It's code red for ChatGPT

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I don't know. Waveform is too good. We have to focus on everything. We got to rebuild our user experience. Exactly right. I'm your friend David Pierce. New upsells here. Hey, buddy. Yep. So we have some code reds to talk about this week. OpenAI has, I think, just decided to be much less chaotic for a minute while it tries to compete with some other stuff. You don't get to be less chaotic by sending out memos declaring a code red.

That's not how that works. That's more chaos. It's like, but it's like, we're going to do all our chaos at one thing is the new, the new open AI plan. We'll come to it. I have a lot of thoughts about this code, right? We've got some Apple news. We've got a Samsung thing to talk about. We've got, we've got a lot going on. Somehow it's, it's December and I feel like news just continues to be news. It's just happening. No one's slowing down. But first I have to, we need to talk about something, which is I'm very upset with you. This is, I bought a Samsung frame TV on Black Friday because it was on sale and

I have had the strangest experience with this television. So we bought this house and we moved into it and our living room is like very narrow and very long. So it ended up basically only having one possible way to set it up that made any sense. And that has forced us to be TV above the fireplace people, which I don't love. And Anna sends me the link to the r slash TV too high subreddit like every 36 hours. Did you get one of those big motorized mounts that like comes down? No, I tried. Believe me, I tried. We talked about getting a projector. It was a whole thing. But then I was like, OK, if we're going to do this, I at least want something that doesn't look as much like we have a giant television.

above our fireplace. Did a bunch of research. I was going to get the Hisense like frame TV knockoff. And then you, I would say like, talked me into the frame TV. I was like, if you're going to do it, just do it. That's right. This TV is both like exactly correct and like perfectly does the one job that I hired it to do, which is mostly not look like a television. It's awful. The software is bad. What have I been saying? Hour and a half to load every single time I want to turn it on. The power button does a different thing every time you press it. It is simultaneously like the best idea about TVs and the worst TV that I have used in a very long time.

I don't know how you're mad at me for being right. I've been telling everyone on the show for years that the Samsung frame TV's enduring popularity signals the death of television in America. It is a shit TV. And yet there are like two dozen people in your life who would say that they bought a frame TV because of you. So our dear colleague, Chris Welch, who was one of the very first employees here at The Verge, went on to Bloomberg earlier this year. Congratulations, Welch. We're very proud of him. He's doing great work over there. We had to hire a new TV reviewer.

That's not fun to come be a TV reviewer at The Verge. We are at John Higgins, who's great. He's a deep wealth of experience and depth. And, you know, his first review was like the LG C5 OLED. He's a TV reviewer. He wants to review fancy TVs. Like he wants to argue with me about calibrated settings. And I was like, no, dude, it's Black Friday. You got to call in all the art TVs and plug them all in.

And he was like, you got to do it. So he called them all in, Frame Pro, Frame, TCL, the Hisense, plugged them all in. We wrote the review and basically it was like, you can cheap out a little bit, which is I think where you were like, I should buy the Hisense. Yeah, so John was on the show talking about some of this stuff right before Thanksgiving and sort of made that same case that it was like, none of these are great televisions. They kind of do the thing you need them to do.

Just buy whichever one you need. And you bullied me into spending, it wound up being like a hundred more dollars to get. This is what I'm saying. If you're going to have the experience, just have the whole thing. And the whole thing is have a slow Tizen computer in your house for a decade. It's so, so bad. It's the most popular TV in America. It is a status symbol. People brag about it. They price it as high as the OLEDs.

It's all very bad. Yes. And I have two of them. I should say, as the normie TV owner of the two of us, there is a belief out there that not only is the frame TV not as good a TV as it should be for the price, but that it's an actively crappy viewing experience. It's not. It's fine. It is an utterly fine television to look at. I'm coming at it from a... I'm shaking my head at you so hard. I'm coming at this from a several years old TCL thing I bought with Roku built in on presumably also Black Friday. And...

this TV is fine. To look at it, it is fine. It is preposterous that it's as expensive as it is for how it looks, but it is a fine looking television. It's not like, it's not like awful to look at. It is awful to look at for the price and it is awful to use. Like awful, the remote's bad. The remote, I can't get the remote to stop telling me how to use the volume controls every single time I try to use the volume control. Like it's, this TV sucks so much, but then I turn it off and it's like a passable frame of art atop my fireplace. It does its thing. Did you buy this subscription? No.

I'm assuming I will. But right now, I downloaded a high-res print of Van Gogh's Starry Night onto my computer, put it in the SmartThings app just to show Anna how it worked, and that has just become what it is now. That's very good. It just hit our credit card, the subscription, because obviously we bought ours on Black Friday. So I bought the subscription. And it's like, I did this again. And then I'm like, yeah, it'll be fun. Max and I will sit around, go through the art store, look at art, and then you try to use it. And she's like, this is slow. I'm bored. She just left. Yep.

That's the end of that. It's bad. It's a bad TV. Are you using an Apple TV or a Roku? Is it fighting with that thing? Because that is the worst. I haven't yet because in general, I hate that experience. I tried to do that with a Roku. I used the Google TV streamer. You're using the built-in Tizen apps? For now. I've only had this thing for five days. Right now, I'm using the Tizen apps. Can I just say the single dumbest thing is that we download a bunch of apps and a bunch of apps, it just puts immediately into the little row of app icons at the top. It's like there's a For You page, essentially, right? And it's just got a row of stuff.

it doesn't put all the apps there for some unknowable reason. So we downloaded HBO Max and then literally could not find it because the menu up at the top where you have to go up and then over to apps is translucent over top of an advertisement. So you just don't see the menu that's there. So then you have to go over. like press and hold and change a menu in order to get the thing to go to the for you page just so the app shows up on your homes is i mean you if you were trying to like do one of those games where you actively do bad design to piss people off you would end up very close to the tizen experience on this television it's very bad it's all dark patterns it's all dark patterns to make you buy stuff and do what they're advertising can i respond to you about the picture quality thing real quick sure and i say respond to you but i'm also responding to the number of people i argued with in the comments or frame tv um Picture quality does not scale with like, it's fine or how many people have it and it's fine for how many people. Picture quality scales with our expectations of what the picture quality should be. So if I took this same nasty edge lit panel from 500 years ago and was like, this is a phone, you'd be like, this phone sucks.

Because every phone manufacturer knows the consumer's value looking at the screens on their phones, and they've all moved to OLED displays. Because they're thinner, they use less battery life, the blacks are blacker, they don't shine gray in the dark. There's a lot of reasons that phones are all OLEDs now. Like, pretty much down the line. Unless you're very, very cheap, it's hard to find a non-OLED phone. Like, the sort of mainstream, low, mid-range, and up is all OLEDs now.

that's because you care about your phone screen. All you're saying when you say it's fine is I don't care about this screen. So I'm willing to accept this bad edgely LCD screen. I don't, I half agree with that. But I think the reason I bring it up is like it is very clearly like it's a full order of magnitude worse a screen than the crappy TCL Roku TV that I'm upgrading from, quote unquote upgrading. But I bring this up because like when I told my mom we were thinking about buying a frame TV, her immediate question was like, oh, isn't it like an essentially unwatchable?

television like the perception is that the screen is not just not as good as it could be but that it is like so bad that it is basically not a tv and and the way she described it made me think she's imagining like a like an old school like 1970s era pixelated television yes and it's not that right like it is this is so if i were just buying this tv at this quality i would expect this tv to cost like 149 that's what i mean it's like a watchable television ancient technology it's five-year-old lcd technology which is not bad it's just five years old right and because you are valuing what it's like when it's off you're willing to accept the plummeting quality of when it's on being a TV. Yes. Which is bad. It is bad. And it's such a shame that it's bad because like, I am actually super compelled by the whole idea of it. And it is like, presumably at some point, someone will figure out how to do both things better and not for many thousands. Well, it's YPCS. I was like, we gotta...

We got to not over-review these because there's going to be new ones in a month. But you know what's crazy? I hate this thing with every fiber of my being and I don't regret buying it and hanging it on my wall one bit. It was the right decision. Because it looks cool when it's showing up. Yeah. That's it. It's the whole game. And it's showing you art while you're looking at TikTok and it's a hop, skip, and a jump until Starry Night is just hanging on the wall and there's no TV at all. Yep. This is also the first time I've ever had a TV mounted on the wall. It's great.

Did you do it or did you call someone? I called someone. Because we were doing it above the fireplace, I got nervous about all the ways I could really, really screw that up. So I had a company I believe is called Mr. TV Mount. Shout out to Mr. TV Mount for coming out. Unsponsored for flavor. TV Mount, TV mounting person TikTok is one of my favorite TikToks. It's a whole side of TikTok you can be on. I will say I have, you know, a fancy TV. I have the fanciest Sony OLED you can get. I've got a fancy Sony receiver.

the whole thing and uh there were electricians in our house and they cut the power for like five minutes and turn it back on and hdmi cec has not worked once since they were here and they're both sony things and they should have bravia sync or bravia link or whatever it's called so they can talk natively to each other and all that's broken and i was looking at how to fix it and i think i think the instruction is basically unplug them both for a while like not unplug them both for a while So they can just like calm down. You might be, you might be hosed. They're like, we've been sending too many bits, Neelai. We're done with this. We can't. On the other end of the TV house, it's not all roses. Yeah. That makes me feel very confused. You can spend a lot of money and everything still is broken all the time. But it looks so good when you watch that one movie that's available to you on BraviaCore. All right, we should get into the news here. And I want to get into some of the like goings on in the business. But there is one gadget this week that we have to talk about first. And that is yet another wild display idea.

from Samsung. This is a gadget called the Z Trifold, which has been sort of leaked and talked about and shown off behind glass for a while, but is now an official device. It is a three-paned foldable phone. It has a 10-inch screen, 2160 by 1584. It's just, imagine like a very thin iPad that you can fold into thirds. You can run three apps side by side, vertically. It's just three phones stapled to each other. I cannot emphasize this enough. And, Nilay, this is very exciting for you. You can also...

use Dex on this phone without another display. And if you were to say, David, that's the opposite of what Dex is, I would say that's correct. And this thing is just, it's just a whole ass computer. Yeah, that's great. It runs Dex because you can just like prop it up as a little baby monitor with a keyboard and a mouse. So it has a standard windowing environment. I love it. I am convinced based on our previous conversation about Samsung's ability to create usable user-friendly software that this will go poorly in very specific ways when it comes to managing all these apps and all these screens at once. But this is what phones should look like. This is the dream.

This is the thing I want. I honestly kind of agree. Yeah. Like I could not explain to you why or for whom or what I would do with all of this. But like, there's just so many like pieces out there in the world, right? You have this thing where Google is slowly starting to try and put Chrome OS and Android together into sort of one mutable operating system. You have all these people working on these different foldables. There is this like, how do we do desktop environment and mobile environment next to each other? And it's like, if all of that is eventually going to come true and mean anything to anybody, it damn well better be on a device that looks this good. Yeah.

Like, hell yeah that this exists. Can I tell you my favorite part of this whole thing? Yes, please. There's just some like very, very practical things you have to contend with when you launch device like this, right? So it's a phone and a tablet. The phone, when you fold it up, the phone is on the back. Like one of the rear panels is a screen, the size of a phone screen. So there's a selfie camera there. But then when you unfold it, you don't look at that screen anymore. It's on the back. So there's also a selfie camera on the tablet. And it's just, you just like run into it. Like, what if you want to take a selfie when the tablet's open?

well, I guess we have to put another selfie camera in. Here's another one. It's just like, yep, that's just an unavoidable compromise of this design. Two selfie cameras. So it has, however, it has three cameras, like three rear cameras, plus technically a fourth rear camera, which is actually the front camera for the phone part, which is also the first front camera, but then it has a second front camera for the tablet part.

I love it. If you're listening to this show and you have not yet seen this thing, I dare you to sketch on a napkin what Mila just said. Take a picture of it and send it to us. It's perfect. It's everything I want from a solution. It's exactly how Samsung would solve this problem. Right? They're like, screw it, just add another selfie camera. Yeah, just do more cameras. It's fine. Yeah. It's not yet priced for the US, but the price in South Korea equates to about $2,500 in the US, which is I think roughly what I would have guessed for something like this. It's very expensive. It's going to keep being very expensive for a while. It's really thin. It's like kind of great looking.

Given Samsung's track record with first gen foldables, I wouldn't say I have a ton of faith in this one. being great. Yeah. But again, I'm excited this exists. I do increasingly think these foldable phones, maybe in general, but certainly like at the limit like this are essentially being built for a future that doesn't and won't exist and ultimately are phones for no one. But I also hope I'm wrong. Like I continue to root for the future in which there is like the one device to rule them all. I want modular gadgets. I've been on the record about modular gadgets for like 15 years. This is the opposite of a modular gadget. A modular is like you take three phones and you click them together. Which is essentially what this thing is.

I'm very excited. We should note that Huawei has had a mate and I think there's a second generation mate now. We've seen this stuff in China for a minute. This is the first time we're going to see it over here at scale from Samsung. You know there's going to be a huge like Super Bowl ad campaign around this one because it's the form factors that drive the interest. Yeah. This is the most astonishing form factor. So it does seem like there is not a huge mainstream move toward foldables yet. But like if I were to really Galaxy brand theory this.

I think you could kind of make a case that a trifold like this might be significantly more compelling than an individual foldable phone. Like you made my phone slightly bigger is one thing, but like you turned my phone into essentially a laptop screen. maybe different? Like, is that more compelling? I'm just, you know, I always think about the local news, man. This thing is going to get its way on the Good Morning America and the View, and then, you know, Whoopi's going to unfold it, and they're going to be like, it runs Dex now, and she's going to be like, get this out of my face. Somebody will unfold it in front of Jimmy Fallon, and he will go, whoa, and that will be that. Yeah, but is Samsung going to convince one person to switch away from my message? Probably not. Is the form factor powerful enough to escape the lock-in?

It does have a lot of cameras. It has two front-facing cameras on different sides. It counts for something. I love it. I'm going to definitely think about buying one. I think that's ungodly expensive. Everyone should be glad these exist, even if you don't buy one, is how I feel about all of these ones. Let's talk about Apple news. So this has been a weird time for Apple in recent months. I would say an unusual amount of executive turnover. There have been lots of rumors about succession. Is Tim Cook leaving or retiring at any point soon? The big news of this week was that Alan Dye, who has been the head of UI design at Apple,

Basically, he was like the Johnny Ive heir apparent. Is that a fair thing to say? He's leaving Apple to go start a design studio at Meta. It's particularly geared around artificial intelligence and glasses. That is the thing Mark Zuckerberg seems to have identified as what they want to go do. But he is leaving Apple. John Gianandrea, who was running a lot of the AI efforts at Apple, also leaving. These seem to be happening in very different ways. I don't have any particular reporting on this, but it seems very much like John Gianandrea was...

sort of asked to leave or was told it was a good time to leave. Whereas I don't think Alan Dye was pushed out the door in any way. It seems like somebody, and by somebody, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg wrote him a very large check to go to Meta. I don't know about that. No? I don't know about that. I think there's a lot of turnover in Apple. Yes. If you believe that the future of all devices is somehow based on natural language processing, then Apple is behind and they've totally reset.

right? The entire Siri project, they're kind of nowhere on generative AI. If you believe that there's a new wave of devices coming where that will be the heart of it and the most you can do at Apple is liquid glass, maybe you leave. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg writes you a huge check and that's great. Then there's like Apple fired its AI guy because he didn't get it right and they hired a new AI guy from Microsoft to use for Gemini. I think it's all the same.

It's just different expressions than noise. Interesting. Like I think Alan Dye is like, they were not gonna get rid of him no matter how much people hated what was happening with Apple design. And we should talk about that. But I think the opportunity to design the next wave of devices without the core technology or the belief or the investment in the core technology, perhaps not fair. That is true. If you're a true believer in AI as like the organizing principle of the next generation of products, why would you do it at Apple right now? That is a fair point. But the most interesting thing about this Alan Dye announcement would be that the immediate response

sort of publicly has been basically like, thank God this guy is finally gone. I've only met Alan Dye a couple of times. He was very much out in front of the Apple Watch announcement many years ago. He was a big part of the software design for that and has sort of gotten more and more remit over time. He did a lot of the like watch face work in those early days. But anyway, especially now with what Liquid Glass has become, which I think is like universally disliked at this point. We're going to get comments from people who like it. But they're going to be like, it's fine. And that's the most easy. I think I can say with pretty strong confidence it is overwhelmingly disliked.

There are, I'm sure, people who like it. But there are a bunch of, I've talked to a bunch of developers who are like, this thing has made all of our apps exactly the same because you're just building translucent round icons over things. And that's what it all has to look like. So every app kind of looks like every app now. That's very true. All of the stuff is like messy and weird. There was this one screenshot going around. I don't know if you saw this. That was like, it was, I think, from the keynote. And it was a liquid glass thing that was like, design is not how it looks. It's how it works. But there's a picture scrolling underneath it. So you can't see the second half of the quote. It's perfect. It's perfect. But there's a real sense of like.

get this guy out of here. And thank God we are getting a design reset inside of Apple. That has been the reaction to this move in a way that I just would not have expected. You know, what's fascinating about that is that was the same reaction to Johnny Ive leaving Apple. Is that true? Yes. Right? Johnny Ive, in the absence of Steve Jobs, made everything insanely thin, did the butterfly keyboard, killed battery life, led his own extreme weird ideas about software design.

I think by the time I was leaving, everyone was like, all right, they're going to get back to it. They're going to make good computers again. And then there was a moment where they made pretty good hardware again. I think Alan Dye's software design, and he's in charge of human interface, right? He's user interface. It's a software design that everyone hated. But I think there was as much Johnny Ive's time has come and gone rumblings around his leaving as well. The interesting thing is that Ive has taken almost all the other designers from Apple, and now they all work at OpenAI.

Yes. Well, and that the thing a lot of people were hoping would happen when Johnny Ive left Apple happened, which is that in like, you could argue as much as you want that Apple has like not had sort of big, splashy, innovative ideas since then, but like they went back to making the Mac really good after Johnny Ive left. Yeah. Which is like, it's not nothing. And I think that what I've seen a lot of people say both kind of in and around Apple is that the guy who's replacing Alan Dye, this guy, Steve LeMay, who's been at Apple since the 90s. I forget exactly when, but like 25 plus years and has worked on tons of stuff. He's like a, he is a lifelong.

UI designer. And there is a sense that like, thank God we are going to put the UI back in the hands of somebody who makes UI. Instead of Alan Dye, who was like, he was a package designer, right? Alan Dye is a designer, not a UI guy. And there's a very different things in a lot of ways. And there is a sense of like, thank God we're giving this back to somebody who doesn't make UI. It's not a video game. You're not born into classes. You can learn how to do UI design. He just chose not to. We can put more blame on him. He didn't like wake up one day and be like, I am the package designer. Sure, that's his background. But yes, his proclivities as a designer were flash over functionality. Yes. And that is absolutely reflected across Apple's design.

Yeah, I mean, that was the story of Liquid Glass, right? Like, it is really beautifully executed, and it's a bad idea about how we should all use software. Yeah. Like, it's fine. Let's get back to making really good Macs that have ports. You know what I mean? Like, so Mark Gurman's take on this is there's a lot of turnover at Apple, right? There's new CFO, new COO, head of interface design is leaving. There's just a lot of turnover at Apple. Like, all kinds of new people. Some of them are, I think, it's time, right? Jeff Williams, he's, yep, it's time to retire. He's run his course. He's not going to be CO. He's also, I think, if you're Apple's board of directors, he's the same age as Tim Cook. Tim Cook is headed towards retirement. You're trying to get more long-term than that. Great.

Take your money and go. So he retires. CFO, making the same deal. John Giandria, who ran AI, I think that was much more, how much is this going to cost to make everyone believe it was your idea? And the answer was apparently a lot of money and everyone thinks so it goes. Yeah. German's point is Apple doesn't fire people. They don't fire their senior executives. They just, they manage them out in specific ways. They retire them out the door. And this wasn't a guy that they were not going to fire out and die. It was not in the cards. It was not going to happen. This is Zuck poached him. And so German is very much saying this is a poached. This is a big deal that Apple's, one of Apple's main design people reporting directly to Tim Cook.

is saying, I think there's a better opportunity for design at Meta and Apple couldn't keep him. Fascinating. Like that dynamic is in here. You can believe Mark or not. I tend to sort of believe what Mark is saying here. Like, I don't think Tim Cook has brilliant ideas about design. I don't think that he knows how to hire designers. And so the idea that he would lose his guy and that he could refill the slot.

You know what I mean? Like, this is not a problem Tim Cook wanted to solve. I think I need an AI guy. That's a problem Tim Cook had to solve. Yes. Right? And they went and recruited the guy from Microsoft. And, you know, the word on the street about that is, like, he went from Google to Microsoft. He was all in on the Microsoft job. And then you just can't turn down, be in charge of AI. It's an unbeatable opportunity. I'm looking at Zuck's post about this new thing.

Today we're, I'm just reading, this is a long threads post from Zuck. Today we're establishing a creative studio and reality labs led by Alan Dye. The new studio will bring together design, fashion, and technology to define the next generation of products and experiences. Our idea is to treat intelligence as a new design material and imagine what becomes hostile and is abundant, capable, and human-centered. We're going to elevate design, blah, blah, blah. He's going to be joined by Billy Soratino, who's another designer at Apple, and he goes on to say, we're entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices will change how we connect with technology and each other. With this new studio, we're focused on making every interaction thoughtful, intuitive, and built to serve people. So, first of all, intelligence is a new design material.

If you believe in good user interface design, the thing you don't want to do is hide the user interface. If I have one criticism throughout all of the products I've ever reviewed, it's hiding the UI from people makes the products more confusing. You can say it's magic and it just does it. But like, what do we want? We want the buttons. Everybody just wants the buttons back. Put the buttons in front of us in the car so I can turn the air conditioning on. Put the auto switch on the devices. Like, just give us the buttons. Like, stop hiding the UI from us. Intelligence as a design material is one of those, like, you'll just say magic words and the computer will understand you and then do what you want. It's like, oh, who's the perfect designer for this? It's Alan Dye, who kind of hates user interface design.

Who has hidden more UI across Apple's operating systems than anyone else in history. Except on the iPad where they just keep putting more. So that's one. Like, I'm just, I'm like, oh, that's why they vibe. I will say the intelligence is a new design material thing is like a very liquid glassy thing to say. Do you know what I mean? It's like, how do we take these digital concepts and make them feel physical is like precisely what liquid glass was trying to do with a sort of different type of thing to work with. And so this idea of like, what I'm hearing is like.

Blobs. How do we make the AI look like something while it's working is a real part of the challenge here. And we had a generation of it where it was like spinning blue lights on Alexa devices. And now we're going to get these blobs that move around in front of your face while they're ordering DoorDash for you on your meta display glasses. Like, I can see it. I know what this is going to be. And this is the thing everyone is going to try to build. And you're going to land on Pretty Clippy. Like, Pretty Clippy is intelligence as a new design material. That's where we're headed. Well, so that's the second part of this. We're entering a new era where AI glasses and other devices change every time. I have two things about this. One, I sort of agree with you that

You know, sexy clippy dancing while it orders a sandwich for you while you walk around. Maybe that's what Zuck wants. You know, like lots of ideas there. If you put on a meta quest, you're like, hey, you all need some design help. You know, like there's a bunch of interface design there, even with the band on the new meta display glasses. None of that's refined or perfect. I understand what you want to design there. But I'm just going to point out that Apple has spent over a decade saying it's going to make glasses.

Tim Cook has said the future is glasses. The future is AR. We have watched Apple demo people playing chess on a chessboard they can only see on their iPads on stage for a decade. The entire Vision Pro is a bet on the future of AR interactions. And they couldn't do the glasses, so they made the VR headset. And Allendei designed all of that interface, which led to Liquid Glass. And you have to imagine, he's looking at what Meta is doing with its display, and he obviously knows what Apple's doing with its, and he's saying, I'm going to go work at Meta. Oh, that's interesting. And maybe Zuck just wrote in the check. Maybe Zuck just wrote in the check. I don't know. Zuck has been writing a lot of checks.

There's a report in Bloomberg today that says Zuck and Meta are going to be cutting down Reality Labs' metaverse investment drastically, which is, duh, like, what a surprise. Like, Alan Dye got to work in his first day. He's like, no legs, get this out of here. First of all, there are legs now. It's just that no one knows because no one has put on a quest in two years. So the metaverse is over, and they're all in on these glasses, and all that's fine. But you have to imagine Alan Dye is looking at perfect knowledge of Apple's efforts, and whatever Zuck tells him the roadmap is going to be, or Andrew Bosworth, who's the CTO of Meta, who he's reporting to, and he's saying, I'm going to pick a meta.

Again, maybe that's just the check. But all these people are already rich. Right. And what they usually are motivated by is the opportunity. And based on everything we know externally just about the products that exist in the world, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to have done. I think Meta is so clearly ahead on this stuff. It has the partnerships. It has built and shipped the glasses. People are starting to use it. Apple has a bunch of unsolved things that it needs to solve in order to do those things. And one of them is Siri, right? A lot of this comes back to if you believe the underlying technology here is AI.

Do you want to be the guy who built the Siri glasses right now? Seriously. Do you want to be the guy who is doing the Meta AI glasses? The llama glasses? You should have called them llama glasses. It's a totally fair point. Who's going to succeed here? Regardless of who's first or who's second. Apple is more poised to succeed because Meta's incredible brand tax is overwhelming. Yes. I know people like their Meta sunglasses and I think it's just because it's a cool camera you can wear on your face and everything. But the second you're like, you're going to talk to Mark Zuckerberg all day.

No. I think that's right. And it is like, can Meta figure out its way out of that hole faster than Apple can ship? Is kind of the question. Or is like, Google going to make Android XR and sort of upend a lot of this stuff in general? As always, I will just run through the set of problems that no one has solved in the context of these glasses. These are all vaporware today. And I realize the Meta display glasses exist. Yeah, they exist. But I've tried them on, you've tried them on. You can read V's review of them. They're just fine. Yeah. They're not ready for prime time in any way, shape, or form. They just exist as a product that Meta was able to ship. If you want to ship AR glasses at scale.

You need a display that's bright enough to show you content over the real world and a battery to power that display all on the device. Then you need a battery that's powerful enough to power the compute that is necessary to visually process everything you're looking at, generate a real-time render over it, and re-display it with perfect positioning over the thing you're looking at. Then you also need a cell radio to go talk to the AI cloud. All that is also going to drain your power and all that has to sit on your fucking face and not be so heavy that you die. That is a lot of problems. Small things. Seems fine. It's a lot of problems. Apple couldn't solve it and they couldn't solve it so hard they pivoted to it's a giant VR headset with an external battery pack.

Maybe meta can increment their way there. Maybe. I mean, it's certainly ahead. Like, unless there is some... It's ahead in the sense that it made the display. It shipped a display in a pair of glasses, but that thing is not ready. And that display also does not do anything but be a display. There's no AR in that display. Right. Right. It's not looking at the world and, like, labeling the world. So, just a huge set of problems before you get to your sexy blobs or whatever you think it's going to be.

It's going to be sexy blobs. No, I think you're right. But I think this there's just a lot here. I also think one reason if you're Mark Zuckerberg, you hire Alan Dye is because there is a long established design culture at Apple that. I would say fairly clearly Meta does not have, right? That like, if you want to build a great design program, you should hire somebody from Apple, right? Like they just, that company understands how to make design central to work. We just said all their designs suck. I mean, I didn't say all their software designs suck because of Ballandai, who's going to go now, you know, run software design. Sure. I'm not saying this is going to go well, but I'm saying if you want to build a design culture, it makes logical sense that that's where you would start because that is the strongest design culture in tech and has been for decades. Sure. I don't disagree with you. I just...

There's a part of me that says Sam Altman hired Johnny Ive and Mark wanted one too. You know what I mean? They all want to be the next two jobs. So Sam went and got Johnny and Johnny's job is to sit on panels and be like, what's the future of ideas? And like never ship anything because the AI technology cannot support whatever humane penny wants to invent. And Zuck was like, I'll get one too. And the one that was available, Alan died. And that's like a very Mark Zuckerberg way of accomplishing a goal. Yeah, I don't see the problem with this. All right, we need to take a break. But before we do, I just, I want to read you a headline that's going to make you happy. Are you ready for this? Yeah.

Linux usage on Steam hits a record high for the second month in a row. It's the year of Linux on the desktop, baby. We're doing it. It's happening. If you have ideas about Linux coverage, by which I mean anything at all, you just let us know.

So Stevie Bonifield wrote this story for us and they wrote, this is my favorite. As of last month, Linux users accounted for 3.2% of all Steam users. That pales in comparison to Windows usage, 94.79%. But it's still a boost from October and marks a new all-time high for Linux usage on Steam. That's amazing. That's like new upstart browser challenges Chrome. Still everyone uses Chrome. Linux is happening. This is the story of 2026. I'm telling you, man. It's sexy blobs floating in front of your face and Linux on the desktop. It's divergent, but it all makes sense. Yeah, we're going two directions hard at the same time. I love it. All right, we need to take a break and then we're going to come back and we are declaring a code red.

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Support for the show comes from Bitwarden. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and here's an upgrade that actually gives you something back, time. With fewer password resets, less typing thanks to autofill, and no more trying to remember which variation of your dog's name you used this time. Bitwarden is a trusted open source solution for passkey, password, and secrets management. It makes secure password management available to everyone, with a free forever plan for individuals. That way, all users have a reliable way to create, manage, and autofill strong and unique passwords across accounts and devices. Bitwarden uses end-to-end encryption to protect vault data.

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All right, we're back. It's time to hit the panic button on OpenAI. The news here is that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote a memo to his team declaring a code red, which is a thing people talk about in tech because they all love like a military metaphor. And basically saying they have to stop doing all the sort of outside work that they've been doing. OpenAI, as we've talked about many times, is like kind of trying to do everything all at once in all directions. And he's saying we have to pause on a bunch of that work. Health agents.

its personal assistant that it was calling Pulse, the work to do advertising, which I think is really interesting, all to pour their focus back into ChatGPT. And this is directly a result of, I would say, two things. One, Google Gemini is, I think, pretty widely considered a better product than what ChatGPT is and what OpenAI is making models-wise right now. It's ahead on the leaderboards. People like it very much. Google has a lot of intrinsic advantages, and there is a sense that Google is winning in a way that it was not winning 12 months ago, which if you're OpenAI and you need to win big in order to pull off all these things you're trying to do...

is scary. There's also been some, I would say, somewhat alarming numbers about what has happened as OpenAI has introduced more guardrails and pulled back on some of the, like, sycophantic personality stuff in ChatGPT and basically has tried to make it a very slightly more responsible product. It turns out people like and use it less. Welcome to the engagement trap of the technology industry. How big and scary a thing do you think this actually is, Nilay? I think the idea of Gemini winning is really interesting because it's just layers and layers. So Gemini 3 Pro, the model.

Everyone thinks it's the best model. The idea that people will switch from Claude or ChatGPT or GPT-5, right? Like Hayden poked at it. And a lot of people are like, we have our workflows. Everyone's happy. We're not going to switch to it. But Google, train that model. They're deploying that model. They have massive distribution advantages because they have Google search and Gmail and YouTube and docs and whatever. If you use a Google product right now, it's like, do you want you to do some stuff?

It's ferociously annoying. Every time we start a Google Meet meeting, it's like, do you want Gemini here? Gemini? Should we meet with Gemini? It's a lot. So there's that. And Google's distribution advantage is real. Google is also running it on their own chips, their own TPUs, which are, from all accounts, last longer than the GPUs, which everyone's burning out right now, and are cheaper to run and more efficient.

Boy, that's a lot, right? You don't have this big dependency on NVIDIA because you've got your own chips. You maybe have a dependency on TSMC because they make everyone's chips. So you just have this like Google problem. Google is now, I mean, you just described more or less the whole stack, right? Like Google is now a successful- Oh, there's one more part of that stack, which is Google also makes money. Right, there's that too. Google is wildly profitable. One of the best quarters in business history last quarter. And it's because of the products that they're now accelerating AI. So Google can afford to spend its excess profit, of which it has an infinite amount on AI stuff, which it owns, like vertically integrated, owns every part of the stack. OpenAI is just burning other people's money on NVIDIA chips.

And I think Sam Altman has spent his time traveling the world asking for even more money, making more outlandish promises about what will happen when AGI reboots the economy. In the meantime, its product team isn't the one shipping its most interesting product. Like Sora 2 came out of the research team, not the product team. It's weird that OpenAI has a research team that launches products. So I kind of understand why he's declaring code red. I just, you know, the code red is like, they should make a dollar. Well, that's not going to happen any time soon. I just, but that's like the, I don't think, I mean, you know me, I don't think core LLM technology can do the things.

that in particular Shane Waltman is promising it could do. Well, and that's the other thing that is happening right now is I think that thesis is growing in its sort of mainstream acceptability. The idea that actually LLMs are not in their current form going to get us where we want to go or where everybody has been promising that they're going to go. That actually what we need is some entirely new like orthogonal breakthrough to go do something else. If we're going to make these true like, you know, generally intelligent systems, better, bigger, faster LLMs is not the thing. Yeah.

But it has to be the thing for OpenAI. If LLMs aren't the thing, like, I don't know if OpenAI has on the move, right? All of their promises are about ChatGPT, which is running on GPT-5, which is an LLM. They've lost a lot of their bleeding-edge research talent to other labs, many of whom left because they thought Sam Altman wasn't behaving in a safe enough manner, which now might be borne out because there's, like, a serious mental health crisis associated with ChatGPT. That's not good. And then another set of whom left because people like Mark Zuckerberg wrote them gigantic, preposterous checks to go do it for them. Yeah, sure. I mean, but, like, the bleeding-edge talent doesn't work there anymore, right? NetAid also makes dollars.

for Prince money. And you know, what I keep hearing about meta is like, they'll buy all the GPUs and even if none of this comes to pass, they'll just do ad targeting with the GPUs. Because that's how they make their money, maybe that's fine. All the people that OpenAI has hired are product people. Johnny Ive and all of those Apple designers, they're to make products. All the people from Instagram that they've hired, they're to make consumer products. The consumer products can't be executed if the LLM technology can't make the products good. Like you can make the prettiest humane pin in the world, but it's, if the LLM is still kind of dumb.

You didn't get very far. You didn't disrupt the iPhone such that you can pay back all the investors who gave you all that money. Sure. But I think the assumption there is that there are no products that can work with LLMs. And that's just not true, right? The question of, can we build God in such a way that...

I mean, because as we've talked about many times on the show, like OpenAI is so leveraged in so many directions that if it does half the job, it fails. Like literally specifically fails. This thing has to work at such unbelievably huge scale that eventually it is so big and so powerful that it like remakes the economy. And that's how OpenAI succeeds. Anything short of that is a disaster. Like I was listening to an interview with James Cameron about the new Avatar movie. And Matt Bellany, who was interviewing him, was trying to get him to say how much the movie costs. And he was like, I'll tell you this. It is one metric fuck ton of money.

And so I have to go out and make two metric tons of money or else none of this is worth it. And that is such a perfect analogy to open AI. Like this thing can't just be pretty good and pretty successful. It has to be unprecedentedly good and successful in order to pay off all the things that open AI is doing just from a business perspective. That said, I think there is a compelling argument to be made that if none of the technology got any better, there's still a lot of room for chat GPT to get better. Oh, sure. Okay. And that's the thing that I think. That's your code red.

That's the thing that Sam Altman should be pointing at, right? Because they keep trying things inside of ChatGPT. They tried this weird stuff where it was going to be like a to-do list and they tried the apps and they tried the custom GPTs and none of it has worked. The only like meaningful addition to ChatGPT since the beginning of ChatGPT I think has been web search. And you just need more than that. If you want to build the thing that becomes like the new app store for how people interact with AI, ChatGPT has as good a shot of getting there as anybody right now because it is huge. It has the brand. People have been using it. Like it has a lead in a real way as like a consumer adopted product.

but it's not getting better at the speed that other things are going to get better. So I have some pushback there. I agree with you. There is room to make the core chat GPT product better. And by room, I mean, sometimes it just hallucinates pure garbage at you. You could just make that better. You just have it not to. I don't know if that's technically possible. I also, I will tell you with great confidence, I don't think most people give two craps that it hallucinates. I think that is so far down the list of people's concerns about AI right now, whether it should be or not. Well, I mean, it hallucinates capabilities. Oh yeah, for sure. It will tell you it's good at things it is not good at, which is a real problem. I have a 10-year-old car that needed a transmission service.

And I like took it to the place and they're like, here's a bunch of costs. And I was like, ah, that's reasonable. It's on the high side. Do you want me to find you a list of other service areas near you that will do it for cheaper? And I was like, yes. And then it just can't do that. Like, just like, it just said, I should be able to do that. It just super can't do that, but it's like happy to suggest it can. Like you can, you can, you can round that off, right? You can either chat GPT is the product manager for chat GPT. It's just like, here's all the cool stuff. It would be so rad if I could do it. It came back with some results, but it was like, here's a place in Canada.

whose price list I found online for transmissions. And it's like, that's not helpful at all. Like, it's not even the right currency. These are fake dollars, man. So there's that. You can just like finish that. But the thing that Sam Altman has to deliver on is fully replacing Google as a business and the iPhone. That's how much money. That's your two metric fuck tons of money. Yes.

That's how much money he has to pay back to everyone, is fully disrupt the iPhone and the entire iPhone economy and all of the money Apple makes on the iPhone and fully disrupt Google search and all of the money Google has printed off of Google search for years. And I don't think either one of those companies is particularly motivated to let him. And so Google, like first and foremost, Google declared its own Code Red two years ago. I guess it's almost three years ago now, two and a half years ago. Google said, Code Red, ChatGPT is here. We invented the transformer. This was like right after the original ChatGPT launch, right? Yep. This is Nadella saying, I'm going to make you dance. And he was like, I'm not going to. It was like a whole thing. And they declared their own Code Red. Sundar basically turned over all of his executives.

and they have done nothing but execute another run fine. Okay, maybe a code red works. But it means you have to still fight Google, which is Ascendant. And then what does your app run on? It runs on the iPhone. And every time someone signs up for Chattaping the iPhone, Tim Cook goes cha-ching and takes 30% of your money away. These are structural problems that are hard to overcome. And to your point, Google had three years of runway to go do this because it has effectively unlimited resources to throw at this. And I think the thing about being Sam Altman is that it is, his ability to infinitely raise money is really powerful until it's not, right? And those things turn on a dime. And the minute you become,

a not, you know, a not viable candidate to give money to at crazy scales anymore, it all kind of falls apart, right? Like it is, that is a thing. It's a Ponzi scheme. You have to keep running. Well, they did just make yet another circular deal. Yeah. They bought their own VC firm, which is incredible. Just an incredible move. You know, Dario from Anthropic is out there saying like, there's a bubble. Everyone's been saying there's a bubble.

The thing that really pays us off is agents, right? You have a little butler that you can tell to go do something and it goes and does something for you and maybe that changes the economy. The problem is the agents don't work because, again, I think the LMs can't do it. The core technology can't do it because it doesn't know anything. We can come to that. But V tested all the AI browsers, including Chrome with agents in it, and none of them can buy a pair of shoes. Right. I think it was really fun. I edited that story with V and we went back and forth a lot because it's like, the question is...

how useful is this thing despite the fact that it can't do the whole thing, right? It is so abundantly clear that the idea that I should just be able to declare to my browser that I would like the best pair of new balances and I need them to be delivered tomorrow, which to be clear is the vision. That is what everyone claims they are going to build. That is not, I'm not being hyperbolic in the least. I should be able to say, I need new shoes and it should deliver the right shoes at the right price to my house tomorrow. That's the promise. Holy God, are we far away? But there's a bunch of questions in the middle, right? Where it's like, okay, how close to that?

How close to that do we need to be in order for it to be even a little bit useful? And V had a bunch of really fun experiences. She's like, okay, well, this thing can help me figure out which pair of shoes I need as somebody who has wide feet and likes off-white colors. That's a thing these tools are able to do very quickly. And that's genuinely useful, right? And it's like, if I have a bunch of specs on a webpage, it is able to successfully summarize and compare those stats to other specs on another webpage. Great. That is not how...

you pay off the investment in open AI. And so I think it's like, if you're, this is kind of what I mean, right? Where there's a lot of things that these products can do that are genuinely useful, but we are so leveraged against the end state here that none of it matters until we get there in a way. And this is why I'm saying, the promise has to be the web browser browses the web for you. The computer uses itself. Yeah. Right. When I talked to Casey Newton, who lives in San Francisco, it might be a little bit more uphill than me. He's like, but the computer is using itself. Like, why don't you have any wonder? You're too jaded and you live in New York. And I say, yes, I do the greatest thing. Sorry.

I like it here. And I get it, right? The computer's using itself. That's going to get there. From here to there, there's a straight line going up. And I don't think that's true. So here's a little just...

So we had this guy, Dr. Adam Dubé, on Decoder to talk about AI and education. At the end, he was like, that was really great. I said, hey, do you know any people who study intelligence, right? You're an education professor. Do you know people who study intelligence? Because I've been curious about the idea of language intelligence. And he was like, I got the perfect person for you, Scott Ben Reilly, made the introduction. And we had Ben write, like based on cutting edge research into the science of intelligence, my favorite headline of the past year, large language mistake. And basically the thesis is language is not intelligence. You should read Ben's piece. I think it's one of the smartest things we have published this year. And basically it just runs down.

Everything we know about language and intelligence suggests you can have intelligence without language, and you can have language without intelligence. And just doing language does not make you intelligent. And everything we know about these AI models, just looking at them today, suggests they are very capable of language, right? They're auto-prediction machines. That does not mean they understand one lick of what they're doing. They're just moving words around and sort of prompting themselves. Chain of thought is sort of like the very, very reductive way of thinking about it. It's just prompting itself over and over again. I'm just going to read you one very small chunk of his story that I really like, that I think hits this on the head really well and has been a thing I've been thinking about a lot ever since. He says, about large language models, they have no apparent reason to become dissatisfied with the data they're being fed and by extension to make great scientific and creative leaps. Instead, the most obvious outcome is nothing more than a common sense repository.

I love that. Thinking about LLMs as a common sense repository is so good. And it's not, that's not the burn that it might immediately sound. Like a giant repository of common sense is actually like an incredibly valuable thing, but it is not the next thing. And it's, I know that we, you know, I've been ranting and raving about whether or not the LLMs can do it for a long time in the show. The industry is starting to say it. Yeah. Mustafa Stuliman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, is patiently explaining on podcasts that they're just doing token prediction and they don't actually know what they're talking about. And it gets dangerous when you start to believe they do. Ilya Stutskiver, who was one of the founders of OpenAI.

participated in the coup against Altman, left to start Safe Superintelligence. He's on the, I think it's the Dworkesh podcast, this week saying the age of scaling is over. Just adding more data to pre-training isn't going to do it. We need to go back to research. I think we have this clip. Can we just run this clip? Yeah. Up until 2020, from 2012 to 2020, it was the age of research. Now, from 2020 to 2025, it was the age of scaling. Or maybe plus minus. Let's add aero bars to those years. Because people say, this is amazing. You've got to scale more. Keep scaling. The one word, scaling.

But now the scale is so big. Like, is the belief really that, oh, it's so big, but if you had to honeydex more, everything would be so different. Like, it would be different for sure. But like, is the belief that if you just honeydex the scale, everything would be transformed? I don't think that's true. So it's back to data research again, just with big computers. I mean, good for you, Elliot. You got to make a computer. Like, I wish I could be like, I have this idea, but I need like $100 billion to build the world's biggest computer. And then it still won't happen and I need to do more research with a big computer. Yeah.

It's nice work if you get it. But that really is such a tone shift from the way a lot of this stuff was being talked about. And the fact that that idea that actually what we need is not more of this breakthrough, but new breakthroughs, is completely runs against the bet that all of these companies, like this is how NVIDIA became the biggest company in the world, is everybody's like, oh, if we just do this more, we will get where we're going. And now there is an increasing sense that actually we have to do something else and then do it more. Right, the computers don't know anything. It's as simple as that. Language is not intelligence. We built computers that have an incredible facility with language. And I understand that now they're multimodal.

and token prediction and language prediction. Like, yeah, I understand, but they don't know anything. There's something very important about that, where if you want to send an agent out onto the web to buy you a pair of shoes, it needs to have a glimmer of actual intelligence. And I think we can see with just the browsers that exist today. We can see with the humane pin. You can see with ChatGPT pretending it can find you prices of auto repair near you, which it absolutely cannot do. That it knows what words it should say, but it has no idea what those words mean. And then it falls down. And I think this is the danger for OpenAI. It's the danger for anthropic. It's the danger for every company except Google because Google makes a lot of money. Yes. Well, and the thing here is what you're describing wouldn't be such a problem if all of these companies hadn't spent the last three years promising us that it was going to come true, right? Like if we were just in the...

what do we do with these models that exists era? Like the thing you described, where can it go find me another service center that is cheaper where I can get my car fixed? Incredible. Totally, utterly doable with current technology. Like that is a thing that an LLM is actually perfectly placed to do. And there has been so much work that has been based on the idea that actually that problem will just get solved if we make the models bigger, not I need to point the models at interesting problems and products, right? And that to me is like the correct thing that Sam is doing with this.

Code Red is like, what we need to do is not just keep building technology based on the belief that more better technology will solve all of our problems. We need to go build products with the technology that exists. Because it really, like, there is nothing about the problem that you just described with your transmission that isn't possible. It's just that no one has built it because everybody's like, well, we have to do bigger models. That's the only way to do any of this. And it's like, no, go build stuff with your models. We don't need new coding languages. We need to build shit with the code. I don't know, man.

Like, I agree. I want to agree with you. I think there's some stuff that is really, really cool. I think Suno, we ran a piece about Suno and the country music industry this week. It's really good. I think Charlie's going to come on next week and talk about it. Like, there's something there that I find fascinating. I find Sora 2 in its own weird, grotesque way to be deeply fascinating. The products I want, like, I want ChatGPT to call all the car repair shops and get me the prices for the transmission fluid change. Can they execute that? Can Fiji SEMA, where they hired from Meta to run products and open AI?

That's not product manager stuff, right? We're going to do experiments and A-B test with users until we refine the thing. It's like, yeah, but the engine of that is like two drunk hamsters on a wheel that's kind of broken. And if that doesn't work, like it doesn't matter how pretty it is. But this is what I'm saying. This is because we keep betting that if we make the foundational infrastructure better, everything, it'll be like if 50 years ago, everybody had just been like, well, we're going to make everybody's internet connection faster and it'll solve all of our problems. And people are going to be like, well, what are they going to do on the internet? And they're like, I don't know. We're going to make it faster. I will point out that that was the bubble. I know. And then a bunch of people were like, oh, what if we built actual things that people liked? And Jeff Bezos was like, you can buy books and we'll ship them to you. And it's like.

We need to get to that much more quickly than we have been getting there, which is like, and it's because everybody has raised money against and made deals around, we are inventing God. And so you can't have ideas that are less than that because you will panic the market. And I like, there's nothing that bums me out more than talking about products in terms of stock prices, but more than any time I can remember in doing this, it has felt to me like every product decision is being made. based on valuations and stock prices. And if you say, the coolest thing that we're doing right now is we're building a thing that we'll call a bunch of mechanics to get you the cheapest price, that's not God. And it's going to tank your stock price. I don't know if it's called a bunch of repair shops. You might need some spiritual energy to pull that off. I'm with you. OpenAI is a public company. Anthropic is a public company. There's a lot of races to go public between all of these companies now. I think there's actually, I would, we can end here. I just think there's more nihilism to that. It's if you believe that you can get to AGI with these tools, why would you ever stop to make the products good?

Why does it even matter if the products are good? If you're at the end of it, you're going to be like, I have to call Sasha Nadella to convene the Pope and Mariah Carey to declare God because I have to put together a panel of experts. And those are the two. That's who I got on my list. Mariah Carey and the Pope.

Drake and Kendrick have to agree on Digital God. And I think what I'm saying is like, make me the AI czar of the world. And I'm just going to look at everybody and say, everybody's going to shut up about AGI for two years. And your only goal and job is to build products that people will pay $10 a month for. And I don't care about anything else that you're doing with your AI. Go do that for two years and tell me if we don't actually make the world better. And I like, that is a vastly more plausible and interesting road to go down. Well, David, I hesitate to say this to you, but that might be what you want.

But in the meantime, Sooner Pashai went on Fox News this week to say that he was going to start something called Project Suncatcher to put data centers in space. I'm just going to play this clip and then we're going to take a break because I'm sad and I hate everything. I love it. Over time, at Google, we're always proud of taking moonshots. You mentioned Waymo earlier, that's been over a decade in the making. We're working on quantum computing. In that spirit, one of our moonshots is to, how do we one day have data centers in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun? That is 100 trillion times more energy than what we produce in all of Earth today. So we want to put these data centers in space, closer to the sun. And I think we are taking our first step in 27. We'll send tiny, tiny racks of machines and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there. But there's no doubt to me that a decade or so are we.

We'll be viewing it as a more normal way to build data centers. That's not what moonshots are, Sundar. They're not literally about the moon. It's a metaphor. That's it, everybody. We're taking a break. Nothing else to say. We'll be right back.

Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this show comes from Airbus. Every experiment we've ever done down here on Earth has involved gravity. So when the International Space Station launched in 1998, it opened up new frontiers for research in human biology and medicine. An opportunity to see how DNA strands, stem cells, and more might grow and evolve without the weight of the world on them. Now, a game-changing new space station, Starlab, is launching double-study agriculture, medicine, robotics, and more. And Airbus, who lead the ongoing design and engineering of the station, have designed it to be the next evolution for early research and real commercial production.

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All right, we're back. We're here on Earth. The code red is over. We're back to, what's the opposite? Like a code yellow? Code green. Code green. It's code green here on the Vergecast. Times are good. It's time for the lightning round. Eric, we have a sponsor this week. That is correct. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS. How leading businesses use AI for next level innovation. Eli, is it time? It's time. God, every week I'm like, he's gonna say no. And we get to just move on with our lives and everything's gonna be fine. He never stops. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I found another one that called itself America's favorite. Shout out to the Ringer Fantasy Football Show.

Absolutely not. It is time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Wait, they call themselves America's favorite podcast within a podcast? They call it a segment, but they know what they're doing. And I don't like it. And I'm not okay with it. I do think we should be with the Ringer Fantasy Bowl show. Come on, Bill Simmons. Bring it on. That's what I'm saying. We're coming for you. All right. It's time for Brandon Carr's a dummy. What do you do this week? He's such a dummy. And the layers of idiocy here are good. If you've been following Brandon Carr's a dummy or just my telecom coverage for years or our telecom coverage here at The Verge, you will know that in the first Trump administration...

Carr, who was floating around the FCC, but part of the FCC with Ajit Pah, who was the chairman at the time, and the Trump DOJ approved the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, cutting our nation's wireless carriers from three in Sprint to three, from three competitive carriers in Sprint to three. And the idea was that Dish Network would take Boost Mobile and some other bits and bobs and start a fourth wireless carrier that would compete for the hearts and minds and dollars of Americans. This was a farce from the very beginning. It didn't happen, and Dish Network gave up. There's nothing else to say about this. Everyone got utterly bamboozled into reducing the number of competitive wireless carriers in America. Now, of course, we have Trump Mobile, which is just winning every single day. Still not here, by the way. Trump phone. Trump phone update. Nope. Nothing. Anyway, so now the Dish Network has given up on its plans to compete, leaving us with just three wireless carriers. Everyone wants to buy its Spectrum. AT&T.

just applied for FCC approval to spend $23 billion on Spectrum from EchoStar, which owns this network. And it needs DOJ approval for a $5 billion deal to buy CenturyLink's fiber division. So AT&T wants to buy stuff. When you want to buy Spectrum, when you want to combine fiber divisions, you need government approval. And if you need government approval, our man Brendan Carr is here to basically be like, be more racist and I'll give you approval. There's nothing else. The man is the speech police. And so he basically, I would say under the table.

as he's done with every other telecom company, said, sure, maybe I'll do this deal. You got to get rid of your DEI programs. So AT&T has dropped all of its DEI programs. AT&T filed a letter on its FCC docket for a billion-dollar purchase of U.S. cellular spectrum. And the letter says, we've closely followed the recent executive orders, Supreme Court filings, and guidance issued by the administration. And we've ended DEI-related policies as described below, not just in name, but in substance.

Brendan, of course, is celebrating this. AT&T has now memorialized its commitment to any DEI-related policies and FCC filing. It will not have any roles focused on DEI. He's very happy about this. This is our government telling a private company how to run its business, how to hire, attract, and retain talent if it wants to do business deals. If you're a raging free marketer, this should drive you bananas. It should absolutely drive you bananas. This isn't, you can feel however you want about a DEI program. So I personally think they've been shown to increase the amount of talent companies have. They've been shown to make companies more resilient to change, to attract a wider array of customers. There's data about that, but you could hate them. You could not like them at all.

The government still shouldn't tell AT&T how to manage its talent, how to run its business if it wants to deal. And it should certainly not let one unelected bureaucrat, Brandon Carr at the FCC, issue threats left and right to these companies. Instead of fighting back, obviously all the telecom companies are caving. Verizon caved, T-Mobile has caved, Comcast has caved. Disclosure, Comcast has done some stake in Box Media, but they hate me anyway. That's true. None of them like me. So the two things I wonder about here are whether this is...

AT&T, like a lot of other companies looking around and saying, okay, we're not being sort of actively threatened. Like no one is telling us to take somebody off the air or whatever. But we understand that we want to do business and this is what is required. Like I was watching a 60 Minutes interview the other day with the CEO of Polymarket who took an investment from Donald Trump Jr. and put him on like an advisory board. And Anderson Cooper was like, is this just like naked politicking? And he was like, well, yeah, we want to do stuff and this is the administration.

seems fine. And it's just like, it's like, it is sort of corruption in like de facto, even if it's not official, you know what I mean? Oh, no, I mean, the argument from the Trump administration is it's not corruption if you can see it. Look at how corrupt we are. Right, I guess that's all out in the open, unlike those corrupt Bidens. And like, sure, here it is, all out in the open. I don't have to do anything to do this segment every week except search Brendan Carr's name. And then some ridiculous corruption or censorship appears in front of our face. Right, because they are loudly saying what the rules are. Right, it's just if you just look at the list, right? Verizon only got to buy Frontier after caving to Brendan on DEI. T-Mobile got to acquire some US cellular spectrum after caving to Brendan Carr. Paramount.

got to settle its lawsuit with President Trump personally after it agreed to impose a quote bias monitor at CBS. On and on and on and on, right? And all it is, and again, if you are a raging free marketer, this should drive you bananas. My default posture is, I don't trust you. You can think whatever you want in my politics, but mostly what I say on the show is free market competition is good and maybe we should have health care. I feel very comfortable that I live in a Venn diagram with many, many people. It drives me bananas that we've decided the government can interfere with private companies in this way. We should make them compete.

We should absolutely make them compete. And instead, what they're competing on is to cave to this administration that is directing the economy from the top down, in particular, in ways that she'll speak. Does it feel any different knowing that Trump got rush hour four green in this way? Like, is it all OK because we're going to get rush hour four? Do you know the backstory of the Rush Hour 4 thing is hilarious, right? No. He hired Brett Ratner to produce a Melania Trump documentary. Oh, God. And I think Ratner was like, let me do Rush Hour 4. In the production, so now they're doing Rush Hour 4. The one that they sold to Amazon for some outrageous amount of money. It's just free association. Yes, people say stuff, and then Trump says stuff, and then we have to pretend it's real. There will never be a Rush Hour 4, just as there was never a Foxconn page in Wisconsin. That's what I have for you. Should we start at how many weeks counter for Rush Hour 4? It's like, was there a Google COVID website? Is there Rush Hour 4?

The big questions in front of us. Anyhow, Brandon, as always, you're welcome to come on this show or on Decoder, face the music, try to defend your just intolerable meddling in our nation's free markets, your desire for constant censorship, and honestly, like your whole beard situation. I'm happy to insult your face. You can insult me right back. I think people will like it.

You're welcome. Anytime you want. That's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. You hear that ringer? Favorite. Number one. It's best one. All right. My first one is, I just want to say a small shout out to everyone on the internet for getting involved in the year in review trend. This is like, it's, I guess the week after Thanksgiving is now officially like wrapped week. So we got Spotify wrapped this week. We got Amazon music. It's called like discovered, which is bad. Apple music, I think has replay.

something. YouTube has a new one this year called Recap that I quite like. I think YouTube is probably up there with TikTok in terms of like the most revealing of my actual personality. So discovering all of the stuff that I watched on YouTube was sort of alarming. But really interesting. There was a Google Photos one. Google Photos has done this before, but now it's like, here's how many selfies you took this year, which is just an incredible burn to do to everyone in Google Photos. I just think it's great. And this is like...

It's one of the funniest things about the internet to me because it is like when these companies say the quiet part loud that they are tracking everything you do all the time, always. And it's not the kind of thing you want to think about. But then once a year, Spotify presents it back to you in a delightful way where your favorite artist makes a video for you. And it's like, okay, maybe surveillance capitalism is okay for one week a year. I saw Evan Gray, who's a great privacy activist, and they were like, oh, you listen to the same song, the same kid's song every morning for 15 minutes? I know when your kids go to school. Oh, God.

Yeah. It is like so many things. The minute you think a little bit about it, it becomes really, really horrifying. It is cute. I will say all of mine were Taylor Swift or lullaby versions of Taylor Swift because I have two children and that's the way it goes. Yeah. Yep. Mine was, my YouTube recap was very funny because it was basically like, you watch a lot of sports highlights, you watch a lot of tech videos, and you watch a lot of super simple songs on YouTube. I haven't looked at my YouTube. I don't have tracking turned on my YouTube. I turned it off long ago, which is getting increasingly annoying. Do you have the empty home screen? Yep. Interesting. It is very relaxing. YouTube for me is a pure utility in that way. Yeah. It's a search product. Yep.

That's interesting. That's probably the correct way to use YouTube in a lot of ways. I should have asked YouTube how to fix my car. There are a bunch of Chrome extensions out there that will just basically strip away everything else on the page except the video you're looking at. And every time I load it, I'm like, oh, this is nice. What if my video was just a video and not 65 other things simultaneously? But anyway, shouts to everybody doing recaps. And if you're going to track me, at least give me a stories formatted thing about how weird I am on the internet at the end of the year. What's your second one? My second one is a call to a Sean story we ran Thanksgiving week. And I insisted that we run it before Black Friday.

because all these tools from these companies, Hodo and Fantic, go on sale for Black Friday. And so every year I look at all the lists, I look at our lists. I'm like, what are these things? Like, we sell more of these Hodo screwdrivers than you can possibly imagine. And I'm like, where did these companies, are they just like TikTok brands? Like, what are they? So we sent Sean Hollister to investigate them. He talked to the CEOs of both companies, talked to their designers. These are wild stories. So Hodo is like, Lidan Liu is a pretty notable industrial designer. She just like joined the Xiaomi incubator and was like, what if I make beautiful tools instead of crappy tools?

And they're just a phenomenon. Like, they're just a phenomenon. Fantic is an even wilder story. So you remember, like, there's that explosion of, like, charger companies? Yeah, the, like, I feel like Anchor was, like, the main one. Anchor's the big winner. So remember there was a competitor called Aki? Oh, yeah, I do remember Aki. Aki was banned from Amazon permanently for review fraud. Oh, sick. 600 Chinese bands were banned from Amazon in 2021 for doing review fraud. So Aki pivoted. It reconstitutes itself as, like, a house of brands and launched Fantic as its tool brand. And they're back, baby!

Like, it's just Aki, but another brand. And they're running the same playbook as Hodo. They just, like, do well-designed tools. These companies ferociously compete with each other. Like, Sean has pointed out in a story, like, they claim they don't compete with each other. But one company releases one product, and the next revision of the next company's product is slightly better and back and forth. I love it. Like, pure gadget competition makes me the happiest, especially in things that's silly as screwdrivers. There are some criticisms here. All these things have, like, sealed lithium-ion batteries in them. They're not as powerful as tools that have, you know, like, screwdriver, like DeWalt screwdrivers with, you know, replaceable batteries. Some of the designs make no sense at all. Like, I have some of these tools that, like...

It's really pretty, but it's actually not very functional. Yeah. Like straightforwardly, like I have the rotary tool, the Fantic rotary tool. And I'm like my Dremel from 20 years ago, you plug into the wall is like so much more effective than the Fantic rotary tool. I love it. I have the electric screwdriver, the like USB-C powered one. And I always describe it to people as like for Ikea level projects and below, it is fabulous. And just like a little tiny powered screwdriver is great. Wait, can we compare algorithms for a second? There is one particular one of these products that has been all over all of my social video apps. Has there been one for you? For the last like two weeks, I've seen like every third video. Yeah, which one is yours?

Mine is the powered scissors that people are using to cut cardboard boxes. The powered scissors for me are a couple months ago. Mine is, you know, all these companies are like little motor companies. That's like fundamentally the innovation here is there's a tiny efficient motor and battery. And if you can get a tiny efficient motor and battery, you can make anything you want. Yeah, they're like mini Dysons in that sense. Yeah, Dyson is this company. They made a very efficient motor. And then they're like, we make everything and now we make hair dryers. They got all the way to what can we do with a big efficient motor? We can drive the wheels of a car. Did they really? That's Dyson trying to make a car. They're like, wait, we need an EV. It's like lithium ion batteries and efficient motors.

Now you're riding in style. You can spin out. I had the CEO of Shark Ninja and Decoder. I was like, so it's just fans? Everything's a fan? He's like, stop with the fans. It's all just fans. What is the most lucrative fan you can sell? He's like, we have an air fryer. I was like, that's a fan. He's like, I made a grill. It does convection. Like a fan? What is the most lucrative fan you can sell? A hairdryer. It is the most expensive Dyson product. It's still just a fan. Yep. So Fantic is moving into beauty. And this one isn't a motor, but they've got like a brush that heats up.

And I see the video for the brush that heats up all the time. All constantly. It's like a battery-powered brush that is hot for people with curly hair. And I see it every day. And I'm like, I should get this brush that heats up. And I don't know why, but maybe I will. I feel like we can make your hair. I'm going to have long, straight hair. Yeah, we can make your hair so big with one of those. It doesn't need help. I've been letting it grow out since we had the baby, and it's just getting oppressively large. And Becky's like, it's never going to fall down and be cool. It's just going to keep going out. I'm like, how do you know? And she's like, I've known you since you were 18.

Listen, you never know until you find out. Okay, can I say the one thing about the feeds in this story that is crazy? Please. Fantix, they basically, like, horsepower themselves into existence by paying influencers. So, Fantix...

It has 31,000 TikTok creators competing to make screwdriver social videos. 30% of the company's sales are from TikTok alone. It sold $25 million for their tools in just two years. It thinks it's going to hit $40 million for the sales just doing TikTok videos. Single videos get 21 million views and sell 13,000 screwdrivers. It's just an army of people taking free products from like influencer marketing campaigns and making ads for Fantic. And that is the business. It is crazy to me that you can just make a brand that way. I mean, yeah, if you have a huge amount of supply of almost anything to give away.

like I got like halfway down the road of reporting out a big story about the candy ecosystem on TikTok because it's another version of this thing where like there's this company Bon Bon that is just absolutely everywhere on TikTok trying to sell you candy and it is like I talked to a bunch of people who were like yeah I just started a company and said I have free candy on TikTok and all of a sudden like hundreds and hundreds of people were like I'll make a video about your candy in exchange for free candy and it's like if you have the thing to ship them and they get a commission if they sell it holy lord is it just gonna start to turn for you I mean and this is professional there are entire platforms that do this for brands Fantec has its own people. They have 30 people that just managed TikTok. And the estimates in Sean's story are there are multiple videos about new Fantec products that hit TikTok every hour. Wow. Wow. Like just an influx of ads. That's nuts. Ridiculous.

um all right my next one is a very short one um which is there's this new feature on threads that they're testing uh that you can start a post with dear algo and actually literally speak to the threads algorithm about what you want this was like a mini trend a while ago people would post like dear algo show me more basketball scores as a way of trying to like literally state to the algorithm what you want to see on the platform because people have no control over what they see on these platforms and Threads is now testing, just sort of making this explicit. This is from Connor Hayes, who is the head of Threads. And it says, when people add zero, I'll go to a post. It will tell your feed what you want to see more or less of for up to three days. If your profile is public, people can see your request, connect with you about it, or repost it.

fascinating. I have a hundred questions about this, but I have been, I have been on this show and in many other places saying for years, we need tools to tell algorithms what we want. Like we should not all be held to our basis desires and behaviors on platforms. And like, it's, it's sort of bleak and dystopian that it's dear algo that we've turned the algorithm into like a character. But I also think that's very telling about where we are in the world. Like if you're on YouTube, you spend a lot of time thinking about the algorithm as if it is like a person with a button who decides whether your video gets played or not. And this is the sort of thing I think we're going to start to see more of because it's.

People want more control. People have more places to go when it feels like the algorithm is getting away from them. So the sense that actually I can have some influence is going to go a long way towards making people feel better about being on platforms. But just the idea of me publicly posting, like, dear Algo, hot ladies, please? It's just that stuff is going to be everywhere. My entire algorithm is American flag bikinis and trucks jumping over stuff. It could be a little bit smarter. Dear Algo.

Stop this, please. My weirdest one is TikTok, which TikTok is the only platform that does not understand that I like technology. My TikTok is exclusively like it's like it's like stand up comedians and like sports stuff. And then like random influencers telling stories in the passenger seat of their car. Like that's my entire.

TikTok algorithm. YouTube is like, David loves gadgets and only gadgets and nothing else. Instagram is like, David just wants to see Marquez Brownlee's face 600 times a day. But I want to tell TikTok, like, I'm like, I'm sure there's some cool tech stuff you're having. Can you show me some of it? Have you tried searching for stuff and hitting the heart button? This is how you used to tell the algorithm what you like. You're like, no, I refuse to try anything. It's just, I, in my mind, the only page on TikTok is the For You page and I acknowledge the existence of no other project. You're not scrolling the STEM page, David? Come on, man. Look, here's a, I don't know if this is how this is built. The idea that you can build a dear algo and just sort of say stuff and it might react to you.

That's an AI victory. That's what that feels like to me. Absolutely. You have a natural language interface for a very complicated system of statistical probability that is ranking content from all around the world that has essentially no built-in semantic organization. That's a victory. Totally. I mean, I'll take that. And I'm guessing, right, you know, the sort of like threads targeting algorithm, the Instagram targeting algorithm, it's all the same advertising targeting.

So if you're an advertiser and you can be like, I want to hit these people with this content, it's a pretty easy flip for the people to say, I want to see more of this content. But you have to give them an interface that isn't like the crazy demographic targeting interface. It's smart. We should look into it. I'm guessing there's a hint of LLM in here that is actually quite interesting. I suspect so. Yeah, we should dig further into it. Connor, if you're listening, and I know that you are, get at me. Love to hear from you. All right, you get one more and then we're going to get out of here. And I'm only letting you do this because you pasted the most boring link into this Google Doc that I've ever seen in my whole life. And I would like you to defend why this belongs on our podcast. All right, it's a thermostat. Here's what I'm saying. It's the new Honeywell Home thermostat.

I will say it did surprisingly well on the website. It has a bad name. It's called the XAS. It's compatible with matter. It has room sensor. It's a touchscreen thermostat. It's also, it supports ring doorbells. So if someone rings your doorbell, the video pops up on the feed. Whatever. This is all a side note. The point I'm making is that it is crazy to me that it is now 2025. And I think the Honeywell thermostat is more compelling than the Nest thermostat. God.

First of all, there is rejoicing in Honeywell happening right now. I mean, we haven't plugged the thing. I don't know. It's ugly in a way. Whatever. But if you show these to two people, and you're like, this one will show you a ring doorbell, and it'll work with every smartphone platform because it's Matter, and then you show them whatever Nest, you're like, you're going to buy this one. I feel like this thing is actually kind of fine looking. I don't mind it. It's like a 2015 seven-inch Android tablet you glued to the wall. It's fine, but its set of capabilities is way more advanced than whatever Nest is doing right now. Jen was like, I'm going to write about this thermostat, and I was like, fine. I was like, wait, this...

This is like crazy that Nest is this far behind. God, it's also cheaper than the latest Nest. Yeah, this is a tough beat for Nest. It's rough. It's rough. Yeah. And I do think Jen and I share the theory that thermostats are still one of the most important like entry smart home gadgets and having a nice one goes a really long way. Yeah. Like a good smart thermostat is actually an incredibly nice like quality of life improvement in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean.

Ideally, they're like not even on the wall, you know? Fair. But I just mean for me, like if you were to be like, David, where has the smart home actively made your life better? The very first example that comes to mind is I can change the temperature of my house after we leave and then raise the temperature again before we come home. It's like, great, done. Just being able to change the temperature of my house from my phone is a victory. And then you start to add, you know, routines and you can do all sorts of other stuff on top of it. But like you start with the energy management stuff. That's pretty cool. I will say mine is a Honeywell and I have used the Resideo app.

And it's not good. It's not good. So this one doesn't use that app. It uses the First Alert app for some godforsaken reason. I don't know, man. None of this is good. All these companies are merging and unmerging, and they keep the old brand names because they think people care about the old brand. None of this makes sense. It connects to matter. You can just control it from Apple Home or Google Home. This is the point of matter. That's the dream. I'm just saying. The point here is, boy, Google blew it with Nest. That's Google. Gemini going great. Nest, less great. Can't win them all. By the way, if you have a Google Home and we have Google Homes, trying to figure out what you're paying for and what comes with what subscription.

It's like, and now you get monitoring of your Nest cameras. It's like, I don't have those. I just want this to be less stupid than it was yesterday. And then it's like, we made the voice Australian. It's like, that's not helpful either. Yeah. Google is back in a what if everything had a hundred names phase for everything right now too. And it drives me completely up the wall. Like there was a story the other day that was like, Google is thinking about merging AI overviews into AI mode. And I'm just like, I can't, I'm not even acknowledging that headline. Like I can't do it. I will not. And I will not address it. I can't even look at this sentence. It's just awful. It's very bad. All right. We've gone way over. Way over. We're going to get out of here.

Thank you to everybody for watching and listening. If you have things you'd like to, you know, call a code red on, send us an email, vergecasttheverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. I should say before we go that Version History Season 2 starts this Sunday. Google Glass is the first episode of this season. It was a lot of fun.

delightful episode full of us having feelings about our faces, which was very interesting. That is not going to be on the Vergecast feed, so you have to go subscribe to that. If you subscribe to The Verge, verge.com slash subscribe, you get all of our podcasts, including this one, and Version History, and Decoder, ad-free. People like ad-free podcasts, I would say, has been my main discovery of the last several months. So subscribe to The Verge. It supports everything that we do so we can keep yelling at Comcast about all of its stupid decisions.

This show is part of The Virgin of Vox Media Podcast Network. We are produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We are going to be back next week. You and I are doing some fun year-end stuff with Joanna Stern starting next week. So she's going to be all over the show for the next week or so. We're going to be back. There's just more news happening. Someday you and I are going to disappear into holidays, but that is not happening yet. Not yet. Not yet. We'll see you next time.

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