Get ready to meet your AI best friend

25:32Can I bang you? Like, what are you doing later tonight? Copilot's like, please leave me alone, Kranz. Well, and I do think there's a big chunk of people who show up to something like ChatGPT knowing what they want and will do stuff, right? Like that's – there are lots of people who work like that. Most people don't. Most people are not – that is not baked into their brain that like, I'm tired. Let me talk to a chatbot about it. Right. And so like, maybe someday we'll get there. I think it's not crazy to imagine that that becomes a much more normal behavior for a much larger number of people, but we're nowhere near that yet.

26:08And so right now it's the chatbot is both very powerful and like the ultimate cold start problem. Uh, and so I think even you're starting to see chat GPT and others like offer you prompts and ideas and just like little things that it's like, here's the kind of stuff I can do just to get you over that hump of like, what am I supposed to type into this box? Yeah. Because I think the more you use it, the more you get it and the more natural it feels. But those first few are really challenging. But I just want to mention one thing. There was a really great piece in The Atlantic this week about a bunch of researchers who got a huge data set of people's transcripts with ChatGPT and basically went through it and found people are willing and able to reveal so much about themselves to a chatbot in this incredibly like deep personal way and it just keeps reinforcing this idea for me that like the bar for people to pour their lives and souls and hearts and minds into these things and treat them like people is so low like we're way past that bar all of these models pass whatever turing test there is in real life at this point right and and so now the question is basically like what products are we supposed to make out of that.

27:18And the first one is just, it's fun to talk to, right? And that's where we are with so much of this. And like now that, that, that doesn't get Microsoft anywhere. It just costs Microsoft a lot of money, right? Like being fun to talk to is not how Microsoft makes money over time. They've got to figure out this other stuff. And I think you're starting to see Copilot push towards that. Yeah. So what's fascinating about this is on the flip side of this. Let me say again. So I agree with all that. What is deeply fascinating to me is the flip side of the new co-pilot, which is the voice mode, which is inherently open-ended.

27:48You just talk to it. It doesn't wake up and say, hey, would you like to meditate? You just push the button and start talking, and then it talks back to you, and you can interrupt it like all the new multimodal voice modes can do. And that, it seems like you don't have to prompt people. They will just start talking to the AI, and the AI will just talk to them, and that feels very natural. And then the other one is co-pilot vision, where it can do all the things that all of them can do now, which is like look at the web for you and like do searches. And that also doesn't have prompting. It's just the text box where we're like, we need to show people what they can type.

28:21Everything else is kind of wide open. And I think that's really, I think that split is just going to keep going. It's just going to keep getting wider and wider and wider where when you want to do it in where when you want to interact with a computer in ways that feel more human, like talking, we don't think we need to prompt you because you're just going to start talking. and then mice and keyboards and typing still feel like computer stuff and people still need instructions or training wheels or whatever metaphor you want to use to like get up and running. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. It's, it's why everybody is pushing toward both voice and vision, right?

28:56Like the camera is very much the same way. Uh, like in the way that sitting down at a text box to accomplish a goal is not a thing that comes naturally for a lot of people taking a picture of a thing super is that's just the world now and so the like google just rolled out the the gemini search with a video in lens which i think is going to be very successful uh everybody's doing this multimodal search part of copilot is now that it has the same voice mode and it will do the the video search stuff and like those i totally agree those are the things that are gonna like immediately click in people's brains and i wrote this feature for wired when i was there like in 2016 being like the voice revolution is coming.

29:37Uh, and for years I looked at that piece being like, boy, did I whiff on that one? Cause it was like the thesis then was that it was, it was Alexa and it was Siri and it was Google assistant. It was like, this is going to change how we interact with our computers. Uh, and yeah, like, like Microsoft, uh, I wasn't wrong. I was just way too early. Well, the enabling technology wasn't there. I want to keep coming back to this point. Yeah. Everybody had this idea. And then the first problem everybody had was the computers can't actually understand what you are saying. And then even if they do set a timer for five minutes, that gets filtered into some pretty static algorithms.

30:12Like I will set a timer or in the case of Siri, only one at a time. Um, God help us two timers. It took them like five years or I can play some music or I can go do a Google search or I can look at Wolfram Alpha, like these very pre-planned routes. And now you have an enabling technology, which is I can just understand anything you're saying and i can go look at stuff and with a multimodal search find it understand it and spit it back out to your natural language that is a very powerful set of enabling technology like you just everybody had the right ideas but the literally the core bits and bobs weren't there i knew when i was a child that cell phones would exist i could not make an lcd screen like that that is the thing right it's just in the middle is all of the i think the word everyone uses is agentic.

31:00Like an agent. It's good. Yeah. I was like, what does that even mean? The first time I heard it, I was like, what? Agentic. Okay. You're going to hear it a lot. That sounds like a consulting firm. Yeah. Sounds like the name you come up with when you pay a consulting firm. We would make so much more money than whenever it's unsponsored lightning round. Or like a medication that you're not sure if it works. It's like, ask your doctor about agentic today. Yeah. Yeah. Yikes. Ask your doctor if you're ready for agentic. Well, if you're AI curious, the Vergecast and agentic are here for you. Okay. So you've got all these ideas, which are, okay, now I can understand you can go do stuff for you.

31:41And in the middle, the actually doing stuff for you, unclear how those tasks will be accomplished. Is it a bunch of APIs? Will Delta provide a bunch of flight booking APIs to all AI products? Delta can't even manage to get their flight attendant. to the planes all the time with their software. Very tense relationship right now, I would point out. Is everyone just going to allow AI bots to set up VNC clients in the cloud and click around on their websites? That is very slow and very brittle. And computationally expensive. Probably computationally expensive. They could be rendering them in black and white.

32:18I don't know. There's probably some way. Who knows? But that is such a hack. like a pure hack to say the way the AI agents are going to work is we're going to light up Chrome on AWS on a Linux instance for every individual user, take your credentials to the cloud, and then click around on websites to accomplish the tasks for you. Because what you really want to do is speak to your phone. Maybe you could do it locally, right? Apple's going to do it with Intense in Siri. So you talk to Siri, presumably whenever Apple intelligence ships, a bunch of app developers will have had to allow Siri to access their services.

33:01And Siri locally will fire off a bunch of API calls and do stuff on your phone. The middle part is totally up for grabs. I don't know if anybody has an answer. I don't know if anybody has a fallback that is better than we're going to light up a Chrome instance in the sky. And I don't know if anybody has a solution for what happens when kayak or doordash or delta like don't have the ability to show you their user interface they will like if you run doordash and suddenly people can order stuff without ever looking at the doordash interface you don't actually run much of a company anymore all of your revenue opportunities go away because you're built in advertising the thing where they try to get you to order more stuff the second you've ordered something I'm convinced this is DoorDash's entire business.

33:46Yeah, they're always like, don't you want a soda with this soda you already want? No, they're like, DoubleDash. Like, the counter comes up, and you're like, that's just more stuff. But that's the business. Uber is like, would you like Uber Eats? If you just, if you commoditize all of those services into things that AIs can do, those companies are going to be like, actually, no. Like, Uber and Lyft want to be different companies, not just commodity providers of taxis to AI services. Dumb pipes. You create a lot of dumb pipes. You commoditize a lot of businesses right away. And I just don't know.

34:18That middle part is where I think all of these companies are going to run into the reality of, well, everybody else doesn't want to be a commodity for your AI. Yeah. And I truly, right now, it seems like the fallback answer is, well, we're just going to click around on your website. Like, what are you going to do? Not have a website? And lately, it seems like the answer is not have a website. Yeah. Or like a terms of service battle about you have to be a human to use our website. Well, it also sounds like in the conversations I've had with folks that part of this is also they don't necessarily want to do that.

34:48They just want it to be like this companion you talk to. It doesn't necessarily it's not your executive assistant. It's not ordering you flights or anything like that. It's there to help with math. It's there to like do the very basic things. And then I think with all of it, you still run into this cultural concept. Like culturally, are we prepared for this? Are we prepared to make these things our friends? And I don't think people are. Well, so the new co-pilot, because it has OpenAI 01 in it, has a feature called Think Deeper, which allows it to supply step-by-step answers to complex questions like, should I move to New York or San Francisco?

35:30Which is definitely something you just want to ask. That's what I want to ask a computer. That is the thing. Right? Like it's trying to replicate friends. And I don't know how to tell it. Computers are not friends. They're computers. They don't have souls. They don't have the ability to reason. But this is what David is saying. Once you let people talk to a computer, they just start talking to a computer. Right. Because they like to talk. Once you let somebody on the Internet, they love to put everything on the Internet. Right. Like there's no – we all love to just – not everyone. A lot of people just love to put themselves out there in all these forms.

36:06And generally speaking, culturally, we think it's weird when someone talks to a computer. Over and over again, we see in TV and film, that's like the example of that person is cut off from everything they know. That person is profoundly lonely. I think of, was it Mr. Robot, where the woman would every episode have a conversation with Alexa? And it was meant to show you how sad and pathetic she was. And now we're like, actually, that isn't sad and pathetic. it's cool with co-pilot we should do a remix of Mr. Robot as a co-pilot ad yes 100 % I'm just saying that's a very good idea I actually don't know I don't know if the answer well I know the answer to the question is should you move to New York or San Francisco it's obviously New York just putting that out there straight out everything no that's true yeah I was gonna fight that for a minute it's true it's just so true sorry to everyone in San Francisco sorry in particular Connie Robinson our reporter our reporter and so it's like, who loves reporter?

37:01But I'm right, it's New York. But the idea that you can have some big life decision and you're asking a computer in a low stakes way to help you think through it, fine. Does that make you better talking to other people? Unclear. That's what the replica of people will say is people practice having social interactions with their robots and then they go off into the world and they're confident. I'm really of the mind that we should spend more time I'm wondering if actually those two things have nothing to do with each other, right? Because I think the alarmist's side of that argument is people are talking to computers and thus not talking to other people.

37:41And you hear the stories about the women in Asia who are dating men who are AIs instead of men in the world. And there's this big moral crisis about it. And there's probably lots of interesting research being done on those fronts. But I think to me, the question of, is it a good and healthy thing to have a relationship like this with a computer is interesting and important in its own right. Can I read you the quote from Sullyman that directly responds to you? Yeah, sure. We are not creating, reminder, beautiful accent, musical. Did not get acquired by Microsoft. Did not get acquired by Microsoft.

38:19Quote, we are not creating a static tool so much as establishing a dynamic, emergent, and evolving interaction. It will accompany you to that doctor's appointment, taking notes and following up at the right time. It'll share the load of planning and preparing for your child's birthday party. And it will be there at the end of the day to help you think through a tricky life decision. This is just a friend. What he is describing is a friend who's going to come do all the things and then you can just take advantage of the friend. Like plan this birthday party. And that is a huge vision. And again, I'm just pointing out, okay, planning and preparing for your child's birthday party requires doing a bunch of stuff.

38:57And how it does the stuff is not a technical problem. It is a legal problem and it is a set of business problems. And I don't know if anybody actually has the answers to those problems right now. Can this robot go use a website on my behalf? Well, someone can just write a terms of service agreement that prohibits that. Yeah. And now we have to have a lot. And Microsoft can pay the money. They got money, but it's going to get fought out before this vision happens. And I think there's, as always with the tech industry, they're like, huh, permission. It's still really weird that a couple of years ago, Google fired a dude.

39:36And part of the reason they fired him, not the entire reason, part of it, was that he insisted the AI was like human enough now. Oh, yeah. And then now we're back. Now we've gone all the way around to look at how human our AI is. Yeah. Yeah, it's a feature, not a bug now. Yeah, and that's just, that's a weird turn that I'm having trouble making along with all of the tech companies. They did it and I'm like, hello, I'm still back here. Like, it's kind of weird. Google's like, you've planned too many birthday parties. Get out of here. Can I just say, by the way, tech companies, stop using children in your marketing for AI chat.

40:10It's just a bad idea. Yeah. Like, stop having them write letters to Olympians with it. stop having their birthday parties planned with AI. Like, please, please leave children out of it. It's just not a good look. It makes everything feel very dystopian and bad. Let's just not do that. Also, most parents of young children are deep in an extraordinarily controversial discussion about whether the kids should have phones at all. Yeah. Just what are you doing? Also, if you're going to spend your time doing anything, it's planning your kid's birthday party. All of the rest of the time, she had freed up so you can do that thing.

40:46Yeah, right. Well, yeah, but they can't do that because all of that other stuff is business stuff. And you get into what is legal at your company going to say if you're using this to plan all of your meetings? They might have problems. You know, like you run into that thing of, OK, this has to be in the personal space because we're not yet ready to put this. And who can't sue us? Kids. Yep. Kids can't sue. Get more money, little kids. Loser. What would be a good ad for AI is me sending my stupid AI note taker to all of my meetings so that I can go plan my kid's birthday party. What if I'm outside with my children while my AI is in a meeting?

41:20Now I'm in on AI. I just want to point out that Eric Yeun, the CEO of Zoom, came on Decoder and said, soon all meetings will be AI avatars talking to each other. And you will have thousands of AI avatars going to thousands of meetings. Somebody posted something on threads the other day. I don't know if it was true or not, but they posted a screenshot of a Google Meet with several people in a meeting and all of them had just sent their AI notetakers. That's the scene from the greatest movie of all time, Real Genius, with Val Kilmer, where in the 80s, everybody puts their boombox in to record the lecture, and then the professor comes and plays the lecture out of the boombox.

41:56This is one of the most underrated movies of all time. This is Val Kilmer's greatest performance, Real Genius. Go watch this movie. Everything you need to know about my personality comes from this movie. I'm just letting you know. This sounds like a special episode we need to do. I'm sort of serious. We just watch Real Genius? Yeah. Incredible final scene. Okay, speaking of AI companies that don't ask anyone for permission to do anything, OpenAI just raised$6.6 billion to build God. That seems fine. That's cheap. Yeah. Everyone works there still, right? There are now more founders of OpenAI who work at Anthropic than work at OpenAI.

42:29This is a real stat. It's pretty fantastic. Who knows if they're going to do that money. Sam Hellman has consolidated ever more power. I think one of the big questions here with all this Microsoft news is it feels like Microsoft is pulling farther and farther away from OpenAI. I mean, for Microsoft, this is just, it's just a really great way to get a lot of computing money. I forget who the author was, but somebody at The Information wrote a very good story basically being like, here's why all these investors would do this. And you just go down the list and it's like, oh, NVIDIA is in this because NVIDIA is actually just giving open AI money that it will get back for all of its technology.

43:01Microsoft, same. Thrive is like in too deep now. They've just, they've pinned their whole thing on being, yeah, on like being bros with founders and with Sam Altman. in particular, you could make a case that this is not the vast bet that OpenAI is the greatest company in the history of ever, that it appears to be on its face. But it also puts OpenAI in a pretty wild position, which is, I think, the money hinges on the company becoming a for-profit company within two years, which is a big deal that we've kind of known was coming. The thing I thought was the wildest was that OpenAI apparently asked all of its investors not to invest in other basically similar companies, not to invest in OpenAI competitors, which is just a wild thing to be able to ask your investors.

43:50Like I watched Silicon Valley. I know that you're supposed to have multiple plays in every sector of the market. And so for OpenAI to just be like, no, you can't touch anybody else if you want part of this is pretty nuts. Also, SoftBank is in this, which is not great. Yeah, that's usually - It's not what you want. Like money is good, but the vibes are bad. Yeah. All this also hinges on, I've mentioned the phrase enabling technology a bunch of times. There's a difference between the engineering you need to make the technology and then the product work you need to make the products. And all this hinges on OpenAI going from a research and engineering company to a products company.

44:29And right now they have but one product, which is ChatGPT. Or there being some vast leap left to do in the engineering side. But all those people have left. Well, right. But I mean, but OpenAI's case is God, right? Like if OpenAI is right about that, there are several gigantic leaps left here. And there are an increasing number of people out there who say maybe there aren't and maybe it doesn't matter. That maybe the technology now is good enough to do most of the plausible stuff that we want to do. And actually, to your point, all the interesting stuff left is product, right? Like we've built the internet.

45:05Now what are we going to do with it? It's like, that's one moment we're in. And there's another moment that we're in that says all of this is about to get 100 ,000 times better at like a foundational level. And that will change everything all over again. And I hear an increasing number of people who don't believe that second thing is true. But that's OpenAI's entire pitch for why it's worth all of this money. And that pitch comes down to we will run an even larger model. We'll train an even larger model with an even larger amount of data. Which they are running out of data. So they're going to make synthetic data to do it.

45:37Which is great. And then they'll use all of the power in Saudi Arabia to build the data center. Like legitimately, this is how they are talking. This is how they spend their money. And that's just a big bet. You got to do a lot of things. I believe the people at TSMC referred to Sam Altman as a podcast bro. They heard his ideas to build 36 more chip fabs to make him chips. Like that's just a big idea. And maybe he'll get the money. Maybe he'll do it. Who knows? It's just in the meantime, while you're busy building 36 fabs to build the world's largest data center to train the world's largest model on synthetic data that your current models have produced everyone else is going to go build products and like maybe that's fine you know like i i just there's a weirdness here you know we're covering it we're all over it but i would just zoom out of like the day-to-day sam altman drama and you're like what are the products there's also there's the third one which is that ai is a bubble and and it's about to pop right like like Like that a lot of this stuff is just built on dreams and ambition and there's nothing actually to back it up.

46:40Because if you don't have those products, if you don't build God in the next five years, shareholders are going to be like, yo, where's God? Yep. I gave you a billion dollars. This is – look, I'm a capitalist. I often do capitalist critiques, but I would say shareholders will get mad if you don't build God in the next five years is the perfect summation of where we are in technology capitalism. There's a very Vergecast sentence right there, and I just want everyone to hold on to it as tightly as they can. Well, we have the title of the show, so that's good. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back.

47:17We're going to talk about gadgets, and I might mention Real Genius three or four more times. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

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48:31Terms and conditions apply. Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s, you splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela.

49:07I'll take reindeer paper with, hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us, no trade-in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just$25 a line. with 24 monthly bill credits and four eligible portings on essentials for well-qualified customers auto pay plus taxes fees and 35 dollar device connection chart credits and balance do if you pay off earlier cancel contact us finance agreement 256 gigabytes 830 dollars required visit t-mobile.com support for this show comes from zapier when people talk about ai they often talk about the future how will ai affect the economy what will ai's potential be in the future will ai be able to make popular art but the more important question is what can ai actually do for your business today.

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50:58We're back with the Real Genius Radio Hour. That movie is great. Actually, to be 100 % on the nose, that movie is about a group of scientists to invent a laser that gets productized into a weapon. And at one point, one of the main characters says, that's for the engineers to figure out. It's a real thing. Woof.

51:27It is great. It's truly one of the finest movies of all time. Apparently to prepare for it, they did a lot of research into the CIA and lasers. Really found it in - They didn't do that much research. Months. Wikipedia says months of research. This is a movie in which the breakthrough is of El Kilmer screaming, ice is nice.

51:49Oh, excuse me, the director did the research, not the writers. It's not that much research. They did a lot of research into like MIT and Caltech secret societies. Okay. This movie is great. It's a tremendous 80s movie, and you have to watch it like five times to catch all the jokes. It's great. All right. A lot of gadget stuff going on. Should we start with the meta glasses? Yeah, this is like Neelai's dream came true when it's horrible and we have to talk about it. So, so many people have pinged me with this story in email, on threads, just in the comments of unrelated stories on Slack. A group of college students, I believe at Harvard, they took the meta Ray-Bans and they just hacked it together.

52:31So with the Meta Ray-Bans, you can just stream live to Instagram. So they set up a private Instagram account. They started streaming live for the Meta Ray-Bans. And then they set up facial recognition, watching their computers live stream to just tell them who they were looking at. And you should watch this video. It's great. You know, it's like everyone's a video editor now. So the video is edited all snappy. There's like moments of discovery and despair. It's like the whole thing is great. but like dude's on the subway and he's just looking at someone and it tells him who they are because they've done facial recognition and then he walks up to them and he's like hey are you this person that where did i meet you at this place and everyone falls for it and it is maybe a put on like maybe this only worked half the time it's a video right we don't know but the proof of concept is there.

53:18Like that chain of things all exist. Streaming live to Instagram exists. Worldwide facial recognition systems exist. Text messaging exists. You can make this product today out of the things that exist. Yeah. You can go do this. And it is terrifying. It is 100 % the product I want. I want to be very clear about this. I've said this so many times on the show that if you could give me AR glasses that just tell me who people are, tell me people's names, that is a killer app for this product. It always has been. It always will be. And the cost of it, which I have said every single time I have said this is a killer app, is that you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database.

53:57And that is terrifying. And the second someone built even this hack together prototype, it's obviously terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, Meta, we asked them about it and they just sent a block quote of their terms of service to us. Yeah. I mean, it makes so plain that the only reason this isn't happening is because everyone is slightly skeeved out by it, except for you, apparently. I would be the greatest politician in American history if I could just remember people's names. I do not want to shy away from that. That is my claim. I will stick to it. It is unprovable, but I know in my heart that it is true.

54:29I feel like everyone should have this when they have to go to like CES or something like that, like really big events. I would be totally fine with that. You wearing it on the street? No, stop. I don't even like wearing the NFC tag built into the badges at CES. Yeah. Zip it out. No, I want to know who everyone is at CES. I want to be like, okay. I did meet you five years ago and I'm so sorry I forgot. That seems great. This has made me think so much about the UX of all of this. Like what if you could wear these glasses, but it wouldn't show you somebody's names unless the glasses had seen them before.

54:58So in theory, your first encounter with somebody, it wouldn't just tell you their name. But if this was a person you knew somehow, you had a picture of them in your Google photos or you were friends with them on some social network. Like, again, a series of very queryable databases. Then it could be like, oh, you know this person. Like, does that get less sketchy? No, because then your spouse puts on your glasses and finds out you've been having an affair for five years. I just went straight there. Right? That's going to happen because you put them on and then it's like, wait, why does it recognize this person?

55:26Oh, because they were being in them. Well, you look at your phone. It's like he's been banging the assistant this whole time. No, not co-pilot.

55:39Just hearts. It'd be rules. look, someone's going to actually do this. Whether or not it's this hacky product or another one of these companies, once the display technology is available, someone will instantly build a product like this. I mean, Meta could go build this right now, but then we would not be talking about his shirts as much. We'd be talking about that. Well, so the UX of this, as David is saying, is the thing. Yeah. Because you need the glasses and it has to show you the name over the person. I think if it's just saying the name, No, this is why it's a hack. Yeah. Right now it's like texting you the name.

56:17I mean, I'd still be fine with that. But I think as a consumer product, that's a little challenging. Yeah. Right. Or on my watch, it just pops up on your watch. You're like, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Phil. It's from Eustachia. Like, I think that'd be great. I'm going to start doing this to people. Just call it everyone Phil. Be like, so you're Phil. Yeah. I'm saying once the – right? Meta could build this with Orion, presumably, because they have the display technology. But that's vaporware. Yes. I'm saying once, on some timeline, once the display technology to put images on glasses that let you just see the real world exists, this thing is inevitable.

56:55No. AirPods solves this problem. Like, did either of you watch Veep? Yes. You know how Gary and Veep is just forever behind her going, this is Senator Doyle. I want Gary. He is an idiot. This is Gary. Like call this product Gary. And it just, whenever someone is like clearly walking towards you, it just tells you who they are. And it's just Tony Hale's voice in your ear. It's just Tony Hale. Give Tony Hale millions of dollars to do this. And I will subscribe tomorrow. 100%. It is funny how obvious the trade-off is to everyone once they see it. Oh yeah. Because again, for years I've been saying I would buy this product in a heartbeat, but you have to build a worldwide facial recognition database to do it.

57:33And everyone's like, that's fine. And then you see it, you're like, boop. Never mind. Don't want that. Don't want that. There is a worldwide facial recognition database. It's just the internet. Anyway, I want one. If you're these college students, call us. We'll do a whole. I want to know everything about this project and how it works. Give us a call. Other gadget news. Sonos announced a plan to fix the app. We haven't covered this too much on the Verchess, I don't think. In bits and pieces. Chris Walsh has been covering the story top to bottom on the site. So obviously Sonos put out the app. It was not a hit.

58:14People hated it. Yeah, that's how they felt about it. I think it's safe to say people hated it. Missing a bunch of functionality. The ongoing narrative is that they needed to rush out the headphones. I didn't want to say conspiracy theory because I think it is correct. They needed to rush out the headphones. They needed to put out the new version of the app to support the mobility of the headphones. And the app was mentioning a bunch of functionality, very buggy, missing core functionality. People at the company were upset that they were releasing it. Yep. And so now they're like, OK, what if we listen more?

58:48Why are you guys being so nice to Sonos? This is like weird to listen. Sonos released a horrible app that everyone hated, and it has basically tanked the company. Like, it's just that simple. Yeah, they've had to have layoffs because of it. But, you know, like the reason that it happened was because they weren't listening. No, it's because Sonos released a horrible app that everyone hated. Here's what I'm trying not to do. I'm trying not to just repeat like Reddit conspiracy theories and say only what I actually know. Because the Reddit conspiracy theories are in fact out of control. Yes. At this point, the company is so tanked its reputation.

59:23They can't do anything right. So what they have done is they took Eddie Lazarus, who is their chief legal officer, and they assigned him the project to figure out what happened. And he's not writing a report. So he did that. Eddie's been on the show before. We've talked to him. And they released their plan. The plan is charitably fairly vague. The plan contains things like unwavering focus on the customer experience. To ensure that we deliver the highest levels of customer experience, we will always establish ambitious quality benchmarks at the outset of product development. Is that the plan? the plan is like it just makes me think of the people who are like no one holds me to a higher standard than i hold myself so to everyone i've disappointed please know i've disappointed myself even more it's like no you still did bad yeah it's like one of the other pieces of the plan is demonstrate humility when introducing changes uh in contrast the all at once automated app released we should may any major change the stonus app will be released gradually I will just point out, this is how every other company has done everything forever.

1:00:28So I think there, yes, we should have some humility, but also just like do it good is one of those. And then the last one, which I think has oddly backfired and pissed people off the most, is the executives are foregoing their bonuses. See, they know they did bad, just like David said. no one knows more than they do so they're in their advisory assembly and customer advisory board to get feedback and insights i think people are gonna be like finish the app make app good yeah there are two real things i will say uh in addition to all of those not real things that you just said uh they're they're extending the warranty uh the manufacturer warranty on a bunch of stuff which is good kudos to sonos for being like okay this is gonna take us a minute will keep supporting your stuff throughout.

1:01:16And the other one they're doing, which actually to some extent confirms some of the conspiracy theories, is they appointed, I believe they're calling it an ombudsman to basically help internally figure out what people think and deliver that opinion to the people who are in charge. Because one of the stories we've heard is that people inside of Sonos were freaking out about how bad the app was and that they were sort of resoundingly ignored in favor of just shipping the app. And so there were people inside of the company who were like, we can't do this, this is a disaster. Which made me think of the folks at Humane who were trying the thing before it shipped who were like, this thing sucks.

1:01:52And they were just like, well, ship it. And so Sonos is at least, it seems, taking steps to make sure that particular thing doesn't happen again, which seems good. Yeah, if they listen to that person. I think at this point, Sonos is very worried that a lot of people are realizing that AirPlay 2 exists. I never use the app anymore. I just use AirPlay 2. Yeah. Like, a lot of people have realized that AirPlay 2 exists and can group speakers from a variety of manufacturers together, as can Chromecast Audio. Like, a lot of people have discovered that their phones have stuff in them. They're betting on the Arc 2 and a bunch of new products that are coming out.

1:02:33But if your app doesn't work, it doesn't matter. Yeah. By the way, I got it wrong. Eddie Lazarus, no longer the chief legal officer, chief strategy officer, it says. and his strategy is making it good yeah david what's going on these new chromebooks so they found the g button are sorry crans sorry it's it's it's the gemini button they found the gemini it's not calling it the gemini button this is the thing that throws me it's called the quick insert button oh good what it's basically so one of one of the hacks for years on Chromebooks has been to reuse the caps lock button. A lot of people do it, you can use it to like, invoke the the menu button, a lot of people do that you can do it for like a search, the caps lock button is a is a sort of endlessly mutable thing in the Chromebook universe, and a lot of people do it.

1:03:25So what Google is doing now is replacing the caps lock button, which is also sometimes the search launcher button, with what's called the quick insert button. And I think the idea is that it's just going to be the like way to do all of the help me write or turn this into different kind of Google Doc or whatever inside of any product, right? The idea is to like AI your way through the internet with this one. Yeah. It's like this little sparkle you see in Android now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But it's a little button and it's got a G on it. Yeah. And I think that's fine. It's fine. I mean, that's the same thing that we saw with Copilot, right?

1:04:03It's like the co-pilot button on Windows. This is Google's version. And it's like, yeah, they had to do this. Windows did it. It makes sense. Right. I do think this is like a statement of AI is important to us more than it is like an actually useful user feature. But it is something. It will remind people to use it, which I think counts for something. I don't know. I've spent a long time waiting for Chromebooks to be like cool, exciting, good computers. and I'm kind of, I'm just over it now. This just makes me tired. This is just like a bunch of students who are going to like use AI to write their papers now and now it's easier.

1:04:39Great. But isn't Samsung saying this is like one of their thinnest laptops ever? Sure. Samsung says that about every Chromebook they've ever made. Yeah, that's fair. Like they're running out of, they're running out of Chromebook. Yeah. No room left. Also, they're all talking now about like 13 and 12 hours of battery life. I think we're the number on the two here. and they're like six hundred and seven hundred dollars and then there's a lenovo one that's cheaper but like these are not impressive numbers anymore like we're we're in a new phase of laptops y 'all like chromebooks come come do something new and interesting again yeah or be cheap the fact that neil i i bet still has not replaced his mom's chromebook pixel uh should be a real problem for everyone on the Chromebook team at Google and I super don't think it is.

1:05:29Yeah, so if you don't know, this is ancient history now. I bought my mom a Chromebook. Do you remember the Chromebook Pixel? Oh yeah. It was a$1 ,000 Chromebook. It was nice. Still maybe the sexiest laptop of all time. Yeah. Is it all yellowed now? No, it's fine. Oh, that's fine. It was aluminum mostly. So I bought that for my mom instead of a MacBook. You're thinking of the Pixelbook, Kranz. The one that got weird on the palm rest. The Chromebook Pixel was the one that was like metal and chrome and gorgeous. It was squared off. It was great. It was a USB-C computer back when that was like a thing.

1:05:56Not every computer. But my mom needed a new Mac and I was just like, there's too many interface metaphors here. And that was before all the ones that exist now on top of everything else. And I was like, she just wants the browser. She doesn't give a shit. And so I bought her a Chromebook Pixel, which was a thousand dollar Chromebook with an i7 in it. It's ridiculous. She's still using it because she just runs Chrome. Yeah. And she just, I don't know, she's just banging around on the web all day. I would love to get her a new one, but I can't think of a reason to. Yeah. And she hasn't complained.

1:06:25And there's not one that is as cool looking as the Chromebook Pixel. Yeah. Because, again, that was a$1 ,000 computer. The one with a little light bar on it. Yeah, at the very top on the hedge. Yeah, it's great. And every now and again I check on it and it continues to run Chrome, which is all anyone really needs. And I think Google just hasn't chased that idea all the way to ground. Right? Like what most people, they're just cheap and, like, students get them to cheat on their homework with now with AI. I'm spending more time in the Pixel 9 Pro and Google's just like AI Clippy is everywhere. Every time you pick up that phone, it's just like more AI stuff.

1:06:59And it's just fun. Yeah. And if Google can bring that to a Chromebook, maybe that will be fun. But I don't think they think of the Chromebook the same way as they think of the Pixel. No, I agree. Yeah, and as a layer on top of stuff, Google is like the quick insert button where you can just like put it anywhere kind of makes sense, right? And you're invoking like system software instead of just doing inside of Google Docs. but I don't know. I don't see it. Hard to get excited about it. It's interesting that we didn't talk about this next one in the context of Microsoft doing co-pilot because Microsoft was way ahead on AR glasses with HoloLens and in the same breath that they are doing this new co-pilot, they are discontinuing HoloLens.

1:07:40And everyone's idea is that you'll have an AI assistant that's just looking at stuff with you. But I think HoloLens just never got there. Well, also the guy who like was the big champion of HoloLens. He was not a great guy. He was not a great guy and left the company. And Panos, I think, oversaw the whole thing, and he also left. Yeah, so you didn't have any advocates within the company with any real power over it. And it's a shame because, like, HoloLens figured a lot of it out straight off the bat and then just never did anything besides teach us how to change Sparkplugs. Did they figure it out?

1:08:09Again, so they solved a display problem. Yeah, well, I don't think the display problem. I think the user interface. I thought the user interface in it really just made sense, and we've seen bits and pieces of that in stuff from Meta. We've seen bits and pieces of that in stuff from Google. Yeah, we've seen it from a lot of people, like the pinchy-pinchy and stuff like that. We saw that there first. But then again, all they did with it was teach you and I how to change Sparkplugs. And that's not... Still, to this day, one of the coolest demos I've ever received around tech company. Super, super cool.

1:08:39They set up a full garage. Pull up YouTube. Yeah, there's also that problem. No, they set up a full garage and walked around and was like, there's a spark club, there's where it goes, and screwed it in. Yeah, it was sick. And I was like, man, if I ever open up an ATV shop with a lot of extra money - I'm ready. And I don't know what I'm doing. This just makes me think that this coming on the heels of what we were talking about with Meta last week, it's so clear that the only way to do this right now is to have some stakeholder, ideally your CEO, who is so hell-bent on the idea that this is the future that they're going to just pour money down the drain to make it happen.

1:09:22So Tim Cook. I think Tim Cook is one of those people. That man has been a true believer in AR for a long time, like a long time, and has talked unusually publicly about how much he believes in AR for a really long time. And I don't think Microsoft has that conviction. I don't think Microsoft has that conviction about much, sometimes to its detriment. It did have that conviction for a little bit there, right? They were like, this is going to be the future of computing. We're going to do everything this way. Go get yourself one of these Acer headsets and put it on so you can see the future. And then instead, they were like, never mind.

1:09:57Right. Well, I think to your point, the people with that conviction don't work there anymore. Right. And then they saw AI and they said, that's shiny and that works. That's what we're going to chase now. And it also makes us Azure money. Yeah. I feel like Microsoft's conviction is in Office and in Azure. And everything else, it will just worry about later. And Microsoft has figured out a way to make a lot of money on the AI revolution without winning the AI revolution. And I think it's going to be fine with that. Whether that is the right call long term or whether some next generation of Microsoft leadership is going to be like, dear God, why did we give up on this?

1:10:30In the same way that I think a lot of people feel like Microsoft botched mobile in all of the decisions that it made and has made a lot of wrong decisions about killing products that turned out to have been the wrong decision over time. who knows? But I think you're right that like HoloLens got a lot of things right. And there's no reason to believe that if Microsoft hadn't really, really bought into this idea that it could be very much in this race instead of like kind of a joke inside of it. Yeah. I don't think they saw the display. I just want to be clear that the thing that is the problem for all these devices is the displays.

1:11:05And I think Microsoft got as far with HoloLens as they could realize they were not getting any farther and decided to walk. And I will reveal this much. I think the people who worked on HoloLens have looked at Orion and said, meta didn't solve it either. Just a thing that I've heard through the grapevine. All right, last one. And we're going to try to get through this one very quickly. Oh, God. I know it's not going to work. It's very complicated, but we can add some reporting to it. Like I said, we might break some news on this episode. There's a lot of drama in open source world. about WordPress.

1:11:43And if you don't know what WordPress is, I don't know why you're listening to this show. I think the people who listen to the Vergecast know what WordPress is, but WordPress is the most dominant content management platform on the internet. It's the thing that runs all websites. Famously open source. Famously, the Verge is moving to WordPress sometime next year. I would call this a conflict of interest, but we're paying them. Yeah. You know? I don't know. It's like saying Slack is a conflict of interest because I'm forced to use Slack every day. Like, it's fine. Whatever that is. Other Vox Media networks are already on WordPress.

1:12:15Polygon, notably on WordPress. Vox.com on WordPress today. Sometime next year, we're going to move the back end. The front end will look larger than the same. It doesn't matter. I'm just letting you know because we disclosed everything at this point, force of habit. Lot of drama in WordPress world. David, what is going on? Oh, God. Okay. So the very short version of this story is that I have to explain the structure of the internet to you. No, so the very short version of the story is And Matt Mullenweg, who is one of the co-creators of all things WordPress and is the CEO of Automatic, which is a company that oversees WordPress.com, which provides a lot of service to WordPress.

1:12:51The simplest way I can explain the difference here is there is WordPress.com, which is a for-profit company that provides a lot of WordPress services and hosts websites and does all kinds of stuff for WordPress. There's also WordPress.org, which is the open source software that's open to everybody. It's like Google's version of Android and open source Android. Technically different things, super messy oversight questions over both of them. Matt Mullenweg is the super messy oversight question over both of them. Matt Mullenweg got very mad at this company called WP Engine, which is, I think, pretty neatly a WordPress.com competitor.

1:13:23They provide lots of services to WordPress people. They host WordPress. So WordPress is software you can download and you just host it yourself. Right. We can pay another company to host and manage it for you to just run your website on. And that's WP Engine. WP Engine is a big one. That's what WP Engine does. It got bought by a private equity company. Matt Mullenweg, like many people, has strong negative feelings about private equity. Picked a fight basically saying you're being a bad citizen of the open source community because you're not giving stuff back to the open source community, even though you're taking things from the open source community.

1:13:50This spiraled into WP Engine, essentially calling him an extortionist, which led to a lawsuit calling him an extortionist after Automatic sent them a term sheet, basically demanding a chunk of either their revenue or their employees' time dedicated back to the open source community. And I think that's a rough sense of where we are. These two sides are very mad at each other about everything. And Matt Mullenweg would tell you that he is just being a defender of the open source community and the WordPress community at large. WP Engine would tell you that he is trying to bully them out of their money and or out of existence.

1:14:26Right. So along the way, the only mechanism for WordPress.com and automatic to get money out of WP Engine was to claim some amount of intellectual property infringement somewhere. But you can't do that because WordPress... Because the WordPress code is open source. So what they're claiming is trademark infringement over the WordPress name. And WooCommerce, which is the thing that Automatic owns and is a big... It's like a Shopify competitor inside of WordPress. And it's very big and very popular. Yeah. So they're claiming this trademark infringement. And to settle it, they're saying you can pay us some percentage of revenue, which might be huge.

1:15:02This is all very messy. And we've been reporting on it. Emma Roth on our team has done an amazing job reporting on it. By the time you listen to this, she should have a story up because she just talked to Matt Mullenweg while we were podcasting. She was doing reporting. There's a thing here going on that it feels like we're splitting hairs, that Matt is trying to split hairs, between the WordPress Foundation, which has like a board of directors. There's three of them. Matt's one of them that actually makes decisions. Automatic and WordPress.com, which is the company that he is the CEO of. And in the middle, WordPress.org, which is just a website that is the most important website in the entire WordPress ecosystem.

1:15:46Because the other way that you can make life miserable for WP Engine is by blocking access to the repository where all the plugins live on WordPress, which is WordPress.org. Right. Plugins, themes, like all the stuff that isn't like the very basic infrastructure lives inside of WordPress.org. Yep. So if you set up, if you take open source WordPress code, build it yourself and put up your own website and you want to use a new theme, it's going to go look at WordPress.org. Right. Which is where all the plugins and themes are. Matt Mullenweg just said to Emmeros, WordPress.org just belongs to me personally.

1:16:19Whoa. It's just his website. He's the one who controls the repository of all the plugins and themes. He made his own WordPress site. I think it runs on WordPress. So there's the foundation which controls the open source code and also notably has the trademark. Automatic gave the trademark to the WordPress foundation of WordPress, and then WordPress foundation licensed it back to Automatic. So there's that mess where to call yourself WordPress, you need to apparently get the trademark, which is hazy. That's a new idea. and then there's the to use WordPress at any scale you probably want the repository of plugins and themes and everything which just means Matt has to like you because it's just his here's the other quote I happily provide wordpress.org services to literally every other host we serve over 30 ,000 requests per second I can't say the exact numbers like 40 times the size of WP engine websites that pay wordpress.org for updates for plugin searches for image searches for everything they have every right to the GPL code and that's perhaps what my PR team is trying to explain they have access to all the code, but they don't have any rights to call our services.

1:17:24So he's basically saying, I can just take this away from you. Oh boy. And that is complicated. Like in the world of open source, the whole point of this is no one gets all the control. And he's saying, well, I have this control and either they can pay us for the trademark, which will help pay to fund the development, or they can walk away from everything that I provide on my own. That's a lot of, like, I think a lot of open source people are having a lot of feelings about this. can i just make the devil's advocate argument here the the thing about open source is your other companies are supposed to be able to take your code and do whatever they want with it and so i have all the feelings in the world about private equity we did an entire decoder about private equity being bad and so the idea of the private equity company is going to come and free ride in the open source community and provide hosting services and never contribute anything back to the code yeah it's problematic it you know probably offends but the leverage points in open source are rarely in taking things away right like that's against the ideals of the community right and i there's something there that needs to get sorted out here that i don't understand like if you are on the chrome team at google lots of people are doing all kinds of wacky stuff with the open source chromium engines, including Microsoft building browsers that compete with you, but you, they're still open sourcing chromium because that makes the whole ecosystem better.

1:18:52I think the better analogy in this particular case might be with Android, because you have on the one hand, AOSP, the open source Android, which, which anyone can take and do whatever they want with. And lots of people do like there is an overwhelming chance that everything in your house that you think is a gadget runs on Android in some way. Many of them open source Android. And then there is what you would call like recognizable Android. And Google famously, litigiously, regulatorily said, if you want the full experience of Android that feels like it is to people, which means you need things like the Play Store, which means you need things like YouTube, pretty popular, you need Gmail pretty popular, here is a long set of rules that you have to play by.

1:19:36And, and it's technically you can have Android, technically, it is open source. But if you want the thing that is functionally recognizably the Android that people want, here's a long set of Google rules for it. And that feels a lot like either the threat or the reality of what's happening here is like, sure, knock yourself out. You can have WordPress. But if you want the thing that actually is WordPress, you have to play by my rules. And that feels different. If you want WooCommerce and all of that. But like literally like plugins, like the thing that makes comments work is like, that's a, that's a separate thing.

1:20:09And if you're, if you're going to take away literally everything other than you can have words that render on a page and make that part of the, the, like, if you're in my good graces side of things, you've completely changed the way that people are going to feel about this. Well, so let me make a tiny distinction here because it's a small distinction, but it's a big one. So if you're Motorola and you want to make an Android phone and you're like, I can't sell an Android phone unless I has Google Maps. That means I got to take all of Play services and sign Google's contracts and all that. At least you're a big company.

1:20:44Right. And there isn't anything other than Android you can run. Like you're not calling Microsoft and being like, so Windows phone. Right. But whatever. But you have some amount of agency because you're a company and you can either make a phone or not. In this case, WP Engine is reselling WordPress hosting to its customers who are now being blocked from going to get plugins. And those customers are kind of being punished for picking a hosting provider that competes with WordPress.com. And I think that's where this just gets really sideways. They're trying to punish WP Engine. And maybe they're right.

1:21:17I don't know. Like dueling lawsuits. Who knows? but at the end of the day it's a bunch of WordPress customers like people using WordPress to run their businesses who are suddenly getting their access shut off because of a business dispute somewhere above them and that's pretty weird and so like just in the world of open source like the whole point of it is that that stuff when that happens you can just walk away and it turns out the whole WordPress ecosystem is runs on one guy's website that's what he's saying to us technically you can get a lot of those plugins and stuff not through the website, right?

1:21:52Like, I mean, it's been a while since I ran a WordPress website, but you would go and you'd build it. And then if you wanted just to quickly grab WooCommerce or any of those other things, you'd go to WordPress.org or you'd go through the plugin setup. Yeah. There's basically an app store. Yeah. Or you could be like, you'd go to, you know, I went to ThemeForest and got a theme or I'd go somewhere else and be like, oh, this dude just has a weird plugin on his website. I'm going to take that. And so you can still do that, but the convenience was you could just go to WordPress.org. Can I just read you a paragraph from this that actually I think neatly describes what you're talking about?

1:22:29So this is Matt Mullenweg wrote this at the beginning of all of this when they first banned WP Engine from WordPress.org, which they then undid. But then that has expired. I honestly don't know where we are at this particular moment. What he said was, if WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-O-Matic, and Showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

1:22:58Like, sure. Yes. Agreed. All of that is buildable and replaceable and doable. It is a hell of a lot of work. Yeah. Like, you can go build your own YouTube if you want to. Go for it. No, thanks. Godspeed. Yeah. I feel like the line all the way to conferences is like a lot there. I mean, sure. Plug-in directories. It's like a little more reasonable. We'll see. Emma's got a piece coming out. She's doing all the reporting. Those quotes came from her in real time. That was real time reporting from someone else. Well, we talk shit about HoloLens here on the VergeCast. But that story should be out by the time you are listening to this.

1:23:34She's done an amazing job all week pulling this apart. It's going to keep going. much like our show, which we'll be back after this break.

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1:27:10All right, we're back for the lightning round. I'm going to break some news on the lightning round. The worst sponsor we've ever had in the lightning round. We have some news. Alex, say your news. Yeah, so the news is I am leaving the verge. Today is my last, or when you're listening to this, it'll be my last day. This is my last verge cast. It might not be your last verge cast. It might not be the last verge cast, but this is the last one as host. Yeah. And it is a great time. I've had a wonderful time working with you guys and doing really cool stuff here and talking about my Plex server as much as humanly possible.

1:27:47Subscribe now via Venmo. Alex is leaving the start of subscription flex server business. Yeah, that definitely won't end in litigation. So yeah, just going to take a break for a little bit and play as many video games as possible. Hit me up if you've got recommendations. But it has been a blast. And now we're going to talk about a lightning round. No, first we have a surprise. Who am I going to talk about you? Surprise. Yes. Oh, hell yes. Look at this. Look at this. We're going to light the studio on fire with this clip. Do we have a plan? for what happens now, Liam? Well, I figured Alex would make a secret wish for her last episode of the Birchcast.

1:28:27Blow out her candles and... Liam said, Alex, you have to make a secret wish and then blow out your candles. Okay. You have to guess what the wish is. I don't think this is what we usually do when people leave the show. Is this the new tradition? I think Neil, I should have to give you his jacket for your last Birchcast. I take the jacket with me. All right, let me blow him out and then I'll tell you what my secret wish is. Oh my God, we're going to set off this one. We need it a hundred percent. This is what IT gets. They send us our, we give them ours. My secret wish is we don't get arrested.

1:28:59My secret wish is Amazon fixes the Kindle. Hey. I feel it in my heart. I feel like I'm bringing that into existence. You're willing, willing some new, willing some new Kindles into existence. All right, well, Alex, it has been a delight and a pleasure. It has. I'm glad we got to spend our last few versus in the studio together. It is a gorgeous studio. that we have now lit on fire. It smells like burning birthday cake in here so much. It smells very, very good. You know how usually when we sat down in here it smells like weed? The next people are going to be like, what is that weed? Yeah, and it's cake weed.

1:29:32All right, let's do the lightning round. Let's do it. Alex, you're the person of honor. You go first. Yeah, yeah. So Nintendo is continuing to find Switch emulators and kill them. in this case it was ryojinx i think that's how you say it ryojinx sounds right and ryojinx um however you want to say that but it was another switch emulator they actually reached out nintendo apparently reached out to the developer and was like can you stop and it's unclear if they reached out via legal channels via stop and we'll give you money channels it's it's it's not really clear there. They haven't said a whole lot, but it stopped.

1:30:15A lot of theories for this. Nintendo has famously not gone after emulators in the past, and now it's gone after, this is now two Switch emulators that have been killed. And my favorite theory so far is that the Switch and the Switch 2 have such similar, like, they work so similarly that they're trying to just head off Switch 2 emulation by killing the Switch 1 emulators. Which we saw the same thing with Wii versus the Wii U. it uses the same thing. So like Dolphin. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So that's like... Knowing that the Switch 2 is so small of a leap that Switch 1 emulators now have to be illegal is, I feel like I know a lot now.

1:30:55Yeah. So definitely play all of your Switch games on your PC. We're a little run better. Which is what we learned this week because of emulators like this. We saw like, oh, it actually runs better when it's not. The cake smells so good. It smells so much like cake in here. It's so much. It's like a bakery in here. It rules. But yeah, so it sounds like the Switch 2 is, you know, if you still have your copy of this stuff, you might be able to play some Switch 2 games when it comes out. We'll see. Same thing happened. Again, same thing happened previously, but they didn't go after Dolphin and all of those companies.

1:31:29So something's different this time. That is fascinating that they have not pushed the Switch 2 that far ahead. Yeah. Or at least that's what it feels like. Yeah. The exact same thing. We were all like, why is the Wii U so similar? And they're like, well, because we want your money. And we didn't want to build a bunch of stuff. Alex, wasn't this the one that was supposed to be untouchable? After all the Yuzu stuff, it was like, oh, but there's this other one. People start using it and they won't shut it down. Yeah, because it was based in Brazil, right? Yeah, so it was based in Brazil. So they thought there's less litigation, I guess, you can do because Brazil's laws around this stuff is a little different.

1:32:04But that's why Nintendo apparently reached out directly to the developer and was like, stop. and unclear if they said stop really and like really seriously or if they said stop and then slowly pushed over a bag of money in a little mario suitcase but uh something happened there yeah sean's been on it he will continue to be on it i'm sure he will find out the truth and he better text me first we asked sean to write a story about the state of emulation and he came back with i could do a multi-part feature package and we're like one one story but he's not wrong he's not wrong it's it's there's a lot there uh all right david what's i just want to briefly talk about a web app that i'm very excited about which is the the new google pixel buds web app is a web app an app on the web that you can download on lots of devices and use to manage your pixel buds you can update your firmware you can change the multi-point connection stuff.

1:33:02You can like do all the things you would normally do on one device, but you can do it on the web, which means you can do it anywhere. And I'm just like, this to me was one of those moments where it was like, oh, this is why the web is better, right? Like this, this is an example I will point to, to a lot of people. You can, you can update the firmware on your Bluetooth headset through a web app. I just want to say that out loud. That is, that is a thing that is possible to do. That's good. And it means you can do it anywhere. And this is very exciting. And this is how it should work everywhere.

1:33:30Wait, the Pixelbot stuff to talk to your phone to Bluetooth, right? Through Bluetooth, right? Yeah. So the web app can control the Bluetooth on your phone or communicate over Bluetooth from your phone. It just feels like Tim Cook is standing there being like, you shall not pass. It's a progressive web app, right? So you like have to sort of, you have to like do the home screen thing, but it has, they're able to have this same kind of access. And to me, it's like, this is a thing Google has pressed on for years, right? They're like rather than make good native apps, especially for iOS, we're just going to make you use our websites.

1:34:02Sometimes that sucks, like with Google Docs, which I desperately could use a better native app on iOS. But in this case, it's like, oh, it's ridiculous that the only way to manage your headphones is through one single device. And the fact that you can just open up a website and do it on other devices is a good thing. And like speaks to how powerful progressive web apps can be when they're actually like developed and worked on and allowed to be powerful. And I just think that's very cool. It sounds so normal that I'm like, wait, you can't already do this with a bunch of other products? Well, with other products, historically, they have all run tiny web servers in them.

1:34:40Right. So you can control my Sony receiver through a web browser, but you shouldn't. But I'm gonna. You know what I mean? And I'm like, there's something, there's a full-on web server, like Apache is running. You're going to be like, what's happening in my house next week? And you won't know. Yeah, it's just like, web server. Yeah, I'm going to have a great time. Plex server running on my receiver. I know what you're after, Alex. Oh, yeah. Alex's botnet Plex server idea. He's been pitching this to VCs around the country. It's going to rule. Get excited. But you're talking about a web app that is actually just talking to the device directly, not some weird web server idea.

1:35:18Right. And it's just a more cross-platform way of doing the same kind of stuff. Like if you have a pair of AirPods, right? Like you can manage the settings of your AirPods on your phone in a way that you can't anywhere else. Like God help you if you want to like change the way you do stuff on your AirPods through an Android phone. Sure. Best of luck, friendo. That's not how it should work. And this now works in other places. Because you don't have to write an Android app and an iOS app and a desktop app. Right, you just write web apps and it works everywhere because it actually has that access.

1:35:53And like, I have a pair of Bose QuietComfort headphones that like theoretically do multipoint, but they never ever guess correctly which thing I want to connect to. So I like turn it on and it's like connected to these two devices. And then I press play on my phone and it's like, you didn't want that. You're trying to play from your computer, which is closed in your backpack. So I have to open up the Bose app and on my phone, turn off the computer one, turn on the phone one, and then it will play in the right place. And it's like all of this management is bad, but the idea of just being able to like whip open a browser and do it anywhere is good.

1:36:23And I am in favor. So here's my worry about this. The web app still lives on the web, which means when Google wants to turn it off, which Google often wants to do, it just disappears. Whereas at least if I have the bits on my iOS device or whatever or my Android phone, at least they're still there. The thing I'm specifically thinking about, and this week we ran a story, Juicebox, EV charger or Juicebox. Oh, yeah. That company, NLX, just was like, F it, we're out. Like, we're just leaving North America, and all of the back-end infrastructure, including the commercial chargers that they have installed, is just going dark.

1:36:58Oof. So the thing will still charge your car with whatever settings you have, but if you want to change the amps or you want to connect it to your electric company or whatever, it's gone. Like, literally, they changed their website to just a letter that's like we out you can email this email address that we're not listening to and like that's the always the worry right is like if you're now dependent on google maintaining an app on the web let me tell you about google's history of maintaining apps on the web yeah i should also say it only works in uh chromium so of course there's a large series of browsers it won't work inside of, including the iOS ones.

1:37:37It all sucks. That's better. It just confirms my belief that if we do it right, progressive web apps solve a lot of problems. Somewhere Dieter Bone just did a thumbs up at his headphones hearing me say that. Dieter, I love you. His headphones are paired to the wrong device. It's the real problem. Dieter can't hear us at all. Alright, Nilo, what's yours? I'm so sorry for this, but also, you're welcome. That's what I have. Sometimes you introduce what you're about to talk about, and I just immediately know, and I'm like, oh, I can leave for 20 minutes. Like, that's fine. I'll come back. So my lightning round is that DirecTV, the satellite TV company, is merging with Dish, the other satellite TV company.

1:38:19It's for a dollar. Like, you look at the transaction price. CNBC is like, DirecTV to buy Dish for a dollar. It's actually they're taking on$9 billion of debt. sometimes if you have one titanic and you put it with another titanic maybe it won't sink as fast you're like you've reduced the debt that i'm taking on by one dollar is what you've accomplished here so they're acquiring this like underwater company for a dollar and a whole bunch of debt um direct tv is being further spun out of at &t by a private equity company called tpg management and then they're going to merge the whole thing with dish and that will be the satellite company And then EchoStar, the company that currently owns Dish, will be free to pursue its dream of starting a 5G network in this country called Genesis, which does not exist.

1:39:10So this doesn't kill the possibilities for Gen5Sys? five sis genna five sis it still exists the only phone they have is the 2023 motorola edge plus which you can get in some markets and mostly which from at least the reddit uh rolls over to at &t's network and sucks on it sure that's and i will remind you that this all happened because t-mobile wanted to buy sprint and the trump administration didn't know how to stop it so they orchestrated a deal in which t-mobile was allowed to buy sprint a bunch of sprint spectrum went to Dish Network. So Dish Network could stand up a 5G network using a technology called ORAN, Open Radio Access Network, that would become a fourth wireless carrier and provide meaningful competition to AT &T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

1:39:54Competition which all of us can feel every day through the lower prices and better services that we experience in our nation's wireless system. Yeah, Verizon definitely didn't go down this week for like a lot of people and a large chunk of time. Nope. So that's good. Didn't happen. So that's today's news. That's what's happening now i just the thing i want to point out to you is that this merger mania has been going on for 25 fucking years and richard lawler and i have been working together for a long time and we have covered so many versions of these mergers between these companies that we just like looked at each other like is it over is it just beginning how damaged are we How much of my brain contains the knowledge of who owns DirecTV?

1:40:45It's so much of it. So Richard and Wes Davis and I sat down and we made a timeline. By the time you listen to this, our poor designer, Kath Virginia, may have solved how to make this timeline a chart of mergers. I will tell you right now, there's too many mergers on it to make a visually coherent timeline. like she's like can you take stuff out of the timeline and i'm like no those are the mergers so let me just read you some of what has happened here to arrive at direct tv buying dish for a dollar and billions of dollars i'm gonna while you do this i'm gonna keep a list of the number of companies i forgot existed while you do this oh i've taken some out of this i've condensed it i'll put one on there right now there's a whole company a whole sideshow of a company called sky Terra that I just removed from this.

1:41:38That goes on the list. That's just number one. It's not even on my list. The Sky Terra sideshow is just I've removed it. All right. Our story starts in January 2001 when AOL Time Warner is born. In October 2001, General Motors, GM, the car company tries to sell Hughes Electronics, which owns DirecTV, to EchoStar, the company that owns Dish Network. This is a victory for EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen, who beat out Rupert Murdoch, who wanted to buy Hughes. The FCC blocks Ergen from buying EchoStar, so Hughes EchoStar deal is blocked. This is a huge defeat for Charlie Ergen, and News Corp, Rupert Murdoch swoops in in December 2003 and wins the bid to buy Hughes Electronics, giving Rupert Murdoch control of DirecTV.

1:42:37March 2004, Hughes Electronics rebrands itself as the DirecTV group. November 2005, a city in Texas called Clark, Texas, changes its name to Dish, Texas. What? In exchange for 10 years of free TVs and DVRs. That's amazing. This is a real thing that happens. in uh june of 2006 i graduated from law school i'm just putting that in there uh because this is when richard and i entered the scene and start blogging every one of these deals at engadget january 2008 echo star officially renames itself to dish network and splits into two companies one is dish network the provider of satellite services and the other is certain satellite assets which are owned by a new company called echo star what does this make any sense to you no EchoStar renames itself to DISH and splits off a company that owns a satellite that's called EchoStar.

1:43:30Time Warner, in March 2009, spins off Time Warner Cable. December 2009, spins off AOL. Just keep that in mind. June 2011, EchoStar buys Hughes Communications. Remember? Which didn't exist anymore. Giving EchoStar, and therefore DISH, access to those satellites. February 2013, Comcast buys the remainder of NBCUniversal from GE, General Electric, not General Motors, a process it had started two years earlier. March 2014, DirecTV and Dish are rumored to be in talks for a merger, which falls through. May 2014, AT &T announces it will buy DirecTV. So now we're 10 years ago, AT &T has bought DirecTV.

1:44:09June 2018, AT &T buys Time Warner and renames it WarnerMedia. I'm just reminding you, this started with General Motors selling Hughes Electronics to Rupert Murdoch, and we end in June 2018 with AT &T buying Time Warner, which I will remind you resulted in the 4-3 grayscale Snyder Cut. I'm just putting that up there. 2020, Dish Network suggests merging with DirecTV once again. Once again, shut down. August 2021, AT &T spins off DirecTV because the Warner Media deal was a disaster, but keeps 70 % of the assets of the company. April 2022, it spins off Warner Media, which merges with Discovery, and Warner Brothers Discovery is born.

1:44:52January 2024, Echo Star once again buys Dish Network. I don't know, man. What? This happened. It's rules. October 2024, AT &T will sell the rest of DirecTV to TPG, which will then buy Dish Network and merge the two together, finally. What a disaster. That is so many billions of dollars in so many layoffs. I cannot even tell you. Every one of those deals, thousands of people lost their jobs. Every one of those deals, thousands of people lost their jobs. And all of our service declined. All the bankers got rich. All the lawyers got rich. Well, what a disaster. A bunch of people in Clark, Texas, have free TVs out.

1:45:37The people of Clark, Texas got 10 years of free DVRs. There's only like 400 people that live there. And you can argue that, you know, this is all because satellite distribution went away and now they're streaming. But this all came to nothing. Dish and EchoStar have merged and split and been owned by different companies like eight times in that list. I think EchoStar you just described as like four completely different entities over the course of that. And somewhere in there, I'd like to point out that they became the relief valve for the T-Mobile Sprint deal, which reduced the amount of competition in wireless.

1:46:09And they have utterly failed to stand up their fourth competitor, which was supposed to solve the problem. What are we doing? Just why have Richard and I thought about this so much? I beg of you. Why do I know all this information? Now Echo Star gets to do it. I just want to say my reaction to this is that the camera that's facing you right now also shows a little bit of Kranz's computer and she was on threads for like 85%. Which I think is fair. I'm having a great time over here. I was looking up Dish, Texas. General Motors tries to sell Hughes Electronics in 2001 and somewhere in there, right, there's a little domino.

1:46:50the big domino 100 is the 4-3 grayscale snyder cut i don't know what to tell you this is such a waste the whole thing was a waste no one got better service none of their stupid ideas came true remember when at &t was like here's what we're gonna do we're gonna preload everyone's android phones with bloatware and then give you many episodes of game of thrones and that's the future of mobile i remember because i i'm a good reporter and I sat in the briefing and I tried not to laugh. They're buying it for a dollar. All right. That's it. They'll both be dead in 10 years. This is why Kranz is leaving.

1:47:30She's like, I can't listen to this anymore. No, Tubi's gonna take them all out. It'll be fine. My Plex server's coming for them. All right, Kranz. It has been a joy. It has been a joy. Are you excited to eat this cake? I'm excited. I've been smelling this cake for so long. Honestly, that's why I'm ending the show. It's time to stuff our faces. Sorry, David. It has been a lovely pleasure working with you, but there is cake. I will tell you this. One time David left, and we dressed him up as a pirate when he was leaving. You can go look that up. That was on video. And now he's back. Yeah. He also sang a song.

1:48:01And now there's an HR version of our company that exists. Now we have laws. I will just say two things. One, Paramount Plus is officially dead now that you're leaving The Verge. This is it. You were the last one. It's done. It's over. Good riddance to Paramount Plus. And also, I do have your phone number and I will be texting you about E-Ink several times a week. Yeah. So just let me know whatever freelance fee you need for that to just yell at me about E-Ink. I will miss you terribly. I'll miss you too. All right. That's it. That's the Verge Cast. We're renaming ourselves to Echo Star as of next week.

1:48:37Rock and roll.

1:48:42And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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