Ring's adorable surveillance hellscape

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That's this week on Explain It to me. Find new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the first cast, flagship podcast of slightly dystopian pet finders. I'm a friend David Pierce, the office house here, everybody. How do you feel about using the full surveillance industry to find your pets?

This is why I don't have pets, get them out of my face too complicated. The moral quandary of pet ownership is, we do a lot of moral quandary in the show. I will say, you know, do you really own a dog? Let's talk about it. Yeah, you just, you don't, you just let it poop inside your house for a while.

At least that's my current experience. Last going on this week, we have some Super Bowl follow-up to do.

The packers weren't in it because they never are, so that sucks for you.

“Patriots did lose, which was important, I think, for America.”

Agreed. The world is a little brighter now than the Patriots lost the Super Bowl. We have a lot of surveillance cameras stuff to talk about. We have some opening. I news to talk about.

We have some hardware that doesn't exist. We have some hardware that might someday exist. We have lots to talk about, but I think we should probably start the same place we started last week, which is unfortunately with the Epstein files. You asked in particular, people to give us feedback on how we are, how we're talking

about this stuff, how we're covering this stuff, what they want to see, what's interesting. What did you hear? What have the vibes been like? I would divide this feedback into two discrete categories. Okay.

I care about a lot, which is the actual people talking to us. You just look at the comments on YouTube, you shouldn't look at our email directly. Pam Bonday, but I will tell you what is in our email, and it's people emailing us and saying, keep doing this. It's important.

We appreciate your approach to it. We want the stories, your quandary about the source and the mechanism by which the material is being released. You can set that aside. We understand.

Sure. So we're going to keep talking about it. One, there is just the data, and the data says people desperately want David and I to talk about James, like the numbers are higher, and we can't quite explain why. We don't do a lot of data driven content decision making at the verge, which is why I haven't

started a fully automated, like Android, bot farm in overseas to manipulate YouTube. I should. Every good content creator who cares about business does this, you've come to meetings with that idea. Yeah.

That's nobody about 100 Android phones and just do a bot farm for me. That would be great. We don't do a lot out here. Famously our reporters don't get paid fees, like all the stuff we don't do, but in this case it was particularly notable that there was the qualitative feedback from actual people that

we care about a lot. It said, please do the stories, and then there was just the straight views and downloads on the podcast. And so. That's enough signal.

“I'll mention two that are important to me, two Epstein stories that we cover this week”

that are very important to me that I think are very virgin in their scope.

far. Jeffrey Epstein cared about SEO a lot, just a lot. And he employed people to manage his Google presidency, employed people to go on Wikipedia and clean up his bio, he did offensive SEO. He was all over.

His digital footprint was a thing he cared about, and he had people constantly emailing him, telling him how they were cleaning up his digital footprint. And to be clear by cleaning up, you mean, Jeffrey Epstein is a criminal and a pedophile was at the top of the rankings. And Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time in energy and money trying to move that down in

the rankings. Yes. If you're seeding stories with oppositional links, again, monitoring Wikipedia and making sure Wikipedia, there's like edit wars about his entry, taking out negative information about himself.

Yeah. There are a bunch of really fascinating back-and-forths with reporters from people on in his orbit who are basically yelling at reporters and threatening them in order to get them to remove stuff from stories and then reporting it back to Epstein saying, look, we did it.

We got your name out of this story. Let me at Sato and our team as a great story about this, there's one back and forth in particular where the report backs says they didn't know I was working for you. They don't know that we're talking.

“And so you just see, there's this, we kind of hint at it all the time, right?”

We spend a lot of time talking to coms people and PR people and I, I love writing a spicy response to what is obviously like a secret legal demand and then looping our lawyers on it. It's one of the funer parts of my job that no one ever gets to see. I really do enjoy it.

There's a lot of that in our world that you all never see, you shouldn't ever see, right?

We're just pushing back in people who want to shade our stories in some way. And then you see how effectively Jeffrey Epstein was using that as a weapon, not just to shade the coverage, but connecting the dot all the way to his own search results to SEO. And so that's just like straightforwardly a first story and Mia did a great job, we've been making Mia cover SEO for a while.

She's the one who wrote all the content goblin stories for us about the SEO industry, the last days of disco before AI showed up. We did, that was a huge track and she did for us. She saw this and was like, oh, I see what's happening here. So this story is great because she has so much depth.

Yeah.

“And I think on that front, we talked a bunch last week about how one of the odd things about”

these files is how just sort of plainly they lay bare how old of this stuff works. Right. A lot about Steven Sinozki, who was running Windows at Microsoft and his negotiations for his package when he left Microsoft is like, it's the sort of thing nobody ever talks about in the way that they are willing to email their colleagues about it.

And so you just see a different version of it and this was so striking to me for the same reason that you see with no, no spin, no nothing, just a perfectly completely laid bare plan for how to spin up a bunch of essentially fake websites designed to launder somebody's reputation. And there's Mia has, has links and an explanation to this about like somebody who is basically

buying and hosting domain names, starting fake websites, filling them with a specific kind of content, all in the name of gaming, the SEO algorithms to move stuff up and down to their liking. And this is, I would remind you, a game that Google has said for decades is unwinnable and doesn't exist in no one is trying to do it.

And it is just so fabulously clear that this is a game that everybody plays and can win with enough money and resources. And it's just, this is the sort of thing you just don't get to see it laid out in front of you.

Yeah, you never get to see the vendor talking directly to clients saying, I spent all this

money. Here's exactly what we did and here's how it worked. Yeah. And, you know, that's a gold mine. If you are researching the dynamics of information, you know, so that's one big story.

Again, Mia did an incredible job here, just because we forced her to cover me for a year.

“Like her understanding that space, I think really comes through in this story.”

So that's one. The other one that I would point people to last week, I mentioned sort of in passing that Epstein had a connection to Fort Chan in a particular slash poll, the politics board. And so we thought about who can explain this. There's so much history.

So you ask Kat 10bars, who used to be an amazing misinformation, misinformation reporter at NBC News. She now writes a news letter called Spitfire News, which is very good. You should subscribe to it. So we asked her to just write about the connections between Epstein, Christopher Poole, who ran Fort Chan.

His name is Moot, that was handle and poll.

And the dynamics between all of that, between gamer gate, between the first Trump campaign.

And you can see there's a straight line in Epstein's support for eugenics and his hatred of women and his weird ideas about just how to destabilize the country. There's a lot of Steve Bannon in the mix who understood early that you could weaponize form culture and make turn it into the culture war and then turn that in the politics. And then here we are in 2026.

You can't say that they had a meeting in the next day of the thing happened. But in the e-mails, you can see, yep, they definitely met Epstein said I really like this guy. I think he's so bright. I drove him home and then a series of things unfolded where everyone's goals were being met.

And that to me is maybe the most undercovered story of our time that, you know, there's

always this push that you shouldn't take what happens on the internet seriously.

The Twitter isn't real life. And to some extent, that's real, like the reality outs, like the truth outs are people. They go, live their lives, they move their meat sacks, their bodies around in real space. You can't tweet everything and you can't overcome the metaphysics of reality with Twitter. But boy, you can come close and you can see, like just as you're saying about SEO, you

see them talking about it, nakedly, openly, cynically, pushing the ball forward. Well, everyone else is, you know, saying very sincere things with the nature of content moderation. And like the systems are being gamed at every level, and Epstein's right in the middle of it.

“So that story is also, I think, very good, very virgin, cats at a great job.”

So those are the two I wanted to call out this week that we're going to have more. Again, the, you know, I value people writing to us and saying things to us more than I value the data. But in this case, it's both, it's both, like clearly both says that we should cover this more.

There's more to be said here. And in particular, Epstein as a, as a force in the digital world is like overwhelming. Yeah. You can just see that he, he clocked it, he figured it out early. And then all of these people came to him for advice, and then his money influenced a bunch

of platform dynamics and tech dynamics across the board. Yeah. And that this group understood the power of the internet to move their own awful world views into the norm in, like, really structured and deliberate way. It's like, you read the thing from, from Ryan Broderick last week, who writes the garbage

shoes that are who's basically saying, I've been covering misinformation and the all right

for decades, and I'm realizing that I may have just been following Jeffrey Epstein around. Like, the more we learn about these files, the more it feels like that is the case. Yeah. It's in there. And, you know, there's more, there's more to come, assuming our department of justice does

the thing that we believe mandated to do by all the subjects. There's more to come. I suspect we're going to come in as for quite a while. Yeah. And I think folks should go read this story as well, we'll link them in the show notes.

But the, yeah, the particulars of how all of this works. I think is it continues to be the hardest thing to mind of all of this, and our team's been doing a really good job because there's just so much. And like we talked about last week, it's just this unordered dump of PDFs.

“And if you want to, you can read almost anything you want into it, right?”

And so trying to go through and be like, okay, what is, what is real, what is conspiracy?

What is stuff that Jeffrey Epstein who had a lot of reasons to vastly overstate his own importance, it's, it's hard to parse a lot, but there is just like the raw data of this, the more we start to put the pieces together, is like a very different version of the history of sort of the modern internet than I think people are, you see. And that's even just looking at through this slice of what's here, like we don't, we don't

know what happened at the parties. We don't happen at the dinners. We don't know what happened on the island. We don't know what happened on the plane, like we don't know how happened on the phone. There's just a universe of stuff we don't know, but what we can just see paints a very

different picture of the history of the culture and the internet colliding in this specific way. Yeah. Oh, by the way, I won for you, you and I were talking about this briefly on the show last week, and then we talked about it afterwards, and I went out and assigned it, the equal

signs. Oh, yeah. In the weird, the weird things are that feel like censored reductions, but like kind of clearly aren't. We're chasing that down.

I'm not going to give it away, but I think by next week, we will have a good answer. We will have a story about what's went on at the equal signs. Oh, that's awesome. I'm so glad you assigned that story. Yeah, I was like, I'm doing, we're I'm I'm the king now, but am I the editor in

chief? Can I just do this? That's what happened. I love this.

“That's what all it's in all my meetings.”

Can I do this? To be clear, everyone, most of the time people say no, and then you lie to the dinning. That's the dynamic here. I had a good call today with it, a long time tech, exact. And he was saying the way to think about open claw in these AI agents is like, what

if, like, don't think about it like you have one employee, think about like you have a whole team and like how much more in control you would feel. And I was like, I don't know. I mean, I have a whole team and I look at my phone and I was like, what happened now? What are you talking about?

All right. Let's move on for this. We're going to keep covering the obscene stuff. I think this story is a long ways from being over, even in our zone.

But for now, let's talk about a different kind of different scams or failings, a different scandal.

“So the the beginning of this, I think, is there was a super bowl ad that ring ran about”

a feature called search party. But I'm going to describe this in the most milk toast way. And then we're going to get into a search party is a feature that is designed to help people find their dogs. That's it.

If you, if your dog runs away, you can activate the whole neighborhood of cameras to help you find your dog. I'm just going to share my screen with you real quick. And I'm going to play this ad because it's 30 seconds long. And I just watched it again and it is just, it's, it is really something special.

This is my low, heads are family, but every year 10 million go missing.

And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now, one post of a dog's photo in the ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search party from ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since last, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family.

Be a hero in your neighborhood with search party. Available to everyone for free right now join the neighborhood at ring dot com. So Neil, I don't, I don't see the problem. What a lovely ad about how to find your dog. I don't know.

So Jamie was on Dakota or not so long ago talking about this. And I would characterize that conversation as very pleasant. I like Jamie. He's very smart. And also just me for an hour being like, is this the stopia?

Are you describing the stopia? And we just went back and forth on that. And do you ever ring camera? Well, I do.

We, we were grandfathered into the one on our front door when we bought this house.

And it has actually been a really interesting process of deciding whether we want to keep it. It's fascinating to me that this is a moral of laundry. We have ring cameras in our house. They're good.

They're product. They work. And that's fine. Do you have the neighbor's app or do you have neighbors, notifications turn on in the ring app?

No, I turn them off because it made me feel like he. To be honest. So we have them on.

“Again, I don't think you should feel more focused on this.”

Like I'm very curious. You know, I have that get out of jail for e-card of like I'm a decoporter. Guys, you have to pay attention. But like, it's fine. You can just turn on.

It's anonymized and at least where I live. There are only two things that show up in the neighbor's app. Was that an explosion by far in a way? Number one. Just all day long, people ask you if things are explosions.

Couldn't tell you why, but that is it. Are they ever explosions? Sometimes. You know, like once a year, there's an explosion. Okay.

Right. Like I don't tell you once a year at the conned plant a transformer blows. You know, like the rest of the time, it's like no big truck. Yep.

It's almost always big truck or nothing.

Like nothing is a shockingly popular answer. And then that replies are always like, you know, hilarious lies. Like yes, it wasn't explosion. Like go in your basement now. Like actually, I shame it with this.

It seems like there are a lot of people asking about explosions in the data. And then the other thing is my dog is lost. That's it. That's it. All day long, people like a last night dog or like I saw a dog, a deer's a dog, a pet, whatever.

And so you can see how anyone looking at what people are talking about and sharing their footage about would get to. We should just automate the process of saying we see a dog. Sure. I just want to, I just want to say that like, if you are, your concerns about the surveillance

apparatus are valid, like that's, everyone's listening to this. They're already yelling at me. I'm just saying that the logical, like, outside of the world we live in conclusion from

“why do people hit share on video footage and our app?”

Sure. One, again, like I cannot overstate this is, is this an explosion? Like if they could solve that problem, maybe they should have started there honestly. And then too is my dog is lost where I saw a dog. And you can see how you would just get there.

You would just very quickly arrive at we should push a button and let people be like here or some bucks. Right. Sure. And I don't, I'm only pointing that out because it is the reality of the platform.

That's the thing people are doing. It's also the sort of feature that in a vacuum, no one's going to have a problem with. Right. And all at once reach out to all of my neighbors to see if any of them have found my dog near 100% approval rate on the, that, that idea, that big.

And again, this is what people are already doing in the app. Now, in different neighborhoods, boy, do you run into different things people are doing that cause all kinds of problems? Right. Is this an explosion?

Did you see my dog? Right. On the scale of moral order. We got a lot of, this is a teenager in a hoodie. They're probably a criminal.

There you go. Yeah. I saw a guy looking at my car. Yeah. It comes up in the data, a lot of that.

I'm mad. The delivery person for my food order didn't look like a citizen is one that is rising

Like, this is all bad stuff that you can do once you have this level of surveillance. And ring has been in the mix of this problem since the day it was founded because Jamie, who again, smart person, was founded the company, you know, famously founded it on Shark Tank is door bot, like, very compelling story, very compelling actor, founder talk all the whole thing since the first day he's been like, this is to fight crime.

Yeah.

He's never a waiver, he's never been, he's never, he didn't find, it wasn't like, he had

to find product market fit.

“He's like, why did I make this video camera to fight crime?”

Like, straight up his pitch has been surveillance from the beginning. And on Dakota into Gen 2, he, the last time I talked to Gen 2, he had launched the last round of doorbells. He's like, if you put enough of these in certain neighborhoods, we will zero out crime. And he and I spent an hour talking about that.

Next week, we'll have a Dakota episode, just a really unpacking that conversation one more time. So I won't go into it too much here. But he and I spent an hour being like, what do you mean if you have enough cameras, you will zero.

What is the mechanism, by which these cameras will bring crime to zero? And the answer is, well, people will know there are cameras that will make this behave. And, you know, to some extent, it's we're going to share the footage with Bonforsan. No, please, that, that gives J because it would have so much less credit than he should get for the aggressiveness with which he wants to give all of you.

They keep signing deals with police officers, please support me. This is a feature not a bug. Like, actually, can I, can I please this question? Yeah. Can I play you one more 30 second thing?

So why is a smart home competitor to, to ring, which hilariously has a whole bunch of don't like, security issues and privacy issues? Uh, got a lot of credit after this ring ad came out and sparked a lot of people's fears. Because immediately, like, you look at that ad and it's like, oh, replace dogs with anything else.

And this is a horrifying, yeah, dystopian hellscape that you've just described. Um, I am confident. There is a reason that ring launched this feature with dogs. Do you know what I mean? But anyway, so why is makes this thing, let me just play you this 30 seconds.

“I think it is, it is a useful and important piece of the equation here.”

This is Milo, pets or family, but every year, 10 million of them go missing.

And the ways we look for them haven't changed in years, except for all of these. But what if we could make finding one lost dog require the computational power of a small dictator led nation's search party for money? All right. You get the idea.

I got the idea. Can I just point out why does this have massive security issues? Yeah. Don't lie, strangers. I can't really realize, can't get over the internet.

Like cameras outside your house, yeah, you got weird surveillance problems when we're talking about how complicated all that will make you feel. Do not put cameras in your house. Yeah. Do it.

The number of like feel good clips, I watch of like babies breaking out of their crib and going to the kitchen to like get juice.

It's like first you feel great.

Like this is very funny. That baby jumps out of a crib. Like why is there a camera in your house? Why is there a camera in your house? Why is there one in your kitchen?

Why is there one in your living room?

“Why is there one all the way from the baby's crib to the kid?”

What are you doing? And there's no way to like reach through your phone and disconnect the camera, but I want it. Yeah. Yeah.

For cameras. Nealine and I will come to your house and slightly disconnect all of your kids. I have a lot to say about the fact that the baby monitor camera that we bought got discontinued and now the only one you can buy from the same brand has a Wi-Fi option and that it in it and they know it's bad so there's a hardware switch in the camera.

Oh, wild. But I'm like, I don't even want to, don't put a camera in your house. Yes. Don't do that. So the point of this, Ed, like, I think if you're Jamie and Ring, that Wi's video is

not a good burn because you're like, yeah, that actually is exactly what we're trying. That's what I'm doing. Yeah, they, again, he will tell you, he will, he, he, he, look, I like people who are honest. Yeah.

Right. And Jamie is very honest. He's like, I started this company of fight crime and I do it with pervasive video surveillance. He's not hiding the ball. No.

I think he's a little annoyed that the nature of law enforcement and how people feel about the police using their data right now are radically different than when he founded Ring in like 2012 or 2013 and it was back then, right? The nature of all this has changed, but his point of view is not. But again, all of this stuff is, it's, it's a feature and how to book, right?

Like, yeah. And I think to your point about the being honest, I think the challenge here is that everyone is able to make those decisions for themselves, right? Like, it is, is the possibility of, is lowering the possibility of someone breaking into your house worth the intrusiveness of having a camera.

I think reasonable people can disagree on where you land on that. The other thing that's happening is my camera is also watching you. And so what we've now created is this big society-wide problem that not all of society gets to participate in. And I think that has been the part that Ring has not done a good job of reckoning with.

It's like, sure, or would I consent to you lighting up my camera in order to find your

Sure. Fine.

“Is it unbelievably obvious to me what opting me into that automatically does?”

And what you can very clearly do next with that exact same technique? Like, yes, of course. And do we as reasonable consumers in the year 2026 have any reason to believe tech executives

when they tell us they'll never do the bad thing?

No. So like, I'm at this point now where I, I struggle with this because I don't know how to reckon with the fact that my block is filled with these things. And if my dog ever gets out, I will be grateful for the fact that most people on my block probably didn't know to turn this feature off.

But I also sort of feel like I should go door to door until everybody to turn this feature off. I have this theory about just what has happened in politics right now is I think about it a lot. Right now, we are convinced, like culturally convinced that our actions do not affect

other people. You just see it everywhere. Interesting. You see it and there's a rise in measles cases. Why?

Because we've decided our actions don't affect other people, even though they're very clearly. Like all over the place. And ring cameras are an incredible example of this, where the cameras on my house are fine. They're fine. And I can turn them on and off and whatever, but they are, to your point, they're taking

video of you. And so my cameras can invade your rights, but me turning that on has no impact on me. So here's this button in app distributed by Amazon on the hardware that Amazon owns, where

“you have like a moral quandary that is, should I affect someone else's rights?”

And I would just say American culture in 2026 has does not equip people to think about that well. Yeah, true. Like you kind of, once you start looking for it, like do you believe that all of us working together is a better solution of problem than ever working individually, like do my actions

affect you and should that have any impact on how I behave?

They're just, no, no, the answer is no one wants to think about it, but like, please open

to talk and move on. And you just, I think this button is very challenging for people for that reason. Because your individual decision will matter affect you. Right, it will affect other people. And the collective decisions of other people will affect you.

But you have no agency here, really. And I don't know how to reconcile that, but to your point, if you lose your dog, maybe this will be helpful. There's a reason they're starting with dogs. At the same time Savannah got through his mother was kidnapped and everyone was like, where's

the doorbell footage? And she didn't have a nest subscription on her nest cam, and I ever thought it was lost. And it turns out that the way the nest cams work meant some data was sent to Google at some point, and Google was able to recover it. We should talk about the mechanics of that, because that's equally confusing.

But the fact that the FBI then released to the footage of Google had, was I would say widely celebrated. Yeah, this was this is deemed to be a win by nest and by law enforcement and by the existence of these cameras. And you know somewhere, Jamie Simmons office, like, told you, this is what this is for.

But to me, it's like, I don't know, I have, I also reacted to both of those things, the ways you just described.

“And I think having, though, you can't hold both ideas in your head at the same time.”

You just can't have it both ways. Either this stuff is too problematic and too invasive, and we need ways to roll it back

and not have it be this kind of incredible ongoing permanently stored surveillance complex

that can find anybody at any time or it's awesome that this piece of information about what happened in Nancy Guthrie is coming out and might help solve a crime. You can't have it both ways. Well, you can, you can chart one middle path. You can.

So, you know, 20 years ago, CCTV cameras became absolutely prevalent in England. Like this, a 20 year old story, like, and there is a controversy about just the number of private CCTV cameras. And this is like the old technology, right? This is even like digital, interactive technology.

This is closed circuit. There's tapes in the back of the convenience stores. And they were everywhere. You know, there's a privacy debate in that country at that time. And you end up with a series of regulations and laws and social norms and I don't know

that it has worked out. I don't know, it's any different. But there's one other path, right? Which is to say, we should have privacy laws, like the way the government accesses the private surveillance footage on everyone's front door is regulated in some way in transparent

in some way. There's things that police can't do. And that is just not where we are in America as a society right now. If we are not going to have some full-sum debate about what it means that everyone has a camera and the cops want all the footage all the time, especially because so many people

no longer trust the intentions, the methods, or even their interactions with the police. Like, just that's not where we are, right?

true crime story, it seems lost, right?

So now these companies are just doing whatever they want. It seems like what they're going to do is chase the check. And the United States government is going to write a lot of checks. Yeah, house by house, we are neatly solving a law enforcement problem. Yeah, there's the one middle path.

And you could write that law. You could write it myself, right? You could say you can't like this up all the time. There's a million ways to do this. It may be not everyone will be happy with any of those ways.

“I think the failure is no one is even proposing them.”

And even if you did propose them, no one believes that any of them will pass into law or be effective. Like, what do you make of the Nancy Guthrie thing before we move on and get out of this? Like, you know, I keep hearing a lot of cliches, like, you're only paying for access to your data.

But it is true that the Google cameras work differently than the ring cameras work differently than the wise cameras work differently than the Arlo cameras and Google system in particular. We don't know which camera she had. So this is like, depending on which generation of Nest camera you had, that works slightly differently.

But it seems very much like you always get a few days of data for free, but a few days

of video history for free. And so there was a motion alert. The data was sent to Google and it just didn't get overwritten. And so the only real insight we have into what happened here was, of course, from Cache Patel who's not a reliable narrator, who said they were covered the footage from, quote,

residual data located in backend systems. I think Google should explain exactly what that means.

“Yeah, I think you have a right to know if you're a Nest customer, exactly how residual”

your data is to what level on what backend systems. But our best guess given the way the Nest camera system works is that the video went up because you do get some amount for free and it just had not been overwritten and given the high profile nature of this case, Google assign some engineers to go get it. I don't know this.

I'm just saying this is the logical result of what they're saying. Yes.

Google should absolutely have to explain if your data goes away.

And ring, you know, again, they're trying to claw their way back and everyone's good graces said to Jen, we have no idea what the word is residual data mean because that's not how their system works. Right. And I believe that, right?

It's purely a system or a context or a question of what you're doing here. But I mean, the way Google and the FBI make it sound is that it was like, this is like the 1970s and somebody like left the VHS in the room without meaning to it. And that is like, if that is how it works, that's because Google made a deliberate choice in how it stores and eventually deletes and eventually overrites the data on its servers.

And a, the idea that that data still existed and b that it was clearly in relatively short portable retrievable by Google is just wild.

“And again, like, I, I think it is possible in this case to both think it's good that”

this information is out there and I'm, I'm glad that there is this clue as to what happened in ancient got three. It is also like deeply weird and alarming that this was possible. Yeah. I mean, again, I think all these companies owe us way more explanations about what's going

out for data, I think they should be required to give us those explanations by law. That's what a privacy law would do. Yeah. And I think law enforcement needs far more guardrails having access or data. And that is, especially in an Trump administration, whoo, that's a long way away from

being reality. There are no more guardrails for these companies. And so yep, I have a problem with ring, but I also have a problem with clear U.A.I. Sure. Like, I, I have a lot of problems with a lot of the systems are being deployed against

us. I mean, I'm not making apologies for ring, I just think I know that company and what they care about, they're, they're designed to be like, we will stop crime with video surveillance. And so, you know, yes, every camera kind of works this way. Yes, you can complicate this by talking about an ancient got three, but if you don't want

to participate in that mission, you can actually make a market decision, right? You can be like, I'm going to buy one from a company that isn't like, we're here to zero out of crime. That is, that is a choice you can make with your dollars. But if you're the door dasher who has to go up to someone's door to bring them food and

they get to take a picture of you and post it wondering if you're a citizen, you have made zero market decision. Yeah. And this is what I mean, your, your choice is, affect other people and really not yourself. And that's a weird thing.

That's a weird problem. App design. Yeah. Right? How are you going to communicate this in, in a switch box in an app?

It is also just a weird problem in our society right now that no one really has the tools to evaluate that kind of choice. And you're actually pushed away from thinking about those choices in that way right now. Again, this is big and small. But once you see it, it's everywhere in these cameras are, like, a particular instantiation

of that that just happened to be gadgets. So we're going to talk about them. Yeah. Indeed. All right.

I think we will, we will keep coming back to all of this.

“I'm going to go, make sure the camera on my rings, but we should take a break, and then”

we're going to go back, we're going to talk about some, some other gadgets that don't exist, and some other gadgets that might clear it back. Support for the show comes from one password. You might think that because you're a small business, cyber criminals won't waste their time on you.

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but it both is in is not Super Bowl ad. It's the Schrodinger Super Bowl ad that we're going to talk about. We've talked a lot on the show and we've been waiting for OpenAI to release a hardware. OpenAI is working on something with Johnny Ive, potentially many, some things there has been rumors, there's been reporting, there's been a lot of stuff out there. And then this week there was a weird leak that started as a Reddit thread from a

supposedly disgrundled employee explaining why they were mad that they're Super Bowl ad about OpenAI hardware. It didn't go on the Super Bowl and then they quote unquote leaked this ad. Have you seen this ad? This is a crypto scam. Can we just start with, I'm not 100% crypto scam positive, you know, but I've seen a lot of Photoshop's in my time. This is a crypto scam. When in doubt crypto scam is a non-incorrect way to live your life at this point

in time. It's especially the way it worked because they leaked it and there was like what there was like a file name on a server and then someone was like, I've discovered the file name on a server. It got all the way to a Lexus so handy me like Reddit, cracked it again. Yeah, crypto scam. All of that just reads crypto scam to me. I'm not sure where the crypto scam was. Yeah, but just that sequence of events were a bunch of people were a little too

smart a little too fast. Crypto scam. Somewhere in there Elon Musk asked you for your Bitcoin.

“This is like that's that's the turn. But the ad, I think, is sort of fascinating. It's Alexander”

Skarsgard wearing it's AI Alexander Skarsgard. Sorry. Fake Alexander Skarsgard. Very convincing

playing with this little orb called dime. Again, all of this is fake. Everyone at open AI

“has set its fake to the point where it would be wild for this to be true. It's definitely. It's”

definitely the whole thing is fake all the way up and down. But this this ad ostensibly showing opening as hardware really kind of caught on in a really funny way. Did you believe this ad the first time you saw it? No, no, no, because again, look, I've seen a lot of other shops. Like my scam detection ability is the under threat every day because of slot. But the thing here

where there was like a reddit post where I count that it never existed before and then the people

and the reddit figured it out so fast and then there was a full ad that was leaked with a celebrity in it that wasn't run because opening AI chickened out because of the meta executives you're working. Like you just look at all that. Like none of that happened. Like a zero percent of this went down. Yeah, especially if you've ever watched Johnny I've introduced a product ever in history,

“which we have done a lot. He does not make an ad where nothing is said true. And there's a moment”

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

ad so fastening and it very clearly to me points to people are so desperately curious A, what any of the AI hardware is going to be and B they're so deeply skeptical of this being anything that immediately there was this very funny feedback that was like of course this is real and of course it's this stupid. So I read this more and we should talk about the AI in history as a whole. I read this more as like open AI's own actual ad during the funeral wasn't a good and the anthropic ads

were really good on Twitter and then in a room where people were actually watching the super wall, they played nothing. They've done a bit hit in a room. Like you just no one's paying enough attention to these ads. Like the best ad was the coin base ad where they just did karaoke to backstreet boys because at least you had everyone's attention and then you know what happened when they showed the coin base logo, at least in the party I was at, everyone groaned and said fuck coin base.

But everyone's saying a backstreet boys song for a minute. By the way in the ad industry that's

“all the pattern breakers, you know that and they very successful and they're good at this, right?”

Like whatever, like, but what you saw was the actual chat to be added isn't any good. The chat should be too product because it's about to get ads in it. People think it's about to get shitty or in some way

and then as we have talked about so much like clawed and clawed code or having this incredible moment

and open AI doesn't seem to be poised to compete with that anyway except to try to light up ads to compete with Google search. And so I looked at this whole kerfuffle is like in order for this hoax to work. In order for this crypto scam to sell one Bitcoin or the other try to do, you had to believe that there was a better ad on the shelf. And that was believable. You had to believe that there was an ad executive somewhere at Open AI who was furious that his better ad was shelved

in favor of the thing they actually ran. And if you didn't, if you don't believe that then of course this is hoax. If you look at the state of advertising, you're like, yeah, that's possible. And then you are all existing here. Yeah, fair. Meanwhile, the actual Open AI hardware news of the week is that it appears Open AI's actual hardware launch has slipped to next year. I would just going to keep pointing out the all-knowing voice assistant that can do things for you is a long way away. Even if

you're the biggest Open Cloth fan in the world, that thing is a million miles away from

being a mass consumer product. Yes. And it is increasingly clear that everyone including Johnny I've might know that. But let's talk about some of the weirdness going on in this space right now because you just alluded to this. But one of the things that has been happening all week is a bunch of people have been leaving high profile jobs at AI companies and sort of sounding alarms behind them. Yeah. An Open AI executive left and wrote a sort of scathing essay in the New York Times

about how problematic it was that ads are going to be in TATGPT, an anthropic safety person, left and wrote a similarly sort of catastrophic thing about the state of AI and where we're all

All right. Yeah. That's right. There's a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding at

this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world less we face the consequences. I would say that's a little different than I'm mad about ads. It's a little worse. I would agree with that. But and then the other thing is this big group of XAI people left and I think there's a chance that that one belongs off to the side because XAI just became part of SpaceX. There's going to be a lot of corporate changes.

A bunch of people presumably just got very rich from this thing which created the largest private company, I think in America or maybe even the world. But there is something happening here where an increasing number of important people are finding cause to sound the alarm about what's going on with AI. Do you make anything of all of this happening at the same time? Well, you keep saying

“this is my pet theory, but I think this is real. I think this is an important thing to be already”

know where this is going and I hate it. I think anthropic things cloud is a life. Like I really do like and I think this might be shared in other labs and anthropic is particularly kind of hinting that they think cloud is live. They just did a big New Yorker profile called what is cloud anthropic doesn't know either and it's like new to know what kind of it is. But they think it's live and they keep running these tests on it and it keeps surprising them in different ways and

yes, cloud is very powerful and yes, if you give it a vending machine, it will sell everyone

a tungsten cube for a dollar or whatever mistakes it's going to make and yes, they release reports on skewing but like there's some thing in this industry where they have decided the people who work in the industry sort of collectively decided that they they're they're they're touching consciousness maybe not human consciousness of a conscious of a hide. I don't know how to evaluate that.

“I just see it right like particularly I think anthropic makes cloud as live because they keep”

hinting it. They keep talking about it. It's alive. They don't say it the way that Sam Altman is like we're going to do a GI right. They just keep hinting it. So if you're there right of course you're safety researchers like well you're doing stuff to make money with the thing that's alive that my kill us all we should stop until we figure out how to make it not kill us all and then you see that happening at open AI which has to make way more money

way faster because they don't have the enterprise business that anthropic has and they're just disbanding their quote mission alignment team and their head of platform safety is now the head futurist and it's like well what do you think isn't happening in the future such that you're ahead of safety has to be the head futurist. Oh it's going to kill us all and like I don't want to buy into doomerism. I think I'm personally still the most skeptical person about AI that

I encounter on regular basis but this industry right now is marked by a sense that people who work there are afraid of the capabilities that they've created and they do not think there's sufficient

“controls. Right there is a measure of true belief that you have to have to quit your job in this way”

which is a weird thing right because it's not it would be one thing if they were like I'm quitting my job because I think Sam Altman is a you know a scam artist who is just building people out of money and is going to ruin the economy. That's not what these people are saying they're saying essentially we've created God and we're not doing enough to reign it in. You know I think more on the speaking circuit given that talk than you wanted to cash again

you're on prop extent. I'm sure that's true and I think this is to be fair all sort of long tradition in the tech industry. People left Facebook saying the same kind of thing. People left Google Tristan Harris made a whole life. He did make more money in the speaking circuit. Oh no question. Out of saying essentially the same things like we have created this thing

that is very powerful and we are neither honest about nor reckoning with the consequence.

And we're seeing you know we haven't really talked about the fact that meta is on trial. Adam and Sarah was on the stand this week and there is just a lot of documentation coming out of meta that proves that they knew what they were doing to people. So this is the thing that I struggle with right like A the people who have come out and loudly said this have been proven right historically in the tech industry over and over and over and over again. We should have

believed Tristan Harris quicker than we did. He eventually helped make a documentary that I didn't like very much but that's beside the point. The idea that these people were coming out saying we have built a machine that is changing the way the people live their lives and we're not talking about it enough. Like if we had recognized that at a bigger level about Google and Facebook much sooner things might have been different in better ways. And so part of me looks at this and is like

okay maybe maybe what we need to do is take these people at their word that they see what they've built more clearly than we do because they see the dashboards, they see what's happening, they see how people are using these things. And this is why I bring up the ads thing too right it's like

information that people are giving to chat GPT. And you put this next to like everybody's up in arms about uh open AI retiring GPT 40 which is like the truly sick authentic thing that everybody

“turned into their best friend and it's like that stuff is real and I think I think we do need”

to reckon with it and I have to remind myself sometimes that even though I'm confident that AI is not nearly as good as the people wanting to sell it to me say that it is, it's still good enough that it is causing people to do these kinds of things and make these kinds of trades and we should worry about those things. And so I'm just stuck in this thing of like I don't believe it's as good as any of these people say that it is but maybe that doesn't matter because maybe the people are

still doing the things that are scary even if the tech is not as good as Sam Altman says that it is. But it's good enough to cause harm. Yeah, that much is true, it's obviously true at this point. It's good enough to cause harm. Yeah, is it going to destroy humanity like probably not yet? But is it doing a lot of harm? I watched I've watched so many AI cats do the electric breaker stance that I'm very concerned about humanity. It is just convincing every time. It is really

ironic that that would be how it would do it. You know what I mean? Like it's much more likely to like borrow us all to death with cat videos or like entertain us all to death with cat videos

than it is to just truly. Yeah, it will dull in our critical thinking skills and so it can

promise in anything. And that by the way is kind of how Claude works. So who knows? What I'm seeing is a bunch of people who see the technology getting commercialized, who understand the incentives that commercialization will create, particularly advertising and who are saying, hey, we have

“stopped being as careful as we should be. And I think that this is the tipping point. Yeah, right?”

These things are going from being research projects or things that you can give a TED talk about to actual products that are being deployed that now need to return on the massive investments that have been made into them. And that means the commercial pressure is arriving. And you can see in some of these notes and some of these letters, these people who are quitting loudly are saying, we're not making the right decisions. I raised the flags and I was overruled. Open I just fired

it at an executive who opposed adult mode. Right. He said, we should not let this thing make erotica. And you can see why you would raise that objection. Right. You can see why you would not want the system to do that because you look at that headline. I went and read it thread about it

like in the chat sheet he formed. And the first response was the reason I used to rock is because

it was erotica for me. And it's like, oh, this is bad. Like, you can have whatever, you know, high and mighty approach to AI that you want. And then hundreds of millions of people are using the tools. And the tools are being guided by commercial imperatives, not moral imperatives. Right. And we're not good at that right now. We are certainly not good at not making money. Like,

“as again, as a society, we are going to make all the money that can be made. And I think that's”

underneath it, less than pure doom orism. It's we've gone from being, being idealistic about it to being commercial about it. And those incentives really, really change the game with the technology that is, again, at least good enough to do harm. Yeah. And this is why we keep talking about ads in chat GPT as such a sort of seminal moment in that transition. And that was there was

some news about that this week. The first ads started rolling out in chat GPT. Open AI announced to

the first advertisers were going to be, I spent a long time trying to get chat GPT to show me an ad. And it hasn't yet. I even asked chat GPT what kind of questions could I ask you that are likely to show an ad. And then I asked all those questions and it showed me zero ads because AI is a good technology. I'm like show me ads chat GPT. And it's like, ah, you're good. Everything's fine. But, but I think you're right that like this is this is the turn towards a different kind of

road of commercializing your product. And it's like we talked about last week that opening AI has said it has lots of values. It has, it has stated all of the ways in which it is not going to use ads and advertising to change the nature of your conversations with chat GPT. And I think one of the things a lot of these people are saying is A, those two things are impossible to separate and B, all of your incentives are to mess up my conversations with the chat GPT in order to make more

money. Yeah. And some of the initial advertisers are really interesting. It's like some normal stuff, you know, target Williams Sonoma, hello, fresh. It's like these are these are advertisers. You're going to ask about a product and it's going to offer you a product. Fine. All ready. This is this is the beginning of a road that ends in a very different place where all of a sudden what you have is is a giant set of advertisers who want to be in front of you in as sort of narratively normal way

as possible. They're going to want to be as seamless and integrated and feel like they are

and be, yeah, I'm going to ask it to cook and it's going to be like, oh, you're so tired. Why don't

just get Hello Fresh? It's right there. Well, also importantly, you know, all of these people are X meta people. If you just see my ran Facebook, yeah, like it's all meta people up and down running ads at Open AI and building an intersection between and they all know that they do not make their money at meta or at Google from the big fancy blue chip advertisers to the brands you just listed are not the majority of the money on the big platforms. It is bottom of the funnel long-tail

“ultra targeted Instagram crap. And so if you are running a business where you need to peel”

maybe a hundred percent of Google search revenue to pay back the trillions of dollars at same Altman has gone out and raised, you're going to have to get those advertisers and you're going to have to put them right in front of people. And that is not going to be as fun as, you know, target. It's going to be a lot prettier in like a lot of different ways. Like, are you ready for Shark Ninja to be in your house in this way? Like, because it's coming and that that entire sort of

direct response QVCE world that we can see on the social platforms. If they want to make the money, they're going to have to do that product. Yeah, and Poonos, right, Koonos, how that's going to work. Yeah, I just want to read you something from HelloFresh about this. This is a linked-in post

from Patrick Saul, who does marketing at HelloFresh. And goes into basically why are we doing this?

Why, why do we think it's important? And one of the things he says is it's meeting high intent moments. And he writes, when someone asks an AI for help planning a weekly menu or managing of his family schedule, they aren't just browsing. They're solving a problem. By exploring the space, we are positioning our brands at the exact moment of intent. We're not just showing an ad, we are offering a solution to the what's for dinner dilemma at the moment it's being asked.

And he describes this as a thing that might come up when you ask about meal planning. And like, you can just imagine the ways in this immediate, they go sideways, right? You have people who have been talking to chat GPT about being tired or the mental health issues that are going through, the actual health issues that are going through that they're uploading to chat GPT health. And you have an advertiser who Koonos in and says, well, don't worry about cooking. We know

you, we know you've had a hard day. We know you're tired. We know you're going through all this stuff. Why not just, why not just offload all of the work of cooking to this great family health fresh that can do? That's like, that's a good ass advertisement. Like, that would work. And that's the thing is like every single incentive inside of this product is going to be to use all of that information that people are giving to this incredibly personal and incredibly

personalized, incredibly real seeming to lots of people tool and essentially weaponize it to sell

you stuff in a way that is actually potentially more powerful than the set of data Google has

ever had and the set of tools that it has to put that in front of you. Have you had this happen to you in Gemini yet? No. So, you know, Google does personal intelligence sound where they they're happy to know about you. Yeah. And the other day, I was trying to fix a sink and Gemini was like, well, you're a 45-year-old guy. It likes to do home improvement projects. You could just replace the whole sink instead of the cartridge. And I was like, you shut your gut. Whoa. And it's coming.

Oh, I don't like to be fair. Open at his center. They will not mix the data. The ads do not yet mix the data, but the incentives are there. Even the advertisers want that. Like, this is the thing, this is the, the hello fresh marketing person saying, this is the thing we're after and Google's going to give it to them. Yeah. Their competitor is going to give it to them.

“Open at other has to invent digital God. They got to do a GI or they have to take, I think”

a hundred percent of Google search revenue to pay down Sam Alvin's loans. Who knows what's going to happen here? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, if, if you see a chat GPT ad, screenshot it and send it to us. Firstcast at theverse.com, I'm serious. I want to see all of them. Also, if you work in a thropic, and you can tell us whether athropic thing's clawed his life, let me know, because I, I'm just saying, like, and if your email involves starting with the question, well, it depends

on what you mean by a lot. If you wanted a crunch, you want to be an interview in L.M., like, you get out of my face. Okay, if it was every day. Like, the number of people were like, have you interviewed Bing to see if it's like, I'm not doing it. But if you can tell me, if Dario thinks and clawed his life, you can't interview Bing. Nobody ever asked you to interview an Excel spreadsheet. That's not how it works. I will, one day, I'm just going to come on the show and I'll read the

back and forth I had with a guy who asked me to interview Bing. And I was like, I think you're,

“I think you need to step away from your eyes, sir. And he got super mad at me. Yeah. Anyway, send us”

the ads. I want to see all of them. The weirder the better. And if you, if you want to send me your hello fresh referral so that we can both get some free stuff, I'm down. Let's do that. We're going to take a break. Then we're going to come back, we're going to let you know. That's how we're going to break the configs. For free meals, I'll do almost everything. Is the honest truth about where I come from. Journalistically. Alright, we're going to take a break. We'll be right back.

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“What are the main takeaways of the foreign policy section from Donald Trump's State of the Union address?”

I do think they've made a decision to elevate domestic issues as we head towards the midterms.

We'll see if that sticks because he keeps getting drawn back to the foreign policy issues. I'm John Finer, and I'm Jake Sullivan, and we're the host of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week we'll react to President Trump's State of the Union address, the situation with Iran, and the eruption of violence involving cartels in Mexico. The episodes out now search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we're back. It's time for the lighting round. Unsponsored. For flavor. We keep forgetting to say that. It's been quite feel it's important to say.

It is very important. Especially after I just told everyone to send me free meals.

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

Okay, our thanks to, I believe it's pronounced maquil. We sent that to us on flu sky. It's you know, that's a music, but it rules. It rules.

“A thing you should know is if you ever want to know exactly what is David's music tastes like that,”

just there was like a warning. It's a great suit of government regulators being taken down by AI pop punk. There is also a full version of that song that we will link to in the show notes, because it is, it is. Thanks, spectacular. Thank you to everyone who keeps sending us theme songs. We're going to keep running them, obviously. This feedback loop is very strong. Talk about incentives. All right, Brendan did a lot this week and we're going to start, you know,

look at it's a Brendan's side swipe, but it's, it's, to me, it's the biggest one of them all. So if you've been paying attention, a lot of people asked us talk about this. The Trump administration came for the biggest controller of speech in America, the thing that dominates all of our conversations all day long. It sets the cultural tone, the, the Trump administration this week came for Apple News. You know, Apple News. You talk, all day. Everyone, the agenda is set by Apple News.

The broadcast channel Apple News. So there was a study by the Media Research Council, which is very conservative sort of right-leaning media watchdog. And the study is bad. We'll get into why it's bad. But they looked at of the, you know, 600-some Apple news stories at the top of Apple News, or some period of time, most of them were by, quote, left-leaning outlets. And there are no, quote, conservative or right-leaning outlets on here. Now, if you're our open Apple News

your life, you know, a couple of things. One, this product is for, for dead people, like only old people use Apple News. And like a lot of old people use Apple News. We should say disclosure,

News. Like, if you're a subscriber, Apple News plus you get our, you get past our paywall. Like, the

media industry is addicted to Apple News. Like, in a very real way. A real thing, the verge staff is used to is you just showing up at random hours of the day and dropping in an Apple News link that doesn't work for anybody because you were reading a news story. Well, I'll get to this in a minute. There's a reason why it's, it's specifically just like three outlets that do that for. Um, so there's a study. Media Research Council does this study. This study

gets picked up by the New York Post, which is like Apple News is horribly biased. And then the machine starts to turn and Andrew Ferguson did the chair of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission sends a legal threat to Tim Cook that he, of course, post on X, saying, we are going to investigate Apple News for suppressing conservative news, which is not a thing that much big commission can do. And I know it's on a thing they can do because in that letter, yeah, Ferguson says, we are not the

speech police. But I'm curious about the speech. What? And so the mechanism by which they, the FTC believes it can be that it's speech police is the terms of service of Apple News may or may not suggest to people that this is unbiased and won't promote leftly in the outlet. That's not anywhere in the terms of service. I was going to say I can't imagine there's a thing in there that is like don't worry, conservatives, we got you too. Right. But Andrew Ferguson sends this letter,

saying there's consumer deception because of the Federal Trade Commission, they're going to look into whether Apple was playing fair in the market with Apple News, which again, and I know this for a fact is mostly read by very old people. Like the demos of Apple News, you're not, you're

“just not worried about it. It's extreme, it's just boomers. That's what it is. It's very popular”

and it pays out a lot of money to publishers and publishers care and awful lot of the Apple News. There are publications in this world, big famous ones where like the majority of their revenue is Apple News. And we just don't talk. It's like the same as Google search, but we just we can't talk about it. Like give you break the count of silence, like maybe Apple will take the money away from it. She just can't

talk about it. But I always talk about everything because I like it. So I guess. Okay. So Ferguson does this.

So then we get Brendan, who can't stay away from a speech controversy tweeting, the FCC Chairman Ferguson exactly right. Apple has no right to suppress conservative viewpoints in violation of the FTC Act. I want to be 100% clear Brendan. Apple has every right in the world to publish whatever it wants any way it wants. That is the first amendment. I will remind you it is the first one. It's the first one. The government should make no logic in the Korean speech. Apple absolutely

can make any collection of stories it wants and publish them and say this is Apple News today. Of course it can. Secondarily, there's no violation the FTC Act found. Right? Right. It absolutely has a right to suppress conservative viewpoints. If it wants, which is not even

doing, again, we will come to that in one second. But in violation the FTC Act is not a thing.

“There's no part of the FTC Act that says you have to publish all viewpoints. Like absolutely not.”

You can't find it. If you can find me this actually like, or do you send it to me? The thin read that everyone is standing on here is they've discovered someone apples, terms of service. A promise that it will do everything fairly in Apple News. And then they have found this study by this media watchdog group that has organized outlets according to some political taxonomy that we do not quite understand. Sure. That says the right wing news sources

are suppressed. Now, the reason that I keep saying will come back to what Apple News actually is is if you open Apple News, the outlets at the top of the app are routinely lawyers, the AP, CBS News, which you could now very much argue is a conservative out. And most importantly, and this is why everyone keeps getting Apple News links for me, the Wall Street Journal, because do you know who the biggest newspaper publisher that participates in Apple News is?

News Corp. In 2022, News Corp signed a deal with Apple News saying it is a significant part of our revenue mix. Apple News. Do you know what doesn't participate? The New York Times. Do you know what just stopped participating? CNN. Interesting. So the reason that our team keeps getting Apple News links for me is because the fastest way for me to read the Wall Street Journal is to see a

“journal link and send it to Apple News where I can just get the story out. Because they're the key news”

partner of Apple News. Yeah. They're the reason Apple News is a good deal. It's actually cheaper to get Apple News than it is to just pay for the Wall Street Journal. And I have Apple One. So it's just there for me all the time. It's just like the fastest way to get this thing done. And so you're looking at this entire sequence of events where Brendan has said, a quote, Apple has no right to suppress conservative view points in violation of FCAC. Not one part of that sentence is true.

Apple News is. It is the top of Apple News is editorially curated. I've met that team before. It's a bunch of old magazine editors and they pick and choose. They really do pick and choose. They choose the

“best, most even handed coverage of the things they think are the most important. And if you look,”

it is almost always big legacy news organizations who standards and sourcing the trust. Right,

who to meet the bar, it CBS ABC Fox News is in there from time to time. Reuters, the AP, the Wall Street Journal, those are the sources they often pick at the top of Apple News because the boomer audience trusts them too. Right, like keep that in mind. One scroll down from that, this thing is all for you. Right. It is all algorithmic recommendations based on what you've put before. And that's a huge range of sources. So you can't even argue with that because

now you're running the same problem. The same meta is suppressing concerto. So each of which is like everyone has their own algorithm and you're actually just telling yourself. One scroll down from that is my favorite part of Apple News, which is trending, which is the clearest glimpse into what this

platform is and who it's for. Okay, that I can offer you. Let me just show you what's trending. The

number one trending story on Apple News as I look at this. And this is true every time I look. The number one trending story is from Fox News. It's about a tattoo that is was seen in the Nancy got through video possible tattoo. See the answer got through video. It may help by the subject. It says former profile just some Fox News laugh. I mean, that's a perfect perfect number one aggregator news story. Yep. Number of anybody you look at that. That's the top thing right now. Number

two CNBC psychology expert, Cohen. The number one phrase to shut down a manipulator. Number two story in Apple News. Number three is the athletic, which is not the wild start of the biathlon, infidelity, credit card fraud, and reallocated metals. Damn, I want to read all of those. Number four. I need Apple. Former NFL players. Number four is people magazine, former NFL players wife reveals what you don't see after retirement. This is just boomer slot. Like you can

see it's in the trending topics. Apple news is the magazine rack at the grocery store. Yes, it is the thing that it is is not the coolest thing Apple makes. Number two, a couple hours ago,

“a self magazine, nine simple exercises to improve your balance. Do you know how he needs that?”

Me need to be fair. Okay. So this is all just dumb. This is just pure posturing left and right. If Apple had an ounce of self respect, it would tell the government in this case like go away. Yeah, what I'm worried about is Apple no longer has an ounce of self respect. And so what I've been thinking about actually in this context, weirdly is Steve Jobs. Not because I think I know what Steve Jobs would do, not because I have some vision of how Steve Jobs would punch Donald Trump in the

face, although I believe I've seen that ASLat video as well. But because of the things Steve Jobs actually said all the time, which is that Apple stands at the center of technology in the liberal arts. We, I'm threatened David with a clip. So I think we actually have a clip of him saying this at one of the many many events that he said, there's the literal sign behind him. Can we run the clip? So I've said this before. I thought it was worth repeating. It's in Apple's DNA. The technology

alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. If you're just listening to this,

he gave us speech like a bunch of times. And he would always stand in front of a literal street

sign at the intersection of technology in the liberal arts. Right? And the whole tech industry has forgotten about the intersection. We're just doing technology and we're all very confused about how governments and systems and societies work because no one reads the liberal arts anymore. They just ask I had a sunrise for them. This is the moment. Right? If you believe that you built the richest company in the world on that insight, which he did, right? He built products, people love,

he built a company, people trust, he turned it into one of the richest companies in the world. That's the insight. He's saying out loud, that's the insight. And this is the moment to say, our taste is not up for grabs for government pressure. Right? Our ability to say to our audience in our news product, we with our taste or the bunch of fancy magazine editors, they have hired to run Apple news. We're going to pick the sources of information that we think are good at

the top. And then the all the rest can be algorithmic and trending stories about how to not fall over, like whatever the audience there needs. But at the top, we're going to use our judgment. And your weird media watchdog group can't just top, skip and jump into government pressure

“about our judgment. Right? That's what it means to have the liberal arts embedded in your product.”

Like I really mean that. And by the way, that is a case Apple has made for Apple news in the past. Like we actually know for sure that Apple believes that is part of the value proposition

were like, well, why is Apple even in this game? It it talked a lot about the fact that this is

people and this is taste and this is Apple and that actually we are doing a thing here on purpose that matters. Like we know that that is what Apple believes or at least believed about this product. Yeah. And by the way, I don't mean liberal arts in the sense of like liberals and Democrats. And liberal arts, liberal democracy, like having a sense of culture. Like in the most basic way, like thinking about how other people treat it one another. Like the humanities, the Steve Jobs

saying it. He doesn't mean Democrats. He means studying art and culture right next to science and engineering and putting those things together. This is the moment. Right. To say to the government, we have made no promises in our terms of service about conservative news. And we think you have no place in impinging on our judgment. Now, here's the problem. Do you think Tim Cook is going to do that? No. No. A lot of recent history suggests Tim Cook is not going to do that.

“He's not going to do that. And I think that is a tragedy. Yeah. Because he would be the winner if”

he did. Right. Like by all right, he could just very Apple could publish a letter to Mara saying, our terms of the FTC Act, you cannot read our terms of service such that we have violated the FTC Act with the top six stories Apple news. But is he going to cave? Is he going to make sure there's more bright, bright, bright Apple news or whatever other source that you think is conservative enough to count? Maybe. I think that's really bad. Like especially any partners

already knew Scorp in the Wall Street Journal and CBS news. Like they're there. Fox news is there. I'm just saying, running cars are dummy every sentence about Apple is nowhere to stress conservative speech and violation of the C Act is purely wrong. That is the maybe the single dumbest thing Brendan has ever published. And it's because he knows it might work. He knows it might work. He knows this company might cave. Yep. And this is the pressure they can apply. And the flip

side is Tim Cook keeps caving and it keeps getting him nothing. Nothing. Nothing. They just keep coming for him. And Apple is one of the companies in the world who's big enough to stand up. And I hope they do here. I really hope they do here. This is also such an easy obvious win. Can I can I complicate this with the flip side of this, which is really interesting. So this is the media research castle, right, which publishes a report that I picked up by the post, which

“immediately became government policies. That's how it works now. The flip side of this is there was”

a big merger of ad agencies. And part of that merger Andrew Ferguson said this merger can go through but you have to stop relying on this company called newsguard, which rates the trustworthiness of media brands to decide what to put at. Because that means you're not putting ads on conservative websites. In newsguard, you know, people have problems in newsguard. But they were just straightforwardly like, here's the reporting standards, here's the sourcing standards, like here's our accurate,

they are here's how many scathing plemics about whatever they publish. They had a rubric and you could look at the rubric and the big ad agencies were saying, okay, like we want our, we want, we're going to put ads in your more trustworthy things. We picked this independent neutral observer in the FTC went and crushed them. Basically, took their business away because they want to make sure the money can flow to conservative news outlets that didn't meet the standards. So the one hand

you have based on nothing more than this one media research council report, a thread against Apple. Biggest company over. One of the biggest companies wrote, and on the other hand, you have a very

similar organization saying, here's what you can trust, you can't, that the FTC is trying to crush

because it might take dollars away. And so they have, they have sued the FTC for free-sweets violations and saying this merger condition is actually a violation of free-sweets. It's super fascinating, like you can just see the hypocrisy of the Trump administration is laid bare in how they treat the media ranking organizations. It's a lot. Yeah. The Wall Street Journal. It's funny how often I'm

“like, I am pointing to Wall Street Journal. Yeah, it's rough. And honestly, this isn't even the end”

of the bread and car stuff this week. He's also mad at the view. I'm going to give you 30 seconds to tell me why bread and car is mad at the view because then I'm going to stop caring and we're going to look forward. Okay. So as we know, bread and car fully believes that broadcast television only speech in America that matters, except for apparently for Apple news. If you are an old person and you're considering media in this country, Brendan, it wants to be in your face. He wants to

control what you see. So he had this rule, the equal time rule that it's fallen into oblivion because ever interested in watching TikTok anyway. And he is decided he's going to force it very vigorously.

So first you point to this gun at Saturday Night Live because Coma Harris on Saturday Night Live.

And it turns out, Ty and I are very good at this because they know they're a comedy show. So comedy shows, there's no exceptions. And they actually NBC had given Trump equal time. So now,

which they can't quite claim that they're a bona fide news program, right? And news programs getting accepted. If you're a news Friday enough to give equal time to both parties, right? So the talk show hosts would have Democrats on and Brendan said we're going to investigate you if you don't have an equal number of Republicans on. And talk show hosts are like, but they are interviews and also no one cares. But that's one, right? He's pushing the boundary and talk show hosts,

whether they get the news exception. This week, he has launched an investigation into ABC's the view, because the Texas Senate candidate James Slayerco appeared on the show.

This is ridiculous. First of all, the view is part of ABC News. It is straightforwardly a news

program. It is run by the news division of ABC. You could think it's a bad news program. You could answer news program that prioritizes nonsense school debate and conflict over actual news, but it is a news program. That is the thing that it is meant to do. You could think that. What could think that? In the process of selling the book pitch that I was, I fetched for the

“coder. I often talked about how I want to appear on the view, and I think I just closed that door”

as hard as I can. But whatever. It's a news program. It's straightforwardly a news program. There's nothing about it that isn't news. It's just a bunch of people talking on the news all the long. He's going to crash and burn in this if Disney fights back. Right. Is Disney going to fight back?

I don't know. Brendan keeps pushing the boundary. This is so stupid. First of all, no one's

watching this stuff. You know where they're watching it? They're watching it on YouTube. They're watching it in clips on TikTok that are pirated by the Android powered boss farms that I think we should get. They're not watching a broadcast. And it's right next to all of these candidates having an infinity amount of their own time to capture. Ted Cruz has a podcast for God's sake. That's how I know speech regulation America is completely out of whack. Sorry. It's really bad podcast.

Just non-sensical. Anyway, he is trying to say that the view is not news enough to qualify for the news exemption to the equal time rule. It is 2026. What are we talking about? Yeah. He's so stupid. It does put Disney in a very funny position of either it has to fight against the Trump administration or just publicly drag the view as aggressively as possible. I mean, it's just we should not be in a position right now with the amount of media we have and the access to media we have,

where we are trying to draw lines about where the boundary of the news is. Right. Yeah. Like, I want to draw some batteries. I think we make the news.

“I think a bunch of influencers don't. Is that a good use of my time to argue that every day?”

It is absolutely the worst use of my time to argue that every day. We just need to make better news. The government stepping into ABC's face and saying, "This isn't news enough. We're going to punish you for not making it news enough." Who? That's rough. You should feel very bad about that. Again, I remind everybody that the politics of hear me express the most are that governments, speech regulations are bad and free market competition is good, which is why I find myself

agreeing with the Wall Street Journal during this segment all the time. Brendan, as always,

you are welcome to come on this show to come on to color and try to defend any of the city. Especially that bone-headed tweet about Apple not being free to suppress conservative news and violation of the FCC Act. Every word of which is wrong. Every single word of which is wrong. I welcome it. I would love debate, a false debate. At the end, maybe we could fight a little bit. Just an invitation, I have for you, Brendan Carr. That has been Brendan Carr's

America's favorite podcast. We're going to podcast. A true epic of a podcast of their podcast this time. He says, "All right, let's blow through the rest of the lightning round here because we need to get you out of here on time." My first lightning round is that for everyone who is like shut up about all the other stuff, talk about gadgets. I have bad news and good news. The bad news is there just haven't been any. The good news is it's about to be gadgets season again. Yeah.

Samsung confirmed that there's an unpacked coming later this month. We're going to get some new phones. There's already been some leaks about those phones that suggest that maybe not the most interesting set of phones is about to come out. But we're about to get everyone to do Samsung phones. The iPhone 17. E is also potentially coming the Google Pixel 10. A is also coming soon. It's like, it's about to be a really interesting round of new somewhere between the mass market

phones everybody buys and the slightly cheaper phones that some people get. If you had Apple's last quarter, why are you doing a 17-E? They should be like, it's a $7,000 pro phone. That's the thing that they sell. Yeah, 100%. Anyway, all of that is coming. We're also potentially about to get new iPads, which I think is very exciting. I reviewed the base iPad last year and my read on it was

“essentially this is the first time the base iPad is not the one you should buy because it is full of”

such outdated hardware that actually it's going to run out on you before it should. Like, usually when I've had planning on it lasting you seven years and the current base iPad won't.

But the running reporting right now mostly for Markdown and Bloomberg is that that's coming. It's going to get to big upgrade. So we should get a good round of gadgets coming soon. What we are not getting is better, Siri. So reporting again from Markdown and Bloomberg that Apple is continuing to work on this revamped Siri that is going to be better and smarter and largely powered by Gemini. But that it has been pushed back a point release and is now going to be part of

the May software launch not March, which was what we had been hearing for some time. This is I would say a small bummer and a large heaping of not at all surprising.

“It's not all surprising. I think every one of the big smart home makers has had trouble”

integrating the powerful voice assistant with the needs to not be broken,

automation, control and Siri right now is very much automation control. And so I don't I mean Google has gotten better. I would say my Gemini smart home stuff has gotten better, but you like Apple is not in the business of breaking stuff. Not the way the Google will just break stuff, not the way that Amazon is just broken stuff. And Apple is also about to the timing of this headache is really interesting because Apple is going to put this thing out in May and then in

June has to explain to developers how to use it. And so the big thing that Apple has been talking about is all of this contextual awareness that it's going to have, it's going to know about all the other apps and your phone, it's going to be able to use those apps for you. Apple needs to ship a version of that that works in some meaningful way. If it wants to get developers on board,

“it doesn't need all of that to exist, but it needs Siri to be good. Do you know what I mean?”

Like I think I think we're at the point where Siri is so constrained right now, Siri is timers and music and they can get there and add a dash of like you can talk to it other stuff. So I agree with that except I think even the very basic features of Siri have progressed. It is still fine at setting timers, but like Siri as a voice recognition machine has gotten noticeably worse for me over the last let's say two years. This is also like there are

a lot of people who keep wondering why the auto correct on the iOS keyboard feels like it's getting worse. Yeah. It's because it is and it's because of all of this underlying technology Apple's working out. So like all of that stuff needs to be demonstrated as like a step change forward. If Apple is going to say this is the future of the interface, get on board to developers. And it is running out of time to prove that. I just want to point out is a minor pushback.

Apple blew it with AI. Yeah. Yes. No AI. They shipped liquid glass, which looks like butts. They had the biggest quarter in their history. Sure. One of those things. They're insulated because of the phone upgrade cycle. They're going to get more things wrong than right and they're just going to keep selling phones because of what I believe to be eye message lock in about the data issues that I'm not correct, but I believe it's eye message lock in. No. I think that's right. And I think

what Apple does at this year's WWDC is not show everybody the thrilling future of AI, but

basically start to pretend that none of it exists. Yeah. And just just bury all of that under

really technical language of features in the notes app, which maybe is what it should

“add on all along. I mean, that's what I did last year. I'm just saying I think this year what you're”

going to get is it's Siri. You can still do timers in music. And now when you ask it questions, it doesn't kick you out to a web search right away. Yeah. Because knowing what's going on in your phone and controlling apps in your phone, they're nowhere close. And it's your describing perplexity, basically. Like if the new Siri is perplexity, that may be job done for Al. Yeah. I, in this moment that might be, I might be all they can do, but it might be all they need to do.

Yeah. That's very possible. That's very possible. All right. What's your next one?

All right. I got two cars in a YouTube. What do you want? Let's do cars first. All right.

You may have seen this week for already and they'll not. It's whole first TV, which is the inside. It's first TV. She's got the Luché. She's light. The codename, by the way, was Electrica, which is way better. Oh, that's way better. I don't, I don't what they're doing. But by the way, this is a conversation for another day. Everybody's doing stupid names for their EVs. And I would like to say. Well, that's like a great name for a phrase. Anyway,

interior design, but one, Mr. Johnny, I've. And Mike Madison, a whole bunch of other Mark Newsom, like, you know, love from. Yeah. Johnny has company that is on the interior. So a big party, a bunch of people went, a bunch of people we know were there. Johnny, I've didn't unveiling. And then it was just like the interior components arranged around a room. So like the steering wheel and the display were in one part of the room and like the center

other and looking doing this stuff. Very good. The video is very, very compelling because of Johnny and video about how much he likes designing switch gear, which should just be a genre on to itself. I get Spotify just plenty of that play. That's to be very happy. Yeah. It's so cool.

It looks nothing like a Ferrari. Our James Graham is the first creative record of the

Verge, actually said this looks more like a Porsche. I agree with him. It's all very round, very eye funny.

“Obviously, it's eye. But here's the thing. It's like not touch screens. It's all digital displays”

connected to hardware controls. And as you use the hardware controls, like the displays around the controls change and light up in different ways. So like the center screen is on a pivot and you pivot towards the driver, pivot towards passenger. And then the top is a circle display. It often looks like a clock. And it has real needles in it. And if you push the button, the whole display changes and it turns like a stopwatch and you add times. Well, it's like this,

the sickest interaction you can think of. Wait, I like this now. It's very good. My immediate reaction looking at a picture of this was like it. It looks like a very fancy F1 racing simulator with a giant ass iPad. And I was like really Johnny, like this kind of what it looks. This is what you're doing. There's, but again, there's a part of me that's like, none of this is Ferrari. It was not the point of a Ferrari. No, it's not. But I do love the idea of connecting it back to physical controls.

Yeah, that's very, he was very clear. He, he, he, he had interviews and he Alex, he interviewed him, Tim Steven, he writes for us all the time, interviewed him. And he was like, it's a car. I'm there to drive the car. I don't want to look at his screen and touch the screen,

“which is fascinating. Because if you remember, all of the Apple car rumors was that he wanted to”

get rid of the steering wheel, have full autonomy, and then like do something else inside the car. Right. This was the dream. Yeah. And so it's fascinating to see him abandoned. Basically, all the ideas we've heard about the Apple car for the very tech dial, it's all switch gears and buttons and clicky magnet vents in a Ferrari. The thing that I'm sad about, if you look at this, it's very cool. Right. You can see, you can see a lot of Johnny I've been here. And

I, it's particularly good at accessible design, like accessible and every sense of work, like accessible for people with different abilities, but also just like the point of the iPhone is that everyone has one. Richard Poor, everybody has a sink on iPhone. Right. Yeah. And you're like, oh, this is only for like five people. True. And it just makes me, that makes me a little sad. Like, I've as that is best when he's addressing millions of people. And here it's like six guys are going to

be looking for this car. So what you're saying is you want Johnny I have to do the next. I'm saying camera. If you have, yeah, this was a Kia. Yeah. You'd be like, though, this is the future of cars. And I think that was the opportunity with the Apple car. And I'm dying to know how many ideas moved from the Apple car to this. I'm dying to know if there are other ideas to bring these ideas to life. Very quickly, a bunch of Chinese manufacturers are going to copy all this. Like, so it's

all going to happen. But you know, there's that thing where you'd see an eye designed. And we would talk so much about care and polish. And you're like, oh, the thing that's amazing at this is that millions of people will have these products. They will experience a subtle design and care.

And here, it's like, it's beautiful. Yeah. You're never going to see one. Most people will never

be able to flip on these switches. Does the car industry have the kind of fast follow thing that we see in tech all the time that like, if Johnny, I've did this for Apple, the thing I would say in response to what you just said is, well, the good news is everybody's going to copy this. And in two years, this will be some of the ideas here will it be sort of normalize across the industry,

“because that's what happens. Does that happen in cars? Like, if does Ferrari do something?”

And then it's sort of trickles down into like three years from now Volvo is will look like this. There's a lot of pictures of like Moses that look exactly like Ferrari's right now, or Ferrari's looking exactly like Moses. You can find those. This is such a corner thing. For a long time BMW had this thing called the Bangle, but the designer's name Chris Come again. Yeah. Chris Bangle is one of the most controversial designers in being the history. And he designed this like

lid of the trunk of the seven series, like the early 2000s I want to say. And now every car has that.

And so the BMW Mercedes, if you look at them, the reason their cars always look so bananas,

and they're getting increasingly more bananas, is because they get fast-falled so fast. Everybody wants to look like a German luxury car. In that dynamic is changing in some ways. You know, I think that this sort of like newer Hyundai's and Kia's in particular, they're like they're charting their own weird retro futuristic course, but there is a time when like, yep, within a year, every car looks like whatever BMW is to do. Interesting. I don't know if

it's not gonna happen with this for us. And we don't know what the outside of the wheelchair looks like it. People have suspicions, but nobody actually knows. I am encouraged by the idea that a lot of car designers will look at Johnny I've and say, oh, he doesn't think touch screen everything is the future of cars. Maybe I should change the whole industry, the whole industry already thinks that. Like the car designers across the industry have been like, oh, this is dumb. I just add a lot of

motorized door handles, because they're telling people. I mean, that, yeah, that's the industry, the, the, the, the pendulum is way on its way back. My Hyundai Kia Volvo, a bunch of car makers

YouTube and then we'll end on mine and we'll get out of here. What's your last one? Uh, big news, huge, huge news. YouTube is coming to the Apple Vision Pro. Huge news. First, huge news. Well, I've looked first of all. YouTube has the biggest library of 360 content anywhere. Sure.

And so it was always a huge mess that Apple did not have access to YouTube, because what are you

going to do? Like, when I review the Apple Vision Pro, so can I use YouTube? That's where all the stuff is. It's not like, yeah. Yeah. And they kind of shade it because, you know, some of that content is really old. Like, there's been 360 video on YouTube forever. Yeah. I interviewed Michelle Obama on YouTube 10 years ago in 360. Like, that's a long time ago. Yeah. So that content exists. You can go look at it. You can get it. Um, I think also YouTube wants to get people making the content again,

because Android XR is coming out soon. Right. And so it's on the Apple Vision Pro. It's just

“way to get a headline. You're like, you can upload some 360 content to this platform. You should try it.”

And then that's how you get a trickle of new content for Android XR. That's that's my like big strategic think of this. But I just think it's very funny. Finally, now there's YouTube

out for the Vision Pro. That's a good take. It was always kind of a deliberate burn that it wasn't

there because YouTube is everywhere. Like, or if YouTube's whole thing is that is everywhere that is available to look at stuff, you can find YouTube. Yeah. And so to not be on the Vision Pro was clearly a choice. So I think I think your take is probably right that they're now in the position of being like, okay, we want to incentivize people to make this kind of stuff. We might as well start somewhere. Well, I mean, it's to be fair. They're already in the question all these other headsets.

They just weren't in the Vision Pro. Yeah. But like the people who bought Vision Pro and the true believers in this content are like, that is one overlapping circle. And there's been like weird third party YouTube. Like, that was the first way of the apps. I was like, well, they're the

“YouTube app. Like, right. But I think it's I think they're just trying to seed some content ahead of Android”

XR. Yeah. All right. Before we go, I have, I have just a very boring but obligatory update on the Paramount Netflix war to buy Warner Bros. Somehow this has become my cross to bear is that every time somebody does a weird boring thing. I have to tell you better on this show. Although I will say, I am enjoying the extent to which the elephants are just like, well, if we have more money, which is what happened this time. So Paramount, where we are basically is Warner Bros. keeps telling

its shareholders not to accept Paramount buying them because they would like to be bought by Netflix. Everyone is very clear that one of the brothers would like to be owned by Netflix and Netflix would like to own Warner Bros. And Paramount just keeps coming in and just like, hucking dollar bills at everybody hoping that that works. So what happened this time is,

Paramount is now offering to pay the $2.8 billion termination fee that would go, if the Netflix

deal didn't happen. So they're just handing over $2.8 billion and they're offering a 25 cent per share. They could they call it a ticking fee, which pays to shareholders and Warner Bros. Discovery for each quarter, the transaction doesn't close after this year. So they're basically saying, the money is going to go up. Every quarter, the transaction doesn't close, which just incentivizes everybody to not take the deal, which is so funny. But anyway, all of this is happening

while there's a lot of like political machinations going on. The elephants are meeting with the Trump administration and like everybody is trying to convince everybody else. No, the machinations are even even funny or anything. Did you see the latest update today? No. So surrender,

“met with Trump, CEO of Netflix, the Ellison's a met with Trump. Trump was, I believe on ABC News”

last night, and he said, everyone's paying attention to me. I must be very important. I'm going to stay out of this one and let the department adjust this handle it. So you can just flatter his way. He could just flatter Trump and is sitting it out. It's good. It's really good. And then you're like, oh, who runs the department adjust it? Oh, it's Pam Mahdi. That'll go well. Who's your anti-trust chief? Oh, Gale Slater, the anti-trust chief at the department of justice, just quit

because she was about to take live nation, take it master to trial. And Kellyanne Conway has successfully lobbied potentially the government of dropping that case over Gale Slater's objection and she quit over it. Wow. This is true. This is all in the background of this. Trump is saying I'm looking to department adjust it. It's handled it. And the department adjusts this antitrust chief, just quit because it appears that ticket master has crutly lobbied its way out of that trial.

So there's going to be no one to stop this deal. Potentially no one to open either direction. Yeah, there's just good. It's perfect. No one is going to own anyone. You know, you know,

I'm out. I'm not paying attention anymore. Unreal. Yeah. So this this chaos will continue

“but just the extent to which the elephants have all of the money and no idea how to win this fight”

is just great. I just want to say this one more time. Just put yourself in this position. You are Larry Ellison. All of your wealth amount is Oracle stock. Oracle stock is AI stock. And you are desperate sell your AI stock to buy Warner Brothers. Do you Larry Ellison believe that your AI stock is going up or down if what you think a better trade is is to sell it and buy Warner Brothers. Just ask yourself, does Larry Ellison think we're in a bubble based on the fact that he wants to sell

his Oracle stock and buy Warner Brothers a thing that has killed every other employer for over 20 years. Do you want do you want to buy the AI bubble or do you want friends reruns? This is where we are in 2020. You can you can you can evaluate that anyway you want. But if you had if you today own Oracle stock would you think it was a good idea to sell it to buy Warner Brothers? Wait, no, no. I'm going to put this in even simpler fashion. Would you rather bet on

the AI industry continuing to go up the way that it is or would you rather do you want to bet

“on the success of the Harry Potter HBO show coming up? That's what I want to hear about first”

guys the verse.com. Tell us which of those you would rather bet on. I want to sell my Oracle stock to buy Warner Brothers as one of them. It's a tough beat. Personally, I'm out on either one. I'm going to go to Paramount Plus and keep watching Mission Impossible movies. It's going to be fine. All right, we should get out of here. We've gone way over as we are wanting to do. I've been a brand new car for this one pretty succinctly this time. Any time you want, Brendan. If you

read about any of this in Apple news, please send me a like the link because he can open it. I can't.

I don't want to hear about it. That's it. That's it for the Vergecasts. Remember, as always to get

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