Mark Zuckerberg has an Instagzam

21:56David Pierce:I will tell you, I have thought a lot about the idea that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun in the context of the way a lot of people are talking about AI. And it is, I mean, that's Zuckerberg's entire argument. That's not even a disingenuous reading of the argument. That is the argument. that if you have AI, the only way to defeat you is if I have AI. Like, literally, okay, I will use Mark Zuckerberg's words to prove my point. He says, over time, I expect that widely deployed AI models with strong cybersecurity capabilities will lead to systems that are more secure, not less.

22:30David Pierce:This will be definitively true once superintelligence enables most of the world's code to be verifiably secure.

22:40Verifiably secure is doing an awful lot of work right there. A lot of work, and also the tacit assumption that there will be no more holes.

22:47David Pierce:We're going to get AI that is so good that it can patch all the holes, but not AI that is good enough to find new ones. It just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't account for social engineering, which is an actual exploit vector that many AI systems have been able to use, including the ones that have broken out of their sandboxes in various ways in recent weeks, including Meta's own AI, which you can believe whether it did or it didn't or if meta just felt left out. You know, like everyone else's AI is breaking out of the sandbox like ours did too. There's a little bit of that going on here.

23:20But the idea that it's just the code that is the vulnerability and not the systems or structures or human beings around the code that are the vulnerability, it doesn't even factor into the analysis here. And that makes no sense. It's just fundamentally no sense. Yep, totally agree. Okay, I'm just going to do two more. I have 15 here, but I'm just going to do two more.

23:44David Pierce:This one I just chose for you specifically, Eli. It says export controls on silicon have been successful for slowing the progress of foreign labs during this critical period. So it is the right strategic move to continue those. Any policy that slows American model releases, even by a month, could add significant risk to American leadership while letting foreign models race ahead. China bad, Eli. It's funny because we're going to get to this later. Our government here in the United States is touting the fact that banning Chinese drones has resulted in a surge of drone manufacturing in the United States.

24:19And we will come to the truth of that later in the show, in America's favorite podcast in the podcast. Export controls have been successful so far, but it's not like China is going to sit there and not invest in chip making and chip design or steal our chip IP or find any number of ways to make their own chips. And so we should continue those. But anything that slows down America creating these new offensive capabilities that might break containment and cause havoc all on their own, well, we can't have that. Because even though we know that China will react to us trying to slow them down, we must proceed.

24:55Like there's just something confused in there where, again, it's a collective action problem. If what you actually had was cooperation between rivals to make sure that problem doesn't escalate out of control, you might have good outcomes. You might have nuclear nonproliferation. There's like dozens and dozens of years of political and military strategy here to not kill everyone in the world that is just not even mentioned here. Yep. Okay. There's just a part of this where it's, you know, tech people love first principles. And it's like, great, you did first principles. You know, there's like a hundred years of principles built on top of them, right?

25:41Of how great power should interact. He should have finished Harvard. That's all I'm saying.

25:45David Pierce:According to Marc Andreessen, looking backwards is not useful. You should know introspection, always look ahead. Okay, here's the last one, and this is the purest Neil Ibeg in the whole manifesto. He's talking about distillation, which has been very controversial, the idea that you can essentially use a model to train another model. It's how a lot of people think that Chinese models have gotten so good so fast. Very hot topic in this space, should distillation be legal? Mark Zuckerberg writes, The ability for models to learn from other models is an important principle of how the open source ecosystem works.

26:17David Pierce:All AI models are derived from human knowledge. Some have tried to frame distillation as harmful, but I think it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe. This is how the world works, and the U.S. will not be able to lead if we restrict ourselves on this front. This is Mark Zuckerberg saying, you have to make it legal for us to do everything that we've been doing with AI models. uh the distillation discourse is very funny to me it it just fills me with a kind of joy sure because everyone is mad about the thing they did right if you're anthropic you're mad about distillation well you stole all the books in the world yeah what what do you want to get fine you got nothing to say the principle that you need to learn from what you can observe is just a bedrock applies to humans.

27:06Computers that retain perfect copies of everything that they've ever ingested, and in many cases with these models, can spit out perfect copies of everything they've ever ingested, totally changes the game in terms of who should get compensated for what and who has permission to ingest what. And Mark doesn't care. Like, this computer is the same as me is also a fundamental thought that exists throughout this entire framework.

27:32David Pierce:Yes. And throughout the entire AI industry, right? Like the fundamental goodness of computers and bonkersness of humans is a real thing that is just burbling up. You leave my robot girlfriend alone, said Mark Zuckerberg. I'm sure she's very nice. Okay. I have a bunch more. He goes on a whole tangent about RSI, which essentially describes AI that - Competitive stress injury. Exactly. It's when AI can start to train itself, essentially. You set it loose and it is able to train itself on how to get better. There are a lot of things that become possible when that happens. These things can theoretically improve very quickly.

28:10David Pierce:That's also how we get to Terminator stuff. So he goes on this whole long discursion about how we should a lot compute to the RSI models so that they can get better. But we have to give humans more compute because that's it's like all of this is insane. You should just read it just to understand his theory of the world as much as anything, which is that humans are fundamentally all great. And if you just shove them all together, everything will be fine. Like meta. I went to a school for nerds, extreme nerds. The motto, the unofficial motto of the University of Chicago, literally, they make t-shirts, is where fun goes to die.

28:55I loved it there. Could not be happier with my education there. And a number of professors, I had two cliches in all my political science classes. One, where's your evidence? This is what they would just say. You would say some nonsense and they would say, where's your evidence? And then you would have to be a big nerd and you have to like produce your books and do it. Mark has no evidence for any of his ideas. The second one, much more actionable, an exercise you can do if you, like me, are screaming in your car at Mark Zuckerberg. Try to write the law that puts any of this into practice. Write the rule that says we have to somehow slow down China by limiting chip exports, but we can't let American models fall behind in any way, shape, or form.

29:36We have to allow distillation, but we have to protect the value. Everyone should get as much super intelligence as they want to do as much baking as they can. But they also have to use their super intelligence to make sure the bad guy next door is somehow not doing offensive cyber attacks. Just write it down. Just write down your law. Pass it. Go to the United States Senate. Get a number of dead people to show up, you know, and be like, this is here's the rule. I'm giving it to you. Mark Zuckerberg's lobbyists are certainly trying to do that today. He has not shown us what they are proposing in any way, shape or form.

30:09He's given us this freshman year nonsense. But write the rules down. Yeah, that's actually my my number one response to this was to rewind my brain to when I was in college. And I would have professors say, write the rule that you're describing.

30:23David Pierce:Make it work. I think this is why everybody is so obsessed with the idea of government review of frontier models, because that is at least in theory one thing you can do. And there are so many things in this space that are not actually things you can do. But when does the government review models? How do they review those models? What does that review look like? Who's in charge? That is all actually tractable stuff in a way that is very unusual. And the AI industry stance is we'll do it voluntarily. Don't worry about it. We're all just going to be cool. Everything's going to be fine. We don't need laws.

30:58David Pierce:We will we will volunteer to do this. And that will be that will be enough. That will be sufficient because I think they're deathly afraid that the minute somebody tries to write a law, it is going to accidentally or intentionally cause them vast quantities of pain that no one even saw coming. This was the Biden administration, which said, you're bleeding edge models. You have to tell us what they're capable of. There's some transparency around them. It was not a lot. They all fought against it. They all went to Trump's inauguration because he took away all the rules. And the Trump administration has quickly realized it's going to impose some of the exact same controls the Biden administration imposed, if not more in additional controls.

31:35And again, when I say write a law, it's not frontier labs should be forbidden from doing offensive cyber attacks. That's not a rule. You can't. You got to write it down. You got to define a frontier lab. You have to define offensive cyber attacks. You have to say what it means to not do them. Write that rule. It's very, very challenging. So all these platitudes are great. All these predictions about how it's going to be amazing when there's super intelligence having a relationship for you. Amazing. I couldn't be, I love reading science fiction. Show me the rules, Mark, because I don't think they exist.

32:11And I think his argument generally is maybe they shouldn't, because we'll just give it to everybody and it'll be fine. Don't even worry about it. And that has never caused any problems ever. Including on meta platforms. How could he know? He's never seen this before. I'm having an instagasm! Sorry. All right, we should take a break. That was it. That was, this is, it's your last episode before you have a baby. It's my last episode ever. I'm having an instigasm is the title of this episode. It's going to be fantastic. I can't wait. We're going to take a break and we're going to go back. And unfortunately for all of us, we're talking more AI.

32:44We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Bitwarden. Quick gut check. How many of your passwords are actually strong and unique? If you had to think about that for more than a second, today's sponsor is for you. Bitwarden is the trusted open source solution for passkey, password, and secrets management, built to make secure password management accessible to everyone. With its free forever plan for individuals, you can create, securely store, and autofill strong, unique passwords across all your accounts and devices, so you never have to remember dozens of complicated logins or rely on the same password everywhere.

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34:51All right, we're back. Neil, we have more AI shenanigans to talk about today. The unfortunate theme of this show is everybody has bad ideas about AI this week, which is fun for me because I get to get all of my

35:05David Pierce:feelings out and then go on parental leave. But for you, you get to just stew in everybody's bad ideas about AI. But I want to start with an idea that I have not decided whether it's good or bad yet. And it's Claude's new watermark for AI generated text. The idea here is Anthropic is rolling out a new tool by which it will invisibly watermark text created with Claude. I have done more research than was necessary on this, and I find it fascinating. We can get into it. The idea is that it will be then detectable by the AI detectors. They're also going to embed information in images. They're trying to be more transparent about what is and is not generated by AI.

35:51David Pierce:This seems like a good thing in the way that all of these ideas seem like good ideas. We've also, once again, it seems run into the XKCD comic of there are 14 standards. Let's come up with a new standard problem. There are 15 standards. Is this just, are we just doing this again? The most important thing to know is that all of the labs have realized people don't like AI content. And they especially do not like AI content when they're not told it's AI content. And you can see it on your own feeds. Somebody posts something and the immediate response is, this is AI. And it doesn't matter what that thing is.

36:27And they all knew this was coming. They did essentially nothing about it. And now the backlash is here. Everyone hates them. They're pulling worse than ICE. No one wants their data centers. You got to do something. And so we're going to do lots and lots of watermarking ideas so that you can see the AI content and hopefully you can see that you like some of it, which is the unremarked flip side of all of these efforts. Oh, that's interesting. They're like, no, it's AI and it's good. You loved it, didn't you? We'll see about that. That's really interesting.

37:01David Pierce:So you don't think this is sheer sort of corporate responsibility, these companies trying to be good guys. You're like, they want you to be tricked and then have your mind blown by the fact that you've been tricked. It's like a reveal. It's like they pull the cloth off at the end. It was cloth all along. Some of that is in there, I think. I think there's also just the notion that maybe you'll opt into a feed full of all the eye contact, which is a dream they all have. Wrong. Just tell you right now. No. Half of them have tried it and mostly they have failed. But that's the meta structure of this, right?

37:37The reaction to AI content in almost every case is negative. And we need to label it because there's a disinformation crisis across the world and a misinformation crisis across the world. And so the labels will help us get there. How are we going to do this is not a problem that was solved yet. I'm dying to know if Anthropic asked Claude how to watermark Claude's text because this system seems so complicated to me. Did you get all the way down to red lists and green lists? I did. I did. Can you explain this to me? Because I'm not sure I quite understand it. I can try.

38:12David Pierce:So first of all, shout out to our commenters who immediately found this great video from a couple of years ago that links to a University of Maryland paper from a couple of years ago digging into this idea. So the idea, as I understand it, is watermark is actually sort of the wrong term. um watermark connotes that there is some thing invisibly embedded in the text like a special character or some kind of underlying metadata that says this is generated with ai this is not that to the best of my understanding what this is is basically if you think of uh an ai system as next word prediction which a lot of people don't like to but it is fundamentally what's going on that looks a bunch of words and says, what's the next one?

38:55David Pierce:It is essentially going to up and down rank certain answers to what the next word might be. And the way that they talk about this in this paper is you have a red list and a green list. So like Neil, I went to the, there are a bunch of words that could come after that. Right. So like store football game. And then there's a bunch that it would never be like, I don't know, Taylor Swift concert. You love Taylor Swift. I'm just kidding. That's sad. So the idea is then you essentially break these things into all the things that could possibly be, and you uprank some and you downrank some in order to create a certain kind of slightly slanted version of the output.

39:39David Pierce:So there are going to be words that the text doesn't use. It's going to use certain words more often, but it is basically up ranking and down ranking certain answers to the question. And then it's able to over time, the way they use red and green is like you take all the possible answers, put them into red group and green group, and you only use the green group or you mostly use the green group in the actual text that you're predicting. Then if you go back and you say, oh, that's so weird. This is four paragraphs of it always picked the green one. Suddenly you have an incredibly high likelihood that this thing was generated by AI.

40:15David Pierce:And that's essentially the idea, is rather than embed some extra character, this is why Anthropic is able to say, if you copy and paste the text, it will carry with it, because it is the text itself. The way that it was predicted and the order in which and the types of words that are actually used are the ones that reveal that it was created by AI. The paper is fascinating. It's deep and weird, but it seems to work. And it especially works on long text. And that's a big deal because one of the things that Claude even will do, in this case, they'd say, is not do a great job with short text. One of their cautions is, if the text isn't long enough, it may not be reliable.

40:58David Pierce:But with multi-paragraph stuff, you're going to get to the point where, statistically, it is incredibly unlikely that a human would have written this same set of things in exactly the way that we have slightly geared Claude to do. Did you feel the same glimmer of recognition when you read this description that I did? No, tell me. This is how people detect that things are AI. I mean, yeah. They're like, yeah, why would you use an M dash? It's like literally the thing that everyone online is always doing. Like, you know, that's not AI, that's just common sense. It's like whatever that thing is that you are always doing with AI content now where you see the fake AI influencer on TikTok.

41:41David Pierce:Here's my honest answer, colon. They're too shiny. That's quad. You know, like AI video people, like AI avatars, they're too glossy in like a very specific way. It's like, oh, this is the thing that I do. Like there's something about this that I just find fascinating. Yeah. It also means it won't work unless the model providers sign on to it. Yes. So here's another collective action problem. Claude's list of green words is made by Anthropic. They probably won't release them, right? Anthropic is particularly closed. They're probably not going to tell you what words or what tokens Claude has. They'll tell like the pangrams of the world, but they're very unlikely to share it with everyone.

42:25Even that to me feels like a hard baby. Fair. So only Claude text is detectable and ChatGPT text is not detectable. Now you have an imbalance of power and it is an open AI's interest to never, ever use Claude's detection system.

42:38David Pierce:Right. And if you take text out of Claude and put it into ChatGPT, it immediately breaks the whole thing. Right. Like this is these are not hard systems to get around unless everyone agrees that these are the systems. So, yeah, I mean, I applaud Anthropic for being like forthright that mountains of text spamming every text box on the Internet is a problem. And you should be able to have a detector that can just disregard it. Straightforwardly disregard it or say, are you you're a real person? You've been shoving a lot of text into LinkedIn lately. Would you like to pay us some extra money? Because that's going to happen.

43:14Yeah.

43:14David Pierce:I also wonder, I mean, to your point about the already overused words in AI tools, it's going to be very hard for them to do this in a way that is actually imperceptible. And they say that it is imperceptible. The paper it's based on says it is imperceptible, that you can do this with very little extra compute, very little extra time and very little degradation of the output. But everything we see from AI-generated text suggests that that is probably not the case. That what this thing is going to do is it's going to develop a new set of ticks that are going to make it even easier for humans to recognize AI-written text that are going to make it weirder and harder for Claude to know what to do with that.

43:57Yeah, I think walls of AI-generated text are so inherently disrespectful that I kind of don't care about this one. Fair. Like you can see it. It's not hard to see it. I don't want to read it. No one wants to read it. Fine. Like hopefully Anthropik is successful with this and people learn to not do it because everyone's looking for detectors. It's the multimedia stuff that is way more dangerous, way more widespread in a lot of ways, and way more fractured in terms of detecting it, how the watermarks work, and in particular how the platforms display that information. So there's code, I think, in the latest betas of iOS called Apple Reference Image, where if you take a photo with an iPhone, it will mark it as the reference image and say, these are the actual pixels, which is already funny because there's so much computational photography going on in an iPhone.

44:51And whether or not they're the actual pixels is challenging. right it wwc when apple started showing off their ai edits you know background remover changing poses all the stuff you can do i asked them if they were going to use some of the water marking standards that we already have c2pa synth id they i think they said they were going to use synth id which is google's but it sounds like they're they're going at it the other way they're also going to mark the real image which is not an approach many people have taken thus far but you want that real image to travel around and be marked as real. And you want the AI edited image or the AI generated image to also travel around and be marked as AI.

45:30Somewhere in there are some real fuzzy lines, right? Even the noise reduction on an iPhone now is like an AI powered situation. So these are very fuzzy lines of where the AI takes over and what makes an AI image or not, but everyone is labeling and no one is picking the same labeling standards and none of the platforms have agreed on how to display the information. And this, when you say this is just segments about bad ideas about AI, the reality that people don't like this stuff has just like hit them in the face and they weren't ready and they did not have a unified plan in any way, shape or form to handle it.

46:07David Pierce:Yeah. And I think from Apple's perspective, the idea of we're going to mark the real one makes a lot of sense to me because that in a certain way might be the more controllable outcome for Apple, right? Like it's actually, it's a bleak state of affairs, but it makes a certain kind of sense if you think we're going to get to the point where you should assume that everything that's not marked real is fake. And if we're in a moment where no one is going to agree on how we mark things fake, it's easier to be the one who says, well, we can be the arbiters of what is real. And that is just a weird societal switch that I feel like we are making.

46:46David Pierce:And again, it makes sense for Apple. Apple can actually verify whether this thing was made on an iPhone is probably vastly easier in many cases than trying to verify whether something was generated with AI. Yeah. Weird state of affairs. Like maybe, maybe we're not going to have an AI feed. We're going to have a real feed. Do you know what I mean? Like this is the, that's the, the mental shift we're all having to make. And I think are kind of making in real time from all of this is probably real to all of this is probably fake. Oh, I mean, we wrote that story ages ago. Sarah John wrote it for us.

47:17The headline was no one's ready for this. We'll link to it in the show notes. And the mental shift in society to I'm probably looking at something fake when presented with a photo or a video is totally destabilizing. And it already is destabilizing.

47:31David Pierce:I listened to a fantasy football podcast. Shout out the Ringer fantasy football podcast. And last training camp. So a thing that happens at the beginning of every NFL season is all the teams go to training camp and you see all the players for the first time in several months. And last year, everybody got fooled by a picture of Debo Samuel. It doesn't matter who Debo Samuel is, but somebody had edited the photo to make him look really fat. And it became a news story before everybody realized it was fake. This year, everyone assumes every picture of every player is fake. It's the most it's just the most fascinating shift that like in 12 months they've gone from instinctively believing the photo they saw on Twitter to assuming it's fake and actually having to go back and verify before discovering that.

48:15David Pierce:Oh, no, he's actually fat and out of shape. And this is going to be a big problem for the NFL season. And it's just the speed with which we have all had to make that change just kind of continues to blow my mind. Yeah. And this is I mean, there's market demand for provenance information embedded. It's the time of capture from the sensor. Great. So Apple's going to do it. And it's going to go up to private cloud compute and generate an ID. And someone is going to have to respect the ID that Apple embeds in the photo and display the information. Do you think that that is X, the everything app? Right.

48:47This is where it falls down. Yeah. Jess Weatherbet has written about C2PA, which is the competing standard here, over and over again. C2PA doesn't work very well. It can be defeated pretty easily. And the other problem with it is that no one respects it. Right. And I don't just mean they don't respect it because it's bad and they look down on it. I mean, no one displays the information. You have to go to another website and like paste an image into it and run the detector check. And this is all nonsense and no one's ever going to do it. Completely defeats the whole purpose. The platforms that are doing it are kind of interesting.

49:20So Spotify announced it's not going to recommend music from AI personas this week because they know that their customers do not like it when AI artists show up in their feeds and their recommendations and they want music from other real people. This goes back to exactly what you were saying, too, about people not wanting to be tricked.

49:37David Pierce:There is, I think, a lot of people have had the experience of having AI music appear in their algorithms for one reason or another, shows up in a playlist, it shows up on your Discover Weekly, whatever. you get 30 seconds into it and then you start to get that kind of tingly feeling that this is AI or worse, you like it and then you discover it was AI and I have watched a lot of people go through that experience in various ways where like, oh, this song is a bop and then you're like, oh my god, it's AI and that feels bad on so many levels I mean, we just had an entire news cycle in the music industry about Rubbers Oh yeah by Phoenix Flexin he's a real person it's obviously an AI track and first they denied it was AI and then it was obviously AI and now they've been admitting that more and more of it is, they're going to get to the end which is yes we just opened Suno and told it to make a Smith song and then I pretended to sing a Smith song Wait have you been tracking this Daddario, the guitar company thing along the same lines?

50:43The guitar industry is in full turmoil Can you explain this one to me? I have not followed this one as closely. Dadrio, which is - Dadrio, excuse me. They make all the guitar strings. Uh-huh. If you have ever played the guitar in your life, you have ended up with a pack of Dadrio guitar strings. They made an ad, and guitar people thought the music in the ad was AI, and then their first denial was that it was a real song, and they just recreated it with AI, which is incredible. That doesn't even mean anything. Sure. And then they just issued a full walk back and apology and said they believe in real music.

51:23This is an incredible problem for the company that makes guitar strings. I'm confident they make other things. Someone is going to correct me and be like, they're the biggest manufacturer of violas. I don't know what it is. I've played guitar and they're the guitar string company. And they should probably lean into being the analog guitar string company and not have AI anywhere in their process. They threw someone on their bus. Like, we didn't want to do this. It just happened that the music was recreated with AI. Got it. This is right next to the CEO offender describing having bandmates as analog.

51:56And then having to do a full walk back. You were following him much more closely.

52:01David Pierce:So, okay, this guy's name is Bud Cole. He's a CEO offender. Unbelievable name for the CEO offender to be named Bud Cole. I imagine him sitting on a stage playing blues guitar. He gave an interview, I believe in May. to the magazine T3. And he said, among other things, I think AI has existed in music as long as there's been recorded music, which what? Sure, bud. And then he says, I actually believe cover music has been sort of analog AI for a long time. I listened to a lot of REM, U2, The Smiths, and The Cure, and at some point I got sick of just listening to them. I wanted to play it, so I learned to play guitar.

52:36David Pierce:To compare that to AI is so fundamentally insane. And this goes, I mean, this goes back to what you were saying about the difference between humans and computers, right? Like it's one thing to say, I listened to a bunch of Smith songs and so I learned how to play a Smith song on the guitar. The idea, just at a very simple way, the idea that I play the same notes and am thus playing the same song is bananas. And anyone who has ever heard a song, a song knows that to be true. But then this guy, I think without meaning to, is basically denigrating every music artist ever in the history of music, which is a wild thing for the Fender CEO to do.

53:19David Pierce:But he basically is like, we are going to free people up from the nightmare of having to learn other music and play with bandmates and just create whatever they want to. Yeah. This is, by the way, the same thing that the CEO of Suno has said over and over again. Yeah. But only one of them is trying to sell me guitars. Like, Suno's at least trying to sell me AI software. I get why they would say that. Bud Cole has guitars to sell me. If you listen to a lot of R.E.M. U2, The Smiths, and The Cure, and you want to play it, it is true that it's important to learn to play the guitar. You also definitely need to buy a delay pedal.

53:55And so I think that is probably a better expansion opportunity for Fender. Here's the Johnny Marr sound from How Soon Is Now. No one has ever been able to figure it out. AI will figure it out for you. That would have almost made sense. this does not no suno by the way uh also under fire and they've unveiled download song caps now uh because they know that there's mass exports of suno music flooding platforms they're under fire actually ashley carmen uh former star verge reporter ashley carmen now at bloomberg just an entire profile of suno including interview with the ceo over at bloomberg with luka shaw that piece is great they know that they're in trouble like they have to meaningfully participate in the music industry in some way.

54:41They just signed a deal with BMG. They've got other deals in the works. They're in copyright hell because everyone's suing them. But the music industry secretly loves Suno.

54:50David Pierce:Right. They're percolating all over the music industry all the time because artists who do know how to play their instruments, who do know stuff, still find it interesting and easy to prompt Suno to give them a sketch. And then sometimes that sketch just ends up on the tracks. Right. And I think the trick is when is that deception? When is that garbage? When is that slop? And when is that something meaningfully new and interesting? And it's, I don't know that there's an answer across the board. And all of these companies have just rushed forward to be like, this is the future without accounting at all for are we deceiving people?

55:27How will they know? And are they going to hate us for it?

55:30David Pierce:My most maybe controversial opinion on this front is that I actually think the line is somewhere in the middle. Like we're going to hear from a lot of people watching and listening to this who are like, the answer is clear. As soon as you use any AI tool, it is tainted and ruined and I'm out. And I respect that opinion. I just don't agree with it. I think to the extent that AI is software, which is a thing that I believe, can you use software to make music? Sure. People freaked out when we started making computer music because you could make a drum kit in GarageBand. I don't think that makes it not music anymore.

56:05David Pierce:If you want to disagree with that that's fine but i do think that is the interesting conversation in ai to have and in a funny way like you talk a lot on this show about how music always is at the front of every technology question it is so perfectly suited to have this discussion about like i think i think most reasonable people will agree that typing a sentence into suno and generating a song is not an artistic expression some people think that it is suno ceo certainly thinks that it is I do not and you will not convince me otherwise. Somewhere in between there and you are not allowed to open your computer is the right answer.

56:42David Pierce:And I think it's actually going to be really interesting to watch the music industry from all sides, the creatives, the platforms like Spotify on this front. You mentioned the personas thing. They're very clear that this is not about AI generated music. This is about AI personas, people, artists who are wholly AI creations, In part because Spotify can't figure out how to detect or litigate what makes AI music because that would require Spotify to make a decision about when a music becomes a piece of AI generated work. And nobody knows. And we should really figure it out. We should really figure it out.

57:16Like as people, as societies, as businesses, like that is the question in front of so many people.

57:23David Pierce:And it really does feel like the music industry is just the deepest in it right now. But it's kind of coming for everybody. the music industry is always at the vanguard like i'm always saying for a few reasons one everyone always listens to songs over and over again so hollywood streamers you might have watched infinity war 50 times that is the most anyone has ever watched infinity war do you know what i mean like that's the max most people watch that movie once or twice and that's it and then you watch clips on it bootlegged on tiktok for the rest of your life But you've consumed that movie once or twice.

57:57Your favorite show, even if you're a massive weirdo like David and you're just streaming The Office 24-7 in the background of everything you do all the time. Like, you're only watching that so much. Music is infinitely consumable. I've probably listened to London Calling by The Clash 10 ,000 times. High Fidelity is on Netflix, so I keep watching it by accident. By accident, for sure. That's not like a perfect Neelai movie. Definitely not. You just like watch two. It's a place in Chicago. I can't get enough of it. Nick Hornby, who wrote High Fidelity in one of his other books, he wrote that he has listened to Thunder Road by Bruce Springsteen every day of his life.

58:36Wow. Infinitely consumable material. Like, there are songs like this for lots of people, right? There's music like this for lots of people. So you have over and over and over again, you have the opportunity to sell the same product over again. It is also mostly a closed ecosystem. There's only a handful of record labels. There's only a handful of distributors, a handful of big agents. at this point there's only one artist in the world her name is Taylor Swift and they all are repeat players so they're all doing deals with each other all the time and if they overdo it then they won't get a deal the next time so they're motivated to like make long term deals and then the music industry is so litigious and so protective of its value because of these other two qualities that they sue people if you screw them in a way that Hollywood doesn't right And so you just have this machine that figures out how to make music worth money over and over and over again because the catalogs are worth something.

59:34If you buy one of the big catalogs from Neil Young or someone, that's worth a lot of money to you in a way that buying the entire back catalog of Warner Brothers when it eventually crashes into the ocean might not be worth anything to you.

59:48David Pierce:Right. And so all of this means that these issues will get figured out in music first in like maybe annoying ways, maybe the wrong ways. But there will be some set of answers. And I think one of those answers looks like Suno has to put the labels on it. If Suno generates a song with vocals, the vocals will be tagged as not a real person because people particularly hate that. On and on and on. And Spotify will take pressure from Universal and BMG and whoever else to label the stuff generated by Suno in very specific ways because the human artists won't participate with Spotify. And on and on and on it goes because it's a closed ecosystem that knows how to make money.

1:00:31And then whatever happens there will come to YouTube and Disney Plus and TikTok because the model will exist in music. And this is a prediction. I'm not saying this will definitely happen, but there's a reason why everything happens in music first.

1:00:44David Pierce:It's a good theory. Do you remember that phase of music in like the mid aughts when the first 25 seconds of every song was all the producers saying their producer tag? Yeah. And you just get six of them in a row and it would always end with like DJ Khaled just being like DJ Khaled. It was great. Another one. Another one. Right. We're going to get that but with like AI labels at the beginning where it's just at the very beginning of every song. It's just going to be like Suno. And that's how every song is going to start. A Suno producer tag is actually great. I'm actually, one, I'm shocked there's not a DJ calling himself Suno already.

1:01:15True. Just take the credit for it. And the second, it was producer tags. And for a hot minute, my friend, it was face tattoos. If you recall, the SoundCloud rappers and their face tattoos, just to stand out from the crowd, were a real thing. And whatever the AI version of face tattoos, it's coming for us. Unfortunately, it might be face tattoos. We should take a break and then get to the lighting round.

1:01:38David Pierce:But I do, I just want to leave us with one more piece of evidence in the everybody knows this is a problem bit of the story here, which is from Mike Minton, the chief product officer at Twitch. Twitch just rolled out a new thing where they basically are starting to train Amazon's models from Twitch content. They made it opt out, which means that by default, everyone on Twitch is being used in this program unless they go to opt out. He was asked, why not make it opt in? What a very simple thing to do is just let people choose to be part of this or not. And his answer is, if it was opt-in, nobody would opt-in.

1:02:17They know! This is the true nature of all opt-in. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Would you want to opt-in in targeted advertising? You want this bad thing? Yeah. This is my point. They know, right?

1:02:30David Pierce:It is increasingly clear to all of these companies that people do not want this. and they are in a position of either having to make hard decisions or run afoul of Wall Street and the economy in a very real way. And I don't envy the people in that position, frankly, but boy, are they just making user hostile decision after user hostile decision. You know, I'm not up on the nature of the relationship between Twitch creators and Twitch the platform. I'm guessing it's as testy as the nature of all platforms and creators. We're going to come to some YouTube changes in the lightning round. My prediction is that the music industry figures out some labeling and attribution stuff first.

1:03:14My prediction right next to that is YouTube undergoes some sort of AI training creator crisis first. Right? Because they have basically opted all their creators into training and they're making it harder to make money. and somewhere in there is a very angry swirl.

1:03:33David Pierce:Yeah. I mean, it is now, I think, basically beyond doubt that YouTube was a foundational part of the training data for every AI model everywhere. Yep. And boy, have creators not had their full say about that. Well, let's get to some of that stuff. Let's take a break, then we're going to come back. We're going to do the laying around. We'll be right back. Hey, Chicago. Class it up with Crocs. You know back to school is coming in fast. So why wait to find your new fave footwear? Step into a local croc store and step into your new look. Try it. Style it. Make it yours. Because the right pair doesn't just show up.

1:04:14It shows off. First day fits, handled. Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest croc store today. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by Facebook.

1:04:53So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

1:05:22David Pierce:all right we're back it is time now for the lightning round beginning with i get to escape this i just realized i don't have to do this for a while but you have to every week and this week america's favorite podcast within a podcast brendan car is a dummy um brendan car is a dummy brendan car is a dummy

1:05:53All right. That's from Rich Straffolino, who sent this in with the caveat that it is, quote, bad in a distinctly human way. It does seem like you drank a lot and opened the soundboard, but in like a fun synthwave way, you know? Yeah. David, I got a surprise for you. You know, you're having a baby. I hired you a new night nurse. His name is Brendan. He's coming to your house. he's just gonna sit with my baby in one arm and on the phone with like a Comcast in the other from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. He's just gonna look at your shoulder and be like you can't say that every single day. He's gonna yell at the late night TV while he's in play with my baby.

1:06:33That's not funny. I mean, it's pretty good. I'm down, I'm ready for this. He's coming to your house. Oh, God. No, thank you. What do you do this week? Brendan Carr this week is, it's a complicated, it's not the usual, we are banning speech and being a traitor to the First Amendment, Brendan Carr said. So I'm just letting you know, there's a switch up. This week, the FCC has taken to tweeting proudly about how shotgun banning different things has led to a resurgence of manufacturing in America. Oh, sure. That's exciting. They tweeted, made in America following the FCC's action to ban imports of new models of foreign produced drones.

1:07:13There's been$5 billion in U.S. drone investment, thousands of new American jobs, and new U.S. factory square footage. Read more. And then actually, this is particularly good. They retweeted Rapid Response 47, which is an official White House account that posted a bootleg clip of Fox News visiting a Michigan drone startup called AG3 Labs. Perfect. Perfect. Just a little copyright infringement thrown in the mix there. Love it. Can't be happier about it. They also tweeted, economic independence under a Brendan Carr FCC. We have taken action alongside the executive branch to ensure that America is not reliant on hostile foreign nations for drones, routers, advanced robotics or power inverters.

1:07:52They tweeted a link to a study about the manufacturer of power inverters in America, which is going to hit some high number. They forgot to note that the research note that they tweeted also pointed out that they would be vastly more expensive than the Chinese power inverters we were looking for. This is all very good. Fabulous. So this is on its face great, right? We've banned Chinese products or Chinese components. That has led to a resurgence in American manufacturing, which is one of the biggest policy goals of this administration. And then you scratch at it and you're like, oh, none of this is actually happening.

1:08:29And it's right up there with tariffs. I think this rhymes with, we're going to put tariffs on all this stuff, and that will move manufacturing back to America, which has basically not happened.

1:08:39David Pierce:No, instead it just made everything more expensive. It made everything more expensive, and the tariffs got knocked down. So as Sean Hollister on our team has been pointing out over and over again, these bans are, first of all, fundamentally ineffective. If you want to buy a DJI drone today, you can. These manufacturers are finding ways to get these products onto shelves. Sean is basically the compliance officer for the United States of America right now. He keeps finding stuff and sending it to the FCC and saying, isn't this illegal? And the FCC keeps not responding on the record. And I'm just pointing out that if they had any stones, Brendan, they would respond on the record with a named spokesperson per our background policy instead of just saying some stuff we can't print.

1:09:18Pointing it out. That is the state of the reporting right now. Sean Hollister every day is like, I bought another illegal Chinese camera. Do you have anything to say about this? Look at all these drones in my house now. And every day the FCC has nothing we can print to say about it. Perfect. And then the things vanishly disappear from Amazon shelves. This is a real dynamic that is happening. We're going to report it all out. I'm just putting a little pressure on our nation's government to respond to the record. The other thing is that even these companies that claim to be doing all this investment and manufacturing all these devices in the United States are not actually doing it.

1:09:53because what they're really doing is importing components through other channels to get the United States and doing final assembly here in the United States. I know this because we just had Evan Smith, the CEO of Altana on Decoder. Altana is a startup that does massive supply chain tracking and data. They just make it easier for goods to move around the world. They've built huge platforms that everyone uses that can track everything. And I asked him specifically if manufacturing is moving back to the United States, and he specifically responded with respect to drones. Here's what Evan Smith said about drone manufacturing in America.

1:10:27The Chinese control roughly 90 % of the, you know, relevant value chain components for autonomous systems. So even if you have a U.S. startup that's saying, hey, we're making everything here in America. No, you're not. You're assembling component parts to make an air or land-based drone. And, you know, you're saying made in America. Yep. Here's lying. And here's our nation's government being like, look at these cool lies. So what we have in America is like, we have screwdrivers. Everything else comes from China. Here in America, we have the screwdriver. Yeah. And look, you can say it is our goal to move component manufacturing and component supplies closer to America or in America specifically.

1:11:11There's a lot of that going on. There's a lot of shipping to Mexico or Canada, which have different relationships with China, and then shipping to the United States a slightly more finished product. Right. And maybe you can get around it. And the German administration wants that to stop too. Like there's all this stuff happening, right? There are rules and the company's trying to get around the rules and all this is fine. Like this is the nature of the system. None of this has resulted in true American manufacturing end-to-end of these products. There is some investment occurring, but we haven't actually achieved the goal.

1:11:43and we can tout the investment, but the shotgun approach to banning things left and right, the FCC just banned Roombas. And they didn't actually notice until Sean noticed that the rule is that they banned Roombas. And like, this is where we are with Brendan Carr's FCC. We're doing big First Amendment violations with speech. We're issuing laws that make no sense in regards to broadcasters and how much broadcasters can be owned by a single company. We're doing corrupt favors for Trump cronies left and right. And then over here, we're issuing blanket bans based on national security that are not achieving their outcomes and then openly lying about the outcomes being achieved.

1:12:25And you don't have to look too far to see if the outcomes are being achieved. You just have to look on Amazon to see if you can buy a DJI Phantom. And the answer is you can. And it boggles the mind that Brendan thinks everyone is as stupid as he is. Because you can just see that he banned foreign-made routers and a bunch of router companies said, whoa, hold on. Can we get an exception? And he gave them exceptions. And the mechanism of that, still a little unclear, but based on everything I know about the Trump administration, suggests only one of two possibilities. And neither of them are fully above board.

1:13:01No. Anyhow, Brendan, if you can answer how any of this works or how you're going to move component manufacturing back to America or whether the router ban is effective in the slightest, please join the show. We'd love to have you on. I have a long list of questions for you at this point. My AI will ask them politely of you. I mean, he's upstairs. I can just go get him. He's watching TV at Davidson. He's just hanging out. Yeah. Also, if you have babysitting availability, I'll pay you above market rate. Anyhow, Brendan, that's been Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:13:41I will say we have the other Brendan Carr is a dummy theme song that we love that I've asked that we license. And there's a big debate on our team because it's obviously AI made. True. You want to have a real emotional breakdown. there's a hot Brandon Carr's a Dummy theme song. I feel nothing about it. I think we should play it again. All right.

1:14:06David Pierce:I have a lightning round item for you, Neal. Yeah. This is a segment that we're going to do one of because I'm leaving for a while. It's called Numbers or Lies and Everyone Should Stop It. As you may recall, I had a long obsession with my running thesis that everybody's view count is nonsense and that views don't matter and they're all lies and you should never believe them all. I had a similar experience this week with two companies, OpenAI and Google, both declaring that they have reached a billion users. So Sundar Pichai tweeted this week that Google Gemini now has a billion users. Big, huge, incredible number.

1:14:45David Pierce:Last week, OpenAI kind of buried in a blog post that ChatGPT had hit a billion users. But I went, reported that out, managed to confirm that, yes, They have, in fact, hit a billion users. This has started kind of a firestorm all over the Internet because does it does it make like emotional sense to you that a billion people use Gemini every month? Like, does it does it feel popular in that sense? It just depends on how U.S. centric your worldview is. OK, explain. Because Google is just available in many, many, many more countries than Chachie. Yes. I mean, that's definitely true. But I think people's immediate reaction to this, which I think is largely correct and also just really interesting, was there is no way Gemini is as popular as ChatGPT.

1:15:33David Pierce:It's just impossible. Even their numbers are different. Google reported a billion monthly users. ChatGPT apparently hit that number a while ago. They wouldn't tell me more specifically than a while ago. But they hit a million, a billion weekly users a couple of weeks ago in July. So monthly versus weekly is meaningful, but I would say, historically speaking, not like orders of magnitude different necessarily. But it just it feels wrong to people in this space that a billion people use both of these products. And so everybody starts essentially accusing Google of cheating. There's this because like a lot of these people come from one one way you might use Gemini is by owning an Android phone.

1:16:18David Pierce:right like if you have a recent android phone you have used gemini by accident it just happens it happens all the time and you count as a user gemini is in chrome constantly asking you to do stuff there's the gemini app so like google has gone way out of its way to say that no the the gemini that pops up to help you do stuff in gmail does not count but an android phone does and on the one hand that's fair enough right like you're using the assistant as it is intended to be used but everybody is like, this doesn't count. All of these billion people had to go get ChatGPT and use it on purpose. You're cheating.

1:16:57And like, to me, it's like, well, kind of, right? Like they certainly didn't have to work as hard, but you're also describing all of Google's strategic advantage in this space all at once. Yeah, Google's distribution advantage was a huge advantage, is not cheating. Exactly, exactly. And yeah, so I have just been, I have been so caught up in this that like, essentially what Google's saying is a lot of people own Android phones. which is true, but it also makes Gemini really popular.

1:17:21David Pierce:Like it, both of those things are true at the same time. And I think, you know, we talked a lot about Demis Asabas and Jeff Dean and this sort of shakeup in the AI industry. You did a decoder this week. The headline was basically like, does Google even want to win an AI? And this feels right next to that to me, that it's like, actually, Google isn't even playing the same game that OpenAI is playing. And I think that drives everybody crazy who like really wants to watch the model benchmarks. compete with each other. And Google's just over here being like, buddies, we got the third best model and Android.

1:17:55And we are going to win. Yeah. And we have everyone's training data and we own YouTube. Yeah. Bloomberg ran a piece this week. It's just like, Google is killing the web. Right? Because there's like the search traffic has gone down. And one, it's nice to be right. It's nice to be validated in this way. Did they name you specifically? I actually, I didn't read that. I just saw the headline. I was like, well, here we go. At this point, this headline exists every single day. Yes. And it is just abundantly clear to me that Google has moved on from wanting to fight the same fights as everybody else.

1:18:29Right? Like, publishers can be mad at Google all day and all night. They've got YouTube. And eventually, YouTube creators will be mad at Google all day and all night. But where are you going to go? Right. Which is what they basically said to publishers for 500 years. And ChattoBD can say they have more users. Google's like, we have Android. And this is just how Google works. It's probably the reason Google doesn't always appear to have its foot on the gas. Right. And they don't feel that competitive pressure in the same way, but they've also won. Right.

1:18:58David Pierce:They don't have competition in the same way. It's not open. ChatGPT is not competitive with Google in the way that I think open AI would like you to think that it is. yeah i mean again how long ago was it when satya nadal said he was going to make google dance on decoder no one danced nope there was there was i mean there was some dancing in the sense that like all the executives are different but not in the sense that like one point of market share moved yeah yeah i'll actually connect this to my lightning round item which i hinted at earlier YouTube has made it vastly harder to get into the partner program and make money on YouTube.

1:19:37So we've said this over and over and over again. The vast majority of creators do not make their money from the platforms. Wait, they make their money from brand deals. The platforms are notorious for not really paying anyone for content. The gold standard of paying creators for content is YouTube and the YouTube partner program and the rev share. and you can have a really big debate about if YouTube started today, would they have the same payment terms to creators? Because when they started out early, it was a little bit more idealistic at the time. It wasn't clear that everyone would win in the same way or that they'd be so dominant in the same way.

1:20:11And so the partner program has been historically quite generous compared to what TikTok has or what Instagram has, which is nothing. I was going to say, not actually generous, but certainly relatively generous. Yeah, against that floor. Instagram is nothing. There's some amount on TikTok. And then YouTube is like, compared to that, the most generous any platform has ever been. Until now. Right. Because there's a surge of creators and YouTube is paying out more money from its spot to more creators. And so they've just made it harder to get into the partner program. So you now need at least 1 ,000 subscribers and 8 ,000 qualified watch hours over the past year.

1:20:49These are almost impossible numbers for a small creator to hit out the gate.

1:20:53David Pierce:Yeah, 8 ,000 watch hours is a big number. This is a double. Or, this is my favorite one, 20 million shorts views in the last 90 days. Good Lord. That is, the only way to do that as a new creator is to pump so much garbage into the feed that you collect as many views as possible. Yeah, that's like hundreds of thousands of shorts views every single day, always, forever. Just 90 days to get into the program. No, but then you have to maintain a super high number like that usually to stay in the program. You have to maintain 10 million shorts views over 90 days to earn money from the shorts creators pool, which is a different pool of money.

1:21:33But if you don't hit that, you don't fall out of the program.

1:21:36David Pierce:Okay. All I'm saying is if you're a new creator getting into the money now basically requires you to front a bunch of money. right you have to you have to make a bunch of videos for extremely free for quite a while to hit any of these numbers 8 000 watch hours is a is a lot right if you're a new creator getting to a thousand subscribers is already challenging 8 000 watch hours is even more challenging you to do the math every one of those people has to watch you for eight hours yeah uh there's just something here that suggests to me youtube is not just making it harder to make money with them.

1:22:13They're trying to radically shrink the amount of money they actually pay out, even though the amount of content coming out of the platform is going up. And there's a lot of analysis here that says this is because of an influx of AI content, right? Under the previous requirements, you could probably just flood the platform with a bunch of AI content, hit the previous numbers, and go. And that has, in fact, become like a noted public strategy of a lot of This is an arbitrage opportunity all day long. And by the way, the number of people automating Instagram in this way is like off the charts. Oh, yeah.

1:22:45Everywhere, all the time. But Instagram doesn't pay out any money, so Instagram doesn't care. YouTube pays out money, so they have to care. And their response is to make it vastly harder to make money on YouTube. Now, existing creators aren't going to be affected by this. Like I say, every creator gets their wings when they make a video about how mad at YouTube they are. And they all do it. They all turn into beautiful business butterflies when they make the video about how YouTube is a monster that they can't get away from. But something is going to come here. Something is going to happen when a cohort of new creators shows up to make money on YouTube and they discover that it's effectively impossible.

1:23:22And actually what they should do is go get brand deals. Right. The pressure to go get brand deals and be a niche creator is going to go up because the actual programmatic money you can get from YouTube is now harder to get. Aren't we kind of already there, though? That's going to turn YouTube into Instagram in a more meaningful way.

1:23:39David Pierce:That's interesting. I guess that's true. And then it actually rests some of the control away from YouTube. Because a big part of YouTube's appeal for a long time has been it is a place you can actually make money. We've talked about this many times on the show. a lot of people use a lot of platforms, but they feel like YouTube is their most important one because it is the thing that pays the money. And even if it's not all of your money, that thing is still meaningful. And I think you're right that even because one of the pieces of feedback I've seen to this all week is a bunch of people being like, well, I don't care.

1:24:09David Pierce:I don't make any money from like 10 million shorts views like that and a nickel will buy you a soda. You know what I mean? But I think we're in a position now where like it actually that may be YouTube testing the where you're going to go theory in a pretty powerful way. Right, and it's right next to eventually a bunch of creators are going to find out that Google trained on their content and they're going to be unhappy about it because they will want payment. These platforms just don't pay creators. They don't pay creators enough and it's turning everything into advertising and I can rant and rave about that like I usually do but everyone's heard it before.

1:24:43What do you got, David?

1:24:44David Pierce:Okay, I have a brief Ramageddon update for you. Things are bad. prices continue to go up. We talked about the Pixel 11 prices on the live stream on Wednesday. Everybody should watch that. But there was a really interesting bit of data from a research institution called CounterPoint about cheap phones. One of the things we've talked about a bunch on the show is the possibility that the market for inexpensive phones is essentially going to evaporate because you just can't make cheap phones anymore. And what CounterPoint found is that sales of phones under$100, which are crucially important to lots of people all around the world, dropped 64 % year over year in the second quarter of this year.

1:25:30David Pierce:And essentially the main thing that happened is everybody but Samsung and Motorola just can't be in the market anymore. So the others portion of the chart here, it's basically like Samsung, Motorola, everybody else, the everybody else portion of it dropped by about half because there are just aren't companies that can afford to float these things anymore. If you're Samsung and Motorola, you can shrink your margins. You can make your money somewhere else. You can do things to stay in the cheap phone market. But if you are a manufacturer of cheap phones who mostly makes cheap phones, there is essentially not a path forward for you at this moment in time.

1:26:12David Pierce:It's just it's bad on so many levels but we're at a point now where like if you if you make a phone that costs a hundred dollars most of that sales price for not not just like material price most of that sales price is going to be eaten up by even the like meager amount of ram in the phone if you can get your hands on it so like this this is an industry and a price tier of gadgets in general we have wondered if it would survive this and increasingly the answer just looks like no Yeah, I think it's gone. And by the end of the year, I think these are gone. Yeah. I think there's probably still some stock on some shelves, but none of these companies are motivated to go figure this out right now.

1:26:51No. And it's hard to even like be mad at them about that.

1:26:55David Pierce:It's just, it's a horrible business idea to go spend$70 on RAM and try to charge$90 for your phone. Don't do that. That's called bad business. But it's bad out there, dude. If anyone wants to report out a story about like, weed dealers and the crisis in burner phones. I'm just saying. That's pretty good. It's probably something. Yeah. You're a young reporter on The Make. Give me a call. The thing like at the counter at CVS is now$300. There's like blue phones. Yeah. What are you going to do when you can't get a burner? It's pretty good. There's a lot. It's pretty good. All right. What's your next one?

1:27:30I guarantee you there's a young reporter in New York City who can get that story. Oh, absolutely. Go buy every burner in New York City. Neil, I will pay for them personally. I got a good one. Lauren Feiner reported this one this week. She interviewed the CEO of Flock, which makes the license plate cameras.

1:27:45David Pierce:Yeah. Everybody's least favorite company on earth right now, I would say. And so Flock has the same problem as the AI companies, the data center companies. They need to go make everyone love them. Unlike the AI companies, the data center companies, they can't just like show up in your local community and be like, we'll buy your electricity for you. Just like let us have a data center. They're not flush with cash in the same way. So the CEO flock said to Lauren, we thought that there would be some regulation around surveillance that would tell us what to do. And we were wrong about that. So Garrett Langley.

1:28:23By the way, with the parenthetical implied there being, so we went and did a bunch of surveillance. Yeah. So we went super hard at surveillance because no one was here to stop us. Garrett Langley to Lauren, he's seen firsthand how slowly the regulatory process can move. It's such an obvious way to curb abuse, he said, of the tool that lets agency administrators require case numbers before searching the worldwide surveillance drag that he built. And I said, fine. You know what? I think that's right. We got it wrong. We should make case numbers a requirement. This is this is he's going to make people love him this way.

1:29:00This is so bonkers, dude. I think the whole flock thing is absurd. Like the idea that a company came along that made Ring look sort of benevolent and neighborly is bananas to me. And this is what flock has done. They're like, look, we have horrible dystopia cameras. This is fine, right? Everyone's like, no, thank you. This doesn't even like tell me when there's a package at my house. It just sucks. And so to come in and be like, oh, we didn't do anything because we were waiting for somebody to tell us to stop.

1:29:33David Pierce:And so we never did is so like even even his apology is so grossly saying the quiet part loud. It just really bums me out. He's like, American democracy didn't stop us, but you all hate us. Right. So we've added some fields to the database. You want an argument against capitalism? Like there's a damn good one. There it is right there. The ACLU released an analysis of the changes, and it says, quote, they appear more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms these products create. Yeah. Very good. Langley has been a fighter in the past, but everyone – I mean, he's called D-Flock a terroristic group.

1:30:14Woof, really? And they just have a database of where Flock cameras are. So he's walking back. He's going to be a real cuddle bug now. He got a bunch of things wrong. But I had a friend text me and say, you're all about data centers being the thing that realigns left and right in America and brings people together in midterms. Flock cameras and surveillance is the other one. Keep an eye on it. And I think that might be true. There was a political article about it this week. And the headline was something like, work boots and Subarus come together to protest flock. It's a great headline. That is good.

1:30:46David Pierce:It is really, flock, I feel like just in the last couple of weeks, has really broken a certain kind of containment. and I feel like everyone is aware of what it is doing now in a way that I think your friend might be right. Letting the government track your movements without permission is just, what are you doing? That doesn't seem right in any way, shape, or form. Well said. All right, on that note, I got a baby to have. We need to get out of here. Neal, who's on Decoder next week? Decoder next week is Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief of Semaphore. They're launching a big new thing called Silicon Valley and the World.

1:31:21he keeps describing their event series as Davos with follow up questions which is very good it's very good we talked about publishing we talked about the army of teenagers working for free on platforms Semaphore uniquely big website spends a lot of money one of the few without a paywall so we just talked about I've had a lot of media people on Dakota recently

1:31:41David Pierce:Ben also not short of opinions about the future Ben is absolutely not short of opinions that was a really fun conversation it's good hang looking forward to that one Also, go listen to the decoder from this Thursday with Hayden about the Google stuff and AI. Hayden's done a lot of really good reporting on what's going on with Google's AI teams. She has really good perspective. That's a good episode. All right. We need to get out of here. Neal, you're alone for six weeks. Are you going to be okay? Jake's going to be doing a lot of stuff. We have a really fun run of guest hosts. Don't worry. It won't just be Neal.

1:32:13I like how David immediately answered that question. He's like, Jake will fix it. Jake will be here to keep Neil I company. That'll be great. I'm going to, yeah, it was super fun last summer. It's insane that it was last summer that I did this already. I was also gone last summer.

1:32:28David Pierce:Yeah, you were also gone last summer. We had Hot Girl Vergecast summer. It went fabulously. And now we're going to have, I don't know what this one's going to be called. I'm just going to crash out with other people who are like, what are you doing? People listen to this show? It's going to be great. I will tell you if they launch a foldable iPhone, there is a 100 % chance I am going to bully my way onto that live stream with a baby. It's going to be great. It's going to be rad. I'm excited about it. Until then, a reminder, as always, the best way to get in touch with us about all of this and everything.

1:32:59David Pierce:If you have knocked down a flat camera recently and you want to tell us about it, email us, vergecasttotheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. And the best thing you can do to support all of this is to subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our newsletters. all of our coverage of Google and Flock and insane things that Mark Zuckerberg says and everything else. Theverge.com slash subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Verge Cast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk.

1:33:28We will see you next week. I'm going to be gone, but we've recorded a bunch of stuff.

1:33:33David Pierce:So things that we have made already are going to keep appearing. We actually have a couple of really fun episodes coming up at the beginning of next week that I think folks are really going to like. I am just going to sit and listen to them loudly in my living room. And I'm very excited about it. We're going to miss you, buddy. I know. I'll miss you too. Give me a good one so I can leave. Rock and roll.

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