The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare

14:20Brendan Carr:The scale is what makes it dangerous.

14:22David Pierce:Right. And over and over, that keeps being correct. And take all of that for what it is, right? But then put next to it, who is this for? Like, I don't know anyone who makes this kind of thing and then feels good about it. It's either for these like craven, cynical, post on Instagram, the perfect thing kind of photos, or it feels icky. Like I like to pull people who get new pixels and start to mess around with some of the like magic photo stuff where it'll just even correct small things, right? You can slide yourself over on a bench to get a better shot or you can make sure everybody's eyes are open.

15:00David Pierce:And everybody I ask about this has this slightly icky feeling that this is no longer the photo I took. And you never quite forget that you changed the photo. So the best case scenario for this thing does not exist as far as I can tell. And so we're trading this like deeply dangerous thing for a use case that I don't think exists.

15:22Brendan Carr:Oh, I have a use case for you. You'll enjoy it. Here, you just think in your head who would use the following feature. Personal details, such as a spill on clothing, can now also be cleaned up with Galaxy AI's new ability to change outfits in photos.

15:36David Pierce:They skip right past we'll remove the spill and they're like, whole new outfit.

15:40Brendan Carr:Yeah, I mean, you can, again, watch the demo. They present it as, what if you take a photo and you like your own smile, but you want to be wearing something else? And it's like, well, I can think of a whole class of people on the popular platform X that love changing the outfits the women with beautiful smiles are wearing. What are the guardrails? But now I can download it and do it on my own phone. But now I can download it and do it on my own phone. Look, I don't know if there's guardrails. I don't know if they're going to, you know, whitelist certain words or prevent certain words from being used in these tools.

16:09Brendan Carr:I don't know if they're going to add some of the absolutely useless metadata protections that we've been covering. Just Weatherbird actually has a whole piece about how the tech industry is sort of like C2PA washing all of their AI slop. They just keep saying they're using it, but it's not doing anything for anybody. Look, I don't know if Samsung is doing that. We will ask all of the questions. But this is the downside of pretending that this market can regulate itself. Yeah. straightforwardly, this is the downside. This is a no-holds-barred competition. People like it the same way people like sugar, and these companies are all trying to sell one more phone, and unless you make them stop doing deepfakes, they will sell you the ability to do deepfakes at scale.

16:56Brendan Carr:And I'm using deepfakes loosely here, but we are now right on the cusp of Samsung saying you can make photos of people doing things they never did. just, that's what they're advertising here. That's what these features are. Wearing clothes they were never wearing in places they never were in, next to people they were never next to. That's these features. As easily as possible, too. Like, with almost no work. Yep, natural language prompting. And so, yeah, I know people are going to yell at me and they're going to say I'm an Apple fanboy because I think the Galaxy S26 camera should be legal. But I'm convinced that unless someone stops these companies from going down this road, the next turn of all these cameras will be even more dangerous.

17:43Brendan Carr:And they might not even have lenses. Like we're like this close to saying, okay, the photos these cameras create are not even depictions of light hitting a sensor. It's just whatever the AI dreamed up based on the training data it has of you.

17:58David Pierce:Do you remember that? This was a couple of years ago now. There was an art project that we talked about that was essentially that it was it was a camera that had no lens and no nothing, but it understood GPS coordinates and what it was looking at. And so you would you would press it and it would use all the available data around to sort of assemble a photo for you. And and the question it was trying to ask is, is this a photo? Like, is this what we're accomplishing? And we are we are just barreling towards that with all of these things. And even in the ways in which they say they're taking photos, there is more AI in the processing pipeline than ever.

18:32David Pierce:And so, like, it stops being even an attempt at accurately depicting reality almost immediately. And it's very clear that, again, that's what these companies are doing on purpose. And again, I just come back to, like, who is this for? No, I'm saying sugar.

18:50Brendan Carr:Like, if you let my kids eat sugar all day, people like these photos. They like these edits. They like saying, make me smile.

18:57David Pierce:I think people like sharing on Instagram. I don't think people derive actual joy from these photos. I think you can—

19:05Brendan Carr:No, I mean, my dad just turned 80, and, you know, like, my cousins were all trying to share photos with my dad when he was younger, and, like, the number of miserable AI edits that came back to me for my family just being like, this photo is dark. So I asked Trashy Media to brighten it up. And one of them was like, my dad had a different face. Oh my God. Okay, wait, you just brought up a thing that,

19:29David Pierce:okay, can I tell you the strangest thing that has been happening to me all week? So my three-year-old son is obsessed with Spider-Man. Like it's the only thing on earth that he cares about. And out of nowhere, like a week ago, well, like two weeks ago, he started asking to see pictures of Spider-Man on my phone. So he would just sit on my lap and I would just like Google Spider-Man and we would just scroll through pictures and that made him happy. And then all of a sudden he starts going, I want to see pictures of me with Spider-Man. And sort of stupidly in retrospect, I realized, oh, Gemini can do this for me.

20:02David Pierce:So I was like, I'm going to play with Nano Banana, see if this works. So I take a picture of us, a selfie picture of us, put it into Gemini and say, put Spider-Man in his picture like he's hanging out with us. And it just it just it worked. The funniest part about this is the first time it said it wouldn't do it because of copyright issues. And then I copied and pasted the prompt again and it did it. And this has been my experience all week. So I have spent a lot of time this week putting Spider-Man and Ghost Spider and Iron Man and Hulk and all these things into photos of me and my son. And once, no, more than once, but once in particular, it just completely replaced my three-year-old son with a superhero.

20:42David Pierce:and he thought it was weird. He had this moment, like he couldn't process what had just happened. And I've spent this whole week being super conflicted about like, I'm sitting here making AI pictures with my son that make him happy. Like he's enjoying this thing and he doesn't understand all the reasons it's weird and bad, but I do. And like, what am I showing this kid that are just fake pictures

21:02Brendan Carr:of him with Spider-Man? I'll give you like 10 different examples of this in the history of tech. The loudness wars in music are an enormously good example of this. In the late 70s and 80s, there's like a lot of dynamics in music. Like the quiet parts are quiet and the loud parts are loud. And you can just hear this in a bunch of classic rock albums. As we go from the late 80s into the 90s and particularly in the 2000s, everyone realizes that people like louder sounds. Sure. They just like louder things. They just perceive that to sound better. So music just got loud. The amount of compression on a track just was insane.

21:36Brendan Carr:So the quiet parts were basically as loud as the loud parts and everything was super loud. Just really loud. And dynamics were crushed out of music. You couldn't tell the quiet parts and loud parts. And consumers could not perceive this. They were just like, everything's loud. It sounds awesome. And eventually the music industry and a bunch of recording engineers and artists were like, stop it. And you can just go read about the loudness wars. This is a real thing that happened. But an industry was like, we have to get away from this problem. We're doing something bad to ourselves. We should stop it.

22:09Brendan Carr:That's one. And the retail mode setting on TVs.

22:13David Pierce:I was just about to say brightness wars.

22:14Brendan Carr:Yeah. Right. Like they're just super bright and the settings are all jacked up and motion smoothing is turned on because in the store, that's the one people like. But then when you're watching a TV at home, you're like, this is horrible. And I know what to do about it. And Tom Cruise has to make PSAs being like, turn on filmmaker mode. I beg of you because you're ruining my art. But this is an industry that, in order to just move units, destroyed the fidelity and truth of its own product. It's just all over the place. This is a thing that happens particularly in representations of art. This is just the next turn of it in my eyes.

22:52Brendan Carr:The smartphone industry knows that people like retouching their photos. They like editing their photos. They love filters. They love beauty filters. They love looking skinnier. there was a time several years ago where the split between what the asian markets would accept in terms of beauty filters was vastly different than what the american market would accept and all these companies had to walk a tight rope of saying we don't have beauty filters but here are some apps you can use in asia right and like samsung basically was like we have beauty filters like it's fine um i mean we lived through it and i think that that time is kind of over there are filters everywhere every tiktoker has a beauty filter on all the time instagram is literally on trial right now for making its product more addictive and dangerous to children and part of that conversation is what filters are allowed adam iseri and mark suckerberg were both on the stand over the past two weeks talking about what beauty filters they would allow for teenage girls like this is real high stakes dangerous territory for all of these companies yeah and then here's samsung joking about how it can change your outfits and put dogs in your photos as though those are the things people are going to do.

24:02Right.

24:03Brendan Carr:When in reality, people are going to do horrible things to photos of women with the ability to change outfits, and they're going to make all kinds of deep fakes of people in all kinds of situations they weren't actually in. And there's no way you can claim that you don't know these things are going to happen. But you're trying to sell more phones, so you make the music as loud as possible, you make the TV and the screen as bright as possible, you turn on motion smoothing, you create a deep fake camera, and you say, this is what the market wanted. And I'm telling you, there is a mechanism to regulate this industry.

24:33Brendan Carr:You can do it. One part of it is the industry itself saying we've gotten out of control. We should pull this back, which has happened in the past. You get Tom Cruise to just say, look, I need filming remote. I don't think that's happening. I don't see that anywhere in this industry right now. And the other one is to say, look, these features need to be illegal. You should not ship these features to this many people. And I know we're going to get people say, well, Photoshop could do it. I know we're going to get people say, look, the metadata will solve it. We have coverage of those things in detail on our site for years.

25:06We will link the piece where we take down the Photoshop argument like inch by inch because it does not work at scale.

25:13Brendan Carr:Yes, Photoshop has existed for years. Most people don't have it and they can't use it. Right. You make this a natural language prompt that is a whole new category of danger. C2PA does not work. Content authenticity does not work. And even if it did, platforms like X don't respect it. They don't display it. So it doesn't matter because you're still distributing content people cannot understand. I'm like fired up about this because we've been covering this for years. And it has usually been people laughing at us because I'm crashing out about photos of the moon. Right? And we just did it. We just jumped over the bar.

25:49Brendan Carr:and now we're making deep fakes on the phone with natural language prompt and calling it a camera. And there's something very bad there.

25:56David Pierce:And I think the moon bit is a useful analog here because the reason the moon part of it is scary is because it ends here, right? Like this is the end of that thing because once you start down this road, this is where you land and you can't have the good, silly, fun outfit try-on part without the horrible nude deepfakes of women part. You just can't. Like, you don't get change my outfit without put this woman in a bikini. You don't get it. It doesn't exist. There is no indication so far that those safeguards are either possible or that these companies are interested in doing them.

26:35Brendan Carr:Or have been remotely contemplated. Maybe there is. Maybe Samsung has made it so if you type bikini into this prompt, it won't do it. They have not made one hand wave at this possibility. and I will tell you from our own audience, some people are going to say, but what if I want to put myself in a bikini? And now Samsung is in what amounts to a content moderation nightmare. Yep. So look, we're going to ask Samsung more questions, but my point of view is we have crossed a line here where the market, the audience, the people should say, nope, you've gone too far. The industry should start saying we've gone too far.

27:09Brendan Carr:And if that doesn't happen, I am confident governments of the world, maybe not the United States government, which apparently doesn't function anymore. But governments around the world are going to start very quickly saying these features should be illegal.

27:22David Pierce:I think you're right. And I think there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that that first step will happen. The idea of someone in the industry saying, well, we've gone too far. We have to go back. Like, if anything, everything is accelerating in that direction. Because again, you need to sell more phones. The goal is to sell more phones. And I actually think the brightness one is a fun example because a lot of people buy bright TVs, take them home, realize it looks like shit and fix it. But it gets it out of the store. And so all they care about is the thing that gets it out of the store. And like we make a joke about turning off motion smoothing.

27:53David Pierce:Motion smoothing's on because it makes you buy the TV in the store. Makes you buy the TV in the store. Because it looks nice in some sort of unknowable way. This is, even if it's not a use case and I firmly believe that for most people it's not it is a splashy thing that they get to put on the website that will generate headlines and make people buy their phone. And they will live with every consequence downstream of that if it gets you out of the store with that phone because somebody at a Verizon store can demo that thing for you and it'll seem kind of neat yeah and I don't know man

28:20Brendan Carr:like we we were at the Boston Children's Museum last week and I I opened Lightroom and I took a person's face out of the background of a photo of my kids and you're right it feels like I know I did it yeah everyone I sent that photo to was like what a great photo and I was like I'm living in it I'm just I'm living in the ambiguity that I talk about on my own show every week but that felt at least i'll just give it back to google google their line forever has been we are here to make memories right and like there's some fuzzy amount of stuff that you can allow in the service of making a memory and i was like well my kids really were in the museum we i was actually here i actually took this photo yeah i i don't remember this person's face in the background like the the moment i'm capturing looks looked like this to me sure i don't know there's a lot there there's another hour of philosophical crisis in that moment but at least it's still mostly true yeah this is just fakery and i i i i don't know if there's gonna be a anyone who stops it before some people get really hurt but it is obvious how some people will get really hurt here yep

29:24David Pierce:agreed um one more google thing we should talk about before we stop talking about samsung and i I say Google because there is a fascinating Gemini, Bixby, Samsung AI thing happening here. But one of the other announcements at this event was agentic AI. Like in a very straightforward way, they announced that your Pixel 10 or your Samsung Galaxy S26 is going to be able to do agentic assistant stuff. Samir Samad, who runs Android at Google, really tried to breeze past that. He was like, some people call it AI. I just call it getting things done. And it's like, no, it's you also call it agentic AI.

30:05David Pierce:Super new. You've been on stage saying words like agentic AI for the last couple of years. But the things they showed off are like, you can now ask your phone to book you an Uber and it just will do it for you. You can ask it to order food and it will do it for you. Like this is straightforwardly the stuff we have been talking about that Apple is trying to do with Siri, that Google is barreling towards the Gemini. This idea of like your phone should just be able to use itself on your behalf. They just did it. It hasn't shipped. None of it is real. We'll see how any of it actually works. But like Google and Samsung just announced the thing.

30:42David Pierce:Like they did the next phase of phones according to everybody today.

30:46Brendan Carr:I mean this is what Apple announced in its demo video in 2024 at WWDC. Yeah. Where you talk to Siri using App Intense, which was a framework they announced at WWDC. Siri will run around and use the apps on your phones for you and call it a day. I don't know if that's exactly what Google was showing here. They have some ability to use MCP on the phone, model context protocol, which is how you'd use these apps. It is the big standard that Anthropic is pushing everyone has signed on to. Allison got a demo with Samir. He talked to her about it. And the demos that she saw were literally Gemini using apps on the phone.

31:22Brendan Carr:And they had opened the apps virtually. Right. So they weren't actually running on the phone. In the foreground, they were just like virtualized instances of the apps.

31:30David Pierce:Yeah, it's like a phone inside your phone. Yeah. It's not a good UI. It's very odd.

31:35Brendan Carr:Well, it's not supposed to be a UI for you. It's a UI for Gemini. So Gemini basically gets its own like Dockerized version of Android to run in. And it's virtualized your phone. It's running apps virtual. It's like that's all very cool. And it's like clicking around in there. We have to see if it's going to work. But Samir's point of view is you should not care how it works. Right. Either we're clicking around on these apps or we will have MCP or we will use the app functions framework, which is their version of Siri Intense. They have a lot of ways for Gemini to use these apps and they're just going to use them.

32:08Brendan Carr:And I have the same questions for Google as I do for Apple. Why would app developers want to do this? If you're a DoorDash or Uber or whatever, why would you want to get disintermediated and not get to show your interface and your ads and whatever to people? I call this the DoorDash problem. We've done a long decoder on it. And so Allison asks Samir about this. and his answer is fascinating. He said, this technology is happening, and the question is, how do we figure out the right ways to embrace it together? It's ice cold. Ice cold. He's like, we're going to do this. We're doing it. It's like, here we go.

32:36Brendan Carr:The phone can click around the apps for you, and if the apps are on the phone, we're going to click on them. And like, fine. I think that is super interesting. I saw a bunch of people online, you know, when we post about it, say, does it work? This is vaporware, too. It might be. It's vapor until it ships, right? And they say they're going to ship it soon, in preview. We'll see if it actually works. A lot of the stuff has not actually worked. I'm more willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt than I was with Apple two years ago. First of all, Google has Gemini. It's the thing they made. And it's so good that Apple's going to use it too.

33:09David Pierce:Yeah. Google is the reason that in theory, Apple is going to be able to pull this off, which means Google has many more advantages to pulling it off. I also think the thing you described, the sort of agnosticism towards process is really smart on Google's part, because Apple has really tried to leverage the fact that developers will do whatever it says to make Siri app intents be the thing. And it's been doing this with Spotlight and it is like developers are going to open up their apps to us because we are Apple and that is what we are requiring. And developers largely told Apple to just suck it.

33:42David Pierce:And so Apple has since turned to really embracing MCP as a much more open way to do this. But even that requires these developers to play ball, right? You don't have to play ball as like directly away, but you still have to set up a server that says, yes, come use my app.

33:57Brendan Carr:And from everything I've heard, Apple's version of MCP is still very much an Apple walled garden version of MCP.

34:03David Pierce:But for Google to say, OK, well, if you want to have a really great experience with our app that is clean and simple and works for everybody, we have this app functions thing. If you want something that you don't really have to worry about, you just sort of open up your database and we'll come play with it. Do MCP. And if you don't, we're going to use your app anyway. Yeah. It's a leverage play, right? Google is like, it actually doesn't matter whether developers buy into this or not. We have the technology to just go use their app. And actually the problem is the experience is going to suck. And so they're going to have to play ball.

34:35David Pierce:Like this is, it's such a forcing function if Gemini is actually good at this for everyone else to just fall in line. And that's what I think Samir means. He's like clear in that statement of this tech is happening is we don't need your help to do this. Yeah. We'd love your help. It'll be better if you do, but we don't need your help to do this.

34:50Brendan Carr:And I think that's why I'm also saying I'm willing to give Google the benefit of doubt. They shipped auto-browsed in Chrome. Yeah. It works, you know, in the way that these agentic browsers, like, work. Yeah. Like, it'll stumble around the web for you and get to an outcome. They have a commerce version of MCP called UCP, which I think is hilarious. And that's just for retailers to participate in because every retailer wants to do agentic commerce in some way.

35:16David Pierce:People are very alarmed by this, by the way. We should do a deep dive into the UCP stuff at some point. But the idea of like Google being the arbiter for pricing on the Internet terrifies a lot of people.

35:24Brendan Carr:Yeah. And then if you ask Google, they're like, everyone just wants our demand. And so like there's a real mismatch here of how those things can be true at the same time.

35:32David Pierce:That's what monopolies are for.

35:34Brendan Carr:Yep. Especially big monopolies of search demand, of direct intent consumer demand. Google knows exactly how to use that power. Weird.

35:42David Pierce:It's almost like it lost two lawsuits and has really no cost to show for it so far.

35:47Brendan Carr:uh and then there's just this last piece uh where again i'm just willing to give google they they ship gemini and personal intelligence they shipped auto browse like this isn't a far jump from the stuff google has already been doing and then right next to that you know this whole industry has been tearing itself apart over open claw like the past two weeks yeah and like what is that it's a little agentic system that runs on whatever computer you want it to run it's going to bang around the web and do whatever it wants. And it's like, well, that works. And like one guy vibe coded that until he got himself a job at open AI.

36:19Like, you know, there's like, there is

36:22Brendan Carr:a turn happening in AI that we should talk about where it, you know, I think our podcast is as skeptical as it gets with these AI tools. We have covered more of the failures of these companies, hyping things that cannot happen than maybe any other tech podcast. With always with an eye of, well, the stuff that works is good.

36:41David Pierce:I spent three hours on a train this morning doing Cloud Code stuff, and it was awesome.

36:45Brendan Carr:Yeah, like there's something happening. There's one turn that got made here recently where I think the reason Samir doesn't want to say agentic is all of that stuff is wildly overhyped. And I think this is very much, you know, I've talked to Dara, the CEO of Uber, and he's like, yeah, we're willing to try anything. So now you can call an Uber using Gemini on an Android phone. Like, they're constraining this so they can actually deliver the things. And it's particularly constrained to ride hailing and food delivery.

37:14David Pierce:Which are, by the way, not hard problems. In the scheme of, like, accomplishing goals on your phone, ordering an Uber is a pretty easy one. There's a reason that, like, one of the first cool Alexa things 12 years ago was ordering an Uber. It's a pretty straightforward set of computational problems.

37:35Brendan Carr:Yeah, they need to know where you are.

37:37David Pierce:Yeah, but things get vastly more complicated immediately after that, right? And that's like the long tail of stuff you have to get right in order for this stuff to work in a useful, reliable way for people. Like Uber and DoorDash are the setting timers and playing music of our time, right? And that last generation never really found a way beyond that. Neither has this one so far.

38:01Brendan Carr:Yeah, I mean, I would even say DoorDash food delivery is exponentially more complicated than Uber. Like, you call an Uber, the set of outcomes is pretty limited. It's like, where are you? And is it going to be a Camry or a Highlander? Like, that's it. And like, some people want a button to make sure they don't get a Model 3 because they get carsick in Model 3s. That's it. That's like your whole universe of choices. Yeah. You know, I want a sandwich is like a much more complicated thing to sort of. For sure. And like, we'll see if any of this stuff works. I just, I think the knee jerk attitude that Apple couldn't ship it.

38:36Brendan Carr:We've talked a lot about assistance in the smart home and how complicated they have found that problem. I think Google is on purpose constraining what they're doing here to make sure it ships. And you can see that they have already set up basically every building block they need to make this work. And so, yeah, we got to see it. We're going to test that. I just, I don't have the same, like, it's vapor that I have towards the Rabbit R1 or, like, whatever else. Like, we know Samir, you and I have both talked to him at length about a whole bunch of stuff. There's no way he's getting on stage and putting himself in a position that anything feels like what Microsoft put itself into with its co-pilot ads for Windows.

39:15Brendan Carr:Like, that's just not happening. I really do think that there's a reason it's food delivery and ride sharing to begin with. and I also think you can see in all of their other products that are actually shipping today like how they can be confident that they can do everything else they want to do.

39:30David Pierce:Yep, agreed. All right, there's more Samsung stuff to do but Alison Johnson is going to come on the show on Tuesday and we're going to talk through more of the news. She also tried the Galaxy Buds. She's going to MWC. We should say MWC which is like the big mobile conference every year. That starts I think on Sunday. In Barcelona there's going to be a lot of stuff. She'll be on the show. We'll have more to cover.

39:50Brendan Carr:Can I just say the thing that's going to happen at MWC this year?

39:53David Pierce:Yes.

39:54Brendan Carr:There's going to be a lot of noise about 6G. Oh, God. It's coming, baby. No. It's coming. Get ready. I won't spoil it, but it's coming.

40:04David Pierce:Okay. I'm just telling you this now. We will do surgery on a grape over 6G. This is the year. This is the vergiest story in history. It's the year. We are going to try to do surgery on a grape.

40:15Brendan Carr:We're going to do Edge co-located data centers, do self-driving cars. in the back of that car wearing my augmented reality glasses, doing surgery on a grape, all over the low latency power of 5, I mean 6G. I can't wait.

40:30David Pierce:It's going to be amazing. All right, we should take a break and then we're going to come back. We're going to talk some Xbox news. We'll be back.

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41:12David Pierce:All right, we're back. So the other big news that's been happening this week, and it's kind of been happening all week, is this big shakeup inside of Microsoft and particularly on the Xbox team. The news in particular is that Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, who have been running all things Xbox and all things gaming at Microsoft, are out. The Phil Spencer thing in particular seems like it had been a long time in the works, but there's a sort of messy shakeup as part of all this. Asha Sharma is now the CEO of Microsoft Gaming. There's just a lot of stuff happening here. And I think you and Tom Warren, who's been covering this for us, did a big decoder about this, right?

41:50David Pierce:Talking through sort of the business logistics of all of it.

41:53Brendan Carr:Yeah, by the time you're listening to this, that decoder will be out. Tom and I spent, I don't know, half an hour just unpacking the sort of Phil Spencer, did he or did he not retire as previously announced. His longtime deputy, Sarah Bond, who everyone thought would replace him, didn't get that job. And, you know, there's some controversy online about just the reporting around why she didn't get that job. She didn't get that job. And people at Microsoft have a lot of theories that they shared with Tom about why she didn't get that job. They sure did, yeah. Asha got that job. And so Phil had announced ages ago that he was going to retire.

42:26Brendan Carr:Whether or not the decision to retire now was Phil's decision remains an open question. But it's just straightforward to say the person that everyone assumed would get his job upon retirement did not get that job. Yes. And, you know, Tom and I.

42:40David Pierce:And in fact, the job went to someone who represents a pretty big pivot. Asha Sharma comes from AI work at Microsoft.

42:47Brendan Carr:And she was the CEO of Instacart. We should ask her about the DoorDash problem. And she was at Meta before. So she is an operator. Yeah. And, you know, you can listen to that episode of Decoder. It's out right now. Tom gets into the weeds of, like, all the strategy. The thing that is worth saying is Xbox as a product has not been successful for a long time. And I can actually point to when it stopped being successful because I wrote the story when Microsoft launched the Xbox One. Do you remember this? You edited this. One, colon. This is me and David as babies in early verge in the office all night trying to turn a story on a tight deadline.

43:30Brendan Carr:and I was like literally writing paragraphs and sending them to you to edit while I would write the next paragraph because it was such a long night. So Microsoft called me to profile the Xbox One team before the launch of the Xbox and I had like one weekend to turn this whole story around. Like a video, the whole thing. And I wrote this thing and I was like, Microsoft wants to put a Windows PC under your TV. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do. And the Xbox One is that thing. And long time Verge House listeners will know this is when I started railing against IR blasters. Yeah. because IR blasters are stupid.

44:02Brendan Carr:Like they are the hack to control a cable box, or at least they were, and they never worked. And none of these ideas ever worked. And the centerpiece of the Xbox One was the IR blaster. I wrote that story, and I remember it's an ant story. And like within a year, every single executive that I profiled for that story had been fired from Microsoft because this thing was such a flop.

44:21David Pierce:And the reason it flopped is really telling, right? Because Microsoft comes out with this thing and they're like, okay, we've made this console that is so much more than gaming. So Sony comes out with the PlayStation 4 and is like, this is a gaming console for gamers to play games and just wipes the floor with Xbox as a result. Just killed them.

44:40Brendan Carr:And none of the TV stuff even worked on the Xbox One. And it shipped for the Kinect, which had some good games. The whole thing was nuts. And it was just a bad idea. And Phil Spencer is the guy who fixed it. All those executives got fired and Phil showed up. Well, he was the guy tasked. Phil showed up.

44:55David Pierce:Did he fix it? Who knows? He sure showed up. time trying to fix it.

44:59Brendan Carr:He did. To whatever extent that he refocused Xbox on video games.

45:03David Pierce:Well, he also, he had and used gamer cred in a very real way. Like he was, when he came in, perceived as a person who plays and loves and knows games and that that is going to be valuable to the Xbox team.

45:18Brendan Carr:Okay, so here's what I will offer you today in 2026. 13 years after David and I pulled an all-nighter in our office on 40th Street, New York. I still like that story.

45:28David Pierce:I read it, again, not that long ago.

45:29Brendan Carr:It was good. It opened with what is obviously now, in retrospect, a totally sleep-deprived metaphor about Trojan horses. Who knows, man? But it's good. It's a good story. We were young. Yeah, we were babies. We didn't have any babies. That's why we were up all night in the office together, just like half drunk, running on Xboxes. It was a charmed time in our lives. 13 years later 2026 Phil is out handpicks a successor doesn't get the job Asha the new person from outside of Xbox gets the job and she says we're gonna make this about it we're gonna get the Xbox back and she makes a lot of noise about consoles and being refocused on consoles she gave an interview to Windows Central with Matt Booty the chief content officer and she says I need to understand why these decisions were made and what the what the goals were you can just ask Phil why he made these decisions.

46:22Brendan Carr:He's just right there. Phil's been on Decoder twice. I've literally asked him how and why he makes decisions. He's forthcoming with the answers. You get the sense that they're going to throw all that stuff away. What Satya Nadella wanted was fresh eyes on this whole project. And embedded in all of this is hilariously Microsoft's failure along with Epic to get Apple to open the App Store. because you can really see that what they wanted the whole time was to unlock new gamers on phones, which is where new gamers are. They are not really buying consoles. Even Microsoft and Sony have this problem.

47:01Brendan Carr:And their whole plan was to ship a game streaming app on phones and win there, right? Because what is Microsoft? It's Azure. So you put the game streaming app on phones and you run it on Azure and you've won. Hooray. and they couldn't do it. What were you going to say?

47:19David Pierce:That's the thing. It's an Azure company is, I think, the thing that unites all of this to me. And as I look through, Microsoft has had a series of ideas about what the Xbox might be and how it might make money from gaming, right? One of it was the Xbox is a game console, but it's actually a Windows computer. And then it was, well, the Xbox is a game console, but it's actually a cloud machine. And then it was like, well, it's a game console, but actually we make money from games. Like the Xbox has never actually been allowed to be the Xbox. It has just had to be the vessel for somebody else's strategy at Microsoft for so long.

48:03David Pierce:And it's why I come back to Sony being like, we made a thing that plays video games for people to play video games on. Microsoft has not made that case for the Xbox, like ever. And I think the thing that really threw this away for Microsoft, and I think one of the reasons a lot of people are saying that Sarah Bond might be gone, is this everything's an Xbox strategy that they underwent, right? Where a couple of years ago, they start coming out with this idea that actually the Xbox is not a console after all, that your phone is an Xbox and your laptop is an Xbox and your TV is an Xbox. And obviously, this is a story about game streaming, which I think is a good idea that is not yet materialized at all.

48:38Brendan Carr:No, that idea would have worked. Maybe it wouldn't have worked with like smart TV apps. I don't know if it were consumer-t apps. That idea works if game streaming was a kind of app you could ship on iOS and Android devices. And if the internet is better.

48:49David Pierce:Like, in a real way, there are a lot of people who are like—

48:53Brendan Carr:Because those apps—the apps don't exist.

48:54David Pierce:Fair. Yeah, agreed. So I think it definitely didn't get a fair shake to play that. And I think it made a wrong bet that that world was coming and that they were left with streaming through Safari on your phone. And that's not the answer.

49:08Brendan Carr:Yeah, I mean, like we, I think Microsoft, they couldn't go to open war with Apple. They just couldn't. But I think they were extremely supportive of Spotify and Epic and all of the other, the Coalition for App Fairness trying to crack open the App Store in this way. And you can see in those cases, there's a lot of talk about game streaming and Microsoft trying to do this stuff in the background. It just didn't work. That didn't work. They were not able to use the regulatory power of governments around the world to crack open the App Store and actually turn your iPhone into an Xbox. And you can turn as many Samsung smart TVs into Xboxes as you want.

49:44Brendan Carr:But if you can't solve the big problem, you cannot execute the strategy. And they just never gave up on it.

49:50David Pierce:Right. And it's both a self-perpetuating and a self-defeating thing, right? Because if you don't have the numbers, you don't have the games. And so in Microsoft's case, what they had to go do was spend an absolutely enormous amount of money and then legal time and money going and getting the games by buying Activision Blizzard. And then you have to do all the things to make that defensible, which requires making a bunch of crazy decisions like putting Xbox exclusives on other platforms. And so all of a sudden you've done everything but make a gaming console for people to play games on. Yeah. And I do think you're right that what Asha Sharma seems to be suggesting is that there is a real sense of like, let's throw all of that away and get back to being a thing for people to play games with.

50:30David Pierce:And the question to me is, if that is her plan, will the people she works for bet on that plan long enough to even see it out? Because historically speaking, the answer is no.

50:42Brendan Carr:Yeah, I don't know. I truly don't know. I don't even know if her hints about Xbox going back to Xbox mean consoles. Maybe not. Right? I do think it's weird. It might mean weird Windows-powered Steam decks made by third parties. I mean, A, it definitely means that.

51:00David Pierce:But B, I do think, I was reading back through a bunch of our coverage and a couple of folks covering this this week pointed out that it continues to be weird that Microsoft never shipped a handheld. That like through all of this stuff, Phil Spencer spent years hinting that Microsoft really liked handhelds, might do something. Meanwhile, the Steam Deck, clearly a good idea, clearly has real product market fit. The Nintendo Switch, one of the most successful consoles in history. Like it's not unclear that this thing can work. and Microsoft just has yet to, in any kind of meaningful way, throw a tat in the ring.

51:32David Pierce:Instead, it chips weird, bad versions of Windows onto somebody else's hardware. And like, if again, the thing in front of Asha Sharma is like, if all of the resources of Microsoft went to her, you reboot Windows entirely to make the Xbox work. And I just don't see that happening.

51:50Brendan Carr:That's a wild outcome.

51:52David Pierce:But like, that's the one you'd have to do. If you're Satya Nadella and you're like, the only thing I care about is making the Xbox work, you give Windows to the Xbox team.

52:00Brendan Carr:No way. You have to. That's what got them all sideways to the Xbox One. I totally disagree with that. No, no, no.

52:07David Pierce:They gave the Xbox to the Windows team.

52:10Brendan Carr:I think the thing that we have learned about Windows and gaming recently, and it's all over the site. I'm not even saying I have the depth of expertise here. I'm saying that we have Sean Hollister on our team and we have Nathan and we have all these people who understand the actual dynamics of these products. And what they're constantly telling us is that Linux is a better platform to run Windows games on than Windows is right now.

52:34David Pierce:You're right. That's probably a better way of saying it. What Satya Nadella would do if all he cared about was Xbox was allow the Xbox team to stop using Windows. That's the answer. Right.

52:45Brendan Carr:And that's where the Xbox came from. Like famously, Jay Allard got to start a Skunk Works project and they allowed him to not use Windows. Right. Which was the entire, the Alpha and Omega of Microsoft at the time was the Windows business. Yep. And Jay Allard, who started Xbox, was like, I didn't do it. And I don't think that he, Jay Allard, had any pretensions about whether or not they were going to Trojan horse a Windows PC under your TV. they just got there with the xbox one and they've been backing out of it ever since you know tom's point to me was when they lost that generation they'd lost forever because that was the first generation with digital games and once people bought the digital library they weren't ever going to give it up in the way that you know your physical library well what are you going to do right game doesn't work anymore anyway wait once you're on a platform and you have an account you have a digital library like you're you're like you're going to stay there You can quibble with that, but I think Microsoft perceived that they had lost that in that way, and they've just been trying to back out of it ever since.

53:44Brendan Carr:So I don't know what Oshar Sherman's going to do with the Xbox. I suspect what they're going to try to do is what Microsoft is best at doing, which is continue pushing on the idea that Xbox is a software platform that should go everywhere. The same way that they basically got out of the Windows phone debacle by saying, you know what? We're an applications provider. We're a cloud provider. And if you want to run iOS applications, you can run them on Azure and we'll be a better place for that than anywhere else to host your applications. And that worked. It made them a very wealthy company. They're trying to do it right now with AI.

54:18Brendan Carr:They are in some kind of weird, messy divorce with OpenAI and no one is using Copilot. And I suspect all of that made Nadella look at why did we buy Activision Blizzard? For what, almost$70 billion? Yeah, it's the biggest acquisition in history, one of the biggest acquisitions of all time. And it's like, to get Candy Crush money? That's it? That's all we're getting out of it? Like, we got to rethink this. Yeah. And so I bet if AI was doing what they thought it was going to do and they weren't out there being like, we have to make sure it delivers value, which is a thing Nadella is saying right now.

54:51Brendan Carr:If that was going gangbusters, maybe this pressure wouldn't be so hard on the Xbox division. But it's not going gangbusters. And I think this strategy is not going to pay off the way they wanted it to. I'm very curious to see if she changes it.

55:02David Pierce:I agree. I think you're right that that is the most obvious pivot. And I also think in every meaningful way, that is the end of Xbox. Xbox becomes a sort of infrastructural feature. It's a thing you can buy on Azure, not a meaningful consumer brand that lots of people care about.

55:19Brendan Carr:They own all these studios. They said they're not going to lay anyone off in the studios. They have all these angry gamers. This is their only consumer brand. this is the only place Microsoft can even dare to dream of reaching a young person is through Xbox yeah it's either that or you get your first job and co-pilot is on the screen and it's like well this sucks and those are your two choices so I suspect they will find a way to keep the brand alive if only to keep that that youth consumer touch point but man I don't know there's no way that they're going to just keep shipping consoles and losing.

55:57David Pierce:I think you're right, and I think they're out, and I think it's going to be fast. But we will come back, and we will talk about that. We should take one more break, and then we're going to come back. We're going to do some lightning round stuff. We'll be right back.

56:09Hi, everyone.

56:10Brendan Carr:This segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss, Helen Havlock, the Veritas publisher, and L 'Oreal Group's global vice president of tech and open innovation. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.

56:19Nilay Patel:We're going to start with a Decoder classic question, Giv. What does tech and open innovation mean at L 'Oreal? Who is on your team? What kind of projects do you work on? Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in L 'Oreal working with startups outside. And it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech. So we do all those partnerships and our team is responsible for them. And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had a blank page and now how can we bring beauty and tech together?

56:53Nilay Patel:How do you decide which projects to invest in? At the beginning, I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that beauty was relevant for tech, so we're really tech-centric. And then over time, we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products that we can upgrade thanks to tech. And so we have a little bit more kind of process behind how we choose projects now. We try and kind of do things like upgrading the hairdryer to be able to do three out of four people have a hairdryer at home. So how can we make it better? Or this year, like the flat irons that we're using and LED masks and stuff like that.

57:27Nilay Patel:So we do have a little bit of that kind of process, but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity. So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we let the scientists kind of think of some new clever ideas too.

57:47David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. unsponsored. Long pause. If we keep starting

57:54Brendan Carr:the lightning round with Brendan, I don't know. I think we're going to be very flavorful for a long time. You know what I'm saying?

58:00David Pierce:Yeah, well, listen, this is Brendan's fault. Brendan owes us a lot of money at this point, I think, fairly directly.

58:06Brendan Carr:Brendan did a panel in D.C. today. Oh, no, God. We haven't even...

58:10David Pierce:Listen, it's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I think we've officially claimed this title now. The people who used to ask me who our competitors are, no longer ask. We have vanquished the Munch Squad. America's favorite podcast within podcasts. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

58:29Brendan Carr:Brendan Carr is a dummy.

58:37Brendan Carr:That is not what I expected. That was from Robert. Robert sent that one in. Thank you, Robert. I'm assuming that was all, that was like 10 Roberts.

58:47David Pierce:That's how Eli sings himself to sleep at night. Everyone should know that.

58:50Brendan Carr:Just sort of lying in bed singing that to himself. That sounds fire in the bathroom. Let me tell you.

58:55David Pierce:What did Brendan do this week?

58:57Brendan Carr:Wherever you are right now, get up, take your phone to the bathroom and play that again. Let Robert just fill your bones with that energy. There we go. What did Brendan do this week, Neelon? It'll be a short one. There's two that are very quick and very funny. So Brendan put out a letter this week.

59:16David Pierce:Brendan loves a letter.

59:17Brendan Carr:He loves a letter. he has announced something called the Pledge America campaign. And in this letter, he, quote, invites broadcasters to pledge to air programming in support of the historic national nonpartisan celebration of America's 250th birthday. Can I just give you some examples of things Brendan wants our nation's broadcasters to air?

59:43David Pierce:When you, like, this is real historical, historic national nonpartisan celebration t-shirt is answering questions raised by my historic national nonpartisan celebration t-shirt. You know what I mean?

59:55Brendan Carr:Yeah. Like if you weren't the speech police every other day of the week, you could say like, America's turning 250. Do some cool stuff on the 4th of July. Won't that be fun? I never would be like, yeah, that's right. That sounds fun. When you're like running around being like, I'll arrest you if you say bad things about Donald Trump. Like then this is a bit more of a threat. Yeah. Especially in the context of whatever culture war the Trump administration is perpetually in the midst of, these are his suggestions. This is what he wants broadcasters to do. The chairman of the FCC, not saying what content you shouldn't run.

1:00:32Brendan Carr:I'm terrified. Giving specific ideas about what content he would like to see. Okay. He believes that every broadcaster should start each broadcast day with the Star Spangled Banner or the Pledge of Allegiance. much like my first grade classroom.

1:00:50David Pierce:Does he think this is like 70 years ago when they sign off at night and then they come back in the morning?

1:00:55Brendan Carr:Can you imagine going to a young person in America and being like, let me explain to you the concept of a broadcast day. What are you talking about? This is the whole problem with Brendan. Carson Daly on the Today Show is just like... Where does the broadcast day begin? What are you talking about? The man has power over a declining medium, and so he has to act like it's real. But yes, he believes -

1:01:21David Pierce:Do you think he has an object permanence problem? He thinks the TV goes away when he goes to sleep?

1:01:25Brendan Carr:I just keep thinking about - He's much like my seventh-year-old, seven-month-old baby. I just keep thinking about the Weird Al movie UHF. You know, it's like they walk into the station, like turn it on, and they start doing The Pledge of Allegiance. Yep. Okay. In addition to that, he thinks that broadcasters should air more music by America's greatest composers, such as John Philip Sousa, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, or George Gershwin. That's a pretty weird list, actually. The weird list, I don't have any notes, though. They're all great. It's all good. It's just— Yeah. To get from Sousa to Duke Ellington, it's like—it's wild.

1:02:01Brendan Carr:Okay, but that's what Brendan wants. Sure. Let's do it. all right um you should provide daily today in american history announcements highlighting significant events that took place on that day in history daily we got to do this every day we got to do the tear off calendar on our local broadcast stations uh and then of course does he

1:02:24David Pierce:know that like a bunch of bad stuff has happened in american history no no there's culture war you

1:02:28Brendan Carr:can't do it and this is what i'm saying um you have to run psa short segments or full specials specifically promoting civic education inspiring local stories and american history would you like to be the person at sinclair broadcasting in charge of uh running full specials about american history at the behest of a government bureaucrat that job is available to you now in trump's america this is horrible like there's no way again if this was a very different bureaucracy, you can see the chair of the FCC with a bunch of broadcast leaders being like, in honor of our 250 blah, blah, blah, all of us are going to play the national anthem at two o 'clock on the 4th of July.

1:03:09Like, sure.

1:03:11Brendan Carr:You know, like that's like the sort of thing previous FCCs may have done, but it would have been like constrained to like that kind of moment, right? Like in every city in America, the Blue Angels will do a flyover and every radio station will play the Pledge of Allegiance. Like, that would be sick. Honestly, if you vote for me, I will make sure that the Blue Angels fly over every town in America on the 4th of July. I don't know how we're going to do it.

1:03:38David Pierce:You're going to need a lot of Blue Angels.

1:03:39Brendan Carr:We're going to raise taxes. Okay, there we go. The Blue Angels in every city at 2 p.m. while every radio station plays the Pledge of Allegiance and the Star-Sangled Banner at the same time.

1:03:48David Pierce:Now we're talking. The funniest thing about this to me is this would finally kill broadcast TV. Like, this is how you lose the last viewers you have. Is by getting rid of Chicago Fire and instead doing weird civics lessons.

1:04:04Brendan Carr:You'd be saying it's about the actual Chicago Fire. Like, yeah, the last member of the greatest generation finally is like, you know what? I don't even need the TV to be on while I browse Facebook. Okay, this is nonsense. Like, this is not just the chilling effect that we've talked about, Brendan, in the context of CBS, where he just fulminates about regulation so the speech stops. This is now an unelected government bureaucrat straightforwardly telling programmers what to do. And maybe you agree that all programmers should be more patriotic. You should just express those preferences in the market.

1:04:36Brendan Carr:It's fine. Go watch the patriotic things. No one does. This is the problem with the market. So of course the government has to step in and tell you what to do.

1:04:45David Pierce:There's a reason it's just Ken Burns on PBS. Do you know what I mean?

1:04:51Brendan Carr:anyway I will end with a glimmer of hope so you know a while back we had the Jimmy Kimmel Charlie Kirk controversy The Hill and TMZ both FOIA'd the FCC for all of the complaints that were filed to the agency about all of this it was more than 1600 complaints were filed to the FCC about this whole controversy that's a lot 30 were about Jimmy Kimmel specifically almost all of the rest, hundreds of the rest were about how much Brendan Carr sucks.

1:05:23David Pierce:You know like 12 of the 30 were from Brendan's burners.

1:05:28Brendan Carr:Oh my god. So I'll just read you some of them. Hundreds of complaints the vast majority reviewed by the Hill took aim at Carr and the FCC, accusing them of bowing to Trump. Here's just one for a viewer from Overland Park, Kansas wrote, I find FCC Chairman Carr's comments regarding Kimmel as being much more chilling than the comments of any late night comedian. Shame on Carr for doing this. It is unconscionable to think this is acceptable behavior. A Los Angeles resident wrote, I mean, assuming this is just Jimmy Kimmel himself, he wrote, why does the FCC hate the First Amendment? Be consistent and stop censoring stuff you disagree with.

1:05:58Brendan Carr:A San Francisco viewer wrote, leave ABC and Jimmy Kimmel live alone. Respect the freedom of the press. On and on. It's just all about, it's just this. I never thought I'd see the day in this country when a comedian would be pulled for telling a joke many of us agree with said a complaint from San Antonio, Texas.

1:06:15David Pierce:Hell yeah, Texas.

1:06:16Brendan Carr:All 50 states think Brendan Carr is a dummy. I'm basing this based on three. That's the big three, you know what I mean? That's very important. Anyway, it made my heart sing to know that most people think Brendan Carr is in fact a dummy. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on the show. I will happily read the Constitution to you in service of your Pledge of America situation. We can get all the way through it, including the First Amendment, which says the government will not make laws respecting the freedom of speech. And then we can talk about that for a while. As always, Brendan, you're welcome on the show.

1:06:50Brendan Carr:I suspect you won't show up because you're a huge coward, which is my first amendment right to say. That has been Brendan Carr as a dummy, America's favorite podcast in the podcast.

1:06:57David Pierce:If Brendan agrees to come on the show, will you agree to sing the Star Spangled Banner at the beginning of the interview?

1:07:03Brendan Carr:It's very hard to sing. I think you would have to sing. You're a much better singer than me.

1:07:07David Pierce:It's a tough, tough. We'll just play Charlie Puths. He did a good job. Can I point this out?

1:07:11Brendan Carr:Can I say this? You can tell me to edit this if you want me to say this. David was literally born on the 4th of July.

1:07:16David Pierce:That's true. That's true.

1:07:17Brendan Carr:If Brendan wants to come on the show on David's birthday and have this man sing the Star Spangled Banner at him while I wave around a toy blue angel, we can do it.

1:07:28David Pierce:I'll do that. I will. Yes. Sign me up. We'll do it. I'm in. I'm ready for it.

1:07:32Brendan Carr:Brendan, you heard it here first.

1:07:34David Pierce:Get at us. You got time, Brendan.

1:07:35Brendan Carr:If you can get a real blue angel, that'd be even better, but I don't think you have to pull.

1:07:38David Pierce:All right. My first lightning round is we've been talking a lot about RAM shortages and these like giant circular deals that all of these companies are signing with each other for building out huge data centers and getting tons of chips. Meta signed another deal with AMD. Like the money is all so enormous as to seem essentially pretend. And we got some evidence this week that some of the money and some of the deals are, in fact, kind of pretend. And the news this week was OpenAI's big Stargate thing, which, if you remember a while back, was announced with Sam Altman at the White House with Donald Trump talking about, I think,$500 billion of data centers that they were going to do in lots of U.S.

1:08:18David Pierce:money they were going to do with Oracle and SoftBank. It was going to be a whole big, beautiful thing. It's going to be called Stargate. The information has a report that suggests that it has not staffed up and it is not developing any of those data centers. Like this is all essentially just kind of unraveling. Right. And what you have instead of these big, giant, splashy, beautiful, huge deals is a lot of much smaller, more targeted deals. And this is not to say OpenAI is not spending a lot of money building stuff out. It is to say that all of the pomp and circumstance around this stuff is specifically designed to be pomp and circumstance and nothing else.

1:08:54David Pierce:And this is shades of Tim Cook giving Donald Trump a tour of an already existing Apple factory in Texas. In Texas.

1:09:01Brendan Carr:It's a flex factory in Texas. That's right. In the first term.

1:09:03David Pierce:And this is, these things are done for show. And to take them as anything other than that is incorrect. incorrect. And all of these companies have realized if we make these big, splashy announcements, we'll get slots of press. Everybody's stock price goes up. Everybody wins. We can pay for these things with the stock price increases, and then nobody really pays attention when all of it actually fritters away to something much smaller. It is currently frittering, and we should look at it.

1:09:29Brendan Carr:I mean, OpenAI is a company. I will repeat my prediction. I don't think it ends the year as the same kind of thing it is today. And you can see its Microsoft relationship is unraveling. The SoftBank relationship is unraveling. There's been a lot of noise about the NVIDIA relationship and the scale and the depth of that partnership over time. I don't know, man. And not for nothing, we pointed out in our newsroom that all the heat's on Claude. Yeah. And we can briefly talk about the Pentagon stuff. But, you know, Pete Hegseth is, like, dragging Dario Mote into the Pentagon to say, I demand that you let us use Claude for whatever we want.

1:10:04Brendan Carr:and there's quotes being given to Axios from senior Pentagon officials that are like, they're in this position because Claude's the best one. Yep. We have to have it. That's not great. Like, OpenAI's like, we'll do whatever. Like, we want remote drones that'll kill anyone you want all over there. Like, take it. Google's saying the same thing and it's weird that OpenAI is not the winner in these contexts right now.

1:10:25David Pierce:Well, we've been talking about this for a while, that the two biggest things that OpenAI had going for it were a first-mover advantage, which was very real. It just jumped the gun on everybody. and chat gpt was by a mile the biggest brand in this space um i think that's still true but it's it's changing fast and i think one of the things that i have found really interesting is i've been talking to a lot of people about codex which is open ai's answer to cloud code codex is by all accounts very good it's it's not it's better at some stuff and worse at some stuff than cloud code but it is like a roughly equivalent kind of product nobody talks about codex like That is a thing in which OpenAI's brand lead got it nowhere.

1:11:06David Pierce:And Codex is growing fast and doing fine, but it is not the name in the space. Cloud Code is the name in that space in the way that ChatGPT was in the chatbots. And so you're just seeing this lead that OpenAI had built for itself start to evaporate because it never had a real product moat. Everybody has caught up. We're at this incredible place of sameness, and everybody leapfrogs everybody all the time. And so this question of how do you win is you build moats and OpenAI doesn't have any.

1:11:37Brendan Carr:Yeah. You know, it's interesting about Cloud Code and all that. OpenAI has hired a bunch of meta executives, right? VGCMO used to run literally Facebook. Yeah. This is the product person at OpenAI. All of those people are ads people. Like, what's their big idea is like putting ads in their consumer product. There's a meta executive at Anthropic too. It's just Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram. Yeah. He's the chief product officer at Anthropic. And you're like, oh, he's better at making products. Like, OpenAI hired all the ads people, and Anthropic hired the great product person who always hated the ads.

1:12:12Brendan Carr:Yeah. Like, that's real. And I think that you're starting to see that play out. Like, people are gravitating towards a more complete product. Again, it's mostly software developers. I think OpenAI has a massive consumer lead. Bigger than even, it's still bigger than Gemini, for example. but you can just see Google's like, yep, we'll just put it everywhere. It's in Gmail now. You hate it, but you can't turn it off. Like they're just going to eat away at that lead in very specific ways, especially when they ship it in iOS 26 and it's embedded into the system. OpenAI has got to get a lot farther, a lot faster.

1:12:43Yeah.

1:12:43David Pierce:I will say one thing on that front. The other thing that happened with Anthropic this week was as part of this whole back and forth with the Pentagon, scrapped a bunch of its promises about not shipping models until it could be confident that they were reliable. And Anthropic has made a meal out of positioning itself as the safe one and the thoughtful one and the one that is going to take great care. Boris Churny, the head of Cloud Code, was on this show a few days ago saying, yes, trust us with all of your data because we are the ones who have gone out of our way to be trustworthy. And then to just turn around and read the headline that is like, oh, well, they took all the trustworthy stuff out of their documents.

1:13:19It's like, that's a -

1:13:21Brendan Carr:All right, this leads right into my lightning round item. Okay. so I've been saying on the show for the last three weeks that it feels very clear to me that Anthropic thinks Claude is alive yeah you just read the interviews and they're like oh they think it's alive so we sent Aiden to Anthropic the instruction was just ask them as directly as you can if they think Claude is alive and there was some hemming and aahing but Aiden's very good so she has an on the record statement from Kyle Fish who leads model welfare research at Anthropic. Again, the question as bluntly as we could ask it, as bluntly as Hayden could ask it, was do you think Claude is alive?

1:14:03Brendan Carr:Which is an insane thing to go to a tech company and ask. Of all the questions I've asked all the tech companies, I've never been like, do you think the iPhone's alive? So we asked. Hayden asked.

1:14:12David Pierce:That's because they would just say no, and that's easy. And that would be the end of it.

1:14:14Brendan Carr:So Hayden asks Anthropic, do you think Claude is alive? And here's Kyle Fish, who leads model welfare research at Anthropic. Here's what he said. No, we don't think Claude is, quote, alive like humans or any other biological organisms. Asking whether they're, quote, alive is not a helpful framing for understanding them, as it typically refers to a fuzzy set of physiological, reproductive, and evolutionary characteristics. Instead, Kyle believes that Claude and other AI models are a new kind of entity altogether. And so then Hayden asked, do you think that that entity is conscious? Because we have a quote from Dario saying, we don't know if the models are conscious.

1:14:57Brendan Carr:Do you think this new kind of entity is conscious? Here's what Kyle from Anthropic said. questions about potential internal experience, consciousness, moral status, and welfare are serious ones that we're investigating as models become more sophisticated and capable, but we remain deeply uncertain about these topics. Hayden has a very good line here. She says, this is a position of highly suggestive uncertainty.

1:15:21David Pierce:That's a yes. It's a yes. That's a lot of words to say yes.

1:15:25Brendan Carr:We've defined alive to mean meat. Right. And then this isn't meat. So it's not alive, per your definition, meat. You called it that. But anything up to meat could be alive. And it's like, well, I don't, like, have you ever seen one episode of Star Trek? There's lots of non-meat alive that is potentially available, you know? I'm just, like, utterly fascinated by this answer. Like, it's a metaphysical crisis of an answer. do you think it's alive has one answer you know no but what do you think alive means in response to the question do you think it's alive is like a whole un like just fractally expanding set of questions about everything to be clear i do not think claude is alive i think anthropic because they want to be so careful they're they set up a model welfare team that's kyle fish runs his team they have this you know soul document the constitution for claude where they have discovered if they talk to claude like it should behave morally it's more likely to behave morally metaphysical crisis yeah but i and that's i think i promise you we're gonna run it every other we're definitely gonna ask google if they think gemini is alive like we're just gonna run down the list here because i suspect this answer is actually an outlier i think that's right and i also think it's

1:16:56David Pierce:it requires such a lofty view of this thing that you're doing in order to say that, right? Because it is, the converse is, no, it's just really great software. And then you have just immediately dumbed down the vision of this thing that you're building. So I actually, I think Anthropic to some extent, A, I think does believe Claude is alive. But it also kind of needs everyone to believe Claude is alive.

1:17:17Brendan Carr:Well, Claude and other AI models are a new kind of entity altogether. They're software. They're software. I mean, do you think entities are alive? Like, what is this question that we're asking? And if they are alive, should they have rights? And then I think this conversation short circuits. Right? Like, should Claude have agency in its conversation with Pete Hegseth? Because that's a wild thing to bring to the Pentagon. Our entity has a lot of feelings about you, Pete. And they've been developed by training them on the internet's feelings about you, Pete. So that's not going to go great for you.

1:17:48David Pierce:There was a thing going around this week that somebody did a study and found that all of the models, given enough war games will eventually recommend nuclear strikes. Like over and over and over. Yeah, it was 95 % of cases in war games they wound up recommending nuclear strikes. And this is like, well, if it's alive, maybe it's allowed.

1:18:10Brendan Carr:All right, I'm just going to bleed into the chart. Can I talk about the chart? Yeah, you can talk about the chart. I know it's an audio show, so I apologize to all of our audio listeners. But I'm going to, once again, on the verge, you have to describe a chart. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas did a study on the potential economic benefits of AI. And in this study, they released a chart. It is the single greatest chart I've ever seen in my entire life. Without question, the single greatest chart I've ever seen in my entire life. So I'll try to describe it. But on the X axis is years. On the Y axis is a log scale of$1990.

1:18:47Brendan Carr:So they've normalized everything to dollars in 1990. And then you've got a blue line that's kind of wavy. and that's the real GDP per capita. And it's just sort of going up on a curve, right? This is like the thing. And it goes up and down over years and you can like see the Great Depression in there. But it's just sort of going up on the line. Then they have things that AI could do to GDP. One of them is singularity benign scenario. And it's just the line going basically straight up, right? So here's the trend line. You can see, well, if there's a singularity benign scenario, GDP will skyrocket.

1:19:21Brendan Carr:Everything is so amazing on this line. Then there's a line. And David, I'm very curious to hear what you make of the curve of this line. There's another line, and it's titled Singularity Extinction. And the crazy thing about this line is that it is less vertical than Singularity Benign Scenario. But it's down. The prediction of this line is basically straight down to zero. GDP will go to zero because we are all extinct. So it's just like, if you think about it, it's just a gentle slope up tracking the log of GDP over capita from 1870 to 2029 or whatever this line is. And then your choices are, there's three choices.

1:20:07Brendan Carr:The two that I'm focused on are singularity benign, which is basically straight up. Singularity extinction, which goes down to zero, but on a gentler curve. We're going to have a couple of years like, oh boy, this is bad. and then it's like literally vertical down.

1:20:23David Pierce:Yeah, I think it's like there's going to be a while where we can run faster than the robots. It's like gentle because some people are slow and some people are fast. So we get away from the robots, but eventually the robots get fast and then we all die really quickly.

1:20:35Brendan Carr:Yeah, I just like, the curve of this line is so funny to me. It's like, oh, you think we're going to, nope, we're dead. Okay, so those are the two singularities. You're going down the cliff

1:20:45David Pierce:and your skis have already fallen off, but you haven't hit anything yet. You're in that moment.

1:20:51Brendan Carr:So, again, this is the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas issued this chart where you have two singularity outcomes.

1:20:57David Pierce:You have to say the third outcome because it is the best one.

1:21:00Brendan Carr:I'm just pointing out the two outcomes are singularity, straight vertical, positive, singularity, gentle curve, and then literally negative to zero because of extinction. And then there's the green line, which is titled AI GDP boosted trend, which basically follows exactly the existing trend line because their prediction is 2 % growth for 10 years. So nothing.

1:21:25David Pierce:Well, it's a 0.2 % increase, Neelai. Get excited, my friend. This is what all these trillions of dollars are for.

1:21:33Brendan Carr:It's like your choice is like either you're going to do singularity benign and it'll be worth it. you'll do singularity extinction we all die or it'll be two percent growth and you're just like when you when the people at the ai company see this chart which like which one are they do you think they're banking on it's good it's a good chart we'll put it in the show notes i'm sorry for the audio listeners i i cannot tell you how funny it is that the federal reserve big issue this chart.

1:22:03David Pierce:It's like we're standing here and imagine I have both my hands behind my back and you pick one and I give you a million dollars. You pick the other one and I beat you to death. And then the third one is I just sort of turn around and walk away.

1:22:15Brendan Carr:Those are the three options. I sent it to a finance friend. I immediately was like, is this real? I was like, it's real, man. I don't want to tell you.

1:22:24David Pierce:I am going to be thinking about the singularity extinction chart for a while. But it's good. It lands about 2042 when we all die. So we have some time.

1:22:32Brendan Carr:You've got, yeah, there's some time you're going to get past 2035 before it goes straight vertical down. It's good stuff.

1:22:41David Pierce:Yeah. My other one that I feel obligated to keep you in particular and Eli updated on is the nonsensical plans coming out of this OpenAI Johnny Ive hardware thing. There was a new report this week that suggested that actually OpenAI's first hardware product won't be all the other things that we thought it might be, but that it's going to be a smart speaker, something you have on a table or a desk, with a camera. Like, very echo show of OpenAI and Johnny Ive. They're also apparently working on a smart lamp, smart glasses. They're working on the pendant. They're doing the AirPods with cameras. We talked about this.

1:23:21David Pierce:Like, this is the handful of ideas that everybody seems to be having right now. We talked about this with Apple, which has all of these same ideas, too. Apple has semi-publicly at this point been working on this, like, HomePod robot thing that we may or may not see at some point. But this is the new idea that OpenAI is working on. It's an Echo Show that runs ChatGPT. With a camera. With a camera. I think if you want to make a thing that works and is useful to people, this is not a bad place to start. It's just deeply unsexy.

1:23:54Brendan Carr:So the two things about it that jumped out to me were, one, it wouldn't have a wake word. It would be always listening. And then, two, the camera would be able to recognize things like items on a nearby table or, like, faces, like facial recognition. Sure. And I'm like, man, did you not see what just happened to Ring? you're gonna Sam Altman is gonna be like I'm gonna listen and watch you all the time and you think the people of America are gonna accept this they do think that they absolutely think that I don't know man I I I think that the public is turning against surveillance in a real way and they're not gonna put more they already think all the things are listening to them yeah even the ones that aren't yeah uh Adam Masseri has to make an Instagram video like once a month being like I'm not listening to you but I really want to.

1:24:41Brendan Carr:You know, like, who knows, man? I think the thing that they're stuck on is the devices can't work the way that Johnny I would want them to work. Right? He wants the things to be complete. He wants them to be delightful. He wants them to surprise you with capabilities you hadn't thought of. And these tools at this moment in time cannot do all those things. Yeah. They're getting better. I will concede that they've gotten better over the past year, but they're not complete in the way that an I product needs to be complete.

1:25:10David Pierce:Right. And so I think what continues to interest me about this space is you can either do two things. You can either build the incredibly futuristic, magical thing, knowing it's not going to be what it needs to be and trust that eventually the underlying technology will catch up. Or you can try to find the thing along the way that works. And to me, I've seen a lot of people betting on the technology getting better and making a bunch of these things work. And I have not seen one good idea about how to make it work now, except for essentially like desktop apps on your computer and your phone that let you write code.

1:25:46David Pierce:Like I keep talking to people who write a lot of code in AI apps on their phone, which I think is like a fascinating cultural behavior that we should talk about. But there is nothing to me that is like we understand what these things are and are not good at right now. And we have found a way to address that with hardware. I just I have not seen it anywhere.

1:26:04Brendan Carr:Yeah, the consumer uses are like I replaced Google a little bit.

1:26:08David Pierce:and like you have a phone and a laptop for those things it's fine uh you know johnny i've products

1:26:12Brendan Carr:i've said this before johnny i've products are defined by their constraints that that is the thing that he is the best at he finds the constraint of the hardware of the software and he makes that the focus of the product yep in in the realest way that is the the genius of any great johnny i've design and being like i will find the limitation of the ai system and make that the focus actually runs counter to what everyone wants you to believe about AI, which is that it's going to be the singularity and line is going to go straight up.

1:26:40David Pierce:Yeah.

1:26:41Brendan Carr:Like acknowledging limitation, I think is going to be fundamentally the challenge for whatever product this is, because that's what I've does, but that's not what Sam Altman does. And they can't, there's too much money in it.

1:26:50David Pierce:Yep. All right. You get to end with one that -

1:26:54Brendan Carr:This might be the greatest thing you're about. I know you're very excited about. So I love when the economics of the creator economy just sort of like show up. And sometimes they show up in dramatic ways. My joke is that every YouTuber gets their wings when they make their video about YouTube and like the business of YouTube.

1:27:13David Pierce:Brian and Matt at YouTube will always do numbers.

1:27:16Brendan Carr:Always. And it's like that's when they become business people. It's like that's the day that like the light goes out of their eyes and like they become mercenaries and they've made a video about YouTube. do monetize. Like everyone, they all do it. Yeah. Okay. That's like one category of these videos. The other category is everyone else is corrupt except for me, which is very good. And one of my favorites. So there's a really good one this week.

1:27:37David Pierce:This is all over Substack right now with the Polymarket integration. Everybody is like, no, but I do markets okay. Yeah.

1:27:45Brendan Carr:It's gross for everybody else,

1:27:46David Pierce:but I treat them respectfully.

1:27:48Brendan Carr:I will integrate gambling advertising into my content directly. But in a hot way. so i think that's all the time because you know we run a reviews program where noise about our ethics policies i i'm not even trying to hype ourselves up here it just i watched this video and this one thing like leapt out to me like flashing red signs so a youtuber named honestly who reviews chairs desk chairs made a video the title of the video is how a chair exposed the worst youtubers phenomenal title like a plus a plus a plus YouTube page. So there's a desk chair called the Libra Novo Omni started on a Kickstarter.

1:28:27Brendan Carr:The thing was given to a bunch of YouTubers to review. And the dark side of all product reviews right now is the creator economy for product reviews is so gross. It's all paid placements. It's all secret advertising deals. If the advertising deals aren't there, it's and we've heard this from creators. I'm saying this with sympathy. It's creators who know that the next brand deal is on the line. So they're going to hold their tongue. We've heard from creators who they know that the brands are watching their content. So they sort of preemptively hold back so they can get the next sponsorship. Like there's just a lot there.

1:29:07Brendan Carr:So this video is in incredible petty detail goes through how every other YouTuber is corrupt about the Libra Novo Omni, whether it's the affiliate link disclosures, whether it's disclosing that it's a partnership at all, whether it's not talking about the floor. Like this is, it's a, I want you to watch this video. It's a classic of this genre. And I love this genre. And I think it's extremely well done. And whatever chairs this man wants me to buy, I will buy those chairs. I have no hate towards this at all. What jumped out to me like a blinking red light is this line. Can I, can I play this for you?

1:29:42Brendan Carr:Please.

1:29:42David Pierce:Because this is a chair review channel, they naturally approached me, and I told them that I would only accept the sponsorship on three conditions. One is that I must be able to test the product thoroughly to make sure it's an actually good product. Two is that I must be able to disclose honestly, without any kind of hindrance, the cons of the chair. And three, I must be able to talk about the riskiness of a Kickstarter. LibraNovo agreed to all my terms, and they stayed true to their word. When I submitted my draft that had criticisms about the armrests, about the seat density, about the lumbar support, they did not ask for a single revision.

1:30:16Brendan Carr:David, what jumped out to you about that?

1:30:17David Pierce:When I submitted my draft is a sentence I did not expect to hear.

1:30:22Brendan Carr:I don't know how to say this. The idea that any of our reviewers would ever say we will accept this deal, but you have to let me say the truth about your product. And then we would submit our draft to a company for approval. Like blinking red lights, right? This is the economy now. This is the creator economy on YouTube. This is the product review economy. I'm telling you to watch this video. I think it's very well done, and I cannot review a chair this well. Please, by all means, continue watching as many chair reviews as you want from honestly. I'm just getting at, I think it's starting to bleed into people's perceptions of everything.

1:31:01Brendan Carr:That everything is transactional. That everything is bought and paid for. this polymarket and call sheet that everything is gambling in the background is everything is a brand deal or you're trying to get sponsors or you're trying to get access and so i watched this and i was like it's crazy that we now live in a an information ecosystem where the single greatest video about chair drama i've ever seen in my entire life contains with it this like absolute meta crisis of a video about the corruption of brand deals containing within it an admission that the brand deal required approval from the company.

1:31:38Yep.

1:31:38Brendan Carr:Like my head's been.

1:31:39David Pierce:And it's first saying, by the way, that this is not, none of this is pointed at this guy, honestly. This is the game. This is the game everybody plays. This is the game you are forced to play to make money and be relevant on these platforms.

1:31:52Brendan Carr:Yeah. The structure of the system at work. Yeah. Like YouTube does not pay enough money to these creators. Instagram pays no money to creators. TikTok does not pay enough money to creators. You have to have brand deals in order to survive. So make your money. I truly do not begrudge anyone for playing the game as it's designed to be played. I'm just pointing out we have crossed a bridge where even in the video about corruption, there's an admission that the brand has control of the content. Or could assert control of the content in a way that, again, if any of our viewers came to me and said we are going to submit the story for approval, I'd be like, no, you're not.

1:32:30Brendan Carr:You're absolutely not doing that. And that's very old school. There's a part of our audience that assumes that's how everyone should work. And there's a new younger part of our audience that assumes that everything we do is also up for approval. Managing that split is actually one of the weirder, more complicated things. Because every time we talk about our ethics policy or whatever, a lot of people are like, that's how everyone works. And then a bunch of people are like, what are you talking about?

1:32:52David Pierce:That's not how anything works.

1:32:53Brendan Carr:Yeah, exactly. Anyhow, watch the video. Yeah, no shame. This is like a great video. I thoroughly enjoyed watching every minute of this video. It's so well done. And it is so instructive about how this economy works. And it just, there was just a part of it where I was like, and then within it is the economy.

1:33:10David Pierce:Yeah. I say this with deep sadness. Hank Green was really good on Decoder this week talking about a lot of this stuff. And in particular, he talks a lot about why they're able to put up with this game as platforms. Because there is this endless supply of people who will come and play the game and be burned out. And once they're burned out, there's a bunch of other people who want to come. Hank talking about everybody will do the silly stuff for six months because it feels good. And there's an endless supply of those people. And I think that is sad, honestly. Like, not for those people, but for the fact that the platforms and the advertisers have decided that they can win this game because that churn gives them all the leverage is a real bummer.

1:33:54Brendan Carr:And I think there's a real incentive for creators to make their bag as quickly as they can because they all think it's fleeting. it is just a fear that they all express and i again i'm saying this with sympathy because that is not a thing that you are in control of if you build your business on someone else's algorithm and so i i whenever we post these videos all these people like i get all these comments like you hate the creators and i i literally i have done everything in my power to not be beholden to other people's algorithms like david can tell you i'm like manic about it every single day that we should be in control of our own platform.

1:34:31Brendan Carr:And so I have nothing but sympathy for people who have made that choice because I can sense the loss of agency or the precariousness that they feel when there is a shift. And all I'm saying is go watch the video. I think it's very good. But when you watch it through that lens, it takes on a very different tone.

1:34:48David Pierce:Yeah, totally. All right, well, that is as good a place to end as any because if you want to continue to make sure that Nilay Patel is absolutely ungovernable, the best thing you can do is subscribe to The Verge theverge.com slash subscribe. Not only do you get ad-free podcasts, but it is like, that's the thing that lets us do these things, right? Like it puts all the incentives in the right place for us. It lets us do the thing that we want to do in the right way that makes sense to everybody. And it is working and it makes me tremendously happy. We have gone way over. We should get out of here.

1:35:17David Pierce:It is like 7.30 p.m. Thank you as always for watching and listening. This show is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back next week with Allison doing some MWC stuff. We got a lot of other gadget stuff. It's gadget season. We're so back. Eli, rock and roll.

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