympics. He's like, I'm gonna stop and get a baguette and a cigarette, you know, and see how it goes. Two things about Kim.com. One, we had the best headline in George history. Kim.com mega uploaded to the United States. Oh, yeah. On copyright charges, which people thought was a body shaming joke. And we're like, no, that's the name of the company. I'm sorry, it was just very funny. That whole sequence of events was very funny. Two, copyright law, the only one where we just accept the speech regulation. It is wild to me. You're like, you pirated a bunch of Disney movies? Jail. The entire international community is going to put you in jail altogether at the same time. Everyone's like, huh, that's not a problem. Like Elon Musk is not like justice for Kim.com. Right?

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  And then it's like, we're talking about ISIS and CSAM and Censorship. We're having a free, and it's like, what are you talking about? So there's just a huge disconnect in how we perceive speech regulations, even in this case, where it's two people are, are facing criminal prosecution around the world for, you know, for violating our speech norms. One just happens to be Disney or like Hollywood, and that seems to be fine. So that's just weird. Like just on its face, Alex, I agree. There's a weirdness there. But the other piece of the puzzle is that even in the United States, where we have strong prohibitions against speech regulations and the First Amendment and things like section 230, which insulate platform owners for the speech that happens on their platforms.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  We make a big exception for criminal behavior on your platforms. Like, part of Section 230 is no effect on criminal prosecution. Like, it's the heading. It's like, you don't get insulated from crimes.

• 22:04Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  If the people are doing crimes in your platforms and we can connect it to you, we're gonna, you are the crimes. That's you. Fasta and Sesta, the, the, the, the exception to, to 230 that made, uh, basically made talking about sex work illegal on these platforms. It was an anti-trafficking law, but it landed with, basically, sex workers can't do business on platforms anymore. Um, that is a criminal, that's a criminal statute. We're like, you, this is illegal now. You'll be responsible for this. You'll be liable for this. And the platforms all take it down. And most people are sort of fine with that. There's a large controversy brewing about that, that we don't have time to talk about. But that was the trade-off that was made in that policy.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Here, I think there's just a deep confusion about A, French law, no, no, no, it's French law. And B, like, how much do you have to know? When do you have to know it? Is Mark Zuckerberg gonna go to jail? Because all of this stuff exists on meta platforms. But they actively try to shut it down. They work with law enforcement, so is he gonna go to jail? If you do slightly less than meta, do you go to jail? If you're Elon Musk, do you go to jail? Right? Like, I, I don't think we understand the gradation. And then, on top of that, every country on the planet right now is grappling with how to regulate social media and the bad things that happen on social media. And they're all gonna come to diff, wildly different answers. Uh, and I think all these platform owners are kind of like, okay, this is the tip of the spear.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is the beginning of the end, even though it's so out of bounds. Even though it's so far afield. Like, no one else is doing it, Telegram is doing it this way.

• 23:38Alex Cranz?

  Do you guys consider Telegram social media? I always considered it like a chat platform.

• 23:43Nilay Patel?

  What is a photo?

• 23:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's somewhere in between.

• 23:46Alex Cranz?

  Basically, wanted to just do that at you. What is a social media platform?

• 23:50David Pierce?

  Like, it's, it's Instagram-y enough in the way that people use it in some ways that I think, I think it counts.

• 23:58Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm all the way at, like, anything where you can post.

• 24:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  So like, uh, and that post might go to people you don't know, is a social media platform.

• 24:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  And that's a, that's a very loose, so you can, you can find exceptions to that one all over the place, but that's kind of my, my broad definition.

• 24:16Alex Cranz?

  Can you post? I like that.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, can you post and can the person on the other, like, do you have to know the person on the other, other end of it? So like, by this definition, like Discord is a social media platform, right? Twitch is a social media platform. Twitch is obviously, in my mind, obviously, YouTube is a social media platform by this definition. So I think there's, that's a, that's a broad one. But this basic idea of like, if you run a platform or someone can talk to a lot of strangers, what responsibility do you as a platform owner have? And pretty much the only responsibility we've decided any of these companies truly have is making sure there's not copyright infringement. Like, is making sure that Hollywood and the music industry are protected. That is pretty much it. Right? And then there's a, there's a litany of, of really bad things that they've decided that they will keep off on their

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  own. And that is it? That's the answer, like, across the world? Like, that's the baseline answer is copyright infringement? And then, and then there's TikTok, which is like, what if we did it anyway?

• 25:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  But like, I would just point out that that always is where these arguments break down. If you're okay with sending Kim come to jail for copyright infringement, you, you might have to reconsider how you feel about the other stuff. Or you might have to reconsider if you feel about copyright infringement. I just think this stuff is so openly horrible that actively thwarting the authorities should probably land you in some hot water.

• 25:41David Pierce?

  But I think the, the question of who, who is you in that sentence, right? I think is, is doing a lot of work in this question. Because like, what, what we see most of the time is companies get in trouble, right? Like, companies get fined, or everybody, like, the government sends things to lawyers. And, and it's all this sort of entity to entity thing. And so I think the fact that it was like a, a dude who got arrested for it is so unusual. I mean, it's like, if, if somebody did a bad tweet and Jack Dorsey got arrested, like, back in the day, instead of him going to-

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  Do you know how different our lives would have been if Dorsey could have been arrested for bad tweets?

• 26:20David Pierce?

  This is what I mean. And I think it's, it's-

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  We live in a utopia.

• 26:23David Pierce?

  I, I think if you, if you like, there's that. The jails would just be full of Jack Dorsey.

• 26:32Alex Cranz?

  He'd be on a sex extradition tour.

• 26:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:34Nilay Patel?

  We'd send him around the world from jail to jail around the world.

• 26:38David Pierce?

  I think if you if you cast this out and in a certain way that it goes, like, you know, we talk about chilling effects of laws all the time.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:45David Pierce?

  How are you going to feel right now if you're a CEO of a company that is dealing with any of this? You're like, oh, my God, suddenly not only is my company at risk, but literally I personally could go to jail, which I guarantee you is not something most people are thinking about.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my access to high quality wine and cheese is at risk today.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  We cannot go to France.

• 27:05Alex Cranz?

  I was like, who are the who are those CEOs? It's like Mark Zuckerberg, what Elon Musk? They're fine.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot of them, right? Like, you know.

• 27:12David Pierce?

  What if Andy Jassy could go to jail because something bad happened on Twitch?

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  But all of us, like, yes.

• 27:18Alex Cranz?

  He should for Amazon Kindle app.

• 27:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, sooner or later, I should go to jail for what happens on YouTube is like a pretty weird jump, right?

• 27:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  At the same time, all of those companies actively cooperate with law enforcement all the time.

• 27:32David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  In ways in ways, good and bad. I think on our lightning round list is like Mark Zuckerberg sending a letter to Jim Jordan in Congress this week, saying, I we caved to the Biden administration too much. I think that letter is like political theater, but like, that's what I mean by active cooperation, the government on both sides. He's saying we cooperated with Biden administration and now he's cooperating with Jim Jordan, saying, we cooperated with Biden administration. Like, the the big companies in this country at least are actively engaged with various governments around the world in various ways. And I think that insulates them from Mark Zuckerberg getting arrested in France. Here you just have this other thing. It is so different, like architecturally and how the app works,

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  user experience wise, and, you know, the the 1 to 200,000 kind of opportunities you have, moderation wise, and that they do literally nothing with the worst content anyone can possibly imagine. And then policy wise, in that they have structured it to make it impossible for the authorities to even arrest the people they can see with their own eyes.

• 28:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 28:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  And all of that is just.

• 28:33David Pierce?

  Raise the middle finger to them in the process.

• 28:35Nilay Patel?

  Right, and you just you just like stack all that up. You're like, that is a lot of decisions that land you in French jail.

• 28:41Alex Cranz?

  I wonder how it's gonna affect Elon, because he'd really been trying to take the same path with X that Durov's been doing of just being like the free speech absolutionist. Is that how you say it?

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I completely disagree with that. I understand the argument. That's what he wants us all to think.

• 28:56Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, he's always like, "It's all about free speech." And he fundamentally is very different in how he actually does that, because he's always like, "Oh, you want me to take that down? Done." But like-

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, his definition of free speech, and you can look at the tweet, is, "If people want speech regulations, they should pass laws, and that's how democracy is supposed to work, and I will follow the law." And you're like, "That's the weirdest definition of free speech that exists, because you're asking for government speech regulations."

• 29:26David Pierce?

  And what they have followed historically has been draconian speech laws in other countries.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. Like, India has draconian speech laws, X complies with them. Brazil has new draconian speech laws, and he doesn't like the government, so he won't. It's like, it's this weird balance of like, "Actually, I'll do whatever I want, but like, if I don't want to get into a fight with the government, or I like the government there, I'll do what they say." Which is just not a position, right? That is just pure opportunism. And I think the noise around Durov getting arrested in France is like useful for him and his ongoing quest to be perceived as a free speech martyr. But if you look at his posts lately, you can tell he's like in an intellectual spiral, because his position has no center, right? There's actually no ideological commitment to anything.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  So if you're like, "I would wish to defy the government, but I might get arrested. Also, some of this stuff is horrible. Also, I'm suing advertisers for antitrust." There's nothing there. Like, there's literally no center. There's no intellectual center to that position. And you can kind of see him be like- Oh crap, this is what free speech might actually mean. I don't want to, I don't want to over-intellectualize Elon's, you know, ketamine musings or whatever the fuck it is. But it's like, you can, you can see it's starting, like, the pressure, welcome to hell is basically what I'm saying.

• 30:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  The internal contradictions of owning a platform like X and all of the demands that are placed on that. I think it's, it's starting to wear on him a little bit.

• 30:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, and I think we should probably move on from this, but the, the thing that keeps coming up to me as I, I read these stories and talk to people about this. There's been a ton of good reporting on this, by the way. Good, good week for the journalists out there. Is how much that the, the sort of legal push against the tech industry is still going along the lines of we have to protect the children. Like so much of this is about the CSAM stuff that's happening on Telegram and the laws that have been passed recently. I think it was, I think it was Britain that passed a law last year that explicitly allows the executives of tech companies to be held personally responsible

• 31:34David Pierce?

  for CSAM stuff and child safety stuff on their platform in general, if they're told about it and don't do anything about it. Like, that's, that's now a law that exists. And, and this idea of, uh, we have to protect children being like the most bipartisan thing you'll find anywhere on any line of political reasoning. That's how we're getting towards all of this. And it's just, it's just fascinating that that continues to be the thing. That is like, the deeper this goes, the more it's about child safety.

• 32:02Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's always the argument for censorship. That's always like the first line of arguments for censorship is we must think of the children.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's Hollywood first and then child safety.

• 32:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  It's never, it's never not Mickey Mouse first.

• 32:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Mickey Mouse and then child safety almost always. Like, there's a great Simpsons episode about that exact thing. And then all of the big fights in the, the 90s over, uh, TV ratings and stuff like that, where you had like Clinton.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:27Alex Cranz?

  And then all these Republicans getting together being like, won't anyone think of these babies?

• 32:31David Pierce?

  Right. You can get anything done if you can convince people it's about keeping children safe.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I, I agree with you and, you know, Tipper Gore put the explicit lyrics label on all the CDs. And that was Tipper Gore.

• 32:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Nilay Patel?

  Very weird. Tipper Gore versus NWA. Just imagine.

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  How far we've come. It's super weird. But the, the reason that you do that is if you can make the counter argument seem morally indefensible, you, you win. Right. Right. And, but here, I just want to come back to, it is really there. It, it. Oh, yeah. The, the CSAM is there. It's very bad. And so like, sometimes you just have to say it's there and it's bad and you have to do something about it. Right. And I, that's, if you've listened to this show or Decoder or listened, read us for years, like, the free speech debate online has raged and we have struggled with it and we've done endless episodes about it. But like, you need an ideological center, right? That's what I'm saying. And it's real, it's there. Like ISIS is there.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  Like you don't have to overthink it. You just have to make it go away and hold the people responsible for it accountable. And I think here it's like, well, that's an easy line. There are lots of gray areas and lots of much harder lines. That one feels pretty easy to me. Yeah. All right, we should wrap it up. I promise we'll talk about doing other more fun crimes the next section. We'll be right back.

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• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  We're back with more crimes. Fun crimes and antitrust crimes.

• 35:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, are these, they're, they're less bummer crimes. I don't know if they're more fun crimes.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  I would say that-

• 35:40David Pierce?

  Not a lot of whimsical crimes in this episode.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  The, the Grok AI being so out of control that you can just make like Hillary Clinton do GTA is legitimately very funny to me.

• 35:52David Pierce?

  Okay, yeah, fair enough. I'll give you that.

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, I have a lot of deep reservations about deep fakes and what is a photo and lies on the internet. And then I'm like, it's also hilarious to have Elon Musk go on an ayahuasca journey at the end of it, have his deep fake character say, I'm starting in soup kitchen, which is a real video I watched today.

• 36:10David Pierce?

  Oh, brother.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  You're so brother. I don't want to tell you. It's all very good. With an Elon voice, too. All of it's great. Don't look at it. Respect the truth. Photography is sacred. I laughed, I did laugh. Let's start with the, the big one, David. You, you said, this is the story of segment two. It's Yelp sues Google for antitrust violations.

• 36:39David Pierce?

  So, okay. Did you guys think that Yelp had already sued Google? Because I definitely thought Yelp sued Google like a long time ago.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Yelp at this point is a front for suing Google, right? Is that how it works?

• 36:52David Pierce?

  Basically, it's, I think everyone who works at Yelp is just lawyers now. But anyway, so very recently, earlier this summer, a couple of weeks ago, uh, Google lost its antitrust search trial. Uh, we're still in the remedies phase and then there will be appeals and then God only knows. But for now, it lost. Uh, and so Yelp, clearly emboldened by that fact, uh, filed a suit of its own. That basically brings up something that got thrown out of the last case against Google, which I find really interesting. And essentially, the argument is that Google prioritizes its own stuff in Google's search results and thus de-prioritizes Yelp and TripAdvisor and other companies like it and has thus killed them. This is an argument we've been

• 37:37David Pierce?

  hearing forever. This is an argument Yelp has been making loudly forever. Literally, I assumed Yelp had already sued Google. Apparently, it hadn't. And now, what Yelp seems to be thinking, like Jeremy Stoplman, the CEO, said in as many words, "The winds on antitrust have shifted dramatically." So this company clearly senses this is the moment to finally pick the fight it's been wanting to pick for many years, which I think is very odd, given that that particular fight has been thrown out of court in the same search trial that Google just lost. So I'm confused, but also, I think it's fascinating. And yet again, like, Google is just up against it, man. Like, the Epic stuff is happening,

• 38:21David Pierce?

  the search stuff is happening. This is hap- like, it's just, it just keeps happening for Google.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  There's an ad tech trial.

• 38:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  I say that like people know it is. Google has yet another antitrust trial coming up over its ad tech stack, which is the money.

• 38:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, wasn't this like, Google strategy, they would spend 20 years fucking around, and then now they're in their find out phase, and that's why they have all the lawyers that they pay a lot of money to?

• 38:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, there's something, I agree with Jeremy Stoplman, and the winds of antitrust have definitely changed. I actually can point to a very, very odd example of this. Luther Lowe, who is Yelp's old policy person, recently left Yelp, he's doing all this stuff, I think he's a Y-combinator now, and they did like a meet and greet in DC, you know, like a little thing. And JD Vance, before he was vice presidential candidate, showed up at the meet and greet with all the startups, talked about how he used to be in ad tech, and he thought big tech was censoring everyone, and the woke mob was out of control. And then in the middle of all that nonsense, he was like, "I think Lena Khan's doing a good job." Weird, like weird, right? Like, that's how much the winds of antitrust has changed. He's like, the only person in Biden administration is doing a good job is Lena Khan.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, because we should break up. And, and really his point was like, because this woke bullshit is out of control. And like, maybe that doesn't all put together like that puzzle. You put all the pieces together. You're like, that doesn't look like anything. But he still said it, right? Like, that's, that's where the mindset is, is these companies have too much control. And we should take that control away from them and do something else. What the something else is, I think all of us are very curious to find out. It's clearly going to be something else. But you look at Google, which is just taking it on the chin lately, right? In the search case, in the epic case they lost, there's, and the judge in that case has been very loud. Like, you did it. I'm gonna do something about it.

• 40:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  And then the ad tech case, which I, you know, I, we don't know what's gonna happen. Every trial is kind of a coin flip. But we're gonna get a documents about Google's money in that case. Like, it's gonna, some stuff is gonna come out because it's gonna be the business side of Google talking about the money.

• 40:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:27Nilay Patel?

  And I, I think Google's image is very cuddly, is the, the money just appears from nowhere. And that's not true.

• 40:33David Pierce?

  And that's also the trial. Let's not forget that Google wrote a, just without any questions, just wrote a check for the maximum possible amount.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, I forgot about this.

• 40:41David Pierce?

  To avoid having a jury trial. Like, innocent, you know, innocent until proven guilty, but that's a tough look.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  Can we just sit on that for one second? This is a real thing. We have a picture of the check on the website, I believe. They just wrote a check to the Department of Justice for the maximum, like a cashier's check. I believe it's drawn on Wells Fargo. And they're like, here's all of the money we could possibly owe you. We would like to settle the case. Like, out of the blue.

• 41:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  It's incredible.

• 41:08David Pierce?

  Just to not have a jury trial.

• 41:10Alex Cranz?

  And I mean, it's at Wells Fargo, so it'll take about, what, 12 years before it gets cashed?

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  The blockchain solves this.

• 41:19Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Have you heard of lightning? Okay. So back to Yelp. I think the winds have changed is an opportunity for maybe not to, you know, win like Epic, right? Yelp doesn't have a fortnight in the background to fund all this stuff. But I think maybe to claw at a settlement out of Google.

• 41:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  To somehow put some pressure on Google to open up and make this go away, to appease the Europeans in some way. Whatever you think of Google's relationship to the internet, it is changing. And I think that, as we've said a million times, that means the internet's going to change.

• 41:52David Pierce?

  So you think Yelp wants to be to Google what like the Delta emulator folks have been to Apple, which is just, just sort of the one in there, just like prying it open slightly. And they're in a position of weakness and gonna have to start to make policy changes that are good for you, but also good for everybody. And so Yelp is like, we don't, we don't want to break up Google. We just, we just think this is a chance to like extract some of what we want from the company because they're going to decide it's easier to do that.

• 42:20Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of necessary for Yelp at this point because they've been struggling for a while, right? Like they, they, they have resorted to basically bullying restaurants and stuff and making sure that they're on their, their platform and everything.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  Here's what we can do. We can shake down millions of local restaurants or we can get a check from Google, which is.

• 42:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I mean, it kind of feels like what it is for Yelp.

• 42:42David Pierce?

  There are so many companies you can describe with that sentence. Good God.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, so there was somebody who was on threads, say, who, who posted that I've, I've been more cantankerous lately. Can I, can I just describe my Joker moment broadly? Because I love that these companies are having these fights. I love that the internet's going to be potentially more open. I love that at least we're in a season of change. All that's great. I do not for one second believe any of this is truly idealistic, right? I think this is a version of capitalism at play where a lot of very self-interested parties are looking out for their own self-interest and they're colliding in weird ways. Great. The reason I say it that way is because a long time ago, I used to cover net neutrality like every other day. And the big player in net neutrality was Netflix. If you will

• 43:26Nilay Patel?

  recall, they Netflix and Reddit were like out in front, like blackout the internet, fight for net neutrality. We don't let Comcast throttle us disclosure Comcast is an investor in this company. And boy, did they not like my net neutrality coverage. Just putting it all out there. And then one year, Reed Hastings onstage at the Code Conference, I believe, Peter Kafka, and Peter said, you've been really quiet about net neutrality lately. And Reed Hastings looked at him and said, yeah, we're so big, it doesn't matter anymore. And I turned into the Joker.

• 43:56David Pierce?

  That's honest. Wow.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  And like, fine, right? Like, fine. And so I like the idea that Yelp is an idealistic freedom fighter, or even Delta, even though it's a smaller company, I do think they are pressing their regulatory advantage to open up these platforms.

• 44:11David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  But I don't think that like they're the, they're gonna get theirs, right?

• 44:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  All bets are off. And I think all of this change is like, who's gonna get theirs at the end of this? And so like, we're gonna shake down a bunch of restaurants or shake down Google is kind of the best, in my mind, like the best way to understand. Like, everyone's just trying to get paid. Whether or not the legal system can shift the money around in a more equitable way at the end of all this totally remains to be seen. I truly do not know.

• 44:36David Pierce?

  In a funny way, what you're arguing for is capitalism working as intended.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:40David Pierce?

  Everyone fighting for money is what it should be. What we've landed on is nobody can fight for money because Google took it all.

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. True capitalism has never been tried, David. I think that's what I'm trying to tell you.

• 44:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. What if it was just a street fight for money? Let's find out.

• 44:57Alex Cranz?

  Is postmodern capitalism just Google opening its wallet?

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, sorry?

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  You come all the way, that's the horseshoe theory of internet capitalism is Google is the planned economy director just handing money to people.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying that's not what everybody wants. Okay, so that's Google. We'll see what happens to Yelp and Google, but you can see, like, as we keep saying, whatever happens to Google is the internet. But you can just see the internet sort of like fracturing around, around that already. This other one I think is really interesting. It's a weird ruling. TikTok has to face a lawsuit for recommending the blackout challenge. And this is a very, very sad story. There is a 10 year old who died doing the blackout challenge. The parents sued TikTok. You know, one of those cases where it's like TikTok didn't make the blackout challenge videos. They didn't. They're, they're not telling you to do it. Right? The people are seeing the content on the platform. They're taking the action.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  A horrible, extremely depressing thing happened. And now we're going to try to hold TikTok liable. And throughout most of this, we are not holding platforms liable for what the recommendation algorithms do. Except we just had a Supreme Court ruling, which said, maybe we should. Like, more or less, maybe we should. So one of the weirdest things about this case is that it's, it's like a, it's like a puzzle the Supreme Court put itself in. So the, there were content moderation laws passed in Texas and Florida. They went up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court basically said, no, these are, these are weird. You're just obviously conservative states being mad at Facebook. But you didn't think about what would happen to other platforms, smaller platforms.

• 46:38Nilay Patel?

  You have to go think about this before you, you might like go back and figure it out. The one thing the Supreme Court was very clear about was that it is protected first party speech when they curate other people's content. Right? So section 230 says you, Facebook are not responsible for what people post on platform, mostly. That's their speech, not your speech. The way you moderate that speech and present it to other people is your speech. So that's protected by the First Amendment. You cannot, the government cannot set content moderation rules because the content moderation itself is speech.

• 47:14Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that feels right. Generally, that feels right. That's how you get a market different platforms. That's how you end up with Truth Social, N and X, and then whatever kindergarten subreddit rules you want to participate in, right? Like, that's how you get the whole range of expression. The marketing sort of decide how much content moderation they want. The court, the Third Circuit, evaluated in TikTok case, says, well, give, quote, "Given the Supreme Court's observation that platforms engage in protected first-party speech under the First Amendment, when they curate compilations of other people's content via their expressive algorithms, it follows that doing so amounts to first-party speech under Section 230." So the algorithm is your speech. That means you're liable for your speech. So if you recommend a bunch of blackout challenge videos, that's your speech.

• 47:58Nilay Patel?

  That's a choice you've made. Now you're liable for your speech.

• 48:01Alex Cranz?

  And it's calling that curation, which is really fascinating.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  So this is just like a long, a long chain of reasoning that ends with, okay, some of this belongs to you, so the government can't tell you what to do, but it belongs to you, so now other people can get mad at you for it. And that, I don't know how that's going to shake out. I don't know if TikTok is the right plaintiff for that. They're TikTok after all. We just talked about Save the Children is a theme. The TikTok versus the United States government versus China, that's all in the mix there. Whether or not TikTok can like mount a challenge to this,

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  kind of a huge precedent to say these algorithms are not only your speech and can be protected from laws and can be protected from government interference, but also now other people can sue you for your algorithms.

• 48:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, that like breaks the internet, right? Like, because it doesn't just break TikTok, which arguably should be broken because I hate its algorithm right now, but it breaks, it breaks Facebook. It breaks Google because Google is using an algorithm to recommend search results.

• 49:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're showing me bad stuff is now legally actionable is, whoa, like, off we go, you know? And like, yeah, fine, but we're, I don't think we're ready for that world either. So the other side of the coin, the non-Google side of the coin, also sort of up for grabs because of what's happening in legal system, which just, again, say this to you, I'm trying to have the end of summer here. I'm trying to drink a pina colada and the PDFs just keep coming.

• 49:24Alex Cranz?

  Nonstop.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  Killing me. All right, let's do one more PDF and then we got to get out of here. The pina colada's a weight. This one is a tough one because it's not actually the law yet. And I actually don't know if Gavin Newsom is going to sign this bill, but the California State Assembly passed an AI safety bill. What's going on in here, David?

• 49:41David Pierce?

  So it's called the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, which just rolls off the tongue.

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  Does that spell anything?

• 49:50David Pierce?

  S S I F A I M A.

• 49:53Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 49:54David Pierce?

  Sifama. No. All good laws are backronyms. Everyone needs to remember this. If your law is not a backronym, it's not a good law. It's just, it's so important.

• 50:04Nilay Patel?

  Just ask ChatGPT to make a name, man.

• 50:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, right? Can you, like, the insane things people have done.

• 50:11Alex Cranz?

  I think the people writing this bill weren't fans of AI, though.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 50:16Alex Cranz?

  They weren't going to ask ChatGPT to do it.

• 50:18David Pierce?

  This law, they should have found a way to make it spell out artificial with all the letters and it would have been amazing. But alas, it is mostly just called SB 1047. It's an AI safety bill that I would say concerns itself, as we've been talking about, in part with who is responsible for bad things that happen downstream of AI models. And it changes the way that companies need to test and train these things. It changes the way that they need to talk to the government. Like, it's kind of sweeping, like, here's how we want to oversee and think about AI models. There's been a lot of backing and forthing. OpenAI kind of came out against it. Anthropic was like, we love it. Let's change some stuff.

• 51:02David Pierce?

  There have been a bunch of politicians who are against it, a bunch of politicians who are for it. I agree, it seems very debatable whether Gavin Newsom will sign this thing as it currently stands. But it does still feel like a moment that it passed out of the assembly the way that it has.

• 51:21Alex Cranz?

  If he signs it, does that just mean, like, Google, OpenAI, a lot of these companies relocate?

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, California is still a huge market.

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:29David Pierce?

  Well, that, but also, one of the things a lot of the companies have said essentially is, why are you making a law to make us do what we've already promised to do? Which is essentially make sure our AI is not going to destroy the world. And I would argue that's a very funny line of reasoning to be like, we said we're going to be cool. Why are you going to make me be cool? Is, is, is an odd stance. But my sense is, and again, all of this could change, especially as the, the law, you know, continues to change and depending on how it gets implemented is that a lot of these companies are going to not like it, but we'll figure out a way to play along. I don't think this is the sort of thing that is like, gonna run anybody out of California.

• 52:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Anthropic sent a letter basically supporting it.

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  And to your point, they're like, yeah. But then you read the letter and you're like, we should definitely do something. Here's just a line from Anthropic's letter. "We believe SB 1047, particularly after recent amendments, likely presents a feasible compliance burden for companies like ours in light of the importance of averting catastrophic misuse."

• 52:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:33Nilay Patel?

  Cool. Yeah, there's a real chance we might destroy the world. So let's do a feasible compliance burden.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  Whoops.

• 52:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how this plays, you know, the Biden had the AI order that just came out. A bunch of companies said they were going to join the, the AI model board that make sure their safety testing and releases results. This one feels like, in particular Gavin Newsom has to make a decision. And then that will decide whether a bunch of similar state laws get passed all around the country. Cause once California does it, it's, it's like, fine, like New York will do it tomorrow.

• 53:11David Pierce?

  Right.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause now you're not making him do anything. Like you're just like off to the races. And then, and then Alex, your point in the question is like, whether Texas does or doesn't do it. And it doesn't matter because all the researchers are in California anyway. Right. Like, and you have to sell to the California market and then there you go. So I, I'm very confused about this one in the sense that what you really need is a federal law. And that doesn't seem likely. And it's also election season and who knows what's going to happen. But it also seems like Newsom kind of didn't want to sign it.

• 53:43David Pierce?

  He hasn't said anything. Like usually when you're the governor of the big state with the first in the nation AI safety bill, you're like pounding the pavement. And here he literally has not said anything to anyone.

• 53:54Alex Cranz?

  Like affects who gives him money for his presidential campaign in four years?

• 53:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's true. I mean, I also think like we're in a moment right now where all of the money on planet Earth is being thrown at AI. And there are a lot of very powerful, very rich people who will be happy to yell about you being anti-progress if you sign a bill that does anything perceived to be slowing it down. And I think it was OpenAI that was like, we need a federally driven set of AI policies rather than, you know, just a bunch of different state laws about how this. And that's what will really foster innovation. And this is like the same thing everybody says about everything, which is like, we would so, so love to have regulation as long as it's like the perfect regulation

• 54:41David Pierce?

  and doesn't slow anyone down or cost us any money. But it would be like so good. Like Mark Zuckerberg did this. The crypto industry has been doing this forever. Everybody wants there to be rules until there are rules. And then everybody's like, well, what if there was just like a simpler set of rules that I could just like do? Like, that'd be fine.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  By the way, in case you're wondering what SB 1047 says, you have to make it possible to quickly and fully shut the model down. You have to, right? You just need to unplug the Terminator. That seems fine.

• 55:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Nilay Patel?

  You have to ensure the model is protected against unsafe post-training modifications, which is hard. And then you have to have a testing procedure to see whether a model or its derivatives are especially at risk of causing critical harm. So this is a lot. Like, some of that is pretty fuzzy. Some of it is like, you just have to be able to unplug it.

• 55:24Alex Cranz?

  I was like, those last two are super fuzzy.

• 55:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, the like, how do you prove this isn't going to destroy the world is actually a really hard question.

• 55:31Alex Cranz?

  What is critical?

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  But I would argue that if you're watching a product and you have to ask that question, we should ask that question a lot, right? Like Ford doesn't come out with a 2025 Bronco Sport and immediately be like, will this destroy the world?

• 55:46David Pierce?

  Neil, did you watch Oppenheimer?

• 55:49David Pierce?

  So the probability is near zero.

• 55:51Nilay Patel?

  Few products in the world where we're like, what is this gonna destroy the world?

• 55:56Alex Cranz?

  If you are really crushing as a project manager, you're not gonna ask those questions. You're gonna be happy you're hitting deadlines.

• 56:01David Pierce?

  You got user stories to collect. You don't have time to worry about that.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like, you know, the TikToker is doing like bottled water. It's not like...

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  All right. By the way, there's just a reminder for me, mental note. There's like two or three TikTok gadget companies I think we should write profiles of. I won't tell you who they are, but if you have thoughts, email us at the verge. There's one in particular, I'm like, where did they come from? Are they the next Snacker? Wow. Just a, just a little mystery drop. All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back. Letting Around Part Two, The Fun One. Huh? The Fun One. Un-sponsored. We'll be right back.

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• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. In the break, I disclosed to David what company I was thinking of, and Liam immediately said he'd bought something, and now David is writing a profile. It's happening.

• 58:22David Pierce?

  It's gonna happen.

• 58:22Nilay Patel?

  But I'm not telling you who it is.

• 58:24Alex Cranz?

  Just immediate. It was incredible.

• 58:25Nilay Patel?

  If you can guess, if you send us an email and you guess, maybe something good will happen to you.

• 58:30David Pierce?

  We'll ship you whatever Liam bought from you.

• 58:34Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, okay, we're doing it this way. We're doing true lightning round, unsponsored. No one can tell us what to do because they haven't paid us any money. What I'm suggesting here is you could pay us money. I don't know how that works, and I probably still won't do what you say, but, you know, live a life of possibility.

• 58:52David Pierce?

  I had one Vergecast listener slash startup executive, who I will not name, who asked me very seriously recently if we actually want people to sponsor the lightning round, or if we enjoy this bit so much that we actually don't want people. And I was like, no, to be very clear, I like money more than I like bits. We will take, please sponsor the lightning round.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Can I do an aside about the influencer? I've been thinking a lot about journals, influencers, the whole thing. Here's the problem that we have. When you give other people money, they do what you say. People come to our sales team and like, will they do what we say? And we're kind of like, no. Just like flatly, no. There's a real problem with journalism as a whole right now, fighting an uphill fight. But there's always a chance. Huh?

• 59:39David Pierce?

  I do think our enthusiasm for a sponsor of the lightning round might make it the greatest ROI in the history of the Verge. We will talk about whoever that sponsor is forever. Unless they suck, in which case we will see that.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  See? You never know. Life's a game of chance. Roll the dice, people. Sponsor the lightning round. All right, true lightning round. I'm gonna read a headline, we're all gonna react to it, we're gonna move on. Right. This is the idea?

• 1:00:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay, here we go. Google Gemini will let you create AI-generated people again.

• 1:00:09David Pierce?

  Remember the diverse Nazis?

• 1:00:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11David Pierce?

  Those were the days. We're back. Google says they fixed it.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  I would say you guys-

• 1:00:15Alex Cranz?

  Only white Nazis now.

• 1:00:16Nilay Patel?

  But you all talked at length about what is a photo last week with Reimagine the Pixel?

• 1:00:20Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, I had a bit of a freak out that I still am getting a lot of notes from people about, and I feel very good about. As time goes on.

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel, I feel, by the way, yes, we're gonna defend the sanctity of photography here in the world.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  I feel nothing about this. Um, my only question is, it feels like Google's attitude about this has slightly shifted. Right? Like, the diverse Nazis are a thing, and they, they killed it because now they're like, actually, they killed it because a bunch of people were like, we should be able to make diverse Nazis, which is weird. And they took it down, because like, we don't want to, so I, I don't know how Gemini is gonna work now. But Reimagine, they're just like, yeah, let it ride, right? Like, it's more or less their attitude towards it.

• 1:00:59David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just, it feels like something has shifted there, and I'm not sure what with Google.

• 1:01:04David Pierce?

  Was it six months ago that the Gemini thing first happened?

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08David Pierce?

  It was like earlier this year. Wild how much this has shifted in six months. Because I totally agree with you.

• 1:01:14Nilay Patel?

  There's more safety rules there. Like, Reimagine is not supposed to add a bunch of drugs to, like, I don't think that's what they want.

• 1:01:20Alex Cranz?

  But you can't add people at all in-

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  You can't add people, it won't touch people, we don't know how this one's gonna work. So there's some shit, all I'm saying is there's a shift. It's not the next thing we're gonna talk about, which is just a free-for-all. But there's some little shift inside of Google that says, okay, the market is willing to accept a little bit more crazy. And like, here we are. Speaking of free-for-all, XAI's new Grok image generator floods X with controversial AI fakes. That is a very soft headline.

• 1:01:47David Pierce?

  Wait, that's, okay, here, little, little quick-

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  We're almost like a little too nice.

• 1:01:51David Pierce?

  No, little, little quick how the internet works thing, that's actually the SEO-optimized headline that goes to Google. Can I read you the headline that's on our website?

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  Ah, this makes more sense, yes.

• 1:02:00David Pierce?

  X's new AI image generator will make anything from Taylor Swift in lingerie to Kamala Harris with a gun.

• 1:02:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we should, I don't know, that's what Google wants. Kamala Harris with a gun is all anybody searching nowadays. And let alone the other thing. It's bananas. Like, again, I've watched hilarious videos of like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in an armed standoff on X. And it, and the underlying technology is called Flux, which is an open source AI system. So even if X added the controls, they've now sort of like opened everyone's eyes to Flux, which is open source. You can just do whatever you want with.

• 1:02:34David Pierce?

  And Flux is by all accounts very good.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. You can just go watch the thing. It's just very funny that Grok, like Elon Musk, Elon Musk, I mean, he wants to be a famous person, right? He released his own completely out of control deep fake tool on his own platform. And the number of deep fakes of him are out of control.

• 1:02:53David Pierce?

  What was the one you were saying you were seeing before?

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  It's Elon Musk. It's a long video.

• 1:02:58David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  Where Elon Musk narrates his ayahuasca journey. There's a, there's like a nightmare dream sequence in the middle of it. And at the end of it, um, he commits to do it like giving like free food to everyone, like soup kitchens. And also says he's going to build a public transport system. And it is, it's perfect. Like it is a perfect Elon Musk troll.

• 1:03:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:03:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh, robot Elon Musk was, I, deep fakes should be illegal. Like, speaking of laws that are coming, like, a lot of people agree that deep fakes should be legal, especially non-consensual pornography deep fakes. Uh, this is going to be a weird fight. It's going to be a weird fight. A bunch of, Scarlett Johansson does not want her voice being used by OpenAI, right? Like she's filed that complaint. I don't know. I, I do not know how these are going to go because it feels like we just let the cat out of the bag. Talk about feasible compliance. Here we go. Like we have a picture of Mickey Mouse smoking a cigarette on the verge of.

• 1:03:52David Pierce?

  It's so good.

• 1:03:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  Next one, smart home company Brilliant has found a buyer. David, did you ever have a brilliant?

• 1:03:59David Pierce?

  I did briefly. Wow.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  I knew it.

• 1:04:01David Pierce?

  I had, I had one of the earliest, earliest ones I met with our founders, like before they even launched the product and they gave me a prototype of one. I put it in my wall and then I had a, I had a balcony at my apartment and it turned on the balcony light permanently. It wouldn't turn it off. And that was, that was my experience with the first Brilliant. Brilliant stuff actually got very good. There, they made a, most of their business, like going into apartment buildings and stuff, but just never really made it work.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This is the, what if you had an iPod Touch in your wall that controlled all your smart home stuff, right?

• 1:04:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  And Jen Tuohy, our brilliant smart home reviewer, reported they were going out of business, which they kind of denied and then they went out of business, but rescued, rescued by those white knights of American capitalism, private equity.

• 1:04:48David Pierce?

  Ah, our people. We love them. The company is now called, the company is now called Brilliant Next Gen, which is just brutal. And it seems like what we know so far is that people who had brilliant stuff, their stuff is going to continue to work. What happens after that? I don't know.

• 1:05:10David Pierce?

  The, the new leadership did say they're going to stop selling direct to consumer stuff anywhere other than their website, which I think is a pretty strong signal that they are going further and further into the, like selling into new construction business, which makes a certain amount of sense. A lot of these companies, like Amazon has focused a lot on that with Alexa stuff. There's been this big race to be the sort of default choice for professional builders.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  I know that when I was still in the rental market, what I looked for in an apartment was a six-year-old unsupported iPod Touch built right into the wall.

• 1:05:42David Pierce?

  It's the dream.

• 1:05:44Nilay Patel?

  So I was like, get these, get these non iPod Touch apartments out of my face.

• 1:05:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, but I think it's this company has always been, I would say, more sort of B to B than like a thing a regular person would consider buying. Like you go to Home Depot and you're gonna buy a Lutron, not this, right? Like, I think that's pretty clear. But it'll be interesting to see if they can get it righted, or if this just becomes kind of a slow death for a smart home company.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like if you have one of these in your wall, you're you're running out the clock on that cloud service continuing to work.

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  I kind of think that's right.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. ESPN, where to watch feature finds where to stream sporting events. They basically made a TV guide, but for streaming.

• 1:06:25David Pierce?

  That has ever happened to me in my entire.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  This is pretty funny.

• 1:06:27David Pierce?

  I spent like a lot of yesterday trying to find the catch in this, and I think there's like a big galaxy brain strategy, but also this is just like a good, nice thing for the internet. ESPN released a thing that just gives you a list of all the games that are being played, which is like a thing that every sports app has, right? Except for Apple Sports, which doesn't. But you can go and you can see where all the games are, what the score is, whatever. And now it just has a TV guide thing where you can, it'll say it's playing on MLB TV, or it's playing on TNT, or this MLS game is on Apple TV plus. Like, it just tells you where to stream sports, which seems like a thing that should not be complicated or need to exist.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  Picture of a pirate ship and a Reddit logo anywhere in this app?

• 1:07:08David Pierce?

  There's just one that says parentheses, it's a Russian website against like half of these.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  You will be extradited.

• 1:07:16David Pierce?

  Exactly. But I like ESPN did this whole big media day on Wednesday this week and essentially made clear that it is making this pivot from being a cable channel to like a sports lifestyle brand. That was how Sarah Fisher at Axios explained it, and I think that was really right. They're about to launch a streaming service that shows you all the ESPN stuff, like ESPN, the cable channel is going to be a streaming service. They're part of venue sports. ESPN's whole thing is they're just like, we want you to come to ESPN when you want to watch sports. Even if you go somewhere else, because they have the rights, if you open the ESPN app first, we win, right? Because that's how you bet, that's how you get into fantasy, all this stuff.

• 1:07:56David Pierce?

  And so ESPN is like, deep in the weeds of like, how do we become a destination for all things sports all the time? And this is both a very good idea in that vein, and also just like a useful page that I am going to load every single day for the rest of my life.

• 1:08:10Alex Cranz?

  I have a question. Was this originally supposed to be a venue launch? Party or something because wasn't venue like supposed to launch around now before Fubo killed it?

• 1:08:19David Pierce?

  It was.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  So they sued them. Another anti trust lawsuit in the background of the entire internet economy. Maybe, but venue was supposed to have everything in it. Venue is the opposite strategy.

• 1:08:31Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  Where ESPN is trying to send you to every other service. And then he was like, we're going to buy everything and Fubo was dead. And Fubo was like, hold on a minute.

• 1:08:40Alex Cranz?

  ESPN was going to be a part of this. Then, you know, you'd go and you'd look and be like, oh, what should I watch? Oh, it's all on venue. I sure should subscribe to venue.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  It's a TV guide, but the answer is one channel.

• 1:08:50Alex Cranz?

  It's just one channel every time.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  I could see it.

• 1:08:54David Pierce?

  But you know what's so telling about the sports industry is it wouldn't have been that way. The thing that is ostensibly the streaming service for all the sports is not actually the streaming service for all the sports. This is why it's so terrible.

• 1:09:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was going to be like 60% I think.

• 1:09:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, which is fine. And I think venue, if it eventually launches, will be a useful thing that I'm sure I will give too much money to. But like the fact that you can go on here and it will tell you the game is on Prime Video or that the game is on Apple TV plus is like a genuine user interface victory. And I also think it makes a lot of sense for ESPN as like a big.

• 1:09:28Nilay Patel?

  How low our standards have fallen.

• 1:09:30David Pierce?

  This is what I mean.

• 1:09:31Nilay Patel?

  TV guide. Literally it's TV guide. All right, we're moving on. David, I feel like you're going to try to convince some people to buy this thing. And I'm telling you already immediately saying don't.

• 1:09:41David Pierce?

  Do you want to see it? I have it.

• 1:09:42Nilay Patel?

  You have it.

• 1:09:43Alex Cranz?

  The plod.

• 1:09:43David Pierce?

  This thing is called the Plod Note Pin.

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46David Pierce?

  And it's, we're just in this phase of everybody launching little tiny voice recorders that then use chat GPT to summarize whatever they hear. Like they all have bigger ideas, but that's essentially what it is. This one is just cool because it's like a little, it's a little guy. It's a wearable. It comes with a lanyard and a clip and something else. Oh, and a thing you can wear on your wrist. So the idea is like it's a, it's a wearable. You, you tap it, you talk to it, it summarizes your notes. Is that anything? I don't know. But this is like, this is the thing, right? Like Microsoft Recall is a version of this. The limitless thing, which we've talked about is a version of this.

• 1:10:27David Pierce?

  This idea of like, how do we make it easy for you to input all of your stuff into an AI system? And then it will make something out of that for you?

• 1:10:37David Pierce?

  Is like a the big new product question for a lot of these companies. I don't know if any of it amounts to anything. I have just been sitting here like yelling thoughts into this thing all day and it just keeps transcribing them being like, you need to remember that your meeting is in an hour. I'm like, is this useful? What did I get from this?

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  This is like, what were those journals with the pens and the notebooks?

• 1:10:57David Pierce?

  Or the LiveScribe?

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  Dots? Yeah. And I wanted to be a LiveScribe person so bad, so bad. And now it's a little chat GPT AI bubble device. I look forward to your review. I encourage everyone to wait for the inevitable review.

• 1:11:13David Pierce?

  The good news is this is a thing AI can actually do, which like summarize a bunch like voice to text to summarization. AI is good at all of those steps, unlike so many other things. Like I watched a very funny video of somebody reviewing the brilliant frame AR AI glasses. And I got such flashbacks to doing the review of the Humane AI pen where you're just sitting there asking it really basic questions. He was sitting there holding up like a, I forget what it was, a drink of some kind, I think. And it kept being like, that's a bag of potato chips. He's like, no, it's not. And it's just like, oh yeah, this is where AI is. But summarizing text on point.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  All right. Again, I look forward to your review. And if you don't have the chart of wearable bullshit in the review, here's what I'm saying. The maker of the Books Palma has a new cheaper e-reader.

• 1:12:01Alex Cranz?

  Don't get it.

• 1:12:02Nilay Patel?

  You don't get it? Oh wait, you're saying not to get it?

• 1:12:05Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so it's $150, it's the Books Six Go. And it's their new small, low budget, cheap e-reader that also runs Android. So you think, oh, these are all good things. Oh, it's cheaper than the Books Palma, but I get a wider screen. That sounds great. Then you look at how much RAM it has. And then you look at how much RAM the Books Palma has.

• 1:12:24David Pierce?

  Oh my God, it's only two gigs of RAM?

• 1:12:26Alex Cranz?

  Only two gigs of RAM. Don't, don't, I like, I've had a couple of Books products where they, where they skimp on the RAM and you feel it. It's real, real rough.

• 1:12:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's the sort of thing that like on a Kindle, you don't really have to worry about RAM because it's kind of only doing one thing. Yeah, but like you're going to accidentally have three apps open at the same time on this thing. And it is just going to set itself on fire.

• 1:12:46Alex Cranz?

  Yep. So don't like resist the urge. I know books, put more RAM in like it's not that you're not Apple.

• 1:12:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, at this point, we are just directly controlling books's business.

• 1:12:58Alex Cranz?

  I'm trying.

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  We will tell you what to do. All right. Speaking of RAM.

• 1:13:04David Pierce?

  Makes no sense. Sure.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  The Dyson Airwrap ID is a new smarter hair curler. So I put this on here because one is Alex has mentioned to us many, many times. The Dyson Supersonic, that's the hair dryer and the Airwrap legitimate gadgets, like insane gadgets. In the classic Dyson mold of we made a fan, what can have a fan? And remember when they got all the way to car and they're like, no fan.

• 1:13:28Alex Cranz?

  You know, they stopped, they stopped fans. They got to, they're doing like a hair serum now. And I was like, where is the fan in this hair serum?

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm calling it right now. Dyson, you're way out your lane.

• 1:13:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Nilay Patel?

  Fans only.

• 1:13:40Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  I really wanted the car to have a fan. Anyway, tell me.

• 1:13:44Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so this is the new Airwrap. They've released a couple of different additions at this point. This one's got a couple of different extensions, one that like just is going to suck your hair slightly differently. I probably should explain what an Airwrap does after saying that.

• 1:14:01David Pierce?

  It sucks your hair. I don't understand.

• 1:14:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the Airwrap basically sucks your hair.

• 1:14:05Nilay Patel?

  You go in one of two directions.

• 1:14:06Alex Cranz?

  It sucks your hair in one of two directions and, and then you like, you can put hot air on it or cold air on it.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Alex Cranz?

  And it's magic. And if you have ever tried to curl your hair or have thought about it, it's, it's horrible. And, and this makes it easier. It's for those of us who don't want to worry about having hot metal near our faces.

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So I'm going to ask you this question about this one.

• 1:14:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  The addition to this one is that it has Bluetooth.

• 1:14:30Alex Cranz?

  It's got an app.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:14:33Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:14:33Alex Cranz?

  The, I think the app could probably be like, you could just not get this and turn on, use YouTube or TikTok. I would give you the same thing, but yeah, it's supposed to kind of guide you through doing the hair and making sure you're holding it for long enough because a lot of people would just do it once and be like, it looks good.

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  Is this like the smart oven theory where you like, you have a QR code of a hairstyle? And then it just like does the settings for you?

• 1:14:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you're, yeah, it kind of walks you through it. I haven't gotten to play with this app, obviously, but that's kind of the idea. It's just supposed to help you make things a little easier through some Bluetooth and so.

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Alex Cranz?

  More gadget, but honestly, the, the extensions for it are the cool part. They're doing like one for curly hair and one for straighter hair. So curly hair people get like more diffusers and stuff, which is very exciting.

• 1:15:22David Pierce?

  And it's just as stupidly expensive as the air rack was already, so whatever.

• 1:15:27Alex Cranz?

  And it's worth it. Somebody in your life is gonna ask for one, get it.

• 1:15:30Nilay Patel?

  I bought one for Becky because Alex has been so high on these things for so long. Uh, and for, in the spirit of no one knows how to use it, I bought without the Bluetooth. The Bluetooth one was not yet. Also, also if I bought Becky a Bluetooth, I should be like, no, no, thank you. I'm never, I'm never using this functionality. Um, but for like a week, both Becky and Max looked like, like full Texas cheerleaders.

• 1:15:54Alex Cranz?

  Just big hair every day. That's how you know somebody gets one.

• 1:15:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then the weird thing is our air purifiers like light up every time we use it. And someone told me it's because of the hot air, uh, like the hair products you use, it like lights up their purifiers.

• 1:16:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that would make sense. Your hairspray.

• 1:16:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Alex Cranz?

  Is you're not, don't breathe that stuff. I mean, it smells great, but don't huff it.

• 1:16:13Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm saying, Dyson, find more things to put fans in. That's your lane. And I, I fully support it. Get to a car, get to a hovercraft car. This is what I'm, I'm trying to, this is why your first car failed. It wasn't floating on a bed of perfectly produced air.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  An ex car.

• 1:16:32Alex Cranz?

  They got this. I believe in them. Everybody has such great hair.

• 1:16:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they were like, electric motors are kind of like fans, right? They're fans of blades and they're like, we'll do electric motors at scale. I'm dying. James Dyson, Sir James Dyson. Come on the show. I have only one question for you. It's not worth a full decoder. Did you think electric cars are fans without blades? Yes or no, sir?

• 1:16:53Alex Cranz?

  Just a yes or no.

• 1:16:54David Pierce?

  We're gonna get James Dyson on the show and we're gonna play, can you put a fan in that? We're gonna do that for one full hour of the first cast and it's gonna be incredible. And I honestly believe he would say yes to doing that with us on the first cast. This is my new goal. Can you put a fan in that with James Dyson?

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  Gauntlet of Thrones.

• 1:17:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, let's go.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  Snapchat finally launched an iPad app.

• 1:17:17Alex Cranz?

  Good.

• 1:17:18Nilay Patel?

  Right? Huh?

• 1:17:20Alex Cranz?

  The little, like the 13 year olds? They're like, they can use their iPads now. That's great.

• 1:17:26Nilay Patel?

  I feel like this belongs in our, is this anything Hall of Fame?

• 1:17:30David Pierce?

  Snapchat's for iPad.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like, it's a bunch of weird AI gadgets and it's like Snapchat. Like, is this anything?

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  What people want is Instagram.

• 1:17:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  And they're never gonna get it.

• 1:17:43David Pierce?

  And Snap is like, it clearly wants you to use it to like, watch Snap originals and stories and stuff. I don't think this is gonna be like a super kick ass messaging system. Snapchat for the iPad. Not so sure.

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. Speaking of Instagram, another classic all time headline on theverge.com. Instagram adds what photos have always needed. Words.

• 1:18:13Nilay Patel?

  It's good.

• 1:18:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I look at a lot of photos and think, what if it just had a letter on it?

• 1:18:17Nilay Patel?

  Basically, you can now put text in the, on photos in the Instagram editor, which is fine, because you could already do that.

• 1:18:23David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, everyone has figured out how to do this anyway.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  But the fact that Instagram is slowly becoming Canva, because Instagram is slowly becoming Craigslist. Very real.

• 1:18:33David Pierce?

  Oh, that's okay. So I, the reason I put this in here is I was gonna ask, are we headed towards a world in which threads and Instagram are just the same thing? Instagram is gonna get texty and threads is gonna get photosy and they're just gonna be the same. But what you're saying is threads is gonna become Instagram because Instagram is becoming Craigslist.

• 1:18:52Alex Cranz?

  No, threads isn't gonna become Instagram.

• 1:18:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think they know that the point of threads is extremely leading questions about nothing. And they're just gonna keep leaning right into it. I, I come up with lists of questions to ask threads like every day. It's like, I was walking down the street and I saw a guy wearing headphones. Has anyone seen one of these before?

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  All day long. Like, I could be the most popular person on threads tomorrow. You can just do it all day long. You just like, look at things like, has anyone ever seen this before? I saw one today, today. A person posted, they were on an airplane and you know, sometimes on an airplane you're boarding and there's condensation coming off the plane. And I don't know who, they were just like, I've never seen this on a plane before and I fly all the time.

• 1:19:35David Pierce?

  My plane is wet.

• 1:19:36Nilay Patel?

  And all of the, just like millions of replies of people being like, you've never been on a plane before.

• 1:19:41David Pierce?

  Wow, that's great.

• 1:19:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a lot of people are, she was, she was asking if she was gonna die. And people were like, no.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just telling you, the fact that like, millions of people will fall for the worst engagement bait on threads means we've learned nothing. You know how like, we just did the like, you're here because you, you think people are smarter than Photoshop, you know? And everyone's like, we are, you know this? I'm like, I'm gonna show you this picture of condensation on a plane and millions of people bringing

• 1:20:07David Pierce?

  We know nothing.

• 1:20:07Nilay Patel?

  one of our biggest tech companies' algorithms to its knees over the dumbest engagement bait in the world.

• 1:20:14David Pierce?

  It is fun just as like an intellectual exercise to look around and just think like, what engagement baity question could I ask?

• 1:20:20Nilay Patel?

  You can just post a picture of anything, like, what is this?

• 1:20:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, my water has bubbles in it. How did that happen?

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  This is what we're doing from now on. Just get ready, it's coming. Anyway, my point is, I think they know that they want that thing. They want a bunch of calm tweets during NBA games, right?

• 1:20:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  That's not actually like a visual communication moment, but it's a place for people to engage. And they just want the engagement, they put the ads there. Whether or not that's photos or not, I think they're happy with what they've got. I'm just saying Instagram is becoming a marketing platform. It already was a marketing platform. And increasingly, what they're marketing is small business services. So being able to just put the picture on your yoga studio with the text, it's like yoga class. Like, they're just gonna do it. And that, I think that that's why I was like, it's Canva. Because that's what Canva does for people. Great. Cool. Soon it will just be AI. Like, generate me a photo of a yoga studio. It'll be fine. All right, last one. We've gone this whole time without talking about it. We're just gonna talk about it for one second in the slide round, because I'm confident next week we'll have a full preview. Apple's iPhone 16 launch event is September 9.

• 1:21:23Alex Cranz?

  It sure is.

• 1:21:24David Pierce?

  Glow time, right? That's the tagline?

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  That's gotta be for the Siri, right? The Siri effect?

• 1:21:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. Which I'm excited about. Okay, I have, I see this going one of two ways, and I'm curious which you guys think it is. One, this is just another AI show. There's gonna be some new hardware, they're gonna, but all they're gonna talk about is how like, the new, whatever chip inside of the iPhone 16 gives you more AI stuff. Or, this is going to be like a massive new hardware rev. We're gonna get the camera buttons. We're gonna get new designs, new colors, all kinds of stuff. Like, I could see this being either incredibly boring, or incredibly huge, cool, exciting new iPhone year. And I kind of feel like it's nothing between. And it all seems

• 1:22:15David Pierce?

  to me, it depends on how exciting Apple really thinks Apple Intelligence is.

• 1:22:19Alex Cranz?

  I think it'll be between, because that's, they threaded that needle at WWDC, where they took all the really cool stuff that was gonna happen. And they're like, this is happening.

• 1:22:29Alex Cranz?

  So we're gonna be like, button, cool new phones, AI for the rest of the show.

• 1:22:33David Pierce?

  That is true. Like WWDC was actually like very good and totally overshadowed by the weirdness of Apple Intelligence.

• 1:22:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I think, you know, they've got to talk about it. It's the thing that's coming next year and this phone will be the bleeding edge of it. I think the real question is whether they bring those features to the base model phone, for lack of a better word, right? Does the iPhone 16 get Apple Intelligence or just the 16 Pro? Because only the 15 Pro is getting it, right? If the 16 is getting it, the regular 16, that's the big upgrade cycle and they're gonna reintroduce all of the features. Because that's, they know that general consumers do not pay attention to WWDC, right? That's, that's the tech audience, that's developers. Apple releases new iPhone, it's gonna have the features coming later this year, you'll be able to tell Siri to do whatever you can tell Siri to do. That's your good morning, America.

• 1:23:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. We've seen some rumors, I think, that, that it was gonna come for the 16, right?

• 1:23:30Nilay Patel?

  I, I assume so, but I'm just saying, like, that's my guess, that like, this is, that's how they balance that out. I'm excited for a bunch of other stuff. I think we're also expecting new

• 1:23:38Alex Cranz?

  Watches.

• 1:23:38Nilay Patel?

  New watches, uh,

• 1:23:40Alex Cranz?

  New headphones.

• 1:23:41David Pierce?

  New headphones, new AirPods.

• 1:23:42Nilay Patel?

  M4 Mac Mini, maybe, right? Is it in the mix?

• 1:23:45David Pierce?

  Yep. Is it weird that that is the thing I want by a

• 1:23:47Alex Cranz?

  We're not gonna get any computers.

• 1:23:49David Pierce?

  I can keep everything else the same for another year, but I, an M4 Mac Mini to replace the M1 Mac Mini that is sitting here, I want it so bad.

• 1:23:57Alex Cranz?

  If, if that is here in two weeks, I don't know, I don't want to pay you guys money.

• 1:24:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta stop. This was the lightning round. We're gonna have a full preview next week. All right, go do some reporting, think some real thoughts. Preview, that's, that's next week's episode. That's why we ended the lightning round, the unsponsored lightning round. Tim Cook, you could have, you could have, you could have tried.

• 1:24:17Alex Cranz?

  Could have been you.

• 1:24:18David Pierce?

  Could have been you.

• 1:24:19Nilay Patel?

  Could have been us actually playing. That's the big announcement on September.

• 1:24:25Nilay Patel?

  Finally, iVerge is here. I'm gonna put it up. iVerge is real. That's a deep cut. That's the Vergecast. I want to shout out one big story. We did a deep dive into OpenSea this week. It is a great story with some incredible quotes in it. And also, one of those moments that like fills an editor in chief's hearts with joy. Part of our story is we didn't know if OpenSea had gotten an SEC investigation notice, and they tried to front run our story by announcing the notice the day before we published.

• 1:24:49Speaker 08

  Sure did.

• 1:24:49Nilay Patel?

  Always a win. Go read that story. It's really good.

• 1:24:51David Pierce?

  We should also say, by the way, we're off Sunday and Tuesday. The third episode of our productivity series is actually gonna run September 8th. So we'll be back Friday to do an iPad preview. Or iPad. We'll be back Friday to do an Apple preview, and then Sunday with that, and then all kinds of Apple stuff the week after.

• 1:25:09Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be wild. Alright, that's it. That's the Vergecast.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-Verge-11. 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.

• 1:25:33Speaker 09

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• 1:25:51Speaker 10

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• 1:26:03Speaker 08

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