Why people really hate AI

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

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We are hiring. I want to get this out of the way right up top because we haven't mentioned it on the show yet because we are terrible people. We are hiring a producer to come work on the Vergecast with us. You can go to voxmedia.com slash jobs, apply, mention Brendan Carr in your cover letter. If you are Brendan Carr, I'll interview for this job. I really, I think the greatest part of this is Brendan Carr wouldn't get the job, but he would get an interview. Do you know what I mean? Like we would come in. I would hire Brendan. You know, we're also hiring a supervising producer for Decoder. I would hire Brendan to be the supervising producer for Decoder. That'd be fun. Just because that job is like.

run my business and policy show. And I would just be like Brenton all day, every day. He is good at getting attention on the internet. See what I'm saying? And that is the game we all play now. Yeah. But anyway, both of those jobs are open. Producer on the first cast, supervising producer on Decoder. We have big plans for our shows. We want to expand them in lots of ways. So we need help. So if you know people. I promise we are not as unpleasant to work with as you would think we would be. We're like mostly as unpleasant as you think. David's not all the way. Well, I'm more and you're less. This is why we're a good match. You're a delight and I drive everybody insane.

And this is like a good balance. It is. It is. In the sense that David does all the work and I do none. That's really how this plays out. It's a great move. You just sort of Kool-Aid man in five minutes before the show starts. You're like, what's up, guys? Yeah. I have a bunch of hot takes I haven't done any research on. Let's go. Which, in fact, brings us to where we should start the show today. We have a lot to talk about. There's some Apple stuff we're going to get to later. Allison Johnson is going to come on and talk about the unbelievably brief life and death of the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold and her bizarre experiences with that phone. I'm very excited about that. But first, there's sort of a big picture thing going on here. But the specific bit of news this week that I think has been...

on a lot of people's minds was this memo that went around inside of OpenAI from Fiji Simo, who is the CEO of applications at OpenAI, which is a hilarious title that means nothing. But Fiji Simo is like a big deal. She ran Facebook at Facebook. She was the CEO of Instacart. Like she's a heavy hitter in this world and has been at OpenAI making a bunch of changes. And she sent out this memo essentially saying OpenAI needs to focus, that this company has been on what she called side quests, which is...

a pretty accurate representation of what's been going on. Like OpenAI has launched every single thing you can think of over the last two years. And she's basically like, we need to stop doing all of that and focus really aggressively on enterprise and coding use cases because that is where the product market fit is. That's what we need to do. We need to pull back on all of this stuff and focus on those things. And in there somewhere, I think, is the bones of a bigger conversation being had right now about how people feel about AI and whether AI is going to continue to grow in the way that these companies need it to grow. And I just think, I don't know, we can talk about this from a bunch of different angles. But I'm curious, like...

How do you respond to the OpenAI thing? What do you make of Fiji Simo's memo here? Is this the right thing for OpenAI to do at this moment? I think so, but I have two big reactions to this. One, they just did this. Sam Altman just declared a code red minutes ago. I don't even think we've settled down. I don't think we've undeclared the code red. It's not over. So what are we doing? Why are we doing it again? Did it not work the first time? Did it not take?

Like literally, did people not get the code red memo? So we're sending a different memo with different words to see if that one hits. There's a really great line from Fijicimo in an all hands with the team talking about this stuff. Somebody, I guess, asked her, is this a code red? And she goes, we are very much acting as if it's a code red. I don't think necessarily declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense. Very good. Perfect. And correct. But I think, I mean, this is not, you're right that this is not news to OpenAI, or at the very least, it shouldn't be news to OpenAI that this is the move.

Well, I think this is my second reaction to this. OpenAI is stuck. Fiji is supposed to be the one making the big consumer product. They hired her because she ran Facebook, which has ads. They hired a million ads people from Meta. There are so many people at Meta from OpenAI that in Meta all hands, they talk about losing people to OpenAI. Sam kicked himself to run the lab, you know, to do research and pretty much raise money to make Digital Jesus or whatever he thinks he's doing. And Fiji is CEO of applications. She's supposed to make the big consumer product that does it, that takes market share away from Google search, the most lucrative business in the history of technology. And they're not doing it.

It is not occurring. They might be taking market share, but they're not making money. That's the thing. That's, I think, the important distinction. There is no question that ChatGPT has been an enormous success, right? Tons of people use it. And we're going to get into the way that people feel about that, which is what I really want to talk about here. The feelings people have when they use ChatGPT are fascinating. But people are using ChatGPT. And opening eyes, losing money hand over fist every time you use ChatGPT. And I think it's increasingly clear what this company has realized is there is no path from that to suddenly we make money on ChatGPT. They're trying ads. They've tried shopping. They've tried all the things that you would try. And it appears all indications are.

we're not running towards profitability here. Right. You hire the person from the big scaled consumer internet business to do that again. You hire Fiji from SEMO to do it again. And she's the one writing the memo, acting as though it's a code red, saying we have to pivot to enterprise. Yeah. Because that is the opportunity. The story here is that no one has figured out the worthwhile consumer AI business. No one. Even Google kind of hasn't. Right? Like their attempts to do it look way more like slop than not. Yes. AI overviews is just so frequently wrong now that it's becoming a joke.

We are planning our Apple 50 package, and I asked it yesterday, when did the wedge-shaped MacBook Air come out? Which is just a fact you can know. There's a lot of ways to find out when that one came out. And AI overuse could not get that answer right. That's brutal.

even Google, which is going to do the best job here because it already has the scaled consumer business that's making a lot of money and has a lot of advertisers, they are hurting their own product. They're going to hurt YouTube in a very real way. They're starting to run surveys on YouTube asking people if they think the videos are AI slots. Oh, wow. Because they need to build a detector. Like, there's something going on with Google, but they already have a big business that's winning and they have Google Cloud and all this other stuff. OpenAI, they got to make a business. It's existential for them. They need to make more money than they are spending or Sam has to keep raising money forever and that is pretty shaky. And so, I think absent a big consumer hit, this whole industry is...

paralyzed and starting to kind of lash out that people don't love them more. Like you were talking right before we started recording about the perception that the verge hates technology, which is very funny because we employ literal gadget reviewers. And like, I love technology and I will spend all day and all night talking about high bit rate movie streaming and we'll do like spec episodes. Like what do people think we're doing here? The problem is people have conflated tech with AI and AI has not come up with a consumer use case that people love. They really have not. Like none of these companies have really come up with that thing in this way, or at least in a way that makes money. And now the industry is starting to feel that pressure because they're asking for so much.

Data centers everywhere. No more RAM for anybody. Weird ideas about what GPUs should do to video games. They're way over their skis in terms of what they're asking for. And they haven't made a product people love. And so people are like, no, actually, we'd really dislike you.

And the data kind of backs it up. Yeah, I mean, there was this one NBC News poll a week or so ago that I've seen a bunch of people talking about that is essentially, the question was basically, how do you weigh the risks and rewards of AI, basically? Like, is it net good or net bad? And with the caveat that polls are always messy, people think that it's bad. This is just one thing from it. It says 57% said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefit compared to 34% who said the opposite. A plurality of voters view AI negatively and don't believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology.

That is not unclear evidence. This poll is fascinating, by the way, because they also poll people about like, how do you feel about Gavin Newsom and ICE and the Democratic Party and just a lot of things sort of in the ether right now. And it's like, people are psyched about Pope Leo. People are psyched about Stephen Colbert and like everything else sucks, including AI. And AI is like down there with Democrats generally in the war. It's between ICE and the Democrats, which is just a tough beat for AI right now. That's really bad. And I've talked to executives at the biggest companies in tech who are like, Gen Z hates AI and that's our problem. Yeah. Like straight, like they will just look me in the eye and be like, the problem is that Gen Z hates AI. We don't know what to do about it.

There was also this really interesting Pew study from last fall. Like this is a building set of data, right? That we've been getting real scientific research about how people feel about AI for a while now. And it's kind of been like this the whole time. It's not like people are starting to sour on it. People talk about, you know, the trough of disillusionment. It's just been like this pretty much the whole time. But in this Pew study, 53% of people said AI will worsen people's ability to think creatively compared to 16% who said it will improve this. Far more people said AI will worsen rather than improve people's ability to form meaningful relationships. 50% said it will worsen them. Five said it will improve them.

Like this is not, there's a certain subset of people out there who are ambivalent and wait and see and who knows and whatever, but like to the extent that people have reflexive feelings about this, it is overwhelmingly bad. Yeah. And I want to make the comparison to two other things because the scale of change that AI might bring is huge, but it's not without precedent. So the internet promised a huge amount of change and it was just adopted. You didn't have to try. Do you know what I mean? Like it took a while and there was a dot-com bubble and there were fits and starts and there was a lot of silly ideas going on with the internet, but people by and large just started using it. And a bunch of companies were able to make a lot of money along the way. And there wasn't this level of confusion. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like Amazon chose not to make money for a long time, very publicly, very loudly said we're not making money because we're going to build all this infrastructure. And the second they're like, we need to make money now. Jeff Bezos owns a very large boat.

You know, like the internet, the way that economy developed overall, it was just obvious. It was the same with smartphones and apps. And you can feel a lot of ways about mobile. You can feel a lot of ways about social media. You can feel a lot of ways about Mark Zuckerberg. You can feel a lot of ways about the Apple tax. Like that economy developed and you did not have to convince people to buy smartphones. Facebook is actually my favorite example of this. People raced to join Facebook, like raced to get on it because.

we eventually figured out the downstream effects and there were all kinds of problems and all that stuff. But like the initial value proposition of here's why this will make your life better was so clear to so many people that the minute their college would allow them to, they started pouring their lives into the platform. Like it was so straightforward, a good proposition that everybody just ran for it. And I've been doing all this research for version history, our other podcast, which people should listen to, that has led me back to like the days of the radio and the early days of the phone. Yes, there are small panics about what those things will do to the world, but overwhelmingly, most of those new technologies were going to solve world peace. These were the things that when they bring us together, everything will be wonderful now and we will never have problems because we can just communicate. Seriously, these are real pervasive beliefs that radio...

will make the world a meaningfully better place. Yes, connecting everybody is the goal. And there will be some negative consequences, some externalities, but we need to connect everybody anyway. Andrew Bosworth at Meta famously wrote a memo called The Ugly in which he laid out all of the bad things that would happen and said, still we connect everyone because we think that's the highest and best use of technology. You can feel a lot of ways about that memo. A lot of people have felt a lot of ways about that memo. And his point always has been, no, I was just laying it out. These are the stakes and these are the consequences and we believe in what we're doing anyway because we think we're going to make the world a better place. This is the line from Silicon Valley. It's got him Nelson saying, I don't want anyone else making the world a better place before I do. Yes.

That's Silicon Valley. But everyone believed in this stuff. I can make this even more narrow. YouTube is basically built on widespread copyright infringement. Those industries did not like this. YouTube took all this stuff. The same as the AI industry is kind of built on widespread copyright infringement. But YouTube was so useful and so good and so obvious that everyone sided with them in a way that they're not siding with the AI industry. You can just see delivering meaningful actual value to consumers lets you get away with a lot. The iPhone, it's the vanguard of moving high-tech manufacturing to China.

that Apple built that ecosystem in China. So did Tesla. Everyone should go read Apple in China. It's a great book. But you see these two companies in particular kickstarted an entire industry over there. Why did we allow that to happen? Because the iPhone was great. Because it's great. It's just a great product. And so are smartphones. And my point here is the AI industry is staring at these polls.

that say everyone hates them. And it's because they are asking for so much. And you can quantify that in a million ways. They're asking for a lot of power. They're asking for a lot of land to build data centers. They are asking for every stick of RAM that has ever existed in the history of the world. They're asking to scan every book without payment. They're asking for my identity to run Grammarly. Like whatever it is that they're asking for, they're doing it without permission and they're asking for a lot. And they have not given back a product that makes people feel the way that the internet made them feel or the smartphone made them feel or YouTube made them feel. It just doesn't exist yet.

And so instead of reacting to that by building great products, VGC was saying we need to pivot to enterprise encoding because Anthropic is killing us there. And then the VCs are going on podcasts and doing what they do, which is blaming consumers or blaming the media, which I think is bananas. Yeah. Have you been deep in the weeds of the VC podcast this week? I feel like you've been talking to me about VC podcasts more than usual. I have. So here's what happens. I feel so bad for our team. What happens is at night, I try to put the baby to sleep and he's a real cuddler.

So you got to just hold him until he's like actually asleep. But his eyes are closed and he's, you know, he's just trying to do that wiggly thrashy thing where if you put him down too early, he'll wake up. You got to sit there. What are you going to do when you're sitting there? You're going to watch TikTok on silent. That's what you're going to do while you're sitting there. So I've just... But you don't even wear headphones? You just watch it on silent? I just watch it on silent. Oh my God. It's fine. And I dim silent. It is a weird way to experience TikTok, but it's what I do. And our poor team just gets TikToks at like 8.30 p.m. all day, every day.

I can confirm this for everyone. I feel bad about it. So I ran across this creator called Signals and Noise. She has a PhD from New York Chicago, which I love because I went there. She's the co-founder of something called Bookscape. Her title says AI Tech Strategist. You gotta watch her videos. We'll link them. They're good. Her name is in here. So if you want to tell me what your name is, I'm happy to say her name, but it's hard to find your actual name. And she's called that too, Podcast.

One, of course, is all in. Always. Everyone's going to know who that is. And the one I want to start with is the Big Technology Podcast, which is hosted by Alex Cantrowitz, who's a friend of ours. He had Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, on. And she called out this clip, this reaction that in particular VCs are starting to have to the negative messaging around AI. So I want to actually just play the same clip from the Big Technology Podcast. This is Olivia Moore, who's a partner at Andreessen.

There's been a lot in the media in the U.S. more broadly, these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology. I was just talking to someone this morning who was not in the tech industry, and they were saying the same lines, like, AI is evil, it's going to watch us, like, it's using all the water. And then they were like, but ChatGPT really helps me. And it has, like, great answers. And so I think part of it is a timing thing of we just need these products to kind of saturate the mainstream consumer and they can realize the value. So there's a lot of things in there. A lot of ideas there, huh? We can talk about the water another time.

This assumes in a certain way that these products exist and are out there, right? And the only thing that we're missing is adoption. And I would actually say what seems to be the case is that we have the exact reverse, which is that everybody's tried these things. They're everywhere. And found them wanting in some meaningful... You can't avoid these chatbots at this point. If you open up Gmail, you get 11 pop-ups reminding you how to Gemini in your Gmail. These things are not far away from the users. It's just that people find them, use them, and...

at the very least, find them not worth $20 a month, right? Like for the purposes of this conversation, we don't even have to litigate whether the products are any good. They're not worth $20 a month to most people. And until they are worth $20 a month to most people, they're going to hemorrhage money. And this to me is just like, this just assumes that all of this is out there and it's like the, you know, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. That is not at all my experience with AI right now. Yeah, no, it's everywhere. I have a different objection to this idea from Olivia Moore at Andreessen Horowitz. And it's the one that the creator made in her video. And I brought this idea to our environmental reporter, Justin Kama, and to Mia Sato who covers the fashion industry and shopping generally for us.

environmental objections do not do shit for the American consumer. They've never done anything for any, no. Not one thing. Like the reason I brought up fashion is fast fashion exists and no one cares about the environmental cost of Sheehan. Totally. Literally no one cares. That's how I was flying off the shelves. I am a sucker for a big stupid car.

I really am. I love them. The more cylinders, the better. Well, light them up. Lots of people in this country know every inch of the environmental cost of big, stupid cars. We've been talking about it forever. I have an EV. I will tell you my EV is a much more pleasant thing to drive than my stupid Mustang, but I love my stupid Mustang, right? Like there's, it just doesn't work. Like you're watching what's happening in EV sales right now. If you cared about the environment, you would buy an EV. You would not buy the dumbest trucks that you can buy, which is what Americans are addicted to buying.

Yeah. Someday when you make a country album, I need it to be called I Love My Stupid Mustang. I do love my stupid Mustang. It's just going to make me very happy. I love it the most. This idea that the media has convinced everyone that the, in particular, water cost of AI is so high that you should hate it is just totally divorced from the reality of how people react to environmental messaging at all. Yes. At all. In fact, I would argue that the do the right thing versus do the convenient thing is an easier trade for people to get over to do the convenient thing than almost anything else with environment. Like many times the, you know, do I give up my...

private data in exchange for some convenience. Like, people have more feelings about that than will I burn the world down for some convenience. Like, behavior suggests that we will happily burn the world down if it gets to be my clothes 10 minutes. Ask people how they feel about the paper straws, man. Yes. Yes, exactly. And like, the paper straws might not be helping anything. But like, the idea that you should like, suffer some minor inconvenience to make some incremental benefit. Like, no, everyone's like, I hate these straws. It is so easy to overcome the environmental roadblock, the moral sense that your actions will help the environment or hurt the environment. You just need a great product.

That's literally it. Or a more convenient product. And so here you have a partner at Andre Snorowitz, which is effectively now just a VC for defense contractors, saying people hate this technology because the media is lying to them. And first of all, the media that most people consume, as we have talked about over and over on the show, is not... People are not reading their times. They're just opening TikTok. They're watching the algorithmic media that is being delivered to them by big tech companies. They have a huge vested interest in, as you're saying, distributing AI tools to them. So I'm not popping up on people's feeds and being like, did you know that's a lot of... No, it's just not happening.

And even if that was happening, you can just look at, you know, the weird dip in EV sales after the incentives went away and people rushing to buy gas cars, even though gas prices are through the roof. Like people make weird decisions when the environmental factor is the main factor. By the way, asterisk, I know we're going to get notes about this. EV sales are ticking back up because gas prices are high and the cars are actually better. Maybe that's all going to equalize, but it's not the environmental concern that is driving consumer behavior in the car market or in the fashion market or anywhere else where you have environmental concerns that should shift the market. And that's what I asked Justine about. That's what I asked me about. It's what this creator was pointing out in her video. You can get over it. The point I'm trying to make is you can overcome the environmental concern really, really easily. So this is one big attempt, like one big narrative from in particular AIVCs who are saying it's not our fault. You're too stupid. You've been lied to. The tools are amazing. We just have to wait and the objections we overcome.

There's another one as well, which again, this is all an instrument. So it's like, I feel like I'm dunking on a baby, but like, we should listen. At least some parts of the AI ecosystem have decided that this crazy, scary doomerism is the best way to raise money. Where every now and then they come out and they say, all the jobs will be destroyed. Anthropic, you know, Dario says that. This thing is sentient. And investors are like, okay, here's 10 billion, here's 50 billion, here's 100 billion. Now we're blaming the AI founders themselves. I find this argument to be essentially nonsensical. Like, because A, the whole...

AI will remake the economy. AI will change the way that work gets done. We're going to have to do universal basic income because nobody's going to have a job anymore. This was a feature of the rise of all of this stuff for years until a bunch of people went, wait, that sounds horrible. I don't want that. I like my job. I enjoy doing my job. Please don't automate my job away with AI slap. And there have been other lines in all of this. They're like, ugh, in America, we're way over-indexed on people liking creative arts. It's like, yeah, I'm good with that, actually. Like, all of these things are fine. And for the longest time, people like Chamath and podcasts like the All In podcast were talking.

in glorious terms about how terrific it was going to be when AI completely remade the economy. And so now to call that doomerism is just ridiculous. Yeah, I totally agree. In that worldview, and that worldview is really prevalent, Alex Karp is running around saying women are going to lose their political power and it's men who work with their hands who will suddenly have the economic power because AI will replace all of your dumb woke laptop work or whatever he wants to say. And if that works to raise money, by the way, Chamath, you're the money guy.

He has the money. He's the money. He's the dumbest money. If this is the sales pitch that works on you, you are the problem. Well, to be clear, these guys hate Anthropic because they think Anthropic is woke. Sure. But Sam Altman is just as doomer-y in this way, right? He's the one running around saying everyone's just going to rent intelligence from the cloud and they're going to build AGI. Like, there's something here where their own messaging is the problem and they've convinced people that all of the jobs are going away and now they are facing the consequences of that messaging and they're blaming the people. And I just keep coming back to the idea that...

We all knew what was going to happen when you put a camera on every phone in every pocket in the world. We at The Verge have been writing about the effects of that at every level from the very beginning. Like the whole Verge is kind of founded on the insight that phones would be a big deal. And it was like not obvious in 2011. It's very funny to tell people that in retrospect because it's like, oh, congratulations. You thought phones might be important? Like, great job. But I'm like, no, it wasn't. It wasn't guaranteed. We need to write about technology and culture at the same time. We're like, what are you talking about? It's like, well, they're all the same. And now here we are. We did it anyway because people were like, I love having this phone in my pocket.

I love having this camera with me all the time. And you can just, we have written the stories. You draw a straight line from that to like the Black Lives Matter movement. Yeah. To these huge like social changes around everyone should have a camera all the time. These big conversations about surveillance and surveillance. Those are all the costs of putting cameras everywhere in the way that we put them everywhere. Those are enormous costs. I think we're reckoning with those costs now in real ways. But it all happened because people wanted the technology. They love it.

That's not what's happening here. The costs are being imposed. We're going to take your job away is not the fault of the consumer. It might be the fault of Dario. It might be the fault of Sam Altman. But the only way the investment pays off is if you remake the economy with AI. It's the only way that the mobile investment pays off. These are the stakes they've drawn for themselves. And I'm flabbergasted that they don't see that they haven't made a great consumer product. That's the thing that will change this. Actually, we had a couple weeks from now people here, but we just taped an episode of Decoder with the CEO of Cisco. Cisco sells the stuff that goes in data centers. And I was asking about this. And I was like...

You know, like if you just said the data center had Netflix in it, people would be happy. Like that's where the movies come from. And he started laughing. He's like, you think so? And I was like, oh, you don't, this is just flying over your head. Like you have to make some case that there's some benefit to all of this investment in order for the investment to continue. You know who understands it is Sasha Nadella. He was at Davos of all places. And he said that the AI companies need to get, quote, social permission.

which is amazing for a company like Microsoft to say. We should run this clip. I'd say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens. If these tokens are not improving, health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large. Okay, I have two thoughts on this. One, Davos, famously a place a bunch of billionaires fly on their private jets to talk about how to save the environment. Perfect. Two, this is right.

This is correct. I think it's slightly ironic that it's coming from Satya Nadella, someone who has spent the last few years flailing pretty aggressively to try to find the use case he's describing. And it hasn't gone well. Bing is not the thing. Copilot so far is not the thing. Microsoft, I think in less straightforward terms, is doing a pretty similar kind of retrenchment that Fujisimo and OpenAI are talking about. They're like, what if we just approach AI as a business software? And that has been, you and I have both been on this podcast saying AI is business software. The business of AI is B2B SaaS software and has been for a long time. And there are like, we've been threatening to do an episode about the SaaSpocalypse for a while. And I think we should, because I think there are actually really interesting.

disruptive things that AI is going to do to business software. That is not how you get to where all of these companies want to go. And I think Satya Nadella is right that the risks that they run by not making this appealing to consumers are also going to backfire in business, right? Because they are incurring such a reputational hit and a sort of reflexive problem with AI that people are developing that is going to make it harder to even build business tools that do AI things. Yeah, I mean, there are as many studies as you can count about whether or not businesses are seeing efficiency improvements by adding AI. And the answer is basically not yet or no. Yeah, it's somewhere between no and like, eh. Yeah.

It's like, it hasn't happened yet. And maybe there's going to be a new set of companies that come up and they're built on the cost models of having a bunch of AI agents instead of a bunch of engineers. And that means they can make the same product as a big company cheaper. And that's just the disruption lifecycle. I don't know. Maybe that's going to happen. It hasn't happened yet. It certainly has not happened yet.

And so you're just seeing, OK, we're asking for all of this energy. We're asking for all of this data center displacement and all these communities. The communities are basically saying, no, make it worth it to us. Yeah, to what end? What is in this for me? And I don't mean to say that AI is totally useless. I think it's still pretty brittle, as we have discussed on the show many, many times. You can run into the walls of things AI cannot do. But we know now that at least when it comes to software development, it has tremendous value that is causing a bunch of consternation in that community. You just had Paul Ford on. I think that conversation is brilliant. People should listen to it. Once you can develop software, you can kind of go into adjacent industries.

It's a real thing. There's a lot of software running a lot of companies and you can widen out. But that doesn't mean you can do everything. And it doesn't mean you can eat the whole world. And I just see this gap where everybody in that industry is like, why doesn't Wired like tech anymore? Or why does The Verge hate technology? And it's like, no, it's literally the citizens of America who are like, I don't like this. Like the polling is clear and it's not because of the media. It's not because of Doomerism. It's because you're asking for so much and you haven't delivered a great consumer product. You've delivered some very compelling enterprise products.

That's not enough. And I think the hope from a lot of these companies is that something like CloudCode will eventually be a consumer product. I mean, you see it now, right? They built Cowork out of CloudCode to make it a little more accessible. They built Dispatch out of Cowork, which is basically like you can run it from a messaging app. They're trying to make this kind of creative tool accessible to more people. And it's going to work, but that is not a mainstream, that is not an Instagram level use case, right? You and I always like to talk about the sort of foundational mobile experiences, right? And the two you always bring up, which I think are right, are Uber and Instagram, that are like things you couldn't do on a phone, that the technology on a phone enabled, that changed the way we do life.

That's the stakes. And there is nothing remotely approaching that for normal people living their normal lives. Yeah, you can have a lot of feelings about Uber. We did, we just had Dara on Decoder. Boy, do people have feelings about Uber. Yeah. But the fact that you can be almost anywhere in the world, push a button and have a Toyota Camry appear is just bananas.

That is just a remarkable thing that happened because of the mobile revolution. That should be Uber's new tagline. I've said that to Dara. I once said that to Travis Kalnick in our office in Midtown, and he just started cracking up. He's like, I never thought of it that way. Like, it's crazy, right? Like, you push a button, and something happens in the real world, and in Uber's case, either it's a Camry or a Highlander. It's one or the other, really. Or if you're unlucky, it's a Model 3, and they'll have the region breaking on, and you'll just have a bad time. A lot of complaints in the world about Model 3s with region breaking.

It's the same with Door to Ashes, whatever. Like, you push a button and something happens in the real world. You order something from Amazon, an object comes to your house. That is the thing that the mobile revolution truly delivered in a way that had never occurred before. And then Instagram and social media, we actually wrote a piece about this. James Spiram, our first creative director, wrote a piece about this way at the beginning. James is an old film photographer. He used to shoot the windsurfing championships hanging off a helicopter on film. Sick. And so when, like, digital showed up and phone showed up and all the photographers sat there at the moment, he's like, I'm so happy about this. Like, I never want to be worried that my film is gone and missed the shot again. It's digital. Like, he had this totally interesting, wonderful perspective.

And his reaction to Instagram was, it is so insanely powerful to put the distribution next to the camera, right? The feedback loop here is, it's the story. I've come back, we'll link that story to you. I've come back to it over and over again. Just the insight there is so powerful. You can't do that without a phone. You can make an Instagram on a desktop computer, but the camera part doesn't exist. And so most people will never close the gap. Instagram brought those things right next to each other. I think TikTok brought those things right next to each other. The dominant language of TikTok is replication.

You see a trend and you make it yourself. That is an unusual dynamic in the history of culture. Most people are like, you copy me in the studio. But TikTok is just about widespread replication. These are huge changes that technology brings about. I think they're fascinating. I think it's pretty hard to make the argument that we don't like technology because this is what we talk about all the time on the show and our site. It's like, look at how cool this is. We're changing how we live. And then AI is in there and it's like, would you like a girlfriend? That's the best idea they have. And it's like, most people are like, no, that's pretty weird. And my friend who does have an AI girlfriend is getting weirder by the day.

And it's bananas to me that this century can't see it. Yeah, agreed. All right, we should move on to this, but I will say I am curious. If you have used or have an inkling to what these use cases are, if you've seen something, if you're making something, if there is a thing that you're betting on is like the mainstream consumer use case, I desperately want to hear about it. And if it has to do with vibe coding, I don't want to hear about it. Or automating anything. I'm serious about this. The idea that most people can identify a loop in their lives that is worth automating. I mean, we got 50 years of technology development to prove that that is not the case. Yes. You just can't do it.

Productivity, like for me as a productivity nerd, AI has been so fun because it is going to remap everyone's to-do list system. Most people don't have a to-do list system. So it's like, we need to go several levels down into what it is like to be a person in the world. But genuinely, if you have a theory on what that is, I want to hear about it. 866-4211 is the hotline. Firstcastofthevirge.com is the email. Nealiatthevirge.com is where you can send all of your five coding ideas. We're going to take a break and then it's trifled time. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison. Hello. Okay, we're here to talk about trifolds, and I want to, but I just had one of the strangest parent technology experiences I've ever had. This is happening to me in real time, and I just need to talk this out with both of you who have young children. So our three-year-old is in preschool, and for the first time, we're using the Brightwheel app. Do you guys know what this is? I don't know. It checks them in and out, right? Yeah, I assume every school has apps like this, but we check them in and out with a QR code. They send us pictures throughout the day. They send us information about what they're doing, all this stuff. And a few minutes ago, I got three separate notifications. I don't know if you can see this here, that just say incident.

and have a band-aid emoji. Oh, no. I have no other information. Presumably he's alive. I don't know. What do I do with this? I either desperately need to know about this and need to leave this podcast right now, or this is fine and this is information I'm going to wish I never had. Do you think there's a second set of notifications after an incident?

Like, it's just like, come now. Yeah, it's pretty bad, you guys. It's a phone call when the phone starts ringing. So all of this is to say, this was luckily, this was like 20 minutes ago. So presumably everyone has recovered, but I may suddenly leave this podcast. Modern parenting is very strange. This is like, I have both, I'm glad to have all this information. Is there an incident with a bandaid and then like incident with a poop emoji? Do you know what I'm saying? This is my first. Well, so there is, there's potty colon P and there's potty colon BM. So I know the ones and twos. I see why. But like, it's a real, like how much information are we as people supposed to have? Do you know what I mean?

This is the dilemma I feel. We get very little of that information and is honestly for the best. I'm like, well, he was alive at the end of the day. That might be the correct answer. Call me if I need to get them to the hospital and otherwise I'll see him at the end of the day. See, now I'm in a very different place with the older one. So, you know, Max is like almost eight and she's in second grade. So now she comes home from school. I'm like, what happened to you? She's like, you'll never know.

No information will be replied to you. And so I'm kind of like looking, I'm like waiting for Jack to like get some bright wheel in his life. You can know the P's and the B's. With Max, you know, when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, like my office was in the basement. Like I did, I did a show from the basement basement and I was off and down there working and Becky would be upstairs and you couldn't actually yell from the basement all the way upstairs. And so we used the walkie talkie on our Apple watch all the time. And it was basically just a poop notification. So like a very expensive, I need you.

She pooped again. And now this house, you can just yell from his bedroom to the kitchen. It's trivial. And I feel bad because we're not walkie-talking about what you've called DMs anymore. Yeah, it's important parental communication to just yell. It's happening to each other. Exactly. Or, oh no! I need new pants. It's a whole thing. All right, Allison.

You have what has become a precious object just in the last few days. This is now rare phone contraband, which is you have a Samsung Galaxy Z trifold in your possession. Yeah. Tell us what happened with the trifold this week. I mean, you have a thing that appears to be a Samsung Galaxy. That's a fair point. Yeah. TBD. You've been trying to get this phone for months. Yes. We have been on a whole journey trying to get one. Wrote about it all in very great detail on the site. But the basics are like Samsung PR, you know, typically will send us a review unit of a new phone. They did not provide us one this time around.

There are reasons for that. Always a tell. Yes, exactly. And I'm realizing how much of a tell. So we tried to get ahold of this trifold. We're like, we got to buy one. Went in and out of stock like so fast. Couldn't get one. We turned to eBay, you know, found someone selling a trifold for a small fortune and ordered it. And in the meantime, I had to fly all over the world to go see phones. And so none of us really clocked that it hadn't shipped when it was supposed to. So this was like red flag number one.

We go back and forth with the seller. The thing finally shows up at my door and I open up this FedEx package. It is a box with like two seals on it that say like, do not accept if this has been tampered with. And it's like very clearly been tampered with. So I was like, this is very strange. Not usually how I receive a new phone. Opened it up, took the film off of the inner screen and there were crumbs and little hairs on it. Like, yeah, yeah. This is not the first time that phone had been like.

you know, exposed to air. This is not ideal. It was gross. I turned the phone on. It's already set up, which was also a very large red flag. Also not how phones are typically shipped to a customer. All there is to say, this was a very weird experience. I was sketched out. The phone immediately asked for a whole bunch of permissions. And I was like, deny, factory reset. And then I turned it off and I like didn't want to touch it for a little bit. So that was acquiring the trifold. In the meantime,

Samsung announced they're not going to make it anymore. They canceled the phone. Yeah, they just up and canceled it. Like I've been on this journey to get this stupid phone. And all of a sudden I'm like, well, this is the end of our relationship. I thought we were at the beginning. We were going to have these good times together. So here I have this phone. And just the funniest part is that when I powered it back on after resetting it and coming to my senses, it wanted a SIM card to set it up. Also strange to me, I've never had a phone insist on a SIM card.

And I was like, well, I don't have one lying around. I don't really trust it. And then the light bulb went off and I was like, I have this Trump mobile sound that is just languishing in like a Samsung S25. Kind of perfect, actually. Right. This is the realest Trump mobile has ever been. Right. Yeah. It like got this this phone to work. I set it up. It's still asked for a lot of weird permissions. But I think these are just the thing is we have.

The serial number is a phone sold in China and the eBay seller claimed it was a Taiwan model, which is a different serial number. This is where the weirdness is coming in, I think. So this is why I'm getting some of these apps that are loaded on the phone or just in one UI in China, which is I've never seen them. I don't think it's like a malware infested, you know, taking time bomb of a phone, but it is running on Trump Mobile. And that's like the weirdest combination of phone and network. A weird Chinese phone with it does have the Play Store if it's Chinese. No, it does not. So a weird Chinese.

trifold, with no Google Play Store or Play services because they're not allowed in China, running on Trump Mobile is an unholy combination. Like, you should light a candle or something. It's actually kind of perfect. I feel like I have no notes on that. I actually feel like the Trump administration would be like, great job, Allison. Or they would arrest you. Like, I don't know if you should run this podcast. I don't know which government official is going to show up at my door and arrest me. It could be any number of countries. It's a lot of possibilities. So how far have you gotten with this phone? Is it actually up and running for you now? It functions. It won't get on the internet on the Trump Mobile network for some reason.

It'll receive a spam phone call. I was in the other room yesterday and the phone started ringing and it was honestly like a horror movie. I'm sorry, the fact that the Trump mobile site won't provide you data but will provide you spam calls is also perfect. It's perfect. Yes, yeah. It doesn't do the thing that you pay $50 a month for, but you can have a spam call. So it does not have the internet. I don't trust it enough to put it on my home Wi-Fi. So I hotspotted it to the iPhone Air that I'm using right now. I was like, what do I do? And I just loaded up, you know.

the Verge in a web browser and made the window a bunch of different sizes. I was like, cool. $4,000 later, I can look at the internet in different ways. You're resizing a window on a phone. Honestly, that's a lot of innovation. Somewhere in there is a truly damning critique of foldable phones, which we should get to, but I do, you guys, I'm assuming, were as surprised as I was about the cancellation of the trifle, right? Not one bit. The second Samsung refused to send us a review unit, I was like, one, this product's a dud.

I mean, look, here's my usual caveat. It is very hard to make money making media on the internet. Sure. And there's a lot of creators out there and a lot of influencers and like, go make your bag. Do it how you got to do it. They just make a different thing than we make. And so my criticism here is not of people in their businesses and they're like, please be successful. It's so hard. I'm not going to fault you for trying to make money on YouTube or Instagram or whatever. It's so hard.

It's a huge tell when only the influencers and creators get the phone. Sure. Because they're so reliant on brand deals. They're so reliant on access in very specific ways that these companies can put them on rails. You can actually see it right now with Apple. Apple is putting a bunch of influencers on rails. One of these with Apple 50. You can see it. We don't do that. What you buy from us is our ethics policy. We're huge jokes about it. We're very annoying about it. Talk about it all the time. And so when the companies won't give us the phone or give our peers at other publications who have the same or similar ethics policies, when it's hard for traditional reviewers to get the phone, you always know. It is a tell every single time.

Because it means the product isn't good enough and the coverage has to be sent off. Now, again, I'm not trying to take shots. Like lots of people, lots of influencers got the phone. They can feel however they want. I'm just saying that's the reason I think it's a tell. Because we don't have to do what you say.

Sure. And that's a dynamic that exists for a lot of people. And so the second, it was like week three of me in the editorial meeting in the morning being like, do we have the phone yet? And it was like Samsung was ghosting us. I was like, this phone sucks. Allison, what were they telling you about why you couldn't get a phone? I got a lot of polite, you know, lines like, oh, you know, we're noting your request and your interest. I was like, okay, great. You know, and I teased out a little more information about, you know, they were sent very few review units and they were going to try and give me a heads up when it went back on sale.

And it sold out before anybody could be like, hey. Right, because they made five. I was going to say, we're all agreed on that is not about popularity. That's about they made five. Yeah, yeah. Which is when I started to suspect something about this. I was like, if they wanted to sell this phone, they could sell the phone. Like, they would just make more phones. No, they could. There's like a RAM shortage. There's tariffs. Like, there's a lot of reasons that an already expensive phone was getting more expensive or harder to produce. And maybe you just want to put all the RAM in the S26. But that's not really what they're saying here. Right? Like, they're just like, yep, goodbye. Yeah. Yeah, they're framing it as like.

This was a nifty concept that we decided to show off for a little while. And that is, that feels very disingenuous with how Samsung originally talked about this. Also, there's real demand for the phone. They would allocate the RAM to this phone. Do you know what I mean? Like, they make all the phones. If you're like, well, people really want to buy tri-folds, we're going to put the components that we can get in the tri-folds and we'll charge what the market can bear. And instead, they're like, no. On top of that, Oppo launched the Find N6, which they're, it's a zero feel crease, not zero C. You know what I'm saying? You can see it, but you can't feel it. It is very compelling. We have a video they did hands-on. It is almost creaseless. They're only launching it in Asia and Australia. They're not even coming to Europe.

Let alone the United States. My thesis here, Allison, I'm curious now, you tried the trifold and you reviewed all the other folds. I think this might be a dud. I don't think people want folding phones. And I think, like, my little phone gets bigger might still be compelling. But my big phone gets even bigger. And my big phone gets three times as big. I don't know. Can I just tell you I'm this close to declaring victory over you, Allison? Oh, no. You and I have been fighting flip phones versus folding phones for, like, two years. Uh-oh. And I'm this close to feeling like I'm winning. Is this some kind of, like, intervention? Is this, like, a gotcha? Yeah. No, I wouldn't do that to you because, again, having a Chinese phone with a Trump mobile SIM on it, I think is punishment enough. Right. But Allison, you've been using the phones. You've obviously seen this phone as close as anyone can see it. What do you think? I mean, did this work?

I think it's still playing out. And it's definitely, you know, we're seeing in real time companies be like, what should this kind of phone be shaped like? What's the limit of how big it can be versus how annoying it is to carry around versus how expensive it is? Like the trifold is almost $3,000 if you could actually buy one. So and meanwhile, you know, the Chinese brands, I think, are dialing it in a little faster. It kind of seems they have the...

you know, the zero fill crease. They have a very slim foldable that is also dust and water resistant. In the U.S., we have the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which is the dust resistant one. So you can't have it like quite all together. And I think there's, you know, I think companies are really, for many reasons, hesitant to jump into the U.S., especially with a phone that's going to cost somewhere between $1,800 and $2,000. So I don't know. I think some of these companies...

It sort of feels like we're in a place where they're treading water and they kind of want to see what this Apple foldable that we will potentially probably maybe see towards the end of the year is going to look like. And we're such an iPhone centric market. I think that could be a big moment for folding phones or it's the moment we find out that nobody wanted these things. And it was just a fun little project for me to walk around with one and buy a tiny keyboard for it. I think it'll be a telling moment. I mean, you're my favorite case on this because you have.

kind of deliberately, you have bullied yourself into finding use cases for the foldable phone. And I think you've genuinely found some. Like there are, it's not that there aren't things that the foldable phone makes better. It's just that they're still very expensive. And I think like we were talking about in a moment where all of these companies are struggling desperately to have their phones not get more expensive. The idea of this already being twice the price is a problem, right? We've spent, I mean, how long has the fold been out? Five years now. We've been waiting for the price on these things to come down and it just has not. It just hasn't. And now there's this upward pressure on phones that is like preventing these things from becoming mainstream accessible anyway.

And then you fold in, I say this with love, Allison, most people do not want to tote a Logitech keys to go to the coffee shop and do email on the table while they drink their coffee. It just doesn't feel like somewhere in there. And part of me wonders if maybe, you know, we've talked a lot over the years about the sort of cultural differences in phone markets, that maybe there are reasons that people will use phones differently in Asia or in Brazil or in some of these other markets that have very different phone needs than the U.S. does, that they'll start to take off. But for me right now, I don't look around and have any reason to think there are sort of killer apps for foldables just sitting out there.

especially not at this price. I do want to call it the thunderous sideways dunk on the watch that keys to go. Very important. I have one over here. It's a beautiful little keyboard. Total stray at the watch that keys to go. Richard Lawler, a Virchast favorite. Richard Lawler is our senior news editor here at The Verge. He runs our news team. His job is boiled down to looking at stuff. And I also say that with love because if I could do any one job at The Verge, it would be a news editor, which is just a terrifying reality for us. Richard does it better than Eli would, just so everyone's clear. He does a much better job. It is still my favorite job. It was a job I had at Engadget ages ago. I mean, his job is looking at stuff. He has a pixel tenfold, and we were talking about this, and he was like,

I am the person that this phone is for, and I struggle to find reasons to use it. Because all day long, I'm meant to be looking at things. And, like, on the go, like, being able to have the bigger canvas so I can, like, look at a desktop web page and, like, evaluate what I'm looking at and, like, have a Slack window open and back and forth. And he's like, I don't use it. Maybe he doesn't have a logic keys to go. Maybe this is the problem. See? I got to sell them on the Logitech. The thing that makes me wonder if there's some place that they could hit this market is my parents. Because I brought home the Pixel 10 Pro Fold for it. It was kind of my home.

My phone I used over Christmas. And I opened it up and my mom was like, I want that phone. That is so cool. But it is $2,000. My parents are Pixel A series people. They buy their $500 phone and they don't want to think about buying a new phone for the next, you know, five years if they can get away with it. And they have their iPad. It's like iPad to FaceTime with a grandchild and then phone.

Things could be the same device. I wonder if there's a world where they'd be like, OK, yeah, I'm willing to spend more on this phone and it's going to replace the iPad. Or if it just ends up being like, no, that's $2,000. I'm going to stick with, you know, these two devices and it's not ruining my life. You've brought us to the precipice, Allison. Who will take the first leap in predicting what the Apple folding phone will do? Right. It is for FaceTiming grandchildren. If that's all it is, you can unfold it and run two iPhone apps side by side and then maybe like a big FaceTime. Either it will be a huge hit.

or the biggest flop in Apple history. Yeah. The question is whether you unfold it and it is a little iPad. Right. Or a big iPhone. Or, you know, that's a pretty fine distinction. I am just truly, if they make that phone and it is the same kind of compromise as the iPhone Air, where it gets thinner and lighter and a camera is way worse, like, it's not worth it to me. Like, you will have reduced the primary utility of my phone to give me an iPad and I don't use my iPad. It's like, but I might be a very narrow use case. Like, maybe it's just big FaceTime as long as anybody wants.

I'm looking at this. Like, Samsung scared the pants out of Apple for, like, two years by having big screens first. And there's, like, a lot of, like, internal tech company emails from various court cases where, like, Apple is, like, literally freaking out that Samsung has big screens on phones and is taking market share away. And it reorganized, like, the tech landscape. Like, Samsung became a player because their phones were bigger than Apple's for a couple years there. Yeah, that worked. It worked. And then Apple was like, fine, our phones are big too now. And you would think, I think this is what Samsung thought, that the Fold would be, like, the biggest screen of all.

And I don't think that's playing out the way that they thought it would. And so, like, what's Apple going to catch up to? I don't know. I think predicting what the iPhone Fold might be in the face of Samsung, the tri-fold didn't work here. I can't tell you the Z Fold 7 is like a phenomenon.

Oppo is not even, it's like hottest ones. They're not launching it in like one of the bigger markets for Android in the world, in Europe. I don't know. It just seems like this might have come to nothing. I certainly think that the RAM situation and all those different pressures come at a very tough time for foldables when it's sort of like, okay, we're figuring out some of this technology. We haven't figured out how to make it cheaper. And all of the pressure is leading to more expensive phones now. So I can see how you'd maybe ease off of like, okay, well, this cool thing that we're trying to push forward on.

But we're going to back off a little bit and just focus on like selling phones and trying to make some money off of that right now. Yeah. If you're going to decide to stop selling one thing, this is pretty clearly the one, right? Like if we need RAMs on the phones that people buy, so we're going to stop putting it at like it might just freeze the tiny bit of this market that does exist for a while because you just have to put the RAMs in something else. But that doesn't explain why they didn't want us to review it. I think the phone wasn't very good. It's super heavy, I will say. And I played with it at CES. I don't know.

My takeaway then wasn't like, wow, what a heavy phone. But maybe it's just having it, especially like all folded. Can you unfold it for us? Do you have it? I can. I will say like six times right after this thing came out, Travis, our producer, would just Slack me and be like, who is this for? That thing is enormous. I mean, this is like, you know when the Huawei trifold came and everyone stopped watching that video of it unfolding? Like, I'm having the same reaction to it. Yeah, it looks sick. Boy, I want to unfold that a lot. It's a tablet. I mean, it's real thin.

You hold it like this, you're like, this is a lightweight tablet. And you fold it up and you're like, God, this is a heavy phone. I mean, look, maybe the problem is just the people, like, I'm going to say this about Android tablets and the people are going to send me notes. Maybe the problem is people just don't want Android tablets. That's why we're waiting for the iFold. Allison, will you just hold up the home screen to the camera again? You can tell from this home screen that no one has done the job of figuring out what Android is supposed to look like when you open your phone up. Because all they do is they take Android.

And they just make it real stretchy. Like, that's not, that is not the answer. And neither is the malware. Constantly asking, begging for. Do you have any financial information, by the way, that I should know? Have you considered downloading your banking app? Yeah, I think the other side of this is, like, I've experienced all the wonkiness of using Android on the big screen of a phone. And I have notes, you know, like, let it be more of a computer than they do right now. And the other question is, like.

when Chrome OS becomes aluminum, is it going to, when I open up a folding phone, am I going to get that experience or am I going to continue to get big Android, which is frustrating? You know, I don't know. There's like a number of scenarios that could play out or start to play out this year. And like, we're going to have to wait and see. It's an annoying reality. Yeah. It does seem like the iPhone fold stakes are both very high and very low.

This is not, this is Apple going to sort of try to do the like prove the market thing, but there is no market. And it's just, is this the Vision Pro or is this the iPod, right? Where they put up the slide of all the ugly ones and they're like, we did better. Is it that or is it look at this science project that we also made? I'm just saying, if you're like triumphantly, like all these ones turn into Android tablets, but the iPhone full turns into an iPad. It's like, cool. Like there's something there that will just be weird. Yeah, indeed.

All right. We need to take a break. Allison, how long do you intend to use this thing before you like throw it out of a window to avoid whatever is happening to you? So, you know, I'm going to take it out tomorrow. I have a whole day planned for it. I wanted to have like a nice, you know, day where we go do some fun stuff. We're going to go downtown. I'm going to use my little Logitech keys to go. You're going to get all its favorite treats. Exactly. I know. Because it's, you know, if they discontinued it, it's we don't know how long it has. I'm going to give it a good like effort. And then I don't know what's going to.

It's going to become a bit. Put it out of its misery. Yes. I hope not. Yeah. All right. Well, good luck. Thank you for coming on. We're going to take another break and then me and I are going to come back and presumably yell about free speech for a while. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Time for the lightning round. And Eli, I assume that means once again, we have to do this. We're supposed to say it's unsponsored for flavor. Oh yeah, it's unsponsored for flavor. There you go. Long pause. I want you to imagine like two or three ellipses in a row every time I say that. Is it time? It's time. It's time. You know what I feel like? David, we're at the point now where Brendan is so dumb that people like jump out of bushes to tell me how stupid he is. It is true. It's not so much the existence of Brendan Carr as a dummy that makes me sad. It is just the consistency of it. It's just like, sometimes you need like a routine breaker in your life. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Can Brendan just, like, what if one time you just came on here and you're like, Brendan, this amazing, smart thing. Do you know how great that would be for the Vergecast if you were like, three cheers for Brent anyway. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. This week's theme music submitted by Julia Mark. Here it is. Brendan Carr, Brendan Carr. How did he get this far? Brendan Carr is a dummy. Oh my God.

Do you ever hear a song and immediately know this is going to be in my head for a long time? I'm going to be lying on my pillow at 2.30 this morning singing. Julia, thank you for that. That was beautiful. I love the band Stars. They're one of my favorite bands, and that just sounds like not a great Stars record, because that's not what they would do. But it's like, you know what I mean? It's like the song they made just to sort of get the juices flowing first thing in the day, yeah. If they were like, we made a song, I'd be like, why did you do that? But that was amazing. Oh, it made me so happy. Thank you so much, Julia. What do we have this week? We have a lot. We're going to go from that vibe to a very different vibe.

Like me being so happy to me being so upset. All in one go. So here's just some facts. The United States is currently engaged in a war on Iran. Oh, God. We're going to start here? We're going to start here. It does not appear that anyone knows why. It does not appear that anyone knows how this war will end. Or if it should. And it does not appear that Donald Trump even knows if it's a war. You know what I mean? Like the president's supposed to ask Congress to declare war and they keep going back and forth and he keeps saying it's a war. It's all very confusing then.

I would say media coverage of this war is unlike, for example, the war in Iraq, which was my political awakening as a young college student. Everyone I knew under the age of 500 knew that going to war in Iraq was a bad idea. And the media and the Democrats and everybody was like, we're doing it, freedom fries. And then, you know, the war in Iraq. And this is very bad. I'm just putting this into context. I think what this administration wanted was a bunch of drum-pounding war coverage the way that the war in Iraq got a bunch of drum-pounding war coverage. They're not getting it because, again, everyone's like, is it a war? And there's confusion. Why do we go to war? Confusion.

How do we end the war? Confusion. This is all fine. I think this is driving Donald Trump crazy. So Brendan last week was at Mar-a-Lago where presumably he encountered Donald Trump. We actually have a clip of how Brendan describes Donald Trump. This is on a podcast he was on called Pod Force One. Can we just run this clip? He is the alpha in every single room. That's true. In every single place all across the world. God, that sucks. That sucks so bad. First of all, just as an exercise for the listener, it's very easy to make a list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the alpha. Like my daughter's second grade classroom. It's almost impossible to be the alpha in that environment. An NFL locker room. I don't know about that.

You're powerful if people think you're powerful. This is like the theory of true power. A PTA meeting. Yeah. You know what I mean? A Planned Parenthood board meeting. I don't think he's the most powerful person in that room. You can come up with an infinite list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the most powerful person in the room. Any room I'm in, honestly.

It was there and I took it. I don't feel bad about it at all. So that's just how Brendan encounters Donald Trump. He's just there as a sycophant to suck up to the boss, which is a bad thing for the primary speech regulator in the United States, especially one as censorious as Brendan. But again, just as an exercise, it's a pretty fun exercise to make a list of rooms in which any president would not be the alpha. And I'm just assuring you a kindergarten would be one of those rooms. It's trivial to make this list. Okay, I bring this up because Brendan's at Mar-a-Lago where the alpha dog is telling him what to do. From the 14th hole. And Trump puts on Truth Social this like...

classic rambling, out-of-his-mind, truth social post, where he says, yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the fake news media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly stuck down at an airport. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, in particular, and other low-life quote papers and media actually want us to lose the war. Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts. They are truly second to meant to people. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Trump stuff. He's mad at the newspaper saying the war is going poorly or that the United States is incurring any losses or that the United States has made errors in the war, like bombing a school. He doesn't like the coverage of the war. He's not getting Iraq war coverage. It's just not happening. How does Brendan react to this?

He says, broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortion, also known as the fake news, have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not. And he goes on to say, changing course in their own business interests, since trusted legacy media is not on the long time. This like rhymes with him going on Benny Johnson's podcast and telling ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel, but it's actually somehow like a less veiled threat than that. This is an open threat. Yeah. And it's done in a staggering number of ways.

First of all, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are not broadcasters. To say this, their newspapers, they don't have broadcast licenses. To the extent that they make audio and video programming, they distribute them over the internet where Brendan has no authority whatsoever. So he's taking this Trump shot at the Wall Street Journal, which I will remind you is owned by Rupert Murdoch and the New York Times. And he's taking this Trump criticism of the Times and the Journal and turning it to the place where he does have authority, broadcast news organizations. He doesn't really even have authority over that. He has this idea that he can use the concept of a license renewal to affect the news coverage by saying you're doing news distortion.

This is a totally unproven theory. Like, this hasn't come up ever. Like, a broadcast station hasn't had its license denied in, like, a long time. And if he does it, it's going to be a court case. It's unproven that he has this authority. But the threats do keep working. The threats do keep working. The chilling effect, as we have talked about many times, is, to some extent, the point and is working. Yeah, and I'll just remind people the chilling effect is this concept in First Amendment law that just by threatening enforcement, you stop the speech from ever happening.

Right? People are afraid that they'll be punished for a speech. They never say the thing out loud. And that is happening all over the place. The chilling effect is super real in the American media right now, especially for the broadcasters who keep running into Brennan Carr. This is why James Tallarico wasn't on The Colbert Show. Right? CBS was effectively chilled from that. In whatever way that that actually happened, the chilling effect worked there. They made the decision, but it was because they were afraid of enforcement. And I think we're going to see a lot of that in this upcoming election cycle. The chilling effect of the equal time rule is just going to be real for the broadcasters in this cycle. So now we have an extension to this. Brennan has this perceived power of the news distortion rule, and he's saying his interpretation of that is broadcasters must operate in the public interest in what

Donald Trump thinks is that the public interest is positive coverage of the war. Because that is patriotism. Because that is patriotism. Being a patriot means loving the war that your country is in. No matter why we started it or how it will end or how much it will cost or whether there's an end in sight. And again, just because my frame of reference is the war in Iraq, that's what they want. They just want freedom for us and chest-pounding coverage and absolute belief that there are weapons of mass destruction. All that stuff that happened in the early 2000s, which was a mistake.

And like, to the extent that anyone's learned a lesson, that lesson has sort of been learned and they're not getting that coverage. And so now Brendan's saying broadcasters must operate in public interest, even if that means not particularly covering a war that the majority of Americans do not like. So this is Brendan being very stupid, right? Like, I think he's out over his skis. I think he's misread the room. I'm going to punish a bunch of comedians for making fun of Donald Trump. You can pick up about half of Americans with that. It's also like low-ish stakes. Right. I don't think it's great. I think I will be outraged about the First Amendment. You know, lots of people will be outraged about the First Amendment. Stephen Colbert will get lots of views on YouTube because saying the thing is not allowed works.

But you can pick up about half Americans by saying don't make fun of the president. Sure. Another party. When you get to don't do negative coverage of the war or the government will punish you. You've made, like, a critical miscalculation. You are so stupid, Brendan. And you've come all the way back around where Ron Johnson, who's a senator from my home state of Wisconsin, is on Fox News criticizing Brendan Carr. And the reason I'm bringing up Ron is, again, he's a senator from my home state of Wisconsin. Ron is a complete and total idiot. Like, he just is. Like, the people of Wisconsin know he's an idiot. Like, everyone knows he's an idiot. Like, this is just not a smart man. And, you know, for whatever reason, he's been elected. Like, Ron thought the Foxconn factory was a great idea. You know what I mean? Like, it's Ron. And, like, even people who vote for Ron are like, he's not the brightest bulb, but he's our guy. Like, that's the vibe for Ron Wisconsin.

Here's Senator Ron Johnson on Fox News after being asked about Brennan Carr threatening the broadcast licenses of news organizations that aren't sufficiently patriotic. I'm a big supporter of the First Amendment. I do not like the heavy hand of government no matter who's wielding it. So, no, I'd rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible. And really, the federal government's role is to protect our freedoms, protect our constitutional rights.

I mean, there's a rousing speech. It's not great. When you are so stupid and you're so, so addicted to the idea of censorship to please Donald Trump, you're out the dog. You've gotten on the other side of Ron Johnson. Like, I can't, maybe just because I'm from Wisconsin. Like, I can't even describe how, like, totally out in the wilderness Brendan is this week. Like, no one thinks that what he's doing is the right thing to do, except maybe Donald Trump, because Donald Trump hates negative media coverage of his war. There's no coming back. There's not going to be positive coverage of the war. Like, the American people do not like this war.

And I think Brendan is on the cusp of making a mistake here that kind of reveals just how hollow all of his threats actually are. Because once he punishes a news organization for negative coverage of the war or says he'll do it or comes close to actually doing it, I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, including Senator Ron Johnson, are going to say, no, you've definitely gone too far. Roll it back. I mean, so much of this is, I think, back to the thing we've talked about before, that a lot of what people like Brendan Carr say publicly is for an audience of one, and that one is Donald Trump. But as what Trump wants to hear and what resonates with the public get further and further apart, that becomes a more dangerous game, right? Because like you said, for a long time, you could come out and say bonkers things that lots of people think were bonkers, but that lots of people would agree with. But when you run into these things, and I think the Kimmel thing was a really interesting kind of early example of this, that was bipartisan against what the Trump administration wanted to do. Like the backlash to that was swift and it was across the spectrum. And so when you go out and you say he's the alpha in every room, like that is for Donald Trump. That is so that he will see it.

That is 100% what that is for because it will score you points with him because he likes hearing people say nice things about him on television. Like there's been all these really interesting stories about people getting Trump's phone number. Have you seen all this? That you can just, with two minutes of work, get Trump's phone number and he answers and you can call him. And he says a bunch of nonsense and people print it because they think it's cool that he answered their phone call, right? Like that is fundamentally how you win points with Trump. It's like access, right? And so, but then as that move gets more and more politically problematic.

this gets to be a harder game to play. Trump is going to push you out on the ledge. Yes. And Brendan is out on the ledge. Yes. And I'll actually contrast this. You know, The Verge is, like, vast. So, you know, this week we covered DLSS5 and we covered the Samsung canceling the trifle. And Tina Nguyen, our DC reporter, she went to a Pentagon press briefing this week. Yeah. It's a big place. The Verge.com. And we're trying to, like, figure out why. Like, why did the Pentagon, which famously kicked the traditional press corps out, invite Tina? And the answer is they wanted her to see Pete Hegseth take good questions.

Huh. Right? They were interested in showing that performance off. And they had invited some senior traditional reporters, and Hexley was basically like, I hate you, why are you here? And then, you know, the front row was like, Newsmax and the Mike Lindell show. Like, some really weird stuff was in the front row. And they wanted Tina for her to see, like, these press briefings are real. Because it's very important that any government, especially our government, like, do that show for the press. Like, I was just like, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Sina Pichai's politicians. They're not actually politicians. No. Like, real politicians never shut up. They're everywhere all the time making their case to their constituents because you can fire them. Yeah.

Like, Joe Biden didn't show up and he got fired. Straightforward as that. He just wasn't accessible. The number of CEOs I've talked to on Decoder who were like, we couldn't get a hold of anyone in the Biden administration, so whatever. Like, at least Trump picks up the phone. Like, that's a real dynamic. I think it's a real dynamic for any number of voters. Like, where was this guy? He just disappeared. And then we shut up. He was like, looked old. Like, we fired him. Politicians get fired. And so you see the government is just constantly talking. And they have to earn the respect of not a captive for us. Brendan doesn't understand. He's undoing the thing that gives them legitimacy with this stuff. And I really do think Trump has pushed him on this ledge. And he can't back off it because Trump is the alpha in every single room he's in.

Anyway, Brendan, I've once again called you a coward as loudly and as clearly as I can. I'll do it one more time. Brendan, I think you're a coward. If you want to come on the show and defend these moves, defend your relentless attacks on the First Amendment, or come on Decoder and tell me about your decision-making process. Happy to have you on. You know where I'm at. I think the audience wants you to come on. And just a reminder, we're hiring, so if you'd like to be a producer on the Vergecast, you can submit your resume. As always, that's been Brendan Carr's Dummy America's favorite podcast. I'm just saying, Brendan, if you go on Decoder and not the Vergecast, you won't get custom theme music. It's just something you should think about. We'll play the music.

All right. Let's actually, you mentioned DLSS. So for my first lightning round item, let's do DLSS. Sure. You, I know, have been practicing to describe to the people what DLSS is. And if I'm being completely honest, I'm not fully confident in my ability to do it. So can you describe what DLSS is? And then I will describe why it has caused such a ruckus this week.

Everyone loves it when I describe gamer technology. It's where I live. It's truly the heart of my expertise. How does this apply to Madden? That's what I got for you. Have you ever wanted Madden players to be even hotter than Madden? All right, DLSS, actually very clever. I think what NVIDIA did with DLSS, the entire idea behind it is very clever. Basically, if you have NVIDIA graphics card, your game can render frames at lower resolution and then pass it through DLSS, which uses AI to upscale all the games.

So you don't take the full power of the graphics card to render its, you know, 140 frames per second at high resolution. You can get the performance out and DLSS upscales the graphics to higher resolution. And this is more efficient in a lot of different ways. It allows you to get higher resolution, higher frame rates on the graphics card. Again, I think it's a very clever use of the technology. And until yesterday was not the world's most controversial thing NVIDIA had ever done. Yeah. So then yesterday, NVIDIA rolled out DLSS 5 and basically...

framed it as an AI filter to make everything look better. And this is not some big future thing that's going to make games look better. This is not like a new version of the Unreal Engine. This is saying all your games look like shit, and we're going to use AI to make them look great. And I'm not really overstating the way that it was presented very much in that. So this comes out, and it comes out in a really interesting way. There was a Digital Foundry video that I think a lot of people recognize as bought and paid for, and Digital Foundry is a really important voice in the gaming community. That made a lot of people feel bad about all this stuff, but also there was this sense that NVIDIA is just railroading all of our games with AI, whether you like it or not. And there is also next to that the fact that a lot of the stuff just doesn't look very good.

Yeah. You've seen a lot of the same examples I have, I'm sure. They're like, what if there just were no shadows and everything looked kind of like a soap opera from the 1990s? Is that what you want? Yeah. Or what if we upscale faces and we literally change the way these characters that you've come to know and love look? That people made on purpose. Yeah, that people like artists have designed. Yeah. And by change the way they look, what they mean is like give them Instagram model face. It's very odd. Like they've all been yassified in real ways. And again, I just want to point out, in particular, the coach models in Madden are very bad. And I would accept a fully yassified like Matt LaFleur. If Matt LaFleur was like...

really hot. You see what I'm saying? To be fair, Malifor is a good looking mask. And you could turn that up to 11 with power of DLSS 5. I think the really interesting thing here is, yes, NVIDIA is just like the big bully. They're doing whatever they want. AI in general in video games is hot button and controversial. DLSS kind of wasn't.

It's DLSS 5. Right. Like, there's been criticism of it. And, like, certainly people have, like, lock-in concerns because the developer's code for DLSS. Like, whatever. But the idea that it had the same sort of slop concerns as AI, not really in the mix until DLSS 5. And the reason is because it's the first time the graphics card is imposing taste on a video game. So you're talking about shadows going away.

you know, that's iPhone HDR. Like the phone adopted a look. This is right next to the what is a photo question. It's right next to what is a photo. It's right next to the iPhone has a look and people don't like the look. And we've talked for years about how we prefer the pixels looking. Like now there's a tone mapping control. And do you like process zero and highlight? Like cameras have looks, they have aesthetic judgments embedded in them. And your graphics card playing a video game should not. The aesthetic judgment should come from the developer. And to whatever extent that you want to monkey with the settings should come from you. Your graphics card sitting in the middle should not be like, and everyone has huge boobs, which is kind of like where we're going with this. And I don't think NVIDIA saw that as a problem until the...

the rush of feedback, and to be honest, the frankly hilarious memes of DLSS5 on and off that have been circulating over the internet this week. The memes are very good. And Jensen Wang, the CEO of NVIDIA, responded to the criticism of this at GTC, their big conference this week. Basically, well, he said, I'll just read this to you. He said, well, first of all, they're completely wrong, which I would just say in the annals of how to respond to backlash is not the right answer. Particularly gamer backlash. Yeah.

You're wrong doesn't usually work. People don't go, oh, you're right. Great call. I am wrong. You don't just run up against the gaming community and be like, you suck and you're stupid. Yeah. You'll take my slap and you'll like it, gamers. Yeah. Very confusing. I'm not sure why he said that or took that approach. The point he was trying to make in hand-fisted fashion was that the developers are in control of DLSS 5. So if they choose to use the DLSS 5 SDK and enable it, they have some control over what it looks like at the end of the process. And maybe they were just showing the most dramatic examples for the purpose of a keynote. But first of all, you're completely wrong. It's just not the way to send that message.

Especially when you're in video and it's getting ever harder to buy one of your video cards to play video games because you're selling them all to AI companies that people hate. Yeah. I mean, again, it goes back to there's this fundamental disconnect between the stuff that is being built with AI inside of it and the experience people are having with these tools. I will say if you'll sell me DLSS 5 to Yassify David on Riverside, which is what we used to make the purchase, I'll take it. Like if I were like, you know, 60 to 70% hotter, this podcast would be unstoppable. This is like, these are my two theories. If I could remember everyone's name, totally unstoppable. And if David was just hot, can you imagine? Unstoppable.

All right. We're going to do one more each. This is how we end up in the manosphere. We're like, I'm like, David, have you just had abs? I'm going to start looks maxing and you're going to regret a lot of things that we've done on this show. David, I do. And I've been meaning to tell you this for quite some time. I think you should hit yourself in the face with a hammer. Weirdly, you have said that to me before, but in a really different context. What's your next lightning round? I'm going to do two at once. It's double debunk for my second lightning round. And it's just two headlines by our reporter, Robert Hart, who covers AI and culture. He's a great science reporter. One headline is, this is not a fly uploaded to a computer. And the second headline is, chat GBT did not cure a dog's cancer.

Okay, I'm familiar with one of those things, but not the other. Well, if you spend any time on the Everything App X, you know, the world famous Everything App X, the amount of wild AI hype that gets laundered into like the SEO factories of the world into outrageous headlines that have nothing to do with even the claims on X, that cycle is alive and well. Most famously, this is me saying they did not do robot surgery on a banana. Yep. Okay, this is happening with AI at scale because the hype machine is out of control. So one of them is there is a research group called Eon that just put out a post being like, we have uploaded a flight to a computer.

This is what it says. And this goes everywhere. There's headlines. Like, the SEO machine takes off. You know, people are reposting it for class. It's, like, nuts. Like, just out of control. And basically, their evidence is, like, a video of a computer fly. Like, I don't... It's buzzing now. So, Robert looks at this. We look at it. And Robert runs around and starts talking to researchers. Like, could you do this? Look at the evidence they provided. Is this real? By the way, the research group in question claimed, we think this fly is conscious in a limited sense. It can smell, see, taste, et cetera. And he described the system as kind of an MVP or minimal viable product of an uploaded animal. These are not words that make sense. You cannot have an MVP of life.

You know, like I love product manager speak. Decoder is basically just like, what do you mean product managers? And like, this is nothing. So Robert goes and talks to a bunch of researchers. The researchers are like, this makes no sense. One of them points out to Robert, and this is a real quote, also the fly does not fly, which in the grand scheme of what makes that thing a fly, it's like very important. So he goes back to the company.

and says, I have all these researchers saying you're full of shit. And the company concedes to Robert, this is not a perfect replica of a fly. I don't think of uploading an animal as a binary concept describing, quote, different levels of upload and admitting that we don't know how much biology is required to capture the information that matters. So just full walkback, full and total walkback. Robert, one reporter just went and said, does this make sense to like a bunch of researchers? Researchers all said no. Robert went back to the company and said, no one thinks this makes any sense. And they're like, yep, we didn't do this. We did not upload a fly to a computer. It's uploading a fly to a computer as a spectrum. That's the answer.

Nonsense. It's the friends we made along the way. Okay, second one, ChachiBT did not cure a dog's cancer. And we'll link to Hank Green here. Hank Green made a video about this, also a really good debunk. The funniest part of this video is he tried to make YouTube short, but it was too long for short. So he just put it in regular YouTube and called it along, which I think is hilarious. That's very good. Anyway, there's, you know, Silicon Valley bro says that he used ChachiBT to come up with a vaccine for his dog's cancer. Okay.

Okay. This one I did see. I do remember. This one's everywhere because it's a dog. The local news can resist this one. Robert looks into this. Not only was Rosie not cured of cancer, it's not clear that the vaccine was responsible for the improvement. The personalized treatment was administered alongside another form of immunotherapy known as a checkpoint inhibitor designed to help the immune system target tumors, making it difficult to know the vaccine had any effect at all.

So you just don't know. It's just straightforwardly, this is not a real test. You don't know. So it's like we did this thing and also gave them the solution to their problem. Who knows which one it was? So we just don't know. And then here's just the other line from Robert. The vaccine itself was not generated by a chatbot. ChatDBT did not design or create rosy's treatment. Human researchers did. At most, the chatbot served as a research assistant helping parse medical literature. Just a full debunk of this one. And this one went wild everywhere. What a perfect AI story. Because...

The thing that actually might have happened is very cool and very exciting and like a genuinely exciting use of technology. This helped a researcher do better research and solve problems. No, a layperson did better research. Sure, fine. Kick ass. If that is the truth, great.

why do we have to go pretend that it cured cancer? Because everyone wants to tweet true. And you can farm a lot of clout on X, the Everything app, by saying things people want to tweet true. Likes for days, man. Anyway, poor Robert is just on the debunk case now. This is what he does. We'll put those links up. You can read them. But just be careful over there. This is what we mean, by the way, when we say Nelai just sends people TikToks at 8.30 p.m. It's just like, the Verge's newsroom exists to figure out if what Nelai saw in his timeline is real. What we sell here is rigor. And like the first step of rigor is like, is this true? Yeah.

weirdly relevant question in these times. It turns out that rigor does not exist on X, the everything else. That's very true. All right. My last one, and I think this is an appropriate place to end, is that Meta continues to do the funniest possible things with the metaverse. So we've been tracking all the ways in which the metaverse is not working for a very long time. Meta announced a while ago that it was splitting Horizon Worlds and its VR efforts, which looks like a bad sign for the metaverse. Then it announced that it was going to shut down VR Horizon Worlds, which looks like a bad sign for the metaverse. And then it announced it was doing a bunch of layoffs in its reality labs, which looks like a bad sign for the metaverse. And then Meta put a date.

on the actual end of the VR Horizon Worlds experience. It was June 15th was the news this week. That is going to be the end of VR, the end of the VR version of Horizon Worlds. Everybody hears this and immediately this generates a new round of headlines saying, Meta is bailing on the metaverse. This became a narrative this week. We've been tracking this for forever. There was actually no new information except a date. But everybody saw this as, oh, Meta is winding down the metaverse. Is Meta going to change its name back to Facebook? This company is completely giving up. So Meta does what I can only assume is a complete reaction to this narrative and decides it's not going to shut down the VR universe after all.

This news just came out today, Thursday, as we're recording this. And in an AMA on Instagram, because this is how meta disseminates news, Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of the company, said that they're going to keep the existing VR worlds and that it would be available to download, quote, for the foreseeable future. And what he said was, the fans who reached out like yourself, who really care about it. are the reason that they're going to keep it around. I would like to say, A, there are none of those people or else this thing would still exist. They exist. They're there to trade crypto and try to have AI go. Sure. You were in the video we did a while back, right? Exploring it and it was just a bunch of children. It was so odd. It was such a failure from the job. Alex Heath, remember Alex Heath was one of the first people we got to have a Quest Pro. I still have a Quest Pro sitting over there. And this was like the embodied internet when Mark was going on with Metaverse and they were doing all the demos. And I just remember that dude came back from his first briefing and was like, it sucks. And I was like, you know, Alex, you can just say it. Just say it. Just say it sucks.

It was always very bad. It was. But it is now the funniest possible outcome because meta is now forced to continue to support this bad product because if they kill it, everyone will think they've given up on the metaverse and they cannot appear to have given up on the metaverse because the company is called meta and that is hysterical. It's very good. Meta also doesn't know what AI is for. They keep hiring and firing thousands of people and spending millions of dollars to make. Talk about not having a good consumer AI product. What's your plan, dude? Yeah. Also, by the way, the Ray-Ban meta stuff running straight at that same problem. There are...

glasshole murmurings starting to bubble up in a lot of places about how to feel about these glasses. People do not like seeing those in public. Mark Zuckerberg's trust deficit is really, really starting to come to the fore here. I actually want to call out, you know, the one product they had that people loved was Supernatural, the fitness app in VR. And they shut that down. It's like, the existing content is still there, but they're not making new content. They fire all the instructors that people really liked. V wrote a great story about that community, how mad they are. And then this week, I want to call out, she interviewed Lena Kahn, who, as Biden's FTC chair, tried to stop that acquisition, sued to stop it. She was way out overseas, and I never knew. She was just trying to push the envelope. Like, the government should stop more acquisitions. And her theory of the case was all...

ways. If this market is not competitive, it will die. Right? She's like, competition leads to better outcomes. Which, by the way, again, if you listen to Verge House, like, my main political viewpoint is, like, competition is good for the economy, and governance future regulations are bad. So V interviewed in the comments this week, our head behind is in the comments, right? And there's a lot of comments there being like, well, it was such a bad business, Matt, I couldn't keep it running. The problem is the market for that stuff was never competitive. Supernatural only had to do whatever served Meta's interests, right? And Meta, you can see, is strategically confused about everything.

If Supernatural was a business that ran on the Quest and the Quest was confused, they might have gone to the Vision Pro. They might have gone to a cheaper, different VR headset. The VR headset technology is basically a commodity at this point. Right? Like, Meta's selling the Quest 2 for $1.99 right now. They could have made their own hardware. I mean, I think they're trying to blow it out to shut it down. But, like, it's $1.99 right now. Like, Supernatural, as a company, could have done a million things to better serve its audience and its community that now feels completely abandoned, that knew that they would get abandoned the second Meta bought them. So there's this raging argument in our comments about, no one ever wants we are, blah, blah, blah. And, like, I think that's all pointed at Meta. And the argument really is, well, you know what happens when the acquisition happens.

I know what happens to a company when Google buys it. I know what happened. I know what happened to Dark Sky when Apple bought it. You know, who also figured out the people who made Dark Sky, who just quit Apple to start a new weather app. Acme Weather, great app, big fan. But they were like, we don't want to do this anymore. Like, we're getting crushed. We would like to go back to making a weather app. Yep. Yeah. And everyone knew what would happen to Supernatural when Meta bought it. So it's true. Lena Khan, she pushed the boundary of the law and the argument was not great and she lost. But she was trying to avoid an outcome that everyone could see clearly that happened immediately. Yeah. And my only point is people loved Supernatural. The theme of this episode is when consumers love something, you can get away with a lot.

People loved that. They loved that experience. You can go read that story if you wrote it. It is one of my favorite stories of the year so far. It's just a community of people who are sad about a virtual reality fitness app. Those are the virtual keywords. That's us loving technology, right? And that company never had a chance to take that and turn it into something real. They were subsumed into the MetaBorg. They were subservient to total strategy confusion. And now it's dead. And like, I think the Quest 2 is at $1.99 because Meta's blown them out the door and they're going to focus on the RayBands. I think you're probably right. Anyhow, go read the LinaCon piece. Go read the other stuff. It's all inside. It's all very good. It's good stuff. The LinaCon interview is good.

She continues to be a smart person who knows what she's doing, I would say. All right, we should get out of here. We've gone way over. Way over. This is what we do. I blame Allison. She's not here anymore, so we're going to blame Allison for this. Not Ron Johnson, who I would also like to blame for this. Two bits of plugging before we go. Well, three, actually. Number one, apply to be our producer at voxmedia.com slash jobs. Come help us make the show shorter. Number two, version history this week is the episode about the vocoder. It is with the band Chromio. It is as much fun as we have ever had making this show. I think you're going to really like it. Charlie Harding, Vergecast intern.

hosted that with me, helped me, helped me figure out the story of the vocoder with Chromio. We had a blast. It's a really good episode. A, listen to the interview that Neil I did on Decoder with Jim Landzone from Yahoo, which I thought was fascinating. They are, what a weird company to do. Weird company. Interesting, innovative 30-year-old internet ideas. Very fun. Who's on Decoder next week? It's a little up in the air. Okay. If the CEO of Superhuman, the Grammarly guy, shows up on Friday, which I think he's going to do. So as you're listening to this, I will know. Then that one will be Decoder next week. If not, it'll be somebody else. But as of right now...

this day has come out. Again, we keep saying out loud that Shishir has to do this, so he's going to do it. As of today, he said he's going to do it. By the time you're listening to this, I will know. I'm excited. And if you want to get in touch, the email is vergecastatheverge.com. The hotline is 866-VERGE-11. If you want all of our podcasts ad-free, including all the ones we just talked about, subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe. It's a good website. We like it quite a bit, and I think you will too. The Verge Cast is a production of Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. This show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next time. Neal, take a stab. Right now.

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