This is your laptop... on AI

23:08I think the opposition to data centers is how all of the products make all the people feel, which is stupid. All the time. Even though they're like, sycophantic and they try to make you feel like a genius, at some point you hit the brittleness, particularly the free models, or you hit the like, this This isn't the answer I wanted, but it's been presented in such a confident form that I'm just going to walk away from you. Right. Which is something like what Gemini Spark is doing. Right. It made you a beautiful plan. And to argue with that plan, like, it's not like talking to your actual travel agent.

23:44It's not like talking to your friend who helps you plan a trip because they're really good at credit card points or whatever. It's like I have to prod the computer in some way to not screw up the first half of the trip because I want to change a restaurant in the second half of the trip. And like now you're a computer programmer. You might be using natural language, but you have to conform yourself to how Gemini wants you to issue these instructions. And that stuff isn't good enough yet. It is great in the business context because you have every incentive to be good at your job and use these tools in that way.

24:14And I'm just pounding the table. Making people's lives feel like work makes for horrible consumer products. These consumer products are not anywhere close to good enough because all of them are in the framework of what if more of your life looked like using the computer at work? And I just think that's a mistake. even the personal contact stuff that google's doing that's a straight lift from how enterprises think about using ai because they have these vast stores of data and all of these databases or their data lakes or all this enterprise it vocabulary none of that data talks to each other all of their like middleware products that are supposed to connect it all are expensive and don't work and now you can just let loose gemini for work on your vast interconnected source of databases and it will start generating business insights at you.

25:02And like, all of this seems very exciting. The leadership conferences are more energized than ever about this stuff. And no human being in their lives is like, boy, my data is in several unconnected databases. I, if only Gemini could read them all and deliver actionable insight. Like what? No, man, I just want to get, I just want to drink a bunch of Miller Lights and chill out. Like there's something there that's missing forever, you know?

25:25David Pierce:Yes. I think that's right. But also I think, I think the belief that these companies increasingly is that you're wrong and that actually the ability to one shot me a useful personalized trip planner is going to cross that chasm. I just want to read you a quote from so I interviewed this woman, Gazde Ozenor, who's a product manager at Google. We were talking in the context of this app called Dream Beans that Google came out with this week. I don't know if you saw this. The idea is it's essentially a proactive list of they call them stories of AI generated things every day. I encourage you to go look at the thing that I posted on the site, which is one of the things it does is it generates pictures of you for a lot of these stories, which is just extremely rude about the size of my forehead in most of them.

26:12David Pierce:But it's the idea is like, OK, how do we put all of this data together for you in sort of a proactive, helpful, useful way? So sometimes it's like, here's a bit of information you should know for today or like a fun way to tell me to update all my computers ahead of WWDC is literally one of the things it gave me. And she said this thing. She said she was originally on the personal intelligence team at Google. And she said, we realize that each service holds a specific piece of your life. Gmail has mostly your logistics and receipts. Photos has your visual memories and the people you care about.

26:42David Pierce:YouTube has your interests and search reflects what you're curious about. So there's definitely something interesting in connecting all of that. Software brain. That is the most software brain, software brain of all time. You are just a bunch of different databases that Google runs. I'm not positive she's wrong. Like, I think I'm positive she's wrong. You think YouTube is a complete list of your interests? I think it's closer than just about anything else you'd find. No way, dude. It's just like, no, that's absolutely not true. Does YouTube know that you just reviewed a whole bunch of phones and went back to iOS for Android?

27:20Probably. How would it know this?

27:24David Pierce:Based on a bunch of things that I did and the Apple Store receipt in my Gmail. No, that's Gmail. I'm saying YouTube. It's sitting there, but it doesn't matter. Google has all of them, right? And this is the bet. And this is like, again, I bring this up in the context of Microsoft Build, where their theory is you can do this at work. And I think fairly straightforwardly, you can do this at work, right? Like everybody has incentives. That's what I'm saying. In work, this all makes sense to me. Yeah, everybody has - Work is just database manipulation for most people. Right, and you put all of these in structure places, like Notion is deep down this road, right?

27:53David Pierce:Of like put all of your business stuff into Notion and our AI will just do everybody's job for them. Like that's plausible because everybody is incentivized to make these things in these structured ways inside of their companies. the most alarming thing about this spark experience for me was like it's it kind of works in my personal life like it it didn't i'm going to follow that itinerary pretty exactly because it was right about most things sure and that's like that's one example of many things but it's like but then the fact that it worked and it still made me feel bad is is just this thing i can't get past and so i think like for me it's been like okay this isn't gonna work because everybody is software-brained.

28:36David Pierce:And I think we are inching to the point where maybe at least Google, maybe not anybody else, but maybe at least Google actually does have enough of this data about me that if it can put it all together in a way that feels as useful as this one Spark experience did. And again, this is one experience. Life is full of experiences. This is one. But it did the thing in a way that I had just not experienced before. I can just think of ways that this can break you pretty easily. One, if you don't use Google for everything. Right? And I will stick on the idea that YouTube doesn't actually know my interests, but Google needs to pretend it does.

29:17Sure. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's very important. Aren't you one of those people who, like, turned off history on YouTube? Yeah. So you don't get recommendations anymore? I open YouTube and it is basically a dark gray search box and a prompt. It's like, please turn on your history. And I'm like, I will never turn on my history.

29:32David Pierce:No, it's absolutely true that all of this only works if you willingly have given your, but also like - If you give your life to Google. So like lots of people don't do that. I made the Gmail decision in 2004. Like this is not, people are not making this decision today. People made these decisions a long time ago. Right, but some of those people made the decision to use Yahoo in 2002, right? Like there's a lot of that in the world, right? Where Google can't make the promise for everybody. Sure. And there's the software brain piece of this is they have to flatten you into the databases they have.

30:02So I'm just going to keep pushing on the YouTube one. To just flatly say like YouTube is where your interests are is required to make the product work, but it has no reflection on where your interests actually are. because a lot of your interests are also on Instagram and a lot of your interests are also on TikTok and a lot of interests are never expressed to your phone at all. Like, at all. You know? And like, we're both watching Widow's Bay, right? I don't know that YouTube has any indication that I'm watching Widow's Bay in a totally different streaming service.

30:33David Pierce:It does because you say your name at the beginning of the podcast and it's a transcript on YouTube. But that's us. That's us. It's there, dude. Like, this is what I'm saying. But like, most people are not opening their podcast. Statistically, everybody has a podcast. So that's not correct. Like, I'm confident that Google knows I play mad at them. But it's fine. But it's us, not everyone else. I'm just saying that is the software brain. It's the promise. It is also the peril, right? Where you're like, okay, you're just a bunch of databases. What databases do I have that reflect you? YouTube is your interest.

31:04And you are sort of just required to say it. There's also, like, you know, Microsoft had built this week. There's their approach to it, which is to say out loud, we're just focused on the enterprise. right and we have our new models and we're going to build a bunch of enterprise applications and because we have so much microsoft 365 and azure data about your workplace we can put out whole new products concept products of what a computer looks like now that have nothing to do with windows that are just like agent control panels that you might use to do work and this makes sense again i think in the enterprise right if you sit down at your corporate job where like mostly you use a laptop to use software, it does make a bunch of sense to say, oh, I can talk to my agent to go use the software and the databases for me.

31:48And I think Microsoft sees that opportunity in like gigantic, interesting ways. Sure. But everyone else, this is the Rabbit R1. Everyone else is like, we're going to run around and use your apps and services for you as a consumer. And that turns your life into work in exactly the same way. And I just, I don't think people want their regular lives to feel like what they do with their jobs. I, I, maybe some people do. I, you know, I know people who love to use Airtable to like plan their weddings or like whatever. There's, there's reasons for lists and schemes to exist everywhere, but no one wants to be like, what's it?

32:22How do I get 20 % more efficiency in my automated process at home? Like, absolutely not. We'll see. I agree with you. I think this is the, this is the turning point. Like these things are going to ship to consumers and it's going to be extraordinarily apparent that a lot of us are reflected in a lot of databases that can be linked together to do this kind of stuff. And then everyone is going to have to choose.

32:44David Pierce:Yeah, and there's going to be this question of like, knowing everything we know about where this technology came from, who stole what to make it, and what it's doing to the environment and to our brains. Do I want really great trip planning service? Yeah. Boy, did this all feel very existential, just trying to get like a weekend trip to Hershey, Pennsylvania. But actually, we should take a break, and then I want to come back and talk about the computer thing you just said, because I think that's sort of the other AI story of the week is basically Jensen Wong's theory of the computing future, and we should litigate this.

33:21David Pierce:So let's take a quick break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about computers. Be right back.

33:26Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from Zapier. Everywhere you look, people are talking about AI, seemingly all the time. But when it gets down to business, endless talk doesn't get work done. If you want to break the hype cycle and put AI to work across your company for real, then use Zapier. Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy. With their AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow so you can do more of what matters. You can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the tools your team already uses, whether that's AI-powered workflows an autonomous agent, a customer chatbot, or whatever else, you can orchestrate it all with Zapier.

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34:36Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question comes with a clean, easy answer, and the ones that actually matter tend to come with a mix of sparks and second-guessing, aha moments, and quiet reflection. So when you're in the middle of something like that, it helps to have a sounding board to kick ideas off and dig into what's really going on underneath. That's where Claude comes in. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move.

35:12Nilay Patel:Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude today at claude.ai slash vergecast. That's claude.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash vergecast. I keep seeing celebrities posts, me in the 90s versus now. While the person staring at me in the mirror is definitely not the same person that could pull off bootcut jeans, time creeps up on us so slowly.

36:00Nilay Patel:You don't see it until suddenly you do. Same thing goes for your bills. A dollar here, an uptick there. It's a slow burn until one day you realize the price you're paying now is way higher than when you signed up. But at T-Mobile, customers had the lowest wireless bills versus Verizon and AT &T over the past five years. And with T-Mobile on their experience plans, you get a five-year price guarantee, so you know exactly what your plan price will be for the next five years. So at least that's one thing that won't change over time. I can't guarantee you'll still look good with frosted tips, but T-Mobile can give you a clear guarantee on your wireless plan.

36:51David Pierce:All right, we're back. So, Neela, you kind of alluded to this, but the thing I want to talk about here is Jensen Wong's theory about computers. In addition to being Microsoft Build this week, it was also Computex, and NVIDIA announced this chip called the RTX Spark that it thinks is the new sort of consumer chip from NVIDIA. They're going after Apple Silicon. They're going after Intel. They're going after AMD. they're like, NVIDIA is really feeling itself here and just trying to like take over the computing industry. But in the course of all of this, Jensen Wong was up on stage and he had a long sort of digression into what he believes to be the future of computers.

37:32David Pierce:Can I just play you this clip? It's long, but it is the most Vergecast-y thing anyone has said on stage in a very long time. Can I just play this for you? Yeah, let's see it. Okay.

37:43Nilay Patel:About three years ago, I talked to Satya and I said in the future AI wants to run on a device too because we want to have assistance running with us all the time right now well for you all of your laptops are here my laptop is in the room if I want to talk to my laptop today I gotta wait until I get back to my room in the future if I need my laptop to do something I just text it with whatsapp I I said, you know, whatever. R2-D2. You know, there's this thing with the PowerPoint slide, slide number 17. That image is scaled or titled wrong. It should not say CX-9. It should say CX-10. R2-D2 opens up PowerPoint, modifies it, puts it in PDF, sends it to me.

38:33Nilay Patel:Can you imagine that? Easy. That's a future where your AI is not just a laptop, not just a tool, but your laptop becomes an AI, becomes an assistant. All day long. Now, you don't want to necessarily run everything in the cloud because if you can run it locally, it's free. Just like laptops. Just like phones. Just like in your house. You know, why rent a television? You're going to use it every day. Why rent the washer dryer? You're going to use it every, well, hopefully once a week. Okay? You know? Why rent your refrigerator? You're going to use it every day. Why rent your assistant computer? You're going to use it every day.

39:14David Pierce:Just going to go out on a limb here and say Jensen Wong, probably not somebody who does his own laundry. He has no idea how often laundry is done. This man, I don't even know if Jensen has children. If you have children, that thing is running every day. That's just how that goes. Yeah. But this, like what a perfect encapsulation I think of everything happening right now. Like that's why the RTX Spark chip exists is to make devices that can do that kind of AI stuff locally. It's what a lot of the Windows stuff is after. It's what Microsoft thinks is the future. Like that is as good an encapsulation of a certain bet about the future of computing as I have heard anyone make.

39:51David Pierce:And I'm desperate to know what you think about it. Okay. So first of all, I have to just call out Hayden Field who wrote about Build with Tom Warren. And she wrote this line that I think just contextualizes all of this, especially when you think about Microsoft and OpenAI breaking up and Microsoft having to be its own company. Here's what Hayden wrote. This year's build had the vibe of a freshly single divorcee posting a thirst trap on Instagram. And I know for a fact that inside Microsoft, there's furious debate about whether that's good or bad. Oh, interesting. Hayden will tell you that she thinks it's good, right?

40:24Microsoft is feeling itself. They're out of the relationship. Yeah. They're just like, look at us, man. I've been hitting the gym. I've been eating clean. Yeah. I'm that baby. Talk to Tom. Actually, Mustafa's going to be a decoder. And they're training their own models. They want to be their own company with their own ideas about the future of computing. The fascinating thing about Jensen talking about editing PowerPoint slides on his laptop. One, very much implies your laptop is open and available to do tasks on call for you. Yeah. Which is not the state of laptops when you're not around them.

40:55Just a weird example there. to, I don't know if he's aware of this, but most people rent Microsoft Office. Right? Like if the intelligence is built into your laptop, but it's using PowerPoint, you're paying that SaaS fee for PowerPoint anyway. True. So even the example breaks down because the first thing Microsoft is going to do is bundle some intelligence into what they now call M365, which is horrible. and then they're like, let the PowerPoint AI do it for you, not the assistant on your laptop. So something about where the computer lives is very much like at stake, but also totally confused.

41:38I feel like we've been asking where the computer should live since Alexa came out. Yeah, yeah.

41:43David Pierce:And what does that computer look like and where does it live is a 15-year-old question at this point. And you shouldn't rent the intelligence because it can just happen locally in your laptop and that's free is like, whew, that's a lot, right? Right, because it's not actually free. You need a new RTX Spark computer that can do local inference at a fast enough rate. Which is going to cost many thousands of dollars. Yeah. Yeah, Jensen, have you seen what you are personally doing to RAM prices right now? So there's just a lot in there about where does the computer live? What applications does it have access to?

42:14How much does applications cost? Is it on all the time? And if it's an always-on computer with permanent access to your applications that you're already paying SaaS fees for, Shouldn't that just live in the cloud anyway? That all just feels like, oh, we made one big bet, but Microsoft is feeling itself, wants to talk about the future of computers. And so we're going to talk about this thing that exists, too. Even though, isn't that chip, like, already out? Wasn't Sean on the Vergecast saying that chip is basically already out?

42:43David Pierce:Yeah, it was, like, a year ago, I think, when NVIDIA shipped the Spark AI supercomputer. Do you remember this thing? It was like the little gold Mac mini looking thing that they were like, this is a supercomputer on everyone's desk and it costs$4 ,000 and I forgot about it until this happened. Yeah. That's just, that's what happened. Yeah. I think the Microsoft flexing that it has a bunch of its own ideas and it is no longer dependent on open AI. And by the way, here's Jensen Wong, you know, the most powerful man in AI with all kinds of ties to open AI on our stage, talking about not renting compute from our partner that will only rent you compute that we're breaking up with.

43:18like there's just some great Microsoft in there like Microsoft at this moment in time they showed off devices that don't run Windows they actually run Android like this project Solana stuff and that's all agentic all of that compute happens in the cloud right yeah like yeah where if you're using it's like a little credit card thing right like a badge size yeah and it you just talk to it it's a little agent and like goes and does stuff in the cloud

43:43David Pierce:I continue to think that rules. I talked about this with Tom too, but like that idea of like the little employee badge that becomes an intelligent AI assistant. Like if you're Microsoft, that is a perfect idea. Like I really, I earnestly believe that is, I don't know if any of it will come true or be real or ever actually work successfully, but it is the most like complete and most Microsofty thought about AI that I have seen yet. Right. And it absolutely presumes that the computer is in the cloud. Yeah. right you don't need any sort of local compute if it's just a little badge with a display that is telling you what your agents are doing off in the cloud and that is a hundred percent opposed to why rent your refrigerator when i can just text my laptop which is the open claw announcement and microsoft is basically like using open claw yeah so they're pointed in two diametrically opposed directions i'm sure you can write some coherent thesis about like you got to make every bad and like some people are going to want X and some people are going to want Y.

44:42But Jensen being like, why rent this stuff? It's like everybody wants you to rent the actual inference.

44:47David Pierce:Yeah. I don't think Microsoft is the only one confused about this for whatever it's worth. Like this is very much what OpenAI is doing with OpenClaw. Like this is why OpenClaw is now part of OpenAI, right? Like this idea that we should have some piece of it that lives in the cloud, some piece of it that can use your computer, not just live on your computer, but use your computer, Right. Like that's the that's the turn is how do we get access to all of your apps? We just use your computer for you. And what should run locally? What should run on your your own sort of private data? And then what should run in like a public cloud somewhere else?

45:24David Pierce:No one knows. Right. Like Apple is trying to figure this out with Siri and Apple intelligence. They have this whole private cloud thing that kind of works. And then they just punt things to chat GPT. And I think we're about to get new ideas about where all of that goes. No one has any answers to this. So I don't think Microsoft is like unique in being confused here, but it just makes me think we've been having this debate for a long time. And I've been asking people this question for a really long time where one of two futures is coming. Either everything is going to be a computer, right? Smartphone chips became so cheap and so readily available that what if we just put one in everything became the thing?

46:00David Pierce:or you're going to have this one sort of centralized computer that you log into from everywhere, which is like sort of the Chromebook bet or is like what Alexa is doing, right? Alexa exists outside of any given device. You just have a bunch of devices through which you interact with Alexa. Everybody is trying to do both of those things simultaneously right now, and it's just very confusing. The answer is going to be some sort of hybrid model. I mean, this is true of smartphones too, right? I think it probably should be. Like if you have a smartphone with a slow processor, it doesn't matter how much compute is available to you in the cloud.

46:33You're not having the most fun, right? For sure. And so this has been going back and forth for years. I just think in this case, as we've been talking about, like all of your data is in the cloud. All of the applications that the AI needs to use more often than not in the cloud, right? And it just seemed the web exists, right? Like they often need to go search the web for stuff. It doesn't seem like having the big local, even OpenClaw, like it started off as CloudBot because it was just a thing on your computer that was calling Cloud a lot to use your computer for you. And people are just like burning through their token allocations using these harnesses.

47:10So at some point, either NVIDIA has made a chip that is so good, it can run a good enough model locally and your laptop isn't red hot and your power bills aren't skyrocketing. rocketing or the cost of inference will go down, which is whatever we'll predict over time. And this will be like a moot point. Like you just pick whichever one works for you and that's fine.

47:30David Pierce:Yeah. I think to me, the big question there is there is a next thing implicit in all of this stuff that Jensen is talking about and in all of the bets that even these PC makers are making that if we can make the chips fast enough, then it's going to completely change the way you use all of these devices and what you, not just what you use them for, but like how you interact with them, right? Like one of the things Jensen said in this is that he wants to talk to his computer. Everybody has this idea that typing is now like outdated. That actually you should just be yelling at your computer all the time.

48:05David Pierce:And if you believe all of this, right, there is going to come a time when the whole size and shape and form of your PC is going to need to change because of AI. And to me, There's no evidence of that at all, right? Like, can you get a sufficiently fast chip to be able to do more things locally? I think is a really fun and interesting question. Like I've been using all of these dictation tools, the whisper flows and spoken lees of the world as a typing replacement. And in many ways, they're really interesting. They're also irritatingly slow because they're all doing stuff in the cloud and you download the local ones and they're enormous and still kind of slow because I'm on a Mac mini, which like they work fine.

48:44David Pierce:Like this stuff is good and fine, But in order for the sort of set of things you can do to expand, you do need these faster chips. But the idea that that is going to immediately turn into some brand new kind of relationship with our laptop, I think is just dead wrong. I just don't see it. All right. I'm just going to here's I have one counter example for you. OK. Just a very simple point to make. The hottest consumer electronics product the past six months is the MacBook Neo. Yeah. a very inexpensive laptop that runs an older iphone chip that does not have any pretensions to ai at all and yes i know people are going to tell me that people are buying mac minis all around san francisco to run up whatever man the hottest consumer electronics product of the last six months it's the macbook neo no question everyone is super happy with that thing because it doesn't have any of these pretensions about new form factors it's just a really good laptop for not a lot of money that is absolutely fast enough.

49:42Dell just put out a new XPS at a cheap price to compete with a Neo. And I believe it was Dell who said to us, we have to stop marketing these things as AI PCs because consumers don't want them.

49:53David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. So I hear you. Like, where does the compute live? Where does the logic live is a live question. I think it's been a live question since Alexa, right? We're going to put Alexa in the smoke detector was a real moment that we all lived through. And it was like, why? why is why are there microphones all over my house i i need one in every room and you need to tell me where the computer is where does home kit live an open question i don't think anyone knows the answer to including the people who make a home kit at apple yeah like does it live on your apple tv does it live on your iphone who knows restart them both there's like a real thing that happens all the time uh it's like where should the logic be how diffuse should the logic be is the logic on someone else's server or is it on 15 different devices in your home by the way this is the argument to put Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi.

50:39That's another episode of the show that we're certainly going to have to do at some point. But I don't think any of these approaches to computing, even if they change where the computer lives, where the logic lives, change the form factor. I was on a flight to Chicago yesterday and I played games on my phone. There's nothing about any of these agentic tools that can replace that. And if you can't replace that, then you still have a phone and then you still have a device that is capable of doing all the things and nothing about that form factor is different. And I haven't seen anyone gesture at that problem, right?

51:16It's like, oh my God, you can just talk to everything now. The form factor should be different. And it's like, bro, I played whatever horrible golf game for two hours on the flight yesterday. Like, do you have that? Like, no. Okay. I'm done with this. Yeah.

51:30David Pierce:No, I think one of my favorite things about this whole moment is I think there is a really strong case to be made that laptops are a perfectly solved problem. Like we nailed it. Laptops are done. Stop monkeying with the form factor. We can do what we can have all kinds of new ideas about lots of things. No, no. Keyboard in the front, man. Shout out, Paul Miller. Keyboard in the front. What a true nightmare that was for 10 minutes. Was that an Acer computer that they did that, that they switched them around? There was a lot of them. It was like, Like it was one of our weirdest recurring segments on the show was keyboard in the front club.

52:05David Pierce:Yeah, that was really something. But even like just reading back over this thing Jensen is describing where he's like, if I need my laptop to do something, I just text it with WhatsApp. I say R2D2. There's this thing with the PowerPoint slide, slide number 17. That image is scaled or titled wrong. First of all, to your point, this is pure business brain. Nobody has any ideas about what this would do for you other than PowerPoint. Like, A, do this on your phone. Like there's a real case to be made that it would be easier to make PowerPoint good on your phone to make this change than it would to do all of the things so that I can send this very long message through WhatsApp that a bunch of things will then go happen.

52:39I don't know if you've ever opened PowerPoint or Google Slides on a phone. That is a fast way to make your phone overheat and shut down.

52:45David Pierce:That is true. Maybe that is an impossible technological problem. But your point is correct. Like this is only compelling if you're the managing director at an investment bank. yes and in no way does this require a different kind of laptop right like i'm sure you've seen all of these memes of like now all everybody like leaves their laptop slightly cracked outside of the the bathroom because their agent is running and it's like first of all buddy google caffeine app mac and you will have solved all of your problems uh there are ways to make sure your computer doesn't turn off when you close the lid like i don't know if you guys know this blow your mind but also it works on your laptop.

53:22David Pierce:It's fine. This is not, we don't need new ideas about laptops here. And I think this goes back to your idea of like, isn't the actual future of this that all of this stuff lives in the cloud. But even if it's running locally, my MacBook Air running an M4 chip could do everything described there perfectly fine, except that Apple is bad at AI. Like we don't need new gadgets to solve this problem. And I'm like, Like I'm so struck by we have phones and we have laptops. And actually that might be the entirety of what the AI revolution requires. I mean, there's a lot of startups that want to bet differently.

53:57I'm just coming back to what did I play? I played like a game where you connect a bunch of lines. It was called like flow. Okay. It's like, it's just burned time while the baby was asleep on me on the plane. Like whatever, man. Yep. Can, can your weird pendant that wants to be my girlfriend do that for me? Because if it can't, like I'm still going to have a phone. and I guarantee you my phone is going to have a faster processor, a better cell modem and a bigger battery than your girlfriend pendant. Yeah. I'm sorry. Like, and I have a wife. So phone wife nailed it. Sorry, friend.

54:31David Pierce:You know what I mean? I think the idea that what if we can make much faster laptops is super exciting. I actually think like the whole RTX Spark thing is going to be really interesting. If they have made the thing as sufficiently powerful as they say and can bring the sort of Windows ecosystem up to the Apple Silicon level, that's cool and exciting and will enable lots of new things for people. Nothing in that to me suggests we need an entirely new take on what computers are. I just don't, I don't see it. Not to be a total conspiracist, this industry is desperate to get away from the Apple techs.

55:05And the way you do that is you get people to buy different hardware, running a different OS with different toll rates in the app stores, like whatever that thing is and to do that you need a new user interface paradigm because otherwise you're competing with the iPhone. This is why Meta did the Metaverse for whatever reason they did the Metaverse. But like underneath it all if you like go back and read all that coverage Nick here actually wrote a long piece at Pixel Envy about the Metaverse promises and he points out Mark Zuckerberg is constantly talking about the Apple tax and Apple and how much he hates Apple.

55:39That's the whole impetus behind that whole disaster.

55:42David Pierce:Their bet was the next thing. They had no conviction about what it was. They just needed the next thing. They just wanted another platform that they didn't have to pay the Apple techs on and didn't have to care about Apple's privacy policies. And so they were like, that's it. We're helmets on your head. It's definitely going to be it. And now what if you talk to it? And so Meta has thrown away the helmets on your head. They've put out the glasses. You can just talk to that. They're going to build personal superintelligence. Everyone else is chasing pendants and wearables and rings and bracelets.

56:07Because if you can just talk to the computer, you don't need all the apps on the phone. You don't need that distribution. You don't have to deal with Apple and the Apple tax. And Apple could just end this overnight by changing how the App Store worked, right? And they would cement the dominance of iOS for another generation, but they can't because that's all their money. And so now we have this fight. And maybe that's great, right? Maybe this is actually the competition everyone needs. But you just see like, oh, there's a weird dance here that has nothing to do with whether or not you actually need the new form factors, right?

56:37Maybe they're exciting, but you don't need them if you weren't trying to run away from the economics of iOS in particular. And by the way, Android has the same economics. It's just Google is like, here's our assistant, and no one can beat that. Yeah. Right? And because Siri has to date been a disaster, there's a lot of like, oh, we can beat Siri. But very few people are rolling up into an Android phone and being like, we can beat Gemini or Android phone. Like, that seems much harder than beating Siri. So all the emphasis on Siri and also iOS customers spend more money. There's a lot of reasons for this.

57:04We'll see what happens at WWDC. But I look at this, all of this frenetic, let's reinvent computers in somewhere lurking in the background at different priority levels for every company is we have to get away from Apple. We have to get away from the Apple tax.

57:18David Pierce:Apple and Google both, but I think particularly the Apple tax. And there is this ongoing sense that those things are only going to become more entrenched. Right. And so it's like if we're going to do it, we have to do it right now. Otherwise, Apple will figure out the next form factor that it needs. and we'll get to this in a minute, but there's been a lot of new reporting about Apple's vision plan for smart glasses and the Vision Pro and all this stuff. And it's like, Apple is also reportedly working on a pendant. Like Apple has these ideas too. And so there is this sense of like, we have to beat this paradigm first or else the ones that have already closed it will just close it again.

57:55David Pierce:And that's what Gemini is doing, right? Like the fact that Google caught up so fast with Gemini is like an existential threat to everybody else doing this because it's like, oh, well, Google, If Google just wins the next one the way that it won the last one, we're all in trouble again. Yeah. The same duopoly just can do it again. This is why they're all doing browsers. This is why they're all doing computer use. They need access to your data as directly as Google has access to your data and a staggering number of applications. Who knows, man? I just think, like, I'll use smartwatch as an example.

58:26Right. The Apple Watch is a great product. People love them. Google just put out the Fitbit Air. I'm wearing this whoop band that tortures me daily about, if I could just tell the whoop band I have a baby and it could stop telling me that my sleep was interrupted, that would be great. And it just like won't believe me. Like, I'm like, this is not going to stop for 18 years.

58:43David Pierce:One of my favorite things about the Fitbit Air is that the first night it was like, gosh, you woke up a lot. I was like, I have a 10 month old asshole. And now it just says every morning, it's like, you did great. Even though the baby woke up six times. I'm really proud of you. It's like fully changed its tenor about my horrible sleep. It's great. Maybe I just don't want to tell the whoop band that much information on myself. It'll be like, you're less masculine because you care for your child. I have a lot of feelings for the whoop band. Such a low T move to care for your child. It's constantly telling me.

59:12It's like, no one wants me to 10x my testosterone. Like zero people in the world think that is a good idea for me in particular. um anyhow uh the that set of wearables works right there's competition in the market for screenless health trackers and they all kind of work with ios in whatever way they work and if you want to display one notification and make something smarter than that apple stops you and there's not actually great competition for the apple watch in the category of things that are apple watches right there's competition for things that are next to it like i'm a much hard hardcore runner, so I'm going to go to Garmin or whatever it is, right?

59:49And then there's competition for things that don't even pretend to do the things the Apple Watch does. Like, all these screenless trackers, the whoops and the Fitbit Airs, they're just doing what they can do inside the apps that they can run. And then they stop at Apple's garden walls. And I think no one wants to repeat that. There should be way more competition in smartwatches. And there kind of just isn't. because every single phone maker has the smartwatch that works best with their phone, and that's pretty much where that ends. It's the same with headphones. Actually, this has happened to the headphone market in, like, the saddest ways.

1:00:25True. Not to talk about the headphone jack here, but there used to be pretty vast competition in headphones, and now there's one set of wireless earbuds that work best with your phone, and they're often made by the manufacturer of your phone, and that is where that ends. And, like, doesn't that suck? it does and so like all these ai products like i i i respect that there's furious competition to get to the next turn of user interface because that's usually how you break the form factor and you break the lock-in But, boy, it seems like Apple is going to get there with Siri before any of these figure out how to do all the rest of the smartphone stuff.

1:00:59David Pierce:Yeah. And I also think you're making me realize that maybe that's the reason everyone is obsessed with reinventing your desktop computer from the inside out, because it's the only way you can get access. Right. Like NVIDIA can't do the things it's describing on your phone because it can't. It violates the policies Apple that prevents that from being possible. but you can get pretty deep system access to somebody's Mac and start doing stuff at that level. Right. Like I've spent a lot of time with this app Raycast, which is kind of the same thing. It's like it started as an application launcher and then it's like, OK, we can actually just take full system access and control all of your windows and control all of your settings.

1:01:36David Pierce:And all of a sudden it's like, oh, we become a new way to use your computer. And you only get that kind of access on people's desktop computers. So if you need to change the paradigm you have to change it in some sort of giant non-accessory way you can't build the pendant because apple and google won't let you so you have to start with the desktop computer because it's the only way in like maybe that's the reason everybody's desperately trying to reinvent your laptop because it's the only move they have yeah i mean this is why microsoft is announcing the surface laptop ultra with the rtx spark and they've got a whole lineup of their partners announcing it like they want to make the claim that doing local ai inference on a laptop is the future of computing and the form factor can change slightly but actually we're going to start selling you laptops with 108 gigs of ram right uh and for the first time ever there's a reason for that if you're not like a heavy photoshop user or whatever right sure and it i just don't first of all 120 gigs of ram in this economy come on uh literally by a house i could buy a laptop ultra that's where we are um but i don't know that just adding a ton of ram and processing power to a laptop is going to make it a different thing than a laptop right right yeah i'm i am all for more powerful laptops um i think they're they should probably keep being laptops keyboard in the front do it bring it back somebody you cowards if you believe in ai just get rid of the keyboard entirely what if it's just one giant ass touchpad and you and a microphone i mean that's what lenovo is for this is why lenovo exists we're gonna see the lenovo concept of like a folding tablet with no input except a microphone like tomorrow all right we need to take a break before anybody gets ideas lenovo that was a joke and also trademark nila patel 2026 all right let's take a break.

1:03:31David Pierce:Then we're going to come back. We got hype desk. We got the lightning round. We'll be right back.

1:03:36Nilay Patel:Have we underestimated the damage Trump has done? It's easy, perhaps, to chuckle at a Donald Trump. There are times when he's sort of campy. I think there are things that he does, you know, is his little dance and some of the other kinds of things to come across as a rascal. But I think we have to look under those things at the real harm he has done to American institutions and the rule of law. I'm Preet Bharara, and this week, former U.S. attorney Barb McQuaid joins me to discuss this administration's mob-style governance and corruption. The episode is out now. Search and follow Stay Tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04:18Nilay Patel:Who is actually winning the war between Russia and Ukraine? Right now, it's clear that Ukraine is much more confident. Time now looks increasingly on Ukraine's side, and there's no obvious reasons for them to negotiate a ceasefire in the near term just because the United States or somebody else wants it. I'm Jon Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we discuss the war in Ukraine with Michael Kaufman, one of the leading analysts of the conflict who recently returned from the front lines. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04:56David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk, where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about cool things happening on the internet and in the world. Today, it's just Ross. Sad. It's okay. Ross, welcome back. Hello. Hello. Ashley sends her regards. She's just flying back from a three-week trip in Japan. So excited to hear about that. That is cool. So what do you wait? Actually, can we rewind to last week? Because you were going to come on last week and tell us about 007 First Light, which is the only thing I care about in the world. Yeah, I'm actually surprised you are playing it as much as you are.

1:05:28David Pierce:And you're not playing it on PlayStation, right? You're playing it streaming. So we talked about this last week when when you weren't here and I had to have feelings about it only to Neel, who does not care about my feelings about James Bond games. but uh i don't have a ps5 or a current xbox i play all of my games on the switch at this point which like says a lot about the kind of gamer that i am basically but this is the first game in forever that i was like i will go buy a console just for this game i love they got one games they raise the prices of the console and then they put out a game that you like yeah so it was 650 which is more money than i'm willing to spend on a james bond game uh thank you to everybody by the way, who sent me the link to the Woot sale that there was for like out of box refurbished PS5s for 300 bucks.

1:06:11David Pierce:They were sold out before I got there, but these are my people. What I ended up doing is spending$200 on a year subscription to GeForce Ultimate, which comes with 007 First Light. And I have been playing on my Mac mini and it rules. This game is amazing. Okay. Just a lot there. I feel like the whole segment is how incredibly rolled by the tech industry you finally have been. Yes. 100%. You're gaming on a Mac mini with a subscription bundle from a service no one uses. I don't know, man. I will defend NVIDIA GeForce. It is surprisingly good. It's great. Fair enough. My internet's very fast and it's wired.

1:06:47They're going to pull you on stage at WWDC and be like, we found one. We found a Mac gamer. Yeah. Well, ironically,

1:06:55David Pierce:you have to use like 11 other platforms in order to get this to work. I had to sign up for an account from the game developer. I had to get into my Steam account and I had to get a GeForce account. I don't know where I actually own this game, but I own it somewhere and it plays on my computer now and it rules. And this game is, it's spectacular. I'm literally barely through the tutorial of 007 First Light and I'm already having like a true blast playing this game. It is one of the all-time great tutorials and people I've talked to in the industry like love it because it is just, it's so smart.

1:07:28David Pierce:Like, and y 'all heard me talk about some pre-record, but like it is basically WarioWare for adults. Like it teaches you everything in like this cinematic montage. The way you would watch in a movie, right? You see James in a basic training. He's punching. He's learning to shoot. He's driving. He's getting better every rotation. But you see that rotation because they want to show the passage of time. They do exactly that, jumping from scene to scene in the basic training. This is like 30 minutes of the game. It's not a big spoiler. But it is one of the smartest ways to get people caught up on like the basics of the game.

1:07:56David Pierce:Yeah. And the whole first act is basically a movie that you kind of participate in. It's like 80 % cut scene. And then you walk. It's like most of the game. And it works. Like it plays somehow for the first full hour of this game. But anyway, we're mostly not here to talk about 007 First Light. You have something else for us this week. What do you have for us? Yes. Well, I will talk about 007 all you want. But primarily, this is the greatest week in gaming. This is the one I'm really legitimately hyped and excited about. I got started in the industry covering E3. E3 is dead. But everyone kept showing up to Los Angeles anyway this week.

1:08:31David Pierce:And so they've kept it going as Summer Games Fest. So this is the week where every major company shows off basically all the games they want to release the next 12 to 24 months. Make huge hype circuits, all these trailers, hands-ons if you're out in LA. You can go to these little events as press and industry members. It's great. It's exciting. We just started this week with PlayStation State of Play a few days ago. And then Friday is the big flagship recording, followed by an Xbox showcase on Sunday. and rumor has it a Nintendo thing next week, which not confirmed, but every year they've done something around here.

1:09:04David Pierce:So it's not E3, but everybody is like, well, we already have the hotels booked, so we'll just keep doing stuff in LA. Honestly, basically. Like when E3 died, everyone's like, well, what do we do? We all go drink at the Figaroa, the JW Marriott downtown. We all have our friends here. People just kept coming and people just like, everyone just started doing like their own decentralized events. And now a surname, Jeff Keighley, who runs the Game Awards, has his own live stream that's kind of like the flagship press conference of the week. So what have we seen? Any super exciting games everybody's about?

1:09:34David Pierce:I feel like the only thing I hear about now is GTA 6. And the joke is like XYZ is going to happen before GTA 6. And GTA 6 keeps getting delayed. Did anybody announce anything that's exciting in the run-up to GTA 6? GTA 6 is definitively in November. Everyone feels pretty confident about that. But as a knock-on effect, we're seeing games that were going to usually come out in that kind of October-November timeframe, they're all either getting bunched up in November, there were so many September announcements already, or they're getting delayed all the way to like February 2027 just to get away from this.

1:10:07David Pierce:Like everyone is scared of being like crowded out by GTA. But yeah, so Sony State of Play, it's a lot of first-party games, a few third parties are all really exciting. The two that have come up more than anything, Marvel's Wolverine, which is an Insomniac game from the makers of the Spider-Man series, and God of War Laufey, which is a next mainline chapter, but they don't want to call it a sequel per se. It's just a new God of War game that does not star Kratos. Is it still a God of War game? It is still a God of War game. Mild spoiler if you've not played the 2018 game. To put this in Neelai terms, by the way, this is like, we made a Madden game.

1:10:41David Pierce:It's about baseball. Yeah, that's what this feels like. This is like, you're going to watch The Penguin and you're going to like it. And it's like, I'm not going to do that. Well, first off, The Penguin, very good, won awards. I know that everyone likes it, but you understand what I'm saying. Point taken, yes. this happens in parallel to the first God of War game. The first game starts with Kratos burying his wife. And in God of War Laufey, you play that wife. And she's woken up in the afterlife, which for a game that's been so steadfast in saying we're sticking to one mythology at a time, she's now in like the God afterlife where like it mixes like Egyptian and we're assuming Japanese, probably not a Jesus.

1:11:19David Pierce:That might be a step too far, but like any kind of weird religious domination, these are apparently where the gods go to like kind of commingle. And she's very quickly captured and there are two things that people cannot stop talking about. One, no surprise, not playing Kratos is a big deal. And two, very quickly, she just meets a gelatinous cube with a sword stuck in it. And that cube's name is Frank. What's the plan, boss? Not your boss, Frank. That's Jesus. Yeah, it's... It's very obvious what's happening here. It is gelatinous cube Jesus. But he goes by Frank in the world. It's a little weird the way it's a twist.

1:11:57David Pierce:I love it. I understand why it's divisive, but we saw 20 minutes of gameplay and Frank to me was my favorite part. Just a gelatinous talking cube with a slight sense of humor that makes everything, it's already kind of weird, just that much more bizarre. I'm sort of in on that idea. Yeah, thank you, right? That gives me a little bit of like the Stephen Merchant thing in Portal that just like followed you around and made jokes at you. That's like, that's the best part of that game. It's like, I just want to hang out with this weird thing that just moves along above me as I play a game. Yeah, and when the first God of War remake came out in like 2018, it's the same studio that made that as making this.

1:12:33David Pierce:Kratos had a talking severed head with them at all times that would just comment on the world and be sassy. And at first we're like, this is kind of weird. I think it's going to work in a similar effect where I do have faith in them to kind of pull it off, even if the way they kind of showed it off was weird. But long story short, I think the big theme of State of Play and PlayStation, everything they showed off was we make really great single-player games. We make very cinematic games. And you will want to play this, as we all know. They're going to be exclusive on PlayStation. So you're going to want to buy that console and get a truly unparalleled cinematic experience in what you play.

1:13:06David Pierce:For$650. Yeah, well, I mean, there's that. But the past, what, decade of games is like, you're going to play a live service game with 10 million other people and download DLC and show them your outfits. And I'm like, I don't care about any of that, actually. I'm just going to keep playing Madden until you put out a great single player game. And now it just sounds like in this conversation, there's like a lot of them. Yeah, there's a lot of it. I mean, the Wolverine game is going to be basically a standalone Wolverine movie that you happen to get to play in. And if you've seen the Spider-Man games, it's very similar.

1:13:38David Pierce:It's a lot bloodier. I mean, you get drenched in blood after every combat. My one pet peeve is somehow his self-healing factor like cleans up all his laundry as well. Like he will just be perfectly clean by the next scene. Tech can't go that far. but in the middle of combat, like they're going all in, like Mortal Kombat levels of gore in the way he's fighting. That's right. Sony's going to put out an accessory that actually 4D splatters you with blood. You know weird Sony would have done it. I don't know about modern Sony, but weird 80s Sony would have absolutely sprayed you with blood. A little robot dog that comes in and just like squirts you, just keeps track.

1:14:12David Pierce:It's good stuff. Yeah, I agree. I think this idea of like, what if we just go back to games that are fun to play by yourself is an exciting and good idea. I think so, too. I love those kind of games. I will say, you will still get the DLC content as, like, story expansions. You'll still get the skins and costumes. Like, that never goes away at this point. But, Neal, to your point, it is just for you and anyone you take a screenshot of and share on social media. I only dress for myself, Ross. I always have and I always will. There's going to be a God of War DLC where you can play as the gelatinous cube, right?

1:14:44David Pierce:We can just put that on the calendar right now. I would hope so. It's Jesus. I don't know. It's Jesus. Jesus gel. That's the name of the DLC. Oh, we are all going to get so many phone calls after this. All right. It's good stuff. Also, Ross, I don't remember if it was you or Ashley, but I owe the both of you kudos for recommending Widow's Bay. I was hoping you would say this. But don't say it. I haven't finished yet. I won't. But it is like I cannot believe how good that show is in a way that like very few shows hold up the way that they have as long as they do. like that show has no right to be as good as it is and I cannot believe how much I'm enjoying it.

1:15:22David Pierce:No, it is. So thank you for that recommendation. I love it. It is basically comedians doing the best honor or tribute to horror they ever could. Like everything they do is they try to do it in like the name of horror and the scary shit but they're comedians at heart so there's like this rhythm and cadence that makes it just so much more watchable. Like it's a masterpiece in like suspense. Not a lot of jump scares just a lot of build up and dread. It really is. And I will not say anything please finish it Neil I'm so excited for you to get to there. Yeah, at some point, we're just going to do like a full spoilers edition of Widow's Bay Hypedesk, and I cannot wait for it.

1:15:55David Pierce:It's like three weeks until the finale. And yeah, we are watching the minute it comes out every day. Apple, Apple is on a roll. It is, we're not here to talk about that, but I am just so happy with everything I've seen on Apple TV. Totally. All right, Ross, good to see you, buddy. Thanks for coming. Cheers, y 'all. All right, now let's get to the lightning round, starting with our good buddy, Brendan. Oh, but first, costume change. Hold on. It's time. Once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, the one on my shirt, Brendan Carr is a Dummy. Available now in the Verge Shop. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:16:33David Pierce:I cannot tell you the number of people who have earnestly requested that we put the Brendan Carr is a Dummy theme song on Spotify. We should put it on Spotify. I don't know how. I don't either. A Bandcamp account? We can pull it off. Yeah. It's on our SoundCloud. There are no rules on SoundCloud. By the way, we still welcome new theme songs. Oh, absolutely. Even though we licensed Viola de Goombas here. We bought it, I think. We welcome new ones because it is the most fun. Yes. The cinematic universe needs many soundtracks and theme songs. If we're going to put it on Spotify, we're going to make a playlist.

1:17:06Do you understand what I'm saying? A hundred percent. He was so dumb this week, David. What did he do? I'm just going to read you a sentence that he tweeted. Oh, God. And then we can get into it. But this fills me with an irrational amount of rage.

1:17:18David Pierce:Okay. Brendan this week tweeted on X, the Everything app. You know, the one that you use for all your credit card payments? Right, sure, yeah. Here's what Brendan said. Thanks to President Trump, millions of Americans are paying a lot less for internet. That's not true. That's the sentence? No, there's more. But just that's the first. He didn't actually even put a period at the end of that sentence because he tweets like a teenager. You just know that's not true. In your heart, right? You know that's not true? No shot. No one's prices have gone down for anything. So that's the first part. Okay, here's the rest of the tweet.

1:17:52The Trump FCC, which Brendan runs, quickly shut down a Biden-era plan that would have spiked internet prices. A new study now shows that consumers would have paid$5.6 billion more annually under the Biden FCC's plan. You will note that he does not explain what this plan is or what they shut down or where$5.6 billion come from. None of this is true. I just want to be 100 % clear. None of this is true. No one is paying less for internet access. In fact, if you just Google internet price increases, you find a long list of price increases that AT &T and Verizon have imposed over the past several years, including just like random regulatory fees that they think you should yell at the government about.

1:18:32This is the nature of telecoms in America. They do not experience competition. They only increase prices. We pay higher prices for slower speeds than anywhere else in the developed world. This is just the nature of the thing. Yep. All right, what is Brendan actually talking about? The Biden FCC made it so that you live in an apartment building, your landlord could not bulk sign every tenant up for a single service provider. This is called bulk billing. Right. So if you live in a big apartment building, this is true in New York for many years. You live in a big apartment building, Optimum would just buy your building and then you would only be able to have Optimum.

1:19:08That's not competition, right? Like you already see how this goes. Optimum would just go to all the landlords on your block and cut them a deal and they would take their kickback and all the tenants on your street would have Optimum. And Optimum is just the one that most people in New York had, but all the ISPs did this. Right. This is just nakedly a bad thing. I should not have to explain how that reduces competition. Right. Like in people in dense urban areas, like getting the different Internet service was a big deal. Right. Like Optimum is not beloved in New York. When Fios came to New York City, which has happened in just a huge wave of corruption and lies, but Fios did come to New York City.

1:19:45This was like a revelation for tons of New Yorkers that one other company was trying to break in. And it's a long story, but moving to a building with Fios in like the early 2000s in New York was a whole thing because people wanted to get away from Optimum so bad. But this is true across the country. So the Biden FCC says we're not going to do bulk billing. The landlord cannot just tell every tenant what internet service they're going to have. The tenants have to be able to choose, and that means different services can come to your building and sign you up. And if they want to pay to lay the infrastructure, they can do it, but they can go get more customers.

1:20:16So Brendan undoes this rule because he has never met a regulation that would increase competition for his telecom masters that he did not hate. He is a monopolist at heart, and every time there's a regulation that would increase competition or even transparency, he gets rid of it. this is the man who got rid of the broadband nutrition label because he claimed it was too onerous for broadband companies to tell you how fast their internet would be and how much it costs. He hates it. Or the thing where they had to tell you

1:20:46David Pierce:what fees they charge you. Like, paperwork is the enemy of Brandon Carr, I would say. Yeah, transparency, competition, he hates it. He just wants to lie to you that Americans are paying less for broadband than before. No one thinks, even the replies to his own tweet are like, what are you talking about? On X, the Everything app, which should be a friendly space for him. All right. So what is this study? What is the thing that is making me furiously mad? What is this study that claims we're paying$5.6 billion less for broadband? Well, David, it was sponsored by the Bulk Broadband Alliance.

1:21:24They hired a consulting firm called Cartesian and they put a press release. A recent study from the Bulk Broadband Alliance found bulk arrangement to provide lower cost, greater competition, and expanded connectivity. You don't say that the Bulk Broadband Alliance thinks bulk broadband arrangements are better than not, huh? The We Love Monopoly Corporation put out a study saying monopolies are great. It took me one click to be like, what is this study? And it's a sponsored study from the trade group that wants to monopolize your broadband. Well, this is so dumb. So dumb. And he's he's the telecom regulator.

1:22:05Parroting the studies from the telecom industry. He's the one who's like, no, this is a lie. Like, I'm actually going to look at what's happening here. The FCC will do its own studies, not the bulk broadband alliance, which doesn't exist. Right. That is just the ISPs who started a trade group. There's no grassroots bulk broadband alliance. The people of New York City are not like, you know what we should do? We should start a lobbying group to really push for our interests. Like, I hate having to choose an internet provider based on speeds and feeds. No, we're going to start the bulk broadband.

1:22:35You and me, David. Finally. I'm down. Consumer rights group that pushes for monopolistic broadband policies. Who will think of the landlords, Eli? Do you know what I mean? It is the dumbest thing I've... It just took me one second. Like, sometimes as Brandon Carson's army, it takes me a long time to assemble, you know? Sure. I got to weave an argument about free speech and censorship and, you know, what he's actually doing is test balloons to write. No, no, no. This one is a new study. And then I Googled the study and it's the bulk broadband alliance sponsored the study.

1:23:06David Pierce:A new study by the make internet more expensive lobby discovered that making internet more expensive is good. it's so transparently dumb and corrupt right like try harder brendan but make me google one more turn make me have to use an ai tool to discover what is actually happening not the first google result yeah anyway everyone in his own replies like what are you talking about my internet's more expensive than it was if you every internet provider is constantly raising their prices the speeds are not getting faster their service is not getting more reliable my at &t wireless is it's useless.

1:23:41Like, I don't even know. Well, I don't even know what we're doing in America anymore when it comes to connectivity. But Brendan is out here tweeting that collectively we've paid $5.6 billion less than we were before under the Biden plan. If you feel that, you let me know. Because I certainly don't. Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on the show and discuss why you think tweeting studies from the industry that you're supposed to regulate proves your point or really explain any of this at all, because I don't believe it. But as always, that's been Brandon Carr is a Dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:24:14David Pierce:Now with merch. Brandon Carr is a dummy. It's gorgeous. This is a totally random aside, but did you see, there was this New York Times story from like a week ago where they reviewed a bunch of cabinet footage to find how the Trump administration speaks to Trump specifically. Uh, the beginning of Brendan's tweet made me think of this. Um, they, they went, the times went through, uh, they said over a dozen hours of cabinet meeting footage to analyze how his administration spoke to him. On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Mr. Trump gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

1:24:51David Pierce:One in six is just like, that to me was just so like illuminating about how this entire administration works that all anybody who works for Trump does is talk about how terrific Trump is because that's how you keep your job. Yep. It's just what it is. It's funny that he's also just like running out of guys. You know, he's like the new director of national intelligence. It's this guy. It's fine. Yeah. He'd say he was nice to me. As long as he's nice to me, he keeps his job. Anyway, I have a lightning round item for you. Both of my lightning round items for you are like loosely about Apple and loosely about WWDC.

1:25:28David Pierce:the big thing that's been happening over the last couple of months is everybody trying to sort of put the pieces together about what john turnus the incoming ceo of apple is going to do differently from tim cook the outgoing ceo of sure so everybody's trying to read tea leaves about supply chains and new software ideas and um i would i would just point out that most of these decisions especially for things in the supply chain are going to way predate any ceo announcement Yeah. So like giving John Ternus credit for what's happening right now is probably not correct. But at any rate, one of the bits of news that came out this week from Ming-Chi Kuo, who is a person who is very tapped into supply chains, gets a lot of things right, gets a lot of things wrong.

1:26:10David Pierce:Supply chains are an imperfect source of information. But a bit that has come out is that basically the Apple Vision Pro, as it is sort of currently constituted, may be no longer. And that actually Apple is pivoting much more toward simpler, lighter smart glasses things as opposed to like full on headsets. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg sort of disagrees with this, but only lightly. He said over the weekend that Apple is developing, let's see, it was, quote, a slimmer and lighter headset to succeed the$34.99 Vision Pro. That can mean a lot of things. But at any rate, it seems like... Gruber disagrees with this, maybe more strongly.

1:26:53John Gruber, he believes that there will be another Vision Pro.

1:26:56David Pierce:Yeah, there's a lot in the wind here, but it does seem like Apple is very focused on the idea of smart glasses as a thing, right? Like Meta was sort of the first to accidentally discover that there's a real market here for this thing. And now Apple is falling further into that. So I think to me, this is one of the things about Apple's entire AI plan, but also about WWDC that I'm very curious to see. Like if Apple is moving away from pass-through VR headsets as the future and toward smart glasses, that would just, in theory, predict a lot of UI change everywhere, right? Like Liquid Glass last year was based on the idea that what if everything was kind of like the Vision Pro?

1:27:42David Pierce:And now if we're pulling back to something different, something more voice-based, like Apple's dictation is trash. Apple's whole voice-based input system is really bad. Siri sucks. So like, if you believe in smart glasses, there are a bunch of AI decisions you have to make in order to make smart glasses work. And I'm just very curious to see how that stuff starts to pan out. But what do you make of all of this Vision Pro smart glasses noise right now? First, I would just like to point out that I was correct about the Vision Pro in my review. I might have given it too high of a score, which I know you will point out.

1:28:16I gave it a seven instead of a six. But right, this is the endpoint of head mounted display VR was the thesis of that review this is the best one of these you can ever make and it's definitely not enough yep uh and i don't think it was enough i mean i understand it's very expensive and maybe costs them down but meta is running away from this uh there there's just there's an end point to vr yeah this is the best one of these you can make it's the best one ever anyone's ever made it's hard to see how it can get better except for getting lighter and nothing in here is as compelling as it should be to make everyone want to live in a helmet all the time.

1:28:54So I want to say I was right. I think Apple always wanted to make actual glasses and carrying on down, we're going to occlude your vision with OLED screens and then pass through cameras. That is a lot of technology and a lot of development that just points you in the wrong direction. Yes, totally. You will make a lot of decisions downstream of that that will help you zero if what you actually need to do is put content over real light passing through lenses. Right? Like if you can take all of, you can point a camera at something and then the image from the camera gets to pass through your compute and you can get to recognize what it is and layer your AR information on that and then display a final composited image.

1:29:40That is a very different pipeline and set of decisions. And all of that is just radically different. Totally. You can do it with more latency. There's all kinds of stuff you can do there that the real light is going to pass through my glasses lenses. And all of these decisions are going to happen in real time such that it's going to put a label on the Washington Monument or whatever it is. Right. Like that's the goal. You're in the art museum. You're looking at the painting and it puts the information next to the painting. And you haven't captured it through a camera. You're just looking at it through a pair of glasses.

1:30:12That's the goal. And if that's your goal, you're not going to spin your wheels on we're doing real-time compositing of camera signals.

1:30:19David Pierce:Well, I think Apple's bet seemed to be, and we talked about this at the time, that if you build the VR bit of it first, that you can then turn a$3 ,500 technical achievement into a$600 pair of smart glasses because you've solved some of the tech problems and now all you have to do is make it cheaper over time. whereas what meta i think accidentally discovered is that there are actually for a lot of people killer use cases in the shitty cheap thing right like apple's apple's bet was we have to do like we have to do the tesla roadster in order to get down to the model s but actually like meta made a bicycle and it turned out people wanted that and and i think the thing that no one in this industry saw including meta was that headphones and camera would be enough to make people spend a lot of money on a pair of smart glasses.

1:31:13David Pierce:And I don't think Apple saw that because I think if Apple saw that, they would have done smart glasses first. First of all, shout out to every product manager who listens to the Vergecast who's thinking about the skateboard metaphor of how you build a product. Yeah. Right. You don't start with a truck. You start with a skateboard and then you build your way up. Like that's a every PM I've ever talked to you talks about that. Meta did that on purpose, by the way. Boz, Andrew Bosworth, often talked about how they were building Oculus headsets and glasses, and they were going to find out if they could cut one down or build one up.

1:31:49Yeah.

1:31:49David Pierce:Meta tried to do both bets. They did both bets, very obviously and very openly. They were like, we're going to see which one gets there first, but we're starting at both ends and we're going to head towards the middle. and I think they discovered that they had more killer use cases with starting simple and trying to build up. And that's what they're doing, right? There's meta display glasses and all that stuff now. But the problems are still the problems, right? Like you still need to put a camera next to those lenses, like identify the real world, pull in a bunch of contextual information, composite something onto a display over the right thing positionally for your eyes.

1:32:24Like that stuff is still essentially impossible and they haven't really done it yet. And even the meta display glasses, they still basically are just doing like notifications and like, you know, like fake AR where they put like the map arrows in front of you, but they're not pointing to anything. There's something there that I think Apple can get to very quickly. And obviously Apple has richer access to notifications and they've got better camera ideas and all this stuff. And they've got their own halo and privacy, but they haven't solved the AR piece. and I think if they walk away from the Vision Pro which I don't think they will I think they will announce Vision OS 27 or whatever it's going to be and it will have some new features and they will keep seeing what's there but I don't think we're going to get a Vision Pro 2 I think we will see another product that reuses those ideas and maybe we'll get one more chip bump to the Vision Pro like I think if you see the opportunity in glasses in smarter AirPods the problems are so different that continuing to try to iterate on the solutions as they exist in the Vision Pro, even at Apple's scale, with Apple's resources, with Apple's talent, you would just reprioritize all of that towards solving the harder, more lucrative problem.

1:33:33Totally.

1:33:34David Pierce:Yeah, and the one that everyone seems to increasingly believe is the thing, right? Even if you just look at the sort of traditional Apple thing is to go into a market that a lot of people think is the thing but doesn't yet have a great product and try to build that great product, that's where smart glasses are right now yeah everyone in tech at the very least believes smart glasses are going to be a thing i think my stance on that opinion is much less certain than i was about like mp3 players before the ipod but that that is that is a sort of widespread belief in the tech industry is that smart glasses are going to be a thing but this is more we're chasing a form factor we're just trying to get away from the iphone sure but again i think apple is also in a position of being like actually maybe the best place for smart glasses to be is an accessory of the iPhone.

1:34:19David Pierce:And I think Apple's probably right about that. It's just that no one else can do that. Like you said, Apple has access to the notifications. It can do more stuff with the camera. Like if anyone can build smart glasses to do all of the things you would want smart glasses to do, it probably is Apple. Yeah. Which is a bummer. I do feel like I should gesture at the idea that there's some coming set of European Union regulations that might make all this more interoperable. Yes. It's on the site. The Europeans who work at The Verge are always talking about this stuff at this point but you know it's like sure all the batteries are going to be interchangeable sure you know like sure yeah um so like maybe maybe this market will crack open more because there is some eu effort to even notifications like uh the google smart glasses that they showed me at io i was like is this going to work better with your iphone camera like yeah it's just open now like apple just like made that more open um so there's something changing in that but it's not enough and certainly apple will find the one thing it can definitely lock down that makes its product better than everyone else's.

1:35:17Apple's great at doing that. I just think, I think consumers are going to look at everyone wearing these glasses and react in a really weird way. Actually, here's a good example. I have been telling the joke on this show about how glasses that show me names and faces are the killer app for me personally for 10 years. Not a joke.

1:35:39David Pierce:Real thing that you believe. True fact. Everyone should be mad at Neelive for the dystopian hellscape he wants to bring in just so he can have smart glasses. The reason I'm saying it's a joke is because the other half of it is I'm aware that it requires a dystopian hellscape to exist. Fair. Right? Like, I'm constantly pointing out this thing that would make me reconsider the dystopian hellscape. But the dystopian hellscape is the reason I keep bringing up the example. I would love names and faces. I'm extraordinarily aware that you have to build a dystopian surveillance hellscape to do it. And anyone who's listened to this show is probably aware of that because we talk about it all the time.

1:36:09I mentioned this in passing to Joanna when she was on the show talking about her book. and we just talked about it for a while. And then someone made a clip of that and it went viral. Like it broke containment out of our audience. And all of the comments were like, this dummy doesn't know what he's talking about. I would never, this tech bro. And it's like, yo, I've been talking about this for the longest time. And I'm extremely aware of the surveillance hellscape. That's why I keep using the example because it's the one that personally for me is like, oh, that would be great, but the trade-off isn't worth it.

1:36:40And I just, first of all, experiencing algorithmic containment breaches is wild. I hope no one experiences it. I mean, it's just a wild experience to have. And second, you can just see, oh, there's a lot of people out there who will not accept this trade-off. Yeah. And they're already going to smash the glasses and they're already pissed about it. And at some point, the Apple logo on the side of your glasses is not a sign of fashion or style or being on the bleeding edge. It is a sign of invasiveness and people will react to it very strongly. Yep, completely agree.

1:37:13David Pierce:It'll be an interesting thing to see Apple try and navigate that. Like this is when if you're Apple, you have to make all of the noise you've made about privacy pay off in a big way. And I don't have a lot of confidence in Apple's ability or anyone's ability to do that, but it'll be fascinating to see them try. I could talk about WWDC forever but let's save that for next week we got a bunch of Apple stuff coming up next week let's end with your lightning round thing because it is one of the weird stories of the week and we should just talk about it I'll do it quickly but you gotta end on a high note because mine is so dumb it will make everyone so mad you gotta find a fun gadget to end on alright deal so my lightning round item it's just you know karma's a real bitch so over the weekend tons of Instagram accounts were hacked, including President Obama's Instagram account.

1:38:07And they were stolen by hackers, and, you know, ransoms were held and all this stuff. And it turned out that this was not a sophisticated security breach. Meta has fired so many people in trust and safety and support and all of these roles, and they replaced them with an AI chatbot, and the hackers basically figured out that you could trick the AI chatbot into resetting the passwords on the account. And the exploits are dead simple. 404 media wrote about it. Everyone should go subscribe to 404. If I understand it by trick, you mean just ask. They asked and then they would say, we're going to send you an email.

1:38:42And it's like, literally the attackers would be like, I don't have access to the email. Can you just do it? And they'd be like, all right, I did it. Or can you send it to a different email? And they would be like, okay, I did it. So like tons of accounts are breached. Meta says nothing about this. And finally, Andy Stone, Meta's head of comms, who is an absolute social media combatant most of the time, says in a reply to one of the posts about it, this issue has been addressed. Doesn't even announce that there's an issue, that they're working on it. In a reply, Andy Stone says this issue has been addressed.

1:39:15Now, Meta is one of these companies that is doing tons and tons of layouts. Like, it is just Black Thursday at Meta every Thursday. I don't know if you see all the memes of people stealing the free food from the cafeterias before the Monday where they're all going to get fired. Yeah, yeah. Right? And then like all the people were like, I just got fired from Meta. Now I'm free. Like it's all happening. They're just firing tons of people. In particular, they have fired tons of people in trust and safety. And so the people they didn't fire got reassigned to data labeling while Meta and data labeling is how you train AI.

1:39:43While Meta is also imposing tracking on all their employees to like get better at computer use for the next model. But they also just announced because the employees hated it so much that you could take 30 minute breaks from the AI watching everything you do for personal reasons. this is the most dystopian stupid thing i've ever heard like incognito mode for being a person yep uh yes you should not use your work laptop to do personal things in the first place but also your employer should not track every move that you make this is nonsensical um and then of course the thing that happened is none of this stuff got appropriately red team none of this stuff got appropriately put trust and safety and there was a large-scale account breach on instagram because there's no one there to watch over the ai and you've you've just you know you've stupidly insisted that you can replace all these actual human professionals with your AI system.

1:40:31And of course it was breached instantly. Like there was no other outcome. It's just like, I'm mad about it, but I'm also like, did we all learn an important lesson today, Mark? Like, should you babysit the, should you have someone watching over the store? I think we should have someone watching over the store. Yeah. We fired our security guards and we got robbed. That's the, it's the weirdest, thing. So stupid. You know they're not going to learn. You know they're just going to keep monitoring more trust and safety people.

1:41:01David Pierce:Yep. We'll put 404's story in the show notes too. It's very good and it really is enraging in the most straightforward way that it is like, of course, this is what's going to happen when no one is paying attention and this is, you want the AI takeover? Here's what it is. This is what it looks like. Yeah, and especially, particularly Mark Zuckerberg has turned his back on content moderation and trust and safety so significantly, Instagram as a platform is just full of racism now. Like it just exists in a way that it didn't used to, right? Like they're degrading the experiences people have. They're degrading the security and stability of their service by just like firing off vibe coded features and gaping security holes.

1:41:43And they're firing all the people that made that not happen because they're in the way. Something much worse will happen as they chase whatever next turn. Like, would you trust Mark Zuckerberg with personal super intelligence right now based on the quality of the experiences you have on Instagram? No. This is your problem.

1:42:03David Pierce:Yeah, yeah. Password hygiene, people. It's very important. Two-factor authentication. It didn't work because the AI chatbot's like, oh, you forgot your 2FA code? Yeah, we're all pretty screwed. This is, yet again, more evidence for all your advices in the ocean. All right. I have some good news to end us on. Yes. And it's actually a question for you specifically and Becky, your wife, more specifically. Have you told Becky that Supernatural is coming back? I have not told her that Supernatural is coming back yet. Supernatural, which we thought was dead because of Meta's complete negligence and lack of interest in VR and the metaverse, was going to just be left on the vine.

1:42:40David Pierce:It's actually being spun out as an independent company, Supernatural Health. We don't have a ton of details, but it sounds like it's going to be run by some of the people who made it in the first place. becky at one point was like a dedicated quest wearing supernatural player supernatural is the vr fitness game we should explain what this was this was beat saber but it was peloton beat saber with squats yeah it's cool i loved it i played yeah in the pandemic yeah this like got us through covid in a very real way uh how enthusiastic about this is becky gonna be i well i think she'll be into it i mean we still have a quest 2 laying around that was our supernatural machine and we bought the custom headband for it like the sweat resistant face band and headband uh so maybe we'll dig that back out i don't have you used a quest recently i put a i have a quest pro sitting around i put it on for the first time in ages the things they have done to that os are completely mind-boggling like it is so hard to navigate now it makes no sense to me they're they shuttered horizon world so like the whole thrust of that product has changed obviously the quest pro is discontinued but there's a batman game that's pretty fun shout to the Arkham.

1:43:44There's a lot of confusion in that world. I really hope Supernatural Health, the new company, takes advantage of being independent and how much people want the product to find a way to make their own dedicated hardware. That's the thing that'll make me really excited. And VR headsets are basically a commodity now. Like, we're over a decade into the product as they should exist. Like, even Meta was able to make the Quest 3S, like, cheap. Yeah. I want to say it's, like, cheap-ish. I realize we're, like, in Ramageddon and all this stuff, but that's the thing that would make me excited is that they can get away from that platform, which has gotten deeply confusing.

1:44:19Obviously, they're going to have to support all their existing users who already bought Quest headsets. But I think they have a much brighter future as an independent. Yeah. I agree.

1:44:27David Pierce:I mean, there's also like, it would be trivially easy in certain ways to put Supernatural on like the Switch, get sort of a Wii Fit thing going on with the Joy-Cons. Like it wouldn't be that hard to do. You can do it. You could do all kinds of wild stuff with like image recognition on people's webcams. Like there's so many cool things that Supernatural could do and be on these devices that doesn't actually require VR that I think might be awesome. Yeah. But it might also be part of the fun is the immersion of it, I think, to some extent. So like seeing them try to sort out what is a 2D Supernatural experience look like might actually be kind of fun.

1:45:02David Pierce:Yeah. I'm excited about it. Well, I'm dying to talk to Chris Milk, who is the founder of Supernatural. I'm assuming he's part of this spin out. They haven't said any names. They haven't said who's running the company. so I think there's still some confusion there but my understanding is he's involved in some way you know the reason Supernatural worked is because Chris Milk is like a famous music video director and so he had all the contacts in the music industry to license the music no one else could pull it off because the music industry is generally so hostile to any ideas but Chris is like an insider so he pulled it off so if he can figure that out if he can figure out the music licensing again without Meta's money and all this stuff Chris you're invited on the show come on the show explain this to how this is gonna work because i think a lot of people are gonna be really excited also shout out v song who wrote the big story about how furious people were that supernatural was shutting down and then did the follow-up interview with lena khan about how she basically was like i told you so she's very much giving herself credit for people spinning it out as she should i'm gonna give her the credit too uh but she has covered every inch of that story and she actually broke this news too yeah it's pretty awesome i'm i'm just excited it's coming back i don't know if it's gonna make me use my quest anymore but just in in the abstract i'm glad is coming back.

1:46:10Yeah.

1:46:10David Pierce:All right. We should get out of here. Nilay, what's on Decoder this week? Mustafa Silliman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, is on Decoder. We're going to talk about his breakup with OpenAI. He just spending some time with Tom after Build. Spicy. Guys excited to talk about what he's up to. Yeah. And yeah, you get the sense they're very excited to just outwardly go to war with OpenAI after seemingly inwardly going to war with OpenAI. I mean, I'm also going to ask him if he thinks we're in the foothills of the singularity. There's a lot to react to for Mustafa. I think that should become one of the decoder questions from now on.

1:46:46David Pierce:How do you run your company? Are we at the foothills of the singularity?

1:46:53David Pierce:Yeah, we've got lots more VergeCast coming up next week. You're going to be at WWDC, right? I am. Okay, so I think the plan is we're going to do a live stream on the VergeCast right after WWDC. You'll be running around in Cupertino doing briefings, meeting with people, so you probably won't be on that. But then we're going to follow up and do a whole hotline episode with lots of people's questions and I think that's going to be you and me. We're going to do a bunch of two days later follow up on all the WWDC stuff. There's always lots to talk about. People have lots of questions. We also have another Apple thing coming on the show on Tuesday.

1:47:24David Pierce:It's going to be a very Apple-y week. It's just, this tends to happen. I'm on a red-eye home from WWDC on that day that we're going to do that episode. So if you thought Loopy post-IO Neelai was fun, you just get ready because he's coming back. tired Neelai is a time on a podcast and I'm very excited about it. It's going to be great. If you have needlessly complicated questions that Neelai is going to be unable to answer after a red-eye flight, call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Send us an email, vergecastatheverge.com. Again, do a lot of this on Monday. As you have questions during WWDC afterwards, if there's things you want us to talk about, feelings you want us to have, call the hotline, send us emails.

1:47:58David Pierce:We're going to dig into as much of it as we can all through next week. Until then, the Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. A reminder that to get all of our podcasts ad-free, plus all of our subscriber-exclusive newsletters, all of our other coverage, to get the whole Verge, the best thing you can do is subscribe to verge.com slash subscribe. We will see you on Monday. Nealai. Drag and roll.