Why people really hate AI

14:41David Pierce:And yes, there are small panics about what those things will do to the world, But overwhelmingly, most of those new technologies were going to solve world peace. These were the things that when they bring us together, everything will be wonderful now. And we will never have problems because we can just communicate. Seriously, these are real pervasive beliefs that radio will make the world a meaningfully better place.

15:05Brendan Carr:Yes, connecting everybody is the goal. And there will be some negative consequences, some externalities. But we need to connect everybody anyway. Andrew Bosworth at Meta famously wrote a memo called The Ugly in which he laid out all of the bad things that would happen and said, still we connect everyone because we think that's the highest and best use of the technology. You can feel a lot of ways about that memo. A lot of people have felt a lot of ways about that memo. And his point always has been, no, I was just laying it out. These are the stakes and these are the consequences and we believe in what we're doing anyway because we think we're going to make the world a better place.

15:39Brendan Carr:This is the line from Silicon Valley. It's Gavin Belson saying, I don't want anyone else making the world a better place before I do. That's Silicon Valley. But everyone believed in this stuff. I can make this even more narrow. YouTube is basically built on widespread copyright infringement. Yeah. Those industries did not like this. YouTube took all this stuff. The same as the AI industry is kind of built on widespread copyright infringement. But YouTube was so useful and so good and so obvious that everyone sided with them in a way that they're not siding with the AI industry. You can just see delivering meaningful, actual value to consumers lets you get away with a lot.

16:20Brendan Carr:The iPhone, it's the vanguard of moving high-tech manufacturing to China. Apple built that ecosystem in China. So did Tesla. Everyone should go read Apple in China. And it's a great book, but you see these two companies in particular kickstarted entire industry over there. Why did we allow that to happen? Because the iPhone was great. Because it's great. It's just a great product. And so are smartphones. And my point here is the AI industry is staring at these polls that say everyone hates them. And it's because they are asking for so much. And you can quantify that in a million ways. They're asking for a lot of power.

17:00Brendan Carr:They're asking for a lot of land to build data centers. they are asking for every stick of ram that has ever existed in the history of the world they're asking to scan every book without payment they're asking for my identity to run grammarly like whatever it is that they're asking for uh they're doing it without permission and they're asking for a lot and they have not given back a product that makes people feel the way that the internet made them feel or the smartphone made them feel or youtube made them feel it just doesn't exist yet and so instead of reacting to that by building great products fiji cmo saying we need to pivot to enterprise encoding because Anthropic is killing us there.

17:35Brendan Carr:And then the VCs are going on podcasts and doing what they do, which is blaming consumers or blaming the media, which I think is bananas.

17:44David Pierce:Yeah. Have you been deep in the weeds of the VC podcast this week? I feel like you've been talking to me about VC podcasts more than usual. I have.

17:51Brendan Carr:So here's what happens. I feel so bad for our team. What happens is at night, I try to put the baby to sleep and he's a real cuddler. So you got to just hold him until he's like actually asleep. But his eyes are closed and he's, you know, he's just trying to do that wiggly thrashy thing where if you put him down too early, he'll wake up. You got to sit there. Yep. What are you going to do when you're sitting there? You're going to watch TikTok on silent. That's what you're going to do while you're sitting there. So I've just. Wait, you don't even wear headphones. You just watch it on silent? I just watch it on silent.

18:21David Pierce:Oh, my God. That is. It's fine. And dim silent.

18:25Brendan Carr:It is a weird way to experience TikTok, but it's what I do. And our poor team just gets TikToks at like 8.30 p.m. all day, every day. I can confirm this for everyone.

18:37David Pierce:I feel bad about it.

18:38Brendan Carr:So I ran across this creator called Signals and Noise. She has a PhD from the University of Chicago, which I love because I went there. She's the co-founder of something called Bookscape. Her title says AI Tech Strategist. You go watch her videos. We'll link them. They're good. Her name is in here. So if you want to tell me what your name is, I'd be happy to say her name. But it's hard to find your actual name. And she's called that 2Podcast. One, of course, is all in. That's Shemot.

19:01David Pierce:Always.

19:02Brendan Carr:Everyone's going to know what that is. And the one I want to start with is the Big Technology Podcast, which is hosted by Alex Kantrowitz, who's a friend of ours. He had Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, on. And she called out this clip, this reaction that, in particular, VCs are starting to have to the negative messaging around AI. So I want to actually just play the same clip from the Big Technology Podcast. This is Olivia Moore, who's a partner at Andreessen.

19:27Nilay Patel:There's been a lot in the media in the U.S. more broadly, these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology. I was just talking with someone this morning who is not in the tech industry, and they were saying the same lines like, AI is evil. It's going to watch us like it's using all the water. And then they were like, but ChetGPT really helps me. And it has like great answers. And so I think part of it is a timing thing of we just need these products to kind of saturate the mainstream consumer and they can realize the value.

20:02David Pierce:So there's a lot of things in there. A lot of ideas there, huh? We can talk about the water another time. This assumes in a certain way that these products exist and are out there, right? And the only thing that we're missing is adoption. and I would actually say what seems to be the case is that we have the exact reverse which is that everybody has tried these things. They're everywhere. And found them wanting in some meaningful, like you can't avoid these chatbots at this point. Like if you open up Gmail, you get 11 pop-ups reminding you how to Gemini in your Gmail. These things are not far away from the users.

20:38David Pierce:It's just that people find them, use them and at the very least find them not worth$20 a month, right? Like for the purposes of this conversation, we don't even have to litigate whether the products are any good. They're not worth$20 a month to most people. And until they are worth$20 a month to most people, they're going to hemorrhage money. And this to me is just like, this just assumes that all of this is out there and it's like the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. That is not at all my experience with AI right now.

21:09Brendan Carr:Yeah, no, it's everywhere. I have a different objection to this idea from Olivia Moore at Andreessen Horowitz. And it's the one that the creator made in her video. And I brought this idea to our environmental reporter, Justine Kalma, and to Mia Sato, who covers the fashion industry and shopping generally for us. Environmental objections do not do shit for the American consumer. They've never done anything for any—no. Not one thing. The reason I brought up fashion is fast fashion exists and no one cares about the environmental cost of Sheehan. Literally no one cares. That stuff is flying off the shelves.

21:50Brendan Carr:I am a sucker for a big, stupid car. I really am. I love them. The more cylinders, the better. Light them up. Lots of people in this country know every inch of the environmental cost of big, stupid cars. We've been talking about it forever. I have an EV. I will tell you my EV is a much more pleasant thing to drive than my stupid Mustang. But I love my stupid Mustang, right? Like there's, it just doesn't work. Like you're watching what's happening in EV sales right now. If you cared about the environment, you would buy an EV. You would not buy the dumbest trucks that you can buy, which is what Americans are addicted to buying.

22:29Yeah.

22:30David Pierce:Someday when you make a country album, I need it to be called I Love My Stupid Mustang.

22:33Brendan Carr:I do love my stupid Mustang. It's just going to make me very happy. I love it the most. I'm just pointing this out. This idea that the media has convinced everyone that in particular the water cost of AI is so high that you should hate it is just totally divorced from the reality of how people react to environmental messaging at all.

22:52David Pierce:Yes. At all. in fact i would argue that the um do the right thing versus do the convenient thing is an easier trade for people to get over to do the convenient thing than almost anything else with environment like many times the you know do i give up my private data in exchange for some convenience like people have more feelings about that than will i burn the world down for some convenience like behavior suggests that we will happily burn the world down if it gets me my clothes 10 minutes.

23:22Brendan Carr:Ask people how they feel about the paper straws, man. Yes. Yes. Exactly. And like the paper straws might not be helping anything. But like the idea that you should like suffer some minor inconvenience to make some incremental benefit. Like, no. Everyone's like, I hate these straws. It is so easy to overcome the environmental roadblock, the moral sense that your actions will help the environment or hurt the environment. You just need a great product. That's literally it or a more convenient product. And so here you have a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which is effectively now just a VC for defense contractors, saying people hate this technology because the media is lying to them.

24:00Brendan Carr:And first of all, the media that most people consume, as we have talked about over and over on the show, is not, it's, right, people are not reading their own times. They're just opening TikTok. They're watching the algorithmic media that is being delivered to them by big tech companies that have a huge vested interest in, as you're saying, distributing AI tools to them. Yep. So it's not, I'm not popping up on people's feeds and be like, did you know it has a lot of water? No, it's just not happening. And even if that was happening, you can just look at, you know, the weird dip in EV sales after the incentives went away and people rushing to buy gas cars, even though gas prices are through the roof.

24:42Brendan Carr:Like people make weird decisions when the environmental factor is the main factor. By the way, asterisk, I know we're going to get notes about this. EV sales are ticking back up because gas prices are high and the cars are actually better. And maybe that's all going to equalize, but it's not the environmental concern that is driving consumer behavior in the car market or in the fashion market or anywhere else where you have environmental concerns that should shift the market. And that's what I asked Justine about. That's what I asked me about. It's what this creator is pointing out in her video.

25:11Brendan Carr:You can get over it. The point I'm trying to make is you can overcome the environmental concern really, really easily. So this is one big attempt, like one big narrative from in particular AI VCs who are saying it's not our fault. You're too stupid. Right. You've been lied to. The tools are amazing and we just have to wait and the objections we overcome. Yep. There's another one as well, which again, this is all in an inch from out. So it's like, I just feel like I'm dunking on a baby, but like we should listen to it.

25:38Nilay Patel:At least some parts of the AI ecosystem have decided that this crazy, scary doomerism is the best way to raise money. Where every now and then they come out and they say, all the jobs will be destroyed. Anthropic, you know, Dario says that. This thing is sentient. And investors are like, okay, here's$10 billion, here's$50 billion, here's$100 billion.

26:01David Pierce:Now we're blaming the AI founders themselves. I find this argument to be essentially nonsensical. like because a the whole ai will remake the economy ai will change the way that work gets done we're gonna have to do universal basic income because nobody's gonna have a job anymore this was a feature of the rise of all of this stuff for years until until a bunch of people went wait that sounds horrible i don't want that i like my job i enjoy doing my job please don't automate my job away with ai slop and there was there have been other lines in all of this they're like, in America, we're way over indexed on people liking creative arts.

26:41David Pierce:It's like, yeah, I'm good with that, actually. Like, all of these things are fine. And for the longest time, people like Chamath and podcasts like the All In podcast were talking in glorious terms about how terrific it was going to be when AI completely remade the economy. And so now to call that doomerism is just ridiculous.

27:00Brendan Carr:Yeah, I totally agree. In that worldview, and that worldview is really prevalent, Alex Karp is running around saying women are going to lose their political power and it's men who work with their hands who will suddenly have the economic power because AI will replace all of your dumb, woke laptop work or whatever he wants to say.

27:18David Pierce:And if that works to raise money, by the way, Chamath, you're the money guy.

27:26Brendan Carr:He has the money. He's the money. He's the dumbest money. If this is the sales pitch that works on you, you are the problem. Well, to be clear, these guys hate Anthropic because they think Anthropic is woke. Sure. But Sam Altman is just as doomer-y in this way, right? He's the one running around saying everyone's just going to rent intelligence from the cloud. Yeah. And they're going to build AGI. Like, there's something here where their own messaging is the problem. And they've convinced people that all of the jobs are going away. And now they're facing the consequences of that messaging. And they're blaming the people.

28:00Brendan Carr:Yep. And I just keep coming back to the idea that we all knew what was going to happen when you put a camera on every phone in every pocket in the world. We at The Verge have been writing about the effects of that at every level from the very beginning. Like the whole Verge is kind of founded on the insight that phones would be a big deal. And it was like not obvious in 2011.

28:25David Pierce:It's very funny to tell people that in retrospect because it's like, oh, congratulations. You thought phones might be important? Like, great job. But I'm like, no, it wasn't. It wasn't guaranteed.

28:34Brendan Carr:We need to write about technology and culture at the same time. We were like, what are you talking about? It's like, well, the whole they're all the same. And now here we are. We did it anyway because people were like, I love having this phone in my pocket. I love having this camera with me all the time. And you can just we have written the stories. You draw a straight line from that to like the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah. To these huge, like, social changes around everyone should have a camera all the time. These big conversations about surveillance and surveillance. Those are all the costs of putting cameras everywhere in the way that we put them everywhere.

29:10Brendan Carr:Those are enormous costs. I think we're reckoning with those costs now in real ways. But it all happened because people wanted the technology. They love it. That's not what's happening here. Right? The costs are being imposed. we're going to take your job away is not the fault of the consumer. Right. It might be the fault of Dario. It might be the fault of Sam Altman. But the only way the investment pays off is if you remake the economy with AI. It's the only way that the mobile investment paid off.

29:43David Pierce:These are the stakes they've drawn for themselves.

29:45Brendan Carr:And I just, I'm flabbergasted that they don't see that they haven't made a great consumer product. That's the thing that will change this. Actually, we had a couple weeks from now people hear it, but we just taped an episode of Dakota with the CEO of Cisco. Cisco sells the stuff that goes in data centers. And I was asking about this. And I was like, you know, like if you just said the data center had Netflix in it, people would be happy. Like that's where the movies come from. And he started laughing. He was like, you think so? And I was like, oh, you don't. This is just flying over your head.

30:15Brendan Carr:Like you have to make some case that there's some benefit to all of this investment in order for the investment to continue. You know who understands it? is Sacha Nadella. He was at Davos of all places. And he said that the AI companies need to get, quote, social permission, which is amazing for a company like Microsoft to say, we should run this clip.

30:36Nilay Patel:I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens. If these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large.

30:57David Pierce:Okay, I have two thoughts on this. One, Davos, famously a place a bunch of billionaires fly on their private jets to talk about how to save the environment. Perfect. Two, this is right. This is correct. I think it's slightly ironic that it's coming from Satya Nadella, someone who has spent the last few years flailing pretty aggressively to try to find the use case he's describing. And it hasn't gone well. Bing is not the thing. Copilot so far is not the thing. Microsoft, I think, in less straightforward terms, is doing a pretty similar kind of retrenchment that Fijicimo and OpenAI are talking about, that they're like, what if we just approach AI as a business software?

31:35David Pierce:And that has been, you and I have both been on this podcast saying AI is business software. The business of AI is B2B SaaS software and has been for a long time. And there are like, we've been threatening to do an episode about the SaaSpocalypse for a while. And I think we should because I think there are actually really interesting disruptive things that AI is going to do to business software. That is not how you get to where all of these companies want to go. And I think Satya Nadella is right that the risks that they run by not making this appealing to consumers are also going to backfire in business, right?

32:11David Pierce:Because they are incurring such a reputational hit and a sort of reflexive problem with AI that people are developing that is going to make it harder to even build business tools that do AI things.

32:24Brendan Carr:Yeah, I mean, there are as many studies as you can count about whether or not businesses are seeing efficiency improvements by adding AI. And the answer is basically not yet or no.

32:33David Pierce:Yeah, it's somewhere between no and like, eh.

32:35Brendan Carr:Yeah, it's like it hasn't happened yet. And maybe there's going to be a new set of companies that come up and they're built on the cost models of having a bunch of AI agents instead of a bunch of engineers. And that means they can make the same product as the big company cheaper. And that's just the disruption life cycle. I don't know. Maybe that's going to happen. Has it happened yet? It certainly has not happened yet. And so you're just seeing, okay, we're asking for all of this energy. We're asking for all of this data center displacement in all these communities. The communities are basically saying, no, like make it worth it to us.

33:10Brendan Carr:Yeah. To what end? What is in this for me? And I don't mean to say that AI is like totally useless. I think it's still pretty brittle, as we have discussed on the show many, many times. You can run into the walls of things AI cannot do. But we know now that at least when it comes to software development, it has tremendous value that is causing a bunch of consternation in that community. You just had Paul Ford on. I think that conversation is brilliant. People just listen to it. once you can develop software you can kind of go into adjacent industries that's it's a real thing there's a lot of software running a lot of companies and you can you can widen out yeah but that doesn't mean you can do everything and it doesn't mean you can eat the whole world and i just see this gap where everybody in that industry is like why doesn't wired like tech anymore or why does the verge hate technology and it's like no it's it's literally the citizens of america who are like, I don't like this.

34:07Brendan Carr:Right. Like the polling is clear and it's not because of the media. It's not because of doomerism. It's because you're asking for so much and you haven't delivered a great consumer product. You've delivered some very compelling enterprise products.

34:21David Pierce:Yeah. That's not enough. And I think the hope from a lot of these companies is that something like Claude Code will eventually be a consumer product. I mean, you see it now, right? They built co-work out of cloud code to make it a little more accessible. They built dispatch out of co-work, which is basically like you can run it from a messaging app. They're trying to make this kind of creative tool accessible to more people. And it's going to work, but that is not a mainstream, that is not an Instagram level use case, right? You and I always like to talk about the sort of foundational mobile experiences, right?

34:56David Pierce:And the two you always bring up, which I think are right, are Uber and Instagram that are like things you couldn't do on a phone that the technology on a phone enabled that changed the way we do life. That's the stakes. And there is nothing remotely approaching that for normal people living their normal lives.

35:13Brendan Carr:Yeah, you can have a lot of feelings about Uber. We did, we just had Dara on Decoder. Boy, do people have feelings about Uber. Yeah. But the fact that you can be almost anywhere in the world, push a button and have a Toyota Camry appear is just bananas. That is just a remarkable thing that happened because of the mobile revolution.

35:35David Pierce:That should be Uber's new tagline.

35:37Brendan Carr:I've said that to Dara. I once said that to Travis Kalanick in our office in Midtown, and he just started cracking up. He's like, I never thought about that one. Like, it's crazy, right? Like, you push a button and something happens in the real world, and in Uber's case, either it's a Camry or a Highlander. It's one or the other, really. Or if you're unlucky, it's a Model 3, and they'll have the regen braking on and you'll just have a bad time. um a lot of a lot of complaints in uber world about model threes with region breaking um it's the same with door dash it's whatever like you push a button something happens in the real world you order something from amazon an object comes to your house that is the thing that the mobile revolution like truly delivered in a way that had never occurred before and then instagram and social media we actually wrote a piece about this james spierram our first creative director wrote a piece about this way at the beginning um james is an old film photographer he used to shoot the windsurfing championships hanging off a helicopter on film sick um and so when like digital showed up and phone showed up and all the photographers had their moment he's like i'm so happy about this like i never want to be worried that my film is gone i missed the shot again it's digital like he had this totally interesting wonderful perspective and his reaction to instagram was it is so insanely powerful to put the distribution next to the camera right you're gonna the feedback loop here is it's the story i i've come back we'll link that story to i've come back to it over and over again just the insight there is so powerful you can't do that without a phone you can make an instagram on a desktop computer but the camera part doesn't exist and so most people will never close the gap instagram brought those things right next to each other i think tiktok brought those things right next to each other the dominant language of tiktok is replication you see a trend and you make it yourself.

37:26David Pierce:Yeah.

37:26Brendan Carr:That is an unusual dynamic in like the history of culture. Right. Most people are like, you copied me. I'm going to sue you. Right. But like TikTok is just about widespread replication. These are huge changes that technology brings about. I think they're fascinating. I think it's pretty hard to make the argument that we don't like technology because this is what we talk about all the time on the show and our site is like, look at how cool this is. Like we're changing how we live.

37:48David Pierce:Yeah.

37:48Brendan Carr:And then AI is like, it's in there and it's like, would you like a girlfriend that's the best idea they have right and i it's like most people like no that's pretty weird and my friend who does have an ai girlfriend is getting weirder by the day and it's like it's bananas to me that this industry can't see it yeah agreed all right we

38:09David Pierce:should move on from this but i will say i am curious if you have used or have an inkling to what these use cases are. If you've seen something, if you're making something, if there is a thing that you're betting on as like the mainstream consumer use case, I desperately want to hear about it. And if it has to do with vibe coding, I don't want to hear about it anymore.

38:29Brendan Carr:Or automating anything. Correct. I'm serious about this. The idea that most people can identify a loop in their lives that is worth automating.

38:37David Pierce:Yep.

38:37Brendan Carr:I mean, we got 50 years of technology development to prove that that is not the case.

38:42David Pierce:Yes.

38:43Brendan Carr:You just can't do it.

38:44David Pierce:productivity, like for me as a productivity nerd, AI has been so fun because it is going to remap everyone's to-do list system. Most people don't have a to-do list system. So it's like we need to go several levels down into what it is like to be a person in the world. But genuinely, if you have a theory on what that is, I want to hear about it. 866-411 is the hotline. Firstcast of theverge.com is the email. Neali at theverge.com is where you can send all of your vibe coding ideas. we're going to take a break and then it's it's trifold time we'll be right back

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42:10David Pierce:All right, we're back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison. Hello. Okay, we're here to talk about trifolds, and I want to, but I just had one of the strangest parent technology experiences I've ever had. This is happening to me in real time, and I just need to talk this out with both of you who have young children. So our three-year-old is in preschool, and for the first time we're using the Brightwheel app. Do you guys know what this is? I don't know.

42:33Brendan Carr:It checks them in and out, right? Yeah, I assume every school has apps like this.

42:36David Pierce:But we check them in and out with a QR code. They send us pictures throughout the day. They send us information about what they're doing, all this stuff. And a few minutes ago, I got three separate notifications. I don't know if you can see this here, that just say incident and have a Band-Aid emoji. Oh, no. I have no other information. Presumably he's alive. I don't know what to, like, what do I do with this? This is like, I don't, I either desperately need to know about this and need to leave this podcast right now, or this is fine and this is information I'm going to wish I never had.

43:07Brendan Carr:Do you think there's like a second set of notifications? Like after incident? Like, it's just like, come now. Yeah. It's pretty bad, you guys. That's a phone call when the phone starts ringing. Yeah.

43:20David Pierce:So all of this is to say, this was luckily, this was like 20 minutes ago. so presumably everyone has recovered, but I may suddenly leave this podcast. Modern parenting is very strange. This is like, I have both, I'm glad to have all this information.

43:33Brendan Carr:Wait, is there incident with a band-aid and then like incident with a poop emoji? Do you know what I'm saying? I don't know.

43:37David Pierce:This is my first, well, so there is, there's potty colon P and there's potty colon BM. So I know the ones and twos. I see why. But like, it's a real, like how much information are we as people supposed to have? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. This is the dilemma I feel with Brightwood. We get very little of that information and is honestly for the best. I'm like, well, he was alive at the end of the day. Great. That might be the correct answer. Like, call me if I need to get them to the hospital and otherwise I'll see him at the end of the day.

44:08Brendan Carr:See, now I'm in a very different place with the older one. So, you know, Max is like almost eight and she's in second grade. So now she comes home from school. I'm like, what happened to you? She's like, you'll never know. No information will be refrauded to you. And so I'm kind of like looking, I'm like waiting for Jack to like get some Brightwheel in his life.

44:27David Pierce:You can know the P's and the B's.

44:30Brendan Carr:With Max, you know, when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, like my office was in the basement. Like I did, I did the show from the basement basement and I was often down there working and Becky would be upstairs and you couldn't actually yell from the basement all the way upstairs. And so we used the walkie talkie on our Apple watch all the time. And it was basically just a poop notification. So like a very expensive, like, I need you. She pooped again. And now this house, you can just yell from his bedroom to the kitchen. Like it's trivial. And I feel bad because we're not walkie-talking about what you've called DMs anymore.

45:02David Pierce:Yeah. It's important parental communication to just yell. It's happening to each other. Exactly. Many times a day. Yes. Or, oh, no. Seriously. Yeah. I need new pants. Like it's a whole thing. All right, Allison, you have what has become a precious object just in the last few days. This is now rare phone contraband, which is you have a Samsung Galaxy Z trifold in your possession. Tell us what happened with the trifold this week.

45:30Brendan Carr:I mean, you have a thing that appears to be a Samsung Galaxy.

45:32David Pierce:That's a fair point. Yeah. TBD. You have been trying to get this phone for months. Yes. We have been on a whole journey trying to get one. wrote about it all in very great detail on the site. But the basics are like Samsung PR, you know, typically will send us a review unit of a new phone. They did not provide us one this time around. There are reasons for that. Always a tell. Yes, exactly. And I'm realizing how much of a tell. So we try to get a hold of this trifold. We're like, we got to buy one. Went in and out of stock like so fast. Couldn't get one. We turned to eBay, you know, found someone selling a trifold for a small fortune and ordered it.

46:21And in the meantime, I had to fly all over the world to go see phones. And so none of us really clocked that it hadn't shipped when it was supposed to. So this was like red flag number one. We go back and forth with a seller. The thing finally shows up at my door. and I open up this FedEx package. It is a box with like two seals on it that say like, do not accept if this has been tampered with. And it's like very clearly been tampered with. So I was like, this is very strange. Not usually how I receive a new phone. Opened it up, took the film off of the inner screen and there were crumbs and little hairs on like uh yeah yeah this is not the first time the phone

47:16David Pierce:had been like you know exposed to to air it was it was gross um i turned the phone on it's already set up which was also a very large red flag um also not how phones are typically shipped to a to a customer. All that is to say, this was a very weird experience. I was sketched out. The phone immediately asked for a whole bunch of permissions. And I was like, deny, factory reset. And then I turned it off and I like didn't want to touch it for a little bit. So that was acquiring the Trifold. In the meantime, Samsung announced they're not going to make it anymore. They canceled the phone. Yeah. They just up and canceled it.

48:04Like I've been on this journey to get this stupid phone. And all of a sudden I'm like, well, this is our, this is the end of our relationship. I thought we were at the beginning. We were going to have these good times together. So, so here I have this phone and just the funniest part is that it, But when I powered it back on after resetting it and coming to my senses, it wanted a SIM card to set it up. Also strange to me, I've never had a phone insist on a SIM card. And I was like, well, I don't have one lying around. I don't really trust it. And then the light bulb went off. I was like, I have this Trump mobile SIM that is just languishing in like a Samsung S25.

48:51It's kind of perfect, actually. Right.

48:54Brendan Carr:This is the realest Trump mobile has ever been. Right. Yeah. It like got this this phone to work. I set it up. It's still asked for a lot of weird permissions. But I think these are just the thing is, we have the serial number is a phone sold in China. And the eBay seller claimed it was a Taiwan model, which is a different serial number. This is where the weirdness is coming in, I think. So this is why I'm getting some of these apps that are loaded on the phone are just in one UI in China, which is I've never seen them. I don't think it's like a malware infested, you know, taking time bomb of a phone, but it is running on Trump Mobile.

49:40And that's like the weirdest combination of phone and network.

49:44Brendan Carr:A weird Chinese phone with it does have the Play Store if it's Chinese? No, it does not. So a weird Chinese trifold with no Google Play Store or Play Services because they're not allowed in China running on Trump Mobile is an unholy combination. Like, you should light a candle or something. I know.

50:04David Pierce:It's actually kind of perfect. I feel like I have no notes on that. I actually feel like the Trump administration would be like, great job, Allison. Right.

50:11Brendan Carr:Or they would arrest you.

50:12David Pierce:Like, I don't know if we should run this podcast. I don't know which government official is going to show up at my door and arrest me. It could be any number. It's true for any number of countries. Yeah. It's a lot of possibilities. So how far have you gotten with this phone? Is it like, is it actually up and running for you now? It functions. It won't get on the internet on the Trump mobile network for some reason. It'll receive a spam phone call. The phone started. I was in the other room yesterday and the phone started ringing and it was honestly like a horror movie.

50:48Brendan Carr:I'm sorry. The fact that the Trump mobile site won't provide you data, but will provide you spam calls is also perfect. It's perfect. Yes. Yeah. It doesn't do the thing that you pay$50 a month for, but you can have a spam call. So it does not have the Internet. I don't trust it enough to put it on my home Wi-Fi. So I hotspotted it to the iPhone Air that I'm using right now. I was like, what do I do? And I just loaded up. you know, the Verge in a web browser and made the window a bunch of different sizes. I was like, cool. That's what you do. $4 ,000 later, I can like look at the internet in different ways.

51:31Brendan Carr:A window on a phone.

51:32David Pierce:Honestly, that's a lot of innovation. Somewhere in there is a truly damning critique of foldable phones, which we should get to. But I do, you guys, I'm assuming, were as surprised as I was about the cancellation of the trifold, right this was not one bit the second samsung refused to send us a review unit i was like one

51:53Brendan Carr:this product's a dud uh i mean look i i'm gonna here's my usual caveat it is very hard to make money making media on the internet sure and there's a lot of creators out there and a lot of influencers and like go make your bag do it how you got to do it they just make a different thing than we make. And so my criticism here is not of people in their businesses and their audience. Like, please be successful. It's so hard. I'm not going to fault you for trying to make money on YouTube or Instagram or whatever. It's so hard. It's a huge tell when only the influencers and creators get the fun. Sure.

52:31Brendan Carr:Because they're so reliant on brand deals. They're so reliant on access in very specific ways that these companies can put them on rails. You can actually see it right now with Apple. Apple is putting a bunch of influencers on Rails, little interviews with Apple 50. Like it's, you can see it. We don't do that, right? What you buy from us is our ethics policy. We're huge jerks about it. We're very annoying about it, talking about it all the time. And so when the companies won't give us the phone or give our peers at other publications who have the same or similar ethics policies, when it's hard for traditional reviewers to get the phone, And you always know it is a tell every single time because it means the product isn't good enough and the coverage has to be sanded off.

53:13Brendan Carr:Now, again, I'm not trying to take shots. Like lots of people, lots of influencers got the phone. They can feel however they want. I'm just saying that's the reason I think it's a tell. Because we don't have to do what you say. Sure. And that's a dynamic that exists for a lot of people. And so the second it was like week three of me in the editorial meeting in the morning being like, do we have the phone yet? And it was like Samsung was ghosting us. I was like, oh, this phone sucks.

53:40David Pierce:Allison, what were they telling you about why you couldn't get a phone? I got a lot of polite, you know, lines like, oh, you know, we're noting your request and your interest. I was like, OK, great. But, you know, and I teased out a little more information about, you know, they were sent very few review units and they were going to try and give me a heads up when it went back on sale. And it sold out before anybody could be like, hey. Right. Because they made five. I was going to say, we're all agreed on that is not about popularity. That's about they made five. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which is when I started to suspect something about this.

54:23I was like, if they wanted to sell this phone, they could sell the phone. Like, they would just make more phones.

54:29Brendan Carr:No, there's, look, they could. There's, like, a RAM shortage. It's their tariffs. Like, there's a lot of reasons that an already expensive phone was getting more expensive or harder to produce. And maybe you just want to put all the RAM and the S26. But that's not really what they're saying here. Right? Like, they're just like, yep, goodbye. Yeah.

54:49David Pierce:Yeah, they're framing it as like, this was a nifty concept that we decided to show off for a little while. And that feels very disingenuous with how Samsung originally talked about this.

54:59Brendan Carr:Also, there's real demand for the phone. They would allocate the RAM to this phone. Do you know what I mean? Like they make all the phones. If you're like, well, people really want to buy trifolds. We're going to put the components that we can get in the trifolds and we'll charge what the market can bear. And instead they're like, no. On top of that, Oppo launched the Find N6, which it's a zero feel crease, not zero C. You know what I'm saying? You can see it, but you can't feel it. It is very compelling. We have a video of it. Dom did a hands-on. It is almost creaseless. They're only launching it in Asia and Australia.

55:32Brendan Carr:They're not even coming to Europe, let alone the United States. My thesis here, Allison, I'm curious now that you've tried the tri-fold, I know you've reviewed all the other folds. I think this might be a dud. I don't think people want folding phones. And I think like my little phone gets bigger might still be compelling, but my big phone gets even bigger and my big phone gets three times as big. I don't know.

55:56David Pierce:Can I just tell you I am this close to declaring victory over you, Allison? Oh, no. You and I have been fighting flip phones versus folding phones for like two years. And I'm this close to feeling like I'm winning. Is this some kind of like intervention? Is this like a gotcha? Yeah.

56:12Brendan Carr:No, I wouldn't do that to you because, again, having a Chinese phone with a Trump mobile SIM on it, I think is punishment enough. Right. But Allison, you've been using the phones. You've obviously seen this phone as close as anyone can see it. What do you think? I mean, did this work? I think it's still playing out. And it's definitely, you know, we're seeing in real time companies be like, what should this kind of phone be shaped like? Like, what's the limit of how big it can be versus how annoying it is to carry around versus how expensive it is? Like, the tri-fold is almost$3 ,000 if you could actually buy one.

56:55So, and meanwhile, you know, the Chinese brands, I think, are dialing it in a little faster. It kind of seems they have the, you know, the zero-fill crease. They have a very slim foldable that is also dust and water resistant. We in the U.S., we have the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which is the dust resistant one. So you can't have like quite all together. And I think there's, you know, I think companies are really for many reasons hesitant to jump into the U.S., especially with a phone that's going to cost somewhere between$1 ,800 and$2 ,000. So I don't know. I think some of these companies, it sort of feels like we're in a place where they're treading water and they kind of want to see what this Apple foldable that we will potentially probably maybe see towards the end of the year is going to look like.

57:52And we're such an iPhone-centric market. I think that could be a big moment for folding phones. or it's the moment we find out that nobody wanted these things. And it was just a fun little project for me to to walk around with one and buy a tiny keyboard for it. I think it'll be a telling moment.

58:14David Pierce:I mean, you're my favorite case on this because you have kind of deliberately you have bullied yourself into finding use cases for the foldable phone. And I think you've genuinely found some like there are. It's not that there aren't things that the foldable phone makes better. It's just that they're still very expensive. And I think like we were talking about in a moment where all of these companies are struggling desperately to have their phones not get more expensive. The idea of this already being twice the price is a problem, right? We've spent, I mean, how long has the fold been out? Five years now?

58:45David Pierce:We've been waiting for the price on these things to come down and it just has not. It just hasn't. And now there's this upward pressure on phones that is like preventing these things from becoming mainstream accessible anyway. And then you fold in. I say this with love, Allison. Most people do not want to tote a Logitech keys to go to the coffee shop and do email on the table while they drink their coffee. Right. That just it just doesn't feel like somewhere in there. And part of me wonders if if maybe, you know, we've we've talked a lot over the years about the sort of cultural differences in phone markets, that maybe there are reasons that people will use phones differently in Asia or in Brazil or in some of these other markets that have very different phone needs than the U.S.

59:28David Pierce:does that they'll start to take off. But for me right now, I don't look around and have any reason to think there are sort of killer apps for foldables just sitting out there, especially not at this price.

59:39Brendan Carr:I do want to call it the thunderous sideways dunk on the Logitech Keys to Go.

59:43David Pierce:Very important.

59:44Brendan Carr:Look, I have one over here. It's a beautiful little keyboard. Total stray at the Logitech Keys to Go. Richard Lawler, Verge has favorite. Richard Lawler is our senior news editor here at The Verge. He runs our news team. His job is boiled down to looking at stuff. And I also say that with love because if I could do any one job at The Verge, it would be a news editor, which is just a terrifying reality for Mr. Routine.

1:00:07David Pierce:Richard does it better than Neal I would, just so everyone's clear.

1:00:09Brendan Carr:He does a much better job. It is still my favorite job. It was the job I had at Engadget ages ago. I mean, his job is looking at stuff. He has a pixel tenfold, and we were talking about this. And he was like. I am the person that this phone is for and I struggle to find reasons to use it. Because all day long I'm meant to be looking at things. Yep. And like on the go, like being able to have the bigger canvas so I can like look at a desktop web page and like evaluate what I'm looking at and like have a Slack window open and back and forth. And he's like, I don't use it. Maybe he doesn't have a Logitech keys to go.

1:00:42Brendan Carr:Maybe this is the problem. See, I got to sell him on the Logitech. check. The thing that makes me wonder if there's some place that they could hit this market is my parents. Because I brought home the Pixel 10 Pro Fold for, it was kind of my home, my phone I used over Christmas. And I opened it up and my mom was like, I want that phone. That is so cool. But it is$2 ,000. My parents are Pixel A series people. They buy their$500 phone and they don't want to think about buying a new phone for the next, you know, five years if they can get away with it. And they have their iPad. It's like iPad to FaceTime with a grandchild and then phone.

1:01:27And if those things could be the same device, I wonder if there's a world where they'd be like, okay, yeah, I'm willing to spend more on this phone and it's going to replace the iPad. Or if it just ends up being like, no, that's$2 ,000. I'm going to stick with, you know, these two devices and it's not ruining my life.

1:01:48Brendan Carr:You've brought us to the precipice, Allison. Who will take the first leap in predicting what the Apple folding phone will do? Right. It is for FaceTiming grandchildren. If that's all it is, you can unfold it and run two iPhone apps side by side and then maybe like a big FaceTime. Either it will be a huge hit or the biggest flop in Apple history. Yeah. The question is whether you unfold it and it is a little iPad. Right. Or a big iPhone. Or, you know, that's a pretty fine distinction. i am just truly if if they make that phone and it is the same kind of compromise the iphone air where it gets thinner and lighter and the camera is way worse like i it's not worth it to me like you will have reduced the the primary utility of my phone to give me an ipad and i don't use my ipad it's like but i might be a very narrow use case like maybe it's just big face time is all anybody wants.

1:02:46Brendan Carr:I'm looking at this, like Samsung scared the pants out of Apple for like two years by having big screens first. And there's like a lot of like internal tech company emails from various court cases where like Apple is like literally freaking out that Samsung has big screens on phones and is taking market share away. And it reorganized like the tech landscape. like Samsung became a player because their phones were bigger than Apple's for a couple of years there yeah that one that worked it worked and then Apple was like fine our phones are big too now that's normal and you would think I think this is what Samsung thought that the Fold would be like the biggest screen of all and I don't think that's playing out the way that they thought it would and so like what's Apple gonna catch up to I don't know I think predicting what the iPhone Fold might be in the face of Samsung, the trifold didn't work here.

1:03:46Brendan Carr:I can't tell you the Z Fold 7 is like a phenomenon. Oppo is not even, it's like hottest ones, they're not launching it in like one of the bigger markets for Android in the world, in Europe. I don't know. It just seems like this might have come to nothing. I certainly think that the RAM situation and all those different pressures like come at a very tough time. Yeah. for foldables when it's sort of like, okay, we're figuring out some of this technology. We haven't figured out how to make it cheaper. And all of the pressure is leading to more expensive phones now. So I can see how you'd maybe ease off of like, okay, well, this cool thing that we're trying to push forward on, we're going to back off a little bit and just focus on like selling phones and trying to make some money off of that right now.

1:04:39David Pierce:Yeah. If you're going to decide to stop selling one thing, this is pretty clearly the one, right? Like if we need RAMs on the phones, the people buy. So we're going to stop putting it like it might just freeze the tiny bit of this market that does exist for a while because you just have to put the RAMs in something else.

1:04:59Brendan Carr:But that doesn't explain why they didn't want us to review it. I think the phone wasn't very good. It's super heavy. I will say, and I played with it at CES. I don't know. My takeaway then wasn't like, wow, what a heavy phone. But maybe it's just having it, especially like all folded. Can you unfold it for us? Do you have it? I can.

1:05:20David Pierce:I will say like six times right after this thing came out, Travis, our producer, would just slack me and be like, who is this for? And I think it's that thing is enormous.

1:05:29Brendan Carr:I mean, this is like, you know, when the Huawei trifold came and everyone kept watching that video of it unfolding? Like, I'm having the same reaction to it. Like, look at that thing. It looks sick. Boy, I want to unfold that a lot. I mean, it's real thin. You hold it like this. You're like, this is a lightweight tablet. And you fold it up and you're like, God, this is a heavy phone. I mean, look, maybe the problem is just the people, like, I'm going to say this about Android tablets and the people are going to send me notes. Maybe the problem is people just don't want Android tablets. That's why we're waiting for the iFold.

1:05:59David Pierce:Allison, will you just hold up the home screen to the camera again? Yeah. You can tell from this home screen that no one has done the job of figuring out what Android is supposed to look like when you open your phone up. Because all they do is they take Android and they just make it real stretchy. Like, that's not, that is not the answer. See, it wants, oh, it's doing. And neither is the malware. It wants access to your network. Constantly asking, begging for, yeah.

1:06:25Brendan Carr:It's like, do you have any financial information, by the way, that I should know? Have you considered downloading your banking app? Yeah, I think the other side of this is like I've experienced all the wonkiness of using Android on the big screen of a phone. And I have notes, you know, like let it be more of a computer than they do right now. And the other question is like, when Chrome OS becomes aluminum, is it going to, when I open up a folding phone, am I going to get that experience or am I going to continue to get big Android, which is frustrating? You know, I don't know. There's like a number of scenarios that could play out or start to play out this year.

1:07:12And like, we're going to have to wait and see. It's an annoying reality.

1:07:18David Pierce:Yeah. It does seem like the iPhone fold stakes are both very high and very low in that respect. Like, this is not, this is Apple going to sort of try to do the, like, prove the market thing. But there is no market. And it's just, is this the Vision Pro or is this the iPod, right? Where they put up the slide of all the ugly ones and they're like, we did better. Is it that or is it look at this science project that we also made?

1:07:45Brendan Carr:Right. I'm just saying if you're like triumphantly like all these ones turn in Android tablets, but the iPhone full turns into an iPad. It's like cool.

1:07:57Brendan Carr:There's something there that will just be weird. Yeah. Yeah. Indeed.

1:08:01David Pierce:All right. We need to take a break. Allison, how long do you intend to use this thing before you like throw it out of a window to avoid whatever is happening to you? So, you know, I'm going to take it out tomorrow. I have a whole day planned for it. I wanted to have like a nice, you know, day where we go do some fun stuff. We're going to go downtown. I'm going to use my little Logitech keys to go with it. You're going to give it all its favorite treats. Exactly. I know. Because it's, you know, if they discontinued it, we don't know. This is so sweet. How long it has. I'm going to give it a good like effort and then I don't know what's going to become of it.

1:08:42David Pierce:Put it out of its misery I guess I hope not Alright well good luck thank you for coming on. We're going to take another break and then Neil and I are going to come back and presumably yell about free speech for a while We'll be right back

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1:11:27Nilay Patel:stop you can really feel the respect in this battle pick a meal to pick a side

1:11:38David Pierce:all right we're back time for the lightning round and neil i assume that means it's where

1:11:43Brendan Carr:we once again we have to do this to say it's unsponsored flavor oh yeah it's unsponsored

1:11:48David Pierce:for flavor there you go long pause i want you to imagine like two or three ellipses in a row every time I say that. Is it time? It's time. It's time.

1:11:59Brendan Carr:You don't have to say. David, we're at the point now where Brendan is so dumb that people like jump out of bushes

1:12:07David Pierce:to tell me how stupid he is. It is true. It's not so much the existence of Brendan Carr as a dummy that makes me sad. It is just the consistency of it. It's just like sometimes you need like a routine breaker in your life. You know what I mean? Yeah. Can Brendan just like, What if one time you just came on here and you're like, Brendan, this amazing, smart thing. Do you know how great that would be for the Verge cast? If you were like, three cheers for Brent anyway. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. This week's theme music submitted by Julia Mark.

1:12:39David Pierce:Here it is. Brendan Carr, Brendan Carr. How did he get this far? Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:12:50Brendan Carr:Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:12:53David Pierce:Oh, my God. Do you ever hear a song and immediately know this is going to be in my head for a long time? I'm going to be lying on my pillow at 2.30 this morning singing.

1:13:03Brendan Carr:Julia, thank you for that. That was incredible. I love the band Stars. Like, they're one of my favorite bands. And that just sounds like not a great Stars record because that's not what they would do. But it's like, you know what I mean?

1:13:17David Pierce:It's like the song they made just to sort of get the juices flowing first thing in the day. Yeah. like

1:13:23Brendan Carr:if they were like we made a song about brennicar I'd be like why did you do that but that was amazing oh it made me so happy thank you so much Julia

1:13:30David Pierce:what do we have this week

1:13:32Brendan Carr:we have a lot we're gonna go from that vibe to a very different vibe like me being so like happy to me being so upset all in one all in one go so here's just some facts the United States is currently engaged in a war in Iran

1:13:50David Pierce:oh god

1:13:51Brendan Carr:We have to start here? We're going to start here. It does not appear that anyone knows why. It does not appear that anyone knows how this war will end, or if it should. And it does not appear that Donald Trump even knows if it's a war. You know what I mean? Like, the president's supposed to ask Congress to declare war, and they keep going back and forth, and he keeps saying it's a war. It's all very confusing and bad. I would say media coverage of this war is unlike, for example, the war in Iraq, which was my political awakening as a young college student. We're like, everyone I knew under the age of 500 knew that going to war in Iraq was a bad idea.

1:14:32Brendan Carr:And the media and the Democrats and everybody was like, we're doing it. Freedom fries. And then, you know, the war in Iraq. And this is very bad. I'm just putting this in a context. Right? I think what this administration wanted was a bunch of drum-pounding war coverage the way that the war in Iraq got a bunch of drum-pounding war coverage. And they're not getting it because, again, everyone's like, is it a war? And there's confusion. Why did we go to war? Confusion. How do we end the war? Confusion. This is all fine. I think this is driving Donald Trump crazy. So Brendan last week was at Mar-a-Lago where presumably he encountered Donald Trump.

1:15:10Brendan Carr:We actually have a clip of how Brendan describes Donald Trump. This is on a podcast he was on called Pod Force One. Can we just run this clip?

1:15:17Nilay Patel:He is, you know, the alpha in every single realm. That's true. In every single place all across the world.

1:15:24Brendan Carr:God, that sucks. That sucks so bad. First of all, just as an exercise for the listener, it's very easy to make a list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the alpha. Like my daughter's second grade classroom. It's almost impossible to be the alpha in that environment. An NFL locker room. I don't know about that. You're powerful if the people think you're powerful. This is the theory of true power.

1:15:47David Pierce:A PTA meeting.

1:15:49Brendan Carr:Yeah. You know what I mean? A Planned Parenthood board meeting. I don't think he's the most powerful person in that room. You can come up with an infinite list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the most powerful person in the room, not be the alpha room. Any room I'm in, honestly. It was there and I took it. I don't feel bad about it at all. so that's just how brendan encounters almost trump like he's just he's just there as a sycophant to suck up to the bus which is a bad thing for the primary speech regulator in the united states especially one as censorious as brendan but again just as like an exercise you can make it's like a pretty fun exercise to make a list of rooms in which any president would not be the alpha and i i'm just assuring you like a kindergarten would be one of those rooms like It's trivial to make this list.

1:16:38Brendan Carr:Okay. I bring this up because, you know, Brendan's at Mar-a-Lago where, you know, the alpha dog is telling him what to do.

1:16:44David Pierce:From the 14th hole. From the 14th hole. Yeah.

1:16:47Brendan Carr:And Trump puts on Truth Social this, like, classic rambling, out-of-his-mind Truth Social post where he says, Yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the fake news media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly stuck down an airport. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in particular, and other low-life, quote, papers and media actually want us to lose the war. They're terrible reporting. is the exact opposite of the actual facts. They are truly second-demanded people. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Trump stuff. He's mad at the newspapers saying the war is going poorly or that the United States is incurring any losses or that the United States has made errors in the war, like bombing a school.

1:17:21Brendan Carr:He doesn't like the coverage of the war. He's not getting Iraq war coverage. It's just not happening.

1:17:26David Pierce:Yep.

1:17:27Brendan Carr:How does Brendan react to this? He says, broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortion, also known as the fake news, have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest and they will lose their licenses if they do not. And he goes on to say, changing course in their own business interests since trusted legacy media is now falling at an all-time low, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:17:52David Pierce:This like rhymes with him going on Benny Johnson's podcast and telling ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, but it's actually somehow like a less veiled threat than that?

1:18:02Brendan Carr:This is an open threat. Yeah. And it's dumb in a staggering number of ways. First of all, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are not broadcasters. I don't know how else to say this. Their newspapers, they don't have broadcast licenses. To the extent that they make audio and video programming, they distribute them over the internet where Brendan has no authority whatsoever. So he's taking this Trump shot at the Wall Street Journal, which I will remind you is owned by Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times. and he's taking this Trump criticism of the Times and the Journal and turning it to the place where he does have authority, broadcast news organizations.

1:18:39Brendan Carr:He doesn't really even have authority over that. He has this idea that he can use the concept of a license renewal to affect the news coverage by saying you're doing news distortion. This is a totally unproven theory. Like, this hasn't come up ever. Like, a broadcast station hasn't had its license denied in like a long time. And if he does it, it's going to be a court case. It's unproven that he has this authority.

1:19:05David Pierce:But the threats do keep working. The threats do keep working. The chilling effect, as we have talked about many times, is to some extent the point and is working.

1:19:12Brendan Carr:Yep. And I'll just remind people the chilling effect is this concept in First Amendment law that just by threatening enforcement, you stop the speech from ever happening. Right? People are afraid that they'll be punished for the speech. They never say the thing out loud. And that is happening all over the place. The chilling effect is super real in the American media right now, especially for the broadcasters who keep running into Brennan Carr. This is why James Tallarico wasn't on The Colbert Show. Right. CBS was effectively chilled from that. In whatever way that that actually happened, the chilling effect worked there.

1:19:40Brendan Carr:They made the decision, but it was because they were afraid of enforcement. And I think we're going to see a lot of that in this upcoming election cycle. The chilling effect of the equal time rule is just going to be real for the broadcasters in this cycle. So now we have an extension to this. Brendan has this perceived power of the news distortion rule, and he's saying his interpretation of that is broadcasters must operate in the public interest. And what Donald Trump thinks is that the public interest is positive coverage of the war.

1:20:10David Pierce:Because that is patriotism. Because that is patriotism. Being a patriot means loving the war that your country is in.

1:20:17Brendan Carr:No matter why we started it or how it will end or how much it will cost or whether there's an end in sight. And again, just because my frame of reference is the war in Iraq, that's what they want. Right? They just want freedom for ice and chest-pounding coverage and absolute belief that there are weapons of mass destruction. All that stuff that happened in the early 2000s, which was a mistake. And to the extent that anyone's learned a lesson, that lesson has sort of been learned. And they're not getting that coverage. And so now Brendan is saying broadcasters must operate in the public interest, even if that means not critically covering a war that the majority of Americans do not like.

1:20:58Brendan Carr:So this is Brendan being very stupid, right? Like, I think he's out over his skis. I think he's misread the room. I'm going to punish a bunch of comedians for making fun of Donald Trump. You can pick up about half of Americans with that.

1:21:10David Pierce:It's also, like, low-ish stakes. Right.

1:21:12Brendan Carr:I don't think it's great. I think I will be outraged about the First Amendment. You know, lots of people will be outraged about the First Amendment. Stephen Colbert will get lots of views on YouTube because saying the thing is not allowed works. But you can pick up about half Americans by saying don't make fun of the president. Another party. When you get to don't do negative coverage of the war or the government will punish you, you've made like a critical miscalculation. You are so stupid, Brendan. and you've come all the way back around where Ron Johnson, who's a senator from my home state of Wisconsin, is on Fox News criticizing Brennan Carr.

1:21:50Brendan Carr:And the reason I'm bringing up Ron is, again, he's a senator from my home state of Wisconsin. Ron is a complete and total idiot. Like, he just is. Like, the people of Wisconsin know he's an idiot. Like, everyone knows he's an idiot. Like, this is just not a smart man. And, you know, for whatever reason he keeps getting elected. Like, Ron thought the Foxconn factory was a great idea. You know what I mean? Like, Like, yeah, it's wrong. And even people who vote for Ron are like, he's not the brightest bulb, but he's our guy. Like, that's the vibe around Ron, Wisconsin. Here's Senator Ron Johnson on Fox News after being asked about Brendan Carr threatening the broadcast licenses of news organizations that aren't sufficiently patriotic.

1:22:27Brendan Carr:I'm a big supporter of the First Amendment. I do not like the heavy hand of government, no matter who's wielding it. So, no, I'd rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible. And really, the federal government's role is to protect our freedoms, protect our constitutional rights.

1:22:45David Pierce:I mean, there's a rousing speech.

1:22:48Brendan Carr:It's not great. When you are so stupid and you're so, so addicted to the idea of censorship to please Donald Trump, you're out the dog. You've gotten on the other side of Ron Johnson. Like, I can't maybe just because I'm from Wisconsin. Like, I can't even describe how, like, totally out in the wilderness Brendan is this week. Like, no one thinks that what he's doing is the right thing to do, except maybe Donald Trump, because Donald Trump hates negative media coverage of his war. There's no coming back. There's not going to be positive coverage of the war. Like, the American people do not like this war.

1:23:25Brendan Carr:And I think Brendan is on the cusp of making a mistake here that kind of reveals just how hollow all of his threats actually are. because once he punishes a news organization for negative coverage of the war or says he'll do it or comes close to actually doing it, I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, including Senator Ron Johnson, are going to say, no, you've definitely gone too far. But roll it back.

1:23:49David Pierce:I mean, so much of this is, I think, back to the thing we've talked about before, that a lot of what people like Brendan Carr say publicly is for an audience of one, and that one is Donald Trump, as what Trump wants to hear and what resonates with the public get further and further apart, that becomes a more dangerous game, right? Because like you said, for a long time, you could come out and say bonkers things that lots of people think were bonkers, but that lots of people would agree with. But when you run into these things, and I think the Kimmel thing was a really interesting kind of early example of this, that are, that was bipartisan against what the Trump administration wanted to do.

1:24:30David Pierce:Like the backlash to that was swift and it was across the spectrum. And so when you go out and you say he's the alpha in every room, like that is for Donald Trump. That is so that he will see it. That is 100 % what that is for because it will score you points with him because he likes hearing people say nice things about him on television. Like there's been all these really interesting stories about people getting Trump's phone number. Have you seen all this? That you can just, with two minutes of work, get Trump's phone number and he answers and you can call him. And he says a bunch of nonsense and people print it because they think it's cool that he answered their phone call.

1:25:03David Pierce:Right. Like that is fundamentally how you win points with Trump is like access. Right. And so but then as as that move gets more and more politically problematic. This gets to be a harder game to play.

1:25:20Brendan Carr:Trump is going to push you out on the ledge and Brendan is out on the ledge. Yes. And I'll actually contrast this. You know, The Verge is, like, vast. So, you know, this week we covered DLSS5, and we covered Samsung canceling the trifold. And Tina Nguyen, our DC reporter, she went to a Pentagon press briefing this week. Yeah. It's a big place, baby. The Verge.com. Yep. And we're trying to, like, figure out why. Like, why did the Pentagon, which famously kicked the traditional press corps out, invite Tina? And the answer is they wanted her to see Pete Hegseth take good questions. Huh. Right? They were interested in showing that performance off.

1:26:01Brendan Carr:And they had invited some senior traditional reporters and Hegseth was basically like, I hate you, why are you here? And then, you know, the front row was like Newsmax and the Mike Lindell show. Like some really weird stuff was in the front row. And they wanted Tina there for her to see, like these press briefings are real. Because it's very important that any government, especially our government, like, do that show for the press. Like, I was this guy, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Suna Pichai's politicians. They're not actually politicians. No. Like, real politicians never shut up. They're everywhere all the time making their case to their constituents because you can fire them.

1:26:40David Pierce:Yeah.

1:26:41Brendan Carr:Like, Joe Biden didn't show up and he got fired. Straightforward is that. Like, he just wasn't accessible. The number of CEOs I've talked to on Decoder who are like, we couldn't get a hold of anyone in the Biden administration, so whatever. like at least Trump picks up the phone like that's a real dynamic I think it's a real dynamic for any number of voters like where was this guy? He just disappeared and then we showed up he was like looked old like we fired him politicians get fired and so you see the government is just like constantly talking and they have to earn the respect of not a captive press Brendan doesn't understand he's undoing the thing that gives them legitimacy with this stuff and I really do think Trump has pushed him on this ledge and he can't back off it because Trump is the alpha in every single room that he's in anyway Brendan I've once again called you a coward as loudly and as clearly as I can I'll do it one more time Brendan I think you're a coward if you want to come on this show and defend these moves defend your relentless attacks on the first amendment or come on Decoder and tell me about your decision making process happy to have you on you know where I'm at I think the audience wants you to come on and just a reminder we're hiring so if you'd like to be a producer on the virtual house you can submit your resume as always that's been Brendan Carr as a dummy America's favorite podcast within a podcast

1:27:49David Pierce:I'm just saying Brendan And if you go on Decoder and not the Vergecast, you won't get custom theme music. That's just something you should think about. We'll play the music. All right. Let's actually, you mentioned DLSS. So for my first lightning round item, let's do DLSS. Sure. You, I know, have been practicing to describe to the people what DLSS is. And if I'm being completely honest, I'm not fully confident in my ability to do it. So can you describe what DLSS is? and then I will describe why it has caused such a ruckus this week.

1:28:20Brendan Carr:Everyone loves it when I describe gamer technology. It's where I live. It's truly the heart of my expertise. How does this apply to Madden? That's what I got for you. Actually, you can make some arguments. Have you ever wanted Madden players to be even hotter than they are? All right, DLSS is actually very clever. I think what NVIDIA did with DLSS and the entire idea behind it is very clever. Basically, if you have an NVIDIA graphics card, your game can render frames at lower resolution and then pass it through DLSS, which uses AI to upscale the games. So you don't have to take the full power of the graphics card to render its, you know, 140 frames per second at high resolution.

1:28:59Brendan Carr:You can get the performance out, and then DLSS upscales the graphics to higher resolution. And this is more efficient in a lot of different ways. It allows you to get higher resolution, higher frame rates on lower end graphics card. Again, I think it's a very clever use of the technology. and until yesterday was not the world's most controversial thing NVIDIA had ever done.

1:29:17David Pierce:Yeah, so then yesterday NVIDIA rolled out DLSS 5 and basically framed it as an AI filter to make everything look better. And this is not some, you know, big future thing that's going to make games look better. This is not like a new version of the Unreal Engine. This is saying all your games look like shit and we're going to use AI to make them look great. And I'm not, really overstating the way that it was presented very much in that. So this comes out, and it comes out in a really interesting way. There was a Digital Foundry video that I think a lot of people recognize as bought and paid for, and Digital Foundry is a really important voice in the gaming community.

1:29:57David Pierce:That made a lot of people feel bad about all this stuff, but also there was this sense that NVIDIA is just railroading all of our games with AI, whether you like it or not. And there is also next to that the fact that a lot of the stuff just doesn't look very good. Yeah. You've seen a lot of the same examples I have, I'm sure. They're like, what if there just were no shadows and everything looked kind of like a like a soap opera from the 1990s? Is that what you want?

1:30:23Brendan Carr:Yeah. Or what if we upscale faces and we literally change the way these characters that you've come to know and love look?

1:30:29David Pierce:Right. That people made on purpose to look like that.

1:30:32Brendan Carr:People, like artists have designed.

1:30:33David Pierce:Yeah.

1:30:34Brendan Carr:And by change the way they look, what they mean is like give them Instagram model face.

1:30:38David Pierce:Mm-hmm.

1:30:39Brendan Carr:It's very odd. Like they've all been Yassified in real ways. And again, I just want to point out, in particular, the coach models in Madden are very bad. And I would accept a fully Yassified like Matt LaFleur in Madden.

1:30:51David Pierce:Matt LaFleur was like really hot. You see what I'm saying? Like... To be fair, Matt LaFleur is a good looking man. So he's like, he's going fine.

1:30:58Brendan Carr:And you could turn that up to 11 with the power of DLSS 5. I just put it out there. I think the really interesting thing here is, yes, NVIDIA is just like the big bully. They're doing whatever they want. AI in general in video games is hot button and controversial. DLSS kind of wasn't. No. It's DLSS 5. Right. Like, there's been criticism of it. And, like, certainly people have, like, lock-in concerns because the developers code for DLSS. Like, whatever. whatever but the idea that it had the same sort of slop concerns as ai not really in the mix until dlss5 and the reason is because it's the first time the graphics card is imposing taste on a video game so you're talking about shadows going away you know that's iphone hdr like the phone

1:31:45David Pierce:adopted a look this is right next to the what is a photo question it's right next to what is a photo

1:31:50Brendan Carr:So it's right next to the iPhone has a look and people don't like the look. And we've talked for years about how we prefer the pixels look. And like now there's a tone mapping control. And do you like process zero and highlight? Like cameras have looks. They have aesthetic judgments embedded in them. And your graphics card playing a video game should not. Right. The aesthetic judgment should come from the developer. And to whatever extent that you want to monkey with the settings should come from you. Your graphics card sitting in the middle should not be like, and everyone has huge boobs, which is kind of like where we're going with this.

1:32:19Nilay Patel:Yeah.

1:32:19Brendan Carr:And I don't think NVIDIA saw that as a problem until the rush of feedback. And to be honest, the frankly hilarious memes of DLSS5 on and off that have been circulating over the internet this week.

1:32:31David Pierce:The memes are very good. And Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, responded to the criticism of this at GTC, their big conference this week. Basically, well, he said, I'll just read this to you. He says, well, first of all, they're completely wrong, which I will just say in the annals of how to respond to backlash is not the right answer.

1:32:52Brendan Carr:Particularly gamer backlash.

1:32:54David Pierce:Yeah. You're wrong doesn't usually work. People don't go, oh, you're right. Great call. I am wrong.

1:32:59Brendan Carr:You don't just run off against the gaming community and be like, you suck and you're stupid. Yeah. You'll take my slop and you'll like it, gamers. Yeah. Very confusing. I'm not sure why he said that or took that approach. The point he was trying to make in ham-fisted fashion was that the developers are in control of DLSS 5. So if they choose to use the DLSS 5 SDK and enable it, they have some control over what it looks like at the end of the process. And maybe they were just showing the most dramatic examples for the purpose of a keynote. But first of all, you're completely wrong. It's just not the way to send that message.

1:33:32Brendan Carr:Especially when you're in video and it's getting ever harder to buy one of your video cards to play video games because you're selling them all to AI companies that people hate.

1:33:41David Pierce:Yeah. I mean, again, it goes back to there is this fundamental disconnect between the stuff that is being built with AI inside of it and the experience people are having with these tools.

1:33:52Brendan Carr:I will say if you'll sell me DLSS 5 to Yasify David on Riverside, which is what we used to make the bird chess, I'll take it.

1:33:58David Pierce:I'm just like, if I were like, you know, 60 to 70 % hotter, this podcast would be unstoppable.

1:34:05Brendan Carr:This is like, these are my two theories. If I could remember everyone's name, Politically Unstoppable, and if David was just hot, can you imagine? Unstoppable. All right.

1:34:16David Pierce:We're going to do one more each.

1:34:17Brendan Carr:This is how we end up in the manosphere. We're like, I'm like, David, have you just had abs?

1:34:22David Pierce:I'm going to start looks maxing and you're going to regret a lot of things that we've done on this show.

1:34:27Brendan Carr:David, I do. And I've been meaning to tell you this for quite some time. I think you should hit yourself in the face with a hammer every day.

1:34:35David Pierce:weirdly you have said that to me before but in a really different context uh what's your next

1:34:40Brendan Carr:lightning round all right i'm gonna do two i'm gonna do two at once there it's double debunk for my second lightning round uh and just two headlines by our reporter robert hart who covers ai and culture he's a great science reporter uh one headline is this is not a fly uploaded to a computer and a second headline is chat gbt did not cure a dog's cancer okay i'm i'm familiar with

1:34:59David Pierce:one of those things, but not the other.

1:35:01Brendan Carr:Well, if you spend any time on the Everything App X, you know, the world famous Everything App X, the amount of wild AI hype that gets laundered into like the SEO factories of the world into outrageous headlines that have nothing to do with even the claims on X, that cycle is alive and well. Most famously, this is me saying they did not do robot surgery on a banana.

1:35:23David Pierce:Yep. Okay.

1:35:25Brendan Carr:This is happening with AI at scale because the hype machine is out of control. so one of them is there is a research group called eon that just put out a post being like we have uploaded a fly to a computer this is what it says and this goes everywhere there's headlines like the seo machine takes off you know people are reposting it for class it's like nuts like just out of control and basically their evidence is like uh a video of a computer fly like i don't it's buzzing now it's so robert looks at this we look at it and robert runs around starts talking of researchers like could you do this look at the evidence they provided is this real um by the way the research group in question the claim we think this fly is conscious in a limited sense it can smell see taste etc and he described the system as kind of an mvp or minimal viable product of an uploaded animal these are not words that make sense you cannot have an mvp of life you know like i love product manager speak decoder is basically just like what do you mean product managers and like this is nothing um so robert goes and talks to a bunch of researchers the researchers are like this makes no sense one of them points out to robert and this is a real quote also the fly does not fly which in the grand scheme of what makes that thing a fly

1:36:42David Pierce:it's like very important uh-huh so he goes back to the company and says i have all these

1:36:49Brendan Carr:researchers saying you're full of shit. And the company concedes to Robert, this is not a perfect replica of a fly. I don't think of uploading an animal as a binary concept describing, quote, different levels of upload and admitting that we don't know how much biology is required to capture the information that matters. So just full walkback, full and total walkback. Robert, one reporter just went and said, does this make sense to like a bunch of researchers? The researchers all said no. Robert went back to the company and said, no one thinks this makes any sense. And they're like, yep, we didn't do this.

1:37:22Brendan Carr:We did not upload a fly to a computer. It's uploading an, uploading a fly to a computer is a spectrum. That's the answer. Nonsense. It's the friends we made along the way. Okay, second one. Chajubi did not cure a dog's cancer. And we'll link to Hank Green here. Hank Green made a video about this. Also a really good debunk. The funniest part of this video is he tried to make YouTube short, but it was too long for a short. So he just put it and regular YouTubing called it along, which I think is hilarious. That's very good. Anyway, there's, you know, Silicon Valley bro says that he used ChachiBT to come up with a vaccine for his dog's cancer.

1:38:00Okay.

1:38:02Brendan Carr:Okay.

1:38:03David Pierce:Robert looks into this. Oh, this one I did see. I do remember this.

1:38:05Brendan Carr:This one's never here because it's a dog. You know, it's like the local news couldn't resist this one. Robert looks into this. I'm just going to read the quote. Not only was Rosie not cured of cancer, it's not clear that the vaccine was responsible for the improvement. The personalized treatment was administered alongside another form of immunotherapy known as a checkpoint inhibitor designed to help the immune system target tumors, making it difficult to know if the vaccine had any effect at all. So, like, you just don't know. Like, just straightforwardly, this is not a real test. You don't know.

1:38:33David Pierce:So, it's like we did this thing and also gave them the solution to their problem. Who knows which one it was?

1:38:39Brendan Carr:So, we just don't know. And then here's just the other line from Robert. the vaccine itself was not generated by a chatbot chat dbt did not design or create rosie's treatment human researchers did at most the chatbot served as a research assistant helping parse medical literature just a full debunk of this and this one went wild everywhere what a perfect ai story because the thing that actually might have happened is very cool and

1:39:06David Pierce:very exciting and like a genuinely exciting use of technology this helped a researcher do better research and solve problems. No, a layperson did better research. Sure, fine. Kick ass. If that is the truth, great. Why do we have to go pretend that it cured cancer?

1:39:25Brendan Carr:Because everyone wants it to be true. And you can farm a lot of clout on X, the Everything app, by saying things people want to be true.

1:39:33David Pierce:Likes for days, man.

1:39:35Brendan Carr:Anyway, poor Robert is just on the debunk case now. This is what he does. We'll put those links up. You can read them. but just be careful over there.

1:39:43David Pierce:This is what we mean, by the way, when we say Neelai just sends people TikToks at 8.30 p.m. It's just like, The Verge's newsroom exists to figure out if what Neelai saw in his timeline is real. Journalism is a process.

1:39:54Brendan Carr:What we sell here is rigor. And like the first type of rigor is like, is this true?

1:39:59David Pierce:Yeah. Weirdly relevant question in these times.

1:40:02Brendan Carr:It turns out that rigor does not exist on X the Everything app.

1:40:06David Pierce:That's very true. All right. My last one, and I think this is an appropriate place to end is that Meta continues to do the funniest possible things with the Metaverse. So we've been tracking all the ways in which the Metaverse is not working for a very long time. Meta announced a while ago that it was splitting Horizon Worlds and its VR efforts, which looked like a bad sign for the Metaverse. Then it announced that it was going to shut down VR Horizon Worlds, which looked like a bad sign for the Metaverse. And then it announced it was doing a bunch of layoffs in its reality labs, which looked like a bad sign for the metaverse.

1:40:40David Pierce:And then meta put a date on the actual end of the VR Horizon Worlds experience. It was June 15th was the news this week. That is going to be the end of VR in like the end of the VR version of Horizon Worlds. Everybody hears this and immediately this generates a new round of headlines saying meta is bailing on the metaverse. This like became a narrative this week. We've been tracking this for forever. There was actually no new information except a date. but everybody saw this as oh meta is winding down the metaverse is meta going to change its name back to facebook what is this company is is completely giving up so meta does what i can only assume is a complete reaction to this narrative and decides it's not going to shut down the vr members after all uh this is this news just came out today thursday as we're recording this and um in an ama on instagram because this is how meta disseminates news uh andrew bosworth the CTO of the company, said that they're going to keep the existing VR worlds and that it would be available to download, quote, for the foreseeable future.

1:41:44David Pierce:And what he said was, the fans who reached out like yourself, who really care about it, are the reason that they're going to keep it around. I would like to say, A, there are none of those people or else this thing would still exist. They exist.

1:41:57Brendan Carr:They're there to trade crypto and try to have AI girlfriends.

1:41:59David Pierce:Sure. You were in the video we did a while back, right? Exploring it. And it was just a bunch of

1:42:06Brendan Carr:children it was so odd it was it was such a failure from the jump alex heath remember you remember alex heath was like one of the first people a quest pro i still have a quest pro sitting over there um and this was like the embodied internet when mark was going on with metaverse and they were doing all the demos and like i would just remember that dude came back from his first briefing and was like it sucks and i was like you know alex you can just say it just say it just say it sucks yeah it's it was always very bad it was um but it is it is now

1:42:36David Pierce:the funniest possible outcome because Meta is now forced to continue to support this bad product because if they kill it, everyone will think they've given up on the metaverse. And they cannot appear to have given up on the metaverse because the company is called Meta. And that is hysterical.

1:42:51Brendan Carr:It's very good. Meta also doesn't know what AI is for. They keep hiring and firing thousands of people and spending millions of dollars to make... Talk about not having a good consumer AI product. What's your plan, dude?

1:43:02David Pierce:Yeah. Also, by the way, the Ray-Ban Meta stuff running straight at that same problem. There are glass hole murmurings starting to bubble up in a lot of places about how to feel about these glasses.

1:43:14Brendan Carr:People do not like seeing those in public. Mark Zuckerberg's trust deficit is really starting to come to the fore here. I actually want to call out, the one product they had that people loved was Supernatural, the fitness app in VR. And they shut that down. It's like the existing content is still there, but they're not making new content. They fire all the instructors that people really liked. V wrote a great story about that community, how mad they are. And then this week, I want to call out, she interviewed Lena Kahn, who, as Biden's FTC chair, tried to stop that acquisition, sued to stop it.

1:43:46Brendan Carr:She was way out over her skis, and I whenever knew, she was just trying to push the envelope. Like, the government should stop more acquisitions. And her theory of the case was always, if this market is not competitive, it will die. Right? She's like, competition leads to better outcomes. Which, by the way, again, if you listen to the Birch House, like, my main political viewpoint is, like, competition's good for the economy, and government's huge regulations are bad. So V interviewed Lena Khan this week. Our headline is Lena Khan was right. And there's a lot of comments there being like, well, it was such a bad business, Meta couldn't keep it running.

1:44:13Brendan Carr:The problem is the market for that stuff was never competitive. Supernatural only had to do whatever served Meta's interests. And Meta, you can see, is strategically confused about everything. If Supernatural was a business that ran on the Quest and the Quest was confused, they might have gone to the Vision Pro. They might have gone to a cheaper, different VR headset. The VR headset technology is basically commodity at this point. Right? Like, Meta's selling the Quest 2 for$1.99 right now. They could have made their own hardware. I mean, I think they're trying to blow it out to shut it down. But, like, it's$1.99 right now.

1:44:55Brendan Carr:Like, Supernatural as a company could have done a million things to better serve its audience and its community that now feels completely abandoned that knew that they would get abandoned the second Meta bought them. So there's this raging argument or comments about no one ever wants VR and blah, blah, blah. And I think that's all pointed at Meta. And the argument really is, well, you know what happens when the acquisition happens. I know what happens to a company when Google buys it. I know what happened. I know what happened to Dark Sky when Apple bought it. You know, who also figured out? The people who made Dark Sky, who just quit Apple to start a new weather app.

1:45:29David Pierce:Acme Weather, great app, big fan.

1:45:30Brendan Carr:But they were like, we don't want to do this anymore. We're getting crushed.

1:45:34David Pierce:We would like to go back to making a weather app.

1:45:36Brendan Carr:Yep.

1:45:36David Pierce:Yeah.

1:45:37Brendan Carr:And everyone knew what would happen to Supernatural when Meta bought it. So it's true. Lena Kahn, she pushed the boundary of the law. And the argument was not great and she lost. But she was trying to avoid an outcome that everyone could see clearly that happened immediately. Yeah. And my only point is people loved Supernatural. The theme of this episode is when consumers love something, you can get away with a lot. People loved that app. They loved that experience. You can go read that story. V wrote it. It is one of my favorite stories of the year so far. It's just a community of people who are sad about a virtual reality fitness app.

1:46:11Brendan Carr:Those are the Verge keywords. That's us loving technology, right? Yeah. And that company never had a chance to take that and turn it into something real. Right. They were subsumed into the meta-borg. They were subservient to total strategy confusion. And now it's dead. and like I think the quest 2 is at$1.99 because the meta has blown them out the door and they're going to focus on the rebounds I think you're probably right and yeah go read the Lena Khan piece go read the other stuff it's all on the site it's all very good

1:46:38David Pierce:it's good stuff the Lena Khan interview is good she continues to be a smart person who knows what she's doing I would say alright we should get out of here we've gone way over way over this is what we do I blame Allison she's not here anymore so we're going to blame Allison for this not Ron Johnson who I would also like to blame for this. Two bits of plugging before we go. Well, three, actually. Number one, apply to be our producer, voxmedia.com slash jobs. Come help us make the show shorter. Number two, version history this week is the episode about the vocoder. It is with the band Chromio. It is as much fun as we have ever had making this show.

1:47:16David Pierce:I think you're going to really like it. Charlie Harding, Vergecast intern, hosted that with me, helped me figure out the story of the vocoder with Chromio. We had a blast it's really good episode um a listen to the interview that neil i did on decoder with jim lenzone from yahoo which i thought was fascinating um they are what a weird company to do weird company interesting innovative 30 year old internet ideas very fun um who's on

1:47:41Brendan Carr:decoder next week it's a little up in the air okay if the ceo of superhuman the grammarly guy shows up on friday which i think he's gonna do so as you're listening to this i will know then that one will be a decoder next week. If not, it'll be somebody else. But as of right now, they say he's coming up.

1:47:59David Pierce:Again, we keep saying out loud that Shishir has to do this. So he's going to do it.

1:48:04Brendan Carr:As of today, he said he's going to do it. By the time you're listening to this, I will know. I'm excited.

1:48:09David Pierce:And if you want to get in touch, the email is vergecastattheverge.com. The hotline is 866-VERGE-11. If you want all of our podcasts ad-free, including all the ones we just talked about, subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe. it's a good website we like it quite a bit and I think you will too The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network this show was produced by Eric Gomez Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk we will see you next time Neelai take a stab right now

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