The Cybertruck lives, and so does OpenAI

26:57And I think, I mean, it's wild how even a year ago that seemed like a reasonable bet, right? I think there was a time when it looked like for all of the chaos and for all of the bad stuff, everybody was just going to kind of hold their nose and keep using Twitter. because to some extent there was nowhere to go and to a potentially larger extent the chaos and the fun are so close to each other on twitter that you you can ramp up one and kind of accidentally ramp up the like the the mess is the point and i think i like 12 months ago i'm sure on this show we were having this same debate and to me at this point i think it feels like a foregone conclusion that at some point or another X is going to go away in a pretty real way.

27:47I don't know if the company is going to die just because he has so much money he could float the thing forever if he felt like it. He's got investors. He has to pay off. There's a lot going on there. Yeah, but I also get the increasing sense that he is trying to set it up in such a way that if X goes away, goes out of business, declares bankruptcy, whatever it turns out to be, he wants to be a murderer. And he wants to have – that will be his like full proof positive that the world is against him and has gone woke and everything is a disaster. And now he kind of wins coming and going, right? It's either like a business victory or a moral victory or it's kind of a moral victory on either side no matter what happens.

28:25He's trying to set up this thing that I find very strange. I mean it's not that strange because it's a pretty common playbook now. Like this was the exact same playbook Trump has and continues to have. And I think it's just a really – it's difficult to counter and I think that's why it's really like useful and deeply irritating. Let me make the distinction for you. A comparison and a distinction. You're right. It's the same playbook. Yeah. Very different dudes. The election was lost. Everyone is corrupt. It was stolen from me. The bad forces came and took this away from me. That's voting with your votes.

28:57Yep. Very few people get to make that argument when it's voting with your dollars. That's true. And so Elon is now making the argument that these woke corporations are no longer buying advertising to spite him. And it is very hard to tell anyone, particularly Americans, that they have an obligation to spend money. It is just not a thing you can do in this country. Culturally, just not a thing you can do to say you have to spend money advertising dollars on this platform because it's important that this thing exists. And most people are like, what? You can't tell me how to spend my money. That was like the immediate reaction on social media and our own like comments and stuff.

29:37Everybody was just like, no, it's my money. Oh, yeah. No, it's very – like we talk a lot about free speech on the show. And like when it's anything but money, like everyone immediately sees the gray areas. There's like nuance. When it's like you have to spend money, people are like, no, I don't. No, no, sir. No, thank you. Yeah. Go fuck yourself. And it's like you're just watching him run into this, right? Yeah. Like he had this argument about Tesla at the Dilwell conference as well where he was like – I think Andrew asked him, are you worried that your tweets and your antics are going to hurt the company?

30:08He said, no, we make the best car. If you want the best car, you have to buy a Tesla, which is debatable, but it is a market-driven argument. Right. Right? We're putting our product in the market and people are going to look at an evaluation and maybe they'll evaluate me, but really they're going to want the best car and they're going to pick my car. We make the best-selling car. Okay. You're competing in the market. You're weighing all the variables. With Twitter, it's like, if you don't advertise here, you're destroying America. And it's like, that's just not how that works. That's just a weird argument, man.

30:39And to say, like, my product is objectively worse or my product is not what the market demands from me or what the market says it wants and not buying it anyway is the problem. I don't know, man. Like, it's just odd. And, like, what's going to happen right next to it is Threads is going to light up advertising. We're going to go into a holiday season where TikTok and Amazon and Google and Meta are all in Q4. They all have salespeople with real relationships. They all have content moderation teams. And they're going to say every dollar you are spending on Twitter, you should spend that dollar here.

31:11And we'll treat you nicely. We won't tell you to fuck off. Yeah. Like we'll send you some swag. Whatever salespeople do. I don't know. I don't know if this works. It's swag. It's just T-shirts from company to company floating around. And poor Linda Yaccarina, like her job is to run this playbook and she can't because her boss has just told all these people to F off. That will kill the company. And this attempt to run the martyr playbook, it will fail because you just cannot be a martyr because people didn't buy your shit. You can't be like a musician and be like, people didn't buy my album. The world is corrupt.

31:51No. I mean, a lot of musicians do that. I totally disagree with that. Well, sure, but it never hits. It never hits. No, but it's literally, this is going to sound like I'm joking, but I'm not. It's because no one else is trying hard enough. The thing Elon Musk is doing is making it his life's mission to tell everyone how X is the last bastion of free speech. Anything against X is against free speech. Like, Linda Yaccarino's tweet said, what was it, X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of free speech and Main Street, which like, what on earth does that mean? Yeah. No idea what that means.

32:28Pure nonsense. But we're now in this position where like he, I. By the way, can I just point out speech notably free on Main Street. You can find the Main Street in your town and stand on that corner and do whatever you want. Like, that's the whole point. That's the whole idea. Yeah. But you can yell, cops, arrest me. And the cops will be like, no. Depends on how many clothes you're wearing. That's true. I'll be like, one nipple's fine. But he's going to be able to do this whole thing and get to the end of this process and say, by killing X, you have killed free speech in America. And it's a ridiculous argument, but he has said it so many times that at this point, some people are going to believe him.

33:10And it's just going to be ridiculous. Like Donald Trump says it about truth social, that it is – and nobody believes it. Like part of it is Elon took this thing that was so much bigger and destroyed it so much faster that in a funny way it's going to make his argument more credible as he does this. Like he's going to be able to track those two things against each other in a way that is absolutely unrelated to the truth of the world. But it's going to work for him for some people. You've also got Twitter brain saying that. Like I think like maybe people on Twitter, like his fans on Twitter will probably believe that.

33:47I don't think anybody else out in the general world is going to be like, man, can you believe what happened? He was right. There's something to it. Yeah. Like some stuff he says, sure. I don't think you can make the Donald Trump comparison you made a few minutes ago and then make that argument. I mean they both have very passionate groups of followers and those passionate followers are going to follow them regardless of what they say. And they're both really, really good at that. And then they use that very vocal small group of followers as cudgels, right? And as barriers to all other discourse and all other actual reality.

34:26That's what he's really good at. That's what Trump's really good at. And it's interesting to watch it first play out in politics and now in tech. Yeah. It's kind of a bummer. But it's also interesting. It is definitely a bummer. I think the world might be better off that Twitter is on the decline as we go into an election year. just putting that out there yeah uh i'm not saying that the ends justify the means yeah i think the means have been very destructive lots of people have lost their jobs like all that's been bad racism and anti-semitism skyrocketing on platform i in no way am i saying that the means have been appropriate or effective i just think this argument that he represents free speech while he's suing media matters for criticizing him like this is the stuff that just begins to fall on deaf ears Yeah.

35:12Like over and over and over again. And I think that when we talk about Tesla, like he has to sell more cars and his antics with Twitter are actively making people not want to give him money, whether that's advertisers, whether it's car customers, whatever it is. The last monopoly he has is actually SpaceX. Yeah. And it's a really good one. It's a really good one. Like there's no, the United Launch Alliance is nowhere close to shipping a Ford F-150 Lightning. Like, you know, where there's like any other choice. There's no Polestar in the rocket business. I don't know. Bezos is out here kind of doing stuff.

35:50Blue Origin is like lingering. Bezos can't put a payload into space. He can put like four rich people into space. But like subspace. It's not even like full space. He's like, my girlfriend's in the sky. Like, that's what he can do. Like, maybe he'll get there. It's a long way away before SpaceX has real competition. And that's like, you can think about that any way you want. But Tesla has real competition and Twitter has real competition. And in both cases, he's reacting very differently. And I just think as we go into an election year, as things get more heated on social media, his decisions about what he amplifies, what he moderates, all this stuff, and whether or not the platform is.

36:32a safe place for advertisers because advertisers want brand safety. I think you're right. I think there's not a world in which a year from now we are talking about a Twitter, the company that exists in the form that even this diminished company exists right now. Yeah. One more thing I'll say. All right, we've officially talked too much about this. So do this quickly. It's just copyright law. I promise you. It's just me talking about copyright law. So Sorkin asked about AI. Go watch this clip. Add a quick posted tech turret write-up of this clip. It is amazing. Sorgan's like, AI, it's a lot of training data.

37:06You have a lot of training data. These copyright lawsuits might just end it all. And Musk looks at Andrew and says, by the time these lawsuits come to a conclusion, we'll have a digital god, and you should ask him. I know Andrew. He's a pretty rational god. And he's just like, what? What are you talking about? He's like, by the time these lawsuits get sorted out, we'll have a digital god and it won't matter. And that was the end. Like, there's nothing more you can do with that statement. Like, he's like, AI will have become a god. And so copyright lawsuits, who cares? And it's like, dude, those lawsuits are going to take like two or three years.

37:49Digital god's right around the corner. He's ascending as we speak. it's okay neil i digital god base model cyber truck which comes first

38:02that's tough that's tough i gotta go digital god on this one i mean honestly i would agree and i think if you're working at one of these generative ai companies you're hoping it's digital god too because these copyright lawsuits are an existential threat and the cyber truck you know it's just a truck get them ascending get going Everyone at OpenAI is like furiously ordering a base model Cybertruck right now. All right. David's right. We've talked enough about Elon. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. Talk about some other drama. We'll be right back.

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40:50All right, we're back. It feels like we should update everybody on what's going on with OpenAI this week. Yeah. It feels like there was a run of instantly obsolete emergency podcasts last week, including our own. Including our own. It was a great podcast. It was 24 hours. It was obsolete. We did our best. I enjoyed listening to it. Yeah. It was fun. People liked it. Instantly obsolete. So here's what we know. and we can kind of unpack what we think it means because there's some stuff we don't know. What we know is that Sam Altman is officially back as CEO. He is not on the board of directors. Ilya, the chief scientist, does not appear to be working at OpenAI again, is not on the new board of directors.

41:33Craig Bachman, the president, is back as president. The new board of directors has begun. Brett Taylor, the former CEO of Salesforce, on the board. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Has interesting ideas about women. Yes. He thinks you're bad at math. I mean, I have said I'm bad at math on this very podcast. That's true. I'm sorry to all other women. There are many women who are excellent at math. I'm okay. Yeah. But Larry, there's just some weird ideas, but he's apparently been in the mix as an adult. And then Adam D 'Angelo, who was on the old board, one of the guys who voted to remove Sam and Greg in the first place.

42:08And apparently Adam, they've like, Adam and Sam have like hung out. cool so the new board of directors its job is to make the actual board of directors and fill out this board and then microsoft is taking an observer seat and microsoft will not tell us who is taking that seat we have asked and they said we're not we're not gonna tell you do you think it could just be some like guy at my or girl at microsoft i think the only rational answer is kevin scott the head of ai at microsoft but for some reason microsoft i don't i don't know this yeah i'm just saying if I had to look at Microsoft? Maybe they're all on vacation.

42:43They haven't decided yet. It's not Phil Spencer. Is it possible Microsoft doesn't know? I mean, I just keep going back to, so where we left our emergency podcast was we thought that Sam and Greg were Microsoft employees who were going to start a new thing at Microsoft. And that was the thing that became most instantly obsolete because suddenly it became very clear that actually they were probably going back to open AI and it was never really official. But then Satya Nadella does a round of media interviews in which I don't want to say it didn't sound like he knew what was going on, but it kind of sounded like he didn't know what was going on.

43:19It was, it got to the point where it was moving so fast that it seemed like even he, the person who was by all accounts kind of brokering this whole thing, uh, was caught off guard by some of the turns of it. Yes. I can call her in some there. Okay. I think there was a notion that Nadella was trying to make it happen. I think that ultimately he was involved in some conversations. But we now know that Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who is a friend of Sam Emmett Shearer, who is a former CEO of Twitch, who became the interim CEO of OpenAI for five minutes. And Larry Summers and some other folks, they were the ones actually mediating this conversation.

44:01And Nadella was just like around because he wanted to protect Microsoft's interests. The other thing I know is that that round of media tours is our fault. Straight up. Oh, interesting. That's our fault. It's because Alex and I reported that Sam and Greg were trying to go back to open AI after Microsoft had made its big announcement. So Microsoft had made its big announcement. They're all going to come work at Microsoft. We're going to start an new AI thing. The stock goes up. Then we report, ah, maybe this won't happen. And now there's, like, instability. We got jittery investors. And of course, Nadella goes on CNBC and Bloomberg to say it's all good.

44:39Like, doesn't matter which way is happening. Microsoft is moving forward with Sam Altman, which was very much his message. And he kept saying, and I thought this was just the funniest thing. He kept saying, irrespective of configuration, which just sounds like he was announcing plug and play device drivers. Yeah, doesn't matter. Irrespective of how your dip switches are set. Like, we will find this USB device. We will find Sam Altman. He's not wrong. It doesn't matter what order you put the cards in. With PCI Express 4, it's like irrespective of who can figure it out. He just kept saying it. It was amazing.

45:15So I think that was that, right? Because of our reporting, we had made it clear, like, this isn't a done deal. And so I think he was compelled to go out and say, yeah, I actually don't know what's going on. Like, it's going to land one way or the other, but our investment in OpenAI is safe. Because either we will take all of these employees at very high rates, which is a massive investment for Microsoft to make to protect this investment. Or we will find a way to keep working with OpenAI. And they asked him, I think it was Emily Chang at Bloomberg, asked him, who will be the CEO of OpenAI tomorrow?

45:49And he looked exhausted. And he said, that's for the board to decide. I don't know. Oh, he also did on with Kara Swisher. And it was, you know, I interviewed a lot of CEOs. Sometimes CEOs just have a thing they're going to say, and he said the thing in all three places. But I know that what was happening there was the market thought that this thing was a done deal, and it became quickly apparent that it was actually not a done deal and actively trying to go the other way. Which it did. Which it did. Which in the end it did. And Microsoft seems very happy. and Sam notably tweeted my thanks to Satya for his support.

46:34So I think everybody wanted this to happen. And I think at one point Nadella said to Kara or Emma, like surprises are bad. Like we don't want to be surprised like this anyway. We will fix the governance of the company. So you've got the board observer seat, which again, I don't know who it will be. But it just feels like you want that to be Kevin Scott, your head of AI, or maybe Brad Smith, their chief legal officer. Like that's who you want in that spot. Just some PM. But I don't think you can – I personally do not think you can put Satya there. Yeah. I think you need a little bit of distance from the company to claim that you're not running the company.

47:12So you put your famous high-profile CEO on this board. Now you've just got another part of Microsoft, which I think Microsoft wants to keep a little bit of that distance. That's what we know so far. Then there's this weirdness where Alex Heath got a quick interview with Sam Altman and Mira Morati, the former CTO who was the first interim CEO who is now the CTO again. You did it. Yes. Nailed it. Just so you know, that was like the third take of that. And, you know, Alex is like, what should I ask? There's no question. Like, why did you get fired? And Alex asked this question five times in a row and there's no answer to this question.

47:48That continues to kind of baffle me. I could understand why the board wasn't saying anything, but, like, why isn't he? I don't know. We do know that the board has been talking. Like, I think Helen Toner, who's a member of the board, has been talking to folks saying, like, we feel confident in our decision, all this stuff. It is abundantly clear that these ideas that it was about safety or that there was a new model that could destroy the world or do basic math. It's one or the other. It's do basic math or destroy the world. Same thing. but like the notion that that spooked the board and they had to get rid of Sam so they could put in their own person that none of that appears to be true.

48:26Like no one on either side is saying this was the reason it is. It really comes down to interpersonal conflicts between a group of four people and Sam Altman. Yeah. And I think the board, uh, basically thinks like they couldn't control him and then whenever they tried, he would do something to get out of it. Yeah. And there will be an investigation. We are told, I think the results of that investigation should likely be made public given the dollar amounts and investors and employees involved. Oh, we're going to find out anyway. Even for OpenAI's employees, you need to make that investigation public.

49:01Why did this happen to us, right? Yeah. I think there's skittishness on both sides there. And we'll see. And that's another job of this new board run by Brett Taylor is to run that investigation. I think my question is if it was something like we're upset that he's moving too fast, he's being too commercial, which seemed from the beginning to be one of the issues there, particularly like his conflict with Helen Toner was particularly about that and how she'd written a paper about that. If that's the case and they come back and they say, oh, we found that was the reason why, what do they do? Because they now have a board that is very much for commercialization.

49:38And they now have their biggest investor in an observer seat on that board. And the guy who was doing all of that that they had conflict with is now still CEO of the company. Like what happens then? Well, they're gone. They've wiped their hands with this. By the way, that Helen Toner paper is worth reading. We'll link to it in the show notes or something. You know, the part that everyone is – that apparently Sam was up in arms about is she just points out that the industry had been very cautious until the success of ChatGPT. And then everyone started moving really fast. And they had abandoned the caution in favor of whatever commercial outcomes they could see.

50:16Which is exactly what happened. Which is exactly what happened. And it's actually really hard to read a criticism of OpenAI into it. She's just like compare and contrast. Like we had, you know, very famously Anthropics split from OpenAI over safety concerns. And they're like, they waited, but everyone else rushed after we had our success. That's true. Right. Well, and what's funny about that is there's a version of that story that I think is true that says OpenAI didn't do that on purpose. Right? Like I think what Microsoft did with Bing was just ruthlessly capitalistic. Right? They just said, like, I got to figure out how to make money off of this.

50:55And that's what they did. But, like, today, Thursday, as we're recording this, is the one-year anniversary of the ChatGPT launch. And, like, the thing we know beyond a shadow of a doubt at this point is that no one at OpenAI or Microsoft or anywhere launched ChatGPT thinking it was going to take over the world. There was this, like, long-term plan that everybody was on. And it's funny, if you rewind back to pre-ChatGPT and sort of asked a bunch of people at these companies what they thought the future of AI was going to look like, they all would have been more or less right, just wrong about the timeline.

51:31And then ChatGPT happened and everybody went, oh, crap, this stuff that we've been working on in the background towards this interesting long future, we have to do today. And that's what Google did. It was like, what was it, the code red within Google that Sergey and Larry put up. Microsoft starts running. everybody just starts running and it did it it lit this fire in the tech industry that took it down a bunch of how do we make money off of ai questions from people who had previously been saying we have to do this carefully we have to be thoughtful about this we have to be smart about this but it all happened like by accident it's the weirdest sort of twist of fate that it wasn't like somebody launched the revolutionary product knowing it was the revolutionary product and like turned everything on its head.

52:15It's just like somebody just like farted out a blog post and then the world changed. Like it's nuts. Well, yeah, that's the chat GPT side of it, which is, you should read David's piece, it's the fastest growing consumer product. We should reckon with it. But, you know, Satya Nadella didn't look me in the eye and say I want Google to know I made them dance. Yeah, oh yeah. Like he was headed that way regardless, right? Yeah, but I don't think he would have gotten there in February of 2023. Right. I don't know. He did make the giant investment, right? Like this, it's, it's hard to know, but like Microsoft was doing co-pilots already.

52:52They had started doing this stuff in a very small way. And I think the part of it where the stack overflows of the world were just overrun with, Oh, this is better if I just ask an AI to do it. And that's a real thing that's going on. Yeah. Maybe that would have happened anyway, but the sort of like, I'll have it write my resume for me, like just sort of like whatever's going to go on with LLMs. And you shouldn't, by the way, have it write your resume. Well, no, it'll hallucinate some great stuff. If it's going to be fact-checked, you shouldn't. If it's not, do it. Yeah. It's making me look good.

53:30And that's actually the part of your piece, David, that I think is the most resonant for me, which is now we have these tools and everyone thinks they're going to change everything. I am personally still stuck at, yeah, but they're not very good yet. Like they're good at some things. Programming a computer, everyone constantly telling me they're great at this in a way that is revolutionary. And that's because it's programming computers effectively just delivering instructions, right? Make me a set of instructions such that some input in the computer generates some output. Yeah, that's a deterministic task.

54:04You can like set an AI to it. Many people have done it before. or the internet is full of this knowledge. You can get there. Write me a new idea, something like inherently creative. I still think they fall down all the time. These non-determinist attacks, they fall down all the time. Yeah. And I continue to point out, all these companies are one copyright decision away from just not existing. And that's, and like no one, it's just like, well, let's just not look at that time bomb. Yeah. That seems, meh. Yeah, I love it. As a person who loves to do that sort of thing, just be like, oh, I'm not going to worry about that for now.

54:40Put my blinders on and go straight ahead. Yeah, that car's on fire. It's fine. Don't worry about it. There was a great, Corey Doctorow, the author and EFF activist who's been on the show a few times, wrote a really good thing this week that I'll try and make sure we link to in the show notes. Basically saying he quoted this guy named Lee Vintel, who talks about this concept of crit-a-hype, which is basically taking the sort of truths that the most optimistic people who are usually the people making products, believing that they're going to be right, and then covering it with hellscapes is the way he describes it.

55:14So it's like to talk about this world in which AI takes over everything and ruins everything assumes that AI is going to get as good as some of these people say that it is, which they have a massive vested interest in doing. And so like it's the digital god thing, right? Like just to talk about whether we think a digital god is a good idea or a bad idea is to assume that it's going to happen. And there is just no evidence in the AI that exists now that we are headed toward that place anytime soon. And this is like what OpenAI talks about with the artificial general intelligence and AGI and this idea that like we're on the brink of something that is like you're talking about, Neal, like creative and thoughtful and human and better than us at everything.

55:58And there's just no reason to believe right now in the world that we live in that that's actually coming. And it's like Corey's piece was very smart and I've been thinking about it all week because it's like we have to criticize the thing that exists, not the thing that the people who make the thing exist promise us is coming someday soon. Well, and I think what's really interesting about that is it ignores the stuff that – the harms and stuff like the actual concern you should have right now about it. Totally. Which is the stuff we talk about all the time, how it's destroying the internet. Like that's happening right now.

56:29Yeah. This second, somebody is writing garbage, having it write garbage and putting, publishing it on a website. And that gets totally ignored. This week, Sports Illustrated got caught publishing AI generated SEO affiliate garbage. Then they took it down and they blamed a company. And like, we didn't know they were using AI. And then somebody looked up the company on LinkedIn. And like literally the company is described as using AI and ML to do SEO affiliate garbage. And it's like, I don't know, man. I think Advan Commerce, the AI ML commerce company, was probably going to use AI and ML to make your commerce articles.

57:04They actually asked AI what company should we hire for this? It was the most circular excuse in the world. But that's happening. Like storied media institutions are chasing just the bottom of the barrel SEO content in a way that will pollute Google and the internet. Lots of sort of just like mid-level creatives are going to lose their jobs over this stuff at the place it is now. David, your point about we can't criticize what's to come is like our oldest rule in reviewing products is you review what comes in the box. Yeah. And when the company promises a software update will fix it, you just – we always say, all right, let us know when it comes out.

57:43Yeah. We're not going to review this promise against the promise. Sorry. It's so harsh. Sorry. Sorry. They just put out a next product. Yeah. That's a great example, actually. Yeah. We're like, we will not review a product against the promise of a software update. And Opal's like, here's a new camera. No software updates for you. Oh. That's brutal. Yeah. And so here we are with the LLMs, and some of them are good and some of them are bad. And, like, they all have different capabilities. But GBT4 right now is not a threat to the world. Yeah. I agree with that. Just a threat to bloggers. It's just a threat to the people who make affiliate commerce links.

58:21And our ability to do functional Google searches. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to see it like in YouTube. And we're seeing those other mediums too, right? Like just the ability to generate mass amounts of garbage into a world that is largely driven by algorithms that are predisposed to that garbage because they're algorithms. And they think like computers just the way this garbage being generated does. Like it's just this weird, gross snake eating its tail. and we all have to sit in it. I need to. I'm assigning myself a story. So I have this idea that you can make a list of all of Google's platforms and then you can make a list of all of Google's tools and you can just draw a line from one to the other and be like, here's the problem.

59:04You know, like you can draw a line from the pixel camera using AI to do photos to YouTube. It has a rule. It's like you need to disclose the AI in the video and you're like, well, have you guys talked? And they're like, no. That should be the headline. This is a column that you just described, Eli, called Have These Guys Talked? Yeah. And it's just literally drawing a line between any Google platform and any Google tool. Like, Google Docs now lets you do AI-generated things. And you go talk to the search team and he's like, do you know about this? And they're like, huh. It's just like a big circle.

59:41And like every part of Google has this problem, which I think is utterly fascinating. And that's just one company that runs both platforms. Another one, just this last week, the Bard team extended Bard such that you can just give it a YouTube video and it will summarize it for you. If it's a recipe, it'll just pull out the recipe. Does the creator get a YouTube view when that happens? Does YouTube know about that? Does YouTube know? That's weird, right? YouTube is an economy. Like, it is the gold standard in creator platforms where people can make a living. And Bard's like, what if we just pull everything off of it and summarize the videos for people?

1:00:24Little 12-year-olds watching, like, reading Mr. Beast videos in Bard now? He needs to start feeding Mr. Beast videos to Bard. Bard would be like, this is not a good use of your time. Google, summarize this video. Shut down. No, Eli, you just described a decoder series. And you know how much I love talking about it. Have you guys talked? You just bring two people in and you just say, have you guys talked? And then you just leave. And it's like a Big Brother style. We just record them with security cameras for an hour and that's decoder. It's perfect. It's just us making different parts of Google talk to each other.

1:01:00You could run that show for a decade. This is one of my favorite stories about early verge, just like us learning how to do reporting, how everything worked. and remember early verges like early in life cycle all these companies too yeah uh so there was just one time where basically we told google that they had scheduled two events on the same day because they hadn't talked and like and we didn't we were babies so we were like did you that you have the same is that okay is that how we normally and they're like no we have to talk to each other and like, are we in trouble?

1:01:40But no, they were just, Google's so big and sprawling that the two teams hadn't talked and they had both scheduled events in the same day. Oh boy. And it was us. We had told them. Yeah. It was very good. Have you talked? The extension of Decoder coming soon to a podcast player. All right, we should take a break. We're going to come back. We'll do a lightning round.

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1:04:28All right, we're back with the Cybertruck lightning round sponsored by no one. This could be you. I'm looking directly at you, advertisers. By not sponsoring the lightning round, you are blackmailing.

1:04:44Stop it. And I, you know, the woke mind virus has overtaken America, and that's why the lightning round does not have a sponsor. And that's the first cast. Possibly forever.

1:04:59Very good. All right, Alex, what you got? Okay, so I'm going to continue our theme of talking a little bit of boardroom drama. That's David's favorite. Yeah, David, get excited. Okay, but this one is fun because it's Disney and what actually happens here could really affect Disney. Because – so there's an activist investor. His name is Nelson Peltz. And he is really good friends with Ike Perlmutter. And Ike Perlmutter used to run Marvel back in the day. And he got fired earlier this year. Another guy with ideas. And he – boy, does he have a lot of ideas. He was like, you know what? We don't need women.

1:05:33Not a fan of them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, he didn't want a Black Widow movie. He didn't want a Captain Marvel movie. a Black Panther movie. He didn't think any of it works. He's like, you know what you need? You need a bunch of strapping young white guys out there. I feel like we're learning something else about Ike Perlmutter. We are, yeah. Interesting. But they're very good friends. Ike was fired earlier this year from Disney by Bob Iker. They are not friends. Nelson Peltz is an activist investor trying to get two board seats on the Disney board because he's mad at everything. And the Disney board is like, you just want to bring Ike back.

1:06:04And all the voting shares you're using, like 78 % of the voting shares you're using are Ike's voting shares. No. So there's a little fight there. And right now there is ammunition. There's a lot of garbage. Bob Iger was also at that deal book conference and he talked about it and he was like, yeah, Captain Marvel didn't work because we didn't have enough, like essentially adults in the room. We didn't have enough executives watching over this. We've been making bad films. And in the case of the Marvels, it was really interesting to hear him say that given that there were a lot of reasons that movies struggled.

1:06:35Yeah. Box office is down across the board this year. There was a strike. It was a film. Yeah, they couldn't promote the movie. They just straight up couldn't promote the movie. And part of it was like, yeah, it was a messy production. They did have to go back and do a whole bunch of reshoots. And the third, the back third of the film is like not as good as the first two parts. That's brutal. Like it is true. But also they've been releasing a ton of garbage for the last few years. The fatigue is set in. And so for them to be like, oh, that one just didn't work because we didn't try hard enough was really interesting for him to say.

1:07:11And so now he's like, don't worry. We're going to try harder. And that's not what you need to be saying when you've got activist investors breathing down your neck, particularly activist investors who think it's a mistake that you've made all these films starring – And Peltz is in the mix, right, with Chapek. So you got your duel in Bobs. Yeah. So you have Bob Iger. He hands it off to Chapek. The pandemic hits. He doesn't like how Shepak is running anything. He brings himself back. Brings himself back. But somewhere in there, right, Nelson Peltz shows up and, like, causes trouble for Disney along the way.

1:07:46Yeah, because he's been friends with Ike for this whole time. So he's been really supportive of Ike and supportive of, like, kind of Ike's way of doing things. And so he's really wanted a seat on that board. He's wanted to maintain a seat on that board. And he and Iger don't like each other. And we saw that at the DealBook conference. Andrew kept asking him, tell me about Pelts. What's going on with him? And he's like, don't worry about it. It's fine. Really blowing him off there. So it's going to be really interesting to see how they go about this. And I think it is very concerning when you have the largest media company in the world and you've got these guys who have a really strong reputation for not liking half of the population of the world, wanting to go back and wanting a seat at the table to dictate kind of how that company operates and including the kind of films they make.

1:08:36For me, as a woman, not my favorite thing to see, but it's happening. So we'll see how it lands. It's also true. I mean, I agree with you, but it is also true Disney is not doing great. That's true, too. Yeah. Disney is not doing great. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Iger likes to put everything on JPEG, and I think that's stupid of him. Yeah, that clock has run out. He's been back long enough. Yeah, he's been back way too long for that. I think there is a lot of problems with that company. And there's a lot of different reasons for that. I saw a really great story the other day about how Disney Plus was kind of like antithetical to the way that Disney has always done business, because Disney's business has always been circular.

1:09:10Every single thing builds, gets you to go buy something else that Disney makes, right? And when you put suddenly everything in one spot, why are you going anywhere else? It's a great deal for us, the consumer. It's a terrible deal for Disney. And Disney's got to figure out a way out of that. And their idea is, okay, well, we're going to put more into our parks. We're going to make them bigger. We're going to make them more fun, make them more accessible. They changed a whole lot of the rules there to kind of get all those park goers happy again because that was one of the things JPEG really screwed up was he pissed off all of those.

1:09:41He raised all the prices. Yeah, he raised the prices. He changed how you could get into the park and stuff like that. So, like, Iger's got a lot of work to do and I don't think he's moving fast enough. Interesting. I think he's got to move a lot faster and he's also got to start like letting off the reins and more importantly like trusting your directors, trusting your writers, trusting the creatives you hire to do their job. The fact that he was like, oh, yeah, we just didn't have enough executives watching over the Marvels is a wild statement to make because one of the big reasons that Marvel has been struggling is that there's one guy at the top, Kevin Feige, and he stretched too thin.

1:10:19And he was like kind of – he had a Midas touch. He could fix anything and he can't fix everything. Like delegate, my man. So there needs to be a lot more delegation over there. Can I tell you a story about Decoder really quickly? I had IBM's head of quantum computing on Decoder this week. I don't know what that episode – but it's coming out. And at the very end, I was like, what do you think of those Ant-Man movies? And I was just like, ugh.

1:10:42Just letting you know. Brutal. So you should get Jerry and Chad watching this. I will say as a person who was just at Disney World, they have not lowered the prices, my friend. I bought a$35 bubble wand. And boy, did we not get$35 of value out of that thing. Not even a little bit. No. Also Disney World, very entertaining because people from all walks of life are there. Yeah. And there's a monorail, which is like public transit, and watching big people in MAGA hats happily ride the train is very entertaining. And you're like, wait, this train doesn't work nearly as well as it should. It really doesn't.

1:11:20It's really not great. I would describe it. My sister is like a Disney adult, and she can work the app, and she knows the vocabulary to get you in the lines. You're in all your lines and lightning lanes. It was incredible. No adult should ever say to another adult, have you checked your My Genie Plus? That should not happen. But it does when you go to this world. But you're like, oh, this is the most incredible technocratic neoliberal bureaucracy in the world. Like if you can work the system, the world is your oyster. There's a sheen of light corruption that makes everything a little exciting.

1:11:55Yeah. You're like, is Bradley Cooper here? Does he have to stand in line? Did you get the little band? Oh, we had the band. The band flew off my wrist during Guardians of the Galaxy, and I caught it. That is, by the way, one of the best roller coasters I've ever been on in my entire life. Incredible. And then somehow I lost the band during Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a slow boat ride. No idea. Not the one where you're doing like a spiral. No. No idea how I lost it on that one. And I caught it during Guardians. Very cool. Loved every minute of it. But Max was happy. Do they make you a Guardian if you catch it in midair?

1:12:28they're just like Chris Pratt comes out and he's like you did it no that's how the ride starts is your guardian basically no kind of yeah I mean it's a ride there's a story the thing is the story comes to its conclusion during the roller coaster while everyone is screaming and they're blasting 80s music at you perfect so I have no idea what happened I wrote it twice and I'm like what happens the first time I wrote it I was maybe really enjoying It was kind of an April 20th kind of day for me. Would you say you were in the Magic Kingdom? I was in the Magic Kingdom. And I didn't enjoy it very much because I spent the entire time being like, what if my glasses fly off?

1:13:09I just spent like this and the video of me was just holding my glasses. Just be more careful. Yeah. Second time I just didn't wear it. It was good. And the Tron ride was good. It was fun. But you're just like in this place. We're like, oh, this is what you want. The taxes are very high. The services are available, but somewhat mediocre. Sometimes they just carry a man out. And if you can work this app, you can get health insurance. Yes. Like Disney World. Really good health insurance. I was not the most fun at Disney World. Everyone's like, yes, we understand that you have ideas about politics.

1:13:43But it was very fun. We had a good time. And the Enterprise Wi-Fi Network is WLAN-TWDC, which it has been apparently for over a decade. What? It's like this at every Disney property and Disney employees were posting on threads at me that it is so cumbersome that they install network devices in their house so they can get on the corporate network instead of using the VPN. All very good. I like to think that Disney World has so many devices on the Wi-Fi they can never change the network name. Like they have to walk around the entire park like hitting the reset button. All very good. All right, David, what's your lightning round?

1:14:20That was mine. I'll just do that one. I just. Neelai went to Disney World. Yeah. Very, very. I just like, I'm now imagining Neelai with like his 16-inch MacBook Pro just like sitting in line for a roller coaster. Waiting for open AI news to break. A real thing that I thought was going to happen. Yeah. Have you ever been on the phone with a source and been like, is this going to get wrapped up tonight? Because I have to go to Disney World in the morning. It's a cool line, honestly. I support it. But mine is just to, as I occasionally do, implore every website and app and person on earth to do your version of Spotify Wrapped.

1:14:59So Spotify Wrapped came out this week. This is the week of like everybody gets their year in review stuff. YouTube Music did it. Apple Music did it. Has Reddit's come out yet? Reddit does one every year. I haven't seen mine. I don't know if it came out yet. Spotify is out. Pocket Casts, my podcast app did one. All kinds of stuff coming out. This is my favorite genre of thing on the internet. I saw somebody who just posted one that was like a screenshot of their Chrome history, just showing all the web pages they go to the most. I was like, my browser should have this. I want my email to show me who I email the most.

1:15:29Should your browser have this? It does, like it or not. It has that information. It might as well show it to me in a funny way. I just think everything that exists. I want Google Calendar wrapped at the end of every year. Just to tell me. That's so brutal. That's depressing. I don't want that. Like, David, who have you talked shit about in Slack most this year? Oh, Slack should do that. That would actually be great. This is what I'm saying. Didn't Slack used to? I feel like there used to be a way where you could just see, like, who talks the most. No, this was like a weird enterprise privacy nightmare debate where, like, your Slack administrator could see who the biggest user of Slack was in your organization.

1:16:11Oh, yeah. And people were like, this is a privacy violation. And I was like, no, you work at a company, bro. You don't have privacy in the company's stuff. Not on the work laptop. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Shut it down. All right. My last, my real lightning round item, which is not about my trip to Disney World. It's lightning lane. Technocratic neoliberal nightmare of Disney World. No, it's the Epic versus Google trial. So the Epic versus Google NHS trials ongoing. showing that again is about Fortnite and billing on app stores. This is the sequel to the Apple one. We mentioned this during the, while we were covering the Apple one, I think we've mentioned the show since then.

1:16:53Apple case was very straightforward. Apple doesn't allow other app stores. They require you to use their billing system, this whole thing. There's no emails except Apple executives being like, this is stupid, go away. And so like Epic had to concoct this entire case about Apple and its monopoly and lock in. And you can believe it or not, Google is an ecosystem provider. They have lots and lots of deals. They have lots and lots of relationships. They have hardware vendors. They have hardware vendors trying to differentiate their products. There is a ton of evidence about how Google makes deals in this case and how people try to make deals with Google.

1:17:27And it is not pretty. And I think that's like the thing that we have learned throughout this entire case and throughout the DOJ case with Google is Google does a lot of deal making. So the one that came out this week that is, I think, really, really revealing is Activision tried to start its own mobile game app store on Android. So Activision proposed with Epic and with the company that makes Clash of Clans Super Solid, they would start their own app store on Android. It would be Steam for Android. And they called this Project Boston, and they were running it with one track, and they had another track with Google that was just give us$100 million and we won't do this.

1:18:05and Google just paid them the money because they don't want competition for their App Store and Android. And, you know, we'll link our story. There's all these emails about it and whether they're really going to do it and whether Google is really afraid of it. But Google paid them the money to foreclose the competition. And that there's just a lot of that in this case because there are so many companies in the Android ecosystem that are trying to get leverage over one another and Google's sitting in the middle of it. And you can put that right next to, hey, you know, Apple Maps is pretty good lately.

1:18:37Right? Like Apple had to build a competitor to Google Maps for all kinds of reasons and they made a really good one and there's a lot of conversation lately about how it is superior to Google Maps. And I think if you live in the right places, particularly for driving directions, for turn by turn, vastly superior to Google Maps. I agree. It's really good now. Okay, well, if Apple wants to make a competitor to a Google product, they can definitely do it. And they definitely have the install base to do it. and Google does not want that to happen to search and pays Apple the money. And you can put that right next to, Blizzard said we might start an app store and Google said, we don't want you to do that.

1:19:10Pay them the money. And we're just, I don't want to tell you, I think most people think that the world they live in is not done by handshakes in backroom deals. Or maybe they do now. Maybe Gen Z is wiser to the waist. They all watch Hamilton, so they all know. Is it Hamilton or Suits? Both. If you want to know how the world works, two of the two shows. Those are the two shows. Core to your understanding. No, I think there has been, at least on the internet, the idea that the internet is democratizing, that the distribution is free and open and equal. And then you get to these app stores and you get to these mobile platforms and that has instantly broken down.

1:19:54Yeah. So read that on the site. It is really, really illuminating coverage about how all this stuff works. And then when the trial is over, we will have Sean on and he can synthesize what he has learned. But it is like gleeful coverage from the courtroom from Sean. Oh, yeah. This one, the USV Google was so locked down and so redacted and so careful in everything that anyone revealed about anything. This one is the opposite. They're just like everybody is just throwing signed contracts like into the wind every morning in the courtroom. You really get the sense the discovery process here has been a joyful one for a lot of people.

1:20:32Yeah. I'm really just bummed I haven't come up with an idea that Google will pay me not to do. Honestly, it really feels like if you just go park your car in Google's parking lot and just start going, maybe I'll open an app store. Someone will just fire a money cannon into your car. Yeah. Let's head out. Yeah. Yeah. you know what's what's interesting about that point david is you know us v google the united states government doing an antitrust case they need to be buttoned up they were in a very buttoned up courtroom the united states government right now does not have a great history of pursuing these cases or a lot of pressure on them they're making a very complicated argument about search locking epic is just like f go fuck yourselves like straight up like that is tim sweeney's attitude towards about this is a moral mission for him as well as an economic one and then you have the ecosystem that is never happy with these players and a constant looking for every little ounce of leverage and you can you're right the tenor of this case is very different because epic is already gone they have nothing to lose right you get the definite sense that even if they lose they're prepared to lose having landed a bunch of punches against google and that is that That is pretty clearly the tactic here.

1:21:46And so far, I think it's working. Like, I don't know if they'll win the case, but boy, have they made Google look bad over and over and over here. Yeah. What's interesting to me, just as a person who looks at how our website is doing, is when they are up against Apple, like every one of our stories was a hit. And here we're with Google, like with the evidence that the store, like there's shenanigans afoot and we have to sell the stories a little bit harder. And I think that just speaks to, honestly, how many people have iPhones versus how many people care about how Android works. But I will remind you that Android is the most used operating system on the planet.

1:22:21And how Google manages it affects basically how computing is done. And so, like, all these little shenanigans have, like, massive downstream effects across the entire Android ecosystem. Because if Google stops making money in this way, their case for making Android the open source operating system goes a little sideways. so I guess you should read Sean's cover it is very fun I enjoy catching up on it every day this is why we invented story streams with like it's all happening and then we will have Sean at the conclusion on trial which will be soon I think we'll have Sean on to talk about yeah all right we have gone long I gotta go through rocks at a triangle but not too hard Neil is about to get arrested I'm watching the social video team make comparison videos of the metal ball versus the baseball it's a very good go or TikTok and look at that.

1:23:12Thank you to everybody who's been posting about your Spotify wrapped with the Vergecast and with Decoder. We love it. We've also got a lot of emails from people telling us about Spotify wrapped, which is great. We love it. Our hotline episode next week, David's buying advice. Yeah, we're doing a whole, we got a bunch of questions kind of organically from people who are like, I'm trying to figure out what to buy or I'm trying to buy this thing or this thing. So we're gonna do a whole bunch of those. We're just gonna grab a bunch of folks and sit around and try to help people buy stuff for the holidays.

1:23:39so if you have holiday questions email us vergecast at the verge.com which you can do about all of your feelings in general but also buying questions uh or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11 send them all in we're gonna answer a whole bunch of them on next wednesday show love it all right that's it that's vergecast and that's a wrap for vergecast this week hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866 The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Xander Adams. And that's it.

1:24:18We'll see you next week.

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