The real cost of the PS5 Pro

27:09Yeah. You just can't. You can't look at stuff on a smartphone screen. Just like when people try to, we do it all the time. When we're like, listen to these speakers and we record them and then people watch them on YouTube on their smartphone speakers. I don't know what's happening there. That's nothing. That's just like a handshake agreement through the internet that we're going to feel some vibes. Yeah. That's not right. Just believe us. We're telling the truth. That's how I feel about those videos. I don't know. I'm very interested in what is happening in the broader gaming market because it feels like that shakeup.

27:40The split is like really happening, right? Like we knew this PC moment was happening for consoles, but this in particular, like it was a moment with PS4 Pro because you were like, okay, now we are fracturing the console market and the way the console market typically isn't fractured. The whole point of the console market is no fracture. Like everything is, you go, you buy this thing, it does the games. And now you're getting all these different SKUs, sort of like Apple, just introducing all these different SKUs. And like, yeah, okay, you're going to meet more of the market here, but you also lose why people like this product to begin with, which is simplicity.

28:12I wonder if what we're seeing is just this like incredible bifurcation of the gaming industry, where on the one hand you have the handheld revolution, right? Which is like I think is going to eat the low-end consoles alive. It's already happening, right? Like if I just want to play Astro Bot, the idea of me needing a gigantic box to do it, I think is like that's ending very quickly. then the flip side is the high end stuff is going to get higher end so it feels like we're going to end up in a place of like music streaming and vinyl and nothing in between right you're either going to have this sort of like beautiful bespoke setup with a lot of very specific things but it is going to be extremely high fidelity and wonderful or we're going to lean deep into convenience and streaming and everything is going to be lower quality but that's what people want well i think there's a third prong here that kind of affects it, which is that they own so many of these studios that are making these games.

29:08And these studios aren't making games for anybody else, right? Like Astro Bot, you can't go play that on anything but a Sony device because Sony wants to keep you in their wheelhouse. And that's, ooh, the FTC is going to have feelings. I think if you're like, look, we're basically PCs. We're doing all of this stuff. Also, you can't play Last of Us on anything else, people will start having feelings about that in a very real way that I'm kind of curious about. Well, I think Sony is allowed to have its first party studios, which has been whittling down. It's when Microsoft bought Activision and said, we're going to close off Call of Duty that you've got all the regulators.

29:43I would point out that ever since Microsoft actually closed that Activision deal, it has just been clown car city over there, just banging into walls and falling off cliffs. It's great. they announced just today that they're going to lay off 650 more xbox employees this is just a wave of layoffs and strategy shifts all after they they fought tooth and nail to buy activision because something because they want to have everybody wants their little fiefdom and you have to go and buy the console to get in to play the games rather than just play them on a pc which they can all theoretically do because architecturally they're all the same well sure but i'm Sony at least has a first of all it's the winner of this generation yeah because it's got the good games if you don't count the Switch which has won every generation that it's been anywhere near right and the new Switch we think is coming out that will probably win whatever generation it's a part of the cycles don't quite line up but Sony has beaten Microsoft pretty soundly this generation I hear what you're saying like the underlying software or the underlying hardware architectures are similar like they're AMD chips but the ps5 is a it's an opinionated device yeah right it sony has a lot of thoughts about the playstation and what it's for and what the game should work like and mark cerny has a lot of ideas about settings right like there's there's a vision there for better or worse and you cannot feel it and you can be mad about the disk drive but yeah sony has confidence microsoft has confidence i think phil spencer is a confident person they have a lot of ideas but actually they're it feels to me like they knew they were losing they wanted to make a big swing and they have just whiffed on a bunch of their big swings they whiffed on cloud gaming which was supposed to be the biggest swing of all they haven't pulled it off yet yeah um this activision deal you know they let call of duty be the sideshow but it was really about candy crush and phil has said this to us mobile gaming is the future no one has a foothold there we got to win there that was also kind of a weird sideshow of cloud gaming and none of that i don't think anybody any consumer if you're a if you're a gamer please please use the feature on ios where it makes your emails a little bit nicer but then email us i'm curious did did microsoft buying activision improve anything about playing games for you like i don't see it yet and it's true the deal is pretty new yeah but you you see that what's happening over there is they are looking for a new strategy or a new vision and i i think he needed that before he made one of the biggest acquisitions of all time but i think sony's muddy you talk about it's got this big clear vision it's muddied that vision because on the one point yeah you have astrobot you have the last of us you have spider-man you have these games these first party games that look gorgeous or stunning play great on this thing, have really kind of unique things focused on that controller, and then you just have everything else.

32:41And Microsoft has kind of said, we're going to be everything else. We're going to own that space. We're going to be the PCs. We're going to bring, you know, kind of gaming PCs into the console space. And Sony's now saying the same thing. Even though they've got this lead, they're saying, yeah, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to muddy the waters here. And I think that's where, like, the PS5 Pro doesn't have that clear vision you see in their games. Oh, I think it has one very clear vision. It costs more money. It costs so much money. Right now, if you're going to buy a console, is there any, and you already have a Switch, because that's what you should buy.

33:16If you're going to buy a console, you're going to buy a PS5. Yeah. Right? They're the winner. That's what most people have chosen. Unless you don't want to play those first-party games. If you just want to play Call of Duty and stuff, go get an Xbox. Most people are still going to buy PlayStations. To the extent that there is a default choice, it's the PlayStation. Right. So then you have a PlayStation and you can discount the regular one because you have your economy of scale. So you can go into the holiday and be like, here's the cheap PlayStation, like you're saying. Yeah, get that Series S.

33:43And then you can – there's some category of people that will just spend more money. And you can sit there – we had a CFO at Fox Media a long time ago. This guy was waiting to catch the basketball. He's like, I'm just – the money comes and I'm here to get it. And I was like, I don't think that's what a CFO does. But it was a learning experience for me. He was great. But I think Sony is just like, here's a more expensive one. Catch the money. We're just here. If you have$300 extra, we'll take it from you. Yeah, that's true. This is the game both of these companies have been playing for this whole generation, right?

34:14And Microsoft's bet has been for years now that we are on the cusp of a giant shift in how this entire industry works. How we play the games, where they are, how they're architected, the kinds of games that we play. Like Microsoft has been making this bet for a long time now. I think Microsoft still thinks it's right and is running out of patience for it to actually happen. Sony is just sitting around saying, look at all this money flowing in. And then the question will be, if you fast forward a few years, is Microsoft going to be right before it gave up? Or is Sony just going to have so much money at the end of it that who cares?

34:51But like Sony is basically betting that this shift is going to happen slowly and Microsoft is betting that it's going to happen fast. Okay, I'm going to end by saying one thing that will make everybody mad. Yeah. Or that you will completely agree with. I don't think there's a middle ground. It's weird that Microsoft has tried to run away from the idea of the Xbox being a thing that just plays games really well for so long. It's never one of that. Right? It's like the whole Xbox One side quest with where it had IR blasters and HDMI pass. People got so mad at me when I was like, this is a disaster.

35:24My ongoing theory about this is that every once in a while, there's an executive meeting at Microsoft and somebody turns to Phil Spencer and goes like, why are you here? And so he has to explain why Xbox is part of Microsoft. And eventually that morphed into talking about Azure. And then it was just toast. Right. Can we run? This is what I mean. First, we're going to do it. We're going to take over. We're going to have a dish network integration in the Xbox. They were all the way down the rabbit hole of that stuff. And they walked it all back to games. and then it was reasonably successful again.

35:55And then this generation, they were starting with games and they're like, well, we lost to Sony. We're going to stream the games from Azure. That will disrupt the whole market and that just has not panned out. And it just seems like if they, maybe some focus on the main thing would continue to be successful. But that's back it up to the first thing and it's a how do we be part of the Windows strategy thing inside of Microsoft. and then fast forward to this generation and it's a how do we be part of the cloud first strategy of Microsoft. Like I think there is a very compelling case to be made that the best and worst thing going for the Xbox team is that they work for Microsoft.

36:34But you know, I was going to say though, I think part of the reason they've been doing all this flip-flopping is because their first party games haven't landed the same. Like they just don't land. Like Sony's first party games move consoles. People buy consoles for Sony's first party games. I don't know. Halo was good for a while. Halo. Name another one. Halo 2. See, like, and Microsoft went on this whole buying spree. They were like, we're going to buy all of these companies. And then they got told, oh, okay, you cannot make Call of Duty exclusive for you. They own Minecraft. Yeah, not exclusive.

37:07Like, first party exclusives. You know, The Last of Us, Spider-Man, those are exclusive. They come to the PC eventually. And then you can sort of play it through Xbox, I think, through the cloud. But you have to wait a while. If you want to play The Last of Us, which all the other gamers are playing and everybody's talking about, you go get a PlayStation. Well, yeah. And I think that all sort of flows from the same circles, right? Where it's like, okay, if our job is to sell consoles, how do you sell consoles? You sell consoles with really good games. But if our job is to increase the market share of our cloud services arm of our company, you just prioritize things very differently.

37:46I think Full Censor would take deep issue with that characterization of Xbox. but it's always a little more true than anybody wants to be. By the way, can I just read you the first paragraph of his note announcing these layoffs? For the past, this is Phil Spencer, his memo to Microsoft employees. For the past year, our goal has been to minimize disruption while welcoming new teams and enabling to do their best work. As part of aligning our post-acquisition team structure and managing our business, we've made the decision to eliminate approximately 650 roles. Welcome! You're fired. That's tough.

38:19And then at the end of it, he's like, we've had some good days and we've had some bad days and this is a bad day. It's like, thanks, Bill. I mean, there's no good way to write those notes. No, there's not. I think mergers are bad. That's all I'm saying. I think generally they lead to chaos and disruption in actually smaller companies with less focus or less ambition. And I suspect that will be in the long run true of the Activision deal. Are you saying Warner Brothers Discovery isn't a good company? We got to go. We got to take a break. All right. Yeah, we're taking a break. Like, we'll talk about whatever Zaslav is doing a little bit later.

38:49We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

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40:05We're back. and we have the most breaking news of all. In the middle of our break, literally in the middle of our break, Google put up a blog post announcing the developer preview of desktop windowing on Android tablets. I know that the audience is as lit up by this as we are, but I have to tell you, this whole room got so distracted that we almost forgot to start the show again in the middle of the break. Just looking at this blog post. It's a good blog post. If you're a Dex head, just know your empire is falling, crumbling, brick by brick. It's Google ruthlessly Sherlock's your entire operating system away from you.

40:50So basically a Pixel Fold, which feels like one of the hotter phones going right now. David just got one. Yep. It's sitting here in a FedEx box on my desk. Liam has a Pixel watch on right now. And a Pixel Fold. And a Pixel Fold because he bought a Pixel Fold and now he's in the ecosystem. him i'm seeing him people are excited about this phone and so google which has liam was trying to run the pixel fold on a desktop monitor the other day and it was the saddest thing i've ever seen it's adorable truly this like no literally no affordance for running with a keyboard and display like it's just here's your pixel full like here's a mediocre android tablet and it's still square it was still square it was beautiful everything about it was great as you know samsung has decks As Vergecast listeners know, Samsung has this thing called DeX, which is the desktop mode for its phones.

41:37There's a lot of weird DeX stuff going on. Literally different SKUs of the same phone in the Samsung lineup run different versions of DeX with different capabilities. Samsung, baby. It is just not a thing you can depend on. As someone who has desperately tried to live the DeX lifestyle, the only person I know who ever pulled it off successfully is Dan Seifert, our former reviews editor, who now works at Google. because Google was like, Dan, can you explain what is going on in Samsung devices? So I was going to ask. So there's a man named Dieter Bone who also works at Google, who also was a big believer in window freedom, I would say.

42:17And then Dan, America's number one Dex user. Yeah. The one and only Dex user. Still number one, man. Goes to Google. Does The Verge get credit for this feature? Yes, this is us. This is our alumni. I feel like we did this. I think that we don't, actually. We don't. We're all good friends. We just learn to not talk about work anymore, which is weird for people that worked in media together especially. We just don't. I see Dieter. We talk about anything else. So I don't know. We have no inside info, and I maintain that line because I like talking to Dieter. He's my friend. So we just enforce this.

42:56We had to learn what to talk about that wasn't working or gadgets. very weird um so i don't know but i'm just taking credit for it yeah i'm saying with no literally no evidence and actually like uh an ideological resistance to knowing yeah and a deep knowledge of that not being how it works yes we're still taking credit absolutely we will send our armies into your house and introduce desktop windowing could not agree more i'm into it so okay here's what's actually going on it's just a developer preview right now they're showing it mostly in a Pixel tablet. I have to imagine that this is going to be what will happen on Pixel Fold, which very much acts like a tablet when you unfold it.

43:35You can just freeform Windows. You can just run Android like a desktop operating system. You pull a Chrome window down and it opens a window with a nav bar and tabs and navigation. It should. I think there's some weirdness here between what is a Chrome OS device and what is it. The Google weirdness here is very powerful like the the chrome os team just saw this and is like what the hell or they're like aren't we on the same team you know it's with google um so there's some weirdness here about just the differences in between the apps like chrome os can run android apps weird that that came to nothing as most of these ideas generally come to nothing um but the idea that google is taking a bigger step forward in particular with the fold because i don't think android tablets is a thing really matter if they have free-form windowing but part in particular with the fold and foldable android devices that when they're closed they act like android phones and when they open they have free-form windows that can be useful in a variety of like computing situations that's a big deal like it feels like a big deal they have to actually chip it it has to like work But this is the thing that everybody wants.

44:52You just carry your phone to work and you plug it in and it's a computer. We're a little bit closer there. I'm sorry. I'm just looking at the desktop windowing thing they have. And it feels like the person, the sample they're using here, the person is lying about going to Tahoe. This is so Gemini can summarize it. Yeah. The Tahoe debrief. And then behind that, you see they've been Googling Tahoe. interesting interesting they're like gemini summarize this web page about tahoe email about my trip to tahoe like windows uh calling you out there a little bit that's good i will say yeah you're right that they're like on a video call they're doing an email while they're searching for literally just the word tahoe a little a little weird a little weird But these look, I don't know.

45:44I think these windows look nice. They seem to move smoothly in little GIFs we're seeing. It's such a rising tide lifts all boats thing too, because the biggest challenge for Android apps on Chrome OS, once they got past some of the like basic compatibility issues, has been that Android apps look like butts when they're big, right? Like overwhelmingly. And this is a thing that Apple has had really good luck with over the years, and it has served Apple really well, is making apps look good at different sizes. Google has struggled forever to get developers to care about anything other than the vertical size of a smartphone.

46:23And one of the reasons people like to build apps for iOS before they build for even Android smartphones is because the screen sizes are different. Like it's so hard to build a good Android app because you essentially have to build 100 of them that all look slightly different at slightly different orientations at slightly different sizes. So like the idea of there just being one software of one screen size is very appealing to people, which is why a lot of people like to build iOS apps. What Google has made an effort to do over the last few years, it has not done it exceptionally well, but it has done it relatively well, is get people to build these more flexible apps that work at tablet size, and they work at smartphone size, and they work at the size of a laptop screen to run on Chrome OS.

47:06And so every bit of it that gets better on one of those makes it better for all of them, right? So like the Pixel Fold being good this year should be very exciting to people who own Chromebooks because it's going to make people who make Android apps make them better for the Fold, which will make them better on the Chromebook. And every one of these pieces just gets better and better as time goes on, which I think like and for this, again, I can't imagine there are that many Pixel tablet users out there in the world. But like this is just a step, again, in that direction. Dan's just so happy somewhere.

47:35I do have one question. Does Android design, like do they not have responsive design where you just like, okay, you make it. In this context, it's called adaptive. Okay. So they've been pushing that for a long time. But adaptive is not a checkbox, right? Like it's not a thing that you say that make my app adaptive. Like that, you have to build it to be all of those things. And that's, it takes work. So they don't have like a tool set that'll be like boop, boop, boop, boop. Adaptive. So they do. you'll see some apps and this is why like there are a lot of ios apps that look the same on an ipad because you can basically just sort of like paint by numbers into a template and it'll do it at all the different sizes uh and some folks do that and that's fine but like if you want to build an app with different ideas about navigation or different animations or like like literally to load a page at all the different sizes an android device can be is a challenge especially if you care about how it looks and works.

48:33And then you throw in all the different devices and all the different, you know, screen refresh rates. And there's just so many variables. But the sheer raw, like, X by Y size of the app has been the biggest holdup for Google forever. Because it's a thing people have not invested in doing because Android tablets were not any good. Android apps on Chromebooks didn't work. And nobody cared about foldable phones. And so, like, as each one of those gets better, they all get better. And that's very cool. I think I'm just kind of surprised because like in web design, we had this whole moment where everybody was like, you know, you can just download this little theme and it's a responsive theme and it's going to automatically resize it for anything you do.

49:11And the fact that Google doesn't just have like, here's the lazy way. Well, no, but somebody built that theme. That's like, that theme doesn't just exist. If you listen carefully, that's the sound of every web designer listening to the show screaming. You're welcome. I like to piss you off. You know, just the WordPress theme that just exists. Yeah. I paid$40 for it on ThemeFort. Taking our site from desktop mobile. We had an MDOT site for a minute. To responsive was a nightmare. Responsive design is really hard. It's really hard. It's gotten a lot easier because it has become so much more important.

49:46But it is really hard. Well, I think my question is, why doesn't Google do that work? Actually, can I tell you a fun fact about responsive design? I love a fun fact. My fun fact about responsive design is that it was a Vox Media designer, Scott Cullum, who invented some of the very first responsive design prototypes. Well, that's awesome. Yeah. And he was like, look at this thing. He was like showing us stretchy web windows. And I was like, make our site do that. And then the office lit in flames for a long time. That's awesome. See, that was live breaking gadget news on the Vergecast. We still, our hearts still aflame when there's Android windowing.

50:25Yeah. We're still where we came from. David, I think you think the next story is very funny. I do think the next story is very funny. All right. Make the case, buddy. Okay. So there was a debate. Well, let me back up. So there's an election happening in the United States. Actually, let me back up. Do we know where Trump stands in Android windowing? He doesn't like it. Which candidate do you think is more likely to use Dex in the office? Neither. One of them's a lawyer. She's using like word perfect. Tim Wills. Ooh, that's a good one. Tim is definitely on like a Galaxy Note just because he wanted the stylus.

51:05You see what I'm saying? He refused to upgrade. He can feel it. Yeah. Yeah. Tim has a foldable keyboard in his backpack at all times. That feels exactly right to me. JD Vance is like, here's what I want to do. I want to nationalize iMessage. Like that's where his brain is at. By the way, have I told you guys about how we discovered very recently that JD Vance has a house like right down the street from me and there's now a secret service motorcade that goes by my house like almost every day. Oh, wow. That's the whole story. That's it. That's all I wanted to tell you. There's now a park that is like the size of this room that's fake behind me that is now closed because it's too close to J.D.

51:38Vance's house. And that's how everyone in this neighborhood found out that J.D. Vance has a house here. But he's never there. He's walking into donut shops across America, confusing the population. Apparently one of them might be in my neighborhood. I'm gonna have to start walking into donut shops every day just to see if I can find J.D. Vance. Anyway. Let's talk about the earrings. There's a debate. uh kamala harris was wearing earrings and that became tech news because there was a set of people on the internet who advanced a clearly not correct theory that the earrings she was wearing were actually headphones and uh i just i brought this up for two reasons one because it's not true uh and this is like a thing that people have tried to do for years the idea that a the candidate who does well in a debate is being fed answers in some way shape or form is like a long-running conspiracy theory that's never proven true.

52:22But B, I think it's very funny that the earrings in particular that she's being accused of wearing, there's some strong evidence that they don't actually exist. This is like a Kickstarter company that doesn't really seem to have shipped. Like, in fairness, we have not covered this company closely, so maybe there's more out there. If you are an owner of Nova H1 headphones, get at me. I have a lot of questions. I want to know everything. Audio earrings. You're right. I apologize. The H1 audio earrings, they just aren't what she was wearing. Yeah, they look very different. It would have been funnier if everybody's like, she's wearing Beats, but she's wearing a Kickstarter project.

53:05The only similarity is they both have a pearl on them. Like, they're pearl earrings. That's it. Everybody's like, wow. The fact that the CEO is out there being like, I can't confirm or deny that these are our fake earrings. It's like, well, one, what are you doing? The fact that the guy who can't ship his product is saying that. Yeah. And also the battery life only lasts two and a half hours, which means they probably would have died like mid-debate if we're being realistic. She's putting them on right before she goes out. Yeah. Just give them to me. Let's go. She takes off her earrings mid-debate, puts them in her charging case, takes them back out.

53:36There was a very funny, in Gadget days, way back when, when Obama was first elected, there was all these reports that he wanted to keep his Blackberry. i don't know if you remember this it's like frothing at the mouth will obama get a blackberry and then there was all this stuff about he would need like a secret blackberry it was like ultra lockdown and he really wanted his blackberry and there was this company that made a phone called the sectara edge and the ceo of that i don't remember what they're called i don't know i refuse to remember but the ceo of this company is like a military vendor guy and he's just like on all the tv channels being like the sectara edge is the most hardened military grade blah blah blah And everyone's like, Obama's getting a sectar edge.

54:19And like, definitely not. He ended up with a BlackBerry 8000 that was just like stripped of its apps. And then later on, he had an iPad. And it's like, why did we spend so much time talking about the sectar edge? I think Josh Topolsky had a post in Engadget during those days where he was like, it's not the Superphone 9000. It's BlackBerry. I think that was like the headline. It's pretty good. Yeah. I'm learning so much about they were not technically smartphones. The Sex Air Edge. Which was made by General Dynamics. Yeah, see, I knew. He's like, here's what we do. It's cruise missiles and this weird feature phone for the government.

54:54Well, that was like, remember the Boeing Black that Boeing was like, we made a super secure smartphone? Like, this is a whole, it's a whole genre floating out there. There are many stories during the Trump era that I spent too much time focused on. Foxconn in particular. But I don't know if you remember, they would always describe him as having a super TiVo in the White House. Oh, yeah. Trump would watch like his super TiVo and he kept referring to it as a super TiVo. And like, you know, America's political reporters are not be like, what's a super TiVo? Like, I get it. But I was like, what's a super TiVo?

55:25Like, I've had every TiVo that's ever shipped. Which one is it? Is there? That company is now a patent licensing troll. Like, which TiVo is it, dude? And it was just a bog standard DirecTV box. And one time someone published a photo of the super TiVo remote and it was a$4 white DirecTV remote.

55:47but somebody like painted a racing stripe on it so like super tivo it's just like dude he's got direct tv like i'm aware that it can record four channels at once but like so can everything honestly i think if direct tv had rebranded as super tivo it would probably have been more the one trump has senior citizens of america you can all have direct tv together it's a remote but it like has the cover on it so you can only hit two buttons just to make sure it is very sad that everybody just assumed Kamala Harris's earrings were earbuds. Do you think Tim Walz has ever backed a Kickstarter? That's my last question for you.

56:22A hundred percent. I mean, J.D. Vanspector had a Kickstarter to return the cover in the United States. Let's move on. There you go. I will cop to getting this wrong at the top of the show. I said it was Honor because Honor has also been hinting at a trifold smartphone, but it's actually the Huawei trifold smartphone. It's$2 ,800. It looks sick. again while we got like booted out of the country you will recall and almost went out of business because we wouldn't sell them chips there's like a whole thing that happened they'd make their own operating system it start all over and now they're like three screens and everyone's kind of like what if what if we let Huawei back in the United States I want this the world's first dual folding triple screen so it's the mate xt it is ultimate design it's called the mate xt ultimate design They announced it on the same day as the iPhone, which is very good.

57:13It's very expensive. It's$2 ,800 thereabout, depending on the conversion factors we want. That's 250 gigs of storage. Our story points out that's$300 more than a 16-inch MacBook Pro. How many times can I fold up my 16-inch MacBook Pro, Eli? All of the videos, all the assets, all the content that Wallier's released is just the thing unfolding and showing people looking at presentations. Somebody got a hands-on with it, though. Somebody has a hands-on? Yeah, so Gizmo China got a hands-on with it and put in a couple of additional specs. It's only a little thicker than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold. And it looks like, like you can watch this video.

57:51We'll put it in the show notes. It looks thick. The camera is huge. Yeah, that is a big camera. That's a big boy. Oh, I'm looking now on YouTube. There are more Chinese hands-ons with this thing. that are starting to trickle out. But they're all just the thing unfolding. Yeah. That's the only content that exists is a very controlled demo of a thing unfolding. What else do you need to know? That's the whole job. Well, does the operating system do anything when you turn it into a sheet of paper? Bah. We need to see before and after. Don't worry about the process. So one of the things that I am very curious about in this next turn of phones, we've been talking a lot about the Pixel Fold.

58:36It seems to be very popular amongst the gadget population. Whether it's going to move Google's market share at all, it won't. But if you're a particular kind of gadget nerd, it is the device everyone's talking about it into lately, which is interesting. It feels like folding phones that bifold. They've reached a point where now they're just maturing in iterative steps. Yeah. Right, compared to where the Galaxy Fold started. Which means Apple will have one next year. Maybe. In a pixel fold, you can still feel the seam. It's not perfect, but it's right in a way. You can see that little crease when you open it still.

59:13You can definitely feel it with your finger. But it's like it's hit that point. And so now are we just at, okay, add another one? Yeah. Do we think, I mean, like the Chinese phone market and the Indian phone market are like full of these ideas. Like, do bonkers hardware stuff and see what happens. Markets around the world are generally more open to weirdness just because of the way our carriers are and Apple's iMessage domination. They're all a bunch of VergeCast stuff that means we don't get cool phones first. Oh, no. This one video has the guy actually folding it and you watch it all, like, realign itself.

59:53Yeah. It looks cool. I mean, Huawei did have to build their own operating system because, again, the amount of sanctions the United States government put on Huawei just changed the direction of that company. That's fine. But it just seems like this is a weird – you look at this, you look at how people are excited about it in a way that the first set of foldables didn't really capture. But now maybe the technology is mature enough. I think there's like also there's a weird cultural element here, too, because we're seeing all of these things happening in other countries in the United States is so focused on the iPhone and the iPhone is so stuck in glass slab land.

1:00:29And like Google, it's really nice that Google is coming in. But Huawei has been doing this for a while. A lot of these – Xiaomi has been doing this. A lot of these other companies have been doing really, really cool stuff with phones that just don't come to the United States. In many ways, it's less like they're doing weird stuff. It's more like we're getting a little left behind. Yeah. I mean, again, it's so hard to break into the U.S. smartphone market because of the essential duopoly of Apple and Samsung. The carriers are more or less enforced. So it goes. We've talked about this so many times.

1:01:04But I'm just wondering from a hardware perspective, do we think the regular folding phones have reached their sort of like, we're done with this. We don't need to figure out any basics here. Now we're just thinking about it. Because I think a lot of people are – folks are comfortable with that little crease. It doesn't seem to bother people that much. And they figured out the front of the phone, right? Like with the Pixel Pro, that was the thing everybody really likes about it is that they figured out the front. So you can just use the phone as normal. You never even have to open it up. But then when you do want to like have a good time, you open it up and enjoy yourself.

1:01:36I don't know. David, you have long insisted that it'll be the flip style. Does seeing a triple fold change your mind? It should. No. I think the triple fold is an interesting tablet replacement way more than it is an interesting phone replacement. Like I think phone that turns into smartwatch is a way more compelling thing to most people than tablet that turns into phone. And but to your point about the hardware, like on one level, we are getting there. Like this stuff is pretty good. There's work left to do. They need to get more rugged. The cameras need to get better. The screens need to continue to improve.

1:02:20The whole thing needs to get thinner and lighter. Like these phones are big. They're big. big and uh there's just there's a lot of work left to do but in terms of like can you make a phone that kind of works open and closed like the answer to that is yes right and i think we've we've landed on especially with this last generation samsung has gotten closer to the right size one plus is getting closer to the right size google is seemingly very close to the right size uh i think what you're seeing from a lot of these companies and huawei and xiaomi and others have done this for years is like unbelievably cool, really high-end tech demos that like, they don't think a lot of people are going to buy this phone.

1:03:01But it gets people excited. It's like, it's a branding exercise as much as it is like an actual phone to sell to humans. I disagree. It's so cool looking. It is$2 ,800. It's$2 ,800. Look, you put that on like a 10-year plan. The whole point is that it's cool looking. Yeah, a 10-year plan paying like$30 a month. This would be great. Didn't you just complain about the PS5 Pro's cost? If it could fold like an accordion, I'd take it all back. If it was like big GPU but also folded like this, yeah. You put the motion in, I'm sold. Now, I do think we're going to hit a point where people start doing even weirder stuff with this.

1:03:44But also, like, there's a thing that's coming that is a lot of new, wacky experimenting in phone hardware. And I'm very excited about it. Like, it got stagnant for so long. And then a couple of people tried folding phones and it didn't really work. And I think everybody decided maybe this isn't going to be the thing. And now it feels like it might be the thing. And I think, like, nothing is going to beat the candy bar phone anytime soon, if ever. but the experimentation is coming back and I think that's awesome. Yeah. I mean, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is 6.9 inches, almost seven. We're starting to strain the boundaries of how big a phone can be before it has to fold.

1:04:26I want to accordion that immediately. You know, the first thing I did in the hands-on air was just fold one up. That list of things you said about what folding phones need to get better, they need to be more durable, the screens need to be better, that's the same list of qualities that you could have applied to the first iPhone. Oh, for sure. Right? And so it's just, they're on the same path, right? And that's what I mean. Like, we figured out the core technology and now we're just iteratively improving like around the edges to get them even better. That feels like a moment. I'm not sure where that moment's going to lead to.

1:04:57The fact that we're like, screw it, two screens fold out kind of feels like maybe they figured out how to get one screen to fold out and that now we're just seeing what else we can do. Put another fold in. I'm just, I'm dying for the three screen phone. It's so dumb. Just think about the difference in how the screen looks and feels from the first Z Fold to now, right? Like just the sheer amount of like material science improvements that have been made to get to this point is crazy. Those things were like plastic. And was it, it was Dieter, right? Who like accidentally peeled part of the screen off thinking it was a screen protector.

1:05:35Like that was not that long ago. No, no. Dieter had a tiny amount of dust in his review unit that broke the screen. And then somebody else peeled off the screen protector. And then Samsung delayed the launch of the first C4. That was not a long time ago. And now like four years ago. Yeah, like the speed with which that stuff, and that was always the gating factor, right? Like the question was not, how do you build a good hinge? It was, can you make a screen that works like this? And works means a lot of things. But I think the answer to that is like, yes, and we're almost there. and so I think you're right that like the path now is way more about software and it's way more about use cases and it's way more about details uh and again it's way more about do people actually want this which also is can you make this thing for eight hundred dollars and not eighteen hundred dollars yeah and those are like those are big hills to climb but they are I think like I don't know to just ruin the analogy they're like hills you can see the top of whereas I think not that many years ago like can we make this screen not fall apart was genuinely i think kind of up in the air and now you can just do in a little accordion just boop boop you just walk up to any phone you see and fold it in half dude i'm telling you there's one shot in this huawei video where it's open on it's open on two so it just looks like a normal foldable phone and then he just kind of reaches below and pulls up the third part and the the ui just gloriously expands yeah i've watched that like 25 times since we've been sitting here talking it's awesome it's sick it's coming.

1:07:01I'm telling you, it got more attention from a certain audience on iPhone day than the iPhone. Yeah. There's something to that. All right. I want to end by putting two Google stories together right next to each other. Cause I think they're kind of really interesting when you put it right next to each other. We've actually talked a lot about Google on this episode. They seem in one way to have a bunch of confidence and maybe that confidence is just like, we have to put Gemini in front of you. So here it is. But we reviewed the Pixel Watch 3 this week. V reviewed it. She gave it an 8. People like it.

1:07:34Like, yeah, people really like this watch. It is a confident product. The integrations across the sort of Pixel and Google ecosystem are solid. We've been talking a lot about the Pixel 9s. For all of their, you know, general issues with swerving reality into chaos because of their just absolute nihilism about AI image editing, but they're good phones that people like yeah and the Pixel Watch 3 is a good watch that V really likes and I think people who buy into the ecosystem are going to like it there's something happening on that side of the house for Google where they've fallen into a groove the hardware is good there's a thesis in the software even if the every time you pick up a Pixel phone it's just like Gemini like there's still a thesis there's a point of view which I think is very strong they haven't had a point of view for quite a while that's that side of the house On the other side of the house, well, their search engine just got ruled to be a monopoly.

1:08:28And they are on trial again right now for antitrust for their ad tech stack. And, you know, there's trial. It's witnesses. There's documents. Lauren Feiner is in the courthouse covering it for us. It's all very boring. It's a bunch of suits talking about display ads on the web. Like if you want to go to sleep, programmatic advertising is the thing to talk about. but what's fascinating is one in all the documents all witnesses the way google's business people talk about its business is ice cold oh yeah right there's no google cuddle bugs there no at all uh it is literally how do we own this market here's the value the value is there's a line one of the emails it's like the value here is that we own everything like that's that's the thing that makes this powerful is we own every part of the stack and so that they're just saying it out loud And then you have the clients, the actual people buying advertising, being like, Google's technology here is bad.

1:09:23We're just stuck with it. Right. And like the core ad tech server that Google's been using to serve all the programmatic ads all over the web, they're like, this is bad. Like, this is like 20-year-old technology that we would like to get away from, but we're stuck with it because there's nowhere to go. And that is a weird dynamic for Google. Right? On the one hand, with the AI stuff with Gemini, maybe they got caught on the back foot, but it provided some amount of focus for the company, it seems like. And it's reflected in these Pixel devices. I think you can see it. There's a reason for them to be the way they are, which is really interesting.

1:10:01I don't know. If not for chat GBT, would the Pixel 9 have had this much focus? I don't know the answer to that question. like they weren't on this path all by themselves like it took this weird sort of diversion from open ai to to bring them here but they it worked and then on the other side of the house the money people are like this is a monopoly we don't like using this technology and it feels based on what happened in the search trial like the government knows how to beat google this is the case i would remind everybody that google tried to avoid a jury trial by just sending a check to the united states government for what it calculated to be the maximum amount of damages like on its wells fargo account they're just like here's some millions of dollars is this good we will put it in the show now there's a picture of the check you can look at the check google senate check that's how monopoly works right here you go literally like they were so desperate for this not to be happening that they just wrote they just fronted the money for a settlement uh and so i I would just juxtapose those two things.

1:11:08I think it's, you see this company, it kind of like at war with itself a little bit because the thing that is funding everything is at all of this risk and the future is like coming into focus over here. Except that in so many ways so far, all of Google's future stuff has just been ancillary to the other thing, right? Like I think the most damning critique you could make of everything Google has done in 25 years is that it actually doesn't care about anything but search. and so everything gets subjugated to the needs of search like the people who build chrome will tell you they could have built a better browser except that what they had to do is optimize for search queries which is a weird thing to have to optimize for in a web browser and so like and this is a story you hear over and over from google is everything eventually loses at the hand of the search team and i i think you could make the case that the only team as powerful at google as the people who make the search engine are the people who make the ads and like that that is who is now being thrown into this fight and the to your point like the thing we say a lot on this show is that what happens at one trial has very little to do with what happens at the next trial and i think that's probably true in google's case here too like all this stuff is still very up in the air but the thing we heard over and over in the last trial was google's argument was google is very good which is why we keep winning and it's very hard to argue that there are better products out there than Google.

1:12:29And yet Google still lost because, because the argument came up over and over that actually what Google is doing is preventing that from happening, right? That like, maybe the reason there isn't more competition for Google is because Google has not allowed it. And, and Amit Mehta, the judge was very receptive to that argument. Uh, this one in which the overwhelming thing seems to be actually, this sucks and there's nothing anybody can do about it. It's like, even the way Lauren was covering the first couple of days, you get the sense that the people accusing Google of being monopolists are very confident coming into this.

1:13:02And how that means it'll go, who knows? But there is a real sense of like, the argument is extremely strong in this particular case. And it's going to come down to market definitions as it always does. And it's going to get deeply wonky. And I'm going to court at least once next week. And I could not be more excited to listen to people yell at me about ad stacks for weeks. But yeah, it is like Google is both kind of feeling itself and fighting for its life, like, all at the same time. And it's very odd. I feel like I need to disclose here. We have ads on our website. What? We have. Oh, my God.

1:13:40And Vox Media's president of revenue and growth, Ryan Pauly, is on the list of potential witnesses in this trial. I haven't talked to him about it. I don't know if he's going to get called. He's just on the list because we run a programmatic ad network called Concert. Theoretically competes with Google. That's truly not our side of the house. It's all the way over there. I love it. Ryan has great hair. I will say that. That's the one thing I know about Ryan. He does a great hair. Agreed. But this thing where you say, anybody listening, pull over in your car and think about the internet. That's my instruction to you.

1:14:14Do you like the ads that you're seeing? There's a million companies, a million ad tech companies that are like, we can make better ads. And all of them are like, and then you run into the monster and you give up. Most of those people flip the ad tech companies or they try to bundle them up to create a new monster and they get rich. And then they, you know, live a healthy life on LinkedIn complaining about the monster. Like they're well-practiced at this. It's not like they're available to you. The reporting is easy to do. It's just kind of what you're really trying to sell an audience, even what I'm trying to sell to you right now listening, is like there's a reason ads on the internet are bad and it's because no one the market is not actually competitive for better ad experiences okay but which is worse ads now the ad experience now or like in the 1990s where it would be a pop-up of porn that would then infect your computer well so in the 1990s uh i was a teenage boy so you're like that ruled i was a teenage girl i was early 2000s like this is great this is what i was here for the whole time can i just say one more thing on this before we we leave this subject one of the things uh i have been paying a lot of attention to and i'm well aware that this is like a giant generalization but it has it has really jumped out to me in reading some of these court documents so far like a thing you hear a lot from people in and around the tech industry is that like Like if you want to believe that in the early days of the tech industry, it was like a bunch of well-meaning hippies who just like wanted to make the world a better place.

1:15:43And then that eventually got morphed and ruined. They all blame the MBAs. They're like a bunch of people like graduated from Harvard Business School and came here because they thought that's where the money was. And they changed the culture and they ruined everything. And like, boy, does that ring true when you read some of these documents. Like to your point about these people being ice cold, it's like these are the MBAs. these are the people who are like oh you want to build a cool product i don't care that's not interesting to me we're just we're in charge of this money machine yeah make us money and like that is the thing that runs silicon valley now and it's just very hard because google does such a good job of for the most part being like very cuddly like yeah i think there's a reason google still has one of the worst logos in world history like it's cuddly and dumb and it still kind of looks like marissa mayer drew it herself right and there's a there's a reason there was a slide in the youtube office like they this is a company that its entire image was friendly and then you know in the background eric schmidt former chairman and former c of google just a few weeks ago was like here's what she here's what i would do so i was running an ad company i would steal everything and then have the lawyers figure out the copyright problem yep and it's like oh that's because that's that's what you did with youtube right like fully what you did with youtube even though viacom was dumb in that lawsuit uh and their own people were kept uploading videos to YouTube in the middle of the copyright lawsuit, which is why they lost.

1:17:02It's a true story. But there's a ruthlessness inside of Google that I'm just seeing playing out right now. And the thing I'm pointing out in particular is viewed a certain way. It's products. The pixel products in particular have never been better. Yeah. Like they're good this time. Like they have a point of view. They have clarity. and then over here, the things that have been reliable Google ATMs are kind of in chaos because of the regulatory pressure. And I'm just not sure how that plays out together. That's what happens when you have the MBAs run stuff. No MBAs on the Pixel team, please. That's how you stay out of court.

1:17:41You stay away. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be back with a lightning round. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

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1:19:12I just want to say thank you to all of you rooting for us. Get this done. Give us money and then be happy. How about that? I do get emails and I try to take the money, but I don't know how because it's not my job. I can't be like, I take Stripe. It's just not like a thing. Alright, lightning round. Krantz, what you got? You know how trucks are huge? This is actually kind of a sad one for you because I know you love a big truck. Every time I see a Raptor now, I'm like, my baby. But sometimes trucks are too big. Not sometimes. Many times the trucks are too big. If they come up to my shoulders, I'm like 5 '8".

1:19:48That's too tall. The U.S. is finally taking aim. And they are proposing these new rules and they were going to use crash test dummies. But instead of for crashing, it's for pedestrians. So we're going to run the car into people? Yeah. Just a little poop. I think that's really nice because a lot of the times now we've been seeing these really big trucks and then you see all of these YouTube videos and stuff of people in these really big trucks and they can't see little kids in front of them. And it's like, somebody should check that out. And apparently the government was like, we should check that out.

1:20:20Presumably the only way to do that is to make the truck smaller. I will never be able to describe to you why I just started imagining it's the Beatles Abbey Road cover, but it's four crash test dummies lined up like the Beatles. And then just like a cyber truck just comes and just floors all four of them. And they're like, too big. That's an AI prompt right there, David. Yeah. Coming soon to our runway generator near you. Just immediately what popped into my head. But there is a lot of optimism about these rules. People seem to be really, really excited about it. It feels like it's a good first step.

1:20:54So it's after all these years of just watching the trucks get huge, it's nice to be like, hey, how about they don't get that tall? So, Neela, you're a truck guy. Does this like, is this going to piss off all the truck people? Sorry, I just typed the Beatles Abbey Road cover, but it's crash test dummies. It's a grok. The AI image generator. It's so bad. This is what you get when there's literally no, I'll send it to you, David. When there's literally no safety standards on your AI image generator. That's why I picked grok. Because it won't stop me. Their heads are cute. You were asking. Yes, as a person who once owned a truck and still thinks of my truck fondly.

1:21:36For example, when I use Grok to generate crash test dummies as the Beatles' Ivy Road cover, I think about moving back into the woods and driving my truck again instead of living in society. What I wonder is, do people buy the giant trucks because they're the good trucks and people want good trucks? So if they make the good trucks a little smaller, it'll be fine. Or have we gotten to a point where, like, I need big truck and if I can't have big truck, big mad? No, actually, two things. There's two data points that kind of refute the idea that people actually want the big cars. Some people want big cars.

1:22:08One, the Ford Maverick is a small truck that is just selling like gangbusters. It's a hit product. And then two, people are starting to import these Japanese K trucks. I actually saw one at the Apple event driving down the road in front of Apple Park, and it was like a tension magnet. Yeah. And then there's just these little trucks. And the beds, they're still like five and a half foot beds. The beds are about the same size as a full-size truck. They're just small. Right? So they're as useful, but they're just small. And I think you're seeing a bunch of interest in small cars again. Like the market wants them.

1:22:40And then you look around and all the cars are so gigantic. Like I think Pendulum just swing back and forth. There's like tech stuff where you buy a car for your small business. You can write off the full depreciation that is pushed like the dentists of America. They're buying giant SUVs. I think that stuff is coming to an end or changing in some way. And so I just think like between the market, the regulatory pressure, and then just the reality of you get in a car that's so big, you need cameras to drive it. That's too much. It's getting weird, right? Like when the solution to we you can't see children as we put cameras all around the truck that can see the children for you, you're just you're just in a weird spot.

1:23:19So I think I look at like I thoroughly enjoyed owning a Raptor. It was very fun, but I lived near no one. And every time I drove that thing into New York City, I encourage if you ever have the opportunity to drive Ford Raptor through the West Village at night during dinnertime when everyone's eating outside, listening to The Cure with open windows, take it. That was just a weird experience all the way around for everyone. Everyone was like, what is happening right now? The car is incompatible with the city. it's incompatible with the suburb I live in now. It's just too big, which is why I got rid of it.

1:23:53And I just see a push, particularly like the Rivian R3. That's a small-ish car. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, it's actually big, but they designed it to look like a small car. Like, it's SUV-ish proportions, but it's designed to look like a classic hatchback. And I think people are attracted to it selling really well because it feels small, even though it isn't technically as small as it looks. So I just think there's more interest in smaller stuff as opposed to just like full-on Yukon vehicles. You don't have to crawl into them. I was in, a friend got one of the big Ram 3500s, and I was like, hold on, do you have like a step or something?

1:24:33How do I get into this thing? It was just nightmarish. I do miss my Raptor very much. I'm just saying it one more time. I think about it all the time. The car ruled. I drove it not at all. Neil is going to go home and start asking Becky if he can buy a big truck before it's illegal to have a big truck. No, it's fine. We have a very cranky Mustang inside. It's a good time. All right, David, what you got? So mine is news that actually happened like right after the Vergecast last week, but I have been thinking about ever since, which is that Meta finally sort of showed off what WhatsApp and Messenger are going to look like now that they're being forced to interoperate with other chat networks.

1:25:09This is one of those things that has been sort of burbling forever. We've known that this is going to happen because of some EU regulation that basically says any sufficiently large messaging platform has to interoperate with other messaging systems. But there's just a couple of screenshots that they showed off. One, they look great. You're going to be able to either have separate or combined inboxes the way you can have like multiple email accounts in one email client. Like, it seems like obviously how this should work. Excited that it's going to work that way. I always kind of thought they were going to do like, you have an inbox and then the like Facebook side inbox thing that you have to like go way out of your way to do, but they're actually seem to make it a sort of first party messaging system, which is very cool.

1:25:51Uh, and then also there's a screenshot that shows, uh, basically how you will set it up in each app and meta invented two messaging apps just for the sake of these screenshots. One is called spruce and one is called blurb. And I just, I have been, I have been designing and product managing spruce and blurb all week. Um, and I have a lot of thoughts about them as messaging apps. Which one do you think is better, Spruce or Blurb? Spruce is like business-y. It's like Spruce is kind of like where you go to LinkedIn vibe. Blurb is like yo, where it's just down to clown on Blurb all the time. You're just Blurbin' all day?

1:26:28Just Blurbin', baby, yeah. You're just like, yo, you want to Blurb later? That has connotations, you know what I mean? Well, no, in yo, you could only yo. Yeah, well, okay, you're right. Blurb is more than yo. Got it, okay, just be clear. But you can yo in Blurb, to be clear. Yo is a feature of blurb.

1:26:48And two super yo's equals one blurb. It's important to understand that. I got it. I have an app on my phone called Bonk. Yeah. Yeah. Casey Newton got really excited about Bonk for a minute. Bonk was yo with bonks. Bonk was yo with bonks. Bonk was like real-time collaborative yo.

1:27:12all right yeah but i i just think this is very cool and uh as as far as we can tell all of this is just coming to the eu uh again this fascinating schism happening between the experience of technology in the united states and the eu and in many ways the eu is going to be much cooler and more open and more interesting but uh just the way this looks and the way this works has me like actually sort of excited about what messaging might look like so i thought that was cool yeah by the way the eu thing that you mentioned is uh i think is going to be part of my solution to how to review the iphones and talk about them because apple intelligence isn't coming to europe so we're just going to make like european iphone content continental iphone content um and then we'll make like freedom loving american bald eagles everywhere yeah where the iphone is just constantly summarizing everything.

1:28:02It's like text. Summarized. America. All right, Neal, what's yours? Mine is, you know, more AI doomerism, but in a fun way. This is legitimately, I think, the most interesting AI product I've seen yet. Do tell. So Google has this thing called Notebook ML. They've actually announced two different versions of this, this core idea. So Google has this idea. They've settled on this idea. They're going to take all of their AI stuff where they can take a bunch of data. They have big context windows for their model. They can understand a bunch of documents. They have good voice synthesis. They own YouTube.

1:28:41Here's their idea. We're going to take a bunch of documents. We're going to turn them into a podcast with voices talking to each other. And so they have one for scientific papers, which I believe we have access to, but we haven't really tested very much. So inside of Notebook LM, which is their AI-powered notes app that they announced last year, David, you're my notes. It was last year. And it's like, imagine a feature that should be in either Google Keep or Google Docs, but isn't. And that's what Notebook LM is. But it's in Blurb, from what I understand. You can Blurb to Notebook LM for sure.

1:29:12Yeah. Anyway, so in this app, you can give it a bunch of documents. And it will just generate a podcast. Like two hosts talking about your documents. And it is kind of remarkably convincing. I'm sorry. I've been reading a bunch about this. and it's like I can sort of understand it but just hearing you say that sentence you you give it a bunch of documents and it can generate a podcast I just want to like throw myself out of a window it's like a and like people have been using it um it the podcast host uses phrases like messy as heck like they use idioms it's just weird and it's like Google has had this idea twice now like you know that thing where creatures evolved to become crabs it's like Google's AI efforts evolved to make podcasts out of documents.

1:29:59Like simultaneously evolved twice inside of Google. I think it's utterly fascinating. You can use it now in Notebook LM. The weirdest one I've seen is Robert Stevens, who is the founder of the Geek Squad, the actual Geek Squad in Best Buy. The founder of the Geek Squad, Robert Stevens, appears to be a member of the Bennett Valley Community Association in Sonoma County, California. Apparently, the Bennett Valley Community Association has been having a lot of fights about whether to allow weed to be grown on farms there, like commercial cannabis growing. And so he says he uploaded a bunch of docs and meeting notes and PDFs into this tool, and it just generated a podcast about this fight that, for all the world, sounds like a true crime podcast about whether or not they should grow weed in Snowman County.

1:30:55Can I just play you the beginning of it? Please. Yes, please. All right. We're going to dive into another pile of documents. Always. What do we have this time? Well, today we're headed out west to Sonoma County, California. Oh, nice. Wine country. Not so fast. This isn't about a relaxing getaway. It's actually about a pretty heated controversy brewing in Bennett Valley. Bennett Valley. Okay. I'm intrigued. So it all centers around commercial cannabis cultivation. Seems like a lot of places have been grappling with this since legalization. Yeah. Right? It's just like he didn't write that script.

1:31:33Wine country. Here's just a bunch of weird minutes from board meetings, and it made a – now, is it accurate? Did it hallucinate the heatedness of this controversy? I don't know. Did it hallucinate that the AI needs a vacation? Yeah, super did. Super duper did.

1:31:52there's a part in here where um it notes correctly if you listen to it for longer it notes correctly that um the board's lawyers told it that its first attempt to ban cannabis cultivation uh would not work so the board backed down and tried a new legal avenue and it issued that ai issues that as a criticism of the board which is fascinating for a guy on the board to publish but like that's to me this is one of the most interesting uses of this tech that i've seen no one is making podcasts about the county weed controversy it doesn't seem like there are only four subscribers well technically someone did make the podcast but right but no one listens i'm interested in generally can you make people more interested in the things that are happening their community, right?

1:32:41Every day, wherever you live, there is some board or HOA or town council that is doing stuff. Yeah. And there's a desert of local news throughout this country. It's not being covered. If you can turn it into weird true crime podcasts, is that actually useful service of AI? I don't know the answer to that question, but this is the most interesting thing that I've seen out of it yet. Yeah. All the same problems are there. Is it going to hallucinate? Is it telling the truth? Can it be manipulated by the people who are making it to be favorable to one side or another? Is it accountable? These are just fake people.

1:33:16Is it interesting to listen to? It feels like an important question. Wine country. Well, so what I found, I think the reason that this sparked such interest to me is not the wine country. They actually were telling a story. Yeah. As you go into it, they're like, here are the stakes. Here's the back and forth. Here's a thing that happened. Here's the next thing that happened. This is legitimately like they constantly do this tell a story thing where they're like, you're just driving in your car and your kid's sad in the back and you just have the AI tell it a story. And that's always stupid. Yeah.

1:33:45This is actually like an interesting use case of it. Right. Because there's there's things that actually happened. Yeah. Again, do I know if the AIs I'm not deep in I'm not deep in Bennett Valley's weed controversy. Not yet. I'm going to be. But it's just interesting that one, like Google announced it. This is again, they've come up with this idea twice downside of Google. And then two people are actually using it, right? Like this is someone who is on this board who is dealing with this controversy is like, I tried this out. This is good enough to share. Right. This is to me. He thinks it's good enough to share.

1:34:17I think other people are going to use this in other ways. Is this going to make good podcasts? I don't know. Is this the most interesting sort of how do you get people to consider things in their local community? that they would not have otherwise considered attempt that I've seen in quite some time. It sure is. Now, do I think that this works for every case? Because Notebook LM, well, you just do anything. You put any random assortment of documents in there. I'm very excited to put like any one of our legal decisions in there. Like the Google antitrust decision. I want to make Google make a podcast.

1:34:53I'm very, are they going to do a better job than we do? but there's just something about all of the LLM stuff where all it's ever really doing is playing with language, right? We've enabled natural language input. We've enabled computers to use language in ways that couldn't do before where it's actually this kind of thing that feels like the most interesting use case. I don't know that this use case can support the hype or the investment, but actually like we can make your local politics somewhat more digestible to you. It's the first time I've ever been like, all right, there's, there's something going on here that seems interesting.

1:35:28That doesn't seem like massive copyright theft in the end of reality, which is how I usually evaluate these things. Well, the challenge there is, can you have this use case without all that other stuff? Yeah, I don't know. But, but I agree. It is an interesting use case. And I also like the, the other news kind of, of this ilk that came out this week was opening. I released a one it's new, like reasoning capable model. it looks like an emoji first of all terrible name open ai said to kylie robinson who wrote the story for us they were like oh we think our names are bad we try to reboot it like you you did bad again sorry open ai oh one is nothing um but one of the things that it does is you ask it a question and because it's a quote-unquote reasoning model it takes longer to answer because it's just doing more steps at a time but it will walk you through the steps that it's taking and Kylie included this screenshot in which it's saying things like, this is the model reporting back as it's thinking aloud.

1:36:30I'm curious about defining variables to translate the problem into algebra. And then a minute later, I'm thinking through a new variable to measure time and establishing clear definitions for years in the past. And like, we're still down this road of making these things seem sort of human. It's like when you talk to Siri and it goes, hmm, or um, And it's like, is this what we want? It's the most irritating thing in the world. I'm like, you're fake. Like, do I want the AI to pretend to be a person? And I feel that same way listening to this podcast. I'm like, what are you here for? I want all of them to go and watch like a whole, one of the Star Trek series because they actually do interact with computers.

1:37:11Like the computer's not irritating in it. It's like, hold on, let me process that. Tea, Earl Grey, hot. Yeah, done. The tea machine is like, hmm, I'm thinking about which blend you might be. I've always wanted to just communicate only in nouns and adjectives. Yeah. Very good. I will say just to, you know, the people are going to yell at me because I said something nice about AI. I will say something doomer about AI, which is Meta's taking the AI labels off of Instagram. Or they're hiding them in a menu because none of that was ready. None of it worked. No one has any point of view. And LOL, nothing matters.

1:37:46They just gave up. We have just given up on this. We're doing AI generated images of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift having a cat baby. That's a real picture that I saw this week. Why? Why? The end. Yeah, you said it all. This is like the real plus and minus of AI right now. Maybe this will help people engage in local communities. I will have to see this picture. And there will be no label on it because no one figured out how any of that works. and maybe it never will. That's it. That's the Verge Cast, everybody. Yay. Fold your phone in half. Any phone. It doesn't have to actually be a foldable. Just get out there and start folding phones in half.

1:38:27Brute strength. Rock and roll.

1:38:33And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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