The 'AI is inevitable' trap

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which until this week was the silliest thing a company has done in recent memory to capitalize on wild technology trends. This, you'll remember, is when Long Island Ice-T rebranded as the Long Blockchain Corporation in order to make a bunch of money, and it worked. This is what we do now. I'm Randy Woodpears, Neil Abtels here. Hey, buddy. Hello. So the news on this one, let's just get right into this one. This is, I think, the silliest thing that has happened in the tech industry in a minute, and I'm very excited about it, was that Allbirds, which most people would know as a shoe company, which also kind of came up at a really interesting time in the tech industry when all you had to do was convince a bunch of people that you were a tech company, and they would just give you lots of money. So Allbirds, a shoe company,

got like a tech company valuation. It was one point valued at $4 billion. They had a huge office in San Francisco. They were going to like reshape footwear. I don't know. They were going to do something. And then everybody realized they were a shoe company and it all kind of fell apart. And then this week decided that no, they are not a shoe company. They are an AI company.

And guess what, it worked. Their stock briefly went up. I think it was over 700% at one point. It has settled back down a bit, but it's still way up even over where it was a few days ago because their big plan, as I understand it, is to get GPUs and rent them for you. They're just going to go get some compute and rent it to other people, which I would point out is everyone's idea for the future of technology right now. It's also still a shoe company. It's not even a shoe company. It's like the shell of a shoe company. Yeah, they're selling off the name Allbirds and their assets, which is...

are the shoes and the ability to make shoes for $39 million. So a company called American Exchange. Once worth $4 billion. And they're closing all their stores. And then the Shell, the public Shell company that was Allbirds, is being renamed to New Bird AI. That's fantastic. Which will be, quote, a fully integrated GPU as a service and AI native cloud solutions provider. And I just want to point out, this is real. They are initializing GPU as a service as GPU-ass. Well, I don't like that. So GPU-A-A-S? GPU-ass, baby.

Ugh, the capitalization alone in that acronym is awful. The honest category on Tinder. You're not wrong. You go to Palo Alto. That's going to get you some swipes. Newbird AI expects to use the initial capital from the sale to acquire high-performance GPU assets, or GPU assets, if you will, which will be deployed to serve customers requiring dedicated access to AI compute capacity. This is so dumb. It is. Well, it's not even dumb. It's worse than dumb. It's nothing. Do you know what I mean? This is the most nonsensical sort of buzzword capitalization we've seen in a while. And you and I were not around covering this stuff in the early .com days, but a few people have compared this to that when, like, in the mid-90s.

If you just did anything, but you put .com at the end of your company, it signaled to a bunch of investors on Wall Street that, oh, they know the internet. And they just like want to be next to that thing. So they will pour money into your business. This sounds stupid. And it sounds like anyone paying attention would not possibly fall for this over and over again. And yet, historically speaking, everyone has fallen for this over and over again. Everybody piled into mobile when mobile was becoming a thing. It was a joke on the show Silicon Valley, the mo-lo-so, the mobile local social and so-lo-mo. And then we did it all again with crypto and we did it all again with Web3. And now we are doing it maybe at the biggest scale ever with AI. If you just say you're AI. I mean, actually, the funniest thing about this is that.

Their scale is so small as to be useless. They're selling the company, the actual shoe company, for $39 million, and they're going to raise $50 million from an unnamed investor. If you would wish to name yourself investor, please call us and let us know who you are, and I will tell you that you are blowing $50 million to your face. So they're going to have a total of $89 million to compete with Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure and NVIDIA's weird circular finance NeoClouds. What are you doing? Like, Sam Hoffman is like, here's what I need, all of the money in the world to build Stargate. And they're like, we have $89 million worth of GPUs, which at today's price is six GPUs.

Yeah. None of it makes any sense. But it sextupled the stock price. Job done. Like, if you ever want an indication that all of this is just nonsense to juice money out of dumb investors, here it is. I present to you NewBirds AI as a service. Richard Lawler, who wrote the story, has a line here. We asked Wharton Professor Gat Allen about the news, and he said, calling this a pivot gives Allbirds too much credit. By the way, this thing you're pointing out about being confused about what were tech companies, sort of in the explosion of tech companies, when The Verge started, quite frankly. This is WeWork.

Like WeWork ran around calling itself a tech company and everyone woke up one day and was like, so you own a bunch of real estate? Where's that tech company part? And they had to talk about like elevating the world's consciousness with co-working or whatever it was in the rest. One that collapsed. It was Blue Bottle Coffee, if you'll remember that. It is Warby Parker. The thing that makes a tech company a tech company is either you are Apple or Google and you're able to extract monopoly rents on your platform, which is very lucrative and I highly recommend it. Very few people manage to pull this off. Or you have zero marginal cost for the next thing that you make because you're a software company and you can just distribute infinity software to people for zero dollars. And choose.

are neither of those things. They sure aren't. And when you try to make things that aren't tech company things and tech company things, you end up with subscription offerings that drive people bananas. Like, absolutely bananas full of rage. And your companies fail. And this happens over, you end up DRMing the coffee machines. You know what I mean? Like, that's where you get to. And you just see, like, you can't make everything software. I keep going on and on that software brain. And this is just, they tried to make shoes into software. And now they're new bird AI. Yep. Sure. So the reason, we have a lot of news to get to. There's actually a lot going on. This is kind of a lightning roundy episode because there's no sort of...

big giant new thing that happened, but there's a lot to talk about. Everything's crazy. The Vergecast. Everything's crazy. Don't be afraid. I think there's some...

broader AI thing happening right now. And I just want to kind of talk through it. And I think Allbirds is a useful place to start because it is such a silly version of, I think, the way in which all of this is getting away from everybody, that there is a sense of like, oh, I have to be in AI because it is the thing. And nobody knows what that thing is. Nobody knows whether a shoe company can be the thing. But it's like the FOMO in a certain way is now so intense that all you have to do is stand on a street corner and say AI and people will buy your stock.

But I think the other thing that has been happening this week is on a very different note is this stuff with Sam Altman. And there have been these repeated attacks on Sam Altman's house and against him and these threats against him. And there's just, we've talked a lot about the vibe difference in AI, right? And the way that companies talk about what they're building versus the way that the users perceive it versus the way that sort of the world is receiving all of this from these companies and from this industry. And in a bunch of different directions, it feels like all of this is coming to a head right at the same time. And there's some interesting data out this week to support that theory that we should talk about.

I don't know, you're sort of in the wind in this industry in a lot of the same ways that I am. Are you feeling this right now as much as I am? I am, and I think we've been talking about it on this show for a while, on The Verge for a while. It does feel like it has come to some kind of head this week, specifically because the person who threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house had said, quote, we should be Luigi-ing some tech CEOs. And I want to talk about that and what that means, and that's a lot to unpack there. I do think it's important to say, and I said this clearly on Decoder this week too, that violence is unacceptable. Political violence is unacceptable. You can be as mad at Sam Altman as you want. It's unacceptable to wish violence on him or his family.

At the same time, I also think it is unacceptable how helpless people feel. And I think the people in power ought to take a real hard look at that because those ideas are all connected. These outbursts are coming from a feeling, a place of helplessness. And I think that's as unacceptable as the violence itself. So just to say, I hope that's clear. We're going to talk about it, but I just don't want anyone to ever think that we're condoning violence in that way. I think The Verge is an anti-war, anti-violence publication. We've been that way for one time. We're going to stay that way. Saying we should be Luigi-ing some tech CEOs and then attacking Sam Altman. It is very bad for the tech industry to find its leaders occupying the same moral space as healthcare CEOs.

Yep. Like on whatever scale of cool CEOs there are, which maybe is all in the gutter. Maybe there's no more scale of cool CEOs. The reaction that the, you know, the murder of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare got was shocking to a lot of people. And then, you know, we saw it in our audience. We saw it in the wider culture. There were a lot of people like, yeah.

That's it. Yeah. Right? Like, these people are all monsters. They've all profited from our pain. Fine. And we have sent Miyazato to cover the Luigi Nanjiani trial. And you see that dynamic playing out. That is not where tech CEOs have been. No. Like, not even very long ago, it was the opposite. Yeah. And the idea that they had something to say that was interesting about remaking the world or innovation or design, we have long had tech CEOs on our website. We have had conferences with them. The code conference used to exist. A decoder exists. And the tenor of...

how people reacted in particular to technology CEOs used to be one of excitement because they liked the idea that people were building things. And now it is the same in some cases as healthcare CEOs. It is one of being exploited and taken advantage of and being made to feel helpless. And I could connect that to AI. I think we will. I think there's a lot of data connecting that directly to AI. But I also think it's, you know, it's the way that all of them insist that everyone is stupid except for them. Right. And they should be in charge of the world in very specific ways. And I, man, that just seems like a miss to me.

You know, it seems like telling everyone that you are smarter than them and they should be deferential to you because you know how to do everything in one tweet. That's rough. And then we all use the products. I think the thing that these companies all fail to understand is that the truth outs because people use the products and they have real experiences with these products and you cannot hide from bad products. Yeah. I mean, and I think it's...

hard for me to figure out how much of this is specifically an AI thing because the other sort of running theme under a lot of this is this incredible ongoing recognition of what social media in particular is doing to us and the algorithm timelines and the ways in which people are starting to feel like they're being used by products and not the other way around that I think I don't I suspect it'll be really obvious in 10 years what it was that did this but it's not obvious to me right now but it feels like at some point in the last 18 months, the sense of this is mostly a good experience on the internet has turned for most people. And I don't think it's everybody. I don't even know if it's like the sort of prevailing thought is the same for individual people about how they feel about individual platforms. But the percentage of conversations that I have with people in all walks of my life where they are fundamentally about, I don't like my experience with technology and the internet and devices and social media. And there's a sense that all of these things are being forced upon me rather than look at this cool thing that is available to me for free and all I have to do is look at some ads. That has completely shifted.

And I think a lot of the reasons, frankly, are the same, right? There's also like big capitalism things going on and people are mad at the government for a lot of really good reasons. Like it's very hard to put all of this stuff together, but AI is just the frothiest possible version of this thing. And it's also the one that these people are trying the hardest to make. feel the biggest, right? Like nobody's out there being like TikTok is going to become so powerful that everyone will stay at home, watch it all day and we'll need universal basic income. That is like precisely what Sam Altman has been saying about AI for years. And so it's just like, that's such an obvious like tip of the spear of what I think is probably a bundle of feelings about a bundle of things. But it is just too easy to sort of stick it all into AI. You know, I think you can say that people's negative emotions on social media have come to one kind of head, right? There's literally trials these companies are losing where they're being held liable for negligently making teenagers feel bad and do harm to themselves.

That's a lot. There's a lot of ways to feel about that. But I would offer you that on balance, social media has made a lot of people feel empowered. Sure. Right? You're connected to whatever's happening in your community, good or bad. You're connected to what's happening in your local school district, good or bad. You can tell what my experiences with social media are. But you can also find a big audience of people for the things you like to make. You can wish to be a YouTuber and start being a YouTuber tomorrow. We know lots of people who feel this way. You can build careers that were not possible because there's at least one class of gatekeepers that were removed. I think that is...

cool. Like there's a lot of trade-offs in there and everyone knows how I feel about social media and the creator economy and all that stuff. But like the idea that somewhere in there is empowerment is really important. Tremendously important. I have something to say and I'm going to open TikTok and this app and CapCut and the video editing features of TikTok are going to help me say it.

And then maybe I'll pull the slot machine and maybe 10 million people will see what I have to say. There's something there that even if you think there's a lot of negative to come from social media, that one piece makes a lot of people feel empowered. My favorite is like the pressure washing businesses. We're like, I've got nothing but a pressure washer and a dream. I'm going to advertise my pressure washing business by just making ASMR videos of pressure washing. And now I have customers. Something in there is empowering. And then you get the people who get so successful that they do the pressure washing for free for the content. Yep.

There's a whole fascinating... Yeah, there's a whole group of people that run around their communities just mowing unkempt lawns for the content. And I'm like, this is great. Like, something in there is good. Sure. And I think that's, like, worth protecting even as you try to make the parts that are bad go away or minimize those or whatever you do. I think people's reaction to AI is not to feel empowered. It is to feel like something will be taken away from them. And we have the data here. We have study after study. There was one from Gallup that was just in the New York Times. There's a new big study from Stanford that we should talk about. There's the Quinn Impact study. There's an NBC News poll. There's a lot of this now that, in particular, kind of shows that the more young people...

use AI, the angrier and more upset and more anxious they become. And if you're this industry, you have to look at that and say, oh, we have a huge problem on our hands. This is why people are putting us in the same moral category as healthcare CEOs. We are running around saying we're going to take everyone's job and we need to rethink the social contract and I need every electron that has ever been produced in the history of the world to fund my data centers and you can't buy one stick of RAM and also we're going to take your jobs away. Oh, but by the way, you should love us. I don't think you get to do all of that. No. And not only that, there is also this ongoing

fear mongering of if you don't get on board and start using these tools, you'll just be left behind. So I think like one of the things that comes up in the poll you're talking about that the New York Times wrote a really great story about Gen Z's AI use. And they all have this feeling of like, well, I don't want to use it because I think it's making me stupid and I don't want it to replace me. And by the way, the idea of extended AI use leading to cognitive decline is seeping into public consciousness in a very real way. Like that is starting to be accepted as truth in a way that I think is really fascinating.

At the same time, these people are like, I'm also being told by my professors and the world that if I don't get on board, if I'm not the AI person, I'm never going to get a job at my company. So there's this sense of AI is going to replace me, but without AI, I don't have a chance anyway. That like, how would you not feel helpless? Like you're truly sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't. And that just feels bad. I mean, I'm just going to read you the stats. 22% of Gen Z feels excitement about AI. That's a decline from last year. Only 18% feel hopefulness, which is also declined from last year. 31% of Gen Z, according to the scalpel, feels anger. 42% feel anxiety.

Those numbers are miserable. They're also not a secret. The industry knows this. The tech executives I talk to all know this. Policymakers I talk to all know this. And I think all birds being like, it's a pivot to AI. We're calling it on shoes to rent 25 GPUs to whoever will take them. There's just an amount of fraudulence in the economy that you can see that that's an obvious scam, and yet it's working. And I think the value people perceive from the actual tools is mixed. The polling is showing you it's mixed. Yeah, there's a great stat from this Stanford study that just said this was basically on...

particularly pertaining to how people do their jobs. It says 73% of experts expect a positive impact compared to just 23% of the public. 73% of AI experts think AI is going to fundamentally be good for your job. 23% of the public. Like that is as big a disconnect in perception as you're going to find on almost anything, almost anywhere. You and I have talked a lot about this in the past. And I think a theory we both share is like most people just have experience with these products that suggest they're not that good. Does that account for a 50 point gap to you? I think Americans don't like being told what to do. Do you know what I mean? Say more.

Like 73% of US AI experts say the technology's impact on jobs are positive. Who are US AI experts? It's a bunch of consultants at Deloitte. You know what I mean? Like it's people who walk into your company and say, we can automate this and you better use it is what you're describing. And this is the future. And we can see how much money we'll get in building your company because we're going to convince your boss that the data isn't ready for AI. Yeah. And so you better make some cuts so we can do.

some data migration to make the data ready for you. By the way, I'm saying this because I get this pitch in my inbox every single day. How to get your data ready. When you run a business podcast, you get a lot of bad consulting pitches. I get a lot of bad consulting pitches. Mine are all people just being like, put all your data in markdown files so that your agents can navigate it. I mean, there's just something there. It's like, isn't the point that you can just read all the databases without help? But all these people are being told what to do. They're being told that this thing will fix problems or revolutionize the economy or provide universal baseline income. And in their lives, I suspect most of them are experiencing free chat GPT at home and co-pilot at work.

And these products are just not very good. I don't think anybody's out there trying to defend the quality or performance of free chat GPT. That is the majority of users. I don't think anyone's out there really trying to defend the quality of Google's AI overviews. They're just not very good, you know? And that's what people are experiencing. People open their social media feeds, which again, I think used to provide a sense of empowerment and they are confronted with AI slot, right? They're confronted with this output, with this like never ending series of scams. No one knows if you can trust a picture anymore because the industry just failed to accomplish any kind of metadata labeling. And like, why would you feel good about this?

Every other big technology trend has been bottoms up. It's been led by people who are like, this is exciting, as opposed to being top down in this way. And then the characters pushing the top down change, by and large, are not cuddle bugs. They're not making the case. They're saying this is happening. And if it doesn't happen, we'll lose to China. And also we've taken over the government and gotten rid of everyone's health care. And you're all stupid except for me. And like, what are you doing? Like, how do you expect to fix that? You can't fix it by buying TBPN for $200 million and saying they're going to handle your marketing.

You have to fix it by, you know, like winning people over. And that's why I think you, when you propose that we do a segment, you're like, should we just call the top of AI? Like, I don't know, like business wise, if this is the top, but I do know that public perception wise, something is over for the tech industry. Yeah. And it increasingly to me seems like that divide is not.

fixable. And it's possible that I'm wrong and it's possible there will be some version of these products that is so mainstream, good and useful that it'll work. But I increasingly don't see it. I mean, you look at all of these trends, right? There's been all this stuff this week with Anthropic basically neutering Claude in order to make it work better with the amount of compute that it has. And these companies are desperately trying to figure out how to make any money at all, or at least lose less money before they go public. So the products in a lot of ways are actively getting more expensive and worse simultaneously. Like they're sort of in shitifying in real time as these companies have to figure out how to make some money. They're also getting more and more aggressive about

like trying to take your whole life inside of them. OpenAI is just nakedly calling it a super app. And they're like, we want you to live your entire life inside of ChatGPT. There is just all of the business incentives that these companies have are actually against make the best product, right? And it's like, that is not how you win the hearts and minds of people that you have to win. And I think that the only thing I can surmise, and I think this has been true for a while and continues to be true, is that the people who are truly AI-pilled are still so AI-pilled that they earnestly believe the line.

it's happening whether you like it or not. And the only responsible thing to do is get on board. I think a lot of people would look you in the eye with all of your best intentions in mind and say that to you. And I think those people are wrong. And I think that is about to be pulled like further and further apart all the time. And this is the thing that has happened for me this week because I've just gone from like, I don't know how you come back from somebody saying we need to be Luigi-ing the tech CEOs and getting like...

pretty broad support from a lot of corners of the internet. Yeah. Like, that's a line that is very hard to uncross. The moment for me that I, like, really had to sit and think about was how hard we had to moderate our comments on the stories about the attacks on Samuelson. And, you know, I love our audience. We have a good audience. Usually our audience is pretty anti-violence. Usually our audience is pretty anti-war. We were like, oh, we got to do it.

This is not the publication we want to run. This is not the audience we want to have. This is not the image we want to promote. And like, when it's the tech audience turning on you in this way, something bad's happening. And, you know, you see these guys, Mark Andreessen is blaming the media. Mark Andreessen famously is out there on podcasts saying you should have no introspection whatsoever. Right. Because our ancestors didn't, which is just a lie. They're not motivated to think about this very hard. Yeah. Like literally he's saying, I refuse to think about the consequences of my actions or have any interiority whatsoever. That is not the right approach for somebody with money and power.

Right? If you're going to take over the world, I think people would like to think that their leaders are thoughtful. Historically, that usually works better than I'm the mad king, you know? And I have no introspection, even as everyone hates me. And the only thing I can say is the media is lying to you about everything. And we need to control the message. It's not going to work. How many times on a show do we talk about Brandon Carr and he's like railing about how he will censor every local news station in the world? We're going to talk about it again this week because he's all doing it again. And I'm pointing out that people are on social media talking to themselves.

They are not under your thrall in this way. And you can see that they've lost it and they've decided that everyone listens to the media. And it's like, nope, they're listening to you. And they are making up their minds. They're listening to you and they're using your products and they are making up their minds. Casey Newton had a good piece in Platformer last week. Kyle Chick had a good piece in The New Yorker this week. Just pointing out that Sam Altman calling for an end to the overheated rhetoric is true. Yes, we should drop the overheated rhetoric. Also, that means Sam should stop saying that he's going to take everyone's job away. Yes. Like it came from one side of the equation, not the whole thing.

I don't know, man. I agree. I don't know if it's the top economically. I think there's a lot more money to be made. And boy, are these folks going to make money. But I think I keep coming back to this. I'm going to get in trouble for it again. The products are speaking loudly. And if you don't show people why they should love the thing you're making such that they demand the change themselves, they're going to fight you. And if you make them feel helpless, which I think a lot of people feel helpless right now, bad things are going to happen. Yeah. All right. Well, we should switch gears on this, but I just want to offer you one more example before we take a break, which is Reese Witherspoon, our girl Reese, who I would say among...

celebrities in the world is about as like universally liked as anybody. She's Reese Witherspoon. Like if you hate Reese Witherspoon, don't at me about it. You know what I mean? So Reese goes on threads, I think on Wednesday of this week and posts this video of her in her kitchen making a smoothie. It's very like influentery. And she says, I've decided it's time. The AI revolution has begun and I need to learn as much as I possibly can about AI and share it all with you. Basically says, women don't want to be left behind. So do you want to learn with me? And the comments, I would say about a hundred to one amount to, oh girl, no, don't do this. Roxane Gay replies, oh Reese, absolutely not.

Is this sponsored content? This feels very scripted. I want to know less about AI, but thanks. Oh, Reese, did the body snatchers get you? This is like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these. And this is about as earnest let's embrace AI thing as you're going to find from anybody. And just reflexively, the overwhelming response is like, this is so bad you can't possibly be serious. What is happening here?

It's the same as crypto. What you're describing is when people are like, I'm Tom Brady and I'm here to sell you Solana, like whatever he was selling, whatever SBF's coin was. But I think with crypto, at least there was, if you dug a little, you could sort of understand that they were just getting paid for it, right? Like, yes, they didn't disclose that they were getting paid for it. And yes, that became a whole thing and whatever. But I don't think most people really believed that Tom Brady like loved crypto and thought it was an important backbone to the internet.

AI is like, we're going to change your way of life. And Reese Witherspoon is like, let's talk about it. And everybody's like, let's not, Reese. I don't, let's go out to the book club, not about AI. Yeah. It's also just like, you know, I vibe coded some nonsense this week. I know you did too. I know you're talking to people about what they're making. Like it's, the best part about AI is how small it is actually, right? Like if you're a regular person, like the best thing that can happen with AI is like you can make something for yourself that maybe you weren't able to make before. And that is, I keep coming back to this, that's empowering. And like, boy, have we gotten far away from it. Like most people cannot.

they're not going to pay however much in tokens to have that experience. And I think everyone's just missing it. Like, how do you get people to feel great about it? You empower them. You don't put Reese Witherspoon on threads being like, let's do some prompts together. Like, no, absolutely not. Yeah. Reese Witherspoon's prompt club is not an idea whose time it's come. All right, we should take a break. Then we're going to come back. We're going to do the hype desk. We're going to just barrel through some more news because there's a lot going on. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back. It's time now for the segment where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley has got to come on and tell us what's cool in the world and on the internet. It's time for the Hype Desk. Ross, Ashley, welcome back. Great to have you guys. Hello. Hello. Neil, this is the last time you get to give the speech. Do you want to give the speech? So as you know, Ross and Ashley do not work at The Verge. They're influencers. I feel influenced. So per our precious ethics policy, you can't buy me and David, but you can buy them.

And so eventually we're going to get to the one line, which is you can't buy us, but you can buy them. That's pretty good. See it? I like it. Today we're unsponsored for flavor. So it's fine. But you understand what we're trying to do here. Yeah. Ashley, I think this is your story. I think it is. Yeah. I'm building a new computer. And I was very fortunate that a friend sold me a 5070 Ti at reasonable MSRP. And I was very excited for that until I started putting together the rest of it and remembered that the RAMpocalypse is happening. And I have built my own computer since 1999. I remember having an old beige.

PC I was very proud of that I built. And I hate pre-buying them. And so I want them to look exactly how I want them to look. And so imagine my shock when I went to go buy two sticks of... two sticks of 48 gigs of RAM, and it was $1,200. Oh, wow. I felt like there was maybe almost an aneurysm, a pre-aneurysm moment where I was just like, uh. And so this is where it gets kind of weird because everything's always weird when it has to do with me. It never can be normal. The RAMpocalypse is weird enough and horrible enough. But I made a joke on my Instagram saying like, oh, I'm going to start selling feet pics now. Like, haha. And somebody DM'd me and said, actually, you already have a WikiFeet page. And I was like, stop. No, this can't be.

I'm not important enough for this. And so, yeah, I went and looked at the Wikipedia page. First of all, very insulted to find out that I have a 4.4 score. Wait, out of five or out of 10? Out of five. I have great feet. Is this like the Uber ranking when you look at your own Uber? Yeah, if it's under like five, they're bad. I'm pretty sure a 4.4 on Uber gets you fired, though. Yeah, that's the same. If you get through a 4.2, you get kicked off. No, you get fired as a rider. You don't get fired as a driver. You get fired as a rider. You can't ride anywhere. So this, I'm like, this is deeply upsetting. I was very insulted by that. But my favorite thing was, there's one of the pictures, they have like comments. And one of the comments on the picture was, I have a tattoo on my ankle and someone described it as graffiti on the Mona Lisa, which like.

So we started with We Built a PC and we ended with what amounts to an invitation for people to go juice your WikiFeet ranking. This is what happens. Do we think this is going to get you enough cash to buy two sticks of RAM? The RAM apocalypse comes for us all. Well, I don't have a single segue out of WikiFeet. So Ross, what do you have for us? I've been thinking, what can I do to transition? I cannot. Feet to walking, walking to festivals. I'm going to talk about Coachella, but here's a spoiler. I did not go to Coachella. I never go to Coachella.

I love the Coachella live stream. And this year, they went 4K on all the streams. They've got the multi-view, so it feels like you're watching, you know, if you do Premier League or the Olympics on Peacock, same idea. You can watch them all at once. You can jump between the audio. They do a fast channel now. It's just radio. But I will say there's one thing that felt very different this year, and I don't know how quite to put it, but I feel like more than I've ever seen in the past is the headline artists played to the cameras more than they did to the audience. They've been doing a lot of, like, really nice 4K live streaming for a while. The main stage has been doing that. But this is the first year where I saw a lot of songs that...

They were clearly directed just for the camera themselves. Like Trent Reznor and his wife, Mary Quinn, did Nine Inch Noise. They had this amazing performance from Closer. And if you were in the crowd, you cannot see what was happening. But they had a full choreographed concert. They had camera people right up to Trent's face, having the bokeh effect. I think it was 24 frames per second this year. They really wanted to make it look like concert footage, like from a documentary. Do you think that that's because they're going to release it as like a, like a purchasable, like by Coachella? I think that every year, but no, I think it's just because they know these are the breakout clips that are going to travel. Because like Coachella's biggest marketing thing is FOMO, right? Like they sold out 120,000 people every day, the weekend, sold out tickets.

In many ways, I think it's just like, hey, aren't you sad you're not here? Look how cool it is. And I'm looking at this going, this is the best seat in the house. I have air conditioning. I do not have to be in crowds. I'm just enjoying a really good sound bar. But no, it's like, it's the favorite thing to do. And it just surprised me how much they've really upped the production. And I didn't realize until just doing research for this, how long YouTube has been the live stream partner. Like, this is just a thing they've been doing for over a decade now. And we talk over and over again, like, you know, obviously YouTube's getting the Oscars coming up soon too. And like, they've just been laying the groundwork for all these like premium streaming tools of TV with Coachella.

And I cannot recommend it enough. It's Weekend 2. Please just put it on the background and learn some new music. Okay, Ross, the two things that I feel like were all over the internet were that the Nine Inch Noise set was unbelievable. Like, generationally incredible. I haven't seen it. And then there are, I would say, a lot of very conflicted feelings about Justin Bieber. What did you think of Justin Bieber's set? Okay, so for people who do not know, Justin Bieber did a full set, but it was a lot looser. And then toward the end, that's the part that's been really viral, he just opens up his laptop and he starts playing YouTube clips. But to do that, he literally just goes to YouTube.com and he searches for them. Everyone has to do brand deals, Ross. That's what I'm thinking. I don't...

I think a lot of people are calling it lazy, and I don't think it's lazy. If anything, Bieber came from YouTube. He's discovered. His story is so indebted into the YouTube history. I actually thought it was very poignant.

I do question, was that a Bieber, I thought? Or did Google go, hey, I've got a great idea for you. And it's a great integration. Can I tell you one of our most popular stories on the entire site all week has been the debunk of the conspiracy theory that in order to play his old songs, Bieber had to do the YouTube thing. Because he sold his catalog. Because he'd sold his catalog to like private equity for hundreds of millions of dollars. That is so silly. And so there's this conspiracy theory that he was forced into like karaoke. And it's like, no, like one, everybody's got lawyers.

The people who own the catalog are thrilled when this stuff happens because the value of the catalog goes up. And also, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And so we wrote a debug, we got all the quotes in it, all the reporting, and it has just been at the top of the site all week. People want to know. That's amazing. You're doing the good work. That's good journalism. It's something. Go do the Justin Bieber story, yelled the editor-in-chief. You remember, Ross. Every now and again, I have ideas. I will tell you, I am choosing to believe that that was authentic. Because you're a believer. You're choosing to believe. The moment that he went up an octave singing Baby and sounded like his old self.

Magic happened. I just want my youth back. The internet was changed. I want to be who I was when Baby came out. And so does Justin Bieber. I think we all do. That's 15 years ago. Don't we all want to be who we were when YouTube was butter baby? Exactly. Those were the days. All right. Ross, Ashley, thank you so much. Always great to have you here. Always great to be here. See you again next week. Bye. All right. Thank you again, Ross and Ashley. Neil, let's just lightning round our way through the end of this show. Does this sound good to you? Yeah. Okay. So lightning round one. We're just going to barrel through a bunch of news. We should probably start a Ticketmaster.

which we sort of left off with at an odd point, which is that Ticketmaster Live Nation had settled with the DOJ in its case about whether Ticketmaster Live Nation is a monopoly. It's a fascinating, interesting case, but it looked like it might go away and then it didn't. And it kept going because a bunch of state attorneys general decided to keep prosecuting this case. And they won. I like that you got attorneys general right on the first go. I appreciate it. Listen, I've been working with you a while. This is what we do now. Man, talk about people feeling helpless. The Trump administration corruptly settling the most obvious antitrust lawsuit in the history of the world. It's bad. But yeah, it's true. The states kept it going.

I think everyone knew what would happen. Are you even really surprised they were liable on two counts of being a monopoly? Not a legal monopoly, I should say. There's still no remedies and the judges still break them up. We're just very much at, they illegally monopolize the market for live event ticketing and they tie their concert promotion business together with the use of their venues, which is illegal. And so if you don't know, I mean, everyone knows I've taken Masterworks, but if you like run a theater, let's say David and I ran a small theater and we had to keep it going, we had to put on one last great show, which I think is a movie everybody would watch. It's also the plot of the Muppets movie. And we're like, all right, we got to get some acts in here. The problem is that...

Ticketmaster would literally run the business that sells tickets, the Ticketmaster part that everyone thinks of. They run Live Nation, which owns competing venues, and they are the artist contract with to promote their shows. So I'm like, hey, I, you know. Billie Eilish is one who keeps coming up. Billie's going to headline our night-saving event. She would do that for us. Right. Like, I was thinking of Justin Bieber. I really want Justin Bieber to show up and just watch YouTube with the audience for a while. Hell yeah, dude. Right. And in the case, you saw, like, the CEO of Barclays Center and the CEO of Live Nation argue on the phone, and the threat was, if you don't extend your ticketing deal, we'll take our artists to the other venue across town. And that is just straightforwardly legal. That is just cartoon villain stuff. And there was no chance they weren't going to be found liable by a jury of regular people who deal with this. Anyhow, we don't know what's going to happen next.

You know, I continue to believe that like the intense monopolization and control of the American economy is a root cause of helplessness. So just score one for the good guys. Absolutely. You know, this case took a long time that Trump DOJ corruptly tried to leave because like Kellyanne Conway was lobbying for Ticketmaster. The state's got it done. And there's some glimmer of hope that you can fight off the big bans. Yeah, it definitely remains to be seen how this thing will actually end. But I am not surprised, but still sort of surprised that they lost. I mean, who knows? I mean, they're going to appeal.

All kinds of dumb stuff. It's a long way from over. Yeah. We're trying very hard to get some of, like, Live Nation's not going to come on our shows. We're trying very hard to get the competitors to come on our shows to be like, okay, you've got this ruling. How much change can you make right away so that while the appeals process happens, some other kind of change can actually take root. Oh, that's interesting. Can you, like, make cultural music business change in this weird sort of chill? Yeah, you've got this weird moment in time before Clarence Thomas has to weigh in on the pricing of Billie Eilish tickets. What can you get done before that happens? Because who knows what happens in that case. Yeah. Yeah, we've already talked about it, but Justin Bieber, you are welcome anytime. I loved it.

Justin Bieber can play YouTube videos at me as much as he wants. These are the walls. All right, next up on the list, the sort of ongoing MacBook Neo effect in the world has caused a bunch of action from Microsoft in a really fascinating way. Tom Warren, fresh from parental leave, wrote a really great piece for us last week arguing that actually the MacBook Neo is a very good thing for Windows because Microsoft is nothing if not a fast follower. I would argue that that piece is very funny because what Tom describes is Microsoft's fast follows are a series of things that just didn't work. Microsoft has a history of fast following with products that aren't successful. But in this case, the thing it does seem to have inspired Microsoft to do is push much harder for students and try to make Windows better. I put this in here because I think you are as fascinated by what is happening with the Neo as I am. The hottest gadget in the world is an iPhone chip running macOS. Isn't that nuts?

It just bears repeating. It's an iPhone chip that runs macOS. You unnerf the chip and let people do computer stuff with it for real and everyone loses their minds. Yeah. What do you make of the sort of Microsoft response here? It's like, do you think, can this company actually sort of pull up its bootstraps and compete here? It's hard to talk about Microsoft's response here without talking about Microsoft and OpenAI. Okay. I think Microsoft, remember that when they introduced Bing and Nadella was like, literally said to me, I want to make Google dance. Like they were riding high on what they thought was an interface revolution that would let them just upend mobile and search and computers. And boy, did that relationship not turn out how they wanted. Yes. At all. Like just this week, you know, OpenAI leaked another memo about Focus.

which is hilarious because the thing that is distracting OpenAI is how many memos they write about having to focus. Every week, another executive is like, it's time to buckle down again, I said. And it's like, didn't your boss say that last week? Okay. But in that memo, it's like the CFO of OpenAI, it says, we're now on AWS, which is what our customers wanted always.

And it's like, yikes, like Azure was the provider for OpenAI. And it literally says Azure was great to help us get started, but we're now where we need to be on AWS. And it's like this whole thing fell apart for Microsoft in like very specific ways. And I bring all that up as a foundation because I think they really thought co-pilot PCs were going to be the thing. Yeah, I think so too. That you would just talk to your, they ran the ads. You just talk to your computer, it's going to do stuff for you. And it turns out none of that worked. Like Antonio tested all that. And then Antonio tested a 599 MacBook Neo, which is an iPhone chip running bog standard Mac OS and it's the hottest gadget that anyone has going right now. I would just say, I would only tweak what you just said very slightly, which is to say, none of it worked and everybody hated it.

hated it. Like the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Microsoft shoving Copilot onto every single surface of every single Windows computer has been like so sweeping and so huge that Microsoft almost immediately started unwinding it. Like this company not that long ago was loudly and proudly betting the company on Copilot being everything to everybody forever and is now just quietly pulling buttons off the screen. Yep. And saying that they're doing it.

Yeah. And they're like, we're going to, you know, relax the experience and bring it back and we're going to make everything feel a little better and less in your face. And we're going to get it out of like the stupid text editing software. Like we don't need Copilot in all these places. Microsoft, it's going to be fine. But yeah, this thing, Microsoft, I think you're right. I think it thought that it had the answer and all it had left to do was put it everywhere. And now I think it maybe knows it doesn't have the answer at all and is going to flail pretty spectacularly as a result. I mean, just the fact that the agentic computing revolution is not really consumer software yet, like in any real way.

Like, go do a bunch of tasks for me. It's just a thing that costs a billion dollars in tokens now. Sure. Like, you can't make that a consumer problem. Also, I don't think people think in whoops in that specific way. It's also happening on Mac Studios and Mac Minis. Like, no, like, importantly, people are not running OpenClaw on their Windows computers. They're running them on Macs. And there was also news this week about Microsoft, you know, trying to figure out how to do OpenClaw-type computer UC things through Copilot, which is sort of an obviously good idea if you're Microsoft and they should have been doing this a while ago. But, like...

It is just, they've lost every possible version of this advantage so far. It's wild to me. Right, especially because sort of the price performance of Windows is backwards compared to a Mac Mini or now a MacBook Neo. I think they can get that back, right? They're starting to deeply discount some Windows PCs. Like Best Buy is going to sell an IdeaPad Slim 3X for $499. It's got a Snapdragon in there. Like, maybe the battery life will be good. Walmart's going to do a 16-inch HP Omnibook 3. Why are they all 3s? For $429. Like, they're going to discount and they're going to make it compelling price-wise. I think price-performance ratio is going to draw people to Macs because Macs have it.

performance advantage. And then it's also when you boot up a Mac, like all you have to do is tell Apple one time that you don't want Apple intelligence and it's not in your face. And it's just a blank canvas for you to do stuff on that occasionally reminds you to use Apple Pay because Apple can't help itself. But Windows is not that experience right now. And I think to Microsoft's credit, I think the right thing to do is to holistically take a look at Windows and say, okay, how have we lost the plot on this a little bit? I would just say that the history of Windows getting that right for long periods of time is not super strong.

Yeah. And I think as we just heard from Ashley, like the other thing people wanted to do with Windows was build gaming PCs and... Now you can't because of AI. Perfect segue. Like we were talking about with Ross and Ashley, the pricing apocalypse continues to apocalypse. There was a bunch of news on this front this week. And I think I pulled a few of these out because they are like exceedingly mainstream things, right? We've talked in the past about like building gaming PCs or Raspberry Pis or things that are less sort of in most people's day-to-day life. But like Samsung is making Galaxy phones more expensive for RAM reasons because memory is expensive. Microsoft is hiking the price of the Surface Pro and the Surface laptop. Meta raised the price of the Quest 3.

All of this is just, this stuff is too expensive. The prices keep going up. YouTube Premium got more expensive this week. That sucks. That's not a memory problem. That just sucks. That one particularly sucks. Wait, why? I agree, but I want to know why you're mad. YouTube Premium, not YouTube TV. I sort of understand the pricing dynamics of YouTube TV. Sure. Right, there's a bunch of big companies that spend a bunch of money on content and YouTube has to pay them, just like a cable system has to pay them. YouTube Premium is just turning off the ads on YouTube. And the ads on YouTube make YouTube a lot of money. They do not make the creators a lot of money.

And YouTube does not pay creators high enough rates to subsidize. They all have to do brand deals. I keep ranting about this like almost every weekend. Like the YouTube economy, the cost structures are so upside down that all these creators basically have to run little ad agencies. And more power to them. Go do it. It's a hard business to run and a lot of them are really successful at it. But YouTube raising rates to turn up the ads only benefits YouTube. Like straightforwardly, the creators are not going to get more money.

And that sucks. Like, at least when YouTube TV raises the rates, I'm like, yeah, like, some Hollywood masters of the universe smokes cigars in a room and they demanded more money and they got it. YouTube's in a fight with Disney. It's like, that's what normal happens. Sure, and it's like, I hope you all kill each other. Like, whatever happens, let them fight. And it's like, whatever, that's fine. YouTube premium raising rates is, oh, they want more people on the ad tiers because they're going to shove more mid-roll ads onto other people's videos and that money will not go to the creators. And if YouTube would just say, we wanted to make sure that some creators can be sustainable without having to do brand deals and this rate increase will help us do that, I would calm down. But I just know Google's lining its pockets.

There was a report this week that says, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, Meta is on pace to become a bigger digital ad provider than Google. And the pressure is coming for YouTube. And so I'm just so, I'm very cynical about YouTube raising rates on premium. Because up until recently, I think it was the single best bargain in media. I totally agree. I've been saying that for years. And for the longest time, the two responses we get on that, which I always enjoy are, are you insane? Ads are fine. And whatever, my browser blocks ads. It's not even a big deal. Well, get ready. Because guess who owns your browser, my friend? Yeah, exactly. But no, I agree. I think YouTube premium, especially because it comes with YouTube music, it comes with some good features. Like YouTube premium as a sort of holistic entertainment experience is very good.

I read this exactly the same way that you do. This is not YouTube saying we want to do a better job of distributing money to an increasingly large number of creators who are doing an increasingly important amount of work. This is YouTube saying we are underpriced and we're going to spend more money on it. Or we want to watch more ads because the ads are more lucrative. Every single streaming provider realized that if they turn on ads, they can make more money. And I think YouTube sees the same dynamic.

Here we are. They're doing the same thing Netflix says. They are going to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until you go back to watching ads. And if you don't go back to watching ads, that's fine. They are going to absolutely figure out the top of what you were willing to pay in order to not watch ads, which I think for you, Neil Patel, is like thousands of dollars. My parents are on, I shouldn't say this because I'm like, I'll figure it out. My parents are on the Google family plan that gives them my YouTube premium and it like lapsed the other week. And my mother called me in like a sheer pinch. She's like, I saw an ad on YouTube.

I, so my wife is one of seven kids and her siblings and her parents have all had, I would say sort of a light competition to get into the limited slots on my Google family plan, which is the most important piece of leverage I have over everyone in my family. You should be rotating the minute out. I think that's probably right. Who's been most helpful this week? Yeah, like a MySpace top eight situation. Like I will bless you with YouTube premium until you've wronged me. We need a babysitter. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Especially at this price. Dear God, no one's gonna be able to afford it for very long. All right, we should take one more break and then we're gonna go back and it's time for Brendan and it's time for the laying around. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, or I guess in this case, lightning round part two, still unsponsored, still full of flavor. Neil, I assume, I mean, listen, I know it's, it's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I hate that he keeps doing this to me. It is time for Brendan Carr is a dummy.

I'd like to think both Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs would have appreciated that. I think so. I have also never hoped so much that we get a copyright strike on YouTube for that. That's from Billy in Santa Fe. Thank you, Billy. We also, just a little teaser, we have some fun Brendan Cars and Dummy theme music news coming. Yeah. But not this week. Neil, what did he do this week? He did a lot this week. We're at the point now in the Brendan ecosystem where people send us stuff and I have to choose.

idiotic stuff he did this week. You're spoiled for Brendan's choice. It's a lot. You know, he climbed a cell tower for no reason. He does this all the time with like a hard hat. Really? To prove that he's a man of the people. He loves it. Brendan Carr, 2,000 feet in the air, just waving, being like, I'm helping your cell service. Like, all the time. And then people send me these pictures. There's a nothing he did this week, which we're going to talk about later, because it's not technically something he did. It's the absence of doing. So we'll come back to that. This week, I want to talk about two things in particular. One is just very dumb. It's the logical conclusion of a thing we've been talking about here on Brendan Carr is the Dummy America's Favorite Podcast podcast for over a year now. And the other thing is so dumb that it might be smart. Where do you want to start?

Let's do the dumb thing first. Let's just get the dumb thing out of the way. Okay, so Brendan, his main authority that he loves to wield to become America's top censor, to be the number one enemy of free speech in America, the authority that he wields is authority over local broadcast radio and television. So he's always threatening to take your licenses away, right? Which we should remind people in 2026, it's like a teeny tiny power. Yeah. Because everyone's watching TikTok. Yeah. Over the air television. Not that important. Come for us, Brendan. I haven't broadcast over an airwave in my life and I never will, right? But that's his power and he wields it with impunity. And the local broadcasters don't have a lot of money or time and they tend to cave. ABC kind of cave. This is what happens. So as part of that power, he is also very favorable towards big companies he likes. So he allowed Nexstar and Tegna.

two companies that own an awful lot of TV stations to merge against the FCC's own rules, which say there should be competition in local broadcasting so you get a multiplicity of viewpoints. He allowed these companies to merge. And now they own a lot of local news stations, a lot of local news stations. And what is Nextar going to do? They're going to replace the national news programming from ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox with their own programming from News Nation. So if you are like Brendan Carr and you keep running around saying, I need to let these things merge so there's more viewpoints and conservatives aren't held in contempt by the mainstream media and you got to compete with Google, I need to let these companies be bigger. You've allowed these companies to be bigger. You've broken the FCC's own rules on media ownership. And now News Nation will be part of the default broadcast news that millions of Americans receive every night.

Good work, Brendan. I mean, it's so dumb. It's exactly what everyone said would happen. It's also exactly what he wants. It's what he wants. He's a censor. He removed some voices and he's allowing these companies to promote other voices. They obviously say they're going to have favorable news coverage to continue to get favors from the Trump administration. You just see it playing out exactly as everyone said it would. And Brendan along the way is like, this is competition for Google, which makes no sense. Anyway, I look forward to News Nation's programming continuing to sync the ratings of local news just as CBS News pivot to whatever it is they're doing has absolutely created their ratings because Americans are not stupid. Yep. That's one.

Then he did a good thing? I don't know. Okay. I don't know. Because again, Brendan is not a savvy operator. He has just managed to twist himself into a circle that sounds good, but I suspect it will come to none. He's had a couple of like, what's the Onion headline? The worst person you know has a good point. Like, Brendan has, I would say, sort of walked ass backwards into a couple of those so far. Is this another one of those? This is definitely another one of those. And it is very much like, it's another sort of let them fight situation. Or no, I guess it's Alien versus Predator. Okay. You know, whoever wins, we lose. So the NFL, as you know, is addicted to money.

And they keep moving games to streaming services because they know that people have streaming services and they don't have local antennas. And increasingly, they don't have cable. So the NFL is just kind of like chasing the money. And they historically, for years and years and decades, have had an antitrust exemption, which allows NFL teams to come together as a single unit and cooperate on pricing. So every NFL team is a different company. The league obviously is the league and they all agree to the rules, but they're all different companies. So they should compete for things like broadcast rights and payments. But they have an antitrust exemption that says you are allowed to come together and essentially collude on pricing. They're essentially a legal cartel.

Right, and the idea was, you know, in the 60s or whatever this past, that everyone loves the NFL, we want to put the games on TV, we're going to give them an antitrust exemption so they can go deal with the networks as a group and everyone gets paid and everyone's happy and everyone gets sick. And for a variety of reasons, this kind of no longer makes sense in 2026, right? Like, maybe you want, there's more providers, right? There's not just the three big networks who are jockeying for position and maybe one ESPN. There's like a lot of streaming service providers, there's a lot of companies, there's YouTube and TikTok and whoever else that exists. And so basically what it feels like to people is in order to watch every NFL game, you've got to spend thousands of dollars a year now.

because even your local market team might be on Prime one day and ESPN streaming another day and like whatever it is that's happening that's taking this away from your local broadcast stations. And the NFL seems to have a vested interest in increasing that over time, right? Like they're talking about going to more games, more streaming services. Like the NFL has really enjoyed the process of finding more places to give them money for football games. The greed of the NFL knows no bets. By the way, I still, I want to say this clearly for our audience. The 16 game NFL season was perfect and they're going to continue ruining it until they ruin the NFL.

Just laying it out there. I may have never agreed with you as strongly as I do on that particular take. But anyway, so what did Brendan do? So Brendan is not even involved in this, right? He's not involved in this. He runs the Federal Communications Commission. The Department of Justice is investigating the NFL and wondering if the antitrust exemption still holds water when the goal, the policy goal of getting games on TVs in a way that was cost effective for everybody has been subverted by the rise of streaming services. So the DOJ is investigating the league.

to see whether the antitrust exemption is still relevant. Brendan can't stay away from this because some broadcasters are involved and he just keeps running around being like, I think there's a point at which the NFL reaches a tipping point where they're sticking too many games down a paywall, in which case it really raises a lot of questions about the scope of the antitrust exemption. He's so stupid. He's smart. He has nothing to do with this. He's just threatening the NFL because he kind of can. But, like, I think I agree. Like, I think he's right. Like, wouldn't it be great if we could all watch more football games for free? He's like, yeah, I would, Brendan. I agree. Okay, so then here's where it gets particularly done. Again, these are not savvy operators in this administration. You know who used to run the DOJ? Pam Bondi. These are not savvy operators across the board. Pam Bondi, who, by the way, forced out her head of the antitrust division because she wanted to settle the Ticketmaster case and Gail Slater, who ran the antitrust division, didn't. And guess what just happened?

Not savvy operators across the board here. The problem they have is they can take the antitrust exemption away from the league. But the league is composed of billionaires who have every single incentive to find another structure that still gets them all paid. And these structures exist all through sports. F1 is owned by Liberty Media. The teams are companies, but Liberty Media owns the broadcast rights and recently took them and sold them to Apple. Do you think the NFL is going to be like, oh shit, we lost our antitrust exemption?

nothing to be done. We'll just compete and make things cheaper for everybody. What do you think is going to happen? Yeah. And I think the streaming providers are all very excited to lose the antitrust exemption and watch the NFL walk away from broadcast television entirely because that is what's going to happen here. And so Brendan is like latched onto this fight because he thinks he can force the NFL to put more games on broadcast television for free. And I'm just telling you, Brendan, it is...

I'm not a prediction markets person, but if I was to put money on the NFL defeating you in this way, I would put money on the NFL defeating you in this way. Yeah, will the NFL decide to make less money is not typically a winning bet. They're not going to be bullied into putting more games on TV for free. It is absolutely not going to happen. The demand for the NFL is so high that if they have to put everything behind a paywall, they will find a way to do it.

And, you know, you can feel about that however you want. You can sail the stormy seas, my friends. I know you're taking those bites. But I'm just telling you, Brendan wants to be a man of the people here. He wants to wave the flag 2,000 feet in the air on a cell tower and say he's going to make the NFL free again. And I just think Roger Goodell can take him. That's all I'm saying. You just get the sense that NFL owners... Can you imagine going up to Jerry Jones and being like, here's what we want to do. Make less money.

Good luck. A lot of good guys in this fight, I would say. Really, a lot of heartwarming stories. Real underdog situation. The NFL versus the U.S. government. It's rough. We'll see what happens. But my prediction is that Brendan, he's come around to say a thing that everyone wants without thinking through for one second how to actually get that result. You can just say things, Eli. It's been a week filled with you can just say things. Oh, no. Not my antitrust exemption that allows me to bargain collectively with local TV broadcasters. I'm sure Amazon doesn't have $110 billion to pay for the next deal all by itself.

I will say the funniest possible outcome of this is like, you know, how many years everybody's been like, Apple should just buy Netflix. What if Apple just bought the NFL? Do you see what I mean? You could just do it. Oh, brother. All right. Is that, is this all Brendan did this week? That's been Brendan Carr's dummy. I mean, it's not all he did this week. Again, he also did nothing in a very specific way, which we will come to. We will. But Brendan, as always, if you can explain your actions or even how you think the mechanics, just straightforwardly, ice cold, you know, facts only, how you think taking the antitrust exemption away will make the...

the TV more free, you can call me. I'm available. You can come on the show. You can run any show. Fight me in the street. Brendan, I wait your call. That's been Brendan Carr's done, the America's favorite podcast. Okay, on to the lightning round. My first one, I have a news story and I have a question. The news story is that Amazon bought a company called Global Star and is basically trying to juice its satellite internet ambitions. Global Star, I would say, is like a Starlink competitor nobody talks about. Is that a fair thing to say? No, no, no. I don't think it's that fair. No? No.

Global Star is a tiny company whose main thing is that they provide satellite connectivity to Apple for the iPhone and the Apple Watch. Fair. Okay. They have like 20 satellites. Yeah. So this ends up being an interesting part of this deal is that Amazon and Apple, which was an investor in Global Star, now have a deal by which Amazon is going to provide satellite internet to various Apple devices. That's pretty interesting. But I think the bigger picture here is Amazon is very clearly trying to sort of build a spring for its Leo satellite business. Amazon has been at this for a while. First, it was called Project Kuiper. Now it's Leo. It is trying to build a Starlink-sized...

internet satellite business. Fine. I get why you would do this if you want to jumpstart that. It makes sense. I have spent a lot of time reading about this. This is a big deal for Amazon. They spent more than $11 billion on it. I think there's some regulatory questions about whether this deal will get through, but I find myself increasingly wondering.

who cares about satellite internet? Like we talk a lot about this with iPhones and stuff. And like as a backup communications tool, I think it's really interesting, right? Like the Apple made a big deal out of it with the Apple Watch Ultra as a, you can get satellite messaging and satellite calls as a sort of emergency tool. I think that's great. Totally get why that exists. I also understand why better plain Wi-Fi is a good and valuable idea that should exist. And I support there being satellites in space to make that better.

Beyond that, it seems like every experience we've had with satellite internet so far suggests that it is really useful to people in places that are otherwise inaccessible to broadband internet, right? Very rural places, places that companies have historically not been willing to like dig trenches to lay fiber. Again, really good, really valuable thing. I just don't totally understand why a company like Amazon is willing to invest this much time and energy in even the combination of those things, which seems relatively small to me. Like, am I missing some big, huge satellite internet vision here? Can I give you a cynical answer and then like a thoughtful answer? Yeah.

Go cynical first. The cynical answer is that Jeff Bezos has a rocket company and he needs a customer. Okay. Fair. Sure. You got to put something into space. Just like Starlink is basically SpaceX's biggest customer. There's some reporting, I believe, and information, you know, we're awaiting the SpaceX IPO and we're going to get their financials. And there's some early reporting and information, I believe, that Starlink is like the only profitable part of SpaceX and the rest of it is like a money hole that government subsidizes. Sure. Which I think won't surprise most people, but we'll have to find out for real. Yeah. So that's the very cynical answer. It's like, you build a rocket company, you need a customer.

Did you, have you heard of Amazon? Sure. Like, there they are. So I think that's very cynical. I think also in Amazon's character is to spend a bunch of money in infrastructure in the hopes that something happens. And that is like the AWS story. And if you run Amazon, you've got fleets of trucks and drivers. They're all in places where there's maybe not great cell service or internet, or maybe you don't want to be beholden to the AT&T and Verizons of the world. And now you've got your own network in the sky. You can run it however you want. A lot of packages moving all over the world. You're Amazon. You don't have to do all these deals on these places. Okay. There's something there. Sure. Then you got your first customer in Apple. And so you're like, you're going to build Leo. You're going to add global stars.

spectrum because global star owns some spectrum. Again, it's not a lot of satellites and they're not the same as Starlink in any way, shape or form. Like Leo is closer to Starlink. The global star network is device to satellite connection. So it is for iPhones. But now you've got a big customer in Apple, which probably didn't want to continue propping up global star just for one feature and definitely did not want to take Starlink's terms. I think Apple and Elon are in a real rough place right now.

Others reporting this week that Apple threatened to pull Grok from the App Store over the AI deepfix stuff. Yeah, and then didn't, which is ridiculous. But that is neither here nor there. Because again, this is a rough dynamic between these companies. Yeah. So I don't think they want to be in Starlink's pocket. So they stood up and they already have a deal with Amazon. Amazon is a much more normal company to deal with. I'm not saying it's totally normal, but a much more normal company to deal with. So you've got a big customer in Apple already. You have the potential of a big customer in the rest of Amazon. And you're, you know, your founder has a rocket company. I gotta say, none of that adds up to that much for me.

I don't think, I mean, it seems like new forms of connectivity are important to a lot of people as you think about the world globally. Have you ever tried Starlink? I had Starlink for a while in the woods when we lived upstate in the woods here in the pandemic. And I wrote this story where I was like, look, I would have needed to put up like an 80-foot tower to have this thing clear trees. And if you have one tree branch in the way, at that time, this was years and years ago, Starlink was like a little iffy. And now it's like better because there's more satellites in the sky. Thomas Riker, our deputy editor in Europe, is a committed van lifer and this dude loves the Starlink. And every time he writes about Starlink being good, the audience screams at him. And he's, this is my point about great products winning out.

he's like, there's no competition. There's nothing that can do what Starlink does for me. And there's a lot of people who feel that way. I have a lot of family in rural Illinois. My wife's family is all farmers. And they're like, get me off of HughesNet. Get me a Starlink. Let's do this thing. That network is starting to get congested. Like, it's slowing down and changing the prices. Like, stuff is happening to Starlink that reminds everybody of every ISP they've ever had. But there's still no, like, head-up competition. So I'm sort of excited for Bezos. You know what kind of contest it is. You know what they're measuring. You know what that rocket looks like. Like, let's go get it. Sure. I mean, I guess there's something to...

the same thing that animated Google and Meta trying to do this for many years. They had, you know, everybody did like balloon Wi-Fi and Meta did planes that would fly around with Wi-Fi. Meta straight up lied to our face. Casey Newton went and looked at one of those planes and they lied to him about whether it landed. Oh, cool. I don't think he's ever forgiven that company for being lied to him that way. He probably shouldn't have. That's good. But there's something to, okay, if we can connect more people more of the time, they'll use our services. And I guess you can make the same kind of case with Amazon, both with its like Amazon.com, but also all of its other stuff. So fine. This just feels like...

a particularly huge bet on a relatively small version of that. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is some big, giant, ambitious thing that we don't know about inside of the Global Star acquisition. But a big tie-up with Apple, at the very least, I think goes a long way. If you know the truth about satellite internet and you want to tell me what the big idea is here that I'm missing, versecast at theverse.com. I want to hear from you. Neil, what's your next one? All right. This is my Brendan did nothing and it was still stupid. Okay. So, a couple weeks ago, the FCC banned all foreign-made routers from the United States.

which is all routers. And so routers that were already on sale, were allowed to stay on sale, and then you needed to get an exemption from the FCC, which amounted to filing a formal plan committing to build your routers in the United States. And so all these companies scrambled. John Hollister and I did a bunch of reporting. He called all the router companies. He all did no comments because they're all a little terrified and scared and no one wants to cross the Trump administration. I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know what this was. The idea was, if you make a router outside the United States, it is inherently a security risk. And so you have to make it in the United States, except for the routers you're already making, which are fine, and you don't have to update them. Right. They actually didn't ban routers. They banned theoretical future routers. Yeah. But everyone interpreted this as all routers. Right. Okay, so we're waiting to see what happens. Like, what is the process for getting one of these exemptions? Are these router makers going to commit to making routers in the United States? Like, how is this going to work?

Well, the way it worked is that Netgear up and announced out of nowhere that it has been given a specific determination that its devices do not pose risk to U.S. national security. Out of nowhere. Just like, here we go. We filed it with the SEC because our public company CEO made a statement. Netgear, famously, their routers were primarily targeted in the Volt Typhoon incident. Like, they have security problems that have been exploited at massive scale. They said nothing about preventing these problems in the future. They said nothing about building the routers in the United States. They said nothing except...

We have this approval. So Sean, because Sean Hoster can be a dog with a bone, I love him for it, asked Netgear and the FCC whether Netgear had submitted such a plan to manufacture routers in the United States, whether they had submitted the required description of planned capital expenditures, financing, or other investments dedicated to U.S. manufacturing, which is also required, and they've said nothing at all in any way, shape, or form. And hilariously, the approval they've granted is not model numbers. It's like model names. So here's the list. It's Nighthawk Consumer Mesh Mobile and standalone routers. The R, the RAX, the MK, the MR, the Orbi Mesh.

and standalone routers and cable gateways. Does this mean Netgear can make a new router and just call it a Nighthawk? Sure sounds like it. I don't know. Is there any new Orbi count? I don't know.

Like, completely insane. Like, the worst process that anyone has ever put forth. It's all Brendan. And they've said not one word about what they've done to ensure these routers are not a national security risk. And we have been asking over and over again, because that's what we do. We just ask over and over again for statements on the record, and no one is saying a word. It's also just abundantly clear that this didn't happen in any meaningful way because it couldn't possibly have happened this quickly. Like, the ban was the last week of March, which was, like, two and a half weeks ago. Call it three weeks ago, just to be generous. Three weeks ago.

That was three weeks ago. And this very clearly caught everyone in the industry by surprise. And so the idea that Netgear had time to put together a comprehensive thing that was actually properly investigated by the FCC is just impossible. It's just impossible. There is no way real process was run in three weeks in order to get all this stuff. There's no way the Pentagon brought every single Nighthawk available and did a comprehensive battery of security tests to say they were safe for national security. Or even a Google search that would have suggested that they are extremely not.

I know the last line of Sean's story, we'll wink it. We asked Netgear if it has voluntarily improved its security in any way. We have not yet received a response. I encourage the listener, the viewer, you ask Netgear if they've committed to manufacturing the United States or what they've done to improve their security for their routers, which have been targeted at scale by Chinese hacking groups because they haven't told us. So we might as well crowdsource it. Love it.

All right. My last one is very quick and is mostly just a short update. The Trump phone continues to seem slightly more real every day, Eli. You know, we made that image as the Trump phone real. It's a meter and we made it as a static image because we just assumed the needle would always say it now. And we ticked it up a couple weeks ago. Yeah, it's like it's getting there. It is not a 90 on the go 90 scale anymore. It's like an 88 and a half. Yeah. My favorite part about this, this is mostly shout out to Dom Preston on our team who has heroically stayed on this beat far longer than any sane person would. Dom basically caught...

an in-progress rollout of the new Trump Mobile website and basically like bug fixed it in real time by writing about it on our website. And one of the things that he found, he wrote a really good story about it. We'll link to it in the show notes. But one of the things that he found is new photos, a new design for the phone, which he saw first on a Zoom call with a Trump Mobile executive, I think in February. He was on the show talking about it at the time. The phone has a new design. It does not sort of scream any other particular phone. It does look a lot like the HTC U24 Pro. It screams HTC U24 Pro. What are you talking about? Does it? Okay. It's an HTC U24 Pro.

Yeah, no, you're right. It kind of does. I'm putting my fake dollars on the line here. It has a different camera bump, but you could fake your way around the camera bump. But at any rate, this phone is now gold. They've made one, I would say, terrific design decision, which is that the enormous T and then subscript one that was on the back that took up like a third of the back of the phone is now gone. And all that's left is the words Trump Mobile twice on the back, which is a very Trump thing to do, and a sort of weird American flag. No, it's a very weird American flag. Our commenters caught this. It's an American flag that only has 11 stripes.

Like two colonies have been deleted. It is in fact not an American flag. It's the Trump Mobile flag. Yeah, exactly. Unless you count the words Trump Mobile as the last stripe, in which case it still works. But I would not say a designer did that with intention. No. But yeah, anyway, we have reached a point again where I desperately want this phone to exist because it will make for tremendously fun reviewing and content process.

It might exist. Will they sell six of them? Will they be vastly more expensive than anyone has promised on that team? They still claim it's $499, but now they're calling that a promotional price. This thing is going to be a disaster, but I hope to God they ship at least one.

so that I can hear about it. Oh, I mean, what's the phrase? Tremendous content. Tremendous content. Tremendous content. One of my favorite tech TikTokers is CarterPCs. I don't know if you're a CarterPCs fan. I've been trying to get him on Decoder to tell me about how his business actually works. So go tag him. But he has been doing hilarious posts on the Trump phone. And I literally am just excited for the phone to come out so we can review it because I think we'll have a great time. But then so I can watch those videos. Yeah, normally...

like Verge infighting is like who gets to review really cool products. This is going to be the stupidest product that 12 people on our team have ever wanted to review. Every week people are like, why do you keep paying attention to this? And then like another group of people in our comments are like, they have to. This is their Foxconn. I'm like, no. We've committed to this bit now. We have to see it all the way through. This is what we've signed up for. Do you want to do your last one before we go? Just a brief call out. I think it's just one of the most interesting stories we've published in a minute. Alyssa Weil, who is one of our fellows for a minute. She was a great sort of science writer. She was on our team for half a minute just as a fellow for short duration. She wrote a piece called Did Neuralink Make the Wrong Bet? And I know that all of you are thinking that it was just like a...

We're just out to slam Neuralink. But no, the piece is about the brain-computer interface community moving on from one style of interface to the next one. And Neuralink has started investing in it, too. So Neuralink was speech-to-motor, which still has a lot of proponents, and a lot of people are very happy with them, and that's what they want. That's where your brain moves a cursor on a computer screen, and they've now moved to speech, where your brain directly generates speech. And this is just one of those, like, ultra-cutting-edge, how do we build a technology that's going to help the most people at the most accessible price in the simplest way with the least invasive surgery? And she's a really good reporter. This story cooked for a long time.

ton of reporting in it. And it was just one of those where I read it and like your feelings about Elon and you're like, oh, a lot of people are trying to solve an impossible problem and the approach on how to do it the best way is not settled. And like, I just think that's when the verge is at its best. So I just want to call it the story because it's really fun to read. There's like very smart people in the comments, like being like, here's the next layer of analysis, which is really interesting. And then there's people figuring out about Elon as you would get. But to me, this actually has nothing to do with Elon. It's...

how do you build a product like this? How is it supposed to work? And there's not consensus, which I think is super interesting. Yeah, like what do we want from this is a really interesting underlying thesis of that story. It is really good. You should read it. We'll link to it in the show notes. I'll put a gift link to that in the show notes. So even if you're not a version subscriber, you can go read that one. All right, we should get out of here. Quick version history plug. The season of version history is over, so we're taking a break to make the next season. The next season is going to be all smart home stuff. And the six episodes we're going to do are the Philips Hue, the Roomba, the Nest Thermostat, the Logitech Harmony Remote.

The Clapper, which is maybe the most excited I've ever been about a version history episode, and The Keurig Coffee Maker. It's going to be a really fun season. You're doing a couple of episodes. Gentoo is going to be in a bunch of them. We got really fun guest plan. It's going to be a really fun series. If you want to have questions or be in that show or tell us stories that you remember about any of those things, or you want to just give us feedback on all of our feelings about AI and everything, as always, the hotline is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecastatheverge.com. Hit us up about everything, especially about The Clapper, because that episode is going to be 16 hours long, and I could not be more excited. Neil, I will send you code this week.

Uh, so I don't know if you're paying attention to, you know, AI news and virtual listener, but this week Adobe announced that you can control all of creative cloud by just prompting it. They called it interface revolution. And then Canva announced, uh, the AI 2.0 update where you can also just prompt Canva now and it'll do stuff. And Canva CEO, Melanie Perkins, who's the founder of Canva is on Dakota this week. Um, she is like very smart. She's, you know, she's a designer. She's a founder. She has great accent. Great conversation. Like Dakota has been on a run of like just yelling at people.

This one's like, let's talk about design. It's like everyone needed a break, you know? That's good. That's good stuff. That's coming out on Monday? Yeah. Love it. Very much looking forward to it. All right. And as always, if you subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe, you get this podcast, all of our other podcasts, everything ad-free, plus all of our newsletters, plus you don't need gift links. You can just read theverge.com all the time. It's the coolest website. That's what I do all the time. I open all of our links 10 different times. Just a reminder, the subscription is free. No one can tell us what to do. It's the thing I hold dearest to my heart. I love it. All right. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week

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