Fear and loathing at OpenAI

And build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system. Computers are getting smarter, Silicon Valley's getting weirder, and AI is taking over. At least that's what everyone keeps telling us. Welcome to Machine Gods, a new NPR podcast that will be your field guide to the AI-powered future. We're veteran tech journalists with front row seats to the industry. And twice a week, we'll make sure you get smarter about AI, so you know what's real, what's hype, and what might come next. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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What we do here on the podcast. Wow. I'm your friend David Pierce. Would you say in this media environment that we are the flagship podcast of that? Because I don't. RFK started a podcast this week. You know what I mean? A very high bar for being unconstrained by truth on the podcast. But we're here today. We're going to do our very best. The Webby for being unconstrained by truth. The voting is now open. It's beautiful. That, of course, is a line from a New Yorker profile of Sam Altman that is deeply fascinating and has been making the rounds this week. We're going to talk about it. There's another big story about Satoshi Nakamoto, the founder of Bitcoin that's been going around that we're going to talk about. We have some Brendan stuff to talk about. We have some anthropic stuff to talk about. We have a lot to talk about. All that is much less important than weird things Neil and David have been doing on their computers this week.

We also have a couple of housekeeping items for you. One is, please vote for us in the Webby's. The voting is open until next Thursday. We are currently winning for Best Technology Podcast, but it's too close and it's making me uncomfortable. Yeah, we're not winning by enough. I would like to win in a way that hurts everyone else's feelings. Do you know what I mean? I'd like to win in a way that we have to be good winners. Do you know what I mean? Right. It becomes incumbent on us to give a nice speech acknowledging the others. Yeah. I was like, oh my God, I'm so happy I won. But if you win by enough, if you don't nail the speech, you're a jerk. And I want to be in that position. I want that level of stress and pressure on the five-word Webby acceptance speech. I respect that.

I would like to be required. I want I want the like Tom Brady, Michael Jordan level of success where we do so well that we still find haters. And everybody's like, wow, the amount of rage and anger that you have to have to still find haters amongst all the success. That's what I want. And then thrive on them. Right.

I think it's clear that I thrive on my haters, David. I don't know that we need to find anymore. That's true. People have been saying this about you. Also, the Verge movie night on April 27th is already sold out. Not only did the IFC Center have to bump us to the bigger theater to go see sneakers with all of you, it's already sold out. So A, very excited to see a bunch of you for sneakers in a couple of weeks. B, I think this is officially a thing we're going to have to do again. So keep an eye out. We're going to do more of these. It's going to be very fun. Last one, in two Tuesdays, I think April 21st, we're going to do a whole Verge cast about the Verge and the Verge cast.

the media business and journalism and AI and our feelings about everything. So you and I are going to spend a whole episode answering as many questions as we can. We're going to loop in. Helen have like our publisher to talk about the business a little bit. If you have questions about The Verge or The Vergecast or the state of media or why Neelai is like this, you can always call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Email us, vergecasttheverge.com. Send all that stuff in. We're going to answer as many of those as we can in two Tuesdays. So you've got a little bit of time, but not too much to get all that stuff in as quickly as you can. That ends up being, I think, one of my favorite episodes to make. We do this like once a year, I would say on average. It's very fun.

get all your questions in. David, I had this like old school journalism. Don't do inside baseball and make this story about yourself. And you look at every famous creator and influencer and they're like, here's what I wore today. And we were just going to try to, we're going to try to thread that needle a little bit more. Yep. A hundred percent. Bless.

All of the news this week, I think, is demonstrably less important than weird stuff that Neelai and David have been doing on their computers this week. Let's make the show let ourselves do it, as I was saying. Let's just do it. Let's start with you, Neelai, because you, I think, owe us updates on a couple of different projects, starting with your iMac as monitor saga, which has become, it has been elevated to the level of a saga here on the first. It is a little bit of a saga. It's not so much of a saga, but it's a little bit of a saga. I believe where we left off was you were going to try some wacky firmware shenanigans. Yes. What's been going on? So I bought the Stone Taskin R1820, which is now a model number that I know and talk about.

is that everyone cares about iMac display retrofit boards. There is a community, and that community is great, and they've been working on this for years. You can go read those threads. They were literally years long on various forms. So I bought the newest board because you've got to buy the newest one. Not the one everyone's been using for years that obviously works. Right? You have to buy the newest one. The 1811 is the one everyone's using for years that already works. But I bought the 1820 because it's new. You understand what I'm saying? Sure. So 1820, I came to my house, opened up iMac. It was harrowing in its way, but not as hard as people say. Put the board in, kind of did a bad job. I called out Snazzy Labs. They needed a way better job. Go watch that video. It's way more impressive than whatever I did.

Set it all up. It works. It lights up. It looks beautiful. I have a little color calibrator so that, you know, when the display is in an iMac, Apple controls the color. So it's like perfect. The Apple color is perfect. When it's just running native off some board you bought from China, it's just sort of a little green. So I color calibrated it, made it look good. And then you install the software called Better Display to control the brightness with the keyboard, which you obviously have to do.

I mean, how could you not? And the backlight mapping was inaccurate. And so as you stepped up the brightness, it would get to 100 and then reset, like halfway through, and then do it again. So one, this is not a problem because you can just set it to 100. You can set it to its obvious brightest setting and leave it alone. But I cannot do that. On principle. So I find myself emailing with Stonetasking, just as a customer. I don't know who I am. They were very responsive. I feel great about that. They sent me a very blurry video of how to update the firmware using a piece of software that only runs on Windows and only addresses the card over DisplayPort. Here's problem one.

All of my Windows PCs don't have display ports. They're all ancient. The only one in our house that does is Becky's work computer, which she would not allow me to install Chinese firmware updates on. Fair. Two, I never anticipated using the display port on this thing. And the board is now sealed inside the iMac, whose screen has been glued back on. Right, because you get to the end of this process, and you're like, I am never going to open this or touch it ever again. Yeah, HDMI port, set up, it's plugged into the Mac Studio. By the time I buy a new computer, this adventure will have to come to some sort of conclusion, right? This display will be like 20 years old, and I will have to buy a new one. I made it work in this setup, and that's how long it's going to take. Now I need the display port.

The only way to, I'm not going to cut the display open again. So I have to dig around the memory access door with a DisplayPort cable and try to get it in the board. So that's one. And then two, I was like, I need a computer with a DisplayPort. And we looked in the reviews closet, I said, last week, and we found a Surface laptop from like 2019 with a mini DisplayPort. And I took it and I took it out of the reviews closet and I put it on my desk in my office and I promptly left the office without it. So now what am I going to do? I installed Windows 10 on Becky's old Intel MacBook Air, which has been sitting on a shelf for ages with a USB-C to DisplayPort, figured it all out, downloaded the weird software, watched a very blurry video that was...

The software is in Chinese. There's a lot going on in this video. Nailed it. Nailed it out the gate in one. Terrifying. The MacBook Air has now been reset because it had a Chinese firmware update or installed Windows on it. So that is no longer doing whatever it may have been doing in my house. And I booted it all up and it worked great. And the entire interface of this monitor is now in Chinese.

Okay. I mean, I hate to say you both deserve this and should have seen it coming. Yeah, it's excellent customer service. Just one last step that I needed to resolve. So I ended up sitting there with Gemini, taking pictures of the display, translating menus until I found the one. I mean, this is like, if you look at the buttons, it's just a raw PCB that sticks out of the back of an iMac casing on a ribbon cable, and it just has some unlabeled buttons on it. So there's just a lot of mistakes to be made as you navigate sort of backwards on the front of the thing in Chinese with Gemini in your hand. Like, none of that was elegant, I would say. But I feel like monitored interface is like four buttons, right? It's like you can figure out which icon means contrast and which icon means brightness, and then you just move it to the thing and it's fine, right?

I would say that they did not use icons. The universal language of graphics is not present in this. Contrast, you have the dark half and the light half. Brightness is the sun. I was trying to change it to English. I think in the grand scheme of all language settings, the fact that the one that lets you change the language is always in the language you don't understand. That's how that goes. I figured it out. It's in English now. It works. The only thing is when you turn on the computer and it wakes from sleep, it lights up and then it turns off and it thinks real hard and then it comes back again and it's fine for the day. This is one little problem. It does a little handshake-y weirdness.

But like totally acceptable to have an excellent looking 5K display connected to an iMac studio. This is now a what is Neil's threshold for solving this problem question? Because are you going to do that for 10 days and then be like, I can fix this and go through this again? Or have we officially reached I'm never touching this thing ever again? We're never touching it. It is buttoned back up. There's a DisplayPort extension coming out of it. As long as I was fishing, I put a USB-C extension in the back of there. We're done. We're super done. How upset do you think Johnny Ive would be if you showed him the inside of your iMac now? I think the part where I grabbed the main logic board of an iMac.

and just yanked it out of Johnny Ive's carefully constructed, exquisitely packaged internals because I was like, it doesn't matter if this breaks. And I just yanked it. I literally thought about Johnny Ive in that moment. I was like, someone worked on this very hard. It's beautiful. In the Apple way, you open it and it is beautiful inside. And I was like, huh, that sucks for you. And it just started pulling out stuff. Because what you need is an empty case to fit the board in. Anyway, it's done. We're going to leave it alone. The other hilarious thing about better display that I should say, my other monitor, my Zoom monitor, my Google Meet video conferencing monitor is the sort of infamous Samsung Curve TV that I bought almost a decade ago now. Amazing.

Because it's all you need. You just need a 40-inch screen over there to run some video conferencing software on. And there's a webcam in front of it. It's a better display. It can talk to that screen over Wi-Fi, over the internet. Oh. So when I turn on my computer right now, because that's a TV. It doesn't respect sleep commands. So it's like, OK, I found that display. I fixed its IP address on my router. And it just turns it on and off with the computer now over the network. I've never been happier with a little thing, like an unnecessary little feature. I used to have to turn on that thing with the remote every day. And now the computer is like, I see it. I'll just send the packet to it. And it just does it. It's amazing. The software is wild. It is not complete software. It's obviously made by people who care a lot about displays in very nerdy ways and assume you know everything that they know. Sure.

But when you figure it out, it works amazing. That is pretty cool. I've just realized, A, we need to do like a Nilay Patel studio tour thing. But B, my picture of your studio, I'm just realizing this right now, is that you essentially are in like the back room of a Best Buy with just a bunch of like weird old stuff that you've just sort of, it's like, you're like an ongoing Geek Squad project that no one wants at the end. It's not wrong. Except it, you know, it's like the attic next to my daughter's bedroom. Nice. And it is just a mess in here.

There's just stuff everywhere. I need to clean it up. That's why it's like no one wants to see it. People think this is all very glamorous and exciting. And I'm like, I'm staring over my laptop at just a giant pile of unfolded laundry. Like this is just what we're doing today. That's pretty good. All right, what's your project? So I've been cloud coding like a maniac, like for months now. But I have finally built my dream productivity tool.

which no one is going to care about. But I've had very funny adventures with it recently. So Thomas Paul Mann, the CEO of Raycast, came on this show a while ago and told me his big theory of AI is that the best thing you can do with these generative tools is build software because you can do it once. And when you get the thing to work, then it works every time. That like reinventing the wheel and having this thing go out and do explorations for the same thing over and over and over, the sort of agentic world we're talking about, is the wrong approach. But what you can do is you can build specific useful software that you can then test and verify. And once you have that, it can just be reliable software. So he was like, he was one of the first people who really turned me on to the idea of like why like AI software is actually a really powerful idea for a lot of reasons.

So I have set out to build myself like my ideal. to-do list and notes and like keep all my life together. I need to write a long story about my many adventures. But I basically like I tried to build a whole thing from scratch, got super far down the road and then got annoyed by all the bugs I couldn't figure out how to fix and bailed. I then tried to do a less ambitious thing that I got bored with and bailed. And what I eventually found was I use a bunch of different services, all of which have built MCP servers. They've built really robust APIs. And in many cases, they built command line interfaces for working with AI. So I was like, oh, rather than try to like reinvent Todoist, which I use for Todo's, which I think is like a really great infrastructure, but a really ugly app. I can just build my own thing to look at Todoist.

And so now I have a thing that pipes in my calendar events from Google, my to-dos from Todoist, my notes from a text file, which I sync with Obsidian, and then two other services, one Readwise Reader, which I use for saving and reading articles, and Raindrop.io, which I use for bookmarking. And all of this just pours into one little web app that I've built myself that looks exactly the way that I want to and is just full of all the things that I make every day. And then at the end of every day, I export a Markdown file with everything I did and created that day that now is like in a searchable archive of text files on my desktop. And it's awesome. And I love it very much. But the funniest thing that has happened to me recently is...

I wanted to build this thing for mobile, right? It's a web app. I can use it as a progressive web app, but I was like, there's some little things I want to do. I want to build this as like a more robust desktop app on my computer. So I start futzing with Electron. We go through this whole thing. It's like, okay, I'm just going to build this thing as a DMG on my Mac so that I can pin it on top of other apps, essentially, and like access it with global shortcuts and from the menu bar and stuff like this. You have to build slightly more on top of a tab in order to make that work. I told it to just do this. And it's like, cool, I can do that for you. Goes off and does it. It pulled an entirely different Vercel web app and compiled it onto my desktop.

The strangest thing I've ever experienced. It was like, it was like, I've been doing this thing inside of Cloud Code for like three weeks now, like building and refining this thing. And I was like, okay, just make this thing a DMG. And it goes, great. I've compiled this for you to run it in your desktop. So I run it and install it completely. I just got somebody else's private web inside of my thing. I responded to Cloud Code. I was like, I don't know what this is, but this is a completely different app. And it goes, oh, sorry, grabbed it from the wrong URL.

No. So you could just do it. It just went and got it for me. And this is a thing that has actually happened a few times where it mistakes, like it guesses what your GitHub link is and pulls the wrong thing based on what it thinks its name should be. It has tried to upload things to the wrong place. It at one point made this whole thing public and then was like, hey, your Google API credentials have just been public on GitHub for five minutes. Hope that's not a problem. And so it's just like all of these, I know you've been using these tools a bunch too, but it's like, it has this relentless ability to just keep trying to do stuff. And generally speaking, I've had to interrupt it a bunch of times and be like, hey.

You need this one very small piece of information. I can just give it to you. You don't have to go guess where it exists on the internet or try to figure it out or do a bunch of weird shit to go find this API. I know the URL. I can just tell you what it is. It'll be fine. And it's like, oh, that'd be great. You've been working for an hour and we've burned down a rainforest so that you could do this. But at the end of all of this...

I did it. I have, I have, I have vibe coded myself an app that I use all day, every day. And it's just a regular piece of software that you made that runs on your desktop natively. It's mostly still a web app because I wanted to be able to use it like a everywhere and be like in a browser and pull stuff to it. Where's the web app hosted? Vercel. Okay. And I could tell you the URL, but then you'd presumably be able to just use it. Yeah. I should, can you give me access to it? I feel like I can start assigning you stuff. I would like you to add things to my to-do list. That would honestly be helpful for me. But yeah. And it's like, I feel sort of the way I bet you feel about your iMac, which is that like.

I did it. There's this insane process. It took too long. Like, could I have successfully used the limited amount of HTML and CSS and JavaScript that I have to build this myself? Probably. But instead, like last night, I spent three hours playing video games. This is a real story. I'm sitting there playing FIFA and every time the ball would go out of bounds and there's like a throw in or halftime or whatever, I would just lean over and do another command for clock code. And it's just sitting there building this thing for me as I'm playing video games. And I'm like, this is a future I can get behind. Yeah. I have two thoughts about this because I'm going to talk about my mobile coding adventure. One, I have the same general reaction to all of these stories.

that I do when people tell me about their dreams. I'm like, this had, you had real emotions. You felt real feelings. I feel nothing because you were describing a literal hallucination that your mind created while you were asleep. Like, I'm sorry. Like, I under, and like, some people are really into other people's dreams and some people aren't. Like, actually, Addie Robertson wrote this headline about AI-generated art for us like years ago because people would make it and be so excited about it. And as we can all tell, it like kind of doesn't hit unless it's like a dancing baby strawberry and you're like, something is happening in America. That's how I feel about all of those. I think that's fine. There's something about that that I think is really important and it connects to

how all the software people we know are having full emotional crises about the nature of software development and they're landing on the thing is alive. And the way OpenAI and Anthropic now talk about their coding tools specifically, they just call them AGI. We'll come to this, right? Like they've arrived at like, it's obviously, AGI is here because it can write software for you. But then you, the outputs are like, I made myself a little piece of software. Like I, I'll just, I'll say mine. Like I made myself a little piece of software this week. It is very stupid. It is so much stupider than yours. But I defeated the SmartThings API on Frame TV. I'm very proud of myself. Okay. You let the AI control your house now.

No, no, no, no. I'm much more of a scaredy-cat than you. Oh, okay. So I have a MacBook Neo that now has Canva on it because we got Max a CryCut printer for her birthday. Nice. And so, like, we're just going to use it for that. But also, it's my agentic toy playground, you know? That's the right combination of things. Yeah. You're an elementary school child and OpenClaw. What could this be wrong? So just using co-work because co-work is a little bit better behaved. Also, Anthropic Change is surprising for OpenClaw, so that's all a mess. But so this week, and so I just won't let it out of the box.

And so I really want, you know, I have two shows. You know, I host Decoder and we do the Vergecast and I need to change the picture on this TV. And then also we've decided that gamer lights are appropriate for the Vergecast and not appropriate for interviewing CEOs. So like the lights need to change, like the lighting preset needs to change. I bought a Stream Deck, a Stream Deck Neo. It's little and cute. And it just has buttons on it. And I was like, when I push the button, the lights should change and the image on the TV should change.

And the lights are easy because the lights run on a piece of Mac desktop software called Amron Desktop, which has a Stream Deck plugin. So you set up the scene, push the button, great, the lights will change. As someone who has seen you fight with just changing the image on the frame TV, this seems very exciting. Right. So the frame TV runs Tizen, which is controlled by SmartThings, which is software written by Samsung. And Samsung, I would say, has not taken advantage of the vibe coding revolution to make better software. Yeah.

you know, it's just, it is the thing that is, and SmartThings, the platform in particular, is very bad because it, from what I can tell, the TV runs like a little web server that the SmartThings app on your phone has to connect to anew every time as though that it has never even considered this opportunity in its life. It's like, oh my God, I can see your TV. Would you like to set it up? Like every time it's like utterly confused what's going on. And nothing about that API lets you do the one thing that you might want to do on a frame TV, which is change the artwork. Right. Or importantly, I know you run into this, turn the TV on and off in a predictable way.

That is just not a choice you can make with a frame TV. That's because on and off is not a concept the frame TV understands. Right. There's on, there's kind of on, and then there's also off. But off is sometimes on, and on is technically also off. Yes. Everything I just said is accurate. It's 100%. So you want to turn on a frame TV into art mode and then set an image. You would think this is like the most basic thing you would want to automate on this TV.

It is possible to light up a frame TV, pick one of Samsung's built-in free streaming apps and select a channel. It is not possible to turn it on in art mode and select an image. These things just don't exist in the SmartThings API. So I asked Claude to do it. Claude, and yeah, it's like, I don't know, I have a little kid, you've got a little kid. It's like watching them just fall down, like fall off the bed. It's like, oh, don't do that. Oh, you did it. And it's like, I'm going to use the SmartThings API. And I just watched it try to use the SmartThings API. And it failed. And then it found a bunch of Reddit threads that I was also familiar with in the past where people have discovered the controls to do these things with WebSockets locally on the network.

And I have never set this up because you need a Raspberry Pi running Python. You need a little computer somewhere on your network that will just always talk to this thing. And I just haven't gotten all the way there. But when you have Claude, it's like, oh, I run a Python script for your Mac that sits right in front of the TV. And now the Stream Deck just runs that Python script. And it took a long time. It had to talk to the TV. It had to figure out the file list of all the images on the TV and which images I wanted. And all of this stuff, like you're saying, before I had children, this would have been a somewhat frustrating yet ultimately rewarding weekend of screwing around in the terminal and reading Reddit threads. And instead it was...

somewhat frustrating but ultimately rewarding like half afternoon in between meetings of letting claude just run at smart things and watching it happen and i and i don't let claude use my terminal like again i'm much more of a scaredy cat than you are yeah so i was copying and pasting commands and code back and forth um which is slow but like again this is my level of understanding like i could read the code and like make sure and these are not long commands right i can make sure it was doing what i thought it was supposed to do um again very very basic i'm not even remotely pretending that i'm good at this i can just read three lines of python and be like okay you're sending a command to the tv to get its file list like i understand what i'm looking at here um Like, is there a crypto miner on my frame TV now? Like, I don't know 100%, but I'm reasonably confident. Anyhow, so we made the scripts. They are sitting on this machine that I podcast from. And when I push the button on the stream deck, I'll do it right now. It turns the lights, it does a macro, it changes the lights to light. It sends the command and picks the image on TV. And this is like a huge victory that...

because I have a baby, I would have never had a Saturday to be able to do. And like, I just feel great about this. Did I just describe to you a dream? Like with all the emotional stakes of describing a dream? I think so. But I think you and I both look at this and you're like, oh, a lot more people are gonna be able to do a lot more things. And that is worth taking seriously. Now, I don't think any of this is like consumer software, which is the thing I keep saying. Like this is, we are, both of you and I are like enthusiasts, hobbyists, like whatever category of tech nerd we are. Like I could not, no normal person is ripping open their iMac and writing Python scripts to change the order. Like it's just, we're still pretty far away from that, but there's a glimmer of something important here.

Yeah, I agree. And it's also, it is way too much work. Like even, even the idea that you have to open up the terminal and copy and paste a bunch of commands, like just, we should, we're gonna move on from this. But one tiny example is a thing I've been thinking about a lot. It's like, when you get into the terminal, one thing you constantly have to do is tell the terminal which part of the computer to address, right? Like it's, it's, it's understanding of where you are looking and what, where it's supposed to work from doesn't exist. You have to give it all the context. Cloud code by default doesn't do that. So you're constantly, at least my experience has been, I'm constantly running the wrong terminal command. And then it's like, well, what?

where is that? I can't find the folder you're looking for. And then I have to go back to cloud and be like, what's the address of this folder again? Give me the full thing to ask. And it's just like that you've lost people, right? Like this is no longer a system that just works in any meaningful sense of the word. But the end result is very powerful, which is you have a problem that no one else has. And I have a problem that no one else has. And we have both successfully solved that problem. And that's very powerful because I do think everybody has a problem that no one else has. So you can like, I think you're exactly right. Like there's a glimmer of something here, but it is like, we're still nowhere near this being.

mainstream consumer technology yet. And the gap that I would close there is most people cannot describe the problems they have in terms of software. Right. Your problem, like it described it like very abstractly in terms of software is there's a bunch of databases that I would like to look at all at the same time. Yes. Very straightforwardly. And like software is made for that. Yeah. And like most software is look at this database. Like we keep having CEOs on Decoder and I'm like, all right, CEO Zillow, you made a database and all of your money is in the app that looks at that database. And now someone else might just show up and look at that database without your app in a way. And we've just done like a hundred episodes that are basically that theme. And something about AI is going to upend all of that.

But for consumers being like, so what in your life is a database? You just get the blank stare. There's no follow-up conversation. You're just sitting alone at your bar being like, but databases are important. Which to be clear is good and correct. People should not have to think about databases in their lives. Your life is run by databases. That is true. What is the frame TV but a database of artwork? Is the database on or is it off? Think about that. That is unclear. All right, let's turn now to the Hypedesk, our new segment about what is cool and rad in the world.

Welcome back, Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueda to tell us what is truly hype on the internet these days. Ross, Ashley, welcome back. Hello. Thank you for having us again. Yeah, I didn't think we were going to get another invitation. I mean, it's a week-to-week thing, I would say, but for now, you barely made it by the skin of your teeth. Neela, you gave a speech last time. Do you want to give a shorter version of the speech this time about what the Hype Desk is? Yeah, the Hype Desk is where Ross and Ashley, who are our friends who do not work at The Verge, come and tell us what's hot in entertainment, video games, cool stuff out in the world. And then, because they don't work at The Verge, if brands want to do brand integrations, you can buy them because you can't buy us.

And this makes our ethics policy stay pure, which is very precious to us. My favorite part of the Hype Desk last week is the YouTube audience completely understood what was going on and was very happy to see Ross and Ashley. And the audience that leaves comments on TheVerge.com was like, why do you have to make money? I literally got an email last week that was like, why are you guys doing stuff that seems like you're trying to make money? And I was like, well, this is fascinating and we should talk about it. But a thing we will do always is try to make very clear what is and is not sponsored in the Hype Desk. What we want to do is we want this to be good even when no one's paying for it. And we want it to also be good when someone is paying for it. Today is unsponsored.

For flavor. Fun and not profit. Exactly. All fun, no profit. That's what we're doing. Ross and Ashley, what have you guys been up to? What do you have for us this week? Oh, man. I mean, well, we've been both obsessing over Artemis 2. But before we talk about that, Ross, I think we need to discuss the terrible tragedy that has befallen us named the Super Mario Galaxy movie.

Yeah, there are two through lines in both of these, but I'm very proud of it. It means this happened. We're going to be talking space. Is it just galaxies? Yes. We're going to be talking space and we're going to be talking plumbers in both of these segments. In both stories. Weird overlap. Works out really good. But first, we're going to talk about the Mario Galaxy movie. It had the opening weekend, $370 million. It didn't quite hit what the first one did, but just barely. I mean, it's going to be a billion dollar movie at a time when theaters just need that. It's a very good thing for film. It's not a good film, but it's a great spectacle. I thought the first one was good. I liked it. Yeah, I thought it was solid. I thought it was cute. It was cute. But oh boy, the critics don't care for it. They are...

angry. The critics are actually furious about it. Somebody said it was physically painful to sit through. Goodness. And so is it just people are going to see it because it's something to do? Because the critic...

like populist gap is bigger than ever in all things. This was also sort of true with the first Mario movie, which was like, critics were kind of like, yeah, and audiences loved it. I loved it. So I'm like, I was optimistic coming into this one. I have not seen it yet. I think you will like it too. I enjoyed it, but I enjoyed it going in with the right mindset. Like it is not trying to make like a narrative brilliant movie. It is designed the way you design a Nintendo game. There's a bunch of really cool scenes that are like very loosely connected. Right. And it is just like breakneck pace. Like I remember I went to stay with a friend this week and I looked over a couple times going, how did we get to this point? Cause I had just forgotten how they jumped around. Like the thing that I cannot convey enough is.

I am struggling to think of a Mario game that has not been referenced between these two movies. It's like Nintendo Illumination thought they would get no other chance, so they threw every single idea they had. Did they get to Luigi's Mansion? In the first movie, there's like a reference to it, and that's as far as we've gotten. And if there is a third movie... I want the spinoff. I want a whole Luigi's Mansion spinoff. I want a whole series. It feels like they're going for the Smash Bros. cinematic universe. Like, they're just throwing every Nintendo idea. They introduced a lot of characters in this one. Not a spoiler. Star Fox is in this. Star Fox, yeah. Star Fox is in the trailers, right? Yeah. My son told me that there was a character in it. I'm just going to spoil it. I don't care. Somebody was like...

He was like, Mama, I guess my mother took him to go see it before we could see it together, which is a great offense to me as a Nintendo fan. But he said, Mama, Rob is in this movie. And I'm like, what? First of all, huge high five to my six-year-old for remembering who Rob is. But yeah, he's like, Rob is in this movie. And I was like, that feels like a lot. Like, that feels like they really jammed them all in there. Fanto is in this movie from Super Mario Brothers 2. Can I put this on like a spectrum of things? Yeah. There's, I would say the Lego movie, the first Lego movie, or even the Lego Batman movie. Really well done. Lots of references.

very commercial. Like, the toys are alive. On the other end of the spectrum is, I don't know, Ready Player One, which is just a nonstop sequence of references hung together in a plot that I think ends with being like, you should not trust Mark Zuckerberg. Like, something happened there. But like, you know, Ready Player, even the book is just like, do you remember this? Do you remember this? Do you remember this? It is. Wait, this is just a total random set. I listened to the audiobook of Ready Player One, which is read by Will Wheaton and is excellent. But there's literally, there are parts of that book that are just several minutes long of him saying 80s movies. Like, I'm not exaggerating.

No, I remember that. So this is my spectrum. For whatever it's worth, and you can argue about what movies are. That is a scale. But you can understand. Quality children's entertainment and maybe less quality children's. Quality children's entertainment based on toys and not self-references. Where is this Mario movie? On the range, let's say, from Barbie to Ready Player One, where Barbie had a statement and really used the IP and had something bigger to say. This is closer to Ready Player One, like two-thirds of the way on that. It's speedrunning a theme park. I'm going to put it squarely around the Minecraft movie, which I enjoyed very much. It's a fever dream of a film that satisfies the...

fans of the ip that go see it but also if you are not a huge nintendo fan you might walk away being like i don't know what happened there but also it was cute and i had fun i think if people walk away feeling like they had fun that's great obviously i always want like the the lego movies of the world the barbies the the k-pop demon hunters like that's i want those quality children you can make quality things for kids but yeah but yeah i mean i i think if anyone's ever played a mario game like i don't really think that any of those make any sort of like major statement so the reason i brought up luigi's mansion is a movie or that game came out when I was in my early 20s, and it just made it clear to me that storytelling was a wide-open field. You're like, here's what it is. It's Mario's brother, and he has a vacuum cleaner that sucks up ghosts. You're going to play this game for 60 hours. And I was like, okay, anything is possible. My world is cracked open in an all-new way. It can do anything. But it literally makes no sense. It does not make any sense. And that's the movie. That is the movie. But do you know who else could have used two plumbers this week? Oh, my God. Artemis 2. Incredible transition. I love it. I love it. So good. So good. Tell us what happened. They're having a toilet problem. They're not able to...

eject the urine from the bathroom. But Ross, explain this better. They actually fixed it. So Artemis 2, it's been an amazing moment for humanity and space. And I love this. And I do want to talk a little bit about the toilet because it was something that every daily press conference came up. Everyone had to know what's going on. Hours after Artemis 2 launched, the toilet broke. The urine portion of the toilet broke. And Christina Cook, one of the four, I think she's a mission specialist, won on that. She called herself a space plumber and she got it fixed. Now space plumber one. Then it broke again. It's my favorite weird anecdote. The frozen urine in the exterior event line was just causing cloggage. So what they did is they took the Orion capsule and they decided to rotate the whole capsule toward the sun.

to use solar heat to thaw urine blockage and fix the toilet. That's like day three or four. This, by the way, is the entire thesis of data centers in space. Yeah. We can harness the power of the sun to do amazing things. Yeah. And there's this amazing line, I think it was Jackie Mahaffrey, a mission capsule controller communicator. She said, quote, you are go for all types of use of the toilet. Like just an all-time great space quote. Incredible. The fact that it happened right after a launch in that way when everyone was paying attention and they're like, go for toilet. And then, like, no. It was amazing, actually. Like, all of this happened. We haven't seen a launch at this scale. It's like a great victory. And it's like, whoops.

Toilet busted. It's such the most humane thing because space is like, it's an amazing adventure to go out. We've gone farther now as humans than we've ever done before. And this is a very important part of it. How do you eat? How do you sleep? How do you stay hygienic? And like, it seems silly to talk about. It's quite literally toilet humor, what we're doing, but like, it is such a vital part. And I love how everyone's been kind of humanized by going, we need to know if you're okay with your restroom situation. Yeah. As a person who lives in a house with one bathroom and three people, I understand. That's a critical issue that needs to be fixed immediately. Yeah, you can't screw around with that. I thought right next to it, there were problems with Outlook. We're very good. Yes.

Like literally the call is like, we have two copies of Outlook running on this computer and we don't know why. And it's like, no one knows why. No one knows why. They did solve that as well. It has been an extremely internet-y mission in all of the best ways, right? Like the photos have been unbelievable. Like unbelievable, the photos. Ugh, unreal.

Just gorgeous. It makes me want to quit astrophotography because they're that good. I'm just like, I'll never, what was the point of this? I'm just taking pictures of what's out there, not taking pictures of us. Well, it's fine. Look, you just get a Samsung phone. It'll just generate photos of the moon, left and right. That's right. This has been my favorite run of memes on the internet has been people being like, oh, thank God, all of Samsung's moon photos are going to get even better now because these are so good. But then there was also like the beautiful moment where they're naming a crater after one of the astronauts' late wife and it's discordant and just a bottle of Nutella floats by like so many amazing internet moments. The way that this has just dovetailed into the best.

parts of the internet like i think i think sometimes we all miss like what sort of this idea of like what the internet used to be it used to be this like very fun place and uh and and now i think we got like we've been reminded of like what that was we have this kind of collective joy at this thing that is like really inspiring and really moving but also incredibly memeable and it's just been very like that's the best time on the internet is when something is like really interesting or or cool or inspiring and then also just imminently memeable you can just meme it all day yeah it's beautiful and also honestly kudos to the astronauts because like this is a moment where like everything they say is going to matter and they've been All of them. Surprisingly poetic. There was a line I think Victor Glover gave on Easter, and I want this on a poster. All this emptiness. This is a whole bunch of nothing. This thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. Who just drops fire like that in the middle of a press conference or an interview with CBS? That's so weird. That's how Neelai describes the Verge cast. It's funny, because my favorite quote was when they woke them up with Pink Pony Club by Chapel Rhone, and then didn't play the chorus, and then...

They were like, we were all waiting for the chorus. And the poor flight controller was like, we'll try again tomorrow. And the Wake Up music, there's an official Spotify playlist. So if anyone wants to know, at the time of recording, Lonesome Drifter by Charlie Crockett was the last thing they woke up to. That's pretty good. We have to end on hope. I think we need to, I mean, my rule is you can make a little bit of fun astronauts and say they're goofy, but these photos are incredible. And also kudos to Emma Roth on the Verse team who pulled out the XF data. So we know they're using Nikon cameras to take these amazing photos.

That is cool. They are using Nikon cameras. And a lot of people have been comparing these photos because Hello World, which is the new photo of Earth from that distance, doesn't quite stack up to Blue Marble in ways. And everyone's like, it's because they shot Blue Marble on a Hasselblad. No, it's because the ISO is like, crap, it's like 51,000. I love this. I love this is what we're doing. They also have a bunch of iPhones up there, primarily for photo and video. They don't have internet access. And I think that's also really interesting because the fancy cameras take whatever process. And I think the iPhones are much more candid. And seeing...

The candidates, making them more human in space, I think is also very important. Yeah, that is really cool. It's been very cool. We'll link to some of the photos, but the eclipse photos in particular, every time I look at it, it melts my mind. It blows my mind. It's just so amazing. It's unbelievable. All right, Ross, Ashley, thank you. I think you've earned it. You can come back next week. This is great. Good to have you both here. We're going to take a break, and we're going to come back and talk about some AI news. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. So let's talk about some news. The biggest thing on the internet this week, as has been the case for many weeks the last few years, is OpenAI. And in particular, this big New Yorker story about Sam Altman. I'm assuming, Neil, you've read this story. Yeah, I did read it. It's really interesting. And actually, a little Decoder preview. Ronan Farrow, who co-wrote the piece, is on Decoder next week. Oh, nice. So if you have questions, you can email us at decoder at theverge.com. We really do read all the emails, as I keep saying. We'd love to hear what you want to know, and we'll see if we can get Ronan to tell us some stuff that didn't make it into print. Which would be astonishing. Given the length, yes. Well, given the length and also given what this story is. I mean, I think...

I tried very hard not to see this story as pure David confirmation bias, but I'm starting to feel like the take that I espoused last summer, which is that OpenAI is a house of cards and is about to collapse. We've been talking about this a lot. This company feels like a mess. And in particular, I would say the takeaway from this story about Sam Altman, which is very long, but is terrific. It is exceedingly well reported. It's full of good data. I think it's about as measured a way of saying Sam Altman is a sociopath who wants power and will destroy the world to get it, as you could possibly ask for.

people should read the piece but it's very hard to come out of this piece and not feel like when Sam Altman got fired a couple of years ago and then came back, OpenAI changed forever and only for the worst. Yeah, I think that's right. Not to talk about journalism, but like big features like this often just validate the feeling that everyone has had with rigor. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like a lot of people knew Sam Altman lied. A lot of people knew that the weirdness of him getting fired and coming back was extremely weird. And the inside story of that was not a secret. I think in the AI community, like Ilya left and started a new company and Mira left and started a new company and all of the players left and started new companies and Sam hired lots of new people in particular from Meta. And I really feel as though

OpenAI thought it could stumble its way into defeating Google. Like, from, like, business terms, they're like, we made a thing that people like better than Google. Google will be slow and flat-footed and captured by innovator's dilemma, and they won't do anything, and we'll just be the new Google, and we'll figure out ads, and, like, now we're Google. And that has, one, been hard, just in a lot of ways, that's been hard. Two, Google did not just concede. They were not, that was just not a thing they were going to do, and I think, you know, Sundar, like, shuffled his entire executive team, and they are vastly more competitive now, and their products are good, and people like them.

I think there's a lot of AI slack at the top of search results, but like whatever, set that aside. Like they responded to the threat in meaningful and good ways. And then there's everything else opening eyes doing, which is trying to raise money endlessly, courting Saudi money and Chinese money. Like all of this stuff in the story that's like Sam talks out of both sides of his mouth and doesn't feel bad when one side feels lied to. One, that is very much the heart of why he was fired, according to the reporting in this piece. But two, it's so reflected in everything else that has happened.

And the idea that they could just stumble into a Google scale business that would paper over all the flaws, to me, feels like the story of OpenAI. Like you cannot stumble into being Google. And for all of Google's own distraction, and boy, we talked about Google's distraction over the years and the products they spin up and kill and their reorganization alphabet. And are they gonna make contact lenses that detect diabetes? Like there's a lot of distraction at Google.

they never take their eye off the ball of how much money is search making. Is search a good business? Are we waiting in search? Like they're so good at that, but it funds all of the noise and open AI is nowhere close to that. That to me was like the big takeaway of the story is here's a long story about Sam Altman and his personality and what they think the technology can do. And what it masks is he's not paying any attention to the business he's running.

Like his business is raising money. Right. And I think I was really struck by both the piece and the reaction to it, which I think lay out the whole sort of AI debate along really correct lines. And on the one hand, you can look at everything that Sam Altman is doing as essentially normal behavior for a particular kind of ruthless capitalist, right? Like it's very robber baron activity. And this is a thing, quote unquote, great businessmen have done for generations, right? Like you play some games, you tell some lies, you say one thing to one person because it's what they want to hear. And you say a different thing to somebody else because it's what you want to hear. And the ultimate goal is

to build your business as big as you want. And then the government fights you in an antichrist. And like, this is what we do, right? Like we have heard stories about businessmen who do most of these things for a long time. Lots of people lionize it and try to be those things. Lots of people think it's terrible and those people should be put in jail. But the piece actually starts with the thesis espoused by people like Sam Altman 10 years ago, that AI is different. That if you look at this thing as important and big and transformational and literally world-changing as all of these people say that it is and have been saying that it is since the beginning,

does it require a different kind of person to lead it a different kind of way? And I think that to me is like, is the question to ask about people like Sam Altman and about, and really is the foundation of a lot of the stuff you're describing, right? Like you, you covered Sam Altman's firing in very much in real time. I think like from lines at Disney World. The zoo. It was the Bronx Zoo. We're not at Disney World. But yes, I published scoops about that from the Bronx Zoo on my phone. That's a real thing that happened. But even then there was this question of like, we are doing something that requires more than a great startup CEO. That we have, we have a moral responsibility to the world.

to do this differently and handle it differently. And that was a big part of the original pitch and corporate structure of OpenAI, right? Like there's a whole section in the piece about Google offering people these monstrous salaries to go do AI work there. And people went to OpenAI because they were like, no, no, no, we care about this thing. We are here for moral reasons because we want to do the right thing the right way with this unbelievably important technology that is as important as fire, right? Like these are the stakes. If you believe these are the stakes, then what we require is a different kind of person to run it a different kind of way or else all of this is going to shit and we're all going to die.

Those are the stakes. The AI people would tell you those are the stakes. Yes, they love telling you that those are the stakes. Right. And yet what we have increasingly, and I think there's this very telling moment in the story where Sam Altman basically is like, my job was really fun until we launched ChatGPT and then it immediately changed. And I think that's clearly correct because at some point you get to run like a cool frontier research laboratory that is doing really interesting work that has this huge potential to be transformative. And then you launch the thing and people give you money for it. And that changes everything. And this is, I mean, you and I have seen this story happen over and over and over and over again. This is what happens in tech.

People launch a thing. Somebody gives them money. Somebody demands more money for their money. The incentives change, the business change, and ultimately you end up building business software. Like this is the AI story again. And I just think like, again, I'm so hung up on if this thing is as big as anybody says, the idea of it being run by quote unquote great businessmen should be terrifying. And if that is, if that's where we are, what do we even do? Like, do you trust the government more with this? Do you trust some, do you trust the European government more with this? Like we're in this place of, if not Sam Altman, then who? Is, I just, I don't know. I ended this piece in this place of like, how do we fix any of this?

I'm a little less nihilistic about things than you are, I think. Glad to hear that. Because I've just come to the conclusion that a lot of people got very wealthy and very powerful because they had the ability to write software. Sure. And this is just broadly true, right? Like tech bros exist, you know? And it's because they could write software or they were good at managing teams of people who could write software. And software largely controls our world, right? And that is true to a limit.

Most people do not perceive most of the software that drives their world every single day. Sure. Right. But I don't know. You can take the example of Elon and Doge. Doge showed up in the federal government and how did it exert power? Well, yeah, it fired a bunch of people. It also took over databases. And then Elon got very confused about how the databases, like the social security database, have been modified to reflect reality.

right? All the dead people were just zeroed out columns because it's easier to change the database than change reality. But Elon's brain is backwards. He's a software brain. And he's like, the software is real. Reality is wrong. And so I just think if you're in that mode, and a lot of these people are very powerful and they have earned their wealth and their status because of their ability to make software, and now you have a robot that can just make software, it will delete your status, right? Or change the way software is made forever. This is why they all talk about the SaaS apocalypse. This is why they're all thinking about whether or not enterprise applications are AGI.

I'm not even kidding about that. They changed Fiji CMOS title at OpenAI from CEO of applications to CEO of AGI deployment. Because I think they, I think the industry has coalesced on the idea that being able to write software is AGI. Jensen Wong is like, AGI is here. We're going to deploy digital Jesus. But I don't think that they're at the, you know, like they keep setting these benchmarks. Like it's as smart as a PhD candidate. And it's like a PhD in what? And it turns out what they meant is a PhD in software development. And they, you know, you can like measure that in some way. You can like look at it and say, okay, this is as good as the people that we have been managing and evaluating for years. Outside of that, I'm not sure that these tools can do the things that they promised to do. So you just have this.

moment where a lot of people with a lot of money and status have made a tool that might radically change their money and status and cost a lot of money to run and a lot of people want to use. And you can see the opportunities to find a business process that looks like a loop in a database and automate that yourself. Like, that's going to be huge. I have no doubt that that is going to be huge. And you can see Anthropic, by comparison to OpenAI, lasered in on that opportunity from the very beginning and said, we're going to solve business. We're going to be an enterprise software company. And they are successful.

I think Dario likes to style himself as being safer and more responsible. But the reality is most of Anthropics customers are huge businesses that are not out to destroy the world. They're out to like do logistics a little bit better or like connect five databases from three different vendors that were acquired over 15 different years. And like Claude can just do that. And that is amazing. I'll give you an example just from our own little database. The Verge is a database. Like what is a website? It's a big database full of stories. There's a bunch of old features in our database that are broken because of successive redesigns or web standards changes or whatever it is. After 15 years, there are stories on our site that are broken. I'm like, we should just let Claude fix them.

this is a classic example of we would never pay a human being to go through the archive because we'll never get enough traffic to pay back the work. And it's like, I can, this is what it's for. It's amazing. Its ability to strip bad HTML and replace it with good HTML is like a fundamental capability of clock code. Yeah, and I don't have this like labor anxiety about it because in no world was that ever a good idea to set a human upon doing. Like it just economically made no sense. And even like if you set a human upon doing, you're like, is anyone ever going to read this? Like this is a real conversation I've had. Like engineers want to make new things that people care about. They don't make old things or fix old things. Anyhow, so I just see this moment where you're describing like,

should people like Sam Altman be in charge of the fate of the world? I'm like, I'm not sure that this extends. Like the world insofar as it is describable by databases. Yeah, we should. And I think there is ferocious competition to be the leader of that. And I think there's a reason Anthropic basically markets itself is like, we're so dangerous.

Right. Like they want the perception of that responsibility, even as they walk back to the responsibility pledges. Right. I think there's a reason Google is like constantly talking about how responsible they are. So at least in the spaces where there's product market fit, I actually think that there's a competition to be the most responsible and reliable character. It's do you buy that this is going to be so explosive everywhere? Right. I'm still unconvinced. I think in one field, in software development, it is absolutely true that AI will change everything. It is not clear that software development is all of the human experience. And I think a lot of software people are very confused about that. I agree with that. And I think.

Ironically, your lack of nihilism comes from the fact that you don't think the ceiling on AI is nearly as high as a lot of AI people do, right? I think that ceiling is related to do I think software is everything? Sure. If you believe software literally controls the world, the ceiling on AI is AI will control the world. Sort of. AI will build software that controls the world is not the same as AI will control the world. Or use that software. Sure. No, again, I think the ceiling on that is very high, but it's really, if you believe as many AI people do, and I'm not generalizing this as a thing I've heard people say out loud in the last week, that AI will be more important and more transformative than the industrial revolution. If you believe that...

the stakes are different because it changes the way we live our day-to-day lives. Again, like you're smiling because you don't believe that. No, I'm smiling because I'm thinking about Thomas Jefferson. And I remember you and I once got drunk at a Mexican restaurant and talked about Thomas Jefferson. That's why I'm smiling. It happens from time to time. This is like how David and I live our lives. Because you went to UVA, right? I did. Which is Jefferson's university. We call him Mr. Jefferson. You can tell. There's a lot of depth to the virtuosos. Like we got drunk over tacos and talked about Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson's version of America. And again, Jefferson's problematic character in American history. But he was like, we should all be independent farmers.

Like, this is his big agrarian vision of America. Okay, maybe with AI, every single person can run a little company because you don't need to hire a staff. And everybody can... Sure, like, maybe all that's going to happen. That is not Sam Altman being like, we should rewrite the social contract, which is a real thing OpenAI published this week. Yeah. Right? But maybe the fact that everyone can run their own little small business because the AI tools will allow you to do that at a scale that no one could ever do before. Yeah, maybe that will change all of society. I just don't think, like...

Sam Altman gets to dictate that. But like, that was a very Jeffersonian notion of America. It just didn't come to pass. And maybe it's like, you show TJ some AI, maybe he'd be like, finally, we can all be farmers. But I just, I don't think Sam Altman gets to say it or make it true. And one thing that I think is very true about this piece is, like I said, great features validate things. A lot of people already felt like Sam Altman couldn't be trusted.

And now they know or they are validated in that feeling. And it is no longer a, you no longer have to go out on a limb to say it because there's a big New York piece written by Ronan Farrow that says it for you. And, you know, Tina Nguyen, our DC reporter, ran around with OpenAI policy proposal this week and asked a bunch of DC policymakers. And they're like, this would be great if it didn't come from OpenAI. That is the problem. I think OpenAI is in the middle of digging itself, what I would call the meta hole, where it is, it has gone from the company that is so obviously out in front of this, that is kind of the leader in the face of a movement to being a company that I think is going to have to fight its reputation.

at every turn in the court of public opinion. Especially if it doesn't have a great product. And I'm telling you right now, maybe Codex is a great product that will compete with Cloud Code. It's not the thing that's going to win public opinion. No, it's not. And I think especially, I mean, the New Yorker piece ends, I think, in the right place, which is with the whole battle with the Pentagon, right, between Anthropic and the Pentagon that OpenAI just sort of happily jumped into. And they were like, well, we made a deal. And everybody's like, well, that actually seems like it sucks. And so I think your point that maybe there is a business case to being the responsible AI company is a good and hopeful one. It feels, I don't know, it feels small.

as a moat right now for any of these companies. And I probably keeps walking away from its own commitments, which is basically the through line of the OpenAI piece. And do you know why? It's all for this money. This is the point, right? Like the thing that changed was that AI became where all of the money went. And when all the money goes there, you have to figure out how to pay it off. And these companies, the race became so intense and moved so fast. And all of these companies got so big so quickly. And everybody who left OpenAI after the firing, which they now call the blip, raised billions of dollars, right? Like they were...

$10 billion companies before they ever launched anything. Like, there is now so much money that the ability to operate on, like, moral, let's do what's good for the world grounds is just rapidly starting to disappear. And ironically, you mentioned Google. This puts Google in an incredibly powerful position because Google has enough money that it can just wait everybody else out. Google can continue to run the best business in the history of the internet and be the good guy in the AI world, which I don't really, I don't think it's exactly doing, but it's doing some of it. And I think for a long time, I would say things about how Google was moving slowly and trying to be responsible.

essentially as a tool for being slow. But now it's like that's an opportunity Google has that no one else has. And it'll be fascinating to see how much Google is willing to play the we're the good guys taking our time on this card while everybody else just trips all over themselves trying to figure out how to make money. Yeah. To me, it feels like Google has...

Two fronts. One, it has to respond to Anthropic and Software Development, which they have talked about, and I don't think they're quite as good at yet, but presumably they will respond. And then two, they have to keep OpenAI away in search. And maybe OpenAI has pulled some search queries away from Google, but it hasn't pulled the money away yet. And I don't see that money going anytime soon because OpenAI's ad products are bad, because all of the people are gone. Literally, the amount of turnover in OpenAI's executive ranks is through the roof.

And Google isn't going to sit still. And Google has a single best distribution in world history because it owns search. And they can just keep putting AI mode in search until you just keep using it and using ChatGPT doesn't seem important to you. And I think they're just going to keep doing that. And the other piece of that, which I think is super fascinating, is everyone already expects Google search to be littered with ads. And as they add ads into ChatGPT, people will perceive that experience to be degrading.

So you're saying already having InShitified is actually better than going through it publicly. You're probably right. And especially if Google, you know, the free version of chat TV, which is fundamentally what most people are using, is like not very good. No. Right? They're trying to save costs there. And you can see it and you can feel it. And Google can spend a little bit more money because it's already monetized. And so they just have a game to play in consumer that I think will ultimately lead them to be what Google is, which is the default insert engine for most people. Yep. I think you're right. All right. Everybody should go read that piece. We'll link to it in the show notes. It's a long one. So carve out an afternoon. We're going to take a break. If you have questions for Ronan, decoderwithvurge.com.

Yeah, send him, send him Eli. I have questions for Ronan. Most of all, they're largely about his hair, but that's a different question. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back to the lightning round. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Again, for flavor. You see the problem. We can't accept the sponsorships. We had a CFO at Vox Media ages and ages ago. And he described his job as just being in the ready position in a gym class to catch money when it arrived. Which I've always like, I don't know how our business works. We're going to do the mailbag with Helen. She will tell us how it actually works. But that's always how we pictured it. And the reason I was saying that YouTube audience understands it is because every YouTuber does brand deals. And we can't. We won't do it. So we just need to catch the money. That's all I'm saying. We're just going to catch the money. It's waiting for us. I actually know for sure.

that it is once again time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast because I know what he did this week. It's time for Brendan Carr's a dummy. It's a remix! You got me kidding. Oh, this is great. We are stacking theme songs. This is original Brendan Carr's a Dummy theme by Robert B. Remix by Wesley, who describes it as a New Age remix inspired by Enigma's 1990 banger, Sadness. Hell yeah, everybody. That was awesome. Brendan Carr doesn't deserve theme music this good. We are kind of getting, we're giving him a little too much, but that was awesome. That was. Thank you. What do we have this week, Neil? Everyone knows what we have this week. It is very dumb. It is Brendan just way out over his skis, as usual, saying a thing that he shouldn't say with power that he...

absolutely does not have. So if you are awake in the world, you know the United States and Israel have launched a war against Iran, which is not going well. I think we're safe to say it is not going well, and no one likes it. There was an announcement of a two-week ceasefire after Trump threatened to destroy an entire civilization, which scared a lot of people. They've announced a two-week ceasefire. Everyone claimed victory. Pete Hegseth claimed victory. The Iranians also notably claimed victory. They put out a statement saying, we've won. Here's our 10-point proposal that the United States has agreed to. And they put it out in their official state media channels. News organizations across the spectrum reported on the statement. It was, again, put out by the Iranian government, Iranian officials on Iranian news channels. CNN reported on this.

And it says that they've won. Like, that's just their posture. Like, we won. You're going to do what we want. You can agree or disagree with that, but that is the posture that they are taking. Trump puts out a true social statement only responding to CNN, saying the alleged statement put out by CNN World News is a fraud, as CNN all knows. The false statement was linked to a fake news site from Nigeria. This is not true. Immediately picked up by CNN and blared out as a legitimate headline. The official statement by Iran was just released in post on Truth Below. Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? First of all, if you just read Trump posts for what they are, it is clear that this man is not well. I don't know what else to say about that.

I was just about to say, I assumed you read that wrong and then realized I'm looking at the screenshot and I was like, oh no, you just read the words as they were presented. It ends with CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw the statement with full apologies for their as usual terrible report. Results of this investigation will be announced in the future. Okay, the president of the United States cannot do this. Can't do it. It turns out in America, you can lie. There's an amendment. It's actually the first one. And it protects you from consequences of your speech from the government. Also, importantly, CNN didn't. Also, importantly, the president is ordering CNN to immediately draw the statement is not a power the president has. And in fact, the framers of our government, the founding fathers of this country made sure that that was not a power the government has. And they put it, again, it's the first one. It's the first amendment. You might recall it. It's right there. So Trump posts this and the way that Trump posts things and people take them seriously or not, whatever.

Our boy Brendan cannot, cannot resist. Cannot resist. He gets to be the speech release. He loves being the speech release. So he quotes it on X and he says, more outrageous conduct from CNN. Fake news is bad enough for the country pushing out a hoax headline in such a sensitive national security moment. It says, requires accountability. Iran put out an official statement that simply cannot be squared with the one CNN's false headline attributes to them. Time for change at CNN.

So, Brendan has no authority over cable news networks. None at all. He has no authority of the internet. As we've discussed on Brendan Carr's Dummy time and time again, his authority is over things that use the broadcast spectrum, that public airwaves, which are a scarce public resource in America, and he's not supposed to use that authority to control speech on those airwaves, but he is doing it, right? That's why he's going after broadcast networks like ABC and CBS and whoever else. CNN does not operate on the public airwaves. In fact, CNN mostly operates as clips by Aaron Rupar on X. That's like fundamentally where CNN's audience is now. Like, there's no way that Brendan can attack CNN like this. When he says time for change.

What he very specifically means is the Ellison family is about to bite Warner Brothers and control CNN, and he believes and he wants CNN to change its programming, and he thinks that Ellison will change the programming. This is very bad. Like, it's dumb because Brendan has no authority, but now he's not only stepping into speech regulation where he has no authority, he's saying... I think our politically aligned billionaire donor is going to make the changes that I want, that the president wants. And this is just laying it bare. Even if you report the truth, just the dead ahead truth, there was a ceasefire called, here's a statement from our government, here's a statement from the Iranian government that CNN went on air and defended. They said, no, this is the right statement. And the Iranian government has since repeated it.

Even if you report the truth, the president will attack you for not towing the line. And Brendan will show up and say, I might not have the official power, but I can say time for change at CNN. And everyone knows what I mean is that David Ellison is best by this network. David Ellison controls CBS, which is a broadcast network over which I do have authority. And I will make sure that that authority carries through to CNN. That's a real problem. And I think Brendan is just such an unsavvy operator that he keeps saying it out loud that everyone's on notice.

Yeah, I mean, this is a message to David Ellison as to like, oh, you want to make this merger happen? Here's what you need to keep promising me in order to get this done. It's a message to everyone that here's what's about to happen by this merger that I'm going to allow for this particular political reason. Like, it's just there. Yeah, you want there not to be news distortion cases of CBS or you want to buy a new station or you need more bandwidth on the airwaves. Well, I better be happy with CNN as well. And you can already see what's happened to CBS News. Its ratings are tanking because people do not like the new ideological position of CBS News.

you're going to do it to CNN too because it might not be run by one news organization. This is just straightforwardly corruption. There's no other word for it. It is straight up the state trying to corrupt the free speech of the media in this country. And again, I always think if Brendan was just one turn smarter, he would just do this quietly.

and maybe it would be a scandal if people find out, but he just is doing it out loud. Yep. And I think that is giving a lot of people cover to not listen because they're like, no, we actually don't take our marching orders in the government here in this country. We have freedom of speech. We have the First Amendment. And I don't know, Brendan, I think you're a dummy. I'm dying for you to come on the show and explain to me how you think you can separate regulation of CNN from the coming regulation of CBS that you will have because they operate on the airwaves and how you expect to explain to everyday Americans why the government should interfere with speech in this way. Because this is so far over the line. It's like why you came on and said, I know what it's going to be about.

Everyone knew this was over the line and everyone sent it to us. Yeah. There's no, you don't have to explain this to anyone. The president ordering the investigation of a truthful news report is so far over the line, it's almost cartoonish. And then, of course, there's Brendan, human cartoon. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr is a Dummy. Brendan is always welcome on this show, or really any show that does the Brendan Carr is a Dummy segment. And I'll be there to tell you a dummy to your face. It's taken off. The Brendan Carr is a Dummy cinematic universe continues to expand. We welcome all comers. That's been Brendan Carr is a Dummy, America's favorite podcast on the podcast. It's good stuff. All right, I just have one for you, which is, I think, the other sort of big journalism-y moment of the week, which is the purported unmasking of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, by The New York Times.

I just need to know what you think of this story. So I will just frame this for anybody who has not read it so far as it's set up very much like a process story, right? Like John Kerry Rue, who's the author who was right at the forefront of exposing Theranos, has won Pulitzer Prizes, is like as legit as anybody in this business doing this stuff. Starts with, I went to investigate and then walks through all of the steps of his investigation of how he decided that this guy, Adam Back, is in fact Satoshi Nakamoto. And it ends in a pretty conclusive position. He is confident he has identified this man, Adam Back, as the Satoshi Nakamoto creator of Bitcoin. What do you think of this story? Do you think Adam Back is Satoshi?

I think Adam Back has issued strong denials of the fact that he's Satoshi. Which, like, you would if you were Satoshi. You would. I agree, John Kerry is an excellent reporter. I've talked to him before. He's very diligent, very thorough. He's obsessive in a way that obviously comes out in the story. You can't assign a reporter to do this. No. Only someone who's compelled to do it will do it to this level of detail.

I just, the parts I found most compelling were when he lined up the dates of posting, and he was like, when Satoshi was posting a lot, Adam was not. When Adam was posting a lot, Satoshi was not. Like, the ideas all line up. Like, these are two people, or two characters in the end that have all the same ideas. And then the other most compelling part was he kept asking for the email headers of specific emails, and Adam would completely ignore that request. So that's fishy, that's why. But other than that, it kind of feels like every other I've Unmasked Satoshi expedition that has ever existed. Like, I read a bunch of stuff on the internet, and then I read someone else's stuff, and I did an analysis, and I've concluded it's you. I do think the fact that Adam got his photo taken for The Times.

Right? There are photos. It's true, yeah. Like it's like very, there's something there that I think is interesting. Secondarily, and I'm curious for your view on this, the idea that there's somebody out there who owns so many Bitcoins that can just upend the Bitcoin economy is like perpetually the danger in Bitcoin. And so the Bitcoin community, like they're like, stop it. We don't want to know who this person is. Right. And like, you know, they run around saying everyone is Satoshi. And once you know who the person is and there's like secondary markets are gambling about when these tokens will move, the incentives to screw with the Bitcoin economy just keep going up. Right? Especially if you've...

like made insider trading a valuable thing to do on top of owning the bitcoins. And so I kind of worry that all of these people who claim or don't claim to be Satoshi are, they're just attracting a kind of attention because of the secondary gambling nature of things that is. Like just generally not good for money. Do you know what I mean? I agree with you completely. I mean, I think no matter how you feel about crypto and Bitcoin in particular, no good comes of knowing who Satoshi is. It kills the mystique of this thing that is supposedly bigger than one person, right? Like if you believe in a trustless system, but you actually have to trust this dude named Adam, like it really changes the vibe of the system. It exposes Adam back to real risk. I mean, we've seen horrible stories of people getting kidnapped and essentially held captive for their Bitcoin passwords.

It's a real sort of physical danger to put this person in because we know how much money they have and we know where it's stored. Like this stuff is scary for a lot of reasons, but also it does. It puts this one person in this incredible position of power over everyone else's money, which is a really unusual position for any person to be in because it is all so centralized for a decentralized currency. It's all kind of centralized around this one entity called Satoshi Nakamoto, which is, I think, why a lot of people really want it to be a group of people or somebody who died. Yeah, if all those Bitcoins start moving.

Weird stuff starts happening. So they have to stay where they are forever. Right. It's actually much better for the rest of the ecosystem for none of that Bitcoin to ever move again. And the idea that it is just this British dude who, upon being unmasked, may have lost his motivation to not play the games and go get some of that money, it could change in really huge ways. So I think I sort of land where you do where like, I think John Kerry Rue did a really good, really compelling investigation. I don't 100%

clock his certainty at the end of it. Like, I think he got about as far as anybody has gotten. And I don't feel like he found a definitive answer. He seems to believe he found a definitive answer. And I think John Kerry is a serious journalist who does a good job. So that's interesting. But like, I was not 100% compelled by the story. But I do think if it is true, and this person has now been definitively unmasked, the crypto world is about to change in some weird and probably bad ways. Yeah. As always, I will point out, as I've been pointing out in the show in Decoder for years and years and years now, people only care about Bitcoin because of dollars. And this story has a lot of...

talk about libertarian currency and all this other stuff. And yeah, no, it's because it's a lot of dollars. Yeah. It is a lot of dollars. It is very hard to get anyone to care about any of this unless it's worth millions of dollars. Yep. And that is just the fundamental truth of cryptocurrency. And everyone wants to argue about, everyone wants to argue with me about that all the time. But like...

If you're like, it's a bunch of, it's a bunch of stuff on a hard drive. And like, he has a lot of them. You know, like how much they're worth? Like 50 cents. Like no one cares. Like it is dollars. And that is forever going to be the problem that Bitcoin runs into. Unless you're doing crimes, in which case it's very compelling. Yeah. Ben McKenzie, who wrote a book about crypto. He made a documentary about crypto. He's also Ryan Atwood on the OC, if that name rings a bell. He's on the show on Tuesday talking about a bunch of this stuff too. So stay tuned for that. Eli, you have to go. My internet is barely hanging on by a thread. So we should get out of here.

But just a quick reminder for everybody who's here, please go vote for us in the Web Awards. The award voting is open until next Thursday. Please vote for us for Best Technology Podcast. Also, to everybody who's coming to the movies with us in a few weeks, we're very excited to see you. To everybody who wasn't able to get tickets, keep an eye out. This is the thing we're going to do again. I'm excited at the response we've had so far. I think it's going to be very fun. Also, send us questions about The Verge and about The Verge Cast and about all of your feelings about the media and journalism and everything. We're going to get to as many of them as we can in two Tuesdays. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Send us an email, vergecasttotheverge.com. We love hearing from you on that and absolutely everything. Until then, we're out of here.

The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchock. We will be back on Tuesday. We're talking about crypto with Ben McKenzie, and we're talking about continuous glucose monitors with vSong. Version history this week is about the Western Electric 500, the, the landline phone. Next week on Decoder, you can check out Ronan Farrow talking about more of all the opening eye stuff, plus whatever Neelai and the team have been cooking up. I'm sure it's great. Thank you, as always, for watching and listening. We will see you next time. Rock and roll.

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