Meta's court losses could be just the beginning

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Welcome to the first cast, flagship podcast, the iPhone Bluetooth headset, a gadget we

will tragically not be talking about any more on this podcast. I'm a friend David Pierce. Me, I've tell us here. Hey, buddy.

“Do you want to do my whole riff about how AI is Bluetooth?”

I can do it. I got hot ten on how AI is Bluetooth. I think you've done this on this show. I absolutely don't. It's my favorite thing.

I'm popping up in diners across the country and like, you know, hey, that was kind of like Bluetooth. Like, everybody knew a Bluetooth is going to be, but they had Bluetooth headset through that day. I did it.

I really appreciate the extent to which Bluetooth just gets strays all over the podcast. Bluetooth is the sort of thing that is like not that important to most of people's lives. It just makes your head full. It's totally true. Bluetooth is totally important to everybody all the time.

It's like a magical technology that exists, but also it breaks a little bit. And so you see the limits of human ingenuity. It's technology, baby. All right. We have a lot to do this week and we're doing it at 10 o'clock in the morning on Thursday,

which is, the vibes are very different when we do this show in the morning because you

have somewhere to go, which we're going to talk about in a second because you having

somewhere to go was actually news this week right now. We're going to talk about some Apple stuff. Next week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. We are doing a bunch of stuff. We're going to talk about something you and I have been doing to kick off this whole thing.

We have some news about meta and YouTube in court on trial.

“Big important verdicts coming in that we have a lot to talk about.”

We have a lot of lightening around stuff to do. It's truly remarkable, Brendan Carr is a dummy week in store. Get ready. I am particularly excited about this one, but Neil, I first we have to start with you. You have two very important life updates, both of which are very relevant to the Verge

cast and not just because they're you. I'm genuinely serious. You have a flight to get on today at 5 30 PM. It's 10 AM, you have a flight at 5 30, honest to God, what time are you going to leave to get to the airport?

I'm going to leave it 1 PM, the airport is half an hour away from my house. So you're going to get there with four hours to spare.

Yeah, that's basically my plan.

And you are not normally an early to the airport guy. You're like a role in walk straight through security and on to the plane at the last second. Well, I got to be honest, that's the version me without children. Fair.

It's going to be with children is like a like a newbie, like no idea what's going on first day. How does a stroller work? Like that's bad. The version of me without children, real pro, no bags, everything and it kind of a giant

backpack that just slides through security in and out. I like to do one day trips and I like to do one day trips. Love them. Because we both have children who are trying to get back. That person has been utterly disrupted by the TSA.

Yeah. The, you know, everyone knows this. The Department of Homeland Security is shut down. Airport lines across the country are out of control. There's big argument over refunding DHS and paying TSA agents once again. It comes down to whether or not ISA agents can wear masks and other things.

Democrats want there's some negotiation back and forth. We have a great piece on the site about the push to Republican push to privatize the TSA, which was actually part of project 2025, whether or not all this is going to lead to that.

And then our excellent reporter Gabi Diwali was actually at JFK, figuring out what

ice is doing with your ports, which Swilow is standing around is what they're doing. I mean, because they obviously, you don't want people who are untrained to do security training. So that's a bomb. You don't want that.

So there's some amount of maybe that will actually start happening. It's training occurs. All of this means that I'm flying to Chicago today and I'm going to the airport. Four hours early, which means we're recording in our chest in the morning. So if anything breaks this afternoon, you can blame the TSA.

Yeah. Well, not the TSA. They're not getting paid. You can blame the Trump administration holding TSA hostage for to save America for this crazy voter idea.

Anyhow, that's where we're recording in our chest early. Yeah. It's just full chaos out there. And it is like, add this to the list of sort of really visceral outcomes of weird political machinations.

It's the sort of thing that it was like, oh, it is blindly obvious what all of this chaos is doing because you mistriff like the often politics is the sort of thing that happens. And it is it is not all that obvious how it trickles down to like your minute to minute life. This is the kind of thing that is very obvious.

And how whoever you want to blame for it, and the answer is kind of everybody.

Yeah. It's all bad out there. It's all bad out there. No end in sight. Basically, the answer and I mean, I've we've done the first cast and, you know, wrapped up

it for and I have blazed out of here and gotten on a flight to Chicago at 515. Yeah. It's just the thing you can do. Yep. And that is not what's happening.

By the way, I'm going to Chicago for a fun thing. The American Bar Association invited me to speak at their tech show, which is where they talk about tech in the law. So if you're in Chicago, you're probably listening to this on a Friday. I'm at the ABA tech show, I'm going to do the keynote and talk about AI in the law and all

that stuff coming together. I'd love to see it come say hi.

“They're like, what do you want to talk about with AI?”

And I was like, I have a lot of ideas. So the keynote might be like six hours long. But that's what I'm doing. I think we'll be really fun. And there is a lot going on with AI in the law.

It's just going to be a quick preview. I think a lot of people react to the law, like it's software code, because it's like structured language. It commands to a system. But instead of a computer, there's like a judge who's 800 years old, whose brain has been

cooked by Facebook memes. And those are different things. And so you see how much sort of the AI companies are like, well, we did it to software. What's some other structured language we can go through in the legal system is right there. And like contracts are boring.

No one reads those. And yeah. So that's the talk. If you are in Chicago, you happen to be a lawyer, and you want to go to the ABA tech show.

I'll be there. I love that. By the way, that people invite you to do keynote speeches. It's like there's this abstract way that I understand that you were like very important. But you're also just like the do-fist I make a podcast with all the time.

Do you know what I mean? Yes.

“It's nice to occasionally remember that other people also like you.”

And somewhere out there's one things you're impressive. We're going to see how like you're the best lawyers feel about me at the end of the speech. So who knows? But we're going to give it a shot.

Do you try to sound like a lawyer in front of a bunch of lawyers? Have you thought about like what's the cadence of speech in front of a bunch of lawyers? Slow. Because you got to feel the time. Hello.

Welcome to Chicago. A little bit. I mean, you know, you try to reach people where they are. I'm like the idea that I was ever a lawyer is like deeply hilarious to me. Like I was just I was not good at this.

And so I don't even, I don't pretend that I can do what these folks do. But I think that there want me to talk about is there's a bunch of stuff happening with AI in the worlds that we talk about every day. And it is it's hard in every little bubble to see outside the bubble. And in particular because I have a little bit of background, you know, Mary, to a lawyer,

all this stuff like I can see in both sides of the coin a little bit. Yeah. I mean, that's that's a conversation, but it really like if you think AI is doing weird stuff to other industries, it is doing particularly weird stuff to a lot. And you kind of see it bubble out all the time.

Yeah. Well, we have a bunch of lost stuff to talk about. So this is this is good warm up for you. But we should we should talk a little bit about Apple 50.

“I should say right up front that if you want to hear Neil and I spend the better part”

of two hours just litigating Apple products, which are the good ones. We have a whole separate episode of the Vergecast that is available for subscribers only.

This is I think the first time ever we've done a subscriber only.

And I cannot tell you if this is a benefit or a punishment. The unclear because it really is two hours of me and David just fully crashing out, trying to make, not even rank the list, just make all list of 50 Apple products. It is the most let's name some guys. Vergecast was ever done.

And I had a blast and but if you get three minutes in and you're like they're just saying the names of laptops to each other, you can turn it off because it does emotionally

Yeah.

But anyway, so the reason for that is that this is about to be the 50th anniversary.

Of Apple, Apple is doing a bunch of stuff. David Pogue wrote a very good book. Have you read any of his book by the way? I've not read his book. I've had Gally and I know he just didn't invent with Joanna, which he's like a really

well. Yeah. It's very good. And it is it is holy God as it deep. And it is the kind of book that is like, if you've read a lot of these Apple history

looks, there's a lot of stuff in there, but he also found a lot of new stuff tells the story kind of from beginning to end in a way that is neat and cool. Good book. Apple's doing a lot of stuff, Tim Cook is like rocking out to Alicia Keys, a great and central.

These days. But one of the things that we're doing for our coverage is we built this very cool ranker shout out to Graham McRee and our team and the whole design team for putting all this together, where you can rank the 50 best Apple products of all time.

“Is that a very fraught thing for a bunch of reasons?”

It sure is. So what you and I did was we went through and our job was to just select the 50. Not put them in order, but just take every Apple product that is ever existed and we know them down to 50. And if you go to theVerse.com, I believe starting right now and we'll put it in the container

post with the show notes for this episode, it'll be all over the verge. If you go to theVerse.com, you will not be able to miss it for the next week. You can then go in and do the ranking system. And it's actually very cool.

You're going to be able to basically have two things pitted against each other and you will

pick the one that you like the best and it'll just give you sort of like, forget how many thousands of possible combinations there are. And as a group, we are all going to rank the top 50 together. So you'll get to see the live ranking of how all of these things stack up against each other.

It's very cool and very exciting. The rankers actually really cool. It uses the ELO ranking system, which is designed for chess players. We kind of had to modify a little bit, make it work for 50 Apple products. But basically, everything gets a little score and then they go head to head the scores go

up and down, which is why you can watch the live ranking. It's very cool. They're looking at an eye matchy for in the original iPod yesterday and it's just like choose.

“It's like I can't, you know, there's no getting around that.”

But you get to see all those mashups together. The hard part was making the list of 50 products. Yeah. Which again, you can listen to Neil I and I spend a lot of time doing.

But I'm curious, you and I, this is now the third time you and I have sat here at two

months ago. We're not doing this together. I want to know, if what you think, I have one product specifically in mind that I'm like, I'm pretty sure a bunch of people are going to be mad at me about this that it isn't even on the list, I will put, we'll put the whole list on the site so you can see what

they all are. I don't me reading 50 Apple products, you and Rose, probably not great podcast. But I'm curious, is there anything you think of that is not on the list that you're like people are going to be pissed? No, there's one that's on the list that every time I saw it, when I wear a test in the

ranker, I was like, why do we pick this one? No, it's the Intel Mac mini, like who could get out of here, like every time I saw it, I lose. All right, see? This is why two hours.

You can list it in two hours. The Intel Mac mini is when the Mac mini became good. Sure. Sure. Mini.

I'm on a Mac mini right now. Mac mini. Intel Mac mini. Oh, god. No.

Absolutely. By the way, the other very fun thing you can do in the ranker is you can hit the little about button and read the blurbs, David, and I wrote for every single product. And boy, did my friend David and I argue in a Google sheath. They're like three or four where I found them, and it's just like, oh, Neil, I deleted

mine and I wrote about how much he loved the titanium power book. That's what it did. That's what I think. That's the good thing. I was like, I can't do them all, so you can see it.

This ranker is a lot. There's a lot about David and I's 15 year relationship. This is an outbuilt in this ranker. Very much so. Yeah, we had a lot.

I will say the only, the only one that keeps coming to my mind is there's going to be people who are like, why isn't the iPhone 3GS in here? And to all of you, I want to say that's not correct. That makes this sense. You're you're wrong, and that's fine, and I love you.

Go rank Apple products. So here's what I want. Make, we're going to put off 50 analysts somewhere.

“Go do our ranker, but also if you want to set, if you want to make and send us your”

own top 50, I want to see them. Yeah, we'll give you the list and you can just rank them however you want. I want to see all of them. And then you and I next week, we're each going to make our lists independently. And then we're going to see what everybody on the site does collectively.

And then we're just going to fight to the death of that. I don't know what, I don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, fifth turn of these 50 Apple products, I'm really excited. I haven't thought about the G3 Power Mac this much since it came out, like since I physically had one in a computer lab in school.

At some point in this whole process, I did like three hours of research on Bondi Blue as a concept. But it's a transparent bond. It might be. I can't confirm that anyway, we're going to have tons of great coverage.

The ranker is just one piece of it. We have a bunch of really fun stories coming. Jason's now has written some stuff for us a bunch of other people on staff of it and stuff.

It's going to be a really fun series. Guess who wrote the piece titled for $200 more, you can get a MacBook Air.

“I won't say, but you just take a guess, who's to say?”

And did it cause that person a brief existential crisis about the course of their career? Also who's to say? But yeah, it's good stuff. I'm very excited about it. I think it's going to be a fun week.

We also have a bunch more Apple stuff coming on Tuesday's show. We have a version history about the Macintosh with you and John Gruber and me coming this weekend. It's going to be a very Apple week. Yeah.

I'm pretty excited about it. It's been a lot of fun. I have some personal news. Do you? Yeah, it's very important.

I realize what people feel when people say you have some personal news and I want you to feel that because it rises to that occasion, I think. Okay. Good injury lawyer. No.

Like hard you turns back back to the thing I ran from. No, no, no, no, the driver board to turn my 5k I'm back into a monitor is it has cleared customs from Shenzhen where it was the whole week and is on its way. It's on a UPS truck to my house. What is this piece of equipment?

There's lots of them, my friend. When you're like, I'm going to turn my 5k I'm back into a monitor. You enter a subculture for people who do this, who buy all of the boards and test them, who have deep ideas about whether or not you want to convert the speakers and the microphone as well.

There are companies that specialize in this, they're model numbers. It's a good. I spent a full day.

The first thing you do is you got to open the I'm back and figure out the model

number of the display in your I'm at. I see. Which I think is just what keeps people from doing it because it's like steps. You can't just like do it in an afternoon.

“You have to take the thing apart and then you have an I'm at with a floppy display that”

has to be tucked in the corner with tape on it while you order the part from China and then it takes more than a week to get to your house. I literally think this is what can be from doing it. There's like a lot of these boards. I bought one from what appears to be a company is opposed to some guys.

It's a stone task in our 1820. It can do everything. You have a speaker driver and you can redo the speakers. I'm not going to do any of that, but it's the one that doesn't need a fan and you can just run off one HDMI.

That's what I want it. I'm very excited about this. I'm probably going to blow up this computer. Those are the two feelings that I have. Have you done the research on like what kind of labor from you this process is actually

going to be? I mean, the hardest part is cutting the adhesive that holds the glass to the shell and it is scary. Like that part sucks. I did it with like a guitar pick.

They sell little pizza cutters. It's literally a wheel on a handle, but you can like pizza cut the display. It's very cute. But once you get it open, you just take all the parts out. You figure out where to mount the board.

You plug in the two cables and you're like off to the races.

Okay, so this is a lot of confidence, which brings me to the most important question.

Are you willing to livestream yourself doing this? No, no, no, no, no. I would like to just issue my conspiracy theory, because I love watching and tear it on video. It's on my favorite stuff to do.

I also love watching like the videos for people like sandblast old tools and like fix them up again. Oh, yeah. That's all very good. This is like this is rusty and now it's not.

It's all for forever. I mean, I'm like, I should buy a sandblaster. I don't know. Whatever. So I love watching tearing on video.

And my conspiracy theory belief is that everybody makes tear down videos by is at least two so they can practice on the first one so the actual tear down video is good when they make it. And so we are, I don't have two axe to practice on. So we're going to do it and well, you know, well, we'll talk about it.

We'll see if it works. But I sat there with the studio display XDR and my car, because it was $100 off an Amazon. And I was like, I can't, I have to try, I have, you made a lot of promises about $1. I did make a lot of promises about $1, but it's already $100 off. Yeah.

Amazon has a $100. It's interesting. I came very close. I almost got pure pressure. But I was like, I got to do it.

I have to try. Well, this is great for you, because now it's all upside, right, either it this works and suddenly you've turned your eye back into a terrific display or oh no, whoops, did my best gotta go buy a $3,000 monitor. Yeah, it's gotta have the skills.

I have to say by the way, the people out in the ether that I know who you would expect to be buying a $3,300 monitor are all buying it and everybody seems to love this thing. Yeah, I know. I know. But like, it's going to go for me.

Like, you remember the first studio display was, it was kind of a mess in certain ways.

Like, a lot about the screen was really great, but like the webcam really sucked. It just wasn't a perfectly executed product.

“No, I think I gave it a thing like a six.”

Yeah, the feelings about the XDR are like rapturous so far. I don't need to know this information. I mean, to do is take apart my 10-year-old eye Mac with a little pizza cutter and a guitar pic and put in this like suspiciously sourced driver board that came to my house from

What could possibly go on? This is good. I'm happy for you.

“I think this is going to go really well and I am going to come to your house and”

live shrimp at what you do. It's going to be great. Whether you like it or not. I'm just saying this is the news.

Apple's starting 50 and I'm finally doing the eye Mac project.

A lot of people said I wouldn't do it. Here I am. Are these two things connected? No, it was really the like am I going to am I going to carry the $3,200 box past my baby who has to go to college like I don't think I am.

That's right. Wait, also, one more knee-like life update. Did you actually decide to keep your MacBook Neo? I confess I returned mine. We should just, I should just say this out loud.

I took it back. I attempted to give it to Anna my wife because I have a Mac Mini and a MacBook Air and I thus have no use for a MacBook Neo but I gave it to Anna because she has like a kind of crummy Samsung Chromebook that is like it works fine for most things. But every once in a while she needs proper Excel basically and is like annoyed at using

a Chromebook. So as a click here's the Neo, do you just want this?

And she basically looked at it and was like, I have no, I have no use for this.

Like she reminded me about whenever you have tried to upgrade Becky's Kindle and she's just like, what do you mean I already have a Kindle? It does the thing, that was Anna's response to me trying to give her the Neo. So I took the Neo back, I took it back and basically swapped the Neo and an iPhone 16 for an iPhone 17 and a gift card and now here we are.

But you, I think, are potentially keeping the Neo. Today would be the day, two weeks or up. So it's right. It's staying. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to run either open and claw or claw and computer

use on it and just have some agents and see what happens. I have decided that I have no feelings about Instagram as a platform, especially after the news this week, which we'll talk about. And so I'm like, what if I just automate my social media in some way? Interesting.

I should take some runs at using these tools for actual purposes.

Not just, I set up an agent and made it send me a digest of the news, like, I'm having

done that. I'm like, this means nothing to me. I think it's important for us to use the tools and have deep familiarity with them. Particularly when the CEOs of the companies come on the show, I've used your tools and I've thought about them.

That connection is important to me. So I think I'm going to use my Neo as an open claw machine. I don't know exactly what it means to automate my social media. I'm not going to automate my blue sky. My blue sky is where I'm going to just have feelings, which as you can see.

We generate a lot of video clips, and they need to go to a lot of places. I'm very curious to see if I can actually make a workflow like that happen on my personal accounts. And what that just honestly, what that feels like. Because we are up against just absolute machines that do that all day long.

So one, I think we need to understand how the modern environment works and what our competitors are doing. I think there's something important about what it feels like to have an agent running. I want to experience, again, outside of the like, I set it up in my home. That's neat.

To like, actually try to do a thing. So we're going to see.

“I think the Neo is that's what it's going to be for, which is absolutely not what Apple”

is selling the Neo for. No. It's precisely the opposite of what they want to sell. But you need a cheap computer to do it, and I have one, and yeah, I could do it with a mini and like, you know, screen share into a mini, sure.

But you're like, you're like, put that all together, and you're out of Neo, and do my little just keep the Neo. I like it. We're going to check back in on this, because I'm particularly curious about how your trust with the thing develops.

I've been talking to the main thing. I'm curious about it. Yeah. I've been talking to a lot of people about this. And there is this weird transition you go through where you go from.

I have an agent that I have to sit and watch, and actually it's not saving me any time, because I'm babysitting the thing all the way down to like, do I fully completely trust this thing to post to my Instagram? And it works, and I don't think about it anymore, because like that's the success state, right?

It's like this thing actually works on my behalf, and it is officially no longer my problem. And the road to get there looks very different for everybody on every individual thing. And I think for you in particular, I'm very curious to see how far down that path you're actually able to get over time. Where this is the next segment, how do you feel about social platforms?

Yep.

“But I think what that's going to run into is do I care about Instagram?”

Can I just be like, robot, do Instagram and not have feelings about that? I don't know. I'm very curious to see how that dynamic plays out. But you're right. The main thing that I want to experience is how much trust can you actually put in a system

like this? Because I think it's important. I know people, lots of feelings that I have in this in the show. Lots of feelings that I am on the verge in general, but I actually think it's very important for us as reporters to use the tools, and like this is a tool, but I want to do some

experiments with some stakes.

Now the Grammarly AI is going to make sure that you hit it this smart wash up when it's

good David.

“Anyway, I want to do some experiments with some stakes with, you know, that the things”

can go wrong for real to feel like that's like it. Yeah, I like it. Alright, speaking of that, let's get into some of the news. Let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we got to talk about social media trials.

We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns, because let's be honest. You didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database.

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The world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else with Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com, that's Grammarly.com. So the big news of the week, and you have been kind of hammering for months about how big this news was going to be, is these two trials, both against meta and in many ways about

the concept of social media in general, that both came to ahead this week. One in New Mexico, one in California, they're different in their actual substance, but in a real way, this is sort of a referendum moment on not just is social media bad, but how do we litigate the ways in which it is bad?

“I think we should start with this trial in LA, right?”

This feels like the more important one. Would you agree? We should have in the one in LA, just because that ruling is against YouTube and meta, particularly Instagram, although most of its other products as well, and the one in New Mexico is very specifically about meta, they have different theories, and it's important.

So they're both important, and the floodgates to sue these companies for making bad products that hurt people are now wide open, and that's why everyone keeps calling them Bell weather cases. You see that word in every single news report, including hours, that these are Bell weather cases, and what that means is a bunch of attorneys general, a bunch of consumer advocacy groups, a bunch of parents got together and said, what are the cases we can bring against

the most, and test this theory of the law, and if we can win, then we can bring a whole

“bunch of other cases, that's why they're called Bell weather cases.”

So the other trial balloons, the one in California, again, that the facts are bad, the young woman, she's 20 now, she goes by KGM, just her initials to protect her identity, the facts are she started using YouTube at age 6, she started using Instagram at age 9, she blames these platforms on all kinds of mental health issues, including body dysmorphia, she's specifically about them, it was really hard for Instagram and YouTube to put her on the stand

and cross examiner, they're like, you're mental health issues are your issues, this was like

never going to go well, they were always going to lose these cases, you put Mark Zuckerberg

an adversary and Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, on the stand, and you're like, do your products hurt people, and they're like, no, and then you show them all of these documents where they study teen usage, where they know that there's harm, where they compare their products to cigarettes

“and then you have a jury full of regular people and it's like, how do you feel about Instagram?”

Do you think it's good? Do you think it hurt these people or didn't? And there's not a jury in the world that was not going to find them guilty of designing products therapy. What it was important that it was a jury, right, because this case just was different in so many ways from the cases that we've seen before. Again, in the particulars of the facts of the case, in the way that it was constructed in front of a jury, like you're right that Mark Zuckerberg can sit in front of Congress

or a judge and say stuff and it can go a lot of ways, but we've seen Mark Zuckerberg talk, he's not going to win over a jury in this case, and there were also Lauren Finer did a really great job of covering this case for us. If she was in the courtroom. Yes, she was in the courtroom a lot and she talked to like there were parents of kids who who have died and gone through horrible things in large part and they blame social media for those things. Like, I think you're right

that the social media companies were always going to lose this case. But I want to come back to the

idea of this. Can I just give you one vignette from Lauren's piece. People should go to read it. Lauren has a piece about the parents reacting to Zuckerberg. It's brutal. It's really brutal, it's just a heartbreaking piece to read because it's a bunch of parents who've lost their children to various harms in social media platform. And there's one parent in that piece who's quoted saying, "I saw Mark Zuckerberg's curly hair. My son had curly hair before he killed himself. It was

beautiful. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't deserve to have his hair." Like that is just a fully devastating emotional reaction from a parent to seeing the person who they blame for the death of

“their child. And like, you know, I think, you know, that I had to make the arguments that it wasn't”

them. Like they didn't reach into an individual and do these things. But these cases were about are the products designed to be addictive, to foster these behaviors, do you know that you're doing it? Right? Are you aware that you're causing these harms? And I just don't think there was ever going to be a jury that would look at the evidence presented in these cases and say anything and think about their own experiences with these products and find anything other than yes you knew it

and you did it anything. So you've mentioned the product design piece of this and I want you to like put on your lawyer hat for me for a minute here because like we talked about section 230 on this on this show a lot and one of the things that came up over and over in all of the discussion about this is like these companies get out of these trials because they're like, well, we're so sorry for this bad thing that happened to you because of section 230 we're actually not responsible for the content

posted on our platforms. Right? And a lot of the stories in Lawrence story from from the parents and a lot of the things that come up are like my kid tried to emulate a video that they watched on YouTube and and harmed themselves or died. And those stories are awful and that's very different from the way that this became litigated. Like these trials as far as I understand and this wanted to lay in particular went way out of its way to not be about content on the platforms.

Yep. Can you explain sort of the legal avenue they went down with these and why it seemed to get away from the section 230 flight? They needed to get away from the section 230 flight and I think there's a lot of consternation about whether section 230 survives trials like this, survives this attack. By the way, there are bills in Congress right now that would just straight up repeal section 230. The idea that we need to regulate the social media companies is by partisan.

It is enormously popular with the American people and it just keeps running into both section 230

and I think very importantly the first amendment. Yep. So you just have that problem and I'm calling

it a problem because everyone agrees that there should be some control over what social media companies are able to do. And you, you know, I think governments see tribulations are bad.

pretty much prevents you from telling them what they have to moderate. Yeah. I can say me and things about you on the internet. They can say mean things because of the first amendment. And then 230 says Facebook is not responsible for the content of what users post in Facebook. So if you go on Facebook and you're like, I hate my neighbor. They're, they've done something that they think is

defamatory and then Facebook spreads it to 10 million people. The neighbor can sue you, but they

can't sue Facebook even though Facebook is a one that amplified and distributed the message. So this is a real tension. And it connects to the first amendment very directly, right? If you change section 230, well, the government is going to make Facebook liable for a lot of speech. It wasn't liable for before. That's going to change how Facebook moderates. It's going to change how Facebook

“operates. There are some first amendment concerns tied up in that. I think these cases are different.”

And a lot of people disagree with me. I, you know, Addy Robertson, our policy editor, are just like having like a daily crash out about our feelings about tech policy and tech regulation because it, it feels like we've come to a point where everyone understands that the platform internet designed for virology and likes and reach engagement has, has done some bad things. And there isn't some market force to fix it. You can't start a new social network and be like,

it's just like Instagram, but it's not as engaging. Like, it's, it's not going to work for you. Right. Like, we, we've seen these attempts like the market isn't correcting the harm. So you got to do something else. It is unclear what that something else is. And I think these cases are, well, we're not going to talk about the content on the platform. You're not going to run head first into the first amendment in section 230. We're going to say, when you design the

ranking algorithm for the Instagram feed and you put the, you put stuff that is more negative at the top or you, you, you, you feed engagement by pushing notifications over and over again to young people in particular. You know what you're doing. Those are choices you are making that you

should be liable for. The, the really bad analogy, you can argue with this analogy of million

different ways is if I shipped you a print magazine and like the edges of the paper constantly gave you paper cuts, you would not be like suing the over the speech in a magazine. You're like,

“this product hurts me. Right. And it's like kind of that dynamic in these cases. Now, I think a”

lot of people, Mike Massick was just on a coder. I think Mike Massick is really smart. He's a great tech policy reporter. He runs tech dirt. He is like, this is a disaster for 230 in the first amendment. Right. Like, people are having different reactions to these cases. My view is, if you don't do, if you don't put some control, if you don't find some way to make these companies liable for the harm that most people feel that they have caused, then they're just going to keep getting away with it.

And I think saying your products cause harm versus the content that other people distribute, cause harm, at least let's you get to, is your algorithm any good? Right. Can you push these many notifications to young people? Do your teen controls actually work? Do your parental controls actually work? I think there's some back and forth in there, but man, again, the idea that you can go to court and say, we're not liable for a product design because it contains the speech of

“other people. To me, it has never passed the smell test and I think we're going to see a lot of”

these cases come up and these companies are going to, they're going to back into a posture where they have to fix the products and not necessarily the moderation. Yeah. I'm not sure that's going to play up, but that feels like the future of these platforms. Yeah. It was really fascinating. I went back and was reading a bunch about this case from 2021, lemon versus snap, which I either missed entirely at the time or had just kind of memory hold, like it was 2021. It was like going on

at 2021. But that to me is such a fascinating and sort of clean example here. We're basically

like lemon versus snap was a kid was driving and there was a filter on snapchat that would show this how fast you were going and there was a belief that if you could take a picture while the filter showed you going over a hundred miles an hour, you would get some kind of achievement inside of snapchat. They did it. I believe it was 113 was what it showed on the filter when they took the picture and then they crashed and died. And initially, this case gets thrown out on

on section 230 grounds of like, well, this is just content on our platform. You can't hold snap response before it. And then it turns around and it peels court says, actually, no, you can be tried for this because this is not like you said this is not about the content on the platform. This is about the the structural design of the platform that incentivizes this kind of behavior

crack in the door that a lot of people in cases like this saw as like, oh, this is this is now

this is a road we can go down and a case we can win. And like the lines here are so unclear to me, which is what's really challenging, right? Where like we've spent a lot of time talking about our

“algorithm speech. And I I don't have a clean answer to that in my head, honestly. Like is the”

order in which you present a bunch of things to me protected free speech or not and should it be messy. So far pretty protected. So far keeps getting thrown out on 230 grounds. Seems messy. But like in this case, it's worth mentioning that the plaintiff here, KGM, didn't just sue Meta. She sued Meta and YouTube and TikTok and snap and settled ahead of the trial with snap and TikTok. But this is not this is not a particular fight with a particular mechanism of Instagram. This is this is

pointed at the entirety of the way that social media works, which I think is really fascinating. And like YouTube had a very funny statement at the end of this, which is this is from Jose Castinata from Google, who said this case, Miss understands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site. Wrong, flat linker. It's just not true. Like nothing about nothing about YouTube is not social media. But there is this thing. Can I

kind of stick on that for one second? Sure. That is the nothing is anything argument of market

definition that all these companies fall back into. You want to sue Meta for monopolizing social media, like what is social media? Sure. What is Facebook social media? What is the market for

“Instagram? Is it videos of dancing people? Or is it how to videos for small business owners?”

Nothing exists. And so we like they do this all the time. Yeah. And so, you know, Google saying YouTube is a streaming platform not a social media site. Is there even a difference? This is whatever it's watching. It's TikTok a streaming platform not a social media site. But is Instagram? Like you can't just fall back on nothing is anything all the time. Right. Well, and simultaneously nothing is anything and everything is everything. Yeah.

Like you can't, it just doesn't. None of that works. I think they all thought they were going to win because they win so much. And again, I think the tech industry really misunderstands how much people just like them. So, okay. So, this is actually the thing I want to talk most about here is I think you can argue the facts of the case, however you want. Right. The idea of is this an assault on free speech or is this a useful different way of talking about what these platforms

“are. I think is a good and valuable discussion. Right. Like is your notification system different”

from my free speech? I would say I tend to be on your side of that that that that that passes a smell test for me of like the way that you make auto play happen is different from the content of the video that I'm watching. And it was really interesting that there was a moment where the jury in this LA trial was instructed not to think about the content of videos. Like it was it was made very clear that this is not about the stuff that this person is watching, which is just

fascinating in a case like this that is fundamentally about like what she watched and experienced on social media, but it is like it is so clear to the point of like this is about the way the thing works, not about what is on the thing. But then it is just true that everybody hates social media. Like and so part of me wonders like it goes back to the fact that this is a jury trial it goes back to the fact that there are like dozens or hundreds of these waiting in the wings there's

going to be more of them tried this year. Like did these tech companies just completely miss the fact that everyone turned on them? Yes, that's nuts. I mean look there's there's like two ways you can express your opinions in America. You can vote with your dollars and you vote with your votes. Voting of your votes shaking track record, especially in terms of regulating tech companies. Like we're not good at there's no privacy you want America that is just a straight up disaster.

Yeah, everyone thinks we should have one the tech companies have lobbied their way out of it over and over and over again. App store regulation like the states are like we should do

app store regulation. We should get rid of these Apple taxes and Apple shows up with like $10 billion

in an army of lawyers in a way. Like voting with your votes is just not a thing we're doing well when it comes to regulating tech companies. Okay, we should vote with your dollars. I actually think that would be the preferred outcome. Right? Like you compete in the market and people choose the one that makes them feel good. These companies are all so big and they all own they don't really compete head to head. Right? There's not a competitor to YouTube that's run by Apple. Right.

Apple actually tried to build an AI product and they just ended up using Google's model. Yeah, all right. Like there's there's something about this where they've all retreated to their boxes and they have little like skirmishes, but they don't actually compete. Which is why I find

person, because YouTube different than Instagram, they're like yes it is and then the lawyer is getting away and they define everything down to nothing is anything and now no one competes with anybody. Right. But they're not actually competitive. And so the idea that people dislike them is not showing up in any numbers. No one's switching away. No one's stopping to use Instagram because they're mad at Mark Zuckerberg. They just keep using it because it is a monopoly in its way. We last

week we talked about how there was not a great consumer AI product and that I mean, you probably heard it as much as I did, but chat should we tell you is the most popular consumer product in history. You know what I was referring to. I was the Xbox and act like whatever. People have feelings about the product. Right. AI uses off the charts. It's because it's everywhere in front of everybody all the time. It doesn't mean what you think it means because there's no market competition where people are

like I'm done with this one. I'm going to buy another one now. Right. Carmakers know about market competition. Right. You're like your car is old and you're going to go buy a new car and maybe you'll stick with a brand you have or maybe you'll buy a different car and the products are replaceable

“in that way. It's not true for these companies and so I think they look at their data and they're”

like Gem and I usage and searches off the charts. People must love it and I do they Instagram looks at usage and they're like man there's more video being uploaded to Instagram. Reels every day. People must love it and it's like do they and I think they've missed it. I think they have missed that real people are having real experiences on their platforms and when you heard a bunch of kids the parents are going to get mad and if you heard enough kids even if it is statistically

not a huge number you're still going to get a bunch of mad parents who've had similar experience

of saying why aren't you responsible and they will find a way. You know that the first case

we're talking about that tried this theory was like 2016, 2017. It was Herrick versus Granger. Oh yeah. Where a young man sued Granger because he was like ex-boyfriend had made like 1100 fake profiles and were endlessly harassed him and the the courts found that 230 protected Granger because it was the speech that was a problem at the product design. That was shot one. Right. They just people have just been trying this theory out and finding the edges and the boundaries of okay

you're not responsible for the content. We'll give you that you're not responsible for the content.

“You are making the systems that enable the content to hurt people. You should be responsible for that.”

And again you get a bunch of parents. They're they're going to be relentless with this idea. Like it would mean you and I are both parents like they won't stop. Right. Even and we hear this from these companies over and over again if the harm is statistically small. Right. You have

5 billion users like we only hurt 2% of people. That's a lot of people and they will be relentless.

And I do think these companies have missed it in their own data that a lot of people are actually unhappy with the experiences they're having because there's no competition so you can't switch. Right. So again I just come back to you. You can vote with your vote. You can vote with your dollars. Maybe you can vote with your attention. And if none of those systems work you end up in court and you end up with some outcomes that again I think that the 230 repercussions of free

speech repercussions will be big. Right. These companies will start to moderate and build their systems in different ways. But what other choice do we have? Because I think nothing. I think status quo is not acceptable. Right. So this is where I want to poke the middle ground for you between government free speech regulation is bad and these platforms need to be rained in. Right. Because this is the thing. And I think the challenge we have gone through for a long time

“is that the only way to pick this fight has run directly into free speech. And so it is it is”

very hard to a litigate and b like morally defend. But I do think like to your point. One of the things that has changed is that people are more and more aware of a the bad time they're having on social media platforms and b the lack of recourse they have. Both to sue the companies about it but also like leave. Right. Both for sort of addictive property reasons and also for where else are you going to go reasons. Right. Like network lock-in is a huge important thing that like

it's where people are. It becomes very hard to leave even if you desperately want to. And so all of this stuff is just like we're at a point now where I think one way to look at these things is to say okay this is going to give us an avenue to regulate notifications. Which is like one possible outcome of it is like we're going to get to have a whole conversation about. No it I actually disagree. I think right like the outcome of a court case in which you lose some money

and right now they haven't lost so much money. Right. It's $6 million. Yeah. Well it's $375 million

from meta in New Mexico. It's $3 million in total compensatory damages of which meta has to pay 70% and Google has to pay the rest. It's $8. It's $8. It's $8. There's going to be a punitive award

while I don't. But even the jury's in these cases are saying that the punitive damages are not

the point. The point is depressive. Like everyone is crystal clear on the thing they're trying to do. Right. They're opening the floodgates to more litigation. Yeah. So that's not actually regulatory.

“Right. They're not saying here's how you should design these systems. What they're saying is your”

approach to handling your own information. You did your own studies on how this stuff was affecting teenagers and you made these decisions anyway. You were negligent. Yeah. That's bad. Yeah. There were all these things that came up and trial about the sort of parallel paths of meta-studying the negative effects that it's platforms have on people and also identifying teenagers as the main source of growth for its platforms. Like that stuff became very damning very quickly of like,

oh, this is bad for teens. And then there was an email that I think was like growth, cold in teens. What you're going to see is these companies are ideally going to make different decisions.

Which is just different than a regulatory approach. Sure. Right. A Europe is like here's what the

button should look like. Have you seen a cookie banner? It should say these words on it. Like there's one whole approach that's happening in other countries. You know, it's just a different and for a lot of reasons we're different. And so we're saying you made bad decisions or punished hopefully that leads you to make different decisions. A thing meta in Google because do is say we're actually never going to make different decisions. We'll just keep eating the losses in court.

Yeah. We have a lot of loss. Is it cost to be $3 million every time I kid gets hurt? That is an acceptable outcome. That seems like not what they should do. That seems morally abhorrent.

“But that's what I mean. Like it's not regulatory in that way. That's a thing you just pay to find”

every time. Sure. I don't think they're going to do that. I think actually what they're going to do is appeal. By the way, the meta statement is very good because as you pointed out, they sued all the companies. So, meta says we respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. Teen mental health is profoundly complex and cannot be linked to a single app. And it's like, yeah, they didn't. Yes, it's all of them. Yeah. I don't know what you're saying. Yeah. And also,

we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online. And it's like your record's bad. And in fact, there was evidence that came out in this case that meta in particular has done less work to track that evidence because it knew what was going to come up. Like, do you remember all those years ago when Mark Zuckerberg said something to the effect of like the only reason you're mad at us is because we're the ones who do the research on what's actually

going on. All this other bad stuff is happening elsewhere. And they just don't know because they choose not to. They just turned a blind eye to it. The lesson meta learned from that was to turn its own blind eye. Right. So again, what are what are some actual regulations that don't run into free speech that might help? A privacy law, but straightforwardly, here's how these companies can use our data to operate their services. That would be good. The algorithmic transparency was

where they have to publish other algorithms work, laws making sure that they do the research and they publish or is also at research. So there's not a negative incentive for the research to exist. Right. None of this infringes on the free speech of these platforms. It just says,

“you have to make the information and share it with us and then protect our information as you”

run your services. We are just not going to get there. Those are not proposals like algorithmic transparency proposals come up every year. There are bills in Congress right now. What are we doing? We're not funding the airports. It's like, there's just a roadblock to the voting with your dollars world. This is causing everybody to try to find other avenues. And so courts are the last avenue. And here we are. And I really do think these companies, I think they thought they were

going to win. They have a record of winning. Yeah. And I think they did not understand how much public opinion has shifted against tech companies, particularly social media platforms. We'll see, they're going to appeal. Anything can happen. It appeals process is very different. But the judges are on social media too. They also have feelings about all of this. Yep. So we'll see. Yeah. It is fascinating that you know, they are stuck with jury selection and they're trying

to find people who are not biased against the defendant. It's like, boy, I don't know if you can find 12 people who are going to be unbiased against how bad social media. I'll flip this around. I have very complicated feelings right now about this state of tech regulation. I have very complicated feelings right, Brendan Carr in the state of like speech regulation in America. Like I think governments, speech regulations are bad. Like just flatly, I think they're

bad. These companies have used the first amendment as a shield against accountability for

every single decision they've ever made. And at some point, it just enters like ludicrous zone where everything is speech. Like anything that happens in a computer is speech and no one can ever be accountable for it. And there has to be some recalibration of that so that we're protecting things that are actual speech and making people accountable for the product decisions they make that affect

I think these cases are going to make a lot of people recalibrate that answer, but I do think everything that happens in a computer is speech has just led us to these outcomes where these

companies are more powerful than ever. They control more speech than ever without any market forces

to shape them up. And then there's only going to be one other outcome. And that outcome is

“the government does stuff and I think that is the worst possible outcome. So hopefully we get out of”

this as a bunch of companies reacting to their own research, making different decisions and actually competing to keep people safe. Yeah. All right, well there's more of these cases to come this year. Like you said, we're going to get appeals. It feels like this floodgate is now open. And what it leads to, I think, kind of remains anybody's guess. So we'll see, we'll stay on it. We should say a break and then we're going to come back talk about some stupid speech regulation. We'll be right back.

But you won't believe it. It's a mistake. It's a mistake. It's a mistake. It's a mistake. It's a mistake. And if you then work, you'll be able to do it. That's right. It's safe. It's a mistake. It's a mistake. Now it's a loss. . And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for

listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost

never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on

YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. All right, we're back. Time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. For flavor. Long, long ellipses there. I'm just kind of, can I, can I hype up some sponsorship ideas that are coming? Please. That's it. That's my whole love it. We're sponsored by our upcoming sponsorship idea. We got to compete with influencer world and we're not going to do it.

We got to figure some stuff out. I'm just saying. I love it. Get ready. It's all. It's going to get weird here on the vergecast. I'm very excited about it. I don't even have to ask. I've been following the news. I know. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast and then a podcast with some new competition that I'm not even ready to talk about. America's favorite podcast and then a podcast, Brendan Carr's dummy this week with theme music by Chris Swick.

“Me. I get real like what if there was a Nick Jr. show called Brendan Carr as a dummy vibes?”

I got postal service. I can see that sure. A lot of, I feel like we have a lot of fans who grew up in the same era. Yeah, actually. We're getting a lot of early 2000s in D on Brendan Carr's dummy. It's good. I appreciate it. That was very good. We're back in the live. What did he do this week?

Well, first of all, you mentioned the other show. It turns out our friend Cara Swisher has been

gotten into Carr more on her shows every single week. We have not communicated about this. She's doing it. She said she's going to do an episode of on with Cara Swisher called Brendan Carr's a moron, which is very funny. Independent thought, you know, convergent evolution. It's really it's like when everybody invented the late ball ball at the same time. It's like we all just

“figured up Brendan Carr right at the same time. So I texted Cara and I was like, you should just”

call it Brendan Carr's a dummy. So the hard podcast within a podcast can infiltrate another podcast. She thought it was funny. Uh, you can post it in a thread's body. So they hate Cara, just rewind her at Cara Swisher, run a car as a dummy. We should do it. Um, she will think that's funny as well. So we've texted, I think I'm going to go on her. Nice to do Brendan Carr's a dummy with her. Perfect. Um, we just have to schedule it. But we were texting my yesterday because

it was very funny that she arrived at this conclusion. And she actually said to me, do you think if I'm an optimally, I'm calling him done? And I was like, no, not at all, please, buy all needs. Brendan Carr's stupidity contains a ball to two. I was like, if you just don't do more on do dummy, like happy tapping, licensing fees and zero, like take them. And yeah, uh, two things

it's just, it's just Brendan being stupid in his particular way. Uh, so I'll start with that one

“just very quickly. And then we should talk about router bands. So there's two big broadcast companies”

that are merging, techna and next are you have never heard of these companies debate. They're basically

own on the local broadcast stations in America. They're theoretically competitors. There's a law in America that says you can't own more than 39% of the broadcast stations in a specific area. So if you're, you know, wherever you're sitting, the broadcast stations, the TV stations around you, no one person or company can own more than 39% of them. And it's not like goes back and forth. The number has gone up and down over time. And the idea is that there should be competition in the

market for news and entertainment. And if one person owns all of the media, you consume, that would be bad. I don't even think this is like controversial, right, of having a monopoly on everything people consume gives you a lot of power. The government like to preserve some some sense of competition

instead of doing speech regulations. Okay, 39% is a cap. The problem is that the big companies

“like merging and Brendan is nothing but a studio for big companies. So he just went ahead and”

waved the cap. He said, next to our technical merger, I've waved the cap. And even though that the combined company will cover at least 60% of US households, that's fine. And here's this quote. Waving the rule here is consistent with long sending FCC authorities and doing so promotes the underlying purpose of the FCC's media regulation by promoting competition, localists and diversity. What is this is backwards? So Brendan, Mr. I must follow the rules about news distortion when it

comes to regulating comedians has said, well, these big companies want to merge the pretty Trump friendly companies, they start. You know, if they want to merge they're being very friendly

just Trump in particular right now. I've gone ahead and waved the third ever several to promote

competition to promote competition. Sure, because he says they need to be so big to compete with Facebook. Oh, right, because fundamentally he's really mad at Disney. Right, whatever Ryan the Disney produces half of the content that people want, which is just like, and it's it's all real

“else. I think it's like Brendan words. Anyway, so I just in in Brendan world, this idea that”

he has to exume these ancient statutes that allow him to regulate comedians and he must enforce the laws of Britain while also waving the rules. So he can pass through merger like perfect Brendan cars. It doesn't. In another world, this I would have spent all of our time on this, but that is not this world. It is an imperfect world and Brendan sends something much stupider this week. This is my favorite because this isn't stupid in the normal, like, definition of stupid,

which is that it's like wrong and bad. This is like straightforwardly like a thing a stupid person does. There, I mean, just like out of the blue. It's not like a thing I disagree with. It's just a thing that is stupid. So this week, the FCC issued a national security determination. It says allowing routers like Wi-Fi routers to be produced abroad. And Dominic, the US market can create unacceptable economic, national security and cybersecurity risks. And that means no new routers

produced abroad will be allowed in the American market unless those companies pass a certification. This is a huge surprise to the industry. Sean, all of a sudden, I spent the week calling router executives. This is not a thing we normally spend our time doing. And asking questions like, did you know this was going to happen? What happens now? And the answers were no, no, and we're going to say anything on the record because we're afraid of the Trump administration.

So this is not a normal regulatory moment. Like, you know, I'll just compare it to Biden. With a Biden administration, we would do anything. And like 50 executives would line up to go on CNBC. He'd be like, this is an infringement on the American way. The Trump administration capriciously bans all routers for non-specific reasons in ways that will not actually keep everything anyone safe. And everyone is literally too stared to even issue like a press statement

to us that says something anodine like we are evaluating the thing and block like I was like, give me that statement. So it's clear that you're evaluating the ruling and everyone's too afraid to even issue that statement. Yeah, the only statements we were able to get are from companies that are like, oh, we applaud the push for more security. It's like, cool. Thanks guys. And again, I just I would just compare this to like Biden would be like, man, I wish my TV was brighter and like 50 TV manufacturers

would show up and television to be like, how dare you? Yeah. Do you believe in liberty? Like, this is not that. This is we are deathly afraid of the government and we're not saying a word about it. Which is to be clear, the point that is that is the the desired outcome of the Trump administration doing this stuff this way. Yeah. So here's the here's the the the the upshot of this. All the routers are currently on sale remain on sale. It's only new routers. They don't have existing

SEC clearance. Right. So if you're worried about the security of Americans networks, you would not say all routers that are currently on sale remain on sale. You know, they don't have to be updated.

accomplished any goals. Straight forward, we're just saying you have to make routers in the future in

“United States from America. But all the routers that are currently being made overseas”

that have the existing SEC certification are fine. So net gear, TP link, Cisco, Euro, you name it. All their existing products are fine. Weird. Right. Like, there's a security. It's like there's a security risk in the future that I Brendan Carr have discovered in the future. But cannot tell you about it, but won't tell you about it could have not apparently told any of these companies about it. And it will not sit on routers that haven't been made yet. The only just on routers that haven't made yet.

And it's unclear if getting the certification still making the routers overseas is fine, or if you could just bring all the stuff to the United States, including the software on their routers and just load the software on the routers the United States, and that would be fine, even though the software might have a supply chain of time. And by the way, the certification is a self certification. So the companies can just say here is our stuff. But here's how we're going to

make these routers or promise it's fine. And the FCC might say that's okay. So even the process of how this will work is totally unclear. We've accomplished approximately nothing except maybe a bunch of router manufacturers have to make routers and it sits. That's not that. It's it's a bunch of router manufacturers have to dream up a bunch of fake plans to make routers in the U.S. And then tell them loudly to the Trump administration in a way that makes Donald Trump look good.

“Right. That's the extent of it. You have to write down we're going to make things in the U.S.”

Trump did it. Hurrah-hazah. And then everything gets to keep it normal. Like that's just what this is. We think so. You know, all the attacks that they're calling out like volt typhoon and salt typhoon, those attacks happen because our telecom companies, which brand-in-car is supposed to regulate,

had extremely lack security measures. And basically outsource everything they do now.

And he's not regulating that. Right. In fact, he's reduced regulations until a come companies. He has a whole initiative called delete delete delete that he's very proud of where he lets telecom companies do whatever they want and cheaper cost. He doesn't care about lowering prices or making speeds faster or keeping us safer. He has just found a way to get a bunch of router manufacturers to say that they're going to build routers in that state.

So America to combine this law, what they're actually going to do is nothing and continue making the routers that are still fine overseas while they just wait it out. It's a very obvious that they're just going to wait this out in some way. Or they will find a way to do final assembly in the United States in a way that passes muster with these regulations and claim that as a victory. It's just super unclear what any of this will actually accomplish. Except you got a head

line saying all routers have to be made. And he definitely got a head line saying all routers are banned. Yes, which was very scary people freaked out and then you just look at it. You know, like actually destructive says nothing. It doesn't even present evidence for the claim that these routers are dangerous. Right. Again, Sean and I are just like calling a router manufacturer is a very weird afternoon where we talk to a bunch of router manufacturers. They're all deeply confused.

They're all trying to engage the government on this stuff. It's not like this is a new idea. But the United States knows that there are cyber attacks on the US soil all the time. It knows that these networks are vulnerable. It knows for example that TP link, the biggest solar routers in the United States has like huge problems. TP link was the first to issue a statement. And they're like, we're going to be great, you guys. We're going to super shape up because they have the most to lose.

But the reality is that most routers and most people's homes are delivered to them by telecom companies,

by your ISP. And you could just impose this regulation on the ISP and say, keep the router safe, do as many years of software updates as you can. You are accountable for software patches. And I would accomplish the same goal as saying we're banning all router manufacturing. And Brendan can't do that because he cannot regulate a telecom company. It's just not in his bones. He will regulate late night comedians, but he cannot regulate a telecom company.

He allowed telecom companies to not even have to tell you what your bill is full of. I do think the thing that is funny about this to me is that there is an actual sort of societal good outcome, which is that it is true that your router is a potential vector for problems on your internet connection. And if this leads to everyone going in and changing the admin password on their router, the world will be a very slightly better place. Do you know what I mean?

“Your admin password is probably either admin or one, two, three, four on your router. You should”

change that. It's just a good idea. I should not be able to walk into your house and log into your router. And I probably could, right now, just fix that. It's very simple. But like, they could have just issued that as an executive order from the White House being like,

that is the same pure nonsense, like Sean wrote a great FAQ for the site about this and compared it to the thing where they got all worried about ships just to basically extract a portion

“of Nvidia's revenues. Yep. And that's like that, that is the only thing this looks like to me,”

is the same kind of come bow at the feet of the Trump administration and pay us and we will let you continue doing business. It is, it's a shakedown. Like, I don't know how to look at this other than it's a shakedown. It's a shakedown that it will absolutely result in no new routers for a while, like existing router models will just keep getting sold, which is probably fine. Yeah, like the stakes of that are very low. No one is clamoring for Wi-Fi 8. Like, I think it's going to be fine for a

couple of years. Well, especially because Brendan isn't making the speeds get faster, right? I don't know, man. Like, you can't do this to phones. Like, all the phones are made in China, but it's not a big enough market. And so maybe this is just like a trial balloon. Right, you do it routers and you do a lot to have some finally get to phones. And that would be an enormous regulatory over reach for the FCC. But that's Brendan. That's our boy. Right. I must follow

the law when it comes to regulating comedians. I cannot. I will just graciously change the law when it comes to how many stations you can own in a broadcast market. And I've made up a law when it comes to where router should be made as a way to baby step towards regulating phones directly. That is his end goal is to regulate speech on the internet in whatever form he can get to.

It has always been the end goal. It is all these things are baby steps towards it.

As always, Brendan, you're you're welcome to come on the show. You can come on the show when I when I go do you bring a car as a dummy on carousel show? Like, I think that would be fine. How dare you? Again, I you can you can please I swear to god. Me, like, if you go on carousel show with Brendan car, I will I will cut you out of the first car. We get to have another chance. It's a podcast within a podcast. We have never specified what podcast it must be

within. That's interesting. Okay. Do you see it? It's module. Okay. This is a powerful idea.

“Anyone can be Brendan carousel dummy. It's open source license. If you want to do”

Brendan carousel dummy on your podcast, please we welcome it. It's like it's a benign virus in the podcast ecosystem with sports podcast. You know, mean a kind so you want to do Brendan cars a dummy. Get it out there. If I can get Pat McAfee, did you bring cars a we're we're federating Brendan cars a dummy. It's open source behavior. It's beautiful. Anyhow, Brendan, if you want to come on on Brendan cars a dummy, you want to talk to me on my show.

Wait, if Brendan goes on to coder, is that Brendan cars a dummy? Everything is nothing is what I'm with something. Nothing is anything. If Brendan car goes on Facebook, is that Brendan cars the

dummy? He's a dummy wherever he is. It's always Brendan you're welcome to see if you can answer

questions about any of this. It's not gone well for people lately answering questions. But you can try on this show, on on decoder, on any other show, apparently, on the street. I welcome it. I would love to chat with you about what qualifications writers in United States will have that make them safer than writers made other places. You haven't waited up, but that's been Brendan cars a dummy. America's fair podcast within any podcast. Within all podcasts, simultaneously.

We are Simon Casting, Brendan cars a dummy to every podcast you listen to. We haven't figured out the technology, but it's going to happen. My first one is an end to a lawsuit I've been tracking for the last couple of years against this guy named Michael Smith who did just the most fascinating

“and I think telling the thing about the state of the world. So Michael Smith is this guy from”

North Carolina who over the course of I think seven years used AI to create hundreds of thousands of songs uploaded those songs to Spotify and used AI tools to automatically listen to those hundreds of thousands of songs, hundreds of thousands of times a day. He made himself, I believe

the number was like $1.2 million a year in royalties. Again, over many lessons and many songs

ends up being caught for this ends up getting sued, pled guilty this week and has agreed to pay it was $8.09 million. So this is the end of early fastening road this thing has gone for the last couple of years but he created this kind of dare I say genius scheme in which he used technology to create songs that no human as far as we know ever listened to. It was not important that humans ever listened to them because the bots would go and listen to them and he was just doing royalty arbitrage

artists based on how things get listened to and so he's just pulling money out of the system with

this purely automated making and listening to music thing and my thing is like I absolutely guarantee you this is happening everywhere on the internet all the time at vastly bigger scale than you can possibly imagine like there was this company this was a couple of years ago now that was like starting they they like very loudly pronounced they were going to start making AI generated podcasts and they're like we're going to make thousands of them and they're all each going to get 50 lessons

and because there's thousands of them we're going to make money because it costs us nothing to make them and we can make them at such unbelievable scale that we're going to make a little bit of money every time

“and that's how we make a lot of money and that like they just above board did the same thing this”

dude did. The fraud here was having the bots listen to the song. If you were like I will flood Spotify

AI generated music and that will take lessons from other people but that's the money I made because my cost of erection is this is like the white noise every everybody has been buying views on social media platforms since time can I tell you that actually the twist on this that I love the most sure so I mean anybody on any of the social media platforms knows that there's just clips of podcasts everywhere all the time now right in our companies that will shoot a fake podcast with

founders and then use the clip and then like buy views for this clip to promote like I have the pitch in my inbox from these companies it's like look at this fake podcast we shot and I'm like I should do this for small that's my reaction to this so if you're watching this is a clip by the way please know that is what this is we don't make a lot. So these companies they basically have armies

“of people in in discord doing clips like and they're doing labor arbitrage those people are”

overseas are paying the right to pay them based on views and the turn is they're not using bots to get views for themselves they send bots to the other clippers so that the systems detect those clips and downrank them for having bot fees. Whoa very good and so like I agree with you that

it's happening at massive scale but it's also happening in ways you would never expect.

Yeah well and the thing is it is essentially because it can happen at such incredible skit like if I just made a video and bought it a hundred million views it would you would notice right like there are there are obvious behavioral things that these platforms can detect and shut down they would they would demonize my video they would delete the video whatever there are lots of tools that exist to prevent that behavior they don't work all that well right like every time you look

and see one of these platforms like ban a bunch of obvious bot accounts and you see all the celebrity accounts drop precipitously like this is just a thing that happened everybody has been buying these things for forever and in that case it's like I buy a bunch of followers so that my brand deals get more expensive which is like one bit of fakeness removed right like I'm doing you because you're stupid it's not bots the whole way down my bots are just tricking

you that's slightly different but this is all of these dots are now just connecting because

“you're very close to having like 10,000 Android phones in your basement aren't you?”

Oh my god I could this is the thing! When I say very close do you have like 5,000 Android phones in your basement constantly scrolling your own social media feeds? Let's just say there's a reason my camera is zoomed specifically the way that it is no but but again it's like the the scale of this not in like a revenue sense but in the in the fact that so this guy creates accounts on Apple Music Spotify and YouTube Music he creates thousands

of accounts again all of this is happening individually at such tiny scale that like if I'm Spotify I actually don't care that a few dollars are being allocated in the wrong direction right like that that's a price they're all willing to pay it goes under the detection zones but he did this hundreds of thousands of times because you can completely automate the entire process it costs him nothing to do it once versus to do it 100,000 times and so now you have

this problem with okay I'm not losing three dollars I'm losing three dollars hundreds of thousands of times and that is the kind of thing that I absolutely guarantee you is happening at a scale absolutely no one is willing to reckon oh it's yeah it's all over the place and it's gonna get worse and also point out that is the plot of the movie office space but no I'm gonna pay it watches I'm gonna be pretty extra plot it is the plot of office space that's actually the thing that's happening like

burbling under the jokes like that movie is all tone but there's like a little bit of plot and that's the plot of this picture yeah it is like this is there there are going to be so many lawsuits like this one to come um kudos to Michael Smith for being an innovator you know what I mean

version history online wire with really fun episode we do a series on and all these like copyright

cases about music piracy came up the Grokster case uh Sony versus beta max there was a case this week at the Supreme Court that re-heated all of it where the music labels sued Cox the ISP Cox communications for knowing that music was being pirated on their network and doing nothing about it and it this went all the way to the Supreme Court how did that go to the haven't we litigated this 700,000 different times how did the send up the Supreme Court this is it's the same

as the social media trials yeah yeah you litigate and lose you kind of carve off a different chunk of it and you go at it again so the labels tried it again and they had been winning

“big gotten through I think it was four circuit quarter of appeals and Cox was all liable the”

ended up at the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court re-heated all of the cases that we talked

about in version history online wire the Grokster case the beta max case and they found that Cox was not liable for the piracy its users were committing on that network this and it's like a really if you read the decision it's Clarence Thomas uh and he's like we were getting a little wild here saying it was liable for everything Cox simply this is the quote Cox simply provided internet access which was used for many purposes other than copyright infringement big one

yeah uh anyway the trade organization at our AA is of course disappointed in the court's decision and said copyright law must create creators markets from harmful infringement and policy makers are closely at the impact of this ruling and it's like yeah do the policymakers are also stealing TV you gotta know how to tell you this the boomers all have the weird box that streams IPTV to them and that's for policy makers like sorry bro that's rough dude it just reminded me that episode of

version history it was really fun to make um and the issues in that continue to be relevant literally to this day at the Supreme Court it's the kind of thing that it it does feel like we are doomed to litigate forever and Sarah Jong is doomed to be angry about forever yeah it's it was a fun episode go listen to it go watch it um my next one I'm just I'm gonna wrap up bunch of stuff just into one last lightning round item for me here uh and then we're gonna end with you because I'm

very excited about ending on on some gray and really stuff but um there's a big weekend chat bots we have open AI trying desperately to focus on the things that are actually working and stop doing all the weird stuff that isn't they closed down the Sora app uh for which I would say there was very little sadness and concern the more interesting part of that is when the Sora app went away evidently so did its Disney deal which is very interesting and I suspect I don't want

to speculate on things I don't know but it it seems to me that there is there is a turn of reporting left to do there on what was happening to that deal because we thought it was weird at the time that Disney would sign up to make this deal an invest in open AI and that this this felt odd and it feels even stranger now the one turn of reporting we already had is a Disney was surprised right yeah and and a lot of this is not they're not like giving up on the idea video generation

they're just pulling all of this into chat GPT there seems to be a real sort of centralizing thing happening we also had news last week uh that open AI is really invested in building out this like super app out of chat GPT uh this is everybody's idea now right like this is this is the

“thing and I think everybody sees what the cloud app has become where they put cloud code into it”

and then there's co-working to it and so people are like spending time in there now google is apparently trying to do the same thing with Gemini open AI trying to do the same thing with chat GPT um goddally knows what Microsoft is doing did you see the thing early this week where Microsoft was basically just like we're so sorry we're we're gonna refocus on making Windows 11 good for the first time ever our plan is to make Windows 11 something that you'd like and not have so much co-pilot nonsense

in there so there's just everyone is like flailing to figure out how to package all of this stuff in a way that people actually like uh there's also news this week that Apple's big plan for overhauling all of its AI stuff is to have a standalone Siri app that will do a lot of the same stuff which is like a sort of diametrically different approach than Apple has taken before like

Apple has always talked about Siri as this sort of spread across the operating system technology

that is like diffused into the phone and now decentralizing all of it into an app called Siri would just be a very different way of thinking about what AI means. I think they have to do that because they need to be able to update that app way faster than the operating system. I actually think it's the right decision to be clear I like the the the thing cloud has done which is basically turn AI into a a bundle of experiences inside of an app is just how people use technology right now

“like I think that just makes sense and if you want to eventually have it be the everything everywhere”

all at once technology find but we're not there yet so I think it is probably the right approach

Siri sucks and Apple is going to have to be like here's a Siri app on your phone do you want

this and that makes me laugh. They do guys just put it on your home screen by default which they will do ruthlessly. They also put a YouTube album on everybody's phone by default and that went over super great with everything. It's not it's not going to go over super well I don't think but anyway so this is like this is the big product innovation now it's like everybody has tried to do everything and now what we're actually going to get is a series of these like all in one apps

that are trying to create this kind of sticky user behavior because the other thing that happens is you go to cloud code because cloud code is really good and that makes you use cloud more which is very useful for anthropic like that is not a thing that open AI has done a good job of

building ironically and it's not a thing that Google has done a very good job of building so we're

starting to see this massive consolidation back into all of these AI apps in a way that they're

“just going to look like apps which is very interesting. I mean I think we should say it again this is”

the point you've been making there is a great use case in the enterprise for AI that's business software that's thinking keeps saying if you run a business the AI tools can help you part of your business requires software automation like if you think in loops if you have software brain AI is great for you and a lot of people are software brain and a lot of businesses require a lot of software and if you can bring the cost of developing all new software to zero maybe there will be

new kinds of businesses software brain software brain is like trying to take over the world like what if everything was software brain and just running into reality and most consumers even the software people I know in their everyday lives do not have software brain like you can't I just I just can I read you a slack message that you wrote because I've been thinking about it ever since this is last Friday you we we have a slack room for our whole editorial team and you just wrote I don't

know what the story would be but I feel like we should run the people do not you're in for automation as a headline I have thought the phrase the people do not you're in for automation 16 times a day since that and it's true like the people the people do not you're in for automation it is not that's not what we spend most of our time thinking about as normal humans in their lives if you describe most people's lives as a loop they will get very mad at you yes like those there are lots of movies

“about how bloodless your life is a loop is and trying in fact to get out of the loop and eat”

play love your way through whatever like I mean you can what's the Ryan Reynolds movie reason NPC free guy it's like somewhere on the spectrum like free guy to fight club is your life is not a loop right and so like if you just try to apply software brain to consumer use cases you end

up demanding that everyone lives an automatable life or which is never going to work or you're

gonna run into the inherent brittleness of AI as it exists today yeah right which is well Alson is going to test task automation on the S26 and Gemini is going to take 13 minutes to order an Uber because it's just staring at the Uber out being like what do I do now and just burning tokens along right and so I see what's happening here is there's product market fit in the enterprise they figured it out because if you describe a business as a loop you have gone a long way towards revolutionizing

any business and you can do all kinds of business logic if you are like you're as a consumer

“you're a loop you're going to order the same yogurt every week and that's the yogurt you're”

going to you people go fuck yourself like I look straight like absolutely not and like I just don't every technology that tries to automate the consumer experience in that way runs in the same historically has run into the same problem and they all they're all marketed the same way right we're going to know everything that's in your fridge so we can tell you what recipe to make and it just simply does not work because it turns out you don't log everything that's in your fridge

right so I look at all the stuff and I'm just like man the people do not yearn for automation and these tools are just there to automate things which is great for business and is going to just run into the brittleness of Alexa and Google Assistant and everything else that has promised to automate your entire life in very specific ways yep it's good stuff by the way if you know what the story is I would still up to run that headline yeah this does not obviate running that headline

which is still a thing I would like to do it's it's a very good headline and then I can stop thinking about it which will be very helpful alright for our last one here it's it's time for you to close a loop that we've been talking about you have been we've talked a lot about what's been going on with Grammarly and it's it's expert voice it was it called expert voices expert voices expert voices feature that imparts and aided you and me and lots of other people on the internet

he came on decoder how do you go it went so I didn't know Shishirma before I think you did I know lots of reporters who who've known Shishirma variety of roles over the years he's been the head of products at YouTube so like you know we talked a lot of Google and seconded it's like yeah reporters talked to Google it's like people new Shishir I'm I will just say this

“I like people who are honest I think he's honest like he says what he's thinking yeah I like Shishir”

I've met him many times going all the way back to he he ran a company called Coda for a long time that I really liked like he is he is one of those people who has been doing this long enough

to understand how it works and I have always enjoyed talking to him about products stuff yeah and I

don't I don't I don't think he was like shade I think he was telling me what he really thought and I appreciate that and I appreciate that he came on obviously I was like pretty mad at him because he's so my identity I thought we I thought we sat in the pocket there for for a minute I'd actually invited him on the show because he has such an interesting background like he used to work for later page he used to work for Sundar he's on the board at Spotify

I had wanted to have a big conversation about creators in the creator economy and like building these platforms and then he did a thing that I think is coming to the entire creator economy writ large YouTube is you know they reacted to the grammarally stuff by inviting you and me into

their likeness detection program yeah because they know they need a likeness detection program

because people are going to use our likeness on YouTube left and right without permission

“and they need to have some system to shut it down I think you can clone songs and put them on Spotify”

today so how do I you don't even need to do it every night I just yell at this our smart speaker to play a lullaby versions of Taylor Swift and I don't even know where that stuff comes from there are just 10,000 albums on Spotify called in are they generally but I don't know I know it makes them sleep that's that there's there's there's a Spotify fraud yep right like this thing is going to start happening it really high rates to lots of people

so he got he's in the middle of it obviously he had pulled the feature he said he didn't think the feature is any good but I what I took away from that conversation is no one has sought this through and this stuff is people's livelihoods and just saying it's attribution when there's no economic upside to that attribution and then you can clone people left and right man it's going to get messy but creators do not take kindly to losing money from their work on these platforms they they're

fighting for every dollar like a small creator gets paid like 3,000 dollars to do a brand deal at small scales yeah every dollar counts and so I you know I I felt like she here could take it like he he's been in these roles he you know he he's he is he is faced the full fury of the YouTube community before that role and so there's a little bit of me saying okay I'm gonna make

“you answer for everything and a little bit of like why did you ship this feature but I think you could”

take it I think I don't know how you felt about it I was in it I tried to be as fair as I could well you know it's still dealing with the fact that I was involved but I felt like that conversation both sides of that debate were present and like made with as much conviction as could be made yeah I think that's right I mean my my read on it to be perfectly frank I think you're angry or angerier about your inclusion in that feature than I was which was really interesting but uh

I don't know I have I have a certain sort of nihilism about the internet now that I probably need to get over there are pictures of me wearing AirPods that have been used to sell fake AirPods on Alibaba for 15 years I had a friend who sent me a picture of me in a slide on some like you know one of those like pop crave knockoffs about how bad they were calling them you know pervert glasses all of the like ray bands and there was a picture of me from the version history

episode of Google Glass where in Google Glass is sort of looking up like this and they sent it to me and they were like are you pervert? I was like I don't think so but here we are but anyway I think the I was struck by the same thing that it sounds like you were which is that it just doesn't seem like they actually thought this all the way through like no one asked the full questions

and it reminded me of something uh Jim Lanson the CEO of Yahoo said to you which is basically

that like he thought it was a bummer that Google was forced to react to chat GPT so fast and decided to react so fast that it didn't actually sit down and think about what it wanted to do and I think that there is there is so much of that happening in AI right now the money is so big the stakes are so high there is a sense that all of this is moving so fast that if you take two seconds to sit down and think that you will get left behind and all of these companies are just running themselves

ragged making huge mistakes in service of trying to run as fast as they possibly can and it's like

our products instead of just like scattershot doing everything it possibly could in hoping it would

eventually catch up uh this felt like sort of the same thing to me where they're just like we have an AI gun we're going to point it into everything we can because we feel like we have to. Yeah I mean I look I'll connect it to the social media trials we're talking about these companies are confusing user downloads with quality yeah over and over and over and over again and so you know Google looked at lots and lots of people downloading and chatting with you and decided that they

preferred it and maybe they did prefer you know the sort of conversational output of chat should be to you to whatever jumped up sponsored 10 blue link thing that Google was doing and maybe they didn't interact with it but like everybody knows the free version of chat should be the most people are using isn't it good and we'll like consistently just lie to you and make things up or like be too synchophantic everybody knows it right people people claim that they see chat she was

he writing all over the place now because they're used to it and they think it's not good Google AI overviews you know the hot theories I switched to the cheaper gem and I model to run AI overviews because obviously they need to lower cost that thing is wrong all the time

“in a way that I think is hurting Google's reputation but then you ask Google be like it's got the most”

take up of all time and they just consistently are confusing like numeric measures of success for quality measures of success yeah and I I just think everybody is like these tools can do a lot of stuff they can get you an outcome you can vibe code whatever is it any good like is this good like do people actually like using the tools do the people whose names were using actually want to be included in this way and I think the the mad rush to claim success

is just confusing everybody about what success actually is and it's funny to have this conversation on a custom of Apple 50 when you you know videos of Steve Jobs like left and right being like we won't do stuff to just do it we do stuff because it's great and that's like whoa this industry has forgotten that lesson yeah yeah I don't I don't want to talk on this too long because people should just go listen to the upset it's it's a it's a good decoder most decoder strash but this is

but there's just one thing so you you had this back and forth the thing where you're talking

about basically they went through this immediate backlash to the future and they said that people

could email and opt them out and and he sort of disagrees with you that what he what he ends up saying is he decided this was off strategy and shut it down and all this happened for the lossy but then you say you say it's off strategy for you the future obviously shipped what made it on strategy

“at the time he shipped and he says this thing that I think is totally fascinating at the time”

the team believed they were doing that this is from the transcript they were looking at users and they were focused on a user need which is I wish an expert could give me feedback at this moment I wish my salesperson could give me feedback I wish my support person could give me feedback I wish my idol could give me feedback I wish this expert could give me feedback in itself I think that motivation that users have is a really good one and I think one that I would encourage

experts and creators to lean into it's a big opportunity do you know what never what the word

that never ever ever appears in there is AI like this he he fundamentally misunderstood a human need as an AI product like and this is like do you remember when metal launch the thing where you could chat with AI versions of celebrities same thing like I want to talk to a celebrity is not an AI feature it isn't it and it is actually that disconnect between you've built me an AI solution to a human problem is part of why people don't like AI like this idea that you can simulate human needs

and human relationships and human problems and do human things by throwing AI at it with the name Neelie Patel on it is the problem it's not the solution it is the problem if Graham really built a thing that was like we will connect you to Neelie Patel who will edit your story for you I think that's fascinating like what is the latest cameo cloud of all time like what if cameo but it's Neelie telling you you're writing is not good is like that's a product I'm interested in but the idea that

you they are they are looking at this and they're saying I want more people I want collaborative tools for humans and they're saying we're going to AI fake our way through this and you're going to love it is just so fundamentally disconnected from actual reality that it makes me crazy David it's software brain it is software it's pure software because you know his pitch to me was login to our platform and making AI yourself by writing down the rules you would use to edit and I was like I don't know what those

“are and also why would I do that like what that's not how I edit that's how anybody at it's like”

apart from some very wrote things like put the name of the product in the sentence about the product you know like once you're past that you're there's no way to do rules based taste but software brain with the power of AI thinks you can do rules based taste over and over and over

taste will be a big differentiator yeah that was the superhuman tagline taste will be a more valuable

“whatever and it's like yeah man that squishy it's the thing you can't replicate and so if you think”

taste is more valuable than ever you have got to find a way to actually make it economically valuable and you cannot say it's rules based and my taste isn't apt that you can download that doesn't make any

sense of all so if you can write down what your taste is it's not taste I'm I sat there with some you

know a bunch of writer friends I'll listen to interview and we sat there trying to think of rules about how we edit and that's like you can't and these are fancy writer people you just can't do it if that way is you got little tricks to use when I was a twelve dollar post and gadget blogger I had a keyboard expansion macro for netbook specs I wrote those nitbook specs like 500 times a day does that count like absolute doesn't count yeah and anyway I just I keep them back to software

brand the people do not year in for automation David yep all right we should get out of here you've now said it twice which means I could use this headline as the title for this episode but

“we're not going to we should get out of here real quick before you have to go get your flight”

um plugged decoder what's coming the coder next week is the CEO of octa Todd McKinnon and the week after that is the CEO of Cisco shop robbers this is we fun right like it um version history this weekend the the 1984 Macintosh with John Gruber we had a blast making that thing we had a original Macintosh on the table with us in the studio it's a very good time it's a really fun episode Apple 50 stuff coming all week as you're hearing this the ranker will be live so go go rank stuff

send us your rankings yell at us about all the things that aren't in there uh send us emails vergecast the verge.com about all this and everything else call the hotline 866 first one one

thank you as always for watching and listening the vergecast is a production of the verge

“and the vox media podcast network this show is produced by Eric Gomez brand and key for”

and Travis larchuk me like go get your flight take us out rocker oh