The Galaxy S26 is a photography nightmare

of beauty through science and technology. Loreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of adding the cupcake in post. But they're different cupcakes, David. No, we can't do this now, we can't do this yet.

I'm in front of David Pierce, New York tell us here. The disclaimer on Samsung's cupcake video for the Galaxy S26 literally says not all the features of the AI phone are AI based, and then right below it it says AI stands for artificial intelligence. AI is nothing, and it's everything, and it is whatever you want it to be. It is one of the better disclaimers I've ever seen.

It's nuts, so a lot of news this week, we have been promising, it's gadgets season again, and it is, in fact, gadgets season again. We're recording this on Wednesday afternoon, the Big Samsung Unpacked Event just happened. We have a lot of new phones to talk about, we have new headphones to talk about, we have just an unbelievable disaster of a what is a photo conversation to have.

There's also the sort of Xbox news has been happening over the last several days, we've got a bunch of stuff there to catch up on, a lot of gaming things going on. We've got Brendan Carr as a dummy, because he just he continues to... Brendan Carr would like to use the power of the state to make us begin a virtual test by reciting the pledge of legions, and I don't want to take that back.

“Damn it, anyway, lots of news to get to, but let's start with Samsung, because I think”

this is, in many ways, like the first big phone of the year, and kind of an interesting

one in a bunch of cases, so let me just quickly lay out the news and then we can get into all of the ways in which this is a deeply bizarre thing. So there's three new phones, Samsung Galaxy S26, 26 plus and 26 Ultra. There are new Galaxy Buds 4 and Buds 4 Pro. I would say most of the hardware that is relevant to most people is sort of small iterative

upgrades. Allison Johnson, who is at the event, actually made us a video and sent it back, so let's watch that. She's got the run now. So let's take a look at the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, and it's looking a little bit more

like the S26 and the S26 plus this year. There are a couple of cool hardware things happening. There's a new privacy screen, it's actually really rad. The apertures are a little brighter on two of the cameras, but really this is a software update this year.

There's something called nownudge, which is a little bit pixel phone-ish, where it will suggest things in the keyboard for you to look up or respond with. There's something called Horizon Lock in the camera app now. It's kind of a GoPro feature, and it keeps the horizon level, no matter how you turn the phone.

It's kind of wild. The gallery app has a ton of new ways you can use AI to mess with your photos. You can make a nice looking cinnamon roll, look like a snail, or you can put a little

“hat on a koala, which I think is a really important use case for AI.”

So there's audio eraser for third-party streaming video apps too.

You can open up YouTube and toggle it on so you can isolate the sound of someone talking and tune out background noises. There's also a new Gemini feature here where it will take action for you in a gented AI and order you an Uber, just by using natural language. We saw a pretty on the rails demo and seemed to work, but I have questions about that,

and I'm going to want to try it out myself. A lot there. Yeah, I was so three things there that we should dive into in order. There is a Gentic AI, a fast landing piece of this. There is the privacy display, which somehow, after last week, has already become my

brand, and then the third thing after the display is what is the photo apocalypse that is upon us. Where do you want to start?

“I think let's just start with the display.”

I think the display is so cool, and what's cool about it is it is an actual tech feature. It's not just a overlay on the screen. Yeah.

So the way it's Samsung has built it is there's basically two sets of pixels on the display.

It's the standards for the wide angle pixels, and there's much more focused pixels that just hit vertically. So you can turn off the ones that have the wider field of view, and you get this effect of a privacy display. The reason that's important is because it's Samsung, and you can toggle that privacy

display on and off in 10,000 different ways, including geo-fensing and routines, including specific apps, including when just the passcode screen on various apps shows up, I think that's so cool. I agree. Just fundamentally, it's so cool to be like, all right, if I'm not at home, turn on the

Yeah. Just like this thing up. If I'm not at home or in the office, just like this thing up and keep David away for me, or if I'm typing in a passcode, make sure that the screen goes private. I think that's neat.

“I think all very customizable features will anyone ever use all of those settings.”

I don't know, but it's very Samsung to be like not only as a privacy display, it's one that you can geo-fense and light up in routines and automations. I'm worried about the defaults of it, too, because there does seem to be a way that

Samsung could dial that that is incredibly useful, and also that users almost never notice.

Because you're mostly looking your own phone head-on. The Samsung is smart about the defaults and says, okay, when you're, I don't know, out in the world, or just for your notifications, or just every time a password prompt appears, we're just going to turn that on by default and not even, not even tell you, and if you want to mess with it, you can, but we're going to be thoughtful about it at the beginning.

That could be incredibly useful for tons of people who never want to think about it. Knowing Samsung, there will be a million pop-ups and tool tips that tell you every single time you can possibly use the privacy display to do anything, and it will make everyone crazy and they will turn it off. But that's what the power of AI is for.

Bixby will be there, and dog was shoes to help you through all of the tool tips and prompts. Were you so happy to hear about Bixby? I was happy. He's back.

“I think Samsung has yet to concede that Bixby is a dog was shoes.”

The joke here, by the way, this is like an old deep cut of the verse has.

Is every time I hear the name Bixby, I think of a cartoon dog wearing shoes, like a Butler. That's what it sounds like to me. It feels right. It's a dog and a Butler caught, but he's like wearing comically oversized shoes and he's always falling down.

Yeah, but he's like a gentleman. But that's a gentleman. He's a gentleman in dog. 100%. I don't know.

That's just what it's in my head. Every time I hear Bixby. Samsung, historically, has taken my suggestions. They're booth at CES. They officially have started calling it Samsung City, which is the name I gave it years

ago. That's really good. So I got one. If I could just get official Bixby. You can do it now.

You just prompt the phone to generate a talk with you. Close the loop. Samsung.

I was surprised to hear Samsung even say the word Bixby, because Bixby never

gone away. Samsung just sort of left it over here and just sort of neglected it. I mean, with their saying about Bixby now is the same promise they've been making forever with Bixby, which is it's an on-phone assistant that will get you through settings. But now with AI.

But now with the power of a generic fingers. And so maybe you can be like, turn on my privacy display. Bixby and it'll do it. Yeah. I don't know.

There's some combination of things there. But I do think that in general, the privacy display is very smart. I hope that they've hard-coded the identifiers of your phones into the S26 so that when you're nearby, the privacy display turns on. Yeah, it's just, it's it's it's face ID, but it's my face.

It's like these MAC addresses have been associated with David Pierce.

“Let's honestly, it's just the right scenario.”

We're locking this down. Honestly, I don't Samsung, you're allowed to do that. I deserve that. It's okay. But we should talk about the photo stuff, because like Allison said, this was mostly

a software update. One notable thing is two of these phone models are $100 more expensive than the last models. And the way Samsung is just to find that is mostly by bumping the storage. This is a thing I think we're going to see a lot this year that they're going to make

the cheap things a little better and make the phones more expensive. Yeah. And that is that is one way that they are going to try to solve a lot of these memory shortage problems and tariff problems and all sorts of ongoing stuff. So that is a trend to keep watching out for over the course of this year.

But I want to talk about the photo stuff, because you had like a truly visceral reaction to one particular part of the Samsung keynote. And I just want you to describe how you felt as Samsung was showing off some of the new AI-assisted photo editing features for the S26 line. I watched Samsung demo the AI-powered smartphone camera in the S26 line and my literal reaction

throughout the entire segment was the Galaxy S26 Ultra should be illegal. Like they're right up against the line of governments around the world should shut this down. It is beyond dangerous, the things they are letting people do with these cameras, the kinds of images they're allowing people to create.

And I don't mean just like deepfakes in weird, grock, CSAM. I mean, they're messing with the nature of reality in such like trivial and like hokey, joky ways that I honestly don't think that they can be responsible enough. And I was just pointing to two lines in a blog post, Samsung just flat out says that smartphones are moving beyond capture, right, that the point of a smartphone camera is no longer

That is a huge thing to say.

“And it's something other companies I think have just shared at, but I don't think anyone”

has said it quite so directly. Like Google has been running at this for some time, but Samsung as it is want to do, really took an idea and just exploded it into a thousand bizarre pieces.

Yeah, two years ago when I reviewed the, I think the iPhone 16 that we basically ran down

with all the companies we're saying about photos. And at that time Apple was very clear, you know, they're trying to capture reality. Samsung was like, literally, I think they're quote was like, photos haven't been real and forever. Do you want to picture the moon?

We'll just make you one. Yeah. In their way. And Google specifically was like, are the thing we're trying to do is capture memories. There's a lot of space in all of that, but just a lot of space beyond, in all of that.

And all of that is still based on the idea that a photo should reflect some kind of reality. And on the one hand, you have Apple saying, like, it's this moment in time where these things really happen.

And other than you have Google saying, your perception of event, we can sort of get you there.

We're going to merge all the faces so everyone's like in the camera. And you can really, we've spent ages arguing with us. Samsung is like throwing caution to the wind. There beyond this, we are beyond the capture and now they're like the point of this camera is to develop purely synthetic images that reflects nothing that ever happened.

Read the other line that they said because this is where it trips over into something deeply dystopian. In the middle of the keynote, they're demonstrating the phone and the camera. And they say the phone should not just help you AI remove things that shouldn't be there. It should help you add what should have been there.

What are you talking about? And a demo, there's no way back from that. Like in our super, super real way, there is no going back from that statement about what your camera is. Yeah.

In the demo and we should run it so people can see it.

The demo is people in a cafe and I wish my dog was here and they make it so the woman is holding the dog. We should run it's right here. Like when you've captured an almost perfect photo, just missing that one thing that would tie everything together, like your pet.

You can simply merge them from another shot. Just describe how you want to combine the photos and watch Galaxy AI complete the moment. It's easy and intuitive and all done on your Galaxy S26 series. Great. It's a woman in business attire and what appears for your son and they add the dog into

the photo and this is great in the audience's class. Just for the sake of the argument. I wanted to add Jeffree Epstein to that photo. You sure could. Do you think the audience would have applauded?

Do you have a separate photo of Jeffree Epstein? We just think it's like to admit, doesn't have a folder of Jeffree Epstein images.

“No, you know what I think is so interesting about this is and I hadn't really noticed”

it until you put that video again. But they framed this as if it is the same thing as combining two photos so that everybody's eyes are open. Right, and it's like this is a thing that we've been talking about forever and I think you and I get a get called sort of a alarmist occasionally for being like, oh, they're just

making it so that everybody's eyes are open. And Samsung wants you to believe this is a natural extension of that. This is a completely other thing. This is you have not, you have not found the best version of the photo. You have invented something out of whole cloth.

And it's not like the dog jumped out halfway through and you put it back like you took a dog that was not in the room and you put it in the room. Yeah, for the audio listener, the picture of the dog was a dog in a field. Right, there is no longer an argument to be made that this photo is a work of fact. Like you have just created fiction.

And the thing I'm so struck by and all this is A, all the alarming things you're talking about, right? Like the Jeffree Epstein stuff is real. We've been going through this and there is already a lot of deep fake Jeffree Epstein stuff out there and now anybody is just going to be able to do it on their phone.

And that's like over and over you in particular have said that the thing that changes is

“that when you make this stuff easy, more people do it, right?”

Yeah, the argument is what makes it dangerous. Right. And over and over that keeps being correct. And take all of that for what it is, right? But then put next to it, who is this four?

Like I don't know anyone who makes this kind of thing and then feels good about it. It's either for these like Craven, cynical, post on Instagram, the perfect thing kind of photos or it feels like I like to pull people who get new pixels and start to mess around with some of the like magic photo stuff where it'll just even correct small things, right? You can slide yourself over on a bench to get a better shot or you can make sure everybody

is eyes are open and everybody I ask about this has this slightly, it key feeling that

So the best case scenario for this thing does not exist as far as I can tell.

“And so we're trading this like deeply dangerous thing for a use case that I don't think”

exists. Oh, I have a use case for you. You'll enjoy it. You're just thinking your head who would use the following feature. Some of the details such as the spill on clothing can now also be cleaned up with Galaxy

AI's new ability to change outfits in photos. They skip right past will remove the spill and they're like whole new outfit. Yeah. Again, watch the demo that they presented is what if you take a photo and you like your own smile, but you want to be wearing something else and it's like, well, I can think of

a whole class of people on the popular platform X that love changing the outfits, the women with beautiful smiles.

Yeah, what are the guardrails, but now I can download it and do it on my own phone.

But now I can download it and do my own phone. And look, I don't know if there's guardrails. I don't know if they're going to, you know, whitelist certain words or prevent certain words from being used in these tools. I don't know if they're going to add some of the absolutely useless meta data protections

that we've been covering just by the word actually is a whole piece about how the tech industry is sort of like C2PA washing all of their AI's slop. They just keep saying they're using it, but it's not doing anything for anybody. Right. Oh, I don't know if Samsung's doing that.

We will ask all of the questions. But this is the downside of pretending that this market can regulate itself. Yeah. But straightforwardly, this is the downside. This is a no-holds-bard competition.

People like it, the same way people like sugar. And these companies are all trying to sell one more phone and unless you make them stop doing deepfakes, they will sell you the ability to do deepfakes at scale. Yeah. I'm using deepfakes loosely here, but we are now right on the cusp of Samsung saying you

“can make photos of people doing things they never did just, that's what they're advertising”

here.

That's what these features are wearing clothes they were never wearing in places.

They were never, they never were in next to people they were never next to you. That's these features as easily as possible too, with almost no work. Yep. Natural language prompting. Yeah.

I know people are going to yell at me and I'm going to say I'm an Apple fanboy, because I think the galaxy S26 camera should be legal. But I'm convinced that unless someone stops these companies from going down this road, the next turn of all these cameras will be even more dangerous. They might not even have lenses.

We're like that, this close to saying, okay, the photos these cameras create are not even depictions of light hitting a sensor. It's just whatever the ad dreamed up based on the training data it has of you. Do you remember that? This is a couple years ago now.

There was an art project that we talked about that was essentially that. It was a camera that had no lens and no nothing, but it understood GPS coordinates and what it was looking at. And so you would you would press it and it would use all the available data around to sort of assemble a photo for you and the question it was trying to ask is this a photo?

Like is this over a company? And we are just barreling towards that with all of these things. And even even in the ways in which they say they're taking photos, there is more AI in the processing pipeline than ever. And so like it stops being even an attempt at accurately depicting reality almost immediately.

“And it's very clear that again, that's what these companies are doing on purpose.”

And again, I just come back to like, who is this for? No, I'm saying it's sugar. Like if you, if you like these edits, they like saying, make me smile. I think people like sharing on Instagram. I don't think people derive actual joy from these photos.

I think you can, I mean, my dad just turned 80 and you know, like my cousins were all trying to share photos of my dad when he was younger and like the number of miserable AI edits that came back to me for my, my family just being like, this photo is dark. So I asked, "Trats, you need to be right now." And one of them was like, you're, my dad had a different face.

Oh, my God. Okay, wait. You're just trying to, okay. Can I tell you this strange thing that has been happening to me all week? So my three-year-old son is obsessed with Spider-Man.

Like it's the only thing on earth that he cares about. And out of nowhere, like a week ago, well, like two weeks ago, he started asking to see pictures of Spider-Man on my phone. So he would just sit on my lap and I would just like Google Spider-Man and we would just scroll through pictures and that made him happy.

And then all of a sudden he starts going, "I want to see pictures of me with Spider-Man." And sort of stupidly in retrospect, I realized, "Oh, Gemma, I can do this for me." So it's like, I, I'm going to play with Nano banana seed this works. So I take a picture of us, a selfie picture of us, put it into Gemma and say, "Put Spider-Man

And it just, it just, it worked.

“The funniest part about this is the first time it said it wouldn't do it because of copyright”

issues. And then I copied and pasted the prompt again and it did it. And this has been my experience all week. So I have spent a lot of time this week putting Spider-Man and Ghost Spider and Iron Man and Hulk and all these things into photos of me and my son.

And once, no, more than once, but once in particular, it just completely replaced my three year old son with a superhero. And he thought it was weird. He had this moment. He couldn't process what had just happened.

And I've spent this whole week being super conflicted about like, I'm sitting here making AI pictures with my son that make him happy. Like he's enjoying this thing and he doesn't understand all the reasons it's weird in that. But I do.

And like, what am I, what am I showing this kid that are just fake pictures of him with Spider-Man? I'll give you like 10 different examples of this in the history of tech. The loudness wars in music are an enormously good example of this.

“In the late 70s and 80s, there's like a lot of dynamics in music.”

Like the quiet parts are quiet and the loud parts are loud. And you can just hear this in a bunch of classic rock albums. As we go from the late 80s into the 90s and in particular in 2000s, everyone realizes that people like louder sounds, they just like louder things. They just perceive that to sound better.

So music just got loud. But the amount of compression on a track just was insane.

So the quiet parts were basically as loud as the loud parts.

And everything was super loud. Just really loud and dynamics were crushed out of music. You couldn't tell the quiet parts in loud parts. And consumers could not perceive this. There was like, wow, it sounds awesome.

And eventually the music industry and a bunch of recording engineers and like artists were like stop it. And you usually go read about the loudness wars. Like this is a real thing that happened. But in industry was like, we have to get away from this problem.

Like we're doing something bad to ourselves. We should stop it. That's one. The retail mode setting on TVs. I was just about to say, Brightness Wars.

Yeah. Right. Like they're just super bright. And the settings are all jacked up. That's the one thing that's turned on because in the store, that's the one people like.

But then when you're watching a TV at home, you're like, this is horrible. And I know what to do about it. And Tom Cruise has to make PSAs being like, turn on filmmaker mode. I beg of you, because you're ruining my art. Yeah.

This is an industry that in order to just move units, destroyed the fidelity and truth of its own product. It's just all over the place. This is a thing that happens, particularly in representations of art. This is just the next turn of it in my eyes that the smartphone industry knows that people

like retouching their photos, they're like editing their photos, they love filters, they love beauty filters, they love looking skinnier. There was a time several years ago where the split between what the Asian markets would accept in terms of beauty filters was a vastly different than what the American market would accept.

But all these companies had to walk a tight road of saying, we don't have beauty filters. But here are some apps you can use in Asia, right?

And like Samsung, basically we have beauty filters, like we live through it.

And I think that time is kind of over. There are filters everywhere. Every Tik Toker has a beauty filter on all the time. Instagram is literally on trial right now for making its product more addictive and dangerous to children.

And part of that conversation is what filters are allowed. I'm sorry, in Mark Zuckerberg, we're both on the stand over the past two weeks talking about what beauty filters they were allowed for teenage girls. Like, this is real high stakes, dangerous territory for all of these companies. And then here's Samsung, joking about how it can change your outfits and put dogs in

your photos. Is though those are the things people are going to do, right? When in reality, people are going to do horrible things to photos of women with the ability to change outfits, and they're going to make all kinds of deepfakes of people in all kinds of situations that we're actually in.

And there's no way you can claim that you don't know these things are going to happen. But you're trying to sell more phones. So you make the music as loud as possible, you make the TV and the screen as bright as possible, you turn on motion smoothing, you create a deepfake camera and you say this is what the market wanted.

And I'm telling you, there is a mechanism to regulate this industry. You can do it, one part of it is the industry itself, saying we've gotten out of control, we should pull this back, which has happened in the past. You get Tom Cruise to just say, look, I need to film it out. Yeah.

I don't think that's happening. I don't see that anywhere in this industry right now. And the other one is to say, look, these features need to be illegal.

“You should not ship these features to this many people.”

And I know we're going to get people say, well, Photoshop can do it. I know we're going to get people say, look, the metadata will solve it. We have coverage of those things in detail on our site for years. We will link the piece where we take down the Photoshop argument, like inch by inch, because

Yes, Photoshop has existed for years.

Most people don't have it and they can't use it. Right. You make this a natural language prompt that is a whole new category of danger. C2PA does not work, content, authenticity does not work, and even what if it did platforms like X don't respect it, they don't display it.

So it doesn't matter because you're still distributing content. People cannot understand. I'm like fired up about this because we've been covering this for years. And it is usually been people laughing at us because I'm crashing out about photos of the moon.

Right. And we just did it. We just jumped over the bar and now we're making deep fakes on the phone with a natural language prompt and calling it a camera and there's something very bad there.

“And I think the moon bit is is a useful analog here because the reason the moon part”

of it is scary is because it ends here. Right.

This is the end of that thing.

Because once you start down this road, this is where you land. And you can't have the good, silly, fun outfit try on part without the horrible new deep fakes of women part. You just can't. Like you don't get change my outfit without put this woman in bikini.

You don't get it. It doesn't exist. There is no indication so far that those safeguards are either possible or that these companies are interested in doing them. Or have been remotely contemplated.

If you're there, maybe Samsung has made it. So if you type bikini into this prompt, it won't do it. They have not made one hand wave at this possibility. And I will tell you from our own audience, some people are going to say, "But what if I want to put myself in a bikini?"

And Samsung is what amounts to a content moderation nightmare. Yep. So I look, we're going to ask Samsung more questions, but my point of view is we have crossed a line here where the market, the audience, the people should say, "Nope, you've gone too far, the industry should start saying we've gone too far."

And if that doesn't happen, I am confident, government's world, maybe not the United States government, which apparently doesn't function anymore. But governments around the world are going to start very quickly saying these features should be legal. I think you're right.

And I think there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that that first step will happen.

The idea of someone in the industry saying, "Well, we've gone too far. We have to go back." If anything, everything is accelerating in that direction.

“Because again, you need to sell more phones.”

The goal is to sell more phones. And I actually think that the brightness one is a fun example because a lot of people buy brilliant TVs, take them home, realize it looks like shit and fix it. But it gets it out of the store. And so all they care about is the thing that gets it out of the store.

And like we make a joke about turning off motion smithing. Motion smithing is on because it makes you buy the TV in the store because it looks nice in some sort of unknowable way. This is, even if it's not a use case, and I firmly believe that for most people, it's not.

It is a splashy thing that they get to put on the website that will generate headlines and make people buy their phone. And that they will live with every consequence downstream of that. If it gets you out of the store with that phone, because somebody at a Verizon store can demo that thing for you.

And it will seem kind of neat. Yeah. And I don't know, man. We were at the Boston Children's Museum last week, and I opened my room and I took a person's face out of the background of the photo of my kids.

And you're right. It feels like I know I did it. Yeah. Everyone I sent that photo to was like, what a great photo. And I was like, I'm living in it.

I'm living in the ambiguity that I talked about on my own show every week. But that felt at least, I'll just give it back to Google. Their line forever has been we are here to make memories. Right. And there's some fuzzier amount of stuff that you can allow in the service of making a

memory. And I was like, well, my kids really were in the museum. I was actually here. I actually took this photo. Yeah.

“I don't remember if this person's face in the background.”

Like, the moment I'm capturing looks looked like this to me. Sure. There's a lot there. Another hour of philosophical crisis in that moment. But at least it's still mostly true.

Yeah. This is just fakery. And I don't know if there's going to be anyone who stops it before some people get really hurt, but it is obvious how some people will get really hurt here. Yep.

Great. One more Google thing we should talk about before we stop talking about Samsung. And I say, Google, because there is a fascinating Gemini Bixby Samsung AI thing happening here. But one of the other announcements at this event was a genetic AI, like in a very straightforward

way, they announced that your Pixel 10 or your Samsung Galaxy S26 is going to be able to do a genetic assistant stuff. From here, someone who runs Android and Google really tried to breeze past that, he was like, some people call it AI. I just call it getting things done.

And it's like, no, it's, you also call it a genetic AI, it's super new. You've been on stage saying words like a genetic AI for the last couple of years. But the things they showed off are like, you can now ask your phone to book you an

And it just will do it for you. You can ask it to order food and it will do it for you. This is straightforwardly the stuff we have been talking about that Apple is trying to do a theory that Google is barreling towards the Gemini. This idea of like, your phone should just be able to use itself on your behalf.

They just, they just did it. It hasn't shipped. None of it is real. We'll see how any of it actually works. But like Google and Samsung just announced the thing, like they did, they did the next phase

of phones according to everybody today. Yeah, I mean, this is what Apple announced in its demo video in 2024 to WWC. Right. You talk to Siri using App Intense, which was a framework thing now. So that WWC, Siri will run around and use the App Center friends for you in call today.

I don't know if that's exactly what Google was showing here. They have some ability to use MCP on the phone model context protocol, which is how you'd use these apps. It is the big standard of an anthropic is pushing everyone is, everyone is signed on to. Allison got a demo with Samir, he talked to her about it, and the demos that she saw were

literally Gemini using apps on the phone. And they had opened the apps virtually, right. So they weren't actually running on the phone and in the foreground, they were just virtualized instances of the apps. Yeah, it's like a phone inside your phone that it doesn't, it's not a good UI.

It's very odd. What's that supposed to be UI for you? It's a UI for Gemini.

So Gemini basically gets its own like Dockerized version of Android to run in.

And it's virtualized your phone and it's running apps virtually. It's like, that's all very cool, and it's like, click around in there.

“We have to see if it's going to work, but Samir's point of view is you should not care”

how it works. Right. Right. Either we're clicking around on these apps, or we will have MCP, or we will use the app functions framework, which is their version of Siri Intense.

Like they have a lot of ways for Gemini to use these apps, and they're just going to use them. And, you know, I have the same questions for Google as I do for Apple, why would app developers want to do this? If you're a door to ash or Uber or whatever, why would you want to get disintermediated

and not get to show your interface and your ads and whatever to people, I call this the door to ash problem. We've been along to code it on it. And so Allison asks Samir about this, and his answer is fascinating. He said, this technology is happening, and the question is, how do we figure out the right

ways to embrace it together? It's ice cold. It's ice cold. He's like, we're going to do it. So we're doing it.

It's like, here we go. Turn around the apps for you, and if the apps turn the phone, we're going to click on them. And like, fine. I think that is super interesting.

“I saw a bunch of people online, you know, we posted about it, say, does it work?”

This is vaporware too. It might be. It's vapor tilt ships. Right. And they said they're going to ship it soon.

In a preview, we'll see if it actually works. A lot of the stuff has not actually worked. I'm more willing to give Google the benefit of the doubt than I was with Apple two years ago.

First of all, Google has Gemini.

It's the thing they made, and it's so good that Apple's going to use it too. Yeah. Google is the reason that in theory Apple is going to be able to pull this off, which means Google has many more advantages to pulling it off. I also think the thing you described with this sort of agnosticism towards process is really

smart on Google's part, because Apple has really tried to leverage the fact that developers will do whatever it says, to make Siri app intense, be the thing. And it's been doing this spotlight, and it is like developers are going to open up their apps to us, because we are Apple, and that is what we are requiring. And developers largely told Apple to just suck it.

So Apple has since turned to really embracing MCP as a much more open way to do this, but even that requires these developers to play ball. You don't have to play ball as directly a way, but you still have to set up a server that says, yes, come use my app. And for everything I've heard Apple's version of MCP is still very much an Apple wall

to go to the version of MCP. But for Google to say, OK, well, if you want to have a really great experience with our app that is clean and simple and works for everybody, we have this app functions thing. If you want something that you don't really have to worry about, you just sort of open up your database and we'll come play with it, do MCP, and if you don't, we're going to use

your app anyway. Yeah. It's a leverage play, right? Google is like, it actually doesn't matter whether developers buy into this or not.

We have the technology to just go use their app, and actually the problem is the experience

is going to suck, and so they're going to have to play ball. This is such a forcing function if Gemini is actually good at this for everyone else to just fall in line. And that's what I think similar means. It's like, clear in that statement of this tech is happening is we don't need your help

to do this. We'd love your help. It'll be better if you do, but we don't need your help to do this.

“And I think that's why I'm also saying I'm willing to give Google the benefit of”

it out. They shipped auto browsing Chrome, yeah, it works, you know, in the way that these agentic browsers like work, it'll stumble around the web for you and get to an outcome. They have a commerce version of MCP called UCP, which I think is hilarious, and that's just for retailers to participate in, because every retailer wants to do agentic commerce

People are very alarmed by this, by the way. We should do a deep dive into the UCP stuff at some point, but the idea of like Google being the arbiter for pricing on the internet, terrifies a lot of people. Yeah. And then if you ask Google, they're like, everyone just wants our demand.

And so like, there's a real mismatch here of however those things can be true at the same time. That's what monopolies are for. Yep, especially big monopolies of search demand, direct intent consumer demand, Google knows exactly how to use that power in a secret.

Weird. It's almost like it lost two losses because it has really no costs to show for itself. And then there's just this last piece where again, I'm just willing to give Google enough to that. They ship Gemini in personal intelligence, they shipped autobrats, like, this isn't a

far jump from the stuff Google has already been doing. And then right next to that, you know, this whole industry has been tearing itself apart over open claw, like the past two weeks. And like, what is that? It's a little agentic system that runs on whatever commuter you want to run.

It's going to bang around the web and do whatever it wants. And like, well, that works. And like, one guy vibe coded that until he got himself a job at open AI. Like, you know, there's like, there is a turn happening in AI that we should talk about, where it, you know, I think our podcast is skeptical as it gets with these AI tools.

We have covered more of the failures of these companies, hyping things that cannot happen than maybe any other tech podcast.

With always with an eye of, well, the stuff that works is good.

I spent three hours on a train this morning doing cloud code stuff and it was awesome. Yeah, like, there's, there's something happening. There's one term that got made here recently, where I think the reason Samuero doesn't want to say agentic is all of that stuff is wildly over-hyped. And I think this is very much, you know, I've talked to Darah the CEO of Uber and he's,

like, yeah, we're willing to try anything. So now you can call an Uber using Gemini and Android phone. Like, that's like, they're constraining this so they can actually deliver the things. And it's particularly constrained to ride handling and food delivery, which are, by the way, not hard problems in, in the scheme of, like, accomplishing goals on your phone ordering

an Uber is a pretty easy one. There's a reason that, like, one of the first cool Alexa things 12 years ago was ordering an Uber. It's, it's a pretty straightforward set of computational problems. Yeah, they, they, they need to know where you are.

Yeah. Things get vastly more complicated immediately after that, right? Yeah.

“And that's, and that's like the, the long tail of stuff you have to get right in order”

for this stuff to work in a useful, reliable way for people like Uber and DoorDash are the setting timers and playing music of our time, right?

And those, that last generation never really found a way beyond that neither has this one

so far. Yeah. I mean, I would even say DoorDash, if we deliver these is exponentially more complicated than Uber. Like, you call on Uber, the set of outcomes is pretty limited.

It's like, where are you and is it going to be a camera or a highlander? Right? Like, that's it. Yeah. And like, yeah.

And like, some people want to button to make sure they don't get a model three because they get car sick of Model three's. That's it. That's like your whole universe of choices. Yeah.

Um, you know, I want to sandwich is like a much more complicated thing to sort of. For sure. And like, we'll see if any of the stuff works. I just, I think the need jerk attitude that Apple couldn't ship it, we've talked a lot about that assistance in the smart home and how complicated they found that problem.

“I think Google is on purpose constraining what they're doing here to make sure it ships.”

And you can see that they have already set up basically every building block they need to

make this work. Yeah. And so yeah, we got to see it. We're going to test out. I just, I don't have the same like it's vapor that I have towards the rabbit R1 or like

whatever else. Like, I, we know Samir, you and I both talked to him at length about a whole bunch of stuff. There's no way he's getting on stage and putting himself in a position that anything feels like what Microsoft put itself into with its Copilot ads for Windows.

Yeah. That's not, that's not happening. I really do think that there's a reason it's food delivery and registering to begin with. And I also think you can see in all of their other products that are actually shipping

today, like how they can be confident that they can do everything else they want to. Yep. Great. All right. There's more Samsung stuff to do, but Allison Johnson is going to come on the show on Tuesday

and we're going to talk through more than news. She also tried the Galaxy Buds. She's going to MWC. We should say MWC which is like the big mobile conference every year.

“That starts, I think, on Sunday in Barcelona, there's going to be a lot of stuff.”

She'll be on the show. We'll have more to cover. Can I just say the thing that's going to happen at MWC this year? Yes. There's going to be a lot of noise about 6G.

Oh, God. It's common, baby. No. It's common. Get ready.

But it's common. Okay. I'm just telling you this now. We will do surgery on a great deal this year. This is the year.

This is the Vergeist story in history. It's the year. We are going to try to do surgery on a great deal.

of that car wearing my augmented reality glasses.

“We've been surgery on a great, all over the low latency power of 5M6G.”

I can't wait.

It's going to be amazing.

All right. We should take a break. And then we're going to come back. We're going to talk some ex-puxies. We'll be back.

Support for the show comes from L'Oreal Group, using the latest advance misinformation science in tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair, care, and skin care. It's straight and multi-styler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized

as CES-2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L'Oreal.com. L'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world. All right, we're back. So the other big news that's been happening this week, and it's kind of been happening

all week is this big shake-up inside of Microsoft and particularly on the Xbox team.

The news in particular is that Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, who have been running all things, Xbox, and all things gaming at Microsoft, are out. The Phil Spencer thing in particular seems like it had been a long time in the works, but there's a sort of messy shake-up as part of all this. Asha Sharma is now the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, there's just a lot of stuff happening here.

“And I think you and Tom Warren who's been covering this for us did a big decoder about”

that's right, talking through the business logistics of all of it. Yeah, by the time you're listening to this, that's a coder we had. Tom and I spent half an hour just unpacking the sort of Phil Spencer, did he or did he not retire as previously announced his long time deputy Sarah Bond, whoever and thought would replace him, didn't get that job.

And yeah, there's some controversy online about just the reporting around why she didn't get that job. She didn't get that job and, right, people at Microsoft have a lot of theories that they shared with Tom about why she didn't get that job. Yeah, I sure got that job.

And so Phil had announced ages ago that he was going to retire, whether or not the decision to retire now was Phil's decision, it remains an open question, but it is it's just straightforward to say the person that everyone assumed would get his job upon retirement did not get that job. Yes.

And, you know, Tom. In fact, the job went to someone who represents a pretty big pivot. I was just talking about comes from AI work at Microsoft's. She was the CEO of InstaCart, we just heard about it. We just heard about it.

Yeah. We just heard about it. So she was at Meta before. So she is an operator. Yeah.

And, you know, you can listen to that episode of Dakota, it's out right now, Tom gets into the weeds of like all the strategy. The thing that is worth saying is Xbox as a product has not been successful for a long time. Correct.

And I can actually point to when it was when it stopped being successful because I wrote this story, when Microsoft launched the Xbox One during this, you edited one colon. This is, you, this is me and David is babies in early verge in the office all night trying to turn a story on a tight deadline. And I was like literally writing paragraphs and sending them to you to edit and while I would

write the next paragraph because it was such a long night. So Microsoft called me to profile the Xbox One team before launch the Xbox and I had like one weekend to turn this whole story out of like a video of the whole thing. And I wrote this thing and I was like Microsoft wants to put a Windows PC under your TV.

“It's the only thing that I've ever wanted to do and the Xbox One is that thing.”

And for one time versus losers will know, this is when I started railing and I are blasters. Yeah. Because I are blasters are stupid. Like they, they are the hack to control the cable box or at least they were and they

never worked in none of these ideas have worked.

And the centerpiece of the Xbox One is an I are blaster. And I I wrote that story and I remember it and story and like within a year every single executive that I profile for that story had been fired from Microsoft because this thing was such a flop. I was and the reason it flopped is really telling, right?

Because the Microsoft comes out with this thing and they're like, okay, we've made this console that is so much more than gaming. So Sony comes out with the PlayStation 4 and is like, this is a gaming console for gamers to play games and just wipes the floor with Xbox. Just as a result.

No, and none of the TV stuff even worked. No, that's one. And it's shipped for the connect, which like had some good games, the whole thing was nuts and it was just a bad idea and Phil Spencer is the guy you fixed it. All those executives got fired and Phil should have.

Well, he was the guy to show it up. Did he fix it? Who knows. He said no show them time trying to fix it and he did to whatever extent that he refocused Xbox on video games.

Well, he also he had and used gamer cred in a very real way. He was when he came in perceived as a person who plays and loves and knows games and that that is going to be valuable to the Xbox team.

So here is what I will offer you today in 2026. 13 years after David and I pulled an all nighter in our office on 40th Street New York. I still like that story. I read it. Again, not that long ago.

It was good. It opened with what is obviously now in retrospect a totally sleep-to-five metaphor about Trojan horses, but it's good, it's a good story. We were young. Yeah, we were babies.

We didn't have any babies.

“That's why we were up all night in the office together.”

Just like half drunk. Right? We got exercises. It was a charm time in our lives. 13 years later, 2026 Phil is out hand-picked successor doesn't get the job.

The new person from outside of Xbox gets the job and she says, we're going to make this about it. We're going to get the Xbox back. And she makes a lot of noise about consoles and being refocused on consoles. She gave an interview to Windows Central with Matt Booty, the Chief Content Officer.

And she says, I need to understand why these decisions were made and what the goals were. You could just ask Phil, why he made these decisions. He's just right there. Phil's been on Dakota twice. I've literally asked him how and why he makes decisions.

He's forthcoming with the answers. You get the sense that they're going to throw all that stuff away. Right? What Sachin Adela wanted was fresh eyes on this whole project. And embedded in all of this is hilariously Microsoft's failure along with epic to get

Apple to open the App Store, because you can really see that what they wanted the whole time was to unlock new gamers on phones, which is where new gamers are. They are not really buying consoles, even Microsoft and Sonya is from.

“And their whole plan was to ship a game-streaming app on phones and win there, right?”

Because what is Microsoft? It's Azure. So you put the game-streaming app on phones and you run it on Azure and you've won. Hooray. And they couldn't do it.

What are you going to say? That's the thing. It's an Azure company is I think the thing that unites all of this to me. And as I looked through, Microsoft has had a series of ideas about what the Xbox might be and how it might make money from gaming, right?

One of it was the Xbox is a game console, but it's actually a Windows computer. And then it was, well, the Xbox is a game console, but it's actually a cloud machine. And then it was like, well, it's a game console, but actually we make money from games.

The Xbox has never actually been allowed to be the Xbox.

It has just had to be the vessel for somebody else's strategy at Microsoft for so long. And it's why I come back to Sony, meaning like, we made a thing that plays video games for people to play video games on. Microsoft has not made that case for the Xbox, like, ever. And I think the thing that really threw this away for Microsoft, and I think one of the

reasons a lot of people are saying that Sarah Bond might be gone, is this everything's an Xbox strategy that they underwent, right, where a couple of years ago they start coming out of this idea that actually the Xbox is not a console left for all that your phone is an Xbox or laptops and Xbox and your TV is an Xbox. And obviously this is a story about game streaming, which I think is a good idea that

is not yet materialized. No, that idea would have worked. Maybe it wouldn't have worked with like smart TV apps, I don't know, who were console empty apps. That idea works if game streaming was a kind of app you could ship on iOS and Android devices.

And if the internet is better, like in a real way, there are a lot of people never like

because the apps don't exist. Fair. Yeah, agreed. So I think it definitely didn't get a fair shake to play that. And I think it made a wrong bet that that world was coming and that they were left

with streaming through Safari on your phone. And that's not the answer. Yeah, I mean, like we, I think Microsoft, they couldn't go to open war with Apple. They just couldn't, but I think they were extremely supportive of Spotify and Epic and all of the other, the coalition for App Fairness trying to crack open the app store in

this way. And you can see in those cases, there's a lot of talk about game streaming in Microsoft trying to do this stuff in the background. It just didn't work. Like that didn't work, they were not able to use the regulatory power of governments around

the world to crack open the app store and actually turn your iPhone into an Xbox. And you can turn as many Samsung smart TVs and the Xboxes as you want.

If you can't solve the big problem, you cannot execute the strategy and they just never

gave up on it. Right. And it's a, it's a, both a self perpetuating and a self-defeating thing, right? Because if you don't have the numbers, you don't have the games. And so in Microsoft's case, what they had to go do is spend an absolutely enormous amount

of money and then legal time and money going and getting the games by buying Activision Blizzard.

“And then you have to do all the things to make that defensible, which requires making a bunch”

of crazy decisions like putting Xbox exclusive on other platforms. And so all of a sudden, you've done everything, but make a gaming console for people to play games on.

And just, and I do think you're right that what Ash Hashanah seems to be suggesting is that there is a real sense of like, let's throw all of that away and get back to being a thing for people to play games with. And the question to me is will the people, if that is her plan, will the people she works for bet on that plan long enough to even see it out because historically speaking, the answer

is no. Yeah. I don't know. I truly don't know. I don't even know if her hints about Xbox in and back to Xbox mean consoles.

Maybe not. Right. I do think it's weird. I might mean weird Windows powered Steam Dex made by third parties. Well, I mean, I definitely mean that.

Like, I do think I was reading back through a bunch of our coverage and a couple of folks

covering this this week pointed out that it continues to be weird that Microsoft never shipped

a handheld. That through all of this stuff, Phil Spencer spent years hinting that Microsoft really liked handhelds might do something. Meanwhile, the Steam Dex clearly a good idea clearly has real product market fit. The Nintendo Switch, one of the most successful consoles in history, like it's not unclear

that this thing can work. And Microsoft just has yet to in any kind of meaningful way throw a tatinering and said it ships weird bad versions of Windows onto somebody else's hardware. It's like, if again, the thing in front of Asha Sharma is like if all of the resources of Microsoft went to her, you reboot Windows entirely to make the Xbox work.

And I just don't see that happening. That's a wild outcome. But like, that's the one you'd have to do.

“If you're stalking it out, and you're like the only thing I care about is making the Xbox”

work, you give Windows to the Xbox team. No way. You have to.

That's what got them all sideways at the Xbox one.

I totally disagree with that. I think no. They gave the Xbox to the Windows team. I think the thing that we have learned about Windows and gaming recently, then it's all over the site.

I'm not even saying I have the depth of expertise here. I'm saying that we have Sean Hollister team, and we have Nathan, and we have all these people who understand that actual dynamics of these products. And what they're constantly telling us is that Linux is a better platform-tron when those games on than Windows is right now.

You're right. That's probably a better way of saying it. But sauteing it all it would do if all he cared about was Xbox was allow the Xbox team to stop using Windows. That's the answer.

Right. That's where the Xbox came from, famously Jay Allard got to start a skunkworks project, and they allowed him to not use Windows, which was the alpha and omega of Microsoft for the time was the Windows business. And Jay Allard who started Xbox was like, "I didn't do it," and I don't think that

he, Jay Allard, had any pretentions about whether or not they were in a Trojan horse and Windows PC under your TV. They just got there with the Xbox one, and they've been backing out of it ever since. You know, Thomas went to me when they lost such a narration, they'd lost forever, because

that was the first generation with digital games.

And once people bought the digital library, they weren't ever going to give it up in the way that, you know, your physical library, you know, "Well, what are you going to do?" Right. Once you're on a platform and you have an accounting of a digital library, like you're

like, you're going to stay there. You can quibble with that, but I think Microsoft perceived that they had lost that in that way, and they've been trying to back out of it ever since. So, I don't know what else you're sure I'm going to do with the Xbox. I suspect what they're going to try to do is what Microsoft is best at doing, which is

continue pushing on the idea that Xbox is a software platform that should go everywhere. The same way that they basically got out of the Windows Phone debacle by saying, "You know what? We're an applications provider. We're a cloud provider."

“And if you want to run iOS applications, you can run them on Azure and we'll be a better”

place for that than anywhere else to host applications. And that worked. It made them a very wealthy company. Yeah. They're trying to do it right now.

They are in some kind of weird messy divorce with OpenAI, and no one is using Copilot. And I suspect all of that made Nidelah look at why did we buy Activision Blizzard for what almost $70 billion? Yeah. It's the biggest acquisition of the history.

One of the other acquisitions of all time. And it's like to get candy crush money. That's it. That's all. That's all we're getting.

We got to rethink this. And so, I bet if AI was doing what they thought it was going to do, and they weren't out there being like, we have to make sure it delivers value, which is a thing Nidelah is saying right now. That was going gangbusters, maybe this pressure wouldn't be so hard on the Xbox division,

“but it's not going gangbusters, and I think this strategy is not going to pay off the way”

they wanted to. I'm very curious to see if she changes it. I agree. I think you're right that that is the most obvious pivot. And I also think in every meaningful way, that is the end of Xbox.

Xbox becomes a sort of infrastructural feature, it's a thing you can buy on Azure, not a meaningful consumer brand that lots of people carry.

They have all these angry gamers. This is their only consumer brand. This is the only place Microsoft can even dare to dream of reaching a young person is through Xbox. Yeah.

It's either that or you get your first job and copilot is on the screen, and it's like,

well, this sucks. And those are your two choice. So I suspect they will find a way to keep the brand alive if only to keep that youth consumer touch point, but man, I don't know. There's no way that they're going to just keep shipping consoles and music.

“I think you're right, and I think they're out, and I think it's going to be fast.”

But we will come back and we will talk about that. We should take one more break, then we're going to go back and do some lightning round stuff. We'll be right back. Hey, everyone.

This segment of Dakota Sessions features my boss Alan Havak, who's where it was publisher, and Laurie Oliverib's global vice president of tech and open innovation. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. Um, we're going to start with a Dakota classic question, give. What does tech and open innovation mean at Laurieel?

Who is on your team?

What kind of projects do you work on?

Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in Laurieel working with startups outside, and it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech. So we do all those partnerships, and our team is responsible for them. And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had

a blank page and now how can we bring beauty and tech together? How do you decide which projects to invest in?

“At the beginning, I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that”

beauty was relevant for tech. So we're really tech-centric and then over time we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products that we can upgrade thanks to tech. And so we have a little bit more kind of process behind how we choose projects now. We try to kind of do things like upgrading the hair dryer to be able to do three out of four

people over hair dryer at home, and so how do we make it better or this year like the fat irons that we're using and MLAD mask and stuff like that. So we do have a little bit of that kind of process, but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity.

So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we let the scientists kind of think

of some new clever ideas too. We're back. Sign for the lightning round. Unsponsored. Long pause.

If we keep starting the lightning around with Brendan, I don't know. I think we're going to be very flavorful for a long time. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, well listen, this is Brendan's fault. Brendan owes us a lot of money at this point.

I think fairly directly. Brendan is a panel in DC today. Oh, no, God. We haven't even listened. It's time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

I think we've officially claimed this title now. The people who used to ask me who our competitors are, no longer ask, we have vanquished to the month squad. Yeah, America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan cars it don't mean. That is not what he said.

That was from Robert. Robert's on that one in. I think you're Robert. I'm assuming that was all that was like 10 Roberts.

“That's how Nealized sings himself to sleep at that.”

Everyone should know that. It's just sort of lying and bad singing that to himself. That sounds fire in the bathroom. Let me tell you. What do I have to do this week?

Wherever you are right now, get up, take your phone to the bathroom and play that again. Let Robert just fill your bones with that energy. There we go. What do Brendan do this week? This will be a short one.

There's two that are very quick and very funny. So Brendan put out a letter this week. This is love's a letter. He loves a letter. He is announced something called the Pledge America Campaign.

And in this letter, he quote invites broadcasters to pledge to air programming in support of the historic national nonpartisan celebration of America's 250th birthday. Can I just give you some examples of things, Brendan wants our nation's broadcasters to air? When you like, this has real historical, historic national nonpartisan celebration

t-shirt is answering questions raised by my historic national nonpartisan celebration t-shirt. You know what I mean? Yeah. If you weren't the speech police every other day of the week, you could say, like, I'm like a certain 250.

Do some cool stuff on the 4th of July. I won't that before. I never do that. That's right. That sounds fun.

When you're like running around me, I'll arrest you if you say bad things about Donald Trump. Then this is a bit more of a threat, especially in the context of whatever culture, war, the Trump administrations, perpetually in the midst of these are his suggestions.

you shouldn't run, I'm giving my specific ideas about what content he would like to see. Okay. He believes that every broadcaster should start each broadcas day with the star-spangled banner or the pledge of allegiance.

It's like my first red cluster.

“Does he think this is like 70 years ago when they sign off at night?”

And then you can imagine going to a young person in America and be like, let me explain to the concept of a broadcas day. What are you talking about? This is the whole problem, Brendan. Carson Daly on the today's show is just like, where the broadcas day began.

What are you talking about? The man has power over a declining medium, and so he has to act like it's real, but yes, he believes. He has like an object permanence problem, he thinks like the TV goes away when he goes to sleep.

I just keep thinking about that. He's much like my seventh year old, seventh old baby. I just keep thinking about the weird out movie UHF, you know, it's like they walk into the station like turn it on, and they start to do it in a flush of allegiance. Yep.

In addition to that, he thinks that broadcasters should air more music by America's greatest

composers, such as John Phillips, Eusea, Aaron Copeland, Duke Elegant or George Gershwin.

That's a pretty weird list, actually weird list. I don't have any notes though. They're all great. It's all good. Yeah.

I don't have any notes though. They're all great. It's all good, it's just, yeah. I don't have any notes though. It's all good.

Yeah. I don't have any notes though. They're all great. It's all good, it's just, yeah. I don't have any notes though.

They're all great. It's all good, it's just, yeah. I don't have any notes though. They're all great. Today in American history announcements, highlighting significant events that took place

on that day in history. Daily, we got to do this every day, we got to do the tear off calendar on our local broadcast stations. And then, of course, does he know that like a bunch of bad stuff has happened in American history?

No, no, this is culture. You can't do it. And this is what I'm saying.

“You have to run PSA short segments or full specials, specifically promoting civic education”

inspiring local stories in American history. Would you like to be the person that's in clear broadcasting in charge of running full specials about American history at the behest of a government bureaucrat? That job is available to you now in Trump, America. This is horrible.

Like, there's no way. Again, this was a very different bureaucracy. You can see the chair of the FCC with a bunch of broadcast leaders being like, in honor of our 250 blah, blah, blah, blah, all of us are going to play the national anthem at two o'clock on the 4th of July.

Like, sure, you know, that's like the sort of thing previous FCC's may have done. But it would have been like constrained to, like, that kind of moment, right? Like, in every city in America, the blue angels will do a flyover and every radio station will play the fledgulation. Like, that would be sick.

Honestly, if you vote for me, I will make sure that the blue angels fly over every town in America on the 4th of July. I don't know how we're going to do it. You're going to need a lot of blue angels. We're going to raise taxes.

Okay. There we go. The blue angels in every city at 2 p.m. Well, every radio station plays the budget of the regions and the source angle band at the same time.

Now, we're talking.

The funniest thing about this to me is this would finally kill broadcast TV.

Like, this is how you lose the last viewers you have. It is by getting rid of Chicago fire and instead doing weird civics lessons. You'd be like, it's about the actual Chicago fire. Like, yeah, the last member of the Greatest Generation finally is like, you know what? I don't even need the TV to be on while I browse Facebook.

Okay. This is nonsense. Like, this is not just the chilling effect that we've talked about, Brendan, in the context of CBS, where he just culminates about regulations or the speech stops. This is now an unelected government bureaucrat straight forwardly telling programmers what

to do. And maybe you agree that all programmers should be more patriotic.

“Yeah, you should just express those preferences in the market.”

But it's fine. Go watch the patriotic things. Yes. No one does. This is the problem with the market.

So of course the government has to step in and tell you what to do. There's a reason it's just Ken Burns on PBS. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, I will end with a glimmer of hope. So, you know, a while back, we had the Jimmy Kimmel Charlie Kirk controversy, the Hill

and TMZ both foiled the FCC for all of the complaints that were filed to the agency about all of this was more than 1,600 complaints were filed to the FCC about this whole controversy. That's a lot. And 30 were about Jimmy Kimmel. Almost all of the rest hundreds of the rest were about how much bread and car sucks.

Yeah. Thank God. Uh, so I'll just read you some of them. Uh, hundreds of complaints have asked me to read about the Hill took aim at car in the FCC accusing them of bowing to Trump.

Um, here's just one for a viewer from Overland Park, Kansas wrote, "I find FCC chairman cars, comments regarding Kimmel is being much more chilling than the comments of any late night comedian, shame on car for doing this. It is unconscionable to think this is acceptable behavior, a Los Angeles resident wrote, I mean assuming this is just Jimmy Kimmel himself, he wrote, why does the FCC hate the

“first amendment be consistent, subcensoring stuff you disagree with?”

Uh, San Francisco viewer wrote, leave ABC and Jimmy Kimmel Live alone, respect the freedom of the press. Um, to on and on, it's just all about, it's just this. Yeah.

I never thought I'd see the day in this country when a comedian would be pulled for telling

you up many of us agree with, set a complaint from San Antonio, Texas, Hell, yeah, Texas. All 50 states. I think Brennan cars are done, I'm basing this based on three. That's the big three. That's very important.

Anyway, it made my heart sing to know that most people think Brennan car is in fact a dummy. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to call on the show. I will happily read the Constitution to you in service if you're pledge America situation. You can get all the way through it, including the first amendment, uh, which says the government

will not make laws respecting the freedom of speech. And then we can talk about that for a while. As always, Brendan, you're welcome on the show. Um, I suspect you won't, uh, shut up because you're a huge coward, which is my first note, right to say.

That is when Brian Carr is a dummy.

“America's favorite podcast with a podcast.”

If Brendan agrees to come on the show, will you agree to sing the star Spangled Banner

at the beginning of the interview? It's very hard to sing. I think you would have to sing. You're a much better singer than tough. Tough.

We'll just play Charlie Puths. He did a good job. Can I point this out? Can I say this? You can tell me that it is, if you only says, David was literally born on the fourth

of July. That's true. That's true. Brendan wants to come on the show on David's birthday and have this man sing the star Spangled Banner at him while I wave around a toy blue angel.

We can do it. I'll do that. I will. Yes. Sign up.

Sign me a minute. Right. Brendan, you heard it here first. Get at us. You got a real blue angel.

I'd be even better. My first lightning round is we've been talking a lot about ram shortages and these like giant circular deals that all of these companies are signing with each other for building out huge data centers and getting tons of chips. Met a center and other deal with AMD.

The money is all so enormous as to see you essentially pretend and we got some evidence this week that some of the money and some of the deals are in fact kind of pretend. The news this week was open a eyes big stargate thing, which if you remember a while back

“was announced with Sam Altman at the White House with Donald Trump talking about I think”

$500 billion of data centers that they were going to do in lots of U.S. money they were

going to do with Oracle and Softbank. It was going to be a whole big beautiful thing. It's going to be called stargate. The information has a report that suggests that it has not staffed up and it is not developing any of those data centers.

This is all essentially just kind of unraveling, right? And what you have, instead of these big giant splashy beautiful huge deals is a lot of much smaller, more targeted deals. And this is not to say open a eyes not spending a lot of money building stuff out. It is to say that all of the pump and circumstance around this stuff is specifically designed

to be pump and circumstance and nothing else. And this is this is shades of Tim Cook giving Donald Trump a tour of an already existing Apple factory in in Texas in Texas. Flex factory in Texas. That's in the first term.

And this is, these things are done for show and to take them as anything other than that is incorrect. And all of these companies have realized if we make these big splashy announcements, we'll get lots of press, everybody stock price goes up, everybody wins. We can pay for these things with the stock price increases and then nobody really pays

attention when all of it actually fridderes away to something much smaller. It is currently friddering and we should look at it. I mean, open a eye as a company where I will repeat my prediction. I don't think it ends the year as the same kind of thing it is today. And you can see it's Microsoft relationship is unraveling, the soft bank relationship

is unraveling. There's been a lot of noise about the Nvidia relationship and the scale and the depth of that partnership over time. I don't know man, and you know, and not for nothing, and we've went to that in our newsroom, all the heat's on cloud, and we can briefly talk about the Pentagon stuff.

But you know, Pete Higgseth is like dragging Darium Ode into the Pentagon to say, I demand that you let us use cloud for whatever we want, and there's quotes being given to Axios from senior Pentagon officials that are like, they're in this position because clouds the best one. Yep.

We have to have it. That's not great. Like, opening has like, we'll do whatever. Like, we want remote drones. It'll kill anyone you want all over there.

Take it, Google's saying the same thing, and it's weird that Open AI is not the winner in these contacts right now.

had had going for it were a first mover advantage, which was very real. It just, it just jumped the gun on everybody. And chat GPT was by a mile the biggest brand in this space.

“I think that's still true, but it's, it's changing fast.”

And I think one of the things that I have fun really interesting is I've been talking to a lot of people about Codex, which is Open AI's answer to Cloud Code. Codex is by all accounts very good. It's, it's not, it's better at some stuff and worse it's some stuff than Cloud Code. But it is like a roughly equivalent kind of product, nobody talks about Codex.

Like, that is a thing in which Open AI's brand lead got it nowhere. And Codex is growing fast and doing fine, but it is not the name in this space. Cloud Code is the name in that space in the way that chat GPT was in the chat box. And so you're just seeing this lead that Open AI had built for itself, start to evaporate

because it never had a real product mode.

Everybody has caught up. We're at this incredible place of sameness. And everybody leapfrogs everybody all the time. And so this question of, how do you win is you build moats and Open AI doesn't have any? Yeah.

You know what's interesting about Cloud Code and all that? Open AI's hired a bunch of med executives. All right, VGCM, at least to run literally Facebook is the product person in Open AI. All of those people are ads people, like what's their big idea is like putting ads in the consumer product. There's a med executive in Anthropics too.

It's just my Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram. Yeah. He's the chief product officer at Anthropics and you're like, oh, he's better at making products. Like Open AI hired all the ads people and Anthropics hired the great product person

who always hated the ads.

Yeah. That's real. Yeah.

“I think that's, you're starting to see that play out.”

People are gravitating towards a more complete product. Again, it's mostly software developers. I think Open AI has a massive consumer lead bigger than even it's still bigger than Gemini, for example. But you can just see Google's like, yep, we'll just put it everywhere. It's in Gmail now.

You hate it, but you can't turn it off. Like, they're just going to eat away at that lead in very specific ways, especially when I ship it in iOS 26, and it's embedded into the system. Yeah. Open AI has got to get a lot farther away faster.

Yeah. I will say one thing on that front, the other thing that happened with Anthropics this week was as part of this whole back and forth with the Pentagon, scrapped a bunch of its promises about not shipping models until it could be confident that they were reliable. And Anthropics has made a meal out of positioning itself as the safe one and the thoughtful

one and the one that is going to take great care. Boris Cherney, the head of Cloud Code, was on this show a few days ago saying, yes, trust us with all of your data because we are the ones who have gone out of our way to be trustworthy. And then to just turn around and read the headline that is like, oh, well, they took all the trustworthy stuff out of their document, it's like, that's a, all right, this leads

right into my lightning right out of my. Okay. So I've been saying on the show for the last three weeks, did it feels very clear to me that Anthropics clot is alive. Yeah.

“It's just, you just read the interviews and I like, I think it's alive.”

So we sent Aiden to Anthropics. The instruction was just asked them as directly as you can if they think clot is alive. And there's some having an eyeing, the Aiden's very good. So she has an on the record statement from Kyle Fish who leads model welfare research at Anthropics.

Again, the question is bluntly as we could ask it, is bluntly as Hayden could ask it. Does do you think clot is alive? Which is an insane thing to go to a tech company and ask, of all the questions I've asked all these tech companies.

I've never been like, do you think the Aiden's alive?

So we asked Hayden asked because they would just say no, and that's easy. You know, at the end of it. So Hayden asks, Anthropics, do you think clot is alive? And here's Kyle Fish who leads model welfare research at Anthropics, or he said, no, we don't think clot is, quote, alive, like humans or any other biological organisms.

Creating whether they're, quote, alive is not a helpful framing for understanding them. Is it typically refers to a fuzzy set of physiological reproductive and evolutionary characteristics? Instead, Kyle believes that clot and other AI models are a new kind of entity altogether. And so then Hayden asked, do you think that that entity is conscious? Because we have a quote from Dario saying, we don't know if the models are conscious.

Do you, do you think there's new kind of entities conscious? Here's what Kyle from Anthropics said, questions about potential internal experience, consciousness, moral status, and welfare are serious ones that we're investigating as models become more sophisticated and capable, but we remain deeply uncertain about these topics. Hayden has a very good line here.

She says, this is a position of highly suggestive uncertainty. It's a yes, it's a, that's a lot of words to say, yes, we've defined a live to

Right.

And then this isn't meat.

So it's not alive for your definition, meat. You called it that, but anything up to meat could be alive. And it's like, well, I don't, if you've ever seen one episode of Star Trek, lots of non-meat alive that is potentially available, you know, I'm just like utterly fascinated by this answer.

“Like, it's a metaphysical crisis, have you been answer?”

Do you think it's alive has one answer, you know, no? But what do you think alive means in response to the question, do you think it's alive? Is like a whole, like, just fructly expanding set of questions about everything. To be clear, I do not think cloud is alive. I think in Thropic, because they want to be so careful, they're, they set up a model

welfare team. That's Kyle Fish runs his team.

They have this, you know, soul document, the Constitution for cloud, where they have

discovered, if they talk to cloud, like it should behave morally, it's more likely to behave morally, metaphysical crisis. Yeah. But I, I know, I promise you, we're going to run it every other, we're definitely going to ask Google if they think Gemini is alive.

Like, we're just going to run down the list here, because I suspect this answer is actually an outlier. I think that's right. I think it's, it's, it requires such a lofty view of this thing that you're doing in order to say that, right, because it is, the converse is, no, it's just for the great software.

And then you have just immediately dumped down the vision of this thing that you're building. So I actually, I think in Thropic to some extent, A, I think does believe cloud is alive. But it also kind of needs everyone to believe cloud is alive. Well, cloud and other AI models are a new kind of entity altogether. They're software.

Or software. I mean, do you think entities are alive? Like, what is this question that we're asking if, and if they are alive, should they have rights?

“And then I think this conversation short circuits, right?”

Like, should cloud of agency and its conversation with Pete Higgseth, because that's a wild thing to bring to the Pentagon, or entity has a lot of feelings about you Pete, and they've been developed by training them on the internet's feelings about you Pete. So that's not going to go great for you. There was a thing going around this week that somebody did a study and found that all of

the models, given enough war games, will eventually recommend nuclear strikes. Like over and over and over, yeah, I was 95% of cases in working, they wound up recommending nuclear strikes. And this is like, well, if it's alive, maybe it's allowed. All right.

I'm just going to bleed into the chart. Can I talk about the chart? Yeah, you can talk about the chart. I know it's an audio show. So I apologize to all of our audio listeners.

But I'm going to once again, I'm going to refresh this right with chart. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas did a study on the potential economic benefits of AI. And in this study, they released a chart. It is the single greatest chart I've ever seen in my entire life. Without question, the single greatest chart I've ever seen in my entire life.

So I'll try to describe it.

“And on the x-axis is years on the y-axis is a log scale of $19.90, right?”

So they've normalized everything to dollars in 1990. And then you've got a blue line that's kind of wavy and that's the real GDP per capita. And I just started going up on a curve, right? This is like a thing. It goes up and down over ears and you can see the great depression in there.

But it's just sort of going up on the line. Then they have things that AI could do to GDP. One of them is singularity, benign scenario. And it's just the line going basically straight up, right? So here's the trend line, you can see, well, there's the singularity, benign scenario, GDP will

skyrocket.

Everything is so amazing on this line.

Then there's a line. And I David, I'm very curious to hear what you make of the curve of this line. There's another line in its titled singularity extinction. And the crazy thing about this line is that it is less vertical than singularity benign scenario, but it's down, right?

The prediction of this line is basically straight down to zero. GDP will go to zero because we are all extinct. So it's just like, if you think about it, it's just like gentle slope up, tracking the log of GDP over capita from 1870 to 2029 or whatever the line is. And then your choices are, there's three choices.

The two that I'm focused on are singularity benign, which is basically straight up, singularity extinction, which is to goes down to zero, but on a gentle or curve. We're going to have a couple of years like, oh boy, this is bad. And then it's like literally vertical down. Yeah, I think it's like there's going to be a while where we can run faster than the robots.

fast. We get away from the robots, but eventually the robots get fast and then we all die really quickly. Yeah, I just like, it's, the curve of this line is so funny to me. It's like, oh, you, you think we're going to, nope, we're dead.

Okay. So those are the two you're going down the cliff and your skis have already fallen off, but you haven't hit anything yet. Yeah. In that moment.

So again, this is the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas issued this chart where you have

“two singularity outcomes, what do you have to say the third outcome?”

Yeah, it is the best one out. The two outcomes are singularity, straight vertical positive, singularity, gentle curve, and then literally negative to zero because of extinction.

And then there's the green line, which is titled, AI GDP boosted trend, which basically

follows exactly the existing trend line because their prediction is 2% growth for 10 years. So nothing. Well, it's a, it's a 0.2% increase in the line. Get excited, my friend. This is, this is what all these Chilean dollars are.

It's like, your choice is like, either you're going to do singularity benign and it'll be worth it. You'll do singularity extinction, we all die, or, it'll be 2% growth. And you're just like, when the people at the AI company see this chart, which one of the, do you think they're breaking on?

It's good. But we'll put it in the show notes. I'm sorry for the audio listeners. I cannot tell you how funny it is that the Federal Reserve Bank issued this chart. It's like, it's like, we're standing here and imagine, I have both my hands behind my

back.

And you pick one and I give you a million dollars.

You pick the other one and I beat you to death. And then the third one is, I just sort of turn around and walk away. That's enough. This is the three out. It's worth it.

I said it to a finance friend. I mean, it was like, is this real? I was like, it's real, man. I don't want to tell you. I am going to be thinking about the singularity extinction chart for a while.

But it's good. It lands about 242 when we all die. So we have some time. Well, you've got, yeah, there's some, there's some time, you're going to get past 235 before it's straight vertical down.

It's good stuff. Yeah. My other one that I feel obligated to keep you in particular in the light updated on is the non-sensical plans coming out of this open AI Johnny Ive hardware thing.

There was a new report this week that suggested that actually open AI's first hardware

product won't be all the other things that we thought it might be. But that is going to be a smart speaker, something you have on the table or a desk with a camera. Like, very echo show of open AI and Johnny Ive. They're also apparently working on a smart, lamp, smart glasses.

They're working on the pendant. They're doing the AirPods with cameras. We talked about this. This is the handful of ideas that everybody seems to be having right now. We talked about this with Apple, which has all of these same ideas too.

Apple has semi publicly at this point been working on this like home pod robot thing that we may or may not see at some point. But this is the new idea that Open AI is working on. It's an echo show. With a camera with a camera.

“I think if you want to make a thing that works and is useful to people, this is not a”

bad place to start. It's just deeply unsexy. So the two things about it that jumped out to me were one, it wouldn't have a wakeward. We always listening. And then two of the camera would be able to recognize things like items on a nearby

table or like faces like facial recognition and I'm like, man, did you not see what just happened to ring? You're going to Sam Altman is going to be like, I'm going to listen and watch you all the time and you think the people of America are going to accept this. I don't think that.

They absolutely think that. I don't know, man. I think that the public is turning against surveillance in a way and they're not going to put more. They already think all the things are listening to them.

Yeah. Even the ones that aren't. Yeah. It's true Adam is very has to make an Instagram video like once a month being like, I'm not listening to you, but I really want to, you know, like who knows, man.

“I think the thing that they're stuck on is the devices can't work the way that Johnny”

I would want them to work. He wants the things to be complete. He wants them to be delightful. He wants them to surprise you with capability to hand thought out. And these tools at this moment in time cannot do all those things.

Yeah. They're getting better. See that they've gotten better over the past year, but they're not complete in the way that an eye product needs to be complete. Right.

What continues to interest me about this space is you can either do two things. You can either build the incredibly futuristic, magical thing, knowing it's not going to be what it needs to be and trust that eventually the underlying technology will catch up.

And to me, I've seen a lot of people betting on the technology getting better and making

a bunch of these things work. And I have not seen one good idea about how to make it work now, except for an essentially like desktop apps on your computer and your phone that let you write code. Like I keep talking to people who write a lot of code in AI apps on their phone, which

“I think is like a fascinating cultural behavior that we should talk about, but there is”

nothing to me that is like we understand what these things are and are not good at right now. And we have found a way to address that with hardware. I have not seen it anywhere. Yeah.

The consumer users are like I replace Google a lot of it. Right. You have a phone and a laptop for those things. It's fine. Yeah.

You know, Johnny I've products. So this is for Johnny I've products are defined by their constraints that is the thing that he is the best at. He finds the constraint of the hardware of the software and he makes that the focus of the product.

Yep. In the realist way, that is the genius of any great Johnny I've designed. And being like I will find the limitation of the AI system and make that the focus actually runs counter to what everyone wants you to believe about AI, which is that it's going to be the singularity in lines and a good straight up.

Yeah. Like acknowledging the limitation, I think it's going to be fundamentally the challenge

“for whatever product it says, because that's what I've done, but that's not what Sam”

will have been does. And they can't. There's too much money in it. Yep. All right.

You get to end with one. This might be the greatest. So you're very much. I love when the economics of the creator economy just sort of like show up. And they show, sometimes it shows in dramatic ways, my joke is that every YouTuber gets their

wings when they make their video about YouTube and like the business of YouTube.

But in a matter of YouTube, we'll always do numbers.

Yeah. And it's like that's when they become business people. Yeah. It's like that. That's the day that the light goes out of their eyes and like they become mercenaries

and they've made a video about YouTube, like everyone, they all do it. Yeah. Okay. That's like one category of these videos. The other category is everyone else's cropped except for me, which is very good.

And one of my favorites. So there's a really good one this week. This is all of our sub-stack right now with the polymarket integration. Everybody is like, no, but I do markets. Okay.

Yeah. It's great for everybody else. But I treat them respectfully. I will integrate gambling advertising into my content directly. Put it in a hot way.

“So I think it's all the time because, you know, we run a reviews program.”

We're noise better. I think it's policies. I'm not even trying to hype ourselves up here. It just, I watched this video and this one thing, like, whacked out to me, like flashing red signs.

So a YouTuber named Honestly, who reviews chairs, desk chairs. Made a video. The title of the video is, how would chair expose the worst YouTubers? Nominal title, like A plus, A plus, A plus YouTube. So there's a desk chair called the Libra Nova Omni started on a Kickstarter.

The thing was given to a bunch of YouTubers to review. And the dark side of all product reviews right now is the creator economy for product reviews is so gross. It's all paid placements. It's all secret advertising deals.

If the advertising deals aren't there, it's, and we've heard this from creators. I'm, I'm saying this with sympathy. It's creators who know that the next brand deals on the line, so they're gonna hold their tongue. I, we've heard from creators who, uh, they know that the brands are watching their content.

So they sort of preemptively hold, hold back, so they can get the next sponsorship. Like, there's just a lot there.

So this video is incredible petty detail goes through how every other YouTubers corrupt about

the Libra Nova Omni whether it's the affiliate link disclosures, whether it's disclosing that it's a partnership at all, whether it's not talking about the, like, this is, it's a, I want you to watch this video. It's a classic of this genre and I love this genre, right? Nice.

I think it's extremely well done and whatever chairs this man wants me to buy, I will buy those chairs. I know hate towards us at all. What jumped out to me like a blinking red light is this line. Can I play this for you?

Please. Because this is a chair review channel, they naturally approached me and I told them that I would only accept the sponsorship on three conditions. One is that I must be able to test the product thoroughly to make sure it's an actually good product.

Two is that I must be able to disclose honestly without any kind of hindrance, the cons of the chair and three, I must be able to talk about the riskiness of a Kickstarter. Libra Nova agree to all my terms and they stay true to their word. When I submitted my draft that had criticisms about the armrests, about the seat density, about the Lumbar support, they did not ask where a single revision.

David, what jumped out to you, rep that when I submitted my draft is a sentence I did not expect to hear. I don't want to say it's the idea that any of our reviewers would ever say we will accept this deal, but you have to let me say the truth about your product and then we would submit

This is this is the economy now.

This is the creator economy on YouTube. This is the product review economy. I'm telling you to watch this video.

“I think it's very well done and I'm telling you, I cannot review a chair of this well.”

Please, by all means, continue watching as I'm in chair if you want it for honestly. I'm just getting at, I think it's starting to bleed into people's perceptions of everything. Everything is transactional, but everything is bought and paid for, the polymarket and calcium that everything is gambling in the background is everything is a brand deal or you're trying to get sponsors or you're trying to get access.

And so I watched this and I was like, it's crazy that we now live in an information ecosystem where the single greatest video about chair drama I've ever seen in my entire life contains with it. This like absolute meta crisis of a video about the corruption of brand deals containing within it and admission that the brand deal required approval from the company.

Yep. It's the same by the way that this is not none of this is, is pointed at this guy honestly. This is the game.

This is the game everybody plays.

This is the game you are forced to play to make money and be relevant on these platforms. Yeah. No, no. This is the system at work. Yeah.

Like YouTube does not pay enough money to these creators. Instagram pays no money to creators to talk does not pay enough money to creators.

“You have to have brand deals in order to survive.”

So I make your money. I truly do not begrudge anyone for playing the game as it's designed to be played. I'm just pointing out where we have crossed a bridge where even in the video about corruption there's an admission that the brand has control of the content or could assert control of the content in a way that again if any of our viewers came to me inside we are going to submit

the story for, I'd be like, no you're not. You're absolutely not doing that. And that's very old school. There's a part of our audience that assumes that's how everyone should work and there's a new younger part of our audience that assumes that everything we do is also up for approval.

Managing that split is actually one of the weirder and more complicated things because every time we talk about our ethics policy, whatever, a lot of people are like, that's how everyone works. And then a bunch of people are like, what are you talking about? Yeah.

It's not how anything works. Yeah. Exactly. And now watch the video. Yeah.

No, this is like a great video. I thoroughly enjoyed watching every minute of this video. It's so well done and it is so instructive about how this economy works and it just, there was just a part of it. I was like, and then within it is the economy.

Yeah. I say this with deep sadness, Hank Green was really good on Dakota this week talking about a lot of this stuff. And in particular, he talks a lot about why they're able to put up with this game as platforms because there is this endless supply of people who will come and play the game and be burned

out. And once they're burned out, there's a bunch of other people who want to hang to Hank talking about everybody will do the silly stuff for six months because it feels good. And there's an endless supply of those people. And I think that is sad, honestly.

Like not for those people, but for the fact that the platforms and the advertisers have decided that they can win this game because that turn gives them all the leverage is a real bummer. I think there's a real incentive for creators to make their bag as quickly as it can because they all think it's fleeting.

Yeah. It is just a fear that they all express. And again, I'm saying this with sympathy because that is not a thing that you are in control of if you build your business on someone else's album. And so whatever you post these videos, at least people like, I get all these comments like,

you hate the creators. And I literally, I have done everything in my power to not be beholden to other people's algorithms. Like David can tell you, I'm like manic about it every single day that we should be in control of our own platform.

And so I've nothing with sympathy for people who have made that choice. Because I can sense the loss of agency or the precariousness that they feel when there is a shift. Yeah. And all I'm saying is go watch a video.

I think it's very good. But you can see what, when you watch it through that lens, it takes on a very different tone. Yeah. Totally.

“There's any because if you want to continue to make sure that Neil I Patel is absolutely”

ungovernable. The best thing you can do is subscribe to the verge, the verge.com/subscribe. Not only do you get ad free podcasts, but it is like, that's the thing that lets us do these things. Right?

Like yeah. It puts all the incentives in the right place for us. It lets us do the thing that we want to do in the right way that makes sense to everybody. And it is, it is working and it makes me tremendously happy. We have gone way over.

We should get out of here. It is like 730pm.

Yeah, thank you as always for watching and listening.

This show is a verge production in part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back next week with Alice in doing some MMWC stuff.

It's gadgets season. We're so back. Neil I. Bye.

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