Paramount Warner Brothers Merger Lawsuit

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Today, we've got the first of a two part series on the systems that run the world I'm talking with Bark Butler, the CTO of Proton a company that makes private and secure productivity software It's impossible to create a back dooor that can only be used by the good guys No company is going to go to jail for you Often the response is, oh, if you change the legal foundation here, we will leave. Yeah. How real is that It's dead serious. With all due respect to Swiss authorities and everybody else, I think it would be suicidal. to continue down this path subscribe where get your podcast. This series is presented by Comcast Business If you sit in the sun, you may just get burned But some people are willing to take that chance. There is this certain degree of nihilism of like, oh, well the world is bad anyway, why wouldn't I just also get a tan? Tan maxing That's this week on Explained to mee Find new episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Vverse Cast Flagship podcast of tradeecrets. I'm your friend David Pierce Nil upceells here. Hello sir Hey, how's going How are you? That was tired, you okay I just I just had this wave of like I spent the early part of my career at the Vverge explaining patents to everyone through Apple and we're like fifteen years in and I know I'm going to spend the next part of this journey explaining trade secrets to people. It's kind We're gonna do it. Yeah. But that was that wayait. like The realization had not occurred to me until just this second And we're gonna emotionally process that together as a family over the next ninety minutes. You really had like a literal visceral reaction to the phrase trade secrets. J that was really great. We did copyright, we did patents. know We're still doing copyright. I don't know if we actually did copyright. We tried to do copright really hard. We've reopened copyright in a meaningful way Yeah, we're certainly doing it again Lot to talk about today. We have a bunch of Apple newews. We have Apple versus Op AI, which happened last week, but we haven't really had a chance to talk about it. Lots to get into there. We have a bunch of gadgets, there's some One plus stuff, there's teasers just everywhere for everything I think we should start with the Apple betas, which came out this week I am desperate to know you as America's most steadfast avoider of MacOS Tahoe haveave you upgraded? Are we on Golden Gate now? It takes a lot for me to upgrade my Macs. They're both production machines. I should upgrade the MacBook No, which I bought for no reason I will do that. I just literally don't ever use a computer. I own it for no reason That's cute. That's what it is. It's a charermmagacie that I have. It is very charming. Every now and again, I have to charge it, you know So the Macs are hard for me because I don't I don't like screing with the production setups, especially this Mac The podcast backac, we justtash that one I did update the phone which loogically makes no sense because the phone is the thing you take everywhere with you in case of emergency. I was going to say, not an important device your smartphone. Yeah, the I should have been upgraded the No first, but I updated the phone. I'm on the Siri beta It's good. I think some of the animations in IOS twenty seven can get toned down There's a lot of flipping around the screen for no reason. I know there' Sir in particular, is it's always doing stuff the new Siri. Look at me. L all the time. It's just like not what I need. Apple always tones that stuff down as they get towards release. So take that with a grain of salt works and I actually think this screen reading is interestnteresting I don't know if it's good yet. I know every single person with an Android phone is going to tell you that Jeem and I could do this forever vastly more useful and it is I agree with all of those things. I just Apple was so far behind And then with the power of Google They have managed to catch up in some meaningful way. Y Have you been using it I have. I've been using it since the first developer beta. but you're way more not generally recommend I've had a really interesting experience with Siri AI in particular, which is that has felt sort of like all of these new LLM based smart home systems in that The ceiling of what they can do has gone way up, right? Like there David Amel wrote a great piece for us about the new CAAI and did the thing where I think his example was basically like, I'm looking at a Spotify page I know they're going on tour. goo figure out when they're going on tour and add the ticket sales date to my calendar. And that's like a multi step AI process that I think is ripped basically directly from a Google demo, which is very funny. But it works. that thing works. The ceiling of Siri has gone way way kind of worked for him. He had to say of worked. He had to say magic words in the right order. David's piece is great, by the way. Also, shout out, David's joining us for like six weeks or so. Yeah, while Eson is out on leave I currage everyone to read that piece because it is true. The ceiling is higher if you issue the right incantation at the right time in the system understands it in the right way You can in fact, trigger a multi step agentic workflow Yes, Neat And then if you don't, it's like I don't know what you're talking about So ceiling super high Bic things that Siri used to do very reliably So far, I have found some of them to be actually substantially less reliable. So like a thing I do all the time If I'm out walking the dog or in the car or whatever and I need I have a reminder or just something I want to write down in such a way that I will get back to it. I use Apple rememinders for that all the time. It's just like my inbox of stuff on my phone So I'm constantly saying like, you know, remind me in three hours to switch the laundry. Though I did this morning remind me this afternoon to check the dry event. Like that's just a thing that happened this morning because I need to check the dry e vents. and That is worse. is it is noticeably worse than it was in the past because And we've talked about this many times, right?ike It used to be all of these systems were essentially a series of really elaborate if then statements And they didn't work for anything except the things that they worked for, but the things that they worked for, they worked for And so you learn to understand the boundaries of the thing. And if was all I needed to do is turn on my lights, it would turn on my lights. It wouldn't do anything else, but it would turn on the lights I think we're doing a little bit of throwing that stuff out in order to do more complicated stuff with Siri also And so I've found like it's It still seems to set timers fine. That so far has gone very well But it does things like constantly ask me Did you say this or did you say this And they haven't yet solved the it needs to start immediately listening again to get your answers. have to I have to dig my phone out and press the button again to make it work. So it's just like all these little things, all the basic interactions of Siri. worse The abilities of Siri are vastly better. Maybe I I h you with the baby. And we're in the beta, and it's like not fair to overjudge it and that's sure We'll see what happens in a few months when it comes out for real I u that plplacement of the predictable deterministic system. with the vastly potentially more powerful stchastic parrot system right Yeah, you can see those edges everywhere all the time. I'll give an example from a totally different product category. We have a Cadillac thestic, a Cadalillac EV It had Google Assistant in it. Like the whole thing runs Google built in and there's no car playay which that The only thing that happens in the Facebook group for this car is someone being like, whereere's car playay the only thing people talk about. So they replace Google Assistant with Gemini And okay, here's my favorite example of this I could probably write a PhD thesis about this o specific button in the car. doesn't have a physical garage door open and closeed button. There's not one in the headlineer or whereatever It's a button on the screen So it's in it's in the car software, right? Right You push the button on the screen and it opens and closes ac crosshore. With Google Assistant, I could just say out loud as we are backing out of the driveway, hey, Google close the garage door. And this is Until you've been so lazy that as you are literally backing out of the driveway, you are no longer pressing a button. you're just 's saying clos the garage,'re like I'm king of the world. Like I have a butler now. Like whatever that feeling is, ammazing And I have asked Executives at GM. I've ask the executives at Google My Google just went off The garage is already closed, Google I knew it would happen. That's full like ten seconds too. We're doing great over here guys. Anyway, so I've asked executives at Google, I've asked executives at GM. I've asked Dieter. What's happening when I say close the ger. Is that Google assistant going to the class? byy the way I askedeter just to annoy you him. He's like, we don't talk about working anyway. But is that going to Google Assistant and a clloud Google Home knows about the gowsor openers in that. Or is this thing locally pushing the button on the screen because What it should do is just push the button on the screen Okay, they upgrade to Gemini which Theoretically it' like an MCP server inside the car Right? Like when you when you would tell Gemini to change the, you know, the climate control, it literally pops up a bub that's like connecting to climate system. like Yes it wants you to believe that it's like operating Now Gemini is like, I don't have permission do that. It's not secure enough And I'm like, dude, I'm in the car. I am the security here. L we're good. L hereere I am. I can see the button. Anybody in this car can push that button. They can just reach forward and push that button But it's definitely going to the cloud. and it's saying, I cannot accept a cloud command to open. And that's just the brittleeness. Like we've replaced a system that should be able to do all the things you're expected to do with a a newly architected system that is simulating what it should be able to do or what it used to be able to do. but actually needs to find all kinds of new pathways to do it. And I Si The garage wrippon example is really stupid because I just can push the button At the end of the day it doesn't matter That experience. and then having the new Sira for a few days. is exactly the same experience Right? The AIs want to tell you they can do anything at all and they might have the capability But in reality, the barriers and roadblocks to actually executing are all over the place I think that's right. And in a funny way, it is notot all that different from the very beginning early experience people had with Siri like a generation ago, where there's a set of things that you're like, oh my God, I can't believe it could do that. That is like sincerely moments of that is incredible. and Siri has done for me some personal context stuff where it knows what's on my phone and it can find things in my email and it can find things in like I can be like, oh, what' the what's the door code for the Airbnb I'm staying at this weekend? And it can it just goes and finds that and tells it to me. And that is incredible. That's a liter thing I did and it worked and it's awesome B. But for every one of those I say remind me to check the dryer vents and it goes, did you say callall the Laura friends? Yeah No, I didn't I didn't. I super didn't, Sly what are we do? And so I think the risk here as always with Sory is going to be that people run into the edges without understanding what those edges are, right? whichich is like when when All these things first came out, it was pretty easy to understand what it couldn't and couldn't do very quickly. And I actually think in a certain way The answer to what is this thing good and bad at is vastly more complicated now in part because it's good at so many more things. It's good at so many more things, but it's not predictably good at anything And that's just a weird one Like there there are, um, There are examples of this are just again, across ecosystems where're like search my I'm late turning in the draft of the decoder book. So bump Chest Siri, like go find this contract and see how late I had and how much trouble I in. And it like did it. you know, like the answer is I'm not under arrest yet, but everyone is very worried about the timeline We're gonna to get there. Syri didn't say that, by the way. It was just like you're late Good at that when it can be good at that R when there's like a string of text you can go look for or it's indexed all the stuff in the right way. And then there's I think Apple's going to run into this much more than Google does. A bunch of Google AI technology doing weird stuff P for the course. Apple shipping this serory to millions upon millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, and it being rough around the edges is a danger zone. And I think that's probably why they waited so long But I'm very curious to see how that broad response is because enough of it is different And you mentioned, you know, a generation ago with Alexa. People very quickly figured out what it was good at and what it wasn't good at, and they stopped trying to do anything else, right And I have no idea where that boundary is for this serory once you know, hundreds of millions of people have it. Yeah,, it's going to be really interesting. and especially given all of the work that's happening with A intents and stuff. like I think more than usual, But The fate of Siri AI is going to actually be about developers because if Instagram can figure out how to plug into Syri in a way that is predictable and useful in that way changes things. I don't know that I have inst will never do that Probably Instagram doesn't have an iPad That's okay fair But if Uber can figure out how to do it in a way that's practical and useful, such that I can say, you know, hey, s here, get me an Uber and it works semi reliably Like you can start to turn those things on for people in a way that becomes habit forming really fast. So'm actually I'm still optimistic about what SAI could be, but it is I have been frustrated in the ways that it has actually backtracked in some small ways. Yeah. David's againain, David Mel's piece is great. The thing that jumped out to me, actually saw David in the office who talk about it for a minute. App developers on IOS are more excited about this than you would expect. Because small app developers know that people never open their apps. Oh, that's interesting. So their hope is that if by integrating with SiriAI, it will surface their apps more often, they will get more usage somethingomething good will happen That's a really interesting point. That's a good theory. I hope that pans out. A lot of optimism in ecosystem there. Indeed. You know where there's not optimism How's that first a segue in the Apple and open AI legal teams these days. We should talk about this lawsuit, right? It's a week old. I still feel like we need to talk about it because I'm still wrapping my head around it. Basically The short version of this lawsuit is Apple sued Open AI. for allegedly basically creating an elaborate system by which Apple employees would quit their job and take material confidential information to open A e. There are a couple of specific people named in the suit. There are a couple of open AI adjacent companies like IO Johny I's hardware startup U named in the suit But the idea is essentially there are bunch of people and a bunch of ways in which hundreds of Apple employees stole information from Apple and took it to open AI I feel like the caveat here is this is the first filing in a lawsuit. there will be presumably much time and much discovery over the next period of time, but You and I've both read this lawsuit. What do What do you make of what Apple is alleging here This is right I'ller you the big sigh when we talk about trade secret law. Yeah The first thing that is absolutely important to say, every single one of these big tech companies has realized complaint in the lawsuit a thing to be written for the general public. audience for this complaint is not the judge, it's not the jury. It's you and me and everybody listening and everybody who might read it and everybody who might write a blog post or do a dramatic re enactment on TikTok. They have all figured out this first step The complaint is a narrative and they all need to sell a narrative. The Department of Justice and the Biden administration figured out that their antitrust complaint against Apple needed to be a narrative Yeah. And we have talked to those officials about specific thing in that specific way because everybody understands that technical requirements of the law are irrelevant to the vibes around lawsuits It's just the wayake goes So Apple wrote this to be read. It is worth reading. It's a fun read It's it's heist movie. Yeah. They lay out the they lay out how a heist was takaking place in specific with a bunch of characters, Tang Tan, I think is the main character. Mark German at Blomberg has some reporting and says even at Apple, he was known for playing fast and loose and the quote is flying through close to the sun Interesting. which is which is pretty good. There's other folks in there. There's a guy, you're like literally connected to the servers when He had left Apple and was downloading all the stuff And then the problem is the story can be whatever the story is. and it is certain that open Ae will craft a compelling narrative in return when they file their reply and it'll look something like Apple is late to AI. to be late catch up, They're trying to stop us the winners. likeike you know what they're going to say and they're going to write it all out. So we have to wait for that And then in the middle of that the actual technical requirements of the law And I'll just make another open eye comparison. We had Musk versus Altman. and that stretch for what nine, ten months from the first complaints being filed. a jury trial and then what happened The Statute of limitations had most of the case thrown out Right the technical requirements of the law is actually what won that case for now in like big, meaningful ways. There's other parts of it where they won in the substance But it was a statute of limitations, got most of the case around Okay, like this is we just have to be put ourselves in this framework The thing that is just like particularly funny to me about this is Apple established the boundaries of copyright law and tech against Microsoft in the nineties and two thousands with like the famous look and feel lawsuit. where they tried to copyright the way MacroS looked. and they sued Microsoft for having Windows copy it They sort of lost and they sort of won, but they mostly lost. ight? L Windows looks like the Mac Sure does. Yeah. That's the way it goes. And when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, Microsoft paid a bunch of money to Apple and they tossed out all these claims and they said, we're settling this and moving on because this is dumb Okay Well A bunch of years later, Samsung made a phone that looked an awful lot like the iPhones And Apple filed a bunch of patent lawsuits against Samsung, against Motorola. Everyone except Google, by the way. They did not want to be in a fight with Google over this stuff. They filed lawsuits against the OEMs,. and They fought those to the death. And at one point they were kind of losing And Tim Cook was at a code conference and I literally asked him, Like from the audience, there's video of me asking, whyy are you doing this? And he said, I think the patent licensing schemes for three G standards are a little out of whack And this is how we're going to fix them. And I'm like, you're really doing this to fix patent licensing schemes and he was like And it was just like very obviously that like No, he was just mad and that was cover of fight the fights and eight They fought them to a bitter end Right, the patent on slide to unlock. Again, we made an entire video of this. You can watch me being a baby at MWC. I walked around every booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and did slide to unlock on every single Android phone and said this is how they're getting around the slide to unlock pon And there was technical requirements there and there are technical requirements now. But the ecosystem responded, Samsung paid what a billion dollars. and essentially got away with it And if your're Samsung paying a billion dollars to make the galaxy line of smartphones, is totally worth it Correct. Tottally worth it. So Apple fil this massive intellectual property lawsuit upset the ecosystem for however long they upset the ecosystem and the end result was There are Android phones I don't know if you've looked around. there's quite a lot of them That turned out o Okay, so in the nineties we had a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Microsoft based in copyright point out Windows and Microsoft continue to exist in a two thousands, twenty ten s we a massive intellectual property lawsuit against Samsung based on patent It seems worth noting that Samsung and Android continue to exist.. And here we are in the mid twenty twenties, we have a massive intellectual property lawuit against openen Eye based in trade secret now, the third one seems a safe bet that AI will continue to exist I would be fifty fifty on whether opening Ey continues to exist That was going to be my next question is is I think it's obvious this is not existentially terrifying for the AI business. Boy does it feel like? all of the companies too not want to be at war with at this moment. I mean, frankly, open AI is kind of at war with everybody else in some way already. All the time U Yeah, I mean this is OpenAye is permanently making a hundred billion dollars deals and also in giant fights with everybody all the time. Open says a war of his own executives. they keep leaving. Yeah But this is just this is the last thing Oen AI needs. And I will say, I think one thing that is different about what you just described is Apple has picked a lot of fights about products This isundament like so far, unless open AI is very close to shipping a thing that looks an awful lot like the iPhone This is not about products It's about what manufacturing techniques and what Apple has in the pipeline Sure, it's about products to come It's about how to make products But but I just mean, even if you if you paint all of this for Apple in the most sort of negative light, and you're like, okay, this company feels threatened and they throw a bunch of their lawyers at their threats to try and make them go away in one way or another This doesn't feel exactly like that to me. dont I don't get the sense that Apple is threatened by open AI And there's certainly no Earth shatteringly fabulous AI device that is sitting there threatening Apple at this moment unless again, there's something currently being manufactured that is going to blow everybody's minds and we just don't know about it yet Well, I think that's the whole game here Right Apple knows that AI might be an input mechanism that creates a new class of products, certainly Johnny Ive to go work with openen ee to create a new class of products based on this new input mechanis. Johny loves the new input mechanism. He loves a the click wheel over really t. Right. He loves the multi touch, the The sccroll wheel and the Apple Watch, as we all know, revolutionized the entire world. Everybody loves spinning a circle on the Apple TV remote I mean, the culture really rotated around that one, But Johnny like loves this. So if you're Apple, you're like, okay, he's hired all of our designers. He's hired a bunch of our best manufacturing people. It's like four hundred, five hundred people that they've taken over there. They know what's in our pipeline and they know our suppliers, they know how we do things. And now they're trying to steal our stuff. We have evidence at least one of them is trying to steal our stuff We have evidence at least one of them is trying to ste our stuff Okay, what are we going to do about that? And you can't file a copyright lawsuit becausecause we don't know what they've taken. It might not be code, and they certainly haven't like redeployed the code isn't a patent because there are no products yet So so there's no patent infringement. They ha't made T too infringe a patent, you have to make users sell something We haven't done anything yet. There's no patent infringement. You're left with trade secrets. And you know, trade secrets are pretty fuzzy. The definition of a trade secret is like I'm real fuzzy someone checkking with AI. But but the trade sect as far as I remember it is it has to be something with economic value because your competitors don't have it can't be known, it't be like public information. And then the really fuzzy one and I I'm going to end up having to do a so much trade secret. This is where the big ci came from. I'm going to do so much trade secret research You have to take reasonable measures to keep it a secret This is all over the lawsuit, by the way. L those three things are all over the la. Those are the three elements of a trade secret. Yeah, a huge amount of This complaint against Open AI is Apple explaining all of the things it does to try to protect it people Be it's written for the general public, right? It has to explain the technical foundation of the law so it can say, and openen AI went around this stuff And Again, Apple pushed copyright law to the limit with Microsoft. It pushed patent laws to the limit with Samsung. We're about to be in the middle of Apple pushing trade secret law to the limit. If you worked at Apple And you know how they makeake the iPhone screen, and then you get another job you can probably help people make an iPhone screen. And if you particularly if you work not for Apple, but you work for Foxcon and China There might be some supplier agreement I don't know if you've looked around It turns out Foxcon makes things that look like the iPhone screen for lots of other people now. Be that is the entire Chinese manufacturing ecosystem and supply chain There's books about it. Right with Apple and China is Patrick McGee There's literally books about You can go read it and you're like, this is just going to happen Apple whether they sue open AI or not. againgain, the lawsuit is great to read. I just look at Apple being like they're going to bring everything to bear to push the cutting edge of trade secret law in their direction and other big companies that made a lot of money were able to essentially fight them to a draw. Open AI is not a big company. It issues a new memo about needing to focus and calling a code read every six weeks on the dot when another executive leaves. and its revenue model is totally uncertain. Up until now, the revenue model has been we're going to compete with Google and search in the consumer market, and we're going to put out a bunch of new devices to compete with Apple by hiring Johnny Ive, the guy who made Apple deevices what they are to compete with Apple in the consumer space. And Apple's like, what if we killed you? So you really think it's that simple. This is Apple essentially trying to kill open AI in the cradle I think Well, I think Apple hates anything being stolen. I think the things aren't being stolen by Foxcon or an ecosystem of Chinese companies. They're being stolen by an American company that poached its most well known design executive who then poached a bunch of other stuff. And it is like deep in the DNA of that company to have an emotional response to that. Like over and over, if you take some information out of Apple Park That is Maybe the thing that is most likely to quickly bring the full beare of that company down upon you. Yeah. I mean, they are absolutely nuts about security. I left my jacket at Apple Park at WWC in one part of the thing and I wanted to just walk from where I was back to the seat I was in. And they're like, we're going have to send four people with you. And I was like, it's a path. Like I can just see the paths Yeah And I just left a jacket there. I was like, this is too much production for me to find a fifteen dollars probably right call denim jacket I bought ten years ago And I was like, I just don't to do this But That's where Apple is. They justust to put it in that framework, that the merits of the case are not in this complaint The merits of the case won't be an openy reply. It'll be in this long process we're about to go through. There's also a lot of reaction so far that has said this in trade secrets term is a relatively benign set of trade secrets accusations. But is Apple going to turn the heat up all the way and get themselves in front of a jury and be like, where Apple the company you love. Here's open AI a company in the AI industry which all of you hate. and which is foundationally built on unauthorized taking of information. And Apple's the company where artists love to show off how they use Macs to make the songs you've always loved the most. Hey, did you know this music video was shot entirely on iPhone But you know what's going to happen here Apple is going to bring the full weight of its cultural capital to bear on openen AI as a proxy for how much stuff the AI industry has taken from people without compensation or permission and whether or not it's a benign set of trade secrets or whether it's the full catalogue of YouTube music onn behalf of Suno OpenA is going to stand for all of it in this lawsuit Interesting So Would you handicap this as likely to go to ground in a real way. Like this is this the kind of thing somebody rightits are checkking it all goes away Or is Apple gunning for we want to do this in public If Oe had a lick of sense, it would ride a track and make this go away I agree with that But does Apple want a check?? Does Apple need a check Does mean no Trust open eye to keep the promises it's making as it hands over said Cck. No. So and I think opening eye does not want to write attention. They want to prove they did nothing wrong because probably They also have the same view of this, which is this is just the normal course of business. Right? We hired a bunch of and said, what are you working? What do you know Do you know how to make an AI gadget? Because we don't, right? And they're going they're going to want to fight this to the end. I mean, to be fair, do you know how to make an AI gadget bring us parts from the office to your job interview? Not a normal course of doing business if that is in fact what happened. Look, I've been running a small hardware startup on the side I'm not saying I didn't try it Listen, it's good getting if you can get away with it. you know what I mean? Rather unfortunately, I've only talked to people who used to work at humumane. So bit of a problem. But I think're going they're going to take this one again. This is years. and it's years and then years of appeal and whether open AI is stable enough or has the finances enough to just absorb it the way that Samsung could just absorb it and then pay a billion dollars and be like, that was totally worth it wide open question This one, I suspect we will hear a lot more. We have not, as you said, meaningfully heard a response from openp AI We got a comment from open AI spokesperson, Drew Pusiteri last week who said, Qote, we have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere, which is the least you can possibly say in a statement to the Verge about this particular issue. Yeah, especially when, you know, the claims in the complaint are like Dude downloaded all the presentations about how to make circuit boards. And it's like, well, Maybe you did have an interest in the. you might have some. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to come back to this aab, for now Let's move on because we should talk about gadgets and there's actually an open AI gadget worth talking about. So let's get to that first let's take a break. Support for the show comes from rippling Retaining your best employees should always be top of mind, especially if they are in high demand And while it's impossible to predict the future, rippling AI can help you identify who might be a flight risk. 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Ai slash erge and get AI that turns insight into action That's R I PP L I N G d. ai slash verge Sign up for exclusive access today This is advertiser content from IBM Cold take My laptop works fine at room temperature, and most things on Earth do If quantum computers can only function and behave quantumly at insanely cold temperatures, how will they ever become useful to most people My name is Olivia Laines. I am the global lead for content and Education at IBM Quantum. I want to emphasize that actually cooling down a quantum computer is not really as hard as I think people think it is. It really is just the push of a button that can take your entire infrastructure down to ten millicalvin. That is not the challenge scientifically speaking I also want to emphasize that in the future, we don't envision everyveryone having their own quantum laptop quantum computers are going to live in a data center data centers already have their own cooling infrastructure. 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So this idea of open AI's big hardware play has been looming for a while They released a device this week for Codex that everybody is like, this is the first opening. It's not. This is like a T teeny, tiny brand integration with a company called Worlerder thatakesbos. I don't wantan to talk about that But there was reporting from Bloomberg The thing coming out first is going to be a no screen, but sensor and camera having smmart speaker, that this is going to be openAI's big first device Chat GPT thing for presumably your home, but it'll also have a rechargeable battery Smart homeome controls. this thing seems so incredibly unfocused to me. It's like Alexa, but you can pick it up and carry it around and it has a camera on it but no screen. I just want everyone to stop and imagine a team at OpAI building a full featured smart home platform Listen Matter has solved all of this for us. It's no problem. I just what J just like, what are you doing man Google hasn't built a full featured to home platform They've been trying for years. I don't know if anyone has ever looked at the Google OomeMap G Sure, I dont that thing doesn't even look vibe coded. A computer would have more coherent and crisp ideas about how to organize that app than whatever it is that Google ships in Google, It's really true is fine. I think based on the constraints of the market, This is the only piece of hardware opening I could shit What is it up We'll just run down the metaglasses problem that we run down every week.. If you want to have an AI device that is consistently doing things for you that isn't a phone in I think for a lot of reasons, Open A I cannot make a phone I think it's going to It's going to want to be on record. I think it will make a thing that is they may not call it a phone, but it will very obviously be a phone A lot of people are about to make phones with Instagram Yes, I'll put yeah, that's where my stakeak is. A lot of of people are going to back their way into making phones on Instagram and then realize that they've shipped Windows phone. And then we're all gonna to see how long it takes for them to realize theyve shipped Windows phone. But if you don't wantan to ship a phone, you're like another reform factor, you're competing with the fact that people have a phone You have to be smaller than a phone, which means you need less battery. but you still need connectivity, which means you still need a data plan, which means you still need to run that battery down. You still need to decide what happens locally or if your device is useless without a connection of any kind, which means you need to put processing in RAM and whatever. Your costs have already begun to skyrocket. And now you're one plus and you've gone out of business in the United States. It's just Anything that moves is hard for that reason Eespecially if you want to put cameras and sensors and all that other stuff on.. So of course, we're going to take it home, plug it into the wall Absolutely reduce the challenges of mobility, let whatever processor run as hot as it might need to run so it can do whatever it needs to do locally and have a fixed connection over your Wiifi to open A servers which at least now is a Solft The connectivity issue is solved. If your WiFi goes down, everyone knows nothing works, right but I'm on a plane My device is useless, unacceptable. Sure All right, now we've made an Alexa Right. We've made an Alexa device or a homepod or whatever, and then you've got to build the ecosystem around it that does all the other stuff around it, including the smart homeome ecosystem, because of course you want to turn off the lights in play music, which are the number one and number two things people do on these devices.. Oh set a timer. and unclear if ChatTBT can reliably count to one hundred, let alone set of timer that operates consistently Here we go. likeike this is the only solution and whether or not The chat GBT platform is being built to work in this environment and these constraints and solve these problems or whether they are totally focused on writing code and revamping the entire MAac app to be focused on writing code and whatever healthcare initiative they're doing This is a lot of spaghetti if throw at the wall. Yes And there's no chance that any open AI engineer has been tasked with build a full featured smart home platform that can compete with Apple Home, Google Home Alexa homeome assistant. which will be every nerd's fallback for this and is happy about it R And now if you're an open engineer and you're like, I work at the hotest up on Earth and they're Make the lights turn and off. go deal with the Matter implementation Like I quit like I'm going to go workanthropically like everybody else. I think This existing next to what they've been doing to the Chat GBT app is super fascinating to me because The new Chad GPT app, the so called super app is trash. Everybody hates it. It's poorly designed. It doesn't run well. It took a native app and made it a non native app. like it sucks. It is universally disliked as an attempt to put all of these things together yet again opening e Ie demonstrating it has lots of ability to make very good frontier models and absolutely no product sense. Like this company just cannot figure out how to put this technology in front of people in a way that they like. The only thing it has done is copy Claud a couple of times. Claudd code worked and they said, Ohh, we'll do Codex. and that worked. L there's just not a lot of evidence that this company knows how to figure out these new kinds of things that you're talking about The thing that is so interesting about that app is it kind of deprecates chat. It is it is very codex centric the new ChachTPTS time And the idea that they're they're leaning into, okay We think our technology is for tools, right? This is not thing to hang out with. We're getting past the it's novel to talk to a chat bot Fez and that just burns money anyway. Let's give enterprises enterprise tools That is That's literally the business for this company. That's the business for all of these companies at least for now and possibly forever So then to put that next to this, the only thing I can think of is like we talk a lot about New York versus California, right I think if you are in or near the open AI offices It might be very possible to convince yourself that a lot of people do just want to sit and talk to their agents all day that like this is a this is a thing that is running rampant around startups all over Silicon Valley idea of that being something mainstream enough to be a really sort of meaningful hardware play Yeah, it's just it's the same as Siri. It's brittle Yeah. So if your whole idea is to make a beautiful piece of hardware and it will have great far field microphones and whatever we're going to do with the battery to make it portable around your house, and then the core technology in the backend is chat GPT is there Everyone already knows how that thing is going to work Like don't, I don't have to describe it to you. It's going to be broken in very specific ways. And then you're like, why'd you do that? It's going be like, Oh my Godd, you're so right. You know That's a great point. Yeah. Right. Like you can just put your phone on the table and have this experience today. Yes We have these things. everyverybody who is like, oh, it's an Alexa. We have Alexas. Pople have this experience. We have a decade of this experience and people play music and they set timers. And I think what even Google and Amazon have run into over the last twelve months is the idea that we're going to plug an LLM into it and suddenly unlock vast new kinds of consumer behavior is not happening. It's just not happening. It's actually slightly worse at turning on the lights. It can answer more complicated questions. That's great. So as a sort of simple information retrieval tool ChaduPT is not going to win that particular game It's also less sophisticated in its hardware than Google because Google's been at this a long time. So like, What race is there to win unless you assume there is this giant group of people out there who desperately want an easier way to talk to ChatuPT all day. And I just don't think that exists. Well, they do, but they think it's their girlfriend. Kevin Roous, come on D. I'm sorry, buddy We are We are friends. I'm just you know, you know as I tell the story. I mean,, maybe everyone's going to think we're being overly cynical. I'm confident we'll get those notes from people who think we're being overly cynical. That cynicism is probably born of the fact that we started the verge at the dawn of the smartphone revolution. And the questions about this new class of devices are exactly the same questions about new smartphone platforms and new operating systems, but maybe with slightly different applications So when The Juju tablet came out. Oh God. Rember the Juju tablet? Of course. The crrunch pad.hu. No one remembers this stuff. It ran a thing called Fusion OS and it was going be going to be a revolution B boy did that cause a lot of problems for us as gadget reviewers, including one threatened lawsuit And we would say, arere you going to build an email client Is your email client going to be as good as Gmail Be I'm not going to switch away from Gmail as my email provider, right? And Google made native apps for the other phones Is your email client going to be as good as Google's native client? becausecause they're not going to ship a client for your dumb idea And then these products would die. And you would run into, are you going to build an email client it suddenly becomes this like defining question for a new generation of smartphones Okay, are you going to Are you going to have Instagram? We hate it or love it. Not having Instagram killed Windows phonone peopleeople would get those phones And they would say, there's this app I want And it wouldn't be there. Yeah. And Microsoft spent a lot of money on app developers and try to bribe what at the time was known as Facebook into making an Instagram client and they just didn't do it. They had no interest in this. And then nobody wanted a Windows phone Tom P, like down the line, right? L All these things killed new smartphone platforms over and over and over again because they could not meet the table stakes I'm telling you for this class of devices Can you turn the lights on in the kitchen is going to be table sticks. Can you do you have a spotify app Do you have a spotify integration that releliably works Yeah. And if I don't have Spotify do you have Apple music? And if I don't have Apple music, do you have YouTube music? And if I I am an insane person, do you have title Are you playing title loss sleep I have a sono system. Can you play title over my sono system? Because you're an all powerful AGI robot and all these devices are on my network and you have my credentials and I expect you to just do it. And the answer in every case is going be, no one at Opening Eye wants to work on these problems Oh, I don't think they're stupid. I don't think anybody wants to work on these problems. I think they want to work true. but AGI. I think they want to work on health carere. Like sure But it is also true that some of those things already exist MCP solves some of those problems. someome of Chachii's own you know, integration solve that problem. like Will Will your Chad GBT smart speaker be able to connect to Spotify? I'm so confident the answer to that will be yes. Will it do a good job? I'm not confident Google Home can connect to Spotify. Well. So this is what I was going to say is if you connect to Spotify is Spotify going to want that to be ChGPT talking to the Spotify database or is it going to be Chad GPT talking to the Spotify chatbot that talks to the Spotify? Like, is this product going to work well And is any event going to generate enough revenue be worthwhile to open AI a company that is lighting money on fire every single day and has no plan to stop I mean, this this is my thing is I think on an ongoing basis, Um GPT technology continues to get better. like GPT live, the new voice model, which will presumably behind this is quite good It is, it takes turns more nurally. It's more natural to talk to it doesn't sort of interrupt you and let you interrupt it in weird ways. L it feels better to talk to I think The idea that that is enough just falls on its face as soon as you put this device in my house for all the reasons that you're talking about. because it needs to do things. These things's like I feel like all I talk about with AI is how many things like give great demo and are bad products And this is the kind of thing that yes, there are people who just enjoy talking to chat GPT as an end unto itself I am on record as thinking that is bad for everyone and the world and society Ustand that those people exist and those people will probably get great utility out of having a thing they can just sort of yammer away to as they walk around the living room That is tiny next to the number of people who need this thing to do something And they will need it to, in fact to do lots of things and they will expect it to do lots of things. I just I'm with you in the sense that I have a hard time seeing how that and consumers have no economic incentive to overcome failure Right Right? reggular people in their homes. As Lx to do something, can't do it. they will never ask it again. right They will they will give up. and they did. Like we have the data, we have the experience. They just gave up on Alexa in meaningful ways outside of timers and music Okay In the enterprise context, you keep saying AI is business software In the enterprise context, there's tons of incentive to overcome failure. we were watching a TikTok clip today Ad agencies are like, we're going to automate all of our meta ad spend with clawd MCP sers And like, Maybe that didn't work for a while. It certainly works now and that is true. like The interternet is automated in massive ways with AI Businesses arent getting automated because the incentive to overcome the failure in the rocky starts and they keep plugging at it Everyone can see the efficiency game. Everyone can see the business results. There's a lot of incentives to overome the failure. A regular person is like, I spent how much money O this weird open ee Home pod Doesn't work I'm just never going to use it again. Yep. Right? And like I they've got to This is the Johny Aa P problem. It's got to do exactly what it says on the tin in a little bit more in a way that's delightful And AI is maybe not never going to be predictable enough to actually pull that off and The physical limitations of something like a smart speaker makes that hard Genuine kudos to everyone involved if they can figure out how to add that hardware turn that makes it delightful in the way you're talking about. Oh, it's supposed to have some a mechanical thing that like smiles at you This is the other part of the Germman report. That ain't it, buddy. I tell you that ain some mechanical it's unclear what it is But there's some part of it that moves and responds to you to like make it Have emotions? No, thank you Ch GPC doesn't have emotions Never, ever, ever, ever. Hold A lot of people disagree with you on that one, my friend. They're wrong. Let's move on. Claude loves me. What are you talking about All right, no one else does. The quad does Thanks all of my ideas are great. and you know, you're right to call that out. I've been looking at this the wrong way. from Let's start from the basics Honestly, here's what I recommend. All right, let's move on. That's enough AI gadgets for one day. Wait, can I say one more thing? I had CQad write an email to my solar panel installer about the thing that went wrong and I read it and I was like, they will come to my house and tear the solar panels down before they address what I in this email That sounds great That sometime we should talk about the AI tools that write email drafts and the deeply terrifying things they have taught me about myself. That's for another day. Two more gads of things we should talk about. One, very quick. Have you looked at the pixel colors? The pixels as they always do have leaked to absolute death f course. There's a bunch of new pixel phone colors in particular You I feel like have never really been a phone color guy. No, I've got an orange iPhone, it's just in a gray case. Well, yeah, you're like I feel like in general' the only one worth buying this year. Oh, one hundred percent. I mean, I bought the green one, which is also terrific. but the orange the orang is on the proro was fabulous But I just want you to look at these pixel colors and tell me if they do anything for you Oh, I like this pink a lot. Yeah, Google's really conn for it this year There's a there's a pink. There are a couple of shades of any hibiscus It's it's pink U there's a green, there's a black, there's a there's a light blue that's or like a greenish blue that's called fog that I quite like. I can't you should say all these names. No There's Olive There's Fog, frost, Canyon which is also known as DunN Pistachio I wrote a story recently about the Google Home speaker and I got a request from a Cs personerson at Google who, in this particular case I won't name A. who asked me to change the reference where I called it red to its official name, which is Barry And I said, No, thank you, I will not do that because it's red. It's not Berry is not a color. Red is a color Berries do come in a variety of colors. Yeah, they sure do. But stupid names aside, these colors look great. They do great Like I'm into this. I think a pink phone genuinely might really happen I'm just s psyched about that. This is finally the thing that will make me switch to a pixel This gives was it the Nexus five that came in that re color? Yeah, it's like orangey red. We spo so many arguments in the office about whether it was orange or red And if I remember correctly, Josh Tapulski was very much it's red and I was very much it's orange. I think would If memory serves, I would be on team Red on that one But either way, that phone was hot and this one kind of looks like it has the same thing going. It's got some vi. I like it But the other actual news we should talk about on this front is the One plus news from This week OnePus essentially announced that it is done attempting to sell phones in the US and Europe. And actually there's been some reporting that this is just the beginning, that OnePus is in the process of pulling out of everywhere except for China We've been covering this company for the entirety of its existence And there was a time at which One Pus seemed like it had a shot to be a really powerful upstart brand in the phone market just never quite happened What do you make of this complete sort of retreat from OnePus right now Well, Juan, I think you have been calling out the end of cheap devices because of Armageddon for months now. Tue. Yeah And it is hard to see how this is anything but one culmination of Ramag again. One plus could not compete at the high end It was not making flagship devices was he was part of like a larger company that makes a bunch of phones. It's part of Oppo and it's like has always sort of pretended that it's not part of Oppo. but is very much part of Apo. Yeah. Right. But that whole company was like onene tick under the flagships. Yeah Right And I'm confident we're going to have aunch Android fans telling me that it actually made flag, but it you know called themselves flagship killers. Like that was the idea that they they could do just as well for less money And I think when it's just as well for the same amount of money It probably doesn't work anymore. And you don't have the brand and you're spending, billions of dollars on computational photography at the bleeding edge. L Right, You've got problems structurally and the market never really broke itself down in a way that would support a cheaper player. right? The smartphone market was either to be spending very little money or a lot of money orr you're buying a one year old phone for a medium amount of money. the sort of like mid range Android phone has always just been Kind of forever That is no one has ever really successfully pulled that off. Yeah. I mean, like there are a lot of mid range gnderid phones and every now and again we review whatever Samsung, alpha or Ace or whatever they're called. and like like here's the state of the middle But the reality is most people w to buy the highest end one or they wan to buy the cheapest one You can just see that play out over and over again. So I think this company just was always fighting a fight. It couldn't win because it was never going to attract an iPhone switcher At least in the United States, like that is just the hardest thing in the world to do. Samsung and Google cannot do it. Yeah. And If you're in the middle, The pixel exists in Google will'll tily sell you one All of the Samsung mid range phones exist and every carrier will be like, Do you want this for free? Here you go And then you're at least in whatever ecosystem there, or you want to spend mostount of money What are you going to do How are you going differentiate? R Carriers are largely to blame here because I think a thing we talk about a lot and an email we get a lot when we talk about the phone market is that the U.S way of buying phones is kind of unlike anywhere else in the world. And I think if you rewind back to the beginning of the One plus story, big part of what it was doing was betting that it could upset that, right? That rather than having most of your phone experience to be walk into a store, update your contract, trade in your old phone and get a new phone, which is how most people get their phones. and it changes the way that phones are subsidized. It changes the way that we pay for them. It changes what it feels like to pay for a phone because you're not pututting down your credit card for tw thousandve hundred dollars at a time But that there was this idea ten years ago that that was going to go away and actually more and more people were going to start to buy their phones on Amazon and that you could build a direct to consumer phone brand in the United States. And that one hundred percent has not happened in any meaningful way at all And do you think the carriers have just found ways over and over to kill anyone who is trying to do that thing I think the carriers have found that and an Apple has found that So Apple doesn't want you switching Apple will happily just send you a notification. It's like, it's time to upgrade to the Ph nineteen, right Right like Here we go, but your ESM will transfer seamlessly Yeah If you want to transfer it to an Android phone, you've got to light a candle and do incantations. We will systematically ruin your life, David Pierce. Have you ever tried to do? Have you ever tried to turn off iMessage? It requires human sacrifice. Yeah. So it's some big combination of that. you know, carriers are rational I'm saying rational, and no one will believe me. but Carious have rational economic incentives to make things as easy and cheap as possible and taking you from an iPhone to the next iPhone requires almost no customer service on their part. Yeah. taking from an iPhone to a one plus phone. is a bunch of angry phone calls and maybe a return And then maybe a switch to an iPhone and that's all just costs layers up Well they don't care Like they're like, have you ever wanted to experience even slower five G? Experience the power of AT andT. L that's all they care about So I think yes, like The carriers have a chkehold in the market, Apple has a trkehold in the market. There's no incentive to change and making a phone on the edges has slightly different options in widgets and Oxygen OS compared to Samsung galaxy OS compared to IOS like No consumer cares about that stuff Or at least not at the rates they need to, if you're not so much cheaper So I'm thinking about this in context of what we were just talking about with open AI being one of the companies that is probably going to make something that you looks and feels and smells like a phone. This kind of suggests that if you're not Frankly, Apple or Samsung or one of the three or four biggest companies in the world with enough money to brute force your way into this The phone market in the U.S isial is essentially Sona There's just no room for anybody else. Well, it depends on what company you're talking about. If SpaceX buys T moobile And Starlink makes a phone. Interesting right in that phone has Instagram. I mean because quite honestly, Elon Musk is a creeper and I think he's gonna to want Instagram on that phone Buying a carrier, yes, is a shortcut to getting your phone into a carrier OnePlus probably could have bought TMobile and that might have worked. I don't know But like it's that. It's I don't think if This is just a prediction There's not going to be a device that has an AI based input mechanism so powerful and compelling that it overcomes A phone and the the whole giant ecosystem of apps and accessories and carriers and everything that comes with phone now That whole system is so mature now Yes, we're agreen. I got a ming phone to wrap all of that sure. Yeah Right L you you want to plug the weir Bluetooth dongle into the seat backack of the thing because you have AirPods because they work best with your iPhone boy is that a whole ecosystem that openy has gadget has to overcome right? L Is opening eyes Gs are going to work as well with your AirPods Is everything else? Well then you've got to get new headphones and maybe they won't work as well with your Delta seat back, Bluetooth donongle. Like you've gott to break everything And phones were able to break everything. right? Famously, Blackberry realized that the iPhone was competing with laptops, not Blackberry and they were dead right legs They knew what the problem was And opening I still has to compete the iPhone. One plus still has to compete with the iPhone. I don't just the iPhone. I mean the very concept of a mature flagship smartphone with a whole ass ecosystem all the way around it. Samsung has one of those. Google to some extent has one of those. or obviously big players in China that have fully mature ecosystems that include cars in China Right Like you want to ship an AI gadget? you're like, well, my car also runs the same operating system as my phone in China. Yeah. How are people going to navigate to where they're going on my AI gadget So I think this is just one one part of this is ramageddon. You can't be so much cheaper that it's sustainable. And the other part of it is Boy, what are we taking sales away from? We should take a break here, but I think the thing you just said, You have to break everything is such a cllarifying reason that the entire AI industry is acting the way that it is becausecause that is the stakes and that is the wall you have to climb do the thing that they are all promising they will do in order to change everything about how we do everything But it's not the why you have to climb in enterprise in business software That's a much smaller wall. That's why they're all running towards it. Yeah. All right, let's take one more break and then were getting back we do a lightning rack. We'll right back Is Kamala Harris running for president again Listen, am I Im on But does anybody want that Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't see why not. Absolutely. I think Kamala Harris will run for president again. I don't think there'll never be a woman president in the United States. Now why w w away, you can't just walk away on that. Tell us why. I know it's still early to talk about twenty twenty eight, but as we build to our post Trump future, it seems to be a big question about the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris leads all of the presidential polling Does this mean that the person who let the ticket in twenty twenty four is going to lead the party again in twenty twenty eight campaign needs to be called bye bye Bye just a tainted brand Do you think from a donor community largely that there's any appetite for a Harris return I don't. I'm Estan Hernon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. It all started with Callme Naby. Over ten years ago, we created Switched on Pop to listen clloser, uncovering the songcraft behind even the glossiest of pop hits. Since then, we've released almost five hundred episodes. We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Callme Naby herself I Charl Rson. I'micologist Nateloan and I'm songwriter Chl Harding. and on july fourteenth, Switch on Pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix. Now you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts, but now you'll be able to watch us each week Breaking down the sounds of the moment, digging into musical Muse with your favorite artists and offering questionable dad jokes as always. We're kicking off our Netflix debut with a four part series on the At of the song, with help from artists, producers, and songwriters like Aaron Dessinner, Audrey Hobert, Trevor Horne, Cypress Hill, and Taylor Parks. Stream switched on pop on Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday Starting on july fourteenth. Every body is beautiful. yet society is so obsessed with thinness that it has become a proven financial asset and there's a three hundred billion dollars and growing weight loss industry. If it literally pays to be thinner, are GLP O' s actually a worthwhile financial investment? I'm Vivian two, you' RichBFF, and on this episode of Networth and Chill, we're diving into the thinness economy Its tangible effects on your income and the impact GLP ons are having on our everyday lives. No, you don't need to change yourself to be amazing, but yes, you might make more money if you do. Oof Listen, wherever you get your podcasts and watch on YouTube d. com slash your Rich BFF All right, we're back. It's time for the lighting round, beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast We somehow can't stop doing This stupid thing and carars is a dummy It' gonna happen just incredibly stupid A lot there. So the backstory to this, if you didn't listen to last week's episode is Ryan Mueller sent in a branding Cars a dummy theme Neili was very rude to him because it sounded like this was the build to a drop and there was no drop Ryan resubmitted a drop and Travis, our producer, That was the drop Travis agreed that we need to play the whole thing I mean it was quite a drop. Ryan's back. I think Ryan has righted the ship here. We're okay now Some real elements of Prince's Bat dance in there. I want to just call that out Quite a drop. It was yeah, it was something. I'm feeling things right now U What did Brendon do this week, Neon? I'm still coming down. Honestly, this is all so much more than Brendon deserves But it's okay. do it do it for ourselves and for each other. I'm gonna be so paranoid tomorrow. Okay. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Okay, He did a lot of dumb stuff this week. Let's start with the basics. Okay. You know, is it dumb to take bribes as a public official, David Gally, yes This is a trick question. Okay. Yeah. All right. Brandon took what amounts to one hundred twenty five thousand dollars pride There's no other way to say it. So Paramount and CBS were merging. This part of that whole family dynamic, this needed to pass FCC review because CBS owns a bunch of broadcast stations. And during all this, both Brendan and another FC commissioner O Livia Trusty, who is also a Republican, accepted tickets to various scalas at the Kennedy Center Olivia Tustees tickets gifted to her by Paramount were worth more than twelve thousand dollars according to Eetthhics Exclosure records obtained by Pro Publica. Brendan's private Skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other Paramount and CBS executives one hundred twenty five thousand dollars ticket So that's a quarter million, quarter million dollars. This is all happening as there in theory, debating whether to let this merger happen Yes So in normal times, just the fact that Brendon is there in the sky box would be a huge scandal Yes, just for zero dollars Just to his existence in the room with this man at this time huge scandal And and yet here we are If you remember, there was like a scandal when like Clinton got a haircut on like the Tarmac of Air Force. Like it doesn't, you know, like there's like ye, there was a time when the appearance of a conflict of interest be a scandal, even if no such conflict existed. And by the way, that's the standard for most public officials and lawyers. When you take the bar exam and you have to Do the professional ethics exam The thing that you learn is anything that creates appearance of a conflict of interest is against the rules because the appearance is what undermines trust in the system is gone. over the past decade. And now the standard from the Trump administration and Trump family is, we're telling you we're doing bribes So that's okay. It's all out in the open I mean, you literally hear them say this all the time. Yeah. ye, it's all out in the open So it's fine And so here, Brendon is taking a quarter million dollars in tickets from companies whose activities he directly oversees, whose mergers he can approve And it's fine because he's doing it all in the open. And basically every ethics expert that talked to Proublica was like he should recuse himself from all these decisions because there's no way he can maintain the appearance of impartiality. Of course not There's lawyer, they quoted, an ethics lawyer at from the White House, Treasure Department, and the SEC during the presidencies of H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And she goes, this is shocking Pret disturbing. That's what I would say. I don't understand what they were thinking This is somebody who would know. I would say is about as qualified as you could possibly be on this particular subject Yeah. So obviously paramount Warner Brothers murder is still under review. There's an antitrust review of that. will'll come to that. that's. There's more of that to come. Okay. But here Brendon just took bribes because he's a dummy and he doesn't understand. that taking bribes creates the appearance, if not the actual conflicts of interest from which he is supposed to accuse himselfff. Oh, I don't think that gives Ben enough credit. I think he might know those things. He just doesn't care one teeny tiny bit again, the standard has moved from the appearance of a conflict to what if We did bribes out and the out. What if you brought Brendon coin? That's where we are Okay, the other thing, which is worth talking about because we have brought up a bunch is The FC is fast coming up on a vote which may or may not be illegal unto itself about whether individual companies can own more than thirty nine percent of broadcast licenses in an area, which is a rule enshrined by Congress. Brendan thinks he can just overcome with the vote. Yeah. He wrote it oped in Breitbart of all places. and I just want to call it out. because when Breitbart is the number one publication that will accept your op ed things have gone awry. Well the Wall Street Journal editorial booard hates him. so they would take it. And and then you're just kind of running The New York Post, that doesn't seem right. And you end up in Brerightport. Yeah. And his argument here is the cap basically prevents anyone from owning so many TV stations that you can broadcast programming to more than thirty percent of households. This worked when this was all about local broadcasters, employing local journalists, but I will restore trust to the news by letting single companies own all kinds of broadcast stations more than thirty nine percent because then they'll be able to compete with streaming I'm gonna to make Sinclair so powerful it can take on YouTube. I Brendan Carr am going to make Sinclair so powerful that competition will raign you see what I mean? This is the argument. I'm just going to read it. todayoday the broadcast capap is not protecting local broadcasters. It's preventing them from gaining the same skill their competitors are free to enjoy. It's doing the opposite of what the FCC intended I don't know if you have looked around No one can compete with YouTube or TikTok or Instagram. In fact, on this show, we've talked about Netflix beginning to panic and turn itself into YouTube becausecause these things have massive scale And the cost structures of those platforms are utterly dependent army of teenagers working for free something that all of us are forced to ignore every time we talk about these businesses.. Because if you point it out, everyone gets really squirrely about the fact that they're probably doomed in the long run because they have to pay to make things You can make the broadcasters as big as you want You can have one guy own every broadcast station in the country and we're rapidly heading that direction. It appears. They still have to pay the news anchors. Yeah Probably what they're gonna to do is stop paying them and have AI readD the local news And that still won't restore trust in the news and that still won't let them compete with YouTube, which again enjoys the greatest business model in world history, which is having an army of teenagers make everything for free I find myself in this segment from time to time, trying to Piece a bunch of Brendon Carr logic together And it makes my head spin because you can't possibly hold all of these ideas in your head at the same time. And I've come to realize that, oh, he doesn't He holds no ideas in his head at any time There's only one idea in I said, which is toing up to power and using the government's ability to restrain speech or consolidate speech to his own advantage And I'm telling you all of this is a trial balloon for regulating speech on the interternet. He is finding the ways to use the FCC's power or grow the FCC's power. In this case, casting a vote that will overhide a provision in a law passed by Congress order to say I have more authority over the speech that is transmitted to you. And his argument here When it comes to broadcast news, our country could do with a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting from communities across the countries What is the mechanism that letting a monopoly run by private equity own more TV stations. will create more jobs for local repors Can you draw a line from one thing to the next thing? No, the actual answer, we know for sure would be precisely one hundred and eighty degrees the opposite of what he's describing. Yes. It would pro be nationalizedtely. deceorporatize all of this. That's the answer. And in fact, he's going to Just happily create the opposite of what he says he's abouts to create. Anyway, you can the comment periods and all these things are open, the votes are open. these are open, Th this is your government. You can talk to it. He hasn't can't stop you yet I encourage you to leave the comments. I encourage you to tell Brendon one, bribes are bad and two overcoming these rules and not looking at the real problem, which is massive consolidation across all of our media, a little short sighted. He's a dummy and he won't get it And it's in his own interest to never get it Brendon, if you want to come and actually make an argument in a real journalistic forum, not the op ed pages of Brightpark d. com dot You're welcome come on this show. You'rec to come on to Coder. We can call Rupert and see if you'll let us duke it out in the editorial pages of Wall Street Journal The only place where Rupert Murdoch and I are on the same side. att least when it comes to this, very little else, but when it comes to this, anyway, that has been Bren Car's Dummy America'savorite podast for in the podcast not I have a lighting round item, which is that I have an emoji I need to tell you about. and I'm actually curious before we get into this, do you have a sort of all purpose emoji that is like how you react to most things. Okay, I have two, but they're rude. Okay Perfect Okay I use Green check mark a lot is just the rudest emoji. It is. That's very J What J Oh. It's great. That's like a thumbs up, but Ruter. I don't from the thumbs up to green check markark. And every time I send it, I start laughing because that has such putting a period at the end of your text message energy using the green. Oh, I don't like that at all. This has come to an end That's the that's that's a signal that I'm trying to send And I send it without any remorse. Okay is actually a pretty good case because a thing that is very hard to do is to say this conversation is over. Like we have accomplished all of our goals. I love you. I hope you're great. Let's not talk anymore. It's very hard to do. The G check markark gets it done 's what I'm say Uh Chuck And then you just turn off your video and you're g See see what I did there? It's amazing. It works every time. It's really. Okay, so there's that. And then Mlting face is just the classic . is that is probably the single most communicative emoji that exists. Mine is theais hands. I use the raiseed hands emoji everything. That's pretty good. Raised hands is got it. Raised hands is thanks. Raised hands is awesome. Raised hands just accomplishes thats many of my goals. But there's a new one f. that I think is going to potentially replace a lot of emojis for a lot of people So Unicode put out a bunch of new emojis as they want to do. The emoji making process is sort of fascinating We'll go into that another time, but they're one of the new emojis is called cracking Face and It is precisely what it sounds like. It's yellow smiling face with a sort of gentle smile. It's like the slightly smiling face emoji, but it is cracking all over I think that can mean just about anything you would like it to mean. I look at cracking face as a perfect replacement for melting face, which is like, oh God, everything is terrible. Cracking face is also kind of like a. Cracking face could also mean it could replace the skull dead emoji. This is a very good, very powerful all purpose emoji that I'm really excited about I would say as our company goes through what can only be described as a divorce, I would have used cracking face almost every single this week, Yes It just, to me, this cracking face is just kindind of a it's all too much. Emoji This's just like, I can't even in an emoji is the cracked face. and I'm pretty excited about it. Also, if you look at our quQick post and then you accidentally click on Cacking Face, it zooms out at you as the picture expand and then you can do it one more time to zoom again. And it's pretty good as a thing that's just sort of coming at you. Yeah It Yeah, it looks a little like The thing from the Fantastic four if anyone refereces for anybody. There are a bunch of new emoji coming. There's a butterfly, there are some sideways thumbs, which is also a very funny conversationnder possibility. There's a pickle ' that's great. There's a meteor, there's a bunch of stuff but I just Cracking face emoji, I think is about to revolutionize the way I text message. and I'm very excited about it. So very importantly Are these the unicode standard emojis A these Apples or they Googles? A lot going on here. Yeah, these are unicode emojis, whichich means They will inevitably be sort of weirdly bastardized in many ways. I in particular look forward to what the blobby Android cracking face looks like. Samsung will do some weird stuff with it It's gonna be strange. I think it's going to do the job. I'm pretty excited about it. It's another reason I like raised hands, by the way. everybody everyverybody does the same thing with raised hands We're all good with it. You can't misinterpret green check markark This person hates me and is finished with me. is the only possible takeaway. I understand what you're saying. I do not wish to receive any further information All right, what's your next lighting rd It feels like we have another new segment coming called Niita Beer is going through it So Nikiti Beer is the head of product at X the E app. Y in which should I do all of my banking. Well, obviously. All of my DMs too. Who doesn't? Yeah It was it last week or a week before he posted, Hey, we did this experiment. and we realized if we take all of the influencers out of the platform, people like it more and use it more Precisely ask which is a thing that everybody knows. yeep And they did the other study that found that all of the video on the platform was stolen? Great, greatreat, great stuff going on on next. So this week They realized that not showing your post to the people who follow you is bad post in showing you just exclusively ragebait made people unhappy. Who could have seen that coming? We're rolling out a small tweak to boost visibility of your posts to people who follow you back. We noticed this data was missing from the algo and it made your friends appear less than your replies. This resulted in the repplly section feeling more like a battleground with people you don't recognize. What a surprise. Well said Twitter hasn' been around for over a decade. No one who worked at Twitter ever had this insight before. Well so this is what's so funny. There is a long standing. trruueism about a lot of these social algorithms is that the strongest signal you can have is if you and I follow each other. Like it signifies so many positives. about our interests, about our relationship, about the overlap between us. like If you and I being mutuals is such a powerful signal. And X was just like, ah, who cares Well, I mean they mean first of all, they fired everybody. So everybody who knew how anything worked is gone from Twitter, which is now X to everythingthing app. The phrase we noticed this data was missing from the Algo is very funny. Deply, deeply hilarious. No one has looked in four years and now we finally look. There are like entire teams at Twitter that were like entirely focused on this. They threw, they fired them all, they reset the algorithm and they realized surely prioritizing engagement led you to bad outcomes. And then in particular, with X, the everything app, you know you can pay to be verified and have a rep share, letting those people run wild to make as much money as they want resulted in a site that was bad and overrun by Nazis. and now Nikita Beer every week is slowly rolling it back. He's slowly rediscovering things that people who work to Twitter for ages and ages new. Again, I will point out, I will say this is many times we need to say this, criticism of the current administration has atX is in no way praise for the people who ran Twitter who mostly failed and ran a bad company. So bad. in fact, that Elon Musk could show up and say, can I pay some money for it? And the board of directors had no response They're like, well That's better than anything we can think of and they walked away So again, criticism of the Elon administration in no way praise for the previous administration. But I do know a lot of people worked at Twitter thinking about how to make the site feel good in order to drive growth X made it feel bad and their business has essentially collapsed And we know this because it's part of SpaceX now and SpaceX is a public company and we could read it in the S one filings. It's very good. When we talked about Nikita last week, we got a couple of emails from people who Uh I would say in not quite as many words accused him of being kind of a product grifter. This is a guy who has sort of invented and sold the same company a couple of times and is now doing this job at X clearly very skilled at a certain kind of product making, does not seem to be having a super good time. H new very, very visible job. Well he's got the same problem as anybody who works for Trump has, right So he can be like, I fix this thing in this obvious way that will make one person unhappy. And that person will tweet at Elon and he will be like, I'm looking into it. and then the fix will go away. And this has happened several times now for Nikita and everyone elses a product. The same way that You know, Iice announce're not going do traffic stops because they're murdering people in the street. And Trump is like, no, I love traffic stops and now they're back And like That's going to be what keeps happening to X the everything app becausecause anything that makes it harder for lies and racism to travel on the platform affects one guy in negative ways. sureure does tough out there. Okay I have I have that guy is David Pierce This The X reach is for me in particular. I almost accidentally tweeted the other day, thinking it was threads and had a real sort of terrifying moment. I was like, this is I'm so throttled and ex that I should tweet every day. Like I have a fake blue check markark, that is like a legacy blue check markark. Yeah. And I can tweet and literally zero people will see it That's amazing. becausecause I don't pay for reach. and obviously we' us and we criticize. like they've just turned the knob. There's a knob in Nikit's office labeled Nei and it's at zero That's kind of nice, actually. It's like keeping a journal. There's a part of me that just wants to just start tweeting every day. Like as as much as I can. Yeah. it's pretty good I have a blog post to tell you about from a new substacker apparent just brand brand new substack from Demis Sisabis. Oh sure.. the Nobel prize winning CEO of Google Deepmind is now mostly a substacker.. He wrote a blog post this week about basically a framework for how to regulate frontier AI models and calling for collaboration between the government and these labs to really make sure we can all handle this responsibly as AGI compies. I don't care about any of that I just need to read you a sentence that is going to cause you emotional pain. Are you ready for this This is from the first paragraph of this blog post. When we look back on this time in the decades to come, I think we will realize we were standing in the foothills of the singularity. Nothing less than the dawning of a new age for humanity Does that sound familiar to you? My friend This s his line. This is move. This is a thing now. He said this at IO. you had what I can only call just a full on crashout about it. and And he decided was That was a bar. I should keep using that. So we're doing the foothills of the singularity now. this is a thing Nine So is the singularity a mountain Foothills implies that we're like among the the mountain, right?'re among the foothills. Right Be the foothills were already going up a little bit, right? but there's there's more to come I'm asking this because a phrase that AI researchers love to use right now is hill climbing. Yeah We had Missedopffas Silliman from Microsoft on Coder and he was like are we getting there? He's like, we're see hill climing So I wonder if Demis is like, well, that must be more wor in the foothouse We're climbing a hill to get to the mountain. We're doing hill climbing. H climbing has a definition. I'm sure all the people are going to tell me exactly what it is. I'm just saying I think one word led to another word. Yes And now we're just saying it over and over again But like the implication here, by the way, is that the singularity is nigh Yes. in that we should regulate AI before it kills us all which is Doomerism is just Google can't doomerism the same way Anthropic can doomorism. Like don't I don't think they have the credibility to do doomerism Like if Google woke up tomorrow and it was like, We're afraid we're gonna kill everyone That would have a very different valence than like Anthropics whole deal You you know what I mean? The donon't be Eil company becomes the Don't kill everyone company. know what I mean? And every would to be like, But you run YouTube like what are you gonna shouldould you stop?' like should you stop the interternet economy for a minute before you kill us all? Whereas anthropic is like Fable is so powerful that we stopped it. Like everyone's like, cool, like Can Claude still do stuff? And they're like, Yeahah, because that's our only business. Yeah There is some of that energy in this blog post that it's basically like please regulate us because we don't know how and we won't And ye, we need you to tell us what is and isn't okay so that we don't have to figure that out for ourselves because we are in the foothills of the singularity. Again, which just really implies they're going to kill us all I can't really t. There's And by the way, Google will not really tell you what the singularity is likeike I've asked Sund Pron and he's like Denis and I argue about that all the time. And'm like, did you come to a conclusion You can go watch that interview. was it's unclear Yeah. Mustafa is like there's a difference between AGI and the singularity and super intelligence You can watch him try to parse that Unclear what it means to be in the foothills of the singleulara And also seems bad. justust this week, a researcher at Deepmind published a lengthy essay being like everyvery promise that Google made when they bought Deepmind to not do military applications is gone, is wiped out. And in the middle of this essay, which we will link to, he says The LLM still hallucinate and are still brittle in noable ways and it's not clear if we're going to get from here to there. That's not the foothills of the singularity. And in fact, the truth of whether or not the LMs can actually get there, whether all of this hill climbing will result in a model that remembers things in a meaningful way and doesn't just have like huge context windows four grabs. Yeah completely up for grabs I still think the answer is no I've been wrong about sort of like general progress, so I'll take it. but I still think language is not intelligence and L ofM talking to themselves at rapid rates is not just going to horsepower intelligence into being. Yeah, I tend to agree. I mean, yeah, I was thinking about this that We've been hearing these AI companies for so long talk about essentially linear progress, right? That it's like the graph has gone like this. and as long as it keeps going like this forever and ever and ever, we're going to hit these unbelievable things. And I think frrankly, the graph has gone like this longer than either you or I would have predicted a couple of years ago. That still does not in any way suggest that we're due for another century of that kind of progress. Look, I know a lot of people who talk a lot. They don't get smarter In fact, we get dumber generally as this podcast goes along. Speaking of which do you have one more do you want to do before we get out of here? Very quickly, I just w want to play this clip. We mentioned Paramount earlier. The states now have sued. A bunch of states have sued Paramount to block the Warner merger. Their lead trial counsel was on CNBC. I just want to play this clip. This is Jeffrey Kessler, the lead trial counselor for Paramount's Guidance, responding to a lawsuit from twelve state A attorneys Genal, saying that this would be anti competitive. This is an antitrust case To stop a merger, the merger has to be anti competitive This merger is pro competitive Anybody who knows the entertainment industry knows it is in deep trouble Linear television is in deep trouble because of streaming and because of court cutting Patrical is in deep trouble because of the advent of streaming and what it is done. This merger is designed to make a stronger linear television company to make a stronger theatrical producer and to create a true competitor in streaming that could go toe to toe with a Netflix or a Disney or a prime. All right, David I'm just dying for you to react today I mean, this is the same argument as we should make Sinclair very powerful. so it can take on YouTube. It's interesting that Brendan Carr was in David Ellison's box for a quarter million dollars, huh? Yeah, the like you and I have spent a lot of time over the years. You more than me railing it against all of the times that somebody has acquired Time Warner in order to go compete in one way or another, and they end up laying off a bunch of people and it always fails This is we have tried this thing. L even if the logic of what he just said held and it doesn't, to be super clear We've literally run that theory to ground over and over and over and over and over under under every Republican administration we've ever had in this country. We have done that many times. And it never works We're gonna take two shitty companies and it's gonna make one great company is literally not how it works. I do just wan to focus on the things he said were in decline. So first, he's like, everything's fucked Right? That's's like this is pro competitive. I just want to point out, no one's watching linear television and no one's going to the movie theater, which is true whether or not you're going to go see the Odyssey or not it's like true that no one's going to the movie theater Certainly you're not watching linear television You're watching us, probablyro on YouTube This is the problem. We deliver our content to YouTube for effectively free. The army of teenagers is just looming over all of this. and no one can say it He didn't say YouTube in TikTok. Right? He said Netflix and Disney in Prime problem is that TikTok doesn't pay anyone for the content on their platform, and people like it better than the garbage on Paramount Plus What are you going to do with that You're gonna buy Batman Bat man gonna to fix it. This it's so nonsense because no one can just say the thing that is killing them out loud. Instagram doesn't pay for content Our business model is F because they pay high rates. And I would like More artists and filmmakers and the people who play the violin in the background of the Christopher Nolan movies, I want all those people that get paid lots and lots of money to make art But none of these companies can look at the problem that they have which is their competitors, their actual competitors, the apps on your phone that you actually open. Do not pay for content None of them have an answer to it, except we should buy more stuff because that will fix a linear television. R We're going to make our costs go way up And that's how we'll compete Uh just to be one hundred percent on the nose That was Quibby's argent was what if we spent way more money really genuinely was qu be? What if we spent more money on a content and you could see it on your phone Justice for Qibi. They were right and also the wrongest. I know But at least Quibi deserved one