Apple's HomeView has an app problem

Well, it's been a couple of days, and David and Nilay have some more information — and a bunch of new questions — about the Apple HomeView. They also talk about the latest Gemini model, and whether building the best model matters if you can't build the best products around them. They then debate the merits of returning to X, why none of the supposed Twitter replacements worked, the latest in Brendan Carr nonsense, and more. Further reading: HomeView doesn’t natively support any video apps yet — not even Apple’s Apple’s new Find My-compatible remote will also work with your old Apple TV The AI race is back on Google finally releases Gemini 4 Argon Google brings its AI coding platform to its Gemini app on Mac. Google makes it easier to launch your vibe-coded apps OpenAI employee arrested for allegedly planting a bug in a conference room OpenAI claims an ex-employee took its product plans and presented them to Apple Now that Character. AI is going bankrupt, what happens to all of its users’ data? Daring Fireball: X Once Again Marks the Spot Platformer: Does intelligence need a hard cap? SpaceX announces plan to become a ‘major mobile carrier’ JPMorgan Chase is keeping AI agents out. Xbox is officially embracing the chaos of AI-powered game ports Global smartphone sales just hit a 14-year low. Silicon Valley is falling in line with Trump’s attempt to rename AI The US government launched a “Super Intelligence” website. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 CarPlay Banter01:36 HomeView App Confusion03:40 CarPlay as Home OS08:31 Apple Hardware Software Bet13:28 Should It Just Be an iPad?14:31 Gemini 4 Returns16:18 Meta Muse Strategy19:54 Google Product Dilemma26:28 OpenAI Bugging Scandal29:49 Character AI Bankruptcy32:31 Bankrupt Data Goldmine33:00 Privacy After Shutdown36:55 Why People Return to X39:35 Threads Fumbled It40:49 X Owns AI Talk49:17 Who Should Use X49:57 Reporters And Sources53:00 Video Platforms Win54:44 Gruber Gets It Wrong01:01:29 Brendan Carr is a Dummy01:02:40 Execution Livestream Fallout01:07:21 Sprint Merger Fallout01:08:48 Dish Spectrum to SpaceX01:09:44 Can Starlink Compete01:11:30 SpaceX Phone Rumors01:13:55 Smartphone Sales Slump01:18:37 Agents vs Websites01:24:21 Why UI Still Matters01:26:43 Super Intelligence Rebrand01:30:37 AI Game Decompiling01:36:35 Wrap Up and Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 2:12Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, a flagship podcast of CarPlay entitlements, which are a thing I know about against my will. I'm your friend David Pierce, Neelai Patel is here. Hello, sir.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  I know so much about CarPlay entitlements.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  I am so excited to talk more. I am forcing more HomeView talk into the top of this episode because CarPlay is about to become more important in your life, and I think that is so funny.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  That's the worst. By the way, can I just shout out? Jen Tuohy is amazing. It was so much fun to have her on the livestream afterwards. And we saw comments that were like, you should let Jen talk more, and she's British and polite, and you just run over her. I just like talking to Jen a lot.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  That's it. That's what I've got. Like, it is fun to talk to our reporters who are deep nerds on stuff, and approximately one person in this world wants to talk to me about Z-Wave, and it's Jen. That's it.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  I can confirm that.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  I just want you to know, I just get excited to have another nerd who cares about my nerd stuff here. Jen does not care about CarPlay. The only other person who cares about CarPlay as much as me is Joanna Stern, whose HomeView videos were like, CarPlay! And then she like excitedly texted me about it.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  So I'm working on it. We're going to bring it all together, and then we'll make a show that like four people enjoy, but I will have the most.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  And all four of them are the hosts of the show. It's a show for no one, except the hosts. It's gonna be great. I'm excited about it. We have a lot of stuff to get to today. We have a bunch of AI news. We're going to talk about this thing where people are starting to slink back to X, which I find fascinating. We've got some SpaceX stuff going on. We've got a lot of, we've got a lot of news to get to. But I do want to start with a little bit of HomeView stuff at the top here. We did the livestream on Wednesday about Apple's new smart home entrant play here, but one thing we talked a little bit about and were a little bit confused by and got some feedback about was the app situation on the HomeView. And I would say both that we've had some time to learn about it and read about it and talk to people about it, but also that I feel incredibly vindicated

• 4:09Speaker 01

  because it is really confusing and essentially makes no sense. So Neelai, do you just want to, as best you can, sort of lay out the app situation on the HomeView as we understand it now?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  There is no app situation on the HomeView.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's not. It's mostly true.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  It's so true. The app situation on the HomeView is approximately the same app situation if you went onto Amazon or Alibaba and bought a $299 CarPlay tablet for your car.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's basically right.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, they sell those. You can just get one.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  They're in the TikTok shop all the time.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can just get one. You just like mount it to your car. They sell some that are so big, you just mount them over your vents. I've always been taken with these.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  One day, we'll do an entire episode on just people who own older model Ford F-150s ripping out the entire dash and putting in CarPlay tablets. There's a whole ecosystem there that I'm fascinated by. That's basically what Apple did here. They made the HomeView, they built some first-party software to do some things.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  In particular, make FaceTime calls and the Home App.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not totally dissimilar from what you get kind of out of the box with the iPhone, right? It's like, you get alarms, you get Apple Calendar, you get the Home App, you get messages, you get podcasts. It's sort of the bog standard set of Apple apps are on this thing.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Right, but there's no App Store, and then there's a bunch of Apple apps that aren't there. Right? Like, if you are an Apple Music classical person, which has its own app because classical music is organized and complicated different ways, that is not available to you. Apple News, the thing you might wish to scroll on your display is the chaos of your family makes French toast around you, not available here. All of these things are going to be CarPlay apps. And if you will recall, on the day of the HomeView launch, it seemed like what Apple was going to do was take CarPlay and then like rework it for the HomeView. And instead, it seems like they're just going to force everybody who has a CarPlay app into supporting the HomeView.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a thing in the developer terms that essentially says, if you make a CarPlay app, it will work on the HomeView. The end. There's like, you barely even have the ability to turn it off. Like, if it is in CarPlay, it will be on the HomeView. Does this approach make any sense to you? Because I confess, this does not make any sense to me.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  No. First of all, Apple's entire deal is apps.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  And they're already asking a lot of developers. The iPhone Duo is going to require a lot of developers to support yet another screen size. There's some amount of rumor in the rumor mill about a touchscreen Mac developer is going to have to think about that in some new way. I mean, this is a new hardware category for Apple. It is a new way of thinking about how you might interact with Apple devices in your home. And of all of the things you would ask developers to do, hey, think about like a true cool, fun, multi-user app for our shared screen in the kitchen. Seems like top of the list, right? This is a new category. And instead, Apple has chained it to the iPhone in a way that means,

• 7:16Speaker 02

  I mean, they've sold a lot of iPhones, but they've chained it into the iPhone in a way that means you can only ever sell some fraction of the number of iPhones that exist. And so the app model is that, and the user model is that. And it's a lot of iPhones. So don't get me wrong. I think most companies would be happy to sell a significant portion of a fraction of iPhone sales.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  And I can't imagine somebody who isn't already in the iPhone world is even going to be really looking at this thing. But maybe that's kind of the point, right? Like, this thing is an accessory of an iPhone. It's an Apple Watch in a very real way, in that it actually, there is no reason whatsoever to buy it separately from owning an iPhone. In a way that like, you can own an iPad and an Android phone and live a life that makes sense. This doesn't, this will make no sense if you are not an iPhone family.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  And if you recall, and I know you recall, because you wrote the Wired cover story on the first Apple Watch, which Apple's so mad at you about.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  I do in fact recall.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Right, the Apple Watch started as like a remote control for your iPhone apps. Like, that was a lot of the app model for the Apple Watches. This is just a little screen, but the app is actually running on your phone. And over time, as the processor got more efficient and more powerful, they brought the apps to the watch. This is why I was basically screaming, where is the computer on the livestream this week? The watch became a computer, and then it started running the applications. And now the watch is a vastly more independent computer, even though it's still connected to your iPhone in a lot of ways. The HomeView does not appear to be a computer. Right? It is the model of that first generation Apple Watch, where it's a remote for your phone, is right there. And then on top of that, it's very funny, they picked CarPlay

• 8:54Speaker 02

  as the app model for those little remote control apps. CarPlay, the way to think about CarPlay is that it is just a second monitor for your iPhone.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Right? It is screen projection, and you plug it in or you wirelessly connect, your iPhone detects a second monitor, it's a CarPlay app, and it shares a screen with custom interfaces for the apps that are running on the phone. This is fine in a car.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  It's also, it's also not. Like, it isn't fine in a car. And this is the thing, like, CarPlay, I am the pro CarPlay person on this podcast by default. I don't think CarPlay is very good, right? Like, this experience is not good. Like, the simplest example for me is Spotify. You don't get anything remotely approaching the full Spotify experience in CarPlay, which makes some sense when you're driving and you should be tapping as little as possible. But if I'm going to have to do the stupid CarPlay search thing where it goes, what do you want to listen to? Pause, bing, and then you talk, every single time I want to use the HomeView? That's awful. Like, this is, this is a thing that clearly has enough processing power.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  It has enough screen, it's going to be plugged in, so it's not like there's a power issue.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  You're also not driving, you're not distracted.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Right. There is nothing preventing this thing from being a computer, except that Apple doesn't allow it to be. And I guess part of it is the way that it's thinking about switching between users, and if you want to have a bunch of apps logged into a bunch of different things, like, I can see how that model locally would get confusing, but that model's confusing anyway. And if what you're telling me is that this thing is going to learn to seamlessly switch between CarPlay devices, have you ever tried to switch CarPlay devices, Neelai? Like, I don't know. This just makes me more concerned than ever that this thing is actually going to work in a way that works for people.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  We obviously have to get it and review it. We will see. But here's my, my big question for you is, this is a lot of new hardware from Apple coming out. Right? Where the Duo is soon to come out, this thing will come out, there's the new Apple TV, hot new hardware from Apple. There are rumors today that there will be a touchscreen MacBook from, from German.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Potentially very soon.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  Potentially very soon. There's a lot of new hardware from Apple. It's a big push, right? New CEOs, hardware CEO, here's all the new hardware. And it feels to me like the question we're going to ask at every single turn is, did you get the software right?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Did you make the right software decisions? And if I was going to be super rude, I would say, none of this hardware is particularly... Like beyond the industry. The Home View in particular, right? Is like, it's an LCD display on a previous generation chip. Sure. But like, yes, you could have made this at any point in the past 100 years, Apple.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  I will grant you, the Duo has a lot of like engineering in it, but Foldables have been around for five years. So the wins here are all going to be software wins, ecosystem wins.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  And I, it's, it's interesting that all of my questions about all these devices are around, did we get the software right? Is the ecosystem paying off in the way we want it to, or is it actually holding us back?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  And I truly do not know the answer to that question.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  I don't either, but it's been interesting to see, like, the app developer community has raced to support the Duo. Yeah. Apple, Apple has gone out of its way to help people do this, but also even for a relatively new device that I suspect will not sell in giant numbers, just because it's so expensive. App developers are all over this thing and the App Store situation for the Duo on day one is going to look great. There, this is what Apple is good at. This is Apple's main advantage over Android in particular. I've been using a lot of different sized screen Android devices recently. I had the Alexa tablet, we have Google Books, and I am, I am just struck over and over by the fact that Google is unwilling or unable or both to convince developers to support non-phone devices. Just can't do it.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  The keyboard stuff doesn't work very well, the large screen stuff doesn't work very well. Apple is good at this. And, and for Apple to come out with something like the Home View that it ostensibly believes is going to be a big mainstream device. Like, Apple gave developers a better story for the Vision Pro than they're giving the Home View. And it just, I'm, I'm just confused by this. And I think the long run, it'll probably be like the Apple Watch, like you just described, right? It starts as an accessory and slowly over time becomes a computer. But that was a new piece of hardware with tons of new ideas and really, really intense constraints. Tiny thing, tiny battery, tiny processor, lots of new stuff going on. This should have none of those problems.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Like if, if ever there was an Apple gadget to just over horsepower into existence with an App Store, it should be the one that is plugged in, sitting on your kitchen table. I'm just confused.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Like, actually, the one thing Apple is best at is putting enough processing power and RAM in its computers to make its experiences work.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Like, I think there's two reasons people like CarPlay. And I'm like you, I'm like, it's, it's fine, it's there, I use it in our cars, but I don't think it's the best thing ever made. But I think there's two reasons people really like it and are, are very, very, very vociferous. They'll never buy a car without it. One is just the library of apps. And every time we do like a Decoder or CarPlay episode, we get all this email about it. And one always sticks out in my mind. It was a reader who's like, I have a Bible app. The maker of the Bible app is never going to write an Android automotive app and put it in the Play Store for your weird Android car.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  Right, there, there's no way to get that app, that big library of app. This is like Instagram on the Windows phone. You can, you can make all the Windows one you want, you know, on Instagram, you're dead. There's some long tail of apps that CarPlay supports, and that means you have that. And every other alternative does not have the one app you want to your back to CarPlay. The second, and I, I think this is just tremendously important, is that it is using your car's display, it's just a second monitor. And so all of the logic, all the application is running on your phone, which has enough processor and enough RAM and a fast cell connection. And so the computer is good.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Like, that's it. And every carmaker under specs the, the processor and RAM and everything else in their car.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  So you, you like can't compete with a new iPhone with any car. You just can't do it. Maybe Rivian and Tesla can do it, but I think everybody has the same questions about performance of those systems over time.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Apple is like very, they know that this is what they win on. This is why you have a $300 Apple TV. It has more horsepower than any TV app developer can possibly know what to do with, except for the one or two game vendors who think they're going to make it happen on there, right?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  What are you doing with all that power on the Home View? You, you should just let people run their apps.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  This, all the way back around to, should this just be an iPad?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yes. We got so much response that essentially amounted to, what if Apple had just made a really kick-ass, mag-safe mount for the iPad? That just worked. I'm like, yeah, that would have been the thing. Justice for the Pixel tablet, you know what I mean? Like, Pixel tablet got everything right. We also missed one detail that a couple of people pointed out that I think is a very big deal, which is that the new Apple TV remote, which is easier to find, is backwards compatible, like a long way back in Apple TVs. So screw the new Apple TV, just buy the new remote.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  I, I think that's what I did with the last Apple TV.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  They, they just got me on the remote upgrade cycle.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Remote and polishing cloth are, are how Apple really gets it.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  I feel like I've upgraded my Apple TV remote more often than my iPad.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Shit, that might be true. I agree with that. I've bought a lot of Apple TV remotes now that I think about it. It's like those and left AirPods are the, the other thing I upgrade all the time. All right, we should switch gears, we should talk about some AI news. The big news of this week was that Google released Gemini 4 Argon, which is its sort of reentrance at the frontier of the model race. If you remember, for the last, what would you say, three or four months? The, the scuttlebutt in the AI industry has been that Google fell behind that, with, with Fable and with Mythos. And all of the stuff that OpenAI and Anthropic were doing, that they were way out in front and they had essentially left Google behind.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Google then shows up with Gemini 4 Argon, which it says is just as good as those other models. It's also vastly cheaper and it has sort of announced itself back at the front of the race. Robert Hart on our team also wrote a great piece this week, pointing out that Meta, which just released a model called Wonderful, which is, I don't, I don't like Meta.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Well, it's Meta, it's Wonder, it's Muse Wonder. And then there's the big one, the full one, which is Muse Wonder.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they did Wonderful, and I don't, I don't like that. It's like, it's like, I just don't like it.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Everything about Meta and AI is a little too cute and oddly a little too sexy.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's got like a little bit of an ass on it, you know?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  What, what do you make of some of the news of this week? It does feel like there is this sort of renewed sense of real competition in this space for the first time in a minute, even as all these companies are reckoning with questions about safety and trying to figure out their product stuff. Like this, who is winning at models race does kind of feel like it's back on.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Did you watch Zuckerberg and Alexander Wang on the Cheeky Pint podcast? I mean, everyone watched Zuckerberg drink the Guinness.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, we all saw the meme of him enjoying it, quote unquote, enjoying a beer. I watched bits and pieces of the interview, but not a, not a ton of it. Why?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm, I'm fascinated by where Meta is right now. So I watched most of that interview. As always, it's, it's very fun to watch Zuckerberg talk about communication styles. So I think they asked him about Wang's like tweets with the butts. And Zuckerberg was like, well, you have to be authentic. And I was like, is that, is that actually what you think?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Butts are who I am.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Authenticity, all right, whatever. Anyway, there's a part of that where Zuck in particular was talking about the bet they made on training their own model. And Wang was like, we need our own reasoning model. And at one point, inside of Meta, that was like frowned upon. And he was like, I think we're going to fail, I think we're making the wrong bet. And he convinced Zuck to do it and he like, we're going to write a $200 billion check. We don't know if this is going to pay off. And Zuck was like, but we have to because we are a full stack technology company. We need to control the thing that powers our experiences. And so Meta just, in, yeah, in like Zuckerberg fashion, was like, we're just going to win. We're just going to do this until it's clear that we shouldn't anymore say in our metaverse, right? Like, but this, we need to have this technology in order to make Muse work.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  And the dynamic there that I think is utterly fascinating is they launched the consumer product that people are interested in without the more powerful model.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And then, right, and then now if you pay them money, you'll get Muse Wonder and over time, I think they'll figure it out. But Meta is a consumer products company. They're good at it. You can feel a lot of ways about Meta, but again, I will come back to the Oculus Quest 2 was a great consumer product. They are good at defining a consumer product, marketing it, making it a good consumer experience, and then ruthlessly and shitifying it with Instagram ads, whatever it is, but they're good at it.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  And I think it's very interesting that their priority was launching the product that was interesting, that made investment in the model seem worthwhile. Right, so they need a reasoning model because they want Muse to be more capable, but they need, they were happy to be like, Muse is finished. We can give it to people with the capabilities it has today, and then over time it will get more capabilities. The same way, I don't know, the iPhone come, came out and then they were like OLED screens and then the iPhone changed. And now they're like folding OLED screens and the iPhone changed.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  But the, the product like made a promise and kept it. I think Google is releasing all these models left and right, and they have no idea what their product should be. Right, to the extent that OpenAI and Anthropic are, have products in market, they've both figured out that they, their products are enterprise products. But they're, they're, they are business software companies, as you keep calling them. And they're more powerful models. You know, the, I, I love that everyone's demo case for all these models is like, it can use Blender so well. And it's like, five people in the world need this capability.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  I'm sure they're very enthusiastic, but they haven't made the consumer products. And Meta is the one that has like truly figured out, okay, there's a flywheel here between our consumer product and our massive investment in the models and what that will enable the consumer product to. And I, it's great that there's a race on the frontier, but I, and I think that's fun and interesting. I, it's just, man, none of these companies apart from Meta have like, put it forward, like here's a great, even Dots from OpenAI is enterprise software. I saw Casey talking about how much he loves Dots the other day. And he's like, I run a business now and I do business stuff with my Dots. And I was like,

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Very few people are in that position.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Sure, and that's, and that's well and good, right? The idea, like, the idea of these things being business software is, is good and fine and is going to be very successful. I've been reading Kevin Roos's book, The AGI Chronicles.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  It's very good.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  It is, it's really, really good. And there is a, there's a point he makes very near the beginning that there are, there were kind of two big ideas about AI that are also sort of two big ideas about AI products. And one is, do you make narrow AI to solve narrow problems, right? Like, do you, do you build and train and refine a model to do English to French translation? You can do it very well, but it is very specific and very narrow. Or do you do the big, huge, one model to rule them all approach? Which is much harder and requires vastly more compute, but that these researchers found over and over would actually, over time, outperform the narrow models.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  And he, he ties this to Google as a company which looked at AI for a really long time as a way to make its existing products better. And it's like, okay, we need, we need this new way of doing translation to improve Google Translate. And we can do really great summarization, oh, that's going to be so useful for Gmail. And they, they looked at these things and they said, we have a set of products, how can we, how can we poke AI at them? And you can still see that inside of Google. Even now Gemini like is a product, Google is bad at understanding how to talk about Gemini as a product. And so it, it just exists kind of outside of itself while most of its energy is focused on how do we put Gemini into your Gmail and into your Google Docs?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  And how do we beat you over the head with it every time you use one of our products so that we can put AI in there? And in some ways, that makes a lot of sense. You get, you get a huge distribution victory. Google has all of these business clients. Gemini four is much cheaper than some of the others, which is a big deal that doesn't get talked about a lot. But like, these frontier models are very expensive and Google is running a promotion where they're, I think, 80% cheaper than the comparative models. Like, that's a big deal. But there, there is no sense to me. I have no belief that Google is even capable of doing what Muse did, which is one entire new thought about how people are going to use AI.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Like, it's, it's so telling that Google tried to build this thing backwards out of Gmail rather than start with something wholly new.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I think it's, it is even worse than that. Google announced Gemini Spark at I O.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  They, they, they announced the product. They had the other product, the browser use product, I forgot what it was called, that they canceled.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Mariner, yeah.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  And they, they, that's what should be inside of Gmail.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Like, what, what do these products, what do agentic products like truly need? They need access to your email. If, if you, if you were to break it all down, like, what is the number one thing they, they need to be as effective as everyone wants them to be? They want your email.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  God, Muse is so thirsty about my, can I, can I just tell you, this is a total diversion. Can I tell you my favorite new thing that's happening in Muse? I play fantasy football, I'm in two leagues and every, every Monday night I get a report on how the week went. And then every Wednesday I get the like waiver report on who picked up and dropped players. So now, five days a week, maybe, I get some kind of update from Muse with fantasy football advice.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  I never asked it to do this.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Pure engagement bait.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  It's incredible. It just reaches out and it's like, hey, here's who I think you should pick up off the waiver wire. And I'm like, I didn't, you and I have never talked about football.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Have you told it to stop doing that?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  No, I haven't. I'm sort of enjoying it, to be honest.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Okay, well, so Meta is, Meta is good at consumer products. They're good at engagement bait, they're good at making you come back and use the thing again, they're good at notifications, like, they're good at this.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Really, really good at this. My, it's like every time, talking about AI is so much like talking about a dream you had. Like, the stakes are so low for everyone else and for you, it was like, I almost died. No, you didn't, you're fine, you're sitting right here talking about when you were asleep. Anyway, so, uh, mine is constantly digging, again, I gave it my spam email, so it's always doing the same kind of engagement bait.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Hit me. And I told it to stop. I was like, I want you to stop proactively reading my email. I just want updates on the three things that we agreed on, which are mostly like, did I get a class action notice and did you fill it out? Just make me the like cheapest money you can make. Uh, and it won't stop. And I was like, you have to stop. And I was like, I want you to pay me $200 every time you proactively read my email.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  And it is still trying to figure it out. Like, it is just in the background, somewhere at Meta, some data center is just spinning cycles, trying to figure out how to do this. It has not done more proactive email reading.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Somebody's like, how has this one user used 11 billion tokens? But he hasn't prompted us in, in two weeks.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  It's still going, it's still, every now and again, like, do you figure out this scheme where you're going to stop proactively reading my email? It's like, I'm still figuring out how to make money.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  It's really good.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Let me know when you've done it.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  It's very good.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  The Roos book is good, it is fun to read, all these people truly hate each other. Kevin had a book party in New York and I saw him speak at it. Uh, and he said the book could have been titled Fuck That Guy.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  That's a really good book.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Cause like, they all truly hate each other.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 02

  And it is very true that Google in particular has the innovator's dilemma. All of its products are huge, they all throw off a lot of cash, they can't disrupt them too much. There isn't a business model for consumer AI yet, they haven't figured it out. And so they're, they're trying to just increment all of those products. And they really should just put Gemini in Gmail and be like, if you want us to read your email and send you some notifications, I want to do. And I think they're, they're terrified of doing that. Right, like, I, whereas the upside for Meta, if they get it right, is, is sky high.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  So, we'll see, but I, that to me is, I'm just looking, yes, it's great that the frontier models are, are pushing out there. It's great that like CNBC in the morning now, like, the very straight laced morning anchors on CNBC are like, RSI is coming and then we'll all be dead. Weird, it's weird that that has permeated the consciousness because of the capabilities of these models. The products are still not there and it's, I, I think it is worth giving Meta some credit. They figured out a consumer product before anyone else did. And if you look at the home view, you're kind of like, well, I know what that thing should look like.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have to assume that right now at Google, there is either a furious effort to buy Instinct at almost any price or a furious effort to build that exact thing. Because Google has every single bit of necessary infrastructure to have built an AI bot that works in your messaging app and didn't do it and lost. And like, at some point, the, the bidding war for that company is going to be outrageous. And I suspect that is happening as we speak.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Two more quick things we should talk about before we get off the AI train. Um, one is, are you caught up on this weird story about the OpenAI employee, like planting a bug in one of the conference rooms? I don't have anything to say about this story, I just think it's wild.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a great story. The part that really got me was he tried to hide it with toilet paper, but tell the rest of the story.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Okay, so the, as I understand it, basically, um, OpenAI discovered that an employee had planted a bug in one of their conference rooms, ostensibly to record and take trade secrets. This is one of the like important conference rooms that not even everybody has access to. They, they planted it behind the TV in the USB port, uh, which I think is just a really funny way of just totally dooming the idea of USB ports on television, like.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Well, you gotta get power from somewhere.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  It's a really good place to hide a recording device. I'm just saying, like, I'm not condoning it, but if you're going to put it in a room, that's probably the place to put it. So anyway, this person has been arrested, there's been a bunch of information that has come out about, you know, they, they booked a one-way plane ticket out of the country. Lots of this story left to tell, I think, but, uh, this is also like, OpenAI is embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple over the allegation that they're stealing trade tickets from Apple that is like an official part of their interviewing process. Like, the, the secretiveness and the value of those secrets in this industry, I think, is just starting to create a huge mass of these stories.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Okay, so first of all, the OpenAI guy, he used his wife's ChatGPT account to, to find ways to hide a recording device. This is the best fact in this entire story.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  The FBI found that his, it was his wife's account, which was obviously tied to him in some way.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  They'll never catch me.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  And he was like, what are the best ways to hide a tracking mug? Like, incredible facts in this story. And then he had booked a flight to Saudi Arabia after he'd planted the device. So he was, he was trying to, a one-way ticket with the family back to Saudi Arabia. Just very, very good. And then I mentioned the toilet paper, they, they found a, like a thumb drive sized recording device and he had for some reason wrapped it in toilet paper and stuck it into the TV.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, listen, you're, you're the TV guy. Can you explain this one to me?

• 30:57Speaker 02

  I.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  It feels worse. I feel like if you, if I walk in and I see a thing in the TV, I assume it's there. If I see a thing in the TV wrapped in toilet paper, I, now I have questions.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  I do feel like there's an element of this where he used his wife's ChatGPT account and it hallucinated ideas about how to hide a thumb drive. And it was like, no one will ever notice if you wrap it in toilet paper, when what he should have done is gotten a label maker and printed out like ETH three and just like plug, you know what I mean?

• 31:24Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Right, like some other thing, like EyeLock, like he should have printed, like, you know, the EyeLock dongles?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Or just write the name of the conference room on it and then plug it in?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  It does, yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And everybody will just assume it's supposed to be there.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You just like, whatever the conference room, like, ours at Vox Media were always named after cities, which is very confusing. So you would just print like Chicago on it and just like plug it in there and it's like, fine.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  It's like, well, it must, it must belong here.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  And the number of times at our company when people would be like, I'm in New York City, and we're like, yeah, I know.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Not new information, guys. But yeah, that's a good story. We'll track that one as it comes. The one other one really quick is Character AI, which is a company we haven't talked about a ton on this show, but was one of the early what if the AI bot was your best friend slash sexual partner kinds of companies. Filed bankruptcy, it turns out, in that process was under investigations stemming from a kid who committed suicide not that long after talking with its bot on Character AI. This investigation found or was in the middle of finding some pretty alarming stuff.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  But now, in a really interesting way, there are lots of questions, including one of the questions we asked on the site, which is what happens to all of this data now, right? Like, what happens in a bankruptcy proceeding is it is basically shipped for parts and sold, and presumably, one of the parts is going to be vast quantities of user data, including about children. This is kind of the first one of these that has gone through this at this sort of scale. We also, I think 404 Media had a really good story about the finances that go into this and just the unbelievable amounts of money that are being burned in all of these companies. But this is like, this is a tiny case study of what I suspect is going to be a lot of

• 33:13Speaker 01

  companies that burned through a lot of cash and have a lot of user data and are going to just go belly up out of nowhere.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And what happens after that, I don't know that anybody knows yet.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Well, Character AI was kind of doomed in the middle of its story, right? It was started by Noam Shazer, who was one of the early LLM engineers at Google. It was like very frustrated that Google wouldn't do a chatbot. So then he left to do Character AI because he thought everyone was going to fall in love with LLMs, and then Google did a reverse aqua hire, right? And they brought him back. And so, like, Character AI is like dead men walking because Google just like hired the team out from under it.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Fair, yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  And so, like, it was always like, what are you going to do with this? I think the 404 docs, the bankruptcy docs that they reported on, they were making like a million dollars in revenue. Like, it was like, nothing.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Against all of the spend that they'd taken to start the company. So at some point, they should have been actively trying to manage what happens to this user data because it was, it was just abundantly clear when that, when Google did the aqua hire, this company was going to die.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  There's no, like, what I'm talking about, there's no consumer products, like, your kids can illegally bang a chatbot is not a consumer product.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  No. But these companies are also in a position of they're running so fast and they're burning so much cash and, like, every day is an existential crisis in so many ways that this will not be the last company that didn't think hard enough about

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I agree with that.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  stewarding of that stuff.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  And I think a good question is how valuable is this user data? So the other thing that was on my mind is like, Spirit Airlines went out of business and there was an auction for their corporate data.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Because if you have a bunch of data about ticket booking and flight schedules and itinerary and overbooking and fee and just like the operations of an airline, that's really valuable if you're trying to train a model that can do other enterprise tasks. You have a bunch of the user data that's like, do you love me?

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Like, we are, they already, they already stole all of Tumblr. Like, they don't need more of it. You know?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  You would hope.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  So like, I think we're going to find that there's like markets for different kinds of data as more and more of these companies go under and we see what happens to more and more of them. But yeah, I mean, should there be a federal privacy law that protects user data when companies like this go out of business? There probably should.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, agreed. All right, that's enough AI talk for one day. Let's get on to something less controversial, which is the state of social media and X. But first, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 38:12Speaker 01

  All right, we're back. Neil, are you an X? I actually, I realize I don't know the answer to this question.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  I check it every day now. There's a lot of AI conversation there, and I think it is important to see primary sources. Every now and again, I will snarkily reply to someone who is racist and remind them I'm from Wisconsin.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  It's actually

• 38:33Speaker 02

  That's the thing, that's the thing I do.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  I would say that's a reasonably representative use of X, so that's pretty good.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  So we're going to have this whole conversation. I just want everyone to know that is my experience of X.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's fair. I bring this up because over the last really couple of months now, there's been this slow sort of steady drip of people with some mix of fiery resolve and their tail between their legs going back to X. If you rewind like, three years ago, maybe, four years ago, kind of in the, in the 12 months after Elon Musk bought Twitter and started to ruin it and turn it into X, a lot of people performatively left the platform, announced they were leaving the platform, renounced their support for this place

• 39:18Speaker 02

  I am one of these people.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  and left. I left quietly. I, this was made, this choice was made easily for me because I left on parental leave in December of 2022, which happened to be a really great time to stop tweeting. And I just, I never, I never posted about it. I just never went back. But I think like The Verge has explained in public how we feel about X. But then recently, so I think the first one that really came across my radar was Mac Stories, where, where John and Federico, two of the folks at Mac Stories, decided that they were going to go back to X and start posting. That caused a mini revolt.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Not even a mini revolt, right? They lost a bunch of their staff, people got really mad at them.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, full-scale revolt. People were very upset. And then, just in the last week or so, our friend Casey Newton on Platformer wrote that he is now going to start posting on X again.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  And then our friend John Gruber wrote about basically that X is the thing again. I don't know John's particular stance on posting on X, but he pointed out basically that X is still the best social network.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  No, wait, hold on. That's not, that, sure, in, of its kind.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  No, I, well,

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Just compare, in the universe of social networks, in the category of things that look like Twitter.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  The total, the title of his post is "X Once Again Marks the Spot." And he basically says Mastodon is a wasteland, Blue Sky, lost, Threads is like an empty space filled with people.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Right, but what are those things? Those are all things that look like Twitter. It's like you won the Academy Award for Best Sound Design in a Feature of Film About Dinosaurs. Like, yes, in that, in your category, you might, but Best Social Network is a whole different thing.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Radically different thing.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Different category.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Between Twitter and the Twitter clones, the, there was, there was a, everybody believed they were leaving for something else. Lots of people loudly talked about how they were leaving for something else.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Again, I'm one of those people.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  And people are slinking back.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Some people.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  How do you feel about this?

• 41:25Speaker 02

  I feel like Meta really blew it with Threads. They have a legitimately bigger product with more people, and they were so anti-news and anti-real time feeds that they just lost.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  They, they, Katie Nautopoulos calls it the gas leak social network. She's a great writer, business insider.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  It, you go on there and it is just the weirdest algorithm with the weirdest engagement bait. People getting things wrong on purpose, left and right. Old tweets from like a hundred years ago, being re farmed for engagement. Everything that's wrong about meta is, is just in your face on threads. They have some of the most interesting product design ideas about what a Twitter like canon should do.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  I haven't done this yet, but if you're a podcaster, you can have your podcast card appear between all of your posts on threads. They have some like real time NBA chat stuff going on, like their product ideas are good. Meta is a good consumer product company. Their algorithm ideas are so weighted to engagement that it doesn't matter.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  And it is by far bigger than X, by far. We can, we'll set Blue Sky and Mastodon aside for many minutes and we can come back to them.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  X has decided to win in one category, and I think this is why everyone's confused and angry. They have decided to win in AI conversation and tangentially venture capital circle conversation.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  If you are a VC and you would like to talk about how smart you are in the company of other VCs. Do I have a platform for you? If you are interested in AI and what it can do and being excited about the future of software development, boy, do I have the platform for you. In almost every other case, X is irrelevant. And I, you know, I was talking to Casey about it, because you know, he and I share a revulsion to X at the beginning. And his point, which I think is valid, and I will come to why I think it's valid, is if you want to cover the AI industry, you have to be in the rooms that they are in. And X is that room, by far and away that room.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  If you want to cover almost anything else, you might not have to be in that room.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Right? And so all the people that you are talking about are tech journalists who want to talk about AI and converse about AI and like, knock their ideas around and then go, go home and write about AI or make AI podcasts or whatever it is.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  And so all of the principles in the tech industry are on X. That's what they've chosen and they've chosen it for good reasons or bad reasons. Maybe John Turnus just doesn't want Elon Musk to yell at him. Maybe they all just hate Zuck more than they hate Elon, right? Like a Blue Sky is not big enough, like fair enough, man. They're, they're, they're making whatever choices they're making. And if you're a reporter, I think it's really important to go look at primary sources. For better or worse, the primary sources of the conversation are on that platform. This is what I look at every day. I do not feel the need to participate in that conversation. I, I, I'm not into giving our work away for free, as, as people know, especially to people who don't value my literal existence. And there are a lot of people on X who do not value my existence.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  My, my experience with X is racial source. That is just a thing that happens to me when I post on X.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Cause people hate Wisconsin.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  They hate Wisconsin. I mean, there's like podcasts next to her called like the Indian question, like we're like 2% of the fucking population. We're fine. Yeah. We're, we're just all smarter and hotter than you.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. But like that, that is real and I, I have a lot of friends who don't see it. They're not experiencing that part of it.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  I think that's, that's happening here, but I do think if you are a tech journalist, you ought to go look at the primary sources. And if you're experiencing Blue Sky, it's kind of like mine. I like started to worry that I was just looking at screenshots of X, like curated by other people.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, by people who are mad.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  By people who are mad. And the reason I set those aside is I think those platforms should succeed. I think that there is some great value in federated social networks and open social networks. And maybe Blue Sky's point is never to run Blue Sky. It's to enable a bunch of other things to operate. Maybe Mastodon's point is to never really be big. It's just to be the work of things that are on Activity Pub and one day figure out how to interact with threads, which is just like a holy war. That is all technology. It is not the consumer experience of where are the important people talking? And in this one field in tech, they are all talking on X. I understand it. I have a lot of friends, other besides John and Casey and Federer, all those people who are like, well, I have to go look at it. But here's my counter example, and I'm curious what you think about this.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  It is, we are 20 days, 19 days away from the midterm elections. X is irrelevant to the election. It is, it is just not a factor in this election. They, there was an entire right wing conspiracy theory about James Talarico.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Being in a mental institution.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  In Ohio.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  In, in another world.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  X would have just horsepowered this into existence. Right? The, we've all experienced this in various elections where the, the wildfire of an X political conspiracy theory be, became the assignment editor for the entire media. Just didn't happen, just fizzled. The idea that our candidates are arguing on X or issuing policy positions on X or reacting to X is nowhere in this cycle. And that's the counterpoint.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Okay, I, I fear you just picked the worst example because the Talarico thing did actually kind of escape containment. And it did force the Times to do the piece where they went and like, looked at his Ring camera records to make sure that he was home. And like, this one hit, but it's.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  I totally disagree with you.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it's there, I can show you the coverage, like the, the idea that random people on Twitter get to assign the mainstream media what to do remains in existence. It's just there, it's not nearly as often, but it's still there. And I do, I think one really.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  But not in a way that breaks through. Right? Like, uh, in the, uh, in the last presidential election, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Just concocted out of nothing on X. And so it landed in a debate and then is now like a rap song.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  I agree with that. And I think the thing that is most bizarre about this moment that we're in is that that

• 47:49Speaker 01

  kind of doesn't happen at, anywhere, like in a weird way, even as so many other monocultures were breaking, Twitter stayed kind of a monoculture.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  So Casey's arguing is that Twitter has gotten much smaller. It's much less lucrative than it used to be for sure. And we can see its financials as part of SpaceX, as SpaceX is a public company now. And it's also vastly smaller. Like all, and when you, this is why I reacted so strongly to best social network. The best social network is like Instagram reels.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, yes.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Right? Or TikTok.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  I think, I think there is a strong argument to be made that neither of those things even resemble social networks, but.

• 48:27Speaker 02

  But that is where people are having social media experiences.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  That's where they're having entertainment experiences. But this is, this is a semantics argument we don't need to have. I, I, I take your point and I, I think in a weird way, what actually happened is that we didn't replace Twitter with anything. It all just sort of died. And I, I'm at a point increasingly where like, I, I, I use threads more than any of the other ones.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  I don't really know why, I just do.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Why are you so weird?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  So Blue Sky, Blue Sky is weird because everybody on Blue Sky is either like in violent agreement or violent disagreement in a way that I find exhausting in both directions. But everybody's mad all the time. X I find just like deeply unpleasant, all the people on it. Frankly, I find deeply, I just don't have a good time on X and I don't feel any obligation to post there, so whatever.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Threads is like the sort of tamest middle ground for me and that's fine. It's a place to post, people can find it. But there isn't, like, I, I think the idea that you have to go back to X because it is meaningful for most things is true. But the thing about the AI conversation that you're missing is that the AI conversation is the most important. It's the only conversation everybody is having. And that gives X a huge amount of power because.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  And they did it on purpose. They, they, they made this choice.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  For sure, but it's, and, and for a long time that was politics, right? Like they gave, they gave huge weight to political conversations. And so they elevated it on the cable news and now it's just AI because of the people who run it. But the thing is they called that correctly. AI is the most important conversation everyone is having right now. It's the most important conversation political journalists are having right now, right? Like if, if you, it is like, you're, you're talking about the people on, just offhandedly on CNBC, talking about how RSI is going to kill us all, like.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Well, that's their business journal, it's talking about money.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  What we do. I think we are at a point now where even that one conversation is the closest thing to a universal conversation being had. And it does make X powerful. And I think it's a huge bummer that everybody has allowed themselves to stay on X and do that. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that those, the people on that platform, like they're not there because X is powerful. They're there because their, their politics have moved in large part, the same way that Elon Musk's did, the same way that Mark Andreessen's did, the same way that like, it, no one is not there with open eyes, is what I'm saying. And, and you either do it feeling bad about it, or you do it because these are your people and you love it. But it is still powerful.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  In that one way, and that way is very.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  I'll make this distinction. I don't think any normal person should be on X. They don't, if you're.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  I don't think any normal person should be on social media, to be absolutely completely honest with you. Like, and we'll go with text based Twitter clone social media. There is no audience to build there, there is no community to build there because it's also dispersed and most of it is fake. Like, I cannot sit here and make one good case for why a regular person should join Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads or Mastodon.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Well, as a poster, as a person who like makes things, a person who views things, right? Like those are the, most people are lurkers, right? They're, they're just consuming.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  There are better things to view on every other platform.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  Or you can just open Instagram reels.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, read a book, I don't know.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  But the, I think the distinction that is getting lost in this conversation on going back to X is it's a bunch of reporters. The people who are describing this are reporters.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  And I understand why Casey's like, I didn't do the source building on Threads that I was able to do on Twitter back in the day. That is, that is a universal experience that most reporters I know are having.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Because the sources are there.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  So you, you just gotta go to the party. You just have to be in the room.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  I, I think that all of.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Mike Isaac talked a lot about that, by the way. Mike Isaac, a reporter at the New York Times, talked a lot about basically building his profile as a reporter by being a reply guy in people's DMs.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, every, every reporter in that period did that. We all did it. My Twitter DMs back in the day were the place to be. That's different now. The reason I'm making Instagram videos is because everyone sees them. Right? Like, that's just a dynamic that is true. I can talk to my phone camera for two minutes and put it on Instagram and I get a bunch of incoming. Because even if they're not on Blue Sky, they're definitely on Instagram.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Fine, but I don't think that a bunch of reporters saying, I have to go engage my sources over here is the same kind of endorsement as this platform has regained its vitality. And I think that's actually the error they're all making. If you are in tech and you want to talk about AI with other people who are building and using AI, they're all there. That's where you got it. You gotta go look at it. You should, reporters should look at primary sources. I believe that with all my heart. I don't think that means you have to say that like it has regained its cultural power in sports. Because it has not.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  No, it definitely hasn't.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Right, and like, there's something there that it's, this is Casey's argument. It's powerful and it's one vertical because it has gotten smaller.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Sure. But all that other stuff didn't go anywhere, did it? Like, I do think it's possible that Threads ends up going down as the biggest fumble in this whole space because it just could have done it. And there was a really funny thing this week. Connor Hayes, who is like, leads product at Threads, posted, "We recently made a change that could increase the posts you see from those who follow." Like, Threads had to make a change to its algorithm so that when you follow somebody, you will see the things that they post. Like, what are we doing? How, like, everybody got so lost in the sauce of wanting to do this like, content-based

• 54:15Speaker 01

  recommendation system from TikTok, that they forgot how people want to talk to each other on the internet. And I think, I do think it's possible that Threads may have missed its chance here, but it, boy, did it really actually have a chance to be the thing. And, and-

• 54:31Speaker 02

  In every other vertical except tech and AI, there's still a chance.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Do you think?

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Meta has a lot of money. They could just get all the sports writers to use Threads.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  That's po- it's, you might be right. But I also wonder, like, culturally, it's now been three years, maybe we've, maybe we've moved on. Maybe we don't need that thing anymore. I don't know.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  Look, I, let me, let me zoom way out. I'm sure people will be mad at me for even suggesting that anyone can get any value from X. Fine, like, I, I can't stop a network effect. And I personally do not believe that things go away if you ignore them. Right? And the network effect of the tech executives and the people building these things is on X. So if you are like, I'm not going to pay attention to you, the network effect will still be there and they'll still have it. That's just, that's just reality. But the mainstream audience is watching video platforms. That is the thing they are doing. And they're watching the video platforms, like, every now and again, I get a video and it's just screenshots of X. And it's like, that's how I'm consuming, I'm still not on X.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  I'm just consuming some tweets.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  That is very powerful, and it's right next to the idea that instead of having a phone, you'll have a little AI Asian Tamagotchi.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  And I actually think the little video, the scrolly video platform is the center of gravity that will prevent X from ever fully recapturing its magic and prevent the little AI Tamagotchi from ever supplanting the phone.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  It's a good theory.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  And like, that's, that to me is the real, like, sure, we can all go look at, we can all go see Greg Josriak and John Turnis posting their home view videos on X because that's, they all want to seem cool in front of Elon. Whatever it is. But the views for that actually happen on TikTok and Instagram.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a really interesting argument in that that suggests that scrolly vertical video is a more important format than the smartphone. But that's, I'm not ready to get into that yet. I do just want to-

• 56:30Speaker 02

  With our YouTube in that conversation is a good question.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, fair. I do just want to pick on John Gruber for just one quick second.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Because he writes in this piece, and I should be clear, I think John Gruber is right about most things. I think he's so, so very wrong about this one thing. He writes, "The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator." Is that your experience of X at all?

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Again, in the context of like, here's a cool new AI product that can do cool new things, I think any excitement to be found is on X.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Sure, okay, that's fair. It is AI people cheerleading other AI people, but that is something.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  AI, that, right, and that, there's something there, especially if you work in and around software, you care a lot about software, as John does, that is exciting and fun. There is, there is more tech conversation that is exciting and fun on those platforms than the other Twitter-like networks.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair. He also says-

• 57:22Speaker 02

  My experience of X is nothing like an exclusive, inclusive experience.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  And I, it is like, really important to say that out loud.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, John Gruber and I are both white dudes, which is a really nice thing to be on Twitter.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  He also says, "Without any fanfare, X has de-Musked its algorithm." And I would say, I'm willing to bet that John Gruber muted Elon Musk and forgot about it, and now thinks that is the case, because that is not my experience of X at all. Do you think people should feel bad going back to X? Like, genuinely, like, do you, if you, what is preventing you from going back and, and engaging in that in a more real way?

• 58:00Speaker 02

  It makes me feel bad.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  You know these people.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I mean, again, I look at it several times a day. Because I, it is my job, is our job on this show, to go look at primary sources and then talk about them. The fundamental job of being a reporter is not to report on someone else's reporting, but to go try to find some primary sources. And when we do report on other people's reporting, it's almost always people we trust, who we know to have done that job. Right? Like, that's the dynamic. I think that literally the service we provide here is, one, jokes, two, we like each other and people enjoy that, and three, we curate information well. Like, those are, I think that's in order of what we do on this podcast. And that third thing is really important. So I want to make sure I go look at the primary sources and see the primary sources.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  I don't think anyone else has that responsibility. But like, actually contributing to that platform, like, makes me feel bad. And other people can feel differently. Go ahead, do what you gotta do. But there's not some part where I'm like, oh, I, I need to look away from this. It's like, no, my, my job is to look at primary source information. So I'm gonna go seek it out.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  I buy that.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  But I, again, where am, where am I putting my social media effort into making videos? And I, I'm confident that is a faster way to reach more people that I've never encountered before than the X algorithm.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  It also puts your hair situation much more front and center in the conversation.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Why do you think it's getting crazier?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I just imagine you, like, having a hairdresser on the side, and you like, get your camera up and you're like, more, and they make it higher, and you're like, more, and they just, that's, that's your Instagram strategy. It's good stuff. All right, we should take one more break, and then we're gonna come back. It's time for the lightning round. Be right back.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Ideira by Palo Alto Networks. Every new cloud workload or AI agent your team sends out is another identity that gets permanent access to your systems. And in 2026, those non-human identities with access outnumber actual human identities 109 to 1. You need a tool built to manage them all: human, machine, and AI. That's exactly what Ideira by Palo Alto Networks was designed to do. It's one identity platform for all, and it outshines legacy tools that were only built to manage human employees. How does it work? Well, Ideira replaces permanent permissions with dynamic access, so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your own business.

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• 1:02:14Speaker 00

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• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  All right, we're back. It is, I'm not even gonna ask. I just, this one I know. This one, Brendan broke containment in my world this week. It's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Ooh, some dad rock.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  A little like Chicago-y vibes that time? I like it.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  It's good.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Give me more five-part harmony singing Brendan Carr's name. That's all I'm looking for.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  That was some yacht rock.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  That comes from Bruce Hartley, who said that soft rock has been woefully unrepresented on this podcast.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Bruce Hartley, little known fact, played rhythm guitar for Kenny Loggins.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  You know that name sounds like he did.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  You really had me in the first half. I don't know why. All right, Neil, what did Brendan do this week?

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  I'm curious, what broke containment for you? I've got two, but what did you think?

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  It's gotta be the livestream execution.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Okay, that's one of them. We have some video of this. So let's talk about that very quickly. So Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would livestream an execution, which apparently he didn't tell anyone he was gonna announce, including President Trump, who mostly seemed surprised by this information.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  Bold strategy, Pete.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  So we ran around and asked all the major social networks if they would carry such an execution, because that is against all of their Terms of Service, including X, which has longstanding policy. And you know, X is like very narrow and a lot of wild things happen on X. But all of them have a policy against livestreaming murder.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Or that kind of violent content in general.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so most of the platforms said no. Some of them didn't respond because they didn't want to raise the eye at the president. And then the president was like, that's weird, we're gonna look at it. And then they all were like, we're not gonna.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  That's what happened. So Brendan, in the midst of all this, man loves a speech controversy, goes on CNBC, and CNBC says, are you gonna allow a livestream? What do you think about this? We have the clip, we can just run it.

• 1:05:51Speaker 04

  Well, I think, look, my understanding is it's not on broadcast TV, so I don't think there's a role for the FCC one way or the other there. But I trust Secretary Hegseth. I mean, he's implementing the laws and the regulations that are, you know, relevant to the Department of War. And I think he's doing a great job, and I trust that he's making the right call on these issues.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Is it something that you would allow on broadcast if they wanted to?

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  Look, I mean, ultimately, we're gonna defer to Secretary Hegseth and, you know, his decisions on how to move forward with this.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, did he just say, I'm gonna defer to Secretary Pete Hegseth on whether this is allowed on broadcast?

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  First of all, shout out to Carl Quintanilla, buddy, for asking like the most obvious question.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you gotta love when people ask the question.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  He's just like, what are you?

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Great job.

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  Like, you care a lot about content. You're always ranting and raving about the public interest. The networks don't carry the president's speeches live, and you're like, the network executives have to go to jail now.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Should we livestream an execution? He's like, I don't know. I defer to the military. Weird. And then the idea that Brendan is like, I don't have this power because it's not broadcast television, I can't weigh in on it. Totally blind by the fact that he wants to have the power.

• 1:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my, I'm not, like, my I have no power here t-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my I have no power. I'm on television saying, I don't have any power here, but totally everybody should do it.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, my boy, you wrote the Project 2025 chapter on speech regulations and how you would use your broadcast power to control content moderation on platforms. I know you wrote it because your name's on it and I read it. You want to have the power, but you're like, yeah, this one's a hot potato. I don't know if it's in the public interest to broadcast an execution. I defer to Hegseth.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  That's also, by the way, that's the thing Brendan Carr says when President Trump has not yet declared he's in favor.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  Oh, he's a weasel. I mean, what we're describing here is cowardice.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Right? Like, he should be able to say, well, that seems bad. But he can't because he doesn't know what Trump is gonna do.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  So he defers to Pete Hegseth.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  To Pete Hegseth. A lot there. In another world, if Trump was like, we're doing this, he'd be like, I'm calling up the heads of every broadcast network and saying they have to run it.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'd be like, Jimmy, I'm gonna force Jimmy Kimmel to host the execution.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Jimmy Kimmel will execute this person.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Cowardice, right? Like, doesn't even have the principles. Anyway, Trump called it off. We're not executing someone live. For like a million reasons. I think Trump was actually convinced by members of his own administration, this is a horrible idea for 10 million reasons. Including the number of people who would want to copycat it, including the number of people who would think that this is a sufficient deterrent. There's a lot of reasons we're one of the few countries in the world that still does executions. It doesn't actually deter crime. That's a different story. Okay, that's one. That's the one that broke containment. Can I talk about the other one? The other one that's on my list that I'm much, much, I think is much funnier?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Okay, SpaceX announced, what was it, early this week, late last week, that they're gonna be a major wireless carrier?

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Right. They've been sort of threatening to do this for a while.

• 1:08:55Speaker 02

  And this is partially Brendan. But it's partially just a winding road of Vergecast stuff. And incompetent FCC commissioners. From every, like, every party is incompetent here. This is a bipartisan Brendan Carr is a dummy. Like Brendan Carr, you are all Brendan Carr people. So in Trump 1.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Our we are all Brendan Carr t-shirt is not gonna do numbers.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Everyone at the FCC is gonna be issued a I am Brendan Carr shirt, right?

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  Someone AI that Charlie Kirk song. Like, let's go for it. All right. In Trump 1, you'll recall that T-Mobile wanted to buy Sprint.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  And everyone thought it was a bad idea. We did endless Vergecast, we did decoders about it, how reducing competition in the wireless market from four carriers to three would raise prices and lower service and not be a good outcome. And so the Trump administration, you will recall, engineered a solution in which T-Mobile would be allowed to buy Sprint, and some of Sprint's assets and spectrum would be given to Dish Network to stand up a new network called Project Gen 5 SIS. And this would create fear in the hearts of our network executives, and they would once again compete for your dollars. I will remind you that this did not happen. In no way, shape, or form did Project Gen 5 SIS meaningfully exist.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  To the point that when we covered the fact that it didn't exist, we got on the record emails from Dish Network communications people that just said, our network does exist.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, we did it. I have it. Look at it.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  So we said, people, it was in Vegas, there was, eventually it did exist in like, in the sense that one mid-range Motorola Android phone could sometimes get it, but it mostly rolled over to AT&T's network.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  They built something.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  It had, it had backstop deals with AT&T and T-Mobile. Whatever.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Lot of history there if you're a Vergecast fan. Project Gen 5 SIS, the network that was gonna do it. Anyway, this failed. Dish Network declared bankruptcy, and then they did the thing that everyone thought they were gonna do, which is just hoard spectrum for several years until the value went up and then auction off for money. That is indeed what they did. There is one block of spectrum that they could not get rid of. It was the 800 megahertz and Nextel spectrum. Because Sprint once bought Nextel, and it had the IDN network, which was the, like, push to talk, walk to talk. So the IDN spectrum has been sitting around for ages. No one wants it. Again, in all of this Project Gen 5 SIS noise, this just ends up sitting around, and Dish hasn't been able to sell it forever.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  So they flipped it to a private equity company called Grain Management, and guess who bought it? SpaceX.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Of course, for presumably nothing.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  It's like $8 billion. They bought some other spectrum over the years. Of course, Brendan is just like waiving requirements and auction rules to, right? He's just making it happen for SpaceX. And the thing that's funny about this is that SpaceX is making all this noise about standing up a major wireless carrier, and the stocks of our existing carriers are dropping, and they are freaking out. Because what does Elon Musk represent for them? Actual competition. Right? The idea that people will like Starlink more than their existing service is just reality for them. Nobody likes their wireless carrier. This is why you need competition in the market.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  Whether or not Elon can actually build a cell network using all of this spectrum that can compete nationally with T-Mobile and AT&T and Verizon without roaming agreements for those companies, which have basically said they're not gonna allow them to roam because they don't want real competition. Like, they're afraid.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  And whether any of that will be cost effective in the end is like irrelevant to the fact that Brendan got to do some waivers and finally get some spectrum sold to his buddy Elon Musk. So we'll see. I'm very curious. I think they have some interesting plans around using small dishes connected to Starlink and using Starlink as the backhaul for this new network. But they've gotta get phones to support their new spectrum. Big question. They say most phones already do, but big question about battery life, performance, coverage, all this stuff. They obviously have to launch 15,000 new satellites, Gen 2 Starlink satellites, to support this new network. And then they gotta build some terrestrial network. This is a lot of network to build. While the carriers are like, actually afraid for the first time in their lives.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  That is all because in Trump 1, everyone allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint and destroy competition for ages.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  This is all Project Gen 5 SIS's fault somehow.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  We are, Starlink Mobile, if it comes into fruition, will, is the true Project Gen 5 SIS.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, okay, there have been rumors for a while now that SpaceX is gonna build a phone. Does this make you think it's more or less likely that SpaceX is building a phone?

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  What kind of rebranded mid-range Android phone preloaded with X?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  They're gonna, they're gonna take a Trump phone that no one sold. They're gonna buy all of the unused inventory of Trump phone, paint it gray and call it the SpaceX phone. It's gonna be so sick.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Well, see, again, the wireless market needs more competition. And even the, the presence of a real competitor has these companies shaken in their boots.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Starlink, SpaceX-

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  The notion of a competitor is a real thing.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  Especially one with the resources and brand and the history of SpaceX, right? Like, this is not some upstart trying to lay fiber. This is a company with real resources to go do kind of whatever it decides to do. But then there's also rumors that SpaceX and Tesla are gonna merge in some meaningful- Like, this company is gonna get way more nuts before it ever figures out how to sell you a smartphone, would be my guess.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did an entire decoder on this with Walter Pasek from Lightship Ventures. He's deep in it, that's coming out soon. But I just want to call this out. This is, we've done a lot of monkeying in the mobile market with spectrum over these past 10 years. And a lot of it is, we're still feeling the aftershocks of allowing T-Mobile to buy Sprint, which has potentially created this opportunity. But we have never really focused on, are these markets competitive?

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  And maybe this will happen, but I suspect everyone is gonna learn that building a network is much more expensive than it seems, enough to have killed Dish Network, as it turns out.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, although I'm not sure that took that much, but, but here we are.

• 1:15:19Speaker 02

  Project Genofixis.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, take us out of Brendan.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  All right, Brendan, if you would like to explain any of your spectrum allocation decisions or your rank cowardice, you're available to join our show. We are not regulated by you here on the internet, so I've been told. So I think we would have a free-flowing and respectful debate.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  Don't you, Brendan?

• 1:15:40Speaker 01

  What could possibly go wrong?

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  Anyway, that's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast, my podcast.

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  I feel like that cleanses me of Brendan every time. It's like I'm just immersed in Brendan and then, and then I am free.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  We gotta make a Spotify playlist of these.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  I agree. All right, my first lightning round item is about smartphone sales. One of the things we've been talking about a bunch on this show is what the rising price and lowering availability of RAM is doing to the smartphone market, in particular, what it's doing to cheap phones. The answer is, it's bad for everybody. So Counterpoint, which is a research firm, put out a report this week that said the global smartphone market declined 20% year over year in Q3 of 2026, which is its lowest Q3 level in 14 years. 14 years.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  This is how low smartphones are. A couple of interesting things happened. So everybody is down, I should just say that. But relatively speaking, Samsung and Apple took an even larger share of the smartphone market, up from, let's see, 37% to about 45%. So that's, that's a big jump in two companies owning the smartphone market. Everybody's prices went up. One thing that Counterpoint found is that there has been robust early demand for the Z Fold 8, which is really interesting. This, like, this passport-sized foldable thing seems to be the thing. It's working for Samsung. It appears it's gonna work for the iPhone Duo. That it's just interesting that that is actually now starting to turn.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Everybody's prices are up, everybody's focusing on smaller things, but basically, the ongoing thing here is just that cheap phones are completely disappearing.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Everybody is, is getting for, there's a line that says, "They're prioritizing margins by shifting supply from thinner margin segments to higher-return markets and models," which means they are ditching cheap phones and pushing towards more expensive phones. And they're raising the prices on those more expensive phones because they can, because people who pay a lot for their phone will pay a little more for their phone. And I think this, this market is just getting bleaker and bleaker. And there are a bunch of explanations for it, right? One is the rising costs. One is that I think you can make a good argument that there have not been a lot of interesting phones in the last several years, and so people are holding on to their phones longer. There are fewer compelling reasons to upgrade. It'll be interesting to see if the foldable thing can flip that. But, like, the smartphone market had so much relentless growth for so long,

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  and that relentless growth and enormous scale changed every other tech industry in its wake. Like, my laptop, the Google Book, exists because of the smartphone supply chain. Like, it, and in every way. And, and that is just quarter by quarter being unwound kind of right in front of our eyes.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, everything is an Android phone.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and now Android phones are more expensive. It's like, that's the, it is, it is gonna come for everybody.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Look, everyone wants there to be the next thing, the next wave of growth. I think this sign of maturity in the smartphone market is actually very healthy. Right? Like, it is, it has not been necessary to upgrade your phone every year, every two years for quite some time.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  And I'm sure sales are down. I, I think the refurbished market is actually really healthy. Right? Like, there's something here where, like, it's not necessary to get the newest thing, and we're probably gonna see a lot of demand for refurbished, remanufactured, all those devices. All of that attention should go elsewhere. It has all been locked up in the, in app stores and app taxes. A lot of innovation has been held back because the economics of putting an app on a phone have just held back innovation. And we've covered every variant of this for years and years on this show. If something else happens, I think that's good.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  I've actually been hearing, this is mostly just anecdotal at this point, but I've heard it a few times now, that there are people doing hardware startups who not very long ago couldn't even get their emails answered because these companies were just busy making giant-scale smartphones for everybody. And if you weren't in the smartphone business, they would have to, like, redo their tooling and, and factory systems, and it just wasn't worth it. They were all just focused on making phones. That now there is interest and energy and availability to build other stuff. That there is suddenly, like, manufacturing capacity in this world that there was not, not very long ago. And, and it's made some people optimistic that, like, we're, this stuff is expensive, it's hard to get, especially if you need a lot of RAM,

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  but we, we can build things in a way that if you weren't building a smartphone, it was very hard to build things not that long ago.

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, the danger is that it's easier to build things that are essentially, like, underpowered Android phones.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  And then we'll be surrounded by a lot of underpowered Android phones.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Feels like that's coming. You gotta put all those crappy processors somewhere.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying, is like, everything's an Android phone, really cuts both ways, huh?

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Indeed. What's your next lightning round item?

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  Agent warfare is here.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  What I've been calling the DoorDash problem has arrived at scale. JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, announced that he doesn't want agents running on his platform. Bank of America announced that. We've heard it from, Amazon isn't letting Grokbot on, so Elon is tweeting that he's gonna build an Amazon competitor, which is just great.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Is that true? I missed that.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  That happened today. And it got, like, covered. And it's like, I don't think Elon's gonna build an Amazon competitor, I gotta be honest with you. I think he likes tweaking Jeff Bezos, but I, I don't think he's gonna build a logistics network.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  I really hope he builds it. I hope he calls it Grokazon and it will just, it will just make my life a little bit worse every day.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  If you thought the romance authors of America were mad at Amazon, just you wait until Grokazon shows up.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  This, it's here, right? The idea that agentic commerce is gonna upend the, the world in some way is here. And I think one of the most fascinating lines of debate here is whether or not your computer is you. And, you know, on the internet, everyone's like, well, it's my computer, it's my agent. I just wanna use your website, I can use it any way I want. And that's not true. Like, just because it happens on the computer doesn't mean it's not happening.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:59Speaker 02

  Like, people are allowed to, like, you can't go to the bank and be like, "I'm gonna come in here fully naked and just, like, smash a rubber chicken on the counter a few times, and that means you have to give me money." Right? They can be like, "No, actually, we, we prefer you to interact with our, our staff in a certain way."

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  Private business, yeah.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, right? You can't be like, "Here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put together a remote-controlled car. I'm gonna drive it around your bank as, as many times as I want until everyone leaves, and I'm gonna rob you." Like, it's just like, you know?

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Like, I'm gonna stand outside the bank with a party speaker until you come out and kiss me. Like, not a choice. Yet, online, it's like, any way I want to use your website is a free-for-all.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  And I think agents are gonna bring that into the sharpest focus it's ever been. That actually, the people on the other side of the internet connection have a say. And they're gonna start to find ways to enforce that say. And I know our listeners are gonna say, well, it's a cat mask game, we're gonna do this forever. But like, that's why you have courts and fines. And that's why all these companies are gonna end up with deals. And they're gonna have a lot of incentive to both block and respect the blocks of other competitors. Because there will be economic terms in the middle, and court cases on the side. And so I see all this blocking happening. And I guarantee you, like, what Bank of America said was, we want to make sure that it's safe. And we are involved in how this works.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  And they're gonna just write an API for how the agents are gonna use the thing. Instead of just like clicking around on the website. Because that was always brittle to begin with. And like, giving Muse your Bank of America credentials is always a stupid idea.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  Well, and, I mean, it's, actually, I think it's really good and interesting that this is starting with banking, and in particular, like, consumer banking. Because it is such a perfect version of the problem. That's like, if Muse goes and drains my bank account, either on purpose or by accident, who am I gonna yell at? And ultimately, who is responsible?

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  So Elon announced today that if Grok bought something without your permission, he'll refund you.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Elon Musk lies a lot.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  That's fair enough.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  It's fine. I look forward to him, what the Tesla Roadster is coming out a decade later. I look forward to getting my money back in 10 years. But Bank of America, it's the sort of thing that like, this makes me think of carriage disputes with cable companies, right? Where if I don't have ESPN on my TV, my instinct is not to get mad at ESPN, it's to get mad at Comcast for not showing me the stuff that I want to watch. And this is all of the leverage that those companies have over the carriers and the distributors. And if I'm Bank of America, I'm like, okay, these things are gonna make mistakes. They're gonna take the money, and there are people are going to come to us wanting their money back. And they just don't want that smoke, right? And so what they're gonna build is a system with controls that says things like,

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  you cannot drain their bank account without authorization. Like, so putting this kind of guardrail on it, this is such an obviously straightforwardly good one to do, that I think it's good to start with this and then work towards the one that are more complicated. Like, should Muse be able to buy things for me on Amazon that I explicitly directed to buy on Amazon? Interesting question. Should Muse be able to proactively, without my knowledge, spend the money in my bank account? No.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  Should Muse deliver you an engagement prompt to gamble a little bit more on Kelsey?

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  Right. No. I think no.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  That one's the greatest area of all.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Reasonable, right. And so I think we are going to reckon with each one of those individually. Okay, but here's my thing about the DoorDash problem. Don't we need to rename the DoorDash problem? Because DoorDash appears to have just wholeheartedly embraced the DoorDash problem? Like, DoorDash has no problem.

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  They announced, I think like a while ago, they announced like a CLI integration for some agents.

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  You know, all these companies, any company that moves physical products around the world is like, try.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  Fair, yeah.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  You know, like, it's so hard to build that thing.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  That they're like, yeah, your agent can come and use DoorDash, and we'll just charge you more money. Because you don't get to see, like, DoorDash has a huge advertising business. Instagram has a huge advertising business. So they're very much like, we'll just charge you, we'll just charge you the money we would have lost if you didn't look at our ads.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, true.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  That's basically where that, but DoorDash is doing the other thing, which is they're trying to build their own agent.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Right, sure.

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Like, all their AI stuff is like in the DoorDash app for consumers. And it's like, hmm, I don't, I don't, I don't think what people want is the Dash Buddy or whatever it's called. Like, I think they want to use whatever agent they want to use.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Wait, can I give you a really stupid example of this that I've been thinking about a lot? So there's this place, there's this pizza place near us called Jet's. And Jet's is like, it's a normal pizza place, it's like a mini chain, there's a bunch of them. So you can order online, you can call, you can do whatever. But they give you a 15% discount if you text. I don't, I don't know why, but you get 15% off your pizza if you text your order. So of course I go to text my order. But remembering how to text my order is impossible. Because I'm not looking at a menu, I'm looking at the messages app. And I have to remember which type of pizza it is that I want, the sizes that we get. Like, all, it just made me realize the beauty of a UI that is a menu that you click on. That's like, I want this thing and this thing.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  When I have to say out loud with no help and no visual cues what kind of pizza I want, remembering that what I like is an eight-corner pizza is impossible for me. And this is just like, this is the thing that keeps coming up to me every time I do this. It's like, in theory, I like the idea of just being able to text like, hey, get me my usual at Starbucks, and it orders my Starbucks for me. Like, that is the flow I'm interested in. In reality, having the picture there that shows the thing that I usually order, and having the name of it, and having the confirmation of what it is, ends up being the whole experience.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  And it's just like, actually, UI is good here, in this case.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  I mean, how many times are you ordering with your family and everyone needs to go look at the laptop together?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh my god.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  This is, it's a thing, like, there's a reason that I'm not so worried about phones being displaced by AI. Looking at stuff remains a powerful tool in the human experience.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  And like, we're gonna make the screen smaller, has not historically been a winning move.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  No. What, can I interest you in a screen that's on your kitchen counter and only CarPlay is your app?

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  It's CarPlay apps!

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Does that, is that something you'd be interested in?

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  It's like John Turnis announced that the phone would be the new intelligent hub. And I, I didn't realize how far he was gonna take it. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  That is sort of true. Apple has been saying like, the phone is the thing the world revolves around. And I think they meant that much more literally than we realized.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, truly, it's like, well, that's where the apps are. So, we'll just do CarPlay.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  The future.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Okay, I have one more for you. Which is mostly just a question, which is, how do we feel about superintelligence? So President Trump makes this announcement that it is no longer artificial intelligence, it is superintelligence. And I don't know how to put this, like, other than this, like a bunch of cowardly babies. A lot of people in Silicon Valley followed along. They're renaming SpaceX AI, which is a stupid name for a company, to SpaceX SI, which is a stupider name for a company. Salesforce is out here doing SI stuff. Everybody is just throwing in line with superintelligence. On the one hand,

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  I don't care about this. Artificial intelligence, as I've, we've been talking about this on the podcast for years. The idea of AI, artificial intelligence, as this like catch-all term for all the stuff we're talking about, is actually wrong and problematic and causes lots of problems and has made it very hard to talk about a lot of this stuff. So like, AI as a term, I don't think is any good. I mostly just think it's such like, weak baby nonsense that my guy posts on Truth Social, it's superintelligence now. And everybody in Silicon Valley goes, yes!

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  Wait, he did write an executive order with all the power and force of an executive order?

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Which I would point out have just about as much legal standing as a post on Truth Social.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Well, if you ask Trump, he can rewrite the Constitution with an executive order. Here's, here, here, let me try to give you the framework for it.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  What you're mad about is the naked and rampant corruption in the tech industry. And this is the best example of it. It's so in your face.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  What is the point of being rich and powerful if you're gonna do things like this? Do you know what I mean? Like, they don't call it fuck you money for no reason. If I had that much money, I would be such a pain in everybody's ass all the time. And also, I would live on a giant boat and no one would ever hear from me again. What is the point of any of this if you're just gonna like, play these games?

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  Purchase the government. It's just it came at this additional cost of a little bit of their dignity.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's real.

• 1:30:55Speaker 02

  Right, like, there will be no AI regulations, but you have to call it superintelligence. And they all looked at each other and said, this is gonna suck a little bit.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  Oh god, I hate that that's what it is. That is what happened!

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  That's what happened.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Oh, that sucks so much. Okay, keep going.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, like, the thing you're offended about is corruption.

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  And this is just the naked, stupid example of corruption. It's right next to Kimberly Guilfoyle, got run out of her fake job as Ambassador to Greece, because she asked for a hundred thousand dollars. If she'd asked for like a hundred million dollars, I think it would have been like, good job.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  And like, it's like, the embarrassing corruption is like, truly embarrassing.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  By the way, it's Suzie now, but that was from Drestico, which is Eddie Izzard. Just shout out to my Eddie Izzard fans out there. But that is what you're mad about. You're mad about how, how small and shitty it is.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  Yes, and it is so small and so shitty. I also would think it's a bad term. That's the other problem is like, we didn't, we didn't even improve anything. Which just, we're just saying super now, like.

• 1:32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz he doesn't scare people. And it's like, I think it scares people more.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, AI is at least like a term we've had, like, people have been talking about artificial intelligence for 100 years. At least it's a thing people understand. Superintelligence is just literally nothing. Which just drives me crazy. But anyway.

• 1:32:21Speaker 02

  Well, no, they all want it to be super. Everyone should go read the Kevin Ruess book, which is just dead ahead reporting.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  It's very good.

• 1:32:27Speaker 02

  Like, just beginning, middle, end, here's what all these people said and what they were thinking about. And it is just very clear that they have been trying to build AGI from the start. And they've had to hide it in like enterprise sales agreements. Very funny.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, agreed. All right, you got one more. What's your last one?

• 1:32:44Speaker 02

  My last one is just like, I just want to say this out loud. There's something very big happening with decompiling software, particularly in video games. Where you can take a finished binary and decompile it with AI and then like port it to whatever platform you want. Xbox is gonna embrace this in some way, we just go for it. But Xbox needs any idea they can, so like, that's fine. By the way, I again remind everyone, Asha Sharma, the CEO of Xbox, is from Racine, Wisconsin. And I continue to have an open invitation to interview her at my high school. A thing that I have not formally asked Asha or my high school about, but if you can make this happen, we'll make it happen.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  I'm confident everyone involved could make this happen.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  I just think that'd be really fun.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  That would be really fun.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  So Xbox is embracing it. There's a lot of copyright law involved in game decompilation. You know, the various VCs on X are like, all software is over now.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Right, I saw something going around that was basically like, everything is going to become open source, whether you like it or not. And I was like, first of all, I don't think you have at all reckoned with the implications of that. And second of all, don't we have like, big, broad legal paradigms to prevent that from happening?

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  Again, maybe, maybe this is our new catchphrase. Just cuz it happens on a computer, it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Do you know what I mean? Like, it occurred and you can do things about things that occur. So for example, open source as a concept in the world exists on the framework of copyright law.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  Like, those licenses have effect because you have some property rights in the software you've written. And then you can write a license saying, if you want to modify this, you have to use the same license. And if you don't, I'm gonna sue you for copyright infringement, for contract violation. Like, all that comes from the basis of copyright law. So if you're like, everything is open source now, well, you, boy, have you really made copyright law very powerful. This is just like, the dynamic you're in. And like, yes, it might mean you can like, look at the code. And you can make your own Photoshop, but Adobe will have something to say.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  And the copyright law is in the constitution as a way to create value for people who make things. And I don't think you can run into the courts and be like, well, I was able to do it, so.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  I could see it, so I did it.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Screw you, George Washington. Like, it's not gonna happen that way. And so like, I, I'm thinking about this a lot. Because you can really see the tech industry, particularly on X, which is a particular kind of bubble, is just getting away from the reality of things having cause and effect, particularly if it happens on a computer. Like, I can do this on a computer, so none of your old frameworks apply to me. And it's like, oh, that's, that's all gonna catch up to you real fast.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  And game decompilation is like, the one where I just have not had enough time to formulate all of my thoughts. But, boy, is, I'm very curious for how people want us to talk about it, how they're thinking about it. But it's the, it's, it is absolutely the one where, you know, we did five years of Google versus Oracle.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  And all of that was about whether copy or Google reusing the names of APIs in Java was infringement. And that's like, five years and a billion dollars.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and this is just like, I downloaded and remade Call of Duty.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  What was it? Structure, sequence, and something? Like, even like incredibly arcane acronyms.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  About the, the organization of API names.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do think there is something really fascinating happening here. People are building all kinds of cool stuff. They're modding games, they're making games available for other platforms that they haven't been available on. It is slightly surprising to me that Xbox is in on this because I have to imagine the gaming industry is going to throw every bit of its weight against this trend.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  I mean, Microsoft owns all those studios.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  Well, that's a fair point.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  They're like, no, Activision Blizzard, you love this.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  Like, what are you gonna do? Like, they need to get, they need to get those games on, on more platforms.

• 1:36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44Speaker 02

  Right? Like, they, they have some amount of, and if, if they do it on their terms, they might be in control.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Fair, and I think there is something potentially very cool there that you're gonna start to see. People, like, if every game becomes moddable in this way, there is some very cool stuff to be had there. It gets messy in a lot of ways, in the ways that you've been describing and others, but the idea of giving, like, bringing the sort of vibe coding energy to video games at this kind of scale is pretty cool. There's a lot of cool stuff that will happen as that happens.

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, you know, I'm, I'm not saying I'm a particular expert on the dynamics of the game industry, but I'm pretty good at copyright and software. This one is gonna be a mess.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  This is, we're, we are looking at decades of lawsuits about whether decompiling any piece of software so that you can recompile it any way you want is acceptable or allowed, or copyright infringement. Like, a good question. So if I ship you an app. Right, the ones and zeros, the binary of that app that I ship you, that's copyright protected, right? You can copyright that. Yeah, this is my app, here's the thing. The code I wrote to make that app, protected by copyright, you can file that, that's, it took a decade of lawsuits to get there, but you can do that. If you decompile my binary and you have a slightly different code.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  Important question right there. It's probably a derivative work, like, you can get there, but those, all of copyright law is like, on first impression. And so like, I don't know the answer to that because no court has ruled on.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  I think I probably know the answer to it, but you have to have that lawsuit.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, personally, I'm just thrilled to finally have a reason for you to rant about copyright on The Vergecast again, so this is great news. It's been, it's been like, two whole weeks.

• 1:38:31Speaker 02

  Am I trying to unearth the Java lawsuit from my brain? It's like, my own body is trying to protect me.

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  It's like, what if you just fainted instead?

• 1:38:42Speaker 01

  All right, well, before do we do, let's get out of here. Neelai, who is on Decoder coming up?

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  So we had Ben Jordan today talking about Flock, and then we have Walter Piesack talking about Starlink. And then Governor JP Pritzker from Illinois is on Decoder very soon. I asked him if the Bears are gonna stay in Chicago.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  That's good, you gotta use your platform for the things you can.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  I was just, it's the opening episode. I was like, I, you know, I gotta do a good job here. I have so much family in Illinois. He's like, you can be, we claim you as part of Illinois. I was like, no, no, no, sir, I'm from Wisconsin.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  It was not what he was expecting to be.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  Did you wear your cheese head to the interview?

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  Revealed my Jordan Love jersey.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  And then there's one coming up that's a big deal, very excited about it. That's, I'm just gonna tease it, it'll be a big one.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  It's exciting stuff. We have overhead projectors on Verge history this weekend. One of the wonkier episodes we've ever done, but it's really fun. And we have, we had an overhead projector just blaring at me in the studio the whole time. So you'll get to watch me get progressively hotter from sitting next to an overhead projector for two hours. It's good stuff. Remember, you can subscribe to The Verge to get all of our podcasts, all the ones we've been talking about, ad free, including this one. You get all of our newsletters, you get everything we're doing. Theverge.com/subscribe is the best way to support all of this. And speaking of support, thank you to everybody who voted for us in the Signal Awards. By the time you're hearing this, the voting is over. I don't know if we won, we'll keep you posted. I hope we won, but mostly I just care about all of you voting for us, and thank you to everybody who did.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  And if you want to get in touch about all this or anything else, you can always email us, [email protected], call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Kahas, Kabir Chopra, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neelai.

• 1:40:39Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 1:41:09Speaker 06

  Support for the show comes from JIRA by Atlassian. Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. JIRA taps Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together. Across JIRA, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more. And makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Purser, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time hunting for context, less time asking, wait, what did we decide? And more time actually shipping with JIRA. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 1:41:57Speaker 07

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo dot com slash Vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Vox.