They think they’re building God

26:53And he was like, I genuinely believe in my heart that that is what we're building. It's a level of delusion I can respect. And then, you know, the pessimists think that this is just going to be a complete nothing burger. It's just going to implode, which I get. So listening to both these points and it coming down to sort of a philosophical argument is, is this thing thinking? Is it reasoning? It comes down to that every day. And it's wild. It's just insane. Yeah. I just want to say, for the record, robots, if you're listening, Kylie said delusion. I didn't say delusion. I think you're terrific.

27:31Don't get it twisted. So we're about to enter this really interesting phase for the rest of the year, right? I think MetaConnect is coming. We're going to hear a bunch of AI stuff from Meta. Gemini is still chugging along. Apple Intelligence is sort of kind of starting to a little bit ship. Does it feel like we're heading into kind of a new moment of AI? It's the agent stuff. It's all of this. Like, it sort of feels like if ever this stuff is going to go legit and mainstream, it might start now? You know, I am impressed with OpenAI's ability to help me choose my medical insurance. That happened recently.

28:15I just turned 26, and so I needed to figure out medical insurance. And it helped me choose, based off what I was concerned about, the best medical insurance. Did it give you like a real company that exists that you... I gave it a PDF of my options. So I was like, I don't understand all this jargon. Can you please break it down for me. This is what I need out of the insurance. Which one should I pick? And it was helpful. So its ability to parse information can be really helpful. I am not fully convinced further than that because it's so much hype and so much marketing and so much money involved that I just don't see us reaching this super intelligent model that is capable of reasoning on my behalf and taking over my laptop and doing tasks for me.

29:01I don't see us reaching that anytime soon. But I just talked to like a safety researcher who who thinks that I'm completely wrong and that in three months that I'm going to regret thinking this. So I don't know. I'm just not fully convinced yet. Yeah, that's fair. And O1 didn't push you any further in that direction. I thought O1 was actually really cool when I demoed it because I like being able to see how it is breaking down a problem. But no, do I think it's really intelligence or solving any really genuinely earth shattering problems? No, not yet. Yeah. And there's a certain amount of like showing your work is only impressive if you're still ending up at the right answer.

29:44Exactly. And I think it very much remains to be seen how often it is actually going to arrive at the right answer. Exactly. I have, I think, a bit of a higher tolerance than most about spending the time and money on figuring out if this is going to be good for humanity or not, I think that's okay. If it's fucking up and being weird, I think it's fine until we figure it out. But it can't be forever. And I think I'm more allergic to the hype and this is going to change the world and our SaaS product is going to make you 10x more productive. That I'm allergic to. Yeah, that's totally fair. just remember that crypto did change the world just the way everybody said it was going to and so did NFTs.

30:28So many good memes. And we're doing this on a Web3 platform right now. So everybody's right when they talk about everything that's going to change the world. Great point. That's what I would leave you with. Yeah, you're welcome. All right. Well, thank you for coming to my occasional existential crisis about AI. Kylie, we're going to do this a lot more this year. Now you're not going, there's no more Burning Man until next September. So now you have to come on the Vergecast sometimes. I'm going to start sounding insane. So good luck the rest of the year. I'm really excited. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about some policy stuff.

30:56We'll be right back.

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34:35All right, we're back. let's talk politics. But not like, not really. Like, don't worry. We're not going to yell about politics. But there are some interesting things happening right now in the kind of legal, regulatory world. And also, there is a politics thing happening. But I promise we're not going to spend too much time on that. I asked Gabby Del Valle and Addie Robertson on our team to come on and just kind of do a run through with me. We've got to talk about TikTok. We've got to talk about Google. We've got to talk about crypto. We're just going to blast through all of it, See if we can catch up.

35:08And then we don't have to talk about politics for a minute, which personally makes me very excited here on The Verge Cast. But sometimes, sometimes we got to do it. So let's do it. Addy, welcome back. Hi. Gabby, hello. Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you. First time, this is very exciting. I'm thrilled. I can tell. That was the enthusiasm I was looking for right there. Well, I smiled. They can't hear that, but I did smile. That's just what my voice sounds like. There's always a little bit of sarcasm in it. It's all right. I'll take it. Okay. So I want to do three things while the three of us are here together.

35:43I want to talk about the TikTok hearing. I want to talk about Trump's crypto thing. I don't even know what to call it. We're going to talk about that. And then I want to talk briefly about where we are in the Google ad tech trial. And then we'll get out of here. Does that sound good? Great. Okay. Sounds good. Let's start with TikTok because if I'm being completely honest with you, I had like completely lost track of all this TikTok stuff. I feel like kind of like the last time they tried to ban TikTok, I just sort of forgot about it and then it went away and I felt very justified about that. But there was a big hearing and it appears we are we are still in the process of figuring out what's going on.

36:19So, Gabby, can you just give me kind of the rundown of what happened at this hearing? Yeah. So first, I want to talk a little bit about what happened before the hearing, which is that the government introduced a bunch of classified material in its filings. And they were like, the judge can look at this. We can look at it. TikTok can't look at it because it's a national security concern. so we can talk about it to a point but there is just some stuff that we don't know because it's like pages and pages of redacted material the actual hearing did not focus too much on the redacted material it was more about um the on the one hand tiktok saying that the government did not really consider all of the possible options and on the other hand the government being like well Well, actually, we did negotiate with you guys for three years, I believe.

37:11Adi, was it three years or was it two? So TikTok has been trying to talk about mitigating this since about, I think, 2020 is when Trump made his first we should ban TikTok proposal. And then they've been seriously in discussions since around 2022. That was when Project Texas happened. It started Project Texas in 2022. that was the period at which it was saying we can mitigate these problems by teaming up with Oracle, which, as you all remember, was also the company that was going to buy it during the period where it seemed like Trump was going to try to really force a sale. Yeah. So this I'm starting to feel vindicated again by my stance of just not really paying attention to this and assuming that it will be chaotic and then go away because all of that came to both kind of nothing and where we are now, right?

38:00Like, Gabby, that's kind of the run-up to how we got to where we are. We've been at this a long time now. Yeah, we've been at this a long time. And basically what the government is saying is like, we gave you a million chances. You could not do what we wanted. And TikTok is saying, you didn't give us enough chances, actually. We gave you this proposal. We gave you maps of our offices. We gave you all of these things, please. but the government's argument is also not that tiktok has done anything at the behest of the chinese government just like maybe one day it could so well and that's that's what's been so complicated about this whole thing right like adi you and i have talked about this before it's that it is this uh impossible to prove and impossible to disprove thing that it's like it it seems possible that something very bad could happen.

38:51And that has gone back and forth a million different times. And it does feel like we're running at the question of like how legally defensible is the idea that something bad could possibly happen in this case. A lot of which I think just depends on how threatening do we think China is? Because as long as a Chinese company owns TikTok, like no matter how much they silo it, there's just, I think, not technically anything you can do to prove that the company that owns your subsidiary could not at some point access your data. Right. Yeah. And so the sense I got just reading the coverage we did of the hearing was that it kind of landed in that same place, Gabby, that like it's just everybody making the same arguments that all kind of talk past each other.

39:39And it doesn't sound like we're in a place where there are all that many arguments that actually address each other? Because one side is like, it could be bad. And the other side is like, well, it's not bad. And the other side's like, well, it could be. And I don't know how you overcome that. Yeah, exactly. And also, I would say that the judge's role in this is really interesting. At one point, one of the judges said that TikTok was owned by China. And then TikTok's lawyer had to be like, no, no, no, we're owned by a company that has a holding company. I think he said in the Cayman Islands, he's like, we are not owned by China.

40:11And, you know, that's true. The Chinese government does not own TikTok. But the DOJ's entire argument is, you know, they could influence it. They could. Have they? We don't know. Probably not. Maybe. But they could. And in my opinion, I don't know what you think, Addy, but it seemed like the judges were kind of buying that argument. Like they were really focused on the national security risk of the whole thing. And the hearing, I think, wasn't even so much directed at exactly how much of a threat is TikTok. It was directed at if Congress thinks there's a threat, can you legally force a company to divest?

40:49It's not even like the question of whether it's a threat, I think, comes after all of that. Right. I guess that's true. There is kind of a meta aspect of this where we're not actually arguing about in this particular case. I think I have this right that whether or not the allegations about TikTok are true. It's the question of if Congress believes the allegations against TikTok, what is it able to do about them? Right, which feels sort of one step removed from the actual impossible question, but is ultimately at this moment maybe the only part of the question that actually matters in terms of what happens to TikTok.

41:27Right, and I think there are caveats like, are we at active war with China? Like, I think that those are just really gigantic mitigating factors, Like exactly how much of a threat do we think China is just as a legal status? But yeah, a bunch of this is really just can you prevent something that is a foreign government that we think that Congress thinks presents a threat from operating inside the United States as a commercial entity? So, Gabby, you were saying it felt like the judges were buying the argument. What was kind of the vibe at the end of the hearing? What were you thinking about how it went down?

42:01It was very unclear to me what would happen, but based on the questioning, I felt like the judges were both like torn between whether national security concerns kind of trump this First Amendment question, but also like they did seem to genuinely be like, well, if China is a threat and if Congress believes that China is a threat, then we have to take that seriously. whereas TikTok's entire argument was not only are we not owned by China we are not a threat and at one point they were like other companies and platforms based in China are not being singled out in this way so why are we being singled out in this way um which I do think is you know an interesting question well and it seems like with some hindsight now the answer to that question is still A, very mysterious, but B, has something to do with Israel and Hamas and what happened last October.

42:55And I feel like I got on this podcast and got very loudly upset about like, if you think there is something going on here as the government, you have a responsibility to tell us what's going on. And at least as far as I've seen, we haven't gotten any of that. But do we have any kind of new information or understanding about what is the root cause of all of this? Why everybody is so mad at TikTok and not mad at these other platforms like you're talking about? I think that Israel and Hamas is a big part of it. I don't think, as far as I'm aware, Congress has not proved that there has been any kind of influence campaign.

43:29But there have been several members of Congress, both in the House and the Senate, who have said that, you know, the campus protests, for example, show that our youth are being influenced by malign foreign actors, that they could not have possibly come to these opinions on their own, and that there is somebody putting this information in front of them. In one of the declarations that was filed by the government, there was mention of a feature on TikTok's back end called heating, which is when you can kind of just boost certain content if it's trending or if you want it to be trending. And again, it was said like, we don't have any proof that this has been used maliciously, but could have been right yeah i the the biggest thing i remember is there was this moment i think it was last fall maybe early this year i don't know i've lost track of time uh where there was a there was an intelligence briefing and a bunch of congress people came out and voted unanimously to ban tiktok and and the overwhelming question has been like what did they learn in that briefing And it still feels like whatever it was, we don't know.

44:35And at this point, it's almost shocking to me that we don't know. Yeah. And if you look at the filings, like big chunks of it are redacted. And I guess, you know, if there's valid national security concerns, I do get that. But it's also like, what's in there? What did they tell you? Right. And especially like it's if there are sort of ongoing actual national security concerns, sure. But if it's like heating is a feature that exists, like maybe maybe unredact that. Like, it's fine. Let us let us know what's going on here. Well, that part was was unredacted. I mean, let me pull up the filing. There was one part that I remember being finding very interesting.

45:10Please. Right. OK, so there's a section in one of the filings, eight pages long, titled ByteDance and TikTok's History of Censorship and Content Manipulation at PRC Discretion. Almost entirely redacted. What is that history? I don't know, but it's in there. Maybe. And the fact that it's redacted makes it sound like there must be there must be something. So in that same declaration, it's from Casey Blackburn, who's an assistant director of national intelligence. He writes that there is, quote, no information, end quote, that the Chinese government has used TikTok for, quote, malign foreign influence targeting U.S.

45:47persons or the collection of sensitive data of U.S. persons. Just there's a risk of it happening in the future. Right. And yet we're being very secretive about all the stuff that's being discussed. I just I cannot square those two things in my head. Adi, can you square those two things? This fact that there is a lot of stuff being redacted. We're having this big semi-private sort of obscure debate about what's going on. And then even the people in Congress are saying there's no evidence that this stuff has been going on. How do you make sense of those two things happening simultaneously? I don't know.

46:17I mean, part of the question is how sensitive are the things that are actually redacted? I mean, we understand that there's a very, very long history of sort of over-redaction and over-classification in the U.S. government. And so it's plausible that these things like they are sensitive, but they are also not necessarily incredibly divergent from the things we've heard publicly. But on the other hand, I don't know. I mean, I think the question really comes down to something that is still just not related to that, which is what is the First Amendment right that you have to operate something as a company that has a foreign owner?

46:53Right. Yeah. So we should pivot away from this. But what what is the next piece of this? Because we're still we're like barreling towards January, which is theoretically the deadline for TikTok to either be sold or banned, depending on who you are and how you read what's going on here. Is there a is there a next step between here and there that we know is coming? The next step is whether the D.C. Circuit Court decides that it should block this law, basically. And then at that point, TikTok, I think, correct, has until January to at least start the process of getting divested. Okay. This is like definitely going to the Supreme Court, right?

47:32That feels like the inevitable end of this process one way or another. Yes. Yeah. Okay. All right, cool. Just checking. So we'll be back. We're going to have many more bites at this particular story. Now I want to talk about the story that I just don't understand and basically didn't pay any attention to. But Gabby, you in particular had to. And I just feel like I feel like we we owe it to you to let you talk about your feelings about this. Tell me about the Trump space from from last week. Oh, my God. So the way I've described it to Addy in numerous times is like a jigsaw torture scenario designed for me specifically.

48:10it was you know so let's rewind a little bit Trump was the headliner at the Bitcoin conference this year he's been really trying to you know show the crypto community that he's behind them he wants their votes etc etc and his sons and him have been teasing this crypto platform World Liberty Financial. And he was supposed to announce it in a Twitter space at 8 p.m. Eastern. So, you know, I logged on to the Twitter space at like maybe 7.55. Addy was there, too. I didn't suffer alone. And I from 8 p.m. Eastern until what, like 10.30? It was about 10.30. It was about 10.30. Nobody announced actually what it was.

48:56But they started talking about like some of the details, but they never said just what it was. And I was doing my pre-write like for it and I was taking notes. But my it was just like Trump announces TK and then he got off the stream. So I had to change the whole thing. He didn't announce anything. He was talking about how good his granddaughter Arabella is at speaking Chinese. He was like she impressed she so much. He loved her. He loved how she spoke. And I was like, what is this crypto platform? Please. The best way that I had to describe it as like imagine an apple event or like a game announced at e3 and steve job comes up and he's like i'm announcing something and then he doesn't actually announce the iphone and they just start all talking about the iphone like like features of the iphone he's just like here's how you cut and paste and you're like on what exactly that's very good so okay so let's do some work for this Twitter space.

49:54What do we think this thing is? To be honest, I'm less curious about the product itself and more about sort of what it means in this political moment in the United States. But we should attempt to define the thing a little bit. So what is this thing that they kind of sort of almost didn't a little bit launch? So still actually unclear, but three people with knowledge of the project told the New York Times that it has been pitched as a borrowing and lending platform. So to be clear, they did not tell the New York Times that it is a borrowing and lending platform. They said that it has been pitched as a borrowing and lending platform.

50:31I like that distinction because maybe it's not even that. I don't know. Maybe it is. But the thing that all of them kept talking about, less so Trump because he was just talking about, you know, his usual stuff. But Donald Trump Jr., some of his business partners, they kept talking about debanked people and underserved communities and how this is really going to help out a lot of vulnerable people who have been shut out of traditional financial markets. And as Addie pointed out when I first wrote about this, she was like, remember Trump university remember that so trump university was if i remember correctly um it was before trump ran for president it was you know his apprentice times it was a course program where you could learn to be a real estate investor um but then there was a trial because a bunch of people sued him over how the point of trump university was not to teach people to invest in real estate it It was to sell them more courses about investing in real estate and other business activities.

51:40So it was like basically a scam. It was basically a scam targeted at people who would like to get rich, like Donald Trump. Okay. And then, Addy, what did you make of all this? So the actual detail that we have based on the stream is that, A, it is supposed to, not an exact quote, but a paraphrase, drive mass adoption of stablecoins and be easier to use for normal people. Stablecoins, of course, being like coins that are pegged to an actual currency. And it is pitched specifically, so there is unbanked people. There are unbanked people. Those are people who do not have a bank account. They tend to be people who do not have very much money.

52:19It is a genuine issue. And those are folks that the crypto community has been talking about forever. That is like if you want to make like a big, beautiful, good for the world case for crypto, those are the folks that everybody starts with. And it's mostly that's been tested overseas and the results have been somewhat mixed. This is more specifically they pitched to debanked people, which is basically people that have been quote unquote canceled and they lost their bank account because of it, which is like, let's just say a much more niche group. Yeah, I feel that laughing when you say that. I just assumed that debanked and unbanked were like synonyms for the same thing.

52:57It is deeply upsetting that that's not the case. Oh, no. There was a really great quote from Donald Trump Jr. who was like, you know, there was a time where the Trumps, we could have picked up the phone. We could have gotten any CEO of any bank and gotten a loan from anyone in the world on any project. And then we got into the political arena. And then he said, we went from being people who would have been the elite in that world to just being like totally canceled. And it's like, well, you also your dad got sued for fraud. So maybe it's not. I don't know. It seems like it fits really well into the sort of alt-tech ecosystem.

53:35Stuff like the Freedom Phone and various alternative social networks. Things that run from they actually exist as product to being basically scams or rebadged Android phones. Yeah, I mean, and I think the reason I'm interested in this is less about the actual product itself And more about, A, that ecosystem, which is real and growing, and there are a lot of people making a lot of money from that ecosystem, some of the real products and some of the scams. But also the fact that so much of what the tech industry has been talking about with respect to this election has been either explicitly or implicitly about crypto.

54:18Like in a very real way, there is like a dividing line in this election and it has to do with how you feel about crypto, which I think in a lot of ways has to do with how much money you have invested in crypto. And my read of this whole thing was it was just this entire project is just another way for Trump and the Trump campaign to say we love crypto. Am I misreading that or understating what they're actually trying to do here? I think that's part of it. But I think another big part of it is that they're really appealing to the victim complex that a lot of people who are really into crypto have.

54:51When I was at the Bitcoin conference, there were all these people talking about how terrified they are of like central bank digital currencies and how, you know, eventually the deep state will just be able to like completely shut out whoever they want out of the financial system. And that's why crypto is so powerful. It was it was an extremely political or politicized environment at the Bitcoin conference this year. It wasn't just Trump. I mean, Cynthia Lummis spoke. Edward Snowden eventually gave a speech that was like, yeah, all these politicians are making promises to you, but maybe maybe you don't trust him.

55:22And it was really funny because he got a standing ovation before he spoke. And then he was like, I can't see you guys. I'm like like web calling in right now. But thanks. And then he didn't get a standing ovation afterwards. afterwards. And I remember talking to a friend and being like, do you think that's because of what he said or because he they know that he can't see them? And she was like, definitely both, like, but probably more what he said, because he really like threw cold water on the whole thing. He was like, maybe it's not great that there's a bunch of politicians here. Maybe that's bad.

55:54Yeah. I mean, it is like the whatever last five years of the crypto movement. I think if you ask people not that long ago how it would feel to have a bunch of politicians be the biggest names in crypto, they would feel very differently than they seem to today. I think that has changed in a pretty big way, even just over the course of this election cycle. All right. No more crypto. Let's just talk ad tech in other deeply exciting things. I just want to check in on this trial. Lauren Feiner on our team has been in the courtroom, I think is probably in the courtroom right now as we're doing this.

56:26She's not in the courtroom today because she is traveling. Okay, that's good. Poor Lauren. I was there for one day, and I had to sit in the courtroom. There are no devices, no electronics allowed. I couldn't even wear an Apple Watch, like nothing. And I had to sit there with a notebook and a pen like it was the 1700s and listen to people talk about header bidding and yield management. And it was really something special. But Addy, you've been editing and assigning a lot of this coverage. Lauren's been in the courtroom a ton. I've been in the courtroom a little. It feels like we're getting to kind of the end of the government's part of this trial.

57:04What's your sense on where we're going and what we've learned so far? Correct. The DOJ wrapped up yesterday. We're expecting Google to be making its case through mid-next week. It seems like we could have a wrap of this part of the trial. It's not a sure thing yet, but the end of next week. Okay. And so far, it's hard to say what the judge, how the judge is feeling. That's always very hard to say. And I think we haven't gotten a really clear picture in this case. But so far, the DOJ's case is basically Google has incredible power, which I think most people don't dispute, and has gotten it by making all these very hard-noticed decisions that consolidate its power in a way that relies on the fact that it has access to all these different parts of the spectrum.

57:47It has what was, at the time of most of these events, DoubleClick for Publishers, which was a Google's publisher ad sales server. And then it has access to the sort of other side of the equation for advertisers. And then it has AdEx, which sits in the middle of this. And a lot of what ended up coming up is the idea that it used AdEx access and access to all this very high quality data about the advertisers to strong arm publishers into taking deals that they didn't really like and into neutering projects that and features that might help people diversify away from Google's tools. It's been really interesting to follow this trial after covering the search trial a bunch last year, because so much of the overarching case here kind of rhymes, right, in the sense that Google is like, yes, we're very big and we're very successful.

58:45Like, correct. We won. We did it. Good job, us. But it's because we're good at it and because our product is the best and because people like to use it. And the government is making almost the exact argument they made back then, which is like, no, you got big because you were good. Everybody like, yes, granted, congratulations, you did it. And then you spent years or decades just ruthlessly preventing anyone else from ever being able to do the thing that you did. and like the specifics and the details and the tech are so different. But the case is just the same. Google is like, we win because we're good.

59:23And the government is like, well, you're not actually that good anymore, but you keep winning. So what's that about? Right. Which is how they demonstrate the idea of harm, which is that, yeah, Google made all of these products that people thought were really good. And then they created a situation in which the DOJ alleges the market stagnated. And that it's a little bit harder because obviously anybody can use search. You can look at search. You can decide for yourself whether you think search is still good or not. In this case, it's a little more indirect, but a lot of the idea is people ended up paying more for ads.

59:54It was harder to run a business that was ad supported. It ended up making, say, ads maybe more intrusive because you have to just spam people with a bunch more. And so there's the DOJ isn't making that case nearly as much. But for the average person, that is sort of more of the takeaway. Yeah, it is. deeply, deeply wonky in every possible way. And even talking to folks like in the ad tech business about all of this, their eyes kind of start to glaze over when you talk about like the actual underpinning technology of all of this, where it's like, oh, let's talk about publishing servers and the lock-in effect that they give for the rest of the, and everybody just like falls asleep at their desk talking to me on Google Meet.

1:00:35Which I was very impressed with the judge in particular the one day I was in court and in her ability to just stay locked in. And she was asking a lot of like vocabulary questions because everything in this entire case is just insane acronyms that no person should know. But everyone in the room just assumes, you know, because they all do it for a living. And so at one point she was just like, sorry, what's what's torso and tail in ad tech? She just like paused the whole trial. She's like, what does that mean? Why aren't you explaining this to me? It was great. It turns out it means medium and small publishers.

1:01:07The head is the big ones. the torso is the mid-sized publishers and the tail is all the like cooking blogs and single person operations that are less the focus of this trial. I thought torso was an acronym. I'm so sorry to interrupt this learned conversation, but I thought you were going to be like, I don't know. I can't even think of the letters that torso would be, but I did think it was an acronym. The optimal return sick openness. Yeah, that's what it is. You're right. That's one of Google's products. Not a lot of people know about it. But no, and I think you're kind of right, Addy, that it seems like it has been really hard to figure out how any of this is going for folks.

1:01:47Like reading our coverage, reading other coverage, the government seems to be making a case. Google seems to have strong thoughts about every part of that case. And then the strangest part is like the search trial, it's just down to this one judge who is just sitting there kind of quietly listening and asking vocabulary questions. What's going to happen? And I think it would be so interesting if this was a jury trial. And Google obviously wrote a big check to make this not a jury trial. But it does feel like it would be different if it was in front of 12 random people off the street instead of one judge.

1:02:21Yeah. So far, I think the clearest thing and the thing that seems most likely to go badly for Google is the same thing that was an issue in the search trial by Google overclassifying and not storing chats and turning off chat history and things like that. It seems not necessarily clear that's going to play in hugely into this trial in the way that it didn't last time, but certainly seems like something where the judge is not incredibly sympathetic. Yeah, Google keeps doing the thing where they're like, oh, let's talk about this. And then somebody goes, oh, chat history is on. And then it's like end of chat.

1:02:53Like, oh, well, that's not incriminating at all. Like, that's that's cool. Which is like it's not necessarily incriminating. Like, obviously, but in the last trial, there was a bunch of, OK, you're just saying things that I understand they're not necessarily incriminating, but they also kind of make you sound bad. Right. Exactly. They just make you sound really Machiavellian. Yeah. There's something about saying nobody listen to this that just kind of makes it seem like you're about to say something you don't want people to hear. Like, it's hard to it's hard to argue with that. And even the stuff when they weren't doing that, it was like, OK, well, maybe we should be clear that we use we shouldn't use this terminology because that'd make us sound like a monopoly.

1:03:27Right. My I Am Not a Monopoly shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. Yeah. I'm going to do you think they'd let me wear that shirt into the courtroom? I'm going to go. I'm going to make that shirt and see if they'll allow me into the courthouse in Alexandria and see. And I will report back. It's going to be great. All right. We got to take a break. I should let you guys go. But I think it's it's about to be an election and we're going to have to have you both back. And we got some more stuff to talk about between now and then. But thank you both. Oh, God, that is happening.

1:03:55Yeah. All right. we got to take one more break and then we're going to do a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:07:41you get your iPhones and try the new stuff. I want to hear what you're thinking. Hit us up. Tell me everything. This week, we have a question that is near and dear to my organizational heart. Let's hear it. Hey, my name is Erica. I'm reaching out with kind of a random question. You just went through your mini series on productivity, but the reason I don't find myself to be people productive is my digital debt. I have so many documents and so many photos. And anytime I try to clean them up, it just feels so tedious. And I'm sitting on a plane and I'm deleting screenshots and it's just really the best piece of my time.

1:08:19So if you guys have any ideas or anything you could think of, I would love it. Thanks, guys. Bye. All right. So I bring this question to you for a couple of reasons. One, because if there is a perfect answer to this question, and I have not found it. The idea of digital life being about just collections of stuff is super duper real and bad. So if there is a perfect solution, if you've devised a way to, A, not let your computer get super cluttered, or B, clean it up really quickly, let me know. I want to know. I have this newsletter called Installer. I will talk about it there. I'll talk about it here.

1:08:56I will sing your name from the rooftops. Tell me everything. But I do have a bit of a system for this and just figured I would share the way that I do it in the hopes that it might help. It's kind of three separate things. The first step is about your camera roll on your phone, which I think for a lot of people is where a lot of the file clutter exists. You take screenshots, you have pictures of your receipts, you have duplicate pictures of your kids and everything. I do two things here. The first thing is on both the iPhone and Android, there is a way to quickly delete duplicates on your phone, which I highly recommend and think everybody should do.

1:09:34It's just in settings in the in the photos app of both of those things. You can just delete duplicates. The other one is you can sort out screenshots. You can do it in Google Photos. You just search for screenshots. I'll find the screenshots. Apple pulls it all into a separate album. I periodically just go in there and delete them all. I have never once been burned by this where I'm like, Oh, I wish I had that screenshot again. Go with God, I suppose. There might be problems if you do it in such a sort of brute forcey way. But that is a thing I do every few months. And I'm always amazed at how many screenshots I have in there and how few of them I actually care about.

1:10:10Most of them are just like my lock screen. Anyway, the other one is to find an app that essentially lets you like Tinder swipe your way through your photos. There are a bunch of these. There's one called swipe and delete. There's one called swipe wipe. There's one I think called slide box. There's a bunch of these out there. Most of them will make you pay an ongoing subscription. But what I usually do is either just do the free trial or just pay like once and use it once. And essentially what they do is they show you a photo and you swipe right to keep it or left to get rid of it. And it is shocking how quick a way that is to go through some of your photos.

1:10:43Most of them, it's it's an obvious snap decision, right? Keep or lose. and having just a mechanism that lets you choose that is great. So that's the first thing, camera roll. Thing number two is your computer. And this is where my system is not great, but it really works for me. So I figured I would share. The first thing I do is use an app on the Mac called Disk Inventory X and on Windows called Winderstat, W-I-N-D-I-R-S-T-A-T. And what both of those do is just visualize the storage on your computer. They'll show you where all the big files are, where all the folders are with all the big files.

1:11:20And I'll just go in and find the biggest stuff that I don't need. A lot of it for me is like video recordings or huge application files that I download, caches from browsers, and just delete all of that. And most of the reason I think to do a decluttering like this is because you're starting to run out of storage. And that is a super duper efficient way to do it. Again, I think for a lot of people, photos are a thing that takes up a lot of space. So if you have photos elsewhere, you can delete them from your computer and free up a lot of space. So yeah, one of those visualization apps is an incredibly useful way to just figure out where your storage is going and start to get some of it back.

1:11:57The second thing I do is once every six months or so, I will just take all of the contents of my downloads folder and my desktop folder and for me, my documents folder and just put it all on an external hard drive. Again, I've deleted the biggest files by now. So most of what's left is like little things I downloaded and documents I made and whatever. But the way I work, at least anything that I'm going to need permanently ends up somewhere else. Usually it's in Google Drive, but sometimes it'll get filed to like a specific spot on my computer. Anything that is in sort of those like stock folders is probably something I don't need again.

1:12:36But I don't want to do the work of going through and actually figuring it all out. but I also don't want to delete all of it in case there is something that I need. So I have a little tiny two terabyte hard drive that just sits here on my desk. And every few months I plug it in, I empty the folders onto that drive. And then I don't think about it again. It cleans up my computer. It makes everything very simple. And if all of a sudden I'm like, oh, where is that thing? It's on the hard drive. Overwhelmingly, it is on the hard drive. That has been incredibly useful for me in both keeping my computer and me sane, but also not having to dedicate like four full days a year to keeping it that way.

1:13:15So that's my system. It has worked very well for me. I'm sure it's not the best system. I also am like relatively organized otherwise. So again, like things that I know where I'm going to need end up mostly getting filed somewhere. So if you're just kind of a like let chaos reign and then once a month tame it person, you should probably keep doing that system rather than mine. But I just wanted to share in case that helps. Start with the camera roll. get rid of the big files, dump everything else onto a hard drive and know that it's there if you need it. I hope that helps. That's all I got. And if you have a better idea, I would love to hear it.

1:13:49I think this is a problem everybody has. I'm looking at like the mass of icons on my desktop right now and I'm like, I need to do this again. And I think a lot of us do. So I'd love to hear from you. Anyway, for now, that is it for the Vergecast. Thank you to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from TikTok to Trump to Google to OpenAI, all of it on TheVerge.com. All of this is also like ongoing, so we're covering it as we go. It is a busy season in the tech world. I'll put some links to all that stuff in the show notes, but keep your eyes on the website.

1:14:21It's a fun website. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other things that are gonna make me have an existential crisis about AI, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. I love hearing from you. It's the best. Thank you to everybody who reaches out. It is the absolute most fun Slack room we have that pipes all the voicemails in, and I love hearing from you. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about a bunch of new gadgets, all the stuff going on at MetaConnect, and everything else.

1:14:55We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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