Elon Musk had a bad week in court

10:49Brendan Carr:This is before we've even begun, before he's even had a chance to open his mouth. The doge master has shown up and everyone's like, yeah, we hate that guy.

10:57David Pierce:YGR also, I think, made the main characters in this story agree to stay off of social media during the trial, which is a wild thing.

11:06Brendan Carr:It's because Elon is posting, they stole a charity. This is going to come up again. He's got these lines that he thinks are going to be the winning lines, and you can't just say them to a jury. And he, like, opening eyes, like, filed motions to strike some of this testimony because he's doing tweets. And so she basically is like, I have to be able to trust you're not going to leave here and corrupt this process. Right. So she's told everyone to stop tweeting.

11:31David Pierce:Yeah. So before we get into all of the insane stuff that happened on the stand, I think I want to try and very briefly explain the two sides of the argument. And I want you to tell me if I like more or less have it right as we get into this, because I think it ends up being important again for all the lines Elon Musk says. So the Elon Musk stance is I helped fund and start a thing that I believed was a charity. This whole thing was my idea. I was the driving force behind all of it. And then they stole it from me, essentially. They forced me out. They took my money and they built this gigantic for-profit company on top of it.

12:09David Pierce:How dare they do so? Is that a reasonable?

12:12Brendan Carr:Yeah, that's his version of the argument. That's his version of the argument. There's some daylight between what he thinks the argument is and what's in his legal briefs. Yes. Sure. And there's a lot of daylight between his argument and what may have actually happened, which is that he just hates these guys.

12:28David Pierce:Right. So the other side of the argument is as OpenAI is coming up, Elon Musk tries to basically take over the thing for himself. He wants all of the control. He wants all of the board seats. He wants everything. And when he doesn't get what he wants, he decides to, you know, take his ball and go home, leaves, says, screw this, tries at some point to subsume OpenAI into Tesla because he thinks that's the only way they can take on Google and win at AI. This doesn't work. And he gets angrier and angrier as OpenAI gets more and more successful and thus then decides to sue because he's mad that he didn't get to be in charge of this thing that is huge.

13:06David Pierce:Like in a real way, the argument on the other side of Elon Musk is he's really mad that Sam Altman is the face of AI and not Elon Musk.

13:15Brendan Carr:There's that. And straightforwardly, you didn't read the contract, which also comes up in these cases when we talk about them on the Vergecast over and over and over again. Did you do the reading? And the answer in this case, we now have evidence, is no, that Elon insistently did not do the reading.

13:32David Pierce:Yeah, it's good stuff. So we have a bunch of, there's just a lot of good lines from the testimony. Liz has been in there talking through it all. We pulled some favorites. Neal, do you want to start? Let's just run through the testimony and do some greatest hits here.

13:49Brendan Carr:So we're on day three. As we record, we're on day three. So Elon's been on the stand for two days of the trial and several hours today. The first day was the direct examination. So if you ever watched a courtroom drama, you know this is when your own lawyer shows up and asks you questions about how cool you are.

14:04David Pierce:This is the time you're supposed to do very well and look very good.

14:08Brendan Carr:Right. They're like, how are you such a genius? And everyone's like, I can't possibly say. And like this is what happens, right? He's like, I'm just a benevolent guy who wants to make cars. And so that first day he was really flat because there's no conflict. Yesterday when cross-examination began, he just became a raging jerk. and cross is when, you know, you get asked the leading question and the answer is yes or no. And if, you know, they can say, your honor, there's hostile witness and you just have to say yes or no. Like that whole thing, that's cross-examination.

14:40David Pierce:They say things like, isn't that right? Over and over and over.

14:42Brendan Carr:And it's designed so that the witness is only supposed to say yes or no. And Elon hates this. And it's like he's never watched a single courtroom movie in his life. So at many points, he accuses OpenAI's lawyer of, quote, asking questions that were designed to trick me. And then he answers the questions by saying things like, you mostly do unfair questions. And then OpenAI's lawyer is saying things like, I'm trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best. And Foss just goes, that's not true. And this is just the entire, at one point, Liz writes, he refuses to acknowledge the nature of linear time because - Oh, yeah.

15:23David Pierce:It was like, before you were not a board member, you were a board member, yes? And he just won't answer the question. Who's to say? Yeah.

15:30Brendan Carr:So he's just like fighting the basics. Like we're not even engaging on the basics of whether or not cutting off donations to OpenAI might create pressure on OpenAI, whether Andres Karpathy, who he had recruited to OpenAI and then to Tesla, whether he asked him to stay at OpenAI. Like just these like very basic chronology questions. Elon's like, you're mostly unfair. You're mostly trying to trick me.

15:52David Pierce:yeah and i mean there's another one of these that's just as good and this goes to did you read the contract this is the one that really has stuck out in my brain over the last few days um elon gets an email in 2018 outlining the the bones of the for-profit structure this is like one of the things actually that has come up in this trial and actually and i think will end up important is how long has it been a a discussed possibility for open ai to be a for-profit corporation, right? Like there's this old clip that's going around of Sam and Elon talking, and Sam refers to OpenAI as a company. Elon goes, OpenAI is structured as a 501c3 nonprofit.

16:29David Pierce:And a bunch of people are like, ah. But then it's increasingly clear that conversations about a for-profit OpenAI have come up many times, and Elon has acknowledged that he was okay with a version of that. But there's a moment where they send him an email outlining the corporate structure they're imagining for a for-profit version of OpenAI. And he says on the stand, that he only read the very first section of it, which is, hey, he says, I read the highlighted box with important warning, which is amazing. Just this is very it sounds very much like the way the Trump administration handles Trump, where it's like you have to draw a big red box around the thing you need him to read.

17:07David Pierce:Otherwise, you just have no idea.

17:08Brendan Carr:But the important warning was contributors should consider their investments as donations with no return.

17:13David Pierce:Right.

17:14Brendan Carr:So he's acknowledged that he's read that part.

17:16David Pierce:Right. Which is which is important. and then Musk says I didn't read the fine print we're going into the fine print of this document and then OpenAI's lawyer goes it's a four page document brutal

17:28Brendan Carr:it's so good brutal you can just tell he doesn't like being on the stand in this way because he can't ignore your tweet he can't down rank you his army of fanboys isn't there to distract with memes he just has to do it in the lawsuit that he filed and insistently drove to trial yeah Crazy.

17:48David Pierce:It's a four-page document. It's just such a good... Like, those are one of those moments where you can just imagine, like, he goes back to his law office at the end of the day and just, like, high-fiving all the paralegals everywhere. It's good stuff.

17:59Brendan Carr:He's got another line here where he says earlier, I don't lose my temper and I don't yell at people. And OpenAI's lawyer takes this as an opportunity to bait him into losing his temper.

18:10David Pierce:Which he does very successfully.

18:12Brendan Carr:Immediately and successfully. So in the same sequence, he says, I don't think I read this term sheet. I'm not sure I actually read this term sheet. I did not look closely at this term sheet. And then he's been deposed already. So there's already another version of this testimony. Opening Eyes lawyer points out that in the previous deposition, Musk didn't say that he'd read the first paragraph and nothing else. And Musk starts yelling at him. I said I didn't look closely. I only read the headline. And it's like, my guy, you can't feel like I'm very calm. I'm just here to save humanity. I never raise my voice.

18:42Brendan Carr:And then start yelling at the lawyer.

18:43David Pierce:And then at the next turn, you start yelling at the lawyer.

18:47Brendan Carr:There's another part of this. Again, this is if you put if you set yourself up to be cross examined, you do have to prepare. It doesn't feel like he prepared for this obvious eventuality. And you can't trickster your way out of it. So if anyone if anyone listening has ever done like mock trial in high school, this this one to me as a person who did mock trial in high school is just so funny because you can see him being. the smartest kid in class and it not working. Yeah. So Elon writes an email about DeepMind. And he says, DeepMind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on a path to catch up.

19:24Brendan Carr:Setting it up as a nonprofit might, in hindsight, have been the wrong move. Sense of urgency is not as high. So OpenAI's lawyer produces this email. I show it to Elon. And they say, those are your words, yes or no. Elon's response to this. And I'm telling you, if you did mock trial, you understand exactly where this came from in his brain. Yep. This is a hypothetical.

19:55What?

19:57Brendan Carr:Are these your words? Yes or no? This is a hypothetical.

20:00David Pierce:He's answering the question, is that a thought you might have had at the time? And what they're saying is, did you write this email that you wrote?

20:08Brendan Carr:And so Open Eyes Lawyer says, so you thought it might have been a wrong move. Is this what you said? And they had to keep going until Musk admitted that he had written the email, which, again, if you've just done the high school mock trial, you know that you've now backed yourself into a fight in which the people judging you, the judge, the jury, the high school guidance counselors who are doing mock trial are like, get over it. just like answer the question because it's not so bad if you're like i did write that email can i explain what it means it's very bad if you're like it's hypothetical like i'm not i refuse to even acknowledge you're asking about this email and he's just doing this over and over again throughout this trial liz was based as she was live blogging she was like this room is so testy and so uncomfortable i think her line was if i can't even imagine having this person as a co-founder

20:56David Pierce:yeah i mean the the funniest part about all this and and liz starts her story with this and also a A lot of our commentators and stuff have been saying it, that one of the most remarkable achievements of this testimony is that it makes Sam Altman look really good. Like, Sam Altman is going to come off incredibly reasonable and kind in comparison. Maybe.

21:15Brendan Carr:I mean, Elon's got the worst. I mean, we will see. I mean, the thing about trials, and this has happened every time we go to a trial, like, one side gets to go and then the other side gets to go. Yeah. And so this is the part where it just seems very obvious that, you know, Elon is going to get to make his case and it's not going well, but he's going to get to make his case. And then Sam's going to show up and it's all going to happen. Yeah. And the pendulum will swing back and forth. But as of right now, Elon is just being argumentative and petty. And it, you know, Liz is in the room and she's like, it doesn't seem like a jury is buying this.

21:49Brendan Carr:There's another part of this. This is the most Elon thing in the entire world. And he's arguing with the lawyer. He's arguing with apparently his own lawyer. And so he says, I understand leading questions. That's a leading answer. I was just about to bring this one up. And the judge says he can lead. He can lead all he wants. Let's remind everyone you are not a lawyer and you've never taken a class in evidence, which is an insane thing for a judge to remind a witness.

22:17David Pierce:Yep.

22:17Brendan Carr:And Musk's response is, I did take law 101 technically, but yes, I am not a lawyer. This is a total AI pill man. Like he's like he asked XAI how to do how to do a direct examination. And now he thinks he's a lawyer.

22:35David Pierce:This is also like very clearly someone who is used to either being or at least being treated as the smartest person in every room he's in. And there's even there's been a bunch of evidence in this trial so far of the other open AI founders like going way out of their way to tell Musk how terrific he is. And that like every request begins and ends with unbelievable flattery of what a genius he is and what a pleasure it is to be able to just be in a room with Elon Musk talking about AI. Like Greg Brockman just just like makes an ass out of himself being kind to Elon Musk in every single email. And you can just see this is a person who meets somebody who doesn't want Elon Musk's money.

23:18David Pierce:It actually is out to defeat Elon Musk in a very specific way that no one ever really is in Elon Musk's orbit. And he just self-destructs in the face of it.

23:27Brendan Carr:Yeah, he can't do it.

23:27David Pierce:Yeah.

23:28Brendan Carr:You take him away from his money and his social media platform that he controls where he has built himself an algorithmic filter bubble of people who think he's great. And you're like, oh, this isn't going well for you. Yeah. At the very end of this, the judge says he was at times difficult. Part of management, from my perspective, is to just get through the testimony. It's bad. This is all bad.

23:52David Pierce:Okay, this is actually, this is where I wanted to end this one, because what I can't figure out here is this stuff that Judge Gonzalez Rogers, good old YGR, is saying seems like stuff I've never heard a judge say in the course of a trial. And again, where so much of this is going to come down to Elon Musk convincing this group of people in the jury that he is a good person trying to save the world. Boy, does that all seem to bode very badly for how this is going for Elon Musk so far. The fact that like, is it is out of pocket for a judge to have to say this stuff during a trial, as it seems to me.

24:27Brendan Carr:So they sometimes say it. They say it when they have like the sovereign citizen guys who come in and they're like, you don't have jurisdiction over me. like sure that's they say it in that situation sure uh but normally we've all watched all these ceos appear before congress right they are way buttoned up because when the person with the power to take your stuff away shows up you you back it way down you're right you're conciliatory you say you know your honor i'm gonna have to check that out later like he should be playing to the jury. And he's saying things like they tried to steal a charity and this case is going to set a precedent that will let anyone steal a charity.

25:08Brendan Carr:And this is his ex-workshopped applause line. And he's not allowed to say it. And OpenA has like filing motions to strike his testimony because that's not true. And this is a real, I mean, you can have a lot of feelings about the legal system in the United States of America. You have a lot of feelings about the justice system United States of America. It is a structured system. It's designed the way it's designed to at least gesture at fairness. And you can't just steamroll it. Like that's why you have judges and procedure and rules and lawyers and all this stuff. And he's trying to steamroll it because he steamrolls everything.

25:43Brendan Carr:And he's just running into the reality of he's just a witness on the stand. Again, you know, it's going to flip and they're going to put Sam on the stand. And I'm sure, I'm sure OpenAi's lawyers are going to try to make Sam look great, and Elon's lawyers are going to try to make Sam look horrible, and that's just the way it goes. But right now, what you have is one of the wealthiest men in the world in front of a jury that has pretty clearly indicated, statistically, that they don't like him being a huge dick. And I just don't know what his plan is.

26:11David Pierce:I don't know that he has the, like, personality qualities to solve that problem on his own. Like, Like Liz kept noting on today, Thursday, that he was much more subdued than he has been in the past. Like clearly there is somebody giving him the this is not going well for you, buddy note. And yet he can't help himself. Right. Like this is the third day of this. It's not unclear.

26:36Brendan Carr:This is happening while we're recording. So they've moved on to Jared Birchall, who runs Elon's family office, manages investments. We've already gotten to how many Teslas he has. It's good stuff all the way around. Yeah.

26:47David Pierce:Yeah, it is. Liz's big theory was that this is going to be a trial kind of about a bunch of things that don't make any sense, but there is going to be a lot of stuff that comes out. And I think that is already becoming true. There's just like there's a great moment earlier today where Elon Musk took a long time to acknowledge that his for profit companies are for profit.

27:08Brendan Carr:It's like it's just what are we doing here? line. None of it makes sense. We have all kinds of coverage on the site. Obviously, Liz is in the courtroom. Hayden Field, our senior AI reporter, is taking all the documents that are coming out over the course of trial, looking at them, organizing. There's a long poster. If you just want to see the evidence that's being entered, you can go look at it. We're going to, I mean, it doesn't get bigger than this for us. So we're covering this in every way we can.

27:33David Pierce:Yeah. And there's a bunch of other open AI swirl happening right now. We should just talk about a couple of the things. I think the biggest one that happened this week is Microsoft and OpenAI essentially walked their deal all the way back, right? Like Microsoft and OpenAI for years have had this very complicated, but very sort of important and lucrative deal by which they share revenue and technology with one another. This is how like Bing became what it was back in 2023. They made Google dance, Neil. I listen. It was the greatest day of Bing's life. Give it its one day. And this was like a really important tie up for both of these companies, right?

28:19David Pierce:Microsoft owns a huge portion of OpenAI because of all of this. This is how OpenAI got a lot of access to technology and compute for a long time. And their big thing was all of this gets sort of wound down and reconsidered once we get to AGI. And AGI was supposed to be this magical moment that if somebody got to AGI before OpenAI, OpenAI would shut down and would give all of its technology and resources to that company. All of this is nothing. AGI is nothing.

28:43Brendan Carr:I can't believe you're not leading with this.

28:45David Pierce:And the final acknowledgement of it is their deal is now just a normal contract for compute.

28:53Brendan Carr:I can't believe you didn't lead with the AGI clause going away. This is the clause that started with if you make like$100 billion of economic value, that's AGI. and it got reworked into, we'll put up a panel that will evaluate AGI and they would never say who was on the panel. And I still believe it should have been like the Pope and Mariah Carey and me, especially now that we have Chicago Pope like that. Would have been a great panel. Like I just, we could have sold tickets.

29:17David Pierce:Is this digital God? Is that the question? Yeah.

29:21Brendan Carr:And that's gone. Yep. We never even got to learn who they were thinking about for the panel. So in the annals of tech history, who was on the AGI panel It will just be a forever unsolved mystery.

29:33David Pierce:But in tech circles, this is not because AGI is a fake concept that has no bearing on anything. It is completely immeasurable and nonsensical. It's because we're already there, right? Like we've been seeing this for a while, that the Marc Andreessen's of the world have been out there being like AI and AGI are already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And other people have decided that it's not about AGI, it's about superintelligence, which is apparently a different thing of equally nebulous definition. But yeah, this whole thing has just fallen apart. And very clearly what this is, is OpenAI wanted to be able to go make other deals with other companies and not be tied up with Microsoft in this same way.

30:13David Pierce:Also, there have been lingering issues between Microsoft and OpenAI for a long time. Microsoft hired a whole team of people to go do Microsoft's own AI stuff. A lot of the reporting in the story about Sam Altman that was in The New Yorker that Ronan Farrow did was about the ways in which these companies have kind of, if not lied to each other, at least not been wholly good partners to one another. And so the whole thing is just very clearly like, everybody wants out of this. We're moving on. We are now business contacts who have compute deals.

30:46Brendan Carr:Yeah, they have a first look exclusivity. So OpenAI products will ship first on Microsoft Azure unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities. So if you're OpenAI, you've got to use Azure unless Microsoft is like, no, that seems boring. Sure.

31:04David Pierce:And then OpenAI turned around and immediately announced a gigantic deal with AWS and has started to say, we are an AWS first product. Like that's our focus now.

31:14Brendan Carr:So as you and I have been talking about on the show for weeks now, it has just become very obvious to everyone that AI is an enterprise product. This is a thing businesses are going to do to automate business processes. In particular, a lot of businesses are going to write a lot of code with AI in ways that they weren't able to before. And this is all great. and to make that all work and be good, they need access to lots of data and the businesses already have their data in AWS. Yeah. It's where it is. The AWS is a huge cloud provider. A lot of businesses use it. It's already there.

31:40David Pierce:Amazon is winning that race and has been for a very long time.

31:43Brendan Carr:And they're very proud of it. And so Microsoft is like, if you want the coolest AI stuff, you can migrate to Azure. And a lot of people are like, no, we'll just use Anthropic. Amazon spent a lot of money on Anthropic. We'll just use that. And so I think as OpenAI needed to get to an IPO, and make more revenue and compete with Anthropic, which is resolutely a B2B company. They needed to get to AWS. I think the weirdness between Microsoft and OpenAI exists in a lot of ways, and now it's over. And we're just never going to know if Mariah Carey thought the computer was alive. And I'm personally very sad about that, as you can tell.

32:21Brendan Carr:But the decoupling of OpenAI from Microsoft has been in the works forever. To me, it's just very obvious it's happened. OpenAI needs more customers. Being tied to Microsoft does not get them more customers. And unless OpenAI was content to remain Microsoft's research division and let Microsoft go fight for customers, there was no point in being locked to Azure in the way that they were. And I think we're going to see OpenAI be way more aggressive trying to get business customers now that they're on AWS. None of this matters to anyone normal for any reason whatsoever.

32:58Brendan Carr:drama that has ever existed in the history of the world.

33:01David Pierce:But it is happening for a specific and important reason, which again, you and I keep talking about, which is that people, regular, normal human people in their regular, normal lives are increasingly saying they don't want AI. Yep. And they're saying it in ways big and small, right? There was this company, Censor Tower, which does really interesting analytics data on the internet and on mobile apps in particular, came out with a study that says basically The uninstall rates for AI apps are way up year over year. Just to give you an example, Claude has the best number. Claude is the best performer of all of the major chatbots with a 90 % increase in uninstalls year over year.

33:43David Pierce:ChatGPT is up 257%. And this was measured in particular around all the stuff with the Pentagon and the Department of Defense.

33:52Brendan Carr:Wait, let me understand this rate. So uninstalls are up 257%. Yeah. not 257 % of people are uninstalling it. Correct. Which is a very Trump-like percentage. Yes. But the rate of uninstalls is more than doubled, right? That's right.

34:07David Pierce:Okay. And next to that, the rate of downloads is also slowing down. It's going up, but the actual pace of adoption is slowing really fast. And we're just in this, we're in this fascinating moment where we had a great story on the site this week, digging more into this tension that young people feel where they feel obligated to use AI. And so they do. And most people who are like in high school and college report using these AI bots all the time. And they hate it and they wish they didn't have to. And they feel obligated to. They feel like they're being sold a bill of goods about how if they don't, they'll be left out of the job market and their world will fall apart on them.

34:46David Pierce:But they don't want to use these tools because they understand it to be bad for them to do so. And there is just like this tension is real and it is serious. And the thing that ChatGPT has had going for it for a long time is that growth has been ridiculous. Like it is one of the fastest growing pieces of consumer technology in history. There's been a bunch of reporting recently about the fact that ChatGPT still hasn't announced that it has a billion users, which is like a big important milestone that a lot of people have been waiting for and did not expect to be waiting this long for. And like there is just these things are huge.

35:22David Pierce:They're very successful. Lots of people use them. All that is true. And yet there is just this mounting evidence that even the people who use it don't like it. And more and more people are finding ways to not use it.

35:34Brendan Carr:That billion user billion weekly active user number is a big deal because people have been waiting for it. But the information first reported and then the Wall Street Journal had the same bit that opening a CFO Sarah Fryer is saying we can't withstand the scrutiny of going public right now. Right. The kind of financial reporting we'd have to do, we can't we cannot do right now.

35:53David Pierce:And that as a result, she is being in some ways frozen out of her executive roles at the company. Like the tension inside of OpenAI around this stuff appears to be pretty intense.

36:02Brendan Carr:That's reporting. I will say they keep issuing statements signed by both Sam and Sarah saying we love each other.

36:08David Pierce:Don't put in the newspaper that we're defunct, Eli.

36:12Brendan Carr:There's something here that we keep talking about that people keep arguing with us about because the numbers are broadly big. Google announced this quarter that Google search queries have hit an all-time high. Great. It is true that people are using the tools at high rates. It's also true that they're making up their minds. Like the polling data is super clear. And everyone in tech has gotten so confused about what data is that they can't see the thing in front of their face, which is the experiences in the free consumer products are bad. Yep. Just straightforwardly bad. The experience of free chat GPT is bad.

36:46Brendan Carr:It is nothing but like BuzzFeed style engagement prompts now. Like every query ends with, have you thought about asking me another question? Like it's like some leading way.

36:58David Pierce:Yeah, the ads are starting to get more intense. You're hitting limits faster and faster on these tools. It is an increasingly bad experience.

37:06Brendan Carr:And the bar, the reason it became such a fast-gram product to begin with is that Google Search at that time, to this day, is so intensely commercialized and shittified. So as a competitor to that version of Google Search, which was 95 sponsored posts and an SEO-ified web where the economic conditions of publishing a recipe require all the poor recipe bloggers to write 2 ,000 words of personal narrative before the actual recipe. that was all bad we've written about that at length of course the chatbot that will just talk to you was a better experience of course that thing grew at infinite scale in the beginning and now they have to make money they're reverting to an unshittified version of the product loading it with ads loading it with more engagement prompts trying to drive user engagement in all kinds of ways that we understand and people are reacting to it yeah it's the same with free gemini It's the same with free AI overviews that, yes, it's true.

38:07Brendan Carr:They're doing more search queries because you can just ask the thing more open-ended questions and it will deliver you an answer. It's also true that AI overviews are generally bad.

38:15David Pierce:And you have to do another search to get a good answer.

38:17Brendan Carr:Right. And like no one, I just feel like the tech industry is lost in the data, right? They're looking at these numbers and saying something must be going right. The market is telling us that we're winning. And it's like also they're telling you that they hate the products.

38:29David Pierce:tech companies love to talk about this phrase revealed preferences as a way out of the tension between people actually liking the product or not right that you say oh people are having a bad time on Instagram and it makes them feel bad and it creates issues with with mental health and body dysmorphia and all of this stuff and someone at one of these companies points to a chart that says, well, they keep opening the app, so they must like it. And that idea needs to die. It just needs to die because it is not correct. Because the revealed preference of people using AI is, I would like to have a job in the future.

39:07David Pierce:And the world has spent the last four years telling me that if I don't learn how to use Claude Code, I will never get a job and that the world will leave me behind. And so the revealed preference is not for these good products. It's to continue to be a functioning member of society. And we just have to get out of this idea that because people use your products, that means they like them. This is the story of social media. We have spent a decade learning with social media that they don't have to be good products to be powerful and to be popular and to be like massively used. Like screw you and your revealed preferences.

39:44David Pierce:People are saying out loud that they don't like your product and that they feel like they have to use it. And if you as a tech company think that's a victory, you should understand very quickly why everybody hates you. That's why everybody hates you.

39:56Brendan Carr:Yeah. I mean, to the extent that, you know, when Meta still had product managers, I think they're firing them all because Meta's firing everybody every week. You know, the joke was always that if Meta was having a bad quarter, a product manager could just turn a knob, increase the ad load, and make the number. Yeah. Inside of a tech company, that sort of decision process, where it's like we can just make more money by making the user experience slightly worse for a few weeks, is pretty normal. Like, there's a reason it's a joke.

40:24David Pierce:By the way, Meta this week revealed that to be precisely correct. Meta revealed that it lost 20 million users in its family of apps. Meta stopped breaking out which app had which many users because I think it would make Facebook in particular look bad. So it bundles all of its stuff together. And that whole number across all of them, which protects anything having kind of a down quarter, went down 20 million users. That's a big deal. Do you know what went way, way, way, way up is the amount of money that Meta made last quarter. Like, a record-setting jump. Like, they just turned the knob, and they will keep turning the knob.

41:07Brendan Carr:You know, the way they did it is super interesting, and I'm jealous of the story. So this is a New York Times story by a friend of the rich ass, Trip Mikkel, by the way, and Eli Tan. and I'm utterly fascinated with how the ads economy works. I think understanding the money of the internet helps you understand the internet. And so I'm always just fascinated by it. And there's this thing that's happening on meta platforms and on Google platforms specifically where the old way of ad targeting, where you would show up with your ad, which is called creative in the industry parlance. It's very good.

41:38Brendan Carr:You have to call it creative to make yourself feel good about it. So you'd show up with your ad creative, your video, your picture, whatever it is. and you would say, I made a razor. I'd like to target this razor at men, 18 to 35. Go find them for me. You know who your users are. Put this ad in front of them. And they would do it because they have a lot of data. And then you could refine it even more. You'd be like, I think my razor blades are going to show really well to men, 18 to 35, in metro areas who have previously looked at shaving cream. And they have a lot of data, so they could target it.

42:07Brendan Carr:And you, the advertiser, were trying to go find your audience, right? And you could run all these experiments and refine different ways. That's over. The big jump in revenue is that they have flipped the model upside down and they are using AI to look at your ad, to look at your product. And then they're going and finding you the customers that are most likely to want to look at your ad and buy your product.

42:32David Pierce:Oh, interesting. So you just say, I have shoes and it is now, you used to have to say, I want to sell these shoes to XYZ kind of person. Now you just say, I have shoes and Meta does the rest for you. Yeah.

42:43Brendan Carr:And not even I have shoes. It's here's my ad. Right. I made a video. Here's the ad I made for shoes. And go find me people who are likely to look at this ad and convert into shoe purchasers. Whoa. And so the line that the industry is using that I've heard over and over again is the creative is the targeting. So you just make different ads that you think will appeal to different groups. And you make dozens of variations and you like fire them off into the AI ad system. and the AI ad system looks at your ad and says, okay, this video looks like these videos that this group of people is interested.

43:13Brendan Carr:We're going to give this ad to them. And they're going to go find you the customers. And this is, you can just imagine the next turn, which is, oh, we can edit the ad with AI to make it more effective to the customers that we're finding. Or, and Zuckerberg has said this out loud, don't even show up with the creative. Show up with the product and some money. Give us the money. will generate the ads for you and just deliver you results.

43:39David Pierce:Right. Take one picture of the shoes. We'll do the rest.

43:41Brendan Carr:And we'll do the rest. And by all accounts, this is a massive success for both Google and Meta. Yep. That small companies in particular who were never any good at advertising because they're small companies and you can't afford the big agencies that used to sell this kind of data analysis, they're just showing up and be like, find me some customers. And their sales are going through the roof. So they're just dumping more money into the system. And you look at that and you're like, well that's actually great for a bunch of small companies and then you also look at it you're like this sucks so much yeah like it's tearing the ad industry apart uh it's certainly devaluing creative across the board it's subjecting all of us to the creepiest kinds of targeted advertising that have ever existed in the entire history of the world but then a bunch of small companies are are finding more and more customers i i could not tell you i've been thinking about this story since I read it, since I've been hearing all the ad people say the words, the creative is the targeting, which is a real mind vendor.

44:37Because at the end of the day, like they also want you to give up the creative.

44:41Brendan Carr:They want you to stop making the ads. I don't know, man. Like when I say it's enterprise software, when you say it's enterprise software, it's this. They took the AI tools. They invested in all the AI tools. They built the tools for themselves to run their ad targeting system. And it is, by all accounts, more successful than any ad targeting system or any advertising platform has ever been in the history of the world, even as the users go down. But it's not like great consumer experiences in any way, shape or form.

45:10David Pierce:The digital god stuff is a marketing scheme to bring customers to your ad targeting system. Like that is that is sort of the story of the last 20 years of the Internet. And it is just more nakedly that story than ever. But when we get into ad tech, that means it is time to pull the ripcord on whatever we're talking about. Get out of here. Let's turn now to the hype desk. This is where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Escada come on and tell us what's cool in the world. Sometimes it's sponsored. Today, it is not. Ross, Ashley, welcome back. Hello. Thank you for allowing us to return. I'm surprised you haven't changed the locks, if I'm being honest.

45:48David Pierce:Neil and I have been talking. We've decided that one of your most important jobs on this show is to tell us what TV shows are cool. This is literally just like a thing that Neil and I both require in our lives at this particular moment. And this is a thing I think you guys can provide for us. Ashley has just a thing for you. I can provide. I can provide. I love television. I will binge watch TV. I'm obsessed right now with Widow's Bay on Apple TV. This is so good. It's a horror comedy. Katie Dippold of Bridesmaids created this and it is Matthew Reese is the star he's the mayor of a small little island town in the northeast called Widow's Bay and Stephen Root is in it as like your resident weird guy it's got all the things that you want um and and there's some elements of like uh you know it reminds me so much of Twin Peaks and I I think that this generation needs a new we needed Twin Peaks for this is it as weird as Twin Peaks it is as weird it's the other person who's kind of co-creating is uh Hiro Mirai who did all the Charles Gambino videos yeah he directed it yeah yeah he did um all of Atlanta basically so it's that kind of like modern weird I will say a kudos to Apple for being the only streaming platform left willing to release things once a week and actually stick to it kudos um and be this suddenly the Twin Peaks comparison instantly makes it make sense why all of my TV nerd friends have been excited about this show for like months.

47:19David Pierce:Like this is the show all of 2026. Every TV hipster I know, all of whom love Twin Peaks, have been extremely excited for this show. It feels like it hits for me right now. Fair enough. Also again, kudos to Apple for I miss the golden age of TV that was like Richard Pepler's HBO. I miss that era like a lot. And now I feel like Apple TV has been on such a tear over even just, I mean, like what, five years now? I mean, they're just crushing it. And if you're a connoisseur of fine television shows, a content person, as it were, if you don't have an Apple TV subscription, like you're really missing out.

48:02There's so much good sci-fi, like so many good sci-fi shows on Apple. Yeah.

48:07Brendan Carr:Do you think John Ternus knows them? Like I've read a lot of coverage from the Hollywood press, it's like, who's this new guy? Will he keep paying us money? Does he know we're down here? Yeah, exactly. It's like, yeah, his job is to just ignore it, I think, is what everyone wants to have happen here. Yeah. I mean, it is a really good value add for, I think, the subscription stuff, which I, you know, I think that that's the thing that they're wanting to sell is that, you know, all the subscription services where you have Apple One and it's that like, what is it, $40 something dollars a month where you get like everything all packaged in there with like Apple News.

48:42And so I think that that is, I think Apple TV is the crown jewel of that package, in my opinion.

48:50David Pierce:All right, Ross, what do you have for us? I've got Coyote versus Acme. I'm stupidly excited for this. We weren't here last week, but right after the show went up, they dropped a trailer for this movie. And you all may not know about this movie. It has been so long coming. It got finished in 2022 and then immediately shelled by Warner Brothers for a$30 million tax write-off. It was one of the three movies, that Batgirl and some Scooby thing. This was a fully finished film. Fully finished, ready to go. Completely done. Not like, oh, it still needs post-production, visual effects.

49:24Brendan Carr:Do I just not know how to do my taxes? It definitely feels like I should be like, I wrote this book I didn't publish. Yeah. I'm shelving it, and I'm not releasing it, and it's worth$30 million.

49:36David Pierce:No one will ever see The Lie Day, but I can tell you it was going to be a million seller. No, so it was one of those movies during kind of the early Zaslav years where they're trying to get the finances figured out. All these filmmakers who had seen it, they're like, this is the next Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It's an animated kind of live-action hybrid. The plot essentially is Wile E. Coyote keeps going after the Roadrunner with these Acme products, right? And they've broken every time. So he's fed up and he's finally decided to sue the Acme Corporation. And he hires Will Forte. Will Forte as the down-and-his-luck lawyer versus John Cena, like the super fancy lawyer for Acme Corporation.

50:11David Pierce:Like, this is the little guy, David versus Goliath story. And of course, this is also now a metatextual read of the movie itself because it has been lingering for three or four years now. There was a couple of near misses. Netflix and Paramount tried to buy it. Warner Brothers said, no, we want$80 million. Finally, I think they just gave up. This smaller independent distributor, Ketchup, they've done a lot of little smaller mid-tier movies. They picked it up just recently, I think in March, for$50 million, and it is finally going to see the light of day in August. The trailer just dropped. Is it funnier if this movie is great or if it's horrible?

50:47David Pierce:Like just from a pure, this is the weirdest story ever, like is it a better ending if it's like a smash hit or if it sucks? I will be equally satisfied either way. Yeah, I think that's right. It's either a very funny story or like stick it to the man. Coyote versus Acme is awesome. Like it's kind of a win win. It's entertaining either way for us, the viewer at home. But yeah, I mean, it could be like K-pop demon hunters, but they just didn't realize what they had. Like Sony gave it to Netflix for dirt cheap. And now it's like, shoot, now we got to figure out how to like monetize the back end. I will say all of the people on the Internet, I'm going to because I am terminally online and I saw the the the outcry of people being like, this is terrible.

51:27we can't put the loony toots in a vault. You better go see this movie. Like, you better go see this movie. This movie needs to make, like,$500 million. Like, it doesn't need to cross a billion. It doesn't need to be the Mario movie, but it does need to make a statement, and that requires people to actually go see it. So go see it.

51:47David Pierce:It's a lot to ask in 2026. I know, I know. It's like$400 for a movie ticket now. I understand. I saw Project Hail Mary the other night alone, and it was, like,$90 all in. It's rough. But wasn't it gorgeous? The popcorn was this big, though. It made me very happy. The popcorn supply chain is rough. Big popcorn. That's for another day. Ross, Ashley, thank you guys so much for being here. We will see you back here next week. We are going to take a break, and then we're going to come back. We've got some more stuff to talk about. Gadget time. We'll be right back.

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55:59David Pierce:All right, we're back. Like, Neelai, we have a bunch of gadget news this week, all on a really fun spectrum for me of a bunch of things that I think you might be really into. And then a bunch of things that I think you may have absolutely no feelings about or interest for. So I've invented a new game and it's called Does Neelai Care About This?

56:18Brendan Carr:I love all gadgets. Don't do this to me.

56:21David Pierce:You love all gadgets in theory, right? Like you love that gadgets exist.

56:27Brendan Carr:Yes.

56:27David Pierce:Sometimes you don't care very much about gadgets. They're like, I'm so psyched that you're here. I want what's best for you, and I hope you live a great life. Just don't talk to me anymore. It's like, that's how you feel about some gadgets. So we have a bunch, and I'm just going to name some gadgets, and we're either going to talk a bunch about it or we're going to talk very little.

56:44Brendan Carr:You're going to be so mad at me by the end of this.

56:46David Pierce:All right, let's do it. The one I want to start with is, I think, probably the gadget of the week. It's the Steam Controller. Do you care about the Steam Controller?

56:55Brendan Carr:Okay, first of all, I need to say I do believe it's the gadget of the week. without question people were so into the steam controller on our site this week i understand why i i intellectually understand why okay i am going to convince you that you should care

57:12David Pierce:very deeply about the steam controller but first okay uh let me just play you something that jay peters on our team made he reviewed the steam controller uh and he made he made something for us explaining what this thing is and how it works let me just play it for you here's the steam

57:25Nilay Patel:controller ringing like a telephone. I have in my hands Valve's new Steam controller which I've been using for about two weeks to play a bunch of games on Steam. It's a great controller for playing games but it has all sorts of really cool small touches that make the experience even better. Like if you lose the controller you can just ping it. The controller has nice chimes when you turn it on or off. The included puck that gives you a low latency connection also snaps onto the back of the controller so you can charge it magnetically. You can see a live indicator of that low latency 2.4 gigahertz connection right from Steam's settings.

58:03Nilay Patel:Here are the back buttons which open up all sorts of customizations for when I'm playing my games. And I love the quick access button that opens up a menu so I can connect wireless headphones or check performance in my games. You can even use the controller to type in the text boxes on your computer. Or in a pinch you can use it as a mouse and keyboard to navigate your BIOS. The Steam controller will be available on May 4th for$99. I'm probably going to buy one.

58:27David Pierce:Eli, this is the thing. Yes, it's a video game controller. And yes, you only play Madden. But like, what a good gadget this is.

58:34Brendan Carr:It's a great gadget. This is what I'm saying. I understand intellectually. You can use it in a pinch as a mouse and keyboard to adjust your BIOS settings. It's perfect. Yes, it's such a good gadget. It's$99. People are complaining about some parts of it, like haptic and a trigger. Who cares? It's a perfect gadget. It is very funny that there's no Steam machine because of the RAM crisis. And so they're just doing the controller because that's the thing they can ship. They're like, we promise we've made these.

58:59David Pierce:We just can't sell most of them to you yet.

59:02Brendan Carr:But I think it's a great gadget. I just, I don't, I'm not a PC gamer. It's not for me.

59:07David Pierce:Are you a believer in the theory that like maybe game controllers should do more than be game controllers? Like there's something about what Jay is talking about there that is like, there were those years ago when it was like, maybe you'll use your game controller to also control your cable box and watch tv this sort of xbox one theory of the world uh part of me feels like there's something to that that like if we're gonna do a universal remote in 2026 that can kind of halfway do my tv and my game console and change bios settings on my computer it should be the steam controller this is why i want this thing i don't even own a steam deck and i'm like i'm gonna get one of you want to use it to control

59:45Brendan Carr:Oh, you're Roku? What's wrong with you? No. Joysticks. I feel like we have landed as a society on the remotes for your TV stuff should be as simple as possible and your game controller should be as complicated as possible.

1:00:00David Pierce:That is fair. Right?

1:00:01Brendan Carr:Like that seems like somebody who has an Apple TV remote and a PS5 controller just permanently next to each other. At no point have I ever sat and been like, they should be the same thing. Like they're just, they're different things.

1:00:13David Pierce:Yeah. I will say in this particular case, I respect the hell out of the Steam controller for knowing exactly what it is and who it's for, which is just endless customization, right? Like this thing is basically not supposed to work out of the box. It obviously will, but it is meant to be tinkered with to death. And this is a thing that the whole Steam ecosystem has done really well over the years. Like the Steam Deck does a really good job of being customizable and having lots of different ways you can do things. You can map buttons to different things. You can run all kinds of software. Like this thing is a tinkerer's paradise in a way that I think is really cool.

1:00:50David Pierce:And the Steam controller seems to have found a way to do that that is actually even like more user friendly than average in a lot of ways. And like this thing is you can see why people are excited about this, right? This is the exact thing you should deliver for this group of people. And I think that's really cool.

1:01:07Brendan Carr:Yeah, Steam knows its audience. You know, the thing you were saying earlier about reveal preferences and tech companies getting all confused with their data. Big tech products, the ones that have to move the needle and billions of people, they all treat everyone like they're stupid. Like, you don't know what you want. We know what you want. 2 % of people don't like this. Those 2 % of people happen to be 100 million people. Who cares? That's just how their brains work on the big platforms, the big products. And then products that take their own audiences seriously and let them make choices and customize in user-friendly ways, you can just see there's always love.

1:01:40Brendan Carr:It's just love. and like this is one of those I understand intellectually I understand why I assume controller is a big deal

1:01:47David Pierce:I will say I am substantially less excited about the idea of being able to ring my controller as Jay was but you know props to you Jay but I do think the thing and this is a thing you will appreciate as somebody who I'm sure has had to fight with syncing controllers to game consoles that little puck that just plugs in and snaps on and immediately pairs the controller unbelievably good idea yeah like yeah fabulous i have fought bluetooth settings so many damn times over the years because i used to i had a i had one ps4 controller that i would use uh on my ps4 but then i would also pair it to my ipad and use it as an ipad controller and trying to go between those two things what are you doing man nightmare why why are you trying to live that life just by another controller i don't anymore i've learned i have learned the error of my ways uh and mostly i just don't play games on my ipad anymore because it's not worth the hassle that's the end of that um all right i have another gadget for you um can i interest you in a leak of samsung's first smart glasses thrillingly known as the samsung galaxy glasses what are we doing i'm never gonna

1:02:56Brendan Carr:wear glasses that say samsung on the temple it is not going to happen i don't know anybody who's going to do that.

1:03:03David Pierce:It's a really good point.

1:03:05Brendan Carr:It's 0 % chance of success.

1:03:07David Pierce:I think even the bar for Apple putting a logo on the right temple of your face is a super super high bar and Apple is much more likely to get there than Samsung ever is.

1:03:19Brendan Carr:I mean there's a lot of like conversation about whether Ray-Ban ruined its brand by partnering with Meta. Yeah. Like Meta needed the Ray-Ban brand and no one's putting the Facebook logo on the side of their glasses. Totally. And now people see Ray-Bans and they think of creepy glasses.

1:03:33David Pierce:Yep.

1:03:34Brendan Carr:Vsong wrote a great piece for us this week. She kind of reviewed all of the smart glasses that are available and she was like, what was Radline? All these smart glasses and nothing to do? Yep. These products are fundamentally useless. They're just cameras for your face with a little bit of AI assistant thrown in the mix so that everyone can claim their AI.

1:04:18David Pierce:I don't know, man. And like V was talking about this. She's like, even when people don't notice that I'm wearing them, I know that I'm wearing them and I start to feel weird. It's like I'm wearing these glasses that I need to see and I go into a bathroom and suddenly I feel the need to like apologize to everyone in this bathroom because I'm wearing glasses that I need to see because they come in prescriptions now. but they are smart glasses and they do have a camera and i'm not recording so like there's just there's such a weird social dynamic to this that the we the like this is neil's theory of wearable bullshit right like the killer app needs to be so killer to be worth individually and as a society solving these problems and v's v's stance is basically like we're nowhere near it none of the AI is it?

1:05:08David Pierce:None of the cameras aren't yet good enough to be it. There's just nothing here.

1:05:12Brendan Carr:Again, the killer app is names and faces. I will reconsider a lot of my own personal stances about technology and surveillance and invasiveness if you can give me names and faces.

1:05:23David Pierce:Sure.

1:05:24Brendan Carr:I still think, and I actually think a lot of people will find that too creepy. They should. Because you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database. I'm just saying my personal power will increase so dramatically that, you know, I'm open to the idea.

1:05:39David Pierce:So that's how you get above the curve of Neelai's theory of where we're walking.

1:05:43Brendan Carr:If you can combine my just general level of wanting to talk to people and being charming with actually the capability of remembering anyone's name at any time, whoo, we're going to change a lot of things real fast. The FCC is going to get a lot different, you know what I mean? But, you know, all of these products are inching their way to making that promise. and I don't think they're useful enough yet and I certainly don't think a Samsung clone of a meta product that people are already starting to dislike is going to get them anywhere.

1:06:14David Pierce:No, and they're all pushing harder and harder towards being AI products, right? This is like, they want you to think that the killer app is ongoing access to AI. The camera is an input system. The microphone is an input system that somehow these are all going to work and V's stance, and I think most people's at this point, is like, none of that really works and it's not. And even the thesis of it, is cool at times, right? Like it's a neat way to get walking directions when you're in a city and in a certain place. And that is it. And the idea of like occasional glasses, I just don't think works for people.

1:06:48David Pierce:It's just, that's just not a, that's just not gonna work. The Samsung glasses, by the way, it sounds like we're not gonna have to wait that long to see. They might be announced as soon as Google IO in a few weeks. They're gonna cost somewhere between$379 and$499, which is a lot of money. We'll see. they don't have a display it seems they're camera glasses

1:07:09Brendan Carr:we all understand these products now the camera lenses by the way are huge so at least they're doing that

1:07:15David Pierce:good for them speaking of Samsung leaks there's been some leaks and by leaks I mostly mean like blocks of metal that someone took pictures of that purport to show the wide foldable phone coming from Samsung And I bring this up not because I think you are going to care about Samsung's wide foldable.

1:07:37Brendan Carr:Are we doing wide foldable as a category?

1:07:40David Pierce:This is the thing. We're doing wide foldable, which A, sucks. Apparently, this thing, this phone might literally be called the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 wide, which is the worst possible idea. Like we did phablet once. Just go for it. We did phablet and it was bad. We definitely did phablet. And everyone should feel bad. We can't do wide foldable. We just can't.

1:08:01Brendan Carr:Z Fold 8 wide, first of all, absolutely sounds like a high school football player. I was just thinking that too. 100%. No idea what we're doing here. Like I can hear John Gruden screaming Z Fold 8 wide like in my soul. I mean, what else is it? It's a foldable, it's a little squatter and it's going to open up into a basically landscape tablet. Sure.

1:08:22David Pierce:So the reason I ask is because this also seems to be the ongoing theory about what the iPhone is going to be. That rather than do the sort of tall TV remote when closed, tablet when open, that Apple is also building something that is a little shorter, a little squatter. And this might just be the future of the foldable phone. And I'm curious how you feel about that.

1:08:46Brendan Carr:This is just another category where I intellectually and emotionally want it to win. Sure. I want there to be great folding phones because I think it's so cool. If you're unfolded at one of these phones, you're like, oh, this rules. And then the reality is most people who have them don't ever unfold them. We know a lot of people with folding phones. They just don't unfold them because to make them good, you have to make them useful when they're closed. And then you just have a phone. And then you have a phone that you can unfold. And they don't unfold it because nobody wants a little tablet. Maybe it'll be different when, you know, it's iOS and Apple people are going to be different than the Android people.

1:09:24Brendan Carr:But I don't think it's the shape that's holding anyone back here. I think it is fundamentally unfolding it. You have to have use cases for a bigger screen of that size that isn't just I'm going to watch a video. And even I'm going to watch a video. No one is deterred from watching a video at full volume with no headphones at any time on their phones at this point in time.

1:09:47David Pierce:No. Every time I see somebody on the subway, I was in New York this week, so I got to spend a lot of time riding the subway, which is when I do a lot of my like anthropological technology research. That's very important. I look over people's shoulders and watch them do text messages. And the number of people I clocked watching YouTube videos vertical on their screen, like not vertical videos, but like horizontal YouTube videos where it's the video at the top and then the feed of related videos at the bottom. Just perfectly happy watching the video with it taking up, you know, a third of the screen.

1:10:18David Pierce:It's like, oh, right. Most people don't care about watching on the biggest screen that they have.

1:10:23Brendan Carr:They're reading the comments like they're in it.

1:10:25David Pierce:Right. They're just transiently watching videos.

1:10:27Brendan Carr:yep it's fine this is what we do also most videos on youtube i mean we're we're in it we're in the

1:10:31David Pierce:mix they're just podcasts so like whatever yeah that's exactly right uh yeah no don't look at our faces it's fine um did you see by the way speaking of um size of foldable things mark german who has been reporting the existence of a foldable ipad for like forever uh now thinks that there is not going to be a foldable ipad and and the thing i don't think i realized until this supposed product was canceled was that it was going to be a 20-inch iPad. Yeah. This is a foldable television. And this sounds like you could get Neelai on board. Like, give me a 10-inch iPad that turns into a 20-inch iPad.

1:11:08David Pierce:It's like, that's some Neelai stuff right there.

1:11:10Brendan Carr:I'm into it. Let's go. Like, give me something other than a phone that turns into a tablet. You know? Like, I know how I feel about tablets. I don't use them. That's your answer.

1:11:21David Pierce:Can I interest you in a phone that turns into a smartwatch? Also known as the new Motorola Razr Ultra, the flip phone of my dreams.

1:11:27Brendan Carr:This thing is real pretty.

1:11:29David Pierce:It is. It's really nice looking.

1:11:30Brendan Carr:It's really pretty. Yep. It's still a Motorola phone and it is still utterly confusing software.

1:11:35David Pierce:It's also more expensive than before.

1:11:38Brendan Carr:They have done the most insane job of just one-to-one, pixel-for-pixel, cloning the iPhone camera on this phone.

1:11:48David Pierce:Yes, very, very much so.

1:11:49Brendan Carr:Not even an attempt to make it look anything other than the iPhone camera.

1:11:53David Pierce:No, they're fine with it. Allison Johnson, our senior phone reviewer, basically wrote about the Razer Ultra saying this phone is hot and you shouldn't buy it. And I think that's largely correct. I used a Razer Ultra for a while, found it to be a cool idea that is like completely wanting in functional software. But then I look at this and it's like they've got the wood finish back. They've got a bunch of nice colors. I like that it closes. I don't know. I still I still want it. there's something in me that says flip phone is the right answer to everything.

1:12:23Brendan Carr:I ran into somebody with an older razor a couple weeks ago, and they were just thrilled with it. Just loved it. Loved closing it and putting it away and feeling like if they needed to look at a notification on the cover screen, they could, but they weren't going to do social media on it. And to do anything on the phone, they had to intentionally unflip it. They loved it.

1:12:42David Pierce:It's good stuff. Again, purely anecdotal. This is my subway riding anthropology. technology uh many more z flips out there in the world than z folds people people seem to be buying more flip phones than fold phones at the moment and a lot of that i'm sure is price right like

1:12:59Brendan Carr:the foldable phone is double the price i think a lot of it's price but i i just think no one is like i should get a little tap like look i know the tablet people are out there they're all going to send us emails i know that pilots love the ipad mini and that there's data showing that back injuries for pilots have dropped precipitously since the ipad came out i think i picked that one up uh in david pogue's apple 50 book which is really fun to read i've been flipping through it it's great i get it there's there's a market for tablets i'm just saying most people are not like i should get a tablet they're like i should get a bigger phone yes and then they get the biggest

1:13:31David Pierce:phone that they can okay which is also maybe the story of the last gadget i have to ask you about the asus rog zephyrus duo um can i interest you in a gaming laptop that has a screen and then a another screen on top of that screen.

1:13:45Brendan Carr:I've never been more excited about a product in my entire life. This is pure Neelai. Especially because you can make it go up vertically in like this very precarious and also somewhat like scary way. Like it looks like it's going to attack you.

1:13:58David Pierce:Yeah, I mean, the one is sort of tipping towards you at the end of this process.

1:14:01Brendan Carr:Yeah, this is, I mean, this is a laptop for someone who's very serious about video games and also trading crypto.

1:14:07David Pierce:Yeah, it has two 16-inch OLEDs. It has an NVIDIA 5090 GPU, 16-core Panther Lake chip, all the ports, 32 gigs of RAM, terabyte SSD,$5 ,500 as configured. Antonio reviewed it, and he basically has literally a line in this story that says, this is a laptop for nobody. But then the ongoing thesis of his review is like, but it kind of rips, dude. Like, it's this computer just, it just kind of rips, dude. Like, I spent all week working on my 13-inch MacBook Air instead of the normal big screen that I have. And you know how sick it would have been to just have another 13-inch screen I could pull up?

1:14:56Brendan Carr:I would have gotten so much more done. I do love that the keyboard pogo pins onto the bottom screen. Like, the number of configurations that you can put this laptop in. Oh, my gosh. Very good. I'm into it. This is the best gadget of the week. Screw your screen controller.

1:15:10David Pierce:$5 ,500. That's what you want. Let's do this.

1:15:13Brendan Carr:This is what we need. This is what America needs at this time.

1:15:16David Pierce:I couldn't agree more. All right. Let's take one more break, and then we're going to come back. Stupid Brendan did it again.

1:15:24Nilay Patel:Never stops.

1:15:26David Pierce:We'll be right back.

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1:17:47David Pierce:All right, we're back. Neil, I don't even have to ask. It is time once again for America's Favorite Podcaster Than a Podcast. I know it's time again because the man has escaped containment as he does from time to time. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:18:03Brendan Carr:Brandon Carr is a dummy.

1:18:09David Pierce:Thank you to everyone who has reached out telling us how much you love the new official theme song of Brandon Carr is a Dummy. We've gotten some licensing requests. Yeah. This thing's going to be on the... We'll get it out there. It's going to be on the billboard charts. It's going to be a whole thing. I mean, I couldn't be more excited.

1:18:22Brendan Carr:I want to make sure we license the remix too. Also, keep sending us theme songs. We'll play the other theme songs.

1:18:27David Pierce:Absolutely.

1:18:27Brendan Carr:It's just, we were playing the Gregorian chant so much that it felt that we should just make it official.

1:18:32David Pierce:someday we're going to do like a Coachella, but every act is just Brendan Carr theme songs. Coachella.

1:18:37Brendan Carr:Coachella. It works.

1:18:39David Pierce:Oh, no. And then he'll try to shut it down. Oh, we have to do that now, Neil. Why did you say that out loud?

1:18:44Brendan Carr:It's bad news.

1:18:45David Pierce:Oh, brother. What do you do this week?

1:18:47Brendan Carr:Brendan, you know, he overdid it in the way that he is wont to do. I think it's going to backfire. I think it, I have hope for America this time. He's still a dummy. So as I'm sure everyone is aware, this past weekend was the White House Correspondence Center. There was an attempted shooting, although it is becoming less and less clear who shot at what time.

1:19:07David Pierce:Yes.

1:19:08Brendan Carr:Just based on what we know. But somebody did try to break into the correspondence dinner. They did have a gun. Shots were fired. The thing was shut down. Everyone was hustled out of there. Joanna Stern was there. It's just scary all around. This whole thing is very scary. It's very bad. Don't do political violence. I'm just going to keep saying it. Before the dinner, Jimmy Kimmel had done a fake roast of the dinner on his show. And he showed a picture of Mwani Trump and he said this joke that I personally think is very funny. He said, you have the glow of an expectant widow because Trump is not looking so great lately.

1:19:43Brendan Carr:And that's just a joke about Trump being old. I would point out that the president, when people die, he's like, I hated him anyway. I'm glad the bastard's dead. Like, this is not a man who reveres death. Fine. Anyway, the White House Correspondence Center gets shut down because of this attempted shooting. and people seize on this joke on the right and they're like, what a tasteless joke. You're calling for an assassination. There's not a reading of that joke in which Jimmy Kimmel is calling for an assassination. Right, this is just pure outrage culture. Yeah. At every possible level.

1:20:16David Pierce:I mean, it's right there next to, there was, I forget who it was, it was one of the Trump administration officials said something about how like, there's going to be shots fired at the white, and everybody's like, she knew. And it's like, no, that's just a thing people say.

1:20:28Brendan Carr:You know, there's an entire conspiracy culture online lately. Charles Pulliam Moore wrote about it for us this week, that the sort of conspiracy influencers are having the time of their life right now because they've got all these clips. That's a whole separate thing. But the right seized on Jimmy Kimmel making the somewhat anodyne fake roast of a joke. Melania Trump tweeted about how outraged she was. Trump himself tweeted that Kimmel should be fired. And this was all calling for assassination. And the rhetoric is why this happens and blah, blah, blah. And so, of course, Brendan cannot help himself.

1:20:56Brendan Carr:And he's been wanting to do this. He's been searching for an opportunity to do this. He says, I'm going to take Disney's broadcast licenses for the, I believe it's eight stations that they own and operate. And we're going to pull them. We're going to call them back for early renewals. And his claim is this has nothing to do with the president's tweets. It's actually because Disney does DEI and DEI should be illegal too, which is just a whole other like wrong answer. Yeah, it's all bad. by Brendan Carr. But he can't say, I'm doing retaliation because the president's mad. So he's saying, actually, the president was mad about DEI a while ago, so we're doing that one.

1:21:29Brendan Carr:This is just straightforwardly bad.

1:21:31David Pierce:Isn't it wild that that is the more plausible, acceptable option in his head? He's like, well, I can get away with this one.

1:21:38Brendan Carr:He's not a smart man. This is going to be a problem anyway. So he's going after the broadcast licenses of ABC stations that are owned and operated by Disney. It is unclear what will happen. I think Disney's actually got some fight in it. You know, they got a new CEO, Josh DeMauro is a new CEO of Disney. Bipartisan sort of pushback on this. It is rare that I agree with Ted Cruz on this show, but Ted Cruz is like, this is an affront to the First Amendment. The National Association of Broadcasters, the lobbying organization of the cable and television industry, they're like pushing back and saying you can't call early renewals like this.

1:22:14Brendan Carr:You're going to break the system. This is not how we as broadcasters need to operate. Yeah. This is an organization that, like, I have been very critical of in the past when it comes to telecom policy. They're pushing back. And I think you've just got an American public that is sick of this, right? That does not want Jimmy Kimmel to be punished for a joke that had nothing to do with the assassination. Like, they're not linked in time. He did a fake roast, and then there was a shooting.

1:22:38David Pierce:We've been down almost this exact road, and it was, like, it was a massively bipartisan group of people being like, you have way overstepped. I mean, it is maybe the worst PR move Brennan Carr's FCC has made, and that is a high bar.

1:22:55Brendan Carr:Yeah, and Kimmel's not backing down. They didn't take him off the air this time like they did with the Charlie Kirk shooting. By the way, the audio of the Charlie Kirk shooting is now a TikTok meme. People are using it as a transition.

1:23:06David Pierce:Speaking of things there are conspiracies about.

1:23:08Brendan Carr:Right, but that thing didn't work, right? When you try to shut down speech in this way, the backfire is so much worse than just letting it burn itself out. Like over and over again, particularly with Americans, if you tell them they can't say something, they're just going to say it. They're going to take it away from you. They're going to use it however you want. They're going to use it. Particularly like young Americans, if you tell them they can't say something, they're going to take it away from you and they're going to use it however they want. And it absolutely happened to Charlie Kirk, which is Jimmy Kimmel round one.

1:23:39Brendan Carr:It's going to happen again this time because Trump looks petty. There's already conspiracies swirling about this shooter and the shooting and people think it was staged. There's a lot here. And Brendan saying a thing that was disconnected in time is somehow a call for assassination is so nonsensical on its face and so censorious on its face that it will backfire yet again in some other insane way. So that's just one Brendan this week. Everyone saw this one coming.

1:24:09David Pierce:Before we switch out of that, I do have one procedural question on this, which is the license renewal thing is at least in theory a thing that brendan can do right like that is an actual power the fcc has these license renewals okay you you made a face which is why i'm asking like is this a real thing he can do to to initiate these license renewals take potentially take them away like is this a threat he could actually conceivably follow through on in some way i feel like brendan's

1:24:39Brendan Carr:nights consist of not being invited to parties and instead like going into the basement of the fcc and like blowing the dust off some old book and be like, what powers aren't we using? So like technically he can do this. Usually it's done in case of emergency or like totally egregious behavior, but these licenses were not due for review until 2028. I think on the earliest one was 2028.

1:25:02David Pierce:Which means nothing in reality would happen until after a Trump administration.

1:25:05Brendan Carr:Right. So he's pulling an early renewal, he's pulling it forward from when they would come up for review. And that is just so unusual. So yes, it's a power, but it's a power that's like if something really egregiously bad happens, but he's blaming it on DEI, which makes no sense to anyone. Because it's not even clear what DEI means in the context of these local news stations. Like he hasn't made the claim. So he's got to go fight it through. Right. Like, and I think a lot of judges are going to say this looks like obvious retaliation. This thing happened. The president tweeted. And you filed the slate.

1:25:40Brendan Carr:Like, these are, they are now connected in time, even though the joke had nothing to do with the event.

1:25:45David Pierce:You even have other FCC commissioners telling us that Brandon Carr's full of shit.

1:25:50Brendan Carr:Today, just before we started recording, the FCC had its open meeting and they took questions. Here's Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the FCC. And she just said it straight up. We have the tape. We can run it.

1:26:00Nilay Patel:This week, we saw one of the most egregious assaults on the First Amendment by this FCC to date. The White House called publicly for the silencing of a vocal critic, and the FCC answered the call. The agency's media bureau directed Disney's eight ABC-owned stations to file early license renewals ahead of schedule, some of which are nearly five years before they would otherwise come due.

1:26:28Brendan Carr:This is a bad record for Brendan Carr when he shows up in front of a court. And I do think Disney's going to fight it. I think the new CEO of Disney has a lot of incentive to fight it. I think the people who work at Disney have a lot of incentive to fight it. And I think the American people are on Disney's side. So, you're a dummy, Brendan. You should not have picked this fight. This is classic dumb Brendan. By the way, similarly, Brendan loves the news distortion rule. Like, he loves saying SNL is news distortion or whatever nonsense he is. He's not a smart man. A bunch of former FCC commissioners, like a radically bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners and chairs and staffers filed a lawsuit this week basically saying we petitioned the FCC to get rid of the news distortion rule because we think it's such a danger to free speech.

1:27:13Brendan Carr:But Brendan, instead of ruling on it, has sat on the petition. So they filed a lawsuit this week asking a court to force Brendan to issue a ruling on news distortion. I'm getting rid of it. Because either way, they can appeal the ruling. But as long as he sits on it, they can't do anything.

1:27:32David Pierce:Right. Which is the source of his power. Which is the source of his power. It's the threat that is the thing.

1:27:38Brendan Carr:Yep. So Mark Fowler, who was a Republican chair of the FCC in the 80s, wrote in a statement, the news distortion policy is a loaded gun that Chairman Carr is using to threaten broadcasters. Until it is repealed, we will not have a free press. That's a Republican. An 80s Republican wrote that about news distortion rule. Tom Wheeler, who we know, we've had him on The Verge and on the show before. He was the Democratic chair under Obama, said as long as the news distortion policy remains, the FCC chair can continue to misuse it to police perceived media bias. This just keeps going on and on and on.

1:28:08Brendan Carr:There's Republicans and Democrats. It is the most unlikely coalition of bipartisan telecom regulators you have ever seen in your entire life. They actually pointed out at the end, one of the former Republican commissioners said in a statement, When unlike the allies share an opinion, that opinion eclipses partisanship. You could not find a group of petitioners with more divergent political beliefs than this one. Yet we all agree on one thing. And he goes on to say what they agree on. But I think what they agree on is that Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:28:37David Pierce:There's a real like you are doing this so badly that you're making everyone who has ever done this look bad.

1:28:45Brendan Carr:Everyone who has ever done this job thinks Brendan is an idiot. Right.

1:28:48David Pierce:And he's doing it so poorly that it is reflecting poorly on them for previously having done the job.

1:28:54Brendan Carr:I mean, my joke is I keep coming on the show and being like, I think the Wall Street Journal editorial page has it right. And it's like, what is happening to me? But that's basically this lawsuit. It's that kind of bipartisan group of former FCC officials coming together to be like, we don't agree on anything, but we agree this guy has to be stopped. That's very bad. So I'm eager to see how that lawsuit goes because if Brendan does what we all think he's going to do, which is uphold the news distortion policy, that can go be appealed. And I think that kind of lawsuit will be fascinating to see in a world where the Supreme Court has gotten rid of all of the idea that the courts need to be deferential to agencies.

1:29:33Brendan Carr:So this is like Brendan wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, but the other part of Project 2025 chapter is the agencies have no court should be deferential to these agencies whatsoever. And so like some of this is coming home, right? Like some of the inherent contradictions of MAGA world are starting to get laid bare here. We'll see what happens. I do have one more FCC update. I'm very sorry about this. Oh, my God. We're still doing it? There's more? So several weeks ago, you remember, Brendan just sort of outlawed all the routers in the world? Yeah.

1:30:05David Pierce:For no discernible reason and on no discernible timeline.

1:30:08Brendan Carr:He's like, they're so dangerous, they're all illegal now.

1:30:10David Pierce:But the one you have is fine.

1:30:12Brendan Carr:But the one you already have in your house is fine. Who knows what's going on here?

1:30:16David Pierce:Sure.

1:30:17Brendan Carr:And then there was some process laid out by which router manufacturers could apply to prove that they were safe. It was totally unclear what that process would be. The one thing that they wanted to demand was, You're going to move router manufacturing to the United States because anything made overseas is inherently dangerous. Sure. Sure. So Netgear was the first company to get a conditional waiver. And it was just utterly unclear what they had said to the Trump administration. It's unclear if Netgear is going to make anything in the United States. We just don't know. And Netgear is not talking.

1:30:50Brendan Carr:This week, Amazon got waivers for its Eero routers and the routers it's going to use for its Leo satellites. Also unclear. You can go look on the FCC website, at least at the sort of questions they were asked. My understanding of all this is that these companies are filing some paperwork, making some representations that their products are safe in some ways. You can go look at the questionnaires online. And then that's going into like a black box. and then some combination of like what used to be known as the Defense Department and now is the Department of War and DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, and FCC are like reviewing this in some way and then being like, sure, you're safe.

1:31:34Brendan Carr:I don't know. I couldn't tell you what's happening. I don't think any of these companies are ready to manufacture routers in the United States. I don't think you could if you wanted to. And it is unclear. I don't think this is happening. I don't think they're like buying Bitcoin on the side for Trump. Like all of the comments on the Netgear post, at least like it's bribes. And like, I don't even think that's happening. I think it's a weird black box process that looks a lot like the process that we have for banning drones. And the only difference is there are no big American drone companies. But Netgear is a big American router company and Amazon is a big American router company.

1:32:07Brendan Carr:And they were able to just do the paperwork and say, we're a big American company. Here's how we are representing our supply chain is safe. And they've gotten through it. utterly untransparent, like totally opaque. And in the Trump administration with Brendan, who just did this capriciously and Trump and everyone thinks it's bribes.

1:32:25David Pierce:It's so weird.

1:32:27Brendan Carr:Everyone thinks it's bribed. Like all the comments in our posts are like, oh, bribes.

1:32:29David Pierce:The best part about it is if it's not bribes, what are we even doing? Do you know what I mean? It's actually like more discernible if it's bribes. Like you can you can draw a straight line through this whole story as long as it is corruption. If it's not corruption, the hell is it? Yeah.

1:32:49Brendan Carr:It's so weird. You can just sit here and be like, how serious is this government? You can just look at this process and be like, how serious is the Trump administration about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, about actually securing a bunch of routers and IoT devices? You know, we had the CEO of the UL, Underwriters Laboratories, on Decoder this week, and they were, under the Biden administration, charged with something called the Cybertrust program where they were going to put a safety mark on IOT devices. And Brendan was like, oh, you've got labs in China. China's bad. We're taking this away from you.

1:33:20Brendan Carr:And they gave the contract to run the Cybertrust program to a friend of Donald Trump. And you're like, how serious are you? Are you actually serious about safety? Or are you just using this stuff to do hilarious corruption? And now everyone thinks you're corrupt. So even if you have the best of intentions, Even if this is a bunch of well-meaning, lifelong civil servants earnestly trying to run the program, you've stained it with corruption because you can't explain anything you're doing because Brendan is an idiot. Anyhow, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on the show, explain literally any of this, defend literally any of this.

1:33:56Brendan Carr:We'll make you the time. You can do it before or after the next Vergecast movie night. We'll even do that for you. We'll buy you a ticket to the next movie that we run. It's happily.

1:34:06David Pierce:will play whatever movie you want, Brendan. What kind of movies do you think Brendan likes?

1:34:10Brendan Carr:Oh, I have an answer, but I can't say it out loud.

1:34:15Brendan Carr:Perfect. Anyhow, Brendan, I don't think you have the juice to defend any of this, which is why you, I know you read the coverage and you look at the links and the Google searches you do for your own name, but you never come on the show. But you're always welcome, my friend. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:34:33David Pierce:That's good stuff. All right. I have two lightning round items for you. And first is actually like mostly a question for you. It's I have a real is this anything kind of question for you. So we've spent a lot of time talking about the copyright and trademark issues around AI and Taylor Swift, as she's want to do, is right in the middle of a bunch of interesting stuff right now. There have been all of these issues with people using deep fakes of celebrities to try and sell things. Right. Like the idea of like it's Taylor Swift trying to engage you in some multi-level marketing scheme has become a thing that happens online.

1:35:10David Pierce:So all of these celebrities and all of the platforms are trying to figure out a way to fight this stuff. And then on the side, Taylor Swift in particular is is going further and further down the road of trying to figure out how to, I would say, sort of like give herself certain kinds of ownership, it seems, so that she can fight these things in a more like straightforwardly legal way. And the thing that happened this week is that Taylor Swift and her team filed for the trademark of two phrases. The phrases are, hey, it's Taylor Swift, and hey, it's Taylor. And the reason for this, at least according to Taylor Swift's team, is that most of these videos that are being deepfaked to be Taylor start with her saying, hey, it's Taylor Swift, go buy this sketchy cryptocurrency, right?

1:35:53David Pierce:Right. And so their idea is we can, by trademarking this phrase, we have a much more sort of straight line legal case to take this stuff down. My question for you is literally, is this anything? Is this going to work for Taylor Swift? And is this a thing we're going to start to see people say, right? Like there's been lots of questions about copyrighting your likeness and what about yourself and your world you can own and how that's protected. But like, can you can you trademark the phrase, hey, it's Taylor?

1:36:21Brendan Carr:Sure. I mean, you have to use it in commerce. So she has to figure out how to use it in commerce. Okay. This is the main thing of trademarks is they're designed for trade. It's right there on the name. So she has to do something with, hey, it's Taylor.

1:36:35David Pierce:She has to like sell a line of t-shirts that say, hey, it's Taylor on it. And then she has some.

1:36:39Brendan Carr:No, for her voice, she's got to have something. Oh, I see. You know what I mean?

1:36:42David Pierce:Like there's going to be some weirdness here. She's going to put out a song that's just her saying, hey, it's Taylor, like 300 different ways.

1:36:49Brendan Carr:Yeah. It's something. Like you have to associate the thing you're trying to trademark with something to indicate that it's you. This is the whole point of a trademark, right? It's supposed to indicate that you buy a Coca-Cola, you see the logo, you ascribe the product, the qualities of Coca-Cola. There's a whole body of trademark law that's like this is how markets work. Sure. Okay. And the reason I'm like hammering on this is none of that has anything to do with I'm trying to prevent deepfakes. like you can draw a pretty thin line to you shouldn't use my voice to do scams right and that's the argument they're making here that people are doing crypto scams and it's Taylor saying hey it's Taylor I think you should invest in whatever crypto coin and that is straightforward trademark infringement so I need a trademark but it's not hey people are making deep fakes of me generally or people on X are making the weird sexualized deep fakes that people on X are constantly making of every woman celebrity that has ever existed that's not going to stop it

1:37:48David Pierce:Because that's just like a void of legal precedent, right? Like we still have no idea what to do with that.

1:37:53Brendan Carr:The Take It Down Act is about to go into effect. There's some state law. Like there's some stuff. There's some international laws. It's a pretty messy field right now because it just has never been able to be done at scale before. And so AI, you know, scale changes everything. AI is changing it. But Taylor Swift is going to trademark some stuff is trying to use a body of law that's really designed for commerce to police a kind of computer imagery and synthetic media that might not line up correctly. And I'll make a comparison here, which is YouTube has rolled out its own likeness program. You and I are both in it.

1:38:29Brendan Carr:Right. Yeah. And it is just private law. Like, it's not the law of the United States. YouTube has made some rules about what you can and cannot do with AI likenesses of people. They will detect those AI likenesses. I had to take a photo of myself and upload my license, my driver's license, to say this is me. And then it knows it's me because of the channel. And then if people use my likeness, it will do it and I can send a flag and there's going to be some process. And YouTube has some rules about parody and stuff. And they have just invented YouTube law.

1:39:01David Pierce:This is like what happened with Content ID a million years ago, right?

1:39:03Brendan Carr:So Content ID is built on copyright law. This is actually very different.

1:39:07David Pierce:Oh, interesting. OK.

1:39:07Brendan Carr:So Content ID is built on copyright law. So the core of Content ID, it's expanded over time, is the music industry. So if you want to use music on YouTube, YouTube can detect that you've used a Justin Bieber song. And then they can say, OK, that's Justin Bieber's song. We're going to take some of your AdSense revenue and direct it back to Justin Bieber. And this accomplishes the goal of letting you use the Justin Bieber song and keeping the record labels and, importantly, Justin Bieber. Oh, I see.

1:39:33David Pierce:Okay.

1:39:34Brendan Carr:Right. And so like constant ID starts there. And then it moves on to, okay, you've got all kinds of videos that are being reused in all kinds of ways. You've got all kinds of rights holders and constant ID. We can expand it. But it's all built on copyright law because the thing copyright law lets you do is say, that's mine, take it down. And likeness law, trademark law, isn't quite there. It doesn't have the same thing, right? Especially likeness. It's like very state by state. There hasn't been a really national likeness. So YouTube invented private law. Like there's how likeness works on YouTube as a platform.

1:40:07Brendan Carr:And then there's how likeness works in the United States of America. And the policies of YouTube and the policies of the United States of America are no longer aligned. This is one of the weirdest things I think has happened yet on the end. And I don't know what's going to happen next. But I think you're going to see celebrities say, hey, we've got to find ways to protect ourselves. and maybe the laws of the United States aren't good enough, but we're going to take shots at it while we pressure the platforms to invent some laws of their own, some content moderation policies of their own along the way until something comes together and this all makes sense.

1:40:39Brendan Carr:And this is going to be one of the weirdest fronts in all of AI, in all of social policy, because you can get to some really weird outcomes. For example, should Taylor Swift impersonators be illegal? Probably not, but like you can quickly get to a place where, okay. There goes my side hustle

1:40:57David Pierce:if that happens. Which is bad.

1:40:59Brendan Carr:You look good in the body suit. Thank you. I've always thought it suits you. It did get a lot cheekier over the course of the tour, I thought.

1:41:09David Pierce:I'm in a happy relationship, you know what I mean?

1:41:10Brendan Carr:That's just a David butt joke. I don't think that's the right answer, but you've got to draw a person doing a Taylor Swift impression and a computer doing a Taylor Swift impression are viewed differently in the eyes of the law in different circumstances. I don't know if you've met the people in Congress.

1:41:25David Pierce:good luck yeah okay so if you're taylor swifter like i have to i just have to try some avenue some something might work and i'm sure they're also in heated meetings with youtube trying to figure this out this all makes sense uh but i can keep saying hey it's taylor for the foreseeable future and i'll and i'll be okay yeah okay good uh all right you get one more what's your what's

1:41:44Brendan Carr:your lightning round item my last one i just i just want to say this news to you and then hear you react to it netflix has pushed out its redesigned app and the central feature is a vertical video feed called Clips, where it just shows you clips of movies and shows and stuff on Netflix. Okay.

1:42:02David Pierce:Can I, can I tell you the, the, the radicalization arc that has been my last seven days on this front? So you, to give you a lot of credit, I would say you, you became a, a total clip zealot and radical sometime last year. You were like, the world exists in 90 second vertical increments, nothing else matters. Clips for days, whatever Mr. Beast does, that's what we should be doing is like the stance of Neil I. Patel for a long time. I have fought this fairly aggressively. I think I think in general, there has been this weird tension like we have thought about clips as like marketing for the podcast.

1:42:43David Pierce:And so we're like the goal of you watching two minutes of us on Instagram is to then come back and watch or listen to the podcast. And then Ed Elson, who co-hosts a couple of podcasts with Scott Galloway and is a writer and podcaster, went on Charlie Wurtzel's podcast at The Atlantic and gave, I would say, almost exactly the speech you've given to me like 30 or 40 times. And for some reason, from Ed—

1:43:07Brendan Carr:It's not some reason. Ed has a British accent.

1:43:11David Pierce:Yeah, he's very convincing.

1:43:13Brendan Carr:He's very charming and he's got the accent and it totally worked on you.

1:43:16David Pierce:Yeah. And he looked dead into the camera and he said, David, listen. And his his whole case was no, this is not this is not like smaller versions of the thing. The clips are the thing. And literally in the last like seven days come to see every one of my feeds differently where it's like now instead of thinking about it as like, oh, I'm seeing, you know, two minutes of a friend's episode. what if what if that two minutes is the whole thing like that that is the whole thing that is most people's experience of that thing um and it has totally changed the way i think about everything like there are lots of podcasts out there that many people never consume an entire episode and yet are fans of the podcast because they've watched lots of clips i could name you some of those podcasts for me that i love and care deeply about the hosts and i have never once experienced an episode.

1:44:07David Pierce:Netflix doing this at like the highest possible end of the spectrum where it's like, what if you never watched a Bridgerton episode, but you saw lots of 90 second clips of Bridgerton is such a like mind bending fact. But I've now come around to like, what if most people's experience of Bridgerton is six clips and they love Bridgerton and maybe that's okay. Yeah.

1:44:28Brendan Carr:And maybe Netflix is geniuses. So Netflix has a sort of different opportunity in its app. they're just happy if you open their app on mobile no one does that right they're just thrilled if you if the number of people who open the netflix iphone app goes up yeah and netflix

1:44:45David Pierce:can do a very straightforward thing right which is show you what amounts to a trailer and then you're like oh this seems cool just go watch the movie i actually don't know if trailers is the way

1:44:55Brendan Carr:to go i think it's they have to come around the idea that the clips are the content i think you're And if they want people to open the app more, they cannot be focused on whether it's discovery for the actual shows. Netflix has to get to a place where people open the Netflix app and they flip through the Clips feed and they close the Netflix app and they walk away and they're happy with that experience.

1:45:16David Pierce:And that's a success story for Netflix.

1:45:18Brendan Carr:And that is a huge success story for Netflix. And what they are not going to have is an army of clippers and discord channels trying to pump crypto coins, stealing Netflix content for the best parts to pump an infinite amount of stuff in the algorithmic slot machine, which is the thing that TikTok has. Okay. It's very hard to compete with that.

1:45:39David Pierce:can I tell you what this makes me think? There are two ways this goes. One is, I would say Netflix and Disney are probably the two with the most unique opportunities. And Disney, by the way, also pursuing this very aggressively. You go to the ESPN app and there is the thing, they call it Verts, which sucks, but it's the same thing. It's just a feed of TikTok-y sports videos. Disney has been talking about doing the same thing in the app. I'm not sure if it's in the Disney Plus app or not, but this is the idea. And in theory, what you can do is basically lift all the best parts out of TikTok. And it's like, well, what if instead of every third video being someone eating junk food in their car to try and sell it to me, it was just the good stuff.

1:46:19David Pierce:And it was just, you know, new girl bloopers, which is all I ever want to see on TikTok anyway. What if I could just go to a streaming service and get that experience anyway? Seems really cool. The thing I just described is the pitch for Quibi. This is the problem. I just pitched Quibi to you. Sure did. I don't know.

1:46:39Brendan Carr:I don't know how to feel about those two things. Well, Quibi's cost structure was so dumb. Quibi was like, what if we spent 5 ,000 times per minute of video than anyone else's history? Like Katzenberg sat down and said these words to me. And I was like, I don't, straightforwardly, I don't think that's going to work. TikTok, but really expensive. TikTok was like, what if an army of teenagers worked for free? And Katzenberg was like, what if I hired the most expensive people in history to give me stuff they couldn't sell to anyone else? And it's like, I don't, doesn't seem smart. So that, whatever.

1:47:10Brendan Carr:Format wise, yes, you're describing Quibi. I think the difference now for these streamers is the consumption has moved so thoroughly to phones and they are absolutely up against their own movies being pirated onto the social video services.

1:47:28David Pierce:Yeah, absolutely.

1:47:28Brendan Carr:So if what you're saying is what people are going to discover a few good men all over again by watching it in clips on TikTok, we might as well participate in that economy. Right. I just don't think they're going to get to the full Quibi where they're like making the vertical shorts that like Drama Box and the other companies are making. Because that business model is even yet more different.

1:47:52David Pierce:Well, this is the beauty of it, right? If you're Netflix or if you're like, this is the reason I keep coming back to Disney. It's like if Disney just wanted to make what amounts to like Pixar, TikTok, that is just like an endless stream of stuff. They already have all of the hard stuff to make. They already have all the content. They already have all the movies. And what you're describing is the trick, right? You have to teach these companies that the goal is not to make me go click a button and watch the entirety of A Few Good Men. That that's actually not what we're trying to do here. and and if we're not trying to do that what are we trying to do is still a thing that i'm

1:48:27Brendan Carr:struggling to figure out it's just take more seconds of attention away from someone else show ads between the videos and show ads and the problem with that is again it's every the business of all this gets way easier when you're stealing everything so if you're tiktok and you're like well we know that armies of clippers are stealing content to build channels and eventually run scams but like a lot of people are watching Lifetime movies this way. This is fine for you because you're not on the hook to pay anyone. Like TikTok pays no one anything anyway. If you're Disney and you do this, you might be on the hook to pay a bunch of actors a bunch of residuals, right?

1:49:08Brendan Carr:Like this is like a problem in your streaming deals. Netflix, I think not as much. They just own all their stuff and they don't pay anyone. By the way, a disclosure, we made a Netflix show. They certainly didn't pay me anything. So whatever. so i i think there's like economic problems here that come when you are trying to do the ostensibly right thing and like pay people yeah whereas like tiktok and instagram like piracy go do it and again it's it's just very hard to compete against an army of people working for free

1:49:33David Pierce:yeah agreed um we should talk more about clips i think actually you and we should come back and just like spend a long time talking about the clip economy because um usually i would say because usually you're wrong about everything, but this one you were right about and we should talk about it.

1:49:52Brendan Carr:We have a big piece on the clip economy coming in a week or so from Mia. Oh, that's right. Maybe

1:49:55David Pierce:you and Mia and I should just get together and hash this out on the pod for a while. It'd be good. All right. For now, we have gone way over as we are wont to do. If you found us on a clip this week, tell us about it. I want to know what clips you're seeing in your feeds. Neal, I in particular, has been hearing from a lot of people that he is appearing more and more in their feeds. Oh, I saw clips of you is a sentence you don't really ever get used to hearing. But for now, we should get out of here. There's a lot going on on the website right now. There's like Liz's coverage of the trial remains ongoing.

1:50:28David Pierce:There's all kinds of open AI stuff happening. We've got a lot of like really fun featurey things coming in the next few days. If you haven't read the Attack of the Killer Script Kitties on our website this week, it's a delight. And it's some of the most unhinged art we've published in a minute. Go read that. It's very good.

1:50:46Brendan Carr:It is one of my favorite illustrations that we've ever done. Yeah.

1:50:49David Pierce:It's really good stuff. Neel, what's happening on Dakota this week?

1:50:53Brendan Carr:Dakota this week is the CEO of Uber, Dara Khashoggi. Basically, it was like, how do you run a software company in the age of AI? And he's like, I don't know. We're all figuring it out.

1:51:02David Pierce:That's the chill attitude you hope for.

1:51:05Brendan Carr:I basically was like, all of your peers appear to be going crazy. And he's like, yes. But it was good. And Uber announced a bunch of stuff that you can now book a hotel in Uber. And they're trying to become an everything app. You should listen to it. Everyone's trying to become the interface for everything because they don't want to get intermediated by AI. You know what I mean? There's a lot going on there.

1:51:28David Pierce:I'm really excited to have 100 new ways to book hotels in my future because I've always thought there aren't enough ways to book a hotel. Do you know what I mean? Thank God someone's giving me a way to book a hotel. Thank goodness. We just finished shooting Version History. You and I spent a bunch of time together this week making podcasts. That's all going to start coming out in a few weeks. Go subscribe to that feed. We did a whole season of Smart Home stuff. It was an absolute delight. And one episode ended with me very sweaty, talking very fast in the studio. It's coffee related. We did a Keurig episode that involved drinking from a Keurig, and I about killed myself.

1:52:03Brendan Carr:I was like, did you get a matter-enabled cocaine dispenser? What are we doing here, David?

1:52:08David Pierce:That's a couple seasons. We need more budget before that starts to happen. That's it for the Verge Cast. Remember also to subscribe to The Verge to get all of these podcasts and everything ad-free. You get all of our newsletters. You make sure that we can keep sending Liz to courtrooms to write down the insane things that Elon Musk says. This is what we do here. And you can support all of it by going to theverge.com slash subscribe and signing up. Also, call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Send us an email, vergecast at theverge.com. We love hearing from you on anything and everything. Send us the clips that you think.

1:52:42David Pierce:send us clips of shows that you've seen but will never watch that's what i want clips of send them all directly to us your favorite shows that you've never watched an episode of that's what i want to hear about the verge cast is a production of the verge and the vox media podcast network today's show is produced by eric gomez brandon keifer and travis larchuck we'll see you next time Eli.

1:53:03Brendan Carr:Rock and roll.