The race to win AI — and hack iMessage

26:23And you can't test that. Like it feels like you more have to do like a research project. Like it's more like anthropology or something I feel like than it is like mathematics and computations. Right. Do these models have different personalities? Right. Are they better at different things? Are there cultures? Like you do start to get into some very deep questions about the nature of intelligence. And then you're like someone asked it if I was handsome. And I was like, like literally said, like, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And I was like, well, you got a little bit of personality. All right.

26:59I see how it is. Damn. Yeah. It's like his contributions are vast, but I know. So anyway, people should play with it. I'm curious what people think of it. But there is obviously the future of Google's business is here, right? The future of the search business, which is the cash cow for Google, is sitting right in this product. And I still don't know how that's going to work. And I don't know if Google yet knows how it's going to work. How is it working in the Pixel? I haven't tried the Pixel version yet. And I'm just curious. So the Pixel 8 Pro is only – there's two things today. It's auto summarization in the recorder app and smart reply in the Gboard keyboard are now Gemini Nano.

27:38Okay. Yeah. I mean. And you can really feel that 29th benchmark. Yeah. When you're using Smart Reply and the Pixly keyboard. I mean, look, those are auto-reply, auto-complete. That stuff is really important. That is true. The AI stuff they've been doing in the recorder app is neat. And like for, you know. A lot of our reporters like it. Like a lot of our reporters are like, oh, yeah, I'll use a Pixel phone to just record because I don't have to worry about all the wide variety of transcription services. that cost a lot of money and also use AI. So you can just do it that way. That's genuinely useful, but for a very small group of people, I imagine.

28:16Google is always thinking about the hardworking journalists of the world when they make the pixel features. But if you're recording a meeting and it summarizes the meeting for you and that gets meaningfully better, that's great. And if that happens locally and you're not sending your enterprise work product off to a cloud service, that's good for you. I'm going to do all my CES briefings this way. Just throw the phone down. Talk to this robot. It'll summarize what you have to say for me. Anyway, so that's the big news of the week. This is the future of Google. You can just go play with Bard. It's neat.

28:48There's other AI news this week. So Bing, dear sweet Bing, announced something called Deep Search. So Bing has always been – I can't believe I'm going to say this. We started with Dex, and I'm going to go to Bing. There's always been one really fascinating part of the Bing search product as it relates to GPT-4. I just want to sit with that sentence for a minute. They've been doing – I don't know if it has been good or it's worked or it's taken one point of market share. But they've always been doing something really interesting, which they call search orchestration. Now what it's going to do is take that one step farther.

29:25It's going to read your search query. Microsoft's example is how do point systems work in Japan. And it's going to figure out all the things that could mean. And it's going to go search for those things and lace them together. So you can figure out if you mean credit card point system or weird social credit systems or whatever it is. And it's going to lace those together. So it'll take more time. But it's actually sort of like expanding your query for you. Yeah. And doing a bigger, deeper search of the web, which I think is fascinating. Yeah. I feel like, you know, looking at it and seeing what they did there, I think that's a great example of the loyalty programs.

29:56Because it is something huge. It is nebulous. And if you don't have, like, the card, the points guy or whatever for your region, that is genuinely useful. You want that summary. And, like, that's hard to do on your own. You can, but it's obnoxious. So what's really fascinating to me about this is that if you will remember when ChatGPT launched and Bing launched, there was that explosion of interest in prompt engineering. Yeah. And we had lots of conversations with people, lots of executives around Decoder saying prompt engineering is just a thing that's going to happen in the middle. There needs to be other kinds of interface.

30:33Well, Joanna Stern just did that great piece on prompt engineering. Yeah. And there's this theory that that's like a local – it's like a flash-in-the-pan moment. Yes. And then you look at what Deep Search is doing, and it is mechanically taking your query to the Bing search engine and rewriting it to be a longer prompt. So it takes how do point systems work in Japan and it rewrites the prompt to Bing as provide an explanation for how various loyalty card programs work in Japan, including benefits, requirements, limitations. And then it goes on. It's like a full paragraph long prompt. And you see that Microsoft has learned that it should just automate prompt engineering for you.

31:10And that's how it should constantly talk to the LLMs. It's another job claimed by AI. Created and claimed in the same year. And, you know, now that we know more about particularly how Bing works, like the huge meta prompt that it feeds into GPT is crazy. That's just the one that killed Sydney basically and killed the personality and puts the guide rails is just a meta prompt that is appended to your query. And so I don't know if that's how Google is managing BART. I don't know if that's how they all work. But this is very much how Microsoft is starting to manage Bing. Which is fascinating. It's hysterical.

31:51And this deep search tool is just kind of an extension of that. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that it's pretty candid about it. I'm curious, like, in practice, how often it's going to show you that whole search prompt so that eventually you can figure that out and be like, okay, well, so I just do a whole paragraph now instead of being like, tell me how to fix it. Which is probably useful for people. I mean, I would do that. I don't know. I'm sure most people would just be like, tell me how to fix it because that's faster and easier. Yeah. But the race to your point, the race to just answer the question continues apace.

32:24And I think for Google, the Gemini stuff is exciting. It shows they're in the game. They're excited about it very obviously. Sundar did a press tour, the whole thing. But how they turn that into money is still a huge open question. Yeah. And I just don't know the answer. But if the end result is you ask the LLM a question, it just tells you the answer, whether it's going through this like secondary prompt engineering exercise or not, or it's passing the hella swag test or whatever it's doing. They got to put ads in there somewhere. They got to make some money. I have seen some people say they think that Gemini Ultra will be a subscription product the way that GPT-4 is a subscription product and GPT-3.5 is not.

33:03Or how Grok is a subscription product. Grok also launched this week. Yeah. Don't. It's fine. Last two little bits of AI news. Let me take a break. Apple also made some AI news this week, which is the first time Apple has made any AI news, really. Baby steps. Baby steps. They released a new model framework called MLX that allows you to run various kinds of models and various coding languages like PyTorch on their chips using their memory architecture ideas. I bet that was an internal tool that they're like, it's good enough. We can now make it public. Because that's been a big deal at Apple is they don't want to actually use all the other AI tools.

33:42but they want their own ADI tools. Yeah. So they've been having to like, how do we build our own Bard and Gemini? Yeah. Why are these names all done? And Apple is also leaning more into the open source world. Yeah. So if you are, if you, you know, you're open source researcher, you want to use Meta's Llama, which is open source. You want to run Apple Silicon. You now have a framework to do that, that Apple is providing and supporting. Will that get you anywhere? Like, I don't know. I'm curious to see how well the Silicon handles it because just how different all the different architectures handle AI.

34:15And it's particularly like that stuff, like the Apple Silicon is very specifically built for a specific type of processing. And it's good at the other stuff. We've seen how good it is with video. And I'm just really curious if that translates as like GPU kind of translates. I think you're right. Like Apple has very particular GPU ideas. Yes. But they also have very particular neural engine ideas. Yeah. And we've just never seen anyone attack that part of their chip to go head-to-head with like an NVIDIA AI GPU? Yeah, because all they have to do is say like, yeah, it opens your phone real fast.

34:45It's really good at it and it's super smart. And it's like, cool. I have no way to ever test any Apple product. That's why we do this. Here's what you do. You run Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I was like, that's why we got Shadows of the Tomb Raider. It's the only thing that works. The only way to test an Apple product. Okay. And then the last little piece of AI news, I would just remind everyone again and again and again, these companies are running rampant with copyrighted information to train their systems No one knows if it's legal. They are insistent that they are. But all of them, all of this money, coin flip, fair use lawsuit, could take it all down.

35:18It is just true. It's a total coin flip. You might have some opinions. I have some opinions. Our company has some opinions. Sundar Pichai has some opinions. Satya Ndala has some opinions. I've asked all of them. And they're like, yeah, the legal process will have to pay out. But Getty's lawsuit, Getty Images lawsuit against Stability AI is now going to trial in the UK. And they obviously have sued here too. The law in the UK, different than the law in the United States. This is just a gigantic time bomb in the middle of the AI boom. No one knows that this training data is fair use. Again, I have an opinion.

35:53I think it is probably not. And I am not that person. That's not how I came up at all. That's not that it was just a surprising opinion for me. But the idea that you can just take all of this stuff, just hoover it up and somehow create billions of dollars of value for your users out of it. That seems wrong. Without any return. Just on its face. It seems like you're going to go to a court with that argument and something there is going to happen that you cannot predict. Yeah. Weird. And so we'll see. I don't know. I don't know. The courts are not predictable. We're all going to get like 50 cents for our tweets.

36:28Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Sorry. Here's your 50 cents. We used your tweets. Google has to send you a penny every time anybody uses bar. Man, those fanfic writers are going to make bank. And the lawsuits are just going to keep happening because in particular in this country, fair use is not a precedent-setting decision. Every single fair use case evaluated on its merits, de novo, like it's supposed to be case by case. It's in the law. So you can just keep filing the lawsuits until something else happens. Could somebody just make a law at some point? One would hope. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the state of our government.

37:03Just fix it. Doesn't seem... One day. Doesn't seem likely. One day. George Santos is on Cameo. That's the state of our government. He's not in the government anymore. Well, he's on Cameo. Yeah. Just good pivot. All right. We got to take a break. I'm going to sign up for Cameo. We'll be right back.

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39:49All right, we're back. All right, we're off the AI benchmark news. Yeah, we're done. Now it's time for hacks. Hacks and snacks. And cracks and freaks with a PH. Actually, pretty important. What would you call it, Dan? A workaround? Reverse engineering workaround. Yeah. But there's like. Solution. There's some spoofing happening there too, right? Yeah, okay. So, Beeper, which is a longstanding iMessage workaround that for years, basically, until just recently, involved you signing into your iCloud account on a Mac mini in the cloud as a relay service, now has reverse engineered iMessage. And they say they can do it natively.

40:33Dan, what's going on here? Yeah. So, it's a fascinating story. As Neela and I just said, you know, Beeper's been around for a while. But over the summer, a developer posted proof of concept to GitHub that they had reverse engineered the iMessage protocol and was able to send messages directly from basically any device, Linux, Windows, Android, to Apple's iMessage servers without having to use a relay server. And when Beeper found out about this, Beeper, who is headed by former Pebble CEO, Eric Mijakovsky. Pebble the smartwatch company. Pebble the smartwatch. Yes, you do have to clarify. There are like eight failed Pebbles now.

41:13Don't name your future company Pebble. That's all my advice to anyone. He reached out to this developer, contracted with him. Turns out it's a 16-year-old high school kid. He hires him part-time to develop this into a full-fledged app. So now what we have today is a new app called, they're calling it Beeper Mini for now. It is an iMessage client for Android. And it is exactly what that says. It is, you install it on your Android phone. You don't even have to sign in with an Apple ID. It talks to Apple servers, takes your phone number, and turns it into a blue bubble on iOS devices or Macs, whoever you're messaging.

41:53And it does it all locally without a relay server involved. And the way that they kind of reverse engineered it is a fascinating process. I strongly recommend going to check out Snazzy Q's video on it because he explains step by step. And frankly, it's above my head how it all works. But they end up spoofing serial numbers of real Apple devices, which is a technique that's been around for a long time in the Hackintosh world and in other applications in order to get Apple software to run on things that maybe Apple doesn't formally approve. Apple's kind of just always ignored it and left it alone.

42:27but they're using this now to basically spoof iMessage onto Android and allow you to be having completely, you know, fully supported, for the most part, Blue Bebel conversations on an Android phone. And it's fascinating because it works incredibly well. Yeah, because you've used it. Jake, I know, who wrote the piece has been using it and you really like it. I think it's great. Like, I switched my SIM fully from an iPhone to an Android phone and nobody noticed. Like, nothing skipped a beat. Like, I am still a blue bubble to all of the iPhone contacts I've ever had. And now I can message with RCS in Google Messages app to Android users.

43:07And I, like, don't get left out of group messages. I don't get missed notifications on reactions. If I wanted to send voice messages, I could. Like, all of those features are supported. It's just fascinating. When somebody says congratulations, do you also now get the balloons? So you don't get the iMessage reactions? I think that's called. You don't have that. I believe they said they are working on that. They are working on actually integrating FaceTime somehow, which I don't know how they're going to do. And the one thing that they don't ever anticipate ever being able to support are the iMessage apps and games, which, sorry, big loss.

43:42Oh no, not iMessage apps and games. The iMessage experience that most people think about on their iPhones is now fully replicated on Android. What happens if you have a mixed group of some Android phones, some Beeper Mini, and some iPhones? You just fall back to SMS? The Beeper Mini is going to act as an iMessage in that, and the iPhones are going to act as an iMessage in that, and everything's just going to fall back to SMS, and so that would go through your SMS app, probably Google Messages on your Android phone, because it's just going to be an SMS conversation. When you text someone, are you getting the text both to your Beeper app and to the regular text app?

44:16No. Oh, that's cool. If you are iMessaging someone, See, the app can tell if you're talking to an iMessage client. And so your iMessage conversation stays entirely within Beeper Mini. If someone sends you a text message, it will come through your text message number through Google Messages. I was thinking the example Neil and I had where he was like, okay, what happens if you've got a Beeper person and an Android person and an iMessage person? Then where does that message – it goes to the Beeper app. No, it goes to SM. It falls back to SM. You, in that scenario, you, the Beeper Mini user, are using SMS.

44:55Yeah. And so the annoying part of this is that you now have two apps for messaging. You have your iMessage app and you have your Google Messages app. And Beeper's plan is to, the original Beeper app was kind of like an all-in-one message service. It integrated all of your message services. Beeper Mini is strictly iMessage for now. Their plan is to integrate all of those other plugins into the Beeper Mini app. eventually drop the mini name and sunset the old app is the ultimate plan. But for today, you're using two apps. And the claim here, which I think is important, we don't know if it's true, but the claim is that Apple can't stop it without completely rebuilding the iMessage protocol.

45:34I'm really curious. I think because I keep getting stuck on the spoofing part of this. Like with Hackintosh, I built a lot of Hackintosh when I was younger. I love it. It's a fairly small community. So it was like, okay, Apple, we were all like, well, Apple. The police are coming now. You understand that Craig Gregory was listening to this. He just called the police. Yeah. My poor dog's getting arrested as we speak at home. But it was super easy to do. It was a lot of fun. But it was also understood that, like, it's a very small community. So it wasn't really a big deal. And it wasn't like a bunch of money was exchanging hands.

46:05You weren't being like, build me a Hackintosh. Because as soon as you did that, Apple came down you on. Well, so the difference there is with Hackintosh is usually you have to go acquire Apple software and install it on a device. And there's no real legal way to get that software if you're getting like OS X Leopard or whatever without getting it from Apple. And Apple's not going to give it to you if you don't have a Mac. So you have to basically torrent it. Well, that's why we all – everybody I knew who did it had a Mac. We just wanted to also have a tiny Dell Latitude. Can I tell you a story from my youth?

46:39Yeah. So there was a company in Florida called SciStar. Do you remember this? Yes, I do. And it was like two kids and they figured out how to build Macintoshes and they did an early like internet marketing campaign where like take down the man. Run OS X on your SciStar. We can do it. And they had all these like I would call them Reddit caliber legal theories. Yes. About how it would be legal and how they would defeat Apple in court. And they would – I had a SciStar. I reviewed a SciStar for Engadget. It was just a PC. Yeah. I was like what am I supposed to review here? Like it's just a noisy-ass tower PC that like sometimes boots up into OS X.

47:19That's what I used to build. And sometimes does nothing. It was exciting. But they had all these theories. Like if you owned a copy of the operating system, you weren't committing copyright infringement or breaching the contract. That's what we would all say in the – it was like Tony Mac 86X forum or whatever. We'd all be like, oh, yeah, yeah. We're fine because we already own it. like I went out and I had I had the physical copy of each cd for the os that you could have until they stopped distributing them and we were like we got this but we also generally unlike sci-star weren't charging for it yeah sci-star is like charging money and got this this is like folk copyright yeah like you've convinced yourself that if you just buy the cd you can make you can send as many mp3s to your friends as you want it's same thing with torrenters they're always like no no we're fine yeah and it is all just like you're you are concocting like a moral argument that somewhere some money has changed hands so now you can do whatever Thomas will ignore yeah it's who knows what's gonna happen man uh but but the end of my side story is they they pitched themselves a bunch and they you know they were compelling they were like young kids it started a business they were taking on the man they got all this attention and some like local florida alt weekly wrote this piece about how they were taken on apple and who knew what happened and so i wrote it up in a gadget i was like i can't believe they conned i called i called it a puff piece i was like it's a big puff piece about cy star like fun look at these guys but they're doomed and the reporter and i was like a baby blogger yeah the reporter wrote me just like the most hammer email like how dare you i would never write a puff piece these are valid issues and i was like I don't know how to break this to you like this company is not gonna make like five minutes and sure enough Apple sued them and it went away immediately and I was like that was crazy but it was it was all based on this argument that like if you did one right thing once then you could do the wrong thing as many times as you wanted and I think the difference with beeper is they're not using any of Apple's code right they're not they're just sending Apple a number right that happens to be a serial number.

49:34That's tough. The reverse engineering is legal and protected. That is a valid thing to do. Particularly when it comes to enabling interoperability, which is the whole hinging thing here. It enables interoperability for iMessage on Android devices. There is another law that could get in their way. It's there. It's always lurking in the background. It's one of the worst laws in the books. It's the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that says if you wrongfully gain access to a system, that is a criminal penalty. Well, this was how all the BIOSes, they would reverse engineer the BIOS back in the 80s. And you're like, had to be in a different room from the people reverse engineering it, right?

50:17Kranz, this is a plot point of Halt and Catch Fire. It is a plot point, but it's also true. It really happened. That's why it was such a good plot point. One of the best shows ever made, but it is a whole plot line of it. It's very cool. I remember being really excited. I was like, they're doing it. They're doing BIOS law. But again, the technical side of this is really kind of above my head. But Quinn over at SnazzyQ in his breakdown video, and he installs the open source code on a Linux laptop and connects to the protocol and does the thing as it works to show what it's doing behind the polished app that you see on Android.

50:55And it's really quite fascinating. He makes a point that spoofing the serial numbers does have a number of legitimate use cases. And there's no way for Apple to know whether this serial number that you are sending them is the 2015 iMac 21.5-inch model that it was originally, or it's your Android phone. Apple can't tell that. So if Apple were to turn that off, it would break a lot of things for legitimate users. So that's kind of where the rub is. But because the code is public, because the activity is public, Apple could certainly sue Beeper and say you are improperly accessing the iMessage servers that you are not supposed to have access to.

51:36And there is a long line of cases, like everything in America, have total coin flip outcomes once you hit the Supreme Court. Right? Like AT &T won a case and the characters involved in the case are somewhat unsavory. But AT &T won a case for someone who was just hitting the AT &T website to do lookups over and over again. And that was a CFAA case. LinkedIn just lost a case to an analytics company called HiQ that was scraping the LinkedIn database. And it's like, well, that seems wrong with an HiQ one. The Supreme Court just took another case where a police officer improperly did a lookup. Like someone paid him money to use the police database to do a lookup.

52:15No, no. But he was authorized to use the database. He just did it in an unapproved way. And like you just like if there's a server on the Internet and you talk to it and it tells you something, there's a million different ways to parse out whether that is legal or not legal. So how big is Beeper's legal fund, I think, is the real question we need to be asking. There's a couple of questions. Right next to this, the EU decided this week that Apple did not have to treat iMessage as a platform that has to be interoperable. Like Meta has to with WhatsApp. Did they decide or did they just lean in that direction?

52:48They've signaled. Signaled, yeah. European politics is a lot of signaling and posturing. Yeah. You rotate a piece of cheese. And everybody's like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yes, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much to you. Oh, debris has turned to the left. I message will not be a gatekeeper service. That's like – it seems like that's not going to happen. That is almost certainly because Apple agreed to adopt RCS. Right. Right, which was the gambit. And I think we all saw that as the trade. Like there's the threat of this big interop regulation. or they could do RCS and say, look, it's interoperable this way.

53:16Great, they did it. So that's sort of the background here. Like Apple's going to say, look, there's an interoperable way. It's coming. We're going to use it. Maybe only four people ever use Beeper. Or maybe they just – Apple's pretty litigious. Maybe they just send a threat to this company and say stop it. But the need to stop it or Apple's desire to stop it is going to cause problems because they don't actually have the RCS implementation yet. And so to say we're going to keep people locked out of our service while we work on this other thing, I think it's just going to be – and it's an indie developer that's really well-liked.

53:49It got a lot of press because a lot of Android people in this country really want to send high messages and they're going to pay beeper$2 a month or whatever it is to do it. They should have solved this problem a million years ago. They should have found a way to do this on their terms a million years ago because now they're doing it on the terms of the European Union and somewhat improbably on the terms of Eric Nikoski and Deeper Mini, which is just weird. It's a delight. And this is a 16-year-old kid who reversed engineering the protocol and is like spare time. Like that's a weird place for the richest company in the world to be.

54:23Yeah. Go after that 16-year-old kid. This is the thing. You want to file the CFA lawsuit against a 16-year-old kid for reverse engineering? You're the bad guy. That's just straight up you're the bad guy. Yeah. I mean that's what Sony did, right? I think it was the PS3. Yeah. This is the legend of George Hots. Yeah. Maybe don't do that. Well, George Hots did work. It did work. Twitter for five minutes. All right. So that's that. Other big piece of news we should talk about this week. It seems like podcast industry is in turmoil. Spotify just had layoffs. They're canceling really popular shows, including a show that won Pulitzer Prize.

54:59They canceled Heavyweight. The title laid off 10 % of its staff. It just seems like in general, podcasts, they had the big tech moment where all the money from the big tech companies, particularly Spotify, rushed in. Yes. And now the tide has come back out. It's like Spotify rushed in with zero plan. And then when the gravy train did not continue. The plan was celebrities. The plan was own this entire industry as quickly as possible. Like grow so fast, so big that nobody can stop us and we're a tidal wave. And then like we'll be supported by all our ad dollars. And the ad dollars are like, no, we're not going to support you that much.

55:36And they built an ad tech company. Yeah. And they wanted to do a dynamic insertion of ads. Because they were trying to own the whole ad tech industry side of Spotify. Disclosure, our ads are served by Spotify's ad tech platform, Megaphone. Disclosure, we're a podcast. I don't even know what I'm disclosing there. Like someone uploads this to this thing and we use it. It's great. Someone else runs the ads. But it's true. There's a disclosure. The whole story to me is they thought they could take a big, rich, open ecosystem and turn it into a very closed one. Yes. You could turn Spotify and the open podcasting ecosystem into something that looked a lot more like YouTube.

56:11And I think it just didn't work. Yeah, I 100 % agree. I think they failed. And we all kind of knew this. Remember, Ashley came on, Ashley Carmen, now at Bloomberg, broke a lot of this stuff about Spotify. Notable traitor, Ashley Carmen. Yeah, horrible traitor, but came on this very podcast, like, what, two years ago, talking about this. And we were all like, ooh, this doesn't sound like it's going to work for Spotify. It feels like they're just ignoring everything else about this and why this is a bad idea. It feels like we were all right. High five all of us two years ago. Yes! Yeah, I mean, obviously, they've held on to Joe Rogan.

56:44His deal is up for renewal, we have been told. So we're tracking that. Did not hold on to Prince Harry and Meghan. Meghan and Harry didn't make it. You know, there's something interesting there. You know, the tech industry loves to talk about going direct. Yeah. Like, loves to talk about going direct. You don't need these journalists. And it's like, if you go direct and you have nothing to say, no one will listen to you and you will have gone direct to no one, which is truly the Harry and Meghan story. Like, they're out of things to say. Yeah, they did the book. We were all like, thank you. This is actually all we wanted from you.

57:14We just wanted the tea. And I'm not even someone who, like, I'm Indian American. My people have fled the British twice. Like, we just get out. And I do not care about any of this. But it's like, even the people I know who do care, and we have them on our staff. Liz Lapata and Sarah Jog love some royal family drama. And they're like, whatever, we're done with this. And, like, that to me is, you need some tension to tell a good story. Yeah. And, like, that's, you buy a bunch of the celebrities directly, you're not going to have any tension. Every celebrity podcast is like a celebrity and then someone else just needling them.

57:48The new trend now is it's the D-list celebrities that were on the shows with the really big folks. They all get together and then talk trash about the big folks. Yeah. And then sometimes talk about like how they slept with the entire cast. And you're like, a lot of Disney Channel. Why? Don't get into the podcast scene, guys. There are so many like Disney Channel. We're ending this podcast before we go that way. Yeah, we won't do that. It's wild, though. That's the new trend for celebrity podcasts. Yeah. All of that seems like it didn't work, just to be clear. Spotify burned millions of dollars on this.

58:24They torched Gimlet, which was a darling. It was failing as a company. Obviously, they sold to Spotify for tons and tons of money that they had no plan themselves to gain because they were failing as a company. So good on them. But it also broke Gimlet. It broke Reply All. it broke the culture of that company at some point like the mergers are just bad the acquisitions are just bad and I think this feels like they bought Gimlet they bought Parcast they bought Anchor they bought Megaphone and they had no plan to munch them all together they bought the ringer and the plan to munch them all together seems like it just failed yes but the stock is up and they turn their first ever profit and it's like is that all that matters if you like money yeah Yeah.

59:08I don't think podcasts are going anywhere. You can see some of them are still growing. You can see money is flowing to some categories in them. But it feels like we're returning to a much more sustainable place to grow the podcast industry. It was very unsustainable for a while. And now it's going to be like, we're only going to support podcasts where people actually say something interesting. Maybe. And also Joe Rogan. and then the other thing Spotify and all the other big podcast players are doing is they're they're focusing on chat shows influencer you know the the solo podcast where the influencers just rant at the screen but it looks like a podcast yeah a deeply fast like that's a media phd that's gonna be my spinoff if there are any media phd any media studies students that are pursuing a media studies phd i would read your dissertation on the the one person podcast where they just talk the whole time what do they do i just i i like to talk yeah i mean i love it that's it's my favorite am radio model right like that was the rush limbaugh model it was the alex jones model just talk to the microphone for three hours straight yeah i'm just dying to know in podcasting to do that on your own and then to like close your laptop lid and be like...

1:00:26I did it. Good job. There's something in there about that personality making that kind of content with that kind of distribution that I promise you is a PhD thesis. I'd read it. There's some feedback loop in there that I just want to know more about. Just send it to Neal. Send it to all of us, honestly. I want to read that too. Well, do it. Go get your PhD. That's what I'm telling you. That's a good use of money. And then Tidal, obviously laying off its staff. Again, another Jack Dorsey, brilliantly managed company. Yeah. Love it. It had Beyonce for a while. It did. And then last piece of little media news, and we'll take a break.

1:01:00Apple is munging together its iTunes movies and TV shows app into the proper Apple TV TV app. So now we have to use it. And it was already sort of done that way. Yeah. So it's just like they're just like cleaning up the crumbs. Like the people who haven't really touched their workflow in 20 years are going to be like, oh, no, how are we going to like watch my old Aquaman episodes from 2006? That sucks for them. but also the rest of us have been living now where you just use the one app. Yeah. I'm judging people. What I'm doing is— What you mean is Plex. Alex's Plex app. It's the Apple TV app. Sure.

1:01:39By the way, there was a piece of news this week, very distressing. Sony's just deleting TV shows that people bought on PlayStation accounts. We're going to talk about it later. We'll take a break. We'll be right back. We'll talk about that.

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1:04:29All right, we're back. It's lightning around time. Tell us about the Sony thing. Earlier this week, a lot of PlayStation users noticed that they were just getting banned out of the blue. A lot of people say, oh, I'm getting banned. I don't know what happened. And you're like, no, you do. So this wasn't the case. They were just like totally outright banned. They didn't know what was happening. It was a whole lot of people, which was the other part of this. And so Jay Peters and Tom Warren looked into it. And eventually Sony was like, oops, our bad. And just slowly has been giving everybody their account access back.

1:04:57And it was all just an accident. It was just like a bug and they screwed up. But it also just immediately reminded everyone, particularly when paired with the fact that Sony also recently said, okay, a lot of this content you purchased from Discovery +, you will not have access to it anymore. We've changed some of our licensing. It's just like a big reminder that you don't own anything you buy digitally. You don't own any of it. It's not yours. It's all licenses. It's all fake ownership. And Sony just accidentally reminded their entire customer space, which is not what you want to do when you're highly dependent and all of them buying shit on your stores.

1:05:39They just radicalized a lot of people into buying that disc drive. Yeah, which is— Maybe this is all a plot to get people to buy an external disc drive. Yeah, they're just trying to, like, move those disc drives. I'm like, all right, you're losing it all. Someone opened a closet, like, we have a lot of Blu-ray drives. Way more than we thought, you guys. All right, pull the Disco Plus stuff. Let's go. We got this. Dr. Pimple Popper's out of here. We got to move these drives. But Jay wrote a really great piece just kind of lamenting it, and he's absolutely right. Don't – like if you really want to own something and you want to own it for a long time, don't just buy the digital version.

1:06:14And a lot of times you can just go buy a DVD or a Blu-ray and get the digital version. Then you have both for the same amount of money. Look, I'm building a new home theater right now in the new house. I'm really thinking about putting a Blu-ray player in it. I don't know why. Do it. I've got one. I use it once a year. I plug it into my computer. Use it once a year to rip legal media to your Plex server. You know, it's folk copyright law, and we don't need to talk about it too much. I've got a Blu-ray player that's been running macOS 9 for a decade. It's great. All right, Dan, what's your lightning round?

1:06:51I got two. Can I do both now? Yeah. All right. The first one is Allison did a review of the Razer, which is not to be confused with the Razer Plus. It is Motorola's budget flip phone. Turns out it's not a very good phone. I'm just going to start off by saying that. But what's really fascinating to me about it is this is priced at$700. And because Motorola discounts things 100 % of the time, all the time, you can buy for$500, which means this is a flip phone with a folding screen for$500, which is kind of like a fascinating thing to me that we are already at that point of affordability of these kinds of flip devices.

1:07:31The cameras aren't great. The processor can be a little slow. The outside screen is not very useful. It's not a phone I would recommend anyone buy, but it's pretty cool that like we've gone from, these are all a thousand or$1 ,400 to$500 in just a couple of years. uh so that was my first uh one yeah it's true and we we the second that first galaxy fold came out we're like oh the cost curve on this is gonna go what's interesting is the technology curve has kind of stopped right like the screens are better they're more durable that was the big thing but they look largely the same they're still lumpy well there's lumpy but even just like the way the materials look and feel.

1:08:14Yeah. They still are soft kind of plastic. It doesn't feel like hard glass. Yeah. Yeah. And that was, there was some, there was a lot of talk about bendy glass in the beginning. Do you remember this? Yes. Ultra thin glass. Yeah. Yeah. Where is it? Well, it's all in there. It just, the way they work is there's a layer of ultra thin glass. And then on top of that is a soft plastic screen protector. And that's what you touch. And that's what provides that kind of not so great tactile experience. Whereas with most things, technology kind of like make it better and keep the cost the same, or you can make, keep it the same, keep bringing the cost down.

1:08:46And we are very much on the, keep it the same, bring the cost down part of the curve. There's not the step change into that. Particularly for the flip designs, the fold designs are still very expensive. Uh, the OnePlus open came out earlier this year and that is available for around$1 ,500. That's kind of like the low price for these folding phones. But the flip phones, and I think it's part of who these are marketed to. Folding phones are marketed to like Uber do-everything nerds like me. And then the flip phones are marketed to people who want something a little bit more fashionable, a little bit more compact, discreet, don't want to spend 10 to 12 hours a day staring at their phone like I do, and want to make it more of like an intentional device.

1:09:29And so they don't need the fastest processor they don't need the highest end camera system they don't need the bills and whistles to run decks and things like that uh even though i think motorola lets you run its version of decks which is called ready for on its flip phones so hey it's a thing you could do hey i want to see that next dock with a motorola flick yeah let's do it bad camera slow processor uh great okay you all knew this was going to be my lightning round you knew it there There is no choice except for this story to be my lightning round item, which is the photo of the woman in the bridal gown.

1:10:06Like I saw it. And as soon as the news broke earlier this week, I was like, I know what I'm talking about. The news broke a couple of weeks ago. A couple of weeks ago? And then OpenAI happened and we forgot about it. So this photo, there's a photo of a woman. She's trying on a wedding dress. She's in the bridal shots. There's mirrors all around her like you do so you can see yourself from all the angles. And she's making a different pose in all the mirrors and then in person. She's a British comedian. She posted her Instagram story. She said, this is crazy. I've never had anything like this happen.

1:10:35The immediate theorizing about AI photo composites started happening. Smart HDR. She said she went to the Apple store. Some Apple store employee told her this was Apple beta testing a competitor to best take on Google, which makes no sense. This is all true. This all happened. This is all in her Instagram stories and Instagram posts. Tom Warren, because she's in the UK, Tom Warren reached out to her. I was like, we got to get the actual photo. Then he reached out to her. He got the photo. We were talking about it. Then the opening high news broke. Tom is our Microsoft reporter. He and I got very distracted.

1:11:11Very busy. We stopped paying attention to the woman in her wedding dress for a minute. The post came back this week. People saw it again. The same amount of theorizing that happened. And people calling it fake, a publicity stunt, a social media. And we had the file. And nothing about the file indicates that it's fake. Tom was sent the uncompressed, seemingly unaltered original photo off the iPhone. And we were looking at it. We were trying to figure it out. We were going to ask Apple. Because it is very odd that she's making three different poses in the mirrors. And so everyone's trying to figure this out.

1:11:49Again, a lot of people claiming it's fake. It turns out someone else had taken the photo and they had the camera accidentally in panorama mode. Oh, yeah. So it actually did stitch together several frames across to make it panorama. But if you don't move the camera enough and you don't get a wide enough picture, the iPhone does not append the panorama label. Yeah. The only tell. And I think there's a YouTuber, Ifondo. His name is Farouk. He's the one who kind of like popularized or told the world about this reasoning, how it worked. But the only tell is that the resolution of the final image is not the same as a resolution that is captured by the sensor.

1:12:33And so the Photos app does not say panorama because it's not a panoramic view. It's too tall and narrow. It's a vertically composed shot. But the pixels are different. And so that is like the tell there that is in panoramic mode. So Farouk was able to replicate this very quickly as soon as he figured that out by putting his phone in panoramic mode and doing another shot just that same way and was able to replicate it instantly. So it's kind of fascinating. What's really fascinating to me is the stitching is perfect, which is awesome. Because the camera isn't moving. Yeah, I didn't know you could do that.

1:13:10Because it always is like, move the camera. That's what my phone sounds like to me. But it's always telling me to move the camera. So I'm always like, do it. Alex, that tells you how well people follow directions on their devices. Can I just ignore that? You can just ignore it. One, Apple should just label all panorama photos as panoramas. That seems like an easy fix to the solution. But two, the expectation that AI is just going to munge with reality is everywhere now. Well, I don't think the expectation is the reality is. That's the reality of the situation. I think people are still – because that's why everybody thought it was a fake.

1:13:46Because everybody was like, you're a liar. You did this on purpose. You used Photoshop or Panorama or whatever. And it's like, no, she just accidentally did it. Yeah. But even if you think this is the world's greatest publicity stunt. Yeah. Targeted to a very small community. Very small group. It relies on an understanding that AI exists and is doing photo stuff. That's true. That's true. Right? It's not like it's either ghosts in the building. Like, no, no. It's like, oh, the iPhone camera's AI took this completely unbelievable picture and AI generated you. And, like, people will believe that that's true.

1:14:24And a lot of people believe that it's true such that other people were debunking it, like the whole thing. And in the meantime, it was a totally different lane of photography. Yeah, because a lot of the theories were around it was doing that thing where it chooses the best shot of you. And it just happened to assume she was three different people. Right. The mirror had confused some sort of best take. Yeah. But Apple Smarty Share does not work like this at all. And even Google Best Take does not work like this at all. Apple Smarty Share stacks seven frames in like half a second. She would have had to move her hands so fast.

1:14:58Like totally, insanely too fast. That's why I was like, we got to get the original file. There's no way that an iPhone just generates this because I was not thinking about panorama mode. So it's a Photoshop we might have been able to tell. but the thing that got me was she sent it to Tom right away. Yeah. Tom reached out and she was like, here you go. And that, that like, to me, like you are a reporter long enough. Like, oh, there's some things where if there's a hesitation there, it's like you only can get a compressed one. Then you're like, is this off the record? And then you blame WhatsApp.

1:15:27Like there's all this stuff that usually happens when you request an original. And she was just like, here you go. Okay. So I was like, all right, there's something here that I don't understand. And the panorama of it is interesting. the the thing that's truly fascinating to me is that the culture is ready to receive ai fakery as an explanation for anything yeah and like i'm just telling the what is the photo apocalypse is like well and truly here because you can tell anyone that a photo has been ai faked and they the chances of them believing you are just steadily going up yeah even if it doesn't turn out to be the case that's when all my photos now are going to be fakes you don't know they already are they already are i haven't taken a real photo in 20 years all right i've got a couple other ones just to go through quickly one this is maybe my favorite story of the year windows has an issue that is just renaming printers to hp laserjet across the board the only printer you need it's just very good just advertising it's like will ai kill us all or will the hp smart app worm its way onto literally every computer on the planet and like begin taking out centrifuges And buying ink.

1:16:35And buying ink. Like the problem isn't paperclips. The problem is ink cartridges. So Microsoft says it's looking into it. It's Windows 10, 11. Printer is being randomly renamed to HP LaserJet. Some issues related to printer configurations are being observed on Windows devices, which have access to the store. It's just very good. It's so good. Everyone just has the HP Smart app now. Your printer is an HP LaserJet, and you're going to like it. Yeah. We do say buy a laser printer, but we usually say brother, not H. Official statement. Most printers are being named as HP LaserJet M101-M106. The icons might also be changed.

1:17:14It's so good. It's very good. Then just real quickly, we are going to cover Epic v. Google in much more detail on the Wednesday show. Sean Hollister will be on the show. He's been in the courtroom. But this is really important for this case. Google has gotten itself into an enormous amount of trouble with this judge for deleting records throughout this case. That's a no-no. Like an enormous amount of trouble. The judge is furious. Last Friday, he said he would investigate Google personally for, quote, intentionally and systematically suppressing evidence. He called it a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.

1:17:50And he said, I'm going to get to the bottom of who is responsible on my own outside this trial. Yo. I don't know what kind of. I've been in enough companies that are like getting lawsuits and stuff when you're told to retain all your records that you just never think to not. You're just like, yeah, my mess is going to be out there. And Sundar was asking like can I set this chat to auto delete? They were deleting stuff left and right. They admitted in court that they were just deleting stuff. At one point the judge called in Google's general counsel and made him answer to why these policies – he's furious about this.

1:18:25That's great. I will investigate this on my own outside this trial. It's a very funny threat. Like he's going to get a magnifying glass. Takes his robes off. He puts on a leather jacket. Yeah. A little fedora. And he's like, let's go. He's like a 70s bad cop. You know? Driving his old ass car. He's got a muscle. He's got a GTO and a magnifying glass. He's like, where are the records? I don't know what that will lead to. But importantly, he has told the jury, not that they have to, but they may. infer wrongdoing on the part of Google if there's a question that the missing records would have answered.

1:19:03Okay. Right. So he's in, and that's like a pretty loaded suggestion. I was like that. I mean, it's like, well, that's fair, but also, Ooh, that's bad for Google. Right. So the, the idea here is that the jury is going to consider, and it really, it really seems like Google might lose this case in a way that maybe at the end of Apple, you know i still think uh epic walked away with one important just the way the legal system works they want a bunch of stuff they want to appeal whatever but apple is like we just run our business and that's it google there's all this evidence and there's much deleted evidence all this stuff it really seems like epic mounted a much stronger case with google yeah and now the jury is being sent and they are allowed to infer whatever google was hiding was bad which is just a big deal.

1:19:49It might come to nothing. It might not come to nothing. It's just worth noting the judge is furious. Like this is the shadiest thing Google has done. And the judge is furious about it. And he's told the jury about it. And it's going to make all the appeals really messy because I just assume they will all be appealed, whatever the decision is. Oh, whatever the decision is appealed. It all just what you appeal is the law. Yeah. So the facts remain the facts. And so just this is why you don't delete your records, Right. Yeah. Because this will happen. Right. But an appeals court does not get to go back and say the jury is finding a fact.

1:20:24Right. Right. They get to say that the law is wrong and we should change the law or this other thing. So that's a little it's a little law school. I see the tech. But so here the inference of the jury was you might appeal. This was a wrong inference to give the jury or whatever. But he didn't. He didn't instruct them to think one way or another. He said they were just allowed to. which is a very important instruction. Anyway, I would just say the Epic v. Google case, we're going to talk about it much more with Sean on Wednesday. Get into it. But that was the one that stuck out to me this week.

1:20:54It's like, ooh, there's something there. All right, and then the last one I just want to call out, Allison Johnson, second call for her today, has a big piece as part of our infrastructure package about just 5G and the fact that it hasn't paid off for anyone. and she basically listened to all the big carriers earnings calls and how they're talking about their investments what the investors want. There's nothing there. It's basically like they might compete with fixed broadband so instead of having whatever ISP you have you might get a 5G fixed wireless device. They seem excited about that. They're excited about enterprise customers buying fixed 5G networks which is hard because you've got to have an enterprise sales team which many of them don't.

1:21:38And then they can do what Verizon is calling pricing actions, which means one thing. I hate it. The action is turning the price up. That's the action you can take. You know what we can do? You got faster internet. Now you pay$100 more. Enjoy. I will remind everyone. We actually had a note this week about Project Genna5Sys, the ill-fated attempt to turn Dish Network into a mobile carrier. Still technically it. They have it. But they've – I believe Allison points this out. They've technically hit their coverage goals, but they've done it by leasing space on AT &T and T-Mobile's network. So they have not actually built a nationwide wireless network.

1:22:20It's just Mitchell. It's just Mitchell. He's out there on the trail. Our own wonderful Mitchell Clark who tried desperately to use Project Gen5. This whole thing was a moondoggle. Yeah. It cost a lot of money. It put all these carriers in debt. It consolidated us down from four to three. Well, three in Project Gen of five sys. And now we're doing pricing actions. Like we should just see it for what it is. You should read Allison's piece. It is great. It is very clear eyed and direct about what has happened in a way that is not just me ranting and raving. It like makes the argument really well.

1:22:53It's good. You should read it. Send it to all your friends. And Lena Con. And then whatever carrier you have, switch to another one. That's my advice. That's my end of the year advice for our chat listeners. Whatever you have, just switch to another one. Make them all feel it. Be like, why is this happening? Oh, just do the churn. Yeah, just churn them up. Churn moment. It's a churn moment. I'm just saying we just got to create the appearance of some competition. Yeah, yeah. I really am excited to go to AT &T. I'm not. No. I'm just thinking about this advice. You're like, no, don't actually do that.

1:23:27Just do whatever feels right in your heart. That's the Virchcast, everybody. That's my message. It's holiday season. Whatever's in your heart, do it. Oh, speaking of the holidays, by the way. Yeah. Holiday Spectacular coming up again. We've done HDMI. We've done Bluetooth. Failed at Jeopardy. We did not do a good job with Bluetooth Jeopardy. This year, by just popular demand, just a wave of demand, the Vergecast Holiday Spectacular is USBC. We've got the guests lined up. We've got the ideas. We've got the plug fest coming. And we're going to do another game show this year because Andrew insists that we do a game show.

1:24:05I believe it's The Price is Right are we allowed to say yeah we're allowed to say it's a game show that is not it's not The Price is Right if I don't have a giant wheel we're going to up the ante this year all of us are going to be playing for one of you a Vergecast listener and whoever wins gets a big bag of swag so here's what we need from you call the hotline 866-VERGE-11 that's 866-837-431 one one. Tell us your name and your favorite USBC gadget. We'll put all the names in a hat. We'll pick them out. We'll play. We'll do it. We're going to compete for you. Yeah. I'll represent you. Alex will represent someone else.

1:24:48I'm so sorry. And then whoever wins gets a big bag of Verge merch. I'm actually doing a lot of USB research. Actually, this just says some Verge merch. So whoever with some Verge merch. Depends on how bad your person does. I've seen the merch. The merch is good. It's quality merch. So it'll be a good price. Are you prepping to help your listener? Yeah. Yeah. I'm reading all up. I'm going to know some specs. Oh boy. I'm going to know what ohms mean. All right. She's got it. I'm ready. Let's go. I got you. Alex is going to do some high school level electrical research. It's going to be amazing. No, that's it.

1:25:30That's holiday spectacular, one of our silliest yearly traditions, back and forth to USB-C. Tell us your favorite USB-C gadget, 866 Verge11. We'll pick some people. We'll play for them. The winner, get some merch. Sounds pretty good. Call the number. That's it. That's the VergeCast. Rock and roll.

1:25:53And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Verge Cast 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. We'll see you next week.

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