Apple's plot to crush OpenAI

13:31Nilay Patel:When there's like a string of texts it can go look for, or it's indexed all this stuff in the right way. And then there's, I, I think Apple is going to run into this much more than Google does. A bunch of Google AI technology doing weird stuff is par for the course. Apple shipping this Siri to millions upon millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, and it being rough around the edges is a danger zone. And I think that's probably why they waited so long. Yeah. But I'm very curious to see how that broad response is because enough of it is different. And you mentioned, you know, a generation ago with Alexa, people very quickly figured out what it was good at and what it wasn't good at and they stopped trying to do anything else right and i have no idea where that boundary is for this siri once you know hundreds of millions of people have it yeah it's it's going

14:17David Pierce:to be really interesting and especially given all of the work that's happening with app intents and stuff like i think more than usual uh the fate of siri ai is going to actually be about developers because if instagram can figure out how to plug into siri in a way that is predictable and useful in that way, that changes things. I don't know that I have any faith.

14:38Nilay Patel:Instagram will never do that. Probably not. Instagram doesn't have an iPad app.

14:43David Pierce:Yeah, that's okay. Fair point. But if Uber can figure out how to do it in a way that's practical and useful, such that I can say, you know, hey Siri, get me an Uber and it works semi-reliably, like you can start to turn those things on for people in a way that becomes habit forming really fast. So I'm actually, I'm still optimistic about what Siri AI could be, but it is. I have been frustrated in the ways that it has actually backtracked in some small ways.

15:07Nilay Patel:Yeah. Again, David Amell's piece is great. The thing that jumped out to me, I actually saw David in the office who talked about it for a minute. App developers on iOS are more excited about this than you would expect because small app developers know that people never open their apps. Oh, that's interesting. So their hope is that if by integrating with Siri AI, it will surface their apps more often, they will get more usage and something good will happen.

15:28David Pierce:That's a really interesting point. That's a good theory. I hope that pans out. A lot of optimism in the ecosystem there. Indeed. You know where there's not optimism? How's that for a segue? In the Apple and OpenAI legal teams these days, we should talk about this lawsuit, right? It's a week old. I still feel like we need to talk about it because I'm still wrapping my head around it. Basically, the short version of this lawsuit is Apple sued OpenAI for allegedly basically creating an elaborate system by which Apple employees would quit their job and take material confidential information to OpenAI.

16:05David Pierce:There are a couple of specific people named in the suit. There are a couple of OpenAI adjacent companies like IO, Johnny Ives Hardware Startup, named in the suit. But the idea is essentially there are a bunch of people and a bunch of ways in which hundreds of Apple employees stole information from Apple and took it to OpenAI. I feel like the caveat here is this is the first filing in a lawsuit. There will be presumably much time and much discovery over the next period of time. But you and I have both read this lawsuit. What do you make of what Apple is alleging here?

16:38Nilay Patel:This is where I offer you the big sigh. And we talk about trade secret law. The first thing that is absolutely important to say, every single one of these big tech companies has realized that the complaint in the lawsuit is a thing to be written for the general public. The audience for this complaint is not the judge. It's not the jury. It's you and me and everybody listening and everybody who might read it and everybody who might write a blog post or do a dramatic reenactment on TikTok. they have all figured out this first step, that the complaint is a narrative and they all need to sell a narrative.

17:14Nilay Patel:The Department of Justice and the Biden administration figured out their antitrust complaint against Apple needed to be a narrative. And we have talked to those officials about that specific thing in that specific way because everybody understands that the technical requirements of the law are irrelevant to the vibes around lawsuits. It's just the way it goes. So - Apple wrote this to be read. It is worth reading. It's a fun read. It actually is. It's a heist movie. Yeah. They lay out how a heist was taking place, in specific with a bunch of characters. Trang Tan, I think, is the main character.

17:51Nilay Patel:Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has some reporting. It says, even at Apple, he was known for playing fast and loose, and the quote is, flying too close to the sun.

17:57David Pierce:Interesting.

17:58Nilay Patel:Which is pretty good. There's other folks in there. There's a guy who, like, literally connected to the servers when he had left Apple and was downloading all this stuff. And then the problem is the story can be whatever the story is. And it is certain that OpenAI will craft a compelling narrative in return when they file their reply. And it'll look something like, Apple is late to AI. And to be late and catch up, they're trying to stop us, the winners. Like, you know what they're going to say, and they're going to write it all out. So we have to wait for that. And then in the middle of that is the actual technical requirements of the law.

18:32Nilay Patel:And I'll just make another OpenAI comparison. We had Musk versus Altman in that stretch for, what, nine, 10 months from the first complaints being filed to a jury trial. And then what happened? The statute of limitations had most of the case thrown out.

18:47David Pierce:Right, true.

18:47Nilay Patel:Right? Like, the technical requirements of the law is actually what won that case for opening the eye in, like, big, meaningful ways. There's other parts of it where they won on the substance, but it was the statute of limitations got most of the case thrown out. Okay, like, this is, we just have to put ourselves in this framework. Sure. The thing that is just like particularly funny to me about this is Apple established the boundaries of copyright law in tech against Microsoft in the 90s and 2000s with like the famous look and feel lawsuit where they tried to copyright the way macOS looked and they sued Microsoft for having Windows copy it.

19:21Nilay Patel:They sort of lost and they sort of won, but they mostly lost, right? Like Windows looks like the Mac. Sure does, yeah. That's the way it goes. And when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, Microsoft paid a bunch of money to Apple and they tossed out all these claims. They said, we're settling this and moving on because this is dumb. OK, well, a bunch of years later, Samsung made a phone that looked an awful lot like the iPhones. And Apple filed a bunch of patent lawsuits against Samsung, against Motorola. Everyone except Google, by the way. They did not want to be in a fight with Google over this stuff.

19:56Nilay Patel:They filed the lawsuits against the OEMs, and they fought those to the death. And at one point, they were kind of losing. And Tim Cook was at a code conference, and I literally asked him, like, from the audience, there's video of me asking him, why are you doing this? And he said, I think the patent licensing schemes for 3G standards are a little out of whack, and this is how we're going to fix them. And I'm like, you're really doing this to fix patent licensing schemes? And he was like, sure. And it was just very obviously that like, no, he was just mad. And that was cover to fight the fights.

20:32Nilay Patel:And they fought them to a bitter end, right? The patent on slide to unlock, again, we made an entire video of this. You can watch me being a baby at MWC. I walked around to every booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and did slide to unlock on every single Android phone and said, this is how they're getting around the slide to unlock patent. And there was technical requirements there. and there are technical clients now, but the ecosystem responded, Samsung paid, what, a billion dollars and essentially got away with it. And if you're Samsung paying a billion dollars to make the Galaxy line of smartphones, it's totally worth it.

21:08Nilay Patel:Correct. Totally worth it. So Apple filed this massive intellectual property lawsuit. They upset the ecosystem for however long they upset the ecosystem. And the end result was there are Android phones. I don't know if you've looked around. There's quite a lot of them. Yeah, that turned out okay. So, okay. So in the 90s, we had a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft based on copyright. I'll point out Windows and Microsoft continue to exist. In the 2000s, 2010s, we had a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Samsung based on patent. Seems worth noting that Samsung and Android continue to exist.

21:44Nilay Patel:Yeah, sure. And here we are in the mid-2020s. We have a massive intellectual property lawsuit against OpenAI based in TradeSecret now, the third one. It seems a safe bet that AI will continue to exist. I would be 50-50 on whether OpenAI continues to exist.

21:59David Pierce:That was going to be my next question. I think it's obvious this is not existentially terrifying for the AI business. Boy, does it feel like of all of the companies to not want to be at war with at this moment. I mean, frankly, OpenAI is kind of at war with everybody else in some way already. All the time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is OpenAI is permanently making$100 billion deals and also in giant fights with everybody all the time.

22:27Nilay Patel:OpenAI keeps, there's a war with its own executives. They keep leaving.

22:30David Pierce:Yeah. But this is just, this is the last thing OpenAI needs. And I will say, I think one thing that is different about what you just described is Apple has picked a lot of fights about products. This is fundamental, like so far, unless OpenAI is very close to shipping a thing that looks an awful lot like the iPhone, this is not about products.

22:50Nilay Patel:It's about what manufacturing techniques and what Apple has in the pipeline. Sure. It's about products to come. It's about how to make products.

22:59David Pierce:But I just mean, even if you paint all of this for Apple in the most sort of negative light, and you're like, okay, this company feels threatened, and they throw a bunch of their lawyers at their threats to try and make them go away in one way or another. This doesn't feel exactly like that to me. I don't get the sense that Apple is threatened by open AI, and there's certainly no earth-shatteringly fabulous AI device that is sitting there threatening Apple at this moment. Unless, again, there's something currently being manufactured that is going to blow everybody's minds and we just don't know about it yet.

23:30Nilay Patel:Well, I think that's the whole game here, right? Apple knows that AI might be an input mechanism that creates a new class of products. Certainly, Johnny Ive went to go work with OpenAI to create a new class of products based on this new input mechanism. Johnny I loves the new input mechanism. He loves the click wheel. He really does. Right. He loves the multi-touch, the scroll wheel on the Apple Watch, as we all know, revolutionized the entire world. Everybody loves spinning in a circle on the Apple TV remote. I mean, the culture really rotated around that one. But Johnny I, like, loves this. So if you're Apple, you're like, okay, he's hired all of our designers.

24:06Nilay Patel:He's hired a bunch of our best manufacturing people. It's like 400, 500 people that they've taken over there. They know what's in our pipeline, and they know our suppliers. They know how we do things. And now they're trying to steal our stuff. We have evidence at least one of them is trying to steal our stuff, right? We have evidence at least one of them is trying to steal our stuff. Okay, what are we going to do about that? And you can't file a copyright lawsuit because we don't know what they've taken. It might not be code, and they certainly haven't redeployed the code. It isn't a patent because there are no products yet, so there's no patent infringement.

24:36Nilay Patel:To infringe a patent, you have to make user sell something. So we haven't done anything yet. There's no patent infringement. You're left with trade secrets. And, you know, trade secrets are pretty fuzzy. The definition of a trade secret is like, I'm real fuzzy on this. Someone check me with AI. But the trade secret, as far as I remember, is it has to be something with economic value because your competitors don't have it. It can't be known. It can't be like public information. And then the really fuzzy one, and I'm going to end up having to do so much trade secret. This is where the big sigh came from.

25:10Nilay Patel:I'm going to do so much trade secret research. You have to take reasonable measures to keep it a secret.

25:16David Pierce:This is all over the lawsuit, by the way. Like those three things are all over the lawsuit.

25:20Nilay Patel:Those are the three elements of a trade secret.

25:22David Pierce:Yeah. A huge amount of this complaint against OpenAI is Apple explaining all of the things it does to try to protect it.

25:28Nilay Patel:Because it's written for the general public, right? So it has to explain the technical foundation of the law so it can say, and OpenAI went around this stuff. Right. And, again, Apple pushed copyright law to the limit with Microsoft. It pushed patent law to the limit with Samsung. We're about to be in the middle of Apple pushing trade secret law to the limit. If you worked at Apple and you know how they make the iPhone screen and then you get another job, you can probably help people make an iPhone screen. And if you – particularly if you work not for Apple but you work for Foxconn in China, there might be some supplier agreement.

26:07Nilay Patel:But I don't know if you've looked around. It turns out Foxconn makes things that look like the iPhone screen for lots of other people now. Because that is the entire Chinese manufacturing ecosystem and supply chain. And there's books about it. Right? Apple in China is, what, Patrick McGee? There's literally books about it. You can go read it. And you're like, this is just going to happen to Apple, whether they sue OpenAI or not. So, again, the lawsuit is great to read. I just look at Apple being like, they're going to bring everything to bear to push the cutting edge of trade secret law in their direction.

26:40Nilay Patel:And other big companies that made a lot of money were able to essentially fight them to a draw. OpenAI is not a big company. It issues a new memo about needing to focus and calling a code red every six weeks on the dot when another executive leaves.

26:55David Pierce:Yes.

26:56Nilay Patel:And its revenue model is totally uncertain. And up until now, the revenue model has been, we're going to compete with Google and search in the consumer market. And we're going to put out a bunch of new devices to compete with Apple by hiring Johnny Ive, the guy who made Apple devices what they are, to compete with Apple in the consumer space. And Apple's like, what if we killed you?

27:14David Pierce:So you really think it's that simple? This is Apple essentially trying to kill open AI in the cradle?

27:20Nilay Patel:I think, well, I think Apple hates anything being stolen. I think the things aren't being stolen by Foxconn or an ecosystem of Chinese companies. They're being stolen by an American company that poached its most well-known design executive who then poached a bunch of other stuff.

27:34David Pierce:And it is like deep in the DNA of that company to have an emotional response to that. Like over and over, if you take some information out of Apple Park, that is maybe the thing that is most likely to quickly bring the full bear of that company down upon you.

27:50Nilay Patel:Yeah. I mean, they are absolutely nuts about security. I left my jacket at Apple Park at WWC in one part of the thing, and I wanted to just walk from where I was back to the seat I was in. And they're like, we're going to have to send four people with you. And I was like, it's a path. Like, I can just see the path. And I just left the jacket there. I was like, this is too much production for me to find a$15 denim jacket I bought 10 years ago. And I was like, I just don't want to do this. But that's where Apple is. Just to put it in that framework, the merits of the case are not in this complaint.

28:22Nilay Patel:The merits of the case won't be in OpenAI's reply. It'll be in this long process we're about to go through.

28:27David Pierce:There's also a lot of reaction so far that has said this in trade secrets term is a relatively benign set of trade secrets accusations.

28:34Nilay Patel:But is Apple going to turn the heat up all the way and get themselves in front of a jury and be like, we're Apple, the company you love? Here's OpenAI, a company in the AI industry which all of you hate and which is foundationally built on unauthorized taking of information. and Apple's the company where artists love to show off how they use Macs to make the songs you've always loved the most. Hey, did you know this music video was shot entirely on iPhone? Look, you know what's going to happen here. Apple's going to bring the full weight of its cultural capital to bear on OpenAI as a proxy for how much stuff the AI industry has taken from people without compensation or permission.

29:13Nilay Patel:And whether or not it's a benign set of trade secrets or whether it's the full catalog of YouTube music on behalf of Suno, OpenAI is going to stand for all of it in this lawsuit. Interesting.

29:24David Pierce:So would you handicap this as likely to go to ground in a real way? Like, is this the kind of thing somebody writes a check and it all goes away? Or is Apple gunning for we want to do this in public?

29:35Nilay Patel:If OpenAI had a lick of sense, it would write a check and make this go away.

29:39David Pierce:I agree with that.

29:40Nilay Patel:But does Apple want a check? Does Apple need a check? Does Apple trust OpenAI to keep the promises it's making as it hands over said check? No. And I think OpenAI does not want to write that. They want to prove they did nothing wrong because probably they also have the same view of this, which is this is just the normal course of business.

30:01David Pierce:Yeah.

30:02Nilay Patel:Right? We hired a bunch of people and said, what are you working on? What do you know? Do you know how to make an AI gadget? Because we don't, right? And they're going to want to fight this to the end.

30:11David Pierce:I mean, to be fair, do you know how to make an AI gadget bring us parts from the office to your job interview? Not a normal course of doing business, if that is, in fact, what happened.

30:21Nilay Patel:Look, I've been running a small AI hardware startup on the side. I'm not saying I didn't try it. Listen, it's good getting if you can get away with it, you know what I mean? Rather, unfortunately, I've only talked to people who used to work at Humane. So a bit of a problem. But yeah, they're going to take this one. This is years. And it's years and then years of appeal. And whether OpenAI is stable enough or has the finances enough to just absorb it the way that Samsung could just absorb it and then pay a billion dollars and be like, that was totally worth it. Wide open question.

30:53David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. This one, I suspect we will hear a lot more. We have not, as you said, meaningfully heard a response from OpenAI. We got a comment from OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri last week who said, quote, we have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere, which is just the least you can possibly say in a statement to The Verge about this particular issue.

31:16Nilay Patel:Yeah, especially when the claims and the complaint are like, dude downloaded all the presentations about how to make circuit boards. Right. And it's like, well, maybe you did have an interest. You might have some interest. Yeah. Yeah.

31:30David Pierce:We're going to come back to this a lot. But for now, let's move on because we should talk about gadgets. and there's actually an open AI gadget worth talking about. So let's get to that. But first, let's take a break.

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32:53Nilay Patel:This is advertiser content from IBM. Cold take. When it comes to quantum computing, If you need a million qubits to calculate anything, it sounds like you need a quantum computer the size of a football field. So why are we even trying?

33:12David Pierce:My name is Olivia Lanes. I am the global lead for content and education at IBM Quantum. So you will not need a quantum computer the size of a football field. The quantum chip is really, you know, the size of a stamp. So the chip itself is never going to be the size of a football field.

33:30Nilay Patel:What could be a very large footprint is all of the infrastructure that goes around cooling it, housing the chip, and controlling it.

33:40David Pierce:IBM has really been, I think, the biggest pioneer in terms of making this technology accessible.

33:46Nilay Patel:IBM has deployed, at this point, over 90 quantum computers worldwide. So if we talk about scaling, I will just say we have a plan. And we have what it takes, engineering and science-wise, to make these computers work and to build them up to the scale that we know they will be useful.

34:09David Pierce:If you would like to learn more, you can do so at IBM.com slash quantum. It all started with Call Me Maybe. Over 10 years ago, we created Switched on Pop to Listen Closer, uncovering the song craft behind even the glossiest of pop hits. Since then, we've released almost 500 episodes. We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Call Me Maybe herself, Carly Rae Jepsen. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And on July 14th, Switched on Pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix.

34:48David Pierce:Now you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts, but now you'll be able to watch us each week, breaking down the sounds of the moment, digging into musical minutia with your favorite artists and offering questionable dad jokes as always. We're kicking off our Netflix debut with a four part series on the art of the song with help from artists, producers and songwriters like Aaron Dessner, Audrey Hobart, Trevor Horn, Cypress Hill and Taylor Parks. Stream Switched on Pop on Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday starting on July 14th. All right, we're back. We have just a slew of gadget leaks to talk about.

35:26David Pierce:But let's start with this OpenAI gadget, right? So this idea of OpenAI's big hardware play has been looming for a while. They released a device this week for Codex that everybody's like, this is the first OpenAI. It's not. This is like a teeny tiny brand integration with a company called WorkLauder that makes keyboards. I don't want to talk about that. But there was reporting from Bloomberg that the thing coming out first is going to be a no screen, but sensor and camera having smart speaker. That this is going to be OpenAI's big first device, a chat GPT thing for presumably your home, but it'll also have a rechargeable battery, smart home controls.

36:05David Pierce:This thing seems so incredibly unfocused to me. It's like Alexa, but you can pick it up and carry it around and it has a camera on it, but no screen. I just want everyone to stop and imagine a team at OpenAI building a full-featured smart home platform.

36:23Nilay Patel:Listen, Matter has solved all of this for us.

36:25David Pierce:It's no problem.

36:27Nilay Patel:I just, what, just like, what are you doing, man? Google hasn't built a full-featured home platform. They've been trying for years. I don't know if anyone has ever looked at the Google Home app. Sure, I don't even, that thing doesn't even look vibe-coded. A computer would have more coherent and crisp ideas about how to organize that app than whatever it is that Google ships in Google Home. It's really true. Fine. I think based on the constraints of the market, this is the only piece of hardware opening I could ship. Why do you say that? We just run down the meta glasses problem that we run down every week.

37:07Nilay Patel:If you want to have an AI device that is consistently doing things for you that isn't a phone, and I think for a lot of reasons OpenAI cannot make a phone. I think it's going to. It's going to have to.

37:18David Pierce:I just want to be on record. I think it will make a thing that is, they may not call it a phone, but it will very obviously be a phone.

37:24Nilay Patel:A lot of people are about to make phones to that Instagram. Yes. I'll put, yeah, that's where my stake is. Totally with you. A lot of people are going to back their way into making phones to that Instagram and then realize that they've shipped Windows Phone. and then we're all going to see how long it takes for them to realize they shipped Windows Phone. Yes. But if you don't want to ship a phone, you're like another form factor. You're competing with the fact that people have a phone. You have to be smaller than a phone, which means you need less battery, but you still need connectivity, which means you still need a data plan, which means you still need to run that battery down.

37:54Nilay Patel:You still need to decide what happens locally or if your device is useless without a connection of any kind, which means you need to put processing and RAM and whatever. Your costs have already begun to skyrocket and now you're OnePlus and you've gone out of business in the United States. It's just anything that moves is hard for that reason, especially if you want to put cameras and sensors and all that other stuff on. Totally. So, of course, we're going to take it home, plug it into the wall, absolutely reduce the challenges of mobility, let whatever processor run as hot as it might need to run so it can do whatever it needs to do locally, and have a fixed connection over your Wi-Fi to open AI servers, which at least now is solved.

38:30Nilay Patel:Yeah. Right? The connectivity issue is solved. If your Wi-Fi goes down, everyone knows nothing works, right? But I'm on a plane. My device is useless. Unacceptable. All right, now we've made an Alexa, right? We've made an Alexa device or HomePod or whatever, and then you've got to build the ecosystem around it that does all the other stuff around it, including the smart home ecosystem, because of course you want to turn off the lights and play music, which are the number one and number two things people do on these devices. Oh, set a timer. And unclear if ChatGPT can reliably count to 100, let alone set a timer that operates consistently.

39:01So here we go.

39:04Nilay Patel:Like, this is the only solution. And whether or not the chat GPT platform is being built to work in this environment and these constraints and solve these problems, or whether they are totally focused on writing code and revamping the entire Mac app to be focused on writing code and whatever healthcare initiative they're doing. This is a lot of spaghetti to throw at the wall. Yes. And there's no chance that any open AI engineer has been tasked with build a full-featured smart home platform that can compete with Apple Home, Google Home, Alexa, and Home Assistant, which will be every nerd's fallback for this and is happy about it.

39:49Right?

39:50Nilay Patel:And Matt, if you're an open AI engineer and you're like, I work at the hottest startup on Earth, and they're like, make the lights turn on and off. Go deal with the matter implementation. Like, I quit. Like, I'm going to go work in Anthropically like everybody else.

40:01David Pierce:I think this existing next to what they've been doing to the ChatGPT app is super fascinating to me because the new ChatGPT app, the so-called super app, is trash. Everybody hates it. It's poorly designed. It doesn't run well. It took a native app and made it a non-native app. Like, it sucks. It is universally disliked as an attempt to put all of these things together. Yet again, OpenAI demonstrating it has lots of ability to make very good frontier models and absolutely no product sense. Like this company just cannot figure out how to put this technology in front of people in a way that they like.

40:39David Pierce:The only thing it has done is copy Claude a couple of times. Claude code worked and they said, oh, we'll do codex. And that worked. Like there's just not a lot of evidence that this company knows how to figure out these new kinds of things that you're talking about. But the thing that is so interesting about that app is it kind of deprecates chat. It is very codex-centric, the new ChatGPT app. And the idea that they're leaning into, okay, we think our technology is for tools, right? This is not a thing to hang out with. We're getting past the it's novel to talk to a chatbot phase and that just burns money anyway.

41:17David Pierce:Let's give enterprises enterprise tools. that is clearly the business for this company. That's the business for all of these companies, at least for now and possibly forever. So then to put that next to this, the only thing I can think of is like, we talk a lot about New York versus California, right? I think if you are in or near the open AI offices, it might be very possible to convince yourself that a lot of people do just want to sit and talk to their agents all day. That like, this is a thing that is running rampant around startups all over Silicon Valley. The idea of that being something mainstream enough to be a really sort of meaningful hardware play seems dead wrong to me.

41:59Nilay Patel:Yeah, it's just, it's the same as Siri. It's brittle. Yeah. So if your whole idea is like a beautiful piece of hardware and it will have great far-field microphones and whatever we're going to do with the battery, make it portable around your house. And then the core technology in the backend is chat GPT is there. well, everyone already knows how that thing is going to work. Like, I don't have to describe it to you. It's going to be broken in very specific ways. And then when you're like, why'd you do that? It's like, oh my God, you're so right. You know, like... That's a great point. Yeah. Right.

42:33Nilay Patel:Like, you can just put your phone on the table and have this experience today. Yes. We have these things.

42:40David Pierce:Like, everybody who's like, oh, it's an Alexa. We have Alexas. People have this experience. We have a decade of this experience. and people play music and they set timers. And I think what even Google and Amazon have run into over the last 12 months is the idea that we're going to plug an LLM into it and suddenly unlock vast new kinds of consumer behavior is not happening. It's just not happening. It's actually slightly worse at turning on the lights. It can answer more complicated questions. That's great. So as a sort of simple information retrieval tool, great, fine. ChatGPT is not going to win that particular game.

43:18David Pierce:It's also less sophisticated in its hardware than Google because Google's been at this a longer time. So, like, what race is there to win unless you assume there is this giant group of people out there who desperately want an easier way to talk to ChatGPT all day? And I just don't think that exists.

43:37Nilay Patel:Well, they do, but they think it's their girlfriend. Kevin Roos, come on down. I'm sorry, buddy. We are friends. He knows I tell this joke. I mean, maybe everyone's going to think we're being overly cynical. I'm confident we'll get those notes from people who think we're being overly cynical. That cynicism is probably born of the fact that we started The Verge at the dawn of the smartphone revolution. And the questions about this new class of devices are exactly the same questions about new smartphone platforms and new operating systems, but maybe with slightly different applications. So when the Juju tablet came out, remember the Juju tablet?

44:18Nilay Patel:Of course. The Crunchpad. No one remembers this stuff. It ran a thing called Fusion OS and it was going to be a revolution. And boy, did that cause a lot of problems for us as gadget reviewers, including one threatened lawsuit. And we would say, are you going to build an email client? Is your email client going to be as good as Gmail? right because i'm not going to switch away from gmail as my email provider right and google made native apps for the other phones is your email client going to be as good as google's native client because they're not going to ship a client for your dumb idea and then these products would die and you would run into are you going to build an email client it suddenly becomes this like defining question for a new generation of smartphones okay are you gonna are you gonna have Instagram, hate it or love it, not having Instagram killed Windows Phone.

45:11Nilay Patel:People would get those phones and they would say, there's this app I want. And it wouldn't be there. And Microsoft spent a lot of money on app developers. They tried to bribe what at the time was known as Facebook into making an Instagram client. They just didn't do it. They had no interest in this. And then nobody wanted a Windows Phone. Palm Pre, like down the line, right? Like all these things killed new smartphone platforms over and over and over again because they could not meet the table stakes. I'm telling you for this class of devices, can you turn the lights on in the kitchen is going to be table stakes.

45:47Nilay Patel:Do you have a Spotify app? Do you have a Spotify integration that reliably works? Yeah. And if I don't have Spotify, do you have Apple Music? And if I don't have Apple Music, do you have YouTube Music? And if I am an insane person, do you have Tidal? Are you playing Tidal losslessly? I have a Sonos system. Can you play Tidal over my Sonos system? Because you're an all-powerful AGI robot, and all these devices are on my network, and you have my credentials, and I expect you to just do it. And the answer in every case is going to be no one at OpenAI wants to work on these problems. Oh, I don't think that's fair.

46:18Nilay Patel:I don't think anybody wants to work on these problems. I think they want to work on AGI. I think they want to work on healthcare. Sure.

46:26David Pierce:But it is also true that some of those things already exist. MCPs solve some of those problems. Some of ChatGPT's own, you know, integration solve that problem. Like, will your ChatGPT smart speaker be able to connect to Spotify? I'm so confident the answer to that will be yes. Will it do a good job?

46:44Nilay Patel:I'm not confident Google Home can connect to Spotify.

46:46David Pierce:So this is what I was going to say is if you connect to Spotify, is Spotify going to want that to be ChatGPT talking to the Spotify database? Or is it going to be ChatGPT talking to the Spotify chatbot that talks to the Spotify? Like, is this product going to work well?

47:00Nilay Patel:And is any of that going to generate enough revenue to be worthwhile to open a company that is lighting money on fire every single day and has no plans to stop? Right.

47:11David Pierce:I mean, this is my thing is I think on an ongoing basis, chat GPT technology continues to get better. Like GPT Live, the new voice model, which will presumably be behind this, is quite good. It takes turns more naturally. It's more natural to talk to. It doesn't sort of interrupt you and let you interrupt it in weird ways. Like it feels better to talk to. I think the idea that that is enough just falls on its face as soon as you put this device in my house for all the reasons that you're talking about, because it needs to do things. It's like I feel like all I talk about with AI is how many things like give great demo and are bad products.

47:50David Pierce:And this is the kind of thing that, yes, there are people who just enjoy talking to ChatGPT as an end unto itself. I am I am on record as thinking that is bad for everyone and the world and society. But I understand that those people exist and those people will probably get great utility out of having a thing they can just sort of yammer away to as they walk around the living room. Fine. That is tiny next to the number of people who need this thing to do something. And they will need it to, in fact, to do lots of things and they will expect it to do lots of things. And I just I'm with you in the sense that I have a hard time seeing how that happens.

48:25Nilay Patel:And consumers have no economic incentive to overcome failure. Right. Regular people in their homes, they ask Alexa to do something, they can't do it, they will never ask it again. They will give up. And they did. Like, we have the data. We have the experience. They just gave up on Alexa in meaningful ways outside of timers and music. Okay. In the enterprise context, you keep saying AI is business software. In the enterprise context, there's tons of incentive to overcome failure. We were watching a TikTok clip today. Like, ad agencies are like, we're going to automate all of our meta ad spend with clawed MCP servers.

49:06Nilay Patel:And, like, maybe that didn't work for a while. It certainly works now. And that is true. Like, the internet is automated in massive ways with AI. Businesses are getting automated because the incentive to overcome the failure and the rocky starts and they keep plugging at it, everyone can see the efficiency game. Everyone can see the business results. There's a lot of incentive to overcome the failure. A regular person is like, I spent how much money on this weird OpenAI HomePod and it doesn't work? I'm just never going to use it again. Right? And like, they've got to, this is the Johnny I problem.

49:41Nilay Patel:It's got to do exactly what it says on the tin and a little bit more in a way that's delightful and AI is maybe not, never going to be predictable enough to actually pull that off.

49:50David Pierce:And the physical limitations of something like a smart speaker makes that hard. Like genuine kudos to everyone involved if they can figure out how to add that hardware turn that makes it delightful in the way that you're talking about.

50:03Nilay Patel:Oh, it's supposed to have some mechanical thing that like smiles at you. This is the other part of the German report.

50:08David Pierce:That ain't it, buddy. I gotta tell you, that ain't it.

50:10Nilay Patel:It has some mechanical, it's unclear what it is, but there's some part of it that moves in response to you to like make it have emotions?

50:17David Pierce:No, thank you. ChatGPT doesn't have emotions. Never, ever, ever, ever.

50:24Nilay Patel:A lot of people disagree with you on that one, my friend.

50:27David Pierce:They're wrong.

50:28Nilay Patel:Let's move on. Claude loves me. What are you talking about? All right, no one else does, but Claude does. It thinks all of my ideas are great. And I've been, you know, you're right to call that out.

50:43David Pierce:I've been looking at this the wrong way. let's start from, let's start from the basics. Honestly, here's what I recommend. All right, let's move on. That's enough AI gadgets for one day.

50:53Nilay Patel:Wait, can I say one more thing? I had Claude write an email to my solar panel installer so I had the thing that went wrong and I read it and I was like, they will come to my house and tear the solar panels down before they address what happens in this email. Yep, that sounds great.

51:10David Pierce:Yeah, that's, sometime we should talk about the AI tools that write email drafts and the deeply terrifying things they have taught me about myself. But that's for another day. Two more gadget things we should talk about. One very quick. Have you looked at the pixel colors? The pixels, as they always do, have leaked to absolute death. Of course. There's a bunch of new pixel phone colors in particular. You, I feel like, have never really been a phone color guy.

51:35Nilay Patel:No, I've got an orange iPhone. It's just in a gray case. Well, yeah.

51:39David Pierce:I feel like in general, you're like...

51:40Nilay Patel:This was the only one worth buying this year. Oh, 100%.

51:42David Pierce:I mean, I bought the green one, which is also terrific. But the orange on the Pro was fabulous. But I just want you to look at these pixel colors and tell me if they do anything for you.

51:52Nilay Patel:Oh, I like this pink a lot.

51:53David Pierce:Yeah, Google's really going for it this year. There's a pink. There are a couple of shades of green. It's hibiscus. It's pink. There's a green. There's a black. There's a light blue or like a greenish blue that's called fog that I quite like.

52:08Nilay Patel:I can't say. You should say all these names. No. I'm sorry. There's olive, there's fog, frost, canyon, which is also known as dune. No. Pistachio.

52:20David Pierce:I wrote a story recently about the Google Home speaker, and I got a request from a comms person at Google, who in this particular case I won't name, who asked me to change the reference where I called it red to its official name, which is berry. And I said, no, thank you. I will not do that because it's red. It's not berry is not a color. Red is a color. berries do come in a variety of colors yeah it sure do uh but stupid names aside these colors look great they do look great like i'm into this i think a pink phone genuinely might really happen

52:53Nilay Patel:i'm i'm psyched about this is finally the thing that will make you switch to a pixel 11 this gives was it the nexus 5 that came in that rad red color yeah it's like orangey red we had so many arguments in the office about whether it was orange or red. And if I remember correctly, Josh Sapolsky was very much it's red and I was very much it's orange.

53:13David Pierce:I think I would, if memory serves, I would be on team red on that one.

53:17Nilay Patel:Yeah.

53:17David Pierce:But either way, that phone was hot and this one kind of looks like it has the same thing going for it. It's got some vibe. I like it. But the other actual news we should talk about on this front is the OnePlus news from this week. OnePlus essentially announced that it is done attempting to sell phones in the U.S. and Europe. And actually, there's been some reporting that this is just the beginning, that OnePlus is in the process of pulling out of everywhere except for China. We've been covering this company for the entirety of its existence. And there was a time at which OnePlus seemed like it had a shot to be a really powerful upstart brand in the phone market.

53:53David Pierce:And it just never quite happened. What do you make of this complete sort of retreat from OnePlus right now?

54:00Nilay Patel:Well, Juan, I think you have been calling out the end of cheap devices because of Ramageddon for months now.

54:06David Pierce:True, yeah.

54:06Nilay Patel:And it is hard to see how this is anything but one culmination of Ramageddon. Right. OnePlus could not compete at the high end. It was not making flagship devices. It was part of like a larger company that makes a bunch of phones.

54:22David Pierce:It's part of Oppo and it's like has always sort of pretended that it's not part of Oppo.

54:27Nilay Patel:Yeah.

54:27David Pierce:But it's very much part of Oppo. Yeah.

54:29Nilay Patel:Right. But that whole company was like one tick under the flagships.

54:35David Pierce:Yeah.

54:36Nilay Patel:Right, and I'm confident we're going to have a bunch of Android fans telling me that it actually made flagships. But it, you know...

54:41David Pierce:They called themselves flagship killers. Like, that was the idea, that they could do just as well for less money. And I think when it's just as well for the same amount of money, it probably doesn't work anymore.

54:50Nilay Patel:And you don't have the brand, and you're not spending, you know, billions of dollars on computational photography at the bleeding edge. Like, right, you've got problems, like, structurally, and the market never really broke itself down in a way that would support a cheaper player. True. Like the smartphone market was either you're spending very little money or a lot of money, or you're buying a one-year-old phone for a medium amount of money. But the sort of like mid-range Android phone has always just been hard.

55:19David Pierce:Yes, kind of forever. No one has ever really successfully pulled that off.

55:24Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, like there are a lot of mid-range Android phones and every now and again we review whatever Samsung Alpha or Ace or whatever they're called. and like, here's the state of the middle. But the reality is most people want to buy the highest end one or they want to buy the cheapest one. Right. And you can just see that play out over and over again. So I think this company just was always fighting a fight it couldn't win because it was never going to attract an iPhone switcher. And at least in the United States, like that is just the hardest thing in the world to do. Samsung and Google cannot do it.

55:51Nilay Patel:And if you're in the middle, the Pixel exists and Google will happily sell you one. All of the Samsung mid-range phones exist and every carrier will be like, do you want this for free? Here you go. And then you're at least in whatever ecosystem there, or you want to spend the most amount of money. What are you going to do? How are you going to differentiate? Right.

56:10David Pierce:Do you think carriers are largely to blame here? Because I think a thing we talk about a lot and an email we get a lot when we talk about the phone market is that the U.S. way of buying phones is kind of unlike anywhere else in the world. And I think if you rewind back to the beginning of the OnePlus story, a big part of what it was doing was betting that it could upset that, right? That rather than having most of your phone experience to be walk into a store, update your contract, trade in your old phone and get a new phone, which is how most people get their phones. And it changes the way that phones are subsidized.

56:42David Pierce:It changes the way that we pay for them. It changes what it feels like to pay for a phone because you're not putting down your credit card for$1 ,200 at a time. But that there was this idea 10 years ago that that was going to go away. And actually, more and more people were going to start to buy their phones on Amazon and that you could build a direct-to-consumer phone brand in the United States. And that 100 % has not happened in any meaningful way at all. And do you think the carriers have just found ways over and over to kill anyone who was trying to do that thing?

57:13Nilay Patel:I think the carriers have found that and Apple has found that. Apple doesn't want you switching. Apple will happily just send you a notification that's like, it's time to upgrade to the iPhone 18. Right? Here we go. Your eSIM will transfer seamlessly. And if you want to transfer it to an Android phone, you've got to light a candle and do incantations.

57:31David Pierce:We will systematically ruin your life, David Pierce, if you try to do it.

57:34Nilay Patel:Have you ever tried to turn off iMessage? It requires human sacrifice. So it's some big combination of that. You know, carriers are rational. I'm saying rational and no one will believe me, but carriers have rational economic incentives to make things as easy and cheap as possible. And taking you from an iPhone to the next iPhone requires almost no customer service on their part. Taking you from an iPhone to a OnePlus phone is a bunch of angry phone calls and maybe a return and then maybe a switch to an iPhone and that's all just costs that layers up. They don't care. They're like, have you ever wanted to experience even slower 5G?

58:12Nilay Patel:Experience the power of AT &T. That's all they care about. So I think, yes, the carriers have a chokehold on the market. Apple has a chokehold on the market. There's no incentive to change. And making a phone that on the edges has slightly different options and widgets and Oxygen OS compared to Samsung Galaxy OS compared to iOS, like no consumer cares about that stuff. Or at least not at the rates they need to if you're not so much cheaper. Right.

58:43David Pierce:So I'm thinking about this in context of what we were just talking about with OpenAI being one of the companies that is probably going to make something that, you know, looks and feels and smells like a phone. This kind of suggests that if you're not, frankly, Apple or Samsung or one of the three or four biggest companies in the world with enough money to brute force your way into this, that the phone market in the U.S. is essentially sewn up. There's just no room for anybody else.

59:11Nilay Patel:Well, so it depends on what company you're talking about. If SpaceX buys T-Mobile and Starlink makes a phone. Interesting. Right? And that phone has Instagram. Because quite honestly, Elon Musk is a creeper, and I think he's going to want Instagram on that phone.

59:31David Pierce:Buying a carrier, yes, is a shortcut to getting your phone into a carrier store. Sure. I agree. OnePlus probably could have bought T-Mobile and that might have worked. I don't know.

59:40Nilay Patel:But, like, it's that. I don't think if this is just a prediction, there's not going to be a device that has an AI-based input mechanism so powerful and compelling that it overcomes a phone.

59:55David Pierce:Right. And the whole giant ecosystem of apps and accessories and carriers and everything that comes with phone now. That whole system is so mature now.

1:00:07Nilay Patel:Yes, we're agreeing. I'm saying phone to wrap all of that. Sure.

1:00:10David Pierce:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:00:10Nilay Patel:Right? Like you want to plug the weird Bluetooth dongle into the seat back of the thing because you have AirPods because they work best with your iPhone. Boy, is that a whole ecosystem that Opening Eyes Gadget has to overcome. Like is Opening Eyes Gadget going to work as well with your AirPods as everything else? Well, then you've got to get new headphones and maybe they won't work as well with your Delta seat back Bluetooth dongle. Like you've got to break everything. And phones were able to break everything. Right. And famously, BlackBerry realized that the iPhone was competing with laptops, not BlackBerry, and they were dead.

1:00:44Right?

1:00:44Nilay Patel:Like, they knew what the problem was. And OpenAI still has to compete with the iPhone. OnePlus still has to compete with the iPhone. And I don't mean just the iPhone. I mean the very concept of the mature flagship smartphone with a whole ass ecosystem all the way around it. Samsung has one of those. Google, to some extent, has one of those. There are obviously big players in China that have fully mature ecosystems that include cars in China.

1:01:07David Pierce:Yeah, yeah.

1:01:08Nilay Patel:Right, like you want to ship an AI gadget, you're like, well, my car also runs the same operating system as my phone in China.

1:01:13David Pierce:Yeah, how are people going to navigate to where they're going on my AI gadget?

1:01:17Nilay Patel:Yeah, so I think this is just one part of this is Ramageddon. You can't be so much cheaper that it's sustainable. And the other part of it is, boy, what are we taking sales away from?

1:01:28David Pierce:Yeah, we should take a break here, but I think the thing you just said that you have to break everything is such a clarifying reason that the entire AI industry is acting the way that it is. Because that is the stakes and that is the wall you have to climb to do the thing that they are all promising they will do in order to change everything about how we do everything.

1:01:49Nilay Patel:But it's not the wall you have to climb in enterprise, in business software.

1:01:53David Pierce:Right, that's a much smaller wall.

1:01:54Nilay Patel:That's why they're all running towards it. Yeah, totally.

1:01:57David Pierce:All right, let's take one more break and then we're getting back. We'll do a lightning round. We'll be right back.

1:02:02Nilay Patel:Remember Snapchat?

1:02:03David Pierce:The app best known for being the place to send disappearing photos and videos to your friends? Well, Snapchat was back in the news recently, but this time it was not about disappearing photos and videos. It was about smart glasses that you put and keep on your face. Snapchat was trying to get in on the game with a pair of black, horn-rimmed-looking spectacles. Think the pair that the old man in Up wears, but like three times thicker. and with a price tag of$2 ,195. Photos of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing his specs, that's what they're called, by the way, specs, were all over the internet and not in a good way.

1:02:43David Pierce:People were laughing. And they laughed all the way over the stock market where Snap took a hit. But as you're going to hear on Today Explained from Vox, Snap's playing the long game with smart glasses and the rest of big tech is too. Smart glasses are officially here,

1:02:55Nilay Patel:so we're going to officially talk about them on the show and worry about our privacy. Is Kamala Harris running for president again? Listen, I might. I might. I'm thinking about it. But does anybody want that? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, I think so. Well, I don't see why not. Absolutely, I think Kamala Harris should run for president again.

1:03:19David Pierce:I don't think there'll never be a woman president in the United States.

1:03:22Nilay Patel:Now, wait, wait, wait. You can't just walk away on that. Tell us why. I know it's still early to talk about 2028, But as we build to our post-Trump future, it seems to be a big question about the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris leads all of the presidential polling. So does this mean that the person who led the ticket in 2024 is going to lead the party again in 2028? The campaign needs to be called bye-bye Biden. It's just a tainted brand. Do you think from a donor community largely that there's any appetite for a Harris return? I don't. I'm Estet Herndon. And this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04:04David Pierce:Every body is beautiful, yet society is so obsessed with thinness that it has become a proven financial asset. And there's a$300 billion and growing weight loss industry. If it literally pays to be thinner, are GLP-1s actually a worthwhile financial investment? I'm Vivian Tu, your Rich BFF. And on this episode of Net Worth and Chill, we're diving into the thinness economy, It's tangible effects on your income and the impact GLP-1s are having on our everyday lives. No, you don't need to change yourself to be amazing. But yes, you might make more money if you do. Oof. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and watch on YouTube.com slash yourrichbff.

1:04:44David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. We somehow can't stop doing this stupid thing. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brenda-Brenda-A

1:04:57Nilay Patel:Brenda-A Brenda-Brenda-A Is-ise-Is - Er you high, or just incredibly stupid?

1:05:12David Pierce:No!

1:05:18You're a stupid lover.

1:05:21David Pierce:Welcome back, dummy. No means dummy. A lot there. So the backstory to this, if you didn't listen to last week's episode, is Ryan Muller sent in a Brandon Carr as a dummy theme. Neil, I was very rude to him because it sounded like this was the build to a drop and there was no drop. Ryan resubmitted a drop. And Travis, our producer, that was the drop. Travis agreed that we need to play the whole thing.

1:05:48Nilay Patel:I mean, that was quite a drop.

1:05:49David Pierce:Ryan's back. I think Ryan has righted the ship here. We're okay now.

1:05:53Nilay Patel:Some real elements of Prince's bat dance in there. I want to just call that out. Yep.

1:06:00David Pierce:Quite a drop. Yeah, it was something. I'm feeling things right now. What did Brendan do this week, Neelai?

1:06:05Nilay Patel:I'm still coming down. Honestly.

1:06:08David Pierce:This is all so much more than Brendan deserves. But it's okay. We do it for ourselves and for each other.

1:06:15Nilay Patel:I'm going to be so paranoid tomorrow. Okay. So you understand what I'm talking about. Okay. He did a lot of dumb stuff this week. Let's start with the basics. You know, is it dumb to take bribes as a public official, David? Generally, yes.

1:06:29David Pierce:This is a trick question. Okay.

1:06:31Nilay Patel:Yeah. All right. Brendan took what amounts to$125 ,000 bribe. There's no other way to say it. So Paramount and CBS were merging as part of that whole family dynamic. This needed to pass FCC review because CBS owns a bunch of broadcast stations. And during all this, both Brendan and another FCC commissioner, Olivia Trussie, who's also Republican, accepted tickets to various galas at the Kennedy Center. Olivia Trussie's tickets gifted to her by Paramount were worth more than$12 ,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica. Brendan's private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other Paramount and CBS executives, $125 ,000 a ticket.

1:07:13Nilay Patel:So that's a quarter million, quarter million dollars.

1:07:15David Pierce:This is all happening as they're, in theory, debating whether to let this merger happen. Yes. So in normal times, just the fact that Brendan is there in the skybox would be a huge scandal. Yes. Just for zero dollars, just his existence in the room with this man at this time, huge scandal. Yes. And yet here we are.

1:07:42Nilay Patel:If you'll remember, there was like a scandal when like Clinton got a haircut on like the tarmac of Air Force One. Like it doesn't, you know, like there's like there was a time when the appearance of a conflict of interest would be a scandal, even if no such conflict existed. And by the way, that's the standard for most public officials and lawyers. When you take the bar exam and you have to do the professional ethics exam, the thing that you learn is anything that creates the appearance of a conflict of interest is against the rules because the appearance is what undermines trust in the system.

1:08:16Nilay Patel:That is gone broadly over the past decade. And now the standard from the Trump administration and Trump family is we're telling you we're doing bribes. So that's OK. It's all out in the open. I mean, you literally hear them say this all the time. It's all out in the open. So it's fine. And so here, Brendan is taking a quarter million dollars in tickets from companies whose activities he directly oversees, whose mergers he can approve. and it's fine because he's doing it all in the open. And basically every ethics expert that talked to ProBublica was like, he should recuse himself from all these decisions because there's no way he can maintain the appearance of impartiality.

1:08:56Nilay Patel:Of course not. There's a lawyer they quoted, an ethics lawyer from the White House Treasury Department and the SEC during the presidencies of H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. And she goes, this is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that's what I would say. I don't understand what they were thinking.

1:09:14David Pierce:This is somebody who would know, I would say. It's about as qualified as you could possibly be on this particular subject. Yeah.

1:09:20Nilay Patel:So, obviously, Paramount Warner Brothers murder is still under review. There's an antitrust review of that. We'll come to that. There's more of that to come. But here, Brendan just took bribes because he's a dummy, and he doesn't understand that taking bribes creates the appearance, if not the actual conflict of interest, from which he is supposed to recuse himself.

1:09:41David Pierce:Oh, I don't think that gives Brendan enough credit. I think he might know those things. He just doesn't care one teeny tiny bit.

1:09:47Nilay Patel:Again, the standard has moved from the appearance of a conflict to what if we did bribes out in the open? What if you brought Brendan Coyne? That's where we are. OK, the other thing which is worth talking about because we have brought up a bunch is the FCC is fast coming up on a vote, which may or may not be illegal unto itself, about whether individual companies can own more than 39 percent of broadcast licenses in an area, which is a rule enshrined by Congress. Brendan thinks he can just overcome with a vote. He wrote an op-ed in Breitbart of all places. And I just want to call it out because...

1:10:25David Pierce:When Breitbart is the number one publication that will accept your op-ed, things have gone awry.

1:10:31Nilay Patel:Well, the Wall Street Journal editorial board hates him, so they wouldn't take it. And then you're just kind of running the New York Post. That doesn't seem right. And you end up in Breitbart. And his argument here is, The cap basically prevents anyone from owning so many TV stations that you can broadcast programming to more than 39 % of households. This worked when this was all about local broadcasters employing local journalists. But I will restore trust to the news by letting single companies own all kinds of broadcast stations, more than 39%, because then they'll be able to compete with streaming.

1:11:04David Pierce:I'm going to make Sinclair so powerful it can take on YouTube. is I, Brendan Carr, am going to make Sinclair so powerful that competition will reign.

1:11:18Nilay Patel:See what I mean? This is the argument. I'm just going to read it. Today, the broadcast gap is not protecting local broadcasters, is preventing them from gaining the same scale that their competitors are free to enjoy. It's doing the opposite of what the FCC intended. I don't know if you have looked around. No one can compete with YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. In fact, on this show, we've talked about Netflix beginning to panic and turn itself into YouTube. Because these things have massive scale and the cost structures of those platforms are utterly dependent on an army of teenagers working for free.

1:11:56Nilay Patel:Something that all of us are forced to ignore every time we talk about these businesses. because if you point it out, everyone gets really squirrely about the fact that they're probably doomed in the long run because they have to pay to make things. You can make the broadcasters as big as you want. You can have one guy own every broadcast station in the country.

1:12:14David Pierce:And we're rapidly heading that direction, it appears.

1:12:16Nilay Patel:They still have to pay the news anchors.

1:12:18David Pierce:Yeah.

1:12:19Nilay Patel:And probably what they're going to do is stop paying them and have AI read you the local news. And that still won't restore trust in the news. And that still won't let them compete with YouTube, which again, enjoys the greatest business model in world history, which is having an army of teenagers make everything for free.

1:12:35David Pierce:I find myself in this segment from time to time trying to sort of piece a bunch of Brendan Carr logic together. And it makes my head spin because you can't possibly hold all of these ideas in your head at the same time. And I've come to realize that, oh, he doesn't. He holds no ideas

1:12:52Nilay Patel:in his head at any time. There's only one idea in his head, which is toting up to power and using the government's ability to restrain speech or consolidate speech to his own advantage. And I'm telling you, all of this is a trial balloon for regulating speech on the internet. He is finding the ways to use the FCC's power or grow the FCC's power, in this case, casting a vote that will override a provision in a law passed by Congress in order to say, I have more authority over the speech that is transmitted to you. And his argument here, when it comes to broadcast news, our country could do with a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting from communities across the countries.

1:13:35Nilay Patel:What is the mechanism that letting a monopoly run by private equity own more TV stations will create more jobs for local reporters? Can you draw a line from one thing to the next thing?

1:13:47David Pierce:No, the actual answer we know for sure would be precisely 180 degrees the opposite of what he's describing. Yes. More programming will be nationalized. It would completely decorporatize all of this. That's the answer. And in fact, he's going to just happily create the opposite of what he says he's about to create.

1:14:07Nilay Patel:Anyway, you can, the comment periods and all these things are open. The votes are open. These are, this is your government. You can talk to it. He hasn't, he can't stop you yet. I encourage you to leave the comments. I encourage you to tell Brendan, one, bribes are bad, and two, overcoming these rules and not looking at the real problem, which is massive consolidation across all of our media, a little short-sighted. He's a dummy and he won't get it, and it's in his own interest to never get it. But Brendan, if you want to come and actually make an argument in a real journalistic forum, not the op-ed pages of Breitbart.com, you're welcome to come on this show.

1:14:43Nilay Patel:You're welcome to come on Decoder. We can call Rupert and see if you'll let us duke it out in the editorial pages of Wall Street Journal. That'd be fun. The only place where Rupert Murdoch and I are on the same side. At least when it comes to this. Very little else, but when it comes to this. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr is a Dummy, America's favorite podcast for the podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:15:09David Pierce:So I have a lightning round item, which is that I have an emoji I need to tell you about. And I'm actually curious before we get into this, do you have a sort of all-purpose

1:15:16Nilay Patel:emoji that is like how you react to most things okay i have two but they're rude okay perfect okay i use green check mark a lot which is just the rudest emoji it is that's very yep

1:15:32David Pierce:yep yep it's great that's like a thumbs up but ruder i don't i switch from the thumbs up to

1:15:39Nilay Patel:green check mark and i every time i send it i start laughing because that has such putting a

1:15:43David Pierce:period at the end of your text message energy using the green oh i don't like that at all this

1:15:47Nilay Patel:has come to an end that's that's that's a signal that i'm trying to send and i send it without any

1:15:56David Pierce:remorse okay that is actually a pretty good case because a thing that is very hard to do is to say this conversation is over like we have accomplished all of our goals i love you i hope you're great let's not talk anymore it's very hard to do the green check mark gets it done

1:16:13Nilay Patel:that's what i'm saying uh check and then you just turn off your video and you're gone see what i did there it's amazing it works every time that's really good uh okay so there's that and then uh melting face is just the the classic sure you gotta go yeah it is that is probably the single

1:16:29David Pierce:most communicative emoji that exists uh mine is the raised hands i use the raised hands emoji for everything.

1:16:36Nilay Patel:That's pretty good.

1:16:37David Pierce:Raised hands is got it. Raised hands is thanks. Raised hands is awesome. Raised hands just accomplishes many of my goals. But there's a new one called cracked face that I think is going to potentially replace a lot of emojis for a lot of people. So Unicode put out a bunch of new emojis as they want to do. The emoji making process is sort of fascinating. We'll go into that another time. But one of the new emojis is called cracking face. And it is precisely what it sounds like. It's a yellow smiling face with a sort of gentle smile. It's like the slightly smiling face emoji, but it is cracking all over.

1:17:15David Pierce:I think that can mean just about anything you would like it to mean. I look at cracking face as a perfect replacement for melting face, which is like, oh, God, everything is terrible. Cracking face is also kind of like, ah! Cracking face could also mean it could replace the skull dead emoji. This is a very good, very powerful all-purpose emoji that I'm really excited about.

1:17:38Nilay Patel:I would say as our company goes through what can only be described as a divorce, I would have used cracking face almost every single day this week. Yeah, yes.

1:17:46David Pierce:It just, to me, this cracking face is just kind of a, it's all too much emoji. Yeah. That's just like, I can't even in an emoji is the cracked face. And I'm pretty excited about it.

1:17:58Nilay Patel:Also, if you look at our quick post and then you accidentally click on cracking face, it zooms out at you as the picture expand, and then you can do it one more time to zoom again. And it's, it's pretty good as a thing that's just sort of coming at you. Yeah.

1:18:11David Pierce:It looks a little like the thing from the Fantastic Four, if anyone, if that does references for anybody. There are a bunch of new emoji coming. There's a butterfly. There are some sideways thumbs, which is also a very funny conversation under possibility. There's a pickle because that's great. There's a meteor. There's a bunch of stuff. But I just, cracking face emoji, I think is about to revolutionize the way I text message. And I'm very excited about it. So very importantly, are these the Unicode standard emojis?

1:18:42Nilay Patel:Are these Apples? Are they Googles? A lot going on here. Yeah, these are Unicode emojis, which means they will inevitably be sort of weirdly bastardized in many ways.

1:18:53David Pierce:I in particular look forward to what the blobby Android cracking face looks like. Samsung will do some weird stuff with it. It's going to be strange, but I think it's going to do the job. I'm pretty excited about it. It's another reason I like raised hands, by the way. Everybody does the same thing with raised hands. We're all good with it.

1:19:10Nilay Patel:You can't misinterpret green checkmark.

1:19:14David Pierce:Nope. This person hates me and is finished with me. It's the only possible takeaway.

1:19:18Nilay Patel:I understand what you're saying and do not wish to receive any further information.

1:19:23David Pierce:It's pretty good. All right. What's your next lightning round?

1:19:27Nilay Patel:It feels like we have another new segment coming called Nikita Beer is going through it. so nakita beer is the head of product at x the everything app yep in which i do all of my banking

1:19:37David Pierce:well obviously all of my dms too who doesn't yeah uh it was last week or week before he posted hey

1:19:44Nilay Patel:we we did this experiment and we realized if we take all of the influencers out of the platform people like it more and use it more precisely yes which is the thing that everybody knows yep

1:19:52David Pierce:and they did the other study that found that all of the video on the platform was stolen

1:19:57Nilay Patel:great great great stuff going on on x so this week they realized that not showing your post the people who follow you is bad and post in showing you just exclusively rage bait made people unhappy who could have seen that coming we're rolling out a small tweak to boost visibility of your post to people who follow you back we noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less than your replies this resulted in reply section feeling more like a battleground with people you don't recognize. Yep. What a surprise. Well said. Twitter hasn't been around for over a decade.

1:20:32Nilay Patel:No one who worked at Twitter ever had this insight before. Well, this is what's so funny.

1:20:36David Pierce:There is a longstanding truism about a lot of these social algorithms is that the strongest signal you can have is if you and I follow each other.

1:20:46Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:20:46David Pierce:Like it signifies so many positives about our interests, about our relationship, about the overlap between us. Like, you and I being mutuals is such a powerful signal. And X was just like, ah, who cares?

1:21:01Nilay Patel:Well, I mean, they, first of all, they fired everybody. So everybody who knew how anything worked is gone from Twitter,

1:21:07David Pierce:which is now X, the everything app. The phrase we noticed this data was missing from the algo is very funny.

1:21:12Nilay Patel:Deeply, deeply hilarious. No one has looked in four years and now we finally looked. There are like entire teams at Twitter that were like entirely focused on this. They threw, they fired them all, they reset the algorithm and they realized purely prioritizing engagement led you to bad outcomes. And then in particular with X, the everything app that you can pay to be verified and have a rev share, letting those people run wild to make as much money as they want resulted in a site that was bad and overrun by Nazis. And now Nikita Beer every week is slowly rolling it back. He's slowly rediscovering things that people who worked at Twitter for ages and ages knew.

1:21:52Nilay Patel:Again, I will point out, I will say this as many times as we need to say this. Criticism of the current administration as edX is in no way praise for the people who ran Twitter who mostly failed and ran a bad company. So bad, in fact, that Elon Musk could show up and say, can I pay some money for it? And the board of directors had no response. They're like, well, that's better than anything we can think of. And they walked away. So again, criticism of the Elon administration in no way praise for the previous administration. But I do know a lot of people worked at Twitter thinking about how to make the site feel good in order to drive growth.

1:22:30Nilay Patel:X made it feel bad and their business has essentially collapsed. And we know this because it's part of SpaceX now and SpaceX is a public company and we could read it in the S1 filings.

1:22:41David Pierce:It's very good. When we talked about Nikita last week, we got a couple of emails from people who I would say in not quite as many words accused him of being kind of a product grifter. This is a guy who has sort of invented and sold the same company a couple of times and is now doing this job at X. Clearly very skilled at a certain kind of product making. Does not seem to be having a super good time. His new, very, very visible job at X.

1:23:08Nilay Patel:Well, he's got the same problem as anybody who works for Trump has, right? So he can be like, I fixed this thing in this obvious way that will make one person unhappy. And that person will tweet at Elon and he'll be like, I'm looking into it. And then the fix will go away. And this has happened several times now for Nikita and everyone else's product. The same way that, you know, ICE announced they're not gonna do traffic stops because they're murdering people in the street. And Trump is like, no, I love traffic stops. And now they're back. And like, that's gonna be what keeps happening to X the Everything app.

1:23:38Nilay Patel:Because anything that makes it harder for lies and racism to travel on the platform affects one guy in negative ways.

1:23:48David Pierce:Sure does. It's tough out there.

1:23:51Nilay Patel:Okay, I have... That guy is David Pierce. Yeah.

1:23:56David Pierce:The X reach is for me in particular. I almost accidentally tweeted the other day thinking it was threads and had a real sort of terrifying moment. I was like, this is not...

1:24:06Nilay Patel:Oh, I'm so throttled on X that I should tweet every day. Like, I have a fake blue checkmark. There's like a legacy blue checkmark. and I can tweet and literally zero people will see. That's amazing. Because I don't pay for reach and obviously we're us and we criticize. Like they've just turned the knob. There's a knob in Nikita's office labeled Neelai and it's at zero. That's kind of nice actually.

1:24:29David Pierce:It's like keeping a journal.

1:24:30Nilay Patel:There's a part of me that just wants to just start tweeting every day. Like as much as I can.

1:24:36David Pierce:It's pretty good. I have a blog post to tell you about. Okay. From a new sub stacker apparently. Sure. Just brand new substack from Demis Asabas. Oh, sure. Yeah. The Nobel Prize winning CEO of Google DeepMind is now mostly a substacker. He wrote a blog post this week about basically a framework for how to regulate frontier AI models and calling for collaboration between the government and these labs to really make sure we can all handle this responsibly as AGI comes. I don't care about any of that. I just need to read you a sentence that is going to cause you emotional pain. Are you ready for this?

1:25:16Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:25:16David Pierce:Okay. This is from the first paragraph of this blog post. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realize we were standing in the foothills of the singularity, nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity. Does that sound familiar to you, my friend? That's his line. That's his move. This is a thing now. He said this at IO. You had what I can only call just a full-on crash out about it. And then he decided that was a bar. I should keep using that. So we're doing the foothills of the singularity now. This is a thing, Eli.

1:25:52Nilay Patel:So is the singularity a mountain? Foothills implies that we're like among the mountain, right? We're among the foothills.

1:26:01David Pierce:Right, because the foothills were already going up a little bit, right? But there's more to come.

1:26:06Nilay Patel:I'm asking this because a phrase the AI researchers love to use right now is hill climbing. Yeah. Like we had Mustafa Suleiman from Microsoft on Decoder and I was like, are we getting there? And he's like, well, we're seeing the hill climbing. And so I wonder if Demis is like, well, that must mean we're in the foothills.

1:26:21David Pierce:We're climbing the hill to get to the mountain.

1:26:23Nilay Patel:We're doing hill climbing.

1:26:25David Pierce:Hill climbing has a definition.

1:26:27Nilay Patel:I'm sure all the people are going to tell me exactly what it is. I'm just saying, I think one word led to another word. Yes. And now we're just saying it over and over again. But like... But the implication here, by the way, is that the singularity is nigh. Yes. And that we should regulate AI before it kills us all, which is doomerism. And it is just Google can't do doomerism the same way Anthropic can do doomerism. Like, I don't think they have the credibility to do doomerism. Like, if Google woke up tomorrow and was like, we're afraid we're going to kill everyone, that would have a very different valence than, like, Anthropic's whole deal.

1:27:04Nilay Patel:Do you know what I mean? The don't be evil company becomes the don't kill everyone company. You know what I mean? And everyone would be like, but you run YouTube. Like, what are you going to, should you stop? Should you stop the internet economy for a minute before you kill us all? Whereas Anthropic is like, Fable is so powerful that we stopped it. And everyone's like, cool. Can Claude still do stuff? And they're like, yeah, because that's our only business.

1:27:32David Pierce:There is some of that energy in this blog post that is it's basically like, please regulate us because we don't know how and we won't. And yeah, we need you to tell us what is and isn't OK so that we don't have to figure that out for ourselves because we are in the foothills of the singularity.

1:27:47Nilay Patel:Again, which just really implies they're going to kill us all. I can't really test. There's and by the way, Google will not really tell you what the singularity is. Like I've asked Sundar Pichai and he's like, Dennis, I argue about that all the time. I'm like, did you come to a conclusion? Yeah. You can go watch that interview. It's unclear. Mustafa is like, there's a difference between AGI and the singularity and superintelligence. You can watch him try to parse that. Unclear what it means to be in the foothills of the singularity. Yep. And also seems bad. Just this week, a researcher at DeepMind published a lengthy essay being like every promise that Google made when they bought DeepMind to not do military applications is gone, is wiped out.

1:28:33Nilay Patel:And in the middle of this essay, which we will link to, he says the LLM still hallucinate and are still brittle in knowable ways. And it's not clear if we're going to get from here to there. Yep. That's not the foothills of the singularity. And in fact, the truth of whether or not the LLMs can actually get there, whether all of this hill climbing will result in a model that remembers things in a meaningful way and doesn't just have like huge context windows up for grabs. Yeah. Completely up for grabs. And I still think the answer is no. I've been wrong about sort of like general progress, so I'll take it.

1:29:10Nilay Patel:But I still think language is not intelligence. And LLM's talking to themselves at rapid rates is not just going to horsepower intelligence into being.

1:29:19David Pierce:Yeah, I tend to agree. I mean, yeah, I was thinking about this, that we've been hearing these AI companies for so long talk about essentially linear progress, right? That it's like the graph has gone like this. And as long as it keeps going like this forever and ever and ever, we're going to hit these unbelievable things. And I think, frankly, the graph has gone like this longer than either you or I would have predicted a couple of years ago. That still does not in any way suggest that we're due for another century of that kind of progress.

1:29:46Nilay Patel:Look, I know a lot of people who talk a lot. They don't get smarter.

1:29:50David Pierce:In fact, we get dumber generally as this podcast goes along. Speaking of which, do you have one more you want to do before we get out of here?

1:29:56Nilay Patel:Very quickly, I just want to play this clip. We mentioned Paramount earlier. The states now have sued. A bunch of states have sued Paramount to block the Warner merger. Their lead trial counsel was on CNBC. I just want to play this clip. This is Jeffrey Kessler, the lead trial counselor for Paramount Skydance, responding to the lawsuit from 12 state attorneys general saying that this would be anti-competitive. This is an antitrust case.

1:30:23David Pierce:To stop a merger, the merger has to be anti-competitive. This merger is pro-competitive. Anybody who knows the entertainment industry knows it is in deep trouble. Linear television is in deep trouble because of streaming and because of court cutting. Theatrical is in deep trouble because of the advent of streaming and what it has done. This merger is designed to make a stronger linear television company, to make a stronger theatrical producer and to create a true competitor in streaming that could go toe to toe with a Netflix or a Disney or a Prime.

1:31:12Nilay Patel:All right, David, I'm just dying for you to react to that.

1:31:15David Pierce:I mean, this this is the same argument as we should make Sinclair very powerful so it can take on YouTube.

1:31:21Nilay Patel:It's interesting that Brendan Carr was in David Ellison's box for a quarter million dollars, huh?

1:31:27David Pierce:Yeah, like you and I have spent a lot of time over the years, you more than me, railing it against all of the times that somebody has acquired Time Warner in order to go compete in one way or another. And they end up laying off a bunch of people and it always fails. This is we have tried this thing. like even if the logic of what he just said held and it doesn't to be super clear we've literally run that theory to ground over and over and over and over and over under every under every republican administration we've ever had in this country we have done that many times and it never works we're gonna take two shitty companies and it's gonna make one great company is literally

1:32:08Nilay Patel:not how it works i do just want to focus on the things he said were in decline so first he's like Like, everything's fucked. Right? He's like, this is pro-competitive. I just want to point out, no one's watching linear television and no one's going to the movie theater, which is true. Whether or not you're going to go see The Odyssey or not, it's like true that no one's going to the movie theater. Certainly you're not watching linear television. You're watching us, probably on YouTube. This is the problem. We deliver our content to YouTube for effectively free. The army of teenagers is just looming over all of this.

1:32:40Nilay Patel:And no one can say it. He didn't say YouTube and TikTok, right? He said Netflix and Disney and Prime. But the problem is that TikTok doesn't pay anyone for the content on their platform and people like it better than the garbage on Paramount+. What are you going to do with that? You're going to buy Batman? Is Batman going to fix it? It's so nonsense because no one can just say the thing that is killing them out loud. Instagram doesn't pay for content. Right. So our business model is effed because they pay high rates. And I would like more artists and filmmakers and the people who play the violin in the background of the Christopher Nolan movies.

1:33:25Nilay Patel:I want all those people to get paid lots and lots of money to make art. But none of these companies can look at the problem that they have, which is their competitors, their actual competitors, the apps on your phone that you actually open do not pay for content. And none of them have an answer to it except we should buy more stuff.

1:33:43David Pierce:Right.

1:33:43Nilay Patel:Because that will fix a linear television.

1:33:45David Pierce:Right. We're going to make our costs go way up and that's how we'll compete.

1:33:50Nilay Patel:Yeah. Just to be 100 % on the nose, that was Quibi's argument.

1:33:58David Pierce:Oh, it was. What if we spent way more money really genuinely was Quibi's argument.

1:34:03Nilay Patel:What if we spent more money on the content and you could see it on your phone?

1:34:06David Pierce:Man, justice for Quibi.

1:34:08Nilay Patel:They were right. And also the wrongest.

1:34:10David Pierce:I know. But at least Quibi deserved one outrageously overpriced merger before it all fell apart. You know what I mean? Like, if you're going to make all those arguments, you deserve to be acquired for some stupid amount of money before it all collapses. Yes, exactly. And then let it all collapse in the way that it is supposed to. By the way, it's not. We keep saying Time Warner.

1:34:30Nilay Patel:It's Warner Brothers Discovery now.

1:34:32David Pierce:It is now. It's still Time Warner. Or as I call it, WB Disco. So it's pretty good. That's what they should have called it, to be honest. All right. We should get out of here. Neal, what's on Decoder this week?

1:34:44Nilay Patel:So today, as we record on Thursday, everyone should listen to it. It's the CTO of Proton, Bart Butler. We talked a lot about privacy and building encrypted versions of docs and fighting the EU government. It's really good. Proton's a fascinating company. Super fascinating company. Really enjoyed that conversation. Pushed a lot on the edges of where trust actually comes from. If you're interested in like Apple encryption and all those fights, this episode is like in the weeds of it because he doesn't work at Apple. He works at Proton. He has a way different view, but the problems are all exactly the same.

1:35:11Nilay Patel:So go listen to that one. And then on Monday, we have Jill Lepore, who is a superstar, talking about her new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, which is like verge strike zone.

1:35:21David Pierce:Does this suggest you've read the book? Is it as good as I assume it is?

1:35:24Nilay Patel:It is very dense. It's very good. If it's the sort of thing that speaks to you, it's very good. But it's very much like if you try to run the country by just measuring everyone and doing opinion polls and like make it autonomous, like if you're just like, yeah, we'll just like measure and do the middle, you like lose what makes the country good. And it's so it's basically a book about measuring and what measuring can't tell you, which is like total verge strike zone. It's great.

1:35:49David Pierce:I love that. That's going to be fun. Version history, the season finale is this Sunday. It's about the clapper. It is as much fun as we've ever had making an episode of version history. Also, you and I spent a bunch of this week recording version history. We've got a whole new season in the can. I think it's the most fun we've ever had doing this show, and we made some very good episodes. So please go subscribe to that. We're like dangerously close to 10 ,000 subscribers on our still very new YouTube channel. So please, I beg of you, go subscribe to version history on YouTube with every single one of your bot accounts.

1:36:24David Pierce:That's all I require. I think that's it. That's all the stuff I have, right? There's so much stuff.

1:36:31Nilay Patel:We are going to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, and that will let us finally compete with Prime, a company which is owned by Amazon and utterly subsidized by Amazon.

1:36:42David Pierce:Virgin History Brothers Discovery is coming.

1:36:45Nilay Patel:A streaming service that flippantly made a movie about Melania Trump in order to get preferential treatment for its giant e-commerce operation.

1:36:55David Pierce:What are we doing? It's really fun to just say the whole sentence. You know what I mean? In addition to subscribing to the Version History YouTube channel, the other thing you should do is subscribe to The Verge. It gets you all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one and Version History and Decoder. It gets you all of our newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of dumb things that Brandon Carr does. Everything. Theverge.com slash subscribe. Go subscribe. And if you have thoughts, questions, feedback, you want to know what emoji you should use to be as cruel to people as Neelai is, send us an email.

1:37:24David Pierce:Vergecast at TheVerge.com. call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Locascio. We will see you next week. Eli.

1:37:39Nilay Patel:Green checkmark.