Everybody wants to rule the AI world

15:51David Pierce:Especially at this time. It was like a really, really small number of people who were really leading this stuff.

15:56Nilay Patel:Yeah, and they were all basically deciding whether they were going to go out on their own or go work for Demis at Google. Like, these are your choices at the time. one tweet is all it takes really implies that there's like a bunch of ai people you can like address by a tweet it's it's a very odd empty threat at this moment in time when so much of the drama is basically where's ilia gonna work can we keep him away from demis right and it maybe there's more characters in the mix maybe there's vastly more ai researchers at that time I'm just waiting for a tweet. But it just struck me as such a classic Elon threat.

16:35Nilay Patel:Like I can tweet this into existence when every fact that had preceded it indicated that actually you need to hire one of like four people to make this work. Yeah.

16:46David Pierce:And then, and there's the moment where he hires away Andres Karpathy to Tesla and he goes back to OpenAI and is like, oh, I have an announcement and a confession. I've hired this guy who was like, Very important and is now like a celebrity in the AI world to go work at Tesla, which is a thing that if you care about open AI and want it to succeed, you probably don't do.

17:10Nilay Patel:Yeah. At the same time, there's, you know, there's emails in the record now, Sam emailing Elon apologizing for having recruited even one person away for Tesla. Right. Like, I'm so sorry about this. There's some real, you know, I'm watching the boys. There's some real Homelander vibes around Elon throughout this entire, you know, everyone's just like afraid of him. him and then he's but his instead of lasers from his eyes he has twitter like that's basically what

17:34David Pierce:this feels like at all at every turn well it's more than that though there i i wrote down uh these texts from ilia satskiver came up where he says elon might spend half a day a week with us i imagined how it will be and i worry that our work environment can become very stressful and since he'll be bankrolling it it'll be hard to stop it like yeah you're right it is it is fear and flattery in equal measure and there is this sense of like we have to take his money to do this thing, but we also have to figure out how to keep him out of it as much as possible because he will ruin it.

18:04Nilay Patel:Yeah. And then they're talking about all these conversions and what structure it will be. And the whole time he's like, I'll just take it. Give it to me.

18:11David Pierce:Yeah.

18:12Nilay Patel:Yeah. And now we're in this lawsuit. Which, by the way, he insistently filed.

18:18David Pierce:He's trying to kill open AI. Elon Musk wanted this lawsuit.

18:21Nilay Patel:This is all happening because he wants it to happen.

18:24David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. So the other thing, which I think is, frankly, vastly more fun in terms of the things we got to learn is all the stuff that happened during Sam Altman's firing this very brief couple of days where Sam Altman was fired unceremoniously and kind of out of nowhere. Staged a coup is like a non generous but not wrong way to say it. A lot of people on the team threatened to quit. It became a whole thing. Gets reinstated as CEO. We learned a bunch about what happened in the midst of this. What jumped out to you as somebody who covered this in real time, particularly aggressively? Was there new stuff that really jumped out to you?

19:02All of these people text like children, like just pure children.

19:07Nilay Patel:And I'm not saying I'm like the world's best texter. It's just. You you read these these texts between Mira and Sam, Mira Maradi, the CTO, who is also the CEO for five minutes for all of us. And. If you recall, we broke a lot of news during this time on The Verge. Like Heath and I broke a lot of news throughout all this. And we were texting and calling everyone all the time. Other great reporters broke a lot of news too. Like everyone was talking.

19:34David Pierce:Yeah. Shout out to Ashley Vance, now at Core Memory, who shows up in one of the messages.

19:40Nilay Patel:Yeah. He's like in the screenshots as a notification. You're like, there's going to be a new CEO. Uh-huh. Mike Isaac is like, he's doing a victory lap because he was correct that Mira Morati tried to lead some of this charge to push Sam out. But everyone was like talking and everyone was reporting. and I just remember my texts were like very formal. You know, I was like, I'm going to text somebody and see if we can get some news out of this person. Dear sir. And it's like, yes, pretty much. And I'm like, you're on the back end and you're seeing what they're all saying. And they're like, there's chatter, blah, blah, blah.

20:08Nilay Patel:Like it's all lowercase. Yeah. No one knows what's going on. There's something about that. You know, it's like, it's always interesting to see the other side of a thing you were even loosely a part of.

20:18David Pierce:Yeah. I do think the back and forths between Mira and Sam as all of this is going on are maybe the best thing that came out and have led to some really delightful memes. There is, to your point about Mike Isaac, who wrote a story concurrently as all this was happening, saying that Mira Marati was one of the people intimately involved with ousting Sam in the first place. Got a lot of criticism for that piece. A lot of people who said that wasn't the case. Turns out it functionally was the case. And on the stand, she said over and over, essentially, like, no, I didn't trust him. No, when he came back, I still didn't trust him.

20:51David Pierce:And that's like, that's under oath what she said. And meanwhile, as all of this is going on, she seems to be the person Sam is most consistently messaging, trying to get information about what is going on. Because as we know, he basically, like a lot of this comes up in that New Yorker piece you're talking about. He just like holed up with a couple of his confidants and lawyers and desperately tried to figure out what was going on. Yeah. Like spent a weekend basically frantically calling and texting everyone. And Mira Mirati is like a source of his in the room. And the one exchange that has come out that is now, I think, just the most useful meme we've had in a while is Sam texts, can you indicate directionally good or bad?

21:31David Pierce:Satya and others anxious. And Mira just texts, directionally very bad. Which is such a brutal, incredible own.

21:40Nilay Patel:well no it keeps going and he goes okay can you wrap up soon lots of pressure for microsoft for an update and then mirror replies sam this is very bad she's like no no you don't understand there's not an update like you're fired yeah the you know the background here and the i will say this again criticism of one person in the context of the story has nothing like praise for the other people. Everyone screwed all of this up from top to bottom. The board never communicated why they had taken the step of removing Sam as CEO. They never put out a statement. They never said, here's all the things that went wrong.

22:18Nilay Patel:Here's our evidence for doing this. They had asked Mira to collect evidence of Sam's management trial and these challenges. And Mira had done it. She testified she didn't know why she was doing it. It's like, no, you definitely. what we've all like you put them on a pip like what you well know what's going on here right

22:35David Pierce:you want me to prepare a dossier on my boss that's probably fine like where do you think

22:39Nilay Patel:this was going the boss that you had concerns about you were supposed to document your concerns um and so when the board fired sam it was like the shot out of the dark and no one knew why and there was all they said was he was not consistently candid in his conversations this like totally opaque thing that could mean anything. And so he's texting her. He's legitimately like, what happened? And I think he thought there was some middle path. And there's this one set of texts here that is just, and again, they're all texts like children. Sam says to Mira, can you please tell them, I just want to resolve this however and would like to join.

23:16Nilay Patel:And Mira says, they're convinced about their decision. And I just want everyone to pay attention to this response, which indicates everything about this process and how this company works. And Sam says, in response to, they're convinced about their decision, for me to be fired or some other thing? And Mira has to confirm, yes, for you to be gone. And Sam just says, okay.

23:40David Pierce:He's like, so I'm still fired, right? What? What decision have they made this time? You can tell no one was communicating successfully at any level of this entire process.

23:51Nilay Patel:No one is communicating. And again, the entire process here is they're communicating through Mira. So both sides are communicating through Mira. And I think at one point she becomes the CEO of OpenAI. So just a lot of back and forth confusion here. And then we have to talk about Emmett Scheer being the CEO for five minutes. So Sam texts Mira, can I come in and talk about a path forward with them? Mira says, no, they need more time. Sam, once again, more time for what? which is just a totally reasonable question. And then Mira says, they walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you and why you can't be the CEO.

24:27Nilay Patel:Again, we still kind of don't know, right? There's been a lot of reporting, but we still kind of don't know. And then Sam says, can you ask why they've been saying all weekend they want me back? Mira says, they want a new CEO in place. Sam oddly says, can you say you will call back in 10 minutes? And then Mira says, they want to have a new CEO in place tonight, not me. Sam says, do they know who? can I tell Satya is it final Mira says trying to add Satya now Sam says please still don't want me somebody is texting

24:55David Pierce:Satya a zoom link and Satya's going what

24:58Nilay Patel:it's not happening and then Mira finally ends all this with new guy is a rando Twitch guy

25:04David Pierce:which is so good that rando Twitch guy by the way Emmett Shear who was the CEO of Twitch for a long time I think by most accounts like a good egg in Silicon Valley circles had a weird moment in the sun as part of this entire story. Yeah.

25:21Nilay Patel:I mean, he's enjoying it. I remember, again, during this reporting when they announced it was Emmett Shearer, there was some amount of like, oh, we know him. You know?

25:30David Pierce:Sure.

25:31Nilay Patel:Yeah.

25:31David Pierce:That's a guy that we were all in like the incubator with. But wait, the texts keep going here. So Mira says, new guy's rando twitch guy. And then she says, before Sam can even respond, she goes, they don't want you. And then Sam responds, Emmett? with two question marks. She says, yeah, but hold on, I'm pulling Satya now. Like, it's just bananas. And then Mira is telling Sam that she is trying to bring him back, which may or may not be. Like, it seems very clear she is, like, engaging in different ways on both sides of this as this is all going down. It's just, it's just bizarre. And then they bring in Satya to try to get him to undo it because he ends up being, like, the grown-up in the room in a lot of ways throughout this entire thing.

26:15David Pierce:It's all just so insane, man.

26:18Nilay Patel:There's a moment where they're going to sell the IP to Anthropic. And Mira says, they just don't want your hands on AGI. Which, very funny. Years later, we are no closer to AGI. You have Sam's hands on it or not. By the way, they do finally get Sasha Nadella. Sam goes, did Sasha get on the call? Mira says, yes, with him. Sam says, wait, I have an interesting idea. Mira goes, still with Sasha. just totally sets him aside. You will recall, this is where Nadella decided to react to all of this, which I fully believe he regarded as completely juvial and nonsensical and very threatening to the valuations of a lot of companies, a lot of things invested in OpenAI.

26:58Nilay Patel:Including his. He was like, I'm just going to hire everybody. Yeah. Microsoft will just hire. You can have whatever shell of OpenAI remains. This is his famous quote about we are above them, below them, around them. He's like, I'll just hire everybody. Sam is going to work here now. and that was a bunch of leverage in the middle of this. I mean, this is all very funny because it is just evidence that these things happen in a much more casual way. Like, this isn't lawyers. This is just two people texting each other, obviously being pulled in five different directions, talking to all the same people who are also pulled in five different directions.

27:28Nilay Patel:I'm pretty sure, you know, Musk's attorneys brought this all up to indicate that Sam was unreliable, untrustworthy. At one point, he was fired from OpenAI. I have no idea if this is going to convince a jury that the structure of open AI constituted stealing a charity from Elon Musk, who was again and again presented with this exact scheme and didn't read the paperwork. Yeah.

27:53David Pierce:I mean, it really seems like the easiest takeaway from all of this is that all of this is just a gigantic mess. And that it's like, you could make a lot of arguments about how poorly run this company has been throughout this entire process. I will say there are two things that came up in the why they fired Sam Altman bits of testimony that I thought were really interesting. And the one was like we were talking about this sort of circular set of deals, that there was a sense that the board, Helen Toner, who's also a board member at the time, testified and talked about some of this, that the board felt like it wasn't being properly made aware of all of Sam and Greg's financial entanglements.

28:33David Pierce:They made this deal with a company called Helios, which is a nuclear energy company that both Sam and Greg were invested in. That's a weird thing for OpenAI to be spending its time and resources on. And they felt like they maybe weren't properly notified that one reason to make this deal is that it's going to help make Sam and Greg rich. Another one that came up that I thought was really interesting is Siobhan Zillis said this too, that OpenAI's board was really concerned that it hadn't been notified in advance of ChatGPT being released, which is totally sensible in retrospect, right? Like the launch of ChatGPT like legitimately changed the tech industry forever.

29:09David Pierce:Like it really did. I don't think that's an overstatement at all. I am quite confident that no one at OpenAI up to and including Sam Altman knew that was going to happen on the day they shipped ChatGPT.

29:20Nilay Patel:Right. It was a little research preview that they barely announced.

29:23David Pierce:It was a research preview. They just they just they just put it out into the world in a very sort of academic way. They were like, look, we made a thing. Test it out. Let us know what you think. And then it it it caught like wildfire. So the idea that they should have known ahead of time to warn the board that this earth-shattering thing is coming strikes me as obvious in retrospect, but sort of implausible at the time.

29:45Nilay Patel:Wait, I can academically argue the other side of this.

29:48David Pierce:Okay.

29:49Nilay Patel:I tend to agree with you. Google had something that looked very much like ChatGPT in its labs forever.

29:57David Pierce:Yeah, as Google will remind you, it invented all of this technology.

30:00Nilay Patel:The T in ChatGPT is transformers, which were invented at Google. There, now the Google executive hiding in my bushes to remind me of this. Sundar, you can go home now. They say it all the time. They had this technology. They had Transformers. They demoed it in a variety of ways. It never made any sense because they always did it in increasingly esoteric ways. We'll never forget the I.O. where Sundar was like, and now I'll have a conversation with Pluto, the planet, about what it's like to be a planet. And no one knew what was going on. And instead, he was just like, look at this chat, GPT. Like everyone would have been like, Google has invented the future.

30:34Nilay Patel:You can see that split here in all these texts and emails because everyone's afraid of Demis, who is building the Transformers at Google. Right. Like they've all seen the actual product and the public is like, Sundar's talking to Pluto again.

30:49David Pierce:Oh, that's interesting.

30:50Nilay Patel:Right. And they knew, Google knew not to release this product to the public. their own safety culture kept them away from releasing what was at the time like a gpt one or two class model to the public like this is dangerous there's all this stuff that can go haywire blah blah blah blah we're going to do pluto demos instead all of the principles were like this is the future literally papers called attention is all you need right right and so i can see again i'm making the argument academically because i agree with you that No one knew what would happen. But I can see why a bunch of people immersed in the safety culture of that time were like, everyone knew that you shouldn't do this.

31:31Nilay Patel:OpenAI exists because Google wouldn't do this. And you did it anyway without asking us if you should. That's fair.

31:38David Pierce:And especially if you come from a safety first perspective, which in theory OpenAI at the time did, you would say, oh, this is a potentially like problematic thing we're putting out into the world to see what happens when it's out in the world. You should know that it's coming.

31:54Nilay Patel:Right. This is the thing that Google won't do.

31:56David Pierce:Yeah, I suppose I buy that argument. I also still think it's true that they, honest to God, did not think anybody would care. Like, I really earnestly believe OpenAI shipped ChatGPT. if you think you're releasing a product that's going to change the world, do you call it chat GPT?

32:12Nilay Patel:Like, no. No, that's what I'm saying. I agree with you on balance. Like, I think I'm making this argument for the sake of making the argument. I understand. But there was a reason Google did not release this product. And then OpenAI did. Now, OpenAI was nowhere ready to be a company. They were not ready to commercialize it. They were still chasing AGI. Like, all this stuff. And now they're a totally different company that, you know, in its heart of hearts wants to be a for-profit enterprise competing with Google. Yes. That company is positioned very differently in the opening ad. It was like, look at our research preview.

32:42Nilay Patel:Right? But I understand why the board, which was our job is to keep everything safe and to like pull the ripcord as we get closer to AGI, was like, wait, this is the one thing the big player in the space wouldn't do. Yeah. No, that's fair. I buy that. Wait, can I just add one more thing? Oh, please. So I keep forgetting this as well, but Liz is in the courtroom. You should read her live blog and her coverage. It's very funny. She's so angry. Everyone appears to be very tiresome. Also, this is Liz at her finest. Liz being annoyed that she's watching billionaires through each other is perfect. This is why The Verge exists.

33:20Nilay Patel:Hayden's doing great coverage on the exhibits. But I keep forgetting myself that Microsoft is a party to this case because they had the big investment in OpenAI. And Liz keeps mentioning that every single witness ends with Microsoft's lawyer standing up and saying something like, and Microsoft wasn't there? And then following that up with, and Satya Nadella wasn't there either? And she's like, this is literally the only thing they're adding to this trial.

33:46David Pierce:So we didn't do that, right? We have nothing to do with this.

33:49Nilay Patel:See you later. It's just a very funny dynamic in this case that I can't get enough of.

33:54David Pierce:That would be a really fun job as a lawyer. You just stand up and be like, but not me though, right? And they're like, no, not you. And you're like, see ya. No further questions. It's very good. It's pretty good. Yeah. I really hope at some point we get some Satya texts. Some texts. He's too smart for that, man. He is. Satya wouldn't even be caught on a Zoom call, it appears. So kudos to Satya. All right, we should take a break and then we're going to come back. We got some gadgets to talk about. We'll be right back.

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37:52David Pierce:All right, we're back. Just as a transition out of OpenAI, we should talk about this rumor slash report that's now floating around that suggests that OpenAI is building a phone for chat GPT. It's a phone GPT. What do you make of this, Nealai?

38:10Nilay Patel:First of all, no side quests, I was told. Code red. We have to focus. Now we're making a phone. The one product that will not succeed. There's no way it will succeed. It's very hard to disrupt the iPhone. I don't know if you're aware of this, David. Killing the iPhone. Good luck.

38:31David Pierce:I know. It's weird. It's almost like no one has tried. Why has no one ever tried to take down the iPhone? It's just sitting there.

38:37Nilay Patel:Yeah. I mean, have you heard of Windows Phone? It's got this Metro UI. It's beautiful. Can I make an argument for why you have to do this even though it won't work? Oh, let's do it. Let's do it as an exercise.

38:50David Pierce:Okay.

38:51Nilay Patel:Because I have a similar argument. Okay. You have to make it out of a place of optimism and opportunity.

38:58David Pierce:Ooh, here's why it will work. I will do cold realism. Okay. Here's why chat phone is a terrific idea that should exist. And I very much look forward to it. if what you need for the ai future is a device that is able to capture everything about you all of the time you need something that isn't an iphone that is not a new idea by me that is a thing sam altman keeps talking about he loves the iphone thinks the iphone is great but he thinks the future is constant capture of your context this is terrific for legal discovery uh it's also the idea of agi right now right like i need to have a thing that is constantly recording so that it can get all the action items from my meetings.

39:39David Pierce:I need a camera that is constantly recording so it can tell me what's going on in the world. That requires a different kind of hardware. You can't do it with the iPhone in part because you can't access the hardware in that way because you're not Apple if you're OpenAI, but also you just need a different kind of hardware that operates differently. So you have to build a phone to do the things differently. And you also have to build a phone because everybody owns a phone. And the only way to beat the iPhone is to make a phone that can beat the iPhone. OpenAI has lots of users. ChatGPT is very popular.

40:10David Pierce:Maybe lots of people would buy a phone that offers easier access to ChatGPT. The other thing that it offers, and this is, I think, the real reason you do this if you're OpenAI, is that the only possibility for an AI-first world is to get around the App Store. Apple is systematically removing apps that let you build other apps from the App Store. It is not into the idea of being able to like vibe code on your phone, other apps that work on your phone. That is in fact the whole premise that you would need for an open AI phone to work. That all of a sudden I have a device that I can just tell what I want it to do and it can actually spin up local software to do that for me.

40:50David Pierce:If you believe in the agentic future, if you believe that all of this is going to work on the fly and custom GPTs and all this stuff, it has to start from the hardware and you have to start from whole cloth and that actually having a thing that I just talked to with my voice and it builds its operating system for me on the fly, that has to come from someone other than Apple or Google who will never allow it to be built. So of course, OpenAI is going to do it and it's super going to work.

41:14Nilay Patel:Okay. I think my perspective, the more cynical realist perspective, is exactly the same argument. It's exactly the same argument. I'm going to make exactly the same argument to you. I'm going to add two things to it. one sam hired johnny ive to come build hardware to open it famously hired johnny ive the designer of the iphone and many other legendary products and they made a video that cost somewhere on the order of 25 billion dollars where they walked down a street together and went on a date at a coffee shop um and they talked about phones and laptops as quote legacy devices and the entire promise of this thing was they're going to build something else and there are rumors that it was headphones There's rumors that it was a pendant, that it was a puck, that it was a pen.

41:59Nilay Patel:And all this stuff that wasn't a phone because a phone and laptop are legacy devices. And I agree with you. Sam thinks you just need a bunch of contacts and it's seeing the world around you. And then it can run around the web and call you an Uber and do whatever you think is going to happen. And then the reality, this is my other addition, the reality is that the AI products are not good enough to do that. They can't do the thing that everyone thinks they can do, that everyone wants them to do. No matter how many Mac minis you put in a colo bin and running open claw for every individual user, you can't actually make this product.

42:35Right.

42:36Nilay Patel:And so what are you stuck with? You need a bunch of applications running on something local that ChatGP can address, that it can control. Whether that's through MCP, whether it's through like Google is doing on Samsung phones and literally opening the apps and like virtualized containers and clicking on them, whatever way you're going to do it. whatever Apple's going to do with Siri, it turns out you need the applications. Not just the data, the application. You need to do stuff. You need the logic to exist. You can't just write a custom Uber app and be like, now there's Uber. Like, you need them there.

43:09Nilay Patel:And even if you can, Uber did that already. Yeah, like you just, they're not going to let you be like, you can use the Uber API. The CEO of Uber, Dara, was just on Decoder. He's like, I want my pixels in your face. He said it out loud. So what you're stuck with, But yeah, he was like, I want my pixels there. He kept calling them pixels in like a very specific way. And I was like, you mean your interface? Okay, I get it. Anyway. And so you have Johnny Ive. You made this big promise about the future of computing. And I think maybe Johnny Ive, who likes to make good products, realized that chat GPT can't do it.

43:46Nilay Patel:Like the technology cannot deliver the result.

43:50David Pierce:Right.

43:50Nilay Patel:And so what are you going to do? you're going to back into the right solution, which is it's a phone. And the phone's going to have apps on it. And the AI is going to run around using those apps on the user's behalf because the apps have all the services that people want. And also, if you make a thing that's supposed to replace your phone and it doesn't have Instagram on it, people are still going to carry their phones around. Yep. So what are you going to do? So poor Johnny Ive is stuck making a new iPhone.

44:17David Pierce:Because it's the only thing to make.

44:19Nilay Patel:Because it's the only, I'm telling you, I'm agreeing with you. This is what you have to do. I'm just saying I could have called it the first day that they sat down in an empty coffee shop and called the phone a legacy device.

44:30David Pierce:Yep.

44:31Nilay Patel:Because at no point has been clear that any of these LMs can actually do the thing.

44:37David Pierce:Right. But yeah, this is what I mean by it's not going to work and you have to do it anyway. Like even this whole accessory ecosystem they're describing requires a base device that neither Android nor iOS will give them the permissions to be able to do. iOS is not going to just let you attach a third party camera that's recording all the time. It's just not just not a thing you can do. They might make it themselves. Sure. Apple would do it for itself. well and this is where like apple's ai reputation is like annoyingly turning in its favor because it it screwed up so badly that everybody's like oh four-dimensional chess like apple is stands to get like no apple screwed this up super bad and to whatever extent this is going to work out it is pure dumb luck and not good planning let's be so so so clear about that uh which i have proof for that we will get to in just a minute but the idea of having basically a new version of siri which we think is coming very soon at WWDC.

45:35David Pierce:And there was a report this week that one of the features of that Siri might be that you get to pick your own model inside of it becomes hugely powerful, right? Because Apple is the company with the access to that data and to those services and to those applications. The thing it couldn't figure out how to do was build a model that could manipulate any of them with any kind of success. Now it has this big deal with Google. It's possible it's going to open up so that you can pick ChatGPT or Claude or whatever you want to operate this Siri for you, that becomes a really powerful model. But it's because Apple already did the rest of the iPhone, right?

46:09David Pierce:Like if you just start from whole cloth with, here's a model, build the phone, you can't. It just doesn't work. But you don't have another option. This is why like we've been talking for a decade about how desperate all of these other tech companies are to get past the smartphone. This is why. They are desperate to sell you some other kind of hardware so that they can get around the platform controls that Google and Apple have and absolutely will not relinquish. This is why Mark Zuckerberg tried to do the metaverse.

46:38Nilay Patel:It's the whole thing. And they all have this belief, which is historically correct, that it's an interface paradigm shift that makes people buy new hardware. Yeah. And Apple has ridden this better than anybody, right? You go to mouse and keyboards, you get the Mac, you go to click wheels, you get the iPod, you go to the digital crown, obviously you get the watch. This is a staggering display of interface superiority that changed everything forever. But it's very hard to get past the multi-touch screen in the phone. And so natural language voice commands look like a thing that get you away from the phone.

47:10Nilay Patel:Like this is an interface step change. We can just do natural language. But you still need an instrument. You need a camera. Your kids are running around. You want to take a video of them. And it needs to be a great camera. It's very hard to compete with the most important product in tech history. even if you think the interface is going to change and apple is just like we're just going

47:30David Pierce:to bolt it on when it makes sense right and we're rapidly realizing that chat as that interface is not the answer right that there was a minute where everybody's like everything you do on every computer forever is going to happen inside of a chat window and when we need to we'll just load a browser inside of your chat it turns out that's awful user interface like we we got past the command line once and we're doing it again and apple already built the other stuff well so you

47:56Nilay Patel:know command lines are brittle because if you typed in the wrong thing they just didn't work the modern sort of llm chat interfaces are actually brittle in a different way and it it's not this it's not the way everyone's used to so i'm really opposed to hidden user interface like no one ever discovers the user interface you have to you just put all the controls on the screen is like my my point of view like tell people what they can do and then they'll do it and they'll feel empowered.

48:20David Pierce:Somebody at Samsung just got promoted when you said that. They're like, put more tool tips on the screen. It's a dog with shoes. It'll help you out.

48:28Nilay Patel:More pop-ups. And, you know, there's a big trend in consumer. The pendulum swings back and forth. Like the users get more sophisticated. We give them more controls. We let them customize more things. And then we've gotten too far and we hide all the buttons again. And this just keeps happening. macOS Tahoe is a perfect example of Apple just believing everyone is stupid. like we've been shipping the mac for 50 years uh you're all idiots now like we've took we've taken all the controls away we've learned nothing we just think you're a bunch of dumb iphone users right like there's something in there that is confusing natural language interfaces are kind of the opposite in that you can just say anything you want and it will respond to you like it's not brittle in that way it's not hidden there's nothing to hide like it's all just there you're Like, do whatever.

49:15Nilay Patel:Like, make me a bomb. And it's like, sure. Maybe I'm allowed to that. Maybe I'll just lie to you. Like, who knows? But they can't actually do all the things you're always saying to them. And people run into that really fast. And I think Apple in particular with the iPhone, it like, it wanted to overpromise on the Siri part of it. And so it could do everything. And like, the models at the time couldn't do it. And only lately with all the agentic stuff and like the building of harnesses and like, there's just a method of doing it now that might work and might not work. But I don't think you can build a phone or a new device whole cloth out of LLM chatbots because it's still brittle.

49:52Nilay Patel:It's just brittle in a different way that doesn't immediately appear to be brittle. It confuses everyone in thinking that it actually is resilient to users doing random stuff. But it's actually even more broken because it can't do the things that literally will just confidently tell you it can do. Right.

50:10David Pierce:Yeah, it has such an incredibly different kind of structural problem, which is it fails without telling you it failed, which is very different than the other kinds of failure. Yeah. On this note, actually, we should we should talk about the other thing that happened with Siri this week, which is that Apple settled a class action lawsuit for two hundred and fifty million dollars that is based all around essentially the promises Apple made about Apple intelligence and Siri. I didn't even link these two ideas in my brain. This is perfect. I mean, this is what it is, right? This is Apple spent whatever it cost to get Gemini and$250 million for a bunch of problematic ads that it made that made promises about phones that didn't exist.

50:53David Pierce:Let me just really quickly, to refresh your memory, play you one of these ads that came out after Apple Intelligence. This became the flagship feature of every Apple device. And you couldn't do it. Let me just play this for you. This is the Bella Ramsey to party ad.

51:18Nilay Patel:Siri, what's the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grinnell? You met Zach Wingate at Cafe Grinnell.

51:26David Pierce:Hey. Zach. Oh, wow. I didn't think you'd remember me.

51:29Nilay Patel:Yeah, of course. Since I saw you, I'm like, it's Zach. Nobody walks like Zach.

51:35David Pierce:Doesn't work. Fake feature. That was an ad with a celebrity that Apple ran for a feature that didn't and doesn't exist. We just shouldn't forget how wild that fact is.

51:48Nilay Patel:I mean, you want to talk about software brain. That ad, by the way, is built. The whole concept is built in the idea that all that data is in one calendar that Siri can go look at.

51:56David Pierce:Yep. Which, no part of that exists in the real world. But anyway, so this story has been like burning up all over our site this week because, A, people can go and claim money. If you bought a phone, I think it's basically between like June of 2024 and May of 2025, you can get$25, potentially up to$95. We'll see how it goes. Probably$25. Congratulations to everybody on your$25. But this is like, this continues to be a bad look for Apple. This is what I mean by Apple did not successfully stand aside the AI CapEx problems that other companies have. Apple screwed up so badly that it might actually have turned out okay.

52:43Nilay Patel:Yeah. I mean, they sold more Macs than ever because people are running OpenClaw on them. Yeah.

52:48David Pierce:Which Apple also didn't see coming and they have supply issues. Like this company fell ass backwards into being an AI power player and good on you for falling ass backwards into it. But like, what is it? The line was the Twitter was a clown car that ran into a gold mine. Like that's Apple and AI in such a real way.

53:08Nilay Patel:Absolutely. I mean, you know, WDC is right around the corner. I think we're expecting to see a bunch of this Google deal pay off. I think we're expecting to see the new Siri. I think Apple understands more than any company, like how to use a new user interface paradigm to make products. We'll see if John Ternus can pull even more rabbits out of a hat here. But it is true that at that time, the conventional wisdom was that chatbots would displace the iPhone. And if Apple didn't have an AI narrative, that it would be in some kind of existential danger. So they just concocted one. They never shifted to the point where they're paying millions of dollars out, hundreds of millions of dollars out for making fake ads.

53:48Nilay Patel:and it was all fine because it the fundamental truth was that the natural language interface was not powerful enough on its own to stand up a competitor to the iphone yep and that is that's

54:00David Pierce:why you have to build a phone that is the funniest thing here is like strategically open ai is doing the exact right thing and it's gonna fail and i bet they know it but like what you don't what

54:10Nilay Patel:other choice do you have right because you know the other player in phones is also not sitting

54:14David Pierce:still no also also uh the big bad of open ai's entire history it turns out demis isabes looms holding a samsung s26 yeah he's just like have you seen what i did to bixby bixby has lasers coming out of its eyes smoke coming out of its ears exactly uh google actually launched a sort of aie gadget this week um which i'm actually very curious for your take on this so it's called the Fitbit Air, and it is a screenless Fitbit. It's sort of a throwback to the old ideas of Fitbit, where it's just a little bracelet of a thing that you can wear. They also make one that you can clip. It's a little modular fitness tracker in a very sort of 2012 kind of way.

54:58David Pierce:The big pitch here is not that it's a very old Fitbit, but that it connects to a bunch of Google's AI stuff. They've rebranded the Fitbit app as Google Health, which I think is just a horrifically bad idea, but we can talk about that. And the idea is it's this Gemini-powered health and fitness thing that can collect all of this data and give it back to you in a sort of AI coach kind of way. The thing is$99. I will say personally, I am very enthusiastic about the idea of a pretty straightforward screenless fitness tracker. This is actually a thing I have been wanting for a while. Are you still a whoop guy?

55:35David Pierce:You're a whoop guy, right?

55:36Nilay Patel:So I need to just be very clear. Yes, I'm wearing the Whoop. You're a Whoop guy. One, it's just like fun to try new products, which is, I hope everybody understands I love gadgets and technology. And two, Chase gave them out to everyone for free. Everyone's a Whoop guy now. Everyone I know who has a Chase credit card has a Whoop now because they just gave them to you. Like all the Reddits were aflame with like free Whoops. So I just got one. I was like, sure, I'll take a free gadget and I'm wearing it.

56:08David Pierce:I have nothing more whoop guy than having a Chase Sapphire card. Can I just say? Like, that just screams whoop guy.

56:15Nilay Patel:It's a lifestyle. I have it. It's fun. It's very dumb. Like, it is a good step tracker. I wear it as a sleep tracker because wearing an Apple Watch when I sleep is, like, too heavy and, like, whatever. So it consistently tells me that I haven't slept enough. And it's like, yeah, dude, I have a baby. Yeah. What do you think is going to happen here? Oh, I wake up at 5 a.m. every morning?

56:35David Pierce:Yeah. My Apple Watch told me last night that I did a better job than usual and gave me a 58.

56:41Nilay Patel:I was like, great. Things are going well. We drag him into the bed every morning between 4.30 and 5, and he punches me in the face until 7 a.m. I didn't get restful sleep. You're saying I have a sleep deficit? What a surprise. Yeah. So it's like fun to wear. It's fun to see that side of things. You know, V and I are constantly talking about the wellness tech complex. I get why Google is putting one of these out. The point of these is not the tracking. It's the data analysis and the recommendations that come after the tracking. And if you're Google, you're like, oh, we're just good at that. There's a huge opportunity here to give cheap trackers away to whatever version of RFK's FDA is going to decide that the secret to health is personal responsibility and tracking.

57:26Nilay Patel:By the way, I'm just doing an impression of the song right now. Just a straightforward V impression. This is what we talk about like almost every day. And then we're going to do a bunch of data collection and tell you to sleep more and drink less and blah, blah, blah, blah. Which is all the Whoop AI ever says. Yeah. Like, oh, you had one athletic non-alcoholic beer. You're in a deficit. Like, what's happening to me? But you can see why Google's doing it because this is them being able to leverage their entire AI stack. Also, I think, look, I mean, it's inexpensive for anything being inexpensive anymore.

57:56Nilay Patel:It's like$100, right? And it has like modular bands. People really like Fitbits, and I think they're going to really like this thing.

58:02David Pierce:Yeah, I think so, too. I think the the idea of cheap tracker is smart and good, right? For all the reasons you just said, I think the idea of I want to wear a thing that counts my steps is good and fine. But actually, what people do want is that one extra step. I agree with V and that most of these AI coaches are incredibly annoying. And they just like, tell you how terrific you are all day. And it's like, just what if you just left me alone? Like, what if you just left me alone? And it would be fine. what I don't agree with is the Google health of it all um let me just read you a quote from this is from Rishi Chandra who has been at Google a very long time has run a bunch of products was like on the Chromecast team a million years ago when I first met him was when the Chromecast were coming out yeah so here's what he says he says I know it will be hard for people referring to the rebrand it was hard for us internally but as we think about the future where the health app needs to go the health app is not going to be specific to Fitbit hardware we want to be a health coach to an Apple Watch user too.

58:59David Pierce:That's why we had to make the brand change. I would argue he just made the opposite case that he should have made. I'd like to say it's called Google Health, A, signs you up for a bunch of what I would call Google baggage, which is very real. Including the design language of this app. Yeah, absolutely. Which is, yeah, Google's software design continues to be just terrific. but the idea of Google Health signs you up for people understanding a different kind of data collection that Google is doing. People are going to start to think, oh, are you going to use this to show me ads and search results?

59:34David Pierce:And they will promise you up and down that the answer is no and people won't believe them because the thing is called Google Health. It just has attachments that I don't think Google understands that it has.

59:43Nilay Patel:Well, they're the ads attachments. They are going to use the data as context in your Gemini results. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And that's what that buys them.

59:51David Pierce:do you remember the did you ever watch parks and rec yeah so the do you remember the company grizzle this like mythical bad guy company at the very end of parks and recreation uh do you remember this at all yeah okay so there's the grizzle is basically google it's it's this like company run by skateboarders that becomes the biggest thing in the world and they they make this case to the the main characters in the show where they're like oh yeah here's why we're collecting all your data so if we detect that you're down we can like direct you to a cup of joe as a pick-me-up and if we see that you're having a great day we can i don't know like direct you direct you to your favorite coffee shop to go hang out and leslie note the main character just goes so it's it's a coffee finder app and he goes yeah we're making it with starbucks that's what this makes me think of it's like this it's just it's just that you're just you're gonna take a bunch of things and then you're gonna sell it to starbucks so they can recommend coffee to me all day every day depending

1:00:47Nilay Patel:on how you're going to open Gemini and you're going to say, like, I'm hungry. And it's going to say, based on your heart rate, you should eat less salt. Like, that's what they want. And they're going to recommend you whatever Blue Apron integration. Right. I can see.

1:01:00David Pierce:Or like go to Kava, which is ironically sponsoring us in Google Maps right now.

1:01:07Nilay Patel:I don't know, man. I get why they're doing it. I understand that. Again, this is every single morning. V and I talk about this because I try not to slack our reporters after hours. So I schedule a lot of insane wellness TikToks to send to V in the morning. And then she's mad at me every morning. I was going to say, I don't know that that's better at 9 a.m. Everyone's gotten used to it for me. There's a handful of reporters that get the craziest TikToks from me, like spot on the dot at 9. And I always forget to vary it to seem like I'm a real person. It's always at 9. But every morning, V and I talk about more crazy wellness stuff.

1:01:41Nilay Patel:And all of it is... quantified self, AI, health coaches, data collection, data collection, data collection. And so, of course, it's Google Health because what they get with the brand is data collection. Sure. Everyone knows what's coming. Fitbit being like, we're part of the Google family is like, you get the weird conspiracy theory Facebook posts. You know, like, I order Sundar Pichai to not share my Fitbit data with Google. It's like, you don't get that with Google Health. It's just Google.

1:02:10David Pierce:Yeah. That's a fair point. I'm sort of thinking of it next to meta rebranding all of its apps. Do you remember when it was like WhatsApp by Facebook? Yeah. And everybody was like, hold on, Facebook owns WhatsApp? Yep. And on the one hand, it was like, well, yeah, where you been, guys? But on the other hand, it's like, don't tell them. What are you doing, Mark? People don't know. People like WhatsApp and hates Facebook. Don't shove the Facebook logo into the app. What are you doing? Boy, did he ever take that advice. Yeah, that went great. anyway i think there's there's one other gadget we should talk about before we take a break here which is uh this company familiar machines and magic just sure fabulous name founded by colin angle who is the longtime ceo of i robot which made the roombas this is like a guy who knows home things uh just launched a new i almost called it a device but it's not it's like a weird little robot animal called a familiar.

1:03:08David Pierce:Sure. I'm going to play the brief intro video here, and then I just need your thoughts on what this is. So it's like, I would describe this thing to you as a robot alien dog. Yeah. That is also a polar bear.

1:03:27Nilay Patel:Yeah. What if you made like a lamb look ominous? Yeah.

1:03:32David Pierce:Yeah. They call this thing a familiar. Again, ominous. Yeah. What do you make of this? They call it basically an embodied AI system. And Colin Angle's whole theory is that these things should be companions, right? This is not like a smart home controller that is also adorable. It is explicitly designed to be adorable and to connect with you and to be your best friend. I want to know what you make of this.

1:04:00Nilay Patel:there's a lot of desire for there to be robots. And the humanoid robots don't work, as we've all seen. And so can we get a bunch of training data about navigating a house by making a cute... And that's a fake dog that your kid can knock over and talk to. Boy, I bet we can.

1:04:22David Pierce:Yes.

1:04:24Nilay Patel:That's what I got for you. I would never let this thing in my house. Zero percent chance I would let this thing in my house. I'm with you.

1:04:30David Pierce:I mean, what's funny to me about this is the funniest lesson of Roomba from 20 plus years ago is that people will fall in love with anything. they put a round vacuum on your floor that bumped into the walls and people fell in love with it and became best friends with it so to then be like oh I have to make it look like a dog actually feels like you're learning the wrong lesson that it's like put put robots in people's houses let them fall in love with them if they want to this thing creeps me out if I'm being completely honest with you even if I were into the theory of this which I'm not the specifics of this sort of medium sized animal just padding around my house.

1:05:12David Pierce:I've been watching a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog recently. My three-year-old is super into Sonic right now. This looks like a knock-off Sonic character, and I do not mean that as a compliment.

1:05:24Nilay Patel:Yeah, I see that. Again, Sinister Lamb. Sinister, yeah. Yeah, it's exactly

1:05:29David Pierce:right. Yeah, so I'm fascinated by this to see if it technically can do any of the things it is supposed to do. I just am not at all sold on like the thesis behind any of this stuff

1:05:43Nilay Patel:especially because it doesn't actually talk so it's LLM based but it meows and purrs and they don't talk because quote by design it will avoid giving factual advice about things it shouldn't be giving factual advice about sure I agree you can't just say it's a dog what would it be one so it's going to patter around and be kind of alive and kind of like a dog, but it's going to meow and purr. Does your dog play music? Ours does. By the way, the price is not announced, but Angle does say the cost will be, quote, around the same as pet ownership, which depending on how you count is millions of dollars.

1:06:28Nilay Patel:I was going to say, in my life, so, so, so expensive.

1:06:32David Pierce:Do I need to take it to the vet when it eats grapes. That's your subscription fee. You're going to get a subscription dog.

1:06:37Nilay Patel:And the point, I think this is just such an interesting quote. The next era of robotics is not about dexterity or human-informed. It's about machines that can build and sustain human connection. First of all, I'd point out that there are so many machines that can build and sustain human connection. Including vacuum cleaners. Including vacuum cleaners. We did that already. Ask any car guy about their car. Like, it's fine. But, yeah, I mean, I'm fascinated by this thing. I'm fascinated by the fact that one of the, it's just, it comes up in everything. One of the use cases is help with wellness activities.

1:07:11Nilay Patel:Everyone's doing wellness. Yeah, I don't know. Who knows what this thing will be? I think it is very funny that it is this big. It's a big guy. It's a big guy.

1:07:20David Pierce:Yeah, it's not a tiny little robot wandering around your house. It is like a, it's a guard dog. Yeah. Anybody who gets one of these, I am desperate to hear from you if these things ever ship.

1:07:31Nilay Patel:Final quote. There's enough to it that it's beautiful, wonderful to pet and give a hug to and keep up with you. For some definition of alive, it's alive.

1:07:40David Pierce:So you're saying Anthropic is going to release one of these very soon.

1:07:43Nilay Patel:But it can only meow and purr.

1:07:45David Pierce:Yeah, but it is by some definition of alive. That's how I feel when I wake up in the morning. All right, we should take one more break and then we're going to come back and do the lightning round. We'll be right back.

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1:09:25David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. unsponsored for flavor. That was like eight dots, in case you were wondering. There are a lot of people tracking the dots. First up, the hype desk, where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueda come tell us what's cool on the internet and in the world. Hey, guys. Hello. Hello. Ross, there's a picture in your background that makes me think I know one of the things you want to talk about today. What do you have for us? Yes, I have manifested this, and I am so excited because late last night, out of nowhere, Nintendo announced a new Star Fox game, or rather a new old one.

1:10:03David Pierce:It's the fifth time they've made the same game. And it's still amazing. I'm still excited for it. There is just one Star Fox game, right? And they just make it over and over and over and over again.

1:10:11Nilay Patel:Well, there's that one we don't talk about with the dinosaurs.

1:10:16David Pierce:We don't talk about that one. So what's the deal with this game? Yeah, so it's been rumored for a little bit. On one of the first Hypedesk we ever did, we talked about the Mario movie and how weird it was that Glenn Powell was there to play fox mcleod the titular starfox character and then out of nowhere nintendo usually does look surprise direct announcements but they give you a day heads up this was 10 minutes like literally all my slacks all my messages all my little work chats are like everyone drop what you're doing watch youtube they're gonna announce a new starfox out of nowhere yeah and sure enough they did and i think you you already kind of alluded to it david why break a great thing it's a remake of Star Fox 64, which is itself a kind of definitive edition remake of the original Star Fox.

1:11:00David Pierce:So this is truly the fifth time they've made this game. But it looks amazing. It's got cinematic quality graphics, which hit or miss on what you feel about, like, Fox McCloud looking like an actual Fox now. But it's the same game. It's the same gameplay from what they're saying. There's a little bit of Nintendo Switch. Do you still do a barrel roll? You can still do a barrel roll. Hell yes, you can. That's the only important part of this game.

1:11:21Nilay Patel:Literally in the direct.

1:11:23David Pierce:They made sure you knew you could do a barrel roll, you could do a somersault. Peppy hair and slippy toe will still bother you to no end.

1:11:30Nilay Patel:In the middle of your missions there's still all that cross ship chatter, which is very nice. That's classic Star Fox.

1:11:36David Pierce:It's great. We're so excited for that.

1:11:38Nilay Patel:There's also okay, wait, but we have to talk about the defining feature of this game to me in my opinion, which is if you use game chat to have your face like if it's looking at your face it basically makes like a vtuber version of starfox that tracks with your eyebrows in your mouth and you become starfox wait are you mocap animating the fox or does it make you a furry uh no no no yes you're mocap animating fox mcleod and and And then you become Fox McCloud, which to the delight of furries everywhere.

1:12:19David Pierce:Yeah, it's a virtual fursona onboarding move.

1:12:23Nilay Patel:It's a VTuber, a VTuber, a fursona VTuber kind of thing. But really, genuinely, the sound that emanated from me, the joy I felt at the... This is the thing I love about Nintendo. They are so deeply weird. and they just do not care. And they don't care about what the community thinks of these like very strange, like Alarmo is another really good example of like something where it's like, nobody was asking for it and they made this cute little alarm clock and they were just like, it's just cool and we want to do it. And like, this is like another example of them just being like, hey, we're just going to be a Nintendo on our own terms and this seems really funny and weird and like, we're going to just roll with it.

1:13:12Nilay Patel:But Tomodachi Life, also another great example of the weirdest thing that could possibly come out of Nintendo and somehow it works.

1:13:20David Pierce:I've now been looking at pictures of the new Star Fox for several minutes. I've been ignoring all of what you just said. I'm sure it was great. I can't decide if this is like, do you remember when they first showed the new real Sonic and everybody freaked out and they had to redo Sonic? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is like, there's a version of this that is that, because there is something that is slightly horrifying, but this is also the coolest thing I've ever seen in my whole life.

1:13:47Nilay Patel:Because Star Fox is cool.

1:13:49David Pierce:He's got the not quite zipped up jacket. Yeah, wait till you see James McCloud.

1:13:54Nilay Patel:He's got the aviators. Like, oh my God, like, it's just going to be, really, this is, I'm excited about this.

1:14:02David Pierce:Yeah, it's like Uncanny Valley parentheses complimentary. Do you know what I mean? I keep seeing the tribe meme like DLS is on, DLS is off. It is just a little too realistic. And I think I'm going to get used to it. It took a while. They just redid Donkey Kong's eyes about a year ago for the movie, for the new Donkey Kong game. It was a big deal because they haven't changed that look in forever. I've gotten used to it. I have to believe it's going to be the same case here. But yeah, my initial reaction is that's really real. It's really real.

1:14:32Nilay Patel:but also there's the whole generation of kids and the gen z and kids who have just they've never played a star fox game like they don't know this is all they're gonna know and like that's fine

1:14:43David Pierce:and now they're gonna think star fox is like a very cool guy who like flunked out of the air force academy for partying too hard oh he dropped out on purpose here's the thing he dropped out on

1:14:55Nilay Patel:purpose because he was too good for the academy you know what i mean like that's the lore i choose to believe. Okay, so don't Google Star Fox fursona. Nope, nope, don't do that. In an effort to find a gif of how it looks, because the first result is a Reddit thread from two years ago about audience overlap within subreddits, and I'll just read the headline. Apparently half of all Star Fox fans are furries. That number honestly feels quite low. When you're like Nintendo's doing stuff no one asked for, I feel like the data pointed them directly to let the Star Fox fans have for service.

1:15:34David Pierce:Some important context here because there's also a very famous fighting game champ, Sonic Fox, who is a furry.

1:15:42Nilay Patel:Is a furry.

1:15:42David Pierce:He's also the number one Mortal Kombat player in the world. I think he still is. He has been for many years. He just happens to be someone who always wears like a blue Sonic Fox furry mask.

1:15:53Nilay Patel:I do feel like in Back to Back Hype Desk, we've done wiki feed and furries. It's not back to back, but it has happened enough that it might become a regular thing. I understand what's happening here. We're finding our stride.

1:16:03David Pierce:This is great news. What else do you have for us today? Gardening. We have gardening. Ashley, you want to talk about this? Just the concept of gardening?

1:16:10Nilay Patel:Yeah. So Zach Galifianakis has a gardening show. The man loves a plant show. I was going to say, this is between true ferns. Yeah, sure. I'm going to call it that. I like that. It's not between two ferns. It's between True Ferns, which we both thought this was going to be kind of like a silly, snarky Zach Galifianakis jam where it's like, oh, it's like a funny little garden show. No, man just really likes gardening. And it's like a really wholesome, it's a really wholesome little show on Netflix. I don't understand. I love it. But also I did not peg Zach Galifianakis for a plant girly.

1:16:46David Pierce:So is this one of those things where Netflix was just like, Zach Galifianakis, we'd love you to make a show. And he's like, cool, I'm only going to do one where I just sit in my garden and talk about plants. And Ted Sarandos is like, okay. Kind of. So here's kind of it. So it's directed by Brook Linder, who also did John Mulaney's Everyone's Live in LA or whatever. So it has a very similar kind of rough vibe. Like, you think it's going to be Zach Galifianakis being weird, but it's earnest. Every episode is, first off, every episode is 15 minutes long. 15 minutes.

1:17:14Nilay Patel:Super easy watch. There's six of them.

1:17:15David Pierce:You can binge the whole thing in 90 minutes. Every episode has like three parts. One, he talks to actual farmers about the true history of a tomato or a mushroom or an apple. Like every episode is like an item based. And then the other part of it is like he just goofs off with kids. Like kids say the Darnest Thing style. Like he's just being a clown and just having a good time. Like it just feels in a weird way like a PG adult swim show.

1:17:39Nilay Patel:It feels like something you would see on Nickelodeon in the 90s at like 4 p.m. Yes. Sure. is this because netflix is doing vertical scrolling video and it's mobile app now and they're just like make clips sec that seems like maybe a strategy that like yeah i would say that would that would certainly i mean that would certainly lend itself to that but it also just feels like um if it genuinely feels like this is like content for like if kids watch it like it's like safe content for them but also like keeps them in netflix i don't like i don't know i like I find stuff like that really fascinating because it's just so odd and it's like maybe a parent would like let, I don't know.

1:18:20Nilay Patel:Like if I saw that just randomly, didn't know what it was and hadn't seen it, I don't know that I'd let my kid watch it if I was familiar with Zach Galifianakis.

1:18:26David Pierce:Right.

1:18:27Nilay Patel:But also it is totally like appropriate for kids. Like it's very, actually like very educational.

1:18:34David Pierce:I think he makes a joke about LSD once, but otherwise it is a very like G-rated show. So just the one LSD joke. Just the one, just the one.

1:18:41Nilay Patel:like shrek has like at least four ls

1:18:46David Pierce:shrek is itself an lsd joke but no um no i think it's one of those things we got really surprised by just how earnest he came across in everything like usually you're used to like zach alfanak is the character or even like the heightened version of himself on camera where he's still being like a weird deadpan goof this is where i'm like they constantly show like the wrong take for like talking or he's talking to his producer off camera like they want to make it feel very rough, kind of just truly authentic, off the cuff. He's laughing at his own jokes and he's just having a good time doing what he does.

1:19:15David Pierce:It's kind of like if you watched Conan O 'Brien Must Go, the travel show. And every now and then Conan O 'Brien just drops the facade. It's that, but the whole time.

1:19:23Nilay Patel:That is very Zach Galifianakis. That's very in his character.

1:19:27David Pierce:This is also giving early YouTube when the Broad City girls are making their web series before they made Broad City. We're just doing it in reverse now where A-list celebrity makes webisodes. We've gone back. I'm fully here for this. Speaking of Conan, by the way, Zach Galifianakis was on Conan O 'Brien's podcast like this week, I think. Shockingly thoughtful about internet regulation.

1:19:51Nilay Patel:This is how I feel like whenever I see Ben Affleck talking about AI, I'm like, oh, I was unfamiliar with your game, sir. Affleck was like,

1:19:59David Pierce:and then he sold his AI company to Netflix.

1:20:01Nilay Patel:I know, and then he sold his AI company.

1:20:03David Pierce:So what startup does Zach Galifianakis have that's policy-based? Yeah, exactly. Zach Galavanakis is going to run for Congress in 2020.

1:20:10Nilay Patel:He's starting another MVNO, like Mitt Noble. You know it's coming.

1:20:15David Pierce:Between two phones. Between two phones. Thank you. Thank you for hearing that joke. It just hit. It finally hit. That was the funniest thing I've ever said on this podcast.

1:20:27Nilay Patel:We can't say anything else. We got to end on that note. That's incredible.

1:20:30David Pierce:All right. I'm going to go watch that show. 15-minute episodes, by the way. Fabulous. More things should be 15 minutes. Ross, Ashley, thank you as always. We'll see you next week. Good to see you. Bye. All right, Neelai, this means it's time once again for America's Favorite Podcast Within a Podcast. We got an email this week calling it the world's favorite podcast within a podcast. So we're going global, buddy. It's time for Brennan Carr as a dummy. What do you do this week, Neelai?

1:20:54Nilay Patel:He did a lot this week. As always, he did a lot this week. The main thing is that he cheered on the Eighth Circuit overturning the FCC's broadband equity rules that passed in the Biden administration, where broadband companies had to try to provide internet access equitably to people of all kinds of backgrounds. And they basically, the court overturned it and Brendan cheered it and said, we don't have to do that, which is just the most Brendan car thing in the world.

1:21:23David Pierce:Let's not give people who need internet, internet. Hooray.

1:21:26Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, you can talk about it lots of ways, but Brendan, there's nothing he loves more than allowing telecom providers to charge higher rates and provide worse service. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's his thing. Like, that's where he came from. Well, and importantly, not do any work at all.

1:21:43David Pierce:It's like Brendan is really trying to protect the work-life balance of carrier executives everywhere. Yeah.

1:21:49Nilay Patel:Before the FCC under Brendan became all about speech regulations, every single FCC chair, and I knew them all, was all about bridging the digital divide, closing the homework gap, making sure that rural communities had broadband. and Brendan is like, screw that. We don't need to overbuild. This is one of his favorite phrases. And then he's cheering on these court challenges to forcing what are essentially monopolies to provide coverage equally to people. So that's just very bad. He's very dumb. This is like, I'm saying it this way without a lot of fire because this is just the most Brendan Carr thing.

1:22:28David Pierce:He's like a cartoon character villain in that sense.

1:22:31Nilay Patel:Yeah, but this is also the thing I'm used to arguing with. like GOP, FCC commissioners. Like our edgy pie, we would argue about this sort of thing. Like at least he's like true to form. You know, it's a classic Brendan Carr. Yeah. Then the other thing this week that I feel the need to issue a disclosure about. A few weeks ago, we mentioned that Brendan had bullied himself into a discussion of whether the NFL should lose its antitrust exemption. Oh, right. So big sports leagues have an antitrust exemption because the owners all get together and they go collude basically on prices for broadcast rights.

1:23:10David Pierce:Yeah.

1:23:10Nilay Patel:And so in any normal market, you would have them all compete.

1:23:14David Pierce:We call those things cartels.

1:23:15Nilay Patel:They're not generally allowed. But big sports leagues tend to have these antitrust exemptions. The NFL is maybe the most important one so that the owners can come together and the league can go negotiate for broadcast rights. And there's lots of structures and you don't necessarily need that one, but that's the one we have. So because the owners have now started going to streaming and getting deals, and in particular the NFL is so expensive to watch legally, there's just a lot of fulmination about breaking the antitrust exemption and making sure that it's not all on streaming or if it's going to be on streaming, that the local stations can do whatever they want.

1:23:46Nilay Patel:So the DOJ is investigating this. Brendan can't help it because he loves muscling his way into any sort of TV dispute. He decided that he's got the power too as well. There's going to be Senate hearings about it. Everyone's talking about it. And it's true that fans generally do not like the way that sports broadcast rights are set up right now. It is expensive. It's complicated. A lot of people are sailing the seven seas, if you know what I mean. So this is my disclosure. The Green Bay Packers this week sent a letter to Congress. It's basically a letter that's like, hey, just like we're a small market team.

1:24:21Nilay Patel:We're owned by the community. If you upend the economic structure of the NFL, like we'll be disproportionately impacted. and the last sentence says it as clearly as you can put simply any disruption to the current sports broadcasting act model eliminating our ability to negotiate as the nfl writ large would pose an existential threat to the green bay packers and their existence in green bay as we know it this comes the same week as brendan saying out loud actually this inquiry might not lead to any action because there's a lot of pressure like the nfl is full of lobbyists and billionaires and they're like, no, no, you're not going to touch us.

1:24:57Nilay Patel:It is as powerful an organization as we have in America. This is a cultural institution. They're like, you know what, Donald Trump is president, here's bad money. Yeah, like they just have the authority to do whatever they want in a way that many other places don't have the authority to do what they want. So I'm sure they're lobbying. Brendan said this week, we're just trying to make sure that we're educated on these issues. It's not clear whether there'll be a regulatory outcome or not. So you just have the NFL speaking with a woman voice being like, screw you. As corrupt as it gets in the way the NFL is corrupt.

1:25:23Nilay Patel:And then you have the Packers being like, this might kill the Packers.

1:25:26David Pierce:I'm dying to know what your disclosure is here. Is this like Neelai Patel is secretly the backup quarterback for the Green Bay Packers?

1:25:33Nilay Patel:I don't think anyone would enjoy that. I do think I should be allowed to call both the offense and the defense in the fourth quarter to our playoff games. Based on my record in Madden alone, we would have gone to the Super Bowl 500 times in a row. Anyhow, no, I'm from Wisconsin. I was raised in Wisconsin by my father, a Brett Favre fan. And my family owns four shares of the Packers. No way. You are the owner of the Green Bay Packers. You know, every now and again, like, the sports media will run these trolls. It's like, Packers owner says they're going to trade for a run. It's always, like, one guy.

1:26:06Nilay Patel:Yes, the Packers are owned by the community. When they want to raise money to build stadiums, they issue shares, which give you nothing. And you buy them, and they hang them on the wall. And you can get some of the worst merch in history at a 20 % discount from the pro shop. And you can vote, but it doesn't matter. You can vote on the board of directors of the Packers, which I never do. So there's your disclosure. My dad and I each own two shares, the Green Bay Packers.

1:26:31David Pierce:I'm now going to start angling for a change to the Virg ethics policy that says you're not allowed to also own any sports teams.

1:26:40Nilay Patel:If you want to comment me for that one, I will take it on the chin. We did a quick post about the Packers thing. One of the commenters was like, I feel like this needs a disclosure. And they just meant that I'm a Packers fan. But I thought about it and I was like, nope, I own four shares. That's great. Packers.

1:26:54David Pierce:Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. No, we got to change that one too.

1:26:58Nilay Patel:And Neelai owns the Green Bay Packers. We have to change that disclosure as well, by the way. Why? I didn't even realize this. With the spin out of Versant from Comcast, the NBC investment, it went with Versant.

1:27:15David Pierce:Oh no, now we have to say Versant is a minority investor in Vox Media?

1:27:18Nilay Patel:I think Comcast Ventures is still up there somewhere, but NBC is not. Interesting. Okay. So there's your disclosure update. I own two shares of the Packers. So does my dad. Neil, I owns the Green Bay Packers. I own the Green Bay Packers. I'm trying to get the new president of the Packers at policy on Decoder. And I'm just thinking how funny that episode will be for a variety of reasons. As your boss. That's right. As your boss.

1:27:43David Pierce:That's really good. Anyhow, those are our disclosure updates. So this is now your most direct fight with Brandon Carr ever. We're getting closer. the Neil I Brendan showdown inches ever closer if Brendan ruins

1:27:55Nilay Patel:the Green Bay Packers I will be very upset I don't think it's going to happen because I think the NFL's ability to lobby on its own behalf is very high yeah they're largely doing fine and I also do also think that the streaming landscape and the cost of watching sports is untenable for most people and actually maybe you should renegotiate and rethink the entire structure that led to those outcomes and maybe the Packers are overplaying it I'll find out when I, Ed Policy's boss, is the owner of the Green Bay Packers interview Ed Policy. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm willing that into existence here at the end of Brendan Carr's Dummy.

1:28:29Nilay Patel:As always, Brendan, if you'd like to talk about any of this, in particular, your absolutely regressive approach to broadband deployment in the United States, which is keeping the internet from poor people, you're welcome to come on this show. I can tell you that I'm pretty sure we're going to federate Brendan Carr's Dummy to one more podcast very soon. It was already on Stephen Robles' podcast, but there's another one coming. You might be able to guess what that is. So we're expanding. We're America's favorite podcast within every podcast. Brendan, you're welcome.

1:29:00David Pierce:The B-C-I-A-D-C-U is exploding.

1:29:04Nilay Patel:That's right. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within all the podcasts.

1:29:08David Pierce:That's good stuff. All right, my first lightning round item, I would just like to alert everyone to the existence of a company called Dreamy. if you don't know about dreamy uh jen tui wrote a terrific piece for us about this company basically it's a it's a company out of china that started as a robot vacuum company on kind of a dyson grind where they're like we know how to make a kind of motor what can we put motor in and started doing stuff built robot vacuums built a pretty successful robot vacuum business and then decided that the next thing to do is to make everything for everyone everywhere throughout the world as we know it.

1:29:44David Pierce:And last week had a big, huge U.S. launch event and has basically begun rolling out some of the most spectacular vaporware the world has ever seen. And this just, I just, I'm like earnestly proud of this company for, with a straight face, saying all of the things that it has been saying

1:30:04Nilay Patel:over the last week or so. Straight up, one of the things they said was, we will turn our CEO into Elon Musk.

1:30:09David Pierce:Yeah, just, yeah. There's like, he's gonna be that guy. It's just a thing they're saying out loud. They announced, I think, like two dozen smartphones in the Aurora line, a bunch of which have weird ideas about things, including one that is a modular phone that you can attach different modules, including a telephoto camera lens to. There's also a satellite communications module. I want to be so clear that none of these things are ever going to exist. And if they do, you won't buy them anyway. But I love so much that a company can get on stage and be like, look at all this weird crap we made. They also made a car, I think.

1:30:43Nilay Patel:No, no, no. It's not just a car, David. It's a rocket car.

1:30:46David Pierce:Oh, right.

1:30:47Nilay Patel:It's a rocket car. It's a rocket car. Yeah, it can do zero to 60 in, they claim, 0.9 seconds. So literally it would have to be a rocket car. It's a rocket car. I don't understand. I mean, our deck is so straightforward. Andy Hawkins is our transportation reporter. And the deck of this piece is, the Chinese vacuum company has automotive aspirations, but it's claims of rocket boosted acceleration don't add up. It's like, yeah, I don't think that the math ain't math in my friends.

1:31:18David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. They also launched smart rings, smart glasses, a laundry robot. I would say there is no more classic vaporware genre than robot that will fold your laundry. It has been, somebody has been shipping that since time immemorial. And I believe it will never actually exist in the real world. But dream is making one. They got a bunch of robot vacuums and lawnmowers, all kinds of wild stuff. Like every product you could possibly imagine, Dreamy believes that it will sell you at some point in the very near future. And it's all a bunch of nonsense. And I just admire the hell out of it.

1:31:53Nilay Patel:Can I come back to the rocket car? Sure. It's very important that I come back to Dreamy announcing a rocket car. It's called the Next 01 Jet Edition car. It has Batmobile-style fake jet engines on the back. And again, the claim is it can go from zero to 60 in 0.9 seconds. You can't do that on regular tires, as our transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, points out. You will hit the limits of traction. So you can put all the power to the wheels, but the tires will explode. So they're going to launch this thing briefly into the air as it accelerates. You might have made a top-fueled drag car, but you actually just made this Kia-looking thing with your jet engines on the deck.

1:32:34David Pierce:Fantastic. Unless the reason that it's jet engines is because they're not driving the wheels.

1:32:42Nilay Patel:This is what I'm saying. They're going to launch the car into the air. The wheels are not important. The jet engines can just push the car forward.

1:32:52David Pierce:Yeah, the wheels don't have to turn it off. The wheels are just ancillary.

1:32:56Nilay Patel:When you talk about the most spectacular vaporware in the history of the world.

1:33:01David Pierce:Honestly, it has a real claim to it. Like there's not a lot of better vaporware. Everybody go check it out. We have a great photo essay of all this stuff. Go read Jen's piece. We'll put it all in the show notes. This company is absolutely fascinating. Whether it ships or not, I think Dreamy is fascinating and you should go check it out. Neelai, what's your next one?

1:33:18Nilay Patel:I just want to point out that the Autopian sent an engineer to check out the Nebula Next 01 jet car. And his assessment was, quote, feels like horse shit. Perfect.

1:33:31David Pierce:I like the idea that this person was not like an automotive engineer they're just like an HVAC engineer where they're just like nope wind doesn't work that way

1:33:42Nilay Patel:it's really good it's very good what's your next one Eli? I've got one more it's just one of my favorite stories of the week we started with Elon we're going to end with Elon Elon out of nowhere just announced that he is further consolidating the SpaceX empire and XAI which was its own company which also contained X, the social platform and everything app that we all use for everything. Right.

1:34:03David Pierce:So, yeah, they started X, then started XAI. XAI swallowed X. Yep. And it all became XAI.

1:34:09Nilay Patel:It all became XAI. And then SpaceX swallowed XAI. Right. And now he's formally dissolving XAI as a company. Okay. And it's just going to be part of SpaceX and they're just going to call it SpaceX AI.

1:34:21David Pierce:So, wait, the whole thing is now SpaceX AI?

1:34:24Nilay Patel:Yes. They did not quite announce it. They put out a press release announcing a compute partnership with Anthropic in which SpaceX referred to itself as SpaceX AI over and over again in the press release. So that's what we got.

1:34:38David Pierce:The whole Anthropic thing, by the way, very weird. They're getting all of this compute from, I guess it's called SpaceX AI, but there's like a clause in it that if Elon Musk decides it's bad for the world, they can pull the compute back. Weird stuff going on. Weird stuff going on.

1:34:53Nilay Patel:It's also not clear if SpaceX itself is called SpaceX AI or just the products, the AI products of SpaceX. Right. Are an umbrella brand called SpaceX. None of this makes any sense.

1:35:05David Pierce:X is a feature of XAI, which is a feature of SpaceX AI, which is a branch of SpaceX.

1:35:12Nilay Patel:Yes. And by the way, X, just to be clear, is the everything app that we all do all of our banking and real estate transactions in. Right.

1:35:19David Pierce:Pretty soon you might bank with a division within a division within a division within a division of SpaceX.

1:35:24Nilay Patel:Yes, which is also selling compute to Anthropic. I love it. When you're like, oh, this whole episode started with a long trial about corporate structures and you end with and it's called SpaceX AI. It's like, well, we've learned nothing.

1:35:36David Pierce:I have no notes. I'm in. I will give you a just to just to button that with a better example of a company doing a good job. Asha Sharma, who is running the Xbox team now, continues to do good, smart things, which is to say, make obvious decisions to make Xboxes less bad. She announced this week that they're getting rid of the co-pilot AI stuff on the Xbox. They're making some big changes to the platform. They started teasing the universal look across all kinds of different devices. just before we get out of here just a brief shout to Asha Sharma who has basically shown up and just systematically reversed all of the bad decisions made by people before her which is actually a pretty good way to endear yourself to fans of Xbox and it seems to be going very well there was a lot of skepticism about Asha Sharma when she took over this team and people are coming around really fast there's a lot of enthusiasm she's been up to recently I mean you're just like I'm taking the AI out of it everyone's like you're the best yeah and then and meanwhile microsoft is out here being like oh do you know all those msn widgets that show up in your face every time you open the start menu we're gonna get rid of those too and everybody's like oh my god microsoft gets it what if what if we made our products less horrible yeah it's like it's perfect the fate of windows i'll take it um all right we should get out of here lots going on on the site go go read everything liz literally as we speak is still in the courtroom.

1:37:01David Pierce:There are still shenanigans. This trial has weeks left. We got a lot left to do. We'll keep covering it. But we will not be covering it next week because we are off next week. No show Tuesday, no show Friday. We're going to be back with a live show on the 19th after Google I.O. Neela, you're going to be at I.O. I will be at I.O. TBD on connectivity situations, whether we get you on the show or not. But we have some other folks here that are going to help me run through all the news. We're going to talk about all of it. We're going to go live kind of right-ish after the keynote on Tuesday. So no Tuesday episode that morning, but we'll be back that afternoon.

1:37:35David Pierce:We're just trying to give everybody a break. There's a lot of stuff coming up. We have some really fun plans that we're going to start to tell you about pretty soon. Lots going on. We just figured we're going to give everybody a week to go stare at trees before the true chaos of developer season gets us off.

1:37:50Nilay Patel:I'm going to see if I can get my car to go faster than any car has ever gone in the history of the years.

1:37:55David Pierce:You're going to put several rockets on your car and see if the tires are going to be even matter anymore.

1:37:59Nilay Patel:It's going to be great.

1:38:00David Pierce:I love it. Who's on Decoder this week?

1:38:02Nilay Patel:Joanna's on very soon talking about new things and her new book and then I will just hint that there is a wave of big interviews coming that I'm very excited about.

1:38:10David Pierce:It's going to be good. All right. Remember, as always, you can subscribe to The Verge to get this podcast and all of our podcasts ad-free. Theverge.com slash subscribe. That is what makes us ungovernable. Yeah. They can't mess with us as long as you subscribe. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you, what, in two weeks? Eli, rock and roll.

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