Offer me money. I'm 25 years old, and I finally understood that there's no book. The person who does not understand that is Elon Musk. Hard transition.
This is the only thing we're going to say about Elon Musk. They would promise me that we would say nothing about Elon Musk. Hi, I'm Elon, your friend. David Pierce is here in the studio.
Yeah. We're in person. Trans is not. No.
We think trans happens. The three of us have never been in the same place at the same time. Trans is on vacation. We're going to miss trans.
Addy Robertson's here. Hi. And later on, I'm Richard Robertson. Yeah.
Not in the studio. All right. Let's talk about one Elon thing, then we can move faster. So Elon gave an interview on CBC, talking to David Faber, who's a great reporter.
Actually, I think he did a good job of this interview. He's hard to get an interview, because he kept lobbying what appeared to be softballs and then letting Elon talk. Somebody interviews a lot of people. Like, I was watching the technique, and I thought it was very good.
There's one moment in this interview where he's like, should you tweet so much? You're hurting your companies. And Elon responds, and I must say this. I know every word of this movie by heart, but I'm misquoting The Princess Bride.
Badly. Let's just play the clip. Do your tweets hurt the company? Other Tesla owners just say, I don't agree with his political position, because, and I know it's because he shares so much of it.
He thought that for so long. Yeah, a long time. You know, I'm reminded of the scene of The Princess Bride. Great movie.
Great movie. I'm just right about that. Where he confronts the person who killed his father, and he says... He's going to do the voice right now.
Offer me money. Offer me power. I don't care. I don't care.
So you just don't care. You want to share what you have to say? I'll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it. Okay, so a few notes here.
One, if your moral philosophy is based on the movie The Princess Bride, you should be able to recall it faster than 25 minutes. Yes. Two, you should be able to quote the movie accurately. Can we play the correct clip?
I can't believe this is where we're out of our chest. Offer me money. Yes. Powerful promise me I can.
All the time. Please. Offer me everything I ask for. Anything you want.
I want my father back, you son of a bitch. You will know he doesn't say I don't care. He says something very different. I will say, if Elon Musk in that moment had said, I want my Twitter back, you son of a bitch, it would have been the greatest moment in Teller's Mystery.
It's just, your brain has to be a particular kind of Swiss cheese to be like, why do you tweet to the detriment of your shareholders, and then you misquote that scene, which is about vengeance for his murdered father, and you're like, this is why I say whatever the hell I want. It just doesn't make any sense. I can't formulate a version of this, that those two things are connected. I just, as a young fedora boy myself, you cannot be tough quoting The Princess Bride.
There's not a context in the world in which quoting The Princess Bride is a tough thing to do. I don't know, the I'm not left-handed thing continues to be a rad move that I pull on many people. When I'm typing, I type kind of bad, and I'm like, oh, I'm not left-handed. It's just a movie designed to make eight-year-old boys think they're tough.
It's written, it has a number of scenes that are exactly that. I'm not left-handed. Again, not a tough thing to say. All right, that's enough, Elon.
Now we've got a hard shift in the Supreme Court, which is super weird, but in a different way. They also quote The Princess Bride quite often. This is when you go to the Supreme Court, they're like, you have to watch this movie. I'll tell you a story from my youth.
My father had a conversion ban, an 80s conversion ban, amazing, and he brought it home, and he was very proud of this. He had a TV-VCR combo in the back, and then we would drive this thing in New Jersey like five times a year. It fell like five times a year. And my sister and I watched The Princess Bride in the back of this conversion ban 10 million times.
This is the only movie in there. And if you could just rewind yourself, if I could just go back in time and tell that young boy, one day, you will insult the richest man on earth with the knowledge you were gaining in this ban, it will be good. Prepare yourself for that. All right, let's talk about the Supreme Court.
Actually, today, breaking news. I don't think we were expecting this case to come down. Adi, the last time you were on the show, we were talking about two big cases around Section 230 that hit the Supreme Court. Gonzalez versus Google and Twitter versus Tamni.
They were both related to terrorism, but underlying them was, are these platforms liable for what is being published on them through this route of the anti-terrorism century? And the Supreme Court today said, why are you here, from what I gather? It did. So it basically performed a two-step, which is that one of these cases is about Section 230, and one of them is not.
The question in Twitter versus Tamni is, is a platform aiding and abetting terrorism if it, in Twitter's case, fails to remove content that is posted by terrorists, or if it maybe recommends something, which is what YouTube did. And so that's this question. And then Gonzalez versus Google says, well, if you assume that maybe it would be aiding and abetting, then does Section 230 protect the site from liability, or if it's doing something like recommending content, it isn't actually producing that, it doesn't become the speaker of it. And so what the Supreme Court decided was, look, the facts in this case involving Twitter and also involving Google, it just, you can't say this rises to the level of aiding and abetting.
They were just providing the same service they provide to billions of other people. And so this is just a ridiculous attenuation of the stockering. We can't say that they are liable. And so because of that, we don't have to touch Section 230.
And the person who wrote this meeting is Clarence Thomas, who wants to touch Section 230 so bad. So there was not actually a sign, there was nobody who signed the Gonzalez decision, which was the we won't touch 230 decision. And then yes, Clarence Thomas, the guy who was constantly like, we need to regulate what platforms say, wrote an entire long opinion about, first of all, the fact that, yeah, we should not say that this is illegal, they are not liable for this just because it doesn't rise to the level of aiding and abetting. And then there's also an interesting section that kind of gets to the heart of the recommendation question, where he decides that the problem for the people who are trying to sue these companies is that they can maybe point to content getting recommended, but the recommendation of the content itself is not supposed to promote terrorism.
Twitter doesn't have like a, hey, feed this person terrorism button. It has a thing that just recommends stuff you like. And from that point onward, it's this, as he describes it in a passive entity that just it hits a button, the button runs, the button turns out content, and maybe that content is terrorism related. So this is like a long road for him where he says over and over again, in his opinion, this is passive, they're not screening it, it's just happening, because there's another set of cases that are coming, the Florida and Texas content moderation cases, where I think the Thomas wing of the court wants to mess with Section 230 by saying these are like utilities and the government should be able to regulate what happens on them.
I am curious if that's what's going to happen in part because these cases are pretty strongly, the Texas and Florida cases described as First Amendment decisions, not Section 230 decisions. That the issue is whether companies have the right to say what goes on their site and whether it's compelled speech to make them put hate speech on there. And so, yeah, it's a really good question how that's going to intersect with 230, because in theory, 230 doesn't even necessarily come into this at all. With 230, this is the line.
I just like read Clarence Thomas' name on this opinion and I read this opinion, which people like, like sort of across the spectrum, people like, they got to the right answer. And then you read it and he keeps talking about how these are passive services and they're not exercising any discretion and it's all just happening on the internet. You can see the next jump is, and thus, the state of Texas should be able to insist that you don't moderate against stuff. Yeah, except that there is a parenthetical where he says, he does specifically point out, sometimes they remove it, which I think it is, yeah, it's an offhand remark, but it is one that he included and he's like, well, yeah, Twitter isn't promoting terrorism.
If it's doing anything, it's taking some of it down. And he doesn't say that as being a thing that strikes against the case. Yeah, well, and I'm wrong for thinking even that just taking sort of that stuff you're describing, like the hosting of that content and calling it passive and saying this is not them having an active role in it, that's not nothing, right? Like, it's not to the heart of the Section 230 debate, but where I feel so much of this is so new that even having the Supreme Court say, like, no, just so you know, having something on your website is not illegal, like, still means something at this moment in time.
And not just that, but producing something like a recommendation, which is not just this thing sits on your servers. True, yeah. The thing I've seen a lot of people question is whether this means that AI statutes, like whether you can't regulate something an AI produces because the AI is meant to, I don't know, be racist. Yeah.
And I think that's a pretty open question. I think that this case opens a bunch of AI questions. There's another case about Andy Warhol drawing off the Supreme Court rule against the Warhol state today, which is a big copyright decision that has further implications for AI. Yes.
So the Warhol decision is, I think we've talked about it before, it's about whether the state could take this photograph from this photographer of prints and then paint over it and make a sort of trademark Andy Warhol silkscreen print. And then whether you can claim fair use based on this one particular, it's a four-part defense of fair use and whether the fact that it is a commercial work, to what extent that should count against the Warhol estate. Because they were selling it. Right.
And the sort of example that they were pointing to in the decision is the fact that, say, when Prince died, there were a bunch of magazine covers and one of the magazine covers used Warhol's print in a way that did not have to credit or pay the underlying photographer. And so since one of the standards of fair use is, does this replace the original thing? This was their way of saying, well, clearly it does, because if you want a picture of Prince, then you're going to use this picture of Prince instead of this other picture of Prince. And the fact that one of them transforms it, like what that picture of Prince means, is not material to this really particular part of fair use.
So what comes up for me with this is every fair use decision is supposed to be case by case. So one shouldn't affect the other, the next one down the line. This means nothing in practice. Like fair use decisions like this happen, and there's a massive knock-on effect in the world of culture.
Famously, there's like the Blurred Lines case that went too far. And then just recently, there's the Ed Sheeran case. Marvin Gaye's estate is suing in both cases. Okay, well, technically, it was the other way around in the original Blurred Lines case.
It was Rob Dick suing Gay's estate. Because they asked for money first. Yes. So it's like a circle where Marvin Gaye's estate is like, we just want money.
Marvin Gaye, dead. Andy Warhol also get in this, but that's, yeah. Dead people are haunting us with copyright law. Anyhow, so the Blurred Lines case, it went too far.
Marvin Gaye's estate got paid. Same state soothes Ed Sheeran. They lose, and it gets recalibrated back a little bit. So you see this pendulum that's happening.
That's normally fine. There's some weirdness there. Whatever. You add generative AI to the mix of all of this.
And the Supreme Court's saying, hey, if you take this stuff, and you copy it, and you make a new thing based on it, and it replaces the existing thing, that's bad. You can't do it. And it's like, oh, that's all of chat GPT. That's up to be everything.
And particularly if you sell the thing. Yeah, and that's all of mid-journey. Like, somewhere on the fanfiction forums of the internet, a great cheer was raised when the Supreme Court handed off this any world decision, because that is like a culture war that is brewing in the artistic community right now. Yeah, which is then particularly weird when you mention fanfiction, because fanfiction, there has been this ongoing question of whether or not you can sell things against it, and whether you can monetize it.
And this is, I don't know, I have not spoken to people like the Organization of Transformative Works over this particular case yet, but this is maybe bad for that, too. There's this common misconception that fair use only works for non-commercial things, and I've been telling people, no, this is a misconception. You definitely can sell things that are fair use. And this seems like it is sort of making that less true.
Yeah, you can absolutely sell things that are, our entire website is a collection of fair use that we operate commercially. Like, we're like, here's some news someone made, and then we like, write about it. It's just like, inside a fair use, and then we sell ads against it, and like, I don't know, our other magazine sells it, but like, commercial fair use is a real thing. It just gets me, because I think the AI thing is making everyone, like, copyright maximalists is the word you would use.
And it's like, oh, this is the internet, where everyone is remixing everything all the time. And so to cut against your own interests here, because you're mad at AI, like, kind of shuts down everything you're doing. Like, do you want fanfiction to exist? Yes or no?
Do you want it to exist only if Disney says it can exist? Yes or no? Do you want it to exist if you pay Disney the right to write? Like, you just keep walking up the hill, and it's just like, I don't know if the world is right.
I mean, this just makes me think about the writer's track in Hollywood right now, right? And what they're betting, essentially, is that, like, the AI is going to get good enough very quickly that a lot of people are going to decide that it's worth just looping humans out entirely for commercial purposes. And now, like you said, you're one step past normal copyright stuff that we've talked about for many years. This is like, fair use on top of fair use on top of fair use, and when does it fall apart?
And it just is like, everybody I talk to is like, yeah, sure, there's other complicated stuff going on, but if we don't fight against the AI right now, it's all going to be moot because it will have just railroaded everyone out of their jobs before we get around to resolving the third one of these cases. I don't know if that's true or not, but it does be like, it has just set people's hair on fire in such a new way about all these issues over the last, like, eight months. Yeah. It's wild.
It's funny because, you know, we were expecting the Twitter and Google Supreme Court cases to be important, right? We covered them a lot. We covered them on the show. We were in detail on them, and the Supreme Court was like, meh.
I was actually wondering about that because I think, I remember, I was on parental leave and a lot of this was going down. I remember listening to the first cast that you guys did with Alex, and you were talking about basically the totally disastrous showing from the Gonzalez lawyers, who basically were like, anything that exists on the internet is illegal. This isn't great. And so it became very clear that they were kind of out over their skis on that one.
But it seemed like the consensus was that the Twitter case had a much more sort of relevant possibility to actually mean something and have a decision that meant something. And yet, both of these kind of came out. And I'm with you. It kind of feels like both decisions just amounted to like, nah, never mind.
Like, why did we take these in the first place? No, I think that the Twitter decision was actually important. One of the, I think it was Blake Reed, the Southern Flatirons tech policy expert, was saying that Twitter vs. Tamina is kind of an example of what happens.
It's like a warning for what happens if you get rid of session 230 is that suddenly you have to litigate all these incredibly hard, complicated single-use cases. And it is interesting that then eventually they just decided to shove everything on to that single-use case and say, look, yeah, this just doesn't apply. It turns out that you have to have some kind of real affirmative connection. But it's also, there are a billion of these cases suing web platforms for platforming like some terrorist organization or other.
And so I think this was actually a pretty relevant decision because it's all about the fact that just having these people on your platform does not automatically mean that you are liable for violating anti-terrorist laws. That's fair, yeah. But it just seems like of the cases we got today, they waved away the 231s, which could have been a disaster for the internet, left the door open for the Texas and California moderation cases to go a bad way. Right, because the line is going to be, what is passive and what is active?
That's right, I think that's right. How much can you do before you're doing stuff is very much the open question. And who knows? I don't know what he's going to do.
Do I have any sense about Amy Coney Barrett? Thanks for that. I just don't. Who knows what's going to happen?
In this Warhol case, very hotly anticipated, lots and lots of scholarship, lots and lots of writing, we've done it, Addy's done it. And it's like, oh, this case might be the thing that stops generative AI in its tracks. Now you've got a Supreme Court precedent. If your fair use of an original work takes over the market for that work, we're going to say that's too much.
And it's like, well, I don't know if you guys have used the tools. I'm also curious, like, obviously there's this four-part test. This is one of those four parts. The other issue is how much of the work you're using.
And that's where I think generative AI gets really complicated because, okay, maybe the extreme case is you use it to generate a precise picture of prints that looks almost exactly like prints, but isn't technically prints. That's its own case. And that seems like, I don't know, the most nightmarish copyright thing that might not be fair use. But I don't know, if you're just generating any image in the world using a generated, like a data set that includes someone's work, at what point do you get to sue and say, because I was part of this data set, this person is stealing from me?
Which is a thing that I hear lots of people who don't like generative AI say all the time. Like, these people are literally stealing from me personally because I have a picture in this data set or because I wrote a fan fiction that got scraped. So there's the people saying it, and there's the big companies saying it. So every publisher, News Corp is saying it.
Yeah, it is. It is doing stability. That's basically their argument. Just down the line, Hollywood writers are...
effectively saying this right we wrote this stuff you're gonna put an ai so the four factors are the purpose and character of your use the nature of the work which is real fuzzy yeah the amount or substantiality of the portion used and then the last one the effect on the market for each one so i'm just saying if you can type i want a picture of prince in the mid-journey and it's something that was trained on a getty set and then you use that cover magazine instead of licensing getty getty wins under this ruling i think well listen realize on the idea that all pictures of prints are from getty like if you have a data set that's trained on just i don't know a lot of people took pictures of prints how does getty prove that okay we're the ones who created this thing that then they're drawing from like that seems like it comes to the question of like the amount used yeah it does and i think getty's answer in the case is like you're generating a but i would say the twitter case we thought would be this lightning bolt and this kind of we'll see what happens it's nothing right now and this warhol case i think it's going to throw a loop into the generative ai conversation in a very serious way yes potentially yeah it's always with our nation's government who knows what will happen this is my dream david's nightmare my dream we're only one segment in and we've done the princess bride and we've got copyright like this is neil's greatest i have to say for door boys it's everything i've ever wanted we've had the unmarkery reference the last thing we're out of here this is another thing that when we were walking in david challenged me to put a percentage on how much this will matter montana passed a law last night like in the evening like at 6 30 p.m a little earlier by their time he's like a sunset signing ceremony governor was like i hereby ban tiktok and he said it's because it's a chinese company it's scraping our data the law specifically i think bans tiktok from being distributed in app stores yes or i'm making scare quotes here operated so if you open tiktok you're operating it well that's the question that's a real question whether okay so opening the app or making the app available is explicitly operating one thing we don't know about is whether the web interface is operating okay like if you visit tiktok.com and we should be clear users no one's getting sued over this it does not apply to users but if you visit tiktok.com from inside montana is that tiktok operating in montana and therefore tiktok's gonna get punished for that i'm a little nervous on that yeah and i don't think tiktok knows i don't think apple or google knows i don't think the governor of montana knows but he passed this he signed this bill saying tiktok no longer operates in montana it does not go into effect until january 2024 so you got six months or so a little over six months what happened i mean there's immediately lawsuits right i'm actually wondering about that because there's one other possibility in well there are two other cases in which this law never comes into effect and we never see it the first is that congress passes a law that's nationwide that bans tiktok does something similar so if congress yeah so if congress passes the restrict act then they're just like yeah never mind we're tiktok's again we don't care uh we don't care about our state's law and so then they never have to deal with it and then the other option is that if tiktok is sold to a company or spun off somewhere that is not run by or in china then this law also goes off the books and so i think those are two possibilities and i'm wondering if those possibilities are going to be strong enough that people decide they don't want to sue that seems like a median option but i think that would be a pretty big bet and so yeah they're almost certainly gonna be lawsuits the people i would lean i would expect it's possible tiktok would file one it's also very plausible that a group of users would do that that is actually how the wechat lawsuit went to court after trump tried to ban it was that all of these users got together and said this is infringing on our free speech rights and so then a judge actually provisionally sort of agreed with them and so it's possible we'll see i don't know the aclu file a suit that says yeah collects tiktok users and says these this is infringing on our rights networks is the other organization it's a trade group that ends up filing a lot of lawsuits against state cases uh state laws and so it's possible they will also do something i just can't imagine why they wouldn't because on the one hand i mean it really seems to me like every single action happening right now is designed to force a sale because there's just either a bunch of technology exists to geofence the app store in a way that i don't understand or what montana is proposing is to essentially punish apple for tiktok existing which seems like a mess because what you're saying is like if you're gonna have tiktok in your app store or let people who have iphones or in google's case android phones use tiktok we're gonna penalize you that's a real weird move especially when google and apple have like pretty big levers they can pull to make users in montana very mad at the government who's doing this so i just if you play this all the way out it doesn't make sense to me how this works and there's been no real communication from the state of montana how any of this is gonna work so i have to imagine everybody just the governor's brother has a company called big buck right he's just hoping it's like fine we're merging with big block yeah now the governor owns tiktok basically yeah they're like it's it's a big you know political win in a moment where everyone's worried about china and there's a lot of things about tiktok and everybody's talking about you know half of americans and you just get to keep trying to push this thing down the road of let's sell tiktok and everybody who's part of this gets to take yet another victory lab but in the meantime like that's a big thing to do it's going to take a long time to do january 2024 is not that far away and it seems i don't know when i asked me like this i was like what do you think there's like a five percent chance that this happens and his response was basically like well everything is pure chaos so who knows and that's fair and so if i'm someone interested in making sure that tiktok continues to exist in the state of montana and everywhere why wouldn't you just immediately start yelling loudly to any judge who will listen about free speech i feel so the pessimistic take is that everyone has this kind of it can't happen here feeling where they believe that something is too outlandish to actually come to pass and it's already there and so everyone's like yes i want somebody else to stop it this is so ridiculous no one would ever like want this to happen and then comes january and it's happened is it also possible that it's a tough look to be on the side of tiktok right now i think that tiktok you are if you're siding with it you are not only siding with china i'm putting square quotes around everything you are also siding with big tech and so yeah i think that there's also it's possible no one wants to take a reputational hit that's a handful of like younger democratic congress people can talk to them during the tiktok hearings right like it's a tiny pocket of people who are like this seems like a government over yeah but they don't seem to have any power in that situation like they have very low risk the other thing i've heard is that it's kind of it's all chilling effects that the goal isn't even necessarily to say we will literally crack down on tiktok for being in montana it's just to try to make apple and google drop it by making it toxic like that you're never gonna have to actually sue them you're never gonna have to technically punish them you're just gonna get them to kick tiktok off and then it's you know gonna be pretty debilitated so this is really interesting because apple and google don't they don't have this ability right now they can block apps the country but they've never built the infrastructure to say we know you're in montana and so we're going to block this app from being downloaded in montana i think the goal is that they would just pick them off in general so you think that the governor of montana is like i will ban tiktok in the united states of america because apple can't figure out how to allow it's like the flip side of their rights where it's like once one state yeah everybody has to follow along because i don't want to make you have a bunch of states that are saying we just want to try to ban tiktok then yeah there's all this pressure on apple and google to just kick it out and then you don't have to worry about all the incredibly wonky geofencing stuff because it's just gone you have to go to www.tiktok.com or side vote it on your extremely powerful mobile web browser that certainly loves you using that's actually another really interesting piece of the puzzle right what does it mean to operate in the state do the ISPs of montana have to no this was part of the bill earlier it was part of the original draft that ISPs had to they had the same punishments that app stores have and then i got caught by the bill maybe because everyone's like this is a little too great firewall yeah yeah and so now tiktok just has to proactively block itself from being served montana yes amazing super great i love this bill i'm saying 50 50 if i'm tiktok i'm assuming if i'm apple and i'm google i'm thinking about the net choices of the world filing a lawsuit on my behalf saying this is a weird restraint on trade like gin up some complaints about that sort of idea the other wrinkle with montana is that so the respect act and some other places make this kind of pretense of yeah it's a tiktok punishment but actually it's just any company that's a threat to us montana's like no tiktok you have tiktok here which raises really specific issues legally because you're not supposed to make a law that is just essentially trying to replicate punishing one company i'd like to ban me live from the state of montana it was a great weekend oh and we should note that they also expanded their government device band to include telegram timu and we watch the app for timo it's the shopping app for billionaires you shop a billionaire boy boy you should ban that that was too sexy that's all i gotta say too many people whispering about you feeling like a billionaire weird it was like the spice girls did an e-con or something i don't know how to describe it david you talked to hank green notable montana creator and tiktoker about this band yeah he was kind of non-plussed when we go to break we should play a few minutes of my job because he was really interesting but he was saying basically that he's in a good position because he's somebody who has a big audience on platforms that the real people who would be hurt and affected by this are smaller creators who have really been on tiktok in a big way he also posited that what will happen is people will just like drive to idaho and get tiktok and then come back it'll be like going to the grocery store you just like go out download tiktoks and come back and he was kind of reminded like how on earth would you possibly enforce this and is this actually going to turn into anything but the point that he made that i thought was really interesting was to your big back point there's this idea right now that you can just like rip and replace tiktok that if we just boot tiktok out of america we have youtube shorts and we have we can't do rip and replace either we should we also can't rip and replace we tried that with huawei and that hasn't worked either but if you just kick it out that something will replace it everybody wants to go to be an american-owned company and everybody wins and that's just not how it works like tiktok has this very specific culture with different kinds of users doing different things and seeing different things and having different kinds of experiences than anywhere else and even if you just suddenly were like tiktok is that long-lived big box it doesn't work like that and our options are either have tiktok or don't have tiktok right there is no third option well so it's just playing in two ways right now i think really interesting one directly related to google.io saw a bunch of people and i said where's the culture of youtube shorts totally like i understand what the culture of tiktok is to some extent because instagram has a strong culture unto itself even instagram reels has like a vibe to it it's a very low rent vibe but it's kind of lifestyle it is the thing that is it's just it's just a desperate craven vibe yes yeah and then youtube shorts is just like just shoveling in boots of anything that was successful on the other platforms and it's like it doesn't have an identity and it's the thing that should win it's the thing that makes the most sense and they haven't figured out and they're kind of like yeah and the other one that's really interesting is blue sky right which is as much of a clone of twitter as you can get and there's a lot of parts that we talked about this there's a lot of parts of it that are just twitter again and then you see there's a whole new culture emerging on that platform and maybe it will survive maybe who knows what happened but it's not just it's twitter again right like very actively people are like we don't want to do this again so if you get rid of tiktok yeah maybe everyone will go youtube shorts but it will never be the thing again and some people just quit and some people will choose to use it differently and i agree that that particular piece of the puzzle is like once you have a big vibrant network it either lives or dies you can't port it somewhere else it is bizarre that people have been are saying that given that i thought that network effects was just the thing that everyone talked about that was all that mattered online for years no the internet is just no one understands it it's a series of tubes and vertical videos one more thing to talk about really quickly with adi sam altman was in front of congress this week they seemed to love it boy boy genius really wooed the members of congress yeah they asked if he wanted to run a regulatory agency will you be in charge and his answer from my gather was yes he said i love my job my current job it's okay that's what you say right before he quit your job i think james vincent who has a piece going up on this called it chummy yeah so yeah he was the sort of anti-zuckerberg so they want to regulate ai they don't have the the weird first amendment problems they do like they don't know that government famously failed to regulate social media they famously failed to pass even privacy laws in this country i think one of the reasons they regulate social media is they just couldn't they just couldn't figure out the first amendment they're like boy this thing's at some point both trump and biden were like yeah let's we should just do some speech regulations like yes on both sides of the other then this first amendment's really pesky we'd like to tell what to do and they couldn't figure it out which i think is on the whole good on the ai side like this is a threat to humanity we know what to do here we're going to do export regulations we're going to ban the chips we're going to a good fake acronym it's very good uh it is very sci-fi it's reddick player one it's right yeah yep but there was this this notion that like this should definitely be regulated like i'm building technology that i'm not comfortable with it should be regulated so if i tried it should be regulated obviously microsoft's very close with my eye they feel the same way it seems like that's coming and they're more open to it in a way that the social media companies were always like i don't know the number of times mark zuckerberg i mean like facebook ran ad campaigns like dear god please regulate us and i think they knew that they were always going to be one step ahead and if i'm if i'm going to be cynical about samuel and he's sitting there being like he's not saying like please regulate us he's like getting back in his chairs like yeah regulate us what are we gonna do the thing james pointed out is that also he was saying yeah we should be regulated because in the future we might do really dangerous things you know in the future going forward the sort of counterpoint is that there's the ai act right now going through uh in the eu and it focuses a lot on really present day harms there's things like surveillance or like face recognition and this didn't really get that much of a hearing earlier this week in the us that a lot of it is these kind of big apocalyptic scenarios and they're potentially skipping over the things that might work happen right now before ai becomes sky net yeah and sam altman to his credit has done whether you know honestly or as a pr move a very smart job of loudly saying he's worried about those things too so and i think that's the part that's different about social media right because congress is sitting up there saying social media is bad and the ceos are like no social media is a universal good that connects people to each other in this one sam altman is able to sit there and say i'm worried about all the same things that you are i'm not perpetuating them but maybe someday in the future things will get bad so let's work on it together and he has at least like an ounce more credibility than the social media the difference though is that social media one of the reasons they can't say will prevent any bad use is because a lot of this is up to users but social media is a tool used by a lot of people and if you can't let people do what they want to some extent on social media you don't have a product in ai i think that there is really you can say yeah we're gonna have these very circumscribed uses we will control absolutely everything you can do with ai us as open ai we will tell you exactly what you're able to say with these tools we will tell you exactly what pictures you can generate there's not really the same downside there so of course they can tell congress like we will control exactly how this is used and if it's something bad we'll stop it yeah i mean we're already seeing like sure i said already they're seeing their ai used in ways they couldn't predict and didn't know about it's like this stuff is that's pretty normal but the point is they can stop that is that they can see something and they'll say you'll do that and then they can just shut that down whereas if you do that enough in social media then it no longer really feels like a thing that you were able to meaningfully do anything with as a user true yeah it is it is different in the sense that it's like the social media is that this person to person and the platform is sort of underneath trying to solve it afterwards there's a dial labeled horny and if jack dorsey had a dial on twitter and he turned it down too low twitter would die so this like tiktok ban in montana has been brewing for a while you're a person who makes tiktoks from montana has this like changed your life have you been thinking about this at all like what do you do when this is happening honestly it seems like i think that we're mostly talking about because it's a good sounding headline it's like montana first date to ban tiktok like because it ties into the broader narrative of a very important conversation i'm not saying it's not important but i do think that it is mostly news because it ties into the broader conversation rather than this thing itself being news for a few reasons but mostly the big reason is it seems unlikely to actually happen that's basically right so let's play this out a little bit so it's we've got you know seven months eight months however long it is until this comes into play for you as a person who is you know increasingly invested in tiktok for the audience here what do you think about even if there's a two percent chance that tiktok goes away and this is sort of the broader us band of tiktok in general right this is i know you think you've talked about but how do you sort of hold the idea in your head that this is a remote possibility but it's not not a possibility it is a possibility well what i'll do is if it seems possible i'll go get a new phone that day and i'll download tiktok onto it and then i'll have that phone for a few years and tiktok will be a zombie app like i won't get updates on it so that'll be a problem but i'll keep making content and and i'll keep uploading it like i'm like probably the person we should be talking about this because like one i have a well-established audience and i've like i'm well diversified among a bunch of social media platforms which is tricky to do and it's taken me 15 years but i've done it but there's a lot of tiktokers for who this is a much bigger deal and that is both because like maybe their phone's old and they can't afford a new one and it's going to get out and like six months in they won't be able to get tiktok to drive to idaho which isn't i mean depending on where you live it can be quite it could be a distance to get out of montana for me it's about an hour i kind of like the idea of like having to drive an hour to do tiktok well just download the app but then you drive back and then you can use it again i'll just go to idaho like when i'm california i'll update the app and i'll fly home you know like the entire idea of geofencing the app store is very strange like i don't know if they if anyone knows how to do that or whether that's even possible do you think that's possible you know more about that than i do if it makes you feel better even the lawyers you talk to they don't know either which is part of why i think this is such an interesting moment because it's a series of it's so weird untested things that no one has ever had to answer before and it's like is it likely to get through even if you consider each one of these toss up is it likely to get through every single toss up probably not but again like never rule out the weirdest outcome this is what we live in now who's to say so but back to what you're saying about being a diversified creator who's a little less worried about it than what do you say to those people i'm sure a lot of them ask you like hank what am i going to do if tiktok gets banned what do you tell those people like go you know find a time machine go back 15 years and make this thing called syshow it's pretty cool uh it'll work really well for you i mean it's the same conversation that i have all the time like for completely different reasons people lose their tiktok accounts all the time tiktok is is a very weirdly moderated place people lose accounts with millions of followers and there is no recourse there's no person to email there's nothing you can do vpappas and i like go back a bit and if a friend of mine says to me hank my tiktok account got banned for no good reason they said i was 13 but i'm a 45 year old man or something like seriously there's no one i can email to fix that you know you're sort of building your house or your business on somebody else's land when you're making on social media platforms always you know and like youtube changes its rules and they change how the algorithm works and they change how advertising works and they start demonetizing things and like all this stuff happens and like it has really big impacts on people's businesses and then a lot of times those businesses close down and there's nothing to do about it because you built your house on somebody else's land so that that's not that new honestly so it's a very similar conversation i do say to all creators all the time try and develop close direct connections with your audience whether that's through newsletters or through patreon or those are two really good ways to do it and also diversify across platforms if you can but that's very hard to do yeah it's interesting to me that like the way you describe it is even as it becomes more work tiktok is still worth the effort and i just can't stop thinking about like there's definitely going to be if this all comes out the way that it might there's gonna be like a black market for phones that have tiktok installed and like that's insane what a bizarre world there's a black market for driving to wyoming like like i don't know like is it how is the geofence work is it's not on the individual phone i wouldn't think i think it would be based in like vpns and i don't know it seems like there's gonna be ways to get around it but i do like the idea of a black market tiktok phone where i'm like scrounging around i'm on craigless being like i'm hank green i'll pay ten thousand dollars for a tiktok phone right and somebody's like i have a i have a 2012 ipad that runs it do you want that you're like okay i'll take it it's all just out there i did this with like my macbook once where like they got rid of the sd card slot and i was like i'm just gonna keep buying old macbooks until they bring that back because i'm not gonna live that dongle life but at what point does it become not worth the trouble because it seems like part of all of this is just to make tiktok harder and more annoying and if you can sort of make it what does that point look like i mean it's gonna be really different for different people like for example for me my audience i have a great kind of content for youtube shorts like people on youtube like the kind of content that i make but like tiktok is very culturally different and the thing that we don't do a good job of understanding is that social media platforms are not the code they are not the algorithm they are the cultures that exist there and like there are ways that the platform influences the culture and ways the culture influences the platform is much more complicated than we then to give credit for and you won't you can't recreate that culture it's like it's like trying to take you know the gillman street punk scene and move it to poise like it's just not gonna happen like it becomes much easier and better to use youtube shorts and much harder and worse to use tiktok what that will create is new cultures on youtube shorts but it will not be a direct port it will be a it will be a moment of cultural destruction which is like a big deal and i don't think that we give it credit for the bigness of that part of the deal like culture is important and it's a very strange thing for i don't think that the people writing these blogs have any idea the impact that they could have hey i'm happy shell comedian writer and floating head you may or may not have seen on your for you page and i'm starting a brand new podcast wait wait don't swipe away it's called that sounds like a lot as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning you read three headlines and immediately think oh that sounds like a lot i can't deal with all this but guess what i can deal with it and i'm gonna get into it every friday i'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world then i'll sit down with a comedian you can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying maybe an actor like feminism is on too far you go why it's on the sadie hawkins dance maybe a filmmaker just leaving that show i'm challenged to sparing i just gotta hang out and try to be a politician basically anyone who responds to my cold dms we're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio so yes you can watch it on youtube or you can listen wherever you get your podcast this is not the place to get the news but this is the place to feel a little better about it that sounds like a lot part of the box media podcast network i'm maria sharapova and i'm hosting a new podcast called pretty tough every week i'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition work ethic and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness we'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives actors entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey follow pretty tough wherever you get your podcasts all right we're back inconceivable we just took a two-hour long ad break so that we could watch the princess bride it's a good movie i'm just saying it's for children and you cannot be tough i will watch it today good that's gonna happen you're gonna see some stuff as an adult that you just missed as a child i'm sure that's true it's just very true and we're back richard lawler is here hey good to be back fan favorite richard lawler is here we've heard the request they've heard most of them were from me but okay richard just calls the hotline once a week with a new voice saying where's richard yeah it's good stuff it's an ai voice no i don't use ai because ai is evil but there you go see it's a culture wars here you can't replace richard man the robot all right we gotta talk about some gadgets it was a petty conversation just now yeah and now we're gonna talk about the stupidest tv ever made but david loves the next tv that i own is what you meant to say so get into it man the telly talk about it okay so this thing's called telly which first of all unbelievable name it's a new company created by one of the pluto tv which is like the one of the fast ads for streaming tvs and its thing is basically they're going to give you the tv for free and in exchange they're going to have a second screen below your tv that's like a wide sort of chiron looking thing about the third the height of the tv which is why that is just for showing you ads so you essentially you get a free television and an ad bar in your house that is just a billboard that lives in your house while you watch tv there are a bunch of other weird things about this tv many other weird things so so many but i just i just want to tell you my two favorites um it's a 55 inch 4k tv that's good um it has no built-in streaming stuff so in addition to shipping you a tv they will also ship you i believe it's an android tv wait wait wait it's not it's not a smart tv in the specs they're like built-in streaming stick and i thought they were just no it's just it's just built into the box i thought they were just trying to mute the people where they are you know like it's just a dongle that plugs in i don't know what it is but it is just a dongle that plugs in oh that's so good i bet there's something like a patent thing where like if it's in the tv they have to pay an extra buck and they're just trying to shave every single dollar off to it so that it can be free i suspect you're right yeah and then the other thing which we'll get to in a minute is that it has the worst and jankiest privacy policy in the history of we will come to this but i have not looked at the television i don't know i'm all in on this thing you love it my basic thesis here is that a two screens is actually an extremely good idea i just have like a cnn style chyron just showing me sports scores david just had a kid he misses being at the airport in the bar that's what i'm getting from this conversation this explains a lot about a lot of things just show me who's yelling about politics on the bottom and then it's all ads anyway like watching tv now it's full of ads you on youtube you watch ads there's a bunch of ad news this week about how popular ads are and ads are coming back so i'm like whatever give me one more ad and you're gonna give me a tv for free i'm super stuck on the streaming stick situation okay so it says 4k streaming stick included which again i just read is like we're meeting the walmart buyer where they are right no they literally mean included let me read you from uh emma roth wrote a story about this and she said unlike this is the most like understated burn of all time i love it unlike most mainline smart tv operating systems telly os amazing name currently doesn't support third-party streaming apps like netflix that's why telly comes bundled with a free 4k android tv dongle that you can use to watch whatever streaming service you want right because they don't need to worry about universal search or other stuff for any deals because they're just running ads on the bottom of the tv correct they build ironically a dumb tv with ads okay well so then here's my next question because it has on the spec sheet it's labeled future-proofed yeah and it's evidence of being future-proofed is quote modern hardware that's all it says powerful chipset again all it says frequent updates bringing new and better experiences like ai and smart home control sure and then down to the bottom another box they ship yep and then it has a camera yep and a mic array the camera is an hd camera no specs for video calling fitness interactive gaming unclear where any of that runs it's not important it's for that it's for that it can't do that and then it says mic array with quote hey telly voice control no lord so this thing is running some software yes but just not streaming apps not the software that you want that you have to make these deals for it and it has a motion sensor for wake up and interactive games they think they built a nintendo e with ads and also to make sure that you are sitting there watching the ads that's what it is right so they're like their advertiser said we will only pay for this we know for sure that somebody's actually sitting there watching television and they said oh crap we have to put a camera on everybody's tv and a microphone to make sure that they're actually in the room what weird features can we invent such that we can put these in there okay so again if you opt out of sharing your viewing and activity data this is what it says in the privacy policy unfortunately that means you will no longer have access to the services and must return the television or you can pay $500 i'm going to so immediately pay the $500 just to have this weird tv in my house someone's going to hack it it's going to be cool and they're going to put like subway information on it and stock tickers without their services and i'm thinking like ultra widescreen gaming on the bottom but if this tv costs $500 and it has two screens on the sandbar and then do you know how shit this man has to be you get two leds yeah i'm in love with this i love the audacity i love a new product if you're at old head like me you remember this thing called the qcat from a long time ago this is like an old internet controversy richard's nodding his head richard was on slash on the qcat they handed out like barcode scanners to people and you're supposed to like barcode scan print magazines and then it would like take you to what i don't know what they're supposed to do people immediately hacked these barcode scanners like qr codes before qr codes david where were you in 1999 when this was going down i mean this was like a big deal that people were hacking the barcode scanners that were hanging out for free like this was all over the new york times and wall street journal this was the story of the 2000s and then people like what's the story of the 2000s like other than a few other things yeah it was like the qcat and then like bush v gore you know it was like somewhere in there a talented young artist named britney spirit released her first single but overshadowed by the qcat anyhow people started hacking it and not using like weird diriam software and the company freetown started suing everybody oh wow and i'm i don know richard i saw this thing and i saw that screen on the bottom and i was like oh this is this is a massive qcat situation people are going to take this they're not going to pay for it they're never going to sign up for the services they are immediately going to hack it because it's a janky version of android like the most hackable thing that's ever been created and they're going to be like i've got myself a free two-screen tv and this company is going to lose their mind there's no chance this succeeds no they're going to be in business for like 15 minutes but that's long enough for me to sign up to get one of these televisions and that's all right we gotta talk about the privacy policy okay go ahead this is your this is your tv as far as i'm against you're the ceo of the company so uh credit to shashana woodinsky for being the first one to find this in telly's privacy policy i believe it's not there anymore but it was briefly one of the things it talks about is the personal data of children right it's obviously super regulated what you can do with personal data of children and if you have a large television in your home odds are if there's also a child under 13 they're going to see it so they have to have a rule about this so they go through all this stuff if you're under 13 you can't have an account you shouldn't have personal data we're not collecting personal data and then it says if we learn we have collected personal data from a child under 13 years of age we will delete that information as quickly as possible and then a parenthetical that i am quite confident was not meant to be in the whole version and it's clearly written by a lawyer says parentheses i don't know that this is accurate do we have to say we will delete the information or is there another way around this 10 parentheses like literally the most saying the quiet part loud that's ever happened in the history of the world the company wrote to us we have a long statement from dallas lawrence telly's chief strategy officer he says uh it's all out of context it's literally it's right the context is right there it could not be more in context they published an early version of the policy the tv is only meant to be used by people who are over 18 which natural for television which they prove with the camera that watches you all the time they've changed it i'm just saying this thing should read up on the qcat if you want to know what's going to happen with the belly it's the thing that happened with the qcat this company has an entire business model based on tracking and advertising but they built a piece of hardware that they have no shot at locking down rich are you going to buy one of these and by buy i mean allow yourself to be given one for free no um i don't know if you can see here i have too many tvs already otherwise i would go let's go i may be you know on a restriction when it comes to display that's for the best but this is like this is the business model for all tv makers this has been basically giving away tvs for years their tv business makes no money the business that sells subscriptions and advertising makes money telly is just doing it with more screens like i don't see the downside well the downside is that a 500 panel is not going to be good when you describe full array backlighting this doesn't mean two like a flash lighting one array single array backlighting that's fair it's true every tv maker we get this question all the time all the time people are asking us why can't i just buy a monitor and plug my apple tv into it and the answer is you can and you can go out in the market and buy it they're hard to find and it costs thousands upon thousands of dollars because the architecture of subsidizing tv is not included every time you sign up for an app on roku roku gets a piece just like on your phone every ad that's delivered on roku roku gets a piece that's it but remember when peacock came out and was on roku's they were arguing over ad serving this thing is like that seems hard another display just a whole ass other i remember when vizio was going to go public they're going to have an ipo and they released this document obviously for investors about their business and all their opportunities and they mentioned this little section in there about this company called inscape that was their big plan to make money and i'm ready i was like i've been reporting on vizio for years and i've never heard of this thing and that's because they had never talked about it really and that was and after that they got sued because everyone found out what they were doing yeah so they back off of that that was years ago since i've gone public but every tv on the market today can do acr automatic content recognition and tell people what you're watching it's just a thing you go turn off i haven't turned off my tv i don't even want my tv to connect to watch you know you get a monitor you buy a smart tv you never let it connect to watch that's what i did i like i went into the euro settings and it was like do you want to let this tcl thing connect to the internet it's like nope nope so now i have a bit my lg oh yeah it hates it yeah let me connect to the internet anyhow i can't wait for you to see excited. And I can't wait for the people on Reddit to figure out how to hack this bottom display. I think it's legal for me to say that. I'm not saying you should do it.
I'm not saying I'm doing it. I've never used a computer in my life. I'm just saying I anticipate the day that someone might do it. It's literally inevitable.
It's just gonna happen. Inconceivable. Time for these Echo Buds. And it'll be too big for headphones.
Chris Walsh is on a roll here. Yeah. Richard, what do you make of these Echo Buds? So Amazon, as I just want to do, came out with a bunch of new stuff.
New Echo Pop, little colorful looking smart speaker that looks kind of like the second Echo Dot and just chopped it in half. And then the Echo Buds, super cheap, like prototype-y looking things with no design or interesting features whatsoever, but they're like $40 wireless headphones. So I can't be that mad at them. I don't know.
What do you make of all this? They should have just called these the Amazon Basics Buds? Yes, that's absolutely right. Because then we all would have understood how to take this.
You can put Alexa in it, you can do whatever, but you put Echo on it and then you say $50 and you show me these that have no branding. If you saw them sitting on the table, you have no idea what Buds they were. You understand that yes, these are earbuds in the most generic sense. And I'm sure they're probably fine.
Amazon Basics. Yeah, I really, I'm a big believer in cheap ones like this because I think we're entering a point where like if you want to spend $150 or more, you're like absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to wireless earbuds. There's so many good ones out there. The AirPods are good.
The new Beats ones are great. Like Sony makes good ones. JBL makes like there's tons of good ones out there. But the low end stuff and most of the people I know who don't want to spend that much money on headphones there, but then they're like, I literally can't find ear pods anymore.
So like, what do I buy? I'm stuck buying wireless headphones. So I'm like, it's like that these exist, but like you couldn't design these less than they are currently designed. This is, if you just imagine, close your eyes, don't close your eyes for driving, but pull over and close your eyes and imagine the most boring, nondescript wireless headphones you've ever seen in your life.
And the Echo Buds are like 40%. It's really kind of incredible. Do you remember the first Chromebook, the CR48, where Google was like, we made this black rectangle that is not at all interesting. And we don't know what to do with it.
So we're just going to give them to you for free if it's not for Prime. Yeah, they'll just come in every box from now on. But the Beats Studio Buds Plus look amazing. They do look amazing.
Richard, you're the headphone guy in general? Not so much, but I do have the Beats Studio Buds. Love them. I think that they are Apple's secret plan to get data from Android users.
I know a lot of people who use Android, and I know myself. This is probably the Apple product that I most quickly, most eagerly bought, and then I bought these new Beats Studio Buds Plus too. Yeah, so the deal with the Plus, right, is basically they're just, they have this amazing looking translucent design. They look great.
Like the pictures of Chris Fox with his review are beautiful, and the headphones look fantastic. But otherwise, it's just like it's the Studio Buds, but like everything is slightly better now, right? Yeah, slightly better processor, slightly better case with a little bit bigger battery, better active noise cancellation, better, you know, listening to you, all of those things. But it's still the same.
Okay, and how do they fit? The one thing that has always worried me, and I've never actually used these myself, but they seem, they're very small. Like, they don't have the stem that the AirPods do. They just, they're kind of a little circle that sticks in your ear, yeah.
One of the reasons I like these in particular, because I also got the Pixel Buds around the same time, like with my phone. And those would always fall out of my ears, like just for no reason. These tiny never fell out of my ears. They could do anything.
And they just, they felt good. I could sit there and listen to podcasts for however long I wanted to. And I immediately got the Studio Buds Plus, or I will once I go pick them up. Yeah, they look really good.
Like, like just for aesthetic purposes alone. I kind of want to buy them. They're 169 bucks. They also come in regular colors, but the clear model is the only way to go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, don't get regular colors. You gotta look at these feathers. We'll have in a car.
We'll take Christmas photos. If you find a bunch of vintage clear gadgets, it's good. If you existed in the 90s, you know why. I had the clear, you can.
You know what I'm saying? I'm hopeful that this translucent design thing is coming back. Yeah. I would love to see all kinds of stuff like this.
Like Apple, make the next iPhone. This like frosted translucent thing. I mean, sold. That would be amazing.
Right? Like straight up, like Bondi blue translucent. Yeah, it'd be amazing. Some people haven't like them.
They don't have wireless charging. They don't have like the in-ear sensors. I think to automatically know when you take them out of your ear or things like that. So that's something that you absolutely cannot live without.
They may not do it for you. But yeah, I'm willing to plug these in for 20 minutes once a week to charge them. Yeah, I never wireless charging. Can we just talk about the ear detection thing for a sec?
Do you guys use the ear detection? Do you turn it on? No. No, I turn it off.
I think ear detection is like the single most annoying software feature that exists on any device that I own. I turn it off immediately. Because it's one of those things that's like, okay, if I have two on, one of the nice things about wireless headphones is that I can take one of them off, talk to somebody or listen to something or whatever, and then put it back in. And for it to just pause and unpause and pause and repause and unpause every time I move.
And then it's like, if you move your head slightly too fast, it thinks you took it out, it's just awful. And to me, it's like, it's like the thing that Apple does where when you walk into your house, Apple is like, do you want me to switch devices? Just let me manage my headphones. I'm good.
If I wanted to pause, I would press the button. Yeah, I just literally all I have to do is tap my ear. Like, it's gonna be fine. When I'm reaching out to take it out of my ear, I'll just tap on my ear with my hand that's already right there.
It makes me so crazy. Apple, try less hard. I do. You're still paying me every time.
I don't even use Apple headphones anymore. I have it on the Sony ones. The Sony ones, they really believe that you should be able to put your hand to your cup so you can like go in transparency and like talk to the flight attendant. And I'm like, every time I try to do this, I'm like, I look like a jerk.
Isn't the natural behavior you just slide that you slide the back? That's that's like, yeah, nonsense. Okay, we're gonna take a break. So we are 250 years into this American experiment.
And I say it's going okay. I give us like a C plus. There is no perfect past. But there is also no exclusively negative past.
Because humans are human. That's what we do. I think the story of America is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of America to expand those principles to include more people. What's gonna determine the next 250 years of America?
And how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve? Okay, so I'm just gonna be a jerk here because I'm a historian. So we have to have a prologue explaining you know, we the people. Okay, you know, I just can't remember from Schoolhouse Rock.
We the people are going to the foreign warfare for you again. I establish justice. What is it? Ensure domestic tranquility.
So you're talking about a foundational document. So I'm building a document that will protect American democracy. That's this week on America Actually. All right, we're back.
Do you know the QCAT actually looks like a cat? I have to look this thing up now. It's like C-U-E cat? Yeah.
How did I not know? Oh my god. Because you were a baby. But like the Wikipedia page is long and most of it is the controversy section.
This thing's horrifying. I'm gonna put a link to this in the show notes and I don't recommend looking at it because it's the last thing you see before you die. Richard and I lived through it. These were like the OG internet foreign wars.
It made Time Magazine's list of the 50 worst in this world. Yes, yes. It was one of the things that happened. Maybe not one of the best or most important, but it was definitely one of the things.
Yeah. All right. Lightning around time. I'm sorry.
It's on Time Magazine's list of the worst inventions. Right after QCAT comes subprime mortgages. That's how bad QCAT was. The early 2000s were rough, man.
It was a hard time to be alive. Wow. Yeah. Just say one day they're gonna make the big short about the QCAT.
No, it'll be about Divex. Oh, Divex. Oh, man. The original Divex.
All right, Richard, we can't, we can't not be relitigating Slashdot from 2000s right now. Let's go. Let's dig through some Circuit City Flyers. I'll just give people a peek into like the version of the tour process.
We had our daily editorial meeting today and Liz Lepotto was like, you know, Twitter spawned apart, like searches, whatever. It's all weird. We're back to the basics. We're back to the old internet.
And that was supposed to be a rousing call to blog. And they're like, we're doing Divex. I'm like, QCAT, drop out. Let's go.
Find the Slashdot flame wars of ancient history and we're gonna do them all again on the site. I love it. I think Windows is a monopoly. Linux forever.
This is the year of the Linux desktop. It is. It is truly the year of the Linux desktop or two screen TVs. All right, lightning round, David.
Let's talk about ads. Can I just do some more ads? I really don't know how it became my brand that I believe in ads. But here we are.
Weirdly large amount of ad news this week. It's the upfronts for a lot of the Hollywood studios, which is weird and awkward and complicated because the writer's right is happening. So it's all been very messy. But one of the things that all these companies are announcing is more ads because they want to make more money.
And they're realizing that subscription only streaming is not actually all that good business. But it turns out subscription plus ads is a much better business. So Netflix announced that its ad tier already has almost 5 million users, which is actually a pretty big number for as quickly as it has come out. YouTube is bringing what it calls unskippable 30 second ads to TV, which sucks so bad.
It's mostly replacing two 15 second ads, but they just want to be more like TV, which means they've always wanted to be more like TV. Right. And it's going to be more prestigious. It's only going to be watching stuff on TV, but like they're going to be bigger, more serious, unskippable ads.
And then Max, the streaming service that is coming from Warner Brothers Discovery, which is combining Discovery Plus and ACL Max, has said that it's going to have shorter ad breaks than other streamers. Don't forget, it's going to cost at least $10 a month for the quote ad light plan, which, as I have said, implies the existence of an ad heavy plan, but we will keep that alone. And I believe he said, Dave Zazaloff said it's going to be between three and four minutes of ads per hour, which is substantially better than like if you have broadcast TV, it's something like 18 minutes of ads per hour. So three to four is pretty good.
But that is still for people paying $10 a month to also watch four minutes per hour is going to frustrate some people. So ads are coming, y'all. The world is not going down with the number of ads it has. It's only going to get worse.
So just get your TV for free. Cool. All right, mine. Speaking of costs going up, Verizon rejiggered its plans this week.
They're bad. They're basically like unbundling a bunch of services. People are very upset about this. The problem is if you want a new iPhone or a new S24 or a new Pixel Fold and they hit, they're going to offer you subsidies to get the new plans.
So new plans have less stuff, they're more expensive. This is only an entree to what I actually want to talk about. Well, I do think there was a minute there where the bundles coming from carriers were really good. Like I got Apple TV and Disney Plus and Peacock and all kinds of stuff free from your carrier.
And I started like, it became a thing I started telling people about. It was like a new streaming service. I was like, oh, tell your carrier. Because there's a pretty good chance that there will be some deal because they're all so desperate.
A, these companies need subscribers, so they're going to your carrier because you already have a bill and so they can take it that way. And B, all these carriers are like desperately competing with each other and so you're going to win. And now all at once that seems to be getting... Well, it was Verizon that did the most of it.
Verizon did the most, but T-Mobile started to push on some of that. T-Mobile, AT&T just never did anything. They're like, we've got you. They bought HBO.
They bought HBO. They bought HBO and then sold HBO. I think their willingness to participate dramatically decreased. But Verizon gave much stuff away.
Now all that stuff, $10 a month extra, basically. They're like, you can pick your perks and you just add them up and you end up paying about $10 a month extra. It's less good. It's less good.
People are very annoyed by this, especially the Disney Plus being out of the bundle, which I think a lot of people are depending on. I want to point out, there was a big conference this week. They called it a big 5G event. It was a talk conference.
RCR Wireless wrote about it. Allison Johnson and I were looking at it. And there were multiple sessions at this industry conference about 5G where the carriers just admitted that all of their fancy plans to make more money with 5G have come to nothing. That they have not monetized 5G in any ways that they were not monetized in 4G.
We were going to do self-driving cars. We were going to have AI generation at your house and at your Walmart. Yeah, we were supposed to be getting surgery in a self-driving car. And these new Verizon plans are an incredible example of this.
Because remember all that zero latency robot surgery Richard's talking about? All that's dependent on millimeter wave, it depends on the mid-band stuff. The plans now tier out the good 5G. You have to buy the most expensive plan to get mid-band 5G.
You're just getting, on the cheaper ones, you're just getting refarmed LTE, etc. And it's like, what was the point of all of this? So we're just admitting failure on all of that, basically. It was just a disaster.
So Ultra, Allison heard about this, Verizon is playing cute little games of not including quote-unquote ultra-wideband mid-band 5G on a slower-tier plan, only the slower nationwide 5G, which is just LTE plus or whatever. I love that they call mid-band ultra-wideband, so that's incredible. It's perfect, perfect. But it's like, oh, this just didn't work.
Like, this whole race to 5G, all the meetings we took, like, the amount of just ad dollars spent. Yep. They built the networks. Great, the networks are indeed faster.
It is very cool to see how many people can stream video out of NFL stadiums during these social concerts. True. They've increased the capacity of networks. Richard, I don't know about you, but I have not yet received a robot surgery in the back of the Ultra.
Not yet. Maybe next week. I'm just saying, no attack in Italian in the back of the Ultra. There's an optimism I'm looking for right there.
It's just incredible. We'll link the RCR piece in the show notes. Allison put it in the post on the site. But the plans are getting more expensive, and the bundles are going away, and the incentives are going away.
Because at the end of the day, no matter how hard they have tried for decades, they cannot be anything more than done by. Right. They've tried everything. Like, they got rid of neutrality.
They only have the courtesy of excusing the bundled streaming services from the data caps. That was the nightmare scenario. They won't do it because they need money. Right.
I feel so vindicated about this because for so many years, we just kept asking people, okay, you're going to make that work faster. That's awesome. What is that going to change other than I can download Netflix movies slightly faster than I could before? I just took a trip.
I have downloaded many a Netflix movie. Thank you for that, everybody. There are millions of people who have home internet from T-Mobile and stuff. It exists.
Yeah. Yeah, and it changed nothing for anybody. Like, all of this new world we were supposed to enter because all of this worked. Well, so I think we're just saying for the home internet, like, the customers can't get good fast internet and they've got a T-Mobile home connection.
Maybe they're a little bit happier. Sure. But the thing that they can't do is, like, make more money because more people are doing more things on the internet. They just didn figure it out because it ultimately wasn't there.
I'm telling you, a 5G in crypto, two biggest tight balloons of recent memory. They're right there on top of each other. I'm not sure. And the QCAT.
Right? They agree. They agree. Let us know.
What do you think is a bigger high balloon, 5G or crypto? I'm dying to know. What's your line around? Well, you know, I don't bring up anything that's overhyped.
Let's just talk about the Tesla robot. The last time that we saw it, the more advanced version was not walking. It was not really moving. It waved its arm.
We now saw a video with some segments that were sped up to 2x feed so that, you know, we weren't sitting there for a half hour watching it hold things and occasionally take steps. So, without falling over, which is an achievement. How confident are we that this wasn't a person in a suit pretending to be a robot? There are holes in them, so there is probably not a person in a suit, I think.
That's good. Was it rendered by AI? I don't know. It's really hard to say.
Yeah, this video, they are moving slowly. It's weird. Yeah, and you know, it's like, so we show it picking up things and putting them in a box after it watches the person pick up things and put them in a box. So, you can spend however much it costs one of these for that.
Do you know that walk that people do when you, like, they've, like, done too many swats at the gym that they can't quite move their legs completely? That's how these robots walk. Oh, I very much relate to this robot. I'm exactly like that.
Yeah, so many swats. This robot's yoked. He's just kind of, he's just kind of, he's just kind of shuffled. Like, every step might be his last.
Yeah, look, uh, I'm just gonna end here. Elon promised on same interview that a chat GPT moment for Tesla was coming. That's what he said. That's what he said.
And maybe it's the robot. Maybe it's the self-driving robotaxis he promised again. He said that was coming any minute now. Do you know that if you buy Tesla, the terms of service in Tesla prevent you from using that Tesla from the other self-driving network looking at a robotaxi click?
He said this on television. Oh, wow. And then he quoted the Princess Bride. I really just wanted to come back to the one lesson I want to offer the audience today.
If you are in a situation where you need to sound tough, do not under any circumstances quote the Princess Bride. But at the very least quote it correctly. Use the words that they use in the movie. And don't try to do a depression of Manipa Stink and Taxes.
Do Fezzik. Do Andre the Giants. Okay, so they just announced you can upload two-hour videos on Twitter now if you're at Twitter Blue Ver that means you can upload all of Princess Bride. By the way, Twitter is very funny.
People are just doing it left and right because they fired everybody who does compliance at Twitter. It's amazing. I watched like a little too much of the Super Mario Brothers movie on Twitter. And I was like, I feel bad.
I should not be doing this. And then you just did some more of it. We owned that copy of the Princess Bride in the van. I already paid my money for that movie.
All right, that's it. That's the first cast. Oh, it was a good one. Thanks to Addie Robertson for joining us.
Thanks to Hank Green for joining us. That's great. Thank you so much, man. Of course.
All right. Wednesday show. What's happening? A bunch of stuff.
You talked to Ed Markey on AM radio in cars. Without which he has, I'm told, very strong feelings. Very strong feelings on AM radios. We're going to see you.
talk about that we're gonna talk about zelda i assume this is gonna be like a seven or eight hour episode because we're gonna talk about zelda uh it's gonna be fun i'm excited very cool that's on wednesday we'll be back next friday let's check back and that's a wrap for vergecast this week we'd love to hear from you shoot us an email at vergecast at verge.com the vergecast is a production of the verge and the box media podcast network the show is produced by me and our senior audio director andrew marino our editorial director is brook mentors that's it we'll see you next week i don't care