AI Drake, AI friends, AI everything

Today, things got a little loose in the studio of The Vergecast. Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding joins Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce to make their own version of Drake's AI summer classic. We're not saying a laser bong was involved, but we're not not saying that either. Then deputy editor Alex Heath stops by to tell us about Snaps latest announcements and give us an update on the latest round of layoffs at Meta. Finally, a lightning round with all the big headlines in tech from this week. Further reading: AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google Google employees label AI chatbot Bard ‘worse than useless’ and ‘a pathological liar’: report What’s really going on with ‘Ghostwriter’ and the AI Drake song? Family of F1 legend Michael Schumacher plans legal action over fake AI interview Snapchat releases My AI chatbot to all users for free Google’s big AI push will combine Brain and DeepMind into one team Netflix is shutting down its original DVD business after 25 years Netflix is out of the DVD business because streaming won – now, can Netflix still win? Twitter begins removing blue checkmarks from all legacy users It’s a laser bong SpaceX’s Starship successfully takes off before bursting into flames BuzzFeed News is being shut down Social media is doomed to die Google Fi has a new name and expanded connectivity support for smartwatches Leak: Google will announce the Pixel Fold at I/O and beat Samsung on battery Everything spy movies get right (and wrong) about smart glasses Microsoft is reportedly working on a smaller Surface Pro and Arm-powered Surface Go 4 Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

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• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Drake. But not really Drake. Or maybe it's Drake. Or maybe it's just a crypto scam. That's the Vergecast. I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Krantz is here.

• 1:12Alex Cranz?

  Like, it has to be Drake. If it sounds like Drake, it's Drake, right?

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  What a can of worms Alex is open. It's like a 1950s game show.

• 1:22Alex Cranz?

  We're having a great time.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. David Pierce is here.

• 1:24David Pierce?

  Hi, I'm the other, other Drake. That's what a lot of my friends call me.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Whenever I look at you, David, I think, boy, what an excellent substitute for Drake.

• 1:34Alex Cranz?

  Really loved you in DeCrosy.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  Our friend Charlie Harding from Switched On Pop is here. Hey, Charlie.

• 1:38Speaker 05

  Hello. I am going to clone my voice as Drake today.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited. All I want to talk about is AI Drake. As poor Alex and David know, I have not shut up about AI Drake all week.

• 1:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, immediately. I think Monday, you were just like, it's Drake. We're talking about Drake.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  We're just the whole Vergecast. We have comments on my story about Google and copyright law. And one of the comments is, boy, this is going to be a long Vergecast.

• 2:03Alex Cranz?

  You're right.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  So we got to talk about AI Drake and what's going on. There's just layers upon layers. Charlie is here to help us make some fake Drake tunes.

• 2:12Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  Very good and talk about how the technology works, which I think will be really interesting. There's other stuff going on. It's the blue checkpocalypse on Twitter. Snapchat is doing chatbots. David wants to talk about DVDs for some reason.

• 2:27Alex Cranz?

  Good reasons.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  Well.

• 2:29Alex Cranz?

  I support David. I support you, David.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm surprised you support.

• 2:32David Pierce?

  Listen, I have like five months left to rent DVDs. I have so many DVDs to rent.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm just surprised that it's DVDs and not Blu-rays. I figured Alex would be like, kill the DVDs.

• 2:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of okay with that, but I think they're killing all discs, right? It's not just the DVDs.

• 2:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I like to think of DVD as an umbrella term. It's really.

• 2:49Alex Cranz?

  It's like Kleenex.

• 2:49David Pierce?

  It's like a spiritual DVD. It means whatever you want it to mean.

• 2:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  Laser discs. And there's a, there's a little bit of sad news to talk about today, which is BuzzFeed News is shutting down. And I don't want to dwell on it, but we've been talking a lot about the end of this era of the internet. And I think we should talk about that a little bit at the end as a preview for the entire episode about Activity Pub that David has put on my calendar already.

• 3:11David Pierce?

  Can't wait.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's start with fake Drake. I can't. It's like I'm too excited to start this conversation.

• 3:17Alex Cranz?

  Do you want to tell us all about how this happened, Eli? Cause you, you were on, you were on this from the beginning, fake Drake.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, I'm curious for Charlie's take. Charlie hosts an actual music podcast. So over the weekend, there's a track posted on TikTok by an artist named Ghostwriter977, who is a person in a white sheet and glasses. The track is called Hard On My Sleeve and the voices are Drake and The Weeknd. It's like a pretty good track.

• 3:46David Pierce?

  Is it pitched that way? Like, it's very obvious that way to see it, but I was trying to remember when this first came out, was this like, this is a.

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  It's hashtag Drake in the weekend. Okay. The title is, I say it's them, but it also is hashtag AI. And importantly, this will be very important later. At the beginning of it, there's a producer called Metro Boomin, who's now also an artist. He's got a famous producer tag by Future. If Young Metro don't trust you, I'm gonna shoot you. That's the tag. And that is at the beginning of the song. So the implication here is that Metro Boomin has produced a track with Drake and The Weeknd. Two artists that have not appeared together for five-ish years. This is a real thing, but it's obviously AI. Yeah. So it like blows up in an uncanny way over The Weeknd. Like, the TikTok account is brand new. No one's ever heard of this person. Instantly has millions of streams. Charlie, like, there are lots of AI tracks out there.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  This one just blew up in a weird way. Do people just love Drake that much?

• 4:43Speaker 05

  I think frankly, it's a, it is a serviceable song.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 05

  So it passes the, actually sounds like it was made by a human. And when we think about what part of it was made by AI, I think it's probably actually just one very small piece, which is the creation of their voices.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 05

  Very likely, the beat is made by a human. Very likely, the lyrics, if made by ChatGPT, feel edited by a human. You know how AIs, the large language models, have this problem of hallucinating the longer they go into something?

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  They're not great at doing music composition yet because they don't get the right balance of repetition and novelty. It kind of just like, the beats get weird.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 05

  They don't.

• 5:28David Pierce?

  Do they just get more chaotic as time goes on?

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  A 60-second song is great, but six minutes is like a total disaster?

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Exactly. They stop referencing themselves. It works great for like ambient music, which doesn't need to ever have any reference to an earlier part. It just keeps on blending and moving. And that's why there's a lot of background AI music and like content music that that music is fine. But this is a real beat. So it sounds like someone got a beat. I don't know if they made it or if they just ripped it off of YouTube. There's a lot of beats available.

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they wrote some lyrics and the implication throughout is they sang or performed the song and then they ran it through an AI to have Drake recreate that performance.

• 6:08Speaker 05

  That would be my assumption. There are some tools out there right now that are open source, easy to use, where you can pretty easily just grab a piece of text, run it through a thing and it will spit out a Drake-like voice. Now, the open source ones that I have access to, they kind of sound like you're talking through a bad Zoom phone call. It's a little artifact-y and weird. But there's some coming out in like the next, literally couple of weeks that are in pre-release. I'm sure people have access to betas that sound uncanny, where you can even live redo your voice and sound akin to the president, Drake, kind of whoever you want, as long as there's some training data in there. So my hunch is that this person probably has some access to one of the better tools that

• 6:50Speaker 05

  I don't have access to yet that makes the voice sound really good.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What surprised me is that it's not a new thing that is occurring. Like, there is a very charming version of AI Kanye West performing "Hey There, Delilah" that I'm just obsessed with. It's just like, it's adorable. And I think Kanye should take a note and be like, here's what I'm doing. But like, there's a lot of this stuff. There's burgeoning artistic communities using these tools. It's just fishy that this one appeared and blew up.

• 7:21Speaker 05

  It's, I think it has a lot to do with timing. It have a bunch of things, right? There's so many AI stories happening right now. The whole world has woken up and paying attention to like large language models and people are experimenting in ChatGPT and all of the various tools. And so I think they're just grabbing this perfect moment of the zeitgeist to do something in music, which hasn't been done yet. Like, we've been obsessed with Dolly 2 for a minute. That's our, that fad is probably fading. We've been really obsessed with writing college essays from ChatGPT. There hasn't been a good, there's been some fun ones in the past, but it wasn't in the same news cycle that we've been in right now. So I think it's just kind of riding this AI news cycle perfectly. And it's also at a moment when the music labels are expressing a lot of anxiety to the distributors.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  And trying to figure out what they're going to do about their future copyright, not just of issues of making sure that Drake owns Drake's voice, but also the issue that AI music writ large could just come in such large volumes in the future that even if you are making original music, it might not even get noticed because what we're already at hundreds of thousands of tracks per day being uploaded. Imagine when we're getting to tens of millions.

• 8:29Nilay Patel?

  This is what I'm saying about it. We're already in that environment in this brand new TikTok account that no one's ever heard of before, posted this thing that is maybe 5% better than the other AI songs that have existed before. And it blew. And I'm just telling you that crypto scam vibes in my heart are off the charts. There's just something like a lot of crypto people who became AI people started tweeting about it. There's a link to download the full track to a company called Lelo that wants her phone number.

• 8:59Speaker 06

  No, don't do that.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  That's crypto adjacent in some weird way. Do you see what I'm saying?

• 9:04Speaker 06

  It's Kanye.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  It's Kanye. So my first thought was like, this is Drake himself. This is a real Drake track. And they're doing some stunt with it and he'll pull off the sheet and reveal himself to be Drake.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  Controlling.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  In character for Drake. And then the weekend part of it doesn't sound quite so realistic. And then UMG freaked out, which we can get to. So maybe that's not real. And it's like, maybe it's Kanye West who hates Drake. And this would be like, actually very in character for Kanye. It seems weird too. There's just something fishy about it. I talked to somebody well placed to know. And they were like, look, it's bizarre and things that are this bizarre aren't accidents on the internet anymore.

• 9:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  But no one quite knows what's going on.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  There's a marketing agency behind it.

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  Something's going on.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  It's getting very conspiratorial.

• 9:51David Pierce?

  I don't know, man. Like, there's definitely an Occam's razor version of this that says like, TikTok is incredibly well placed to make things popular that would not otherwise have a platform on which to be popular. If you can do a passably good impression of Drake, you're going to be very popular on the internet. It's just like a thing that is true. And this has that, like, we talked a lot about the swaggy Pope on the show. Like, this has a lot of that same vibe where it's just good enough that you. Initially don't catch it and you like think it's an all right song and then you catch it and you're like, oh my God, this is it like blows your mind in several stages, which is like a perfect recipe for something like this to blow up way beyond what it would ordinarily do.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. I'm just saying all the the earned media that it got is legit. Like we're talking about it because it's impressive. It's worth talking about. But the first wave of that media was this is blowing up on TikTok. And I think that that turn of it in particular is you can just pay TikTok money to promote.

• 10:47David Pierce?

  And there were also a bunch of people like tweeting and stuff who were like, oh, this is really blowing up and it had like 25,000 views. And it's like, I don't know that this is blowing up yet.

• 10:55Nilay Patel?

  And so we'll come, we'll come to the fishy part and the takedowns and all that stuff. Cause I think that's the next turn of the story and I'm obsessed with what Google will do. But I just want to stay focused on the tool itself here. So Charlie, you have made this stuff. I was talking to you about it earlier this week and you're like, I just made one of these in two minutes and you sent it to me. And it was like, you were taking the text of me talking about Ticketmaster and you made Drake rap it. And I was like, I just come on the show and do that. So walk us through how you actually go about doing this.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  Okay. So literally just before coming and sitting down with you all, I was like, oh, I've got to make one of these really fast. So here's how I went about it. The first thing I did is I went to, um, first you need a beat, right? Uh, you can make some AI beats. I don't think they're that great. I don't like them. So you can make a very easy beat by using open uh, or very affordable sample library. So I was sort of like, okay, let's go find like a hi hat loop. Okay. So I found some like little loops.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God. We're doing like a full Charlie Puth impression.

• 11:57Speaker 05

  What if there was a light switch?

• 12:02Speaker 05

  I'll never, I'll never do that. I should say I am an amateur beat maker.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 05

  And I am not a rapper. But I could grab some samples. So I grabbed some samples. I dropped them into Ableton, my, my music software. And I did this. This was like two minutes.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Beat, just existing samples that are out there.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 12:25Speaker 05

  Drake-type beat?

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 05

  Drake would for sure rap on top of that.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Yes. No, no, that beat is like slightly too interesting for modern Drake. If you played that in a Banana Republic, they'd be like, ah, this is too hardcore and that's the current Drake threshold. Banana Republic? Like, he makes gacky pants music right now. Alright, continue.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  Okay, so then I have the issue, as I said, not rapper, but I need some lyrics and I figure what I could do is I could just go to theverge.com and the first thing that I saw, let's see, it's no longer on the front page right now, but what was on the front page was, "It's a laser bong."

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Beautiful.

• 13:02Speaker 05

  And I just, I literally felt like, "Here are the lyrics to our song."

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm so happy.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  So here's what I, here's what I.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  The laser bong is the gift that keeps getting greater. It really does. What a beautiful 420.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  So I record myself just stating the first couple lines of your article on The Verge. "It's a laser bong, it's a bong, there are lasers, I could not be clearer about what it is." It's got some flow.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 05

  Weed and lasers just seem to go together.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  Mean Drake.

• 13:30Speaker 05

  Like weed and black light velour paintings or weed and peanut butter.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  Good, that's good.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Together, uh, seem to go together, peanut butter, little slant rhyme. I was like, alright, those are our lyrics. So I record myself. I go and find this website, Uberduck, uberduck.ai, not affiliated, no idea.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  They have trained a bunch of rapper AI data sets that are, as I said, they're like, they're okay. They're not amazing. So I enter, I upload my voice saying that thing.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 14:03Speaker 05

  And then I type in the text, it needs to match them, and I hit synthesize and outputs this with my beat.

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm so excited. This is the most exciting thing that's ever happened.

• 14:14Speaker 07

  It's a laser bong, it's a bong, there are lasers, I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bong, weed and lasers just seem to go together.

• 14:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 14:26Speaker 07

  Like weed and black light velour paintings or weed and peanut butter bong.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  Oh my god. So that's, it's a laser bong by The Verge. Yes.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  That's going out on Spotify tonight.

• 14:38Speaker 05

  Tonight.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  Who has a CD Baby account? Andrew Marino, do you have a CD Baby account? Yep, that's a thumbs up. It's going out tonight.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  But really, this was like, it took me a few minutes to put this together. And like, if we don't, if we didn't like the Drake, um, who else do we like? Um, let's grab Eminem. Let's see what he gives us. Oh my god. Uh, let's do Eminem freestyle is the model. I'll hit synthesize. Takes a minute because this is like a

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  The real time is like an important piece here.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  And, um, I got a nice picture of Eminem. I feel like this isn't enough lyrics to give Eminem. That's really what I'm worried about. He's gonna do this very fast. Yeah, this is free. They have a paid version.

• 15:19Nilay Patel?

  Uber dot AI.

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, this night is getting shut down. Like Eminem's lawyers are listening to this right now. But, but you're listening to this, pull the car over and synthesize as much rap music as you can.

• 15:31Speaker 05

  Do it now.

• 15:31Nilay Patel?

  Because it's not gonna last for very long.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  And David got in trouble for, uh, using a Eminem AI voice at a live show. And so, uh, I don't want Eminem coming for The Verge cast, but here he is singing laser bong or rapping. Those are my lyrics, Eminem.

• 15:48Speaker 08

  It's a laser bong, love relations, if they did not be clear about what this is. We ain't laces just to go together like we ain't black like Bella paintings. We ain't peanut butter. We my friends and your none.

• 15:59Speaker 05

  Just starts hallucinating.

• 16:05Speaker 05

  Beautiful Eminem. Beautiful.

• 16:07David Pierce?

  I think I understood four of those words.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  And that was just like, you know, each one of these models is clearly being trained by a user. It like, clearly the company is not wanting to upload these data sets. So they don't know how this information is getting in there. And probably why they sound bad is that there's probably not enough training data for each of these artists. And if you want to separate the voice from the music to get the a cappella, you have to do so with an AI separation tool.

• 16:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Which are pretty good. Um, but they still are gonna have some digital artifacting. So that's gonna get into the training data. So these things are not perfect yet, but they're pretty good. And here, here's a, another version of Drake by, to do another era. This is Eminem all era. So people are doing different training sets.

• 16:51Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  You can try different Eminems. Let's see what this one sounds like.

• 16:54Speaker 08

  It's a bong, they're lasers. I'm not be clear about what this is. We ain't laces just to go together.

• 17:01Speaker 09

  We have to stop giving him an M S seizure on this.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  You know, I'm telling you, but doesn't it kind of feel like he's just with us over Zoom? And there's a bad connection and you're like, wait, Eminem, what was that?

• 17:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Can you try that again?

• 17:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it just sounds, he's just a little off there.

• 17:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, all of that and also he's having a stroke as we do this.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  All right, Liam has requested Ice Spice. Can we make this say whatever we want?

• 17:23Speaker 05

  We can make it say whatever we want, yes.

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, so I have an email from a listener.

• 17:26Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 17:27Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  I, in, for disclosure, I've already sent Charlie the text to this email so he can begin this process. I'm going to read you this email, it's from Joe Lamothe. I hope I'm pronouncing that Joe. Okay, guys, I'm late to the party in the last two podcasts, but here goes. I can venture with you all on a lot of stuff, even some of the super weird crap Dieter used to come up with. That said, however, Neel I could not be more wrong on the CarPlay stuff.

• 17:47David Pierce?

  Let's go.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. I drive a 2021 F-150, wireless CarPlay works flawlessly for me. Also, look at these pics, two apps running, or at least kind of like the iPad's version of it. But look, CarPlay on the left and on the right, I have my podcasts running. In the second shot, I even went full, I'm Neel I and I burn money on satellite radio elitist mode. And I'm listening to Sirius XM to show it. You do not need my phone screen, it sits down out of the way and I forget it's there. This implementation of CarPlay is the best I've seen. Can we make Drake rap Joe's email?

• 18:17Speaker 05

  You want Drake, you don't want Jay-Z?

• 18:18David Pierce?

  I would like it to be Jay-Z.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  I think we want both.

• 18:21David Pierce?

  I think it was Jay-Z.

• 18:22Alex Cranz?

  Jay-Z, Jay-Z.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  Well, I just feel like I want to hear another one. Jay-Z, this, this, this model's different. With this one, I don't quite know how to do it, but you can like change its pitch and all kinds of things. But we're just going to do the basic Jay-Z. And it might take a second because this is a longer, a longer passage, so.

• 18:36David Pierce?

  Charlie, I have a question for you while it goes.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 18:38David Pierce?

  Is there a reason this is something that would be easier with rap than with other genres of music? I feel like we've seen it more with hip hop than other genres. Is there a reason for that?

• 18:47Speaker 05

  Well, certainly with rap, you don't have to, pitch is not a big of a consideration, right? So you don't have to worry about getting pitch. Rhythm is challenging. In fact, the reason why I recorded myself saying the, the Lions originally was because I wanted them to be decently in time again. Not a rapper.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  But if you just do what we're doing here, it's gonna put them in some kind of random order. It's not gonna hit the beat where it needs to. But here is Jay-Z, let's see how he does with CarPlay.

• 19:15Speaker 10

  Oh guys, I'm late to the party on the last two podcasts. But here goes, I can venture what you want on a lot of stuff. Here's some of the super weird crap that I used to come up with. It said, however, the link could not be more wrong on the CarPlay stuff. I drive a 2021 450, well, this CarPlay works flawlessly for me. I was like, when I look at these pics, you want running, or at least can't like their best version of it. Look, CarPlay is there on the left and on the right. I have my podcast running. From the second shot, I've been went full on the lane, and I just burned money for sick LA radio. Let this move in actually listening to service and to show it. I do not need my phone screen, it sits down out of the way and I forget it is there. This implementation of CarPlay is the best I have seen as always. Let us show, yeah, I'm a car, the podcast for 110 million, you know, and then. It's mentally enter it takes six.

• 19:58Speaker 10

  This is nearly paying a squirrel, telling them, pay the enemy in good color. Oh guys, I'm late to the party.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  I think it's a good jipper. There was some decent flow in there. There was most like.

• 20:09Alex Cranz?

  Really getting the flow towards the end and then.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  If I chop that up and let me put autotune on that, you give me like, there could be, there's a thing there too. Who knew Jay-Z was so into CarPlay?

• 20:19David Pierce?

  Well, Jay-Z saying, I have my podcast running, needs to go into the Vergecast theme song.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, one, Jay-Z's also wrong about CarPlay, as is Joe. That's the other hour of the show. So let's talk about, this is incredible. Let's just feed more text into AI rappers for the rest of the hour. It's incredible that it's easy. It's incredible this service is free. It's incredible that you were able to synthesize it against your own voice and make something that is quite honestly great and I think will be our legacy. But it's also the layers of complication here are like out of control.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  So you will recall that I said, part of my sleeve of the fake Drake song had the Metro Boom tag in it. I don't know if that's AI or not.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  I really doubt it.

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, it doesn't make any sense.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  Based off of your whole feeling that this is.

• 21:11Alex Cranz?

  What is Metro Boom?

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 21:13Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 21:13Speaker 05

  This is. Metro Boom is a producer, so in the world of hip hop, it's very common that you put a audio tag at the beginning of your beat so that people can identify it as yours. That's a way of producers really building a name for themselves when historically producers, you know, are not usually named artists. So it's a way to, you know, all right, Metro, I start recognizing that. So that tag. I think that someone just copied that tag.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I mean, it makes it's easier.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  Very easy to isolate it, take it apart. You can do that with existing AI tools that separate tracks. That's a whole nother technology. So maybe some AI was used in the process of separating it from its underlying track. Or maybe Metro Boomin has that tag somewhere on the internet that is isolated. Very easy to crop, boom, it's in your track.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 05

  Again, this song, this song is good enough that it works as a song that could chart on the Hot 100. Largely, I think mostly from interest of the, the sort of the excitement of it all, it being AI. But no, this is, that does not sound like it's AI. I really think the main AI element here is likely to just be the, the voice transposition, voice synthesis model. Again, maybe the lyrics were somehow generated with AI. We don't know. We're somewhat, I think we're going to find out, like someone.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Something is going to.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but it's important that the Metro Boomin tag, we think is a sample. It's like a real sample.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  A future actually saying that on a track and Metro use that over and over again. Universal has this like strong statement, which is very long that I won't read here. But Universal Music comes out and says, we have to work with our streaming service providers. We think generative AI like this infringes our copyrights and other agreements. And that honestly, if you were like Universal's marketing team or like legal team, you might release this track just to release that statement. Right. Again, the layers of potential stunt here are very high. I love that idea.

• 22:59David Pierce?

  The statement notably didn't say, we don't know anything about this or where it came from or anything like that. It just, it just says, AI is bad. We love our artists.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 05

  Plausible deniability.

• 23:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we're down in the weeds now of this thing. So they start issuing takedowns. We don't know if they're the ones who took it off of Apple Music and Spotify and title and the rest. We, I've heard that that wasn't them, that the streamers just did it. Right. Again. Cause you did a little reporting on this. Yeah. Every now and again, the old man, old man puts on his old fedora and starts reporting. Pressing a little notebook. Yeah, I started calling around, seeing what's going on. So the, the streamers pulled down. And what's difficult is on YouTube and TikTok, you can't just call up and say, take it down. Right. Cause they're user generated content platforms. So you have to file a DMCA takedown. This is all very complicated. Anybody who's ever watched any amount of YouTube has like run into a creator being like, I don't have the copyright.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Like the YouTube takedown system is real. YouTube takes it down and they put up a copyright notice saying Universal has to take this down. So then I start digging around for real because that's really weird to me because the song is a new song. Universal doesn't own the song and the law around do you own Drake's voice.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Doesn't really exist.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  Universal definitely doesn't own Drake's voice.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, right, right.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  Right, so it wouldn't be Universal, it would be Drake or The Weeknd and then the law, as you're saying, the law doesn't exist. So I dug around, reported out, Google on the record said to us, we took it down because of a sample. And I have learned the sample is the Metro Boomin tag. So we escaped this like legal nightmare.

• 24:34Speaker 05

  It's not even a story about AI. It's just, this is a really old story about getting copyright clearances for samples.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Yep, and it's like the escape hatch, like saved by the bell of this tag. So now Universal can claim this song contains an unauthorized sample that we own. And if we hear this song and that sample is in it, take it down. That's copyright infringement, we own this sample. If that sample wasn't there, this is a nightmare.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I wish it wasn't there.

• 25:00Alex Cranz?

  It's a good nightmare.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  I put it in as like a giant pull quote in our story that's like, if you upload this song without the Metro Boomin tag, because I desperately want this to happen.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  So the thing that you're talking about, the training data.

• 25:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  Someone's out there uploading a bunch of Jay-Z songs, a bunch of Eminem songs, or whatever. To uberduck.ai.

• 25:22Nilay Patel?

  They don't own the rights to train the AI on those songs.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Of course, they're just like OpenAI or any company which is scraping the internet for everything and doing the exact same thing.

• 25:30Alex Cranz?

  Actual rights, though. Like, is it, because that's, I think, the big question right now, right, is who owns the rights to train AI? Is that something that you have to own the rights to? Because everybody's kind of saying, no, it isn't. If it's available, I can do whatever I want with it.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  This is the, this is the big debate.

• 25:46Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  Right, so right now, if you write a song. Let's call it.

• 25:50Alex Cranz?

  I did, I did.

• 25:52Speaker 05

  Part two.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Right, you as the owner of the copyright, you wrote the song, you recorded it, or in this case, you had Drake recorded for you.

• 26:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  That's your song. You have a bunch of exclusive rights that are like listed in the law. There's a bunch of stuff you're allowed to do. One of the things you're allowed to do is sell copies of the song. And that's, most people will buy copies of the song from you. They get from you the right to like play the song. You don't get the right to play the song in public or perform it, that like. There are organizations that run around suing bars and restaurants because they don't have the appropriate public performance licenses. And this is just like a big system that has existed for decades. One right you definitely don't have is the right to make, if you just buy a song. You go to the store and buy

• 26:34Alex Cranz?

  Laserbomb.

• 26:35Nilay Patel?

  A Laserbomb.

• 26:36Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 26:36Nilay Patel?

  On CD and you come back and play it, you don't have the right to remix it or make a sample of it because that's a derivative work, right? That's you as the artist, hold on to that right.

• 26:46Alex Cranz?

  Right, I can't sell, I mean, I can make that, I just can't sell it.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  No, you're really not even supposed to make it.

• 26:52Alex Cranz?

  Really?

• 26:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Alex Cranz?

  I'm learning all sorts of new things today.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, it's just copy, like you're making copies. And so copyright law very narrowly regulates the act of making copies.

• 27:02Alex Cranz?

  Okay. And it says you cannot remix this.

• 27:04David Pierce?

  Is that in any meaningful way different from what's happening with like search engines right now? Like to Charlie's point, the OpenAI and everybody is just pulling everything it can find on the internet, making training data out of it. And now you're starting to see publishers and other companies start to get mad. Is this just exactly the same thing?

• 27:20Nilay Patel?

  It's exactly the same thing. So Getty is suing Stability and News Corp is making a lot of noise about suing Google. News Corp loves talking shit about Google. Um, like every Hollywood studio is going to start doing this. The idea that there are things you are allowed to make copies for and things you are not allowed to make copies for is, there it is, that's copyright law. So here they're saying, hey, making copies of our work into your computer for the purpose of training an AI is, those are unauthorized copies. No one knows if that is a valid thing to say out loud. This has never happened before in the history of the world. And then they're saying, once you've trained your AI on those unauthorized copies, the

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  songs you are making are now unauthorized derivative works of our songs. Or unauthorized derivative works of Getty photos or whatever it is.

• 28:12Alex Cranz?

  Yes, Charlie's going to jail.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  I mean, probably because you all can sue me because I stole, I stole your copyright, I stole the text from The Verge.

• 28:19Alex Cranz?

  I will be suing, yes.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  I mean, nothing, there's nothing that could be better for the show than Universal suing us for

• 28:25Alex Cranz?

  Laserbomb.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  Laserbomb.

• 28:29Nilay Patel?

  So I welcome the lawyers. Parody really gets you out of anything. Parody is a great excuse. I welcome that lawyer, I welcome that letter from your lawyers and we will post it so fast. So you just have this problem, right? Where, okay, this step of we're going to train AI by copying all the data onto the computer. That might not be fair use. And fair use, Liam will kill me if I go into this. It's a four factor test, whatever. It's like as political as anything, right? It's like as random as any court decision in the country, case by case fair use determination. So that, all the creative companies are like, wait, this is not fair use. This is unauthorized copying to make training data.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  And Microsoft and Google and Stability and whoever else are all saying, nope, this is fair use. Alex Heath was at a conference with the CEO of Stability AI where he said, I hired the lawyer who wrote the book on fair use. Oh, okay. And Sarah Chong, I'm like, who? This doesn't make any sense. Sundar Pichai for in search, there's a string of cases from the early 2000s about Google and search where they found fair use. So again, the most famous is called Perfect 10 versus Amazon and Google. Perfect 10 is a porn publisher and their images were showing up in Google image search and Amazon image search. And the court had to feel like, yeah, Google's going to win this one. Like, but you've just got this like ancient body of law that allows these things to happen that doesn't apply one to one to this. Right. And now you're like, what are they going to do?

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  What's Google going to do? Google has to run YouTube where if you take that Metro Boomin tag out, the decision on whether or not this song is fair use or not is wide open. There's no thing like the DMCA for names and likenesses, right? You can't issue a that's my likeness takedown to Google. There's no mechanism, there's no law for it. It's all state law, it's not federal law. And then Google also is doing a bunch of AI stuff. So like what, what you've, you've got YouTube, which as David keeps writing about, turns more and more into the cable company every day. Yep. So it needs rights holders to be happy. It needs the NFL to be happy. It needs Drake to be happy. Whoever's going to play at the next halftime show should be happy with YouTube.

• 30:37Speaker 05

  Worth mentioning that the entire content ID system exists more or less because of the multi-billion dollar lawsuits that many of these content companies went after YouTube when they were a much smaller company.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  And so, Google's highly aware of how vulnerable it could be to huge litigation.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  And so, all that stuff, that the content ID happened because of Viacom and Google basically at that time and YouTube at that time were new and they were like, this is the cost of doing business. There's a famous scene at the end of like The Social Network where Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers are like, this is the price of being a success. Pay the money, settle the lawsuit and walk away. Like, that is very much how Google and YouTube thought about those cases. Now they're giants.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're the incumbents, they're the infrastructure, they're the cable company with the deal with the NFL and OpenAI is not. Stability AI is not.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  And it's worth noting that content ID is not the law. It's just an agreement between some companies.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  The way that content is treated there is very different than it is in other platforms.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, your choices basically are like you upload a song or a video and say, this is my video and Google trusts you that you're not lying and you're like, take all the videos that match this video down or monetize them and send the money to me. If you don't own the song, you can't say that. So like Drake can't show up and say, all uses of my voice I own, even if they're made by a robot, monetize them or take them down. But that system doesn't exist and is also just like.

• 32:02Alex Cranz?

  I hope it does exist. I hope it, I hope this is how it exists.

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  But only for Drake.

• 32:06Alex Cranz?

  But only for Drake.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  I find it really interesting that you're, you're having to go at length to explain how unusual this is, but underneath all of it, it just doesn't pass the smell test.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 05

  I think any human is gonna be like, uh, that sounds like Drake. Can, can you do that with Drake? That doesn't seem right. Like, initially it's just like, oh yeah, you can't, you can't do that. Is the, can you do that? Oh, maybe we can, is where we're at. But.

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  The law is just not prepared for it because the law is all based on making copies of existing things. And we just have never had a robot that can take your voice away from you.

• 32:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:40Nilay Patel?

  And then talk about car.

• 32:41David Pierce?

  Well, and that's the thing. And if you take, if you sort of take that out, like what Charlie is saying, and you, you say, okay, this doesn't pass the smell test, let's not allow it. You've just kneecapped all of the generative AI stuff that Google has basically poured its future into. And like, you, you either say this is allowed to piss off the music industry, or you say, everything we think is the future of our company and the internet is illegal. And I don't, it's, it's a total losing game. And I like, it doesn't seem like there's a middle ground here either. It really doesn't.

• 33:11Alex Cranz?

  Everyone's gonna fight.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't know what Google's gonna do. I don't, I mean, there's one middle ground. And I got an email from a longtime Birchcast listener who said, I agree with you. I think Google's gonna solve it with money.

• 33:21David Pierce?

  I mean, fair.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay, sure. And maybe that's what Universal is gesturing towards. But you're not gonna stop Uber Duck AI by demanding money, right? And the models are just gonna run on people's computers and the training data is gonna get copied. And trying to regulate the copy of Drake's catalog onto your laptop to train a program on your laptop is a ridiculous exercise. But that is like what copyright law can do. It can be like, you made a copy here and that one is illegal.

• 33:51Alex Cranz?

  But I think we are gonna see some precedent because we have seen this in film and TV, where they go and they take somebody's likeness and they slap it onto a model. Like, all the Star Wars movies are like, you know what? Princess Leia is alive again and young.

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Alex Cranz?

  And so, and they sign contracts, like there's, there's a bunch of.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  Will Smith, I think famously signed his like, whatever, what was that horrible movie they made?

• 34:12Alex Cranz?

  I Am Legend? Was it I Am Legend? No, no, no. It was the one where he's like the younger version.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Young Will Smith, yeah.

• 34:16Alex Cranz?

  It's real bad. But, but yeah, like, a bunch of contracts have been written. A bunch of people have kind of agreed on this. So there's, there's stuff there, like people have figured this out. And there are those smell tests, and I think it's just gonna be up to the courts.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  One decade. This is my prediction.

• 34:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we got a decade.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we gotta wrap this up. Alex Heath is waiting. Come talk to us about Snapchat and their chatbots. Charlie, I'm curious, just on the broader picture. You know a lot of artists, you know a lot of songwriters, you know a lot of musicians. Switch on Pop is great. You should go listen to it. Is there the flip side of excitement? Like, look at these tools are so fun.

• 34:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, that was really fun. I just made laser bomb. It's the best. There's so many things that are happening in AI and music. From how to mix and master your music more quickly so you can get it up on Spotify faster to make more interesting beats. There's endless, I think, creative tools that people are doing with this. And there's also people who are creating open source AIs that they are giving explicit permission that you can

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  use their voice. And that's totally awesome. People are gonna do some very creative stuff with it. I haven't, I haven't seen a track break through like this sort of gag one yet, though. But you'll

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  It's fishy.

• 35:29Speaker 05

  There's been like

• 35:30Nilay Patel?

  Because it's a crypto scam.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Totally. It's all a

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a crypto scam. Don't invest in anything. The future of our nation's copyright law is gonna happen because of a crypto scam. And that seems about right.

• 35:41Speaker 05

  There is something, there's definitely excitement. People are already using AI tools in small and interesting ways. But in terms of like writing whole tracks for us, I have been saying, since people have asked me this question, is AI gonna write whole music, whole songs for us? When it's happening, there's just way bigger issues to be worried about.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Speaker 05

  I mean, obviously, I don't mean to diminish the, you know, the music industry. It's a big industry. But when we're writing really good songs and replacing excellently done composition and all the human creativity and the tens of thousands of choices that go into writing a song. I mean, we have, what? The AIs are doing much more important things. Power, military, like, I just, I'm a whole, when that happens, I'm being, I'm paying attention to something else.

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, hit us with some laser bong and let's get on here. One more time. Write again with laser bong. Run it back.

• 36:31Speaker 07

  It's a laser bomb. It's a bomb. There are lasers. I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bomb. We and lasers just seem to go together like weed and black. Like they'll do paintings of weed and peanut butter.

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• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  We're back. It's a laser bong. It's a laser bong. It's catchy. I can't tell you how often we're going to play laser bong on this show. I'm really excited. For the rest of eternity, we're going to play that song. Thank you to Charlie. Charlie's gone now. Mm hmm. But Alex Heath is here. Hey, Alex. Hey, guys. Good to be here. Quite a lot going on in what I would call the Alex Heath world, the world social platform, Snapchat and event. They talked about some AI stuff. Google is reorganizing a little bit. There's some meta layoffs. There's some Reddit API access stuff happening around like training these models, which we were just talking about at length. Let's start with Snapchat. It seems like their event was pretty fun. Like, they're a weird company. They're always having a good time no matter how badly things are going.

• 38:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's actually what I was gonna, the weird was the word I was gonna use. Tech events are back, baby. Yeah, I was, earlier this week, they had this pretty cool event at this airport in Santa Monica, where Harrison Ford parks his planes. So there's like little planes flying above us as we're, as we're outside mingling. And Snap just is like, it's this weird creative company that continues to befuddle people, but manages to also do interesting creative things. And like, you get there and they give you like a 3D bitmoji of yourself and like a little like award trophy case that you can just like set on your desk. And like, they just have all these creative, interesting weird things that they do.

• 39:29Speaker 06

  But yeah, I mean, the big news at that event was this MyAI thing that they're doing, this chatbot, that I interviewed Evan Spiegel on the site for about. And they're really betting big on it. And they're the, I think, the biggest social media company to fully embrace generative AI. And now they're opening up access to the chatbot to all of their users. And like, for everyone listening, I always, every time I feel like I talk about Snap, I hear, people still use Snap? And they gave a stat that they have 750 million monthly active users. So they continue to grow users despite people continuing not to understand them or what they do. And now they're betting big on AI.

• 40:06David Pierce?

  New people turn 13 every day, man. And it's like, that's what happens when you turn 13. It's like, you just get Snap. It's a strategy.

• 40:13Speaker 06

  And like, to just kind of like summarize how weird this company is, they spent three years developing this AI selfie mirror that I tried at the event, that they're not even shipping. It's just R and D. And the camera is inside the mirror, and it's like lenses and AR shopping stuff when you walk up to it. And you could see its applications in stores. I have no idea if they're actually gonna do that, but like, they're a SaaS company now. They're selling AR shopping software to, to companies. They're gonna have some of these mirrors as like tests in Men's Warehouse. They're doing tests with Nike where you can try on a Nike shoe on your foot with like a mirror.

• 40:48Nilay Patel?

  Can we just back up to Men's Warehouse? No shade on people. I have shopped at a Men's Warehouse in my life. I'm just saying, men's clothing is the least AR necessary clothing. Yeah. You're like, you're gonna wear a jacket. What if the jacket was blue? It's like you don't.

• 41:05David Pierce?

  You just precisely exactly described the promotional gif for the men's warehouse. It's a guy trying on what looks to be like a prom tux. And the one, the AR one he's wearing is blue and then he like dramatically presses a button and then it's black.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  Alright, fair enough. I just, it's men's clothing. Like I'm wearing a new black jacket. Looks great. It just doesn't seem like that's what, whatever. Good luck to everyone over here at Men's Warehouse SaaS Business. Is, are they doing all this stuff because Snap is a company, they had Pocalypse because of Apple, just like everybody else and they need to branch out?

• 41:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, they want to diversify revenue. I would point people back to, I leaked this Evan Spiegel memo late last year, kind of outlining the plan for all this and all the metrics they want to hit. They're behind on some of it, but yeah, they want to diversify. So they've also got Snapchat Plus, which is their subscription product. Where you basically pay for early access features. So my AI initially was gated to plus. And they've got three million paid subs for that, which is a little bit behind what Evan wanted to be the goal, but it's, it's still growing. They want to try to get to 10 million this year. You know, Snap is an actual super app. You know, when we talk about Twitter and Elon's goals to build X and build a super app. It's already what Snap is and it's, it's kind of confusing to talk about and understand. And they're still trying to figure out how to make money out of it.

• 42:30Speaker 06

  Because the main reason that people come to Snap is to chat and they don't make money off of chat. So that's been their inherent struggle as a company. Is they, they sell ads against stories which are declining in usage and Discover, which remains kind of like a tabloidy looking thing that hasn't really changed much over the years. And long-term, they think AR advertising is going to be a thing, but I don't think that's going to be a meaningful thing on mobile. I think they're waiting for wearables. So they're in this really weird spot where they're not big enough to get the ad dollars that they think they deserve, even with that user base of 750 million monthly users, which is like a huge user base, right? And that was kind of the background of everything was like the stock is like below the IPO price.

• 43:12Speaker 06

  The new is not growing like they had hoped, but they keep shipping interesting stuff and they're still kind of the product R and D factory for the rest of social media. And you know, when you, when I I've seen a lot of tech events over the years, I really would put them maybe second to Apple in terms of the kind of polish and creativity that they put into these moments where they announce all this stuff and you could hear it and feel it in the audience there. People were genuinely energized by what they were doing. It's just everyone's also going like, when are they gonna make money? And that's a problem when you're an independent publicly traded company and you're not profitable yet, but you know, you have all these employees. They have like over 5,000 employees. So the the Twitter thing kind of hangs over them as an example of like what could go wrong.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Do you think there's a chance that Devin cuts half the company like Elon?

• 44:00Speaker 06

  I think more layoffs could happen. Um, Kara Swisher actually interviewed him on their stage at the end of the day and asked him about selling the company and he's never budged on that question. He's always said, we'll never sell. And he did actually kind of hint to that, basically if we aren't able to uh get the company more efficient and profitable through this tough time, like you know, it would make sense for us to entertain some kind of discussion, but he acted like they had already done that, even though the stock market does not think that they have. And so that I thought that was interesting. It was the first time I've ever heard him not totally dismiss that idea. But you know, he controls the company fully. I don't see that happening. I don't see who the acquirer would be even.

• 44:41Speaker 06

  But yeah, I could see more layoffs happening. I mean, they are a lot bigger than Twitter and they have more users, but um they're not profitable either and that's a problem.

• 44:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, Snap is trying to play this weird game, I feel like, and I was thinking about this watching the Partner Summit this week where Snap's like big long-term bet is on AR, right? Like they've been saying this for years that fundamentally

• 45:00Nilay Patel?

  Everyone's big long-term bet is on AR.

• 45:02David Pierce?

  But hear me out. This

• 45:03Nilay Patel?

  But really?

• 45:04David Pierce?

  This thing that Snap is trying to do, I think, and I is is get so many people used to AR that it can then sell all of that AR to businesses because all of those businesses will have to give people AR features because customers will demand them when they walk into a men's warehouse so that they will buy them from Snap.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna love the way these AR pants look, I guarantee it.

• 45:25David Pierce?

  And that to me is just like, some of the, I think they are genuinely ahead of everybody else in AR. Like, from what we've seen in the world, like, more people use Snap to do cooler stuff than any other AR platform that exists.

• 45:35Speaker 06

  They showed the, like, crying lens in the audience during the keynote where they just, like, pointed the camera at people in the audience and they were just, like, crying, or they looked like Pixar characters, and it's hilarious.

• 45:44David Pierce?

  It's great.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  I mean, the lenses, the face lenses still remain the best current mobile consumer application of AR that exists.

• 45:52David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 45:52Speaker 06

  The problem is, is like, it's goofy and dumb, and it's funny, but it's not a business, right? And so they're starting to introduce, like, lenses you can transact with using, like, Snap tokens and, like, unlock things, like, games. But like, it all comes back to these, like, tabletop demos that we've seen of, like, pointing your phone at a table or whatever, and there's, like, a game, like, no one does that in real life.

• 46:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like iOS, every stylist demo is, like, circling things.

• 46:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:17Alex Cranz?

  For a while, iOS, every...

• 46:18Nilay Patel?

  I have to say, whatever you just said about AR lenses that you shop with, with Snap tokens, like, I rarely feel old on this show. And that made me feel like a, like, an ancient wizard who had just stumbled out of a cave, like, what are you talking about?

• 46:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I felt old many times, uh, during the day, um, like, they were doing, like, they're like, we're gonna have a story where it only, you can only post to it at night and then watch it the next day, it's like an after dark story.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  We gotta stop doing this, we're like, this thing where we invent times of day.

• 46:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 46:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, let's talk about the chat by itself, because that's actually the news. It is interesting that they're the first social platform that's like, you can just talk to a bot in our app in this way. What, what's the play there? What's the idea?

• 47:00Speaker 06

  So Evan, I think, remains one of the most, like, thoughtful product thinkers in consumer internet, and he is really bullish on generative AI, which is interesting, he doesn't usually, like, quickly jump to these kind of trends, I haven't seen him do that over the years, I've interviewed him a lot, and he's really into this, like, this was his idea, like, I've heard he was, like, personally writing my AI prompts, like, responses, like, he's very into it.

• 47:21David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  Um, and, you know, he thinks, he told me that these LLMs are better suited for creativity than information retrieval and accuracy, which we see.

• 47:32Speaker 06

  Right when we when we as you guys have talked about and we'll talk about like we're constantly finding out that these chatbots are actually they suck at search they suck at recalling specific information and so that's accurate that you can count on and so he's treating it and wanting people to think of it more as like a person like a persona so they're anthropomorphizing it and letting you make a bit emoji and all of it and then change the name and introduce it into group chats like at mention the AI

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  Your chaotic liar friend. Isn't that just the worst?

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Well, look, go ahead. Like he told me he was I was like, how do you use it? And he was like, well, I use it to help plan my wife Miranda Kerr's like birthday weekend in LA. And he was also like, I use it to tell my kids a bedtime story every time when I get home from work.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  But wait.

• 48:19Speaker 06

  So generative AI bedtime stories, I don't know.

• 48:21David Pierce?

  That's bleak, man. That is bleak.

• 48:23Nilay Patel?

  That's horrible. It's not horrible. I mean, sorry, I'm not saying that I've done it.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying abstractly, you often read your child's stories written by something else. You often read your child's. I don't know if Dr. Seuss is a robot. Oh, he was a dude. He's a real man. Who knows? History.

• 48:44David Pierce?

  This is the hill you want to die on is who knows who people are?

• 48:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry, I just had Drake rapping laser mong on this show. Nothing is real. The future is wide open.

• 48:55David Pierce?

  That's very fair.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  But this turn, right? Okay, you you introduce this new chaotic, it's Snapchat, so it must be said.

• 49:02David Pierce?

  I would just point out just real quick.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  Occasionally horny element into your chat service.

• 49:06David Pierce?

  This is just clippy. This is the most clippy thing anyone has done yet, including Microsoft, which is running away from doing clippy.

• 49:12Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, it is clippy because they're also so my AI will start recommending lenses like if you ask it and where this gets really wild is.

• 49:21David Pierce?

  I hear you want to do crying face.

• 49:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're exactly. They're doing generative photo snaps back. So they showed on stage, this is just going to be for plus subscribers to start. Eventually it'll be video too, but like you'll literally have visual like snaps being sent back to you generated based on what you send it, which is wild.

• 49:38David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. The example was like you send it a picture of a bunch of tomatoes and say like, what should. I make for dinner and it sends back like a beautiful picture of tomato soup.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 49:45David Pierce?

  Right?

• 49:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, with a recipe or whatever. Um, so there's a couple of things here. Um, Snap is, they can't really like lose more business. I mean, I guess they can, but like they're kind of at, at the bottom in terms of like where they can go from a revenue profit perspective. So they don't have a ton to lose. When you look at what Meta, Meta has all this tech in house, they could do something like this. They could have done it 18 months ago and they wouldn't even need it. Open AI, we should also say Snap is using Open AI for all this. Google, same thing. We've been talking about how Google's been just like slowly forced to ship stuff because of Open AI. These big companies, they have, everything is a reputational disaster for them potentially. So that's like lawyers just saying you can't ship this, right?

• 50:26Speaker 06

  Snap is in this spot where they're huge and they have a very young audience, which also is a even potentially bigger reputational issue for them. But they, they can ship faster. And so Evan was very clear that like, they don't know exactly how my AI is going to be either misused or what's going to happen with it. But they're thinking like the benefits outweigh the risk for a company at our state. I mean, I just want to like, this is, I mean, before you go to Alex, this is a company that right before Evan did the interview with Kara, they had Matt Friend, who's this hilarious creator who does this Trump impersonation. He's like this TikToker Snapchat star, uh, do like a stand up thing, right? But I've never seen something like this at a big tech conference where he like impersonated Trump, made jokes about like China and TikTok

• 51:11Speaker 06

  and impersonated Evan, impersonated Tim Cook, like at a Snap event, like sanctioned like right outside of the main stage. I'm like, they, they are just in a different mode where they can like just YOLO it a little bit. And so I think that's why they're doing this and it may, I, I think it has the risk of being the biggest like potential, you know, reputational disaster for them from a new product they've shipped though.

• 51:31Alex Cranz?

  Because this is, no, because you've got, you just said they had the youngest audience, right? So they have all the people who are young and cannot tell. Probably have the most difficulty telling reality from fiction. And now you're giving him a fiction bot.

• 51:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:46Alex Cranz?

  That you want them to personify that has already, I think, told a 13 year old how to seduce a 31 year old. And they're saying, we just want to move fast and break things. That all seems like a recipe for horrible things to happen.

• 52:00Speaker 06

  Which gets to a bigger thing about Snap right now, which is, I feel like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. A lot of the, a lot of the presentation was also about creators and how they're trying to pay creators more and give them more visibility and Spotlight, which is their TikTok competitor that is growing, has 350 million MAUs. Hasn't managed to break out into pop culture, right? You don't see like spotlights on late night or anything like that. But they have this public thing that they're trying to do because they need to have that consumption and inventory and time spent to make money from ads, because ads are not in chat. And then they also have the chat experience. And the same thing goes with AI. They're trying to say, this is a creative thing, like, don't rely on it. But also like, we're going to pin it to the top of your friend list. We're going to let you name it.

• 52:44Speaker 06

  And it's based on OpenAI's models, which we continue to see how people are jailbreaking them. They don't, we don't fully understand what they can do, how they can interact with us. And so I've never seen Snap kind of just rush into something like this. I mean, this literally was like from January to now, they're releasing this thing to everyone.

• 53:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this just seems like it has the potential for like catastrophic backlash. Like, you've already had it do it once where it had, again, a 13, teach a 13 year old how to seduce a 31 year old.

• 53:13Speaker 06

  Is that a real 13 year old?

• 53:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that was something, that was your piece.

• 53:16Speaker 06

  It was somebody, yeah, it was somebody from the Center for Human Technology, Tristan Harris's thing, trying to get it to say bad things.

• 53:22Alex Cranz?

  So, but, but they still like, that was capable. Yeah, the safeguards aren't there. And now you're going to unleash it on 750 million people, many of whom are children. And like, I don't want to be one of those people that says, think of the children, because that's usually like the worst thing in the world. Think of all of the video games that were shipped in the 90s. But also at the same time, that seems just really dangerous. If you, if you've got this untested thing that you don't know what it's going to do. And now you're going to say, okay, 13 year olds, have fun. And also you're Personifying it, which means like it'll kill us all.

• 53:52David Pierce?

  I don't know. I kind of feel like the the reputational damage gets lower with every one of these that comes out. And it's now like, like Bing is just right there, right? Like you can go make Bing be real horny if you're 13. Like it's it's not that hard. And I don't know that Snap is uniquely.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  All time Vergecast quote. I think we might, that that might be the end of the show. I think the police are coming to our houses right now.

• 54:17David Pierce?

  But but what is interesting about it to me is this is so completely unlike the way Snap has ever done anything. Like, the company has been like thoughtful to a fault over the years. It has been really slow and really deliberate. It's like, you think about like the the speed it has gone with Spectacles, like, Jesus Christ, release something. But and but they've been very careful to say like, we want to get this stuff right. We want to do it well. We want to be thoughtful. We want to make sure the technology is good. And then with this, kind of like the whole tech industry's brain broke when ChatGPT launched. It really did.

• 54:49Nilay Patel?

  I want to use that to change the subject ever so slightly, right? Yes, Snap is like, here's the thing, you can chat with it. We can sign up for the OpenAI API and you can chat with it.

• 55:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:01Nilay Patel?

  In our app too. Great. And they're the first big consumer platform to like out and do it, which is interesting. But it's still just like, you can chat with it and you should be able to talk to it. And the thing is everywhere. I just want to flip this to Google for one second, which has released approximately nothing. There is a report this week that Google's own employees said, don't release Bard. It's it's horrible. It's a pathological liar. I would not say Bard has inspired the level of fervor.

• 55:27Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  That ChatGPT has inspired, not even Bing. Like when you're getting done by by horny Bing, like something really weird has happened to your company. And just today, uh, Google announced, uh, Sunar Pichai had a memo out. Their two rival AI development centers, Google Brain and DeepMind are now being merged. Alex, you know what's going on there? Because it seems like Google, for all of its previous perceived leadership, is now just way behind.

• 55:53Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, this is like the opposite side of the coin from Snap, where Google has like probably 15 different teams building. A version of my AI in parallel and they don't even know it, right? And the DeepMind-Google separation is the ultimate example where they bought DeepMind many years ago, which is this cutting-edge AI research lab in London. And it's been largely separate from Google, doing a lot of parallel work in terms of AI development. Google has Google Brain, led by Jeff Dean, who's doing a lot of like the stuff that you see in Google products. What this signals to me is that Google realizes it needs to ship more. And so it's combining all of these, you know, researchers and scientists that it has together so that they're not doing...

• 56:35Speaker 06

  There's also like the power grab here of like, you know, DeepMind is its own company. It's like when Kevin Systrom was still at Instagram and Instagram was like, "We're still a separate company within Meta," right? And Zuckerberg's like, "No, you're not." And it's a similar thing that Sundar is doing this week, which is like, no, we need to actually be shipping collectively and putting our minds together and not have these fiefdoms, right? And that's the big tech side of it, where like, they're still doing like org chart changes to try to just like catch up to where the industry is moving. And Snap is like, "We're just gonna like use OpenAI and put a bot out and figure it out later, because we can." And so that's, that's the problem you have when you're that big and you have all this scrutiny as, as Google, is that, you know, first we see all these huge org changes before

• 57:20Speaker 06

  there's even a product.

• 57:22David Pierce?

  But the funny part of this is like, I would not say DeepMind is like famously a great shipper of products. Like it's, it's been a really impressive research arm for more than a decade. But basically, the only thing people would know DeepMind for is that it, it built like AlphaGo and, and is like incredible at games, right? And it's like, I think, to me, what this says is that the work that DeepMind is doing is better and more advanced and more likely to help Google products than what's happening in Google Brain.

• 57:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it just doesn't make sense to have them running separately. I mean, it's like Meta went through this with Instagram. I mean, it's, it's a similar thing. So yeah, that is the other side of the coin, right? And it's, you know, I think when we see I/O here in the next couple of weeks, you're gonna see a lot of all this kind of come to a head.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  I/O is gonna be fascinating this year.

• 58:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and before we move off Snap quickly, there's a business thing I wanted to touch on that I think, and you know, I, I wrote about this in, in Command Line, the, the newsletter this week, is that I think the, the reason Snap is moving so quickly here is that my AI to them is the first time they're getting, and why these interfaces in general are taking over the industry, it's this really high-intent

• 58:28Speaker 06

  Interface where you can know exactly what someone's trying to get out of your product. And for Snap, they need that desperately, right? Because they're not monetizing chat with friends. They're not monitoring those messages for ad targeting.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  With a robot and then you can target the ads based on that.

• 58:44Speaker 06

  I mean, the people at Snap are frothing at the mouth about like ad advertised responses in this thing. Target like tying the data from my eye into ad targeting throughout the app.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  Now, I don't feel old anymore. Now I feel appropriately aged.

• 58:59Speaker 06

  So like this all comes around to like ad targeting and business models at the end of the day.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna make you a robot friend and then heavily surveil your interactions with the robot friend. And then the robot friend is gonna be like, have you thought about the men's warehouse?

• 59:11Alex Cranz?

  That's creepy.

• 59:12Speaker 06

  I mean, I mean, I don't know, like if I'm asking my eye to help me plan a vacation to Japan and it like then shows me an ad for like a cool hotel in Japan when I'm like in spotlight, I don't mind. You know, it just depends on depends on how they do it. No one's tried this yet. No one, I mean, Bing is trying it, but they haven't really scaled it yet. The thing is like how people interact with these large language models may just be terrible for ads. It may not be at all what you want and we don't know, but Snap's gonna try.

• 59:37Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be like, do you love me? Do you love me over and over and over again?

• 59:41Speaker 06

  This person is desperate for affection. Let's show them dating app ads.

• 59:46Nilay Patel?

  I would say that is more likely the outcome than not. Last little pieces I want to end on here. In the previous segment with Charlie, we were talking about training data and the copyright disasters that are associated with it. Reddit started charging for API access because people are training on Reddit. Which is fascinating. Elon threatens to Microsoft for something which we can talk about in a minute. I'm not quite sure how that would work. In general, the training data problem is real. We're seeing the tech industry react to it from the other side of the coin. What are you hearing? Is this, are people worried about this at all?

• 1:00:20Speaker 06

  I think the companies that have these valuable data sets of user-generated, interesting, relevant content that also applies to a search-type context, which Reddit is probably at the top of that stack, are going to find that they have an incredibly lucrative business of just licensing that data in this new world we're headed in, where these models need to train on something. And so the companies that are going to succeed are either the ones who have all the data in-house, which is actually, by the way, a long-term bullish thing for Snap on the visual side. They probably have more visual data to train on than just about any company their size. But for Reddit, it makes total sense that they would start charging. I'm surprised they haven't already been doing this because you know that OpenAI has used Reddit data to train its models.

• 1:01:04Speaker 06

  And if you're Reddit, it's like, it's the same thing with copyright. It's like, you gotta pay me for this. You can't just like, take this. And Reddit wants to go public, maybe potentially at the back half of this year. I wouldn't be surprised if this is like, a huge part of their going-public narrative, is that we're this valuable data source for this new wave of AI companies. I could see also a similar thing for Quora. We don't talk about Quora a lot on this show, but Adam D'Angelo, who's also on the board of OpenAI, their CEO, is very smart about this stuff, and they've kept their data off of the internet. It's not easily scraped by Google. That kind of data set is valuable as well. Medium's another interesting example. There are some, Medium, right? We can talk about Medium later. But like, I'm just listing these examples of these companies that have all this UGC content

• 1:01:48Speaker 06

  that's not easily scraped. It's incredibly valuable.

• 1:01:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The Twitter one is interesting, because Microsoft turned off compatibility with Twitter ads. And someone just like, posted the headline, and Elon replied to it. And it was like, they trained using Twitter data, lawsuit incoming. And it's like, whoa. First of all, Microsoft's not OpenAI.

• 1:02:09Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, we gotta like, parse the Elon, we gotta parse the Elon speak here, right? Like, he said Substack was downloading part of the Twitter database or whatever, which is like, not even possible. I don't, I don't know what that even means. But yeah, so like, yeah, the Twitter thing is interesting because Elon, Twitter was very, I wouldn't say lazy, but they, they let people scrape the data and they had to deal with Google. Tweets were indexed on search. I doubt, I don't think they were getting paid much for that. Elon is realizing this is, this is whether it's, it's increasingly becoming less valuable, but throughout history, it has been a valuable data source. And now with these models and he wants to build his own large language model and, and woke whatever counteract.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  Woke GPT.

• 1:02:49Speaker 06

  So it makes sense.

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  Sleepy GPT.

• 1:02:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. So sleepy GPT. So he's, he's, that's the opposite of woke, right? Yeah. So he's wielding Twitter's data as a, as a weapon and something to hoard instead of how it was kind of viewed.

• 1:03:00Nilay Patel?

  But so what's fascinating about this is he doesn't own the data. Like you just go look at Twitter's terms of service or X.com's terms of service, or other companies called now. Like the line is like, you own your data and we take a license to it. And so there's just this like more copyright law stuff.

• 1:03:14Speaker 06

  Sorry.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  But it's just weird. Like there's a whole thing that's going to happen here where these platforms realize like, oh, we have a thing that is, we take a license from all of our users. But then if someone goes and does something bad, we actually have very little recourse.

• 1:03:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because we, we don't own the data. The users could retain, like when you tweet, that is yours.

• 1:03:36Speaker 06

  Except when.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  You just give Twitter a license to use.

• 1:03:38Speaker 06

  Except when Twitter takes it, goes offline suddenly, like when Elon pulls the plug and it's not yours, right? I'm not trying to do an Activity Pub segue, by the way, with that, but like that.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm ready.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Laserbomb Activity Pub, the new Verchast hit single.

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  But yeah, that's, that's, I mean, you're right. There is that interesting copyright question, but you know, I, Elon, I remember him tweeting several months ago that OpenAI was crawling Twitter for their model and he blocked that. So yeah, I, I, I think these, these sources of data, Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Quora, will just become closed off unless you pay. And that's their long-term strategic value for all these models to train on.

• 1:04:19David Pierce?

  Yeah. I think the, the one I would add to that is Wikipedia, which I think is the other one, along with Reddit and Wikipedia, to me are like by far the two most interesting. Because I think like, I've been talking to search engines for years who like are trying to figure out what to do with the fact that smart people just put Reddit at the end of their search query. Because like Reddit is literally like structured data that answers every question anyone has ever had on the internet, right? Like it knows which ones are most likely. It has comments. It's like it is if you can mine Reddit successfully, which is why it's so insane that Reddit is not a better product. You can learn anything about anything. And in the search engine days, you would do all of that and get a bunch of data from Reddit, but you would end up back on Reddit. And the theory was like, we can figure out how to make money as long as we can get you to Reddit. We'll give this data to other people because it eventually accretes back to us because you come to Reddit.

• 1:05:02David Pierce?

  And with all of these models, that's no longer the case, right? Like the my interaction with Reddit ends in my chatbot now. It's data from Reddit. It's information from Reddit, from people on Reddit that I I am never once touching Reddit or even knowing that it's Reddit. So like, I I kind of agree, Alex, that like they should have looked up to this a while ago. And like that that paywall should be big and it should be expensive.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's just no, it's like hard to wake up to a thing that doesn't exist. You know, it's like until chat GPT hit, what are you doing with all this data was not making consumer products.

• 1:05:33David Pierce?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  It was doing demos to collect venture capital, which I think is like Google's problem. Like fundamentally, Google's problem was like, we don't have to make products. We're just gonna baby step our way to AGI.

• 1:05:45David Pierce?

  No, I think I think it's the opposite. Google said, we have to make good products or nobody will use them. And OpenAI came out and said, we made a crappy product. Do you want it? And everybody said, yes.

• 1:05:55Speaker 06

  People love crap. Well, this is this is the reputational thing we were talking about earlier with Snap versus big companies like Google and Meta. They have had all this tech like, based on my understanding, like, yes, OpenAI has done some innovative stuff on like the foundational research. But really their innovation was productizing this stuff and not caring if it got stuff wrong. And just putting it out in the world. And that shocked everyone in big tech that, oh, wow. Like, it doesn't matter if this thing is like not perfect, like people just want to play with this. But if you're Google and your your mission is to index the world's information and make it easily accessible, it's a huge problem if you put a model out that just spits out bad information and you're Google. So.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  And yet they did it anyway.

• 1:06:35Speaker 06

  It's Bard and Eli. It's not Google. But yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. And it's garbage.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. Alex, you want to stick around for the lightning round?

• 1:06:42Speaker 06

  Um, I should probably peace. I need to finish the newsletter. Yeah.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break. We are. We're gonna run over. I'm just letting you know this is gonna happen. Alex, thank you so much.

• 1:06:52Speaker 06

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll be right back.

• 1:06:59Speaker 12

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• 1:07:51Speaker 13

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• 1:08:31Nilay Patel?

  We're back.

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  It's true. It's very good. It's very good.

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  I just, we're gonna run that for the last 10 minutes of the show, and that'll be the Vergecast, everybody. That's it.

• 1:08:49David Pierce?

  Drake, if you want to come on the show and try to do better at rapping laser bong, we would love to have you anytime.

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  I'll bring the laser bong in. The thing is, Charlie's actually a very good musician, so he's like, "I did a bad job with this." It's like, no. You did a very good job. You made it a banger. Yeah, like, this is a banger.

• 1:09:06Alex Cranz?

  Listening to this all the way home.

• 1:09:08Nilay Patel?

  We gotta do a quick lightning round. David, you are very taken with the fact that Netflix is shutting down its DVD business.

• 1:09:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, this is a very fun story to me because, yeah, this is, it's gonna be the 25th anniversary. This year is the 25th anniversary of Netflix shipping DVDs. And on this, the 25th anniversary, Netflix is going to stop selling DVDs, which is the obviously correct thing to do. It's been a bad business for a really long time. It was so bad that they tried to spin it off and name it Quickster, which was a super bad idea. And then they made it DVD.com, which is fine. And it's existed forever, and now it's gone. And I just like, I go back to, I had this nostalgia fest with a bunch of people on the internet over the last few days of like, do you remember how awesome it was when you first got Netflix, the DVD thing? And you could just, just say, I want a DVD, and it just appeared at your house.

• 1:09:59David Pierce?

  And then when you're done, you put it in the mailbox and it's gone. And then the next one arrives, like, that was so much better than anything that had ever existed beforehand. I feel like it sounds ridiculous now, like, two decades after streaming is a thing, but it was magical. And I just, I just want people to remember, like, that was the best Netflix ever was. Like, screw House of Cards, forget all this other stuff. That was the best thing Netflix ever did.

• 1:10:20Alex Cranz?

  It was when your queue mattered. And so like, sometimes you would maybe have a really fun time in college. And then you'd wake up the next day and you'd get some stuff from, from Netflix and you'd be like,

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I understand now why you said sometimes you'd have a really fun time in college with a slight amount of hesitation.

• 1:10:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and then, and then you'd be like, I don't remember this.

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  You definitely hit the laser bong and messed with your Netflix queue.

• 1:10:42Alex Cranz?

  And then like, you'd just be like, oh no, the Netflix queue chaos after like Saturday nights. You'd do like your Sunday morning double check. It was a good time. I missed that.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  I never sent anything back, let's be honest.

• 1:10:54Alex Cranz?

  You still have all of them.

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  I have like, I've got the first three in the mail and I was like, well, I guess these are the only three movies I'll ever own. So, here's an interesting stat that came out of the same earnings call that I just want to point at. Netflix now makes more money from its ad customers than its premium customers. So here's a quote, "Our ads plan already has a total annual revenue per member greater than our standard plan." So they're adding features to the ads plan.

• 1:11:19Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  So if you are a Netflix with ads person, you make Netflix more money than if you're a premium customer. This makes me real twitchy. About the ads coming to every other part of Netflix.

• 1:11:28David Pierce?

  Oh, it's coming. This is the last phase of Netflix killing television. They like, they're coming for everybody. Uh, they, they ate the, they ate Blockbuster and now they're eating basic cable. Like, this is what Netflix has always wanted is to be the size of the entertainment business. And this is like, the only way you get there is with a really, really, really, really big ads business.

• 1:11:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's, I have written here, it's a laser bong.

• 1:11:54Alex Cranz?

  It's true.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Today is 4/20.

• 1:11:56Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's true. A national holiday. The most important holiday.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  The most important day on Elon Musk's calendar.

• 1:12:04Alex Cranz?

  And mine.

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  Here are the three Elon headlines. The Starship launched after a multi-year delay. You should actually go watch the documentary Lauren Grush made with our video team while she was still here before she went to Bloomberg about the people who've just been living at Starbase for years, waiting for this launch. It's just really good. It's, it's like, just, it's good. It's like, one of the best things we've ever made. Our video team did an incredible job with it. Go watch that on YouTube. Uh, but it launched today. Those people are all very happy. Uh, and then it promptly exploded.

• 1:12:30Alex Cranz?

  And they were still happy, apparently.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  They were still happy. And I, I, if you watched the livestream, they were all cheering when it exploded. And I couldn't for a minute figure out if they were just instinctively cheering in an explosion, the way that I would instinctively cheer in an explosion.

• 1:12:44Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I think.

• 1:12:45Alex Cranz?

  Or they like knew something. They're like, yes, this is what's supposed to happen.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  Turn where they realized, like, oh, uh, no, they, they, SpaceX defined anything as clearing the tower as a success.

• 1:12:55Alex Cranz?

  So they did it.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  So they did it. They, the thing went in the air, all the rock, all the Raptor engines fired.

• 1:12:59Alex Cranz?

  Are they gonna pick up the mess?

• 1:13:02Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna pick up that.

• 1:13:02Alex Cranz?

  Did it like vaporize?

• 1:13:03Nilay Patel?

  It's unclear what happened to cause it to explode. There was a phrase they used. David, what was the phrase they used?

• 1:13:08David Pierce?

  I can't remember. I'm gonna look this up now. It was, it was super delightful, though. It made me think of conscious uncoupling, uh, like when Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow broke up. Um.

• 1:13:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, look at that explosion.

• 1:13:20Nilay Patel?

  It's real good.

• 1:13:21Alex Cranz?

  That's a good one.

• 1:13:22David Pierce?

  Rapid unscheduled disassembly. That's what it was.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's very good. It's a very good phrase. Uh, so that happened. Congratulations to SpaceX team. Hopefully we'll launch again soon. But then today is also the day that Elon began removing the blue checks from Twitter.

• 1:13:36Alex Cranz?

  Do you still have yours?

• 1:13:36David Pierce?

  Mine's gone.

• 1:13:37Nilay Patel?

  My, I think mine's gone now. There was a, a period there where they were flickering.

• 1:13:41Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  Which is very good. I've never felt less. I just have no feelings.

• 1:13:46Alex Cranz?

  I was like.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  You wanna start my conversation again? I'll get it ramped up.

• 1:13:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It was one of those things where you're just like, okay, cool.

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's over. And not to make this about Activity Pub, this is also the day that BuzzFeed News shut down. Earlier this week, we ran a post from Ellis Hamburger about this sort of inevitable lifecycle of every social media platform, and while they're all kind of doomed to repeat all the same mistakes, I would say that the Twitter blue check day, BuzzFeed shutting down, BuzzFeed News shutting down, that piece, David's like, it's all kind of the same story for me, which is this era of the internet has come to a close.

• 1:14:21David Pierce?

  How would you name that era? I've been trying to figure this out.

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  The social era.

• 1:14:25David Pierce?

  That's good. Or the social media era.

• 1:14:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the era of the social web has come to a close.

• 1:14:30David Pierce?

  Oh, I don't agree with that.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:14:32David Pierce?

  No, I think, I think if anything, the internet keeps getting more and more social. I think it's like, it's, this is like the era of big social is coming to a close, right? Yeah, it's decentralized. Sure, I'll give you the platform era, that I'm good with.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so, so there's something along that, the social platform era, the platform era, this thing that we all talked about where it was all settled for a minute.

• 1:14:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like, it's come to a close. I'll just read you this line from, from Ben Smith, who now runs Semaphore. He was a former editor of BuzzFeed News. He's got a new book out called Traffic. It's very good, whatever. Here's his line, he wrote about BuzzFeed News.

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  BuzzFeed never found a new path when the trend turned against us. When consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful, when platforms decided news was poison, and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites.

• 1:15:19David Pierce?

  You could replace BuzzFeed with a lot of things in that sentence.

• 1:15:22Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of wreckage in that region. And I think the next one to turn is Kugel and all of the SEO farms that exist in this world. It's just a weird moment. It's like, it's, the blue checks thing is whatever, but you combine that with the BuzzFeed News thing and just sort of this recognition, this sort of like dull recognition that the platform era has like wound itself to whatever this end is.

• 1:15:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Nilay Patel?

  If you run a tech website like we do, you're like, oh, there's a bunch of cool new stuff to write about. But it's worth taking a beat to be like, okay, like this thing is over.

• 1:15:55David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:15:55Nilay Patel?

  And I think there's just gonna be a lot more fallout.

• 1:15:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think this this next period, I don't know how long it's gonna be, but it's gonna be really messy. Because there are, there are a lot of people looking for where to go. You almost forgot about like the impending possibility of a TikTok ban, which is like an existential crisis to a huge number of creators. And so we're now in this place where, like, where do you go? Where do you spend your time on the internet?

• 1:16:17Alex Cranz?

  Theverge.com.

• 1:16:18David Pierce?

  Open question. Yeah, The Verge.com is the best possible answer. Neel, I will be in the comments yelling about CarPlay. I can absolutely guarantee that.

• 1:16:25Alex Cranz?

  Being very wrong.

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  Hey.

• 1:16:28David Pierce?

  But it feels unsettled for the first time in, like, I don't know, 10 years, 15 years, maybe? That it was like, ever since Facebook became sort of the place that everybody was, the the common denominators have been there, and now they're gone. And the the threat of the rest of them being gone looms just as large as the ones that are going away. And it's, it's weird. This next phase is gonna be really, really weird.

• 1:16:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Alex Cranz?

  I'm, I'm honestly excited. As somebody who grew up in that phase, that that first like wild web phase, I'm like, yeah, let's get back to some of that.

• 1:17:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Alex Cranz?

  But with less of the porn, remember, anytime you would, let me elaborate. Anytime you would go on like a search engine and you type anything in, the first result was always just like XXX. Do you remember that?

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  Again, I feel like you and I had very different collision experiences.

• 1:17:14Alex Cranz?

  This is like,

• 1:17:15Nilay Patel?

  Alex is like, here's what I did. I ripped the laser bong. I fucked with my Netflix queue, and I did some porn searches.

• 1:17:22Alex Cranz?

  You'd be like, game cheats. And it'd be like, I'll show you some game cheats. And you're like, sir, no. I wanted to know about video games.

• 1:17:32Alex Cranz?

  I think I was the only one. All right. Nobody else used search, uh, search engines?

• 1:17:36David Pierce?

  Can we feed Alex saying, uh, I'll show you some game cheats into the Drake generator, please?

• 1:17:42Alex Cranz?

  Well, hit up Charlie after that.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how to respond to this without triggering some sort of HR seminar. So we're just gonna move on.

• 1:17:51Alex Cranz?

  They just actually appeared in the window.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  Last two, uh, last.

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  Last few lightning round items. It seems like the pre-Google I/O run-up has begun.

• 1:18:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  So the Pixel Fold is leaking all over the place. It looks nice. Weird camera bump.

• 1:18:12Alex Cranz?

  Huge, huge camera bump.

• 1:18:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't.

• 1:18:16Alex Cranz?

  They're like, what if the camera bump was also a kickstand?

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  Do you know how there's the argument that like, Apple makes the phones? And they know people will do cases, so they make the cases, but they design the phones to not have a case.

• 1:18:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:27Nilay Patel?

  Apple fans argue this all the time. Google is absolutely designing these phones to be put in cases.

• 1:18:32Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Anytime they don't have it in a case, they're like, oh, something's wrong with this.

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What if it was as ugly as possible? Don't worry about it. We're gonna stick in a case. But actually, the Fold does have, it has a way about it, at least in these photos, and the way that the Pixel 7 does not.

• 1:18:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. It's supposed to have a great battery life. We'll see how it goes. And then there's this other rumor that we're hearing along the same, I don't know if it's pre-I/O run-up, but it's just in the mix. Is it Samsung's deal to use Google Search as default on its phones is up? And Google's in a panic because Samsung might go with Bing, which is... When I say we're like back to the future, I could have read that headline to you in 2008.

• 1:19:13Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:19:15Alex Cranz?

  Where's Bixby in all this?

• 1:19:16Nilay Patel?

  Bing will be the default on Samsung phones? That is some 2008 information.

• 1:19:21Alex Cranz?

  I take it back. I don't welcome this new era.

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  Welcome it.

• 1:19:25Alex Cranz?

  Abort, abort, never mind.

• 1:19:27Nilay Patel?

  You're worried about horny search engines? Have you met Bing, my friend?

• 1:19:32Alex Cranz?

  Bing's gonna show things.

• 1:19:35Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. But I/O's coming, the leaks are out. We've got a story stream with all the leaks. We got another story stream on Apple headset rumors. Check that out. And then last one, this is just my favorite one of the entire week. We, actually, this story got an unexpectedly huge amount of traffic. Google Fi has been renamed.

• 1:19:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Nilay Patel?

  To Google Fi Wireless. And I just want to point out that that is Google Fi. Why?

• 1:20:00Nilay Patel?

  What are we doing?

• 1:20:02Alex Cranz?

  It's a new era, man. It's the new era. Anything goes.

• 1:20:05Nilay Patel?

  Look, I'm one of the last Google Fi subscribers, although I will say, again, this story got a wild amount of traffic.

• 1:20:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Nilay Patel?

  So when they're out there, they read the verge.com.

• 1:20:14Alex Cranz?

  People did read it.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  I have it because you can just turn it off for 90 days at a time.

• 1:20:18Alex Cranz?

  You have it as like an ESIM?

• 1:20:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have an ESIM and like whenever I'm doing the two phone thing, I like light it up and put that one. It's T-Mobile 5G. It's all fine. Uh, and then I turn it off. It's great.

• 1:20:28Alex Cranz?

  Love that.

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  Just another thing, but it's like Google Fi why?

• 1:20:31David Pierce?

  Which is good because they were clearly trying to change it so it didn't sound so much like Google Fiber, but instead they made it sound like Google Wi-Fi, so they solved nothing.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  But backwards.

• 1:20:39David Pierce?

  They didn't make it better at all.

• 1:20:40Alex Cranz?

  But also a question? Google Fi why?

• 1:20:43David Pierce?

  Why? But I will say the thing about Google Fi why that I think is exciting, this is just the official name now. We're just calling it Google Fi why. I will hear no other names. Is that you can now put your smartwatch or some smartwatches on your Google Fi why plan for free, which I think is a good and excellent thing that everyone should do. Uh, this, this thing where it's like $10 a month to add all your ancillary devices to your plan is nonsense and it should go away. And then like Amazon sidewalk is sort of undoing that a little bit. Google Fi why is sort of undoing that a little bit like, we're just, we're just going to crack this thing open and I'm, I'm very excited.

• 1:21:17Alex Cranz?

  And Verizon will be furious.

• 1:21:19Nilay Patel?

  We got an email this week from someone who basically accused us of tricking them into believing that Bixby was actually a dog with shoes. And I truly hope we can do that for Google Fi why as well.

• 1:21:30Alex Cranz?

  I really, really hope that. I think we can.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  It's good. And look, I appreciate that you believe that it was a dog with shoes and I don't apologize because that was my goal all along.

• 1:21:40David Pierce?

  And also it was one. Being is horny, Bixby's a dog with shoes and it's Google Fi why. You don't stand for much on this show, but there it is.

• 1:21:49Alex Cranz?

  Those are our tenets.

• 1:21:49Nilay Patel?

  All right, Alex, finally, we've talked about the laser bomb quite a bit and have actually explained zero what is going on.

• 1:21:57Alex Cranz?

  I, I think that the song really covers it. What more is there to say?

• 1:22:02Nilay Patel?

  I reviewed a laser bong.

• 1:22:04Alex Cranz?

  I reviewed a laser bong because I got like the request. They're like, do you want to check out our laser bong? And I was like, I, yes. Oh, I free time. Yes. It is, it is a very, very expensive bong. 99.9% of people don't need it, but that point one percent is like, it's a laser bong. Of course.

• 1:22:23Speaker 14

  That point one percent is in this podcast studio right now.

• 1:22:27Alex Cranz?

  And if you've ever been like, I want to see weed get heated with a laser. That's what it does. That's it.

• 1:22:33Speaker 07

  It's a laser bong. It's a bong. There are lasers. I could not be clearer about what this is. It's a laser bong. We and lasers just seem to go together like we.

• 1:22:46Nilay Patel?

  Liam is so mad at me. This episode has gone so fully off the rails. That's it. We are way over whatever you thought it was going to be. We're over that.

• 1:22:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Nilay Patel?

  That's the Vergecast. The site was incredible this week. It was just a very fun week to work here. We're back to basics. We're just blogging again. Never went away, never went out of style. It's all here. You know what's at theverge.com? Real people talking about their feelings and laser bongs.

• 1:23:10Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:23:10Nilay Patel?

  That's what we, that's what we sell here every day. That's it. That's a Vergecast.

• 1:23:20Speaker 14

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:23:54Speaker 15

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