The AI is in the computer

It's gadget season. More specifically, it's apparently "new computer for your new AI" season. David and Nilay talk through a slew of announcements — Amazon's Alexa Tablets, Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra, the new Googlebooks, and Apple's upcoming smart home launch — to figure out if anyone has the right idea about the future of computing, and where the AI is supposed to live. After that, it's time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, our thoughts on the Paramount / Warner / Skydance merger, and much more. Please vote for The Verge's podcasts in the Signal listener's choice awards! Vote Vergecast: Best Technology Podcast Vote Version History: Best History Podcast Vote Decoder: Best Business Podcast We’re also on video! Check us out on YouTube. 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. Read more about the topics discussed in today's 1 hour, 41 minute podcast: ⁠Amazon’s Alexa Tablets are powerful, impressive, and designed to take on iPad ⁠ ⁠Hands-on with Amazon’s Alexa Tablet 12 Pro and its wild new matte display ⁠ ⁠Amazon is phasing out Fire Tablets because they weren’t ‘giving customers what they were asking for⁠’ ⁠Amazon’s new Kids Tablets let parents manage access to the Google Play store ⁠Apple announces surprise ‘Welcome home’ launch event⁠ ⁠Apple and LG team up on new smart home gear, starting with a lock, doorbell, and thermostat⁠ ⁠New leaks provide our first look at Apple and LG’s smart home devices ⁠Everything announced at Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra event ⁠ ⁠The Surface Laptop Ultra finally has a release date — and a starting price of $2,599⁠ ⁠Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra has built-in magnetic USB-C charging ⁠ ⁠How Microsoft built its MacBook Pro competitor ⁠ ⁠Surface RTX Spark Dev Box is available for preorder for $5,999 ⁠ ⁠The first Nvidia RTX Spark laptops cost up to $7,000 ⁠ ⁠Microsoft is giving Copilot more control over Windows and your files Our first five impressions of Googlebooks — exciting but underbaked Android’s physical navigation buttons are back on Googlebooks, but not the way you think Google admits not every Android app runs great on Intel Googlebooks Politico: ‘Head on a guillotine’: ABC says Trump’s threats are already swaying coverage ChatGPT’s ‘Intelligent UI’ update fills its responses with pictures, charts, and buttons Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery complete $110 billion media megamerger HBO Max and Paramount Plus will merge into a single streamer under Skydance CNN’s boss will remain as Paramount and WBD merge into Skydance Skydance is merging Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery’s games teams. Sam Altman says ‘some bad things’ will happen, but AI is totally worth it 0:00 Cold Open 00:37 David’s back! 01:10 Parenting Chaos Update 02:49 Gadget News Rundown 03:47 New Amazon Alexa Tablets 05:15 Panos Strategy Shift 06:31 Play Store Bet 11:17 Default Android Tablet 13:18 Ads and Pricing Fears 15:30 Amazon Great Products 21:20 Matte Display Debate 25:01 Apple Smart Home Tease 26:12 Siri AI Reality Check 29:08 Smart Home Too Complex 33:37 Candy Crush Question 34:56 iPad Multiuser Problem 39:04 Microsoft AI Surface Push 40:35 Local AI Computing Shift 47:22 Magnetic USB C Charging 48:37 Google Book Laptop Confusion 54:20 AI Agents Need A Surface 58:50 Skepticism About Agents 01:07:46 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:09:23 ABC License Chilling Effect 01:11:24 Brendan Carr Ownership Cap 01:12:30 Cable Companies Sue Back 01:14:44 SXSW Corruption Game 01:15:50 Skydance Mega Merger 01:18:04 Debt Layoffs Streamer Cuts 01:22:58 Go90 Scale Returns 01:24:02 Netflix Loses Its Edge 01:30:44 ChatGPT Interactive UI 01:37:47 Sam Altman Tradeoffs 01:44:49 Wrap Up And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Comcast Business. AI has made cyber attacks faster, cheaper, and easier to scale. Attackers can exploit security gaps long before patches are available. If you're a business owner, you need to stay ahead of threats. If you're only reacting, it might already be too late. That's where the Comcast Business 2026 Cybersecurity Threat Report comes in. Learn more about today's threat landscape and the best ways to stay prepared and ready for what's next. The 2026 Comcast Business Cybersecurity Threat Report uncovers how AI is accelerating today's attacks and how to build defenses that keep pace. Read the report at ComcastBusiness.com/cybersecurity.

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• 0:49Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Liz Ann as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Support for the show comes from JIRA by Atlassian. Your work is scattered, a thread here, a DM there, docs everywhere. 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 agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through MCP. The result? Less token waste, more accuracy, and more time moving forward. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Paramount, Skydance, Warner Brothers, plus Max, a new streaming service coming to you in 2020.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  You leave her alone.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Somehow, this is all Max's fault.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  You've named your daughter Skydance, from what I understand.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  She's very wealthy. It's going very well. Her dad has no large S. It's a real shame. I will never buy her a media company.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Ellison Skydance is a real Taylor Sheridan name.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Ellison Skydance. Just putting it out there.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  I'm hearing like a Netflix Western. Yeah, it's good stuff. I'm into it. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neelav Sella is here. Hello, sir.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  It's good to have you back. I missed you.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I'm very, I'm glad to be here. How have things been?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  They've been good. I, you know, other David did a good job.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  He did do a good job. The people loved David to a point that was like really alarming for my own ego. A lot of love for David Amell in my place.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  And he's dead now. But we missed you, man. We'll have him back. We're gonna, we'll find a way to make David Amell part of The Verge Extended Universe, because he was great. But we did miss you. I missed you. I'm glad you're back. And it sounds like the family's doing good.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, things are good. It's, uh, three is a lot of children. And in a, in a very like strange way, there's, the first thing that happens when you have three kids is people immediately start being like, well, you might as well have a fourth, right? And it's like, which I just don't understand. But, but it is now to the point where I feel like I have infinity children. There's just, every time I turn around, there's, there's just another one. So that's been interesting to get used to. But everybody's good. We had like two weeks of no one sleeping, just no, just no one. But now we're coming out of that, and I feel alive again for the first time.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Well, it's funny, because we, we, last year, we had children at the same time.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  And I do not feel like we have exited the bad part of having a baby with our second one. But you are just, you're back in it.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  My number one parenting recommendation now is, don't have two kids who can't walk. And it's like, there's a real, there's a real thing that is like, I, we were talking to a family who like had kids at about the same gap as ours, and they were like, oh, once, it's so fun because they'll have each other and they'll be so close in age that they'll, they'll feel, they'll grow up as peers, and I'm very excited about that. And then like, oh, it's like in five years. I'm like, oh my God, five years.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  That's such a long time.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  And instead, I'm like, I have not, I have not had an arm free in two months. In a way that is like very hard to describe. I've like, I've gotten good at doing everything with like my elbows now, because that's, that's what I have to accomplish goals while I carry two children. It's a lot. I don't recommend having two tiny children at the same time, if you can avoid it. But, you know, they're real cute and it works out.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  I've also had a lot of time to catch up on TV shows and movies over the last seven weeks, which is, if you'd like to talk about any major motion picture from mid to late 2025, I am ready for it.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I'm nowhere there. We should talk about lanterns for like the full hour, but there's like a lot of gadget news.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  There's a lot of gadget news. That is primarily what we are here to talk about. So, uh, we have Amazon gadget news. It's a big week for what is a computer in a way that is actually very fun and I'm excited to be back for. Amazon is doing tablets again. Microsoft is doing AI computers. Google Books are here. I have one. Uh, I am desperate to talk about them. You guys have been talking about them, and I have so many feelings, and all of you are wrong, and I want to talk about all of them. Apple is, had just announced today, as we're recording, that its big home event is next week on the 13th. There's just a lot of new ideas about how we're supposed to use technology happening all at once. And Skydance owns Hollywood. We'll get to that. Literally, that is coming at the very end of the show, is how many gadgets there are.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Should we start with Amazon? Amazon feels to me like, kind of the, the most immediately newsy. It dropped today, Thursday, as we're recording. I also, this, this is like a perfectly Neelai-coded gadget announcement, because the, the big thing today is the Alexa tablets, a new vastly superior line of tablets from Amazon. They're not Fire tablets. They're actually phasing out the Fire tablet brand in favor of a better, higher-end set of tablets that people will actually like to use. And the, the question of like, what does it mean for Amazon to be a good hardware company? I think is really interesting. It's also entirely about the display. Like, I had a, I had a call with Panos Panay, who runs all of the devices and Alexa stuff at Amazon,

• 6:52Speaker 01

  about all of the Alexa tablets. All we talked about the whole call was this new Nano Matte display that Amazon has built that they swear is like the greatest tablet screen you've ever seen in your life.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  It does look amazing in all of the photos and videos.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  It does. It really does. So the idea is that it, it takes some of the matte texture that is often just put on as a film and actually like bakes it into the glass. And Terrence O'Brien on our team saw it, said it looks great. We'll get one to review. Very excited to see it. What do you make of, of just the existence of Alexa tablets?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Oh, I have so many thoughts about this. You talked to Panos, I didn't, but I talked to Panos many times over the years. I have, I have a sense of Panos decisions.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Like, you can identify Panos decisions. You can just see him at a distance. And there are two here that I think are really important. One, he just up-leveled the hardware. And I say this as a person who has Fire tablets, right? We've got kids, we have a Sono system, there's just a Fire tablet sitting around to control the Sono system, and that's what it does. And the only reason we have it, it's because it's one of the few tablets you can get that has PogoPin charging, so it can just sit in a dock all day.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  And you can open the app and it just stays charged. And so like, this is a, an odd piece of weird technology that I interact with all the time. Like, you would just not expect me to be a Fire tablet person.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  I would not. That, that is genuinely his brother.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  But it is literally because you can just like put it in the dock and it charges, and then you can like use it as a Sona's controller. The two decisions are, one, none of that hardware is any good.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Aside from the fact that you could put it in a dock and charge it. It appears this hardware is very good. He wants it to be premium hardware. That is just a Panos decision. You can hear him in the meeting being like, why is it bad? You know? That's his personality.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  That's not a, like, dig on the old tablets. It's a strategy shift. Like, Amazon never aspired to make good tablets before. They wanted them to be dirt cheap.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  They were $29, so you would get Amazon Kids, and then that was a subscription, and that was the whole strategy, because they couldn't compete with the iPad. And this is the second big Panos decision that I'm utterly curious about. They have the Play Store. They got rid of their dumb Amazon App Store, and they're just straight-up Android tablets that are part of Google's ecosystem, which comes with a bunch of Google stuff. And the fact that they're called Alexa tablets, that you are meant to talk to Amazon's assistant, which has some amount of agentic capability and presumably more to come. I can just hear Panos being like, well, apps are boring. They're the past. Just give people Google. Why are we fighting that fight?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  We're gonna fight the next war. And I don't know if Alexa's good enough to fight the next war. Question mark. But those are the two decisions where, you know, at least a distance, I can see Amazon hired Panos Panay. And he is very opinionated and very crisp in his decision making. And those are the two changes. The hardware is nicer and we're leaving the apps in the past.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Well, I would put it slightly differently, which is, I think the mistake that a lot of people have made is deciding that apps are the past. And what it actually is, is apps are solved, right? The, everybody needs apps. Like it turns out that you have to have an app store or else nothing else matters, right? Like if you decide apps don't matter, agentic AI is the only thing. You build the humane pin and your company dies and you sell the HP and you go make printers. Like, that's what happens when you decide that apps are dead. But going and trying to compete in app stores is a complete waste of time. It like every, many have tried, none have succeeded. And the only way to the next thing is to acknowledge that, right?

• 10:38Speaker 01

  So you say, okay, we're not going to try to play the app game. We're not going to try to build a bunch of new things. We're going to have a couple of new ideas around this fundamentally solved problem, which is the Google Play Store. We can't beat it. We're not even going to try, but we're going to, we're going to use it to spring to the next thing. And I think that is the right bet. And it's the bet way too many companies forget to make because apps are not the past. They're not. They are the present in a, in a super duper real way. And the only way to bet that it's the future is to actually do the app thing in the first place. And I think, again, that's where we're going to get to Google Books, but like, that's the Google Book story too, right? They, they're like, oh, we think agentic AI and the web can solve all of your problems. And everybody's like, I would like apps, please. And they're like, okay, here's some apps. Now we can go do the other things.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  And so, and I think Amazon is trying to do the same thing here.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're two sides of the same coin here. If you believe that there is a future past apps, that apps are solved, then you give up and put the Play Store on these tablets.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Cause you have to put all of your focus on the next thing. But until that next thing took any shape, you had to make your own app store.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  Because otherwise you were just handing your business to Google. And so that's what, that's what I'm getting at is they're willing to concede the past, perhaps the present to Google. And right, like the Play Store comes with a bunch of in-app purchase fees and all that stuff that Google gets sued for.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  I have no idea if Amazon was able to negotiate different rates with Google. But if you have the Play Store, the app developers are going to pay Google for in-app purchases. They're probably not going to pay Amazon. So you've just conceded the revenue model of the present.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  And you're on your way to Alexa should be your all encompassing AGI agent to do all of the economic activity of the future. And you're probably better off making that bet. And that's what I mean, like, yes, it's, it's the past in that I don't think there's going to be a lot of innovation there. There's a lot of emphasis on the AI part. Whether that's good or bad, like fully remains to be seen.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it is. And I think the, the tablet to me is super interesting because it, it sort of clears the deck for that question in a way that I think is really exciting. If the hardware is as good as advertised and I think it probably is, like a company like Amazon certainly has the resources to make great products if it, if it wants to. It has gotten in its way many times, but I think it, this, this thing by all accounts so far seems to be a good piece of hardware. If you remove the, why doesn't it have this thing by giving it, you know, a decent keyboard case and a decent stylus? And all of the Android apps that you want, you've gotten to the point where it's like, okay, now can our thing? And in this case, that thing is Alexa plus actually win, right? Like, do we have the next thing here?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  And, and now in a certain way, it's going to actually get to answer that question because the other stuff is just sort of solved. So if you, if you can just make a good tablet with Android apps, great. That is, turns out easy thing to do if you just do it.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Is this good enough to be like what you would call the default Android tablet?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  I think default Android tablet is such an insult of a thing.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  This is the problem.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  But you know, like for years, you'd be like, what's the default Windows computer?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  And maybe it was.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Dell XPS 13.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  It's, it's the XPS 13 some years and it's the Surface laptop some other years. And, but I mean, we, we made a lot of hay back in the Endgadget days, talking about the default Windows laptop.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Joanna Stern built an empire on the default Windows laptop. And then it was the XPS 13 for like years and years and years. If you ask me, what is the default Android tablet? I would, some Galaxy Tab?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  No, I think you would like deep sigh and then say it's a Fire tablet.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  No, not a Fire, no, no, no, because it doesn't have the Play Store. I'm saying right now.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  But it is.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Okay, go ahead. Make, make your argument in favor of the Fire tablet.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I think that my, my argument is less in favor of the Fire tablet and more against the entire ecosystem of Android tablets. I mean, realistically, I don't think anyone was looking for an Android tablet. You were either looking for an iPad or you didn't want to spend the money on an iPad until you landed on the Fire tablet.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Five Android tablet fans just furiously writing you emails right now.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  There are.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Welcome back, Dave.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  I'm okay with that. And listen, the Pixel tablet had a chance to be that thing if Google had continued. Google can't care about Android tablets. Like Google is onto Google Books because it's no longer interested in Android tablet. This is not, this is not a small thing for anyone to try and get involved in. I think this will almost immediately become the default Android tablet. Amazon is so big and successful and the price on these is really good. The eight inch one starts at $229 and the like very fanciest 12 inch one with the fancy screen is 549 bucks. Like you're looking at like $1,000 iPad territory for 550 bucks. And that's, that's meaningful. And so I think Amazon, unless these things have some spectacular failure in them that we don't know about.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  I think they immediately become the obvious tablet to buy for most Android people.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Now I have to ask the obvious question. Every piece of Amazon hardware, does it show you ads in the home screen by default?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Good question. There aren't any in the, well, okay, there's, I'm, I'm trying to think about just the, the photos I've seen. There's a little Prime widget up in the top left corner that is ostensibly there to show you like what you're reading and watching. And then there's a whole thing you can, you can swipe right on the home screen to get to this big shelf of stuff. I assume that shelf will be a mix of things you're watching and reading and recommendations from amazon.com. I do, I do think it's possible that Amazon is going to just slather shopping all over this thing in a way that is really upsetting. One of the things they're going to do is make it so that you can just at any time be like, how do I buy this?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And it'll look at what Alexa plus will look at whatever's on the screen and put it in your Amazon cart. That's a real flow Amazon imagines. And that might be awful. Like it really honestly might be awful in a way that is, is kind of pernicious and off putting. If, if it has just stayed on the right side of that line, I think these things are almost by default going to be a huge hit.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anybody with a kid who needs a plain tablet, this is, this is the one you buy, right? If it's a nice piece of hardware that can run Disney plus and then get your kids to immediately convert everything they're watching on Disney plus into purchases on Amazon Prime. This is going to be a huge one for everyone. But that, that's the danger with it. At 550 for the nice one, that, that price is subsidized. And the only way Amazon knows how to subsidize a price is with intrusive advertising. That is the entire experience of the Fire TV.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I asked Panos about the price and he said something to the effect of, I don't want to talk about how we got there. Do with that, do with that what you will. Okay.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  That's so ominous.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  It is, it really is. It's like, don't ask me questions about how we got RAM. Okay, Panos, understood.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  He's like in a large conference room. He's like blown out by the window behind him. He's like, don't ask me questions about that.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  This, this Prime Air drones are launching some strikes.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  I, I want to know how you feel about the Nano Matte display, but, but first I have a question that has been rattling around in my brain ever since I found out about this thing.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And I want you, I want you to actually think about this. Has Amazon ever, and I mean sincerely ever, made a great product? It has made a lot of successful products. Has it ever made a, like an out and out great product?

• 18:16Speaker 02

  It's made so many products, it's almost impossible to answer that question. Because prior to Panos, when Dave Limp was running devices, he would have those rapid fire product launch moments. Where he'd be like, it's a washer dryer, it's a stove, it's a microwave and all, everything's Alexa. Have they made a truly great product?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  I would argue the very first Kindle.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  That was the only one that came to mind for me. I'm not sure it was great, but I think that's, it had a, it had an argument.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  It, it, it's just, it's, we should make a version history about it. You know, it's like, it's such an iconic product and it was so weird with the scroll strip on the side. The first Alexa was not a great product, but I remember the day it came out, you and I were in the office together. And we were the only two people who thought it was a good idea.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  And then it turns out like a decade later, it was still the same idea.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Those, those are the two that I would call it.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Okay, I see, I'm, I think the, the original Echo definitively not a great product. Kindle, maybe, but this is the thing, like, I think this is such a huge new path for Amazon. It is just, and again, it's not a knock on Amazon's inability to make great products. It has never tried, like, amazon.com is-

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Wait, I have a question, do Ring cameras count as great product, like, Amazon products?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  I mean, sure, if you want to.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  They are fully there, I mean, I, people have a lot of feelings about Ring and everything associated with Ring. But they relentlessly iterate, like, the newest Ring doorbell is very good.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  That is true, yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  It will also get you arrested if you sign, you know.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think Amazon has just never cared all that much about building great things. Like, amazon.com is very successful. No one up to and including Andy Jassy would tell you it is like a beautifully engineered and executed and lovely user experience product. Like, using amazon.com is awful, but it makes Amazon a lot of money, and so it works for Amazon. This is maybe the most ambitious swing at like, can we make great stuff on its own merits? And can that work for us that I've seen Amazon do? And I think that's just going to be fascinating. And we have a couple more, like, I have the new, I have a purple Kindle here that is the, the aluminum one that they just came out with. It's very nice.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  There's, there's almost certainly some Echo stuff coming that I think might be high end in the same way. Like, Amazon has just upleveled in a big way. And whether that changes its fortunes in this space, I think it's going to be really fascinating to watch.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Again, I think the, the impetus here is there's a platform shift potentially afoot. The, the way we use computers might be changing. I'm saying this with as like, as much skepticism as I can muster into a microphone.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  This is the thesis.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  But the idea that you're going to talk to the computer, issue natural language commands, and it's going to go off and do something for you, creates an opportunity to sell new hardware, the same way that, I don't know, Apple sold a lot of IMAX in the 90s because people wanted web browsers and they didn't care so much about Intel programs running on Windows 3.1 or whatever. Like, that was a platform shift that enabled a new hardware entrant, same with the phone, same with whatever else. This is the opportunity for Amazon, is to say, hey, you don't care about apps anymore. You care about talking to Alexa.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Here's some of the best hardware you can get for talking to Alexa. Will this work?

• 21:57Speaker 02

  Many questions remain to be asked. Will Alexa be as capable as Muse?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  It, it certainly isn't now. I had Jen Toohey was on the show yesterday talking about this, and she, she put up her big one year in review of testing Alexa Plus piece today, Thursday. And, uh, yeah, the read is like, it's, it's gotten very good at smart home stuff and is still nowhere near where it needs to be to do all of that other stuff. It is nowhere near as good as Muse at Muse things.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Today I told my Muse that if it doesn't stop reading my email, it has to pay me $250 each time it proactively reads my email. And it just thought about how to make money for like, a long time.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  It's like, this is worth it if I can figure out how to get, this is how the hugging face hack starts. It's like, your muse is just off somewhere making money now.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  I kinda wanted to see if I could run a crypto scam on Meta servers. I was like, please, I've given you permission to read my email for two things. Cause it's only connected to my spam Gmail. It's allowed to read for updates to class action lawsuits for which it has signed up, a new class action lawsuits for which I, I might wish to sign up. And by the way, there's one a week. We're, we're, we're making, like, annualized, if you do it OpenAI style, I'm making $10 billion a year in class action lawsuits.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  But then every now and again, it's like, hey, some other nonsense spam email came in, are you interested? And I'm always like, please, I want you to stop. And so today I was like, what if you had to pay me money every time you read my email and I didn't give you permission? And it was like, I made a ledger for you. And I was like, no, but make the money.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Here's my Venmo, get at me.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  It didn't, it didn't get anywhere, but I'm working on it. And if I can get Alexa to do it, we'll be in a much happier place.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  That's true. Do you have any thoughts on this Nano Matte display? I was talking to Panos about this and reading about this and thinking about you at the Apple launch event, standing there in front of the two studio displays, the one and the fancier one, and just like staring in awe, trying to find the two differences. And I was just like, I'm, Neel is going to hear the word Nano Matte and have a lot of feelings.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  I want, I mean, I want to see it. It's funny, I was thinking about the last Apple that I went to, which was the iPhone Duo launch. And the, opening the Duo and seeing that it's a matte display was, it was just a collective gasp in that room. Like, everyone had that experience. And we're not expecting it to be matte. It's since come out that there's like, a lot of reasons for it to be matte, including hiding the crease. It, it feels like we're about to have a little matte display fad in consumer devices. I really enjoyed looking at the matte display on the Duo. I haven't seen this one in person. There's something about it, especially for a very portable device that you have in like sunny spaces, bright spaces with reflections, where it's going to be great.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  But we'll see, especially for a cheap device that kids might use, it is much easier to clean a glossy screen.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a interesting point.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Find out.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  I can definitely see my children doing bad things to this display.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Maybe that's why it's only in the highest end device, that like, if you're buying the fancy 12 inch one, you're probably not buying it to just stick in front of your kid on a plane.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Well, I'm curious, I mean, you talked to them, what was Amazon's argument for having a matte display?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Essentially just that it's better, right? Like, Panos started with the argument that the screen is the only thing you absolutely cannot compromise on, on a tablet. And I agree with that fundamentally. But I think they also are really into this being a device that does lots of things and goes lots of places, right? That it is a productivity device and it has the keyboard case. And Panos was like, very proud of the fact that he uses it as his main work computer. But then also, it is a thing you will, you know, hold in your hands and read books on. And so it has some of the, the like tone shifting that it can do automatically when you open the Kindle app. They really like the idea of be using it to watch movies.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Like, they, they understand, I think, pretty thoroughly how many things people use tablets for. And so we need something that looks good and feels good in all of these different use cases. I think does kind of inevitably lead you to a matte display, if you can pull it off. And they seem to believe they have.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wonder how fast they will end up at a folding phone.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  I think if Amazon hadn't made the Fire Phone, they would have shipped a phone instead of a tablet. But I think this to me feels so much like one toe into that water. And then if this works, there will be an Alexa phone in 12 months.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it, it, especially if you're talking about, I want to go all these places and do all these things. You're gonna, you're just gonna end up with a folding phone.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yes, but I think that the hill for, oh god, Amazon made another phone is so high that unless they have this huge hit tablet on their hands, it might feel insurmountable. So I see why you do this first, but I also like, remember, Panos Panay, longtime advocate of folding devices. Made a bunch of them at Microsoft, killed a bunch of them, shipped a bunch of them, like, that, nobody loved the Surface Duo and the Microsoft Courier like Panos Panay. I am, no part of me believes he doesn't want to work on that at Amazon too. That's, it's super clear that that's coming, if they can pull this off.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Again, especially if you buy the notion that the entire paradigm of computing is shifting and this is your opportunity to try something new.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yep, 100%. Real quick, before we, before we switch gears to everybody else's ideas about computers, right next to all of this is whatever Apple is about to do in this space, right? Where Apple is having a, some, a, some kind of something next Tuesday. That's as specific as I'm able to be. They, they sent an invitation to some people, it was mysterious, it had yarn that made an Apple logo. We're expecting Apple to launch a bunch of smart home things.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, they invited Jen Toohey.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. America's smart home reporter.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like I know what's going on.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  What are you, what are you looking for here? I, I still have in my head this social video you made the other day with a screenshot of you scrolling through the insanity of your smart home. This is very much Apple, like, running towards what Amazon and Alexa have been doing successfully for some time, while Amazon is trying to do what Apple has been doing successfully for some time.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Are you, are you bullish on whatever Apple's about to do here?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  So the rumor is Apple's going to announce the Home Pad, that's, that's what we've all agreed to call this product.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  No, we haven't.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  I don't love it.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  We have not agreed to call it that.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  That's what we're calling it. You know, some sort of Siri AI device that lives in your kitchen and does video conferencing. And we just had Mark Gurman on Decoder, and he was like, this device has been ready to go, but they held it because Siri AI was not ready to do the thing. And it's fascinating that Apple believes Siri AI is now ready to do the thing, when Siri AI is now about as capable as 2023 Gemini. Because it is distilled from Gemini.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Do you know what I mean? Like, that's where we've gotten. Like, I've had a Nest Hub in my house for ages that can control the smart home and answer natural language query. And then it has an ad for itself on the screen all the time that says, start a live chat with Gemini. And I'm always like, but isn't that what I'm doing? It makes no sense.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  That's awful.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  It's truly, if anyone at Google can explain what they think the difference in those things are, I would love to hear it. But we're at the agent part of the conversation now.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Grokbot and Dots and Muse. And I think launching a device like this and being like, it can do lights and locks. And we've partnered with LG, a company that just got in a huge scandal for listening to you.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  All of that seems very, it just seems from yesterday. And maybe Apple just got slowed up because Siri wasn't ready and they would have released this if Siri had been ready. But the, yeah, there's just some part of this where Apple, Apple is the company that won apps. And they might be trapped by apps.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Interesting. That's a good theory.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  So, yes, I'm, you know, I'm as a huge smart home nerd. Yes, I want to see what Apple's riff on a smart lock with LG looks like. I don't know that you can convince me to get rid of my Schlage locks that run on thread, where the battery lasts for 500 years and they're already installed in the doors.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Is it possible that the reason Apple is partnering with LG on this stuff is because it knows that? That like even, even Apple knows that it is probably not going to convince most people to rip out their front door lock just because Apple made a new product. Uh, there's, there is some level of humility somewhere in Apple Park that prevents them from believing that. And so they're, they're happy to foist that stuff on other people and be like, well, we're going to be as the, the control layer in the middle and that's where Siri AI becomes important.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I can already, you know, if you want to ghostwrite an Apple announcement, you're like, this will work with the huge ecosystem of Matter door locks that run on thread. And, you know, we had some great ideas. So we partnered with LG on, on making some with Apple, Apple flair in them. Whatever John Turnus is going to say.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. They'll have H2 chips in them or whatever.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. They're like, they have no buttons, whatever that is, whatever Apple thing is. But it needs to work with the big ecosystem of Matter devices. There's some reporting out there that, you know, this is a big reset for Matter 2 and HomeKit in general. But the point that I have just been making for ages, that Jen has been making for ages, is that you cannot sell a smart home in a box.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Like sort of definitionally, everyone's house is an edge case. So you cannot sell in a box, something that works for everyone. Just in my house, the basement door doesn't get any wifi signal.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  So now you gotta add a repeater or an Eero or a MeshNote, like it's all, it's, we're already done. Like it's already gotten more complicated than any normal human would ever deal with. Uh, replacing light switches is easy, but also complicated. Like it's not actually very challenging to replace a light switch. But then you gotta flip your breakers off and you absolutely have to flip the breakers off. Just take it from me. Just turn your breakers off. Don't do it hot.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  I'm so in trouble.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Uh, and you gotta do it and like, not everybody wants to do that or call them a triton and pay the money to do that. Like you just end up with, oh, this is getting complicated really fast.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  And I don't, I'm very curious to see how Apple repositions HomeKit in this device and a bunch of second party accessories from LG as an actual product solution. Not just some fun stuff you can nerd out with. And just to say it again, I love this stuff and I love nerding out on it and I'm a sicko. And I don't think any of this is ready for primetime. Because there's just no way to sell it to anyone else. Like you just end up being the systems administrator for your house.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Or you're Apple and you try to convince everybody that Siri AI is ready to be that thing. And, and unless there is some enormous advance coming next week, it isn't. Like the more I use Siri AI, the less impressed I am by Siri AI. It is, I think Gemini in 2023 is actually the exact right place to situate it because it does some of the things, right? Like some very basic things Siri used to not be able to do, like answer questions or find information for you. It can now do, and that's not nothing. That's, that's useful.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  It can search your text messages and email like never before.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  It sure can. And it actually does that passively well. That is not bleeding edge AI technology, but it does work.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  All of this other stuff, the like, just make sense of the world around me stuff actually is bleeding edge AI technology and I don't see any of it in Siri right now.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, you know, you can say there's a lot of reasons Apple was behind, but to me, the number one thing is that Apple makes an awful lot of money on in-app purchases in the App Store.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  And disrupting the app paradigm is fully disruptive to Apple's business. And, you know, there's reporting out there that says John Turnus actually wants to make more money from services.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  I mean, of course he does.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  But like, John Turnus will get fired if he doesn't figure out how to make more money from services. It's just a real thing.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Well, he can also make new devices if people want to buy it. It's, it's another choice.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  That's a lot harder, turns out.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  Um, and so of course Meta was out with Muse. Of course Meta put an app, an app on your phone that means you don't have to use other apps.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  They, they've got nothing to lose.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Right? And like, I just, I think that it's going to be one of those things. I mean, this is the classic innovator's dilemma, like Apple is trapped by the scale of its own success here.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  And they probably should be the company that gives everybody eight gigs of RAM in the cloud to run a little web browser. So you can tell Siri to go do stuff for you and figure out how to do that in a privacy first way. And then, you know, Siri will shop for you and they can take 30% of that. But they're not gonna. It's going to be, they're going to say Siri can use the apps on your phone. That's their model and they're, they're, and even Google, to some extent, is sticking with that model. They announced Gemini Spark, which is an agent at I/O.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  They are not running NFL ads for Gemini Spark.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  No. Spark is so funny because every day, every time anybody has a conversation about all of these devices and the sort of AI assistants, everybody mentions, you know, Muse, Instinct is kind of up there, Grokbot. And then there's, there's a couple others percolating around. And then every time there is one commenter who from like several rooms away is like, what about Spark though?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  It's just like, oh, that's the Google employee in the room.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  And, and like, Google was out in front of this and just didn't, didn't do the thing. They like, as ever, Google's ability to coherently make and ship and market products, uh, remains to be seen. But okay, last thing on this, then we need to take a break. I want you to call this yay or nay right now. Are you going to be able to play Candy Crush within app purchases on the HomePad?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Look, here's the number one thing about that.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Think of the billions left on the table by that decision.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  So, well, here's my number one question about the HomePad. The, the reporting on it all suggests that it's going to have the camera on and it will recognize you as you walk up to it and then, you know, pop up some personalized stuff. First of all, now you have a camera in your kitchen that is just like looking at for people, looking for faces. Big questions for Apple there. Like I don't like having cameras in my house. Cameras outside the house, fine. Cameras in the house, we just like, don't have them. Even the baby monitor, I won't get a wifi baby monitor, just not, not a thing I'm comfortable with. Apple's like, yeah, we're going to do facial recognition in real time, such that when you walk up to it, we will switch to your accounts. There is not a device anywhere in Apple's ecosystem that can do fast user switching at that speed.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  So like my number one question is how is that going to work? And then if it works, like sure, now you're in your App Store account, you can do Candy Crush. But if this is a single player experience with one App Store, like it's never going to work.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, I agree. Even, yeah, I hadn't even really thought about that because what you actually want in that situation is something that can actually be used simultaneously by multiple different people. And if it's trying to essentially context switch every time, it's going to be a mess, but it also kind of has to if it's going to have the permissions that it's asking for. That is complicated.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, Apple could have saw this a million years ago by doing user profiles on the iPad, which I believe all of us have begged them to do, like every writer at The Verge, like gets their wings when they write, why doesn't the iPad have multiple user accounts? You've written it, I've written it, Dieter's written, like we've all written it.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  But this device, at least from what they're telling, what the reporting is, like that's the feature.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  So maybe, maybe there'll just be Face ID to unlock, but that sucks.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Having to do one more step every time you want to touch it feels bad. Um, all right. Well, whatever it is next week, we will inevitably talk a lot about it. Um, for right now, let's take a break and then we're going to come back. We've got some laptops to talk about. We'll be right back.

• 38:55Speaker 00

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• 39:36Speaker 00

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• 40:10Speaker 00

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• 40:51Speaker 00

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• 41:33Speaker 01

  All right, we're back. So after all of that, two companies this week with some more traditional, I would say, ideas about laptops that are also weird ideas about laptops. Let's start with Microsoft. So Microsoft had an event this week. They teased it by saying something to the effect of, we have something new from Windows. That something new turned out to be a couple of new devices. They re-announced and announced a ship date for the Surface Laptop Ultra. They announced a thing called the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, which really just rolls off the tongue. A lot of this stuff is its sort of AI-forward laptops, built in particular on the RTX Spark platform from Nvidia. Let's start with the Surface Laptop Ultra, which they've talked about before.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  This is by a mile the most powerful Surface they ever built. It's intended to be for local AI development for people who want to build with AI. There were a bunch of new Windows features about how Copilot will be able to use your computer more. The thing that happened, by the way, while I was on leave is Copilot just became a joke. Like, I don't know if everybody noticed this while you were in it every day, but Copilot is now the AI that everybody makes fun of. And like, there but for the grace of God, go every other AI tool on the planet. But Microsoft is still doing it. They're plugging Copilot into everything. They're giving it more control over your files, over Windows. The Surface Laptop Ultra, Neelai, is this a real laptop to be interested in?

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Or is this just like a supercomputer plaything for nobody?

• 43:03Speaker 02

  We had a number of local AI conversations while you were out. You know, Apple announced a bunch of Macs, and they made a lot of noise about how they were great for running local AI models. There's something there that is super interesting. That you don't want to rent your compute in the cloud. You don't want to pay the enormous token fees. You want control of your data. You care about privacy. And then the, right next to that is, boy, a lot of people have to rethink the fundamental paradigm of computing that they have been swimming in for ages. I'll just give you a really dumb example. I'm writing this Decoder book, right? And so there's like 320-odd Decoder transcripts from the last five or six years. Like, obviously, this is a thing for AI to do.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Right? I should just make a Decoder search tool, and I'm like, doing a thing. I'm like, find me a quote when someone said blah, blah, blah. Then, yeah, I should go find it for me. So I built the tool, and I just like built it in Claude. And I, it didn't even occur to me that that tool lived on my computer.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Right? Like, the artifact and the transcripts, it was all just on my computer, and I was using it great. And then I was traveling, and I opened my laptop, and I opened Claude, and I was like, where the is it?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Right?

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Because you're just so used to the stuff being everywhere.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Right? And I was like, I figured it out, and I made it work, and it's all fine. But there's something about this paradigm of computing that makes you really reconsider where it's going to happen.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  In a way that, I think, unless you had a files and folders job, you were not thinking about that a lot with your computer until recently. And I'm fascinated to see if Microsoft's selling an Nvidia platform. I mean, it's expensive. It's $2,600.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  But is there like massive demand for a high-end Nvidia laptop that might be able to do local AI? And is that, is that a glimmer of a signal that actually local computing is going to be back in vogue? When we've all just been trained to be like, it's all in the cloud. Nothing is actually happening here.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Like, why do you need 16 gigs of RAM in a laptop? Because Chrome is shit. Like, there wasn't a reason before, and now there's like a lot of good reasons.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, part of me wonders if what we're missing there is these sort of simple use case, right? Like, what you're describing in a lot of ways is sort of an interface problem that I think is much more easily solved by download Gemini or Muse to your computer, and it will use your computer, but also go to the cloud when it needs to.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  The like, how to get a local model onto your computer is still sort of opaque in a lot of ways. And then what do I do with it? And how do I interact? Like, nobody has packaged that in quite the right way, I don't think. And maybe that's Microsoft's chance, is we make the operating system, we can do this. Like, Apple's trying to do this with Apple Intelligence, but it's so narrow and incomplete in that way. Microsoft could be the one to be like, well, we've just baked this whole thing into your computer, and now it works offline. Like, it is a very funny switch from the company that just spent the last decade.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  From the Azure company?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  The Azure company that also spent all of Satya Nadella's tenure moving Office to the web, moving Windows to the web. Everything is in the cloud now.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Satya Nadella once looked me in the eyes and said, if I could rename Windows, I'd rename it Azure Edge.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Really?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's like, whatever, man.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Like, Satya Nadella, by the way, not created naming products.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  I don't know if any of them are at this point. But I mean, again, I think it's a fascinating device. The idea of a really high-end Nvidia ARM laptop that is optimized for running models locally is new. Like, I am taken by the idea of new kinds of computers. I'm curious about them. I'm interested in them. And then you're just like, well, the paradigm of this, especially in a laptop, is kind of weird. Right? Like, okay, I'm going to have a bunch of compute in my house. I don't want the models to be in a cloud. I don't want my data to go to Anthropic or whatever it is. I'm going to put a server in the basement.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Right. You have a headless Mac Studio. Like, that is understandable. Yeah.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  And then wherever I am in the world, I can use that because it's sitting here on my connection. This is a laptop. It's like, I need to take the model with me to do what in the coffee shop?

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Locally.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  I'm just dying to see what use cases emerge for that thing.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I will say, I think there's a version of this that is just, finally, Microsoft made an honest-to-God, out-and-out MacBook Pro competitor that can hang at that level, that is all on its own, very exciting. Like, it's expensive, but so is the MacBook Pro. You can spec it up to death. Like, if the RTX Spark platform is as good as advertised, this thing is, it looks great. It has the specs. Microsoft got very excited about how many ports it has. It got so excited that it spelled the word "surface" wrong on the slide about all the ports.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  It's really good.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Really a lot going on.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  When you say Copilot has become a bit of a joke, what I know is that it was active while those slides were being made, and it said nothing.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  No. It's like, oh, Sir Ass, I love that. That's my favorite other computer.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Thank you, Copilot. But yeah, it does seem like if you just take this as the the true sort of Surface Pro, fine, but I do think Microsoft is trying to make an argument that there is a next way of using computers inside of this device that you can build and use on this laptop. And yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure anyone has quite figured out what that product is supposed to look like. And maybe that's fine, because this is a developer computer for developers. And in this rev, everyone who gets it will know how to make it work. And maybe that's enough.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, or, you know, there's a market for $26,000 Windows laptops that look nice and perform like a MacBook Pro and

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  people are going to buy them just for that. Maybe the battery life is great and performance is great. And that Windows on ARM will have solved it.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Because Nvidia brought to bear a whole new platform. Like, that's reasonable, too. I'm just fascinated by the idea of, okay, it is not clear if the models commoditize, if you can run distilled models locally. There's all this stuff, right? Where the compute can and should live.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  And I actually think that's totally up for grabs right now.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. And I think it's actually a really huge, interesting product opportunity for all of these companies.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Well, also, it's like, if it turns out to live on a laptop in your backpack, maybe that doesn't mean it needs to live in a data center, which maybe that's how the bubble pops, like.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Edge computing, baby.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Azure Edge.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love it. There is one spec of the laptop ultra that we should talk about, and it's apparently the most important thing about it, which is that it is the first, and I have to read this to make sure that I get all of the words correct. It has built-in magnetic USB C charging. And if you were to say, David, why is that an interesting milestone? I would not have a great answer for you. But that's apparently a thing.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  It's MagSafe. Did you not watch our video? It goes pink.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, but but instead of being MagSafe, it's just a USB cable, which is better.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  And it goes pink.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Does it? Does it actually make the noise? I missed the video.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's like physically going into the pink.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Do you hear? Are you getting a vision?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Give me one more time. One more time.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  All right, now I'm in. I get it now.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  But I never used the MagSafe for my MacBook Pro. Never, not once. Even though I was psyched to see it come back, because I'm always just someplace with USB C.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  And I'm not going to carry another dumb cable. This is like a perfect solution.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, I totally agree. I think this is great. And I think it's it replaces Microsoft's kind of long-term, janky Surface Connect port with something that makes a lot more sense.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  And if this spurs everybody to start doing magnetic USB C, I will be a happy, happy man. That would be awesome.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Okay, the other laptop we should talk about is Google Books. Google Books are here.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  I can just go. I know you have like a five hour monologue now.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  I do. I have a lot of thoughts.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  But, okay, my actual question for you, Neelai, is very simple, which is, why on earth did Google ship this now? And I want you to try to hash this out with me, because the story of Google Books so far, right? There's five devices out. You guys have talked about this on the show. They're an Android-first take on laptops. There is nothing, not one thing about this platform that is finished. There are some weird interface edges. No apps understand what a Google Book is, or how to use them, or what's supposed to like, nothing. It's just, it's an Android tablet pretending to be a laptop in a way that completely drives me crazy. And I just keep looking around, trying to figure out why Google shipped

• 52:01Speaker 01

  this now, and what it feels like it needs to be out in front of, or what wave it's trying to get like.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Well, that one's obvious. I know. I know. I know the answer to that one.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Do you?

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Which is the holidays are coming.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:13Speaker 02

  That's when people buy these things. So you got to get them out now. Developers have to have them. Hopefully, you get a wave of software updates. People buy cheap laptops for the holidays. Off you go. Black Friday is coming. Do you know what I mean? But it's that.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Sure. Okay.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  But is, are they ready? I haven't actually heard anyone describe them as an Android tablet all dressed up as a laptop. That's very good.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  It's what it is. Like, okay, let me give you an example. So you open Netflix. Netflix, app I was very excited about, right? This is like, the reason you want a desktop app is so you can download things to your computer and watch them on planes, right? Like, this is an annoyance with my Mac. Some apps exist for the Mac that will let me down, like Prime Video has an app that will let me download stuff locally. Netflix doesn't. Very annoying. So it's great that I just have Android apps. I can download stuff locally. This thing does not understand that it's not an Android tablet. It only runs fullscreen or 16:9, just down the middle of the thing. It doesn't interact with any other Windows. It can't be resized. Like, it's just, these are tablet apps. And to some extent, this

• 53:18Speaker 01

  is like Google's ongoing problem, which is that it can't make anyone care about Android apps. Like, I've sort of danced around saying this for a long time, because every time I denigrate the state of Android apps, a lot of people send me emails and get mad. But this, to me, is like such a blistering indictment of how much developers care about making good apps for Android, that even after all this time, Android is pretty good on a Google Book. It's pretty good on a television. It's pretty good on it. It's pretty good on lots of things. Android apps suck everywhere but phones.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  And it is so much more obvious to me on a Google Book than it has ever been on anything else. And I just look at this thing. I'm like, maybe this is just a completely unsolvable problem, and Google is hosed.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  It's funny, because all I want back is Chromebook Pixel from 10 years ago, that just had a web browser. But there's infinity research that people want apps. They don't just want to browse the web, even though that's what they do on their computers all day long.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  They don't think that's what they want, even though it is what they want.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  It's, it, it, Google has now complicated the idea of a Chromebook to the point where what is a computer is an existential crisis.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  But there are a bunch of things about this that work for me. Like, the, the Google Book has a concept of a home screen in a way that laptops really don't. Like, you can come and you can see widgets, and it'll show you. You can, you can array apps like you would on your phone. And there's something about that that is immediately like, oh, this is actually a good idea. Like, we should use my desktop for things instead of just being a mess of files that I've downloaded. That's smart. The control center is laid out like my phone and is actually much more understandable than how to find settings all over the Mac in a lot of ways. Like, a lot of these things make sense to me. To bring Android and Chrome OS together works. The Chrome on the Google Book seems a little worse in a way that we're all still trying to figure out. It's like, it's like desktop-ish Chrome.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  If someone can actually put the pieces together on this for me, please, please call me and do it. But it's, it is, it is not just they lifted desktop Chrome and put it on here, which is essentially what Chrome OS is. Like, it is full bore Chrome with some stuff around it.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  I would, I would argue there's actually nothing worse than a desktop-ish browser.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, this thing runs extensions. It has some of the extra features. I haven't found any websites that are broken. But there are a bunch of little pieces of the interface that aren't there. There are a couple of little tweaks to the way that things work that don't feel quite right. The way Windows is a little bit different. Like, it's just, it just, it just feels somewhat less than Chrome. And to me, it's like, the one thing this thing needs to be is full ass Chrome.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you see a laptop, you're like, I'm running full fat Chrome. Like, we're doing it.

• 56:00Speaker 01

  That's the whole thing.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And when I say there's nothing worse than desktop-ish browser, it's like, when you're using a mobile browser, like a baby browser for babies, at least you know. You know, you're going to get kicked out over here, and you're not going to end up in like, some mobile web backwater because the site automatically detected a blah blah. You know, this is the experience of using an iPad for me, all the time. It's like, ah, it's so close to being a real browser. And then everyone knows it's not. And they're like, put you in a kiddie pool. Like, there's nothing worse than that, because you're like, oh, I'm so close. I'm using a thing that feels like a laptop, and it won't just let me be a laptop. For Google to do it with Chrome, a thing called Chrome on a thing called a Google Book that looks like a laptop, it's going to confuse lots of people in lots of ways.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It is kind of crazy making. But it occurs to me that the sort of reason for existence of basically every gadget we've talked about so far is the same. And I like, I don't think I processed that until we were sitting here talking about this, that the idea underpinning all of these is some kind of new hardware on which your AI agent is allowed to just run amok, right? Whether it's Siri AI, or Alexa Plus, or Copilot, or Gemini, whether it's a laptop or a tablet or a weird, like, everyone's hardware idea boils down to, we need to give you Surface on which to let your AI agent do things on your behalf.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  But the right Surface for that is eight gigs of RAM and eight gigs of storage in the cloud. Like, Meta figured it out.

• 57:34Speaker 01

  A little tiny Linux computer?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, fine, we'll just give you a little cloud VM. And it's gonna have a browser in it. And, you know, I think Meta's approach to like, it's just your computer, you can do whatever you want, and here's a file system, is neat.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  I think that was so smart, by the way. Even just in the way that it is, it is describable, in the way that you just described it, is so smart. That like, we just gave you a little tiny Linux computer in the cloud. Immediately, your brain goes, oh, I understand that.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  I will say, you missed some drama while you were out because I think they kind of reconned their way to that.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I don't think that's real at all, but I think it's it's a it's a good explanation.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  No, I mean, like, they announced Muse and then people found that it could talk about the file system. And then they're like, no, it was always meant to do that. And then it quietly changed the behavior of Muse to make it actually do that.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Oh, I saw because you got really pissy about it on threads because you got in a fight with somebody and then you doubled down and then they doubled down and then everybody was mad at everybody. It was great.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  And then I won.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  And then you I think you won. I'm not positive.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Then I demanded a statement on the record from Meta saying what the intended behavior was, and they declined.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Say I won, Mark. Say I won.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, I was like, put your money where your mouth is. Say that this was always the intended behavior on the record. And then it was dead silence.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Just like, you know, but but whatever, they got to the right answer, like a cool ass answer.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Right? The idea that you have a little computer in the cloud and your muse can use it. And this is kind of what I mean about where is the compute going to live for, especially for consumers? The only answer is in the cloud, managed by an IT professional who gets paid a lot of money to make sure that your agent stays in a sandbox and does that, right? Like, there's no way a regular consumer should have a Mac Mini in the basement with open claw just firing away.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  I don't know if you saw the Ben Thompson piece this past week, like it opened with, I got a virus and it's because I have it in my basement. Running open claw. And but he's like, but the only reason I found out I had a virus is because I had open claw on my Mac Mini and it detected the virus. And it's like, all of this is a swirl of problems, right? There's something there that I just find utterly fascinating, like all of these devices are there to get you through a platform shift.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Right? The Google Book, the idea that it can sort of like silently stream apps from your Android phone onto that display. All of the walls between these app paradigms are being torn down because they don't matter anymore. But Google was pretty reticent to do that. The app vendors are reticent to do that. And over the past years, everyone's just like, screw it, just run the apps wherever you want.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  Everything's everything. It's fine. Because the next thing is coming and that's actually the battle worth fighting. I just don't know that I want the AI agent to click around on Chrome on my Google Book in front of me. Go do that somewhere else.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's where things like Instinct and Muse feel good to me. It's like, I actually don't most of the time want to see you doing the work. Just let me know when you need me and it'll be fine. But that's very hard to do because then you you get the thing where it's like, open up this weird browser inside of a messaging app and click around like you're a desktop user with your finger. It's bad. But but again, there's a million interesting product ideas here. And then I can't help but wonder if this is where like OpenAI and Anthropic start looking around being like, do we need to build laptops? Like, if this is the thing, if it's give people a browser, the Android App Store and our AI agent system,

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  we can win on the merits if that's the next thing. And maybe there maybe there's a tablet coming from Anthropic in six months and it's going to actually make a kind of sense.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Maybe. I'm just gonna I'm gonna inject the skepticism back into this because we have bought a lot of the framing for these companies and I do think this is a strategy they're chasing.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Just to say it, none of these agents actually work perfectly yet. They're all brittle in fascinating ways. Amazon is blocking Muse. It seems very likely that some combination of CloudFlare and every other major website in the world are going to be blocking every other agent soon unless there's money exchanged. Like, we're in a very interesting and fun period right now where there are no rules. And it's very easy to imagine the future. And then, especially because it's e-commerce, like all of the walls are going to go up until people make the appropriate business deals. And then maybe the joy of having an agent that can just click around the browser on your behalf and do anything will fall apart.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Right? And like, I don't, I don't know how any of that's going to play out. I just see all these companies are like, well, we could never beat the phone.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  Is this our chance to beat the phone?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  It's the only, it's the only realistic chance they've had in ages.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is what you have to do if you are one of these companies. Like you, it's the only chance. And I think, I mean, I look at a lot of this stuff and I even using some of these devices, like I've been using a Google Book pretty extensively this week and I just can't build the bring Gemini in muscle memory. Like, I just, I know how to use computers and I and adding this brand new layer on top of it that does things sometimes faster, but sometimes slower and

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Like, the the the sort of circle to search thing that Google has been doing, I think, is spectacular and useful, that it's just like, what is this? And where can I buy it? It's like, surprisingly, a question I ask a lot.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  Do you get good answers to this?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Uh, hit and miss.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  I have like a 50% hit rate on this.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  50 is not bad, though, right? And that's kind of my point.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  I think it's horrible.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Well, okay, let me give you an example. So my three-year-old goes to preschool and every day at preschool, he rides this little blue and yellow and red plastic motorcycle on the playground. It's just one of those like little balance bikes, but it looks like a motorcycle and he rides it around with all his friends and he desperately wants one to have at home.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  I don't know what it's called. I don't really know how to look for it. If you just like Google blue balance bike, you get nowhere. But they they took a picture of him riding it at preschool and sent it to us in the app. So I cropped the thing, sent it to Muse and I was like, what is this and where do I buy it? And it found it on like a Dutch school supply website for me to buy. Never in a million years of Googling would I have found it. I went to go and try and do it on my own and didn't find it. And it went and found it for me. And like, sometimes it fails spectacularly and sometimes it doesn't, but like, it is a genuinely useful thing in spots. And that is about the extent of the actual muscle behavior I've been able to build to use this stuff. And there's so many other things where it's like, oh, I could kind of do this with AI, but

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  it would take just as long and be vastly more complicated. Like, most things don't take that long. Is the thing that I keep discovering. Most things that we do are not that hard and don't take that long. And the idea of learning some new thing to offload to AI, just because it's sort of there waiting for me is not compelling.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  This is like when you get your first internship and you just sort of like wander around someone else's office being like, do you have anything for me to do?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  And everyone's like, no, dude, like even just telling you what to do would take too long.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  It's that. I will say Mustafa from Microsoft, Mustafa Suleyman from Microsoft was on Decoder recently and we were like in the thick of AI safety pacing the frontier conversation. And just as a throwaway, he's like, I mean, you have to admit the models are getting better. Like, we don't even talk about hallucinations anymore. And I was like, I can't do this with you right now, but dude, these things hallucinate all the time.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Constantly, all the time. Like, one of the reasons that I'm so skeptical about all of the agentic promises that are being made is all day long, they are just making stuff up. And then, you know, they do that Claude apology where they're like, you're so right. And it's like, no, I'm madder at you now. And I, this isn't helping.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Fair. M dash, that's my bad, is immediately just gives me hives as soon as it appears in in my conversations.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's something about, again, I agree with you. It is a thing they have to do.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  There's no choice but to say, well, that might be the platform of the future. We should build hardware and UIs around it so that if it does emerge, we might be the winner. But there's nothing to say that it will get there on the timeframe that people are talking about.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the fact that Muse, I think, right now is is a phone app that looks like a messaging app and is the one that has really escaped containment is fascinating. Like Muse is not some giant mainstream thing, but it's the only one of these that people outside of this world have asked me about and tried and talked about. And it is not some big new idea about things. It's a messaging app and a tiny computer in the cloud.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, Meta does have the world's greatest advertising ecosystem.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  It sure does.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  They have, like, I felt really bad for OpenAI when they launched Dots because then they went had to pay Meta for Instagram ads for Dots. And I was like, oh, man. We are all just way behind here.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. But then Meta comes out with glasses and everybody says, no, thank you. These are perfect glasses. I'm out.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  No, no, no, phones don't have a light, David. It's fine. They have a light.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  There were a few things that I was really grateful to not be at work to have to reckon with. And Mark Zuckerberg saying, no, phones don't have a light was one of them.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  Oh, we're gonna reckon with phones don't have a light almost every week for the rest of our lives on this show. I promise you. We're gonna have a dedicated segment. We'll have theme music. We're gonna collect sponsors. Phones don't have a light. Our new What is a Photo 2027.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Oh, God. Well, in the meantime, let's take another break so I can go collect myself. Then we're gonna come back with the lightning round. We'll be right back.

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

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• 1:09:35Speaker 02

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• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  All right, we're back. After seven weeks off, Eli, is it, is it, are we still doing this? Is it still time?

• 1:10:45Speaker 02

  It's time. Oh, this, today's is really good. It's time for America's favorite podcast, within the podcast.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  The halftime breakdown is close.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  As a special treat, we had the offspring record Brendan Carr's a dummy theme song.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  They, the people have realized that you like pop punk.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  The, the people get me, and I appreciate that. Uh, this one comes from Corey Wright, who wrote, uh, Neil, I and I are around the same age, so I felt like this is a fitting tribute to our era of pop punk. You have to understand that I love pop punk. Neil, I like sad boy music. That's important to understand.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  I'm just an older generation of punk. Write me a Clash song. We're gonna be very happy.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  But that does not mean you have license to do white boy reggae. Like, we excuse the Clash for doing white boy reggae. Very few other people get that excuse.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Correct. Also, see also ska music. But we will leave that.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  I feel like we're really close to getting a Scott Brendan Carr's a dummy theme. Like, we're, every week, we're inching along, and now we've just tipped him over. All right, there are two this week.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Uh, one, classic sort of First Amendment Brendan Carr battle. And then the second one is delicious. I don't, there's not even another word for it. Uh, so the first one, uh, is we have been covering over and over, over on Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast, within the podcast. Brendan keeps threatening our nation's broadcasters over the content they air because he says their use of the public airways is subject to public interest, and that means late night comedians are bad. Something.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that seems basically right. Yeah.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  It's always been unclear what, what he actually means here. He's hauled in a bunch of ABC stations, uh, owned by Disney, for early license renewal, which he is not supposed to do. That case is in court, and ABC's lawyers, this week on Tuesday, said, quote, "We sit with our head on the guillotine. We are watching everything we do."

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yikes.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  So, over and over and over again, we have pointed out that the point of governance each regulations is often not the actual regulation. It is the chilling effect. It is the prevention of speech. By, just by saying, "The government will punish you for your speech, you will not speak." And so here you have ABC very clearly saying, "By hauling our licenses in for early review against a nebulous standard, uh, and off schedule, you are chilling our speech. We are watching what we do at our news networks in a way that is impermissibly viewpoint based, uh, especially in the United States where we have a First Amendment. The government should not be doing those things." That court, that case is in court. It seems like that judge understands what's going on.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  We'll see what happens as it winds to resolution, which it should ahead of the thick of election season. I mean, it is happening right now.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're in it in a real way right now. I'm in a swing state, and it's a mess.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  I watched the Packers game last week on NFL Sunday Ticket, and somehow, in New York State, I was getting ads for Ken Paxton. Like, that's how much money is being, is being just shotgunned into the ecosystem.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  That, they've broken ad targeting. I was like, "Look, I'm not voting in the Texas Senate race, guys." Like, "Please stop showing me this advertising." Uh, okay, the second one, the, the one that I find delicious.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  If you've been paying attention, you know that the thesis of our segment, Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast, within a podcast, is that Brendan Carr is very dumb. It's the foundational principle of the, of the show, if you will. Well, one thing that happens with Brendan is that sometimes he's so corrupt, he comes all the way back around and irritates the people for whom he is generally corrupt.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Are you gonna agree with Brendan Carr again? This is my favorite when this accidentally happens.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  So Brendan waived the ownership cap on local TV stations. So in the statute written by Congress, there's a 39% cap. You are not allowed to own more than 39% of the local TV stations in a market. Uh, this is designed to protect competition. You don't want all the media in a market to be owned by one company. Brendan's argument is, well, Google exists, and so surely Sinclair must be able to buy all the local TV stations. You reason that out however you want. But he waived the cap, this might be illegal. Guess who's suing him, David?

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  Sinclair.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  Cable TV operators. Everyone's favorite. The lobbying groups for our nation's largest, and dare I say, most beloved cable TV operators, have realized that by allowing Sinclair and Nextar to get huge, they will not be competing for rights and prices. They will just be able to demand rates. So the lobbying groups for Cox and Comcast and all the rest have filed a lawsuit, and they have said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have the leverage to demand higher retransmission fees from TV providers, resulting in higher TV bills for consumers. The FCC order, quote, "Arbitrarily and capriciously ignores the harms

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  that will surely follow from allowing broadcast station groups to exceed the national cap." You come all the way back around, Brendan.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  You're so, you're so close to getting it, you guys. You're so, you're so close. Just say the word antitrust. Just say it, say it out loud.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  Just say, Brendan, you, you, you, you did corruption for one group, but you forgot that you're supposed to be in the pocket of the big cable companies, the big ISPs. They're the ones who are paying the bills.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  But no. So now everyone's mad at Brendan.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  You know what this makes me think of for, for no reason? There, there's this headline today on Variety that says, um,

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  Disclosure, Variety is owned by our parent company.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's right. Our, our friends at Variety, uh, that says, "Glen Powell is staying quiet on politics because, quote, 'I do not like the discourse,' says running man flopped after Paramount laid off entire marketing department." And I just saw a post that just screenshotted that headline and said, "God, he's so close to understanding that business decisions are political in this environment." And it's just like, yup. We're all so close to getting it. We're all so close.

• 1:17:16Speaker 02

  Anyhow, Brendan, I would love to see you come on the show and, and thread this particular needle. Cause, I mean, who are you gonna be more corrupt for? I'm just dying, just come on, just, let's hang out. Let's get a beer. Is it gonna be Comcast, or is it gonna be Sinclair, buddy? Quite a love triangle you find yourself in.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Okay, so I, here's an idea I'm gonna pitch you very quickly. Uh, our new parent company also owns South by Southwest.

• 1:17:42Speaker 02

  They do.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  So I'm, I'm proposing that at South by Southwest, uh, we get one of those things where like, you have two people on either side, and then you put the dog in the middle and see who they run to. But it's Brendan Carr in the middle, and it's the Trump administration on one side, and it's cable operators on the other side. And they all try to just lure him in and see who he runs to first. Main stage, South by Southwest, would be huge.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  We can, Brendan, I can make this happen for you.

• 1:18:06Speaker 01

  We literally can do that.

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  I, I was just in Austin with the South by people. We can, we can figure this out. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast, within a podcast.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  I feel cleansed.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  We're gonna have to make a Spotify playlist very soon.

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  I think, I think so. It's gonna be, it's gonna be very long and very confusing to anyone who finds it by accident.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  That's our midterm election package. It's not substantive coverage of the issues. It's a Spotify playlist of pop punk songs calling the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission a dummy. Verge.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  My first lightning round item is in, in this swirl of insanity, Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery finally completed this long awaited, messy, expensive, complicated merger. Yet another thing I'm glad to frankly have missed many of the recent machinations of, there have been many machinations. Will they, won't they? Who's gonna be in charge? What's Netflix gonna do?

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  We're gonna move to Nashville.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, like fights with various governments, all of whom kind of wussed out at the end, it seems.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  I mean, but look, what, what middle aged man hasn't woken up one day and threatened to move to Nashville?

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  It's real.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  It's just a thing you do.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  This deal is now done and it, it puts Paramount in control of Warner Brothers Discovery, which is now a company known as Skydance in a, in a term that makes perfect sense to everybody. What do you get when you put Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery together? You get Skydance. This is now just an absolutely monstrous Hollywood company. It owns, it owns huge news businesses like CBS News and CNN. It owns vast swaths of the, the studio movies that get made every year. They've made big promises about how many movies they're gonna make. It owns lots of channels. It importantly now owns and operates two very big and very competitive streaming services. And there's been a lot of speculation about whether that's gonna continue to be the case.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Oh, there's no speculation. They have announced they are merging these streaming services.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Sort of. They, they, even they have talked out both sides of their mouth on this. Where like, there have been people who have said things like, we're gonna merge them. And then there have been other people who are like, well, actually that's gonna be more like a bundle than a merger.

• 1:20:20Speaker 02

  No, step one is a bundle. Step two is one big streaming service. David Ellison was on CNBC this morning and he announced that they're gonna compete with Silicon Valley with, with tech.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Well, that doesn't mean anything.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  Just let you know what I heard.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm thrilled for them. Congratulations. Like they, they too have iPhones to make movies on, I guess. Okay. So the idea is eventually one single streamer.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  Somewhere, somehow. Yep. On what timeline? I do not know.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  But the idea that they, they have a lot of debt to service, like an enormous amount of debt to service.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  Which I would point out is exactly what happened when Warner Brothers Discovery combined and nearly killed it.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. And it's what happened to AT&T as well.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  That, yeah, that company made a lot of really bad decisions because it had to service debt. And now it's a richer guy with a lot of debt to service, but still a hell of a lot of debt to service.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Oh no, we are just rolling over this over financed Nissan Altima into a new Nissan Altima every couple of years. Like there's a $10,000 payment on this Altima and we're just gonna keep going. Like that's where we are.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  But they also have to make 30 movies a year or pay $30 million a year per movie they don't make into like a healthcare fund run by the biggest unions. Like they have to spend a lot of money and they gotta pay off a lot of debt. And the only way they're gonna do is cut costs. And there's just no way they're gonna run redundant marketing budgets, redundant customer support, redundant AWS bills.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Layoffs.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  They're gonna lay a bunch of people off and they're gonna cut anything that looks duplicative. So two streaming services just simply cannot be on the menu.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  That's fair. I also think it's very clear that Paramount Plus is not going to win. And if, if this company is actually going to like make smart ruthless decisions, they'll just cut Paramount Plus.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. They hired, um, uh, this is a real decoder PhD thesis. David Ellison is the CEO of Skydance. And then Enon Krees, who used to be the CEO of Mattel and before that of Maker Studios. His title is co-CEO. So there's a CEO.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Not two co-CEOs, a CEO and a co-CEO.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Ellison is the CEO.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  Enon's title is co-CEO.

• 1:22:36Speaker 01

  This has real like Dwight Schrute is assistant to the regional manager kind of vibes.

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  We just had Peter Kafka on Decoder. He just wrote a profile of Enon. Uh, he's deep and you should listen to it if you want more for that. But that, I'm just like, what are we doing? It's very good.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I think I bring this one up in part because there are obviously a lot of important news questions about what's gonna happen to CNN. Now there are a lot of obviously worried people who work for these companies who are worried about layoffs. I, but the, the play here, if you just take David Ellison at his word is to build something that is so big, it can compete with specifically Netflix.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  I would not say anything that has happened at the already combined company of Paramount and Skydance suggests that this company is equipped to do that.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  I don't think it's Netflix. I, I think, I, I think he knows that it's YouTube and TikTok, which by the way, the Ellison family has a stake in TikTok.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  The, the way he was talking about it on CNBC this morning was very much Silicon Valley came in. I mean, this is the quote, Silicon Valley came into media with platform technology, whatever you think that means. And they took it away from us, but now I've assembled the biggest and best bundle of IP the world has ever seen, along with sports and news. And we're gonna put together a tech platform that can compete with Silicon Valley and win.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  I think they mean Netflix when they say that. Maybe they mean TikTok and YouTube. Maybe I'm wrong. But like, it is, it'll be interesting to see if they try to make user generated content work at scale, which is a thing all of these companies keep trying and keep failing at.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. I think we, Disney has already announced that creators can use their IP.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  To make vertical videos for Disney. Plus I think that is a partnership with TikTok. It would not surprise me at all if the Ellison family finds a way to get TikTok content into whatever forthcoming app there is.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  We'll see, but I will just say this again. I say it so many times. The problem for Hollywood is that everyone is actually watching vertical video and none of those platforms pay a dime for it.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  And they have to pay actors and actresses.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  They gotta pay Glenn Powell and then apparently they need to pay Glenn Powell's marketing department. Right? And like, that's just a lot of money for every minute of video that they produce and Instagram doesn't pay anyone a dime.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Or, or you realize that actually there's a lot of really positive signs that people want to go back out into the world and watch movies. And you go make good movies. Like I, a, a, a grand theory that I am percolating is that actually the company that is in trouble here is Netflix because it's gonna be caught in the middle of. It, it doesn't have the vast quantity of free content, nor does it have the event content that people will actually go out of their way and pay for. And so it's turning into, and this is true on the platform, it's turning into just chum, right? Like it is, it is reality TV. It is, it is hours to fill. And I think everybody looks at Netflix as like this unstoppable behemoth.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  I look at Netflix less every month than every month before, because there is just increasingly nothing on it.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  Oh boy. Okay. We're gonna do it. We're gonna do it. We're, we're, we're first episode back after your leave, David, but we're doing it. It's time to break out the go 90 scale of doom streaming services. So if no one remembers anymore, because it was a hundred years ago, Verizon launched a streaming service called Go 90. Whose innovation was that you could turn your phone sideways. Also, I believe you could join a gang. That was their version of community.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Were they crews or were they gangs? It was one of those.

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  I think it was crews. I don't think it was gangs. It'd be amazing if it was a gang.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  That's gonna be our app. When we do, when we do the Verge video app, it's gonna be, it's gonna be gangs.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  Anyway, uh, Go 90 quickly failed. But I don't know. There's no other way to describe what happened to that platform. And thus the Go 90 scale of doom streaming services was born where you start at zero, that's alive and 90 is dead. Many, many, many streaming services have gone 90. Quibi famously, I believe, is the, the, the paradigmatic example of it. We all knew, we all knew what direction that thing was going and to 90 it arrived.

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  All right. Netflix has been sitting at zero on the Go 90 scale of doom streaming services since Netflix existed. You are making it sound like it's not at zero anymore.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  I, I mean, it's hard because it's, it is so big and it has so much money that it is, it's like betting on Netflix to cease to exist is, is ridiculous.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  And yet, I think net, you only get to be a zero if you are also an unstoppable cultural force. And Netflix is not that.

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  And if it's not, it's, it, it, no, I'll say that. It, it is losing that rapidly. Like it, it was a cultural force because Stranger Things was a cultural force. And Wednesday kind of was, and it has, it has inched along through a few things that have been huge. And now it is just betting that you will go on and there will be so much reality stuff to watch that you'll find something and you won't cancel.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  I, I would, I would put it at like a, like a 15, like it's still somewhere in the green zone here. But it is, like, also remember Netflix spends an unbelievable amount of money on content. It is, it is forever hugely expensive. It is forever at the mercy of continuing to grow. And I think, I think things could get ugly the minute anything starts to turn for Netflix. So again, I am not moving it towards it might disappear from existence, but I think this idea that Netflix is the like unstoppable behemoth of the future of entertainment is wrong.

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  Wow. That's bold.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  I think only YouTube is a zero for me on this scale.

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  Oh, YouTube is absolutely zero. It's not going anywhere. Although if they continue to slop up YouTube in the way that they appear to wanna slop up YouTube, I would actually, I would move it.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Am I crazy? Do you like, am I, am I just way over my skis on Netflix?

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  I think Netflix is an aggressively well-run company.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  And the danger for Netflix, in my opinion, is that.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  Everyone has realized that their library of like good movies from the 2000s is valuable, and they don't just dump it on Netflix anymore.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  And there's not an engine to make a bunch of those movies anymore. Right? Like, this is like the problem. You can go watch that Ben Affleck clip about DVD sales and like why they don't make movies like that anymore. By the way, Ben Affleck this week gave like amazing interviews about how deep he is in AI. We should spend an hour just talking about that.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Everybody like Ben Affleck, please come on the Vergecast. I know you listen. Come on the show. Tell us about your Python scripts. I want to hear about all of them.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  We can make this happen.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  But Netflix is also a slave to data. And I think there's a reason every Netflix movie looks the same and is kind of bland and every Netflix TV like there's a Netflix look. And I think it's fine. It is. You can watch TikTok while you watch Netflix.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  They gotta get over that. They gotta make things worth watching or find a way to win the licensing battle with everybody else to buy things worth watching. And I just don't, I, that's, that's their danger, but I don't think that they're confused.

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  Maybe not. Yeah, that might be right. I mean, I, yeah, that might be right. We should talk more about Netflix sometimes. But by the way, while we're looking at the scale here, my read of this is Paramount Plus immediately goes to like an 85 on the scale.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, because it's going to get merged into HBO Max?

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think HBO Max is like a five, like HBO Max, I think is, is the clear end state of all of this for, for this giant new company of Skydance.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  A big thing.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  Where does Skydance?

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  Casey Blaise, who was running HBO into, in, in charge of all of this stuff, like the bet here is very clearly on HBO, both like the, the people and the brand. Which I think is the right bet, to be clear. Like, people don't have feelings about Paramount the way that they do about HBO.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  We have never had to contend with, does being merged into HBO Max constitute going 90?

• 1:31:04Speaker 01

  We have.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  Because it's going away. It's, it's going to be gone.

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  This is the Hulu thing, right? Like Hulu still exists, even though it's also still been merged. But it, it, that's still kind of a bundle, but eventually Hulu will just be a tab in the Disney Plus app. And when that happens, Hulu has gone 90.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that's correct. All right. Last one, Disney Plus. So that's the other one of, of, of note here.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, Disney Plus is like, is like a two or a three. It's, it's, I think it is as close to being the cultural force that you have to reckon with as anybody on this list.

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  This is just, it's very obvious that you have three children.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I have young children, but also like the, the, the Star Wars stuff keeps working. Marvel keeps working like the, the, they have the IP that no one else has. And it'll be interesting, like Amazon is out there spending all this money on James Bond. Can that vault it up this list a little bit? But Disney is just the one you can make theme parks out of. Like it's, that's not, that's not changing anytime soon.

• 1:32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. We could do all the rest of them, but I, it's interesting to see where you put Netflix here. Because I, Netflix was a rock solid zero for the last five years.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just, it feels, it feels like it has lost something. And, and maybe you're right, maybe the, the company is as well run as any you will find in this space. So maybe it'll figure it out. But I don't know, it feels.

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, but just to say this as clearly as I can, I think Netflix is run by essentially sane people. And all of these other companies are crazy.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  I, yes, that I.

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  Like, I don't, I don't know how else to say that. Like, uh, we don't, we don't know much about Josh Demaro at Disney. But, you know, this past few weeks while you were on leave, did you see Bob Chapek reappeared?

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he wrote like a angry memoir, right?

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  He wrote a tell all book. And, you know, his theory is that he was only made CEO. So Bob Iger didn't have to do COVID layoffs until Scarlett Johansson Black Widow was coming out on streaming.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  And then he's like, I knew I was, I was done for when he gave that interview to Ben Smith. And I was like, I know Ben Smith. What happened to this interview?

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  I think more CEOs should write pissy books. Like, I really.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Very upset.

• 1:33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:19Speaker 02

  Uh, and then something clearly happened because he was all over the place. Talking his stuff and then he disappeared.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  He's no longer available.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  I did, I did notice that. It's good stuff. Uh, all right. This is officially the slowest lightning round we've ever done. Uh, Neil, what's your next lightning round item?

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  All right. I want to talk about intelligent UI, which we sort of have been talking about.

• 1:33:43Speaker 02

  Through all the computer stuff, but ChatGPT this week, uh, did an update GPT-6. And now the responses can include interactive elements right in line, buttons. I'm guessing BuzzFeed quizzes. They love to pretend we're all smart. So they're like, here's a color picker for clothes and like an interactive chart where you can do a slider to learn something. And I'm like, tell me who the five sexiest presidents were, like whatever, whatever BuzzFeed nonsense. I am fascinated by this, right? The idea that you would get multimodal interactives has been an idea that's been floating around for a long time. As with everything, Google announced this at I O two years ago.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's like a little bit of it in AI mode. The idea that it, it will, it will sort of, it will gin up a spreadsheet for you rather than just write you a bunch of numbers. Like, there's little pieces of that coming to fruition, but this is the idea that everyone has had for a long time, right? It's like, what if it wasn't just text? And then every product everybody ships is just more text.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but even though like it made you a spreadsheet, it's mostly been like, yes, we, we do, we can do tables and bullet points. Everyone is Axios now, right?

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  This is very much, yeah, sometimes pictures. This is very much like we've made an interactive bicycle for you because you asked how a bicycle works. And there's something about this, which if you put right next to agents and natural language interfaces, is the dream. Right? The computer will naturally adapt to you and give you exactly what you need right at the right moment. And we have been covering this industry for 500 years. So many people have tried to build this thing.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  In so many different ways. And what it always runs into is people just want the controls to be fixed. You, like, you actually want the computer to be vastly more predictable than any adaptive UI system can ever give to you. And the comparison that I will make is we just went through, I don't know, five years of carmakers being like, you don't need HVAC controls. You need a button on a screen that says auto. And every single person was like, no, I want physical buttons that turn the fan up and down and move the temperature. Stop taking them away because you don't think I don't want them. Or worse, intelligently assuming when I should want them and making them appear and disappear at random.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  So I can't tell if this intelligent UI update for ChatGPT is brilliant in the future. Or we're just gonna recapitulate every adaptive UI conversation we've ever had, or whether there's something else happening here.

• 1:36:17Speaker 01

  I think all of these companies are kind of dancing around the wrong idea, which is, which is this constant reinventing the wheel of user interface. Like, not only is it what if it was just a button that said auto, it was what if every time you got in the car, that button was in a different place and looked different? Wouldn't you like that? And, and this is what it has been with all of these companies, right? You, you can, you can build this AI UI on the fly. And what it actually does is build it in a slightly different way, in a slightly different place every single time. And I think, I, I was talking to some product person a couple of years ago, when, when we were really first starting to talk about AI code.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  And he was like, the reason I'm so bullish about building code with AI is that I can do it once. I can use the AI to build something that I then understand. And then I can go use that thing. And I don't have to keep using the AI. I don't have to keep burning tokens. I don't have to keep guessing how this thing is going to work or reinventing my prompts. I can build a thing that I understand and then I can go use the thing that I understand. And this to me is trying kind of to be too clever by half. And in some ways it will work and it'll be very cool. Like as an information retrieval system that it's like, show me company earnings, which is like a thing people care about from time to time, right? It will show you that in a more dynamic way and that's all fine and good.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  Or like, show me how to split the bill between these people. Like, show me that in some nicer visual way. Fine. I don't think it goes beyond that at all in a way that's going to work for people. And I think actually a lot of people prefer text. Because text is a thing that is there, that I understand, that I can refer to, that works in a predictable way, that makes sense. And all of this generative UI stuff, I think just feels like mess to people.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. My hottest take lately is no one actually knows how apps work and they don't know what the buttons are. And they, they don't pay any attention. And this is why, you know, the average number of apps downloaded by the average person is zero.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Well, and when you do learn how to do them, you, you learn how to do the two things that you need to do. And then your brain ceases to even see everything else in the app.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think this is why chatbots generating text was like, well, at least I can just read this.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  But like, it's going to make you an app and it might have a like crazy UI idea in it. I don't, there's something about this. Again, I, I find it fascinating. It has been the industry's dream stretching back decades, right? Like, the computer will adapt to you and present to you exactly the right interface at the right time based on its understanding of you just speaking to it. Boy, every single executive we've ever talked to has issued some proclamation that this will be the future.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  And so maybe we're on the cusp of it. But I'm looking at it. I'm like, huh. Like, like, actually, you know, all the actual users we talked to might not want this. So let's see, I, I, and I'm not saying this, I think this feature as expressed in chat to be today is cool. Like, yes, it will make you a chart and graph and a slider and do a thing. And like, it is funny that Google announced this 100 years ago and OpenAI shipped.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's, that sounds right.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  What are we doing, everybody? Uh, but the next turn, when you have an OpenAI hardware device that has an agent in the cloud, and it's like making you custom UI and adapting the UI to you, that's the one I'm interested in because it's going to be the A track problem that like massive scale.

• 1:39:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, completely agree. And that, yeah, and, and figuring out how to do that in a way that is, uh, build something that is sort of permanent and, and that you can refer to and find and use again and share is like, it's not necessarily impossible, but no one has come anywhere near that yet.

• 1:40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 01

  But I do think it's a fun idea. Like, it's fun to watch people try this thing that like, how do I, how do I deliver you information in, in new and better ways? Is great. Lots of people learn and retain information in lots of different ways. We should keep trying this, but I am, I'm not at all convinced that let's redo some, let's reinvent the wheel every single time is in fact, the answer here.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  But it's funny because everyone knows that, but the, like, if you, it just seems like if you're a product designer at a tech company, you are required to forget it on a three year cadence.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Yes. That's how you get promoted. You reinvent the wheel, you get promoted, you take a vacation and then you come back and you start to reinvent the wheel again.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:38Speaker 01

  It's a thing. Um, all right. We really need to get out of here, but before we do, I just want to talk about one, one thing very briefly. I just want to get your temperature on this thing. So, Sam Altman did an interview on a, a new Politico podcast, um, the name of which I will not say out loud for reasons that anyone who knows the name of the podcast will understand.

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  You know, the podcast is the lawyers at our fancy big company.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  So Sam Altman on this podcast is talking about all the things Sam Altman likes to talk about. Um, and he, he says at one point that, uh, some bad things are going to happen with AI and that we have to be okay with some bad things happening because, and this is a quote, people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff. Uh, this became a whole kerfuffle, right? Everybody spent a couple of days being various degrees of mad about Sam Altman being like, I, I accept some bad stuff because there's also going to be all kinds of good stuff happening.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  I confess my immediate instinct is to be like, this is such a nothing burger of a statement, like there, of everything that has ever happened has some bad things and some good things. And we, we try to, you know, lessen the bad things and increase the good things, but this is just how every advancement we've ever had in history has worked.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  What do you make of this? Like, is this, is, or is this a real thing for people to be angry about that Sam Altman is saying?

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think the way he framed it was particularly awkward. See, the exact quote is, we believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency. And I'm like,

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. When you put it like that.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  I don't care what the benefits of this technology, like the point, the technology is whatever, like, and I get what he's trying to say. There's a big technological revolution and we're going to give people a lot more capability and some people will do bad things. And then negative consequences will be far outweighed by the positive. And you can apply that, as you're saying, you can apply that to anything from

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Everything that has ever happened.

• 1:42:40Speaker 02

  To cars, to whatever it is, right? You're going to give people cars, you're going to increase mobility. You're going to also have some car crashes and then the anti-car movement in cities in 2026 will be a loud and vocal potent force. And then we're going to do congestion pricing, whatever, like some swirl of decisions will have to be made because cars exist. Okay. Like I, if that is what he's trying to say, straightforward, I think is fine. But the, for the benefits of this technology is the entire problem with how the AI industry communicates is as though they are not in control of what they are doing.

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  And so either we're going to have AGI or not, and if I don't get there first, then something bad will happen. And so some bad things have to happen. Like, that's how he sounds.

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  I know that's just how he sounds to people, that he has to get there. He, we, we've got to do this. So you deal with it, deal with the data centers, deal with the, the, the, the teens getting AI psychosis. Like, all of that is fine because I, we have to do this and I can't possibly slow down or be more careful.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  And so if he's talking about the, the straight up societal trade off, like the reason the decoder tagline is big idea is another problem is, is like, it is embedded in the very notion of the big idea that you will have to answer for some problems that you have caused.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Okay. Like, of course I buy it. But the, the way this industry talks about the thing that they're making is though they have completely lost control of their own ambition and we all just have to like, yeah, man, I, I, I think data centers and surveillance are going to tip the election this, in this round. And a large part of it is because the industry cannot help itself.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. And they also, uh, well, at some point, at some point you and I are going to have a, a long, deep conversation that may or may not ever make it onto a podcast about this thing where they've all decided that AI is alive and deserves feelings and fair treatment and all of this weird, like, the fact that the Claude terms now prohibit you from being mean to Claude for too long is just like buck wild in a way that I'm, I'm actually like, just out of my mind about. But in this one, I just kept thinking about the fact that Sam Altman, in this case, and in basically every case, is just completely unable to articulate the good thing that AI is going to do. He's like, yes, all this bad stuff is going to happen, but it's going to do so much more good stuff.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  And it's like, well, what, Sam? It's going to put everybody out of jobs. It might kill all of us. What's the good part?

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  Well, it's going to monitor email for, uh, class action.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  It's going to like do sick math. Like, and that's cool. I like math, but yeah, it's going to monitor for class action settlements. I just, I don't know. Again, just as a, as a watcher of this over the last couple of months, I just kept looking out and it's like, nobody has a better idea for AI than it can help you book trips. And everybody has ideas about how it might kill us all. And like, boy, is that a bad trade? If you, if you can, if you can give me the trade that is good enough that I will accept a 10% chance that we're all going to die. That's actually a really fun conversation to have. I would really, really like someone to make that argument. Once, and no one can do it, including Sam Altman. And it drives me nuts.

• 1:45:50Speaker 02

  They're going to cure all diseases, but they also might kill you.

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  Even say that, like Genesis obvious is out here being like, we're going to cure all diseases. Sam Altman doesn't, he's like, I don't know. War, weapons, maybe. I don't know. And I think that to me was just like this, this thing that like, yes, there are negative consequences to technological innovation is just true. But like, even Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook was like, we're going to connect people and that's good. And that's bad in lots of ways and, and good in lots of ways. And I think there's

• 1:46:21Speaker 02

  Oh, there's that famous memo from Boz at Meta called the ugly. And he's like, here are all of the bad things that will happen if we connect everyone in the world and we're going to do it anyway. And there's a lot of lore around this letter. You should Google it and read it. But the, the sort of most important part of the lore was Boz saying, it's important for me to just say it all out loud. So this whole company can react to it. I've written this as a provocation. And then the company did not react to it by trying to stop any of the things, which is maybe a strategic mistake. But there's no question that the tech industry understands that it has negative consequences when it reorders society. Right. And I think here, Sam, again, if you're just saying that conceptually,

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  fine, like truly the steam engine, like whatever it is. But to say it is a, like a toss off, which is, I think how most people read it.

• 1:47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I agree with that. Uh, and also for what, Sam? 10% chance I'm going to die. I'm, I can put my own flights.

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  Saw a video of Heath Ledger's Joker doing a ukulele rap with Batman the other day.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  All right. You've got me a 2% chance I'm going to die. We can work from there. We're going to go from there.

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  That's what I have. That's a real, it's a real thing that happens.

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  All right. We have gone way over. Send me that link, by the way. I, I appreciate that. Uh, we have gone way over as we are wants to do. It's good to be back. I missed you.

• 1:47:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I missed you too, man.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Glad to be back here doing this. Um, we should get out of here. Thing before we do, um, vote for our show in the Signal Awards. It's a, it's a podcasting awards thing. We would very much like to win. This show is nominated for technology podcasts. Version history is nominated for history podcasts. Decoder is nominated for business podcasts. Not to brag, that's all of our podcasts. We bat it a thousand. Uh, please go vote. We'd really like to win. All the links are in the show notes. Also, uh, we have a bunch of cool decoder stuff coming up next week. Neelai, who's on decoder next week?

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  So go listen to the Peter Kafka episode. If you're, want more on Skydance, he really did just profile that co-CEO of Skydance. He's deep in it. And then Ben Jordan is on to talk about flock cameras and surveillance and his experience testifying before Congress. And I'm just going to say, I'm a huge fanboy and I, you can just sense that I was delighted the whole time that he was even talking to me.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  That's awesome. I'm excited about that one. Uh, this weekend on version history, uh, Jen Tuwi is coming on to talk about the Leap Pad. Jen Tuwi and Andrew Marino to talk about this weird little reading device that taught millions of kids how to read in the early 2000s. Uh, also, if you haven't watched the Chromebook episode, if you want to know the source of all of my feelings about Google Books, go watch last week's episode. You and me and Marques Brownlee on the Chromebook. It's a great time. We've gotten a lot of really good feedback on that episode. I enjoyed it very much. Remember to subscribe to The Verge to get all of our podcasts ad free, all of our award nominated and winning podcasts ad free. All of our exclusive newsletters, everything else, theverge.com/subscribe. It's the best way to support everything that we do here.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Also send us email, [email protected] is the email, 866 VERGE11 is the hotline. We love hearing from you about all this and everything else. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neelai, I haven't heard it in a while. Give it to me. Rock and roll.

• 1:49:39Speaker 03

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