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Ask any developer. It's a great Start building at mongo db.com slash build . 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. Welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of the VergeCast producer job that is now open. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil I Patel is here. I'm gonna apply for that job. I think that job might be easier than my job. We are hiring, I I I want to get this out of the way right up top because we haven't mentioned it on the show yet because we are terrible people. We are hiring a producer to come work on the verge cast with us. You can go to voxmedia.com/slash jobs, apply, mention Brendan Carr in your cover letter. If you are Brendan Carr. I really I think the greatest part of this is Brendan Carr wouldn't get the job, but he would get an interview. Do you know what I mean? Like we I would hire Brendan. You know, we're also hiring a supervising producer for decoder. I would hire Brendan to be the supervising producer for decoder. Just cause that job is like run my business and policy show and I would just be at the yell at Brenton all day, every day. He is good at getting attention on the internet. See what I'm saying and that is that is the game we all play now. Yeah. But anyway, both of those jobs are open. Producer on the Vercast, supervising producer on Decoder. We have big plans for shows. We want to we want to expand them in lots of ways. So we need help. So if you know people. I promise we are not as unpleasant to work with as you would think we would be. We're like mostly as unpleasant as you think it' nots not all the way. Well I'm more in your less. Do you know what I mean? So we like this is why we're a good match. You're you're a delight and I drive everybody insane. And this is like this is like a good balance we strike. It is, I it is I d in in the sense that David does all the work and I do none. That's really how this plays out. It's a great move. You just sort of Kool-Aid ma Kool-Aid man in five minutes before the show starts. And you're like, What's up guys? Yeah. I have a bunch of hot takes I haven't done any research on. Let's go. Which in fact brings us to where we should start the show today. We have we have a lot to talk about. Uh there's some Apple stuff we're gonna get to later. Allison Johnson's gonna come on and talk about the unbelievably brief life and death of the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold and her bizarre experiences with that phone. I'm very excited about that. Um, but first, there's sort of a big picture thing going on here. But the specific bit of news this week that I think has been on a lot of people's minds uh was this memo that went around inside of OpenAI from Fiji SEMO, who is the CEO of applications at OpenAI, which is a hilarious title that means nothing. But Fidic SEMO is like a big deal. She ran Facebook at Facebook. She was the CEO of Instacart. Like she's she's a heavy hitter in this world and has been at OpenAI, making a bunch of changes. And she sent out this memo essentially saying open AI needs to focus. That this company has been on what she called side quests, uh, which is a pretty accurate representation of what's been going on. Like, OpenAI has launched every single thing you can think of over the last two years. And she's basically like, we need to stop doing all of that and focus really aggressively on enterprise and coding use cases, because that that is where the product market fit is. That's what we need to do. We need to pull back on all of this stuff and focus on those things. And in there, somewhere, I think, is the bones of a bigger conversation being had right now about how people feel about AI and whether AI is going to continue to grow in the way that these companies need it to grow. Yeah. And I I just think I don't know, we we we can talk about this from a bunch of different angles. Um, but I'm curious, like, how do you respond to the open AI thing? Like what what do you make of of Fiji Simo's memo here? Is this the right thing for open AI to do at this moment? I I think so, but I I I have like two big reactions to this. One, they just did this. Sam Altman just declared a code red. Yeah. Like minutes ago. Like I like I don't even think we've like settled down. I don't think we've un uhdeclared the code red. It's not over . So what are we doing? What what do we why why are we doing again? Did it not work the first time? Did it not take? Like, literally, did people not get the code red memo? So we're sending a different different memo with words to see if that one hits. There's a really great line um from Fidji Simo in an all hands with the team talking about this stuff. Somebody I guess asked her, is this a code red? And she goes, we are very much acting as if it's a code red. I don't think necessarily declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense. Like very good. Perfect. And correct. But I think you're-I mean, this is not-you're right that this is not news to open AI, or at the very least it shouldn't be news to OpenAI that this is the move. Well, this is I think this is my second reaction to this. OpenAI is stuck. Fiji is supposed to be the one making the big consumer product. They hired her because she ran Facebook, which has ads. They hired a million ads people from Meta. There's so many people at Meta from OpenAI that in Meta All Hands, they talk about losing people to open AI. Sam kicked himself to run the lab, the you know, to do research and pretty much raise money to make digital Jesus or whatever he thinks he's doing. And Fiji, CEO of applications, she's supposed to make the big consumer product that that does it, that takes market share away from Google search, the most lucrative business in the history of technology. And they're not doing it. They're it's it it is not occurring. They might be taking market share, but they're not making money. That's the thing. That that's I think the important distinction. Like it is there is no question that chat GPT has been an enormous success, right? Like tons of people use it. And we're gonna get into the way that people feel about that, which is what I really want to talk about here. The the the feelings people have when they use chat GPT are fascinating. But people are using ChatGPT. And OpenAI is losing money hand over fist every time you use ChatGPT. And I think it's increasingly clear what this company has realized is there is no path from that to suddenly we we make money on ChatGPT. They're trying ads, they've tried shopping, they've tried all the things that you would try, and uh it appears all indications are we're not running towards profitability here. Right. You you hire the person from the big-scaled consumer internet business to do that again. You hire Fiji from SEMO to do it again, and she is the one writing the memo, acting as though it's a code red, saying we have to pivot to enterprise. Yeah. Because that is the opportun ity. The story here is that no one has figured out the worthwhile consumer AI busin ess. No one. Yep. Even Google kind of has n't. Right? Like their attempts to do it look way more like slop than not. Yes. AI overviews is just so frequently wrong now that it's becoming a j oke. Uh we are planning our Apple fifty package and I asked it yesterday, uh, when did the wedge shaped MacBook error come out? Which is a just a fact you can know. Yeah. It's it's there's there's a lot of ways to find out when that one came out. Yeah. And AI overviews could not get that answer right. Yes. That that's brutal. L ike even Google, which is gonna do the best job here because it already has the scaled consumer business that's making a lot of money and has a lot of advertisers, the they are hurting their own product. They're gonna hurt YouTube in a very real way. They're starting to run surveys on YouTube asking people if they think the c the videos are AI slot. Oh wow. Because they they need to build the detector. Like there's something going on with Google, but they already have a big business that's winning and they have Google Cloud and they have all this other stuff. OpenAI, they gotta make a business. It's existential for them. They need to make more money than they are spending, or Sam has to keep raising money forever, and that is pretty shaky. And so I think absent a big consumer hit, this this whole industry is paralyzed and starting to kind of lash out. Yeah. That people don't love them more. Like you were talking right before we started recording about the perception that the Verge hates technology, which is very funny because we employ literal gadget reviewers. And like I love technology and I will spend all day and all night talking about high bitrate movie streaming and we'll do like spec episodes. Like what do what do people think we're doing here? The problem is people have conflated tech with AI and AI has not come up with a consumer use case that people love. They they really have not. Like none of these companies have really come up with that thing in this way, or at least in a way that makes money. And now the industry is starting to feel that pressure because they're asking for so much. Data centers everywhere, no more RAM for anybody, weird ideas about what GPUs should do to video games. They they're they're way over their skis in terms of what they're asking for. Yep. And they haven't made a product people love. And so people are like, no, actually we'd really dislike you. And the data kind of backs it up. Yeah, I mean, there was this one NBC news poll a week or so ago that I I've seen a bunch of people talking about that is essentially uh the question was basically how do you out how do you weigh the risks and rewards of AI, basically? Like is it is it net good or net bad? And uh with the caveat that polls are always messy, um people think that it's bad. Uh this is just one thing from it. It says fifty-seven percent uh b said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefit compared to thirty four percent who said the opposite. Uh a plurality of voters view AI negatively and don't believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology. That is not unclear evidence. Um, this poll is fascinating, by the way, because they also polled people about like, how do you feel about Gavin Newsome and ICE and the Democratic Party and just a lot of things sort of in the ether right now and it's like people are psyched about Pope Leo, people are psyched about Stephen Colbert, and like everything else sucks. Yeah. Including AI. And AI is like down there with Democrats generally in the war. It's between ICE and the Democrats, which is just a tough beat for AI right now. That's really bad. And I've uh talked to executives at the biggest companies in tech who are like Gen Z hates AI and that's our problem. Yeah. Like straight like they will just look me in the eye and be like, the problem is that Gen Z hates AI. We don't know what to do about it. There was also this really interesting Pew study from last fall. Like this is this is a building set of data, right? That peop we've been getting real scientific research about how people feel about AI for a while now. And it's kind of been like this the whole time. Uh it's it's not like people are starting to sour on it. People talk about, you know, the trough of disillusionment, it's just been like this pretty much the whole time. But in this Pew study, uh 53% of people said AI will worsen people's ability to think creatively compared to 16% who said it will improve this. Um far more people said AI will worsen rather than improve people's ability to form meaningful relationships. 50% said it will worsen them. Five said it will improve them. Like this is not there's a there's a certain subset of people out there who are are are ambivalent and wait and see and who knows and whatever, but like to the extent that people have reflexive feelings about this, it is overwhelmingly bad. Yeah. And I I want to make the comparison to two other things. Because the the you know scale of change the AI might bring is hu ge, but it's not without precedent. So the internet promised a huge amount of change. And it was just adopted . You didn't have to try. Do you know what I mean? Like it took a while and there was a dot-com bubble and there were fits and starts and there was a lot of silly ideas going on with the internet. But people by and large just started using it. And a bunch of companies were able to make a lot of money along the way. And there wasn't this level of confusion. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like Amazon chose not to make money for a long time. Very publicly, very loudly said we're not making money because we're going to build all this infrastructure. And the second they were like, we need to make money now, uh, Jeff Bezos owns a very large bo at. You know, like the the the internet, the way It was the same with smartphones and apps. And you can feel a lot of ways about mobile, you can feel a lot of ways about social media, you can feel a lot of ways about Mark Zuckerberg, you can feel a lot of ways about the Apple tax. Like that economy developed and you did not have to convince people to buy smartphones. Right. Facebook is actually my favorite example of this. People raced to join Facebook. Like raced to get on it because we we eventually figured out the downstream effects and there were all kinds of problems and all that stuff. But like the the initial value proposition of here's why this will make your life better was so clear to so many people that the minute their college would allow them to, they started pouring their lives into the platform. Yeah. Like it's it was so straightforward, a good proposition that everybody just ran for it. And I've been doing all this research for Version History, uh, our other podcast, which people should go listen to, um, that has led me back to like the days of the radio and the early days of the the phone. And yes, there are small panics about what those things will do to the world, but overwhelmingly, most of those new technologies were going to like solve world peace. That the these were the things that when they bring us together, everything will be wonderful now and we will never have problems because we can just communicate. Seriously, this is like the these these are real pervasive beliefs that radio will make the world a meaningfully better place. Yes. Connecting everybody is the goal. And there will be some negative consequences, some externalities, but we need to connect everybody anyway. Uh Andrew Bosworth at Meta famously wrote a memo called The Ugly, in which he laid out all of the bad things that would happen and said, Still we connect everyone because we think that's the highest and best use of the technology. You can you can feel a lot of ways about that memo. A lot of people have felt a lot of ways about that memo. And his point always has been, no, I was just laying it out. Like these are the stakes and these are the consequences and we believe in what we're doing anyway, 'cause we think we're gonna make the world a better place. This is the line from from Silicon Valley. It's Gavin Belson saying, I don't want anyone else making the world a better place before I do. That's Silicon Valley. But everyone believed in this stuff. I can make this even more narrow. YouTube is basically built on widespread copyright infringement. Yeah. Those industries did not like this that we we were YouTube took all this stuff. The same as the AI industry is kind of built on widespread copyright infringement, but YouTube was so useful and so good and so obvious that everyone sided with them in a way that they're not sided with the AI industry. Right. You can just see delivering meaningful actual value to consumers lets you get away with a lot. Right. The iPhone uh is the the you, know it,'s the vanguard of moving high-tech manufacturing to Ch ina. Apple built that ecosystem in China. So did Tesla. Everyone should go read Apple in China. It's a great book, but you see, these two companies in particular kick-started entire industry over there. W why did we allow that to happen? Because the iPhone was great. Because it's great. It's just a great product. And so are smartphones. And uh my point here is the AI industry is staring at these poll s that say everyone hates them. And it's because they are asking for so much. And you you can quantify that in a million ways. They're asking for a lot of power.' Therey asking for a lot of land to build data centers. They are asking for every stick of RAM that has ever existed in the history of the world. They're asking to scan every book without payment. They're asking for my identity to run grammarly. Like whatever it is that they're asking for, uh they're doing it without permission and they're asking for a lot, and they have not given back a product that makes people feel the way that the internet made them feel, or the smartphone made them feel, or YouTube made them feel. It just doesn't exist yet. And so instead of reacting to that by building great products, Fiji CMO is saying we need to pivot to enterprise encoding because Enthropic is killing us there. And then the VCs are going on podcasts and doing what they do, which is blaming consumers or blaming the media, which I think is bananas. Yeah. But have you been deep in the weeds of the VC podcast this week? I feel like you've been talking to me about VC podcasts more than usual. I have. So here's what here's what happens. And he I feel so bad for our team. What happens is at night I try to put the baby to sleep and he's a real cudd ler. So you gotta just hold him until he's like actually asleep. But his eyes are closed and he's you know he's just trying to doing that wiggly thrashy thing where if you put him down too early, he'll wake up. So he's gotta sit there. Yep. What are you gonna do when you're sitting there? You're gonna watch TikTok on silent. That's what you're gonna do while you're sitting there. So uh I've just might But you don't even wear headphones, you just watch it on silent. Just watch it on silent. Oh my god. It's it's fine. On and like dim silent it is a weird way to experience TikTok, but it's what I do. Uh and our poor team just gets TikToks at like 8 30 p.m. all day every day. I can confirm this forever. I feel bad about it. So I I ran across this trader called Signals and Noise. She has a PhD from Chicago, which I love because I went there. She's the co-founder of something called Bookscape. Her title says AI Tech Strategist. You go watch her videos, we'll link them. They're good. Her name is in here. So if you want to uh if you want to tell me what your name is, I'd happy to say her name, but it's hard to find your actual name. And she's called that two podcast s. One, of course, is all in with Tramont. Always. Everyone everyone's doing that is. And the the one I want to start with is uh uh the Big Technology Podcast, which is hosted by uh Alex Hansowitz, who's a friend of ours. Uh, he had Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz on. And she called out this clip, this reaction that in particular VCs are starting to have to the negative messaging around AI. So I want to actually just play the same clip from the big technology podcast. This is Olivia Moore, uh, who's a partner at Andreessen. There's been a lot in the media in the US more broadly, these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water and that that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology. I was just talking with someone this morning who was not in the tech industry and they were saying the same lines like AI is evil, it's gonna watch us, like it's using all the water. And then they were like, but Chet GPT really helps me and it has like great answers. And so I think part of it is a timing thing of we just need these products to kind of saturate the mainstream consumer and they can realize the value. So there's a lot of things in there. Lot of ideas there, huh? We can talk about the water another time. Um this assumes in a certain way that the these products exist and are out there, right? And and the only thing that we're missing is adoption. Uh and I would actually say what what seems to be the case is that we have the exact reverse, which is that everybody has tried these things. Everywhere. And found them wanting in some meaningful. Like you can't avoid these chatbots at this at this point. Like if you open up Gmail, you get 11 pop-ups reminding you how to Gemini in your Gmail. These things are not far away from the users. It's just that people find them, use them, and at the very least, find them not worth twenty dollars a month. Right. Like for the purposes of this conversation, we don't even have to litigate whether the products are any good. They're not worth $20 a month to most people. And until they are worth $20 a month to most people, they're going to hemorrhage money. And this, this to me, is just like, this just assumes that all of this is out there and it's like the the you know the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. That is not at all my experience with AI right now. Yeah, no, it's everywhere. I have a different objection to this to this idea from Olivia Moore and Dreeson Orwitz. And it's it's the one uh that that the creator made in her video And I brought this idea to our environmental reporter, Justine Kalma, and to Miyasato covers the fashion industry and shopping generally for us. Environmental objections do not do shit for the American consum er. Not one thing. Like the reason I brought up fashion is fast fashion exists and no one cares about the environmental cost of Shein. Totally. Literally no one cares. That stuff is flying off the shelves. Uh I am a sucker for a big stupid car. I I really am. I love them. The more cylinders the better. Well light 'em up. Uh I uh lots of people in this country know every inch of the environmental cost of big stupid cars. We've been talking about it forever. I have an EV, I will tell you my EV is a much more pleasant thing to drive than my stupid Mustang, but I love my stupid Mustang, right? Like there's it just doesn't work. Like you're watching what's happening in EV sales right now. If you cared about the environment, you would buy an EV. You would not buy it the dumbest trucks that you can buy, which is what Americans are addicted to buying. Yeah. Someday when you make a country album, I need it to be called I Love My Stupid Mustang. I do love my stupid Mustang. Just gonna make me very happy. I love it the most. Uh this I'm just pointing this out. Like this idea that the media has convinced everyone that the in particular water cost of AI is so high that you should hate it, is just totally divorced from the reality of how people react to environmental messaging at all. Yes. At all. In fact, I would argue that the um do the right thing versus do the convenient thing is an easier trade for people to get over to do the convenient thing than almost anything else with environment. Like many times the, you know, do I give up my private data in exchange for some convenience? Like, people have more feelings about that than will I burn the world down for some convenience? Like behavior suggests that we will happily burn the world down if it gets me my clothes ten minutes. Ask people how they feel about the paper straws, man. Yes. Yes. And like the paper straws might not be helping anything. But like the idea that you should like to have s suffer some minor inconvenience to make the turtles incremental benefit. Like, no. Everyone's like, I hate these straws. It is so easy to overcome the environmental roadblock, the moral sense that your actions will help the environment or hurt the environment. You just need a great product. And so here you have a partner at Andreas Norwitz, which is a effec effectively now just a VC for defense contractors, saying people hate this technology because the media is lying to them. And first of all, the media that most people consume, as we have talked about over and over on the show, is not uh it's uh right that people are not reading the art times they're just opening TikTok. They're watching the algorithmic media that is being delivered to them by big tech companies that have a huge vested interest in, as you're saying, distributing AI tools to them. Yep. So uh it's not I'm not popping up on people's feeds and being like, did you know that's a lot of what no, it's like just not happening. And even if even if that was happen ing. You can just look at you know the weird dip in EV sales after the incentives went away and people rushing to buy gas cars, even though gas prices are through the roof. Like people make weird decisions when when the environmental factor is the main fac tor. By the way, Asterisk, I know we're gonna hit notes about this, EV sales are ticking back up because gas prices are high and the cars are actually better. And maybe that's all gonna equalize, but it's not the environmental concern that is dri driving consumer behavior in the car market or in the fashion market or anywhere else where you have environmental concerns that should shift the market. And that's what I asked Justine about. That's what I asked me about. It's what this creator was pointing out in her video. You can get over the point I'm trying to make is you can overcome the environmental concern really, really easily. So this is one big attempt, like one big narrative from in particular AI VCs who are saying it's not it's not our fault. It's you're too stupid. Right. You've been lied to. The tools are amazing. And we just have to wait. And the the objections will be overcome. Yep. There's another one as well, which again, this is all in instrument. So it's like, I just feel like I'm donkey At least some parts of the AI ecosystem have decided that this cra zy scary doomerism is the best way to raise money where every now and then they come out and they say all the jobs will be destroyed. Anthropic, you know, Dario says that. This thing is sentient. And investors are like, okay, here's 10 billion, here's 50 billion, here's 100 billion. Now we're blaming the AI founders themselves. I I find this argument to be essentially nonsensical. Like because A, the whole AI will remake the economy, AI will change the way that work gets done, we're gonna have to do universal basic income because nobody's gonna have a job anymore. This was a feature of the rise of all of this stuff for years. Yep. Until until a bunch of people went, wait, that sounds horrible. I don't want that. I like my job. I enjoy doing my job. Please don't automate my job away with AI slop. And there was there have been other lines in all of this that are like, ugh, in America, we're we're way over indexed on people liking creative arts. It's like, yeah, I'm I'm good with that, actually. Like all of these things are fine. And for the longest time, people like Chamath and podcasts like the All-in Podcast were talking in glorious terms about how terrific it was gonna be when AI completely remade the economy. And so now to call that doomerism is just ridiculous. Yeah, I totally agree. In that worldview, and that worldview is really prevalent, Alex Carp is running around saying women are gonna lose their political power and it's men who work with their hands who will suddenly have the economic power because AI will replace all of your dumb woke laptop work or whatever he whatever he wants to say. And if that works to raise money, by the way, Chamath, you're the money guy . Oh like he has the money. He's the dumbest. He's the dumbest money. If this is the sales pitch that works on you, you are the problem. Well, to be clear, these guys hate anthropic because they think anthropic is woke. Sure. But it's Sam Altman is just as doomery in this way, right? He's the one running around saying you're everyone's just gonna rent intelligence from the cloud. Yeah. And they're gonna build AGI. Like there's something here where their own messaging is the problem, and they've convinced people that all of the jobs are going away, and now they are facing the consequences of that messaging and they're blaming the people. Yep. And I just keep coming back to the idea that we all knew what was gonna happen when you put a camera on every phone in every pocket in the wor ld. We we at the Verge have been writing about the effects of that at every level from the very beginning. Like the whole Verge is kind of founded on the insight that phones would be a big deal. And it was like not obvious in 2011. It's very funny to tell people that in retrospect that because it's like, oh congratulations, you thought phones might be important? Like great job. But I'm like, no, it wasn't it wasn't guaranteed. Right. The idea that we need to write about technology and culture at the same time. We were like, what are you talking about? It's like, well, the whole they're all the same. And now here we are. We did it anyway because people were like, I love having this phone in my po cket. I love having this camera with me all the time. And you get you can just we have written the stories. You draw a straight line from that to like the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah. To these huge like social changes around everyone should have a camera all the time. These big conversations about surveillance and surveillance, those are all the costs of putting cameras everywhere in the way that we put them everywhere. Those are enormous costs. I think we're reckoning with those costs now in real ways . But it all happened because people wanted the technology. They love it. That's not what's happening here. Right? We you the c the costs are being imposed. We're gonna take your job away is not the fault of the consumer. Right. Right. It it might be the fault of Dario. It might be the fault of Sam Altman . But the only way the investment pays off is if you remake the economy with AI. It's the only way that the mobile investment paid off. These are the stakes they've drawn for themselves. And I just flabbergasted that they don't see that they haven't made a great consumer produ ct. That that's the thing that will change us. I actually we had um a couple weeks from now, people hear it, but we just taped an episode of decoder with the CEO of Cisco. Cisco sells the stuff that goes in data centers. And I was asking about this. And I was like, you know, like if you just said the data center had Netflix in it, people would be happy. Like that's where the movies come from. And he started laughing. He's like, You think so? And I was like, Oh, that you don't you're it this is just flying over your he ad. Like you have to make some case that there's some benefit to all of this investment in order for the investment to continue. You know who understands it is Satya Nadella. He has he was at Davos of all places and he said that the AI companies need to get, quote, social permission . Which is amazing for a company like Microsoft to say we should run this clip. I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission uh to actually take something like uh energy, which is a scarce resource, and you Okay. I have two thoughts on this. Yeah. One, Davos famously a place a bunch of billionaires fly on their private jets to talk about how to save the environment. Perfect. Two, this is right. Copilot so far is not the thing. Uh Microsoft, I think in in less straightforward terms is doing a pretty similar kind of retrenchment that Fijicimo and OpenAI are talking about. That they're like, what if we just approach AI as a business software? And that that has been you and I have both been on this podcast saying AI is business software. The business of AI is B2B SaaS software and has been for a long time. And there are like we we're gonna we've been threatening to do an episode about the SaaS pocalypse for a while. And I think we should, because I think there are actually really interesting disruptive things that AI is going to do to business softw are. That is not how you get to where all of these companies want to go. And I think Satya Nadella is right that the risks that they run by not making this appealing to consumers are also going to backfire in business, right? Because it they are they are incurring such a reputational hit and at a a sort of reflexive problem with AI that people are developing that is going to make it harder to even build business tools that do AI things. Yeah. I mean, there are as many studies as you can count about whether or not businesses are seeking efficiency improvements by adding AI. And the answer is basically not yet or no. Yeah. It's somewhere between no and like, eh. Yeah. It's like it hasn't happened yet. Maybe there's going to be a new set of companies that come up and they're built on the cost models of having a bunch of AI agents instead of a bunch of engineers. And that means they can make the same product as the big company cheaper. And that's just the disruption life cycle.. I don't know Maybe that's gonna happen. Has it happened yet? It certainly has not happened yet. And so you're just seeing: okay, we're asking for all of this energy. We're asking for all of this data center displacement in all these communities. The communities are basically saying, no, like make it worth it to us. Yeah. To what end? What is in this for me? And I do I don't mean to say that AI is like totally useless. I think it's still pretty brittle, as we have discussed on the show many, many times. You can you can run into the walls of things AI cannot do, but we know now that at least when it comes to software development, it has tremendous value that is causing a bunch of consternation in that community. You just had Paul Ford on. Uh I think that conversation is brilliant. People should listen to it. Once you can develop software, you can kind of go into adjacent industries. That's a it's a real thing. There's a lot of software running a lot of companies and you can you can widen out. Yeah. But that doesn't mean you can do everything. And it it doesn't mean you can eat the whole world. And I just see this gap where everybody in that industry is like, why doesn't Wired like tech anymore? Or why does the Verge hate technology? And it's like, no, it's it's literally the citizens of America who are like, I don't like this. Right. Like the polling is clear. And it's not because of the media. It's not because of Doomerism. It's because you're asking for so much and you haven't delivered a great consumer product. You have delivered some very compelling enterprise products. Yeah. That's not enough. And I think the hope from a lot of these companies is that something like Cloud Code will eventually be a consumer product. I mean, you you see it now, right? They built co-work out of Claude Code to make it a little more accessible. They built dispatch out of co-work, which is basically like you can you can run it from a messaging app. They're trying to make this kind of creative tool accessible to more people. And it's it's gonna work. But that is not a mainstream that is not an Instagram level use case, right? We you you and I always like to talk about the sort of foundational mobile experiences, right? And the the two you always bring up, which I think are right, are uh Uber and Instagram that are like things you couldn't do on a phone that the technology on a phone enabled that changed the way we do life. Um that's the stakes. And there is nothing remotely approaching that for normal people living their normal lives. Yeah. You can have a lot of feelings about Uber. We did we just had Dara on Decoder. Boy, do people have feelings about Uber. Yeah. But the fact that you can be almost anywhere in the world, push a button and have a Toyota Camry appear is just bananas . That is just a remarkable thing that happened because of the mobile revolution. That should be Uber's new tagline. I've said that. I said I said that to Dara. I said I once said that to Travis Kalnik in our office in Midtown, and he just started cracking up. He's like, I never thought about that one. Like it's crazy, right? Like you push a button and something happens in the real world. And in Uber's case, uh it uh you have uh either it's it's cam aera or a highlander. It's one or the other, really. Or if you're unlucky it's a model three and the they'll have the regen braking on and you'll just have a bad time. Um lot of a lot of complaints in Uber world about model threes with regen braking. Um It's the same with DoorDash, it's whatever. Like you push a button, something happens in the real world. You order something from Amazon, an object comes to your house. That is the thing that the mobile revolution like truly delivered in a way that had never occurred before. And then Instagram and social media, we actually wrote a piece about this. James Feerham, our first creative director, wrote a piece about this way at the beginning. Um, James is an old film photographer. He used to shoot the windsurfing championships hanging off a helicopter on film. Sick. Um, and so when like digital showed up and phone showed up and all the photographers had their moment, he's like, I so happy about this. Like, I never want to be worried that my film is gone and I miss the shot again. It's digital. Like he had this totally interesting, wonderful perspective. And his reaction to Instagram was: it is so insanely powerful to put the distribution next to the camera . Right. You're gonna the feedback loop here is it's the story. I I've come back we'll link that story too. I've come back to it over and over again. Just the insight there is so powerful. You can't do that without a phone. You can make an Instagram on a desktop computer, but the camera part doesn't exist. And so most people will never close the gap. Instagram brought those things right next to each other. I think TikTok brought those things right next to each other. The dominant language of TikTok is replication. You see a trend and you make it yourself. Yeah. That is an unusual dynamic in like the history of culture. Right. Most people are like, you copied me, I'm gonna sue you. Right. But like TikTok is just about widespread replication. These are huge changes that technology brings about. I think they're fascinating. I think it's pretty hard to make the argument that we don't like technology because this is what we talk about all the time on the show and our site is like, look at how cool this is. Like we're changing how we live. Yeah. And then AI is like, we're is in there. And it's like like, would you a girlfriend? That's the best idea they have. Right. And I it it's like most people are like, no, that's pretty weird. And my friend who does have an AI girlfriend is getting weirder by the da y. And it's like it's bananas to me that this industry can't see it. Yeah, agreed. All right. We we should move on from this, but I I will say I am curious if you have used or have an inkling to what Or automating anything. I I I'm I'm serious about this. The the idea that most people can identify a loop in their lives that is worth automating. Yep. I mean, we got fifty years of technology development to prove that that is not the case. Yes. You just can't do it. Productiv like for me as a productivity nerd, AI has been so fun because it is going to remap everyone's to do list system. Most people don't have a to-do list system. So it's like we we need to go several levels down into what it is like to be a person in the world. Uh but genuinely if if you have a theory on what that is, I I want to hear about it. Uh 866-411 is the hotline, first cast of the Nealitheverge.com is where you can send all of your five coding ideas. Um here we're gonna take a break, and then it's it's trifold time. We'll be right back . Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Gro The Global Beauty Leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skincare. Light straight and multi-styler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award Honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L'Oreal.com. L'Oreal Group. Create the beauty that moves the wor ld. Support for the show comes from Samsara. Companies need to move product from point A to point B. That means hiring drivers, which in turn means vehicle insurance, dash cans, and accepting the fact that accidents happen. That's exactly where Samsara can help. It brings AI dashcams, vehicle tracking, and asset visibility together in one simple platform. Their data shows companies have reduced fuel costs and improved driver retention thanks to better visibility and coaching. According to their data, Samsara AI helps reduce crash rates by nearly 75%. 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Also, you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. That's why LinkedIn ads boast one of the highest B2B return on ad spend of all online ad networks. Seriously, all of them. So get your ads in front of the right people and make your B2B strategy work. You can spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash vergcast. That's LinkedIn.com slash vergcast. Terms and conditions app ly. All right, we're back. Alison Johnson is here. Hi, Alison. Hello. Okay, I we're here to talk about trifolds and I want to, but I just had one of the strangest parent technology experiences I've ever had in my this is happening to me in real time, and I just need to talk this out with both of you who have young children. So uh our three-year-old is in preschool, and for the first time, we're using the Brightwheel app. Do you guys know what this is? I don't know. Yeah, I assume every school has apps like this. But like we we check them in and out with a QR code. They send us pictures throughout the day. They send us like information about what they're doing, all this stuff. And a few minutes ago, I got three separate notifications. I don't know if you can see this here that just say incident and have a band-aid emoji. Oh no. Uh I I have I have no other information. Presumably he's alive. I don't know what to like what what do I what do I do with this? This is like I don't I either desperately need to know about this and need to leave this podcast right now, or this is fine and this is information I'm gonna wish I never had. Do you think there's like a second set of notifications like after inc ident. Like it's just like come now. Yeah, like it's pretty bad, you guys. That's a phone call when the phone starts ringing. Yeah, so all of this is to say, uh, this was luckily, this was uh like 20 minutes ago, so presumably everyone has recovered. But uh I may suddenly leave this podcast. Uh modern parenting is very strange. Uh-huh. This is like I have both I'm glad to have all this. Wait, is there incident with a band-aid and then like incident with a poop emoji? Do you know what I'm saying? This is my first well, so there is there's potty colon P and there's potty colon BM. So I know the ones and twos. I see why. But like this, it's a real, like how much information are we as people supposed to have? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. We we give very little of that information and is honestly for the best. I'm like, well he was alive at the end of the day. Yeah I think that's that might be the correct answer. Like call me if I need to get them to the hospital and otherwise I'll see them at the end of the day it'll be. See now I'm in a very different place with the older one. So you know, Max is like almost eight and she's in second grade. So now it's just she comes home from school. I'm like, what happened to him? She's like, you'll never know. No information will be provided to you. I'm kind of like looking I'm like waiting for for Jack to like get some bright wheel in his slide. You can know the Ps and the BMs. It's good to be able to with Max when you know when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, uh like my office was in the the basement. Like I did a I did the show from the basement basement and I was often down there working and Becky would be upstairs and you couldn't actu yallyell from the basin all the way upstairs. And so we used the walkie-talkie on our Apple Watch all the time. And it was basically just a poop notification, like a very expensive like, I need you. She pooped again. And now this house, you can you can just yell from his bedroom to the kitchen like it's trivial. And I feel bad because we're not walkie-talkie about what you've called BMs anymore. Uh-huh. Yeah, you're just it's it's important parental communication to just yell it's happening to each other exactly. Three times a day. Yes. Or oh no. Yeah. I need new pants. Like it's a whole thing. Um, all right, Allison . You have what has become a precious object just in the last few days. This is now rare phone contraband, which is you have a Samsung Galaxy Z trifold in your possession. Yeah. Tell us what happened with the trifold this week. I mean you have a thing that appears to be a Samsung Galaxy Z. That's a fair point. Yeah. TBD. Um you have been trying to get this phone for months. Yes. We have been on a whole journey trying to get one. Wrote about all in very great detail on the site, but the basics are like Samsung PR, you know, typically will send us a review unit of a new phone. They did not provide us one this time around, their reasons uh for that. It's always a tell. Yes, exactly. And I'm I'm realizing how much of a tell. So we try to get a hold of this trifold. We're like, we gotta we gotta buy one. Um went in and out of stock like so fast. Couldn't get one. We turned to eBay, um, you know, found someone selling a trifold for a small fortune and ordered it. And in the meantime, I had to fly all over the world to go see phones. And um so none of us really clocked that it hadn't shipped uh when it was supposed to. So this was like red flag number one. Um, we go back and forth with a cellar, the thing finally shows up at my door, and I open up this FedEx package. It is a box with like two seals on it that say like, do not accept if this has been tampered with and it's like very clearly been tampered with. Um so I was like this is uh very strange not usually how I receive a new phone um opened it up, took the the film off of the the inner screen, and there were crumbs and little hairs on like uh it Yeah, yeah. This is not the first time the phone had been like, you know, exposed to to air. It's just not ideal. It was it was gross. Um, I turned the phone on, it's already set up, which was also a like very large red flag. Um, also not how phones are typically shipped to a to a customer. Um, all that is to say, this was a very weird experience. I was sketched out. Uh, the phone immediately asked for a whole bunch of permissions, and I was like, deny factory reset. Um and then I turned it off and I like didn't want to touch it for a little bit . So that was acquiring the trifold. Um in the meantime, uh Samsung announced they're not gonna make it anymore. They canceled the phone. Yeah, they just up and canceled it. Like I've been on this journey to get this stupid phone, and all of a sudden I'm like, well, this is our this is the end of our relationship. I thought we were at the beginning. We were gonna have these good times together. So so here I have this phone and uh the just the funniest part is that it when I powered it back on after resetting it and coming to my senses, it it wanted a a sim card to set it up. Also strange to me. I've never had a phone ins SIist on aM card. Um and I was like, well, I don't have one laying around. I don't really trust it. And then the light bulb went off. And I was like, I have this Trump mobile sim that is just languishing in in like a a Samsung S twenty five. Um kind of perfect actually. Right. This is the realest Trump Mobile has ever been. Right. Yeah. It like got this this phone to work. I set it up. It still asked for a lot of weird permissions, but I think these are just the the thing is we have um the the serial number is a phone sold in China. And the eBay seller claimed it was a Taiwan model, which is a different serial number. This is where the the weirdness is coming in, I think. So this is why I'm getting some of these apps that are loaded on the phone are just in one UI in China, which is I I've never seen them. Um I don't think it's like a a a malware infested, you know, taking time bomb of a phone, but it is running on Trump Mobile and that's like the weirdest combination of phone and network. A weird uh Chinese phone with it does have the Play Store if it's Chinese? No, it does not. So a weird Chinese trifold with no Google Play Store, Play Services because they're not allowed in China running on Trump Mobile is an unholy combination. Like you should light a candle or something. It's actually kind of perfect. I feel like I have no notes on that. I actually feel like the Trump administration would be like, great job, Alison. Or they would arrest you. Like I don't know if we should run this podcast. I don't know which government official is going to show up at my door and arrest me. It could be any number uh it's true from any number of countries. Yeah. A lot of possibilities. So how far have you gotten with this phone? Is it like is it actually up and running for you now? It functions. Um it it won't get on the it won't get on the internet on the Trump Mobile Network for some reason. Uh I g it'll receive a a spam phone call. The phone started I was in the other room yesterday and the phone started ringing and it was honestly like a horror movie. I was like, the fact that the Trump mobile said we'll provide you data, but we'll provide you spam calls is also perfect. It's perfect. Yes. Yeah. It doesn't do the the the thing that you pay fifty dollars a month for, but um you can have a spam call. Uh so it does not have the internet. I don't trust it enough to put it on my home Wi-Fi. So I hotspotted it to the iPhone Air that I'm using right now. I was like, what do I do? And I just loaded up, you know, uh the Verge in a web browser and and made this the window a bunch of different sizes. I was like, cool. That's what you do. Four thousand dollars later I can like look at the internet and sizing a window on a phone. Honestly, that's that's a lot of innovation. Some somewhere in there is a truly damning critique of foldable phones, which we should get to, but I I I do we're you guys, I'm assuming were as surprised as I was about the cancellation of the trifold, right? This was not one bit. Samsung refused to send us a review unit. I was like, one, this product's a done. Um I mean, look, I I'm gonna here's my usual caveat. It' verys hard to make money making media on the internet. Sure. And we there's a lot of creators out there and a lot of influencers, and like, go make your b ag. Do it how you gotta do it. They just make a different thing than we make. And so I my criticism here is not of people in their businesses and their audio. Like, please be successful. It's so hard. I'm not gonna fault you for for trying to make money on YouTube or Instagram or whatever. It's so hard . It's a huge tell when only the influencers and creators get the phone. Sure. Because they're so reliant on brand deals, they're so reliant on access in in very specific ways that these companies can put them on rails. You can actually see it right now with Apple. Apple is putting a bunch of influencers on Rails, little interviews, but Apple 50. Like it's you can see it. We we we don't do that. Right? Well, you what you buy from us is our ethics policy. We're we're huge jerks about it. We're very annoying about it, talk it all the time. And so when the companies won't give us the phone or give our peers at other publications who have the same or similar ethics policies when it's hard for traditional reviewers to get the phone, you always know it is a tell every single time because it means the product isn't good enough and the coverage has to be sanded off. Now, I again I'm I'm not trying to take shots at any like lots of people, lots of influence got the phone. The cany feel however they want. I'm just saying that's the reason I think it's a t ell. Because we don't have to do what you say. Sure. And that it that's a dynamic that exists for a lot of people. And so the second it was like week three of me in the editorial meeting in the morning being like, Do we have the phone yet? And it was like Samsung w was ghosting us. I was like, Oh, this phone sucks. Alison, what were they telling you about why you couldn't get a phone? I got um I got a lot of polite, you know, lines like, oh, you know, we're noting your request and your interest. I was like, okay, great. you know, and I I teased out a little more information about, you know, they were sent very few uh review units and they were gonna try and give me a heads up when it went back on sale. Um and it sold out before anybody could be like, hey. Right, because it made five. I was gonna say we're all agreed on that is not about popularity, that's about they made five. Yeah, yeah. Which is when I started to suspect something about this, I was like, if they wanted to sell this phone, they could sell the phone. Like they would just make more phones. No, there's look they they could. There's like a RAM shortage. it's their tariffs, like there's a lot of reasons that an already expensive phone was getting more expensive or harder put to produce. And maybe you just want to put all the RAM in the S twenty six, but that's not really what they're saying here. Right? Like they're just like, yep, goodbye. Yeah. Yeah. They're framing it as like this was a nifty concept that we decided to show off for a little while. And that is that feels very disingenuous with how Samsung originally talked about this thing. Also, if there's real demand for the phone they, would allocate the RAM to this phone. Sure. Do you know what I mean like they make all the phones? If you're like, well, people really want to buy trifolds, we're gonna put the components that we can get in the trifolds and we'll charge what the market can bear. And instead, they're like, no. On top of that, Oppo launched the Find N6, which they're it's zero, it's a zero feel crease, not zero C . You know what I'm saying? You can see it, but you can't feel it. It is very compelling. We have a video of it done, did a hands-on. It is almost creaseless. Uh, they're only launching it in Asia and Australia. They're not even coming to uh Europe, let alone the United States. I my thesis here, Alison, I'm curious now that you've tried the trifold, I know you've reviewed all the other folds. Uh I think this might be a dud. I don't think people want folding ph ones. And I I think like my phone, my little phone gets bigger, might still be compelling, but my big phone gets even bigger, and my big phone gets three times as big. I don't know. Can I just tell you I am this close to declaring victory over you, Alison? Oh no. You and I have been fighting flip phones versus folding phones for like two years. Uh-oh. And I'm I'm this close. Is this some kind of like intervention? Is this like to I wouldn't do that to you because again, having a Chinese phone with a Trump mobile sim on it, I think is punishment enough. But yeah, Austin, you've been using the phones. You've you've obviously seen this phone as close as anyone can see it. Um what do you think? I mean it's just did this work? I I think it's still I think it's still playing out and it's definitely um you know, we're we're seeing in real time companies be like, what should this kind of phone be shaped like? What's the limit of how m how big it can be versus how annoying it is to carry around versus how expensive it is. Like the trifold is almost three thousand dollars if you could actually buy one. Um so it and meanwhile, you know, the Chinese brands I think are dialing it in a little faster, it kind of seems they have the um, you know, the zero fill crease. They have a very slim foldable that is also dust and water resistant. We in the US we have the um the Pixel 10 Pro fold, which is the dust resistant one. Um so you can't have it like quite all together. Um and I think there's, you know, I I think companies are really for many reasons hesitant to jump into the US, especially with a a phone that's gonna cost somewhere between eighteen hundred and two thousand dollars. So i I don't know. I think some of these companies it it sort of feels like we're in a place where they're treading water and they kind of want to see what this apple foldable that we will potentially probably maybe see towards the end of the year is going to look like. Um, and we're such an iPhone-centric market. I think that could be a big moment for folding phones, or it's the moment we find out that nobody wanted these things and it was just a a fun little project for me to to walk around with one and buy a tiny keyboard for it. Um I I think it'll it'll be a a telling moment. I mean, I you're my favorite case on this because you have kind of deliberately, you you have bullied yourself into finding use cases for the foldable phone. And I think you've genuinely found some. Like that there are it's not that there aren't things that the foldable phone makes better. It's just that they're still very expensive. And I think like we were talking about in a in a moment where all of these companies are struggling desperately to have their phones not get more expensive, the idea of this already being twice the price is a problem, right? We've spent, I mean, how long has the fold been out? Five years now? We've been waiting for the price on these things to come down and it just has not. It just hasn't. And now there's this upward pressure on phones that is like preventing these things from becoming mainstream accessible anyway. And then you fold in, I I I say this with love, Alison, most people do not want to tote a Logitech keys to go to the coffee shop and do email on the table That maybe there are reasons that people will use phones differently in Asia or in Brazil or in some of these other markets that have very different phone needs than the US does, that they'll start to take off. But for me right now, I I don't look around and have any reason to think there are sort of killer apps for foldables just sitting out there. Especially not at this price. I I do want to call it the thunderous sideways dunk on the logic set keys to go. Very important. Look, I have one over here. Total stray at the watch is a keys to go. Um Richard Lawler, uh VergeCast favorite, Richard Lawler is our our senior news editor here at the Verge. He runs our news team. His job And I also say that with love because if I could do any one job at The Verge, it would be news editor, which is just a terrifying reality for us to our team. I would just so everyone know. He does a much better job. It is still my favorite job. It's like the it was the job I had at In Gadget ages ago. Um I mean his job is looking at stuff he has a pixel tenfold and we were talking about this and he w was like I am the person that this phone is for and I struggle to find reasons to use it. Because all day long I'm I'm meant to be looking at things. Yep. And like on the go, like being able to have the bigger canvas so I can like look at a desktop web page and like evaluate what I'm looking at and like have a Slack window open and back and forth. And he's like, I don't I don't use it. Maybe he doesn't have a logic keys to go. Maybe this is the problem. See, I gotta sell him on the Logitech. The thing that that makes me wonder if there's some uh place that they could hit this market is my parents because I brought home the Pixel Tempo Fold for that was kind of my home um my phone I used over Christmas. And I opened it up and my mom was like, I want that phone. I that is so cool. But it is $2,000. My parents are Pixel A series people. They buy their $500 phone and they don't want to think about buying a new phone for the next, you know, five years if they can get away with it. And they have their iPad. It's like iPad to FaceTime with the grandchild and then phone. And if those things could be the same device, I wonder if there's a world where they'd be like, okay, yeah, I'm willing to spend more on this phone and it's going to replace the iPad or if it just ends up being like, no, that's $2,000. I'm going to stick with, you know, these two devices and it's it's not ruining my life. You've brought us to the precipice, Alison. Who will take the first leap in predicting what the Apple folding phone will do? Right. It is for FaceTiming grandchildren. If that's all it is, you can unfold it and run two iPhone apps side by side and then maybe like a big FaceTime. Either it will be a huge hit or the biggest flop in Apple history. Yeah? The question is whether you unfold it and it is a little iPad. Right. And then a big iPhone. Or it and you know, that's a pretty fine distinction. I am just truly if if they make that phone and it is the same kind of compromise as the iPhone Air, where it gets thinner and lighter and the camera is way worse. Like I it's not worth it to me. Like you will have reduced the the primary utility of my phone to give me an iPad, and I don't use my iPad. It's like, but I might be a very narrow use case. Like maybe it's just big FaceTime as long anybody wants. I I'm looking at this. Like Samsung scared the pants out of Apple for like two years by having big screens first. And there's like a lot of like internal tech company emails from various court cases where like Apple is like literally freaking out that Samsung has big screens on phones and is taking market share away. And it it reorganized like the tech landscape. Like Samsung became a player because their phones were bigger than Apple's for a couple of years there. Yeah. That one, that worked. It worked. And then Apple is like, fine, our phones are big too now. And you would think, I I think this is what Samsung thought that the fold would be like the biggest screen of all. And I don't think that's playing out the way that they they thought it would. And so like m what's Apple gonna catch up to? Mm-hmm. I don't yeah. I think predicting what the the iPhone fold might be in the face of Samsung, the trifold didn't work here. I can't tell you the Z Fold seven is like a phenomen on. Appo is not even it's like hottest ones are they're not launching it in like one of the bigger markets for Android in the world in Europe. I don't know. It it just seems like this might have come to nothing. I certainly think that the the RAM situation and um all those different pressures are like come at a very tough time for foldables when it's sort of like okay, we're figuring out some of this technology. We haven't figured out how to make it cheaper. And all all of the pressure is leading to more expensive phones now. So I I can see how you'd maybe ease off of like, okay, well, this uh cool thing that we're trying to push forward on um we're gonna back off a little bit and just focus on like selling phones and trying to make some money off of that right now. Yeah, it's it if you're gonna decide to stop selling one thing, this is pretty clearly the one, right? Like if we need RAMs on the phones the people buy, so we're gonna stop putting it at the like it it it might just freeze the tiny bit of this market that does exist for a while because you just have to put the RAMs in something else. But that doesn't explain why they didn't usually it. I think the phone wasn't very good. It's super heavy. I will I will say. Um, and I I played with it at CES. I don't know. My takeaway then wasn't like, wow, what a heavy phone, but maybe it's just having it, you know, especially like all folded. Can you unfold it for us? Do you have it? I can. I will say like six times right after this thing came out, Travis, our producer, would just slack me and be like, who is this for? And I think it's a right it's that thing is enormous. I mean this is like you know when the the Huawei trifold came and everyone just kept watching that video of it unfolding. Like I'm having the same reaction to it. Like look at that thin. It looks sick. Boy, I want to unfold that a lot. I mean, it's real thin. You hold it like this, you're like, this is a lightweight tablet. And you fold it up and you're like, God, this is a heavy phone. I mean look, maybe the problem is just that people like I know I'm gonna say this about Android tablets and the people are going to send me notes. Maybe the problem is people just don't want Android tablets. That's why we're waiting for the iPold. Alison, will you just hold up the home screen to the camera again? Like you ca you can tell from this home screen that no one has done the job of figuring out what Android is supposed to look like when you open your phone up. Because all they do is they take Android and they just make it real stretchy. Like that's not that is not the answer. Oh it's the open ones. Oh it's and neither is the malware. It wants access to your malware. Constantly asking, begging for the yeah. So do you have any financial information, by the way, that I should know? Have you considered downloading your banking app? I think, yeah, I think the the other side of this is like I've experienced all the wonkiness of using Android on the big screen of a phone and I I have notes, you know, um, like let it be more of a computer than than they do right now. And the other question is like when uh Chrome OS becomes aluminium, is it gonna when I open up a folding phone, am I gonna get that experience or am I gonna continue to get big Android, which is frustrating? Um you know, I I don't know. There's like a number of scenarios that could could play out or start to play out this year. Um and like I we're gonna have to wait and see. It's an annoying reality. Yeah. It does seem like the the iPhone fold stakes are both very high and very low in that respect. Like there this is not i this is Apple going to sort of try to do the like prove the market thing, but there is no market. And and it's it's just is this is this the Vision Pro or is this the iPod, right? Where they put up the slide of all the ugly ones and they're like, we did better. Is it that or is it look at this science project that we also made? Right. I'm just saying if you're like triumphantly like, all these ones turn into Android tablets, but the iPhone fold turns into an iPad, it's like cool. Like th there's something there that will just be weird. Yeah. Yeah. Indeed. Um all right, we need to take a break. Alison, um, how long do you intend to use this thing before you like throw it out of a window to avoid whatever is happening to you? So you know I'm gonna take it out on tomorrow. I have a whole day planned for it. I wanted to have like a nice, you know, day where we go do some fun stuff. We're gonna go downtown. I'm gonna use my my little Logitech keys to go. You're gonna give it all its favorite treats. Yeah exactly. I know 'cause it's you know, it they discontinued it. It's we don't know. This is so sweet how long it has. Um yeah. I'm gonna give it a good like effort and then um I don't know what's gonna what's gonna become of it. Put it out of its misery I guess. I hope not. Yeah. Yeah. Um all right. Well good luck. Thank you for coming on. Uh we're gonna take another break and then Neil and I are gonna come back and presumably yell about free speech for a while. We'll be right back . Support for this show comes from Factor. Somewhere between the first warm weekend and the 4th of July, eating well stops feeling optional. Luckily, you can keep eating healthy with well-prepared meals from Factor. Factor prepares meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs. Ready in two minutes, no planning, no cooking. With 100 rotating weekly meals to keep things fresh and delicious, Factor makes meals that fit your goals and schedule. No refined sugars, no artificial sweeteners, and no refined seed oils. And all of this can help you eat healthier and manage your calorie intake. 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You can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. 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 Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments you plan and the ones you don't. For the time you forgot your charger at the gate. Passengers, we are now on our initial ascent. Or when you're bouncing between projects like a ping pong b all. We build PCs with long lasting battery life so you're not scrambling for an outlet. And built in intelligence, so you can stay focused on whatever you're doing. Dell Technologies built for you Dell.com slash Dell PC s Alright, we're back. Time for the lightning round. And Neil I assume that means it's we're we once again we have to do that. Oh yeah, it's unsponsor ed. For flavor. There you go. Long pause. I want you to imagine like two or three ellipses in a row every time I say that. Uh is it time? It's time. It's time. You don't have to feel David, we're at the point now where Brandon is so dumb that people like jump out of bushes to tell me how stupid he is. It is true. It's not so much the existence of Brandon Carr as a dummy that makes me sad, it is just the consistency of it. It's just like sometimes you need like a like a routine breaker in your life. You know what I mean? Yeah. Can Brendan just just like what what if one time you just came on here and you're like, Brenda did this amazing smart thing? Do you know how great that would be for the VergeCast if you were like three cheers for Brent anyway? It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within podcasts. Brendan Carr is a dummy. This week's theme music submitted by Julia Mark. Here it is. Brendan Carr, Brandon Carr. Brendan Carr is a dum my Renicar is done. Oh my god. Do you ever hear a song and immediately know this is gonna be in my head for a long time? I'm going to be lying on my pillow at 2 30 this morning singing. Julia, I don't know. I don't I thank you for that. That was incredible. I love the band Starz. Like they're one of my favorite bands, and that just sounds like a very like not a great stars record because that's not what they would do. But it's like, you know what I mean? It's it's it's like the song they made just to sort of get the juices flowing first thing in the day. Yeah. Like they were like, we made a song about Brunner. I'd be like, why did you do that? Uh but that was amazing. Oh, that made me so happy. Thank you so much, Julia. What do we have this week? Uh we have a lot. We're gonna go from that vibe to a very different vibe. Like me being so like happy uh to me being so upset. all All in in one one go. So here's just some fac ts. The United States is currently engaged in a war in I ran. Oh god. Not for start here? We're gonna start here. Uh it does not appear that anyone knows why. It does not appear that anyone knows how this war will end, or if it should. And it does not appear that Donald Trump even knows if it's a war. You know what I mean? Like the president's supposed to ask Congress for the declare war and they keep going back and forth and he keeps saying it's a war. It's all very confusing and bad. I would say media coverage of this war is unlike uh, for example, the war in Iraq, which was my political awakening as a like a young college student, where like everyone I knew under the age of 500 knew that going to war in Iraq was a bad idea. Uh, and the media and the Democrats and everybody was like, we're going to we're doing it. Freedom Prize. And then, you know, the war Iraq. And this is very bad. I'm just putting this in a context. Right. Like I I think what this administration wanted was a bunch of drum pounding war coverage the way that the war in Iraq got a bunch of drum pounding war coverage. And they're not getting it because again, everyone's like, is it a war? And there's just confusion. Wha why do we go to war? Confusion. How do we end the war? Confusion. This is all fun . I think this is driving Donald Trump crazy. So Brendan last week was at Mar-a-Lago, where presumably he encountered Donald Trump. We actually have a clip of how Brendan describes Donald Trump. This is on a podcast he was on called Pod Force One. Can we just run this clip? He is, you know, the alpha in every single realm. That's true. In every single place, all across the world. Okay. God, that sucks. That sucks so bad. First of all, uh just as an exercise for the listener, it's very easy to make a list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the alp ha. Like I like my daughter's second grade classroom. It's almost impossible to be the alpha in that environment. Like an NFL locker room. Uh about that. You're powerful if the people think you're powerful. Like this is like the theory of true power, right? Like a PTA meeting. Yeah. Like you know what I mean? Like uh a planned parenthood board meeting. Like I don't think he's the most powerful person in that room. Like there's you can come up with like an infinite list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the most powerful person in the room, not be the alpha room. Any room I'm in, honestly. Um it was there and I took it. I don't feel bad about it at all. Uh so that's just how Brendan encounters Donald Trump. Like he's just he's just there as a syncophant to suck up to the bus, which is a bad thing for the primary speech regulator in the United States, especially one as censorious is is Brendan. But again, just as like an exercise, you can make a it's like a pretty fun exercise to make a list of rooms in which any president would not be the alpha. And I I I'm just assuring you, like a kindergarten would be one of those rooms. Like it's trivial to make this list. Okay. I bring this up because you know, Brendan's at Mar Lago, where you know the alpha dog is telling him what to do. From the 14th hole. From the 14th hole. Yeah. And Trump puts on Truth Social this like classic rambling, out of his mind Truth Social post, where he says, yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the fake news media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly struck down an airport. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in particular, and other lowlife quote papers and media actually want us to lose the war. Their tailball reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts. They are truly second-demented people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Trump stuff. He's he's mad at the newspaper saying the war is going poorly, or that uh in the United States is incurring any losses, or that the United States has made errors in the war, like bombing a school. He doesn't like the coverage of the war. He's not getting Iraq war coverage. It's just not happening. Yep. How does Brendan react to this? He says broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortion, also known as the fake news, have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear, broadcasters must operate in the public interest and they will lose their licenses if they do not. And he goes on to say changing course in their own business interests since trust and legacy media is not on the long time low, blah blah blah blah. This like rhymes with him going on Benny Johnson's podcast and and telling ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, but is actually somehow like a less veiled threat than that. This is an open threat. Yeah. Uh and it's dumb in in a staggering number of wa ys. First of all, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are not broadcasters. I don't know how to say this. Uh their newspapers, they don't have broadcast licenses. To the extent that they make audio and video programming, they distribute them over the internet where Brendan has no authority whatsoever. So he's taking this Trump shot at the Wall Street Journal, which I will remind you is owned by Rupert Murdoch, uh and the New York Times. Uh and he's taking this Trump criticism of of the Times and the journal and turning it to the place where he does have authority, broadcast news organization. He doesn't really even have authority over that. He has this idea that he can use the concept of a license renewal to affect the news coverage by saying you're doing news distortion. This is a totally unproven theory. Like it it this hasn't come up ever. Like a broadcast station hasn't had its license denied in like a long time. Right. And if he does it, it's going to be a court case. It's unproven Aaron Powell But the threats do keep working. The threats do keep working. The chilling effect, as we have talked about many times, is to some extent the point and is working. Yep. And I'll just remind people the chilling effect is this concept in First Amendment law that just by threatening enforcement you stop the speech from ever hap pening. Right? You people are afraid that they will be punished for the speech. They they never say the thing out loud. And that is happening all over the place. The chilling effect is super real in the American media right now, especially for the broadcasters who keep running into Brennan Carr. This is why James Tolerico wasn't the Colbert show. Right. The CBS was effectively chilled from that. And whatever way that that actually happened, the chilling effect worked there. They made the decision, but it was because they were afraid of enforcement. And I think we're gonna see a lot of that in this upcoming election cycle. The chilling effect of the equal time rule is just gonna be real for the broadcasters in this cycle. So now we have an extension of this. Brendan has this perceived power of the news distortion rule, and he's saying his interpretation of that is broadcasters must operate in the public interest. And what Donald Trump thinks is that the public interest is positive coverage of the war. Right. And 'cause it's 'cause that is patriotism. No matter no matter why we started it or how it will end or how much it will cost or whether there's an end in sight. And again, just because my frame of reference is the war in Iraq, that's what they want. Right? They they just want free freedom price and and chest pounding coverage and and an absolute belief that there are weapons of mass destruction, all that stuff that happened in the early 2000 s, which was a mistake. And like to the extent that anyone's learned a lesson, that lesson has sort of been learned and they're not getting that coverage. And so now Brendan is saying broadcasters must operate in the public interest, even if that means not critically covering a war that the majority of Americans do not like. So this is Brendan being very stupid. Right? Like I think he's out over his skis. I think he's I I think he's misread the room. I'm gonna punish a bunch of comedians for making fun of Donald Trump. You can pick up about half of Americans with that. It's also like low ish stakes. Right. I don't think it's great. I think I will be outraged about the First Amendment. You know, lots of people will be outraged about the First Amendment. Stephen Colbert will get lots of views on YouTube. Yeah. Because saying the thing is not allowed works. L ike but you can pick up about half Americans by saying don't make fun of the president. Sure. Yeah, another another party. When you get to don't do negative coverage of the war, or the government will punish you, you've made like a critical miscalculation. You are so stupid, Brendan. You uh and and you've come all the way back around where Ron Johnson, who's a center for my home state of Wisconsin, is on Fox News criticizing Brennan Carr. And the reason I'm bringing up Ron is again, he's center for my home state of Wisconsin. Ron is a complete and total idiot. Like he he just is. Like the people of Wisconsin know he's an idiot, like everyone knows he's an idiot. Like this is just not a smart man. Um, and you know, for whatever reason he keeps getting elected, like Ron thought the Foxhaun factory was a great idea. You know what I mean? Like it's Ron. And like I even people who vote for Ron are like, he's not uh the brightest bulb, but he's our guy. Like that's the vibe R aroonund Wisconsin. Here's Senator Ron Johnson on Fox News after being asked about Brendan Carr threatening the broadcast licenses of news organizations uh that aren't sufficiently patriotic. I'm a big uh supporter of the first amendment. I I do not like the heavy hand of government no matter who's wielding it. Uh so no, I I I would rather the the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible and really our the federal government's role is to protect our freedoms, protect our constitutional uh rights . I mean speech from Roger. It's not great. When you are so stupid and you're so so addicted to the idea of censorship to please Donald Trump, you're out the dog. You've gotten on the other side Ron Johnson. Like, I can't, I maybe it's just because I'm from Wisconsin. Like, I can't even describe how like totally out in the wilderness Brendan is this week. Like no one thinks that what he's doing is the right thing to do, except maybe Donald Trump, because Donald Trump it hates negative media coverage of his war. There's no coming back. There's not going to be positive coverage of the war. Like the American people do not like this war. And I think Brendan is on the cusp of making a mistake here that kind of reveals just how hollow all of his threats actually are. Because once he punishes a news organization for negative coverage of the war or says he'll do it or comes close to actually doing it, I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, including Senator Ron Johnson, are gonna say, yeah, you've definitely gone too far. Like roll it back. I mean so much of this is I I think back to the thing we've talked about before that a lot of what people like Brennan Carr say publicly is for an audience of one, and that one is Donald Trump. Um as what Trump wants to hear and what resonates with the public get further and further apart, that becomes a more dangerous game, right? Because like you said, there they're for a long time you could come out and say bonkers things that lots of people would think were bonkers, but that lots of people would agree with. But when you run into these things, and I think the the Kimmel thing was a was a really interesting kind of early example of this that are that was that was bipartisan against what the Trump administration wanted to do. Like the the backlash to that was swift and it was across the spectrum. And when so when when you go out and you say he's the alpha in every room. Like that is for Donald Trump. That is that is so that he will see it. That is 100% what that is for because it will score you points with him because he likes hearing people say nice things about him on television. Like there's been all these really interesting uh stories about people getting Trump's phone number. Uh have you seen all this? That that you can just with two minutes of work get Trump's phone number and he answers and you can call him. And he says a bunch of nonsense and people print it because they think it's cool that he answered their phone call, right? Like that is fundamentally how you win points with Trump is like access, right? And so but then as as that move gets more and more politically problematic , this gets to be a harder game to play. Trump is going to push you out on the ledge. And Brendan is out on the ledge. Yes. And I'll actually contrast this. You know, the verge is like vast. So we the you know, this week we covered D DLSS five and we covered uh the Samsung canceling the trifold. And Tina Wynn, our D C reporter, uh she went to a Pentagon press briefing this week. Yeah. Like w we're it's a big, it's a big Verge, verge.com. Yep. And we're trying to like figure out why. Like why did the Pentagon, which famously kicked the traditional press corps out, invite Tina? And the answer is they wanted her to see Pete Hegseth, take good questi ons. Huh. Right. They were interested in showing that performance off. And they had invited some senior traditional reporters and Hegeth was basically, I hate you, why are you here? And then, you know, the the front row was like newsmax and the the Mike Lindell show. Like some really weird stuff was in the front row. Um and they wanted Tina there for her to see like these press press briefings are real because it's a very important that any government, especially our government, like do that show for the press. Like I always describe uh Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Sunerpachaize politicians, they're not actually politicians. No. Like real politicians never shut up. They're everywhere all the time making their case to their constituents because you can fire them. Yeah. Like Joe Biden didn't show up and he got fi red. Straightforward is that. Like he just wasn't accessible. The number of CEOs I've talked to on decoder who are like we couldn't get a hold of anyone in the Biden administration. And so whatever. Like at least Trump picks up the phone. Like that's a real dynamic. I think it's a real dynamic for any number of voters. Like where was this guy? He just disappeared. Then we showed up. He was like looked old. Like we fired him. Politicians get fired. And so you see the government is just like constantly talking. They have to earn the respect of not a captive pr ess. Brendan doesn't understand. He's undoing the thing that gives them legitimacy with this stuff. And I I I really do think Trump has pushed him on the sledge. And he can't back off it because Trump is the alpha in every single room that he's in. Anyway, Brendan, uh, I've once again called you a coward as as as loudly and as clearly as I can. I'll do it one more time. Brendan, I think you're a coward. If you want to come on the show and defend these moves, defend your relentless attacks on the First Amendment, or come on to Coder and tell me about your decision-making process. Happy to have you on. You know where I am at. I think the audience wants you to come on. And uh just a reminder, we're hiring. So if you'd like a producer on the VirgCast, you can submit your resume. As always, that's been Brandon Carr is Dummy America's favorite podcast. I'm saying Br,endan, if you go on Decoder and not the VergeCast, you won't get custom theme music. That's just something. It's just something you should think about. Oh, we'll play the music . Um All right. Let's actually you you mentioned DLSS. So for my first lightning round item, let's let's do DLSS. Sure. You you I know have been practicing to describe to the people what DLSS is. And if I'm being completely honest, I'm not fully confident in my ability to do it. So can you describe what DLSS is? And then I will describe why it has caused such a ruckus this week. Everyone loves it when I describe gamer technology. It's it's it's it's where I live. It's it's the truly the heart of my extra. How does this apply to Madden? Yeah that's what I got for you. Actually, I can you make some arguments. Have you ever wanted Madden players to be even hotter than they? All right, DLSS actually very clever. I I think what NVIDIA did with DLSS and the entire idea behind it is very clever. Basically, if you have an NVIDIA graphics card, your game can render frames at lower resolution and then pass it through DLSS, which uses AI to upscale the games. So you don't have to take the full power of the graphics card to render it's, you know, uh 140 frames per second at high resolution, you can get the performance out and then DLSS upscales the graphics to higher resolution. And this is more efficient in a lot of different ways. It allows you to get higher resolution, higher frame rates on lower end graphics card. Again, I think it's a very clever uh use of the technology. And until yesterday was not the world's most controversial thing NVIDIA had ever done. Yeah. So then yesterday, uh NVIDIA rolled out DLSS five and basically framed it as uh an AI filter to make everything look better. And the the it this is not some you know big future thing that's gonna make games look better. This is not like a new version of the Unreal Engine. This is saying all your games look like shit and we're gonna use AI to make them look great. And I'm not really overstating the way that it was presented very much in that. So this comes out and and it comes out in a really interesting way. There was a a digital foundry video that I I think a lot of people recognize as bought and paid for and digital foundry is a really important voice in the gaming community. That made a lot of people feel bad about all this stuff. But also it there was this sense that NVIDIA is just railroading all of our games with AI, whether you like it or not. And there is also next to that the fact that a lot of the stuff just doesn't look very good. Yeah. You've seen a lot of the the same examples I have, I'm sure. They're like, what if there just were no shadows and everything looked kind of like a like a soap opera from the nineteen nineties? Is that what you want? Yeah. Or what what if we upscale faces and we literally change the way these characters that you've come to know and love look. Right. That people made on purpose to the people like artists have designed. Yeah. And by change the way they look, what they mean is like give them Instagram model face. Mm-hmm. It's it's very odd. Like they've all been Yassified in real ways. And again, I just want to point out, in particular, the coach models in Madden are very bad. And I would accept a fully Yassified like Matt LaFleur in Madden. If Matliflor was like really hot. You see what I'm saying? Like to be fair, Malaflo's good looking, man. So he's fine. And you could turn that up to eleven with the power of DLSS five. Just putting it out there. I think the really interesting thing here is yes, NVIDIA is just like the big bully they're doing whatever they want. AI in general in video games is hot button and controversial. DLSS kind of wasn't . No. Like they had DLSS 5. Right. Like there's been criticism of it, and like certainly people have like lock-in concerns because the developers code for DLSS. Like all this, whatever. But the idea that it had the same sort of slop concerns as AI, I not really in the mix until DLSS 5. And the reason is because this is the first time the graphics card is imposing taste on a video game. So you're talking about shadows going away. Uh you know, that's iPhone HDR. Like the phone adopted a look. This is right next to the what is a photo question. It's it's right next to what is a photo. It's it's right next to the iPhone has a look and people don't like the look. And we've talked for years about how we prefer the pixels look. And like now there's a tone mapping control. And do you like process zero and haylight? Like cameras have looks, they have aesthetic judgments embedded in them. And your graphics card playing a video game should not. Right. The aesthetic judgment should come from the developer, and to whatever extent that you want to monkey with the settings should come from you. Your graphics card sitting in the middle should not be like, and everyone has huge boobs, which is kind of like where we're going with this. Yeah. And I don't think NVIDIA saw that as a problem until the the rush of feedback. And to be honest, the frankly hilarious memes of DLSS5 on and off that have been circulating over the internet this week. The memes are very good. And uh Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, responded to the criticism of this uh at GTC, their big conference this week. Um, basically, well, he said, I'll just read this to you. He says, Well, first of all, they're completely wrong, which I will just say in the in the annals of how to respond to backlash is not the right answer. Particularly gamer backlash. Yeah. You're wrong doesn't usually work. People don't go, oh, you're right. Great call. I am wrong. You know, just run up against the gaming community and be like, you suck and you're stupid. Yeah. You'll take my slop and you'll like it, gamers. Yeah. Very confusing. I'm not sure why he said that or took that approach. I uh the point he was trying to make in hand-fisted fashion was that the developers are in control of DLSS 5. So if they choose to use the DLSS5 STK and enable it, they have some control over what it looks like at the end of the process. And maybe they were just showing the most dramatic examples for the purpose of a keynote. But first of all, you're completely wrong is just not the way to send that message. Especially when you're NVIDIA and it's getting ever harder to buy one of your video cards to play video games because you're selling them all to AI companies that people hate. Yeah. I mean again, it goes back to there is this fundamental disconnect between the stuff that is being built with AI inside of it and the experience people are having with these tools. I will say if you'll sell me DLSS five to Yasify David on Riverside, which is what we used to do with the Bird Chest, I'll take it. I'm just like if if I were like, you know, sixty to seventy percent hotter, this podcast would be unstoppable. This is like this, these are my two theories. If I could remember everyone's name, politically unstoppable. And if David was just hot, can you imagine? Thank God. Unstoppable. All right. We're gonna do one more each. This is how we end up in the manosphere. We're like I'm like, David, if you just had abs. I'm gonna I'm gonna start looks maxing and you're gonna regret a lot of things that we've done on this show. David, I do, and I I've been meaning to tell you this for quite some time. I think you should hit yourself in the face with a hammer every day . Weirdly, you have said that to me before, but in a really different context. What's your next lightning round now? All right, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do two at once. And it's just two headlines by our reporter, Robert Hart, who covers AI and culture. He's a great science reporter. Uh one headline is this is not a fly uploaded to a computer. And a second headline is chat GPT did not cure a dog's can cer. Okay, I'm I'm familiar with one of those things, but not the other. Well, if you spent any time on the Everything App X, uh, you know, the world famous Everything App X, uh the amount of wild AI hype that gets laundered into like the SEO factories of the world into outrageous headlines that have nothing to do with even the claims on X, that cycle is alive and well. Uh most famously this is me saying they did not do robot surgery on a banana. Y ep. Okay. This is happening on with AI at scale because the hype machine is out of control. So one of them is there is a research group called Eon that just put out a post being like, we have uploaded a fly to a comp uter. This is what it says. And this goes everywhere. There's headlines, like the SEO machine takes off, you know, people are reposting it for cloud. It's like nuts. Like it's just out of control. And basically their evidence is like uh a video of a computer fly. Like I don't it's buzzing now. It's so Robert looks at this, we look at it, and Robert runs around starts talking to researchers. Like, could you do this? Look at the evidence they provided. Is this real? Um by the way, the research group in question the claim, we think this fly is conscious in a limited sense. It can smell, see, taste, et cetera. And he described the system as kind of an MVP or minimal viable product of an uploaded animal. These are not words that make sense. You cannot have an MVP of li fe. You know, like I I love product manager speak. Decoder is basically just like, what do you mean product managers? And like that, this is nothing. Um, so Robert goes and talks to a bunch of researchers. The researchers are like, this makes no sense. One of them points out to Robert, and this is a real quote: also, the fly does not f ly. Which in the grand scheme of what makes the thing a fly is like very important. Uh-huh. So he goes back to the comp any and says, I have all these retractors saying you're full of shit. And the company concedes to Robert: this is not a perfect replica of a fly. I don't think of uploading an animal as a binary concept, describing, quote, different levels of upload, and admitting that we don't know how much biology is required to capture the information that matters. So just full walk back. Full and total walk back. Robert, one repor ter just went and said, does this make sense to like a bunch of researchers? The researchers all said no. Robert went back to the company and We did not upload a fly to a computer. It's uploading an uploading a fly to a computer is a spectr um. That's the answer . Nonsense. It's the friends we made along the way. Okay, second one. Chat GB did not cure a dog's cancer. And we'll link to Hank Green here. Uh Hank Green made a video about this. Also a really good debunk. My the funniest part of this video is he tried to make YouTube short So he just put it in regular YouTube and called it a long, which I think is hilarious. It's very good . Anyway, uh there's uh you know Silicon Valley Bro says that he used ChatGBT to come up with a vaccine for his dog's can cer. Okay . Okay. Robert looks into this. This one I did see, I do remember. This one, this one everywhere, because it's it's a dog. You know, it's like the local news couldn't resist this one. Robert looks into this. I'm just gonna read the quote. Not only was Rosie not cured of cancer, it's not clear that the vaccine was responsible for her the improvement, the personalized treatment was administered alongside another form of immunotherapy and So it's like we we did this thing and also gave them the thing that worked. The solution to their problem. Who knows which one it was? So we just don't know. And then uh here's just the other line from Albert. The vaccine itself was not generated by a chat bot Chat DPT did not design or create Rosie's treatment. Human researchers did at most the chatbot served as a research assistant helping parse medical liter ature. Just a full debunk of this one. And this one went wild everywhere. What a perfect AI story because the thing that actually might have happened is very cool and very exciting and like a genuinely exciting use of technology. This helped a researcher do better research and solve problems. No, a lay person did better. research Sure. Fine . Kick ass. If that if that is the truth, gre at. Why do we have to go pretend that it it cured cancer? Like everyone wants it to be true. And you can farm a lot of clout on X, the everything app, by uh saying things people want to be true. Likes for days, man. Uh anyway, Robert, uh poor Robert is just on the debunk case now. This is what he does. Uh we we''llll put those links up.. You can read them Uh but just be careful over there. This is what we mean by the way when we say Nei just sends people TikToks at 8 30 p.m. It's just like the the verge's newsroom exists to figure out if what Neelai saw on his timeline is. What we sell here is rigor. And like the first step of rigor is like, is this true? Ye ah. Weirdly relevant question in in these terms. Turns out that rigor does not exist on X the Everything app. That's that's very true. Um all right. My last one, uh and I think this is an a an appropriate place to end, is that Meta continues to do the funniest possible things with the Metaverse. So we we've been tracking all the ways in which the metaverse is not working for a very long time. Um Meta announced a while ago that it was splitting uh Horizon Worlds and its VR efforts, which looked like a bad sign for the metaverse. Then it announced that it was going to shut down VR Horizon Worlds, which looked like a bad sign for the metaverse, and then it announced it was doing a bunch of layoffs in its reality labs, which looked like a bad sign for the metaverse. And then meta put a date on the actual end of the VR Horizon Worlds experience. It was June 15th, was the news this week. That is going to be the end of VR in like the end of the VR version of Horizon Worlds. Everybody hears this and immediately this generates a new round of headlines saying meta is bailing on the metaverse. This this like became a narrative this week. We've been tracking this for forever. There was actually no new information except a date. But everybody saw this as oh, Meta is winding down the metaverse. Is Meta going to change its name back to Facebook? What is this company is completely giving up? So Meta do es what I can only assume is a complete reaction to this narrative and decides it's not going to shut down the VR papers after all. Uh this was this news just came out today, Thursday as we're recording this, and um in an AMA on Instagram, because this is how Meta disseminates news, uh, Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of the company, said that they're gonna keep the existing VR worlds uh and that it would be available to download, quote, for the foreseeable future. Um, and he what he said was: the fans who reached out like yourself, who really care about it are the reason that they're gonna keep it around. I would like to say A, there are none of those people, or else this this thing would still exist. They're there to trade crypto and try to have AI girlfriends. Sure. There were we we you you were in the video we did a while back, right? Exploring it and it was just a bunch of children. It was so odd. It was it it was such a failure from the jump. Alex Heath. Remember you remember Alex Heath got was one of the first people have a Quest pro. I I still have a Quest Pro sitting over there. Um and this was like the embodied internet when Mark was going on in the metaverse and they were doing all the demos. And like I would just remember that dude came back from his first briefing and was like, it sucks. And I was like, you know, Alex, you can just say it. If you're holding, just say it. Just say it sucks. Yeah. It's it was always very bad. It was. Um, but it is, it is now the funniest possible outcome because Meta is now forced to continue to support this bad product because if they kill it, everyone will think they've given up on the metaverse. And they cannot appear to have given up on the metaverse because the company is called Meta. And that is hysterical. It's very good. Uh Meta also doesn't know what AI is for. They keep hiring and firing thousands of people and spending millions of dollars to make talk about not having a good consumer AI produ ct. What's your plan, dude? Yeah. Also, by the way, the the Ray Ban Meta stuff running straight at that same problem. This the the like there are there are uh m glass hole murmurings starting to bubble up in a lot of places about how to feel about these glasses. Oh yeah people people do not like seeing those in public. Yeah. Mark Zuckerberg's trust deficit is really, really starting to come to the fore here. Yep. I actually want to call out, you know, the one product they had that people loved was supernatural, the fitness app in VR. And they shut that down. It's like the existing content is still there, but they're not making new content. They fire all the instructors. of people really liked V wrote a great story about that community, how mad they are. And then this week, I want to call out. She interviewed Lena Khan, who as Biden's FTC chair uh tried to stop that acquisition sued to stop it. She was way out over her skis and that whenever and knew she was she was just trying to push the envelope. Like the government should stop more acquisitions. And her theory of the case was always if this market is not competitive, it will die. Right. She's like competition leads to better outcomes, which by the way, again, if you listen to the bridge cast, like my main political viewpoint is like competition is good for the economy and uh and government's huge regulations are bad. So the interviewed Lena Khan this week, our headline is Lena Khan was right, and there's a lot of comments there being like, well, it was such a bad business, Meta couldn't keep it running. The problem is the market for that stuff was never competit ive. Supernatural only had to do whatever served Meta's interests. Right. And Meta, you can see, is strategically confused about everything. If Supernatural was a business that ran on the Quest and the Quest was confused, they might have gone to the Vision Pro. They might have gone to a cheaper, different VR headset. The VR headset technology is basically commodity at this point. Right? Like Meta's selling the Quest 2 for a buck ninety nine right now. They could have made their own hardware. I mean, I think they're trying to blow it out to shut it down. But like it's a buck ninety nine right now. Like Supernatural as a company could have done a million things to better serve its audience and its community that now feels completely abandoned, that knew that they would get abandoned, the second meta bought them. So there's this raging argument in our comments about no one ever wants VR and blah blah. And like I think that's all pointed at Meta. And the argument really is, well, you know what happens when the acquisition happ