GPT-5's big new feature: less lying?

27:23Like, I understand, I'm being sort of provocative, but I'm just saying I'm still not really sure that they've actually demonstrated there's a thing they're losing out on. I mean, Siri sucks. You know, Apple intelligence is not intelligent. But I'm not clear either of those things. I don't know. I guess I'm just not clear that anyone else has demonstrated there's necessarily going to be still a transformative use case of AI that, I don't know, makes Siri the thing that Apple has to bet its entire future. I mean, you spend 30 minutes talking to advanced voice mode in ChatGPT and Siri is going to feel outdated pretty fast.

28:00But you could also just not use Siri. Yeah, but like they need Siri to be relevant. There's also this idea in the industry that apps as a concept are going to go away, which I think is interesting with the rise of vibe coding. But like basically the os is like fully abstracted to a either prompt that it's text or voice and and basically you know what we think of as an operating system becomes much higher level and for apple if they have no talent in-house to build that and other people build that and it makes it literally a dumb pane of glass more than it already is you know the only thing keeping you buying an iphone is what you like the shine of the metal better you like the fact that it syncs with your AirPods faster, they lose a lot of their competitive edge in that scenario.

28:47I am really curious, particularly as the models become commoditized, right? Like what is the advantage to having their own in-house one versus just paying for one, just using an open source one? I think they've given up. I think that ship has sailed. I bet they do this plug and play approach. There's all these reports of them, you know, talking still to Gemini, Anthropic, letting people pick their models, just like they pick their search engines. You know, I think for now, that's the path they have to go on until we get to a point where AI is starting to rethink how operating systems work, which is obviously a few years out.

29:20But I think we're going there. I mean, I know people building startups in the space that are focusing first on the desktop, but are thinking like, how can we reimagine how you use your computer with AI? And Apple's at risk there. Yeah. I think there's also just this basic element of, like, Addy, you're right. There's not necessarily anything that the iPhone is specifically missing at this point, right? Siri has been bad for a while, can continue to be bad. But they also, like, came out and they branded this thing. They put, they redefined AI as a thing with their name built into it. And so I do think there's just some more basic stakes that Apple has set up for itself, too.

29:58And it's really interesting watching them attempt to meet those. and I think by their own account, not quite deliver. All right, we've got to take a break. We'll get back talking about the age gating of the internet. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app.

30:34Download today. Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out and see how much you can save versus the other big guys at cmobile.com slash switch.

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32:20Okay, we're back. I want to talk about age gating on the internet. Adi, you've been covering this closely for years now. And I want to lay out what the situation looks like to me. And let me know if I'm overstating it, because it feels like this is about to be a really big deal. It seems to me that in the past couple of weeks, there's been a seismic shift in how the Internet works, where presenting some form of identification to prove that you're 18 or older is going to become the norm for when you want to access certain information online. Maybe that's porn, but maybe that's just like a slightly spicy subreddit.

32:53But either way, a lot of people in a lot of places are going to have to prove that they're of age. Is that off base? Am I in the ballpark here? I think what we've really seen over the past couple weeks is that the first time someone really, as a country, said, you guys have to all do age verification, that moment happened after like a decade. And so there have been over the past several, several years, all of these plans to kind of slowly creep age verification into things. and the UK in particular has been trying to age-gate porn for, I think I looked back and it's been since about 2016. And they passed the Online Safety Act and then the portion of it that requires age-gating for harmful content, including adult content, but also a sort of variety of things that get posted to social media that finally went into effect in late July.

33:46And now since then we've just seen what actually happens and it's really weird. and that there are all these other countries that are just kind of waiting in the wings to do this. And the U.S. is slowly starting to roll it out across states. And so we're, I think, reaching this kind of tipping point. And the U.K.'s version almost seems like it's one of the, maybe I shouldn't say it's the worst case scenario, given that it's the first scenario we've seen, but it seems quite controlling, right? Their definition of what needs to be age protected is really broad. It seems to be like anywhere, any website where a child might possibly encounter something problematic.

34:26Right. And so blue sky users can't access certain features unless they prove that they're of age. Reddit users can't access our slash periods or our slash stop smoking unless they prove that they're of age. Like this is like pretty wild stuff to have to show that you're 18 to access. Sorry, is this literally you have to show a photo of your ID? Basically, there are a sort of list of harmful content things that you have to make sure that if you have them on your site, there is some kind of reasonable assurance that people looking at them are of age. And typically what you end up doing then as a site is you have to either say nobody from the UK can access things.

35:10Or you have to say, we don't have this on our site. Or you have to say, we're blocking this unless you go through this typically third party service that will either have you upload a government issued ID or use something like a credit card or use something like a picture of your face that is run through age estimation to see if you look like you're of age in a like sort of age verification. algorithm. Or there are these methods that kind of they're using inferences from ways that you've used your account. Like if, say, your X account is 15 years old, then they're going to guess you're probably 18 years old.

35:57So it's this whole weird cornucopia of different methods, some of which are easier to fool than others. And basically, the upshot is it's just really unpredictable what people are going to post on social media. And so if you're a social media site, you probably at this point need to run age verification. That Blue Sky has in the UK limited things like DMs, and it will auto filter adult content. Reddit will block a lot of subreddits that are even sort of borderline content potentially, that that's ended up being things like at least as of the time we were writing about about it are period um and there have been say violent protest footage uh or other kind of material that then gets considered adult content uh on services like x so yeah if you're in the uk you basically you have to give up your id or you have to take a picture of your face or video of your face and show it and run it through these services the uk is really it's constantly impressive how shittier they make using the internet become almost on a yearly basis like props to the uk where the internet will continue to suck more and more there are all these reports of these small websites that are just like shut you know shutting down in the uk because they're like we we don't know how to deal with this we don't have the resources for this the way that they have implemented like it's so broad and the way the options for identifying yourself again Again, there's so many options out there, and they don't necessarily have close restrictions around them.

37:32And it feels like the privacy thing is the big question to me, right? The idea of, okay, we should stop children from accessing porn on the internet, I don't think that is necessarily an unreasonable contention. I do think that every single adult who wants to access, I don't know, information about a rated M video game needs to hand over their ID or a face scan to some service that can possibly then track them around the internet and tie that back to their identity. That's very concerning. I think the problem is that there's not really an easy way often to to draw a line between those two things.

38:12Like on in the US so far, it has mostly stayed on just yet it's Pornhub. It's like X video. It's a few different sites. But the problem is that that means either you have to mean you either have to say, all right, that means there's been no sex on social media at all. Like you're not allowed to have, in some cases, artistic nudes. You're not allowed to have, say, just sex workers operating on this site as humans. You have to either then say all of these other services are getting sanitized or you have to say, look, we're going to allow for some level of surveillance of all of these sites. And the UK also, yeah, it's that it's not just pornography.

38:52It is also it's things like eating disorders. It's things like suicide, which are all things that it's really not good for kids to encounter. But just the nature of social media makes it really, really difficult to automate those things away or to say that a child is never going to encounter them in a way that could be problematic. Right. Right now, like Wikipedia is complaining that they might have to, you know, make some big changes as a result of this because they can't quite, you know, guarantee that there isn't any inappropriate information because Wikipedia is a user generated content platform.

39:25And outside Wikipedia, there's also just there are the problems of profit motives like that. There are these services and these services cost money, these verification services and these services. Also, this is all a commercial operation. And there is a lot of incentive to collect as much data as you can and to either cut corners with that data because you are trying to make money off of this thing you're using or to just actually use that information to target advertisements or to otherwise like just run a commercial service and obviously like companies will absolutely promise privacy but just we've seen real security breaches we've seen like twitter for instance was under a consent decree in part because it would use information that you provided for as like security phone numbers uh for commercial purposes like we just understand how all these systems work and how all these incentives work and they're just throwing something into a system that is in a lot of ways filled with perverse incentives and demanding that it work well.

40:31You're saying Europe doesn't understand tech regulation? This is the funny thing is I actually think the EU is doing better. So the EU is running a pilot program that its deal is, look, we have age verification. And I personally, I believe that age verification is in a lot of ways fundamentally flawed. But they're at least saying we also have this technical system that we're trying to build that's just going to be a best like a system anybody could deploy that's going to ideally mean that somebody uploads their passport once to a service and then that service is held to a sort of like it runs on best practices and all that service does then is tell a site whether or not you're 18 and that this makes it in theory easier for the for the websites they just know that there's something that they can use, that they don't have to go and find this third party verifier, and that they are not relying on just this private sector development of all of these weird different options.

41:34So I think the EU in some ways is doing a better job than the UK potentially. Well, so do we expect this to spread more broadly in the EU? Because right now this is like five states are testing an app. I don't know where it goes next. Is this a legal requirement? Because they've been pushing this right i think this seems to be kind of like everywhere in the world um they there's an increased momentum toward educating things yeah australia has i believe also uh determined that they're going to be age gating search engines uh in the future for um if you want basically safe search off i think it's a little bit hard to tell i think on one hand it It seems like all this stuff is becoming kind of inevitable.

42:16On the other hand, the UK has been, it seems like kind of a mess. And none of this is, I think, totally inevitable. I think it is possible that now we are seeing this is what happens when this rolls out. And it turns out it's really messy and there are a lot of problems. And we are seeing really some of the first real life test cases of it. And it's possible that that will make it possible to shape how future rollouts work. So I want to touch on the US too. And this is about a month old at this point, but you cover the Supreme Court's ruling that age-gating porn websites is allowable under the First Amendment.

42:53And I think at this point, what is it, like a third of all U.S. states have laws that require age verification for porn. So it feels like this is going to expand in the U.S. It's not clear to me if it's going to expand beyond adult content in the same way. I'm curious what the ruling even allows. The ruling really specifically deals with content that is obscene to minors, which is a very specifically, this is pornography. I think that there are probably ways you can kind of find wiggle room around that to try to impose regulations more broadly, but it's a pretty different court case. I have talked to people for the last months or year about, well, what happens if age verification for porn is allowed?

43:40Does that mean you can just age gate social media? And the consensus has been it's possible that will happen, but it's a pretty different court case. And that you have to just do a completely different weighing of what are the privacy risks versus the harms that you're trying to prevent. but we've definitely seen states try to pass regulations for social media and so it seems inevitable that it's going to get up to the supreme court yeah because it's right because you could just say there's porn on blue sky right you could easily just make that argument that okay now this entire platform needs to be educated and right uh reddit uh right you could have to educate the entire platform i guess maybe this maybe this starts to just uh slice off chunks of these platforms somehow.

44:25I mean, so far, the actual laws have all basically set a threshold that's like, is one third of the content on the site adult? And I think that it's basically been understood that social media platforms don't fall under that. But I think the thing that's going to be maybe the next issue is there have been laws passed that are basically requiring age verification on app stores. That those are going to, I think, probably end up going to the Supreme Court. It's, I believe, Utah and Texas that are saying that if you operate an app store, like a mobile app store specifically, you have to have a system by which you can guarantee that people are over 18.

45:11And that basically, the legal issue there is going to turn out to be, is this unduly burdening speech in a way that is unique from the concerns of like the it is fair to restrict access to obscene content. I mean, I think the Supreme Court right now kind of operates just on really weird vibes. And so it seems plausible that they're just going to say, yes, that's fine. And so at that point, I think we're going to have to start looking a lot more closely at how all of this is just going to end up getting implemented. The App Store thing is really interesting because I think a lot of the tech companies who do not operate App Stores, such as Meta, are really pushing for this because it seems like a way for them to pass the buck a little bit, right?

45:58Alex, I think you've covered this from Meta where they've been pushing for Apple to implement these requirements and they've been kind of trying to like guilt them into it a little bit. Yeah, their comparison, which I think is an apt one, is like you age-gate someone's ability to drive a car. You don't force the roads to age-gate everyone as they drive down the road. You age-gate the ability to drive the car. And what is the car in this analogy? It's the phone. So if you really wanted to solve this, which Apple in particular is aggressively lobbying against in the United States, is you would force the phone platforms to age gate at the device layer.

46:42I got to say as a metaphor, this makes no sense to me. It's not like cars are required to tell whether you're 16. I did get barely any sleep out of you writing about OpenAI, so maybe it doesn't make sense. But I think conceptually, what makes sense to me is gating at the root, which is the device, and not gating all over the web and chopping up the web. I don't think you should gate at all, to be frank. Like, I think this should – you know what would solve this whole discussion is you make parents liable for what their kids do. and if we've decided as a society that it's evil or bad or harmful for kids to look at porn, guess who should be liable for that?

47:23It should be their fucking parents. It shouldn't be these platforms. That's my view of it all. But yeah, if you're going to gate, why not gate at the device? I think that's a reasonable. I think that there are a lot of good answers. I think that I agree with you that there's a really good reason pragmatically to say that, look, you could probably create a better system using devices than you can like regulating or you can like verifying ages on every service. At the same time, I think in some ways, like my biggest problem with this is that it just means that basically everything has to route through an app or an app store at this point, that it means that just trying to make a thing that works on a desktop, for instance, like it means that ultimately you're just saying desktops and websites don't matter.

48:15It's really strange. Like, I think it basically just assumes, okay, look, most people are using phones. Most kids are using phones. That's fine. And so we're just getting like the broad, we're getting most people and that's enough. But if you push this far enough, what you're saying basically is just any content on the internet has to, at some point, be verified through like Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai. Oh yeah, to be clear, I think this is all a horrible idea. Like gating it all is a horrible idea, but if you were going to do it, it would be the most consistent to do it at the device layer. It shouldn't happen at all, but that would be the most consistent.

48:47And the US also has the just very particular issue of the major party platform is banning pornography entirely. Like the UK and the EU are not both engaged in a just really massive surveillance state building operation right now or an attempt to make like drag shows illegal so the u.s has kind of its own whole set of problems where like even things like i think the eu building a trying to build a sort of government solution for verification is really good if you have a good faith belief in the government and that the government is going to protect your privacy. I think that even something like that just doesn't work well in the U.S.

49:30Google did this weird thing this week where they announced that they were going to start like just trying to like size people up to see if they were kids or not. And if they if they just like think that you're not 18, they're going to put like certain restrictions on your account. And this is this seems to be just entirely voluntary. And I guess I'm wondering at this point if if this is like they're just trying to look responsible so that some of these maybe worst case scenarios don't come to pass. Yeah, they're trying to get ahead of regulation. This is what they've done time and time again with other things, other kind of regulatory movements.

50:04The biggest companies will do it on their own and it will be impossible or way more difficult for startups to do it. That's how this all goes with regulation. Yeah, I'm very concerned about where this is going. The fact that this has actually gone into practice and that we were seeing the fallout be so broad and widespread and that we're seeing major mainstream websites getting blocked is kind of horrifying. And I think the fact that we're seeing an escalation in the US where more and more states are passing laws, and added to your point, there's an overall movement to crack down on anything that one of the major political parties thinks is a little too edgy can lead to some very bad places.

50:51But I think it's maybe encouraging to hear that you think that this is not necessarily a done deal, that the UK is maybe just taking a first swing at this and the US may not be able to get that far. I mean, the U.S. is way more chaotic. The U.K., there has been a request for a petition for, I believe, Parliament has to respond to, like, re-evaluating this. That does not necessarily mean anything, but it does mean that there is public pushback to it. I think that unfortunately, if this is just like anything else that's happened with privacy on the internet, it means that maybe some things are going to loosen up some, but that this is still probably here to stay.

51:35I think that I haven't seen really a ratchet away from privacy invasions on the internet since I've been working here. That sounds really doomer. I'm sorry. but I am hoping that around the edges people can shape things and that if this does screw up badly enough maybe I will be proven wrong. There we go UK do a worse job. All right we got to take a break when we get back some sort of round maybe there's lightning we'll see. Every great company's story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions. These are high-stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rolof Boeta, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments.

52:25We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 wherever you find your podcasts.

52:51Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.

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53:55Okay, welcome back So we heard your feedback on the Thunder Round We've heard it is a branding disaster On par with Tronk or X So we've been doing some work, some deep research here, and I'm pleased to announce that we have re-rebranded this segment. It is now known as the Lightning Round, colon, the Thunder Round. Colon, Jake's edition. And we have a sponsor, Eric. Yeah, that's right. this week's lightning round is presented by Google Gemini. So here's how the lightning round colon thunder round edition colon Jake's edition is going to work. To make sure we get through all these stories we're going to do five stories five minutes each.

54:44Eric Gomez our producer has the power of thunder. If we need to wrap it up we're going to hear some rolling thunder coming in and then he will strike us down with a single thunder crash if we've gone too long. Alright five stories let's do this. Addy you are up first. All right. So my first story is that RFK has pulled$500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine contracts. They announced it. This is via NPR. The Department of Health and Human Services will cancel contracts and pull funding for some vaccines that are being developed to fight respiratory viruses like COVID-19 and the flu. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

55:25announced in a statement Tuesday that 22 projects totaling$500 million to develop vaccines using mRNA technology will be halted. This is bad. And it is the latest in a long string of anti-vaccine decisions that Kennedy has very unsurprisingly made. It's really it's very sad. His argument is basically just these don't work for respiratory diseases. That's not true. It doesn't matter. it's wild like i it's not clear to me if i'm going to be able to get a covid shot this this fall right like they changed the rules and right i've just been getting the the covid shot and the flu shot at the same time um i don't want to get the flu it's not cool and it's it's not clear if that's i mean hopefully the flu shot is still available we'll find out um the covid one it's not clear it's going to happen and yeah i i their vaccine strategy just seems to be don't do it yeah i mean So Lauren Leffer has done a lot of really good work for us on RFK and vaccines.

56:21And basically, he just believes that if you die from a virus, you were weak. That sounds like a horrible mischaracterization of someone. That sounds like a horrible, mean-spirited thing to say. That is just what he keeps saying. Pointing out the hypocrisy of the Trump administration, I realize that does not get very far. I do find this one to be particularly striking because if you go back to Trump's first term, listen, you don't have to hand it to them for how they handled COVID. However, one of the successes was the mRNA vaccines, right? They got the COVID vaccine developed fairly rapidly. They got it distributed fairly rapidly.

57:08This is something that Trump in another world would be touting, would be taking credit for, would be boasting, right? This is a new technology that has some incredible potential impacts for vaccinations. and after spearheading this push for it at the very tail end of his first term, which he seems to totally regret, he's now hired somebody who's just wildly undermining that, right? We're just mRNA, all this potential. It feels like we're just setting this work back by, I mean, at a minimum three years and potentially vastly longer. Yeah, it was one of absolutely the best things he did around COVID.

57:48It was an incredible technological development And it's just it's also such incredibly just it's such a waste. The again, five hundred million dollars is nothing like the only reason to do this is just that you hate vaccines. Even if you believe there's a ninety nine percent chance this none of this is worthwhile, which I believe is really pretty clearly not correct. That's just barely any money for the government. It really is. And the other thing that I've seen Kennedy complain about is, and this is not true, but among his complaints are that we need to do more testing on the vaccines. We need to see if they're safe.

58:28And it's like, OK, you know what this money is used for? Right. Vaccine testing is part of this. We make sure the vaccines work. They're very thoroughly tested. And so this really does just come from this bewildering place of not wanting to help people not get sick, which is upsetting, to say the least. Right. I mean, everything here is just in absolute transparent bad faith. And it's that he believes that if you get sick, the thing that matters isn't making you well. It's making sure that your body is in some way intrinsically strong. because if someone whose body is weak is healed or doesn't get sick, then that's actually just, I mean, it's just eugenics.

59:20Like, it's really straightforwardly just eugenics. And it's really a disgrace. It's very, very bad. And I think just startling, startling to see what a change of tone the Trump administration has had on mRNA from the end of their first term to this new term. Okay, Alex, what have you got for us? So while we've been talking, I've also been looking at the reaction to OpenAI's GTP5 live stream, and it looks like they have been vibe graphing and doing some really insane chart crime. I want to call out two specific things that people have noticed. The first one is this SWE bench benchmark, which is this kind of industry standard coding benchmark for LLMs.

1:00:13Apparently, GTP5 actually does worse than 03 on this, but the bar chart that they put in the stream makes it look like it's better, like it's a taller bar, even though the number is less than 03, which is not great. And then perhaps there's apparently several of these, but then the worst one is when there's a chart about hallucinations. Actually, it's called deception across models. And the coding deception one, GTP5 scores a 50. They don't explain what this score means except deception rate. There's only one axis and it's just called deception rate. GTP5 scores a 50 and O3 scored a 47.4. But the bar for O3 is like more than double the height of GTP5.

1:01:05You really have to see this. We'll have the links in the show notes with the images. But it basically makes it look like if you just glance at this bar chart that GTP5 is materially better at not hallucinating on code gen, when in reality it's worse. And this is literally a bar chart called deception across models. These are incredible. Yeah, not good. I'm going to call this... vibe graphing. Vibe graphing is good. Vibe graphing is a really good excuse for, hey, why did you turn in information that's completely wrong? Well, I was being efficient. I vibe graphed it. I mean, listen, these are graphs.

1:01:48They just don't make any sense. These are bewildering. There's no consistency. The highest number is not in the highest spot. I don't understand what's happening. Things are just randomly colored. This is very confusing and maybe suggest why this presentation was a little confusing overall. I'm wondering if these are like, are they trying to hide it? Do they just not know how to make a graph? It could be VibeGraft. Either answer is really bad to that question. Either way, it's really bad. So, yeah. Yeah, I'm staring at two boxes of the exact same size, and one says 69.1 and one says 30.8 and they're right next to each other and they're both smaller than the one that's 52.

1:02:39I'm honestly, this is an impressive level of inconsistent. Like truly the only consistent thing about this is that everything is wrong. It is amazing. I just love that it's really wrong on a chart about deception. I do have an important question here, which is what's the right deception rate? What number are we feeling is good here? Preferably I would like zero. from the thing that apparently is okay to give me medical advice from? Preferably zero. Right, they had an extended segment on using this for medical advice. And this says the deception rate is 50. Sam Allman literally brought... I don't know what it means.

1:03:16He literally brought an employee's spouse on stage who had been diagnosed with like three cancers and was like talking about how ChachiPT had helped her navigate her diagnosis. And then, yeah, and then in the same presentation, they show a deception rate graph that is intentionally very deceiving. I have to tell you, I've been very bullish on ChatTPT. And now that they have presented a nonsense chart that says their deception rate is 50, this has done the most to tell me that I should use this thing less. Jake, it's not even that the deception rate is 50. It's that the bar is less than half as tall as the last model, which was actually better at not deceiving.

1:04:01So it's made to look on the bar chart like it's way better when it's actually worse.

1:04:10ChatGBT5, honestly, you know what though? This speaks to how good it is at deception. We were fooled. We didn't notice. Yeah. I don't know. Listen, if they keep this up by the next model, these charts, we won't even notice how off these charts are. the higher the deception is actually the lower the deception score goes because you don't realize that it's fooling you vibe charting this is yeah 50 is exactly the middle where you like you're like you catch up you gotta squint okay next story tariff crisis across the globe but specifically in the united states we've been talking about tariffs for a while now uh not uh and it's super exciting for our wallets.

1:04:57This really, I think, hit in a very material way in the past week. Number one, because quite literally, Trump's tariffs did go into force, I believe, Thursday morning. But most notably, we actually saw a bunch of companies raising prices and raising them pretty significantly. I think probably the biggest one that most people are going to experience is that Nintendo raised the price on a bunch of Switch hardware, including the Switch One, the original one it's going up in price by 30 and some of the other models um including switch oled and switch light they're going up in price too a bunch of accessories are going to be going up in price they did not raise the price on the switch too which i'm assuming is because uh that thing is already very expensive and they do not want that to look worse um but this keeps going right uh fujifilm uh they raised one of their cameras went up in price by 800 now this is already a very expensive camera.

1:05:53It was a medium format camera. But what is happening? This is a lot of money. Tim Cook is, you know, Tim Cook actually, he hung out with Trump this week and gave him this beautiful statue that he made with like a 24 karat gold base. How are we not going to mention this? Thank you for mentioning this. We should have led with this. We should have led with this. Yeah, because he went to the White House to announce this big, you know, American manufacturing But before he did this, he announced that they're blowing a billion dollars just this quarter on tariffs. Well, clearly what needs to happen is any company that is raising its prices because of tariffs.

1:06:29You know, Sonos is another example this week. You need to bring a solid gold version of your products to the White House. You need to set it on the desk in the Oval Office. You need to do a photo op with Trump. That is how you avoid tariffs. So Sonos. They put Trump's name on it. Yeah. So Sonos, Nintendo, get on it. solid gold switch solid goes solid gold sonos make it happen addy am i wrong i i think that what he described actually is the new tariff policy like didn't he announce this that if you just like make make trump happy uh he will waive the tariffs chat gpt told me he did so let's just scroll with it okay is that he also announced a new tariff during the apple thing but then was like the tariff won't apply if you build in the u.s uh it's going to be a hundred percent tariff on semiconductors but if you build in the u.s there's not uh we and like everything it's incredibly ambiguous what that means right it's like if you say you will build in the u.s if you like make a good effort and maybe bring a gold bar to the white house you will not get tariffed five tariffs tim cook uh he somehow he's playing both sides of this right everyone is afraid to trash talk the tariffs.

1:07:41Tim Cook, he's on the earnings call. He's like, we're wasting a bunch of cash on tariffs. He said this two quarters in a row. Then he just goes to the White House and he's like, we're all good. We're all good. And it's sort of weird for them in particular. If those, I mean, again, big if, if these 100 % semiconductor tariffs do actually happen, they have an Apple loophole built in. Like that is what it is, right? They were like, Apple, you said you're going to build stuff in the US so we just won't apply this to you, right? That's like fantastic for Apple's business. Tim Cook is really good at hitting that middle point where he doesn't seem like a threat to Trump but also he doesn't make Trump mad.

1:08:26He's very good at this. I don't really mean that as a compliment. And this is how you get to him presenting a statue to Donald Trump. I was bewildered by this thing. So there's a 24 karat gold base, which Tim Cook said was from Utah, right? American made gold. And then on top of it is this big circle of glass that is from Corning, which is where they're going to get the American-made glass for iPhones. And for unknown reasons, this piece of glass just says Donald Trump on it and has Tim Cook's signature on it. And it's like, I guess it's commemorating that Apple is going to build in the U.S. and they are giving it to him for some reason because they did a photo op at the White House.

1:09:16It's very funny. It came in like an Apple product box that he like opened up on, you know, the desk in the Oval Office. Yeah, it was quite a presentation. Do we imagine Trump is going to have a competing phone out this year, supposedly? Things are going to get spicy between those two. It's going to be an interesting year if the Trump phone really does take on the iPhone. OK, right under the buzzer. Addy, what's next? All right. Sometimes it's fun to just have some old fashioned legal drama that's not going to result in a baffling Supreme Court ruling. And it is that Epic has beaten Google in court again.

1:09:55The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 31st said it would not overturn the unanimous jury verdict from 2023 that Google's App Store and payment apps are illegal monopolies. And Google now has, at this point, a few weeks, it could get extended time to start cracking open the App Store by not requiring people to use Google Pay billing and by not enforcing anti-steering rules that stop people from, stop app developers from directing users outside the store. It still does not have to implement the really extreme stuff yet, like allowing third party stores in the Google Play Store. But it's a pretty significant loss, especially compared to how Epic's case went with Apple, where Epic mostly lost.

1:10:41Yeah, I mean, this is this is like potentially huge. And it sounds like it's it's still it. What are we waiting on? Right. It's like is if the Supreme Court decides to hear it or not. For the really short term, we're waiting to see if they appeal and then are granted a stay on having to implement this stuff while, yeah, we find out if it goes up to the Supreme Court. Yeah, but this is like monumental, right? You said the bigger stuff doesn't come into effect, but that's that's it's just because it has a longer timeline. Like they gave Google more time to do it. Whereas Google is like basically out of time in this immediate stuff.

1:11:15The immediate stuff doesn't feel like as huge of a deal to me. like these are important but uh the the next set of impacts fully crack open the google play store and i think it's so interesting because android is uh it's an open platform you can do whatever you want and i usually think it's like very it was very surprising to me at least that apple which has a fully locked down platform mostly won and google which has an open if you know strangle held platform, mostly lost. But on Android, you can install whatever you want. You just have to jump through a bunch of hoops. But these new systems will allow you to just download another app store through the Play Store.

1:12:03And that new app store can be fed by the Play Store, if I'm remembering this all correctly, which just sort of like monumentally shakes things up, right? Like Android is an open system. But the reason that Google is able to maintain it is that its apps are so powerful and so important. And the Play Store is really at the center of that in a lot of ways. It also impacts the way that they can make deals for pre-installations on, say, Android phones and with carriers. So that's just another huge part of their ecosystem. This is wild. I think Android is going to potentially change dramatically if this goes into effect, or at least the way that Google handles it will.

1:12:46I generally think, again, I am surprised that Google is losing more than Apple here. Yeah, me too. We have a really good piece about this. It is partly, I think it's specifically the thing you mentioned is why they lost, which is that Apple could make a really credible case that we have created this incredibly locked down ecosystem. It's central to our business model. We have all these security concerns. And Google, by being kind of halfway there, it made it seem more like it was putting up hoops. But I believe it's Sean who has a really very good comparison of why Apple won and Google lost. I would love to see both of these ecosystems open up in a big way.

1:13:26And it's surprising to me. That is really interesting it's really interesting that by being a little more open but it really has always been sort of it's it's been a little fake like i i've gotten a chance to look at the at the terms of the deals that google has with mobile carriers and you start to realize that android is is only sort of theirs right like they have to right they make carriers or they make phone operators basically agree to these deals and if they want the play store which of course they want the Play Store. That's where all the apps are. You got to put Gmail in a certain spot on your phone.

1:14:02You got to put Google Docs in a certain spot on your phone. It specifies where the folders can go. It specifies how many levels deep the folders can be. It specifies on which page of the home screen it is. And I guess that clearly hurt them in court. When you look at these terms, you go, oh, this is not as open as it is supposed to be. And it will be very interesting uh next year if these things actually go into effect and we get to see what happens if android really opens up to a much more dramatic degree than it currently is in practice all right alex i'm going to try to end us without the thunder on the last one since we have failed at every turn on that um instagram rolled out an update that naturally has caused a ton of uproar they added a map to Instagram it's like the snap map where you can see people that you follow on a map and naturally people freaked out and Instagram has had to do a bunch of messaging around it apparently the I don't know if either of you guys have gone through the process of opening this map is pretty confusing as to who you're sharing with in what context and apparently if you would tag a location on a story that you shared, that would show up as if you were on the map at that specific location.

1:15:24So there was a bunch of just bad design stuff. Meta's been stressing, look, it's all opt-in. We had double opt-in, but apparently they would also show you on the map even before you had opted in, which made people naturally think that they had already opted in to sharing their location with their entire Instagram friend list. And I would just like to point out that there's just an inherent flaw in this where like your Instagram social graph, who you follow, yes, are there people there, you know, very close friends, family members, significant others that you would be comfortable sharing your location with?

1:16:01Probably for a lot of people. Is anyone wanting to share their location with even a significant percentage of their Instagram following list, I'm going to guess no. And the fact that it's on you to curate that and to go, oh, they're on a certain list, they're on close friends or whatever, just puts a lot of work on the user. And like, I think what Snap has done is that people just use it for a different reason. Like people don't, it's not such a huge broadcast platform where you're following a ton of people in this way. And so Instagram's trying to shoehorn this interface into a social network that's just not really built for this level of intimacy.

1:16:40And I think that's what they're experiencing right now, but also like they should have done better messaging this, you know, the, the onboarding seemed confusing and it's become like a meme that, you know, Instagram is showing you on the map now. I have to say they have had eight years, I believe to rip off snap maps. Yeah. It is rough that they could not do it. Right. Like that, that is pretty, pretty bad that, uh, they they're basically just lifting a feature and it's still bewildering and a bad user experience i believe they've been testing this for months too yeah i do think your point about the the following list on both platforms inherently being different is really interesting because i've always like i i'm like a little bit above snapchat age and so i this is not a platform that i have used with any regularity um and so the snap maps thing has never really been appealing to me or made sense to me But you're right.

1:17:37If you're using Snapchat, you have a much tighter friend group, right? You don't have to worry about that in the same way as Instagram, which for a while now has pushed you to have this much broader relationship, right? It is the influencer platform. And that is not true in the same way on Snap. Yeah. And look, I'm sure people will use it. Instagram is huge. It has billions of users. I'm sure there are people with Finstas who keep their friend list super tight and curated and will use the map. But yeah, they definitely could have rolled this one out better. Add a big on broadcasting your location to everybody you know.

1:18:15Any service that has a location tracking feature whenever anyone is building it at a website, at an app developer, there should be like a button that they have to break glass with their bare hands to deploy it with. You should not share people's locations unless you really, really have to. And it should be as painful for you as possible to have them roll out. again they there is like a double opt-in consent flow for this so they are saying but it's the way they presented it and like the fact that you showed up on the map before you can send it even though other people weren't visible which then of course is going to make someone think oh i am already sharing even though i haven't opted in it's more about the ui and the way that but they were not literally opting in everyone to sharing their location on the map oh no i'm not saying that the people should have i'm saying that the developers should have to break the glass with their bare hands.

1:19:06You just shouldn't track people's location in social networks. There's also something going on with meta platforms. There's this thing on Meta's AI app where you have to hit a gigantic share button to share your stuff to the feed publicly, and people still hit it on really personal stuff that they're talking about with AI. So there's just some extent to which, I don't know if it's that platform or that platform's user base. But you got to be careful. And people clearly are not even if the thing is set up correctly. I do wish this was shown up earlier so that they could bring it up in the antitrust trial over whether Snapchat and Instagram were the same thing.

1:19:45If only. Well, there are also some TikTok features, but alas, we have been struck down. All right. That was a good one. That's it for the Verge cast. Keep your eye on the feeds over the weekend because V song is hosting a bonus episode dropping this Sunday. And Jen Toohey is picking up guest hosting duties for the next couple of Tuesday episodes after that. Also, check out Decoder, where Alex Heath is going to have some good stuff coming up next week. I think you guys will really be interested. If you like what we do here, the best way to support us is by getting a subscription to TheVerge.com.

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1:20:50We'll see you next week.

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