AI agents are invading your PC

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Welcome to the Virgcast, flagship podcast of asking forgiveness and not permission. I'm your friend David Pierce. You have sales here. Hello. We're in the studio. We're in the studio. We're back. The first time I've seen your face in person in like an extremely long time. Is that real? Yeah. Huh. It's been like a long time. It's very exciting.

Glad to be here. Is this what you look like? No. You've been doing the TikTok beauty filters the whole time. I remember this like two years ago. I came into the studio one time to do a podcast and I had this like hideous cold. And so I had the like sort of deep raspy thing going on. And we got so many comments on YouTube that were like, that's what David sounds like. His microphone at home makes it all different. I was like, no, no, no. This is just like sexy cold having David. This is like every time I post a photo to Instagram and it's like heavily light roomed and everyone's like, what camera? I'm like, it doesn't matter, man. It's an hour in light room. But it's true that you do have it in person.

deep, sexy rasp. People say this. You can't even walk down the street here in New York City with David Pierce. Everyone, people of all kinds throwing themselves out of cafes and bars. To the person who did that once on my second date with my now wife. Thank you. I owe it all to you. All right. We have a lot of stuff to get to. There's a lot of AI news. There's a big meta decision that I'm vastly more interested in than you are. And we're going to get to that. We got a bunch of lightning round stuff. Brendan Carr continues to Brendan Carr. It never stops. Just our man is off doing stuff. But we have to start with some breaking news. And I mean breaking in like every imaginable sense of the word. Just before we started doing this, Google announced that it has made it possible.

for Android Quick Share and Apple AirDrop to coexist. So on a Pixel 10, only for now, but they say they're rolling it out to more phones, you can now send and receive AirDrop stuff with iPhones. And I've seen people testing it on Macs too. So it appears to have just reverse engineered the AirDrop protocol in order to make Android devices, starting with the Pixel 10, appear as a regular sender and recipient of AirDrop stuff. This is awesome. This is amazing. Yeah. And the wildest part about this is that I assumed, I think everyone assumed, this is Google and Apple playing nice because of some regulator somewhere.

This is how this stuff usually happens. Something something EU interoperability. You know what I mean? Like, that's usually how this goes. Yes. And then it comes out that Google just cracked airdrop. Like, they're saying in their blog post, we just figured it out. And then we asked them, hey, did you work with Apple? And they're like, no, we just figured it out. They used the phrase, our implementation, like, over and over in the statements, which I really enjoyed. And there's a question about whether Apple will block it, which I think is somewhat nuclear.

I've been wondering about this because like the thing that this obviously makes come back up is like the whole Beeper mini thing, right? Where like Beeper was this messaging app that was trying to bring all of your messaging apps into one place. And one of the things it did was figure out how to sort of intercept iMessages. And it started by doing that by putting all of your iMessages on Mac minis in the cloud, which is like an obvious security disaster. And so Apple sort of picked that fight. But Beeper started to find more and more sort of functional ways to make it happen. But Apple kept picking the fight and kept shutting it down and kept being so aggressive about it that eventually Beeper was like, never mind. I mean, Apple doing cat and mouse with people who find ways to open their products.

That's the history of Apple. Yes. You can go back to the iPod. Right. But the difference here is, A, it's Google, right? Which is like just the fact that it is a company with the size and resources of Google changes the dynamic. But also Google, with this announcement, put out this like huge detailed security assessment, basically being like, it's fine, Apple. Nothing is insecure. We're not sending it any new places. They clearly just figured out how to appear like an Apple device and everything else works the same. Like that is what they have done. And so I think if it were like more.

sort of security weird. They're like, we're going to upload it to Google Drive and then share it to your phone. Then it's like, okay, Apple is pretty clearly... We have a bank of Mac minis in Google Cloud that logs into your iCloud. Yeah. But in principle, Apple has to fight this. Like, if you're Apple and your whole thing is your walled garden and you didn't allow this to happen, you have to fight this. Well, so open questions. Again, this is breaking news. Yeah. Like, we sat down and then we're like, oh my God, there's literally breaking news as we're sitting down to the other chest. So open questions I have. Did Apple know?

Google and Apple, historic partners. Like billions of dollars in shared revenue and shared infrastructure. You mean like not to get permission, but did they like give a heads up email? Yeah. Okay. Right. And then outside of just being partners, sort of in security world, there's a lot of notice that's given in case you're going to find a bug or exploit. That's just part of the etiquette of security researchers. And then all these people just like literally know each other. Right. Like it's not a big place in Silicon Valley. So it's like, did Apple know? Are they letting it happen? If they didn't know...

Did Google know? Do you know what I mean? Google's a big place. I will never forget early on in the verge of the run where we told one division of Google that another division of Google was having an event on the same day. Yes. They cleaned it up. That was a long time ago. A little. But this is still my general impression of Google, right? It's not like a top-down. So, like, did the Android team just do this? Did they just fire off a blog post and be like, we go back to our job?

I mean, I could see it. And then you just, like, send Rick Osterlo the Gchat, like, 10 minutes before, and you're like, hey, just FYI. We found this thing. It's on the security block. Don't even worry about it. Yeah, I mean, you know, in sort of, like, tech world, this is, like, the story of the day. Yeah. Like, in consumer tech world, I mean, there are many other stories to talk about. But did Google do this without telling Apple? Or did a team at Google do this without telling Google? Like, to me, open questions. Obviously, they're giving statements to us. They're answering the questions. Presumably, Google knew. But, like, to what level? Right. Like, did Sundar know? Did Sergei Brain know that Airdrop got cracked today? Like, you know? Sergei would love it. Knowing those two. But does that, is like.

Apple is much more top-down. So is Tim Cook going to show up to the, hey, we should run Apple Intelligence on Gemini meeting, being like, you cracked Airdrop. It's so small and so big. Well, it does seem like you only do it this way if you're Google. It was both out of nowhere and completely buttoned up. They clearly built and implemented and documented this thing in as thoughtful and technical a way as it could in order to make clear this is not just a sketchy hack that they've done to Apple's systems that Apple should go fight for the good of the user. And that was the thing about the Bieber thing that I thought was really interesting. It's like, yes,

In principle, I would prefer to be able to check my messages from anywhere. But also, it's a completely defensible thing to say, you're taking people's iMessages and you're putting them on Mac minis somewhere, and that's a security disaster. Like, of course it was. But in this case, Google has, like, they got a third-party security firm to review it. They've, like, they've done the work to make sure this thing is solid. I'm just going to quote our own coverage. Allison wrote this up. She did a great job. She asked Google, how will you anticipate Apple responding to your cracking airdrop? And Google's box said, we always welcome collaboration opportunities to address interoperability issues between iOS and Android. Forgiveness is not permission. This is Google daring Apple.

to say no. Like Google figured out how to do this, maybe by accident, maybe not by accident, built the thing out and is now like, okay, we've built a thing that is cool and interoperable and objectively good for users. Like there's not a lot of people in our comments on this story being like, oh my God, this is life changing. And like it is. Like I live in a house where I use an iPhone and my wife uses an Android phone. And the process of sending pictures to each other is just a nightmare. We're like RCSing pictures to each other all day and hoping that protocol, like it's bad. And if I could just airdrop things to her, it'd be amazing. This is like, it's such a fundamental like quality of life improvement in people.

who own smartphones lives. This is why Apple didn't do it. Right. This is the walled guard. This is the thing that they jealously protect most of all is the network effect of your life is better if everyone... It's Tim Cook saying just buy your mom an iPhone. Just buy your mom an iPhone. And this is why my first instinct was some regulator somewhere said interoperate. With RCS in particular, it wasn't the EU, it was China. Right. Like the Chinese government said, we're going to do RCS because we want to read everyone's messages and Apple eventually just had to comply. And that's sort of like under the table, but that is the heart of why Apple eventually... But Google also mounted this like long and aggressive pressure campaign to get Apple to do it. But it was totally ineffective. Sure. But I just mean from Google's perspective, like...

It's learning this playbook, right? Of like, we are going to loudly put the ball in your court where you have to say out loud that you're not willing to do the thing that's good for your users. And so the list, I mean, I'll just make a comparison to RCS. Apple's list with RCS was RCS isn't good enough. It's not secure enough. The carriers get too much control. You want to encrypt it.

Again, they were basically forced to do it by the government in one of the biggest markets in China. With this, I think the reason you see Google put out a big security framework and analysis is Apple's go-to defense is we will not compromise the privacy and security of our users. And here's Google being like, here it is. We didn't compromise the privacy and security of our users. And in the world of policy and these conversations, Apple's retreat to security.

drives people bananas. There are lots and lots of people. Federal judges have said Apple's retreat to security is inappropriate in many contexts. Yeah, because it is so straightforwardly disingenuous a lot of times. And also, it's not like Apple is doing a perfect job of this anyway. The United States Department of Justice, under Biden, but still pursuing the case under the Trump administration, is saying Apple's fallback to security concerns is disingenuous, makes it monopolist. We will get to whether or not we are good at prosecuting monopoly cases, but that is the argument the government under two administrations has made against Apple. Right. What would you bet happens here? What's the next turn? The reporting I want is...

who knew what, right? I want to see the email thread. I want to see the email thread. There's no way Google just dropped this without giving Apple any kinds of heads up. If they did, I think that changes the dynamics of this completely. Apple not getting a heads up while they're negotiating Gemini to run Apple intelligence while the fate of the search deal remains sort of murky enough for grabs. This is not great. This is the sort of thing that really and truly pisses Tim Cook off. Yes, it is. I do, I mean...

Do you think it is theoretically big enough to get in the way of that stuff? Like that's a different scale of deal and partnership that you wouldn't think would get totally thrown by some engineer reverse engineering the AirDrop protocol. You know, the hottest company in tech right now is NVIDIA. Apple hates NVIDIA. You know, if you're like deep in AI world and you want to run some NVIDIA GPUs, if you want to play video games and you want to do NVIDIA GPUs on your Mac Pro, you can't because Apple hates NVIDIA because they hold a grudge from 30 years ago when NVIDIA GPUs and PowerBooks were faulty.

This is not a company that lets go of grudges. It is like a grudge of a company in a very real way. That said, if your dependency is on Google in the way that it appears Apple's dependencies are on Google, maybe Google is thinking, well, what are you going to do? Yeah. You're on co-pilot? Yeah, right. Are you going to throw away Apple intelligence in order to get airdrop? Yeah. Or are you going to trust Sam Altman? Like you just see sooner being like, go ahead. I think Google as a whole is feeling very powerful right now. Yeah. For some more reasons that we're actually going to get to in a few minutes. But I just, I think.

this lasts. This is my take. It might be messy for a minute, but I think it's possible and maybe even likely that this interop of airdrop just lasts. Right now, it's only on Pixel 10 devices. Google's saying it's going to come to more devices soon. The second this hits Samsung phones, or it's just part of Android, all bets are off. Well, the difference is that if you're Apple and you want to run back to security, what you say is this setting requires you to open Airdrop to everybody, which is itself a security risk. You still have to initiate sending and receiving, but the only way it works is you can't just have it open to contacts or whatever. You have to open up your Airdrop to everybody. And you can see how Apple would be like, that's a security risk. And it's like, well, it is a setting you allow on your phone. So I don't know. But I'm actually optimistic that this lasts.

Or it gets formalized. Yeah, or it gets formalized, which would be a, frankly, even better outcome. Like somewhere in Europe, some bureaucrat is like, oh, do this one. That's good. It is possible. Yeah. All right. So we should talk about some AI stuff because it's been a wild week of AI launches. But also, like, I sort of feel like everyone is losing their mind about AI. We're in this phase where, like, the world is so frothy. The bubble is so bubbly. Everything is chaos. And there's just this sense of, like, you have to do more AI even faster everywhere or else.

And this is just where we are. And that's the only way I can possibly describe what has been happening with Windows over the last months, but especially this week. So last week we were talking about whether Windows as a consumer brand would persist for our children. We're all very small. And what Microsoft is doing in gaming and this appearance of retreat from consumers. This week, Microsoft was like, yeah, you guys are right. I don't know how else to explain that. But they're like, yes, you are completely correct about your assertions that we don't care about consumers. And the way that they're sort of making the case that they no longer care is by just junking up Windows with AI ideas in a way that I don't think I've ever seen backlash to Windows.

ever. Even Windows 8, they were trying to sell an idea, and some people would defend Windows 8. They were in our comments. I remember it well. There's no one in our comments defending, we're going to add agents to the taskbar in Windows 12. No, I mean, not only were there people who defended Windows 8, yes, but there was also an outcry when they moved the start button from the left to the center. And the outcry was so intense that they moved it back. And they got rid of the start button in Windows 8 for a hot minute. Well, right. That didn't go great either. But so the news now is that, I believe the phrase is, a canvas for AI is what Microsoft is trying to turn Windows into. And like...

So basically the plan here seems to be that every surface and screen and pixel you touch on Windows should be AI-ified in some way. And they're starting with the taskbar, the thing at the bottom of the screen, which is now going to have a bunch of like agentic capabilities. And you'll be able to run agents that sort of work in the taskbar and they give you some kind of alert when they need your attention and you can check on them, but then they run. And the big idea here seems to be that you just sit down and just sort of like make demands of all the agents on your computer and they go do stuff and they tell you when they need you and that's it. this is going to ruin the user experience of Windows. Either Microsoft is 100% right that agents are not only coming, but basically here, and that we're going to start to do everything on our computer through this one kind of interface, or Windows is going to become completely unusable. And I just don't see another option here at this point. So the bet on agents, I think, is...

It's reflective of the fact that Microsoft is a big software developer. Sure. They have a lot of people who write software all day long. And it is largely true that tools like Cursor and Cloud Code can do a bunch of things in the background for you in the software development world. And the outcome of that is interesting in the software development world. There's a lot of people who will argue about the quality of the work that's produced, whether or not everyone should be vibe coding. I saw a really good joke that's like, with AI, two engineers can now produce the technical debt of 50 people in one day. That's amazing. That's very good. It's very funny. But it is true, largely. I've talked to a bunch of developers. They're like, yeah, we needed to run a bunch of unit tests. We told Cloud Code to do it. I just did it in the background. And I did some more important things.

And if that is, right, you're seeing your own company, software development shop, being transformed by this, you're like, oh, agents are real. And then you try to apply that model to arbitrary tasks, not software development, and quickly it becomes clear that maybe the agentic revolution does not actually exist. And the example that I keep using, the thing I keep calling the canary in the coal mine, is smart home assistants. Yep. Where, you know, if you kind of like squint, you're like, the smart home is just a bunch of APIs, and you should be able to go use them. And then you're like, Alexa, turn on the lights. And it's like, who are you? And it's not in this world. Google hasn't shipped to a Gemini. Google might be in the lead with Gemini. And Google Assistant can't pull it off yet. Right.

You're like, use Windows. I don't. I mean, it's tricky because on the one hand, it makes total strategic sense for Microsoft, right? Because like Microsoft is going to win the AI wars in a big way because it has Azure. That's already happening. But if you want to be the like the front end to some kind of AI service, you need a place through which people interact with your products, right? I tried that with Bing. That didn't work. The whole like make Google dance thing didn't amount to anything. I mean, I got two great episodes. You did. You got.

It was a big, shiny moment for Neelai and not a big, shiny moment for Bing. You got more market share out of that than Bing. But then they're trying to put this stuff into Office, but they're discovering over and over that there is nowhere that workflows are more cemented than Office. Wait, I kind of disagree with this. I've seen a lot of folks say Copilot in Excel is actually quite helpful. Yes. So one of the things we've seen, I was actually thinking about the, we talked about Adobe a couple of weeks ago, where one of the things Adobe is starting to train its AIs to do is just use Photoshop for you. And you can just say in words what you want this very complicated app to do, and it will go do it for you. And I think the upside in Excel is the exact same, right?

you code in Excel, like in a very real way, people just sitting there writing Python code all day. So to be able to like vibe Excel is actually pretty powerful. And I think one of the things that we're learning about this bubble or this moment is... the pure AI system may never become digital god, may never just have perfect arbitrary capabilities, but the hybrid system, where you have a natural language interface that works with an app like Photoshop or Excel in predictable ways, and they've been designed to work together, might be very powerful. There's still a lot of problems. I don't want to, that future has not been actually built. We've just seen a lot of shots, and some of the shots are more promising than others. But all of that is more promising than you will have a general purpose digital god that just hangs out in Windows. But if you think there's a chance, that's the thing. Of course you have to put it into Windows, right? Like, you can try to do it with Edge, and Microsoft's kind of trying to do it with Edge.

Copilot is all over Edge. Copilot is all over Office. But like, what is Microsoft's most valuable Surface by a mile? It's the thing that runs your computer. Oh, I'd say this is where I disagree with you. This is why I think the evidence is they don't care about consumers. Because if you don't care, then you're like, we'll take this random shot at Windows. Right? Apple doesn't just ruin the iPhone out of the blue, right? They're not like, this isn't important. Microsoft is like, our business is Azure. Our business is barely gaming. Our business is barely Windows. Like, I think Nadella has never really cared about Windows. Like, fundamentally.

Like a long, long time ago when he first got the job as CEO, he told me that if he could rename Windows, he would rename it to Azure Edge. This is like a hundred years ago. It's not a good name. And, you know, Windows has waxed and waned throughout. Fine. He got that job a long time ago. But his mindset has always been Azure is the center of the universe, not Windows. They turned Microsoft into a cloud company. That was the goal. And he's been enormously successful doing that. I'm just saying if you, the evidence that you don't care about Windows is you're like, we're going to re-architect Windows on a bet because it's fundamentally not important to us.

But also it is, I still think it's the highest upside play here. Oh yeah, that's what I mean. It's high risk, high reward. Sure. But the cost of this is nothing. Like if you fail, you're like, Windows sucks. Oh well, you're going to go to Linux, which we will come around to. No, you're not. We're going to come around to. Okay. But no, but I think it's possible that there are, I can't think of a Microsoft product that it has higher, harder switching costs for most people right now than Windows. Like literally you're deploying to your giant company with tens of thousands of people. Like the kiosks in the airport are running Windows. Like where are you going to go? But those are, that's what I mean. Those are enterprise Windows installations.

That's part of your enterprise deployment. That's Microsoft, the B2B company. I'm saying Microsoft doesn't care about consumers. You open up a new cheap Dell PC and it's just full of like super clippies being like, I've heard you've been interested in the past. Like they don't care. And every time you type Azure makes a nickel, like that's the play. I totally agree with that. I think this is evidence that the consumer market as it exists today is not important to them. And if this works, maybe it becomes really important to them because they have executed the platform shift, which is instead of having applications, you have an agent and the agent goes and uses the building blocks of applications in the cloud, which is, we ran a clip last week. That is Nadella's vision of the future of computing.

I don't think that's true. I do know that Antonio reviewed co-pilot in Windows as it exists today. And boy, does none of that work. Nope. This is an ongoing theme that like a fun thing that we started doing here at The Verge that I very much appreciate is just doing the things they do in the commercials. And it goes generally very poorly. Let me just tell you this one clip from Antonio's video that he did for us. How do I go there? That's real secret. You'd fly into Cancun. How do I go there? To explore the downloads folder, you'll need to bring the file explorer window to the front. How do I go there?

To visit the Grand Cayman Crystal Caves, you can plan a trip to the Cayman Islands and book a guided tour. How do you know this crystal cave is in Grand Cayman? I deduced it from the file name of the image you're viewing. The cave is actually in Mexico, but then I noticed it's just reading the file name. So then I tried changing it, and now that cave is in New Jersey. To visit the New Jersey Crystal Caves, head to the Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Arkansas. It's very good. Everyone should feel bad about this. It's not great. No. And it is very funny that we are just doing the things that are in the ads.

Yes. And I mean, again, there's like the leap it's actually going to take to make your computer understand when you say, how do I get to there is so much bigger than anybody wants to understand. And that there are so many complicated like breakthroughs required to understand and process and deliver that input and output that we're just, we're just not close to it. I want to say the answer, open file explorer is a valid answer in the mind of a computer. Sure. That's a, you know.

That's where the file is. Yes. But that's the thing. It's like, it's so much of this stuff. I actually think that's a perfect example because so much of this stuff pretends to be magical and complex. And in reality, it's reading the file. Do you know what I mean? Like, this is all mirage on top of like very basic technology infrastructure. We talked about this with the rabbit stuff from a year or so ago when it was like, we have this large action model that can go use. And it's like, no, we've had technology that can click a button on a website for you for a pretty long time. And it turns out it is exactly that sophisticated and no more sophisticated. And if they move the button, you're in real trouble.

this stuff isn't getting better. We're just getting better at making it look shiny on top of it reads the file name. Well, this doesn't, I don't think this looks good on top of it. I can't do what it says in the ads. Like this is real trouble for Microsoft, right? If they ship a version of Windows to consumers or people on the holidays buy PCs and all the advertising, all the marketing is like, try this thing. And then it just stops working. You know where you end up? You end up with Siri and Alexa. Yeah. Where everyone stopped doing anything except setting timers and asking for music and hoping that that worked. If, you know, the promise of these chatbots, and I think we see it with ChatGPT, is it's a magic box of which you can ask anything. And then you see people just ask for everything. Down to,

Will you marry me, Kevin Roos, on the front page of the New York Times? Sure. And there's a turn here where I think these companies are going to start showing people the wall, and the turn is agents. The turn is the promise that the computer can go off and do stuff and come back and return some result that's good, when even locally, it's not even good at recognizing what's on the screen. Which, by the way, is a solved problem. Yes. Look at this YouTube video and tell me what microphone that is and let me buy it is a problem that Google Lens solved. It's a problem that Microsoft has solved. And it, for some reason, doesn't work in this context, and I have no idea why. Well, and the thing for agents for me is the way you describe what's compelling about these things to people is totally true, but it's only true...

in the course of open-ended conversation. The thing I keep hearing from people in the AI world is you get so much grace. being a bad product if you're fun to talk to, right? And that is, in so many ways, that's the runway. Like, as long as it is compelling to use, people will forgive it lots of things. But there's nothing compelling to use about me directing an agent to do something. I now have a different bar for you, which is, did you do the thing that I asked you to do? And that's, there is no, there's no spectrum there. There's no, like, possibility of, well, we had a nice time. You know what I mean? Like, you made up one of the movies you recommended, but it was, like, super fun to do this together. A post I saw about Gemini 3 was from a developer who says they prompted Gemini 3 to refactor a bunch of code from Claude. It did a lot, and it was beautiful, and it talked a lot of shit about Claude's code. And they're like, this is really great. All of this is wrong.

That's bad. At some point, I mean, this is what you always talk about with reviews, right? It's like at some point it either does the job or it doesn't. And being delightful and confident and silly and sycophantic along the way only matters until there is a job that you either did do or didn't do. And this is what we're running to with agents is it's really simple to evaluate whether an agent did the job. It either did the job or it didn't. And we're now nearing a point where we're actually going to evaluate the success of AI models on whether they can do stuff. And like, spoiler alert, they mostly can't. I mean, think about this. There are some places where they can. And I think, again, the point I would make is when you put them in constrained environments.

mostly enterprise environments, they can do it. And there is a lot, we get a lot of feedback from listeners who work in enterprise environments, who build systems, like internal systems for companies. And they are saying to us, we can have an agent go and ping an MCP server we built for a store of data over here. And it comes back with some result. And like, this is way better than virtual APIs. Like this is all work. That's just software. That's just software. That's software stuff. Yeah. But it's not, this agent is a general purpose employee of our company, which is the bet Microsoft's making. They launched a new product this week called Agent 365, which lets businesses manage their agents like their people. Like we're making big bets on ever increasing capabilities of these AI tools to do stuff.

And maybe a consumer is just harder. Maybe it is all just going to be the future of enterprise software is a bunch of agents like interlinking databases in a way that was hard before. Although I suspect a lot of consultants are going to get very rich telling businesses they need to make their databases more compliant with agents. Yes. But in consumer world, these products don't work. Like a joke we have running right now is like basically every week we can do, did this agentic consumer product work? And the answer is no. Like they just don't work. The browsers don't work. Right. Like they come close to working and then they don't work all the time. And then you might as well just done the browsing yourself. Well, the browser is actually a fun example because like if the thing that you want your browser to do.

is deliver you information about the tab that you're looking at. It's actually pretty good at that, right? That's a constrained amount of context. It is a piece of information it can start to take in all at once and you can summarize this webpage for me. They're generally very good at that. As soon as you're like, I have this thing, this thing, this thing, and this thing, can you collate all of that into a spreadsheet? Like, no, it just cannot. Antonio has an example where he's asking it to just tell him which specs in a laptop benchmark chart are bigger and it can't do it. Right. And this is the thing where, like, I think your enterprise example is a good one because basically what they're saying is like, these agents take a thing that I had to sort of manually build a bunch of if-then statements to do.

and it took a bunch of steps and it was brittle, and this thing is able to just sort of like barrel through the process and accomplish it, fine. What that is, is like a single repeatable goal over and over and over again, right? Like AI models are pretty good at that. If you give it a box this big, you can teach it how to do a thing. That makes sense to me. What all of these companies are promising is these like massive multi-step open-ended tasks, and they just immediately fall apart. And what somebody said to me one time, and I've been thinking about it ever since, is they're like, if you have an AI model that has to do six things in a row, and it does all six of those things at 95% accuracy,

That's pretty good. And also, it's almost certainly going to fail. You just stack this possibility of failure on every imaginable step. And because I can't control it from one thing to the next, it just falls apart. Just none of this is for us. I think you're right that this is just Microsoft being like... I don't think Microsoft sees an achievable path to recapture the high end of the laptop market or wherever you think the most lucrative part of the desktop computer market is. I think that's why Panos Network's name is on now.

And this is your shot. If you're like, you can just talk to Windows. This is the dream for some people. We get a lot of feedback that's like, I don't want to talk to my computer. But for a lot of people, just talk to the computer and it'll do stuff for you. It's the dream. It has been the dream. And maybe this is the thing that allows Windows to do that. You might as well take the shot. The problem is you shipped Copilot Vision, which is apparently just incompetent. Yeah.

just fully drunk and doesn't work. And I don't know why you would take that shot. I don't know why you would advertise these computers on the NFL. I don't know why you would sell these computers because they're just going to turn into Siri again. And this is my belief that we are witnessing Microsoft go through one of the hardest pivots it has ever gone through and they're just not talking about it. Yeah. They're just becoming an enterprise company. Yeah. The end. I mean, I think to a large extent they've always been an enterprise company. Now they're just...

fully not pretending they're anything else anymore. Yeah. And I think that's a big culture change as much as anything. But this is all happening next to Google, the other company. Wait, I got to say the Linux thing first. Oh, sure. Oh, my God. Nathan Edwards, our reviews editor, we've been talking about this. And he's like, I'm going to just install Linux. And I was like, you have to do it. You have to do it. And he's like, I don't have time to do it. I was like, well, you have to at least write that you're going to do it. So he wrote, screw it, I'm switching to Linux, which in the annals of tech headlines is just, you can just do that any day you want. Any day for the past 20 years, you can write, it's time to switch to Linux because I'm mad at Windows. And then the thing that happened, happened, which is like 500 people left angry comments arguing about Linux. But interestingly,

The tone, even of the people who are like, this will never happen. There was somebody who left a comment which was just every year since like 1991 crossed out and it said 2026 will be the year of the last desktop. That's choice. That's like a great virtual aspect. The number of people who said that go ahead and try basically was the same as that ratio was very high. The number of people said go ahead and try but I understand why. That's new. Sure. That's very new. And that is just a weird outcome. Right? And some of the, you know, we're dropping support for Windows 10. I've got a laptop that I don't need to upgrade because it's just fine. I might as well put Linux on it because Microsoft is dropping me. Some of the gamers in particular are like, I just need to run Steam on this thing.

the fact that Steam exists and you can run it on Linux and you can play Windows games as Sean told us at great length last week. There's something that we're going to end up covering Linux a lot this year. It's really upsetting. I feel really good. I feel really good about it. I don't know what shape it will take. Let us know how you want us to cover Linux. My instruction is basically like...

Try stuff? Yeah. I think Nathan has accidentally signed himself up for Linux diaries. Fine. But we're just going to take some shot at covering it. Tell us what you think is most interesting because we don't know. I think I know what's interesting, but that has nothing to do with what the Linux community thinks is interesting. Well, it's an interesting casualty of this change that you're talking about at Microsoft that it would completely upend everyone's computer buying choice. And maybe there is a world in which Linux becomes a thing you at least look at when you're buying a computer because if Windows is no longer the thing that almost everything runs on that is obviously just sort of the default choice unless you want to spend a lot of money on a Mac, where do you go?

Google appears just continuing to do weird stuff trying to combine Chrome OS and Android into whatever mess that's going to be. Mac is over here. I mean, this puts the idea of the cheaper Mac that we've been talking about into really interesting perspectives. It's right there for you. Yeah, because now this is Apple saying, oh, this market is about to be completely abandoned. And maybe we can just show up with a $600 Mac and gobble it up.

Why not? Just to me, Sean actually said this about NVIDIA last week. He's like, NVIDIA used to be a gaming company, and now gaming isn't even on the chart of its revenue. Like, it's so de minimis compared. Like, this is happening to Microsoft. Okay, well, that's a lot of opportunity for someone to see. Anyway, I'm not saying 2026 is the year of Linux desktop. I'm saying...

maybe you could say that to us and then we would cover it. Somebody please cut words together that makes Neil I say, 2026 is the year of Linux on the desktop and we will share that widely on our channel. It's going to have a flicker. We're going to see a little flicker of Linux coverage on the verge. This is going to be like when you decided to go all in on Dex and that lasted like an hour and a half. One train ride of Neil I using Dex and it all falls apart. We should talk about Google for a minute. We should talk about Google. Google launched Gemini 3 this week, which was like a big new model. This was hotly anticipated. Lots of people have been talking about it for a while and Google is pretty bullish on Gemini 3. It like immediately rolled it out everywhere.

which is a big new thing. It's now in search. It's in the Gemini app. It's available for developers. Like it is making Gemini 3 its model everywhere, which is not necessarily how Google has always operated. It called it the most intelligent, the most factually accurate. It had some thoughts about, what was it? Oh, flattery was the word it said it used less of. Oh, nice. We're entering this really interesting phase. It's made me think a lot about the way all the different smartphone companies think about photos, where you end up having to make like a qualitative choice about what this is supposed to feel like. We're doing this with the AI assistants too. Like there is a real sense that all of these companies have to like sit in a room and decide what is this thing supposed to be?

And that's just weird. And we're going to land in strange places. And these companies are like hiring philosophers. Hayden Field has been out like interviewing the people whose job it is to decide like what AI models believe. Like it's crazy stuff. But Gemini 3 Pro immediately jumps to the top of the charts. Grok 4.1 had just come out and was like at the top of the LM arena charts. It had fewer votes, but a high score was the whole thing. And then Gemini 3 Pro just shows up and is like back at the top. What's up? Yeah. Google definitely thinks it's one.

They're posturing around Gemini 3 is, we're done now. We have defeated all. You can't beat us. Right. And Google is also doing an increasingly good job of reminding people that it has a massive set of huge intrinsic advantages. A lot of people are talking about the fact that Google trained this model on TPUs, its own custom-built silicon, which is a huge deal because it means they don't have to just go and fight with the rest of the world for NVIDIA stuff. It was talking a lot about all the stuff that it's already built into. The Gemini app, I think it was 650 million monthly users. We'll see what that means. I'm suspicious of all of these user numbers in very big ways. We're soon to run out of people on Earth with phones.

Yeah, like whatever. But anyway, so it's talking about the integrations that it has with all these other apps. It can put it in search, which immediately puts it in front of tons of different people. I think AI mode in search is mostly very bad, but it's there. Lots of people are using it. That's your user number. Yeah, right. So, but Google is in this place now where like it has the tech stack, it has the distribution. And if it's right that it has the model, it can just start to run away. Like the biggest thing OpenAI has going for it. If all of that is true, OpenAI has like a huge brand lead with ChatGPT, just because ChatGPT is like the Kleenex of this space in a real way. But if Google can actually continue to like build and sustain being the best model,

there's kind of nothing else that someone can take away from it at this point. Yeah, I would compare and contrast Google with Microsoft pretty directly here. Microsoft made the big bet on OpenAI. They were going to be the winner. OpenAI, you know, until recently ran only on Azure. So if you wanted access to the cutting edge model, you were running on Azure and Microsoft was going to collect all the money. And then Microsoft is like, we're going to do Bing. AI will be in all of our products. We have the lead. We have access to the best model. That relationship is totally fractured. And now there's a committee of anonymous.

theologians who will decide I don't know what the hell's gonna go yeah Google in the meantime right was the laggard that caught a lot of shit for inventing all this technology for inventing the transformer for writing attention is all you need and not doing anything with it really they've since caught up they might have that leading edge model and the thing that they have the most is revenue that isn't AI right they just run big businesses so if they get their AI shots wrong they're fine then they also have ideas about what to use AI for right like in real meaningful ways they have ideas on what you should deploy AI against and maybe you hate those ideas but they have those ideas and take those shots and I think some of their ideas even in the context of agents are fascinating The general purpose agents that we're talking about might not work on Windows, but Google is showing off anti-gravity, its entire integrated development environment for agents, which appears to work well. They're showing off new kinds of Canvas in Gemini to one-shot VibeCode apps, which are more interesting than ever. And it's like, I don't know if any of that stuff is good. I have mixed feelings about all of it. But they're closer to executing the vision that Microsoft says it has than Microsoft is for sure. Yeah, I think that's right. And Google just has more surfaces that people use in which to put that stuff. I think the AI mode is the one I keep bringing up because it just...

We're so close, and it would be so easy for Google to just tick the box that switches the default search thing from search results to AI mode. And that is coming. That's the end of the web. It is. It's the end of the web. It is a complete change for Google's business model, but it's coming. That is the turn Google is looking forward to making, and it will make the minute it is able. I was talking to a very smart listener of the show who, very dire prediction, said the open web maybe has 250 days left. Goodness. What's in 250 days? It was just an amount of time less than a year, I think. Smart viewer, if you care to correct me, you can tell me what exactly. But the switch is going to flip.

That strikes me as increasingly not crazy. And we should spend a lot of time talking about what that means. But the flip side of it is Google has talked a lot about, and I went to a briefing right before the Gemini 3 launch, and they talked a lot about the bet they made really early on in doing a multimodal model. This is the thing Google has always talked about with Gemini, that this is not just text in and text out. It's not just an image in, image out model. They wanted to put all of this stuff into one place, which made it work harder. It makes the models more complicated. It makes some of the possibilities for problems much bigger. But it means if you can get all the parts right, you have built one thing that can do and be everything. And if this stuff is going to work,

in the way that the agent stuff we're talking about is going to work, it's going to need that kind of polymath abilities. And it really seems like Google is at least one full order of magnitude further down that road than almost anybody right now. It's hard to measure. OpenAI will tell you that GPT-5 is multimodal. They will. Sure. Do you believe anything that they say? Like, who knows, right? I just think the proof is in the pudding. Yeah. Like, this thing is only just out. The reason I want to compare it to Microsoft is you see Microsoft say a lot of things, born of a lot of confidence of being first. Yes. But they are tied to a company and a model that is now sort of openly competing with them, and they are maybe less in control of their destiny. They're also pivoting to being this enterprise company. They maybe don't care about the polish of the consumer products. Meanwhile, Google is, like, just sort of diligently moving ahead in a way that is totally surprising for Google. Right.

This company is more organized than I can ever remember it being. I will say around the time of I.O., this past I.O., definitely the notion that all the executives had been turned over came up several times. Like, he's like, the idea that Sundar fired everybody and put in new people. And gave them very clear instructions. It came up more than a few times. Yeah, I believe it. But I think, like, Emma Rothfuss wrote a great piece where she did the thing and tested a bunch of the stuff. And, like, it actually works. You can build stuff, the sort of one shot.

interactive visualizations that Gemini is able to do, which is one of the things I talked about, like this canvas feature you're talking about, where I think she had one thing where she asked it to create a 3D visualization of the difference in scale between a subatomic particle, an atom, a DNA strand, a beach ball, the earth, the sun, and the galaxy. And it like, it like did it, which is nuts. And the visualization looks pretty good. It's not like incredible, but it does the job. And this is the kind of thing that is like, if you want to imagine what the step is past search, it's not a bunch of search results collated into a paragraph. It's this. This is how you beat search and destroy the web. And this is very much what Sudara is the hottest about at IO. He was like, I will, the future of search results is,

one-shot apps that do what you want. Yeah. I'm going to make something out of your search results for you. That is unclear to me how many times I want an app to be delivered when I ask a question in search. All right. Here's what I'm going to say. I have the Google Home app with Gemini in it. So I'm obviously not home. I'm in the studio. Correct, David. Confirmed. In his sexy voice. So its suggestion, when I click the Ask box, Ask Your House, the first suggestion I gave me was broadcast. It's dinner time on all speakers. Do it. I dare you. Do it. It's like, it's so rigged. Aren't you AI? Shouldn't you know that I'm not at home and it's nowhere close to dinner? It's also four o'clock. Yeah. That one's uncomplicated.

This is a horrible idea. I'm doing great, everybody. All right, I'm going to ask you the question I'm always asking. How many lights do I have? That's a good one. It's going to think for quite a while. It says I have 27. This is a different answer. Okay, okay. I'm just going to show you the last time I asked the question. Okay, Neil asks, how many lights do I have total? You have 29 lights in total. How many lights do I have? You have 27 lights in your home. What is happening? This is what I'm confused about. That's the same question twice in a row. It sure is.

That was, I asked it earlier before this and I asked it just now just to see because it's never consistent. This is where we are. It's always confused about whether I want the lights that are on or off or just the lights that exist. By the way, the technically right answer to that question is you have 20, 30 some lights connected to Google Home, but obviously many more lights than that. Yeah. All of which is a thing that it is perfectly equipped to know. Right. There are this many lights connected to the system that I have access to, but it can't count. Right. And I think it can't count because sometimes those lights get unplugged or whatever. Like there's just something about the smart home where I try to use the AI as an agent over and over and over again.

run around my house and literally push these buttons. They're all in the same place. And they've been in the same place, connected to the backend of Google Assistant for a long time. And Gemini's like, I don't... I'm drunk. It's like, let's talk about what you mean when you say that. Have you met Kevin Roos? Yeah. And I can tell you, man, Canary and Coleman. For all this agent stuff, to me, it is just fully the Canary and Coleman. I think you're right. Can I connect that to one other idea before we take a break? Sure. Meta's chief scientist, Yann LeCun, just left Meta this week. He is maybe one of the main proponents of the idea that LLMs are not the pathway to HCI. Right. That you can't get super intelligence out of doing language. Gary Marcus is the other one that everyone knows. But the idea that you can't just do language to get yourself to true intelligence.

He's been burbling in the background for quite a while. I've actually asked a nerd to try to his face. His language is the same as intelligence. And he was like, why was that the first question, Eli? And you said, tell me. That was a hard open two years ago when I interviewed him. And he was like, you know, Gemini's multi-mobile. That was his answer.

there's a chance that LLMs can't do it. Yeah. More than a real chance. And the people who are saying LLMs can't do it are getting pushed out of the companies. And I look at some of this agent stuff and I'm like, this is why I think LLMs can't do it. This is the evidence. Because you can't language yourself through how many lights are on. Right. You actually have to, you have to know what you're looking at. And even the people who are building it acknowledge that that's actually the hardest version of this problem is those supposedly simple computer tasks that you just can't language your way through. Yeah. Yeah. And I think like Meta, speaking of companies that can just afford to fund AI projects to infinity because it has money coming from somewhere else, I think it's fallen behind in a pretty big way. And I think that is not an accident that Kuhn is leaving. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that's a company I both have no faith in and continue to keep an eye on. But we should take a break. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about Meadow a bunch more because there is a big, we've talked a lot about this antitrust trial and it is over in the dumbest way. The dumbest way. So we're going to take a break. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. So this meta monopoly trial, which is basically, was it illegal and was it monopoly maintenance for meta to acquire Instagram in particular, has been running for five years? It's been five years. I think it's been five years. Went to trial earlier this year. We finally got a decision this week. I would say the decision is fairly straightforward and it amounts to meta is not a monopoly. Why did we even do this? Would you say that's fair? Yeah.

Well, no, I mean, it's fair in the sense that the beeline of that was TikTok, dude. Yeah. Have you seen the internet? Yeah. But the reason I want to talk about this is because, A, I think it's really interesting that Meta fought this huge fight. And what I've been hearing for, I mean, years now is that there was going to be the outcome of the Google search trial and there was going to be the outcome of the Meta trial. And the whole startup economy was waiting around to see what was going to happen because it's been harder to, you know.

buy your company, which is why at least like weird reverse acquire things are happening. Nobody was sure what the vibes were going to be like for big companies acquiring smaller companies until this. And he comes out, Judge Bosberg, in this and says, basically, not only... did Meta not buy Instagram and then do shady stuff with it that in the world we live in in 2025, Meta buying Instagram is like not a problem at all, which is wild. And I think the thing I really like about this is reading through the opinion, you and I both love a good court opinion, I would say. And this is Bosberg who is, he's been at the forefront of many Trump administration controversies. Trump is called for him to be impeached actually. And was also the one who was very loudly trying to tear Google into threads in the Epic case. But this one, I think this opinion essentially amounts to like the most cogent explanation of how the internet works that I've read in a long time.

And I just really liked it. And I just want to talk through it. It is, by the way, for the listener, it's remarkable that we sat down and David's like, I want to talk about a court case. And I was like, justice means nothing in America anymore. Why even bother? And he's like, no, we have to talk about it. A stunning reversal here on The Virgin. But go ahead. I hate this. You're really taken with this. I know. This is awful. But I think the basic thrust of the case, right, was that the government was arguing that Meta competed in this very specific, very small market of personal social networking, right? Like where you go on the internet to hang out with your friends. That was the market that they wanted. And Snapchat was in that market.

MeWe was in that market. Famously, MeWe, an app no one has heard of or ever used, became a key part of this case. And Meta spent the whole trial just basically saying the word TikTok out loud. Of course we compete with TikTok. What on earth are you talking about? The sheer existence of TikTok and YouTube mean we can't possibly be a monopoly on the internet.

That's essentially where Judge Bosberg landed. He said over and over that at the beginning of this case, maybe there was a time, even five years ago when this case was first filed, that Meta and Facebook in particular and Instagram existed in this way. Now it doesn't. And then the whole rest of the opinion is basically about the incredible sameness of TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. That is in its way is a thunderous dunk on the internet. Oh, it really is. But I mean, but it's just burn after burn after burn on these things. Can I just read you at the very beginning? Like just the first paragraph. You love this.

By the way, I think you got it wrong, but you love it. Go ahead. You think you got it wrong? I'll tell you why. You're an idiot. Wow. All right. He writes, believing that the only constant in the world has changed, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, you know, that guy, posited that no man can ever step into the same river twice. This is the first line of this. What are we doing? Anyway, in the online world of social media, the current runs fast, too. You know, somebody wrote that. The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly. While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down. All right. So if I was Andrew Ferguson, the.

pretty dumb head of Trump's FTC. And I do want to point this out. This case was brought under the Biden administration, but it's the Trump FTC who had to carry it through. So Lena Kahn brings this case, but Andrew Ferguson, whose personality is, I hate big tech, he's the one who runs it through. And he hates big tech because it's woke.

The Trump administration are not full of great lawyers. Correct. If you pay attention to how they succeed in general. They're not great. If I'm Andrew Ferguson, I read that first paragraph and I know what my appeal is, which is, it doesn't matter if the effects of the illegal action don't seem to matter anymore. They were still illegal when they happened. So the illegal conduct here is Meta. Yes, they looked at a small competitor that threatened them and they anti-competitively found their way into buying them. The same with WhatsApp. And that precluded competition in the market. And yes, you can fast forward and you can say, you know what? Meta forgot to buy TikTok.

And so now TikTok exists. It meant I had no shot at buying YouTube and now YouTube exists. And so it doesn't matter if they bought Instagram once upon a time. That is basically the same as being like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to drive a car into your house. Many years later, someone else will fix the house. So I'm no longer in trouble for driving a car into your house. Perfect. No, so I think that is, it's just the, it is the thing that you're, the government has said they're going to appeal this. The FCC has said they're going to appeal this. That is the, that will be the nature of the appeal. Let me try to run the other side of that argument. If I understand the opinion correctly, it's basic.

counter to that is that actually what has happened over the last five years in particular is not that all these companies have chased meta and finally caught up or whatever is that actually meta has spent the last five years chasing these other companies right because there's this whole chunk of the opinion that's about basically how things change right like people's people's phones got faster their networks got faster the cameras got better whatever and so suddenly you have this thing where the sort of world around these apps has changed and it changed away from facebook and it changed away from what instagram used to be it's all tiktok now right like this thing is very focused on reels because i think as this opinion understands meta and i think correctly It's only product now is reels and everything else is just a surface onto which you put reels. And that is a bleak way to think about what meta is up to. And I think it's not wrong. And there was this big shift away from like high percentage of people coming to see content made by their friends on that platform to, they call it, I think they call it unconnected content. It's just stuff that is based on interests that I have and things that I've watched before. It doesn't matter who I follow. It doesn't matter where I come from. It doesn't matter who made it. It's just, it is all this interest-based graph. And TikTok shows up in 2018 in the US and just absolutely starts to...

eat these services alive. Because what it says is like, who cares about the friends you've had on Facebook for 15 years? They're not interesting. I have this other thing you might like. Does a really good job of that and actually makes all of these other apps chase it. So it's not, I think there's this real perception that actually meta is not operating from a position of like incredible, super competitive strength, but of like weakness and like it's losing. And it has had to race to catch up with this thing that just beat it.

Sure. I don't disagree with that chronology. I will just point out the most important part of that chronology is that TikTok exists at the scale it does in the United States because ByteDance, which is connected, if not controlled by the Chinese government in important ways, showed up in America. and bought millions, if not billions of dollars in TikTok advertising on Meta platforms. Yes, it juiced its whole platform on Facebook ads. That's what it did. It just bought users until it was competing with Instagram. And Meta was too stupid to know that was happening. That's the only thing you can say about that. Meta had a giant app install business and ByteDance was like, here's some Chinese government money. Now we have a competitor to you. That is not a reasonable thing to ask any organic competitor to do. Sure. You can't do it. And if that is the only condition by which a real competitor to Reels can exist, then you don't have a competitive market. You just, you simply do not. Yeah.

The one time that that was happening was when Instagram was taking off and Mark Zuckerberg sent a bunch of emails being like, every generation has a sharing dynamic and they have it and we don't, I'm going to buy them. And he did it for WhatsApp too. And obviously this generation has a sharing dynamic with TikTok. Right. And yet he said to clone it, but you can't be like, ByteDance showed up, spent a billion dollars on advertising. So the market is competitive. That makes meta being wise enough to shut down Instagram, not illegal.

sure but youtube is the other part of this right because i think the other because by the way you know our headline is medicine monopolist which is sort of like the big takeaway of it but like the the case is not are you a monopoly being a monopoly is fine the case is did you act anti-competitively right through monopoly when you did some stuff and very specifically stuff was by instagram and whatsapp the remedy is spinoff instagram and i think the judge is saying or the proposed remedy from the ftc was spinoff instagram and whatsapp and the judge is saying no you're fine like there's nothing but instagram it does sound like what you're arguing is they just argued that the ftc argued this case completely wrong because the case like in practice really ended up not being about that Like, for whatever reason, the actual meat of the case ended up being, are you or are you not competitive with TikTok? And YouTube, in particular. It was like... It was denied a market definition. Yeah, and is the idea of, like, places that you hang out with your friends distinct from places you go to be entertained? And I think in that case, if that's the argument, I think Judge Bosberg absolutely came to the correct opinion, which is, no, they're identical. They're the same thing. They have absolutely collapsed into each other.

That like, where people go to hang out with each other is in group chats. And what they do in group chats is like send TikToks to each other. But there's this line in there and he says, I just always really like this. He said, a decade ago, users who checked Facebook or Instagram would see a stock of updates broadcasted by their friends. A status update, a baby picture, a video posted on a friend's Facebook wall. When they wanted to share, they would post something to this ever-growing feed for all their friends to see. Now they are more likely to open the app and scroll through AI-recommended content than share by sending that content as a private message. That is A, precisely correct, and B, like a real bummer. Yeah, I mean, if you listen to Adam Assery ever, he will happily tell you that what people do is they open Instagram, they find Reels, and they share with their friends. And they're in DMs and that's where they live. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. But I'm just saying that, yeah, I'm basically saying the Trump FTC is stupid. They just did it wrong. Or, you know, they needed to pivot to a more politically amenable theory of the antitrust case. Like, it's almost shocking. They weren't like, you should put them in jail because they're woke. Like, you know, whatever they say. Like, this case started with a different theory, I think, under Lena Kahn. She had a very different theory of how big tech monopolies operate. I don't think that's shared by the Trump FTC. They don't seem to care about that in that way. What they care about is having big leverage over tech companies. Yes. So that Trump could make deals whether or not those deals exist. And here they ran this one to the end.

you know, as much as Mark Zuckerberg was paying money and showing up and saying whatever he's saying, they did run this one to the end and Meta won. Meta has consistently sort of won when it comes to market definition in these kinds of cases. And so I think it's kind of interesting that Trump didn't get leveraged over Meta with the beginning. I don't even know if he knew, you know? Usually you hear some like, you know, there's a big case. It'd be a shame if I took your Instagram away from you unless you get less woke. And like none of that occurred here. Maybe it's just because Meta thought it had the winning hand the whole time. But I do think there was a significant change in how they pursued the case when he went from Lena Kahn to Andrew Ferguson. Yes, it was the crime as perceived was not buying Instagram. It was...

what the thing had become all these years later, which is a very different thing. And again, being lost in market definition is where meta wins these things. They're very good at being like, what are we really? Nothing? Is it nothing? You can't possibly describe meta. They're not wrong. Well, and it is a forever changing thing, right? It is true that our construction of meta as a company was super different. It wouldn't call it meta five years ago. And now it's like, if they wanted to, they could be like, well, we're fundamentally about the metaverse. We're called meta. This company can play so many cards in so many directions that...

Yeah, I mean, like... Facebook has expressed to me, if you ask me to describe it, like, this is where I get updates on snow days at school, where cranks in my town complain about EV chargers being installed in Main Street, and where various fly-by-night companies try to sell parts from a 10-year-old car. That's Facebook. That's what that is. Yeah. That's about right. And, like, fine, but, like, is that personal social networking? Whatever it is. I mean, there are other variations of this pattern, right? The Google cases were started in the first Trump administration, pursued by the Biden administration, lost under this Trump administration. So there are other dynamics at work. I will just note that those cases are pursued by the Department of Justice, who's...

antitrust had under even this Trump administration, sort of widely respected, I just think they have to see a different story. Fair. Fair. It's going to be really interesting to see where this goes next, because this is about as cleanly as you could possibly let meta off the hook. It just walks away scot-free. I'm just saying, what are you going to appeal? You're going to appeal, we got sidetracked in market definitions, and the actual market is apps on phone with other people in them. Sure. Was it illegal for them to squash an optician by buying Instagram at that time? Right. Maybe that's a better question. The real question I would ask is, you know who does know how to get Donald Trump's attention in effective ways? Tim Cook. Do you know what antitrust trial is coming up? DOJB Apple. Yeah.

Just get ready for solid gold iPhones to be delivered to the now demolished East Wing of the White House. That one, I think, will tell us a lot about how the government really feels about these and I trust cases. Yeah, I agree. All right, well, we should take another break. This is all I... I just needed to do a little bit. You just need to get it out of your system. I just wanted to review Greek philosophy just for a moment. We're going to take another break. We're going to come back to it later. We'll be right back. Soft, cushy, plush, cozy, soft, smooth, buttery, marshmallowy, warm, soft.

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Feels good to do that. We got a thing going on when we're in the studio. It's good, yeah. It feels good. I enjoyed that very much. Is it time? Oh, it's time. Oh my God. It's going to be a big one too. It's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. The man who will not let me stop doing this, Brendan Carr's dummy. He was so dumb this week.

He was dumb in comically cartoonish dumb ways. Every week I get to Thursday morning and I'm like, oh, please God, tell me Brendan didn't do anything. And Brendan always did something. It's a real stack. I know. All right, hit me. All right, well, I'll start with the easy one. I think a couple weeks ago, we noted that Brendan wanted to roll back the FCC's rules that required telecom providers to have good cybersecurity. That vote is coming up. Oh, okay. And we're going to roll back the cybersecurity rules for telecom providers because it's a huge overreach to say don't get hacked like you did. Yeah, how dare you require them to do a good job. Just do it. And he's all like, I love deleting regulations.

These regulations were put in place after the Salt Typhoon hack. I don't know if people remember the Salt Typhoon. Massive hacks where the United States government started telling American citizens, please use encrypted messaging services. We cannot guarantee the privacy and security of your carrier messages. That's how big the Salt Typhoon hack was. And so then you've got to do something, right? You're like, huh, that was really bad. We're going to take some steps to ensure the security of our telecom infrastructure. Here are some rules. The telecoms naturally pushed back.

Said, you don't have the authority to tell us. We're going to be hacked as much as we want. And now Brendan is back saying the Biden FCC overreached with the one thing they accomplished. Sister, damn right, you can be hacked as much as you want. I don't even know what to say anymore, guys. That's number one. Just dumb on its face. That sucks already. Just go up to anyone and be like, do you trust AT&T and Verizon?

at all end of question Brendan's like they will self manage their security yeah that's gone super well which I would again point out led to an attack so big the United States government told people to use encrypted messaging services which really ran into the whole we need a back door into the encrypted messaging services argument they're making okay that's one number two David where would you say the BBC is located the United Kingdom what do you think the first letter in BBC stands for British there you go that's the one I honestly thought that was a trick for a second. I was like, oh God. I just want to know. How is this important in Brendan Carr's dummy? Well, Brendan Big Dummy. That's all right. The BBC, famously the British Broadcasting Service, now the target of a Brendan Carr investigation. What? Yep. So there's this kerfuffle. This is a big deal for the BBC. They did a January 6th documentary, which why? It's just, do they know they're not America? We don't know they're not America today. There's a lot of, in the background of all this, and I feel great sympathy for both our staff in England and just our English listeners. Sure.

dumb American cultural ideas have like now get transmitted overseas and because they speak English they're like oh we understand those let's get them here we shouldn't I'm sorry it's our worst export anyhow they did a January 6th documentary there was some standards row row in the British pronunciation over whether the Trump speech where he said fight fight fight was misleadingly edited various British journalists have been fired why is any of this worth it I assure you you can just point your attention at your own monarchs and they will also do dumb things yeah just a fact of the BBC or just like screenshot look at the one palace and be like are they smart and you'll have your idea Sorry, my people have escaped the British crunch. I'm Indian American. Okay, Brandon Carr. Yeah, I still don't understand how Brandon Carr figures into this. Brandon Carr has sent a letter to the BBC, PBS, and NPR announcing an investigation over whether the documentary with a misleading edit of Donald Trump was ever aired in the United States. Full investigation. And he's saying this would be news distortion, and somehow PBS and NPR, who have broadcast licenses, should then be punished on the back of news distortion for airing a thing that the BBC produced, again, in Britain. This is going to land on, like, if one person streamed it in the BBC America app.

everyone goes to jail in Britain. So Carr has asked the CEOs of NPR, PBS, and the former director of the BBC who resigned because of all this controversy, he said, have you provided either the audio, a video of the splice speech to NPR, PBS, give me transcripts and video of any possible broadcast of the program in the United States, and then maybe I'll punish them. Again, this is not a great use of his time? No. Like a good use of your time, Brendan, would be to come up with some cybersecurity regulations that you think would be appropriate to be voiced on our telecom providers who were recently hacked so badly that we told American citizens to use encrypted messaging apps instead of deleting those regulations and then chasing after one documentary produced by a British company.

But because NPR and PBS might use the airwaves, he gets to use news distortion, which we talked about last week, a number of former commissioners, chairpeople, staff of the FCC have said it's so problematic that he should delete it. He sent a formal letter to him being like, this power is so problematic you shouldn't have it. No one should have it. And he replied to that with only a thumbs down emoji. He says, it's from mine. How cool is that? So anyway, so our nation's foremost dummy has decided that he now has the power to censor British speech. Love that for him. He's like, well, I can get on a plane and get there. So it's probably America.

Amazing. And then last one. Oh, my God, there's more? There's one more. This is a big Tina Winsoup. Tina is our politics reporter. She's in D.C. She's plugged into the administration in big ways. She got a draft of an executive order, which Trump was going to sign, from what we understand, he was going to sign it. And it would have dramatically punished states that had their own AI regulations. So if you will remember, during the big, beautiful bill of negotiation, the idea that there should be a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI laws was debated, eventually went away, because the states realized they should have some AI laws. And even Republican congresspeople know this. Like, Marsha Blackburn, who represents Tennessee.

was like, no, we have to have state-level AI laws because Nashville is here. Right. And our state law is called the Elvis Act. This is a real thing. And an actually unknown thing about the Elvis Act is whether in banning Elvis AI deepfakes, whether it accidentally banned Elvis impersonators, but like no one's going to ask this question. It's very good. It's all this is very good. Yeah. This is not un-messy. It's all very complicated. Like if you ban the theft of a likeness, did you accidentally ban an Elvis impersonator? It's like a real question. So yeah, maybe you do want one law. And Trump has been tweeting nonstop about we can't have 50 laws. It's got to be one thing. And Tina's doing some reporting on where all this came from and who might be behind it. And it's very contentious, even in manga world. Interesting. Okay.

The reason Brendan is involved is because his theory is that AI and broadband are the same. And so the FCC can regulate AI because it regulates broadband. And so in the same breath that he's saying he doesn't have the power to regulate telecom providers through cybersecurity, he's saying he has so much power over broadband that he can regulate AI. And then on top of that, this EO contemplates if states do pass AI regulations, they'll be punished because Brendan will be empowered to remove their funding for rural broadband. which is just evil. Oh, so that's the stick. That's the stick. If you do pass this law, we will take away your role, the bead program. The bead program. The ever contentious bead program that the Biden administration had in the IRA that, you know, we didn't build broadband for people. Now we have to listen to podcasts about abundance. Right. That thing. Brendan will take it away if you do it. Right. Which he hated, but is now happy to have as a weapon. Brendan is a dummy. And so he's going to roll up. The thing I said to Tina when she was telling me about this is Ajit Pai set up Brendan to lose in the most spectacular way possible because Pai's entire approach to broadband regulation was to write rules saying the FCC had no authority over broadband. Right. Like none at all.

so that when states passed their own net neutrality regulations in California, New York, the FCC went and sued or Verizon sued because it's always Verizon. And the judges were like, no, it says the FCC has no authority over broadband. You said that already. You can't preempt the state laws because you have said you have no authority. Your not authority can't be the thing that is in control because you see how the judges in these cases are like, do you see what I'm going with here? And Brendan's like, no. If you have no power, you can't claim it. You got what I'm saying? So now we're at...

Brendan saying, I have so much power, I can regulate broadband. And if you do it, not only will I say that I have the power, I will punish you. I will punish you by doing the one thing that the FCC should actually do. I will take away your broadband funding. This man is such a dummy. As always, Brendan, if you want to just come on the show and tell me where you think the BBC is located, I'm willing to hear you out. It's a big table. We could put like a very large world map on this table in the studio. And Brendan, I have a lot of questions about where Brendan is. It's true. It's a tiny island. It used to run most of the world. Maybe you're confused. Maybe you think you're a subject of the crown, Brendan. It would explain your entire facial hair situation.

You're welcome on the show. You're welcome on Decoder. I think you're a big dummy and I don't think you can defend yourself. I also think you're a coward. I think you'll never do it. But I know this is in your Google search results. So hello once again, my friend. You're always welcome here on Brennan Carr's Dummy. That's it. That was good. It's like it's over. At some point, you know, it's like the volume of it. Do you just sort of get numb to it? Last week, Joanna was sitting next to me and we got a lot of comments on YouTube that were like, can I show Rupert Murdoch? I feel confident that Rupert Murdoch nods along to our podcast during that part of the show. What I think is the people who run every broadcaster in America think Brennan Carr's Dummy.

regardless of where they're situated on the ideological side. I would agree with that. Yeah. All right. My first one, we're just going to do two each today because you just talked for like nine hours about Brandon Carter. He did so much stuff. No, it's his fault, not yours. But here we are. But my first one is, I would say, the most important news of the week, which is it's about a domain name. So MSNBC has been going through this big shift as it becomes part of the new company, Versant, as it splits off from Comcast. Disclosure, Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media through its subsidiary NBC Universal Comcast. Whoever at Comcast has made this decision has made a series of very bad ones.

The new name of MSNBC as part of this is MSNOW, which is bad. Yeah, it's very bad. It's just bad. By the way, MSNOW stands for something. Wait, what was it? It was News and Our World, right? No, no, no. It's so much worse than that. That's a sentence. You said a sentence. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. It's mysourcenews.opinion.world. They're not dots or periods. You're supposed to read it as mysourcenews.opinion.world.

News Opinion World. The three food groups, as I call them. And also, the branding makes it look like a content forum. I'm very sorry. We know some folks over there. They're great journalists. Everyone's working hard. But like, come on, man. Don't have Gemini vibe go to your website this way. Yeah, agreed. But anyway, so the big shift here has been that MS Now, News Opinion World, has gone to its own website. And that website is ms.now.

which is bad. Yeah. And I just, I just want you to look, let's just look at it. So TLDs, these top level domains have been an obsession of mine for a really long time. If you rewind back, like, 15 years, there was this big idea that actually what we need is a million more ways that domains can end, right? What comes after the dot? Because we need more domains, more people are going to do more things. And having like .com and .biz and .org is not enough. So they had this big program where for I think $185,000, you could own a TLD. And that's how we got .store and .pizza and .restaurant and all this stuff. And the idea was like, okay, we're going to reinvent the way that people think about domain names. Do you know how that went? Poorly. And so I've been reporting on this sort of intermittently ever since. And one of the most interesting things that's been happening over the years is that .coms are getting just...

constantly more expensive. Yeah. Because it's still, the thing somebody said to me at one point was, if you have any name with a .com at the end, you get to just be the name of your company. But if you are, if you have any other thing, the name of your company will always be your entire domain name, which I've always really liked. And it's just a good way of thinking about it, right? Yeah. Like if we get to be The Verge because we are TheVerge.com, but if we were TheVerge.news, we would have to say TheVerge.news over and over and over and over again. We should change this. And this is, if you go to msnow.com.

which I am doing right now. It's actually, I believe, msnow.com. It is, in fact, a motorized snow vehicle. This is amazing. Retailer. Oh, it's in Korea.

Sure. But the dot now domain extension just went out, I think, like almost exactly a year ago that that became a thing. And I just cannot help but wonder if somebody at MSNBC was like, we can get a dot now. Should we get a dot now? And I just every bit of this has just been a like branding disaster that has made everything worse. But I think this big push to we're going to make this new domain structure that no one actually really understands happen. Just a mess. I love I love when people try. It's not gonna work. I know people have a lot of thoughts with the design of our website.

You know, you're allowed to feel how you want about the Burgers website. We like it. You're allowed to hate it. It's fine. So I'm just saying, I'm just, I'm accepting that I'm pre-accepting your criticism of our website. I look at this website and like, this is designed to confuse senior citizens into buying supplements. That's what this website looks like.

Like it looks like a slop website. It does. It really does. And I think it's on purpose. I think the big cable channels kind of know that their audience is older people who consume news on sites that look like this. Sure. High rates from Facebook. And they might as well just look like it too. Just lean in. Just what is our audience reading on Facebook all day long? Man, it's kind of true. And then you kind of scroll down to the sponsored content box and it's as bad as you can possibly expect. It also is two thirds of the webpage. Two thirds of the webpage begins with U.S. cardiologist warns aging seniors about blueberries for breakfast. Top doctor urges people over 60 to stop making this huge mistake for their health. And it's like...

That's one of the biggest stories on this page, actually. It's a sponsored content about why blueberries will kill old people. It's a tough beat. Anyway, ms.now. MySource.News Opinion World. By the way, msnowopinion is a box, which stands for MySource.News Opinion World Opinion. It's fine. All right. What's your next one? All right. You get one more. Palate cleanser. Okay, good. Thank God. Matter 1.5 is out, baby. And it adds camera support.

Okay. Yeah. This is the thing everyone's wanted. It's confusing and weird, as you would expect, and none of the major players have actually committed to it. But it has camera support. You know, like you do. It has camera support in an unknowable way that no one does anything with. Matter. And it probably feels like you still need, like, the native app and whatever. But the thing that you get is, like, you would buy some Aquara cameras, and if you don't want the subscription or the video storage or whatever AI features that everyone's going to voice on you, they'll just show up natively in whatever matter system you're in, whether it's HomeKit or Google Home or whatever. Yeah. That's good. I'll take that.

And then if you do want to pay for, you know, like my ring cameras are like, there's a dog. It's freaking out constantly. You can pay ring and that'll get you all your recording and your storage and all the background. That sounds right. They're also adding support for garage door openers, which is a big one for the Vergecast audience to know. Opening and closing garage doors. Joanna's fist pumping somewhere. Just a core part of the show. They're adding support. Actually, garage doors are part of a thing called closures. So things that close. So like many more types of closures, including more kinds of blinds, including the weird blinds we have in my house that come down from the top. Very excited about this. The hack we have right now is both sides of the blinds that come down from the top are different blinds.

Oh, clever. But then one is open when it's closed, which is very confusing. Matter 1.5 to the rescue, everybody. Who knows what it will actually be implemented? I think the camera thing is a big deal. I make fun because this is how Matter likes to roll things out. We have a protocol that no one understands. Do you love it? Yeah. But my general assumption is that most people come to the smart home either through lights or through cameras. Yeah. Cameras are far away the most popular smart home. Yeah. Because it's the thing you put on your doorbell. It's the security camera. It's whatever. And so I think making the gateway drug to the smart home be Matter is in itself a huge deal. So I think that's great.

I'm very happy about that. Yeah, and if you can push the plus button in the Apple Home app and add any camera to it, huge win for everybody. And then, yeah, maybe you need the back-end service for storage and cloud AI, whatever. We just had Jamie sign off from Ring on Decoder, and he's very much like, give me all the camera feeds, and I'll use AI to stop all crime. And we talked about that for a while, but I did ask him if he was going to bring Matter into Red Sports Ring, and he super deferred, because he's the winner. Right. He doesn't need to. But Amazon is part of the Matter standard. I think Alexa's better off if Matter is well-supported. I think there's going to be a lot of dancing back there. But I'm excited about this one. Jen wrote a great piece. It rolled out maybe a year from now, we will see cameras. Yeah, but it's something. I'll take it.

I'm going to lose my annual prediction bet that everybody walks away from Matter, and I'm frankly grateful to lose that one. All right, for my last one, I have a question for you. I've brought you a gadget. This is the Books Palma 2 Pro. I published a review of it this week. Roku app? Yeah, dude. You are the display guy on this show. I would say my bona fides is somebody who cares deeply about pixel density leave a lot to be desired. I hate this screen's guts. Yeah, this sucks. Okay, this makes me feel better. This is really bad. So the big additions to this new Palma are it has a SIM card slot.

Which rules. I have become totally radicalized this year by absolutely everything you own should have cell connectivity because it just becomes more useful and the list of things you have to worry about goes down. It's better on a watch. Every laptop should have it. It's better on this. I bought a $20 prepaid SIM card, stuck it in, and all I need it to do is just update my Kindle location every time I open the app. And it does that and it's great.

The other big addition is a color screen. It's for the e-ink stands out there. It's e-ink Kaleido 3, which if you've ever wondered how an e-ink stack works, they just take the normal e-ink stack that makes an e-ink screen work and they just boop a color filter on top of it. And so what that does is it cuts the pixel density in about half from 300 pixels per inch to 150. And it makes everything blurrier and darker and worse. And Amazon, when it came out with all of the new Kindles and stuff like the Kindle Colorsoft.

made a bunch of changes to that whole stack. They spent like an hour telling me about all the things they did at the display stack to make Kaleido work better. And I was like, okay, whatever. Congratulations on all your accomplishments. And then I used this for two seconds and it's like, oh, thank God. This sucks. I don't know if people have been seeing my face as you've been talking. I'm just making faces. I hate the screen. It has a bluish tint. Yeah.

And this camera is garb? Yeah, I mean, the camera's supposed to be bad. It's fine. Even they call the camera a document scanner, which I find very funny. But it's really like this device... Yeah, I don't like reading. I don't like... This device is... It's just a screen. The whole thing it is is a screen. Yeah, they're missing what made it great, which is it was a black and white phone-sized e-reader that could run on the app. I just needed this validation from you because I published this review and I've gotten some feedback from people who were like, that's fine, you're a jerk. No, no, no. Whenever you say display is bad, someone's like, you see in a pretentious way.

And it's like, no, I just, I have eyes. I can see when screens are bad. I have looked at a lot of screens. And that one sucks real bad. I've been, I have with me on this trip, I have the Palma 1, the Palma 2, and the Palma 2 Pro. So I've just been laying them out on tables in front of people being like, which one do you like best? And everybody picks the Palma 2. Okay, so that's a slightly better ink screen. Right. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, clearly. Color ink is still a long way to go. Yeah, it does. There's like, there's something about color that will be useful for people who read certain kinds of things on a device far in the future from now. The Kindle Colorsoft is good. You gave this a five? I gave it a five. Too high? Yeah. It's $400 for screen that did, like, hurts you to look at? Three. 2026, we're rebooting the scores

That's kind of fun. I just announced this. The review team doesn't know. I had this idea five seconds ago. Now it's real, but that's what we do here on The First Cast. All right, before we have any more terrible ideas, we should get out of here. We just finished, by the way, just before we were in here, you and I sat with a very special guest and made a whole version history episode about the iPhone 4 that I'm tremendously excited for people to see and hear. It was very fun. The last episode of season one of version history is about Vine. It's coming out this weekend. We're going to be back on Tuesday. We have a really fun episode. It's about how to be a running crazy person and also how to make your TV not bad.

It feels like a useful thing to do over the holidays. You and I will not be here next Friday. We're going to be off for Thanksgiving. We'll be back after that. We're going to start doing some really fun year-end stuff and a bunch of looking ahead to 2026 stuff. We've got a lot of fun stuff coming up. But for now, The Verge Cast is a Verge production part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We are out of here. That's it. That's The Verge Cast.

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Support for today's episode comes from Delta, official airline of the National Women's Soccer League. Traveling is basically magic. It creates opportunities, it fosters understanding, it expands horizons, it connects people and communities to each other and to their own potential. Those are the values that drive Delta. With up to 5,500 daily Delta and Delta Connection flights to more than 300 destinations on six continents, Delta is committed to helping you explore your world. Whatever gives you the travel bug, Delta is here to help you get there. Visit delta.com for more info. Delta, wherever the journey takes you.

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