Ring's adorable surveillance hellscape

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This is why I don't have pets. Get them out of my face. Too complicated. The moral quandary of pet ownership is... We do a lot of moral quandary on the show, I will say. Do you really own a dog? Let's talk about it.

Yeah, you don't. You just let it poop inside your house for a while. At least that's my current experience. Lots going on this week. We have some Super Bowl follow-up to do. The Packers weren't in it because they never are, so that sucks for you. Patriots did lose, which was important, I think, for America. Agreed. The world is a little brighter now that the Patriots lost the Super Bowl. We have a lot of surveillance camera stuff to talk about. We have some opening eye news to talk about. We have some hardware that doesn't exist. We have some hardware that might someday exist. We have lots to talk about, but I think we should probably start the same place we started last week, which is unfortunately...

with the Epstein files. You asked, in particular, people to give us feedback on how we're talking about this stuff, how we're covering this stuff, what they want to see, what's interesting. What did you hear? What have the vibes been like? I would divide this feedback into two discrete categories. There's the one I care about a lot, which is the actual people talking to us. You just look at the comments on YouTube. You shouldn't look at our email directly, Pan Bondi, but I will tell you what is in our email. And it's people emailing us and saying, keep doing this. It's important. We appreciate your approach to it. We want the stories, your quandary about the source.

the mechanism by which the material is being released. You can set that aside. We understand. Sure. So we're going to keep talking about it. Then there's just the data and the data says people desperately want David and I to talk about.

Like, the numbers are higher, and we can't quite explain why. We don't do a lot of data-driven content decision-making at The Verge, which is why I haven't started a fully automated, like, Android bot farm overseas to manipulate YouTube. I should. Every good content creator who cares about their numbers does this. You come to meetings with that idea. Yeah, if somebody buy 100 Android phones and just do a bot farm for me, that would be great. We don't do a lot out here. Famously, our reporters don't get page views. Like, all this stuff we don't do. But in this case, it was particularly notable that there was the qualitative feedback from actual people that we care about a lot that said, please do the stories. And then there was just the straight views.

and downloads on the podcast. And so, all right, that's enough signal. I'll mention two that are important to me, two Epstein stories we covered this week that are very important to me that I think are very Virgie in their scope. One, and this has come out in every version of the Epstein files that has been released so far. Jeffrey Epstein cared about SEO a lot.

Just a lot. And he employed people to manage his Google presence. He employed people to go on Wikipedia and clean up his bio. He did offensive SEO. He was all over it. His digital footprint was a thing he cared about. And he had people constantly emailing him, telling him how they were cleaning up his digital footprint. And to be clear, by cleaning up, you mean Jeffrey Epstein is a criminal and a pedophile, was at the top of the rankings. And Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time and energy and money trying to move that down in the rankings.

Yes. And he was seeding stories with oppositional links, again, monitoring Wikipedia and making sure Wikipedia, there's like edit words about his entry, taking out negative information about himself. There are a bunch of really fascinating back and forths with reporters from people in his orbit who are basically like yelling at reporters and threatening them in order to get them to remove stuff from stories and then reporting it back to Epstein saying, look, we did it. We got your name out of this story. Mia Sato and our team has a great story about this. There's one back and forth in particular where the report back says they didn't know I was working for you. They don't know that we're talking. And so you just see there's this, we kind of hint at it all the time, right? We spend a lot of time talking to comms people and PR people.

I love writing a spicy response to what is obviously like a secret legal demand and then looping our lawyers on it. It's one of the funner parts of my job that no one ever gets to see. I really do enjoy it. There's a lot of that in our world that you all never see. You should never see, right? We're just pushing back on people who want to shade our stories in some way. And then you see how effectively Jeffrey Epstein was using that as a weapon, not just to shade the coverage, but connecting the dot all the way to his own search results, to SEO.

And so that's just a straightforward labor story. And Mia did a great job. We've been making Mia cover SEO for a while. She's the one who wrote all the content goblin stories for us about like the SEO industry, the last days of disco before AI showed up. That was a huge package she did for us. She saw this and was like, oh, I see what's happening here. This story is great because she has so much depth. Yeah. And I think on that front, we talked a bunch last week about how one of the odd things about these files is how...

just sort of plainly they lay bare how all of this stuff works, right? Like we talked a lot about Steven Sanofsky who was running Windows at Microsoft and his negotiations for his package when he left Microsoft is like, it's the sort of thing nobody ever talks about in the way that they are willing to email their colleagues about it. And so you just see a different version of it. And this was so striking to me for the same reason that you see with no spin, no nothing, just a perfectly, completely laid bare plan for how to spin up a bunch of essentially fake websites designed to launder somebody's reputation. And there's, Mia has links and an explanation to this about like, Somebody who is basically buying and hosting domain names, starting fake websites, filling them with a specific kind of content, all in the name of gaming, the SEO algorithms to move stuff up and down to their liking. And this is, I would remind you, a game that Google has said for decades is unwinnable and doesn't exist and no one is trying to do it. And it is just so fabulously clear that this is a game that everybody plays and can win with enough money and resources. And it's just, this is the sort of thing you just don't get to see it.

laid out in front of you. Yeah, you never get to see the vendor talking directly to the client saying, I spent all this money, here's exactly what we did, and here's how it works. And, you know, that's a goldmine if you are researching the dynamics of information on the internet. So that's one big story. Again, Mia did an incredible job here.

Because we forced her to cover ICF for a year. Like her understanding of that space, I think, really comes through in the story. So that's one. The other one that I would point people to, last week, I mentioned sort of in passing that Epstein had a connection to 4chan in particular, slash poll, the politics board. And so we thought about who can explain this. There's so much history. So we asked Kat Tenbarsh, who used to be an amazing misinformation, disinformation reporter at NBC News. She now writes a newsletter called Spitfire News, which is very good. You should subscribe to it. So we asked her to just write about the connections between Epstein, Christopher Poole, who...

ran 4chan, his name is Moot, his handle, and pull. And the dynamics between all of that, between Gamergate, between the first Trump campaign, and you can see there's a straight line in Epstein's support for eugenics and his hatred of women and his weird ideas about just how to destabilize the country. There's a lot of Steve Bannon in the mix who understood early that you could weaponize forum culture and turn it into the culture war and then turn that into politics. And then here we are in 2026. So it's not as straight of a line as people have painted. You can't say that they had a meeting and the next day the thing happened. But in the emails, you can see.

Yep, they definitely met. Epstein said, I really like this guy. I think he's so bright. I drove him home. And then a series of things unfolded where everyone's goals were being met. And that to me is maybe the most undercover story of our time. That, you know, there's always this push that you shouldn't take what happens on the internet seriously. The Twitter isn't real life. And to some extent, that's real. Like the reality outs, like the truth outs for people. They go live their lives. They move their meat sacks of their bodies around in real space. You can't tweet everything and you can't overcome the metaphysics of reality with Twitter. But boy, you can come close. And you can see, like just as you're saying about SEO.

you see them talking about it nakedly, openly, cynically, pushing the ball forward while everyone else is, you know, saying very sincere things about the nature of content moderation. And like the systems are being gamed at every level and Epstein's right in the middle of it. So that story is also, I think, very good, very Virgie. Kat did a great job. So those are the two I wanted to call it this week. We're going to have more. Again, you know, I value people writing to us and saying things to us more than I value the data. But in this case, it's both. Like clearly both says that we should cover this more. There's more to be said here. And in particular, Epstein as a force in a digital world is like overwhelming.

You can just see that he clocked it. He figured it out early. And then all of these people came to him for advice. And then his money influenced a bunch of platform dynamics and tech dynamics across the board. Yeah, and that this group understood the power of the internet to move their own awful worldviews into the norm in really structured and deliberate ways. You read that thing from Ryan Broderick last week, who writes the garbage news letter, who's basically saying, I've been covering misinformation and the alt-right for decades, and I'm realizing that I may have just been following Jeffrey Epstein around. The more we learn about these files, the more it feels like that is the case. Yeah, and there's more to come, assuming our Department of Justice does the things they're legally mandated to do. Bold assumption. There's more to come. I suspect we're going to cover this for quite a while.

Yeah, and I think folks should go read the stories. We'll link them in the show notes. But the particulars of how all of this works, I think, it continues to be the hardest thing to mine of all of this. And our team's been doing a really good job because there's just so much. And like we talked about last week, it's just this unordered dump of PDFs. And if you want to, you can read almost anything you want into it, right? And so trying to go through and be like, okay, what is real? What is conspiracy? What is stuff that Jeffrey Epstein, who had a lot of reasons to vastly overstate his own importance, it's hard to parcel out. But there is just like the raw data of this, the more we start to put the pieces together.

is like a very different version of the history of sort of the modern internet than I think people are used to. And that's even just looking at through the slice of what's here. Like we don't know what happened at the parties. We don't know what happened at the dinners. We don't know what happened on the island. We don't know what happened on the plane. Like we don't know what happened on the phone.

There's just a universe of stuff we don't know, but what we can just see paints a very different picture of the history of the culture and the internet colliding in this specific way. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, by the way, I have one for you. You and I were talking about this briefly on the show last week, and then we talked about it afterwards, and I went out and assigned it. The equal signs. Oh, yeah. And the weird things that feel like censored redactions, but kind of clearly aren't. We're chasing that down. I'm not going to give it away, but I think by next week we will have a good answer. We will have a story about what's going on with equal signs. Oh, that's awesome. I'm so glad you assigned that story.

Yeah, I was like, I'm the king now. Am I the editor-in-chief? Can I just do this? That's what happened. That's what all my meetings were like, can I do this? To be clear, everyone, most of the time people say no, and then Eli does it anyway. That's the dynamic here. I had a good call today with a longtime tech exec, and he was saying the way to think about open claw in these AI agents is like, what if, like, don't think about it like you have one employee. Think about like you have a whole team and like how much more in control you would feel. And I was like, I don't know, man, I have a whole team. I look at my phone and I was like, what happened now?

What are you talking about? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move on for this. We're going to keep covering the Epstein stuff. I think this story is a long ways from being over, even in our zone. So we'll keep talking about it. But for now, let's talk about a different kind of surveillance. A different scandal. So the beginning of this, I think, is there was a Super Bowl ad that Ring ran about a feature called Search Party. And I'm going to describe this in the most milquetoast way, and then we're going to get into it. Search Party is a feature that is designed to help people find their dogs.

That's it. If your dog runs away, you can activate the whole neighborhood of cameras to help you find your dog. I'm just going to share my screen with you real quick, and I'm going to play this ad because it's 30 seconds long. And I just watched it again, and it is really something special. This is Milo. That's our family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years.

Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com.

So Neil, I don't see the problem. What a lovely ad about how to find your dog. So Jamie was on Decoder not so long ago talking about this. And I would characterize that conversation as very pleasant. I like Jamie. He's very smart. And also just me for an hour being like, is this dystopia? Are you describing dystopia? And we just went back and forth on that. And do you have a ring camera? I do. We were grandfathered into the one on our front door when we bought this house. And it has actually been a really interesting process of deciding whether we want to keep it. It's fascinating to me that this is a moral quandary. We have ring cameras at our house. They're good. There's a product. They work. And that's fine.

Do you have the Neighbors app or do you have Neighbors notifications turned on in the Ring app? No, I turned them off because it made me feel icky, to be completely honest. So we have them on. Again, I don't think you should feel moral contrast about this. Like, I'm very curious. You know, I have that get out of jail free card of like, I'm a tech reporter. You have to pay attention. But like, it's fine. You can just turn them on. It's anonymized. And at least where I live, there are only two things that show up in the Neighbors app. Was that an explosion? By far and away, number one. Just all day long, people ask you if things are explosions. Couldn't tell you why, but that is it. Are they ever explosions? Sometimes. Okay.

Like, once a year, there's an explosion. Okay. Right? Like, I don't know what to tell you. Once a year at the Con Ed plant, a transformer blows. You know, like... The rest of the time, it's like, nope, big truck. Yep. It's almost always big truck or nothing. Like, nothing is a shockingly popular answer. And then the replies are always like, you know, hilarious lies. Like, yes, it was an explosion. Like, go in your basement now. I'm like, I actually asked Jamie about this. He's like, yep, a lot of people asking about explosions in the data. Okay. And then the other thing is my dog is lost.

That's it. That's all day long. People are like, I lost my dog. Or like, I saw a dog. Here's a dog. Here's a pet. Whatever. And so you can see how anyone looking at what people are talking about and sharing their footage about would get to, we should just automate the process of saying we see a dog.

Sure. And I just want to say that, like, if you are, your concerns about the surveillance apparatus are valid. Everyone's listening to this. They're already yelling at me. I'm just saying that the logical, like, outside of the world we live in conclusion from why do people hit share on video footage in our app? One, again, I cannot overstate this, is this an explosion?

Like, if they could solve that problem, maybe they should have started there, honestly. And then two is, my dog is lost where I saw a dog. And you can see how you would just get there. You would just very quickly arrive at, we should push a button and let people be like, here are some dogs. Right, sure. And I don't, I'm only pointing that out because it is the reality of the platform. That's the thing people are doing. It's also the sort of feature that in a vacuum, no one's going to have a problem with, right? Like, can I all at once reach out to all of my neighbors to see if any of them have found my dog?

near 100% approval rate on that idea that big. And again, this is what people are already doing in the app. Now, in different neighborhoods, boy, do you run into different things people are doing that cause all kinds of problems, right? Is this an explosion? Did you see my dog?

Right, on the scale of moral... We got a lot of, this is a teenager in a hoodie, they're probably a criminal. There you go. I saw a guy looking at my car. It comes up in the data. A lot of that. I'm mad. The delivery person for my food order didn't look like a citizen, is one that is rising in the rankings. Like, this is all bad stuff that you can do once you have this level of surveillance. And Ring has been in the mix of this problem since the day it was founded. Because Jamie, who again, smart person, founded the company, famously founded it on Shark Tank as DoorBot. Like, very compelling story. Very compelling actor. Founder talk. The whole thing.

since the first day, he's been like, this is to fight crime. Yeah. He's never wavered. He's never been, he's never, he didn't find, it wasn't like he had to find product market fit. He's like, why did I make this video camera? To fight crime. Like straight up, his pitch has been surveillance from the beginning. And on Decoder and to Gen 2E, the last time I talked to Gen 2E at the launch of the last round of doorbells, he's like, if you put enough of these in certain neighborhoods, we will zero out crime. And he and I spent an hour talking about it. Next week, we'll have a Decoder episode just really unpacking that conversation one more time. So I won't go into it too much here. But he and I spent an hour being like, what do you mean if you have enough cameras you will zero crime? What is the mechanism by which these cameras will bring crime to zero?

And the answer is, well, people will know there are cameras so they will misbehave. And, you know, to some extent, it's we're going to share the footage with law enforcement. No, please. That gives J.B. Zunoff so much less credit than he should get for the aggressiveness with which he wants to give all of you. They keep signing deals with police officers, with police departments. This is a feature, not a bug. Like, actually, can I tell you one more 30-second thing? So, Wise, a smart home competitor to Ring, which hilariously has a whole bunch of its own security issues and privacy issues, got a lot of credit after this Ring ad came out and sparked a lot of people's...

fears because immediately like you look at that and it's like oh replace dogs with anything else and this is a horrifying dystopian hellscape that you've just described um i am confident there is a reason that ring launched this feature with dogs do you know what i mean but anyway so wise makes this thing let me just play you this 30 seconds because i think it is it is a useful and important piece of the equation here this is milo pets are family but every year 10 million of them go missing and the ways we look for them haven't changed in years except for all of these but what if we could make finding one lost dog require the computational power of a small dictator-led nation search party from All right, you get the idea. I get the idea. Can I just point out, Wise has had massive security issues. Yeah, don't buy Wise. And like, strangers can control your Wise cams over the internet. Don't do it. Yeah, I'll just say, like, cameras outside your house, yeah, you got some weird surveillance problems, we're gonna talk about how complicated all that will make you feel. Do not put cameras in your house. Don't do it. Yeah, I completely agree. The number of, like, feel-good clips I watch of, like, babies breaking out of their cribs and going to the kitchen to, like, get juice, it's like, first you feel great, like, this is very funny, that baby jumped out of her crib, like, why is there a camera in your house? Why is there an internet camera in your house? Why is there one in your kitchen? Why is there one in your living room? Why is there one all the way from the baby's crib to the kitchen? What are you

Yeah, for a few, Neil and I will come to your house and slightly disconnect all of your cameras. I have a lot to say about the fact that the baby monitor camera that we bought got discontinued and now the only one you can buy from the same brand has a Wi-Fi option. And they know it's bad, so there's a hardware switch on the camera. Oh, wild. But I'm like, I don't even want it. Don't put a camera in your house. Yeah. But anyway, to the point of this ad, like, I think if you're Jamie and Ring, that wise video is not a good burn because you're like, yeah, that actually is exactly what we're trying to do. That's what we're doing. Yeah, again, he will tell you.

Look, I like people who are honest, right? And Jamie is very honest. He's like, I started this company to fight crime and I do it with pervasive video surveillance. He's not hiding the ball. No. I think he's a little annoyed that the nature of law enforcement and how people feel about the police using their data right now are radically different than when he founded Ring in like 2012 or 2013. It was back then, right? The nature of all this has changed, but his point of view has not. But again, all of this stuff, it's a feature, not a bug, right? And I think to your point about them being honest, I think the challenge here is that everyone is able to make those decisions for themselves, right? Like, is the possibility of...

Is lowering the possibility of someone breaking into your house worth the intrusiveness of having a camera? I think reasonable people can disagree on where you land on that. The other thing that's happening is my camera is also watching you. And so what we've now created is this big society-wide problem that not all of society gets to participate in. And I think that has been the part that Ring has not done a good job of reckoning with. It's like, sure, would I consent to you lighting up my camera in order to find your dog? Sure. Fine. Is it unbelievably obvious to me what opting me into that automatically does and what you can very clearly do next with that exact same technology?

Yes, of course. And do we as reasonable consumers in the year 2026 have any reason to believe tech executives when they tell us they'll never do the bad thing? No. So like I'm at this point now where I struggle with this because I don't know how to reckon with the fact that my block is filled with these things. And if my dog ever gets out, I will be grateful for the fact that most people on my block probably didn't know to turn this feature off. But I also sort of feel like I should go door to door until everybody to turn this feature off. I have this theory about just what is happening in politics right now. It was I think about a lot right now. We are convinced, like culturally convinced that our actions do not affect other people.

You just see it everywhere. You see it in, there's a rise in measles cases. Why? Because we've decided our actions don't affect other people, even though they're very clearly, like all over the place. And ring cameras are an incredible example of this, where the cameras at my house are fine. They're fine. Sure. And I can turn them on and off and whatever, but to your point, they're taking video of you. And so my cameras can invade your rights.

But me turning that on has no impact on me. So here's this button in, you know, an app distributed by Amazon on the hardware that Amazon owns where you have like a moral quandary that is, should I affect someone else's rights? And I would just say American culture in 2026 does not equip people to think about that well. Yeah, true. Like it just, it just, you kind of, once you like start looking for it, like, do you believe that?

all of us working together is a better solution problem than ever working individually? Like, do my actions affect you? And should that have any impact on how I behave? That's just, no, no. The answer is no one wants to think about it. Like, please open TikTok and move on. And you just, I think this button is very challenging for people for that reason. Because your individual decision will never affect you. It'll affect other people. And the collective decisions of other people will affect you.

But you have no agency here, really. And I don't know how to reconcile that. But to your point, if you lose your dog, maybe this will be helpful. There's a reason they're starting with dogs. At the same time, Savannah Guthrie's mother was kidnapped. Yeah. And everyone was like, where's the doorbell footage? And she didn't have a Nest subscription on her Nest Cam and everyone thought it was lost. And it turns out that the way the Nest Cams work meant some data was sent to Google at some point and Google was able to recover it. We should talk about the mechanics of that because that's equally confusing. But the fact that the FBI then released the footage that Google had was, I would say, widely celebrated. Yeah, this was deemed to be a win by...

Nest and by law enforcement and by the existence of these cameras. And you know, somewhere Jamie Siminoff is like, I told you, this is what this is for. But to me, it's like, I don't know. I also reacted to both of those things, the ways you just described. And I think having those, you can't hold both those ideas in your head at the same time. You just can't have it both ways. Either this stuff is too problematic and too invasive and we need ways to roll it back and not have it be this kind of incredible, ongoing, permanently stored surveillance complex that can find anybody at any time.

Or it's awesome that this piece of information about what happened to Nancy Guthrie is coming out and might help solve crime. You can't have it both ways. Well, you can chart one middle path. Can you? You can. So, you know, 20 years ago, CCTV cameras became absolutely prevalent in England. Like, this is a 20-year-old story. And there was a controversy about just the number of private CCTV cameras. And this is like the old technology, right? This isn't even like digital internet technology. This is closed circuit. There's tapes in the back of a convenience store. And they were everywhere. And there was a privacy debate in that country at that time. And you end up with a series of...

regulations and laws and social norms. And I don't know that it has worked out as any different, but there's one other path, right? Which is to say we should have privacy laws. Like the way the government accesses the private surveillance footage on everyone's front door is regulated in some way and transparent in some way. And there's things that police can't do. And that is just not where we are in America as a society right now. Like we're not going to have some fulsome debate about what it means that everyone has a camera and the cops want all the footage all the time, especially because so many people no longer trust the intentions, the methods, or even their interactions with the police.

Like, just, that's not where we are. Right. So the idea that you're going to have some good faith debate outside of a high profile true crime story, it seems lost, right? So now these companies are going to do whatever they want. And it seems like what they're going to do is chase the check. And the United States government is going to write a lot of checks. Yeah. House by house, we are neatly solving a law enforcement problem. Yeah. There's the one middle path. And you can write that law. You can write it right. You can say you can't light this up all the time. There's a million ways to do this. And maybe not everyone will be happy with any of those ways. I think the failure is no one is even proposing them. And even if you did propose them, no one believes that any of them will pass into law or be effective. Right.

What do you make of the Nancy Guthrie thing before we move on and get out of this? You know, I keep hearing a lot of cliches like, you're only paying for access to your data. But it is true that the Google cameras work differently than the Ring cameras work differently than the Wyze cameras work differently than the Arlo cameras. And Google's system in particular, we don't know which camera she had. So this is, like, depending on which generation of Nest camera you had, it works slightly differently. But it seems very much like you always get a few days of data for free, a few days of video history for free. And so there was an emotional alert that the data was sent to Google, and it just didn't get overwritten. And so the only real insight we have into what happened here was, of course, from Kash Patel, who's not a reliable narrator, who said they recovered the footage from, quote, residual data located in back-end systems.

I think Google should explain exactly what that means. I think you have a right to know, if you're a Nest customer, exactly how residual your data is, to what level, on what backend systems. But our best guess, given the way the Nest camera system works, is that the video went up because you do get some amount for free, and it just had not been overwritten. And given the high-profile nature of this case, Google assigned some engineers to go get it. I don't know this. I'm just saying this is the logical result of what they're saying. I think Google should absolutely have to explain if your data goes away. And Ring, you know, again, they're trying to claw their way back into everyone's good graces, said to Jen, we have no idea what the words residual data mean.

Because that's not how their system works. And I believe that, right? It's purely a system architecture question of what you're doing here. But yeah, I agree. I mean, the way Google and the FBI make it sound is that it was like, this is like the 1970s and somebody left the VHS in the room without meaning to. And that is like, if that is how it works, that's because Google made a deliberate choice in how it stores and eventually deletes and eventually overwrites the data on its servers. And A, the idea that that data still existed and B, that it was clearly in relatively short order retrievable by Google.

is just wild. And again, I think it is possible in this case to both think it's good that this information is out there and I'm glad that there is this clue as to what happened to Nancy Guthrie. It is also like... deeply weird and alarming that this was possible. Yeah. I mean, again, I think all these companies owe us way more explanations about what's going on through data. I think they should be required to give us those explanations by law. That's what a privacy law would do. And I think law enforcement needs far more guardrails on how they access our data. And that is, especially in the Trump administration, whew, that's a long way away from being reality. There are no more guardrails for these companies. And so, yep, I have a problem with Ring. I also have a problem with Clearview AI. Sure. Like, I have a lot of problems with a lot of the systems that are being deployed against us. I'm not making apologies for Ring. I just think I know that company and what they care about.

They're designed to be like, we will stop crime with video surveillance. And so, you know, yes, every camera kind of works this way. Yes, you can complicate this by talking about Nancy Guthrie. But if you don't want to participate in that mission, you can actually make a market decision, right? You can be like, I'm going to buy one from a company that isn't like, we're here to zero out crime. That is a choice you can make with your knowledge. But if you're the door dasher who has to go up to someone's door to bring them food and they get to take a picture of you and post it wondering if you're a citizen.

You have made zero market decisions. Yeah. And this is what I mean. Your choices affect other people and really not yourself. And that's a weird thing. That's a weird problem with app design. Yeah. Right? How are you going to communicate this in a switch box in an app? It is also just a weird problem in our society right now that no one really has the tools to evaluate that kind of choice. And you're actually pushed away from thinking about those choices in that way right now. Again, this is big and small. But once you see it, it's everywhere. And these cameras are like a particular instantiation of that that just happened to be gadgets. So we're going to talk about it. Yeah, indeed. All right. We should get off of this. I think we will.

keep coming back to all of this. I'm going to go make sure the camera on my ring is not running. But we should take a break and then we're going to go back. We're going to talk about some other gadgets that don't exist and some other gadgets that might. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. We have, believe it or not, one more Super Bowl ad to talk about, but it both is and is not a Super Bowl ad. It's the Schrodinger Super Bowl ad that we're going to talk about. We've talked a lot on the show and we've been waiting for OpenAI to release its hardware. OpenAI is working on something with Johnny Ive, potentially many somethings. There's been rumors, there's been reporting, there's been a lot of stuff out there. And then this week, there was a weird leak that started as a Reddit thread from a supposedly disgruntled employee explaining why they were mad that their Super Bowl ad about OpenAI hardware didn't.

go on the Super Bowl. And then they, quote unquote, leaked this ad. Have you seen this ad? This is a crypto scam. Can we just start with, I'm not 100% crypto scam positive, you know, but I've seen a lot of photoshops in my time. This is a crypto scam. When in doubt, crypto scam is a non-incorrect way to live your life at this point in time. Especially the way it worked. Because they leaked it and there was like, what, there was like a file name on a server and then someone was like, I have discovered the file name on a server. It got all the way to Alexis O'Hanian being like, Reddit cracked it again. Yeah. Crypto scam. All that just reads crypto scam to me. I'm not sure where the crypto scam was.

Yeah. But just that sequence of events where a bunch of people were a little too smart, a little too fast. Crypto scan. Somewhere in there, Elon Musk asked you for your Bitcoin. It's like, that's the turn. But the ad, I think, is sort of fascinating. It's Alexander Skarsgård wearing... It's AI Alexander Skarsgård. Sorry, fake Alexander Skarsgård. Very convincing fake Alexander Skarsgård wearing what look like sort of open ear headphones and playing with this little orb called Dime. Again, all of this is fake. Everyone on open AI has said it's fake to the point where it would be...

wild for this to be true. No, it's definitely fake. The whole thing is fake all the way up and down. But this ad, ostensibly showing opening eyes hardware, really kind of caught on in a really funny way. Did you believe this ad the first time you saw it? No. No? No. Because again, look, I've seen a lot of Photoshop.

Like my scam detection ability is under threat every day because of slot. But the thing here where there was like a Reddit post for an account that had never existed before and then the people in the Reddit figured it out so fast and then there was a full ad that was leaked with a celebrity in it that wasn't run because OpenAI chickened out because of the meta executives working. Like you just look at all that like none of that happened. Like 0% of this went down. Especially if you've ever watched Johnny Ive introduce a product ever in history which we have done a lot. He does not make an ad where nothing is said.

True. And there's a moment at the very end where AI Alexander Skarsgård picks this thing up and does a sort of like checking his teeth face into it that is just so immediately, tonally incorrect that it's like, why would even the person trying to fake this out do this? This was apparently a pretty elaborate procedure to try and fake this. They were sending people proposals to feature this ad. Really interesting thing. But I just found this whole ad so fascinating. And it very clearly, to me, points to...

people are so desperately curious, A, what any of this AI hardware is going to be, and B, they're so deeply skeptical of this being anything that immediately there was this very funny feedback that was like, of course this is real and of course it's this stupid. So I read this more, and we should talk about the AI industry as a whole. I read this more as... like OpenAI's own actual ad during the Super Bowl wasn't any good. And the Anthropic ads were really good on Twitter. And then in a room where people were actually watching the Super Bowl, they played nothing. None of it hit in a room. Like you just, no one's paying enough attention to these ads. Like the best ad was the Coinbase ad where they just did karaoke to Backstreet Boys because it at least got everyone's attention. And then you know what happened when they showed the Coinbase logo at least in the party I was at? Everyone groaned and said, fuck Coinbase.

But everyone's saying a Backstreet Boys song for a minute. By the way, in the ad industry, that's called a pattern breaker. Do you know that? No. And they're very successful. And they're good at this, right? So like, whatever. But what you saw was the actual ChatGPT ad isn't any good. The ChatGPT product, because it's supposed to get ads in it, people think it's about to get shittier in some way. And then, as we have talked about so much, like Claude and Claude Code are having this incredible moment. And OpenAI doesn't seem to be poised to compete with that anyway, except to try to light up ads to compete with Google search. Right. And so I looked at this whole kerfuffle as like, in order for this hoax to work, in order for this crypto scam to sell one Bitcoin or whatever the hell they're trying to do, you had to believe.

that there was a better ad on the shelf. And that was believable. You had to believe that there was an ad executive somewhere at OpenAI who was furious that his better ad was shelled in favor of the thing they actually ran. And if you didn't, if you don't believe that, then of course this is a hoax. If you look at the state of the advertising, you're like, yeah, that's possible. And then you, or Alexis Haney, you're tweeting his ad. Yeah, fair. Meanwhile, the actual OpenAI Hardware News of the Week is that it appears OpenAI's actual hardware launch has slipped to next year.

I'm just going to keep pointing out the all knowing voice assistant that can do things for you is a long way away. Even if you're the biggest open cloth man in the world, that thing is a million miles away from being a mass consumer product. Yes. And it is increasingly clear that everyone, including Johnny Ive, might know that. But let's talk about some of the weirdness going on in this space right now, because you just alluded to this. But one of the things that has been happening all week is a bunch of people have been leaving high profile jobs at AI companies and sort of sounding alarms behind them. Yeah. An open AI executive.

left and wrote a sort of scathing essay in the New York Times about how problematic it was that ads are going to be in ChatGPT. An anthropic safety person left and wrote a similarly sort of catastrophic thing about the state of AI and where we're all headed. Not similarly. I'm mad about ads as one thing. This dude wrote, quote, the world is in peril. There's a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding at this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world lest we face the consequences.

I would say that's a little different than I'm mad about. It's a little worse. I would agree with that. But and then the other thing is this big group of XAI people left. And I think there's a chance that that one belongs off to the side because XAI just became part of SpaceX. There's going to be a lot of corporate changes. A bunch of people presumably just got very rich from this thing, which created the largest private company, I think, in America or maybe even the world.

But there is something happening here where an increasing number of important people are finding cause to sound the alarm about what's going on with AI. Do you make anything of all of this happening at the same time? Well, you keep saying that this is my pet theory, but I think this is real. I think this is an important thing to believe. I already know where this is going and I hate it. I think Anthropic Things Cloud is alive.

Like, I really do. Like, and I think this might be shared in other labs. Anthropic is, like, particularly kind of hinting that they think Claude is live. They just did a big New Yorker profile called What is Claude? Anthropic doesn't know either. And it's like, dude, it's an L. I don't know what it is. But they think it's live. And they keep running these tests on it. And it keeps surprising them in different ways. And yes, Claude is very powerful. And yes, if you give it a vending machine, it will sell everyone a tungsten cube for a dollar or whatever mistakes it's going to make. And yes, they release reports on scheming. But, like, there's something in this industry where they have decided, the people who work in the industry sort of collectively have decided, that they're touching consciousness. Maybe not human consciousness, but consciousness of a kind.

I don't know how to evaluate that. I just see it, right? Like, particularly I think Anthropic Thanks Cloud is alive. Because they keep hinting it. They keep talking about it. It's alive. They don't say it the way that Sam Altman is like, we're going to do AGI. They just keep hinting at it. So if you're there, right, of course your safety researchers are like, well, you're doing stuff to make money with a thing that's alive that might kill us all. We should stop until we figure out how to make it not kill us all. And then you see that happening at OpenAI, which has to make way more money way faster because they don't have the enterprise business that Anthropic has. And they're just disbanding their, quote, mission alignment team. And their head of platform safety is now the head futurist. And it's like, well, what do you think is going to happen in the future such that your head of safety has to be the head futurist? Oh, it's

And like, I don't want to buy into doomerism. I think I'm personally still the most skeptical person about AI that I encounter on a regular basis. But this industry right now is marked by a sense that people who work there are afraid of the capabilities that they've created and they do not think there are sufficient controls. Right. There is a measure of true belief that you have to have to quit your job in this way, which is a weird thing, right? Because it's not, it would be one thing if they were like, I'm quitting my job because I think Sam Altman is a scam artist who is just bilking people out of money and is going to ruin the economy. That's not what these people are saying. They're saying essentially we've created God and we're not doing enough.

to reign it in. You're not going to make more on the speaking circuit, given that talk, than you are cashing in your philanthropic stock. I'm sure that's true. And I think, this is, to be fair, a sort of long tradition in the tech industry. People left Facebook saying the same kind of thing. People left Google. Tristan Harris made a whole life... He did make more money on the speaking circuit. Oh, no question. Out of saying essentially the same things. Like, we have created this thing that is very powerful and we are neither honest about nor reckoning with the consequences. And we're seeing, you know, we haven't really talked about the fact that Meta is on trial. Adam Saria was on the stand this week. And there is just a lot of documentation coming out of Meta that proves they knew what they were doing. So this is the thing that I struggle with, right? Like, A...

The people who have come out and loudly said this have been proven right historically in the tech industry over and over and over and over again. We should have believed Tristan Harris quicker than we did. He eventually helped make a documentary that I didn't like very much, but that's beside the point. The idea that these people were coming out saying we have built a machine that is changing the way that people live their lives and we're not talking about it enough, like if we had recognized that at a bigger level about Google and Facebook much sooner. things might've been different in better ways. And so part of me looks at this and is like, okay, maybe, maybe what we need to do is take these people at their word that they see what they've built more clearly than we do because they see the dashboards, they see what's happening, they see how people are using these things. And this is why I bring up the ads thing too, right? It's like the people alarmed about putting ads in the experience are the ones who are seeing the kinds of information that people are giving to ChatGPT. And you put this next to like everybody's up in arms about OpenAI retiring GPT 4.0, which is like the truly sycophantic thing that everybody turned into their best friend. And it's like, that stuff is real. And I think we do need to reckon with it. And I have to remind myself sometimes that even though I'm

confident that AI is not nearly as good as the people wanting to sell it to me say that it is, it's still good enough that it is causing people to do these kinds of things and make these kinds of trades. And we should worry about those things. And so I'm just stuck in this thing of like, I don't believe it's as good as any of these people say that it is, but maybe that doesn't matter because maybe the people are still doing the things that are scary. even if the tech is not as good as Sam Altman says that it is. Well, it's good enough to cause harm. Yeah, yeah, well said. That much is true. It's obviously true at this point. It's good enough to cause harm. Is it going to destroy humanity? Like, probably not yet. But is it doing a lot of harm? I've watched so many AI cats do the electrobreaker stance that I'm very concerned about humanity. It is just convincing every time. It is really ironic that that would be how it would do it. You know what I mean? Like, it's much more likely to, like, bore us all to death with cat videos or, like, entertain us all to death with cat videos than it is to just truly, like... Yeah, it will dull in our critical thinking skills until it can con us in anything. And that, by the way, is kind of how Claude works, so who knows? What I'm seeing...

is a bunch of people who see the technology getting commercialized, who understand the incentives that commercialization will create, particularly advertising, and who are saying, hey, we have stopped being as careful as we should be. And I think that this is the tipping point, right? These things are going from being research projects or things that you can give a TED Talk about to actual products that are being deployed that now need to return on the massive investments that have been made into them. And that means that commercial pressure is arriving. And you can see in some of these notes and some of these letters...

these people who are quitting loudly are saying, we're not making the right decisions. I raised the flags and I was overruled. OpenAI just fired an executive who opposed adult mode, right? He said, we should not let this thing make erotica. And...

you can see like why you would raise that objection, right? You can see why you would not want these systems to do that because you look at that headline and I went and read a Reddit thread about it, like in the chat CP forum. And the first response was the reason I used to rock is because it was erotica for me. And it's like, oh, this is bad. Like you can have whatever, you know, high and mighty approach to AI that you want. And then hundreds of millions of people are using the tools and the tools are being guided by commercial imperatives, not moral imperatives. And we're not good at that right now. We are certainly not good at not making money. Like again, as a society, we are going to make all the money that can be made.

And I think that's underneath it less than like pure numerism. We've gone from being idealistic about it to being commercial about it. And those incentives really, really change the game with the technology that is, again, at least good enough to do harm. Yeah. And this is why we keep talking about ads in ChatGPT as such a sort of seminal moment in that transition. And there was some news about that this week. The first ads started rolling out in ChatGPT. OpenAI announced who the first advertisers were going to be. I spent a long time trying to get ChatGPT to show me an ad, and it hasn't yet. I even asked ChatGPT, what kind of questions could I ask you that are likely to show an ad? And then I asked all those questions, and it showed me zero ads.

because AI is a good technology. I'm like, show me ads, ChatGPT. And it's like, ah, you're good. Everything's fine. But I think you're right that this is the turn towards a different kind of road of commercializing your product. And it's like we talked about last week that OpenAI has said it has lots of values. It has stated all of the ways in which it is not going to use ads and advertising to change the nature of your conversations with ChatGPT. And I think one of the things a lot of these people are saying is A, those two things are impossible to separate and B, all of your incentives.

are to mess up my conversations with ChatGPT in order to make more money. And some of the initial advertisers are really interesting. It's like some normal stuff, you know, Target, Williams-Sonoma, HelloFresh. It's like, these are advertisers. You're going to ask about a product and it's going to offer you a product. Fine. Already, this is the beginning of a road that ends in a very different place where all of a sudden what you have is a giant set of advertisers who want to be in front of you.

in as sort of narratively normal way as possible. They're going to want to be as seamless and integrated and feel like they are part of the conversation that you're having with ChatGPT. And so HelloFresh is going to come in and be like, I'm going to ask it to cook. And it's like, oh, you're so tired. Why don't you just get HelloFresh? It's right there. Well, also, importantly, you know, all of these people are ex-meta people. Fiji Simo ran Facebook. Yeah. Like, it's all meta people up and down running ads at OpenAI and building them into ChatGPT. And they all know that they do not make their money at meta or at Google from the big, fancy blue chip advertisers. The brands you just listed are not the majority of the money on the big platforms. It is...

bottom of the funnel, long tail, ultra targeted Instagram crap. And so if you are running a business where you need to peel maybe 100% of Google search revenue to pay back the trillions of dollars that Sam Altman has gone out and raised, you're going to have to get those advertisers and you're going to have to put them right in front of people. And that is not going to be as fun as Target. It's going to be a lot shittier in a lot of different ways. Are you ready for Shark Ninja to be in your house in this way? Because it's coming. And that entire sort of direct response QVCE world that we can see on the social platforms, if they want to make the money, they're going to have to do that product.

And who knows? Who knows how it's going to work? Yeah, I just want to read you something from HelloFresh about this. This is a LinkedIn post from Patrick Stahl who does marketing at HelloFresh. It goes into basically why are we doing this? Why we think it's important. And one of the things he says is it's meeting high intent moments. And he writes, when someone asks an AI for help planning a weekly menu or managing a busy family schedule, they aren't just browsing. They're solving a problem. By exploring the space, we are positioning our brands at the exact moment of intent. We're not just showing an ad. We are offering a solution to the what's for dinner dilemma at the moment it's being asked. And he describes this as a thing that might come up when you ask about meal planning. And like, you can just imagine the ways in this.

this immediately goes sideways, right? You have people who've been talking to ChatGPT about being tired or the mental health issues they're going through or the actual health issues they're going through that they're uploading to ChatGPT Health. And you have an advertiser who comes in and says, well, don't worry about cooking. We know you've had a hard day. We know you're tired. We know you're going through all this stuff. Why not just offload all of the work of cooking to this group? That's like, that's a good ass advertisement. Like that would work. And that's the thing is like every single incentive inside of this product is going to be to use all of that information that people are giving to this incredibly personal, incredibly personalized, incredibly real seeming to lots of people tool.

and essentially weaponize it to sell you stuff in a way that is actually potentially more powerful than the set of data Google has ever had and the set of tools that it has to put that in front of you. Have you had this happen to you in Gemini yet? No. So, you know, Google does personal intelligence now where they're happy to know about you. Yeah. And the other day I was trying to fix a sink and Gemini was like, well, you're a 45-year-old guy who likes to do home improvement projects. You can just replace the whole sink instead of the cartridge. And I was like, you shut your goddamn mouth. And it's coming. Now, to be fair, OpenAI has said they will not mix this data. Their ads do not yet mix the data.

The incentives are there. Even the advertisers want that. Like, this is the thing. This is the HelloFresh marketing person saying, this is the thing we're after. And Google's going to give it to them. Yeah. Their competitor's going to give it to them. OpenAI either has to invent digital god, they've got to do AGI, or they have to take, I think, 100% of Google search revenue to pay down Sam Altman's loans. Who knows what's going to happen here? Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, if you see a ChatGPT ad, screenshot it and send it to us. I'm serious. I want to see all of them. Also, if you work in Anthropic and you can tell us whether Anthropic thinks Cloud is live, let me know because I'm just saying. And if your email involves starting with the question, well, it depends on what you mean by live. If you're one of the cranks who wants me to interview you in LLM, you get out of my face. I get those every day. The number of people are like, have you interviewed Bing to see if it's like, I'm not doing it.

But if you can tell me if Dario thinks Claude is live. You can't interview Bing. Nobody ever asked you to interview an Excel spreadsheet. That's not how it works. One day, I'm just going to come on the show and I read the back and forth ad with the guy who asked me to interview Bing. And I was like, I think you need to step away from your AI, sir. And he got super mad at me. Yeah. Anyway, send us the ads. I want to see all of them. The weirder, the better. And if you want to send me your HelloFresh referral so that we can both get some free stuff, I'm down. Let's do this. We're going to take a break. Then we're going to go back. That's how we're going to break the ethics policy.

For free meals, I'll do almost anything, is the honest truth about where I come from, journalistically. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from IDERA by Palo Alto Networks. Every new cloud workload or AI agent your team sends out is another identity that gets permanent access to your systems. And in 2026, those non-human identities with access outnumber actual human identities 109 to 1. You need a tool built to manage them all, human, machine, and AI. That's exactly what IDERA by Palo Alto Networks was designed to do. It's one identity platform for all.

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So, Eli, I'm looking at the Google Doc we use to plan out this show. And I have to say, there is a segment in here that is called Brendan Carr is a Dummy that we do from time to time. This might be the longest set of links you have ever put in. So let's just say it's time for presumably a very long version of America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a Dummy. He's such a dummy. He's such a dummy.

Okay, our thanks to, I believe it's pronounced McKeel, who sent that to us on Blue Sky. It's Suno. That's AI music, but it rules. It rules. A thing you should know is if you ever want to know exactly what is David's music taste, that just there was alarmingly posted. It's gray-suited government regulators being taken down by AI Pop Punk. There is also a full version of that song that we will link to in the show notes because it is spectacular. Thank you to everyone who keeps sending us theme songs. We're going to keep running them, obviously. This feedback loop is very strong. Talk about incentives. All right, Brendan did a lot this week. And we're going to start, you know, it's a Brendan side swipe.

But to me, it's the biggest one of them all. So if you've been paying attention, a lot of people ask us to talk about this. The Trump administration came for the biggest controller of speech in America, the thing that dominates all of our conversations all day long. It sets the cultural tone. The Trump administration this week came for Apple News.

You know, Apple News. You talk all day. Everyone, the agenda is set by Apple News. The broadcast channel, Apple News. Yeah. So there was a study by the Media Research Council, which is a very conservative, sort of right-leaning media watchdog. And the study is bad. We'll get into why it's bad. But they looked at, you know, 600-some Apple News stories at the top of Apple News over some period of time. Most of them were by, quote, left-leaning outlets. And there were no, quote, conservative or right-leaning outlets on here. Now, if you've ever opened Apple News in your life, you know a couple things. One, this product is for dead people. Like, only old people use Apple News. And, like, a lot of old people use Apple News.

We should say, disclosure, Neil, I have to tell is one of them. I'm one of them. Disclosure, The Verge is available on Apple News. If you're a subscriber to Apple News Plus, you get past our paywall. The media industry is addicted to Apple News in a very real way. A real thing The Verge staff is used to is you just showing up at random hours of the day and dropping in an Apple News link that doesn't work for anybody because you were reading a news story. Well, I'll get to this in a minute. There's a reason why it's specifically just like three outlets to do that for. So there's a study, Media Research Council does this study. This study gets picked up by the New York Post, which is like, Apple News is horribly biased. And then the machine starts to turn.

And Andrew Ferguson, the chair of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, sends a legal threat to Tim Cook, that he, of course, posts on X, saying, we are going to investigate Apple News for suppressing conservative news, which is not a thing the Federal Trade Commission can do. And I know it's not a thing they can do, because in that letter, Ferguson says, we are not the speech police. But I'm curious about the speech that you're promoting. What? And so the mechanism by which the FTC believes it can be the speech police is the terms of service of Apple News may or may not suggest to people that this is unbiased and won't promote left-leaning outlets. That's not anywhere in the terms of service. I was going to say, I can't imagine there's a thing in there that is like, don't worry, conservatives, we got you too. Right. But Andrew Ferguson sends us a letter saying there's consumer deception because of the Federal Trade Commission. They're going to look into whether Apple is playing fair in the market with Apple News.

which again, and I know this for a fact, is mostly read by very old people. Like the demos of Apple News, you're just not worried about it. It's extremely, it's just boomers. That's what it is. It's very popular and it pays out a lot of money to publishers. So publishers care an awful lot about Apple News. There are publications in this world, big famous ones, where like the majority of their revenue is Apple News. And we just don't talk. It's like the same as Google search, but we just, we can't talk about it. Like if you break the cone of silence, like maybe Apple will take the money away from you. She just can't talk about it.

But I always talk about everything. So I guess. Okay, so Ferguson does this. So then we get Brendan, who can't stay away from a speech controversy, tweeting, the FCC chairman Ferguson is exactly right. Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FCC Act. I want to be 100% clear, Brendan. Apple has every right in the world to publish whatever it wants, any way it wants. That is the First Amendment. I will remind you, it is the first one.

It's the first one. Apple absolutely can make any collection of stories at once and publish them and say, this is Apple News today. Of course it can. Secondarily, there's no violation of the FTC Act found, right? It absolutely has a right to suppress conservative viewpoints if it wants, which is not even doing. Again, we will come to that in one second. But in violation of the FTC Act is not a thing. There's no part of the FTC Act that says you have to publish all viewpoints. Like, absolutely not. You can't find it. You can find me in this extra language. You send it to me. The thin read that everyone is standing on here is they've discovered somewhere in Apple's terms of service.

a promise that it will do everything fairly in Apple News. And then they have found this study by this media watchdog group that has organized outlets according to some political taxonomy that we do not quite understand that says the right-wing news sources are suppressed. Now, the reason I keep saying we'll come back to what Apple News actually is, is if you open Apple News, the outlets at the top of the app are routinely Reuters, the AP, CBS News, which you could now very much argue is a conservative outlet. And most importantly, and this is why everyone keeps getting Apple News links from me, the Wall Street Journal. Because do you know who the biggest newspaper publisher that participates in Apple News is?

News Corp. In 2022, News Corp signed a deal with Apple News saying it is a significant part of our revenue mix. Apple News. Do you know what doesn't participate? The New York Times. Do you know what just stopped participating? CNN. Oh, interesting. So the reason that our team keeps getting Apple News links for me is because the fastest way for me to read the Wall Street Journal is to see a journal link and then send it to Apple News where I can just get the story out because they're the key news partner of Apple News. Yeah. They're the reason Apple News is a good deal. It's actually cheaper to get Apple News than it is to just pay for the Wall Street Journal.

And I have Apple One. So it's just there for me all the time. It's just like the fastest way for me to get this thing done. And so you're looking at this entire sequence of events where Brendan has said, quote, Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTAC. Not one part of that sentence is true. Apple, first of all, has every right to publish whatever kind of newspaper it wants.

And that's what Apple News is. The top of Apple News is editorially curated. I've met that team before. It's a bunch of old magazine editors. And they pick and choose. They really do pick and choose. They choose the best, most even-handed coverage of the things they think are the most important. And if you look, it is almost always big legacy news organizations whose standards and sourcing they trust, right? Who meet the bar.

CBS, ABC, Fox News is in there from time to time. Reuters, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Those are the sources they often pick at the top of Apple News because the boomer audience trusts them too, right? Like, keep that in mind. One scroll down from that, this thing is all for you.

Right? It is all algorithmic recommendations based on what you've clicked before. And that's a huge range of sources. So you can't even argue with that because now you're running the same problem as saying meta suppressing conservative features, which is like everyone has their own algorithm and you're actually just telling yourself. One scroll down from that is my favorite part of Apple News, which is trending, which is the clearest glimpse into what this platform is and who it's for that I can offer you. Let me just show you what's trending. The number one trending story on Apple News as I look at this, and this is true every time I look. The number one trending story is from Fox News. It's about a tattoo that was seen in the Nancy Guthrie video. Possible tattoo seen in the Nancy Guthrie video may help ID subject. Says former profiler.

Just some Fox News slap. I mean, that's a perfect number one aggregator news story. Yep. Number two. Anywhere you look, I bet that's the top thing right now. Number two. CNBC. Psychology expert, Colin. The number one phrase to shut down a manipulator. Sure. Number two story at Apple News. Number three is The Athletic, which is not the wild start of the biathlon. Infidelity, credit card fraud, and reallocated medals. Damn, I want to read all of those. Number four. I need Apple News. Number four is People Magazine. Former NFL player's wife reveals what you don't see after retirement.

This is just boomer slop. Like, you can see it's in the trending topics. Apple News is the magazine rack at the grocery store. Yes, it is. The thing that it is is not the coolest thing Apple makes. Number two, a couple hours ago, a self-magazine, nine simple exercises to improve your balance. Do you know who needs that? Do you know who needs that?

I mean, me, to be fair. Okay, so this is all just dumb, right? This is just pure posturing left and right. If Apple had an ounce of self-respect, it would tell the government, in this case, like, go away. Yeah. What I'm worried about is Apple no longer has an ounce of self-respect. And so what I've been thinking about, actually, in this context, weirdly, is Steve Jobs. Not because I think I know what Steve Jobs would do, not because I have some vision of how Steve Jobs would, like, punch Donald Trump in the face, although I believe I've seen that AI Slap video as well, but because of a thing Steve Jobs actually said.

all the time, which is that Apple stands at the center of technology and liberal arts. I threatened David with a clip. So I think we actually have a clip of him saying this at one of the many, many events he said. It was the literal sign down. Can we run the clip? So I've said this before. I thought it was worth repeating. It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough.

that it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. If you're just listening to this, he gave this speech like a bunch of times and he would always stand in front of a literal street sign at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, right? And the whole tech industry has forgotten about the intersection. We're just doing technology and we're all very confused about how governments and systems and societies work because no one reads the liberal arts anymore. They just ask me how to summarize it for them. This is the moment, right? If you believe that you built the richest company in the world on that insight.

which he did, right? He built products people love. He built a company people trust. He turned it into one of the richest companies in the world. That's the insight. He's saying out loud, that's the insight. And this is the moment to say, our taste is not up for grabs for government pressure, right? Our ability to say to our audience in our news product, we, with our taste, with a bunch of fancy magazine editors they have hired to run Apple News, we're going to pick the sources of information that we think are good at the top. And then all the rest can be algorithmic and trending stories about how to not fall over, like whatever the audience there needs. But at the top, we're going to use our judgment.

and your weird media watchdog group can't just hop, skip, and jump into government pressure about our judgment. That's what it means to have a liberal arts embedded in your product. Like, I really mean that. And by the way, that is a case Apple has made for Apple News in the past. Like, we actually know for sure that Apple believes that is part of the value proposition of Apple News. That is, like, when Google News and Apple News were competing and when people were like, well, why is Apple even in this game? It talked a lot about...

the fact that this is people and this is taste and this is Apple and that actually we are doing a thing here on purpose that matters. We know that that is what Apple believes or at least believed about this product. Yeah, and by the way, I don't mean liberal arts in the sense of liberals and Democrats. Little L, liberal arts, liberal democracy, having a sense of culture in the most basic way, thinking about how other people treat one another. The humanities, Steve Jobs is saying it. He doesn't mean Democrats. He means studying art and culture right next to science and engineering and putting those things together. This is the moment to say to the government,

We have made no promises in our terms of service about conservative news, and we think you have no place in impinging on our judgment. Now, here's the problem. Do you think Tim Cook is going to do that? No. No. A lot of recent history suggests Tim Cook is not going to do that. He's not going to do that. And I think that is a tragedy, because he would be the winner if he did, right? Like, by all rights, he could just, Apple could publish a letter tomorrow saying our terms of, the FTC Act, you cannot read our terms of service such that we have violated the FTC Act with the top six stories in Apple News. But is he going to cave?

Is he going to make sure there's more Breitbart in Apple News or whatever other source that you think is conservative enough to count? Maybe. I think that's really bad. Like, especially when your partner's already News Corp and The Wall Street Journal and CBS News. Like, they're there. Fox News is there. I'm just saying, Brendan Carr's a dummy. Every sentence about Apple has no rights to suppress conservative speech and violation of the ICI is purely wrong. That is maybe the single dumbest thing Brendan has ever published. And it's because he knows it might work.

He knows it might work. He knows this company might cave. And this is the pressure they can apply. And the flip side is Tim Cook keeps caving and it keeps getting him nothing. Nothing. Nothing. They just keep coming for him. Apple is one of the companies in the world that's big enough to stand up. And I hope they do here. I really hope they do here. This is also such an easy, obvious win. Can I, by the way, can I complicate this with the flip side of this, which is really interesting? So this is the Media Research Council, right, which published this report that got picked up by the Post, which immediately became government policy. That's how it works now. The flip side of this is there was a big merger of ad agencies.

And part of that merger, Andrew Ferguson, said this merger can go through, but you have to stop relying on this company called NewsGuard, which rates the trustworthiness of media brands to decide where to put ads. Because that means you're not putting ads on conservative websites. And NewsGuard, you know, people have problems with NewsGuard, but they were just straightforwardly like, here's the reporting standards, here are the sourcing standards, like here's how accurate they are, here's how many scathing polemics about whatever they publish. They had a rubric, and you could look at the rubric, and the big ad agencies were saying, okay, like we want our, we're going to put ads near more trustworthy things. We picked this independent, neutral observer in the FTC.

went and crushed them, basically took their business away because they want to make sure the money can flow to conservative news outlets that didn't meet the standards. So on the one hand, you have, based on nothing more than this one media research council report, a threat against Apple, the biggest company in the world, one of the biggest companies in the world. And on the other hand, you have a very similar organization saying, here's what you can trust you can't, that the FTC is trying to crush because it might take dollars away. And so they have sued the FTC for free speech violations and saying this merger condition is actually a violation of free speech rights. Super fascinating. Like you can just see the hypocrisy of the Trump administration is laid bare in how they treat the media ranking organizations. It's a lot.

Yeah. The Wall Street Journal. It's funny how often I'm like, I'm pointing to Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it's rough. And honestly, this isn't even the end of the Brendan Carr stuff this week. He's also mad at The View. I'm going to give you 30 seconds to tell me why Brendan Carr is mad at The View because then I'm going to stop caring and we're going to move on. Okay, so as we know, Brendan Carr fully believes that broadcast television is the only speech in America that matters, except apparently for Apple News. If you are an old person and you're consuming media in this country, Brendan, it wants to be in your face. He wants to control what you see.

So he had this rule, the equal time rule, that has fallen into oblivion, because everyone's just watching TikTok anyway. And he has decided he's going to enforce it very vigorously. So first he pointed this gun at Saturday Night Live, because Kamala Harris went on Saturday Night Live. And it turns out Saturday Night Live is very good at this, because they know they're a comedy show. Right? So comedy shows, there's no exceptions. And actually, NBC had given Trump equal time. So now, last week, I think we talked to Brian Carr pointed this gun at late night talk show hosts, which they can't quite claim that they're a bona fide news program.

right? And news programs get an exception. If you're a news writer, you don't have to give equal time to both parties, right? So the talk show host would have Democrats on and Brennan said, we're going to investigate you if you don't have an equal number of Republicans on. And talk show hosts are like, but there are interviews and also no one cares. But that's one, right? He's pushing the boundary on talk show hosts, whether they get the news exception. This week, he has launched an investigation into ABC's The View because the Texas Senate candidate James Tolerico appeared on the show. This is ridiculous. First of all, The View is part of ABC News.

Yeah. Like, it is straightforwardly a news program. It is run by the news division at ABC. You can think it's a bad news program. You can think it's a news program that prioritizes nonsensical debate and conflict over actual news. But it is a news program. That is a thing that it is meant to do. You could think that. One could think that. In the process of selling the book pitch that I pitched for Decoder, I've often talked about how I want to appear on The View, and I think I just closed that door as hard as I can. But whatever. It's a news program. It's straightforwardly a news program. There's nothing about it that isn't news. It's just a bunch of people talking about the news all day long. He's going to crash and burn on this if Disney fights back. Right. Is Disney going to fight back?

I don't know. Brendan keeps pushing the boundary. This is so stupid. First of all, no one's watching this stuff. You know when they're watching it? They're watching it on YouTube. They're watching it in clips on TikTok that are pirated by the Android-powered bot farms that I think we should get. They're not watching the broadcast. And it's right next to all of these candidates having an infinity amount of their own time to capture. Ted Cruz has a podcast, for God's sake. That's how I know speech regulation in America is completely out of whack. Sorry, it's really bad podcast. Just nonsensical. Anyway, he is trying to say that the view is not news enough to qualify for the news exemption to the equal time rule.

It is 2026. What are we talking about? Yeah. He's so stupid. It does put Disney in a very funny position of either it has to fight against the Trump administration or...

just publicly drag the view as aggressively as possible. I mean, we should not be in a position right now with the amount of media we have and the access to media we have where we are trying to draw lines about where the boundary of the news is. Right? Like, I want to draw some boundaries. I think we make the news. I think a bunch of influencers don't. Is that a good use of my time to argue that every day? It is absolutely the worst use of my time to argue that every day. We just need to make better news. The government stepping into ABC's face and saying, this isn't news enough. We're going to punish you for not making it news enough. Whew.

Ooh, that's rough. You should feel very bad about that. Again, I remind everybody that the politics you hear me express the most are that government speech regulations are bad and free market competition is good, which is why I find myself agreeing with the Wall Street Journal during this segment all the time. Brendan, as always, you are welcome to come on this show, to come on Decoder, and try to defend any of this idiocy, especially that boneheaded tweet about Apple not being free to suppress conservative news in violation of the FTC Act, every word of which is wrong. Every single word of which is wrong. I welcome it. I would love a debate, a fulsome debate. At the end, maybe we could fight a little bit.

Just an invitation I have for you, Brennan Carr. That has been Brennan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. A true epic of a podcast with a podcast this time. Let's blow through the rest of the lightning round here because we need to get you out of here on time. My first lightning round is that for everyone who is like, shut up about all this other stuff. Talk about gadgets. I have bad news and good news. The bad news is there just haven't been any. The good news is it's about to be gadget season again. Samsung confirmed that there's an Unpacked coming later this month. We're going to get some new phones. There's already been some leaks about those phones that suggest that maybe not.

The most interesting set of phones is about to come out. We're about to get a bunch of new Samsung phones. The iPhone 17e is also potentially coming. The Google Pixel 10a is also coming soon. It's about to be a really interesting round of new, somewhere between the mass market phones everybody buys and the slightly cheaper phones that some people get. If you had Apple's last quarter, why are you doing a 17e? They should be like, it's a $7,000 pro phone. That's the thing that they sell. Yeah, 100%. Anyway, all that is coming. We're also potentially about to get new iPads, which I think is very exciting. I reviewed the base iPad last year, and my read on it was essentially, this is the first time the base iPad is not the one you should buy because...

it is full of such outdated hardware that actually it's going to run out on you before it should. Like usually by an iPad, planning on it lasting you seven years. And the current-based iPad won't, especially if you believe that there is ever going to be any useful future for AI. But the running reporting right now, mostly for Mark Herman at Bloomberg, is that that's coming. It's going to get some big upgrades. So we should get a good round of gadgets coming soon. What we are not getting...

is better Siri. So I'm reporting again from Mark Kerman of Bloomberg that Apple is continuing to work on this revamped Siri that is going to be better and smarter and largely powered by Gemini, but that it has been pushed back a point release and is now going to be part of the May software launch, not March, which was what we had been hearing for some time. This is, I would say, a small bummer and a large heaping of not at all surprising. It's not at all surprising. I think...

every one of the big smart home makers has had trouble integrating the powerful voice assistant with the needs to not be broken automation control. And Siri right now is very much automation control. And so, I don't know, I mean, Google's gotten better. I would say my Gemini smart home stuff has gotten better. But you, like Apple is not in the business of breaking stuff. Not the way that Google will just break stuff. Not the way that Amazon has just broken stuff. And Apple is also about to, the timing of this I think is really interesting because Apple is going to put this thing out in May and then in June has to explain to developers how to use it.

Right. And so the big thing that Apple has been talking about is all of this contextual awareness that it's going to have. It's going to know about all the other apps on your phone. It's going to be able to use those apps for you. Like Apple needs to ship a version of that that works in some meaningful way. If it wants to get developers on board. It doesn't need all of that to exist, but it needs Siri to be good. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think we're at the point where Siri is so constrained right now. Siri is timers and music and they can get there and add a dash or like you can talk to other stuff.

So I agree with that, except I think even the very basic features of Siri have progressed. It is still fine at setting timers, but like Siri as a voice recognition machine has gotten noticeably worse for me over the last, let's say, two years. This is also like, there are a lot of people who keep wondering why the autocorrect on the iOS keyboard feels like it's getting worse. It's because it is. And it's because of all of this underlying technology Apple's working on. So like all of that stuff needs to be demonstrated as like a step change forward if Apple is going to say, this is the future of the interface, get on board to developers. And it is running out of time to prove that. I just want to point out, is it?

Minor pushback. Apple blew it with AI. Yes. No AI. They shipped liquid glass, which looks like butts, and they had the biggest quarter in their history. Sure. Just one of those things. They're insulated because of the phone upgrade cycle. They're going to get more things wrong than right, and they're just going to keep selling phones because of what I believe to be iMessage lock-in, although the data shows that I'm not correct, but I believe it's iMessage lock-in. No, I think that's right, and I think there is a real chance that what Apple does at this year's WWDC is not show everybody the thrilling future of AI, but basically start to pretend.

that none of it exists. And just bury all of that under really technical language of features in the Notes app, which maybe is what it should have done all along. I mean, that's what it did last year, right? I'm just saying, I think this year what you're going to get is it's Siri. You can still do timers and music. And now when you ask it questions, it doesn't kick you out to a web search right away. Yeah.

Because knowing what's going on your phone and controlling apps on your phone, they're nowhere close. So you're describing perplexity, basically. Like, if the new Siri is perplexity, that may be job done for now. Yeah. In this moment, that might be all... A, it might be all they can do, but it might be all they need to do. Yeah, that's very possible. That's very possible. All right, what's your next one? I got two cars and a YouTube. What do you want? Let's do cars first. All right. You may have seen this week, Ferrari unveiled not its whole first TV, but just the inside of its first TV. It's called the Luce, which means light. The code name, by the way, was Electrica, which is way better. Oh, that's way better. I don't know what they're doing. Why is it...

This is a conversation for another day. Everybody's doing stupid names for their EVs and I would like them to stop. Electric has like a great name for a Ferrari. Anyway, interior designed by one Mr. Johnny Ive.

and Mike Mattis and a whole bunch of other, Mark Newsome, like, you know, love from Johnny Abb's company. They designed the interior. So a big party, a bunch of people went, a bunch of people we know were there. Johnny Abb did an unveiling. And then it was just like the interior components arranged around a room. So like the steering wheel and the display were in one part of the room and like the center console was in another and like the vents were in yet a third and people were just like doing this stuff. Very good. The video is very, very compelling because of Johnny Abb's video about how much he likes designing switchgear, which should just be a genre unto itself. I could Spotify just win me that playlist and be very happy. It's so cool.

It looks nothing like a Ferrari. James Graham, who's the first grader of the Verge, actually said this looks more like a Porsche, and I agree with him. It's all very round, and it's very iPhone-y, obviously. It's Ive. But here's the thing. It's not touchscreens.

It's all digital displays connected to hardware controls. And as you use the hardware controls, the displays around the controls change and light up in different ways. So the center screen is on a pivot. You can pivot towards the driver, pivot towards the passenger. And at the top is a circle display that often looks like a clock. It has real needles in it. And if you push the button, the whole display changes and it turns out like a stopwatch. You can do lap times. It's like the sickest interaction you can think of. Wait, I like this now. It's very good. My immediate reaction looking at a picture of this was like, it looks like a very fancy F1 racing simulator with a giant-ass iPad. And I was like, really, Johnny? This is what you're doing? But again, there's a part of me that's like, none of this is Ferrari. There's not the point of a Ferrari.

No, it's not. But I do love the idea of connecting it back to physical controls. Yeah. He was very clear. He gave interviews. I think Alex Heath interviewed him. Tim Stevens, who writes for us all the time, interviewed him. And he was like...

it's a car. I'm there to drive the car. I don't want to look at a screen and touch the screen, which is fascinating because if you remember, all of the Apple car rumors was that he wanted to get rid of the steering wheel, have full autonomy and then like do something else inside the car, right? This was the dream. And so it's fascinating to see him abandon basically all the ideas we'd heard about for the Apple car for the very tactile, it's all switch gears and buttons and clicky magnet vents in a Ferrari. The thing that I'm saddest about, if you look at this, it's very cool, right? You can see, you can see a lot of Johnny I've been here.

Ive is particularly good at accessible design. Like, accessible in every sense of the word. Like, accessible for people with different abilities, but also just, like, the point of the iPhone is that everyone has one. Rich or poor, everybody has the same kind of iPhone, right? Yeah. And you're like, oh, this is only for, like, five people. That's true. And it just makes me, that makes me a little sad. Like, Ive is at his best when he's addressing millions of people. And here, it's like, six guys are gonna be able to afford this car.

So what you're saying is you want Johnny Ive to do the next Camry. Yeah, if this was a Kia, he'd be like, no, this is the future of cars. And I think that was the opportunity with the Apple car. And I'm dying to know how many ideas moved from the Apple car to this. I'm dying to know if there are other ideas to bring these ideas to life. Very quickly, a bunch of Chinese manufacturers are going to copy all this. It's all going to happen. But, you know, there's that thing where you'd see an Ive design and we'd talk so much about care and polish. And you're like, oh, the thing that's amazing about this is that millions of people will have these products. They will experience this level of design and care. And here, it's like, it's beautiful. Yeah.

You're never going to see one. Most people will never be able to flip one of these switches. Does the car industry have the kind of fast follow thing that we see in tech all the time? That like, if Johnny Ive did this for Apple, the thing I would say in response to what you just said is, well, the good news is everybody's going to copy this and in two years this will be, some of the ideas here will at least be sort of normalized across the industry because that's what happens. Does that happen in cars? Like, does Ferrari do something and then it sort of trickles down into like three years from now, Volvos will look like this? There's a lot of pictures of like Mazdas that look exactly like Ferraris right now. Okay. Or Ferraris that look exactly like Mazdas. Okay. You can find those.

this is such a car nerd thing. For a long time, BMW had this thing called the Bangle Butt. There were designers named Chris Cummings. Chris Bangle is one of the most controversial designers in BMW history. And he designed this lid of the trunk of the 7 Series in the early 2000s, I want to say. And now every car has that. And so BMW and Mercedes, if you look at them, the reason their cars always look so bananas and they're getting increasingly more bananas is because they get fast-forwarded so fast. Everybody wants to look like a German luxury car. And that dynamic is changing in some ways. I think the newer Hyundais and Kias in particular, they're charting their own weird retro futuristic horse. But there was a time when, yep, within a year, every car looks like whatever BMW used to do.

Interesting. I don't know. It's not going to happen with the Ferrari. And we don't know what the outside of the wheelchair looks like yet. People have suspicions, but nobody actually knows. I just, I am encouraged by the idea that a lot of car designers will look at Johnny Ive and say, oh, he doesn't think touchscreen everything is the future of cars. Maybe I should change the whole industry. The whole industry already thinks that. Like the car designers across the industry have been like, oh, this is dumb. China just outlawed motorized door handles because they're telling people. I mean that, yeah. The industry, the pendulum is way on its way back. Like Hyundai, Kia, Volvo, a bunch of car makers like, yeah, we need the buttons back.

Okay, that makes me happy. Yeah. All right, do your YouTube and then we'll end on mine and we'll get out of here. What's your last one? Big news. Huge, huge news. YouTube is coming to the Apple Vision Pro. Huge news for six people. Huge news.

Well, look, first of all, YouTube has the biggest library of 360 content anywhere. Sure. And so it was always a huge miss that Apple did not have access to YouTube. Because what are you going to do? Like when I reviewed Apple Vision Pro, I was like, can I use YouTube? That's where all the stuff is. And they kind of shade it because some of that content is really old. Like there's been 360 video on YouTube forever. Yeah. I interviewed Michelle Obama on YouTube 10 years ago in 360. Like that's a long time ago. So that content exists. You can go look at it. You can get it. I think also YouTube wants to get people making the content again because AndroidXR is coming out soon. Right.

And so it's on the Apple Vision Pro. It's just a way to get a headline. You can upload some 360 content to this platform. You should try it. And then that's how you get a trickle of new content for Android XR. That's my big strategic think of this, but I just think it's very funny. Finally, now there's a YouTube app for the Vision Pro. That's a good take. It was always kind of a deliberate burn that it wasn't there because YouTube is everywhere. Part of YouTube's whole thing is that it's everywhere that is available to look at stuff, you can find YouTube. And so to not be on the Vision Pro was clearly a choice. So I think your take is probably right that they're now in the position of being like, okay, we want to incentivize people to make this kind of stuff. We might as well start somewhere.

Well, I mean, to be fair, they're already in the Quest and all these other headsets. They just weren't in the Vision Pro. Yeah, but, like, the people who bought Vision Pro and the true believers in this content are, like, that is one overlapping circle. Oh, yeah, and there's been, like, weird third-party YouTube. Like, that was the first wave of apps. Like, look at this YouTube app. Right. But I think they're just trying to seed some content ahead of Android XR. Yeah. All right, before we go, I have just a very boring but obligatory update on the Paramount Netflix.

war to buy Warner Brothers. Somehow this has become my cross to bear is that every time somebody does a weird, boring thing, I have to tell you about it on this show. Although I will say I am enjoying the extent to which the Ellisons are just like, well, if we have more money, which is what happened this time. So Paramount, where we are basically is Warner Brothers keeps telling its shareholders not to accept Paramount buying them because they would like to be bought by Netflix. Everyone is very clear that Warner Brothers would like to be owned by Netflix and Netflix would like to own Warner Brothers. And Paramount just keeps coming in and just like hucking dollar bills at everybody hoping that that works. So what happened this time is Paramount is now offering to pay

the $2.8 billion termination fee that would go if the Netflix deal didn't happen. So they're just handing over $2.8 billion more. And they're offering a 25 cent per share. They call it a ticking fee, which pays to shareholders and Warner Brothers' discovery for each quarter the transaction doesn't close after this year. So they're basically saying the money's going to go up every quarter the transaction doesn't close, which just incentivizes everybody to not take the deal, which is so funny. But anyway, all of this is happening while there's a lot of like...

political machinations going on. The Ellisons are meeting with the Trump administration and, like, everybody's trying to convince everybody else to not. No, wait, the machinations are even funnier than you think. Have you seen the latest update today? No. So Sarandos met with Trump, CEO of Netflix. The Ellisons have met with Trump. Trump was, I believe, on ABC News last night and he said, everyone's paying attention to me. I must be very important. I'm going to stay out of this one and let the Department of Justice handle it. So you can just flatter his way. You can just flatter Trump into sitting it out.

It's good. It's really good. And then you're like, oh, who runs the Department of Justice? Oh, it's Pam Bondi. That'll go well. Who's her antitrust chief? Oh, Gail Slater, the antitrust chief at the Department of Justice, just quit because she was about to take Live Nation Ticketmaster to trial. And Kellyanne Conway has successfully lobbied potentially the government dropping that case over Gail Slater's objection and she quit over it. Wow.

This is true. This is all in the background of this. Trump is saying, I'll let the Department of Justice handle it. And the Department of Justice antitrust chief just quit because it appears the Ticketmaster has corruptly lobbied its way out of that trial. So there's going to be no one to stop this deal. Potentially no one to approve this deal. In either direction? Yeah, there's just... It's good. It's perfect. No one is going to own anyone. You know Ted Sarandos gave Trump an Emmy or some shit. Like, it's like, who knows what happened? But he's like, I'm out. I'm not paying attention anymore. Unreal. Yeah, so this chaos will continue. But just the extent to which the Ellisons have all of the money and no idea how to win this fight is just great. I just want to say this one more time.

Just put yourself in this position. You are Larry Ellison. All of your wealth is Oracle stock. Oracle stock is AI stock. And you are desperate to sell your AI stock to buy Warner Brothers. Do you, Larry Ellison, believe that your AI stock is going up or down if what you think a better trade is is to sell it and buy Warner Brothers? Just ask yourself, does Larry Ellison think we're in a bubble based on the fact that he wants to sell his Oracle stock and buy Warner Brothers, a thing that has killed every other acquirer for over 20 years?

Do you want to buy the AI bubble or do you want Friends reruns? This is where we are in 2026. You can evaluate that any way you want. But if you today owned Oracle stock, would you think it was a good idea to sell it to buy Warner Brothers? Wait, no, no, no. I'm going to put this in even simpler fashion. Would you rather bet on the AI industry continuing to go up the way that it is? Or do you want to bet on the success of the Harry Potter HBO show coming out next year?

That's what I want to hear about. Firstcastofthevirge.com. Tell us which of those you would rather bet on. There's a lot of ways to come up with AI bubble, but I want to sell my Oracle stock to buy Warner Brothers as one of them. Yes, it's a tough beat. Personally, I'm out on either one. I'm going to go to Paramount Plus and keep watching Mission Impossible movies. It's going to be fine. All right, we should get out of here. We've gone way over, as we all want to do. I blame Brendan Carr for this one pretty succinctly at this time. Anytime you want, Brendan. If you read about any of this in Apple News, please send Eli the link because he can open it. I can't. I don't want to hear about it. But that's it. That's it for The Virge Cast. Remember, as always, to get this podcast ad-free and to support everything that we do to make Eli utterly ungovernable.

The best thing you can do is subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. You get ad-free podcasts. You get all of our subscriber newsletters. You get all of our everything else. It's the best thing you can do to be part of this whole family and thing that we're building. We also love hearing from you. Keep hitting us up with ideas about how we can be talking about the stuff in the Epstein files, how you feel about the Ring and Wise and Nancy Guthrie stuff. It's all messy, and we're sorting through it all in real time here and on the website. So keep getting at us. The hotline is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. Send Neelai all of your Apple News links at neelai at theverge.com.

The first cast is a virtual production. I'm part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neel Eye, back and roll.

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