The Cybertruck lives, and so does OpenAI

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss the Tesla Cybertruck event, the latest with OpenAI leadership, and what Elon Musk and Bob Iger said at Dealbook Summit 2023. Getting close — but not too close — to the Tesla Cybertruck Tesla Cybertruck delivery event: Elon Musk hands over the first trucks to customers Elon Musk tells advertisers: ‘Go fuck yourself’ Sam Altman is back, so what’s next for OpenAI and ChatGPT? Interview: Sam Altman on being fired and rehired by OpenAI ChatGPT is winning the future — but what future is that? Ikea debuts a trio of affordable smart home sensors DealBook Summit 2023: Elon Musk, Bob Iger, and more How to find your 2023 Spotify Wrapped Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, America's number one source of Cybertruck wiper news. And it's all thanks to readers like you.

• 1:17David Pierce?

  That's actually true now, I think. Like, I think that was, we spoke into existence that we are the world's number one source of Cybertruck wiper news.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, people believe us. The thing is, we still don't know the answer to this question. Not at all. We'll get into it, though. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Krantz is here.

• 1:34Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who wishes they'd used a crossbow, like checked it with a crossbow. I want to see, how does it withstand crossbow fire? The Cybertruck.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, we know the answer now.

• 1:44Alex Cranz?

  Do, not crossbows, just all the...

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see. Just, we know a regular bow and arrow.

• 1:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I want like crossbows, catapults.

• 1:52David Pierce?

  Alex, one of the reasons that I know that like I like you and we're friends is that no part of me would be surprised if that was a reveal that you're like sick with a crossbow. Like, nothing, I wouldn't blink if you just like pulled a crossbow out from underneath the table and were like, just like this.

• 2:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's what I do in my, my off time. I practice with my crossbow.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  Axe throwing, crossbows.

• 2:14Alex Cranz?

  I am actually really good with an axe throw. Like, the axe throwing, knife throwing, terrible. Axe throwing, it's like, I got it.

• 2:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, let's explain why we're talking about this. There's quite a lot of news this week, but we are coming to you directly after the Tesla Cybertruck launch event, which was very odd. That itself followed Elon Musk at the Dealbook conference yesterday, which was even weirder. So we are literally live reacting to you post-Cybertruck reveal, in which we learned nothing.

• 2:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  I want to be very clear. It was a 25-minute event. It started 25 minutes late after playing an enormous amount of just ominous ambient music. That was strange. Elon comes out, they go through the Cybertruck specs. Here's how much it can pull. It can pull more than a Ford F-150 Lightning and a Rivian and an F-350 diesel. Great. They threw a baseball at it.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  Poorly.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  The first time Franz missed.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 3:19Alex Cranz?

  And then the second time he was just like.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  It was very weak.

• 3:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  But the windows didn't shatter this time. They're happy about it.

• 3:25Alex Cranz?

  Well, yeah, if you're throwing it that, like, he threw like I throw a ball. I'm terrible at throwing a ball. And he was just like.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  I sincerely believe that if you threw a baseball at that speed at my car's window, it would not.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  That's kind of what I said. I was like, I've seen Honda Civics withstand more impact than this.

• 3:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it was just so funny because it was clearly that moment was, it's sort of set up to be like a big applause moment because it was, I think, he said four years ago, which is nuts that this was four years ago, the first time this happened. Franz got up there and threw a ball at a supposedly baseball-proof window, which is a thing.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  Be clear. He threw a metal ball at a supposedly bulletproof window.

• 4:05David Pierce?

  Oh, okay. That's a good distinction.

• 4:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:08David Pierce?

  And it, it.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  Shattered. And then he did it again, and the other window shattered.

• 4:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Nilay Patel?

  Incredible moment in product history.

• 4:15David Pierce?

  Oh, it was fantastic. It was one of the great, like, live demos or a disaster moments. I really enjoyed it. But he sets this up as the sort of redemptive moment four years later. And like, kudos to them for, you know, laughing about this. But then didn't rerun the test.

• 4:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:31David Pierce?

  He had him lob a baseball at the window, and he missed the first time. He hit like the underneath of the window. And then. Yeah, like Alex is saying, sort of gently lobbed it.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  You can really tell this man did not want to do this thing.

• 4:45David Pierce?

  No, and it was, the funniest part was they got to the end and he didn't get any of the like applause breaks or laughs or anything he was hoping for. And he was just like, "It's good," is my point.

• 4:57Alex Cranz?

  And the ball bounced on the ground at one point, very, very, like, higher than I would expect a baseball to bounce. So I'm now a ball

• 5:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, there are now 10 owners of a Cybertruck. We have been told.

• 5:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:09Nilay Patel?

  They were not allowed to drive their own Cybertrucks away. So the event happens, and we can talk about all the specs and whatever, and we've got some pricing now for the Cybertruck, which is interesting. But the event ends with Elon, one by one, shaking a person's hand and putting them in a Cybertruck, in the passenger seat, and having them driven away.

• 5:29David Pierce?

  Did you guys recognize anybody? I saw Alexis Ohanian was the one person I recognized, the Reddit co-founder and husband of Serena Williams. I'm sure there were other people in this world that I should have known. Did you guys see any faces you recognize other than?

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  No, I didn't catch Alexis. He took a Cybertruck?

• 5:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, Alexis with like big, like Wolverine mutton chops, got into a Cybertruck. It was a cool look.

• 5:51Alex Cranz?

  Do you think they were real? Or do you think he was like in disguise?

• 5:54David Pierce?

  Sneaky Alexis getting his Cybertruck.

• 5:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  What I caught was that after the second one, Elon was visibly annoyed that he had to keep shaking people's hands.

• 6:05David Pierce?

  People wanted hugs.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  And he said on the camera, "Well, it's a delivery event." Because I think he knew that people were watching a live stream of just 10 people getting their hand shook and driven away. And he said it like three more times. He's like, "Well, this is what's gonna keep happening." And then he tried to end it early. After nine, I think, he was like, "Well, we're done." And someone was like, "There's one more." And he had to shake one more hand. And these people were getting rushed offstage. I think only one family got like the picture.

• 6:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. It doesn't matter. It was an odd event, but-

• 6:36David Pierce?

  Wait, did you notice that nobody could figure out how to get into the car?

• 6:39Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 6:40David Pierce?

  This is my favorite part of the whole thing.

• 6:41Alex Cranz?

  That was great.

• 6:41David Pierce?

  He kept having to tell people. I think almost every single person who got into the car had trouble figuring out how to open the passenger side door to get in. And at first, he was saying things like, "Oh, you just press the..." And then they would sort of figure it out. And then by the end, he just sort of reflexively was going, "Just press the button on the top," as they're walking over to the thing, and they would press it and get in. And it's just, this just makes me so happy. Tesla has lots of interesting ideas about cars and just exclusively bad ideas about how to get into them. And it just makes me happy that the Cybertruck continues that apace.

• 7:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:16David Pierce?

  But it was great.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  It was great. And hopefully, we'll see these actually around. What we did not learn was whether the wiper blade is one blade or two in a line.

• 7:24Alex Cranz?

  Shameful.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  I've received so many photos now, and I think I've been clear about my theory.

• 7:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You've assigned someone to go even-

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  We sent someone to the Tesla showroom. Andy Hawkins went with our photographer, Amelia Crails. I told Andy that I would pay his bail if he got arrested for lifting the wiper up, and he chickened out. Fine. But I've now, people have just reinterpreted what they think I mean by, "Is it two wipers?" One person wrote me an email that said, "I prefer the two wiper design on a regular car." I was like, "That's not..."

• 7:57Alex Cranz?

  Most people do.

• 8:00Nilay Patel?

  So does the free market. Like, I don't-

• 8:04David Pierce?

  Wait, but let's just take this back, Neelai. What is your current belief about the Cybertruck wiper? Because like you said, we've gotten, I would say, like, the 10 best pictures we've ever gotten of the Cybertruck wiper in the last eight days. Most of them, thanks to Vergecast listeners. So, thank you to everyone who sent those in. What is your current belief about the Cybertruck wiper?

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  I think it might be one wiper. I think it might be one extremely weird custom wiper blade. I'd not, I don't know for sure. I've now seen reporting of other people who've seen the truck in YouTube videos, like Tesla fans confidently saying, "It's two wipers in a line." And I've asked, "Do you know?" Or do you know? And gotten no response.

• 8:52Nilay Patel?

  So I don't know, but now that someone owns, I'm sure Alexis has like an NDA about this truck, but I'm definitely gonna write him a note and be like, can you pick up this wiper? Because no one knows, no one knows. And it is the most enduring mystery about this truck. Like, did Tesla make a very fast triangle? They did. Is it so fast that it can out accelerate a Porsche 911 while towing a Porsche 911? Yes, that's very cool. Is it bulletproof? Who knows? Sort of. The bottom is. We saw someone firing a Tommy gun into the side of it during this event. So if you're a 1920s mobster, like you're good to go.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  Can it withstand Joe Rogan firing a metal tipped armor piercing arrow at the side? Sure can. We know that answer. How do the wipers work remains a deep and defining mystery about this vehicle. We've seen photos, like overhead photos of extremely muddy and dirty Teslas. Just a huge. And it's, they're just a huge dirty spot. I've seen videos of extremely muddy Teslas parked at hotels where it is obvious the passenger could not see very well and they've reached their hand over the side and wiped off the mud manually. There is an argument in our comments over whether or not the Ford F-150 actually wipes proportionally less of the windshield than the Cybertruck.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  And I had to be like, look, here's one thing I know for sure. Maybe the Cybertruck proportionally mathematically covers more of the windshield than the F-150. No passenger in my F-150 has ever reached over the side and wiped off some more of the windshield.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  It is just such a bonkers design problem that they've created for themselves. And now it's here. So eventually the mystery will expire. Right? Eventually, this will all be over and we'll know it's one wiper or two. I just think it's amazing that for weeks now, we've propelled a number of tech and car enthusiasts into not knowing because no one knows.

• 11:11Alex Cranz?

  I'm really excited.

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna find out. One thing we do know, we do know some pricing. So the base model, which is available in 2025.

• 11:20Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  And we should point out, we were at the launch event.

• 11:24Alex Cranz?

  In 2023.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  2023.

• 11:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  The base model in 2025 is $60,990, $61,000.

• 11:33David Pierce?

  That's significantly more than we thought, right?

• 11:35Nilay Patel?

  It was supposed to be 49. So it's crept up about $10,000, $11,000.

• 11:40Alex Cranz?

  Inflation has like.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, thanks, Biden.

• 11:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, thanks, Biden.

• 11:44Nilay Patel?

  That's, you know, you know, he did it just so he could say inflation Biden made inflation happen. We'll get to that. That's gonna have a 250 mile range, 6.5 seconds, 0 to 60. The all wheel drive model should deliver next year. It says delivery in 2024. By the way, big difference between available in 2025 and delivery in 2024. I would tell you, based on what we know of the Model 3 and the cheap Model 3 just sort of never arriving.

• 12:13Alex Cranz?

  Go for the delivery in 2024 model.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  This, this base model rear wheel drive.

• 12:17Alex Cranz?

  Don't, don't buy it.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  Just buy any other, just be like, whatever. I'll buy another truck. And if that thing ever comes out.

• 12:23Alex Cranz?

  You, you go, you just keep leasing trucks until the Cybertruck actually comes out and you can buy it.

• 12:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This one is here to, to anchor the price for it.

• 12:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. One of your three year periods, it'll finally be available.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  There was a meeting at Tesla where they were deciding what copy to put on the website. And they put delivery in 2024 for the all wheel drive and for the Cyberbeast. And then someone was like, what do we say about the base model? And they all looked at each other and brainstormed words, possible in 2025.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Apparently in 2025 and they went with available.

• 12:58Alex Cranz?

  Seemingly.

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  We don't know. So then the then the all wheel drive, which I think is the true base model. That's $80,000, 79990, delivering 2024, 340 miles of range, 4.1 seconds zero to 60. You'll note they don't list the top speed on the illusory base model, but this one has 112 mile an hour top speed, 600 horsepower, 7,400 pound feet of torque and 11,000 pounds of torque capacity. Just big silly truck numbers.

• 13:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  And then the Cyber Beast.

• 13:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the beast. That was my brother's high school nickname. He got it as a tattoo. He no longer has that tattoo.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 13:35Alex Cranz?

  We we called him the beast.

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, now we're gonna call him the Cyber Beast.

• 13:40Alex Cranz?

  I'm not doing that.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  This is $100,000, 99990, slightly lower range, 320 miles, much faster 2.6 seconds, 130 mile an hour top speed, 845 horsepower.

• 13:52Alex Cranz?

  What makes it a beast?

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm guessing, it's hard to know. I'm guessing that this is the triple motor one.

• 14:00Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 14:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm guessing. I don't know. There are no specs. It doesn't quite tell you.

• 14:05Alex Cranz?

  Oh, do you think it's got one of those like mufflers, the speaker, the speakers in the mufflers?

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, Teslas make sounds. You know, they can do it. You can make like the.

• 14:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but the beast has like a special edition one.

• 14:15Nilay Patel?

  It's growling.

• 14:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the whole time.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  If I know anything about Tesla, they will make it make growling sounds when it runs. So this is all of the new information that we have, is this much specs in this much pricing? And then Elon being like, it's good at truck stuff, which they really insisted upon.

• 14:31Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's good at work stuff. It's good at towing. At one point he was like, as you all know, a tractor pull is the most important metric for a truck.

• 14:42Alex Cranz?

  Is it?

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  That's exactly. I was like, is it? Is that? Is it? And they demonstrated that a Tesla can pull a sled loaded down with weight much farther than other trucks.

• 14:53Alex Cranz?

  How was the braking? Like, that's what I care about at a tractor pull. I don't do those. But if I'm pulling a trailer, I do care about like.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  If you're pulling a tra- an actual trailer.

• 15:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you want good brakes.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Alex Cranz?

  You want it to like, not have it slam into you and stuff.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, if I know anything about Teslas, we're all gonna learn something about the Cybertruck's brakes. Regular Teslas, because they use regenerative braking so much to recapture energy, they often have weird brake issues. That's just a thing.

• 15:21David Pierce?

  I have two questions about this Cybertruck being for truck stuff thing that I've been thinking about since they started talking about this. And the first is like, why frame it that way? If you're Tesla, on the one hand, there are a lot of people who do not do truck stuff with their trucks who buy trucks anyway. On the other hand, competing for the truck stuff market is probably more complicated than just being like, look, we built this cool new thing with a big truck bed. It's something completely different. It will do like light truck stuff, but not full truck stuff. But fundamentally, like he kept saying over and over, their tagline is the future should look like the future, which is very funny and doesn't mean anything. But and

• 16:06David Pierce?

  he said something to the effect of like, this is going to change the look of the road. Like, why not call this a different thing as opposed to talking to a bunch of people who probably don't want a car that looks like this, don't want an electric car right now, and just aren't really the Tesla target market at all. I just don't, I don't get that part of this.

• 16:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of like an El Camino. Like, that's, that's like where it's existing in the truck ecosystem, right? Is that too mean?

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  It's, that's too mean. I mean, it's, it's a truck. It's as big as an F-150. It, an El Camino is a very different. I think they should bring back the El Camino. If you're listening to this, an EV El Camino, I think would be welcome on America's roads. Talk about changing the look of the roads. This, I think, is different. I think if you already make the best selling car in the country, the Model Y, to move the needle, you've got to make something else that's really popular.

• 16:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  And the Ford F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America for the last 400 years. Like, the first job that ChatGPT is going to take is the writing the press release that says the Ford F-150 is, once again, America's best selling vehicle. Like, I've gotten that press release every year that I've been alive. And that's, that's great for Ford, but it is the biggest car market in the country. It's the most ferocious. It is where the prices have steadily gone up. If you want to sell a hundred thousand dollar car, you're selling a truck.

• 17:31Alex Cranz?

  That's fair.

• 17:32Nilay Patel?

  That's just the way it's going. You're selling a giant SUV or a pickup truck.

• 17:35Alex Cranz?

  Most of the people buying those trucks, like just regular consumers, are they actually buying it to be a truck? Or are they buying it to be a truck?

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  You are the one from Texas, Alex. You tell me.

• 17:47Alex Cranz?

  I like, I tend to feel it's the other, I, I know a lot of people who buy trucks because they need them to haul. My friend called me the other day and was like, I'm hauling a mare.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm hauling a bear?

• 17:56Alex Cranz?

  Mare, mare. But Siri thought it was mayor? And I was like, is Eric Adams in your car? What's happening?

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  You need an F three fifty to haul Eric Adams.

• 18:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  He comes with a lot of baggage.

• 18:15Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, like, I feel like the majority of people I see who just want a truck, want a truck just because it's like, it's cool. It's fun. It's, it's neat to drive. And sometimes you're like, well, I gotta move a bunch of crap and now I can.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I, I own a pickup truck for these reasons.

• 18:30Alex Cranz?

  That's why my mom has one.

• 18:31David Pierce?

  Yeah. The most, most people need to do is like, they have a pile of dirt in their backyard that they would like to not be in their backyard anymore. And that's like the most truck stuff I think a lot of truck owners get into.

• 18:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, when we, in the pandemic, we moved to the country and I had to take my own trash to the dump once a week. And I convinced myself that owning a pickup truck was the only solution to this problem.

• 18:51Alex Cranz?

  I mean.

• 18:51Nilay Patel?

  And now I don't, now I don't live in the, in the country. Then I still own a pickup truck and I haven't figured out why, but I know that we're not getting rid of it.

• 19:03Alex Cranz?

  Do you need to do some sod work or something?

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  No, we don't have, we, no, we live in a very urban.

• 19:11Alex Cranz?

  Furniture refinishing.

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  Fully incompatible with the area I live in now. And yet, and yet, we still have it. That said, look, a lot of people like pickup trucks and you can have a lot of feelings about that. Are they appropriate cars for most places? No.

• 19:25Alex Cranz?

  Depends.

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. Do cars need to be this big? At one point in the Cybertruck event, Elon said, if you get into a fight with another car, you will win. And he showed a car crashing into a Cybertruck.

• 19:34Alex Cranz?

  Isn't that bad?

• 19:36Nilay Patel?

  And our transportation reporter, Andy Hawkins, who has been on a tear, pointing out that cars are too big. They're too dangerous. They're dangerous to other pedestrians, especially when they start going this fast. They're incredibly dangerous to other cars. That's not a good thing.

• 19:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, we used to have a Thunderbird, 66 Thunderbird when I was a kid and stuff. And it was really cool. And if you got in an accident, you were totally fine. And now, but like, the knowledge was if you got in an accident with a modern car, you would annihilate it. And that's actually horrible. And then you'd also get battered around inside the car and just ping pong. And I'm like, there was not a lot of safety discussion at this event. And that was a little concerning for me, given that they have a giant stainless steel box they're putting on the road.

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Alex Cranz?

  Like, what are crumple zones like on this thing? Because everybody else is like, crumple zones, they should do that. And this guy's like, you know what? Small arms fire.

• 20:26David Pierce?

  In a Cybertruck, you crumple everything.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  They did. They did show some crash testing. We will see. Who knows, right? There's a million who knows questions. But back to David's point, which is why market this thing as a truck?

• 20:42Alex Cranz?

  People love them.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  It's because it's the last market, the last big section of the market to go get. I think they could have picked one or two others, right? Luxury SUVs that are not the Model X, which is a little long in the tooth. That's a big market that's growing. Who knows if you can build an EV in that form factor? But this, I think they wanted to build this because it is the statement piece. It is the big, bold design. They're not counting on it winning, which I think they've now said on some earnings calls, like, the Model Y is the volume Tesla that's going to keep doing what it's doing, even as they're slashing prices left and right. This is the one that's going to be the halo car.

• 21:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's a way to look at this, that it's like the successor to the Roadster in a pretty real way. That, that this is like. The car hardly anybody has, but reliably turns heads when you see it on the street. And in that sense, I sort of buy it. But I just keep coming back to this idea of like, if you are a person who like uses the hell out of your truck, what on earth would compel you to buy a Cybertruck at this moment in time? I just don't know that there are good answers.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  This is where we have to talk about Elon and Dealbook.

• 21:56David Pierce?

  We

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  We should not dwell on.

• 21:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, okay, no, we should. You're right.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  And David does not want to talk about this.

• 22:00David Pierce?

  I don't. I super don't, but we should.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  But you can't actually, right now, divorce Tesla, the car company, from Elon Musk, the man, which is a real problem. So in some academic argument about market share and products, you're like, why would you make this product? Why is your market this way? And you can like come to an answer. And part of the answer right now is why would you buy a car from Elon Musk? Like, there's some enormous segment of the population that is just over his antics, over his weird racist and anti-Semitic tweets, just over him, right? And what we saw

• 22:34David Pierce?

  But to be fair, there's also a chunk of people on the opposite, the exact opposite end of that spectrum. Right. Who will, who will follow him to the ends of the earth and buy anything he tells them to buy.

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:44David Pierce?

  Like, he could have a podcast selling them supplements and they would buy the supplements. I think that group is substantially smaller than it was 24 months ago.

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  I also don't think they have $100,000 to buy a Cybertruck. I just want to be very clear, right? Because the people you need to spend the money are often very educated. And this is like a real problem for Elon. Like, he lives in a Twitter bubble and he thinks the Twitter bubble is real. And he thinks the thing that gets him engagement on Twitter will get him engagement in real life. And then he goes to conferences, like we saw him this week, the Dealbook conference with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and he delivers what are like bangers on Twitter.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  It's dead silence.

• 23:27Alex Cranz?

  It was just like Twitter come to life. And then the silence afterwards was so odd. Like every time he'd do a punchline and he'd ape to the camera and be like, eh? And it's just like crickets.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Our transportation reporter, Umar, pointed out that he would often deliver the punchlines twice. And the second time, he got the pity laugh. Which is, if you go watch it again, it's a very real dynamic. I mean, that joke, that Twitter, that thing, that Twitter isn't real life. His appearance at Dealbook was just, oh, Twitter's not real life. Like, fully encapsulated in that event. And so we should talk about what he said. There's a few things that are just worth pulling apart. The first and most important is that advertisers are leaving Twitter after yet more of Musk's antics and weird antisemitism. And Media Matters had a report about ads showing up next to bad content.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  The advertisers started leaving because that's what advertisers do whenever there are brand safety concerns on any platforms. I would just offer you the example of something called the Adpocalypse on YouTube, which was exactly this thing. And Susan Wojcicki, who was CEO of YouTube at the time, did not tell a bunch of advertisers to go fuck themselves. They actively tried to fix it. Elon's response was to look at the Dealbook audience and say, if you think you can blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. And he was like, Bob, if you're here, meaning Bob Iger, go fuck yourself. I don't know, like, again, it's not, I don't sell the ads for us. It's not my side of the house.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm fairly confident if the people who sold our ads announced at a conference, their clients could go fuck themselves. Like, I don't think the advertisers are coming back. And then he follows up with, this advertising boycott will kill the company and the world will know it. We will document it. And I think Andrew followed up by asking... Wasn't that a bad thing? And he's like, Earth will know.

• 25:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he was, he really thinks that everyone is going to come out and save X. He was very, that was one thing he was very clear on. He constantly corrected Andrew on calling it X versus Twitter. And he really thinks that like, the uproar will save X. And it's like, no, but the uproar caused this to happen. Everybody's leaving because there was an uproar because everybody's mad at you.

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, we have talked about in the show, there was a time when Twitter was a particular kind of monopoly. And no matter what the company did, and I will issue our disclaimer again. Criticism of Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, is in no way praise for the previous administration of Twitter, who did a horrible job running this company. But they had a kind of monopoly where no matter how badly they screwed up, everyone kept coming back to Twitter. And I'm pretty sure Elon thought that he was buying that monopoly.

• 26:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  Because if I was addicted to cigarettes, I'm not saying I ever was, and I bought a cigarette company, I'd be like, this rules. Everyone's addicted to my product just as much as I am. And then everyone was like, now you are an asshole and we vape now. And that is more or less what has happened to Elon Musk.

• 26:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 26:39David Pierce?

  And I think, I mean, it's wild how even a year ago, that seemed like a reasonable bet, right? I think there was a time when it looked like, for all of the chaos and for all of the bad stuff, everybody was just gonna kind of hold their nose and keep using Twitter. Because to some extent, there was nowhere to go. And to a potentially larger extent, the chaos and the fun are so close to each other on Twitter, that you can ramp up one and kind of accidentally ramp up the other. Like, the mess is the point. And I think, like 12 months ago, I'm sure on this show, we were having this same debate. And to me at this point, I think it feels like a foregone conclusion

• 27:23David Pierce?

  that at some point or another, X is gonna go away in a pretty real way. I don't know if the company is gonna die just because he has so much money, he could float the thing forever if he felt like it.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  He's got investors he has to pay off. Like, there's a lot going on there.

• 27:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, but I also get the increasing sense that He is trying to set it up in such a way that if X goes away, goes out of business, declares bankruptcy, whatever it turns out to be, uh, he wants to be a martyr and he, he wants to have, that will be his like full proof positive that the world is against him and has gone woke and everything is a disaster. And now he kind of wins coming and going, right? It's either like a business victory or a moral victory, or it's kind of a moral victory on either side, no matter what happens. He's trying to set up this thing that I find very strange.

• 28:09Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's, it's not that strange because it's a, it's a pretty common playbook now. Like this was the exact same playbook Trump has and continues to have. And I think it's just a really, it's, it's difficult to counter. And I think that's why it's really like useful and deeply irritating.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  Let me make the distinction for you, a comparison and a distinction.

• 28:27Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  You're right. It's the same playbook.

• 28:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Very different dudes.

• 28:31Nilay Patel?

  The election was lost. Everyone is corrupt. It was stolen from me. The bad forces came and took this away from me. That's voting with your votes.

• 28:38Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  Very few people get to make that argument when it's voting with your dollars.

• 28:43Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  And so Elon is now making the argument that these woke corporations are no longer buying advertising to, to spite him. And it is very hard to tell anyone, particularly Americans, that they have an obligation to spend money. It is just not a thing you can do in this country. Culturally, just not a thing you can do to say, you have to spend money, advertising dollars on this platform because it's important that this thing exists. And most people are like, what? You can't tell me how to spend my money.

• 29:13Alex Cranz?

  That was like the immediate reaction on social media on, and our own like comments and stuff. Everybody was just like, no, it's my money.

• 29:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. No, it's, it's very like, we talk a lot about free speech on the show and like when it's anything but money, like everyone immediately sees the gray areas. There's like nuance. When it's like, you have to spend money. People are like, no, I don't. No, no, sir. No, thank you.

• 29:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  Go fuck yourself. And it's like you just, you're just watching him run into this, right? Yeah. Like, um, he had this argument about Tesla's at the double conference as well, where he was like, I think Andrew asked him, are you worried that your tweets, your antics are going to hurt the company? He said, no, we make the best car. If you want the best car, you have to buy a Tesla, which is debatable, but it is a market driven argument. Right. Right? We're, we're putting our product in the market and if people are going to look at an evaluation and maybe they'll evaluate me, but really they're going to want the best car and they're going to pick my car. We make the best selling car. Okay. You're competing in the market. You, you've, you're weighing all the variables. With Twitter, it's like, if you don't advertise here, you're destroying America. And it's like, that's just not, that's not how that works. That's just a weird argument, man.

• 30:21Nilay Patel?

  And to say like, my product is objectively worse, or my product is not what the market demands from me, or what the market says it wants, and not buying it anyway is the problem? I don't know, man. Like, it's just odd. And like, what's going to happen right next to it is Threads is going to light up advertising? We're going to go into a holiday season where TikTok and Amazon and Google and Meta are all in Q4. They all have salespeople with real relationships. They all have content moderation teams. And they're going to say, every dollar you were spending on Twitter, you should spend that dollar here and we'll treat you nicely. We won't tell you to fuck off. Yeah. And like, we'll, we'll send you some swag, whatever salespeople do. I don't know. I don't know how this works.

• 31:01David Pierce?

  It's swag. It's just t-shirts from company to company floating around.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  And poor Linda Iaccarino, like, her job is to run this playbook and she can't because her boss has just told all these people to F off. I, that will kill the company and this attempt to run the martyr playbook. It will fail because you just cannot be a martyr because people didn't buy your shit. You, you can't be, uh, like a musician and be like, people didn't buy my album, The World Is Corrupt. Like,

• 31:32David Pierce?

  No.

• 31:34Alex Cranz?

  I mean, a lot of musicians do do that.

• 31:35David Pierce?

  I totally disagree with that.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, but it never hits. It never hits.

• 31:37David Pierce?

  No, but it's, it's literally, I like, this is gonna sound like I'm joking, but I'm not. It's because no one else is trying hard enough. Like, the thing Elon Musk is doing is, is making it his life's mission to tell everyone how X is the last bastion of free speech. Anything against X is against free speech. Like, Lynda Acarino's tweet said, like, uh, was it, "X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of free speech and Main Street." Which, like, what on earth does that mean?

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No idea what that means.

• 32:08David Pierce?

  Pure nonsense. But we're now in this position where, like, he, I, I-

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  By the way, can I just point out, speech notably free on Main Street. You can find the Main Street in your town and stand on that corner and do whatever you want. Like, that's the whole point. That's the whole idea.

• 32:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, you can yell, "Cops, arrest me!" And the cops will be like, "No."

• 32:30Alex Cranz?

  Depends on how many clothes you're wearing.

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  That's true. They'll be like, "One nipple's fine."

• 32:35David Pierce?

  But he's gonna be able to do this whole thing and get to the end of this process and say, "By, by killing X, you have killed free speech in America." And there, it's a ridiculous argument, but he has said it so many times that at this point, some people are going to believe him. And it's just gonna be ridiculous. Like, like, Donald Trump says it about Truth Social, that it is, and nobody believes it. Like, part of it is, is Elon took this thing that was so much bigger and destroyed it so much faster, that in a funny way, it's gonna make his argument more credible as he does this. Like, he, he's gonna be able to track those two things against each other in a way that is absolutely unrelated to the truth of the world. But it's, it's gonna work for him, for some people.

• 33:19Alex Cranz?

  You, you've also got Twitter brain saying that. Like, I, I, I think, like, maybe, maybe the people on Twitter, like, his fans on Twitter will probably believe that. I don't think anybody else out in the general world is gonna be like, "Man, can you believe what happened? He was right. There's something to it."

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Alex Cranz?

  Like, some stuff he says, sure.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you can make the Donald Trump comparison you made a few minutes ago and then make that argument.

• 33:44Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they're both, they're both, they both have very passionate groups of followers and those, those passionate followers are gonna follow them regardless of what they say. And, and they're both really, really good at that. And then they use that, that, that very vocal, small group of followers as, as, as cudgels, right? Like to, as, and as barriers to, to all other discourse and all other like actual reality. That's what he's really good at. That's, that's what Trump's really good at. And it's interesting to watch it first play out in politics and now in, in tech.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Alex Cranz?

  It's a kind of a bummer, but it's also interesting.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  It is definitely a bummer. I think the world might be better off that Twitter is on the decline as we go into an election year. Just putting that out there.

• 34:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I'm not saying that the ends justify the means.

• 34:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  I think the means have been very destructive. Lots of people have lost their jobs. Like, all of it's been bad. Racism and antisemitism skyrocketing on platform. In no way am I saying that the means have been appropriate or effective. I just think this argument that he represents free speech while he's suing Media Matters for criticizing him. Like, this is the stuff that just begins to fall on deaf ears.

• 34:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  Like, over and over and over again. And I, I think that when we talk about Tesla, like, he has to sell more cars. And his antics with Twitter are actively making people not want to give him money. Whether that's advertisers, whether it's car customers, whatever it is, the last monopoly he has is actually SpaceX.

• 35:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And it's a really good one.

• 35:16Nilay Patel?

  It's a really good one. Like, there's no, the United Launch Alliance is nowhere close to shipping a Ford F-150 Lightning. Like, you know, where there's like any other choice. There's no Polestar in the rocket business.

• 35:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, Bezos is out here kind of doing stuff. Blue Origin is like lingering. Bezos can't put a payload into space. He can put like four rich people into space.

• 35:38Alex Cranz?

  But like subspace. It's not even like full space.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  He's like, my girlfriend's in the sky. Like, that's what he can do.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, maybe he'll get there. It's a long way away before SpaceX has real competition. And that's like, you can think about that any way you want, but Tesla has real competition and Twitter has real competition. And in both cases, he's reacting very differently. And I just think as we go into an election year, as things get more heated on social media, his decisions about what he amplifies, what he moderates, all this stuff, and whether or not the platform is a safe place for advertisers, because advertisers want brand safety. I think you're right. I think there's, there's not a world in which a year from now, we are talking about a Twitter, the company that exists in the form that even this diminished company exists right now.

• 36:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  One more thing I'll say.

• 36:30David Pierce?

  All right. We've officially talked too much about this. So do this quickly.

• 36:33Nilay Patel?

  It's just cop, it's just copyright law. I promise you. It's just, it's just me talking about copyright law. So Sorkin asked about AI. Uh, go watch this clip. Add a quick posted tech turret write-up of this clip. It is amazing. Sorkin's like, AI, it's a lot of training data. You have a lot of training data. Like, these copyright lawsuits might just end it all. And Musk looks at Andrew and says, by the time these lawsuits come to a conclusion, we'll have a digital god. And you should ask him. Like, like, I know Andrew, you know, like, he's a pretty rational guy. And he's just like, what? What are you talking about? He's like, by the time these lawsuits get sorted out, we'll have a digital god and it won't matter. And that was the end. Like, there's nothing more you can do

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  with that statement. Like, he's like, AI will have become a god. And so copyright lawsuits, who cares? And it's like, dude, those lawsuits are gonna take like, two or three years?

• 37:30Alex Cranz?

  Digital god's right around the corner. He's ascending as we speak. It's.

• 37:34David Pierce?

  Okay, Neelai. Digital god, base model Cybertruck, which comes first?

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  That's tough. That's tough. I gotta go digital god on this one. I mean, honestly.

• 37:49Alex Cranz?

  I would agree.

• 37:50Nilay Patel?

  And I think if you're working at one of these generative AI companies, you're hoping it's digital god too, because these copyright lawsuits are an existential threat. And the Cybertruck, you know, it's just a truck.

• 38:00Alex Cranz?

  Get him ascending. Get going.

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  Everyone at OpenAI is like furiously ordering a base model Cybertruck right now. All right. We, David's right. We've talked enough about Elon. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. Talk about some other drama. We'll be right back.

• 38:18Speaker 00

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• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It feels like we should update everybody and what's going on with OpenAI this week. Yeah. It feels like there was a run of instantly obsolete emergency podcasts last week, including our own. Including our own.

• 39:32Alex Cranz?

  It's a great podcast.

• 39:33Nilay Patel?

  It was 24 hours. It was obsolete. We did our best.

• 39:36Alex Cranz?

  I enjoyed listening to it.

• 39:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was fun. People, people liked it. Instantly obsolete. So here's what we know and we can kind of unpack what we think it means. Cause there's some stuff we don't know. What we know is that Sam Altman is officially back as CEO. He is not on the board of directors. Ilya, the chief scientist, does not appear to be working at OpenAI again, is not on the new board of directors. Craig Bachman, the president, is back as president. The new board of directors has begun. Brett Taylor, the former CEO of Salesforce, on the board. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

• 40:13Alex Cranz?

  Has interesting ideas about women.

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  Yes, he thinks they're bad at math.

• 40:17Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I have said I'm bad at math on this very podcast.

• 40:20Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 40:20Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry to all other women. There are many women who are excellent at math. I'm OK.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but Larry Summers, just some weird ideas, but he's apparently been in the mix as an adult. And then Adam D'Angelo, who was on the old board, one of the guys who voted to remove Sam and Greg in the first place.

• 40:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Nilay Patel?

  And apparently Adam. They've like, Adam and Sam have like hung out.

• 40:43Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  So the new board of directors, its job is to make the actual board of directors and fill out this board. And then Microsoft is taking an observer's seat and Microsoft will not tell us who is taking that seat. We have asked and they said, we're not, we're not gonna tell you.

• 40:59Alex Cranz?

  Do you think it could just be some like guy at Microsoft or girl at Microsoft?

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  I think the only rational answer is Kevin Scott, the head of AI at Microsoft, but for some reason, Microsoft, I don't, I don't know this.

• 41:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, if I had to look at Microsoft.

• 41:12Alex Cranz?

  Maybe they're all on vacation, they haven't decided yet.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  It's not Phil Spencer.

• 41:15David Pierce?

  Is it possible Microsoft doesn't know? I mean, I just keep going back to, so where we left our emergency podcast was, we thought that Sam and Greg were Microsoft employees who were going to start a new thing at Microsoft. And that was the thing that became most instantly obsolete.

• 41:33Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 41:34David Pierce?

  Because suddenly it became very clear that actually they were probably going back to OpenAI and it was never really official. But then Satya Nadella does a round of media interviews in which, I don't want to say it didn't sound like he knew what was going on, but it kind of sounded like he didn't know what was going on. It was, it got to the point where it was moving so fast that it seemed like even he, the person who was, by all accounts, kind of brokering this whole thing, was caught off guard by some of the turns of it.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I can color in some there.

• 42:05David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 42:06Nilay Patel?

  I think there was a notion that Nadella was trying to make it happen. I think that ultimately, he was involved in some conversations, but we now know that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who's a friend of Sam, Emmett Shear, who's a former CEO of Twitch, who became the interim CEO of OpenAI.

• 42:24David Pierce?

  For five minutes.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  And Larry Summers and some other folks, they were the ones actually sort of mediating this conversation. And Nadella was just like around, because he wanted to protect Microsoft's interests.

• 42:35David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 42:35Nilay Patel?

  The other thing I know is that that round of media tours is our fault. Straight up. Oh, interesting. That's, that's our fault.

• 42:44Nilay Patel?

  It's because Alex and I reported that Sam and Greg were trying to go back to OpenAI after Microsoft had made its big announcement. So Microsoft had made its big announcement, they're all gonna come work at Microsoft, we're gonna start a new AI thing. The stock goes up, then we report, ah, maybe this won't happen. And now there's like instability, we got jittery investors, and of course, Nadella goes on CNBC and Bloomberg to say, it's all good. Like, doesn't matter which way it's happening, Microsoft is moving forward with Sam Altman, which was very much his message. And he kept saying, and I thought this was just the funniest thing, he kept saying irrespective of configuration, which just sounds like he was announcing plug and play device drivers. Yeah, doesn't matter irrespective of how your dip switches are set, like, we will find

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  this USB device, um, we will find Sam Altman.

• 43:33David Pierce?

  He's not wrong.

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't matter what order that you put the cards in. With PCI Express 4, you know, it's like irrespective of configuration, he just kept saying it, it was amazing. So I, I think that was that, right? Like, we had, because of our reporting, we had made it clear, like, this isn't a done deal. And so I think he was compelled to go out and say, yeah, I actually don't know what's going on, like, it's gonna land one way or the other, but our investment in OpenAI is safe, because either we will take all of these employees at very high rates, which is a massive investment for Microsoft to make, to protect this investment, or we will find a way to keep working with OpenAI. And they asked him, and it was Emily Chang at Bloomberg asked him, who will be the CEO of OpenAI tomorrow?

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  And he looked exhausted, and he said, that's for the board to decide.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. Uh, oh, he also did, he also did on with Kara Swisher. And it was, it was, you know, I interview a lot of CEOs. Sometimes CEOs just have a thing they're gonna say, and he said the thing in all three places. Yeah. Uh, but I know that what was happening there was the market thought that this thing was a done deal. And it became quickly apparent that it was actually not a done deal and actively trying to go the other way. Which it did. So, uh, that, which it did, in the, which in the end it did. Uh, and Microsoft seems very happy and Sam notably like tweeted my thanks to Satya for his support. Mm-hmm. So I, I think everybody wanted this to happen. And I think at one point, Nadella said to, to Kara or Emily, like surprises are bad.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, we don't want to be surprised like this anyway. We will fix the governance of the company. So you've got the board observer seat, which again, I don't know who it will be.

• 45:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  But it just feels like you want that to be Kevin Scott, your head of AI, or maybe Brad Smith or their chief legal officer. Like, that's who you want in that spot.

• 45:31Alex Cranz?

  Just some PM.

• 45:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but I don't think you, I, I personally do not think you could put Satya there.

• 45:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Nilay Patel?

  Um, I think you need a little bit of distance from the company to, to claim that you're not running the company. So if you put your famous high-profile CEO on this board, now you've just got another, another part of Microsoft, which I think Microsoft wants to keep a little bit of that distance. That's what we know so far. Then there's this weirdness where Alex Heath got a quick interview with Sam Altman and Mira Maroti. The former CTO, who was the first interim CEO, who is now the CTO again.

• 46:04Alex Cranz?

  You did it!

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  Got it.

• 46:05Alex Cranz?

  Yes, nailed it.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  Just so you know, that was like the third take of that. Um, huh, and you know, Alex is like, what should I ask? There's only one question, like, why'd you get fired? And Alex asked this question five times in a row, and there's no answer to this question.

• 46:18Alex Cranz?

  That's, continues to kind of baffle me. I could understand why the board wasn't saying anything, but like, why isn't he?

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. We do know that, uh, the board has been talking, like, I think Helen Tonner, who's a member of the board, has been talking to folks, saying like, We feel confident in our decision, all the stuff. It is abundantly clear that these ideas that it was about safety, or that there was a new model that could destroy the world or do basic math. It's one or the other. It's do basic math or destroy the world.

• 46:48Alex Cranz?

  Same thing.

• 46:49Nilay Patel?

  But like the notion that that spooked the board and they had to get rid of Sam so they could put in their own person, that none of that appears to be true. Like, no one on either side is saying this was the reason. It is, it really comes down to interpersonal conflicts between a group of four people and Sam Altman.

• 47:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  And I think the board, uh, basically thinks like they couldn't control him and that whenever they tried, he would do something to get out of it.

• 47:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  And there will be an investigation, we are told. I think the results of that investigation should likely be made public, given the dollar amounts and investors and, you know, employees involved.

• 47:26Alex Cranz?

  Well, we're gonna find out anyway.

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  It, I, even, I think even for OpenAI's employees, you need to make that investigation public. Why did this happen to us, right?

• 47:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Nilay Patel?

  I think there's skittishness on both sides there. Uh, and we'll see. And that's another job of this new board run by Brett Taylor is to run that investigation.

• 47:41Alex Cranz?

  I think my question is if it was something like, we're upset that he's, he's moving too fast, he, he's being too commercial. And which seemed from the, from the beginning to be one of the issues there, particularly like his, his conflict with Helen Tonner, was particularly about that and how she'd written a paper about that. If, if that's the case and they come back and they say, oh, we, we found that was the reason why, what, what do they do? Because they now have a board that is very much for commercialization. They now have their biggest investor in an observer's seat on that board. And the guy who was doing all of that, that they had conflict with, is now still CEO of the company. Like, what happens then?

• 48:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're gone. They, they wiped their hands of this. Um, by the way, that Helen Tonner paper is worth reading. We'll link to it in the show notes or something. Um, the, you know, the part that everyone is up with, apparently Sam was up in arms about, is she just points out that the industry had been very cautious. Until the success of ChatGPT.

• 48:38David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  And then everyone started moving really fast. And they had abandoned the caution in favor of whatever commercial outcomes they could see.

• 48:46David Pierce?

  Which is exactly what happened.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Which is exactly what happened. And it it's actually really hard to read a criticism of OpenAI into it. She's just like compare and contrast like we had, you know, they're very famously anthropics split from OpenAI over safety concerns. And they're like, they waited, but everyone else rushed.

• 49:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  After we had our success. That's true.

• 49:06David Pierce?

  Right. Well, and what's what's funny about that is it there's a version of that story that I think is true that says OpenAI didn't do that on purpose. Right? Like, I think.

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:16David Pierce?

  What what Microsoft did with Bing was just ruthlessly capitalistic, right? They just said like, I gotta figure out how to make money off of this. And that's that's what they did.

• 49:28David Pierce?

  But like today, Thursday, as we're recording this, is the one year anniversary of the ChatGPT launch. And like the the thing we know beyond a shadow of a doubt at this point is that no one at OpenAI or Microsoft or anywhere launched ChatGPT thinking it was going to take over the world. There was this like long term plan that everybody was on. And it's funny, if you rewind back to pre ChatGPT and sort of asked a bunch of people at these companies what they thought the future of AI was going to look like, they all would have been more or less right, just wrong about the timeline. And then ChatGPT happened and everybody went, oh crap, this stuff that we've been working on in the background towards this interesting, long future, we have to do today. And that's that's what Google did.

• 50:11David Pierce?

  It was like the, what was it, the code red within Google that that Sergey and Larry put up? Microsoft starts running, everybody just starts running and it did it. It lit this fire in the tech industry that took it down a bunch of how do we make money off of AI? Questions from people who had previously been saying, we have to do this carefully. We have to be thoughtful about this. We have to be smart about this. But it all happened like by accident. It's the weirdest sort of twist of fate that it wasn't like somebody launched the revolutionary product, knowing it was the revolutionary product and like turned everything on its head. It's just like somebody just like farted out a blog post and then the world changed. Like, it's nuts.

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, that's the chat GPT side of it, which is, you should read David's piece. It's the fastest growing consumer product. We should reckon with it. But, you know, Sachin Adella didn't look me in the eye and say, I want Google to know I made them dance. Yeah, oh, yeah. Like, he was, he was headed that way regardless, right? Yeah, but I don't think he would have gotten there in February of 2023. Right. I don't know, he did make the giant investment, right? Yeah. This, it's, it's hard to know, but like, Microsoft was doing co-pilots already. They had started doing this stuff in a very small way. Yeah. And I think the part of it where the stack overflows of the world were just overrun with, oh, this is better if I just ask an AI to do it. And that's a real thing that's going on. Yeah.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Maybe that would have happened anyway, but the sort of like, I'll have it write my resume for me. Like, just sort of like, whatever's gonna go on with L L Ms.

• 51:45Alex Cranz?

  And you shouldn't, by the way, have it write your resume.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it'll lose some great.

• 51:53Alex Cranz?

  If it's gonna be fact checked, you shouldn't. If it's not, do it.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, it's making me look good. And that's actually the, the part of your piece, David, that I think is the most resonant for me, which is now we have these tools. And everyone thinks they're gonna change everything. I am personally still stuck at, yeah, but they're not very good yet. Like, they're good at some things. Programming a computer, everyone constantly telling me they're great at this in a way that is revolutionary. And that's because it's programming computers effectively just delivering instructions, right? Make me a set of instructions such that some input in the computer generates some output. Yeah, that's a deterministic task. You can like, set an AI to it. Many people have done it before. The internet is full of this knowledge. You can get there.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  Write me a new idea, something like inherently creative. I still think they fall down all the time. These non-deterministic tasks, they fall down all the time. Yeah. And, and I continue to point out, they're, all these companies are one copyright decision away from just not existing. And that's like, no one, it's just like, well, let's just not look at that time bomb.

• 53:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  That seems, nah.

• 53:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I love it. As a person who loves to do that sort of thing, just be like, oh, I'm not gonna worry about that for now. Just put my blinders on and go straight ahead.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  That car is on fire.

• 53:13Alex Cranz?

  It's fine. Don't worry about it.

• 53:15David Pierce?

  There was a great Cory Doctorow, the author and EFF activist who's been on the show a few times, uh, wrote a really good thing this week that, uh, I'll, I'll try and make sure we link to in the show notes. Basically saying, he quoted this guy named Lee Vinsel, who talks about this concept of critahype, which is basically taking the sort of truths that the most optimistic people, who are usually the people making products, believing that they're going to be right, and then covering it with hellsapes is the way he describes it. So it's like, to talk about this world in which AI takes over everything and ruins everything, assumes that AI is going to get as good as some of these people say that it is, which they have a massive vested interest in doing.

• 53:58David Pierce?

  And so, like, it's the digital god thing, right? Like, just to talk about whether we think a digital god is a good idea or a bad idea, is, is to assume that it's gonna happen. And we're, there is just no evidence in the AI that exists now that we are headed toward that place anytime soon. And this is like what OpenAI talks about with the artificial general intelligence and AGI, and this idea that like, we're on the brink of something that is, like you're talking about, Neelai, creative and thoughtful and human and better than us at everything. And there's just no reason to believe, right now in the world in, that we live in, that that's actually coming. And it's like Cory's piece was very smart, and I've been thinking about it all week because it's like, we, we have to criticize the thing that exists, not the thing that the people who make the thing exist,

• 54:43David Pierce?

  promise us is coming someday soon.

• 54:45Alex Cranz?

  Well, and I think what's really interesting about that is, is it ignores the stuff that, the harms and stuff, like, the actual concern you should have right now about it, which is the stuff we talk about all the time, how it's, it's destroying the internet. Like, that's happening right now.

• 54:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Alex Cranz?

  This second, somebody is writing garbage, having it write garbage and putting, publishing it on a website. And, and that gets totally ignored to talk about.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  This week, Sports Illustrated got caught publishing AI-generated SEO affiliate garbage. Then they took it down, and they blamed a company, and like, we didn't know they were using AI. And then somebody looked up the company on LinkedIn. And like literally the company is described as using AI and ML to do SEO affiliate articles. It's like, I don't know, man. I think Advan Commerce, the AI ML commerce company was probably going to use AI and ML to make your commerce articles.

• 55:34Alex Cranz?

  They actually asked AI what companies should be hired for this?

• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  It was the most circular excuse in the world. But that's happening. Like storied media institutions are chasing just the bottom of the barrel SEO content. Yeah. In a way that will pollute Google and one in the internet. Lots of sort of just like mid-level creatives are going to lose their jobs over this stuff at the place it is now. David, your point about we can't criticize what's to come is like, our oldest rule in reviewing products is you review what comes in the box. Yep. And when the company promises a software update will fix it, you just, we always say, all right, let us know when it comes out. Yeah. We're not going to review this promise against the promise.

• 56:16Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  So harsh.

• 56:18Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  We, yeah.

• 56:20Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  They just put out a next product.

• 56:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Nilay Patel?

  That's a great example, actually.

• 56:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  We're, we're like, we will not review a product against the promise of a software update. And Opel's like, here's a new camera. No software updates for you.

• 56:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal. Yeah. And so here we are with the LLMs and some of them are good and some of them are bad. And like, they all have different capabilities. But GBT four right now is not a threat to the world. Yeah.

• 56:46Alex Cranz?

  Just a threat to bloggers.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  It's just, yeah, it's just a threat to the people who make affiliate commerce. And our ability to do functional Google searches. Yeah.

• 56:55Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think we're going to see it like in YouTube and we're seeing into those other mediums too, right? Like just the ability to make, to generate mass amounts of garbage into a world that is largely driven by algorithms that are predisposed to that garbage because they're algorithms and they think like computers, just the way this garbage being generated does, like it's just this weird gross snake eating its tail and we all have to sit in it.

• 57:18Nilay Patel?

  I need to, I'm assigning myself a story. So I have this idea that you can make a list of all of Google's platforms.

• 57:25Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  And then you can make a list of all of Google's tools and you can just draw a line from one to the other and be like, here's the problem.

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  You know, like, you can draw a line from the Pixel camera using AI to do photos.

• 57:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  To YouTube. It has a rule. It's like, you need to disclose the AI in the video. And you're like, well, have you guys talked? And they're like, no.

• 57:49David Pierce?

  That should be the headline. This is a column that you just described, Neil, called Have These Guys Talked?

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  And it's just literally drawing a line between any Google platform and any Google tool, like, Google Docs, now let's you do AI-generated thing. And you go talk to the search team and he's like, do you know about this? And they're like, huh. It's just like a big circle. And like, every part of Google has this problem, which I think is utterly fascinating. But that, and that's just one company that runs both platforms. Another one, just this last week, the Bard team extended Bard such that you can just give it a YouTube video, and then we'll summarize it for you. You know, like, if it's a recipe, it'll just like pull out the recipe. Does the creator get a YouTube view when that happens?

• 58:37Alex Cranz?

  Does YouTube know about that?

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  Does YouTube know? That's weird, right? Like, YouTube is an economy. Like, it is the gold standard in creator platforms where people can make a living. And Bard's like, what if we just pull everything off of it and summarize the videos for people?

• 58:53Alex Cranz?

  Little 12-year-olds watching, like, reading Mr. Beast videos in Bard now?

• 58:58Nilay Patel?

  We need to start feeding Mr. Beast videos to Bard. And Bard would be like, this is not a good use of your time.

• 59:03David Pierce?

  Google summarize this video. No, Neil, you just described a decoder series, and you know how much I love talking.

• 59:10Nilay Patel?

  Have you guys talked?

• 59:12David Pierce?

  You just bring two people in, and you just say, have you guys talked? And then you just leave.

• 59:18David Pierce?

  And it's like, it's like a Big Brother style. We just record them with security cameras for an hour, and that's decoder. It's perfect.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  It's just us making different parts of Google talk to each other.

• 59:30David Pierce?

  You could run that show for a decade.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  This is one of my favorite stories about early Verge, just like us learning how to do reporting, how everything worked. And remember, early Verge is like early in lifecycle, all these companies too. Yeah. Uh, so there was just one time where basically we told Google that they had scheduled two events on the same day. Cause they didn't. Cause they hadn't talked and like, and we didn't, we were babies. So we were like, did you, you have the same, is that okay? Is that how we normally? And they're like, no, we have to talk to each other. And I'm like, are we in trouble?

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  But no, they were just, Google's so big and sprawling that the two teams hadn't talked and they had both scheduled events on the same day.

• 1:00:17David Pierce?

  No, boy.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  And, and it was us, we had told them. Yeah. It was very good. Uh, have you talked? The extension of Decoder coming soon to a podcast player. All right, we should take a break. We're gonna come back, we'll do a lightning round.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

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• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back with the Cybertruck Lightning Round, sponsored by No One. This could be you. I'm looking directly at you advertisers. By not sponsoring the Lightning Round, you are blackmailing me.

• 1:01:51Alex Cranz?

  Stop it.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  And I, you know, the woke mind virus has overtaken America, and that's why the Lightning Round does not have a sponsor. And that's the first cast. Possibly forever.

• 1:02:06Nilay Patel?

  There you go. All right, Alex, what you got?

• 1:02:07Alex Cranz?

  Um, okay, so I'm gonna continue our theme of talking a little bit of boardroom drama.

• 1:02:13Nilay Patel?

  That's David's favorite.

• 1:02:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, David, get excited. Okay, but this one is fun because it's Disney and what actually happens here could really affect Disney. Because, so there's an activist investor, his name is Nelson Peltz, and he is really good friends with Ike Perlmutter. And Ike Perlmutter used to run Marvel back in the day, and he got fired earlier this year.

• 1:02:33Nilay Patel?

  Another guy with ideas.

• 1:02:34Alex Cranz?

  And he, boy, does he have a lot of ideas. He was like, you know what, we don't need women. Not a fan of them.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you know, he didn't want a Black Widow movie, he didn't want a Captain Marvel movie, a Black Panther movie, he didn't think any of it works. He's like, you know what you need? You need a bunch of strapping young white guys out there doing stuff.

• 1:02:51Nilay Patel?

  I feel like we're learning something else about Ike Perlmutter.

• 1:02:54Alex Cranz?

  We are, yeah. Interesting. But they're very good friends. Ike was fired earlier this year from Disney by Bob Iger. They are, they are not friends. Nelson Peltz is an activist investor trying to get two board seats on the Disney board because he's mad at everything. And the Disney board is like, you just want to bring Ike back. And all the voting shares you're using, like 78% of the voting shares you're using are Ike's voting shares. No. So, so there's a little fight there. And, and, and right now, there is ammunition. There's a lot of garbage. Bob Iger was also at that Dealbook conference, and he talked about it. And he was like, yeah, Captain Marvel didn't work because we didn't have enough, like, essentially, adults in the room. We didn't have enough executives watching over this. We've been making bad films. And in the case of the Marvels, it

• 1:03:37Alex Cranz?

  was really interesting to hear him say that, given that there were a lot of reasons that movies struggled.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Alex Cranz?

  Box office is down across the board this year.

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  There was a strike. They couldn't promote the movie.

• 1:03:49Alex Cranz?

  They just straight up couldn't promote the movie. And and part of it was like, yeah, it had a mess. It was had it was a messy production. They did have to go back and do a whole bunch of reshoots. And the third, the back third of the film is like, not as good as the first two parts. Like, it is true. But also, they'd been releasing a ton of garbage for the last few years. The fatigue is is set in. And so for them to be like, oh, that one just didn't work because we didn't try hard enough, was really interesting for him to say. And so now he's like, don't worry, we're gonna try harder. And that's not what you need to be saying when you've got activist investors breathing down your neck, particularly activist investors who think it's a mistake that you've made all these films starring, you know.

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  And Peltz was in the mix, right, with Chapek. So you got you got your Duel and Bob's.

• 1:04:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Nilay Patel?

  So you have Bob Iger, he hands it out to Chapek, the pandemic hits. He doesn't like how Chapek is running anything. He brings himself back.

• 1:04:44Alex Cranz?

  Brings himself back.

• 1:04:45Nilay Patel?

  But in there, in somewhere in there, right, Nelson Peltz shows up and like, causes trouble for Disney along the way.

• 1:04:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he's because he's been friends with Ike for this whole time. So he's been really supportive of Ike and and supportive of like, kind of Ike's way of doing things. And and so he's he's really wanted a seat on that board. He's wanted to maintain a seat on that board. And and he and Iger don't like each other. And and we saw that at the Dealbook conference. Andrew was kept asking him, tell me about Peltz. What's going on with him? And he's like, oh, don't worry about it. It's fine. Really blowing him off there. So it's gonna be really interesting to see how how they go about this. And I think it is very concerning when you have the largest media company in the world, and you've got these guys who are have a really strong reputation for not liking half of the population of the world, wanting to go back and wanting a seat at the table

• 1:05:37Alex Cranz?

  to dictate kind of how that company operates and including the kind of films they make. For me, as a woman, not my favorite thing to see, but it's happening. So we'll see how it lands.

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  It is also true, I mean, I agree with you, but it is also true Disney is not doing great.

• 1:05:53Alex Cranz?

  That's true, too. Yeah, Disney is not doing great, and there's a lot of reasons for that. Iger likes to put everything on JPEG, and I think that's stupid.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that clock has run out. He's been back long enough.

• 1:06:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he's been back way too long for that. I think there is a lot of problems with that company, and there's a lot of different reasons for that. I saw a really great story the other day about how Disney Plus was kind of like antithetical to the way that Disney has always done business, because Disney's business has always been circular. Every single thing builds, gets you to go buy something else that Disney makes, right? And when you put suddenly everything in one spot, why are you going anywhere else? It's a great deal for us, the consumer. It's a terrible deal for Disney. And Disney's got to figure out a way out of that. And their idea is, okay, well, we're gonna put more into our parks. We're gonna make them bigger. We're gonna make it more fun, make them more accessible. They changed a whole lot of the rules there to like, kind of, get all those parkgoers happy again,

• 1:06:44Alex Cranz?

  because that was one of the things JPEG really screwed up, was he pissed off all of those...

• 1:06:48Nilay Patel?

  He raised all the prices.

• 1:06:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he raised the prices. He changed like how you could get into the park and stuff like that. So like, Iger's got a lot of work to do, and I don't think he's moving fast enough.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:01Alex Cranz?

  I think he's got to move a lot faster, and he's also got to start like letting off the reins. And more importantly, like trusting your directors, trusting your writers, trusting the creatives you hire to do their job. The fact that he was like, oh, yeah, we just didn't have enough executives watching over the Marvels is a wild statement to make, because one of the big reasons that Marvel has been struggling is that there's one guy at the top, Kevin Feige, and he's stretched too thin. And he was like, kind of, he had a Midas touch. He could fix anything, and he can't fix everything. Like, delegate, my man. So there needs to be a lot more delegation over there.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you a story about Decoder really quickly? I had IBM's head of quantum computing on Decoder this week. I don't know when that happened, but it's coming out at the very end. I was like, what do you think of those Ant-Man movies? And he was just like, ugh.

• 1:07:47Nilay Patel?

  Brutal. There's a Jerry Chau watching this. I will say as a person who was just at Disney World.

• 1:07:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  They have not lowered the prices, my friend. I bought a $35 bubble wand. And boy, did we not get $35 value out of that thing. Not even a little bit.

• 1:08:07Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:08:07Nilay Patel?

  Also, Disney World, very entertaining because, you know, people from all walks of life are there.

• 1:08:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Nilay Patel?

  And there's a monorail, which is like public transit in Washington. Big people in MAGA hats like happily ride the train is like very entertaining. And you're like, wait, this train doesn't work nearly as well as it should. It like really doesn't.

• 1:08:27Alex Cranz?

  It's really.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  It is a, I would describe it, my, my sister and I, my sister's like a Disney adult. And she can like work the app and she knows the vocabulary.

• 1:08:36Alex Cranz?

  All your lines and lightning.

• 1:08:37Nilay Patel?

  It was incredible. Uh, no adult should ever say to another adult, have you checked your MyJeanniePlus? That should not happen.

• 1:08:46Alex Cranz?

  But it does when you go to.

• 1:08:47Nilay Patel?

  But you're like, oh, this is, this is the most like incredible, technocratic neoliberal bureaucracy in the world. Like if you can work the system, the world is your oyster. There's a sheen of light corruption that makes everything a little exciting.

• 1:09:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  You're like, is Bradley Cooper here? Like, does he have to stand in line?

• 1:09:05Alex Cranz?

  Did you get the, did you get the little band?

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we had the band. The band flew off my wrist during Guardians of the Galaxy and I caught it. That is, by the way, one of the best roller coasters I've ever been on in my entire life.

• 1:09:14Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 1:09:15Nilay Patel?

  And then somehow I lost the band during Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a slow boat ride. No idea.

• 1:09:22Alex Cranz?

  Not the one where you're doing like a spiral.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  No idea how I lost it. And I caught it during Guardians. Very cool. Uh, loved every minute of it, but Max was happy.

• 1:09:32David Pierce?

  Do they make you a guardian if you catch it in midair? They're just like Chris Pratt comes out and he's like, you did it.

• 1:09:39Alex Cranz?

  No, that's how the ride starts, is your guardian, basically.

• 1:09:43Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:09:44Alex Cranz?

  Right, kinda.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  No, yeah, I mean, there's, it's like, it's a ride, there's a story. The thing is, the story comes to its conclusion during the roller coaster while everyone is screaming and they're blasting 80s music at you.

• 1:09:55David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  So I have no idea what hap- I wrote it twice and I'm like, what happens?

• 1:09:59Alex Cranz?

  The first time I wrote it, um, I was maybe really enjoying, it was, it was, it was, you know, it was kind of an April 20th kind of day for me.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  Would you say you were in the magic kingdom?

• 1:10:08Alex Cranz?

  I was in the magic kingdom and I didn't enjoy it very much because I spent the entire time being like, what if my glasses fly off?

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  Well.

• 1:10:16Alex Cranz?

  I just spent like this and the video of me was just holding my glasses.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  Just be more careful.

• 1:10:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  I'm tired of the Caribbean.

• 1:10:22Alex Cranz?

  Second time I just didn't wear it.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it was good and the Tron ride was good. It was fun, but you're just like in this place where, oh, this is what, this is what you want. The taxes are very high, the services are available, but somewhat mediocre.

• 1:10:35Alex Cranz?

  And sometimes they just carry a man out.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  And if you can work this app, you can get health insurance.

• 1:10:38Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  Like Disney World.

• 1:10:41Alex Cranz?

  Really good health insurance.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  I was not the most fun at Disney World.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  Like, everyone's like, yes, we understand that you have ideas about politics.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  But it was very fun. We had a good time. Um, and the, uh, enterprise Wi-Fi network, uh, is, uh, W LAN dash T W D C, which it has been apparently for over a decade.

• 1:11:01Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's on, it's like this at every Disney property and Disney employees were posting on threads at me that it is so cumbersome that they install network devices in their house. So they can get on the corporate network instead of using the VPN. All very good. Uh, I like to think that Disney World has so many devices on the Wi-Fi, they can never change the network name. Like, they have to walk around the entire park, like hitting the reset button. All very good. All right, David, what's your lightning round? That was mine. I'll just do that one.

• 1:11:29David Pierce?

  I just.

• 1:11:29Alex Cranz?

  Neil, I went to Disney World.

• 1:11:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, uh, very, very, I just like, I'm now imagining Neil I with like his 16 inch MacBook Pro, just like sitting in line for a roller coaster.

• 1:11:39Nilay Patel?

  Waiting for OpenAI news to break, a real thing that I thought was gonna happen.

• 1:11:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever been on the phone with a sorceress and been like, is this gonna get wrapped up tonight? Because I have to go to Disney World.

• 1:11:52David Pierce?

  It's a cool line, honestly. I support it. Mine is just to, as I occasionally do, implore every website and app and person on earth to do your version of Spotify wrapped. So Spotify wrapped came out this week. This is the week of like, everybody gets their year in review stuff. YouTube Music did it. Apple Music did it. Has Reddit's come out yet? Reddit does one every year. I haven't seen mine. I don't know if it came out yet. Spotify's is out. Pocket Casts, my podcast app did one. All kinds of stuff coming out. This is my favorite genre of thing on the internet. I saw somebody who just posted one that was like a screenshot of their Chrome history, just showing all the webpages they go to the most. And I was like, my browser should have this. I want my email to show me like who I email the most.

• 1:12:36Alex Cranz?

  Should your browser have this?

• 1:12:38David Pierce?

  It does, like it or not. Like it has that information. It might as well show it to me in a funny way. I just think everything that exists, like I want like Google Calendar wrapped at the end of every year. Just to tell me like-

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  That's so brutal.

• 1:12:52Alex Cranz?

  That's depressing. I don't want that.

• 1:12:54David Pierce?

  Like David, who have you talked shit about in Slack most this year?

• 1:12:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Slack should do that. That would actually be great.

• 1:13:00David Pierce?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 1:13:02Alex Cranz?

  Didn't Slack used to? I feel like there used to be where you could just see like who talks the most.

• 1:13:07Nilay Patel?

  No, this was like a weird enterprise privacy nightmare debate. Where like your Slack administrator could see who the biggest user of Slack was in your organization.

• 1:13:18David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  And people are like, this is a privacy violation. And I was like, no, you work at a company, bro.

• 1:13:22Alex Cranz?

  You don't have privacy in the company's stuff.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  Not on the work laptop.

• 1:13:28Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:13:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Alex Cranz?

  Shut it down.

• 1:13:32Nilay Patel?

  All right, my last, my real lightning round item, which is not about my trip to Disney World. Technocratic neoliberal nightmare of Disney World. Uh, no, it's the Epic versus Google trial. So the Epic versus Google antitrust trial is ongoing. That again is about Fortnite and billing on app stores. This is the sequel to the Apple one. We mentioned this during the, while we were covering the Apple one. I think we've mentioned this show since then. Apple case was very straightforward. Apple doesn't allow other app stores. They require you to use their billing system, this whole thing. There's no emails except Apple executives being like, this is stupid, go away. And so like Epic had to concoct this entire case about Apple and its monopoly and lock in.

• 1:14:17Nilay Patel?

  And you can believe it or not, Google is an ecosystem provider. They have lots and lots of deals. They have lots and lots of relationships. They have hardware vendors. They have hardware vendors trying to differentiate their products. There is a ton of evidence about how Google makes deals in this case and how people try to make deals with Google. And it is not pretty. And I think that's like the thing that we have learned throughout this entire case and throughout the DOJ case with Google. Is Google does a lot of deal making. So the one that came out this week that is, I think, really, really revealing is Activision tried to start its own mobile game app store on Android. So Activision proposed with Epic and with the company that makes Clash of Clans super solid.

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  They would start their own app store on Android. It would be Steam for Android. And they called this project Boston and they were running it with one track. And they had another track with Google that was just give us a hundred million dollars and we won't do this. And Google just paid them the money because they don't want competition for their app store on Android. And they're, you know, you can, we'll link our story. There's all these emails about it and whether they're really going to do it and whether Google is really afraid of it. But Google paid them the money to foreclose the competition. And that, there's just a lot of that in this case because there are so many companies in the Android ecosystem that are trying to get leverage over one another and Google's sitting in the middle of it. You can put that right next to, hey, you know, Apple Maps is pretty good lately.

• 1:15:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like Apple had to build a competitor to Google Maps for all kinds of reasons. And they made a really good one. And there's a lot of conversation lately about how it is superior to Google Maps. And I think if you live in the right places, particularly for driving directions or turn by turn, vastly superior to Google Maps. I agree. It's really good now. Okay. Well, if Apple wants to make a competitor to Google product, they can definitely do it. And they definitely have the install base to do it. And Google does not want that to happen to search and pays Apple the money. And you can put that right next to Blizzard said, we might start an app store and Google said, ah, we don't want you to do that. Pay them the money. And we're just, I, I don't want to tell you, like, I think most people think that the world they live in is not done by handshakes and backroom

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  deals, or maybe they do now. Maybe Gen Z is wiser to the ways of the internet.

• 1:16:31Alex Cranz?

  They all watch, they all watch Hamilton. So they all, they all know.

• 1:16:35Nilay Patel?

  Is it Hamilton or suits?

• 1:16:37Alex Cranz?

  Both.

• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  If you want to know how the world works.

• 1:16:42Alex Cranz?

  Those are the two shows. Core to the, your end.

• 1:16:45Nilay Patel?

  No, I think, I think there has been, uh, at least on the internet, the idea that the internet is, is democratizing, that the distribution is free and open and equal. And then you get to these app stores and you get to these mobile platforms and that has instantly broken down.

• 1:17:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so read that on the site. It is

• 1:17:04David Pierce?

  It's great.

• 1:17:04Nilay Patel?

  really, really illuminating coverage about how all this stuff works. And then when, when the trial's over, we will have Sean on and he can synthesize what he has learned. But it is like gleeful coverage in the courtroom from Sean.

• 1:17:16David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. This one, the USV Google was so locked down and so redacted and so careful in everything that anyone revealed about anything. This one is the opposite. They're just like, everybody is just throwing signed contracts like into the wind every morning in the courtroom. Like you really get the sense the discovery process here has been a joyful one for a lot of people.

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Alex Cranz?

  I'm really just bummed I haven't come up with an idea that Google will pay me not to do.

• 1:17:42David Pierce?

  Honestly, it really feels like if you just go like park your car in Google's parking lot and just start going, maybe I'll open an app store. Someone will just like fire a money cannon into your car.

• 1:17:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, let's head out.

• 1:17:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know what's, what's interesting about that point, David, is, you know, USV Google, the United States government doing an antitrust case, they need to be buttoned up. They were in a very buttoned up courtroom. The United States government right now does not have a great history of pursuing these cases or a lot of pressure on them. They're making a very complicated argument about search lock-in. Epic is just like, F, go fuck yourselves.

• 1:18:20Nilay Patel?

  Straight up like that is Tim Sweeney's attitude towards about this is a moral mission for him as well as an economic one. And then you have the ecosystem that is never happy with these players. And like constant looking for every little ounce of leverage. And you can, you're right, the tenor of this case is very different. Because Epic is already gone. They have nothing to lose.

• 1:18:40David Pierce?

  Right. You get the definite sense that even if they lose, they're prepared to lose having landed a bunch of punches against Google. And that is, that is pretty clearly the tactic here. And so far, I think it's working. Like, I don't know if they'll win the case, but boy, have they made Google look bad over and over and over here.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What's interesting to me, just as a person who looks at how our website is doing, is when they are up against Apple, like every one of our stories was a hit. And here we're with, with Google, like with the evidence that the store, like the shenanigans afoot. And we, we have to sell the stories a little bit harder. And I, I think that just speaks to, honestly, how many people have iPhones versus how many people care about how Android works. But I will remind you that Android is the most used operating system on the planet. And how Google manages it affects basically how computing is done.

• 1:19:32David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:19:33Nilay Patel?

  And so like, all these little shenanigans have like massive downstream effects across the entire Android ecosystem. Because if Google stops making money in this way, their case for making Android the open source operating system goes a little sideways. So I'm, like I said, you should read Sean's cover. It is very fun. I enjoy catching up on it every day. This is why we invented story streams with like the quick, like it's all happening. Uh, and then we, we will have Sean at the conclusion of trial, which will be soon, I think, uh, we'll have Sean on to, to talk about.

• 1:20:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. We have gone long. I gotta go throw rocks at a triangle.

• 1:20:09David Pierce?

  But not too hard.

• 1:20:10Alex Cranz?

  Neely's about to get arrested.

• 1:20:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm watching the social video team make comparison videos of the metal ball versus the baseball. It's very good. Go on TikTok and look at that. Thank you to everybody who's been posting about your Spotify wrapped with the Vergecast and with Decoder. We love it. We've also got a lot, a lot of emails from people telling us about Spotify wrapped, which is great. We love it. Our hotline episode next week, David's buying advice.

• 1:20:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're doing a whole, we got a bunch of questions kind of organically from people who are like, I'm trying to figure out what to buy, or I'm trying to buy this thing or this thing. So we're going to do a whole bunch of those. We're just going to grab a bunch of folks and sit around and try to help people buy stuff for the holidays. So if you have holiday questions, email us, [email protected], which you can do about all of your feelings in general, but also buying questions, or call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. Send them all in. We're going to answer a whole bunch of them on next Wednesday's show.

• 1:21:00Nilay Patel?

  Love it. All right. That's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:21:08David Pierce?

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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