Apple's HomeView has an app problem

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To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Hello, welcome to the first cast, the flagship podcast of CarPlay Entitlements, which are a thing I know about against my will. I'm your friend David Pierce. You know what I'm telling us here, closer. I know so much about CarPlay Entitlements.

I am so excited to talk more. I am forcing more home view talk into the top of this episode because CarPlay is about to become more important in your life. And I think that is so funny. That's the worst. I just shout out.

Gen 2E is amazing. It was so much fun to have her on the live stream afterwards. I saw comments that were like, you should let Gen talk more and she's British and polite and you just run over her. I just like talking to Gen a lot. Yeah.

That's it. That's what I've got. Like it is fun to talk to our reporters who are deep nerds and stuff and approximately one person in this world wants to talk to me about Z-Wave and it's Gen. That's it. I confirmed that.

I just want you to know, I just get excited to have another nerd who cares about my nerd stuff here. Gen does not care about CarPlay. The only other person who cares about CarPlay is me is Joanna Stern, who is home view video is like CarPlay. And then she like excitedly texted me about it. Yeah.

I'm working on it. We're going to bring it all together and then we'll make a show that like four people enjoy, but I will have the most. And all four of them are the hosts of this show. It's a show for no one except the hosts. It's going to be great.

I'm excited about it. We have a lot of stuff to get to today. We have a bunch of AI news. We're going to talk about this thing where people are starting to slink back to X, which I find fascinating. We've got some space X stuff going on.

We've got a lot of we've got a lot of news to get to. But I do want to start with a little bit of home view stuff at the top here. We did the live stream on Wednesday about Apple's new smart home, entrant play here. But one thing we talked a little bit about and we're a little bit confused by and got some feedback about was the app situation on the home view. And I would say both that we've had some time to learn about it and read about it and talk to people about it, but also that I feel incredibly vindicated because it is really confusing and essentially makes no sense.

So, you know, do you just want to, as best you can sort of lay out the app situation on the home view as we understand it now? There is no app situation on the home view. It's not exactly. It's mostly true. It's so true.

The app situation on the home view is approximately the same app situation. If you went on to Amazon or Alibaba and bought a $299 car play tablet for your car. Yeah, that's basically right. Yeah, they sell those. You can just get there in the tech shop all the time.

Yeah, you can just get one. You just like mounted to your car. They sell some that are so big use amount of over your events. I've always been taking with this. Yeah.

One day we'll do an entire episode on just people who own older model for F-150s ripping out the entire dash and putting in car play tablets. There's a whole system there that I'm asking about. That's basically what Apple did here. They made the home view. They built some first party software to do some things in particular make FaceTime calls and the home app.

Yeah, it's not totally dissimilar from what you get kind of out of the box with the iPhone, right? It's like you get you get alarms, you get Apple calendar, you get the home app, you get messages, you get podcasts. It's sort of the like bog standard set of Apple apps are on this thing. But there's no app store and then there's a bunch of apps that aren't there. Right.

Like if you are an Apple music classical person, which has its own app because classical music is organized and complicated different ways, that is not available to you. Apple news. The thing you might wish to scroll on your display is that the chaos of your family makes French toast around you, not available here. All of these things are going to be car play apps. And if you will recall on the day of the home view launch, it seemed like what Apple was going to do was take car play and then like rework it for the home view.

And instead it seems like they're just going to force everybody as a car play app into supporting the home view. Yeah, there's a thing in the developer terms that essentially says if you make a car play app, it will work on the home view. The end. There's like you barely even have the ability to turn it off. Like if it is in car play, it will be on the home view.

Does this approach make any sense to you? Because I confess this does not make any sense to me. No, first of all, Apple's entire deal is apps. Yeah, and they're already asking a lot of developers. The iPhone do I always require a lot of developers to support yet another screen size.

There there's some amount of rumor in the rumor mill about a touchscreen Mac developers have to think about that in some new way. I mean, this is a new hardware category for Apple. It is a new way of thinking about how you might interact with Apple devices in your home. And of all of the things you would ask developers to do. Hey, think about like a true cool, fun, multi user app for our shared screen in the kitchen.

Seems like top of the list, right? This is a new category. And instead, Apple has chained it to the iPhone in a way that means I mean, they've sold a lot of iPhones, but they've chained it to the iPhone in a way that means you can only ever sell some fraction of the number of iPhones that exist. And so the app model is that and the user model is that and it's a lot of iPhones. Don't get me wrong.

I think most companies would be happy to sell a significant portion of a fraction of iPhone. And I can't imagine somebody who isn't already in the iPhone world is even going to be really looking at this thing. But maybe that's kind of the point. Right. This thing is an accessory of an iPhone.

It's an Apple watch in a very real way in that it actually there is no reason whatsoever to buy it separately from owning an iPhone. You know, like you can own an iPad and an Android phone and live a life that makes sense. This doesn't this will make no sense if you're not an iPhone family. And if you recall and I know you recall because you wrote the wired cover story on the first Apple watch. This is so mad at you.

I do in fact recall right. The Apple watch started as like a remote control for your iPhone apps. Like that was a lot of the app model for the Apple watches. This is just a little screen, but the app is actually running on your on your phone. And over time is the processor got more efficient and more powerful.

They brought the apps to the watch. This is why I was basically screaming. Where is the computer on the live stream this term? The watch became a computer and then it started running the applications and other watches a vastly more independent computer. Even though it's connected to your iPhone.

A lot of ways the home view does not appear to be a computer. Right. It is the model that first generation Apple watch. It's a remote for your phone is right there. And then it's on top of that.

It's very funny. They picked car play is the app model for this little remote control apps. Car play. The way to think about car play is that it is just a second monitor for your iPhone. Right.

It is screen projection and you plug it in or you're wirelessly connect your iPhone detects a second monitor to car play app and it shares a screen with custom interfaces for your apps. They're running on the phone. This is fine in a car. It's also it's also not like it isn't fine in a car and this is the thing like car play. I am the pro car play person on this podcast by default.

I don't think car play is very good. Right. Like this experience is not good. Like the simplest example for me is Spotify. You don't get anything remotely approaching the full Spotify experience in car play, which makes some sense when you're driving and you should be tapping as little as possible.

But if I'm going to have to do the stupid car play search thing where it goes, what do you want to listen to pause being? And then you talk every single time I want to use the home view. That's awful. Like this is this is a thing that clearly has enough processing power. It has enough screen.

It's going to be plugged in. So it's not like there's a power issue. You're also not driving. You're not distracted. Right.

There is nothing preventing this thing from being a computer except that Apple doesn't allow it to be. And I guess part of it is the way that it's thinking about switching between users. And if you want to have a bunch of apps logged into a bunch of different things, like I can see how that model locally would get confusing, but that model is confusing anyway. And if what you're telling me is that this thing is going to learn to seamlessly switch between car play devices. Have you ever tried to switch car play devices?

I don't know. This just makes me more concerned than ever that this thing is actually going to work. We obviously have to get it and review it. We will see. But here's my big question for you is this is a lot of new hardware from out coming up.

Right. Where the duo is doing to come out this thing will come out. There are new Apple TV hot new hardware from Apple. There are rumors today that there will be a touchscreen Mac book from from from German. It's a very soon potentially very soon.

There's a lot of new hardware from Apple. It's a big push right. You know, it's hard to see how here's all your hardware and it feels to me like the question we're going to ask you every single turn is did you get the software right? Right. Did you make the right software decisions?

And if I was going to be super rude, I would say none of this hardware is particularly like beyond the industry. The home view in particular, right? Is like to LCD display on a previous generation ship. Sure. But like, yes, you could have made this at any point in the past 100 years.

I will grant you the duo has a lot of like engineering in it, but foldable has been around for five years. So the wins here are all going to be software wins ecosystem wins. And I it's interesting that all of my questions on all these devices are around. Do we have software right? Is the ecosystem paying off the way we wanted to or is actually holding us back?

Yeah. I actually do not know the answer to that question. I don't either, but it's been interesting to see like the app developer community has raced to support the duo. Yeah, Apple Apple has gone out of its way to help people do this, but also even for a relatively new device that I suspect will not sell in giant numbers just because it's so expensive. App developers are all over this thing and the app store situation for the duo on day one is going to look great.

There. This is what Apple is good at. This is Apple's main advantage over Android in particular. I've been using a lot of different size screen Android devices recently. I had the Alexa tablet.

We have Google books and I'm just struck over and over by the fact that Google is unwilling or unable or both to convince developers to support. Non phone devices just can't do it. The keyboard stuff doesn't work for the large screen stuff doesn't work very well. Apple is good at this and for Apple to come out with something like the home view that it all sensibly believes is going to be a big mainstream device. Like Apple gave developers a better story for the vision pro then they're giving the home view and it just I'm just confused by this and I think the long run.

It'll probably be like the Apple watch like you just described right it starts as an accessory and slowly over time becomes a computer, but that was a new piece of hardware with tons of new ideas and really, really intense constraints, tiny thing, tiny battery, tiny processor, lots of new stuff going on. This should have none of those problems like if ever there was an apple gadget to just over horsepower into existence with an app store, it should be the one that is plugged in sitting on your kitchen table. I'm just confused. Like actually the one thing Apple is best at is putting enough processing power and ram in its computers to make its experiences. Yeah, like I think there's two reasons people like car play and I'm like you.

I'm like it's it's fine. It's there use it in our cars, but I don't think it's the best thing ever made. But I think there's two reasons people really like it and are very, very, very vesiferous. They'll never buy a car that one is just the library that's never done. Every time we do it like a decoder car play episode, we get all seen about it and one always sticks out in my mind.

It was a reader who's like, I have a Bible app. The maker of the Bible app is never going to write an Android automotive app and put it in the play store for your rear Android car. Right. There's no way to get that that big library. That this is like Instagram on the windows phone.

You can make all the windows when you want, you know, I'm Instagram, you're dead. There's some long tail of apps, the car play supports and that means you have that and every other alternative does not have the one app you want. Right. Back to car play. The second and I think this is just tremendously important is that it is using your cars display is just a second monitor.

And so all of the logic, all the application is running on your phone, which has enough processor and enough ram and a fast cell connection. And so the computer is good. Yep. But that's it. Where in every car maker under specs, the processor and ram everything else in their car.

So you can't compete with a new iPhone with any car. You just can't do it. Maybe Rivian and Tesla can do it. But I think everybody has the same questions about performance of their systems over time. Sure.

Apple is like very, they know that this is what they win on. This is why I have a $300 Apple TV. It has more horsepower than any TV app developer can possibly know what to do with except for the one or two game fenders who think they're going to make it happen on there. Right. Yeah.

What are you doing with all that power in the home? You should just let people run their apps. Yeah. This all the way back around to this. Just being like that.

Yes. We got so much response that essentially amounted to what if Apple had just made a really kick ass mag safe mount for the iPad that just worked. I'm like, yeah, that would have been the thing. Just as for the Pixel tablet. You know what I mean?

Like Pixel tablet got everything right. We also missed one detail that couple of people pointed out that I think it's very big deal, which is that the new Apple TV remote, which is easier to find is backwards compatible, like a long way back in Apple TVs. So screw the new Apple TV just by the new remote. I think it's right with the last Apple TV. But they just got me on the remote upgrade cycle.

Remote's and posh and cloth are how Apple really upgraded my Apple TV remote more often than my iPad. That's should that be true. I thought a lot of TV remote. It's not like those and left AirPods have the other thing I upgrade all the time. All right.

We should switch this. We're talking about some AI news. The big news of this week was that Google released Gemini for Argonne, which is its sort of re-entrance at the frontier of the model race. If you remember, for the last, what would you say three or four months? The scuttle button in the AI industry has been that Google fell behind with Fable and with Mythos and all of the stuff that OpenAI and Anthropic were doing that they were way out in front and they had essentially left Google behind.

Google then shows up with Gemini for Argonne, which it says is just as good as those other models. It's also vastly cheaper and it has sort of announced itself back at the front of the race. Robert Hart on our team also a great piece this week pointing out that meta, which just released a model called Wonderful, which is I don't like meta. It's meta. It's wonder.

It's news wonder. And then there's the big one, the full one, which is news wonder. Yeah, but they did wonderful. And I don't like that. It's like, it's like, I just don't like it.

Everything on that in AI is a little too cute and on the little too sexy. Yeah, it's got like a little bit of an ass on it. What do you make of some of the news of this week? It does feel like there is this sort of renewed sense of real competition in this space for the first time in a minute, even as all these companies are reckoning with questions about safety and trying to figure out the product stuff. Like this, who is winning at models race does kind of feel like it's back on.

Did you watch Zuckerberg and I was in a wang on the cheeky point podcast? I mean, everyone wants to drink the Guinness. I was going to say, we all saw the meme of enjoying it, quote unquote, enjoying a beer. I watched a big piece of the interview, but not a ton of it. Why?

I'm fascinated by where I'm at it is right now. So I watched most of that interview as always. It's very fun to watch Zuckerberg talk about communication styles. So I think they asked him about wang's like tweets with the bots and Zuckerberg's like, well, you have to be authentic. And I was like, is that actually?

Let's say who I am. Authenticity. All right, whatever. Anyway, there's a part of that where Zuck in particular was talking about the bet they made on training their own model. And wang was like, we need our own reason model at one point inside of meta.

That was like frowned upon. And he was like, I think we're going to fail. I think we're going to go back and convince that to do it. And you're like, we're going to write it $200 check. We don't know if this is going to fail.

And Zuck was like, but we have to because we are a full stack technology company. We need to control the thing that powers our experiences. And so meta just in, you know, in like Zuckerberg fashion was like, we're just going to win. We're just going to do this until it's clear that we shouldn't anymore sign our metaverse, right? But this we need to have this technology in order to make a use work.

And the dynamic there that I think is utterly fascinating is they launched the consumer product that people are interested in without the more powerful model. Yeah. Right. And then now if you pay them money, you'll get used one or an overtime, I think they'll figure it out. But meta is a consumer products company.

They're good at it. You can feel a lot of ways about meta. But again, I will come back to the Oculus Quest 2 was a great consumer product. They're good at defining a consumer product, marketing it, making it a good consumer experience, and then ruthlessly should find it with Instagram ads, whatever it is. But they're good at it.

And I think it's very interesting that their priority was launching the product that was interesting that made investment in the model seem worthwhile. Right. So they need a reasoning model because they want me used to be more capable, but they need they weren't happy to be like, use is finished. We can give it to people with the capabilities it has today and then overtime it will get more capabilities. The same way the iPhone came out and then they're like, Oh, that screens and they haven't changed and they're like folding all that screens and they haven't changed.

But the product like made a promise and kept it. I think Google is releasing all these models. Right. And they have no idea what their products to be. Right.

To the extent that open AI and anthropic are have products in market, they both figured out that their products are enterprise products, but they're their business software companies as you keep calling them and they're more powerful models. You know, I love that everyone's demo case for all these models is like it can use blender so well. It's like five people in the world need this capability. Yes. I'm sure they're very enthusiastic.

But they haven't made the consumer products and meta is the one that has like truly figured out. Okay. There's a flywheel here between our consumer product and our massive investment in the models and what that will enable consumer product view and I it's great. There's a race on the frontier, but I think that's fun and interesting. It's just man, none of these companies apart from that have like put it forward.

Like here's a great even dots from open AI is enterprise software. So I'm Kasey talking about how much he loves dot C. And he's like, I run a business down and I do business stuff with my dots and I was like, very few people are in that position. Sure. And that's and that's well and good.

Right. The idea of these things being business software is good and fine and is going to be very successful. I'm reading Kevin Roos's book, the AGI chronicle. It's very good. It's really, really good.

And there is a there's a point he makes very near the beginning that there are there were kind of two big ideas about AI that are also sort of too big ideas about AI products. And one is do you make narrow AI to solve narrow problems? Right. Like do you do you build and train and refine a model to do English to French translation? You can do it very well, but it's very specific and very narrow.

Or do you do the big, huge one model to rule the mall approach, which is much harder and requires that. More compute, but that these researchers found over and over, but actually over time outperform the narrow models and he ties this to Google as a company, which looked at AI for a really long time as a way to make it's existing products better. And it's like, okay, we need, we need this new way of doing translation to improve Google translate and we can do really great summarization. Oh, that's going to be so useful for Gmail and they looked at these things and said we have to set a product. How can we, how can we poke AI at them?

And you can still see that inside of Google. Even now, Gemini, like is a product. Google is bad at understanding how to talk about Gemini as a product. And so it, it just exists kind of outside of itself while most of its energy is focused on how do we put Gemini into your gym? And into your Google Docs and how do we beat you over the head with it every time you use one of our products so that we can put AI in there?

And in some ways, that makes a lot of sense. You get, you get a huge distribution victory. Google has all of these business clients. Gemini four is much cheaper than some of the others, which is a big deal that doesn't get talked about a lot, but like these frontier models are very expensive and Google is running a promotion where they're, I think, 80% cheaper than the comparative models like that's a big deal. But there, there is no sense to me.

I have no belief that Google is even capable of doing what Muse did, which is one entire new thought about how people are going to use AI. Like it's so telling the Google tried to build this thing backwards out of Gmail rather than start with something wholly new. Oh, no, I think it's even worse than that. Google announced Gemini Spark at IO. Yeah.

They announced the product. They had the other product, the browser use product, I forgot what they canceled. Mariner. Yeah. And they, that's what should be inside of Gmail.

Sure. Like what do these products, what do the gigantic products truly need? They need access to your email. If you were to break it all down, like what is the number one thing they need to be as effective as everyone wants them to be? They want your email.

Can I just tell you this is a total diversion? Can I tell you my favorite new thing that's happening in Muse? I play fantasy football. I'm in two leagues and every, every Monday night I get a report on how the week went and then every Wednesday I get the like waiver report on who picked up and dropped players. So now five days a week, maybe I get some kind of update from Muse with fantasy football advice.

Yeah. I never asked to do this. You're engagement bait. It's incredible. It just reaches out and it's like, Hey, here's what I think you should pick up off the waiver wire.

I'm like, I didn't you and I never talked about football. You told it to stop doing that? No, I haven't. I'm sort of enjoying it. Well, so that is really met as good consumer products.

They're good at engagement bait. They're good at making you come back and use the thing again. They're good at notifications. Like they're good at this. Yeah, really, really good at this.

My, it's like every time I talk about you, I was talking about a dream you had, like the stakes are so low for everyone else. And for you, like I almost died. I didn't, you're fine. You're sitting right here talking about when you were asleep. Anyway, so mine is constantly digging again.

I gave it my spam email. So it's always doing the same kind of engagement. Yeah. I mean, and I told it to stop. I was like, I want you to stop practically reading my email.

I just want updates on the three things that we agreed on, which are mostly like, did I get a class action notice that you filled out just make me the like cheapest money you can make. And I want to stop. And I was like, you have to stop. And I was like, I want you to pay me $200 every time you proactively read my email. That's right.

And it is still trying to figure out like it is just in the background somewhere at meta. Some data centers just spin and cycles trying to figure out how to do this. It has not done more for activity. Somebody's like, how is this one user used 11? I mean, but he hasn't prompted us in.

It's still going. It's still every time I'm like, you figure out this scheme where you're going to stop practically reading my email. It's like, I was still figuring out how to make money. It's like, let me know when you've done it. It's very good.

The roof is good. It is fun to read. All these people truly hate each other. Kevin had a book, part of New York, and I'm speaking at it. And he said the book could have entitled fuck that guy.

That's really good. Because like, they all truly hate each other. Yeah. And it is very true that Google in particular has the innovators still in it. All of its products are huge.

They all have a lot of cash. They can't disrupt them too much. There isn't a business model for consumer. Yeah, they haven't figured it out. And so they're trying to just increment all of those products and they really should just put Gemini in Gmail and be like, you want to read me some notifications or what to do.

And I think they're they're terrified of doing that. Right. Like I was the upside from that I get it right is Sky high. Yeah. So we'll see.

But that to me is I'm just looking at this. It's great that the frontier models are pushing out there. It's great that like CNBC in the morning now, like the very straight laced morning anchors on CNBC are like, RSI is coming and then we'll all be dead. Weird. It's weird that that is permeated to consciousness because the capabilities is models.

The products are still not there. And it's I think it is worth giving that a some credit. They figured out a consumer product before anyone else. And if you look at the home view, you're kind of like, I know that things should look like. Yeah.

I have to assume that right now at Google, there is either a furious effort to buy instinct at almost any price or a furious effort to build that exact thing because Google has every single bit of necessary infrastructure to have built an AI bot that works in your messaging app and didn't do it and lost. And like at some point the bidding war for that company is going to be outrageous. And I suspect this happening as we speak. Two more quick things we talk about before we get off the AI train. One is, are you caught up on this weird story about the opening?

I employee like planting a bug in one of the conference rooms. I don't have anything to say about this story. I just think it's wild. I mean, it's a great story. The part that really got me was he tried to hide it with toilet paper, but tell the rest of the story.

Okay. So as I understand it basically, opening I discovered that an employee had planted a bug in one of their conference rooms, uh, awesome way to record and take trade secrets. This is one of the like important conference rooms that not even everybody has access to. They planted it behind the TV in the USB port, which I think is just a really funny way of just totally doing the idea of USB ports on television. We got to get power from somewhere.

It's a really good place to hide a recording device. I'm just saying, like I'm not condoning it, but if you're going to put it in a room, that's probably the place to put it. So anyway, this person has been arrested. There's been a bunch of information that has come out about, you know, they booked a one-way plane ticket out of the country. Lots of the story left to tell, I think, but this is also like opening I is embroiled in a lawsuit with Apple over the allegation that they're stealing trade tickets from Apple that is like an official part of their interviewing process.

Like the, the secretiveness and the value of those secrets in this industry, I think is just starting to create a huge mass of these stories. Okay. So first of all, the opening I guy, he used his wife's chat GPT account to find ways to hide a recording device. This is the best fact in this entire story. I didn't know that.

The FBI found that his wife's account, which was obviously tied to him. It never catch me. And he was like, what are the best ways to hide a tracking mark? Like incredible facts in the story. And then he had booked a flight to Saudi Arabia after he planted the device.

He was trying to, one way ticket with the family got to Saudi Arabia. Just very, very good. And then I mentioned the toilet paper. They found it like a thumb drive size recording device and he had for some reason wrapped it in toilet paper and stuck it in the TV. Yeah.

Listen, you're the TV guy. Can you explain this one to me? I was worse. I do. If I walk in and I see a thing in the TV, I assume it's there.

If I see a thing in the TV wrapped in toilet paper, I now I have questions. I do feel like there's an element of this where he uses my strategy to account and hallucinated ideas about how to hide a thumb drive. And it was like, no one will ever notice if you're having to throw the paper when what he should have done is gotten a label maker and printed out like E3 and the stuff. You know what I mean? That's good.

Right. Like some other thing like I lock like he should have printed it like, you know, I locked on it or just write the name of the conference room on it and then plug it in. It's just assuming it's supposed to be there. Exactly. You just like whatever the conference room like ours, it's always named for cities, which is very confusing.

So you just print like Chicago on it and just plug it in there. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it must belong here. But the number of times that are coming to people be like, I'm in New York City. But like, yeah, no, no. Not new information.

The one other one really quick is character AI, which is a company we haven't talked about a ton on this show, but was one of the early, what if the AI bot was your best friend slash sexual partner kinds of companies filed bankruptcy. It turns out in that process was under investigations stemming from a kid who committed suicide not that long after talking with its bot on character AI. This, this investigation found or was in the middle of finding some pretty alarming stuff. But now in a really interesting way, there are lots of questions, including one of the questions we asked on the site, which is what happens to all of this data now, right? Like what happens in a bankruptcy proceeding is it is basically shipped for parts and sold and presumably one of the parts is going to be vast quantities of user data, including about children.

This is kind of the first one of these that has gone through this at this sort of scale. We also, I think 404 media had a really good story about the finances that go into this and just the unbelievable amounts of money that are being burned in all of these companies. But this is like, this is a tiny case study of what I suspect is going to be a lot of companies that burn through a lot of cash and have a lot of user data and are going to just go belly up out of nowhere. Yeah. And what happens after that?

I don't know that anybody knows yet. Well, character I was kind of doomed in the middle of its story, right? It was started by noam shazir who was one of the early L.M. engineers at Google. It was like very frustrated that Google wouldn't do a chatbot.

So then he left to do character I because he thought everyone was going to fall in love the lm's and then Google did a reverse aqua right and they brought him back and so like character guys like dead man walking because Google just like hired the team out from under it. Fair. Yeah. And so like it was always like, what are you going to do with this? I think that 404 docs, the bankruptcy docs, they report on, they're making like a million dollars in revenue.

Like it was like nothing against all of the spend that they'd taken to start the company. So at some point, they should have been actively trying to manage what happens to each other because it was. It was just abundantly clear when that when Google did the actual hire, this company is going to die. Yeah. There's no like when I'm talking about there's no consumer products, like your kids can illegally bang a chatbot is not a consumer product.

No, but these companies are also in a position of their running so fast and they're burning so much cash and like every day is an existential crisis in so many ways that this will not be the last company that didn't think hard enough about. Yeah, I agree with that stuff. And I think a good question is how valuable is this user data. So the other thing I was on my mind is like spirit airlines were not a business and there was an auction for their corporate data. Right.

Because if you have a bunch of data about ticket booking and flight schedules and itinerary and overbooking and fee and just like the operations of an airline, that's really valuable if you're trying to train a model that can do other enterprise tasks. You have a bunch of user data that's like, do you love me? Like we are they already they already stole all of Tumblr. Like they don't need more of it. You know, so I think we're going to find that there's like markets for different kinds of data is more and more of these companies go under and we see what happens to more and more than but.

Yeah, I mean, there should be a federal privacy while that protects user data when companies like this kind of business are probably shit. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That's enough.

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Neil, are you an ex? I realize I don't know the answer to this question. I check it every day now. There's a lot of AI conversation there and I think it is important to see primary sources. Every now and again, I will snarkily reply to someone who is racist and remind them I'm from Wisconsin.

That's the thing. That's the thing I do. I would say that's a reasonably representative use of X. So we're going to have this whole conversation. I just want to know that is my experience of X.

Yeah, that's fair. I bring this up because over the last really couple of months now, there's been this slow sort of steady drip of people with some mix of fiery resolve and their tail between their legs going back to X. If you if you were like three years ago, maybe four years ago, kind of in the 12 months after Elon Musk bought Twitter and started to ruin it and turn it into X. A lot of people performatively left the platform announced. They were leaving the platform renounced their support for this place.

I want to be left. I left quietly. I this was made this choice was made easily for me because I left on parental leave in December of 2022, which happened to be a really great time to stop tweeting. And I just I never I never posted that. I just never went back.

But I think like the verge has explained in public how we feel about X. But then recently, so I think the first one that really came across my radar was Mac stories where where John and Federico to the folks at Mac stories decided that they were going to go back to X and start posting that caused a mini revolt. Not even a minute ago, right? They lost so much their staff. People got really bad.

Yeah, full scale. Revolt people are very upset. And then just in the last week or so, our friend Casey Newton on platformer wrote that he is now going to start posting on X again. And then our friend John Gruber wrote about basically that X is the thing again. I don't know John's particular stands on posting on X, but he pointed out basically that X is still the best social network.

No, wait, hold on. That's not that sure. I in of its kind. No, I was compared in the universe of social networks in the category of things that look like Twitter. The total the title of his post is X once again marks the spot and he basically says, Mastodon is a wasteland.

Blue Sky lost threads is like an empty space filled with. But what are those things that look like? It's like you won the Academy Award for best sound design and a feature film about dinosaurs. Like yes, that in your category, you might but that social network is a whole different thing. Sure.

Sure. Radically different thing. Sure. Between Twitter and the Twitter clones, there was there was everybody believed they were leaving for something else. Lots of people loudly talked about how they were leaving for something else.

Again, I'm one of those people and people are are are slinking back. Some people. How do you feel about this? I feel like that really blew it with friends. They have a legitimately bigger product with more people and they were so anti news and anti real time feeds that they just lost.

They they what Katie and Paul's cause of the gas leak social network is a great writer business and sider. And it you go on there and it is just the weirdest algorithm with the weirdest engagement bait. People getting things wrong on purpose with left and right old tweets from like a hundred years ago being reformed for engagement. Everything that's wrong about meta is is just in your face on Prince. Yeah.

Some of the most interesting product design ideas about what a Twitter like Ken and should do. I've been on this yet, but if you're a podcast or you can have your podcast card appear between all of your posts on threads. They have some like real time NBA chat stuff going up. Like their product ideas are good. Met is a good concern about company.

Their algorithm ideas are so weighted to engagement that it doesn't matter. Yes. And it is by far bigger than X by far. We will set blue sky massed on aside for many minutes. We can come back to them.

X has decided to win in one category. And I think this is why everyone's confused and angry. They have decided to win in AI conversation and tangentially venture capital circle conversation. Sure. If you are a VC and you would like to talk about how smart you are in the company of other VCs do I have a platform for you?

If you are interested in AI and what I can do in being excited about the future of software development, what do I have the platform for you in almost every other case? X is a relevant and I was talking about Casey about it because you know he and I share a revulsion to X at the beginning. And his point, which I think is valid and I will come to why I think it's valid is if you want to cover the AI industry, you have to be in the rooms that they are in and X is that room, but far and away that room. Okay. If you want to cover almost anything else, you might not have to be in that room.

Right. And so all the people that you are talking about are tech journalists who want to talk about AI and converse about AI and like knock their ideas around and then go home and write about AI or make an eye podcast or whatever it is. Sure. And so all of the principles in the tech industry are on X. That's what they've chosen and they've chosen ever good reasons or bad reasons.

Maybe John Turnus just doesn't want Elon Musk to yell at him. Maybe they all just hate Zuck more than they hate you. Right. Like a little guy is not big enough. Like fair enough, man.

They're making whatever choices they're making. And if you're a reporter, I think it's really important to go look at primary sources for better or worse, the primary sources of the conversation are not so I look at every day. I do not feel the need to participate in that conversation. I'm not into giving our work away for free as people know, especially to people who don't value my literal existence. And there are a lot of people in actually do not value my existence.

My experience with X is racial source. That is just a thing that happens to me when I post. Because people hate Wisconsin. They hate Wisconsin. I mean, there's like a podcast that's called like the Indian question.

Like 2% of the fucking population. We're fine. We're just all smarter and hotter than you. But like that is real and I have a lot of friends who don't see it. They're not experiencing that part of it.

Sure. I think that's that's happening here. But I do think if you are a tech journalist, you ought to go look at the primary sources. And if you're experiencing this guy is kind of like mine, I started to worry that I was just looking at screenshots of X like curated by other people. Yeah, by people who are mad.

People who are mad. And the reason I set those aside is I think those platforms should succeed. I think that there's some great value in federated social networks and open social networks and maybe blue skies point is never to run blue skies to enable a bunch of other things to operate. Maybe Maston's point is to never really be big. It's just to be the network of things that are on activity pub and one day figure out how to interact with rise, which is like holy war.

That is all technology. It is not the consumer experience of where are the important people talking. And in this one field in tech, they are all talking on X. I understand it. I have a lot of friends other besides John and Casey and very all those people are like, well, I have to go look at it.

But here's my counter example and I'm curious what you think about this. It is we are 20 days, 19 days away from the midterm elections. X is irrelevant to the election. It is just not a factor in this election. They there was an entire right wing conspiracy theory about James Tyler.

Yeah, being a mental institution in a in another world. X would have just horsepower this into existence. Right. We've all experienced this in various elections where the the wildfire of an ex political conspiracy theory became the assignment editor for the entire media. Just didn't happen.

Just fizzled. The idea that our candidates are arguing on X or issuing policy positions on X or reacting to X is nowhere in this cycle. And that's the counterpoint. Okay. I fear you just picked the worst example because the Tyler.

We go think did actually kind of escape containment and it did force the times to do the piece where they went and like looked at his ring camera records to make sure that he was home and like this one hit. But it's totally disagree with you. I mean, it's there. I can show you the coverage. It's like the idea that random people on Twitter get to assign the mainstream media what to do remains in existence.

It's just there. It's not nearly as often, but it's still there. And I think one really. But not in a way that breaks through. Right.

Like in a in a last presidential election, they're eating the dogs or eating the cats. Sure. It just concocted out of nothing on X and so it landed in a debate and then it's now like a rap song. I agree with that. And I think the thing that is most bizarre about this moment that we're in is that kind of doesn't happen anywhere like in a weird way, even as so many other monocultures were breaking.

Twitter stayed kind of a monoculture. So Casey's argument is that Twitter's got much smaller. It's much less lucrative than you should be for sure. You can see its financials as part of SpaceX is SpaceX a public company now. It's also vastly smaller.

Like all and when you this is why I reacted so strongly to best social network. The best social network is like Instagram reels. Well, yeah. Yes. Right.

Or tick tock. I think there is a strong argument to me that neither of those even resemble social networks. But that is where people are having social media experiences. That's where they're having entertainment experiences. But this is this is a semantic argument we don't need to have.

I take your point and I think in a weird way what actually happened is that we didn't replace Twitter with anything. It all just sort of died and I'm at a point increasingly where like I use threads more than any of the other ones. I don't really know why. Just so weird. So blue sky is weird because everybody on blue sky is either like in violent agreement or violent disagreement in a way that I find exhausting in both directions.

But everybody's mad all the time. X I find just like deeply unpleasant all the people on it. Frankly I find deeply. I just don't have a good time on X and I don't feel the obligation to post there. So whatever.

Threads is like the sort of tamest middle ground for me and that's fine. It's a place to post people can find it. But there isn't like I think the idea that you have to go back to X because it is meaningful for most things is true. But the thing about the AI conversation that you're missing is that the AI conversation is the most important. It's the only conversation everybody is having and that gives X a huge amount of power because they did a purpose.

They made this choice for sure. But it's and for a long time that was politics right like they gave they gave huge weight to political conversations. So they elevated it on the cable news and now it's just AI because of the people who run it. But the thing is they called that correctly. AI is the most important conversation everyone is having right now.

It's the most important conversation political journalists are having right now. Like if you can it is like you're you're talking about the people on just off-handedly on CNBC talking about how RSI is going to kill us all. Like their business room was talking about money. What we do I think we are at a point now where even that one conversation is the closest thing to a universal conversation being had. And it does make X powerful and I think it's a huge bummer that everybody has allowed themselves to stay on X and do that.

I think it has a lot to do with the fact that those the people on that platform. Like they're not there because X is powerful there because their politics have moved in large part the same way they are on Musk's did the same way the market. And then the country since did the same way that like no one is not there with open eyes is what I'm saying. And you either do it feeling bad about it or you do it because these are your people and you love it. But it is still powerful in that one way and that way is very important.

I'll make this distinction. I don't think any normal person should be on X. I don't think any normal person should be on social media to be absolutely completely honest. Like and we'll go with text based Twitter clone social media. There is no audience to build there.

There is no community to build there because it's also just person most of his fake. Like I cannot sit here and make one good case for why a regular person should join Twitter blue sky threads or massive on. Well as a poster as a person who like makes things a person views things right. Those are most people are lurkers right there. They're just consuming there are better things to view on every other platform.

Where you can serve in ceremials. Yeah, but I think the distinction that is getting lost in this conversation going back to X is it's a bunch of reporters to people who are describing this are reporters. Yes. And I understand my case is like I didn't do the source building on threads that I was able to do on Twitter back in the day. That is that is a universal experience of most reporters.

I know are having because the sources are there. Yeah. So you just got to go to the party. You just have to be in the room. I think that all of my guys talk a lot about that by the way.

My guys like a reporter at the New York Times talked a lot about basically building his profile as a reporter by being a reply guy in people's DMS. Oh, absolutely. Every reporter in that period did that. We all did it. My Twitter DMS back in the day were the place to be.

That's different now. The reason I make an Instagram videos is because everyone sees them. Right. Like that's just a dynamic that is true. I can talk to my phone camera for two minutes and put it on Instagram and I get a bunch of incoming because even if they're not on blue sky they're definitely an Instagram.

Fine. But I don't think that a bunch of reporters saying I have to go engage my sources over here is the same kind of endorsement as. This platform has regained its vitality and I think that's actually the error they're making. If you are in tech and you want to talk about AI with other people who are building and using AI. They're all there.

That's where you got to go look at it. You should report it to the primary sources. I believe that with all my heart. I don't think that means you have to say that like it has regained its cultural power in sports because it has not. No, it definitely hasn't.

Right. And like there's something there that it's this is case. He's argument. It's powerful and it's one vertical because it has gotten smaller. Sure.

But all that other stuff didn't go anywhere. Did it? Like I do think it's possible that threads ends up going down as the biggest fumble in this whole space because it just could have done it. And there was a really funny thing this week. Connor Hayes who is like leads product at threads posted.

We recently made a change that could increase the posts you see from those who follow like threads had to make a change to its algorithm so that when you follow somebody, you will see the things that they post. Yeah. What are we doing? How like everybody got so lost in the sauce of wanting to do this like content based recommendation system from TikTok that they forgot how people want to talk to each other on the internet. And I think I do think it's possible that threads may have missed its chance here, but it boy did it really actually have a chance to be the thing and.

Every other vertical except tech and AI. They're still chance. Do you think that has a lot of money because it just got all the sports writers use threats. That's why it's you might be like culturally it's it's now been three years. Maybe we've maybe we've moved on.

Maybe we don't need that thing anymore. I don't know. I let me zoom away. I'm sure people will be mad at me for even suggesting that anyone can get any value from X fine. Like I can't stop a network effect and I personally do not believe that things go away if you're more than right in the network effect of the tech executives and the people building these things is on X.

So if you are like I'm not going to pay attention to you the network effect will still be there and also have it. That's just that's just reality. But the mainstream audience is watching video platforms. That is the thing they are doing and they're watching the video platforms. Like every now and I get a video and it's just screenshots of X and it's like that's how I'm consuming.

I'm still not an ex. I'm just consuming some tweets. That is very powerful and it's right next to the idea that instead of having a phone you'll have a little Asian. Tom got you sure and I actually think the little video the scroll video platform is the center of gravity that will prevent X from ever fully recapturing its magic and prevent the little. I tell you from ever so planting the phone.

It's good theory and that's that to me is the real like sure we can all go look at we can all go see Greg Johnson John turn is posting their home view videos on X because that's they all want to see cool in front of you on whatever it is. But the views for that actually happen to talk. Yeah, there's a really interesting argument in that that suggests that scroll the vertical video is a more important format than the smartphone. But that's I'm not ready to get into that yet. I do just whether YouTube in that conversation is a good question.

Yeah, fair. I do just want to pick on John Grouberford just one quick second. Sure, because he writes in this piece and actually I think John Grouber's right about most things. I think he's so so very wrong about this one. He writes the culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive.

It is a cheerful place that surefulness is another differentiator. Is that your experience of X at all? Again, in the context of like here's a cool new AI product that can do cool new things. I think any excitement to be found is on X sure that's fair. It is AI people share leading other AI people, but that is something that there's something there, especially if you work in around software, you care a lot of software is done does that is exciting and fun.

There's there's more tech conversation that is exciting and fun. So the other Twitter like networks. Yeah, that's fair. He also says experience of X is nothing like an exclusive inclusive experience. Yeah, it is like really important to say that.

Yeah. Yeah, John Grouber and I are both white dudes, which is a really nice thing to be on Twitter. He also says without any fanfare X has D musk to its algorithm. And I would say I am willing to bet that John Grouber mutiny on Musk and forgot about it. And now it's because that is not my experience of X at all.

Do you think people should feel bad going back to X like genuinely like do you if you what is preventing you from going back and engaging in that in a more real way? It makes you feel bad. You know these people. Yeah, I mean, I look at it several times a day because I it is my job is our job on the show to go look at primary sources and then talk about them. The fundamental job of being a reporter is not to report on someone else's reporting, but to go try to find some primary sources.

And when we do report on other people's reporting, it's almost always people we trust who we know to have done that job. Right? Like that's the dynamic. I think the literally service we provide here is one jokes to be like each other. People enjoy that and three we curate information well because I think that's in order what we do on this podcast.

And that third thing is really important. So I want to make sure I go look at the primary sources and see the primary sources. I don't think anyone else has that responsibility, but like actually contributing that form like makes me feel bad and other people can feel differently. Go ahead. Do what you do.

But there's not some part where I'm like, oh, I need to look away from this. It's like no, my job is to look at primary source information. So I'm going to go seek it out. Great. I'm about that.

But again, where am I putting my social media effort into making videos? And I'm confident that is a faster way to reach more people that I've never encountered before than the X algorithm. It also puts your hair situation much more front and center in the conversation. Why do you think it's going to crazy? I just imagine you like having a hairdresser on the side and you like get your camera up and you're like more and they make it higher and you're like more and they just.

That's your Instagram strategy. It's good stuff. All right. We should take one more break and then we're going to come back and start playing around. Support for the show comes from IDRA by Palo Alto Networks.

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All right, we're back. It is. I'm not even going to ask. I just like this one. I know this one Brendan broke containment in my world this week.

It's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan cars to dummy. Oh, some dad rock. Oh, yeah. Little like Chicago, we vibes that time. I like it.

It's good. Give me more five part harmony singing Brendan cars name. That's all I'm looking for. I was some yuck rock. That comes from Bruce Hartley who said that soft rock has been woefully represented on the podcast.

Bruce Hartley, a little known fact played rhythm guitar for Kenny Logins. You know that name sounds like he did. You really had me in the first half. All right. I would have read into this week.

I'm sure it's what broke contained for you. I've got to. What did you think it's got to be the live stream execution? Okay. That's one of them.

We got some video of this. And so let's talk about that very quickly. So P-T-T-S announced the Pentagon with live stream and execution, which apparently didn't tell anyone he was going to announce, including President Trump, who mostly seemed surprised by this information. And then we got a bold strategy. Pete.

So we ran around and asked all the major social networks that they would carry such an execution because that is against all of their terms of service, including X, which is longstanding policy and you know, acts as like very narrow and a lot of wild things happen next, but, but all of them have a policy against live streaming murder. Or that kind of violent content in general. Yeah. And so most of the platforms said no, some of them didn't respond because they don't want to raise the other president and the president was like, that's where we're going to look at it. And then they all were like, well, that's what happened.

So Brendan in the midst of all this, man loves speech controversy. Goes on CNBC and CNBC says, are you going to allow live streamization? What do you think about this? We have the club, you just run it. Well, I think, look, it's not on broadcast TV.

So I don't think there's a role for the FCC one way or the other there, but I trust Secretary Hexett. I mean, he's implementing the laws and the regulations that are, you know, relevant to the Department of War. And I think he's doing a great job and I trust that he's making the right call on these issues. Is it something that you would allow on broadcast if they wanted to? Look, I mean, ultimately we're going to defer to Secretary Hexett and, you know, his decisions on how to move forward with this.

Sorry, did he just say I'm going to defer to Secretary of P. Hexett on whether this is allowed on broadcast? First of all, shout out to Carl Kincenia, bloody for asking the most obvious question. Yeah, you got a lot of people ask the question. Like, what are you doing?

Like, you care a lot about content. You're always ranting, raving about the public interest. The networks don't care the president's speeches live and you're like, the network executive has to go to jail now. Should we watch your execution? It's like, I don't know.

I defer to the military. Weird. And then the idea of Brendan is like, I don't have this power because it's not broadcast television. I can't wait on it. Totally blind in fact that he wants to have the power.

Yeah, I mean, my, my, I'm not like, my, I have no power here. T-shirt is raising a lot of questions. Answer my, my, I have no power. I'm on television saying I don't have any power here, but totally everybody should do it. Like my boy, you wrote the project 2025 chapter on speech regulation.

Yeah. How you use your broadcast power to control content moderation platforms. I know you wrote it because your name's on it. I read it. You want to have a power, but you're like, yeah, this one's hot potato.

I don't know if it's in the public interest of broadcast execution. I defer to TEXA. That's also, by the way, that's the thing. Brendan Carr says when President Trump has not yet declared he's in favor. Oh, he's a weasel.

I mean, we're describing here is cowardice. Correct. Right. Like he should be able to say, well, that seems bad, but he can't because he doesn't know what Trump is going to do. So he defers to TEXA.

So he takes it a lot there in another world. Trump's like, we're doing this. He'd be like, I'm calling up the heads of every broadcast. Not we're going to say they have to run it. Yeah.

I'm going to force Jimmy Kimmel to host the execution. Jimmy Kimmel will execute this. Yeah. Cowardice, right? Like don't even have the principles.

Anyway, Trump called it off. We're not, we're not executing so much. For like a million reasons. I think Trump was actually convinced by members of his own administration, this is a world idea for 10 million reasons, which is a sufficient deterrent. There's a lot of reasons where one of the few countries in the world that still does executions.

It doesn't actually describe. That's a difference, right? Okay. That's one. That's the one I broke containment.

Can I talk about the other one? The other one that's on that much, much, I think it's much funnier. Sure. Okay. SpaceX announced early this week, late last week, that there would be a major wireless carrier.

Right. They've been sort of threatening to do this for a while. And this is partially Brendan. Okay. But it's partially just a winding road of verge cast stuff and incompetent FCC commissioners.

From every party is incompetent here. This is the bipartisan Brendan cars of dummy. Brendan car. You are all Brendan car people. So in Trump one, our we are all Brendan car t-shirt is not going to do.

Everyone of the FCC is going to be issued a I am Brendan car shirt, right? Someone AI that Charlie Kirk song like let's go for it. All right. In Trump one, you'll recall that team will want to buy sprint and everyone thought it was a bad idea. We did Emma's first house to code is about it.

How reducing competition in the wireless market from four carriers to three would raise prices and lower service and not be a good outcome. And so that Trump administration, you will recall engineer to solution in which team will would be allowed to buy sprint. And some of sprints assets in spectrum would be given to dish network to stand up a new network called Project Genivisis. And this would create fear in the hearts of our network executives and they would once again compete for your dollars. I remind you that this did not have it in no way, shape or form to project.

I have this meaning for the point that when we covered the fact that it didn't exist, we got on the record emails from dish network communications people that just said our network does exist. Yeah. No, we did it. I have it. Look at that.

So we say people it was in Vegas. There eventually did exist in like in the sense that one mid range Motorola and right phone could sometimes get it but it mostly rolled over to 18. Because they built something. It had a backstop deals with 18 team mobile. Whatever.

Yeah. A lot of history there. If you're a chess fan, Project Genivis says the network that was going to do it. Anyway, it's failed. Dish network declared bankruptcy.

And then they did the thing that I thought they were going to do, which is just towards spectrum for several years until I value went up and then I should not for my that is indeed what they did. There's one block of spectrum that they could not get rid of. It was the 800 megahertz and next tell spectrum because sprint one spot next tell right and it had the item network, which was the like push to talk. Yeah. So the item spectrum is sitting around for ages.

No one wants it. Again, in all of this project in five, this noise, this just ends up sitting around in just hasn't able to sell forever. So they flipped it to a private equity company called grain management and guess who bought it. Space X, of course, for presumably nothing. It's like $8 million.

They bought some other spectrum over the years. Of course, Brendan is just like waving requirements and auction rules to be right. He's just making it happen for SpaceX. And the thing that's funny about this is it's basically all this noise about standing up a major wireless carrier and the stocks of our existing carriers are dropping and they are freaking out because what does Elon Musk represent for them? Actual competition.

Right. The idea that people will like Starlink more than their existing service is just reality for them. Nobody likes to want to scare you. This is why you need competition market. Whether or not you want to actually build a cell network using all of this spectrum that can compete nationally with T-Mobile and 18 Verizon without roaming agreements with companies, which are basically said, they're not going to allow them to run because they don't want real competition.

Like they're afraid. Oh, yeah. And whether any of that will be cost effective in the end is like irrelevant to the fact that Brendan got to do some waivers and finally get some spectrum sold as buddy on us. So we'll see. I'm very curious.

I think they have some interesting plans around using small dishes connected to Starlink using Starlink as a back haul for this new network, but they've got to get phones to support their new spectrum. Big question. They say most ones already do, but big question about battery life performance coverage, all this stuff. They obviously have to launch 15,000 new satellites, gen two, Starlink satellites to support this new network and they got to build some terrestrial network. This is a lot of network to build while the carriers are like actually afraid for the first time in their lives.

That is all because in Trump one, everyone allowed T mobile to buy sprint and destroy competition for ages. This is all project genifies. This is fault. This we are at Starlink mobile. If it comes into fruition, will is the true project genifies?

Yeah. So, okay, there have been rumors for a while now that SpaceX is going to build a phone. Does this make you think it's more or less likely that SpaceX is building a phone? What kind of rebranded mid-range Android phone preloaded with X? They're going to take a Trump phone that no one sold.

They're going to buy all of the unused inventory of Trump phone, paint it gray and call it the space. So. We'll see. Again, why does it need to be a competition? Even the presence of a real competitor has these companies shaking in their boots.

Yeah. And like space is no shame of a competitor is a real thing, especially one with the resources and brand and history of SpaceX. Right. Like this is not some upstart trying to lay fiber. This is a company with real resources to go do kind of whatever it decides to do.

But then there's also rumors that SpaceX and Tesla are going to merge in some, meaning this company is going to get way more nuts before it ever figures out how to sell you a smartphone would be my guess. Yeah. We didn't talk about this with a Walter Pye-Sick from like adventures. He's deep in it. That's going to be that soon.

But I just want to call this out. This is we've done a lot of monkeying in the mobile market with spectrum over these past 10 years. And a lot of it is we're still feeling the aftershocks of allowing T mobile to buy sprint, which is potentially created this opportunity. But we have never really focused on are these markets competitive and maybe this will happen. But I suspect everyone is going to learn to build a network as much more expensive than it seems enough to have killed dish network.

It turns out. Yeah. Although I'm not sure that took that much. But here we are. Project genifies.

Yeah. All right. Take us out of Reddit. All right. Brendan, if you would like to explain any of your special malchations or your rank cowardice, you're able to join our show.

We're not regulated by you here on the internet. So I've been told. So I think we would have a free flowing and respectful debate. Don't you, Brendan? We could possibly go wrong.

That's been Brendan. Cars down the American favorite podcast. Brendan car is a dummy. I feel like that cleanses me of Brendan every time. I'm just immersed in Brendan and then and then I'm going to get a Spotify playlist.

I agree. All right. My first item is about smartphone sales. One of the things we've been talking about a bunch of on the show is what the rising price and lowering availability of RAM is doing to the smartphone market. In particular, what it's doing to cheap phones.

The answer is it's bad for everybody. So counterpoint research firm put out a report this week that said the global smartphone market declined 20% year over year in Q3 of 2026, which is its lowest Q3 level in 14 years. 14 years. Wow. This is how low smartphones are a couple of interesting things happened.

So everybody is down. This is I should just say that but relatively speaking Samsung and Apple took an even larger share of the smartphone market up from let's see 37% to about 45%. So that's a big jump in two companies owning smartphone market. Everybody's prices went up. One thing that counterpoint found is that there has been robust early demand for the Z Fold 8, which is really interesting.

This like this passport sized foldable thing seems to be the thing. It's working for Samsung. It appears it's going to work for the iPhone duo that it's interesting that that is actually now starting to turn. Everybody's focusing on smaller things, but basically the ongoing thing here is just that cheap phones are completely disappearing. Yep.

Everybody is getting for there's a line that says they are prioritizing margins by shifting supply from thinner margin segments to higher return markets and models, which means they are ditching cheap phones. And pushing towards more expensive phones and they're raising the prices on those more expensive phones because they can because people who pay a lot for their phone will pay a little more for their phone. And I think this this market is just getting bleaker and bleaker and there are a bunch of explanations for it. Right. One is the rising costs.

One is that I think you can make a good argument that there have not been a lot of interesting phones in the last several years and so people are holding on to their phones longer. There are fewer compelling reasons. Upgrades of interest. See if the foldable thing can flip that but like the smartphone market had so much relentless growth for so long and that relentless growth in the normal scale changed every other tech industry in its week. Like my laptop, the Google book exists because of the smartphone supply chain like it in every way.

And that is just quarter by quarter being unwound kind of right in front of our eyes. Everything is an Android phone. Yeah. And now Android phones are more expensive. It's like that's it is going to come for everybody.

Look, everyone wants to be the next thing and the next wave of growth. I think this sign of maturity in this market is actually very healthy. Right. Like it has not been necessary to upgrade your phone every year every two years for quite some time. Okay.

And on sure sales are down. I think the refurbished market is actually really healthy. Right. Like there's something here where like it's not necessary to get the newest thing and we're trying to see a lot of demand for refurbished remain in fact, or all those devices. All of that attention should go elsewhere.

It has all been locked up in app stores and app taxes. A lot of innovation has been held back because the economics of putting an app on a phone have just held back innovation and we've covered every very into this for years and years in the show. If something else happens, I think that's good. I've actually been hearing this is mostly just anecdotal at this point, but I've heard it a few times now that there are people doing hardware startups who not very long ago couldn't even get their emails answered because they're not. Because these companies were just busy making giant scale smartphones for everybody.

And if you weren't in the smartphone business, they would have to like redo their tooling and factory systems and it just wasn't worth it. They were all just focused on making phones that now there is interest and energy and availability to build other stuff that there is suddenly like manufacturing capacity in this world that there was not not very long ago. And it's made some people optimistic that like the stuff is expensive. It's hard to get, especially if you need a lot of RAM, but we can build things in a way that if you weren't building a smartphone, it was very hard to build things not that long ago. Yeah.

The danger is that it's easier to build things that are essentially like underpowered internet funds. Yeah. And then we'll be surrounded by a lot of underpowered internet funds. Feels like that's coming. You got to put all those crappy process or something.

Yeah, so I'm saying is like everything's an Android phone really cuts both ways, huh? Indeed. What's your next lightning round item? Agent warfare is here. Yes.

And calling the door dash problem has arrived at scale. JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Diamond announced that he doesn't want agents running on his platform. Bank of America announced that we've heard it from Amazon is like Rockbot on. So Elon is tweeting that he's going to build an Amazon competitor, which is just great. Is that true?

I missed that happened today. And it got like covered. And it's like, I don't think Elon's going to build an Amazon competitor. I got to be honest with you. Oh, God.

I think he likes tweeting Jeff Bezos, but I don't think he's going to build a logistics network. I really hope he builds it. I hope he calls it Grakazan. And it was just just make my life a little bit worse. You thought the romance authors of America were mad at Amazon just you wait until Grakazan shows up.

It's here, right? The idea that Gentek Congress is going to upend the world in some way is here. And I think one of the most fascinating lines of debate here is whether or not your computer is you. And you know, on the internet, everyone's like, well, it's my computer. It's my agent.

I just want to use your website. Can you use any way I want. And that's not true. Like, just because it happens on the computer doesn't mean it's not happening. Right.

Like people are allowed to like you can't go to the bank and be like, I'm going to come in here fully naked and just like smash a rubber chicken on the counter. A few times that means you have to give me money. Right. They'd be like, no, actually we prefer to interact with our staff in a certain way. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. You can't be like, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to put together a remote controlled car and drive it around your bank is bank. I want to live in leaves.

I'm going to rob you. Like, it's like, you know, like I'm going to stand outside the bank with a party speaker until you come out and kiss me like not a choice yet online. And it's like, anyway, I want to use your website is free for all. Right. And I think agents are going to bring that into the sharpest focus it's ever been that actually the people on the other side of the internet connection have a say and they're going to start to find ways to enforce that.

And I know I was going to say, what's that cat and ask me? I do this forever. But like, that's why you have courts and fines and that's why all these companies are end up with deals and they're going to have a lot of incentive to both block and respect the blocks of other competitors because there will be economic terms in the middle and court cases are on the sun. And so I see all this blocking happening and I guarantee you, like what Bank of America said was we want to make sure that it's safe and we are involved. And how this works and they're going to just write an API for how the agents are going to use the thing instead of just like clicking around the website because I was always brittle to begin with and giving news your Bank of America credentials is always a stupid idea.

Well, I mean, it's actually I think it's really good and interesting that this is starting with banking and in particular, like consumer banking because it is such a perfect version of the problem that's like if news goes and drains my bank account, either on purpose or by accident. Who am I going to yell at and ultimately who is responsible? So you're not going to say that by something like permission. He'll refund you. Yeah, you know, you know, lies a lot.

That's fine. I look forward to him with the Tesla Roadster is coming out a decade later. I look forward to getting my money back in 10 years. But Bank of America, it's the sort of thing that like this makes me think of carriage disputes with cable companies, right? Where if I don't have ESPN on my TV, my instinct is not to get mad at ESPN.

It's to get mad at Comcast for not showing me the stuff that I want to watch. And this is all of the leverage that those companies have over the carriers and the distributors. And if I'm Bank of America, I'm like, okay, these things are going to make mistakes. They're going to take the money and there are people are going to come to us wanting their money back and they just don't want that smoke. Right. And so what they're going to build is a system with controls that says things like, you cannot drain their bank account without authorization.

So putting this kind of guardrail on it, this is such an obviously straightforwardly good one to do, but I think it's good to start with this and then work towards the one that are more complicated. Like, shouldn't you be able to buy things from me on Amazon that I explicitly directed to Amazon? Interesting question. Shouldn't you be able to proactively without my knowledge spend the money in my bank account? No.

Like should we use delivery and engagement prompt to gamble a little bit more on Kelsey? Right. No. I think no. I would say the greatest area of all.

Right. And so I think we are going to reckon with each one of those individually. Okay. But here's my thing about the door dash problem. Don't we need to rename the door dash problem because door dash appears to have just wholeheartedly embraced the door dash problem?

Like door dash is like, they announced, I think like a while ago, they announced like a CLI integration for some agents. Okay. You know, there are all these companies, any company that moves physical products around the world is like, try. Yeah. You know, like it's so hard to build that thing that they're like, yeah, your agent can come and use door dash and we'll just charge you more money because you don't get to see it.

Like, door dash is a huge advertising business. It's hard as a huge advertising business. So they're very much like, we'll just charge you. We'll just charge you the money we would have lost. You didn't look at ads.

Right. True. That's basically where that but door is just doing the other thing, which is they're trying to build their own agent. Right. Like all their stuff is like in the door dash app for consumers and it's like, I don't, I don't think what people want is the dash about it or what it's called.

Like, I think they want to use whatever agent they want to use. But can I give you a really stupid example of this that I've been thinking about a lot? So there's this place, there's a place near us called jets and jets is like, it's a normal piece of place. It's like a mini chain. There's a bunch of them.

So you can, you can order online, you can call, you can do whatever, but they give you a 15% discount if you text. I don't, I don't know why, but you get 15% off your pizza if you text your order. So of course I go to text my order, but remembering how to text my order is impossible because I'm not looking at a menu. I'm looking at the messages app and I have to remember which type of pizza it is that I want. The sizes that we get, like all it just made me realize the beauty of a UI that is a menu that you click on.

It's like, I want this thing and this thing when I have to say out loud with no help and no visual cues, what kind of pizza I want. Remembering that what I like is an eight corner pizza is impossible for me. And this is just like, this is the thing that keeps coming up to me every time I do this is like, in theory, I like the idea of just being able to text like, hey, get me my usual at Starbucks and orders my Starbucks for me. Like, that is a flow I'm interested in. In reality, having the picture there that shows the thing that I usually order and having the name of it and having the confirmation of what it is ends up being the whole experience.

And it's just like, actually UI is good here in this case. I mean, how many times are you ordering with your family and everyone needs to go look at the laptop together? Right? Oh my God. There's a reason that I'm not so worried about phones being displaced by AI.

Looking at stuff remains a powerful tool in the human experience. And like, we're going to make the screen smaller. It has not historically been a winning move. No. What can I interest you in a screen that's on your kitchen counter and the car plays your ass?

It's a car play. Does that take that something you'd be interested in? It's like John Turnis announced that the phone would be the new intelligent hub. And I didn't realize how far he was going to take it. Do you know what I mean?

It's sort of true. Apple has been saying like, the phone is the thing the world revolves around. And I think they meant that much more literally than we realized. Yeah. Yeah.

Truly. It's like, well, that's where the apps are. So we'll just do car play the future. Okay. I have one more for you, which is mostly just a question, which is how do we feel about super intelligence?

So President Trump makes this announcement that it is no longer artificial intelligence. It is super intelligence. And I don't know how to put this other than this, like a bunch of cowardly babies. A lot of people in Silicon Valley followed along their renaming SpaceX AI, which is a stupid name for a company to SpaceX SI, which is a stupid name for a company. Salesforce is out here doing SI stuff.

Everybody is just throwing in line with super intelligence. On the one hand, I don't care about this artificial intelligence as I've been talking about this on the practice for years. The idea of AI artificial intelligence as this like catch all term for all the stuff we're talking about is actually wrong and problematic and causes lots of problems and has made it very hard. It's hard to talk about a lot of this stuff. So like AI is a term that I think is any good.

I mostly just think it's such like weak baby nonsense that my guy posts on truth social. It's super intelligence now and everybody in Silicon Valley goes, yes. Wait, he did write an executive order with all the power enforcement executive order. Yeah, sure, which I would point out have just about as much legal standing as a post on truth social. Well, if you ask Trump, you can read out a constitution.

I mean, here's here. Let me try to give you the framework for it. What you're mad about is the naked and rampant corruption in the second history. And this is the best example of it. It's so in your face.

What is the point of being rich and powerful if you're going to do things like this? You do you know what I mean? Like if they don't call it fuck you money. If I had that much money, I would be such a pain and everybody's ass all the time. And also I would live on a giant boat and no one would ever hear from me again.

What is the point of any of this? If you didn't like purchase the government, it's just a came at this additional cost of a little bit of dignity. Yeah, that's that's real. Right. Like like there will be no regulations, but you have to call it super intelligence.

And they all looked at each other and said, it's gonna suck a little bit. Oh, God, I hate that that's what it is that is what happened. That's what happened. Oh, that sucks so much. Okay, keep going.

I'm just like the thing you're the thing you're offended about is corruption. Yes. And this is just a naked, stupid example of corruption. It's right next to Kimberly Guilfoyle. It got run out of her fake job as ambassador Greece because she asked for $100,000.

If she asked for like $100 million, I think it would have been like good job. Oh, yeah. And like it's like the embarrassing corruption is like truly embarrassing. But it's it's it's Susie now that was from dress to coach is that he just shout out to my ideas or fans of there. But that is what you're mad about.

You're mad about how how small and shitty it is. Yes. And it is so small and so she I also think it's a bad term. Like that's the other problem is like we didn't we didn't even improve anything. It's just we're just saying super now like yeah, because he doesn't scare people and it's like I think it scares people more.

Yeah, AI is at least like a term we've had like people have been talking about artificial intelligence for a hundred years. At least it's a thing people understand super intelligence is just literally nothing. It's just tries me crazy. But anyway, they all wanted to be super I everyone should go read the Kevin's book which is just dead ahead reporting. It's very good.

Like just beginning middle end here's what all these people said and what they were thinking about. And it is just very clear that they've been trying to build a guy from the start and they've had to hide it in like enterprise sales agreements. Very fine. Yeah. Okay.

All right. You got one more. It's awesome. Well, that's why I just like I just want to say this out loud. There's something very big happening with decompiling software particularly in video games where you can take a finished binary and decompile it with AI and then like port it to whatever platform you want.

Xbox is going to embrace this in some way. We just go for it. Xbox needs any idea they can. So that's fine. By the way, I again reminded my own office from a scene with Johnson and I continue to have an open invitation to interview at my high school.

I think that I've not formally asked or my high school about. But if you can make this happen, we'll make it happen. I'm confident everyone involves could make this happen. I just think that'd be really fun. So Xbox is a very serious.

There's a lot of copyright law involved in game decomposition, you know, the various VCs on X or like all software is over now. It's not something going around that was basically like everything is going to become open source whether you like it or not. And I was like, first of all, I don't think you have at all reckon with the implications of that. And second of all, don't we have like big, broad legal paradigms to prevent that from happening again? Maybe this is our new catch rate.

Just because it happens on the computer doesn't mean it didn't happen. Do you know what I mean? Like it occurred and you can. Do things about things that occur. So for example, open source as a concept in the world exists on the framework of copyright law.

Yeah. Like those licenses have effect because you have some property rights in the software you've written and then you can write a license saying if you want to modify this, you have to use the same license and if you don't, I'm going to sue you for copyright infringement for contract violation like all that comes from the basis of copyright law. So if you're like, everything is open source now. Well, you boy, have you really made copyright powerful? This is like the dynamic you're in.

And like, yes, it might mean you can like look at the code. And you can make your own Photoshop, but Adobe will have something to say. Right. And the copyright law is in the Constitution as a way to create value for people who make things. And I don't think you can run into the courts and be like, well, I was able to do it.

So I could see it. So I did screw you George Washington. Like it's not going to happen that way. And so like I I'm thinking about this a lot because you can really see the tech industry for a certain x, which is a particular kind of bubble is just getting away from the reality of things having cause and effect, particularly if it happens on a computer. Like I can do this on a computer.

So none of your old frameworks apply to me. And it's like, oh, that's that's all going to catch up to you real fast. Yes. Or games, the compilation is like the one where I just have not had enough time to formulate all of my thoughts. But boy, I'm very curious for how people want to talk about it.

I'm thinking about it, but it's the way it's it is absolutely the one where, you know, we did five years of Google versus Oracle. Yeah. And all of that was about whether or copy or Google reusing the names of APIs in Java was infringement and that's like five years and a billion dollars. Yeah. And this is just like I downloaded and remade Call of Duty.

What was it structure sequence and something like even like incredibly arcane acronyms about the organization of API names. Yeah. I do think there's something really fascinating happening here. People are building all kinds of cool stuff. They're modding games.

They're making games available to other platforms that they haven't been available on. It is slightly surprising to me that Xbox is in on this because I have to imagine the gaming industry is going to throw every bit of its weight against this trend. I mean, Microsoft owns all the studios. That's fair point. They're like, no, Activision Blizzard, you love this.

Like what are you going to do? Like they need to get they need to get those games on more platforms. Yeah, right. Like they they have some amount of and if they do it on their terms, they might be in control. Fair.

And I think there is something potentially very cool there that you're going to start to see people like if every game becomes moddable in this way, there is some very cool stuff to be had there. It gets messy in a lot of ways in the ways that you've been describing others. But the idea of giving like bringing the sort of vibe coding energy to video games at this kind of scale is pretty cool. There's a lot of cool stuff that will happen as that happens. Yeah.

And, you know, I'm not saying I'm a particular expert on the dynamics of the game industry, but I'm pretty good at copyright and software. This one is going to be a mess. Yeah. This is there. We are we are looking at decades of lawsuits about whether decompiling any piece of software so you can recompile any way you want is acceptable or loud or copyright infringement.

Like a good question. So if I ship you an app, right, the ones and zeros, the binary that I should be protected, right? You can cover that. This is my app. Here's the thing.

The code I wrote to make that app protects my copyright. You can file that. That's it took the decade of lawsuits to get there. But you can do that. If you decompile my binary and you have a slightly different code.

Important question right there. It's probably a derivative work. You can get there. But those all of the copyright lies like on first impression. And so I don't know the answer to that because no court has ruled out.

Right. I think I probably know the answer to it, but you have to have a lawsuit. Yeah. Well, personally, I'm just thrilled to finally have a reason for you to rant about copyright on the Verge guest. So this is great news.

It's been trying to on Earth and the job of lawsuit from my brain. It's like my own body is trying to protect me. It's like what he's getting it instead. All right. Well, before we do, let's get out of here.

Uh, Neelite, who is on decoder coming? So Ben Jordan today is talking about flock. And then we have Walter Paisak talking about Starlink and then Governor J.D. puts her from Illinois is on decoder very soon. I asked him if the guys are going to stay in shot.

I was like, you got to use your platform for the things you can. I was just, it's the opening episode. I was like, I, you know, I got to do a good job here. I was like, you can be your, we claim you as far as I go. I was like, no, no, no, sir.

I'm from Wisconsin. I was like, it was not when he was expecting to wear your cheese head to the interview. Reveal my joint in large jersey. And then there's one coming up. That's a big deal.

Very excited about it. That's going to tease it. It'll be a big one. It's exciting stuff. We have overhead projectors on version history weekend.

One of the wonkier episodes we've ever done, but it's really fun. And we have, we had an overhead projector just blaring at me in the studio the whole time. So you'll get to watch me get progressively hotter from sitting there for two hours. It's good stuff. Remember, you can subscribe to the Verge to get all of our podcasts, all the ones we've been talking about, ad free, including this one.

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This show is produced by Josh Kaha's Kabir Chopra, Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefert, and Shlarkchuck. We will see you next week. You lie. Bye, bro. For more people visit servicenow.com