Lessons on taste and AI

Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks, instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible, unified platform that gets out of your way. It's acid compliant, enterprise-ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongoDb.com slash bu ild. Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for every moment. With long-lasting battery life and built-in intelligence, you can stay focused on what matters most. Dell Technologies. Built for you. Dell.com slash Dell PC s. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download tod ay . Welcome to the Vercast, the flagship podcast of the iPhone Bluetooth headset, a gadget we will tragically not be talking about anymore on this podcast. I'm your friend David Pierce, meal up tells here. Hey buddy. Do you want to do uh my whole riff about how AI is Bluetooth? I can do it. I got like a hot 10 on how AI is Bluetooth. I think you've done this on their show. I have absolutely done it. It's like it's my favorite thing. I'm popping up in diners across the country being like, you know AI is kind of like Bluetooth. Like everybody knew what Bluetooth was gonna be, but they had Bluetooth headsets for their API. I really appreciate the extent to which Bluetooth just gets strays all over the birdcast. Bluetooth the sort of thing that is like not that important to most of people's lives. It just makes your headphones. Oh, I totally Bluetooth is totally important to everybody all the time. It's like a magical technology that exists, but also it breaks a little bit. And so you you see the limits of human ingenuity. It's technology, baby. Um all right, we we have a lot to do this week. Um, and we're doing it at 10 o'clock in the morning on Thursday, which is dip the vibes are very different when we do the show in the morning. Um, because you have somewhere to go, which we're gonna talk about in a second, because th you having somewhere to go is actually news this week, right now. Um we're gonna talk about some Apple stuff. Um, next week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. We we are doing a bunch of stuff. We're going to talk about something you and I have been doing to kick off this whole thing. Uh, we have some news about meta and YouTube in court on trial, big important verdicts coming in that we have a lot to talk about. We have a lot of lightning round stuff to do. A truly remarkable Brendan Carr is a dummy week in store. Get ready. I am particularly excited about this one. But Neelai, first we have to start with you. You have two very important life updates,, um both of which are very relevant to the verge cast, and not just because they're you. I I'm genuinely serious. You have a flight to get on today. At 5 30 p.m. It's it's 10 a.m. You have a flight at 5 30. Honest to God, what time are you gonna leave to get to the airport? I'm going to leave at 1 p.m. The airport is half an hour away from my house. So you're going to get there with four hours to spare, basically. Yeah, that's basically my plan. And you are not normally an early to the airport guy. No. You're like a roll-in, walk straight through security and onto the plane at the last second. Well th I i I gotta be I gotta be honest, that's the version of me without children. Fair. The version of me with children is like a like a newbie. Like no idea what's going on first day. Like, how does this stroller work? Like, that's bad. The version of me without children, real pro, no, no bags, everything in it, kind of a giant backpack that just slides through security in and out. I like to do one-day trips. I know you like to do one day trips. Love 'em. 'Cause both have children, we're trying to get back. Uh that that that person has been utterly disrupted by the TSA. Yeah. Uh so that the you know, everyone knows this. The D department of homeland security is shut down. Airport lines across the country are out of control. There's a big argument over refunding DHS and paying TSA agents once again. Uh that comes down to whether or not uh ICE agents can wear masks and other things Democrats want. There's some negotiation back and forth. We have a great piece on the site about the push, the Republican push to privatize the TSA, which was actually part of Project 2025, whether or not all this is going to lead to that at various airportss acros the country. And then uh our excellent reporter Gabby Devae was actually at JFK figuring out what ICE is doing at the airports, which spoiler alert, uh standing around is what they're doing. I mean, because they obviously, you don't want people who are untrained to do security training. So like that's a bomb. Like that's that you don't want that. So there's some amount of maybe that will actually start happening as training occ urs. All of this means that I'm flying to Chicago today and I'm going to the airport four hours early, which means we're recording the verchest in the morning. So if anything breaks this afternoon, uh you can blame the TSA. Yeah. Well, not the TSA. They're not getting paid. You can blame the Trump administration holding the TSA hostage for the Save America Act for this like crazy voter ID Act. Anyhow, that's where I recorded the Votch really. Yeah. It is just full of chaos out there. And it is like add this to the list of sort of really visceral outcomes of weird political machinations, right? It's it's the sort of thing that is like, oh, it is blindingly obvious what all of this chaos is doing because you mistroflate. You know what I mean? Like the the often politics is the sort of thing that happens and it is it is not all that obvious how it trickles down to like your minute to minute life. This is the kind of thing that is very obvious. And and how whoever you want to blame for it. And the answer is kind of everybody. Yeah. Um it's all bad out there. It is all bad out there. No end in sight is basically the the the answer. And I um I mean I've we've done the vergast and you know wrapped up at four and I have blazed out of here and gotten on a flight to Chicago at 515. Yeah. It's just a thing you can do. Yep. Uh and that is not what's happening today. By the way, I'm going to Chicago for a a fun thing. Uh the American Bar Association invited me to speak at their tech show, uh which is where they talk about tech and the law. Uh so if you're in Chicago, you're probably listening to this on a Friday, I'm at the ABA tech show. I'm gonna do the keynote and talk about AI and the law and all that stuff coming together. I'd love to see you. Come say hi. They're like, what do you want to talk about with AI? And I was like, ah, and I have a lot of ideas. So the keynote might be like six hours long. Um but that's what I'm doing. I I think it'll be really fun. And and there is a lot going on with AI in the law. Uh just give you a quick preview. The I think a lot of people react to the law like it's software code. Because it's like structured language and you like issue commands to a system. But instead of a computer, there's like a judge who's 800 years old whose brain has been cooked by Facebook memes. And those are different things. And so you see how much sort of the AI companies are like, well, we did it to softw are. What's some other structured language we can go screw with? And like the legal system is right there. And like contracts are boring. No one reads those. And yeah. So that's that's the that's the talk. If you are in Chicago, you happen to be a lawyer and you want to go to the ABA tech show, I'll be there. I'd love to see you. Love that. It's still weird to me by the way that people invite you to do like keynote speeches. Like there's this like abstract way that I understand that you were like very important, but you're also just like the the doofus I make a podcast with all the time. Do you know what I mean? It's just like it's nice to occasionally remember that other people also like you. And some somewhere out there someone thinks you're impressive. We're gonna see how we hear less than lawyers feel about me at the end of the speech. So who knows? But we'll we're gonna give it a shot. Do you try to sound like a lawyer in front of a bunch of lawyers? Uh have you thought about like what's the what's the cadence of speech in front of a bunch of lawyers? Uh slow. Because you gotta you gotta fill the time. Uh hello. Welcome to Chicago. Um uh a little bit. I mean I you know, you try to reach people where they are. I I'm look the idea that I was ever a lawyer is like deeply hilarious to me. Like I was just I was not good at this. Um and so I don't even I don't pretend that I can do what what these folks do. What I think that they're want me to talk about is there's a bunch of stuff happening with AI in the worlds that we talk about every day. And it is it's hard in every little bubble to see outside the bubble. And in particular, because I have a little bit of background, you know, married to a lawyer, all this stuff, like I can see in both sides of the coin a little bit. Yeah, I mean that's that's a conversation. But it really like if you think AI is doing weird stuff to other industries, it is doing particularly weird stuff to the law. And you kind of see it bubble out all the time. Yeah. Well, we have a bunch of law stuff to talk about. Actually, so this is this is good warm-up for you. Um but we should we should talk a little bit about Apple 50. Um I should say right up front that if you want to hear Neila and I spend the better part of two hours just litigating Apple products and which are the good ones, uh we have a whole separate episode of the verge cast that is available for subscribers only. This is I think the first time ever we've done a subscriber only And I cannot tell you if this is a benefit or a punishment. Uh unclear. Because it it really is two hours of me and David just fully crashing out, trying to make oh not even rank the list, just make a list of fifty Apple products. It is the most let's name some guys first we've ever done. And I had a blast. And it but it but if you get three minutes in and you're like they're just saying the names of laptops to each other, you can turn it off because it's not. They're like emotionally saying the names of laptops to each other. Yeah. But anyway, so the the reason for that is that uh the this is about to be fiftieth anniversary of Apple. Uh Apple is doing a bunch of stuff. Um David Pogue wrote a very good book. Have you read any of his book, by the way? I've not read his book. I have a galley. And I I know he just did an event with Joanna, which seems like it went really well. Yeah. It's very good. Uh and it is it is holy god is it deep. And it is the kind of book that is like if you've if you've read a lot of these Apple history books, there's a lot of stuff in there, but he also found a lot of new stuff. Tells the story kind of from beginning to end in a way that is neat and cool. Um, good book, highly recommend it. Apple's doing a lot of stuff. Tim Cook is like rocking out to Alicia Keys at Grand Central these days. But one of the things that we're doing for our coverage is we are we built this very cool ranker, shout out to Graham Macri and our team and the whole design team for putting all this together, where you can rank the 50 best Apple products of all time. Is that a very fraught thing for a bunch of reasons? It sure is. Uh so what you and I did uh was we went through and our job was to just select the 50, not put them in order, but just take every Apple product that has ever existed and winnow them down to 50. And if you go to the verge.com, I believe starting right now and in the we'll put it in the the container post with the show notes for this episode, it'll be all over the verge. If you go to the verge.com, you will not be able to miss it for the next week. Uh you can then go in and do the ranking system. And it's actually very cool. You're gonna be able to basically have two things pitted against each other, and you will pick the one that you like the best, and it'll just give you sort of a like I forget how many thousands of possible combinations there are. And as a group, we are all going to rank the top 50 together. So you'll get to see the live ranking of how all of these things stack up against each other. It's very cool and very exciting. The rankers actually really cool. It uses the ELO ranking system, which is designed for chess players. We kind of had to modify a little bit to make it work for 50 Apple products. But basically, everything gets a little score and then they go head to head, the scores go up and down, which is why you can watch the live ranking. It's very cool. I sat there looking at it in IMAC G4 and the original iPod yesterday. Ooh. And it's just like choose. It's like I can't. You know? Uh-huh. There's there's no getting around that. Um but you get to see all those mashups together. The hard part was making the list of fifty products. Yeah. Yeah. Which again you can listen to Ne Lai and I spend a lot of time doing. But I'm curious, you you and I this is now the third time you and I have sat here and talked about this together. We're not doing this together. I want to know if what you think. I have one product specifically in mind that I'm like I I am pretty sure a bunch of people are gonna be mad at me about this, that it isn't even on the list. Oh really? I will put we'll we'll put the whole list on the site so you can see what they all are. I don't me reading fifty Apple products to you in a row is probably not great podcast. But I'm curious, is there anything you think of that is not on the list that you're like people are gonna be pissed? No, there's one that's on the list that every time I saw it when we were testing the ranker. I was like, why do we pick this one? What is that? It's the Intel Mac Mini. Like who can get out of here? Like every time I saw it, you lose. All right, see? This is why two hours. You can listen to two hours. The Intel Mac Mini is when the Mac Mini became good. Sure . Sure. Mac Mini. I'm on a Mac Mini right now. Mac Mini movies. No. God no. Please. By the way, the other very fun thing you can do in the ranker is you can hit the little about button and read the blurbs David and I wrote for every single product. And boy, did my friend David and I argue in a Google sheet. There are like three or four where I found them and it's just like, oh, Neil I deleted mine and then wrote about how much he loved the titanium power book. And that's just what this going through and I was like, I can't do them all. So you could you could see it there's uh this ranker is a lot. Like there's a lot about David and I's 15 year relationship that's somehow built in this ranker. Very much so. Um yeah, we had a blast. I will say the only the only one that keeps coming to my mind is there's gonna be people who are like, why isn't iPhone 3GS in here? And to all of you, I want to say that's not correct. That makes no sense. You're you're wrong, and that's fine, and I love you. Go rank Apple products. So here's what I want. Make we're gonna put all 50 in a list somewhere. Go do our ranker, but also if you want to set if you want to make and send us your own top 50, I want to see them. Yeah. We'll give you a the the list and you can just rank them however you want. I want to see all of them. And then you and I next week, we're each going to make our lists independently, and then we're going to see what everybody on the site does collectively, and then we're just going to fight to the death about it. I don't know what I don't happen. I'm really excited. I haven't thought about the G three Power Mac this much since it came out. Like since I physically had one in a computer lab in school. At some point in this whole process, I did like three hours of research on Bondy Blue as a concept. It's Prince Bondide. It's it it may it might be. Can't I can't confirm that. But anyway, we're we're gonna have tons of great coverage. The the ranker is just one piece of it. We have a bunch of really fun stories coming. Uh Jason Snell has written some stuff for us. A bunch of other people on staff have written stuff. It's great. It's gonna Guess who wrote the piece titled for two hundred dollars more you can get a map with air? I I won't say, but y just take a take a guess. existential crisis about the course of their career. Also who's to say? Uh but yeah, it's it's good stuff. I'm I'm very excited about it. I think it's gonna be it's gonna be a fun week. We also have a bunch more Apple stuff coming on Tuesday's show. Um we have a version history about the Macintosh with you and John Gruber and me coming this weekend. It's it's gonna be a very Apply week. Um I'm pretty excited about it. It's been a lot of fun. I and I have some personal news. Do you? Yeah, it's very important. And I realize what people feel when I when people say it you have some personal news and I want you to feel that because i it rises to that occasion, I think. Okay . No like hard U-turn back back to the thing I ran from. Uh no no the the the driver board to turn my 5k iMac into a monitor is uh it has cleared customs from Shenzhen, where it was made and is uh on its way. It's on a UPS truck to my house. What is this piece of equipment? Uh there's lots of them, my friend. When you're like, I'm gonna turn my 5k iMac into a monitor, you enter a subculture full of people who do this, who buy all of the boards and test them, who have deep ideas about whether or not you want to convert the speakers and the microphone as well. Uh there are companies that specialize in this. They there are model numbers. It's good. I spent a full day. So the first thing you do is you got to open the iMac and figure out the model number of the display in your iMac. I see. Which I think is just what keeps people from doing it because, it's like steps. You can't just like do it in an afternoon. You have to take the thing apart and then you have an iMac with a floppy display that has to be tucked in a corner with tape on it, while you ordered apart from China, and then it takes more than a week to get to your house. I literally I think this is what kept me from doing it. Yeah. Um there's like a lot of these boards. I bought one from uh what appears to be a company as opposed to some guys. It's a Stone Taskin R1820. It can do everything. It has like a speaker driver in it. You can like redo the speakers. I'm not gonna even do any of that. Um, but it's the one that doesn't need a fan and it can just run off one HTMI. So that's what I wanted. Uh I'm very excited about this. I'm probably gonna blow up this comp uter. Those are the those are the two feelings that I have. Have you have you done the research on like what what kind of labor from you this process is actually going to require? I mean the the hard the hardest part is cutting the adidas that holds the glass to the to the shell and it is scary. Like that part sucks. But I did it with like a guitar p ick. They sell little pizza cutter s. Like you can it's like it's literally a wheel and a handle, but you can like pizza cut the display. It's very cute. Um but yeah then once you get it open you just take all the parts out, you figure out what amount the board and you plug in the two cables and you're like off to the races. Okay. So this is a lot of confidence, which brings me to the most important question. Are you willing to live stream yourself doing this? No, no, no, no. And I would like to just issue my conspiracy theory because I I love watching a teardown video. Love it. There's it's some of my favorite stuff to do. Uh I also love watching like the videos for people like sandblast old tools and like fix them up again. Oh yeah. It's all very good. The thing where it's like this is rusty and now it's not I'll watch that forever. I mean I'm like I should buy a sandblaster. I don't whatever. Um so I love watching tear in the video in my conspiracy theory belief is that everybody makes teardown videos buys at least two so they can practice on the first one so the actual teardown video is good when they make it. And so we are I I don't know how two icks to practice on. So we're gonna do it and then we'll you know, we'll I'll I'll we'll we'll talk about it. We'll see if it works. But I sat there with the the studio display XDR in my cart because it was a hundred dollars off on Amazon. Uh-huh and I was like, I can't I can't I have to try I have I have to You made a lot of promises about one dollar off I did make a lot of promises about one dollar but it's already a hundred dollars off yeah Amazon has it for a hundred dollars off I came very I came very close. I almost got peer pressure, but I was like, I gotta do it. I gotta I have to try. Well, this is great for you because now it's all upside, right? Either it this works and suddenly you've turned your iMac into a terrific display or oh no, whoops, did my best, gotta go buy a three thousand dollar monitor. Yeah, that's kind of how this feels. I have to say, by the way, the the the people out in the ether that I know who you would expect to be buying a thirty three hundred dollar monitor are all buying it, and everybody seems to love this thing. Yeah, I know, I know. Like I know how this is gonna go for me. But like you remember the first studio display was was it was kind of a mess in certain ways. Like the a lot about the screen was really great, but like the webcam really sucked. It just wasn't a a perfectly executed product. No, I think I gave it thing like a six. Yeah, the the the feelings about the XDR are like rapturous so far . I don't need to know this information. What I need to do is take apart my 10 year old iMac with a little pizza cutter and a guitar pick and put in this like suspiciously sourced driver board that came to my house from China and then be h appy. What could possibly go wrong ? Uh this is this is good. I'm I'm I'm happy for you. I think this is gonna go really well. Um and I am going to come to your house and live stream it while you do it. It's gonna be great whether you like it or not. I'm just saying this is the news. Apple's turning fifty and I'm finally doing the iMac project. A lot of people said I wouldn't do it. Here I am. Is are these two things connec ted? No, it was really the like, am I gonna am I gonna like carry the thirty-two hundred dollar box past my baby who has to go to college? Like I don't think I am. That's where that came. Wait, also one one more Neeli Life update. Did you actually decide to keep your MacBook Neo? I confess I returned mine. Um, we should just I should just say this out loud. I took it back. I attempted to give it to Anna, my wife, um, because I have a Mac mini and a MacBook Air and I thus have no use for a MacBook Neo. But I gave it to Anna because she has like a kind of crummy Samsung Chromebook that is like it works fine for most things, but every once in a while she needs proper Excel basically and is like annoyed at using a Chromebook. So I was like, look, here's here's the Neo. Do you just want this? And she basically looked at it and was like, I what I have no I have no use for this. Like she reminded me about when whenever you have tried to upgrade Becky's Kindle and she's just like, What do you mean I already have a Kindle? It does the thing. That was Anna's response to me trying to give her the Neo. So I took the Neo back. Um I took it back and basically swapped the Neo and an iPhone sixteen for an iPhone seventeen and a gift card. And now here we are. But you, I think, are potentially keeping the Neo. Uh today would be the day. Two weeks are up. So it's it's staying. I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run either open claw or clawed computer use on it. Okay. And just have some agents and see what see what happens. My I I've decided that I have no feelings about Instagram as a platform, especially after the the news this week, which we'll talk about. Um and so I'm like, what if I just automate my social media in some way? Interesting. Like I should take some runs at using these tools uh for for actual purposes, not just I set up an agent and made it send me a digest of the news. Like I don't you know having done that, I'm like this means nothing to me. Yeah. Right. Like I I I I think it's important for us to use the tools and like have deep familiarity with them, particularly so when the CEOs of the companies come on the show, I'm like, I've used your tools and I've thoughts about them. Like I that connection is important to me. So I think I'm gonna use my Neo as like an open claw machine. And I don't know exactly what it means to automate my social media. Like I'm gonna like automate my blue sky. My blue sky is where I'm gonna just like have feelings, which is you can see. Um, but we have we generate like a lot of video clips and they need to go to a lot of places. And I'm I'm very curious to see if I can actually make a workflow like that happen on my personal accounts. And what that just honestly, what that feels like. Because we are up against just absolute machines that do that all day long. Yeah. And so one, I think we we need to like be understand how the modern environment works and like what our competitors are doing. And two, I think there's there's something important about what it feels like to have an agent running that I want to experience again outside of the like I set it up and like, oh, that's neat to like actually try to do a thing. So we're gonna see. I I I think the Neo is that's that's what it's gonna be for, which is absolutely not what Apple is selling the Neo for. No. It's precisely the opposite of what they want to sell. But you need a cheap computer to do it and I have one and and it yeah I could do it with a mini and like you know screen share into a mini. Sure. But you like you like put that all together and you're like, you're at a Neo and you might as well just keep the Neo. I like it. Yeah, I'm we're gonna have to check back in on this because I I'm particularly curious about how your trust with the thing develops. Um That's the main thing I'm curious about. Yeah. I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and there is this weird transition you go through where you go from I have an agent that I have to sit and watch and actually it's it's not saving me any time because I'm babysitting the thing, all the way down to like do I fully completely trust this thing to post to my Instagram and it works and I don't think about it anymore. Because like that's that's the success state, right? Is like this thing actually works on my behalf and it is officially no longer my problem. And the the road to get there looks very different for everybody on every individual thing. And I think for you in particular, I'm very curious to see how far down that path you're actually able to get over time. We're this is the next segment about how you feel about social platforms. Yep. But I think what that's going to run into is do I care about Insta gram? Like can can I just be like robot, do Instagram and not have feelings about that. Well I I don't I I don't know. I'm very curious to see how that dynamic plays out. Um but you're right. The main thing that I want to experience is how much trust can you actually put in a system like this? Because I I think it's important. I know people have lots of feelings about yeah, I'm listening to the show. They have lots of feelings about AI on the verge in general. But I actually think it's very important for us as reporters to use the tools. Okay. And like this is a tool that I I I I want to do some experiments with some stakes. Oh no, I said stakes. N AowI the editor is g onna Now the Grammarly AI is gonna make sure that you edit the smartwatch headlines good, David. Um anyway, I wanna do some experiments with some stakes, with you know that that things can go wrong for real. Yeah, I like it. All right. Speaking of that, let's get into some of the news. Let's take a quick break and then we're gonna come back and we gotta talk about these social media trials. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer-first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500, and that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash bu ild. Support for this show comes from Upwork. One of the biggest life hacks is finally realizing that you don't have to do everything alone. Whether it's in life or business, getting the right help is the only way to truly find sustainable success. And Upwork wants to make it easier for your business to find that help by bringing in the right freelancer when you need them. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, and business operations. Upwork can help grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 plus categories. You can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale up or down without committing to full-time headcount. With Upwork Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork. And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours. No endless searching required. You can visit Upwork.com right now to post your job for free and connect with Top Talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWORK.com. Upwork. com Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves Way requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Grammarly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Grammarly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Grammarly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly dot com that's grammarly dot com all right we're back so the big news of the week, uh, and Neila, you have been kind of hammering for months about how big this news was going to be, is these two trials, both against Meta uh and in many ways about the concept of social media in general, that both came to a head this week. One in New Mexico, one in California. They're different in their actual substance, but but in in a very real way, this is sort of a referendum moment on not just is social media bad, but how do we litigate the ways in which it is bad? I feel like we should start with this trial in LA, right? This feels like this feels like the the more important one. Would you agree? Uh we should start with the one in LA just because that ruling is against YouTube and Meta, particularly Instagram, although most of its other products as well. Um and the one in New Mexico is very specifically about meta it they have different theor ies and it's important. So they're both important in that the floodgates to sue these companies for making bad products that hurt people are now wide open. And that's why everyone keeps calling them bellwether cases. You'll you see that word in every single news report, including ours, that these are bellwether cases. And what that means is a bunch of state attorneys general, a bunch of uh consumer advocacy groups, a bunch of parents, got together and said, what are the what are the cases we can bring against these companies that have the best facts, the most sympathetic uh plaintiffs, the people got hurt the most, and test this theory of the law. Right. And if we can win, then we can bring a whole bunch of other cases. That's why they're called bellwether cases. So these are trial balloons. The one in California, again, the the facts are bad. Uh the the young woman, she's 20 now, she goes by KGM, just her initials to protect her identity. Uh the facts are she started u using YouTube at age six, she started using Instagram at age nine. She blames these platforms on all kinds of mental health issues, including body dysmorphia. She was asked specifically about them. It was really hard for Instagram and YouTube to put her on the stand and cross-examine her. They're like, Your your mental health issues are your issues. This was like never gonna go well. Right? Like they were always gonna lose these. cases You put Mark Zuckerberg and Admissary and Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, on the stand and you're like, do your products hurt people? And they're like, no. And then you show them all of these document s where they study teen usage, where they know that there's harm, where they compare their products to cigarettes. And then you have a jury full of regular people and it's like, how do you feel about Instagram? Do you think it do you think it's good? Do you think it hurt these people or didn't? And there was not a jury in the world that was not going to find find them guilty of designing products or hurt people. Well, and it was important that it was a jury, right? Because the the this case just was different in so many ways from the cases that we've seen before. Again, in the particulars of the facts of the case, in the way that it was constructed in front of a jury, like you're right that Mark Zuckerberg can sit in front of Congress or a judge and say stuff and and it can go a lot of ways. But uh we we've seen Mark Zuckerberg talk. He's not gonna win over a jury in this case. And there were also Lauren Finer did a really great job of covering this case for us. Yeah, she's in the courtroom. Yeah, she's in the courtroom a lot. And she talked to like there there were parents of kids who who have died and gone through horrible things, in large part, and they blame social media for those things. Like I I think you're right that the social media companies were always going to lose this case. But I want to come back to the idea of this. People should go read it. Lauren has a piece about the parents reacting to Zuckerberg. It's brutal. Like truly brutal to read. It is just a heartbreaking piece to read because it's lost their children to various harms on social media platform. And there's one parent in that piece who's quoted say ing, I saw Mark Zuckerberg's curly hair. My son had curly hair before he killed himself. It was beautiful. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't deserve to have his hair. Like, that is just a fully like devastating emotional reaction from a parent to seeing the person who they blame for the death of their child. And like, you know, I I think, you know, Meta had to make the arguments that it it wasn't them. Like they didn't reach into an individual and do these things. But these cases were about are the products designed to be addictive, to foster these behaviors? Do you know that you're doing it? Right. Do are you aware that you're causing these harms? And I there I just don't think there was ever going to be a jury that would look at the evidence presented in these cases and say anything and think about their own experiences with these products and find anything other than yes you knew it and you did it anyway. So you you've mentioned the product design piece of this. And I I want you to like put on your lawyer hat for me for a minute here because like we talk about section two thirty on this on this show a lot. And one of the things that came up over and over in all of the discussion about this is like these companies get out of these trials because they're like, Well, we're so sorry for this bad thing that happened to you. Because of Section two thirty, we're actually not responsible for the content posted on our platforms. Right. And uh a lot of the stories in Lauren's story from from the parents and a lot of the things that come up are like my kid tried to emulate a video that they watched on YouTube and and harmed themselves or died. And th those stories are awful and and that's very different from the way that this became litigated. Like these trials, as far as I understand, and this one in LA in particular, went way out of its way to not be about content on the platforms. Yep. Can you explain sort of the legal avenue they went down with these with and why it seemed to get away from the Section 230 fight? They needed to get away from the Section 230 fight. And I think there's a lot of consternation about whether Section 230 survives trials like this, survives this attack. By the way, there are bills in Congress right now that would just straight up repeal section 230. The idea that we need to regulate the social media companies is bipartisan. It is enormously popular with the American people, and it just keeps running into both Section 230 and I think very importantly the first amendment. Yep. So you just have that problem. And I'm calling it a problem because everyone agrees that there should be some control over what social media companies are able to do . And you it's I, you know, I think government huge regulations are bad. You've heard me say it on the show a million times. You just run into well, the first amendment pretty much prevents you from telling them what they have to moderate. Yeah. I can say mean things about you on the internet. They can say mean things about the first amendment. And then two thirty says Facebook is not responsible for the content of what you users post on Facebook. So if you go on Facebook and you're like, I hate my neighbor, they're they've done something that they think is defamatory, and then Facebook spreads it to 10 million people, the neighbor can sue you, but they can't sue Facebook, even though Facebook is the one that amplified and distributed the message. So this is a real tension. And it connects to the First Amendment very directly, right? If you change section 230, well, the government is gonna make Facebook liable for a lot of speech it wasn't liable for before. That's gonna change how Facebook moderates. It's gonna change how Facebook operates. There are some first amendment concerns tied up in that. I think these cases are different. And a lot of people disagree with me. I, you know, Addie Robertson, our policy editor and I are just like having like a daily crash out about our feelings about tech policy and tech regulation, because it it feels like we've come to a point where everyone understands that the platform internet designed for virality and likes and reach and engagement has done some bad things . And there isn't some market force to fix it. You can't start a new social network and be like, it's just like Instagram, but it's not as engaging. Like that's it's not going to work for you. Right. Like we've we've seen these attempts. Like the market isn't correcting the harm. So you gotta do something else. It is unclear what that something else is. And I think these cases are well, we're not gonna talk about the content on the platform. We're not gonna run headfirst into the first amendment in section 230. We're going to say when you design the ranking algorithm for the Instagram feed, and you put them you put stuff that is more negative at the top, or you you you feed engagement by pushing notifications over and over again to young people in particular, you know what you're doing. Those are choices you are making that you should be liable for. The really bad analogy, you can argue with a this analogy million different ways. Is if I shipped you a print magaz ine and like the edges of the paper constantly gave you paper cuts, you would not be like suing me over the speech in the magazine. You'd be like, this product hurts me. Right. And it's like kind of that dynamic in these cases. Now, I think a lot of people, Mike Masink was just on decoder. I think Mike Mazink is really smart. He's a great tech policy reporter. He runs tech dirt. Uh he is like this is a disaster for 230 and the First Amendment. Right? Like people are having different reactions to these cases. My view is if you don't do, if you don't put some control, if you don't find some way to make these companies liable for the harm that most people feel that they have caused, then they're just gonna keep getting away with it. And I think saying your products cause harm versus the content that you that other people distribute cause harm at least lets you get to is your algorithm any good? Right. Can you push these many notifications to young people. Do your teen controls actually work? Do your pre-parental controls actually work ? I think there's some back and forth in there, but man, I again it the idea that you can go to court and say we're not liable for a product design because it contains the speech of other people. It just to me and it has never passed the smell test. And I think we're going to see a lot of these cases come up and these companies are going to, they're going to back into a posture where they have to fix the products and not necessarily the moderation. Yeah. I'm not sure how that's gonna play out, but I that feels like the future of these platforms. Yeah, it it's it was really fascinating. I went back and uh was reading a bunch about this case from 2021, Lemon versus Snap, which I either missed entirely at the time or had just kind of memory hold, like it was 2021. There's a lot going on in 2021. But the it it that to me is is such a fascinating and sort of clean example here where basically like Lemon versus Snap was uh a a kid was driving and there was a filter on Snapchat that would show the s how fast you were going. And there was a belief that if you could take a picture while the filter showed you going over 100 miles an hour, you would get some kind of achievement inside of Snapchat. Uh they they did it, I believe it was one thirteen was what it showed on the filter when they took the picture, and then they they crashed and and died. Um and initially this case gets thrown out on on section two thirty grounds of like, well, this is just content on our platform. You can't hold Snap responsible for it. And then it turns around and an appeals court says, actually, no, you you can be tried for this because this is not, like you said, this is not about the content on the platform. This is about the structural design of the platform that incentivizes this kind of behavior. And actually, Snap can be held liable for that. And as far as I understand, that that was the sort of crack in the door that a lot of people in cases like this saw as like, oh, this is this is now this is a road we can go down and a case we can win. And I like the the lines here are so unclear to me, which is what's really challenging, right? Where like we've spent a lot of time talking about our algorithm speech. And I I I don't have a clean answer to that in my head, honestly. Like, is the is the order in which you present a bunch of things to me protected free speech or not? And should it be messy. So far pretty protected. So far keeps getting thrown out on 230 grounds. Um seems messy. But like in this case, it's worth mentioning that the plaintiff here at KGM didn't just sue Meta. She sued Meta and YouTube and TikTok and Snap um and settled ahead of the trial with Snap and TikTok. But this is not this is not a particular fight with a particular mechanism of Instagram. This is this is uh at pointed at the entirety of the way that social media works, which I think is really fascinating. And like YouTube had a very funny statement at the end of this, which is uh this is from Jose Castanata from Google, who said this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. Wrong. Flatly incorrect. Um it's just not true. Like nothing about nothing about YouTube is is not social media. But there there is a thing that can I can I stick on that for one second? Sure. That is the nothing is anything argument of market definition that all of these companies fall back into. You wanna sue Meta for monopolizing social media. Like, what is social media? Sure. Is fate is Facebook social media? What is the market for m Instagram? Is it videos of dancing people? Right. Or is it how to videos for small business owners? Nothing exists. And so I mean like they they do this all the time. Yeah. And so, you know, Google's saying YouTube is a streaming platform, not a social media site. It's like, is there even a differen ce? This is what everyone's watching. Is TikTok a streaming platform and not a social media site? Like Like is Instagram. Like you can't just fall back on nothing is anything all the time. Right. Well, and simultaneously, nothing is anything and everything is everything. Yeah. Like you can't, it just doesn't it none of that works. I think they all thought they were going to win because it they win so much. And I these I I again I think the tech industry really misunderstands how much people dislike them. So okay, so this is this is actually the thing I wanna talk most about here is I I think you can argue the facts of the case however you want. The idea of is this an assault on free speech or is this a useful, different way of talking about what these platforms are, I think is a good and valuable discussion, right? Like is your notification system different from my free spee ch? I I I would say I tend to be on your side of that, that the that does not, that passes a smell test for me of like the the way that you make autoplay happen is different from the content of the video that I'm watching. And it was really interesting, like there was a moment where the jury in this LA trial was instructed not to think about the content of videos. Like it was it was it was made very clear that this is not about the stuff that this person is watching, which i is just fascinating in a case like this that is fundamentally about like what she watched and experienced on social media. But it is like it is so clear to the point of like this is about the way the thing works, not about what is on the thing. But then it is just true that everybody hates social media. Like, and so part of me wonders, like, I it goes back to the fact that this is a jury trial. It goes back to the fact that there are like dozens or hundreds of these waiting in the wings. There's going to be more of them tried this year. Like, I did these tech companies just completely miss the fact that everyone turned on them? Yes. That's nuts. I mean look, there's there's like two ways you can express your opinions in America. You can vote with your dollars and you can vote with your votes. Voting with your votes , shaky track record, especially in terms of regulating tech companies. Like we're not good at. There's no privacy law in America. That is a just a straight-up disaster. Yeah. Everyone thinks we should have one. The tech companies have lobbied their way out of it over and over and over again. Uh, app store regulation. Like the states are like, we should do app store regulation. We should get rid of these Apple taxes, and Apple shows up with like 10 milli billion dollars and an army of lawyers and they go away. Like voting with your votes is just not a a thinging we're do well when it comes to regulating tech companies . Okay, we should vote with your dollars. I actually think that would be the preferred out come. Right? Like you compete in the market and people choose the one that makes them feel good. These companies are all so big and they all own they don't really compete head to head, right? There's not a competitor to YouTube that's run by Apple. Right. Apple actually tried to build an AI product and they just end up using Google's model. Yeah. Right. Like there's there's something about this where they've all retreated to their boxes and they have little like skirmishes, but they don't actually compete. Which is why I find the nothing is anything argument always so hollow. It's like if you're like, is you if you go to a normal person, is YouTube different than Instagram? They're like, yes, it is. And then the lawyers get in the way and they define everything down to nothing as anything. And now no no one competes with anybody. Right. But they're not actually competitive. And so the idea that people dislike them is not showing up in any numbers. No one's switching away. No one's stopping to use Instagram because they're mad at Mark Zuckerberg. They just keep using it because it is a monopoly in its way. Uh we last week we talked about how there's not a great consumer AI product. And uh I mean, you probably heard it as much as I did. But chat GBT is the most popular consumer product in history. You know what it was before that? It was the Xbox Connect. Like whatever. People have feelings about the produ ct. Right? AI use is off the charts. It's because it's everywhere in front of everybody all the time. It doesn't mean what you think it means because there's no market competition where people are like, I'm done with this one, I'm gonna buy another one now. Right. Car makers know about market competition. Right? You're like your car is old and you're gonna go buy a new car and maybe you'll stick with the brand you have, or maybe you'll buy a different car and the the products are replaceable in that way. It's just not true for these companies. And so I think they look at their data and they're like, Gemini usage in search is off the charts. People must love it. And you're like, ugh, do they? Right. Instagram looks at usage and they're like, man, there's more video being uploaded to Instagram reels every day. People must love it. And it's like, do they? And I think they've missed it. I think they have missed that real people are having real experiences on their platforms. And when you hurt a bunch of kids, the parents are going to get mad. And if you hurt enough kids, even if it is statistically not a huge number, you're still going to get a bunch of mad parents who've had similar experiences saying, Why aren't you responsible? And they will find a way. You know, the the first case you're talking about that that tried this theory was like 2016, 2017. It was Herrick versus Grinder. Oh, yeah. Where uh a young man sued Grinder because the ex-boyfriend had made like eleven hundred fake profiles and relentlessly harassed him. And the you know, the the courts found that two thirty protected Grinder because it was the speech that was a problem, not the product design. That was shot one. Right? We've they've just people have just been trying this theory out and finding the edges and the boundaries of okay, you're not responsible for the content. We'll give you that you're not responsible for the content. You are making the systems that enable the content to hurt people. You should be responsible for that. And again, you get a bunch of parents, they're they're going to be relentless with this idea. Like it would, it, I mean, you and I are both parents. Like the the they won't stop. Right. Even and we hear this from these companies over and over again, if the harm is statistically sm all. Right? You have five billion users, like we only hurt 2% of people. That's a lot of people. Yep. And they will be relentless. And I I I do think these companies have have missed it in their own dat a. That a lot of people are actually unhappy with the experiences they're having because there's no competition. So you can't switch. Right. So again, I I just come back to you,. you You're you you can can vo votete with your vote, with your dollars. Maybe you can vote with your attention. And if none of those systems work, you end up in court and you end up with some outcomes that again, I I think that the two thirty repercussions of free speech repercussions will be big, right? These companies will start to moderate and build their systems in different wa ys. But what other choice do we have? Because I think nothing, I think status quo is not acceptable. Right. So this is this is where I I wanna I wan ponake the middle ground for you between government free speech regulation is bad and these platforms need to be reined in, right? Because this this is the thing. And and I think the the challenge we have gone through for a long time is that the only way to pick this fight has run directly into free speech. And so it is it is very hard to A litigate and B like morally defend. Uh but I I do think like to your point, one of the things that has changed is that people are more and more aware of a the bad time they're having on social media platforms and b the lack of recourse they have both to sue the companies about it, but also like leave, right? Both for sort of addictive property reasons and also for where else are you gonna go reasons, right? Like network lock-in is a huge important thing that like it's where people are, it becomes very hard to leave even if you desperately want to. And so all of this stuff is just like we're we're at a point now where I think one way to look at these things is to say, okay, this is going to give us an avenue to regulate notifications. Which which is like one possible outcome of it. It's like we're gonna get to have a sp a a whole conversation about it. No, I I I actually disagree. I I think right like the outcome of a court case in which you lose some money. And right now they haven't lost that much money. Yeah. Well it's $375 million for Meta in New Mexico. It's three million in total compensatory damages, of which Meta has to pay 70% and Google has to pay the rest in California. Like it's it's eight dollars. There's gonna be a punitive award in California. We don't know how much that's gonna be, but then there'll be more cases and that will add up. Um but even the juries in these cases are saying that the the punitive damages are not the point. The point is the precedent. Like everyone is crystal clear on the thing they're trying to do. Right. They're opening the floodgates to more litigation. So that's not actually regulatory. They're not saying here's how you should design these systems. What they're saying is your approach to handling your own information. You did your own studies on how this stuff was affecting teenagers and you made these decisions anyway. You are negligent. That's bad. Yeah, there were all these things that came up in trial about the the sort of parallel paths of meta studying the negative effects that its platforms had on people and also identifying teenagers as the main source of growth for its platforms, like that stuff became very damning very quickly of like, oh, this is bad for teens. And then there was an email that I think was like, growth colon teens. What you're going to see is these companies are ideally going to make different decisions, which is just different than a regulatory approach. Sure. Right. Like Europe is like, here's what the buttons should look like. Have you seen a cookie banner? It should say these words on it. Like there's there's one whole approach that's happening in other countries. The United States is a different and for a lot of reasons. we're different And so we're saying you made bad decisions, you're punished. Hopefully that leads you to make different decisions. A thing Meta and Google could do is say we're actually never going to make different decisions. We'll just keep eating the losses in quarter. Yeah. We have a lot of if it costs me three million dollars every time a kid gets hurt, that is an acceptable outcome. That seems like not what they should do. That seems morally d uh abhorrent. But that's what I mean. Like it's not regulatory in that way. That's a thing you could you just pay the fine every time. S ure. I don't think they're gonna do that. I think actually what they're gonna do is appeal. Um by the way, the the meta statement is very good uh because as you pointed out, uh it they sued all the companies. So Meta says we respectfully disagree at the verdict and we'll appeal teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. And it's like, yeah, sh they didn't. Yes, it's all of them. Yeah. Uh and also we we're we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online. And it's like your record's bad. And in fact there was evidence that came out in this case that uh meta in particular has done less work to track that evidence because it knew what was gonna come up. Like do you remember all those years ago when when Mark Zuckerberg said something to the effect of like the only reason you're mad at us is because we're the ones who do the research on what's actually going on. All this other bad stuff is happening elsewhere, uh and and they just don't know because they choose not to, they just turned a blind eye to it. Um the the lesson meta learned from that was to turn its own blind eye, apparently. Right. So again, what are what are some actual regulations that don't run into free speech that might hel p? A privacy law, but straightforwardly, here's how these companies can use our data uh to operate their services. That would be good. Uh algorithmic transparency laws, where they have to publish how their algorithms work. Laws making sure that they do the research and they publish the results of that research. So there's not a negative incentive for the research to exist .. Right You and none of this in infringes on a free speech of these platforms. It just says you have to make the information and share it with us and then protect our information as you as you run your services. We are just not gonna get there. Uh those are not proposals like algorithmic transparency proposals come up every year. There are bills in Congress right now. What are we doing? We're not funding the airports. It's like there's just a roadblock to the voting with your dollars world that is causing everybody to try to find other avenues. And so courts are the last avenue. And here we are. And I really do think these companies, I I think they thought they were going to win. They they have a record of winning. Yeah. And I think they did not under stand how much public opinion has shifted against tech companies, particularly social media platforms. We'll see. They're going to appeal. Anything can happen. The appeals process is very different. Um, but you know, the judges are on social media too. They they also have feelings about all of this. Yep. Uh so we'll see. Yeah, it is fascinating. Like you that you know, they always talk about jury selection and they're they're trying to find people who are not biased against the defendant. It's like, boy, I don't know if you can find 12 people who are going to be unbiased against how bad social media has become. Look, I uh you know, I'll I'll flip this around. I have very complicated feelings right now about the state of tech regulation. Um I have very complicated feelings about Brendan Carr in the state of like speech regulation in America. Like I I think government speech regulations are bad. Like just flatly I think they're bad. These companies have used the First Amendment as a shield against accountability for every single decision they have ever made. And at some point, it just enters like ludicrous z one where everything is speech. Like anything that happens on a computer is speech, and no one can ever be accountable for it. And there has to be some recalibration of that. So that we're protecting things that are actual speech and making people accountable for the product decisions they make that affect people's lives. And I there it's somewhere in there is the right answer. I don't know what it is. I think these cases are going to make a lot of people recalibrate that answer, but I do think everything that happens on a computer is speech has just led us to these outcomes where these companies are more powerful than ever. They control more speech than ever without any market forces to shape them up. And then there's only going to be one other outcome and I that outcome is the government does stuff and I think that is the worst possible outcome. So hopefully what you get out of this is a bunch of companies reacting to their own research, making different decisions and actually competing to keep people safe.. Yeah Alright, well there's more of these cases to come this year. Like you said, we're gonna get appeals. It feels like this this floodgate is now open. And what it leads to, I think kind of remains anybody's guess. So we'll we'll see, but we'll we'll stay on it. Um we should take a break and then we're gonna come back talk about some stupid speech regulation. We'll be right back. There's basically been one guy in Republican politics who's argued for a regime change in Iran for years and for America to take a proactive military role in making it happen. Ambassador John Bolton, President Trump's former national security advis Uh as far as we can tell, he did no preparation of the up opposition actually inside Iran. Uh no coordination, no effort to uh see what they would do, no no effort to support them, to provide resources, money, arms if that's what they wanted, telecommunications, just no coordination at all. And uh they don't seem prepared for it. How Trump lost the Republican Party's biggest arad war hawk. Today explain. Every weekday and on Saturdays to o. Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's gonna be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursda y. In 1984, Apple launched maybe the most consequential computer ever. It was not a good computer, particularly. There was actually a lot wrong with it. But the Macintosh had all of the right ideas about what computers would become. And it kind of changed everything. This week on Version History, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history, we're telling the story of the Macintosh and why, again, despite not being very good, it managed to change everything anyway. That's version history on YouTube and wherever you get podc asts. Alright, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsor ed. For flavor. Long, long ellipsis there. I'm just can I can I can I can I hype up some sponsorship ideas that are coming? Please. That's it. That's my wh ole Love it. So we are we're sponsored by our upcoming sponsorship ideas. We gotta compete with influencer world and we're not gonna do it. We gotta figure some stuff out. I'm just saying. I love it. Get ready. It's all it's gonna get weird here on the Verge Cast. I'm very excited about it. Um, I don't even have to ask. I've been following the news. I know. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast and then a podcast with some new competition that I'm not even ready to talk about. America's favorite podcast and then a podcast, Brendan Carr is dummy, this week with theme music by Chris Swick . I get real like what if there was a Nick Jr. show called Brandon Carr as a Dummy vibes for postal service. I can see that su re. A lot of I I feel like we have a lot of fans who grew up in the same era of music as we did. Yeah, I believe that's we're getting a a lot of early two thousands indie on Brendan Carr is the dummy. It's good. I appreci I appreciate it. That was very good. All right, we're back. Neil I, what did he do this week? Uh well first of all we you mentioned the other show. So it turns out our friend Kara Swisher has been calling Brendan Carr a moron on her shows every single week. We we have not communicated about this. She's been doing it. So she said she's gonna do an episode of On with Kara Swisher called Brendan Carr is a moron. So I texted Kara and I was like, uh you should just call it Brennan Carr is a dummy so that our podcast within a podcast can infiltrate another podcast. She thought this was funny. Uh you can post it her threads by the way. So hey Kara, just remind her at Kara Swisher, Brennan Carr is a dummy. We should do it. Um uh she will think that's funny as well. So we've texted, I think I'm gonna go on her show. Nice to do Renn a Car as a Dummy with her. Perfect. Um we just have to schedule it. But we we were texting yesterday because it was very funny that she arrived at this conclusion. And she actually said to me, Do you do you think you have a monopoly on calling him dumb? And I was like, no, not at all. Please, by all means. Brandon Carr's stupidity contains multitudes. I was like, if you're just don't do moron, do dummy. Like ha please have it. Licensing fees and zero. Like take 'em. And yeah, uh two things this week by our boy Brendan. There's the one everyone's paying attention to, and then there's the one that's just it's just Brendan being stupid in his particular way. Uh so I'll start with that one very quickly and then we should talk about router bands. So there's two big broadcast companies that are merging, Techna and Nextstar. You have never heard of these companies, but they they basically own all the local broadcast stations in America. They're theoretically competitors. There's a law in America that says you can't own more than 39% of the broadcast stations in a specific are a. So if you're, you know, wherever you're sitting, the broadcast stations, the TV stations around you, no one person or company can own more than 39% of them. And it's not like goes back and forth. The number has gone up and down over time. And the idea is that there should be competition in the market for news and entertainment. And if one person owns all of the media you consume, that would be bad. I don't even think this is like controversi al, right? Having a monopoly on everything people consume gives you a lot of power. The government would like to preserve some some sense of competition instead of doing speech regulations. Okay, 39% is a cap. The problem is that the big companies like merging, and Brendan is nothing but a stage for big companies. So he just went ahead and waved the cap. He said, Next our technology merger, I've waived the cap. And even though that the combined company will cover at least 60% of US households, that's fine. And here's this quote: waiving the rule here is consistent with long-standing FCC authorities and doing so promotes the underlying purpose of the FCC's media regulation by promoting competition, localism, and diversity. What? This is just backwards. So Brendan, Mr. I must follow the rules about news distortion when it comes to regulating comedians has said, well, these big companies want to merge, they're pretty Trump friendly companies. They just are. Uh you know, they want to merge, they're being very friendly to Trump in particular right now. I've gone ahead and waived the 39% rule. To promote competition. To promote competition. Sure. Because he says they need to be so big to compete with Facebook. Oh right, because fundamentally he's really mad at Disney. Right. Produces half of the content that people watch, which is just like and it's it's all relentlessly woke or whatever. Umbrendon words. Anyway, so it's just in in Brendan World, this idea that he has to exhese these ancient statutes that allow him to regulate comedians and he must enforce the laws it's written while also waiving the rules so he can pass through merger. Like perfect Brendan Carr is a dump. In another world this I would have spent all of our time on this. But that is not this world. It is an imperfect world. And Brendan said something much stupider this week. Uh out of this. This one's my favorite. Because this isn't stupid in the normal like definition of stupid, which is that it's like wrong and bad. This is like straightforwardly like a thing a stupid person does. Do you know what I mean? Just like out of the blue. It's not like a a thing I disagree with. It's just a thing that is stupid. So this week, the FCC issued a national security determination that says allowing routers, like Wi-Fi routers, to be produced abroad and dominate the U.S. market can creates unacceptable economic, national security and, cybersecurity risks. And that means no new routers produced abroad will be allowed in the American market unless those companies pass a certification. This is a huge surprise to the industry. Sean Allister and I spent the week calling router executives. This is not a thing we normally spend our time doing, and asking questions like, did you know this was going to happen? What happens now? And the answers were no, no, and we're gonna say anything on the record because we're afraid of the Trump administration. So this is not a normal regulatory moment. Like uh, you know, I'll just compare it to Biden. But the Biden administration would do anything, and like fifty executives would line up to go on CNBC to be like, this is an infringement on our the American way. Right. The Trump administration capriciously bans all routers for non-specific reasons in ways that will not actually keep every anyone safe. And everyone is literally too scared to even issue a like a press statement to us that says something anodyne, like we are evaluating the thing and blah blah I was like just giving that statement. So it's clear that you're evaluating the ruling and everyone's too afraid to even issue that statement. Yeah. The only statements we were able to get are from companies that are like, ugh, we applaud the push for more security. It's like cool. Thanks, guys. And again, I just I would just compare this to like Biden would be like, man, I wish my TV was brighter. And like 50 TV manufacturers would show up on television to be like, how dare ye? Yeah. Do you believe in liberty? Like, this is not that. This is we are deathly afraid of the government and we're not saying a word about it. Which is to be clear, the point. That is that is the the the desired outcome of the Trump administration doing this stuff this way? Yeah. So here's the here's the the the upshot of this. All the routers that are currently on sale remain on sale. It's only new routers that don't have existing FCC clearance. Right. So if you're worried about the security of Americans' networ ks, you would not say all routers that are currently on sale remain on sale. And they're we they don't have to be updated. You don't have to have to have don't have to be updated. Nope. Uh so we haven't accomplished any goals. Straightforwardly we're just saying you have to make routers in the future in the United States of America. But all the routers that are currently being made overseas that have existing FCC certification are fine. So Netgear, TP Link, Cisco, Eero, you name it, all their existing products are fine . Weird. Right? But there's a security. It's like there's a security risk in the future that I, Brendan Carr, have discovered in the fut ure but cannot tell you about. But won't tell you about ha uh c have not apparently told any of these companies about it only exists on routers that haven't been made yet. And it's unclear if getting the certification still making the routers overseas is fine. Or if you can just bring all the stuff to the United States, including the software on the routers, and just load the software on the routers in the United States, and that would be fine, even though the software might have a supply chain attack. And by the way, the certification is a self-certification . So that the companies can just say, here's our stuff, like here's how we're going to make these routers who promise it's fine. And the FCC might say that's okay. So even the process of how this will work is totally unclear. We've accomplished approximately nothing except maybe a bunch of router manufacturers have to make routers in the United States. That's not that. It's it's a bunch of router manufacturers have to dream up a bunch of fake plans to make routers in the US and then tell them loudly to the Trump administration in a way that makes Donald Trump look good. Right. That's the extent of it. You have to write down we're going to make things in the US. Trump did it. Hur huzzah. And and then everything gets to keep being normal. Like that's that's just what this is. We think so. Uh you know, all the attacks that they're calling out, like revolt typhoon, Insult Typhoon. Those attacks happen because our telecom companies, which Brendan Carr is supposed to regulate, had extremely lax security measures and basically outsource everything they do now. And he's not regulating them. Right. In fact, he's he's reduced regulations on telecom companies. He has a whole initiative called Delete, Delete, Delete that he's very proud of, where he lets telecom companies do whatever they want at cheaper cost. He just doesn't care about lowering prices. He has just found a way to get a bunch of router manufacturers to say that they're gonna build routers in the United States of America to comply with this law. What they're actually gonna do is nothing and continue making the routers that are still fine overseas while they just wait it out. Like it's it's very obvious that they're just going to wait this out in some way. Or they will find a way to do final assembly in the United States in a way that passes muster with these regulations and claim that is a victory. It's just super unclear what any of this will actually accomplish, except he got a headline saying all routers have to be made outside the United States. And he definitely got a headline saying all routers are banned. Yes. Which was very scary. People freaked out. And then you just look at it and you're like, actually this directive says nothing. It doesn't even present evidence for the claim that these routers are dangerous. Right. Again, Sean and I are just like calling on router manufacturers a very weird afternoon where we talk to a bunch of router manufacturers. They're all deeply confused. They're all trying to engage the government on this stuff. It's not like this is a new idea, but the United States knows that there are cyber attacks on US soil all the time. It knows that these networks are vulnerable. It knows, for example, that TP Link, the biggest seller of routers in the United States, has like huge problems. TP Link was the first to issue a statement, and they're like, We're gonna be great, you guys. We're gonna super shape up because they have the most to lose. But the reality is that most routers and most people's homes are delivered to them by telecom companies, by your ISP. And you could just impose this regulation on the ISP and say, keep the routers safe, do as many years of software updates as you can. You are accountable for software patches. And that would accomplish the same goal as saying we're banning all router manufacturing. Yeah. And Brendan can't do that because he cannot regulate a telecom company. It's just not in his bones. He will regulate late night comedians, but he cannot regulate a telecom company. He he allowed telecom companies to not even have to tell you what your bill is for. I I do think the thing that is funniest about this to me is that there is a an actual sort of societal good outcome, which is that it is true that your router is a potential vector for problems on your internet connection. And if if this leads to everyone going in and changing the admin password on their router, the world will be a very slightly better place. Do you know what I mean? Like it your admin password is probably either admin or one, two, three, four on your router. You should change that. You just you just should. It's just a good idea. I should not be able to walk into your house and log into your router. And I probably could right now. Just just fix that. It's very simple. But like it it they could have just m issued that as a as an executive order from the White House being like change your router password. That would have been fine. But instead it's this pure nonsense that is the same pure nonsense. Like Sean wrote a great FAQ for the site about this and compared it to the thing where they got all worried about chips just to basically extract a portion of invidious revenues. Yep. And that's like that that I that is the only thing this looks like to me is the same kind of come bow at the feet of the Trump administration and pay us, and we will let you continue doing business. It is it's a shakedown. Like I don't know how to look at this other than it's a shakedown. It's shakedown that it will absolutely result in no new routers for a while. Like existing router models will just keep getting sold, which is probably fine. Yeah. Like the the stakes of that are very low. Um No no one is clamoring for Wi-Fi eight. Like I w I think it's gonna be fine for a couple of years. Especially because Brendan isn't making the speeds get faster. Right. I don't know, man. Like it he can't do this to phones. Like all the phones are made in Ch ina, but that's not a big enough market. Uh and so maybe this is just like a trial balloon, right? You do it with routers and you do it with laptops and finally you get to phones. And that would be an enormous regulatory overreach for the FCC. Uh, but that's Brendan. That's our boy, right? I must follow the law when it comes to regulating comedians. I cannot, I will just capriciously change the law when it comes to how many stations you can own in a broadcast market. And I've made up a law when it comes to where routers should be made as a way to baby step towards regulating phones directly. That is his end goal, is to regulate speech on the internet in whatever form he can get to. It has always been the end goal. It is all these things are baby steps towards it. As always, Brend an, you can you're you're welcome to come on the show. You can come on the show when I when I go do Brennan Carr as a dummy on Kara's show . I think that would be fun too. How dare you? Again, I you can you can tweet it, Brennan. I swear to God, Neilai, if you go on Kara Swisher's show with Brennan Carr, I will I will cut you out of first class. We can have it on our show. It's a podcast within a podcast. We've never specified what podcast it must be within. That's interesting. Okay. Do you see what I mean? It's module. Whoa. Okay. This is a powerful idea. Anyone can do Brendan Carr as a dummy. It's open source license. If you want to do Brendan Carr as a dummy on your podcast, please. We welcome it. It's like a it's a benign virus in the podcast ecosystem. Sports podcast? You know, Mina Kimes, if you want to do Brennan Carr as a dum my, get it out there. If I can get Pat McAfee to do Brennan Carr as a dum my It's open source baby. It's beautiful. Anyhow, Brendan, if you wanna come on on Brennan Carr as a dummy, you want to talk to me on on my show. Wait, if Brennan goes on decoder, is that Brennan Carr as a dummy ? Everything is nothing. Nothing is anything. If Brendan Carr goes on Facebook, is that Brendan Carr is a dummy? He's a dummy wherever he is. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to see if you can answer questions about any of this. It's not gone well for people lately answering questions. But you can try. Uh on this show, uh, on on Decoder, on any other show, apparently, uh on the street. I welcome it. I'd I would love to chat with you about what qualifications routers in the United States will have that make them safer than routers made other places. You haven't laid it out. Uh but that's been Brennan Carr's d aummy, America's favorite podcast within any podcast. Within all podcasts, simultaneously. We are simulcasting Brennan Carr as a dummy to every podcast you listen to. We haven't figured out the technology, but it's gonna happen. Yeah. Um, my first one is um an end to a lawsuit I've been tracking for the last couple of years against this guy named Michael Smith, uh, who did just the most fascinating and I think telling thing about the state of the world. So Michael Smith is this guy from North Carolina who over the course of I think seven years used AI to create hundreds of thousands of songs, uploaded those songs to Spotify and used AI tools to automatically listen to those hundreds of thousands of songs hundreds of thousands of times a day. Uh he made himself, I believe the number was like $1.2 million a year in royaltyalties, again, over many listens and many songs. Uh ends up being caught for this, ends up getting sued, uh, pled guilty this week, and has agreed to pay uh it was eight point oh nine million dollars. So this is this is the end of a really fascinating road. This thing has gone for the last couple of years. But he he created this kind of like dare I say genius scheme, in which he he used technology to create songs that no human, as far as we know, ever listened to. It was not important that humans ever listened to them, because the bots would go and listen to them. And he was just doing royalty arbitrage, basically. He was just extracting money from Spotify because it has automated systems to pay artists based on how things get listened to. And so he's just he,'s just pulling money out of the system with this purely automated making and listening to music thing. And my thing is like, I absolutely guarantee you this is happen ing everywhere on the internet all the time at vastly bigger scale than you can possibly imagine. Like there was this company, this is a couple years ago now, that was like starting the they they like very loudly pronounced they were going to start making AI generated podcasts. And they were like, we're going to make thousands of them. And they're each going to get 50 listens. And because there's thousands of them, we're going to make money because it costs us nothing to make them and we can make them at such unbelievable scale that we're going to make a little bit of money every time, and that's how we make a lot of money. And that, like, they just above board did the same thing this dude did. Well, the fraud here was having the bots listen to the song. If you were like, I will flood Spotify with AI generated music and that will take listens from other people, but that's the money I made because my cost of production is this is like the white noise on social media. Every everybody has been buying views on social media platforms since time. Can I tell you the actually the the the twist on this that I love the most. Sure. So I mean anybody on any of the social media platforms knows that there's just clips of podcasts everywhere all the time now, right? And there are companies that will shoot a fake podcast with founders and then use the clip and then like buy views for those clips to promote. Like I have I have the pitch in my inbox from these companies that's like, look at this fake podcast we shot. And I'm like, well, I should do this. First of all, that's my reaction to this. Uh so if you're watching this as a clip, by the way, please know that is what this is. That's what I'm making. So these companies, they basically have armies of people in Discords doing clips. Like and they're doing labor arbitrage. Those people are overseas, they' pareying them lower rates, they're paying based on views. And the turn is they're not using bots to get views for themselves. They send bots to the other clippers so that the systems detect those clips and downrank them for having bot fe es. Whoa. Very good. And so like I agree with you that it's happening at massive scale, but it's also happening in ways you would never expect. Yeah. Well, and the thing is, it it is essentially because it can happen at such incredible scale. Like if I just made a video and bought it a hundred million views, it would you would notice, right? Like there are there are obvious behavioral things that these platforms can detect and shut down. They would pr they would demonetize my video, they would delete the video, whatever. There are lots of tools that exist to prevent that behavior. They don't work all that well, right? Like you every time you look and see one of these platforms like ban a bunch of uh obvious bot accounts and you see all the celebrity accounts drop precipitously. Like this is just a thing that happens. Everybody has been buying these things for forever. And in that case, it's like I buy a bunch of followers so that my brand deals get more expensive, which is like one bit of fakeness removed, right? Like I'm duping you because you're stupid. It's not bots the whole way down. My bots are just tricking you. That's slightly different. But this is all of these dots are now just connecting because you are very close to having like 10,000 Android phones in your basement, aren't you? Oh my god. I could. This is the thing. When I say very close, um do you have like five thousand Android phones in your basement constantly scrolling your own social media feeds? Let's just say there's reason a my camera is zoomed specifically the way that it is. No, but but again, it's like the the scale of this, not in like a revenue sense, but in the in the fact that so this guy creates accounts on Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. He creates thousands of accounts. Again, all of this is happening individually at such tiny scale that like if I'm Spotify, I actually don't care that a few dollars are being allocated in the wrong direction, right? Like that that's a price they're all willing to pay. It it goes under the detection zones. But he did this hundreds of thousands of times because you can completely automate the entire process. It costs him nothing to do it once versus to do it a hundred thousand times. And so now you have this problem of okay, I'm not losing three dollars. I'm losing three dollars hundreds of thousands of times. And that is the kind of thing that I absolutely guarantee you is happening at a scale absolutely no one is willing to recognize. It's all over the place. And it's gonna get worse. I'll also point out that is the plot of the movie Office Space, but no one paid watches that movie for the actual plot. It is the plot of Office space. That's actually the thing that's happening like burbling under the jokes. Like that movie is all tone, but there's like a little bit of plot, and that's the plot of office space. But yeah, it is like this is there there are going to be so many lawsuits like this one to come. Um, kudos to Michael Smith for being an innovator. You know what I mean? Uh what's your next one? Uh I've got another one. Uh just I'm just gonna plug version history. So we did version history on Limewire. Uh really fun episode. We did a Sarah Jong and all these like copyright cases about music piracy came up. The Grockster case, uh Sony versus Betamax. There was a case this week at the Supreme Court that reheated all of it, where the music labels sued Cox, the ISP, Cox Communications, for knowing that music was being pirated on their network and doing nothing about it. And it this went all the way up to Supreme Court. How did that go to the haven't we litigated this 700,000 different times? How did this end up the Supreme Court? This is it's the same as the social media trials. Like you you litigate and lose, you you kinda carve off a different chunk of it and you go at it at it again. So the labels tried it again. Um and they had they had been winning. They had gotten through, I think there was a fourth circuit court of appeals, and Cox was held liable. They ended up at the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court reheated all of the cases that we talked about in version history on LimeWire: the Grokster case, the Betamax case, and they found that Cox was not liable for the piracy its users were committing on its network. This and it's like a really if you read the decision, it's Clarence Thomas. Uh and he's like, we we're getting a little wild here, saying everyone's liable for everything. Cox simply, this is the quote, Cox simply provided internet access, which was used for many purposes other than copyright infring ement. Big one. Yeah. Anyway, the trade organization, the RAAA is of course disappointed in the court's decision and said copyright law must create creators of markets from harmful infringement and policymakers should look closely at the impact of this ruling. And it's like, yeah, dude, the policymakers are also stealing TV. I don't know how to tell you this. The boomers all have the weird box that streams IP TV to them. And that's our policymakers. Like, sorry, bro. It's rough, dude. It just reminded me that episode of Virgin History, it was really fun to make. Um, and the issues in that continue to be relevant literally to this day at the Supreme Court. It's the kind of thing that it does feel like we are doomed to litigate forever, and Sarah Jong is doomed to be angry about forever. Yeah, it's it was a fun episode. Go listen to it. Go watch it. Um my next one, I'm I'm just gonna wrap a bunch of stuff just into one last lightning round item for me here. Uh, and then we're gonna end with you because I'm very excited about ending on on some grammarly stuff. But um there's a big week in chatbots. Um we have open AI trying desperately to focus on the things that are actually working and stop doing all the weird stuff that isn't. They closed down the Sora app, uh for which I would say there was very little sadness and constant and concern. The more interesting part of that is when the Sora app went away, evidently so did its Disney deal, which is very interesting. And I suspect I don't want to speculate on things I don't know, but it it seems to me that there is there is a a turn of reporting left to do there on what was happening to that deal. Because we thought it was weird at the time that Disney would sign up to make this deal and invest in OpenAI, and that this this felt odd, and it feels even stranger The one turn of reporting we already have is that Disney was surprised. Right. Yeah. And and a lot of this is not they're not like giving up on the idea of video generation. They're just pulling all this into chat GPT. There seems to be a real sort of centralizing thing happening. We also had news last week uh that OpenAI is really invested in building out this like super app out of Chat GPT. Uh this is everybody's idea now, right? Like this is this is the thing. And I think everybody sees what the Claude app has become where they put Claude code into it and then there's co-work into it. And so people are like spending time in there. Now Google is apparently trying to do the same thing with Gemini. OpenAI is trying to do the same thing with chat GPT. God only knows what Microsoft is doing. Did you see the thing earlier this week where Microsoft was basically just like, we're so sorry, we're we're gonna refocus on making Windows eleven good. For for the first time ever, our plan is to make Windows 11 something that you like and not have so much co-pilot nonsense in there. So there's just ev everyone is like flailing to figure out how to package all of this stuff in a way that people actually like. Uh there was also news this week that Apple's big plan for overhauling all of its AI stuff is to have a standalone Siri app that will do a lot of this same stuff, which is like a a sort of diametrically different approach than Apple has taken before. Like Apple has always talked about Siri as this sort of spread across the operating system technology that is like diffused into the phone. And now recentralizing all of it into an app called Siri would just be a very different way of thinking about what AI means. I think they have to do that because they need to be able to update that app way faster than the operating system. I actually think it's the right decision, to be clear. I like the the the thing Claude has done, which is basically turn AI into a a bundle of experiences inside of an app is just how people use technology right now. Like I think that just makes sense. And if you want to eventually have it be the everything everywhere all at once technology, fine, but we're not there yet. So I think it is probably the right approach. It's it's just going to be very funny for Apple in particular because Siri sucks. Everybody thinks Siri sucks, and Apple's gonna have to be like, here's a Siri app on your phone. Do you want this? And that makes me laugh. They do get to just put it on your home screen by default, which they will do ru ruthlessly. They also put a U2 album on everybody's phone by default, and that went over super great with everybody. But anyway, so this is like this is the big product innovation now. It's like everybody has tried to do everything. And now what we're actually gonna get is a series of these like all in one apps that are trying to create this kind of sticky user behavior. Because the other thing that happens is you go to Claude Code because Claude Code is really good and that makes you use Claude more, which is very useful for anthropic. Like that is not a thing that OpenAI has done a good job of building, ironically. And it's not a thing that Google has done a very good job of building. So we're starting to see this massive consolidation back into all of these AI apps in a way that they're just gonna look like apps, which is very interesting. I mean I I think we should just say it again. This is the point you've been making. Th ere is a great use case in the enterprise for AI. There it's business software. That's the thing you keep saying. If you run a business, the AI tools can help you, particularly if your business requires software or automation. Like if you think in loops, if you have software bra in, AI is great for you. And a lot of people have software brain. And a lot of businesses require a lot of software. And if you can bring the cost of developing all new software to zero, maybe there will be new kinds of businesses. Software brain. Software brain is like trying to take over the world. Like what if everything was software brain and just running into reality? And most consumers, even the software people I know in their everyday lives, do not have software bra in. Like you can't. I just I just can I read you a Slack message that you wrote? Because I've been thinking about it ever since. This is last Friday. You we we have a Slack room for our whole editorial team and you just wrote, I don't know what the story would be, but I feel like we should run the people do not yearn for automation as a headline. I have thought the phrase the people do not yearn for automation sixteen times a day since that. And it's true. Like the people, the people do not yearn for automation. It is not that's not what we spend most of our time thinking about as normal humans in their lives. If you describe most people's lives as a loop, they will get very mad at you. Yes . Like those there are lots of movies about how bloodless your life is a loop is. And trying, in fact, to get out of the loop and eat pray love your way through India or whatever. I mean you can what's the Ryan Reynolds movie where he's an NPC? Oh uh free guy? It's like somewhere on the spectrum of like free guy to fight club is your life is not a lo op. Right. And so like if you just try to apply software brain to consumer use cases, you end up demanding that everyone lives an automatable life, or which I is never gonna work, or you're gonna run into the inherent brittleness of AI as it exists today. Yep. Right? Which is well, Allison is gonna test task automation on the S26, and Gemini is going to take 13 minutes to order an Uber because it's just staring at the Uber app, being like, what do I do now? And just burning tokens along the way. And so I I I I see what's happening here is there's product market fit in the enterprise. They figured it out. Because if you describe a business as a loop, you have gone a long way towards revolutionizing any business. Y ep. And you can do all kinds of business logic. If you are like you're as a consumer, you're a loop. You're gonna order the same yogurt every week, and that's the yogurt you're gonna eat. People are like, go fuck yourself. Like I like straight like absolutely not. And like I just don't, every technology that tries to automate the consumer experience in that way runs into the same historically has run into the same problem. And they are they're all marketed the same way, right? We're gonna know everything that's in your fridge so we can tell you what recipe to make. And uh it just simply does not work. Because it turns out you don't log everything that's in your fridge. R ight. I I so I I look at all this stuff and I'm just like, man, the people do not yearn for automation and these tools are just there to automate things, which is great for business and is gonna just run into the brittleness of Alexa and Google Assistant and everything else that has promised to automate your entire life in very specific ways. Yep. It's good stuff. By the way, if you know what the story is, I would still love to run that headline. Yeah, this does not obviate running that headline, which is still a thing I would like to do. It's it's a very good headline. Uh and then I can stop thinking about it, which will be very helpful. Um all right, for our last one here. It it's it's time for you to close a loop that we've been talking about. You have been uh we we've talked a lot about what's been going on with Grammarly and it's it's expert voice was it called Expert voices? Expert voices. Expert Voices feature that uh impersonated you and me and lots of other people on the internet. Uh you you've been sort of threatening to have Shashir Murocha, the CEO of the company, on Decoder. Uh, he came on Decoder. How'd it go? It it went. It it went . Uh so I didn't know Shashir before I think you did. I I know lots of reporters who who've known Shashir in a variety of roles over the years. He used to be the head of products at YouTube. So, like, you know, we we talked to a lot of Google executives. Like, yeah, reporters talk to Google, like people knew Shashir. Um, I'm I'm I will just say this: I like people who are honest. I think he's honest. Like, I he he says what he's thinking. Yeah. I like Shajir. I've met him many times going all the way back to he he ran a company called Coda for a long time that I really liked. Like he is he is one of those people who has been doing this long enough to understand how it works. Uh and I have always enjoyed talking to him about product stuff. Yeah. And I I don't I I I don't think he was like shading. I think he was telling me what he really thought. Uh and I appreciate that. And I appreciate that he came on. Obviously I was like pretty mad at him because he stole my ident ity. I thought we sat in the pocket there for a minute. I'd actually invited him on the show because he has such an interesting background. Like he used to work for Larry Page, he used to work for Sundar. He's on the board at Spotify. I had wanted to have a big conversation about creators and the creator economy and like building these platforms. And then he did a thing that I think is coming to the entire creator economy writ large. YouTube is, you know, they reacted to the grammarly stuff by inviting you and me into their likeness detection program. Yeah. Because they know they need a likeness detection program. Because people are going to use our likeness on YouTube, left and right witho,ut permission, and they need to have some system to shut it down. I think you can clone songs and put them on Spotify today. Spotify, you don't even need AI to do it. Every night I just yell at uh the our smart speaker to play lullaby versions of Taylor Swift and I don't even know where that stuff comes from. There are just 10,000 albums on Spotify called and are they generated by AI? I don't know. I know it makes them sle ep. That's that there's your there's your Spotify fraud. Yep. Right? Like this thing is gonna start happening at really high rates to lots of people. So he got he's in the middle of it. Obviously, he had pulled the feature. He he said he didn't think the feature was any good. But I what I took away from that conversation is no one has thought this through. And this stuff is people's livelihoods. And just saying it's attribution when there's no economic upside to that attribution, and then you can clone people left and right . Man, it's gonna get messy. Like creators do not take kindly to losing money from their work on these platforms. They are fighting for every dollar. Like a small creator gets paid like $3,000 to do a brand deal at small scales. Yeah. Every dollar counts. And so I I, you know, I I felt like Shashir could take it. Like he he's been in these roles. He's he you know, he he is he has faced the full fury of the YouTube community before in that role. Yeah. And so there's a little bit of me saying, Okay, I'm gonna make you answer for everything. And a little bit of like, why did you ship this feature? But I think he could take it. I think uh I don't know. I don't know how you felt about it. I was in it. Um I I I tried to be as as fair as I could while, you know, still dealing with the fact that I was involved. Um, but I felt like that conversation, both sides of that debate were present and like made with as much conviction as could be made. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, my my read on it, um to be perfectly frank, I think you're angry about angrier about your inclusion in that feature than I was, which was really interesting. But uh I don't know. I have I have a certain sort of nihilism about the internet now that I probably need to get over. There are pictures of me wearing AirPods that have been used to sell fake AirPods on Alibaba for t 15 years. I had a friend who sent me a a picture of me in a slide on some like you know, one of those like pop crave knockoffs about how bad um they were calling them, you know, pervert glasses, all of the the like ray bands and go and there was a picture of me from the version history episode of Google Glass wearing Google Glass and sort of looking up like this. And they sent it to me and, they were like, Are you a pervert? And I was like, I don't think so. But here we are. But anyway, I think the the I was struck by the same thing that it sounds like you were, which is that it just doesn't seem like they actually thought this all the way through. Like, no one asked the full questions, and it reminded me of something uh Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo, said to you, which is basically that like he he thought it was a bummer that Google was forced to react to Chat GPT so fast and decided to react so fast that it didn't actually sit down and think about what it wanted to do. Uh and I think that there is there is so much of that happening in AI right now. The money is so big, the stakes are so high, there is a sense that all of this is moving so fast that if you take two seconds to sit down and think that you will get left behind. And all of these companies are just running themselves ragged, making huge mistakes in service of trying to run as fast as they possibly can. And it's like maybe Google should have sat down and thought, oh, how do we want to actually integrate this into our products? Instead of just like scattershot doing everything it possibly could and hoping it would eventually catch up. Uh this felt like sort of the same thing to me where they're just like we we have an AI gun. We're gonna point it at everything we can because we feel like we have to. Yeah. I mean I look I'll I'll connect it to the social media trials we were talking about. These companies are confusing user downloads with quality over and over and over again. And so, you know, Google looked at lots and lots of people downloading ChatGPT and decided that they preferred it. And maybe they did prefer, you know, the sort of conversational output of ChatGPT to whatever junked up sponsored 10 blue link thing that Google was doing. And maybe they didn't react to it. But like everybody knows the free version of ChatGPT that most people are using isn't any good and will like consistently just lie to you and make things up or like be too synchophantic. Everybody knows it writes people are people claim that they see chat GPT writing all over the place now because they're used to it. Yeah. And they think it's not good. Google AI overviews, uh, you know, the the hot theory is they switch to the cheaper Gemini model to run AI overviews, because obviously they need to lower costs. That thing is wrong all the time, in a way that I think is hurting Google's reputation. But then you ask Google, they're like, it's got the most take up of all time. And they just consistently are confusing like numeric measures of success for quality measures of success. Yeah. And I I just think everybody is like, these tools can do a lot of stuff. They can get you to an outcome. You can vibe code, whatever. Is it any good? Like, is this good? Like, do people actually like using the tools? Do the people whose names we're using actually want to be included in this way. And I think that you're right, the the mad rush to claim success is just confusing everybody about what success actually is. And it's funny to have this conversation on a cusp of Apple 50 when you were you know videos of Steve Jobs of the left and right being like, we won't do stuff to just do it, we do stuff because it's great. And that's like, whoa, this industry has forgotten that lesson. Yep. Yeah, I I don't I don't want to dwell on this too long because people should just go listen to the episode. It's it's a it's a good decoder. Most decoder's trash, but this is decoder. Uh but there's just one thing. So you you had this back and forth with them where you're talking about basically uh the they went through this immediate backlash to the feature and they said uh that people could email and opt him out. And he sort of disagrees with you that what he what he ends up saying is he decided this was off strategy and shuts it down and all this happened for the lawsuit. But then you say, you you say it's off strategy for you. The feature obviously shipped. What made it on strategy at the time he shipped? And he says this thing that I think is totally fascinating. At the time, the team believed they were doing that. This is from the transcript. They were looking at users and they were focused on a user need, which is I wish an expert could give me feedback at this moment. I wish my salesperson could give me feedback. I wish my support person could give me feedback. I wish my idol could give me feedback. I wish this expert could give me feedback. In itself, I think that motivation that users have users have is a really good one. And I think one that I would encourage experts and creators to lean into. It's a big opportunity. Do you know what never w the word that never ever ever appears in there is AI. Like this he he fundamentally misunderstood a human need as an AI product. Like, and this is like, do you remember when Meta launched the thing where you could chat with AI versions of celebrities? Same thing. Like, I want to talk to a celebrity is not an AI feature. It isn't. It and it is actually that disconnect between you have built me an AI solution to a human problem is part of why people don't like AI. Like the this idea that you can simulate human needs and human relationships and human problems and do human things by throwing AI at it with the name Nei Patel on it is the problem. It's not the solution, it is the problem. If Grammarly built a thing that was like, we will connect you to Neil Eye Patel, who will edit your story for you, I think that's fascinating. Like what a weird cameo clone of all time. That's what I'm saying. Like, what if cameo, but it's Neelai yelling at you that your writing is not good is like that's a product I'm interested in. But the idea that you they they are are looking at this and they're saying, I want more people, I want collaborative tools for humans, and they're saying we're gonna AI fake our way through this and you're gonna love it is just so fundamentally disconnected from actual reality that it makes me crazy. David, it's software brain. It is. It is software brain. It's pure software brain. Because you know, his pitch to me was log into our platform and make an AI of yourself by writing down the rules you would use to ed