AI agents are invading your PC

29:03And that's, there, there is no, there's no spectrum there. There's no like possibility of, well, we had a nice time. You know what I mean? Like you, you made up one of the movies you recommended, but it was like super fun to do this together. A post I saw about Gemini three was from a developer who says they prompted Gemini three to refactor a bunch of code from Claude. It did a lot and it was beautiful. And it talked a lot of shit about Claude's code. And then they're like, this is really great. All of this is wrong. That's bad. At some point, I mean, this is what you always talk about with reviews, right?

29:31It's like at some point it either does the job or it doesn't. And being delightful and confident and silly and sycophantic along the way only matters until there is a job that you either did do or didn't do. And this is what we're running to with agents is it's really simple to evaluate whether an agent did the job. It either did the job or it didn't. And we're now nearing a point where we're actually going to evaluate the success of AI models on whether they can do stuff. And like, spoiler alert, they mostly can't. I've been thinking about this a lot. There are some places where they can. And I think, again, the point I would make is when you put them in constrained environments, mostly enterprise environments, they can do it.

30:10There is a lot, we get a lot of feedback from listeners who work in enterprise environments, who build systems, like internal systems for companies. And they are saying to us, we can have an agent go and ping an MCP server we built for a store of data over here. Sure. And it comes back with some result and like, this is way better than brittle APIs and that, that, that, that. Like, this is all working. That's just software. That's just software. That's software stuff. Yeah. But it's not, this agent is a general purpose employee of our company, which is the bet Microsoft is making. Correct. They launched a new product this week called Agent 365, which lets businesses manage their agents like they're people.

30:44Like, we're making big bets on ever-increasing capabilities of these AI tools to do stuff. And maybe consumer is just harder. Maybe it is all just going to be the future of enterprise software is a bunch of agents interlinking databases in a way that was hard before. Although I suspect a lot of consultants are going to get very rich telling businesses they need to make their databases more compliant with agents. Yes. but in consumer world these products don't work like a joke we have running right now is like basically every week we can do did this agentic consumer product work and the answer is no like they just don't work the browsers don't work like they come close to working and then they don't work all the time and then you might as well have just done the browsing yourself well the browser is actually a fun example because like if the thing that you want your browser to do is deliver you information about the tab that you're looking at it's actually pretty good at that right like it's that's a that's a constrained amount of context it is it is a piece of information it can sort of take in all at once and you can like summarize this web page for me and it's they're generally very good at that um as soon as you're like i have this thing this thing this thing and this thing can you collate all of that into a spreadsheet for like no it just cannot and tony has an example where he's asking it to just tell him which specs in a laptop benchmark chart are bigger and it can't do it right and this is the thing where like i think your enterprise example is a good one because Basically, what they're saying is like these agents take a thing that I had to sort of manually build a bunch of if then statements to do.

32:13And it took a bunch of steps and it was brittle. And this thing is able to just sort of like barrel through the process and accomplish it. Fine. What that is, is like a single repeatable goal over and over and over again. Right. Like AI models are pretty good at that. If you if you if you give it a box this big, it can you can teach it how to do a thing that that makes sense to me. What all of these companies are promising is these like massive multi-step open-ended tasks and they just immediately fall apart. Yeah. Like if, and what somebody said to me one time and I've been thinking about it ever since is they're like, if you have an AI model that has to do six things in a row and it does all six of those things at 95 % accuracy, that's pretty good.

32:54And also it's almost certainly going to fail. Like just, you just stack this possibility of failure on every imaginable step. and because I can't control it from one thing to the next, it just falls apart. Just none of this is for us. Like, I think you're right that this is just Microsoft being like... It's worth the shot. Like, I don't think Microsoft sees an achievable path to recapture the high end of the laptop market or wherever you think the most lucrative part of the desktop computer market is. I think that's why Panos Panay works at Amazon now. Yeah. And this is your shot. If you're like, you can just talk to Windows.

33:28This is the dream for some people. We get a lot of feedback that's like, I don't want to talk to my computer, but for a lot of people, just talk to the computer and it'll do stuff for you is the dream. It has been the dream. And maybe this is the thing that allows Windows to do that. You might as well take the shot. Sure. Problem is you shipped co-pilot vision, which is apparently just incompetent. Yeah. Just fully drunk and doesn't work. And I don't know why you would take that shot. I don't know why you would advertise these computers on the NFL. I don't know why you would sell these computers at the Hollywood because they're just going to turn into Syria again.

33:58And this is my belief that we are witnessing Microsoft go through one of the hardest pivots it has ever gone through, and they're just not talking about it. Yeah. They're just becoming an enterprise company. Yeah. The end. I mean, I think to a large extent they've always been an enterprise company. Now they're just fully not pretending they're anything else anymore. Yeah. And I think that's a big culture change as much as anything. But this is all happening next to Google, the other company out here. Wait, I got to say the Linux thing first. Oh, sure. Oh, my God. Nathan Edwards, our reviews editor, we've been talking about this.

34:33And he's like, I'm going to just install Linux. And I was like, you have to do it. You have to do it. And he's like, I don't have time to do it. I was like, well, you have to at least write that you're going to do it. So he wrote, screw it, I'm switching to Linux, which in the annals of tech headlines is just, you could just do that any day you want. Any day for the past 20 years, you could write, it's time to switch to Linux because I'm mad at Windows. And then the thing that happened, happened, which is like 500 people left angry comments arguing about Linux. But interestingly, the tone, even of the people who are like, this will never happen.

35:04There was somebody who left a comment that was just every year since like 1991 crossed out and it said 2026 will be the year of the next nonstop. That's choice. That's like a great Verge cast joke. The number of people who said that go ahead and try basically was the same as everyone. That ratio is very high. The number of people said go ahead and try, but I understand why. That's new. Sure. That's very new. Yeah. And that is just a weird outcome, right? And some of the, you know, we're dropping support for Windows 10. I've got a laptop that I don't need to upgrade because it's just fine. I might as well put Linux on it because Microsoft is dropping me.

35:37Some of the gamers in particular are like, I just need to run Steam on this thing. The fact that Steam exists and you can run it on Linux and you can play Windows games, as Sean told us at great length last week. there's something that we're going to end up covering linux a lot this year it's really upsetting i feel really good about it i feel really good about it i i don't know what shape it will take let us know how you want us to cover linux uh my instruction is basically like try stuff yeah i think nathan has accidentally started like signed himself up for a linux diaries fine um but i you know we're just gonna take some shot at covering like tell us what you think is most interesting because we don't know yeah um and i think i know what's interesting but like that has nothing to do with what the linux community thinks is interesting well there is i mean it's it's an interesting casualty of this change that you're talking about at microsoft that it would like completely upend everyone's computer buying choice and like maybe maybe there is a world in which linux becomes a thing you at least look at when you're buying a computer because if windows is no longer the thing that almost everything runs on that is obviously just sort of the default choice unless you want to spend a lot of money on a Mac.

36:52Where do you go? Google appears just continuing to do weird stuff trying to combine Chrome OS and Android into whatever mess that's going to be. Mac is over here. I mean, this puts the idea of the cheaper Mac that we've been talking about into really interesting perspective. It's right there for you. Yeah, because now this is Apple saying, oh, this market is about to be completely abandoned. And maybe we can just show up with a$600 Mac and gobble it up. why not? I'm just, to me, Sean actually said this about NVIDIA last week. He's like, NVIDIA used to be a gaming company and now gaming isn't even on the chart of its revenue.

37:31Like it's so de minimis compared, like this is happening to Microsoft too. Okay. Well, that's a, that's a lot of opportunity for someone to seize. Sure. Anyway, I'm not saying 2026 is the year of Linux desktop. I'm saying maybe you could say that to us and then we would cover it. Somebody please cut words together that makes Neelai say 2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop and we will share that widely on our channel. It's going to have a flicker. We're going to see a little flicker of Linux coverage on the verge this year. This is going to be like when you decided to go all in on Dex and that lasted like an hour and a half.

38:05One train ride of Neelai using Dex and it all falls apart. We should talk about Google for a minute though. We should talk about Google. Google launched Gemini 3 this week which was like a big new model. This was hotly anticipated. Lots of people have been talking about it for a while and Google is pretty bullish on Gemini 3. It like immediately rolled it out everywhere, which is a big new thing. It's now in search. It's in the Gemini app. It's available for developers. It is making Gemini 3 its model everywhere, which is not necessarily how Google has always operated. It called it the most intelligent, the most factually accurate.

38:39It had some thoughts about, what was it? It was flattery was the word it said it used less of. Oh, nice. We're entering this really interesting phase. it's made me think a lot about the way all the different smartphone companies think about photos where you end up having to make like a qualitative choice about what this is supposed to feel like. We're doing this with the AI assistants too. Like there is a real sense that all of these companies have to like sit in a room and decide what is this thing supposed to be? And that's just weird. And we're going to land in strange places. And these companies are like hiring philosophers hayden field has been out like interviewing the people whose job it is to decide like what ai models believe like it's crazy stuff um but gemini 3 pro immediately jumped to the top of the charts um grok 4.1 had just come out and was like at the top of the lm arena charts it had fewer votes but a high score was the whole thing and then gemini 3 pro just shows up and is like back at the top what's up yeah google definitely thinks it's one that like they're posturing around Gemini 3 is we're done now.

39:41We have defeated all. You can't beat us. Right. And Google is also doing an increasingly good job of reminding people that it has a massive set of huge intrinsic advantages. A lot of people have been talking about the fact that Google trained this model on TPUs, its own custom built silicon, which is a huge deal because it means they don't have to just go and fight with the rest of the world for NVIDIA stuff. It was It's talking a lot about all the stuff that is already built into the Gemini app. I think it was 650 million monthly users. We'll see what that means. I'm suspicious of all of these user numbers in like very big ways.

40:19We're soon to run out of people on earth with phones. Yeah, like whatever. But anyway, so it's talking about the integrations that it has with all these other apps. It can put it in search, which immediately puts it in front of tons of different people. I think AI mode and search is mostly very bad, but it's there. Lots of people are using it. That's your user number. Yeah, right. But Google is in this place now where it has the tech stack, it has the distribution, and if it's right that it has the model, it can just start to run away. Like the biggest thing OpenAI has going for it, if all of that is true, OpenAI has like a huge brand lead with ChatGPT just because ChatGPT is like the Kleenex of this space in a real way.

40:58But if Google can actually continue to build and sustain being the best model, there's kind of nothing else that someone can take away from it at this point. Yeah, I would compare and contrast Google with Microsoft pretty directly here. Microsoft made the big bet on OpenAI. They were going to be the winner. OpenAI, you know, until recently ran only on Azure. so if you wanted access to the cutting edge model, you were running on Azure and Microsoft was going to collect all the money and then Microsoft was like, we're going to do Bing. AI will be in all of our products. We have the lead. We have access to the best model.

41:35That relationship has totally fractured and now there's a committee of anonymous theologians who will decide if Sam Altman may be God. I don't know what the hell's going to go on there. Google in the meantime, right, was the laggard that caught a lot of shit for inventing all of this technology, for inventing the transformer, for writing attention is all you need, and they're not doing anything with it really. They've since caught up. They might have the leading edge model. And the thing that they have the most is revenue that isn't AI. Right. They just run big businesses. So if they get their AI shots wrong, they're fine.

42:09Then they also have ideas about what to use AI for. Right. Like in real meaningful ways, they have ideas on what you should deploy AI against. And maybe you hate those ideas, but they have those ideas and they're going to take those shots. And I think some of their ideas, even in the context of agents, are fascinating. Like agents, the general purpose agents that we're talking about might not work on Windows, but Google is showing off like anti-gravity, its entire integrated development environment for agents, which appears to work well. Right? They're showing off new kinds of Canvas in Gemini to one-shot Vibecode apps, which are more interesting than ever.

42:44And it's like, I don't know if any of that stuff is good. I have mixed feelings about all of it. But they're closer to executing the vision that Microsoft says it has, then Microsoft is for sure. Yeah, I think that's right. And Google just has more surfaces that people use in which to put that stuff, right? Like it, I think the AI mode is the one I keep bringing up because it just, it's, we're so close and it would be so easy for Google to just tick the box that switches the default search thing from search results to AI mode. And like that is coming. That's the end of the web. That's, it is. It's the end of the web.

43:19It is a complete change for Google's business model, but like it's coming. That is the turn Google is looking forward to making and it will make the minute it is able. I was talking to a very smart listener of this show who very dire prediction said the web maybe has, the open web maybe has 250 days left. Goodness. What's in 250 days? Just, it was just like a, just an amount of time less than a year, I think. That, you know, smart viewer, if you care to correct me, you can tell me what exactly you mean. But the switch is going to flip. that strikes me as increasingly not crazy uh and we should spend a lot of time talking about what that means but the the flip side of it is like it is like google has talked a lot about and they i went to a briefing right before the gemini 3 launch and they talked a lot about the bet they made really early on in doing a multimodal model like this is the thing google has always talked about with gemini that this is not just text in and text out it's not just an image in image out model.

44:18They wanted to put all of this stuff into one place, which made it to work harder. It makes the models more complicated. It makes like some of the possibilities for problems much bigger. But it means if you can get all the parts right, you have built one thing that can do and be everything. And if this stuff is going to work in the way that like the agent stuff we're talking about is going to work, it's going to need that kind of like sort of polymath abilities. And it really seems like Google is at least one full order of magnitude further down that road than almost anybody right now. It's hard to measure.

44:53OpenAI will tell you that GPT-5 is multimodal. They will. Sure. Do you believe anything that they say? Who knows, right? I just think the proof is in the pudding. This thing is only just out. The reason I want to compare it to Microsoft is you see Microsoft say a lot of things born of a lot of confidence of being first. Yes. But they are tied to a company and a model that is now sort of openly competing with them and they are maybe less in control of their destiny. They're also pivoting to being this enterprise company. They maybe don't care about the polish of the consumer products. Meanwhile, Google is like just sort of diligently moving ahead in a way that is totally surprising for Google.

45:33Right. This company is more organized than I can ever remember it being. I will say around the time of IO, this past IO, definitely the notion that all of the executives had been turned over came up several times. Like he's like, the idea that Sundar fired everybody and put in new people. And gave them very clear instructions. It came up more than a few times. Yeah, I believe it. But I think like Emma Rothfuss wrote a great piece where she did the thing and tested a bunch of the stuff. And like, it actually works. You can build stuff, the sort of one shot interactive visualizations that Gemini is able to do, which is one of these I talked about, like this canvas feature you're talking about, where I think she had one thing where she asked it to create a 3D visualization of the difference in scale between a subatomic particle, an atom, a DNA strand, a beach ball, the Earth, the sun and the galaxy.

46:20And it like it like did it, which is nuts. And the visualization looks pretty good. It's not like incredible, but it does the job. And this is the kind of thing that is like, if you want to imagine what the step is past search, it's not a bunch of search results collated into a paragraph. It's this. This is how you beat search and destroy the web. And this is very much what Sundar is the hottest about at I.O. He was like, I will search. The future of search results is one shot apps that do what you want. Yeah. I'm going to make something out of your search results for you. That is unclear to me how many times I want an app to be delivered when I ask a question of search.

46:58All right, here's what I'm going to say. I have the Google Home app with Gemini in it. So I'm obviously not home. I'm in the studio. Correct, David. Confirmed. In his sexy voice. So it's suggestion when I click the ask box, ask your house. The first suggestion it gave me was broadcast. It's dinner time on all speakers. Do it. I dare you. Do it. It's like, it's so like, aren't you AI? Shouldn't you know that I'm not at home and it's nowhere close to dinner time? It's also four o 'clock. Yeah. that one's uncomplicated. This is a horrible idea. I'm doing great, everybody. All right, I'm going to ask you the question I'm always asking.

47:34How many lights do I have? That's a good one. It's going to think for quite a while. Yeah. It says I have 27. This is a different answer. Okay, okay. I'm just going to show you the last time I asked the question. Okay, Neelai asks, how many lights do I have total? You have 29 lights in total. How many lights do I have? You have 27 lights in your home. What is happening? This is what I'm confused about. That's the same question twice in a row. It sure is. That was, I asked it earlier before this, and I asked it just now just to see, because it's never consistent. This is where we are. It's always confused about whether I want the lights that are on or off, or just the lights that exist.

48:13By the way, the technically right answer to that question is you have 30-some lights connected to Google Home, but obviously many more lights than that. Yeah. All of which is a thing that it is perfectly equipped to know. Right. There are this many lights connected to the system that I have access to, but it can't count. Right. And I think it can't count because sometimes those lights get unplugged or whatever. Like there's just something about the smart home where I try to use the AI as an agent over and over and over again, run around my house and literally push these buttons. They're all in the same place.

48:50and they've been in the same place connected to the back end of Google Assistant for a long time. And Gemini's like, I don't, I'm drunk. Yeah, it's like, let's talk about what you mean when you say that. Yeah. Have you met Kevin Roos? Yeah. And I can tell you, man, canary in the coal mine. For all this agent stuff, to me, that is, it is just fully the canary in the coal mine. I think you're right. Can I connect that to one other idea before we take a break? Sure. Meta's chief scientist, Jan LeCun, just left Meta this week. he is maybe one of the main proponents of the idea that llms are not the pathway to agi right that there you can't get super intelligence out of doing language gary marcus is the other one that everyone knows but the idea that you can't just do language to get yourself to true intelligence has been burbling in the background for quite a while i've actually asked to his face his language the same as intelligence and he was like why was that the first question neilai and you said tell me just hard that was a hard open two years ago when i interviewed him um and he was like you know uh gemini's multimodal that was his answer yeah there's a chance that lms can't do it yeah it more than a real chance and the people who are saying lms can't do it are getting pushed out of the companies and i look at some of this agent stuff and i'm like this is why i think lms can't do it this is the evidence because you can't language yourself through how how many lights are on.

50:09Right. You actually have to, you have to know what you're looking at. And even the people who are building it acknowledge that that's actually the hardest version of this problem is those supposedly simple computer tasks that you just can't language your way through. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, like, meta, speaking of companies that can just afford to fund AI projects to infinity because it has money coming from somewhere else, I think has fallen behind in a pretty big way. And I think that is not an accident the Yon the Koon is leaving. Yeah. So, yeah, well, that's a company I both have no faith in and continue to keep an eye on.

50:42But we should take a break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Meta a bunch more. Because there is a big, we've talked a lot about this antitrust trial. And it is over. In the dumbest way. The dumbest way. So we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.

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54:46of her permanent collection.

54:52All right, we're back. So this meta monopoly trial, which is basically, was it illegal and was it monopoly maintenance for meta to acquire Instagram in particular, has been running for five years? It's been five years. I think it's been five years. Wow. Went to trial earlier this year. We finally got a decision this week. I would say the decision is fairly straightforward and it amounts to meta is not a monopoly why did we even do this would you say that's fair yeah well no I mean it's fair in the sense that the the beeline of that was tick tick tock dude that's what yeah have you seen the internet yeah so but the the reason I want to talk about this is because a I think it's really interesting that Meta fought this huge fight.

55:42And what I've been hearing for, I mean, years now is that there was going to be the outcome of the Google search trial and there was going to be the outcome of the Meta trial. And there, the whole like startup economy was waiting around to see what was going to happen because like, it's been harder to, you know, buy your company, which is why all these like weird reverse acquire things are happening. Nobody was sure how, what the vibes were going to be like for big companies acquiring smaller companies until this. And he comes out, Judge Bosberg in this, and says basically not only did Meta not buy Instagram and then do shady stuff with it, that in the world we live in in 2025, Meta buying Instagram is like not a problem at all, which is wild.

56:27And I think the thing I really like about this is reading through the opinion, you and I both love a good court opinion, I would say. And this is Bozberg, who has been at the forefront of many Trump administration controversies. Trump has called for him to be impeached, actually. And was also the one who was very loudly trying to tear Google into shreds in the Epic case. Yeah. But this one, I think this opinion essentially amounts to the most cogent explanation of how the internet works that I've read in a long time. And I just really liked it. And I just want to talk through it. It is, by the way, for the listener, it is remarkable that we sat down and David's like, I want to talk about a court case.

57:04And I was like, justice means nothing in America anymore. Why even bother? And he's like, no, we have to talk about it. A stunning reversal here on The Virgin. I know. But go ahead. I hate this. You're really taken with this. I know. This is awful. But I think the basic thrust of the case, right, was the government was arguing that Meta competed in this very specific, very small market of personal social networking, right? Like where you go on the internet to hang out with your friends. That was the market that they wanted. And Snapchat was in that market. MeWe was in that market. Like famously, MeWe, an app no one has heard of or ever used, became like a key part of this case.

57:44and meta spent the whole trial just basically saying the word tiktok out loud like of course we compete with tiktok what on earth are you talking about the sheer existence of tiktok and youtube mean we can't possibly be a monopoly on the internet and that's essentially where judge bosberg landed was like he said over and over that like at the beginning of this case maybe there was a time, even five years ago, when this case was first filed, that Meta and Facebook in particular and Instagram existed in this way. Now it doesn't. And then the whole rest of the opinion is basically about the incredible sameness of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.

58:28That is in its way is a thunderous dunk on the internet. Oh, it really is. But I mean, but it's just burn after burn after burn on these things. Can I just read you the very beginning? Like just the first paragraph just brings me such joy. By the way, I think you got it wrong, but you love it. Go ahead. You think you got it wrong? I do. I'll tell you why. But you go ahead. You're an idiot. Wow. All right. It's been a long week. He writes, believing that the only constant in the world was change, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, Heraclitus, yeah, you know, that guy, posited that no man can ever step into the same river twice.

59:00This is the first line of this opinion. What are we doing? Anyway, in the online world of social media, the current runs fast too. You know somebody wrote that. It was like, bah. The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly. While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down. All right. So if I was Andrew Ferguson, the pretty dumb head of Trump's FTC, sure. And I do want to point this out. This case was brought under the Biden administration, but it's the Trump FTC who had to carry it through.

59:33So Lena Kahn brings this case. but Andrew Ferguson who whose personality is I hate big tech sure he's the one who like runs it through yeah and he hates big tech because it's woke They're not, the Trump administration is not full of great lawyers. Correct. If you pay attention to how they succeed in jail. They're not great at it. If I'm Andrew Ferguson, I read that first paragraph and I know what my appeal is, which is it doesn't matter if the effects of the illegal action don't seem to matter anymore. They were still illegal when they happened. So the illegal conduct here is Meta. Yes, they looked at a small competitor that threatened them and they anti-competitively found their way into buying them.

1:00:19The same with WhatsApp. And that precluded competition in the market. And yes, you can fast forward and you can say, you know what, Meta forgot to buy TikTok. And so now TikTok exists. And Meta had no shot of buying YouTube and now YouTube exists. And so it doesn't matter that they bought Instagram once upon a time. That is basically the same as being like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to drive a car into your house. Many years later, someone else will fix the house. So I'm no longer in trouble for driving a car into your house. Perfect. No, so I think that is, it's just the, it is the thing that you, the government has said they're going to appeal this.

1:00:51Yeah. The FCC has said they're going to appeal this. That is the, that will be the nature of the appeal. Let me try to run the other side of that argument. If I understand the opinion correctly, its basic counter to that is that actually what has happened over the last five years in particular is not that all these companies have chased Meta and finally caught up or whatever. It's that actually Meta has spent the last five years chasing these other companies, right? Because there's this whole chunk of the opinion that's about basically how things change, right? Like people's phones got faster, their networks got faster, the cameras got better, whatever.

1:01:24And so suddenly you have this thing where the sort of world around these apps has changed and it changed away from Facebook and it changed away from what Instagram used to be. It's all TikTok now, right? Like this thing is very focused on Reels because I think as this opinion understands Meta and I think correctly, it's only product now is Reels and everything else is just a surface onto which you put Reels. and that is a bleak way to think about what meta is up to and I think it's not wrong. And there was this big shift away from like high percentage of people coming to see content made by their friends on that platform to they call it, I think they call it unconnected content.

1:02:05It's just stuff that is based on interests that I have and things that I have watched before. It doesn't matter who I follow. It doesn't matter where I come from. It doesn't matter who made it. It's just, it is all this interest-based graph. And TikTok shows up in 2018 in the US and just absolutely starts to eat these services alive. Because what it says is like, who cares about the friends you've had on Facebook for 15 years? They're not interesting. I have this other thing you might like. Does a really good job of that and actually makes all of these other apps chase it. So it's not, I think there's this real perception that actually meta is not operating from a position of like incredible supra competitive strength but of like weakness and like it's losing and it has had to race to catch up with this thing that just beat it sure i don't disagree that that chronology i will just point out the most important part of that chronology is that tiktok exists at the scale it does the united states because by dance which is connected if not controlled by the chinese government important ways showed up in america and bought millions, if not billions of dollars in TikTok advertising on meta platforms.

1:03:15Yes, it juiced its whole platform on Facebook ads. That's what it did. It just bought users until it was competing with Instagram. Right. And meta was too stupid to know that was happening. That's the only thing you can say about that. Meta had a giant app install business and ByteDance was like, here's some Chinese government money. Now we have a competitor to you. Yeah. That is not a reasonable thing to ask any organic competitor to do. Sure. You can't do it. And if that is the only condition by which a real competitor to reels can exist, then you don't have a competitive market. You just, you simply do not.

1:03:51Yeah. And the one time that that was happening was when Instagram was taking off. And Mark Zuckerberg sent a bunch of emails being like, every generation has a sharing dynamic and they have it and we don't. I'm going to buy them. And he did it for WhatsApp too. And obviously this generation has a sharing dynamic with TikTok. Right. And he said to clone it. But you can't be like, ByteDance showed up, spent a billion dollars on advertising. So the market is competitive. That makes Meta being wise enough to shut down Instagram, not illegal. Sure. But YouTube is the other part of this, right? Because I think the other.

1:04:29Because by the way, you know, our headline is Meta is not a monopolist, which is sort of like the big takeaway of it. but like the the case is not are you a monopoly being a monopoly is fine the case is did you act anti-competitively right through monopoly when you did some stuff and very specifically stuff was by instagram and whatsapp the remedy is spinoff instagram and i think the judge is saying or the proposed remedy from the ftc was spinoff instagram and whatsapp and then the judge is saying no you don't have to you're fine like there's nothing but instagram it does sound like what you're arguing is they just argued that the ftc argued this case completely wrong because the The case, like in practice, really ended up not being about that.

1:05:06Like for whatever reason, the actual meat of the case ended up being, are you or are you not competitive with TikTok and YouTube in particular? It was like. It lived in market definition. Yeah. And is the idea of like places that you hang out with your friends distinct from places you go to be entertained? and I think in that case if that's the argument I think Judge Bozberg absolutely came to the correct opinion which is no, they're identical. They are the same thing. They have absolutely collapsed into each other. That like where people go to hang out with each other is in group chats and what they do in group chats is like send TikToks to each other.

1:05:42But there's this line in there and he says, I just always really like this. He said a decade ago users who checked Facebook or Instagram would see a stock of updates broadcasted by their friends. A status update, a baby picture, a video posted on a friend's Facebook wall. When they wanted to share they would post something to this ever-growing feed for all their friends to see. Now they are more likely to open the app and scroll through AI-recommended content than share by sending that content as a private message. That is A, precisely correct, and B, like a real bummer. Yeah, I mean, if you listen to Adam Assery ever, he will happily tell you that what people do is they open Instagram, they find Reels, and they share it with their friends.

1:06:16And then they're in DMs and that's where they live. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I'm just saying that, yeah, I'm basically saying that Trump FTC is stupid. Like - They just did it wrong. Or, you know, they needed to pivot to a more politically amenable theory of the antitrust case. Like, it's almost shocking. They weren't like, you should put them in jail because they're woke. Like, you know, whatever they say. Like, this case started with a different theory, I think. Under Lena Kahn, she had a very different theory of how big tech monopolies operate. I don't think that's shared by the Trump FTC. They don't seem to care about that in that way.

1:06:52what they care about is having big leverage over tech companies yes so that trump can make deals whether or not those deals exist and here they ran this one to the end you know as much as mark zuckerberg was paying money and showing up and saying whatever he's saying they did run this one to the end and meta one meta has consistently sort of won when it comes to market definition these kinds of cases and so i think it's kind of interesting that trump didn't get leverage over meta with a big i don't even know if he knew you know like yeah usually you you hear some like you know there's a big case it'd be a shame if i took your instagram away from you unless you get less woke yeah and like none of that occurred here maybe it's just because meta thought it had the winning hand the whole time but i do think there was a significant change in how they pursued the case when he went from lena con to andrew ferguson yes it was the the the crime as perceived was not buying instagram it was like what the thing had become all these years later which is a very different thing.

1:07:51And again, being lost in market definition is where meta wins these things. They're very good at being like, what are we really? Nothing? Is it nothing? You can't possibly describe meta. They're not wrong. Well, and it is a forever changing thing, right? Like it is true that our construction of meta as a company was super different. It wouldn't call it meta five years ago. Yeah. And now it's like, if they wanted to, they could be like, well, we're fundamentally about the metaverse. We're called meta. Like this company can play so many cards in so many directions that part of me has always wondered if this kind of thing is deliberate, right?

1:08:24Like when they underwent that or made big noise about that huge product to like unify the messaging systems behind all of their apps, like to basically skirt having them be opened up by European regulations. It's like, okay, well, this is both like a reasonable product idea and also like pretty clearly a reaction to make it much harder to break you up. And I sort of like the conspiracy theory that they just like bet on, they're like, okay, the only way we're going to not get broken up is if we just try to do TikTok. And then we can convince everybody that we can compete with TikTok. Yeah. I mean, like Facebook has expressed to me, if you were asking me to describe it, I'd be like, this is where I get updates on, on, on snow days at school, where cranks in my town complain about EV chargers being installed in Main Street and where various fly-by-night companies try to sell parts for my 10 year old car.

1:09:11That's Facebook. That's what that is. Yeah. That's about right. And like, fine. But like, is that personal social networking? Whatever it is. Yeah. I mean, there are other variations of this pattern, right? The Google cases were started in the first Trump administration, pursued by the Biden administration, lost under this Trump administration. So there are other dynamics at work. I will just note that those cases pursued by the Department of Justice, whose antitrust head under even this Trump administration, sort of widely respected. I just think they have to see a different story. Fair. Fair.

1:09:47It's going to be really interesting to see where this goes next because this is about as cleanly as you could possibly let meta off the hook. It just walks away scot-free. I'm just saying, what are you going to appeal? You're going to appeal, we got sidetracked in market definitions, and the actual market is apps on phone with other people in them. Sure. Was it illegal for them to squash competition by buying Instagram at that time? Right. Maybe that's a better question. The real question I would ask is, you know who does know how to get Donald Trump's attention in effective ways? Tim Cook. Do you know what antitrust trial is coming up?

1:10:21DOJ v. Apple. Just get ready for solid gold iPhones to be delivered to the now demolished East Wing of the White House. That one, I think, will tell us a lot about how the government really feels about these antitrust cases. Yeah, I agree. All right, well, we should take another break. This is all I just needed to do a little bit. You seem to get it out of your system. I just wanted to read you Greek philosophy just for a moment. We're going to take another break. We're going to come back to a lightning round. We'll be right back. Every day, millions of customers engage with AI agents like me.

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1:13:40alright we're back it's time for the lightning round unsponsored for flavor feels good to do that we got a thing going on when we're in the studio together feels good I enjoyed that very much is it time? oh it's time it's going to be a big one too it's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. The man who will not let me stop doing this, Brendan Carr is a dummy. He was so dumb this week. He was dumb in comically cartoonish dumb ways. Every week I get to Thursday morning and I'm like, oh, please God, tell me Brendan didn't do anything. And Brendan always did something. It's a real stack.

1:14:19That's stuff, Brendan stuff. I know. All right, hit me. All right, well, I'll start with the easy one. I think a couple weeks ago, we noted that Brendan wanted to roll back the FCC's rules that required telecom providers to have good cybersecurity, that vote is coming up. Oh, okay. And we're going to roll back the cybersecurity rules for telecom providers because it's a huge overreach to say don't get hacked like you did. Yeah, how dare you require them to do a good job? Just stupid. And he's all like, I love deleting regulations. These regulations were put in place after the Salt Typhoon hacked.

1:14:50I don't know if people remember the Salt Typhoon. Massive hacked where the United States government started telling American citizens, please use encrypted messaging services. We cannot guarantee the privacy and security of your carrier messages. That's how big the Salt Typhoon hack was. And so then you got to do something, right? You're like, huh, that was really bad. Yeah. We're going to take some steps to ensure the security of our telecom infrastructure. Here are some rules. The telecoms naturally pushed back, said, you don't have the authority to tell us what to do. We're going to be hacked as much as we want.

1:15:27and now Brendan is back saying the Biden FCC overreached with the one thing they accomplished since you're damn right you can be hacked as much as you want I don't even know what to say get hacked more guys that's number one just just dumb on its face that sucks already just like go up to anyone and be like do you think do you trust AT &T and Verizon at all end of end of question Brendan and it's like they will self-manage their security. Yeah, that's gone super well, I would say. Which I would, again, point out led to an attack so big that the United States government told people to use encrypted messaging services, which really ran into the whole, we need a backdoor into the encrypted messaging services argument they were making.

1:16:09Okay, that's one. Number two. David, where would you say the BBC is located? The United Kingdom. What do you think the first letter in BBC stands for? British. There you go. Yeah, I did it. That's the one. brendan i honestly thought that was a trick for a second i was like oh god i just i just i just important in brendan cars to tell me well brendan big dummy that's all right the bbc famously the british yeah broadcasting service now the target of a brendan car investigation what yep so there's this kerfuffle. This is a big deal for the BBC. They did a January 6th documentary, which why? It's just, do they know they're not America?

1:16:58We don't know they're not America. Do they? There's a lot of, in the background of all this. And I feel great sympathy for both our staff in England and just our English listeners. Sure. Dumb American cultural ideas have like, now get transmitted overseas. And because they speak English, they're like, oh, we understand those let's do them here we shouldn't i i'm sorry it's our worst export anyhow they did a january 6th documentary there was some standards row row in in the british pronunciation over whether the trump speech where he said fight fight fight was misleadingly edited various british journalists have been fired why is any of this worth it i assure you you can just point your attention at your own monarchs and they will also do dumb things yeah just a fact of the bbc or just like screenshot a true social post.

1:17:46Look at the one palace and be like, are they smart? And you'll have your idea. Sorry, my people have escaped the British crown twice. I'm Indian American. Okay. Brendan Carr. Yeah, I still don't understand how Brendan Carr figures into this. Brendan Carr has sent a letter to the BBC, PBS, and NPR announcing an investigation over whether the documentary with a misleading edit of Donald Trump was ever aired to the United States. Full investigation. And he's saying this would be news distortion and somehow PBS and NPR who have broadcast licenses should then be punished on the back of news distortion for airing a thing that the BBC produced again in Britain.

1:18:27This is going to land on like if one person streamed it in the BBC America app, everyone goes to jail in Britain. So Carr has asked the CEOs of NPR, PBS, and the former director of the BBC who resigned because of all this controversy, he said, have you provided either the audio or video of the splice speech to NPR, PBS, give me transcripts and video of any possible broadcasts of the program in the United States, and then maybe I'll punish them. Again, this is not a great use of his time. No. Like a good use of your time, Brendan, would be to come up with some cybersecurity regulations that you think would be appropriate.

1:19:04Stop them from getting hacked. To foist on our telecom providers who were recently hacked so badly that we told American citizens to use encrypted messaging apps instead of deleting those regulations and then chasing after one documentary produced by a British company. But because NPR and PBS might use the airwaves, he gets used news distortion, which we talked about last week. A number of former commissioners, chair people, staff of the FCC have said is so problematic that he should delete it. He sent a formal letter to him being like, this power is so problematic you shouldn't have it. No one should have it.

1:19:40Wow. And he replied to that with only a thumbs down emoji. He says, mine. How cool is that? So anyway, so our nation's foremost dummy has decided that he now has the power to censor British speech. Love that for him. He's like, well, I can get on a plane and get there. So it's probably America. Amazing. And then last one. Oh, my God. There's more. There's one more. This is a big Tina Winscoop. Tina is our politics reporter. She's in D.C. She's plugged into administration in big ways. She got a draft of an executive order, which Trump was going to sign, from what we understand, he was going to sign it, and it would have dramatically punished states that had their own AI regulations.

1:20:24So if you will remember, during the big, beautiful bill negotiation, the idea that there should be a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI laws was debated and eventually went away because the states realized they should have some AI laws. And even Republican, like, Congress people know this. Like, Marsha Blackburn, who represents Tennessee, was like, no, we have to have state-level AI laws because Nashville is here. Right. And our state law is called the Elvis Act. This is a real thing. And an actually unknown thing about the Elvis Act is whether in banning Elvis AI deepfakes, whether it accidentally banned Elvis impersonators, but, like, no one is going to ask this question.

1:20:59It's very good. It's all this is very good. Yeah. This is not un-messy. It's all very complicated. Like if you ban the theft of a likeness, did you accidentally ban an Elvis impersonator is like a real question. So, yeah, maybe you do want one law. And Trump has been tweeting nonstop about we can't have 50 laws. It's got to be one thing. And Tina's doing some reporting on where all this came from and who might be behind it. And it's very contentious even in MAGA world where it's just coming from. The reason Brendan is involved is because his theory is that AI and broadband are the same. And so the FCC can regulate AI because it regulates broadband.

1:21:37And so in the same breath that he's saying he doesn't have the power to regulate telecom providers through cybersecurity, he's saying he has so much power over broadband that he can regulate AI. And then on top of that, this EO contemplates if states do pass AI regulations, they'll be punished because Brendan will be empowered to remove their funding for rural broadband, which is just evil. Oh, so that's the stick. That's the stick. If you do pass this law, we will take away your rural – We'll take your broadband funding away. The bead program. The bead program. The ever-contentious bead program that the Biden administration had in the IRA that, you know, we didn't build broadband for people.

1:22:13Now we have to listen to podcasts about abundance. Right. That thing. Brendan will take it away if you do it. Right. Which he hated, but is now happy to have as a weapon. Brendan is a dummy. And so he's going to roll up. The thing I said to Tina when she was telling me about this is Ajit Pai set up Brendan to lose in the most spectacular way possible. Because Pai's entire approach to broadband regulation was to write rules saying the FCC had no authority over broadband. Right. Like none at all. so that when states passed their own net neutrality regulations in California and New York, the FCC went and sued or Verizon sued because it's always Verizon.

1:22:49And the judges were like, no, like it says the FCC has no authority over broadband. You said that already. You can't preempt the state laws because you have said you have no authority. Your not authority can't be the thing that is in control because you, do you see how that, like the judges in these cases are like, do you see what I'm going with here? And Brendan's like, no. If you have no power, you can't claim, you got what I'm saying? So now we're at Brendan saying, I have so much power I can regulate broadband and if you do it, not only will I say that I have the power, I will punish you. I will punish you by doing the one thing that the FCC should actually do.

1:23:26I will take away your broadband funding. This man is such a dummy. As always, Brendan, if you want to just come on the show and tell me where you think the BBC is located, I'm willing to hear you out. It's a big table. We could put like a very large world map on this table in the studio. And then Brendan, I have a lot of questions about where Brendan thinks. It's true. And it is true. You know, it's a tiny island. It used to run most of the world. Maybe you're confused. Maybe you think you're a subject of the crown, Brendan. It would explain your entire facial hair situation. You're welcome on this show.

1:23:56You're welcome on Decoder. I think you're a big dummy and I don't think you can defend yourself. I also think you're a coward. I think you'll never do it. But I know this is in your Google search results. So hello once again, my friend. You're always welcome here on Brendan Carr's Dummy. That's it. That's why. That was good. David's like, it's over. It's just, at some point, you know, it's like the volume of it. You just sort of get numb to it. Last week, Joanna was sitting next to me and we had a lot of comments on YouTube that were like, you know, she likes Rupert Murdoch.

1:24:25I feel confident that Rupert Murdoch nods along to our podcast during that part of the show. I think what I think is the people who run every broadcaster in America think Brendan Carr is dummy, regardless of where they're situated on the ideological side. I would agree with that. Yeah. All right. My first one, we're just going to do two each today because you just talked for like nine hours about Brandon Carter. He did so much stuff. No, it's his fault, not yours. But here we are. But my first one is, I would say, the most important news of the week, which is it's about a domain name. So MSNBC has been going through this big shift as it becomes part of the new company Versant, as it splits off from Comcast.

1:25:05Disclosure, Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media through its subsidiary NBC Universal, Comcast. Whoever at Comcast has made this decision has made a series of very bad ones. The new name of MSNBC as part of this is MSNOW, which is bad. Yeah, it's very bad. It's just bad. By the way, MSNOW stands for something. Wait, what was it? It was News and Our World, right? No, no, no. It's so much worse than that. That's a sentence. You said a sentence. No, no, no, no, no. So no, no, no, no, no. It's my source news.opinion.world. They're not dots or periods. You're supposed to read it as my source news, opinion, world.

1:25:47News, opinion, world. The three food groups, as I call them. And also the branding makes it look like a content forum. I'm very sorry. We know some folks over there. They're great journalists. Everyone's working hard. but like come on man don't have gemini vibe code your website this way yeah agreed but anyway so the the the big shift here has been that uh ms now news opinion world has gone to its own website and that website is ms.now which is bad yeah and i just i just want out loud. Let's just look at it. So TLDs, these top level domains have been an obsession of mine for a really long time.

1:26:35If you rewind back like 15 years, there was this big idea that actually what we need is a million more ways that domains can end, right? What comes after the dot, because we need more domains, more people are going to do more things and having like.com and.biz and.org is not enough. So they had this big program where for I think$185 ,000, you could own a TLD. And that's how we got.store and.pizza and.restaurant and all this stuff. And the idea was like, okay, we're going to reinvent the way that people think about demand names. Do you know how that went? Poorly. And so I've been reporting on this sort of intermittently ever since.

1:27:15And one of the most interesting things that's been happening over the years is that.coms are getting just constantly more expensive. Yeah. Because it's still, the thing somebody said to me at one point was, if you have any name with a.com at the end, you get to just be the name of your company. But if you are, if you have any other thing, the name of your company will always be your entire domain name, which I've always really liked. And it's just a good way of thinking about it, right? Yeah. Like if we get to be The Verge because we are TheVerge.com, but if we are TheVerge.news, we would have to say TheVerge.news over and over and over and over and over again.

1:27:50We should change this. And this is, if you go to msnow.com, which I am doing right now, it's actually, I believe, msnow.com. It is, in fact, a motorized snow vehicle. This is amazing. A retailer. Oh, it's in Korea. Sure. but the dot now domain extension just went out I think like almost exactly a year ago that that became a thing and I just cannot help but wonder if somebody at MSNBC was like we can get a dot now should we get a dot now and I just every bit of this has just been a like branding disaster that has made everything worse but I think this big push to we're going to make this new domain structure that no one actually really understands happen.

1:28:51Just a mess. I love when people try. It's not going to work. I know people have a lot of thoughts with the design of our website. You know, you're allowed to feel how you want about the Virgis web design. We like it. You're allowed to hate it. It's fine. So I'm just saying, I'm pre-accepting your criticism of our website. I look at this website and I'm like, this is designed to confuse senior citizens into buying supplements. That's what this website looks like. Like it looks like a slop website. It does. It really does. And I think it's on purpose. I think the big cable channels kind of know that their audience is older people who consume news on sites that look like this.

1:29:32Sure. High rates from Facebook. And they might as well just look like it too. Just lean in. Just what is our audience reading on Facebook all day long? Man, it's kind of true. And then you kind of scroll down to the sponsored content box and it's as bad as you can possibly expect. It also is two-thirds of the webpage. Two-thirds of the webpage begins with U.S. cardiologist warns aging seniors about blueberries for breakfast. Top doctor urges people over 60 to stop making this huge mistake for their health. And it's like, that's one of the biggest stories on this page, actually. It's a sponsored content about why blueberries will kill old people.

1:30:06Yeah, it's a tough beat. Anyway, MS.NOW. I'm just saying. My source.newsopinionworld. By the way, MSNOW Opinion is a box, which stands for My Source News Opinion World Opinion. It's fine. All right. All right, what's your next one? All right, I'm going to - You get one more. Palette Cleanser. Okay, good. Thank God. Matter 1.5 is out, baby. And it adds camera support. Okay. Yeah. This is great news. This is the thing everyone's wanted. It's confusing and weird, as you would expect. Matter? Confusing and - The major players have actually committed to it. But it has camera support. You know, like you do.

1:30:45It has camera support in an unknowable way that no one does anything with. Matter. And it probably feels like you still need the native app and whatever. But the thing that you get is you would buy some Aquara cameras. And if you don't want the subscription or the video storage or whatever AI features that everyone's going to voice on you, they will just show up natively in whatever matter system you're in whether it's HomeKit or Google Home or whatever yeah that's good I'll take that and then if you do want to pay for you know like my Ring cameras are like there's a dog like it's freaking out constantly you can pay Ring and that'll get you all your recording and your storage and all the background stuff that all sounds right they're also adding support for garage door openers which is a big one yeah for the Verge Cast audience you know opening and closing garage doors Joanna's fist pumping somewhere just a core part of the show they're adding actually garage stores are part of a thing called closures so things that close so like many more types of closures including more kinds of blinds including the weird blinds we have in my house that come down from the top very excited about this the hack we have right now is both of the both sides of the blinds that come down from the top are different blinds oh clever so they but then one is open when it's closed which is very confusing Matter 1.5 to the rescue, everybody.

1:32:05Who knows what will actually be implemented? I think the camera thing is a big deal. Like, I make fun because this is how Matter likes to roll things out. It's like, we have a protocol that no one understands what supports. Do you love it? Yeah. But my general assumption is that most people come to the smart home either through lights or through cameras. Yeah. Cameras are far and away the most popular smart home. Yes. Because it's the thing you put on your doorbell. It's the security camera. It's whatever. And so I think making the gateway drug to the smart home be matter is in itself a huge deal.

1:32:39So I think that's great. I'm very happy about that. Yeah. And if you can push the plus button in the Apple Home app and add any camera to it, huge win for everybody. Totally. And then, yeah, maybe you need the backend service for storage and cloud AI, whatever. We just had Jamie send off from Ring on Decoder. And he's very much like, give me all the camera feeds and I will use AI to stop all crime. And we talked about that for a while. But I did ask him if he was going to bring Matter and PredSports ring, and he super deferred because he's the winner. Right. He doesn't need to. But Amazon is part of the Matter standard.

1:33:09I think Alexa is better off if Matter is well-supported. For sure. I think there's going to be a lot of dancing back there. But I'm excited about this one. Jen wrote a great piece. It rolled out maybe a year from now. You will see cameras. Yeah. But it's something. I'll take it. Yeah. I'm going to lose my annual prediction bet that everybody walks away from Matter, and I'm frankly grateful to lose that one. All right. For my last one, I have a question for you. I've brought you a gadget. This is the Books Palma 2 Pro. I published a review of it this week. Roku app? Yeah, dude. Yeah, this guy is...

1:33:42You are the display guy on this show. I would say my bona fides is somebody who cares deeply about pixel density leave a lot to be desired. I hate this screen's guts. Yeah, this sucks. Okay, this makes me feel better. This is really bad. So the big additions to this new Palma are it has a SIM card slot, which rules. Like I have become totally radicalized this year by absolutely everything you own should have cell connectivity because it just becomes more useful and the list of things you have to worry about goes down, right? Like it's better on a watch. Every laptop should have it. It's better on this.

1:34:16Like I bought a$20 prepaid SIM card, stuck it in, and all I need it to do is just like update my Kindle location every time I open the app. And it does that and it's great. The other big addition is a color screen. It's for the E-Ink stands out there. It's E-Ink Kaleido 3, which if you've ever wondered how an E-Ink stack works, they just take the normal E-Ink stack that makes an E-Ink screen work and they just boop a color filter on top of it. Sure, yeah. And so what that does is it cuts the pixel density in about half from 300 pixels per inch to 150. And it makes everything blurrier and darker and worse.

1:34:59And Amazon, when it came out with all of the new Kindles and stuff, the Kindle Colorsoft, made a bunch of changes to that whole stack. They spent like an hour telling me about all the things they did at the display stack to make Kaleido work better. And I was like, okay, whatever. Congratulations on all your accomplishments. And then I used this for two seconds and it's like, oh, thank God Amazon did all that. This sucks. I don't know if people have been seeing my face as you've been talking. I'm just making faces. I hate the screen. It's really bad. It has a bluish tint. Yeah. And this camera is garb.

1:35:29Yeah, I mean, the camera's supposed to be bad. It's fine. Even they call the camera a document scanner, which I find very funny. But it's really like this device. Yeah, I don't like reading. I don't like reading. Take it away from me. This device, it's just a screen. The whole thing it is is a screen. Yeah, they're missing what made it great, which is it was a black and white phone-sized e-reader that could run on the app. I just needed this validation from you because I published this review, and I've gotten some feedback from people who were like, it's fine, you're a jerk. And whenever you say display is bad, someone's like, you see in a pretentious way.

1:36:02And it's like, no, I just, I have eyes. I can see when screens are bad. I have looked at a lot of screens and that one sucks real bad. Yeah. I've been, I have with me on this trip, I have the Palma 1, the Palma 2 and the Palma 2 Pro. So I've just been laying them out on tables in front of people being like, which one do you like best? And everybody picks the Palma 2. Oh, because it has a slightly better E-ing screen. Right. Yeah, that's the one. yeah clearly coloring is still a long way to go yeah it does there's like there's something about color that will be useful for people who read certain kinds of things on a device far in the future from now the Kindle Colorsoft is good you gave this a 5 I gave it a 5 too high yeah it's$400 for a screen that did like hurts you to look at 3 2026 we're rebooting the scores and we're gonna do world of no 7s that's kind of fun I'm into that I just announced this the reviews team doesn't know I had this idea five seconds ago.

1:36:53Now it's real, but yeah, that's what we're doing. We're all in a sudden. That's what we do here on the first cast. All right, before we have any more terrible ideas, we should get out of here. Yeah. We just finished, by the way, just before we were in here, you and I sat with a very special guest and made a whole version history episode about the iPhone 4 that I'm tremendously excited for people to see and hear. It was very fun. The last episode of season one of version history is about Vine. It's coming out this weekend. we're going to be back on Tuesday we have a really fun episode it's about how to be a running crazy person and also how to make your TV not bad feels like a useful thing to do over the holidays you and I will not be here next Friday we're going to be off for Thanksgiving we'll be back after that we're going to start doing some really fun like year end stuff and a bunch of like looking ahead to 2026 stuff we got a lot of fun stuff coming up but for now the Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network shows produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

1:37:50We are out of here. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.