Why people really hate AI

Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and

“whatever else they could cobble together, not because they want to, but because building”

internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where retool comes in, built custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data, and retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com/verchcast, we all need to retool how we build software.

Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're a developer stuck fixing bottlenecks instead of building the next big thing, then you need MongoDB. MongoDB is the flexible unified platform that gets out of your way. It's acid compliant, enterprise ready, and built to ship AI apps fast.

It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer.

It's a great freaking database.

Start building at MongoDB.com/build. Once upon a dismal day, Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray, although he had big ambitions and his socials lacked creative vision. Welcome to the Verchcast, the flagship podcast of the Verchcast producer job that is now open.

I'm a friend David Pierce. Neil, I'm going to apply for that job.

“I think that's going to be easier than my job.”

We are hiring, I want to get this out of the way, right up top because we haven't mentioned it on the show yet because we are terrible people. We are hiring a producer to come work on the Verchcast with us. You can go to voxmedia.com/jobs, apply, mention, branding car, and your cover letter. If you are a brand and car, if you are a brand for this job.

I think that the greatest part of this is branding car wouldn't get the job, but he would get an interview. Do you know what I mean? We would come in. I would hire a brand, and we are also hiring a supervising producer for a decoder.

I would hire a brand to be the supervising producer for decoder. That could be fun. That job is run my business in policy show, and I would just be at the yellow and bright in all day every day. He is good at getting attention on the internet.

See what I'm saying? That is the game we all play now. But both of those jobs are open, producer on the Verchcast, supervising producer on decoder. We have big plans for us. We want to expand them in lots of ways, so we need help so if you know people.

I promise we are not as unpleasant to work with as you would think David is would be. We're like mostly as unpleasant as you think. David's not all the way. Well, I'm more in your list, and I mean, so we like, this is why we're a good match. You're at the light and I drive everybody insane, and this is like this is like a good balance

for sure. It is. In the sense that David does all the work and I do none, that's really how this plays out. It's a great move.

You just sort of cool-laden me. Cool-laden man in five minutes before the show starts, and you're like, "What's up, guys?" Yeah. And I imagine hot takes haven't done any research on what to go.

Which, in fact, brings us to where we should start the show today. We have a lot to talk about. There's some Apple stuff we're going to get to later, Allison Johnson is going to come on and talk about the unbelievably brief life and death of the Samsung Galaxy Z. We tri-fold and her bizarre experiences with that phone.

I'm very excited about that.

But first, there's sort of a big picture thing going on here, but the specific bit of news

“this week that I think has been on a lot of people's minds was this memo that went around”

inside of OpenAI from Fiji Simo, who is the CEO of Applications at OpenAI, which is a hilarious headlet that means nothing. But Fiji Simo is like a big deal. She ran Facebook at Facebook. She was the CEO of Instacart, like she's a heavy hitter in this world, and has been an

open AI making a bunch of changes. And she sent out this memo essentially saying, "Open AI needs to focus." This company has been on what she called side quests, which is a pretty accurate representation was going on. Like OpenAI has launched every single thing you can think of over the last two years.

And she's basically like, we need to stop doing all of that and focus really aggressively on enterprise and coding use cases, because that is where the product market fit is. That's what we need to do. We need to pull back on all of this stuff and focus on those things. And in there somewhere, I think, is the bones of a bigger conversation being had right

now about how people feel about AI and whether AI is going to continue to grow in the way that these companies need it to grow. And I just think, I don't know, we can talk about this from a bunch of different angles.

I think, like, what do you make of Fiji Simo's memo here?

“Is this the right thing for OpenAI to do at this moment?”

I think so. But I have like two big reactions to this. One, they just did this. Same amount than just to clear to code red. Yeah.

Like minutes ago. Like, I don't even think we've settled down. I don't think we've undeclared to code red. It's not over. So what are we doing?

What do we, why are we doing it again?

Did it not work the first time?

Did it not take? Like, literally did people not get the code red memo, so we're sending a different memo with different words to see if that one hits? There's a really great line from Fiji Simo in an all hands with the team talking about this stuff. Somebody, I guess, asked her, is this a code red?

And she goes, we are very much acting as if it's a code red. I don't think necessarily declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense. Very good. Perfect. And correct.

This is not your right that this is not news to open AI, or at the very least, it shouldn't be news to open AI that this is the move. Well, this is, I think this is my second reaction to this. Open AI is stuck. Fiji is supposed to be the one making the big consumer product.

They hired her because she ran Facebook, which has ads.

They hired a million ads people for meta.

There are so many people at meta for open AI that in meta all hands, they talk about losing people to open AI. And then kicked himself to run the lab to do research and pretty much ready to make digital Jesus or whatever he thinks he's doing. And Fiji's CEO of applications, she's supposed to make the big consumer product that

does it, that takes market share away from Google search the most lucrative business and a history of technology. And they're not doing it. It is not occurring. They might be taking market share, but they're not making money.

That's the thing.

“That's, I think, the important distinction, like it is, there is no question the chatGPT has”

been doing it on a success, right? Like tons of people use it and we're going to get into the way that people feel about that, which is what I really want to talk about here, the feelings people have when they use chatGPT or fastening, but people are using chatGPT and opening AI is losing money hand over fist every time you use chatGPT.

And I think it's increasingly clear what this company has realized is there is no path from that to suddenly we make money on chatGPT. They're trying ads. They've tried shopping. They've tried all the things that you would try and it appears all indications are we're

not running towards profitability here. Right. You hire the person from the big, scaled consumer internet business to do that again. You hire Fiji from CMO to do it again and she is the one writing the memo acting as though it's a code read saying we have to pivot to enterprise.

Yeah. Because that is the opportunity. The story here is that no one has figured out the worthwhile consumer AI business. No one. Even Google kind of hasn't.

Right. They're attempts to do it. Look way more like slot than not. Yes. AI overview is just so frequently wrong now that it's becoming a joke.

We are planning our Apple 50 package and I asked the yesterday when did the Wedshaped MacBook Air come out which is just a fact you can know. There's a lot of ways to find out when that one came out and AI overviews could not get that answer. Yes.

That's brutal, like even Google which is going to do the best job here because it already has the scaled consumer business. It's making a lot of money and has a lot of advertisers. They are hurting their own product. They're going to hurt YouTube in a very real way.

They're starting to run surveys on YouTube asking people if they think that the videos are ASL. Oh wow. Because they need to build the detector. Like there's something going on with Google but they already have a big business.

It's winning and they have Google Cloud and Google the other stuff. Open AI. They got to make a business. It's existential for them. They need to make more money than they are spending or say I'm has to keep raising money forever

and that is pretty shaky.

“And so I think absent a big consumer hit, this whole industry is paralyzed and starting”

to kind of lash out that people don't love them more. You were talking about before we started according about the perception that the Vergehate technology which is very funny because we employ literal gadget reviewers and I love technology and I will spend all day in all night talking about high bit rate movie streaming and we will do like spec episodes like what do people think we're doing here.

The problem is people have conflated tech with AI and AI has not come up with a consumer

use case that people love. They really have not. Like none of these companies have really come up with that thing in this way or at least a way that makes money and now the industry is starting to feel that pressure because they're asking for so much data centers everywhere, no more RAM for anybody.

skis in terms of what they're asking for and they haven't made a product people love and so people are like no actually we'd really dislike you in the data kind of backs it up. Yeah, I mean there was this one NBC news poll a week or so ago that I've seen a bunch of people talking about that is essentially the question was basically how do you how do

“you weigh the risks and rewards of AI basically like is it is it net good or net bad?”

And with the caveat that polls are always messy people think that it's bad.

This is just one thing from it is says 57% said they believe the risks of AI outweigh it's benefit compared to 34% who said the opposite. A plurality of voters view AI negatively and don't believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology. That is not unclear evidence this poll is fascinating by the way because they also

poll people about like how do you feel about Gavin Newsom and ice and the Democratic party and just a lot of things sort of in the ether right now and it's like people are psyched about polp Leo people are psyched about Stephen Colbert and like everything else sucks including AI and AI is like down there with Democrats generally in the war. It's between ice and the Democrats which is just a tough beat for AI right now.

That's really bad and I've talked to executives at the biggest companies in tech who are like Genzi hate AI and that's our problem. Yeah.

“But straight like they will just look me in the eye and be like the problem is a Genzi hate”

AI. We don't know what to do about it. There's also this really interesting Pew study from last fall like this is this is a building set of data right that we've been getting real scientific research about how people feel about AI for a while now and it's kind of been like this the whole

time. It's not like people are starting to sour on it. People talk about you know the trough of disillusionment it's just been like this pretty much the whole time. But in this Pew study 53% of people said AI will worsen people's ability to think creatively

compared to 16% who said it will improve this far more people said AI will worsen rather than improve people's ability to form meaningful relationships. 50% said it will worsen them five said it will improve them.

“Like this is not there's there's a certain subset of people out there who are our indivalent”

and wait and see and who knows and whatever but like to the extent that people have reflexive feelings about this it is overwhelmingly bad. Yeah. And I want to make the comparison to two other things because the scale of change the AI might bring is huge but it's not without precedent.

So the internet promised a huge amount of change and it was just adopted you didn't have to try. Do you know what I mean like it took a while and there is a dot com bubble and there are fits and starts and there is a lot of silly ideas going on with the internet but people by and large just started using it in a bunch of companies were able to make a lot of money

along the way and there wasn't this level of confusion. Yeah. I mean like Amazon chose not to make money for a long time very publicly very loudly said we're not making money because we're going to build all this infrastructure in the

second they're like we need to make money now Jeff Bezos owns a very large boat.

You know but the the the the internet the way that economy developed overall was it was just obvious. Yeah it was the same with smartphones and apps and you can feel a lot of ways about mobile lot of ways about social media you'd be a lot of ways about mark Zuckerberg you can feel a lot of ways about the Apple text like that economy developed and you did not have to

convince people to buy smartphones. Facebook is actually my favorite example of this people raced to join Facebook like raced to get on it because we we eventually figured out the downstream effects and there were all kinds of problems and all that stuff but like the initial value proposition of here's why this will make your life better was so clear to so many people that the minute their

college would allow them to they started pouring their lives into the platform. Yeah like it it was so straightforward a good proposition that everybody just ran for it. And I've been doing all this research for for version history our other podcast for people to go listen to that has led me back to like the days of the radio and the early days of the the phone and yes there are small panics about what those things will do to the

world but overwhelmingly most of those new technologies were going to like solve world peace. These were the things that when they bring us together everything will be wonderful

now and we will never have problems because you can just communicate seriously.

This is like these are real pervasive beliefs that radio will make the world a meaning hopefully better place. Yes connecting everybody with is the goal and there will be some negative

at meta famously wrote a memo called the ugly in which you laid out all of the bad things

“it would happen and said still we connect everyone because we think that's the highest”

in best use the technology you can you can feel a lot of ways about that memo a lot of

people have felt a lot of ways about that memo and his point always has been no I was just

laying it out like these are mistakes and these are the consequences and we believe in what we're doing anyway because we think we're going to make the world a better place this is the line from from Silicon Valley it's got a Nelson saying I don't want anyone else making the world a better place before I do yes that's Silicon Valley but everyone believed in this stuff I can make this even more narrow YouTube is basically built on widespread copyright infringement

yeah but those industries did not like this that we we were YouTube took all this stuff the same is the AI industry is kind of built on widespread copyright infringement but YouTube was so useful and so good and so obvious that everyone sided with them in a way that they're not sided with AI industry right you can just see delivering meaningful actual value to consumers let's you get away with the law right the iPhone is the you know it's the Vanguard of moving

high-tech manufacturing to China the Apple built that ecosystem in China so to Tesla you ever should go read Apple and in China it's a great book but you see these two companies in particular kickstarted entire industry over there why did we allow that to happen because the iPhone was great because it's great it's just a great product and so our smartphones and my point here is the AI industry is staring at these poles that say everyone hates them and it's because

they are asking for so much and you you can quantify that in a million ways they're asking for a lot of power they're asking for a lot of land to build data centers they are asking for every stick of ram that has ever existed in the history of the world they're asking to scan every book without payment they're asking for my identity to run grammar like whatever it is that they're asking for they're doing it without permission and they're asking for a lot and they have not

given back a product that makes people feel the way that the internet made them feel or the smartphone made them feel or YouTube made them feel it just doesn't exist yet and so instead of reacting to that by building great products feed you see a lot of things we need to pivot to enterprise and coding because anthropic is killing us there and then the vcs are going on podcasts and doing what they do which is blaming consumers or blaming the media which I think is bananas

yeah but have you been deep in the weeds of the vc podcasts this week I feel like you've been

talking to me about vc podcasts more than usual I have so here's what here's what happens and

I feel so bad for her it happens is at night I try to put the baby to sleep and he's real color so you gotta just hold him until he's like actually asleep but his eyes are closed and he's he's just trying to do a not wiggly thrashy thing where if you put him down to early he'll wake up did you have a sit there yep what are you going to do when you're sitting there you're going to

“watch tiktok on silent that's what you're going to do when you're sitting there so I've just”

my I don't even wear headphones you just watch it on silence watch on a tie oh my god that's fine and I didn't say it on the side if it is a weird way to experience tiktok but it's what I do in our poor team just gets tiktoks like 8 30 p.m. all day every I can confirm this for I feel bad about it so I ran across this trader called signals noise she has a PhD from your Chicago child because I went there she's the co-founder thing called bookscape

her title says AI tech strategist you go watch her videos so we'll link them they're good her name is in here so if you want to tell me what your name is I'm happy to say her name but it's hard to find

your actual name and she's called that two podcast one of course is all in always everywhere

everyone's going to know that is and the one I want to start with is uh the big technology podcast which is hosted by uh Alex Kentroets who's a friend of ours he had Olivia Moore a partner at Andreston Horowitz on and she called at this clip this reaction that in particular VCs are shouldn't have to the negative messaging around AI so I want to actually just play the same clip from the big technology podcast this is Olivia Moore who's a partner at Andreston there's been a

lot in the media in the US more broadly these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water and that that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology and I was just talking with someone this morning who's not in the tech industry and they were saying the same lines like AI is evil it's going to watch us like it's using all the water and then they were like but touchy between really helps me and it has like great

“answers and so I think part of it is a timing thing if we just need these products to kind of”

saturate the mainstream consumer and they can realize the value so there's a lot of things in there but we can talk about the water another time um this assumes in a certain way that

and I would actually say what what seems to be the case is that we have the exact reverse

which is that everybody has tried these things everywhere and found them wanting in some meaningful like you can't avoid these chatbox at this point like if you open up Gmail you get 11 pop-ups reminding you how to Gemini in your Gmail these things are not far away from the users it's just that people find them use them and at the very least find them not worth $20 a month right like for the purposes of this conversation we don't even have to litigate

whether the products are any good they're not worth $20 a month to most people and until they are worth $20 a month to most people they're going to hemorrhage money and this this to me is just like it's just assumes that all of this is out there and it's like the the you know the future is here it's just not evenly distributed that is not at all my experience with AI right now yeah no it's everywhere I have a different objection to this to this idea from

Olivia Morton, Jason Horowitz and it's the one that the creator made in her video and I brought this idea to our environmental reporter just in comma and to me asato covers the fashion industry and shopping generally for us environmental objections do not do shit for the American

consumer they like they've never done anything for any no not one thing like the reason I brought

up fashion is fast fashion exists and no one cares about the environmental cost of she and

“totally literally no one cares that's how does fly and off the shelves I am a sucker for a big”

stupid car I really I love them we're still under the better what why don't I lots of people in this country know every inch of the environmental cost of big stupid cars we've been talking about it forever I have an EV I will tell you my EV is a much more pleasant thing to drive than my stupid Mustang but I love my stupid Mustang right like there's it just doesn't work like you're watching what's happening in EV sales right now if you cared about the environment you would buy an

EV you would not buy it the dumbest trucks that you can buy which is what Americans are addicted to buying yeah someday when you make a country album I need it to be called I love my stupid Mustang I'm just going to make me very happy I love it the most I'm just going to set like this idea that the media has convinced everyone that the in particular water cost of AI is so high that you should hate it is just totally divorced from the reality of how people react to environmental messaging

at all yes at all in fact I would argue that the do the right thing versus do the convenient thing is an easier trade for people to get over to do the convenient thing then almost anything else with environment like many times the you know do I give up my private data in exchange for some convenience like people have more feelings about that than will I burn the world down for some convenience like behave your suggests that we will happily burn the world down if it gets me my

clothes 10 minutes ask people how they feel about the paper straws man yes yes exactly the paper straws

“might not be helping anything but like the idea that you should like have suffer some minor inconvenience”

to make the turtles incremental benefit like no that runs like I hate these straws it is so easy to overcome the environmental roadblock the moral sense that your actions will help the environment or hurt the environment you just need a great product you that's that's literally it or a more convenient product and so here you have a partner at industry store which is effectively now just a VC for defense contractors saying people hate this technology because the media is lying to them

and first of all the media that most people consume as we have talked about over and over on the show

is not it's not right that people are not reading their times it's just opening TikTok they're watching the algorithmic media that is being delivered to them by big tech companies I have a huge vested interest in as you're saying distributing AI tools to them yep so it's not I'm not popping up on people's feeds and you're like did you know that's a lot of what no that's not happening and even if even if that was happening you can just look at you know that the weird

dip in EV sales after the incentives one away and people rushing to buy gas cars even though gas prices are through the roof like people make weird decisions when the environmental factor is the main factor by the way asked for us and then we're gonna note about this EV sales are ticking back up because gas prices are I and the cars are actually better and maybe that's all going to equalize but it's not the environmental concern that is driving concern behavior in a

car market or in the fashion market or anywhere else where you have environmental concerns it should

“shift the market and that's what I asked justine about this what asked me about it's what the”

creator is when I heard it you know you can get over the point I'm trying to make is you can

from in particular a IVCs who are saying it's not it's our fault it's your two stupid you've

been lied to the tools are amazing and we just have to wait and the the objections will be overcome

yep there's another one as well which again this is all an inch wrong so it's like I just feel like I'm dunking on a baby but like we should listen at least some parts of the AI ecosystem

“have decided that this crazy scary doomerism is the best way to raise money where every now and”

then they come out and they say all the jobs will be destroyed and profit you know Dario says that this thing is sentient and investors are like okay here's 10 billion here's 50 billion here's a hundred billion now we're blaming the AI founders themselves I find this argument to be essentially non-sensical like because a the whole AI will remake the economy AI will change the way that work gets done we're gonna have to do universal basic income because nobody's gonna have a job anymore

this was a feature of the rise of all of this stuff for years until until a bunch of people went

wait that sounds horrible I don't want that I like my job I enjoy doing my job please don't automate my job away with AI Slap and there was there have been other lines in all of this they're like ugh in America we're we're way over indexed on people like in creative arts and it's again I'm good with that actually like all of these things are fine and for the longest time people like chum off and podcasts like the all-in podcasts we're talking in glorious terms about how

terristic it was gonna be when AI completely remade the economy and so now to call that doomerism is just ridiculous yeah I totally agree in that world view and that world view is really prevalent Alex Carpe is running around saying women are gonna lose their political power and it's men who work

with their hands will suddenly have the economic power because AI will replace all of your

dumb woke laptop work or whatever he whatever he wants to say and if that works to raise money by the way chum off you're the money guy oh yeah he's the money he's the money he's the dumbest money if this is the sales pitch that works on you you are the problem well to be clear these guys hate anthropic as they think anthropic is woke it's just sure but it's Sam Altman is just his doomerie in this way right he's the one running around saying your everyone's just

gonna rent intelligence from the cloud and they're gonna build a GI like there's something here where their own messaging is the problem and they've convinced people that all of the jobs are going away and now they are facing the consequences of that messaging and they're blaming the people yep and I just keep coming back to the idea that we all knew what was gonna happen when you put a camera on every phone in every pocket in the world we we at the verge have been writing

about the effects of that at every level from the very beginning like the whole verge is kind of founded on the inside that phones would be a big deal and it was like not obvious in 2011 it's very funny to tell people that in retrospect that because it's like oh congratulations you thought phones

“might be important like great job but I'm like no it wasn't it wasn't guaranteed for the way”

we need to write about technology and culture at the same time we were like what are you talking about it's like well the whole they're all the same and now here we are we did it anyway because people were like I love having this phone in my pocket I love having this camera with me all the time and you get you can just we have written this story you draw a straight line from that to like the black lives matter movement yeah to these huge like social changes around everyone should have

a camera all the time these big conversations about surveillance and surveillance those are all the costs putting cameras everywhere in the way that with them everywhere those are enormous costs right I think we're reckoning with those costs now in real ways but it all happened because people wanted the technology they love it that's not what's happening here right we the cost being imposed we're gonna take your job away is not the fault of the consumer right right it it might be the

“fault of Dario it might be the fault of Sam Altman but the only way the investment pays off”

is if you remake the economy with the AI it's the only way that the mobile investment paid off these are the stakes they've drawn for themselves and I just I'm flabbergasted that they don't see that they haven't made a great consumer product that that's the thing that will changes actually we had a couple weeks and a lot of people here but we just taped an episode of the code with a CEO Cisco Cisco sells the stuff that goes in data centers and I was asking about this and I was like

you know like if you just said the data center had Netflix in it people would be happy like that's where the movies come from and he started laughing is like you think so and I was like oh that you don't this is just flying over your head like you have to make some case that there's some benefit

is Sachin Adela he he was at Davos of all places and he said that the AI companies need to

get quote social permission which is amazing for a company like Microsoft say we should run this

club I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy which is a scarce resource and use it to generate these tokens if these tokens are not improving health outcomes education outcomes public sector efficiency private sector competitiveness across all sectors small and large okay I have two thoughts on this yeah one Davos famously a place a bunch of billionaires fly on their private jets to talk about how to save the environment

“perfect uh two this is right so this is correct I think it's it's it's slightly ironic that it's”

coming from Sachin Adela someone who has spent the last few years flailing pretty aggressively to try to find the use case he's describing and it hasn't gone well being is not the thing copilot so far is not the thing uh Microsoft I think in in less straightforward terms is doing a pretty similar kind of retrenchment that fidgety mo and open AI are talking about that they're like what if we just approach AI as a business software and that that has been you and I have both been on this podcast

saying AI is business software the business of AI is B to be SaaS software and has been for a long time and there are like we're gonna we've been threatening to do an episode about the SaaS apocalypse for a while and I think we should because I think there are actually really interesting disruptive things that AI is going to do to business software that is not how you get to where all of these companies want to go and I think Sachin Adela is right that the risks that they run

by not making this appealing to consumers are also going to backfire in business right because they are they are incurring such a reputational hit and at a sort of reflexive problem with AI that people are developing that is going to make it harder to even build business tools that do AI things. Yeah I mean there are as many studies as you can count about whether our businesses are seeing

efficiency improvements by adding AI and the answer is basically not yet or no.

Yeah it's somewhere between no and like yeah it's like it hasn't happened yet and maybe there's going to be a new set of companies that come up and they're built on the cost models of having a bunch of AI agents instead of a bunch of engineers and I mean they can make the same products as a big company cheaper and that's just the disruption life cycle I don't know maybe that's going to happen hasn't happened yet it certainly has not happened yet and so you're just seeing

okay we're asking for all of this energy we're asking for all of this data center displacement and all these communities the communities are like no like make it worth it to us yeah to what end

“what is in this for me and I don't mean to say that AI is like totally useless I think it's”

still pretty brittle as we have discussed on the show many many times you can you can run into the walls of things AI cannot do but we know now that at least when it comes to the software development it has tremendous value that is causing a bunch of concentration in that community you just had Paul Ford on I think that conversation is brilliant people just listen to it once you can develop software you can kind of go into adjacent industries that's it's a real thing but there's a lot of software

running a lot of companies and you can you can widen out yeah but that doesn't mean you can do everything and it does mean you can eat the whole world and I just see this gap where everybody in that industry is like why doesn't wired like tech anymore or why does the verge hate technology and it's like no it's it's literally the citizens of America who are like I don't like this right like the the polling is clear and it's not because of the media it's not because of

domerism it's because you're asking for so much and you haven't delivered a great consumer product

“you've delivered some very compelling enterprise products yeah that's not enough and I think”

the hope from a lot of these companies is that something like cloud code will eventually be a consumer product I mean you you see it now right they built co-work out of cloud code to make it a little more accessible they built dispatch out of co-work which is basically like you can you can run it from a messaging out like they're trying to make this kind of creative tool accessible to more people and it's it's going to work but that is not a mainstream that is not an Instagram level

use case right we you you and I always like to talk about the sort of foundational

mobile experiences right and the the two you always bring up which I think are right are uh Uber and Instagram that are like things you couldn't do on a phone that the technology on a phone enabled that changed the way we do life um that's the sticks and there is nothing remotely approaching that for normal people living their normal lives yeah you can have a lot of feelings what we did we just had dara on decoder boy do people I feelings I do right yeah but the fact that you can

that is just a remarkable thing that happened because of the mobile revolution I should be Uber's

“new tag life I've said that I said I said that to dara I said well I once tried said that to Travis”

Kalnik and our office in midtown and he just started cracking up he's like I never thought about that

like it's crazy right like you push a button and something happens in the real world in a new worst case uh it either it's it's a camera or a highlighter it's one of the other really or if you're unlucky it's a model 3 and they'll have the region breaking on and you just have bad time a lot of complaints in the world about model 3 is with region breaking um it's the thing we do or ask is whatever like you push a button so we happen to the real world you order

something for Amazon an object comes to your house that is the thing that the mobile revolution is like truly delivered in a way that had never occurred before and then Instagram and social media we actually wrote a piece about this James Perry on our first creative director wrote a piece about this the way at the beginning um James is an old film photographer he used to shoot the wind surfing championships hanging off a helicopter on the film sick and so when like digital

showed up and phone showed up and all the photographers had their mouth and he's like I

so happy about this like I never want to be worried that my film is gone and missed the shot again

and it's digital like he had this totally interesting wonderful perspective and his reaction to Instagram was it is so insanely powerful to put the distribution next to the camera right you're going the feedback loop here is it's the story I've come back well linked that story too I've come back to it over and over again just the inside there is so powerful you can't do that without a phone you can make an Instagram on desktop computer but the camera part doesn't exist

and so most people will never close the gap Instagram brought those things right next to each other

“I think TikTok brought those things right next to each other the dominant language of TikTok”

is replication you see a trend and you make it yourself yeah that is an unusual dynamic in like the history of culture right most people like you copy me I'm gonna see you all right but like TikTok is just about widespread replication these are huge changes the technology brings about I think they're fascinating I think it's pretty hard to make the argument that we don't like technology because this is what we talk about all the time on the show and our site is like look

how cool this is like we're changing how we live yeah and then AI is like we're it's in there and it's like would you like a girlfriend that's the best idea they have right and it's like most people like no that's pretty weird and my friend who does have an AI girlfriend is getting weirder by the day and it's just like it's been danis to me that this is interesting see it yeah okay all right we we should move on from this but I will say I am curious if you

“have used or have an inkling to what these use cases are if you've if you've seen something”

if you're making something if if there is a thing that you're betting on is like the mainstream consumer use case I desperately want to hear about it and if it has to do with the vibe coding I don't want to hear about it or automating anything that's right I'm I'm serious about this the idea that most people can identify a loop in their lives that is worth automating yep I mean we got 50 years of technology development to prove that that is not the case

yes you just can't do it product like for me as a productivity nerd AI has been so fun because it is going to remap everyone's to do list system most people don't have it to do list so it's like we we need to go several levels down into what it is like to be a person in the world but genuinely if you have a theory on what that is I want to hear about it it's 6x4 to 11 is the hotline first guess of the verse that commas to email me lie at the verse that commas where you

can send all of your five coding ideas we're going to take a break and then it's it's tripled time we'll be right back support for the show comes from laurel group using the latest advance mission science and 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

light 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 laurel.com laurel group create the beauty that moves the world support for the show comes from samsara companies need to move product from point A to point B that means hiring drivers which in turn means vehicle insurance dash cans and accepting the fact that accidents happen that's exactly where samsara

can help it brings AI dash cams vehicle tracking and asset visibility together in one simple platform their data shows companies have reduced fuel costs and improved driver retention thanks to better visibility and coaching according to their data samsara AI helps reduce crash rates by nearly

construction and logistics don't wait for the next accident to take action go to samsara dot com slash verge to request a free demo and see how samsara brings visibility and safety to your operations that samsara dot com slash verge samsara operate smarter support for this show comes from LinkedIn apps when you're running your own business every decision could feel like maker break and you can't afford to waste a penny so if your b to b marketing is still

falling short it may be because you're preaching to the wrong choir whether you know it or not

“if you want to reach the right professionals use LinkedIn ads LinkedIn has grown to a network of”

over one billion professionals and 130 million decision makers according to their data

that's where they stand apart from other ad buys you could target your buyers by job title industry company role seniority skills company revenue also you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience that's why LinkedIn ads both one of the highest b to b return on ad spend of all online ad networks seriously all of them so get your ads in front of the right people and make your b to b strategy work you can spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit

for the next one just go to linkedin dot com slash verge cast that's linkedin dot com slash verge cast terms in conditions apply all right we're back Allison Johnson is here hi Allison hello okay i we're here to talk about trifles and i want to but i just had one of the strangest parent technology experiences i've ever had a my this is happening me in real time and i just need to talk this out with both of you who have

young children so uh our three-year-old is in pre school and for the first time we're using the bright wheel app to you guys know what this is i do check some in an hour right yeah i assume every school has apps like this but like we we check in and out the QR code uh they send us pictures throughout the day they send us like information about what they're doing all this stuff uh and a few minutes ago i got three separate notifications i don't know if you can see this here they're just

“say incident and have a bandaid remember oh no i i have i have no other information presumably he's”

alive i don't know it's like what what do i what do i do with this this is like i don't i either desperately need to know about this and need to leave this podcast right now or this is fine

and this is information i'm gonna wish i never had do you think there's like a second set of notifications

like after incident like it's just like come now yeah it's pretty bad you guys that's a phone call when the phone starts ringing yeah yeah so all of this is to say uh this was luckily this is a like 20 minutes ago so presumably everyone has recovered but uh i may suddenly leave this podcast modern parenting is very strange uh this is like i have both i'm glad to have all this bandaid and then like incident with a poop emoji do you know i'm sorry no this is my first well

so there is there's potty colon p and there's potty colon bm so i know the ones and two's i say oh but like this it's a real like how much information are we as people supposed to have do you know what i mean this is this is the dilemma i feel like right we we he's very

“little of that information and is honestly for the best i'm like well he was alive at the end of”

the day great that might be the correct answer like call me if i need to get them to the hospital and otherwise i'll see you at the end of the day obviously now i'm in a very different place with the older one so you know i'm actually like almost eight and she's in second grade so now

it's just she comes from school i'm like what happened to you she's like you'll never know

i know no information will be refrauded to you and so i'm kind of like looking i'm like waiting for reject like get some bright wheel in his life you can know the p's and the bm's that's good uh with the maximum you know when we lived in the woods in the pandemic uh like my office was in the the basement like i did i did the show from the basement basement and i was often down there working and back you'd be upstairs and you couldn't actually yell from the basement

all the upstairs and so we used the walkie talking on our apple watch all the time and it was basically just a poop notifications are like a very expensive i need you she pooped again and now this house you can you can just yell from his bedroom to the kitchen like it's trivial and i feel bad because we're not walkie talking about what you've called bm's anymore uh yeah you're just it's important parental communication to just yell it's happening to each other

exact times a day yes or oh no yeah i need new pants like it's a whole thing um all right Allison you have what has become a precious object just in the last few days this is now rare phone contraband which is you have a Samsung Galaxy Z tri-fold in your possession tell us what happened with the tri-fold this week i mean you have a thing that appears to be

yes we have been on a whole journey trying to get one wrote about all in very great detail on

“the site but the basics are like Samsung PR you know typically will send us a review unit of a new”

phone they did not provide us one this time around their reasons uh for that always tell

yes exactly and i'm I'm realizing how much of a tell so we try to get a whole this tri-fold where like we got a we got a buy one um went in and out of stock like so fast couldn't get one we turned to eBay um you know found someone selling a tri-fold for a small fortune and ordered it and in the meantime i had to fly all over the world to go see phones and um so none of us really clocked that it hadn't shipped uh when it was supposed to so this was

like red flag number one um we go back and forth with a seller the thing finally shows up at my door and i opened up this FedEx package it is a box with like two seals on it let's say like

“do not accept if this has been tampered with and it's like very clearly been tampered with”

so i was like this is a very strange not usually how i receive a new phone opened it up took the the film off of the inner screen and there were crumbs and little hairs not like uh yeah yeah this is not the first time that phone had been like you know exposed to this is not ideal it is it was gross um i turned the phone on it's already set up which was also a very large red flag um also not how phones are typically shipped to a to a customer

all that is to say this is a very weird experience i was sketched out uh the phone immediately asked for a whole bunch of permissions and i was like did i factory reset um and then i turned it off and i like didn't want to touch it for a little bit so that was acquiring the tri-fold um in the mean time uh Samsung announced they're not gonna make it anymore the canceled the phone yeah they're just up and canceled it like i've been on this journey to get this stupid phone and all

of a sudden i'm like well this is our this is the end of our relationship i thought we were at the beginning we were gonna have these good times together so so here i have this phone and um just the funniest part is that it when i powered it back on after resetting it and coming to my senses

it wanted a sim card to set it up also strange to me you've never had a phone insist on a sim card

and i was like well i don't have one lying around i don't really trust it and then the light bulb went off and i was like i have this Trump mobile sound that is just languishing in like a a Samsung as 25 um kind of perfect actually right this is the realest Trump mobile has ever been right yeah it like got this this phone to work i set it up it's still asked for a lot of weird permissions but i think these are just that the thing is we have um the serial number is a phone

sold in china and the eBay seller claimed it was a Taiwan model which is a different serial number this is where the the weirdness is is coming in i think so this is why i'm getting some of these

apps that are loaded on the phone are just in one UI in china which is i have never seen them um i don't

think it's like a malware infested you know taking time bomb of a phone but it is running on Trump mobile and that's like the weirdest combination of phone and network a weird a chinese phone with it does have the play store if it's chinese no it does not so a weird chinese tri-fold with no google play store play services because they're not allowed in china running on

“Trump mobile isn't unholy combination like you should light a candle or something it's a kind of”

perfect i feel like i have no notes on that i actually feel like the Trump administration would be like great job Alison or they would arrest you like i don't know if i should run a small cast i don't know which government officials going to show up at my door and arrest me it could be any number uh it's true for any number of countries yeah yeah a lot of possibilities so how far have you gotten with this phone is it like is it actually up and running for you now it functions um

it won't get on it it won't get on the internet on the Trump mobile network for some of

and the phone started ringing and it was honestly like a horror movie it was like i'm sorry the fact

that the Trump mobile signal provided you data mobile provide you spam calls is also perfect it's perfect yes yeah it doesn't do the the thing that you pay fifty dollars a month for but um you can have a spam call uh so it does not have the internet i don't trust it enough to put it on my home wifi so i hot spotted it to the iPhone air that i'm using right now i was like what do i do and i just loaded up you know uh the virgin a web browser and and made the window bunch of

“different sizes i was like cool that's what i do for a thousand dollars later i can like look at”

the internet in repising a window on a phone that honestly that's that's a lot of innovation somewhere in there is a truly damning critique of foldable phones which we should get to but i i do where you guys i'm assuming we're a surprise as i was about the cancellation of the tri-fold right

this was not your bit your second Samsung refused to send us a review in it as like one this

product's a dud um it been like i i mean here's my usual caveat it is very hard to make money making media on the internet and there's a lot of creators out there and a lot of influencers and like go make your bag do it how you gotta do it they just make a different thing than we make and so my criticism here is not of people and businesses and they're like like please be successful it's so hard i i'm not gonna fault you for for trying to make money on youtube or instagram or

“whatever it's so hard it's a huge tell when only the influencers and creators get the phone”

sure because they're so reliant on brand deals they're so reliant on access in very specific ways that these companies can put them on rails you can actually see it right now with apple apple is putting a bunch of influencers on rails the owner is about apple 50 like it's you can see it we we we don't do that right well you you buy it from us as our ethics policy we're huge tricks about it we're very annoying about it talk at all time and so when the companies won't give

us the phone or give our peers at other publications we have the same more similar ethics policies

when it's hard for traditional reviewers to get the phone you always know it is a tell every single

time because it means the product is in good enough and the coverage has to be sent it off now again i'm i'm not trying to take shots like lots of people lots of influencers have phone

“they can feel how i really want i'm just saying that's the reason i think it's a tell”

because we don't have to do what you say sure and that that's a dynamic that exists for a lot of people and so the second it was like week three of me in the editorial meeting in the morning being like do we have the phone yet and it was like Samsung what was ghosting us although i was fun sucks Allison what were they telling you about why you couldn't get a fun i got um i got a lot of polite you know lines like oh you know we're noting your request and you're impressed i was like okay

great um you know and i i teased out a little more information about you know they were sent very few review units and they were going to try and give me a heads up when it went back on sale um and it sold out before anybody could be like hey right he's been five i was going to say we're all agreed on that is not about popularity that's about they made five yeah yeah which is when i started to suspect something about this i was like if they wanted to

sell this phone they could sell the phone like they would just make more phone now there's like they they could there's like a ram shortage it's their tariffs like there's a lot of reasons that already expensive phone was getting more expensive or harder produced and maybe you just want to put all the ram in the s26 but that's not really what they're saying here right like they're just like yep goodbye yeah yeah they're framing it as like this was a nifty concept that we decided to

show off for a little while and that is that feels very disingenuous with how Samsung originally talked about this also there's real demand for the phone they would allocate the ram to this phone sure you mean like they make all the phones if you're like well people really want to buy tri folds we're going to put the components that we can get in the tri folds and we'll charge with the market can bear and instead do like no on top of that upo launched the find n6 which they're

that's a zero field crease not zero c if you don't I'm saying you could see it but you can't feel it is very compelling we have a video of it done did a hands-on it is almost creaceless they're only it launched yet in Asia and Australia they're not even coming to Europe what will in the United States my thesis here house and I'm curious now you try to try to hold

phones and I think like my my little phone gets bigger might still be compelling but my big

phone gets even bigger and my big phone gets three times as big I don't know can I tell you I'm this close to declaring victory over you now oh you know I have been fighting flip phones versus folding phones for like two years and I'm this close is this kind of winning like intervention it's like I don't got you yeah no I wouldn't do that to you because again having a Chinese

“one of the Trump mobile sim on it I think I'm trying to spit it out okay but yeah so you've been”

using the phones you've obviously seen this phone as close as anyone can see it what do you think it be this work I think it's still I think it's still playing out and it's definitely you know

we're seeing in real time companies be like what should this kind of phone be shaped like what's

the limit of how big it can be versus how annoying it is to carry around versus how expensive it is like to try full just almost $3,000 if you could actually buy one so in meanwhile you know the Chinese brands I think are dialing it in a little faster it kind of seems they have the you know the zero fill crease they have a very slim foldable that is also dust and water is instant we in the US we have the pixel time profile which is the dust resistant one so you can't

have like quite all together and I think there's you know I think companies are really for many reasons has the tint to jump into the US especially with the phone that's going to cost somewhere

“between 1800 and 2000 dollars so I don't know I think some of these companies it sort of feels like”

we're in a place where they're treading water and they kind of want to see what this apple foldable

that we will potentially probably maybe seed towards the end of the year is going to look like and we're such an an iPhone centric market I think that could be a big moment for folding phones or it's the moment we find out that nobody wanted these things and it was just a fun little project for me to walk around with one and buy a tiny keyboard for it I think it'll it'll be a telling moment I mean you're my favorite case on this because you have kind of deliberately you have bullied

yourself into finding use cases for the foldable phone and I think you've genuinely found some like there are it's not that there aren't things that the foldable phone makes better it's just that they're still very expensive and I think like we were talking about in a moment where all of these companies are struggling desperately to have their phones not get more expensive the idea of this already being twice the price is a problem right we've spent I mean how long is that fold

been out five years now we've been waiting for the price on these things to come down and it just has not it just hasn't and now there's this upward pressure on phones that is like preventing these things from becoming mainstream accessible anyway and then you fold in I say this with love Alice and most people do not want to tote a logitech keys to go to the coffee shop and do you know on the table public drink coffee that just it doesn't feel like somewhere in there and part of

me wonders if if maybe you know we've we've talked a lot over the years about the sort of cultural differences in phone markets that maybe there are reasons that people will use phones differently in Asia or in Brazil or in some of these other markets that have very different phone needs than the U.S. does that they'll start to take off but for me right now I don't look around and have any reason to think there are sort of killer apps for foldables just sitting out there especially

not at this price I do want to call it the thunderous sideways don't kind of watch that keys to go

“very important that I have to be right here you know what's that you know what's funny boy so it's”

favorite Richard Lawler's or senior news editor here at the verge he runs a news team his job is boiled down to what can it stuff and I also say that with love because if I could do any one job at the verge of being a senator which is just a terrifying reality for me. Richard does it better than the lie would just so if he does so much better it's still my favorite job it's like it was the job I had it in gadget ages ago um I mean his job was looking at stuff he has a

pixel phone phone when you're talking about this and he was like I am the person that this phone is for and I struggle to find reasons to use it because all day long I'm meant to be looking at things yep and like on the go like being able to have the bigger canvas so I can like look at a desktop web page and like a value when I'm looking at and like have a slack window open and back and forth and he's like I don't use it maybe doesn't have a logic key to get maybe this

there's some uh place that they could hit this market is my parents because I brought home the

“pixel tempo fold for it was kind of my home um my phone I used over Christmas and I opened it up”

and my mom was like I want that phone I that is so cool but it is $2,000 my parents are pixel A series people they buy their $500 phone and they don't want to think about buying a new phone for the next you know five years if they can get away with it and they have their iPad it's like iPad to face time with the grandchild and then phone and if those things could be the same device I wonder if there's a world where they'd be like okay yeah I'm willing to spend more on

this phone and it's going to replace the iPad or if it just ends up being like no that's $2,000 I'm gonna stick with you know these two devices and it's not ruining my life you've brought

us to the precipice also you will take the first leap in predicting what the Apple folding phone

will do it is for face-timeing grandchildren if that's all it is you can unfold it and run to iPhone app side by side and then maybe like a big face-time either it will be a huge hit or the biggest flop in Apple history the question is whether you unfold it and it is a little iPad or you know that's a pretty fine distinction I am just truly if if they make that phone and it is the same kind of compromises the iPhone Air where it gets thinner and lighter and the camera is

way worse like it's not worth it to me like you will have reduced the the primary utility of my phone to give me an iPad and I don't use my iPad it's like but I might be a very narrow you guys like maybe it's just big face-time as long as anybody wants I'm looking at this like Samsung

scared the pants out of Apple for like two years yeah by having big screens first and there's like

a lot of like internal tech company emails from various court cases where like Apple is like literally freaking out that Samsung has big screens on phones and it's taking market share away and it reorganized like the tech landscape like Samsung became a player because their phones were bigger than Apple's for a couple years there yeah that one that worked it worked and then Apple is like

“fine our phones are big too now and you would think I think this is what Samsung thought that the”

fold would be like the biggest screen of all and I don't think that's playing out the way that they thought it would and so like what's Apple gonna catch up to I don't know yeah I think predicting what the iPhone fold might be in the face of Samsung the travel didn't work here I can't tell you the Z Fold 7 is like a phenomenon. Apple is not even it's like hottest ones they're not launching it in like one of the bigger markets for Android in the world in Europe I don't know it

it just seems like this might have come to nothing. I certainly think that the the ram situation and all those different pressures are like come at a very tough time yeah for foldables when it's sort of like okay we're figuring out some of this technology we haven't figured out how to make it cheaper and all of the pressure is leading to more expensive phones now so I can see how you'd maybe ease off of like okay well this cool thing that we're trying to push forward on

we're gonna back off a little bit and just focus on like selling phones and trying to make some money off of that right now. Yeah if you're gonna decide to stop selling one thing this is pretty clearly the one right like yeah if we need ramps on the phones the people buy so we're gonna stop putting it like it might just freeze the tiny bit of this market that does exist for a while because you just have to put the ramps in something else. But that doesn't explain why they didn't want

“us to review it I think the phone wasn't very good. It's super heavy I will say and I played with”

it at CES I don't know my takeaway then wasn't like wow what a heavy phone but maybe it's just having it especially like all folded. Can you unfold it for us you have it? I can't. I will say like six times right after this thing came out Travis our producer would just slack me and be like who is this four and I think it's a great that thing is enormous. I mean this is like you know I know the Huawei tri-fold came in every step watching that video of it unfolding like I'm having the same

reaction to it like yeah it looks like boy I want to it. It's a tablet. I mean it's real thin you hold it like this you're like this is a lightweight tablet and you fold it up and you're like God this is a

tablets and the people are gonna summon us maybe the problem is people just don't want Android tablets.

“That's why we're waiting for the iPhone. Allison we just hold up the home screen to the camera again”

yeah you can you can tell from this home screen that no one has done the job of figuring out what Android is supposed to look like when you open your phone up because all they do is they take Android and they just make it real stretchy like that's not that's not the answer. Oh it opens in. Oh and neither is the malware. I'm constantly asking begging for yeah financial information. Have you considered downloading your banging up? I think yeah I think

the other side of this is like I've experienced all the wonkyness of using Android on the big screen of

a phone and I have notes you know like let it be more of a computer than then they do right now and the other question is like when Chrome OS becomes aluminium is it gonna when I open up a

“folding phone am I gonna get that experience or am I gonna continue to get big Android which is”

frustrating you know I don't know there's like a number of scenarios that could could play out or start to play out this year and like we're gonna have to wait and see it's an annoying reality yeah it doesn't seem like the the iPhone folds takes are both very high and very low in terms of like this is not this is Apple going to sort of try to do the like prove the market thing but there is no market and it's it's just is this is this the vision pro or is this the

iPod right where they put up the slide of all the ugly ones and they're like we did better is it that or is it look at this science project that we also made I'm just saying if you're like triumphantly like all these ones turned in Android tablets but the iPhone folds turns into an iPad

“it's like cool there's something there that will just be weird yeah yeah indeed all right we”

need to take a break Allison how long do you intend to use this thing before you like throw it out of a window to avoid whatever is happening to you so you know I'm gonna take it out on tomorrow I have a whole day planned for it I wanted to have like a nice you know day where we go do some fun stuff we're gonna go down town I'm gonna use my my little logic tech keys to go you're gonna get all its favorite treats exactly I know because it's you know if they discontinued

it's we don't know how long it has I'm gonna give it a good like effort and then I don't know what's gonna let's get a bit put it up it's miss hurry yes all right well good luck thank you for coming on we're gonna take another break and then Neil and I are gonna come back and presumably yell about free speech for a while we'll be right back support for this show comes from factor

somewhere between the first warm weekend and the fourth of July eating well stops feeling optional

luckily you can keep eating healthy with well-prepared meals from factor factor prepares meals designed by dietitians and crafted by chefs ready in two minutes no planning no cooking with 100 rotating weekly meals to keep things fresh and delicious factor makes meals that fit your goals and schedule no refined sugars no artificial sweeteners and no refined seed oils and all of this can help you eat healthier and manage your calorie intake plus the new muscle pro collection support

strength and recovery perfect if you're getting back into a workout routine head to factor meals dot com slash verge 50 off and use code verge 50 off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year offer only valid for new factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase make healthier eating easy with factor support for this show comes from upwork every business wants to make a profit and with profit comes growth but successfully scaling a

business takes the right expertise at the right time upwork can help grow teams quickly by bringing in specialized freelancers so you can move faster and take the business to the next level upwork is a one-stop platform to find higher and pay expert freelancers across web and software development data analytics marketing and business operations upwork can help grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 plus categories you can fill

skill gaps launch projects faster and scale support up or down without committing to full time

ready to help your business grow that's upw-o-r-k dot com upwork dot com

“but what I want to tell you not to get a lot of the studio semester by tag lepto-pücher soft”

behind the internet so master's really great you can say you can say the back of the guy you mine's for the story upsets no but you're not a guy you're a super worth value for track make the game's a just with visor steu-a and when they then are divided houses catching that's good save visor steu-a hold it down get to ruck yet cost no's out for being all right we're back time for the lightning round and the lie assume that means it's where we want to again we have to say it's unsponsored to play for oh yeah it's unsponsored for play for there you go

long pause i want you to imagine like two or three ellipses in a row every time i say that uh is it time it's time it's time you know i feel like David worth a point now where Brandon is so dumb that people like jump out of bushes to tell me how stupid he is true it's not so much the existence

“of bread and car is the dummy that makes me sad it is just the consistency of it's just like”

sometimes you need like a like a routine breaker in your life you know what i mean yeah can

Brandon just just like what what if one time you just come on here and you're like Brandon this amazing

smart thing do you know how great that would be for the verge cast if you were like three tiers for bread anyway it is time once again for america's favorite podcast with an podcast bread and car is a dummy this week's theme music submitted by julya mark here it is do you ever hear a song and immediately know this is gonna be in my head for a long time i'm going to be lying on my pillow at two thirty this morning singing

julya i don't i don't thank you for that it was incredible i love the band stars like they're one of my favorite bands and that just sounds like like not a great stars record because that's not what they would do but it's like you know i mean it's it's like the song they made just to sort of get the juices flowing first thing in the day yeah like it's like we made a

song i've run like i've been like why did you do but that was amazing oh it made me so happy thank you

so much julya what do we have this week uh we're gonna go from that vibe to a very different vibe like leaving so like happy uh it's leaving so upset all in one all in one go so here's just some facts the united states is currently engaged in a war in a room okay not for here we're gonna start here uh it does not appear that anyone knows why it does not appear that anyone knows how this war went or if it should and it does not appear that Donald Trump even knows if it's a war you

know i mean like the president's first ask congress to declare war and they keep going back and forth and he keeps saying it's war it's all very confusing in that i would say media coverage of this war is unlike uh for example the war in Iraq which was my political awakening is like a young college student we're like everyone i knew under the age of five hundred new that's going to war in Iraq was about idea uh and the media in the democrats and everybody was like we're going

that we're doing it freedom fries and then you know the war act and this is very bad i'm just putting

“this in a context right like i i think what this administration wanted was a bunch of”

drum-hounding war coverage the way that the war in Iraq got a bunch of drum-hounding war coverage and they're not getting it because again everyone's like is it a war and if there's a confusion why do we get a war confusion how do we end the war confusion this is awful i think this is driving Donald Trump crazy and so Brandon last week was at moralago where presumably he encountered Donald Trump we actually have a clip of how Brandon describes Donald Trump this is

on a podcast he was on called pod force one can we just run this clip he is you know the alpha in every single room that's true in every single place all across the world okay god that sucks it sucks so bad first of all and just as an exercise for the listener it's very easy to make a list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the alpha like i like my daughter's second red classroom it's almost impossible to be the alpha and then that's a locker room god i'm about

your powerful if the people think you're powerful like this is like the theory of true power

right like a pta meeting yeah like you know what i mean like a plan parent hood board meeting like

like an infinite list of rooms in which Donald Trump would not be the most powerful person in the

“room not be the alpha any remember honestly um don't forget it was there and i took it i don't feel”

bad about it at all uh so that's just how Brandon encounters Donald Trump like he's just he's just there is a sink a fan to suck up to the boss which is a bad thing for the primary speech regulator in the United States especially when it's sensorious is is is Brandon but again just as like an exercise you can make it it's like a pretty fun exercise to make a list of rooms in which any president would not be the alpha and i i'm just assuring you like a kinder garden would be one of

those rooms like it's trivial to make this list okay i bring this up because you know Brandon's at Marlaga where you know the alpha dog is telling him what to do from the 14th hole from the fourth year yeah and Trump puts on trees social this like classic rambling out of his mind true social post where he says yet again and intentionally misleading headline by the fake news media about the five tanker planes were supposedly stuck down an airport the newer times in

“Wall Street Journal in particular in other low-life quote papers and media actually want us to”

lose the war their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts they are truly

second to mention people blah blah blah blah Trump stuff he's he's mad if the newspaper saying

the war is going poorly or that the United States is incurring any losses or that the United States has made errors in the war like bombing a school he doesn't like the coverage of the war he's not getting a rack war coverage it's just not happening yep how does Brandon react to this he says broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortion also known as the fake news have a chance down to correct course before their license renewals come up the laws clear

broadcasters must operate in the public interest and they will lose their licenses if they do not and he goes on to say changing course in their own business interest since trusted legacy media is off on the off-hand level this like rhymes with him going on Benny Johnson's podcast and telling ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel but is actually somehow like a less veiled threat than that this is an open threat yeah and it's dumb in in a staggering number of ways first of all

the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and opera casters to say this they're newspapers they don't have broadcas licenses to the extent that they make audio and video programming they distribute them over the internet where Brendan has no authority whatsoever so he's taking this Trump shot at the Wall Street Journal which I will remind you is owned by a group of expert Murdoch and here are times and he's taking his Trump criticism of the times in the journal

and turning it to the place where he does have authority broadcas news organizationized he doesn't really even have authority over that he has this idea that he can use the the concept of a license renewal to affect the news coverage by saying you're doing news distortion this is a totally unproven theory but this hasn't come up ever like a broadcas station hasn't had its license denied like a long time and if he does it it's gonna be a court case it's unproven that he has

a authority but the threats do keep working the threats do keep work the chilling in fact as we have talked about many times is to some extent the point and he is working yep and I'll just remind people the chilling effect is this concept in first amendment law they're just by threatening enforcement you stop the speech from ever happening right people are free that they'll be

punished for the speech they never say the thing out loud and that is happening all over the place

the chilling effect is super real in the American media right now especially for the broadcasters who keep running into brand and car this is why James Tolerico wasn't on the commercial right the CBS was effectively chilled from that and whatever way that that actually happened the chilling effect worked there they made the decision but it was because they were afraid of enforcement and I think we're gonna see a lot of that in the upcoming election cycle the chilling effect

of the equal time rule is just me real for the broadcasters in the cycle so now we have an extension this Brendan has this perceived power of the news distortion rule and he's saying his interpretation of that is broadcasters must operate in the public interest and what Donald Trump thinks is that the public interest is positive coverage of the war right and it's because that is patriotism because that is patriotism being a patriot means loving the war that your country is in

no matter why we started it or how will end or how much will cost or whether there's an end in

“cycle and again just because my frame of reference is the horn or rack that's what they want”

right they they just want freedom for ice and and chest pounding coverage and an absolute belief that there are weapons of mass destruction all that stuff that happened in the early 2000s which was a mistake and like to the extent that anyone's learned a lesson that was sort of been learned and they're not getting that coverage and so now Brendan is saying broadcasters must operate in public interest even if that means not critically covering a war that the

out over his keys I think he's I think he's I think he's misread the room I'm going to punish a bunch of comedians for making fun of Donald Trump you can pick up about half of Americans with

“that those are like low-ish stakes all right I don't think it's great I think I will be out”

raged about the first amendment you know lots of people will be out raged about first amendment Stephen Colbert will get lots of views on YouTube because saying the thing is not allowed works like but you can pick up about half Americans by saying don't make fun of the president sure another another party when you get to don't do negative coverage of the war or the government will

punish you you've a like a critical miscalculation you are so stupid Brendan you and you've come

all the way back around where Ron Johnson who's a center for my home state of Wisconsin is on Fox News criticizing Brendan Carr and the reason I'm bearing up Ron is again he's center for my home state of Wisconsin Ron is a complete and total idiot but he just is like the people of Wisconsin know he's like everyone knows you need it like this is just not a smartman and you know for whatever reason he's gonna like did like Ron thought the FoxCon factor was a great idea

“you know what I mean like yeah it's Ron and like I either people who vote for Ron and he's not”

the brightest bulb but he's our guy like that's the vibe Ron Wisconsin here's Senator Ron Johnson on Fox News after being asked about Brendan Carr threatening the broadcast licenses of news

organizations that aren't sufficiently patriotic I'm a big support of the first amendment

I do not like the heavy hand of government no matter who's wielding it so no I'd rather the the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible and really the federal government's rules protect our freedoms protect our our constitutional rights I mean there's a browsing speech right when you are so stupid and you're so so addicted to the idea of censorship to please Donald Trump you're out the dog that you've gotten on the other side of Ron Johnson

like I maybe just because I'm from Wisconsin like I can't even describe how like totally out in the wilderness Brendan is this week like no one thinks that what he's doing is the right thing to do except maybe Donald Trump because Donald Trump it hates negative media coverage of his war there's no coming back there's not going to be positive coverage of the war like the

“American people do not like this war and I think Brendan is on the cusp of making a mistake here”

that kind of reveals just how hollow all of his threats actually are because once he punishes a news organization for negative coverage of the war or says you'll do it or comes close to actually doing it I think a lot of people on both sides of the aisle including Senator Ron Johnson are going to say now you've definitely gone to for yeah road back I mean so much of this is I think back to the thing we talked about before that a lot of what people like Brendan Carsei

publicly is for an audience of one and that one is Donald Trump as what Trump wants to hear and what resonates with the public get further and further apart that becomes a more dangerous game right because like you said there there for a long time you could come out and say bonkers things that lots of people think were bonkers but that lots of people would agree with but when you run into these things and I think the the chemical thing was it was a really interesting

kind of early example of this that are that was that was bipartisan against what the Trump administration wanted to do like the the backlash that was swift and it was across the spectrum and when so when when you go out and you say he's the alpha in every room like that is four Donald Trump that is that is so that he will see it that is 100% what that is for because it will score you points with him because he likes hearing people to say nice things about one television

like there's been all these really interesting stories about people getting Trump's phone number if you see an all this that you can just with two minutes of work get Trump's phone number and he answers and you can call him and he says a bunch of nonsense and people print it because they think it's cool to answer their phone call right like that is fundamentally how you win points with Trump is like access right and so but then as as that move gets more and more

politically problematic this gets to be a harder game to play Trump is going to push you out on the ledge and Brendan is out on the ledge yes and I'll actually contrast this you know the version is like vast so we you know this week we cover DLSS five and we covered the Samsung canceling the tri-fold and Tina win our DC reporter she went to a Pentagon press briefing this week yeah like we're it's big it's big first version.com yeah and we're trying to like figure out why like

why did Pentagon which famously kicked the traditional press score out invite Tina and the answer is

they wanted her to see Pete Heggsett take good questions huh right they were interested in

was basically like I hate you liar here and then you know that the front row was like news max and the the Mike Lindell show like some really weird stuff is in the front row and they wanted Tina there for her to see like these press briefings are real hmm because it's very important that any government especially our government like do that show for the press like I was just got a 10-foot game Mark Zuckerberg and tonight we're trying his politicians actually politicians

no like real politicians never shut up they're everywhere all the time making their history

constituents because you can fire them yeah like Joe Biden didn't show up and he got fired straight forward is that like he just wasn't accessible the number of CEOs I've talked to you on the code or like we couldn't get a hold of anyone about administration so whatever like at least Trump picks up the phone like that's a real dynamic I think it's a real dynamic for any number of voters like where was this guy he just disappeared and then we shut up he was like looked old like we fired him

politicians get fired and so you see the government is just a constantly talking and they have to earn the respect of the not-acapted press Brendan doesn't understand he's undoing the thing that gives them legit in the sea with this stuff and I really do think Trump has pushed him on this

ledge and he can't back off it because Trump is the alpha I never sent a room to these in

anyway Brendan I've once again called you a coward is is loudly and is clearly as I can I'll do

“more time Brendan I think you're a coward if you want to come on the show and defend these moves”

defend your relentless attacks in the first minute or come on to coder and tell me what your decision making process happy to have you on you know where I am at I think the audience wants you to come on and uh it's just a reminder we're hiring so if you like to be a producer of a trust you can submit your estimate it's always that's been running cars dummy America's favorite podcast been a podcast I'm just saying Brendan if you go on to coder and not the verge cast you won't get

custom theme music that's just something that's just something you should think about well play the music

all right let's actually you mentioned DLSS so for my first lightning round item let's let's do

DLSS sure you you I know have been practicing to describe to the people what DLSS is and I find being completely honest I'm not fully confident in my ability to do it so can you describe what DLSS is and then I will describe why it has caused such a ruckus this week everyone loves it when I describe gamer technology it's it's it's it's where I live it's it's truly the heart of my

“excuse this is a plight of madden yeah that's what I got me actually like you make some audience”

have you ever wanted madden players to even hotter than that all right DLSS actually very clever I I I think what Nvidia did with the LSS and the entire idea behind is very clever that basically if you have a video graphics card your game can render frames at lower resolution and then pass it through DLSS which is AI to upscale the games so you don't take the full power of the graphics card to render it's you know 140 frames per second at high resolution you can get

the performance out in the DLSS upscales the graphics to higher resolution and this is more efficient and a lot of different ways a lot of you get higher resolution higher frame rates on lower and the graphics card again I think it's a very clever use of the technology and until yesterday was not the world's most controversial thing Nvidia had ever done yeah so then yesterday a Nvidia rolled out DLSS five and basically framed it as an AI filter to make everything look

better and the this is not some you know big future thing that's gonna make games look better this is not like a new version of the Unreal Engine this is saying all your games look like shit and we're gonna use AI to make them look great and I'm not really overstating the way that it was presented very much in that so this comes out and it comes out in a really interesting way

“there was a digital foundry video that I think a lot of people recognize this button paid for”

and digital founders are really important voice in the gaming community that made a lot of people feel bad about all this stuff but also there was this sense that Nvidia is just railroading all of our games with AI whether you like it or not and there is also next to that the fact that a lot of the stuff just doesn't look very good yeah you've seen a lot of the the same examples I have and sure they're like what if they're just were no shadows and everything looked

kind of like a like a soap opera from the 1990s is that what you would yeah or what what if we upscale faces and we literally changed the way these characters that you've come to know and love look that people made on purpose they look like people like artists have designed yeah and by changed the way they look what they mean is like give them Instagram model face it's it's very odd like they've all been yesified in real ways and again I just want to point

out in particular the coach models in Madden are very bad and I would accept a fully acidified like Matt LaFlor and Matt LaFlor was like really hot you see what I'm saying like to be fair amount of words good looking massive and you could find and you could turn that up to 11 with our BLS5 I just put it out there I think the really interesting thing here is yes Nvidia

button and controversial DLSS kind of was it right like there's been criticism of it and like

“certainly people like locking concerns because the developers code for DLSS like all just whatever”

but the idea that it had the same sort of slop concerns as AI not really in the mix until

DLSS5 and the reason is because it's the first time the graphics hard is imposing taste on a video

so you're talking about shadows going away you know that's the iPhone HDR like the phone adopted this is right next to the what is a photo question it's right next to what is a photo it's right next to the iPhone has a look and people don't like the look and we've talked for years about how we prefer the pixels looking like now there's a tone mapping control and do you like process zero and halide like cameras have looks they have aesthetic judgments embedded in them

and your graphics card playing a video game should not right the aesthetic judgment should come from the developer and to whatever extent that you want to monkey with the settings should come from you your graphics card sitting in the middle should not be like and everyone has huge boobs which is kind of like where we're going with this yeah and I don't think Nvidia saw that as a problem until the the rush if you back and to be honest the frankly hilarious memes of DLSS5 on it off

that have been circulating over the end of this week the memes are very good and uh Jensen along the CEO of Nvidia responded to the criticism of this at GTC their big conference this week

basically well he said I'll just read this to you he says well first of all they're completely wrong

which I will just say in the in the annals of how to respond to backlash is not the right answer particularly gamer backlash yeah you're wrong doesn't usually what people don't

“go oh you're right great call I am wrong you don't just worry I think it's the gaming community”

like you suck in you stupid yeah you'll take my stop and you'll like it gamers yeah very confusing I'm not sure why he said that or took kind of approach uh yeah the point he was trying to make in hand-fisted fashion was that the developers are in control of DLSS5 so if they choose to use the DLSS5 SDK and enable it they have some control over what it looks like at the end of the process and maybe they were just showing the most dramatic examples for the purpose of a keynote

but first of all your completely wrong is just not the way to send that message no especially when

you're in video and it's getting ever harder to buy one of your video cards to play video games because you're selling them all to AI companies of people hate yeah I mean again it goes back to there is this fundamental disconnect between the stuff that is being built with AI and side of it and the experience people are having with these tools I will say if you'll sell me DLSS5 to Yassify David on Riverside which is what we used to take the bird chest I'll take it

I'm just like if I were like you know 60 to 70% hotter this podcast would be unstoppable this is like this is these are my two theories so if I could remember everyone's name put it in soft wool and if David was just hot can you imagine God unstoppable all right we're going to do one more each so we're going to end up in the atmosphere we're like am I David if you just had abs

I'm going to I'm going to start looks maxing and you're going to regret a lot of things that we've done on this show David I do and I I've been meaning to tell you this for quite some time

“I think you should hit yourself in the face of the hammer if you're not”

where do you have said that's going to be before but then a really different context what's your next lightning random I'm going to do it once it's double debunk for my second lightning round and just two headlines by our reporter Robert Hart who covers AI and culture these great science order one headline is this is not a fly uploaded to a computer and a second headline is chat she me tea did not cure a dog's cancer okay I'm familiar with one of those things

but not the other well if you spend any time on the everything app x you know the world fans everything app x mm-hmm the amount of wild AI hype that gets laundered into like the SEO factories of the world into outrageous headlines that have nothing to do with even the claims on x that cycle is alive and well most famously this is me saying they did not do robot surgery in a banana yep okay this is happening on with AI at scale because the hype machine is out of control

so one of them is there is a research group called eon that just put out a post being like we have uploaded a fly to a computer this is what it says and this goes everywhere there's headlines like the SEO machine takes off you know people are reposting it for clad it's like nuts like just out of control and basically their evidence is like a video of a computer fly like I don't it's buzzing now it's so Robert looks at this we look at it and Robert runs around

starts talking a researchers like could you do this look at the evidence they provided is this real by the way the research group in question the claim we think this fly is conscious in a limited

minimal viable product of an uploaded animal these are not words in the sense you cannot have an

MVP of life you know like I love product manager speak decoder is basically just like what do

you mean product managers and like this is nothing so Robert goes and talks to a bunch of researchers the researchers like this makes no sense one of them points out to Robert and this is a real quote

“also the fly does not fly which in the grand scheme of what makes the thing a fly it's like very important”

goes back to the company and says I have all these researchers saying your full shit and the company concedes to Robert this is not a perfect replica of a fly I don't think of uploading an animal as a binary concept describing quote different levels of upload and admitting that we don't knit know how much biology is required to capture the information so just full walk back full in total walk back Robert one reporter just went and said does this make sense to like a bunch of researchers

researchers also had no Robert went back to the company said no one thinks to speak any sense and they're like yep we didn't do this we did not upload a fly by computer it's uploading an uploading a fly to a computer is a spectrum the answer nonsense the friends who made a

long the way you like okay second one tragedy did not cure a dog's cancer and we'll link to Hank Green here

Hank Green made a video about this also a really good debunk the funniest part of this video is he tried to make YouTube short but it was too long for short so he just put it in regular YouTube and

“called it a long which I think is very good anyway there's you know Silicon Valley bro says that”

he used tragedy to come up with a vaccine for his dog's cancer okay okay Robert looks at this one I did see I do remember this one over here because it's a dog you know the local news can resist this one Robert looks into this I'm just going to read the quote not only was Rosie not cured of cancer it's not clear that the vaccine was responsible for her the improvement the personalized treatment was administered alongside another form of immunotherapy

known as a checkpoint inhibitor designed to help the immune system target tumors making it difficult to know the vaccine had any effect at all so like you just don't know like just straightforwardly this is not a real test you don't know so it's like we we did this thing and also gave them the thing that was the solution to their problem who knows which one it was so we just don't know and then here's the other one for Robert the vaccine itself was not generated by a chat but

chat TV did not design a great rosy treatment human researchers did at most the chat about served as a research assistant helping pars medical literature just a full of the bucket this is why wild everywhere what a perfect AI story because the thing that actually might have happened is very cool and very exciting and like a genuinely exciting use of technology this helped a researcher do better research and solve problems no a lay person did better research

sure fine kick ass if that if that is the truth great why do we have to go pretend that it cured cancer like it's because I've ever wanted to feature sure you can farm a lot of cloud on at you see everything up by the same things people want to be true likes for days man anyway Robert poor Robert is just on the deep out case now this is what he does well so what does length so you can read him but just be careful over there this is what we mean

by the way when we say new light just sends people to talk to date 30 p.m. it's just like the verges news room exists to figure out if what me last on his time is real we sell here is

rigor and like the first type of rigor is like is this true yeah weirdly relevant question

in it turns out yeah that rigor does not exist on x the everything that's very true all right

“my last one and I think this is an appropriate place to end is that meta continues to do the”

funniest possible things with the metaverse so we we've been tracking all the ways in which the metaverse is not working for a very long time meta announced a while ago that it was splitting uh horizon worlds and it's VR efforts which looked like a bad sign for the metaverse then it announced that it was going to shut down VR horizon worlds which looked like a bad sign for the metaverse and then it announced it was doing a bunch of layouts and it's reality labs

which looked like a bad sign for the metaverse and then meta put a date on the actual end the the VR horizon worlds experience it was June 15th was the news this week that is going to be the end of VR in like the the end of the VR version of a horizon world everybody here's this and immediately this generates a new round of headline saying meta is bailing on the metaverse this this like became a narrative this week yeah we've been tracking this for forever there was

actually no new information except a date but everybody saw this as oh meta is winding down the

giving up so meta does what I can only assume is a complete reaction to this narrative and

“decides it's not going to shut down the VR horizon first after all uh this is this news just”

came out today Thursday as we're recording this and um in an AMA on Instagram because this is how meta disseminates news uh Andrew Bosworth the CTO of the company said that they're gonna keep the existing VR worlds uh and that it would be available to download quote for the foreseeable future um and he what he said was the fans who reached out like yourself who really care about it are the reason that they're gonna keep it around I would like to say a there are none of those people

or else this this thing would still exist they're there to trade crypto and try to be a girlfriend sure there were we we you you were in the video we did a while back right exploring me it was just a bunch of children it was so odd it was it was such a failure from the jump Alex Heath remember Alex Heath goat was like when the first people got a quest to prove I still a quest for sitting over there um and this was like the embodied internet when Mark was going on

“with metaverse and they were doing on the demos and like I would just remember that dude came”

back from his first briefing and was like it sucks and I was like you know Alex he can just say it

and if he holds you say it just say it sucks yeah it's it was always very bad it was um but it is

it is now the funniest possible outcome because meta is now forced to continue to support this bad product because if they kill it everyone will think they've given up on the metaverse and they cannot appear to have given up on the metaverse because the company is called meta and that is hysterical it's very good uh meta also doesn't know what AI is for the keep hiring and firing thousands of people swimming millions of dollars to make talk about not having a good consumer AI product

it's your plan dude yeah also by the way the the Ray band meta stuff running straight at that same problem this the like there there are uh glass hole murmurings starting to bubble up in a lot of places about how to feel about these glasses alright people people do not like seeing those in public yeah Mark's not going to work as trust deficit is really really starting to come to the fore here yep I actually want to call out you know the one product they had that people loved

was supernatural the fitness at CPR and they shut that down it's like the existing content is still there but they're not making new content they fire all the instructors of people and it likes v wrote a great story about that community how mad they are uh and then this week I want to call out she interviewed Lena Con who as Biden's FTC chair tried to stop that acquisition suit to stop it she was way out overseas and I whenever knew she was she was just trying to push the envelope like the

government should stop more acquisitions and her theory the case was always if this market is not competitive it will die right she's a competition leads to better accounts which by the way again if you listen to the verse has like my main political viewpoint is like competition's good for me and uh and government suit regulations are bad so the interviewed Lena Con this week our headline is Lena Con was right and there's a lot of comments there being like well it was such

a bad business meta couldn't keep it running the problem is the market for that stuff was never

competitive supernatural only had to do whatever served metas interests right and meta you can see is strategically confused about everything if supernatural was a business that ran on the quest and the quest was confused they might have gone to the vision pro they might have gone to a cheaper different VR headset the VR headset technology is basically commodity at this point right like meta's selling the quest to for a buck ninety nine right now they could have made their own hardware

“I mean I think they're trying to blow it out to shut it down but like it's a buck ninety nine right now”

like supernatural as a company could have done a million things to better serve its audience in its community that now feels completely abandoned that new that they would get abandoned the second meta bought them so there's this raging argument our comments about no one ever wants VR blah blah and like I think that's all pointed at meta and the argument really is what you know what happens when the acquisition happens I know what happens to a company or go buy it I know what happened I know

what happened to dark sky when Apple bought it you know who also figured out the people who made dark sky who just quit Apple to start a new weather app act me whether great app big sim but they were like we we don't want to do this anymore like we're getting crushed we would like to go back to making a weather app yep yeah and everyone knew what happened to supernatural when when meta bought it so it's true Lina Khan she she pushed the boundary of the law and the argument was

great and she lost but she was trying to avoid an outcome that everyone could see clearly that happened immediately yeah and I'm my only point is people loved supernatural we but the theme of this episode is when consumers love something you can get away with a lot people loved that they love that experience you can go read that story v wrote it it is one of my favorite stories of the year so far it's just a community people who are sad about a virtual reality fitness

app that's those are the verge keywords that's also loving technology yeah and that company never

the meta board they were subservient to total strategy confusion and now it's dead and like

“I I think the quest to is at the buck 99 because meta's blown them at the door and they're going to”

focus on the revenge and you're probably right and yeah go read go read the Lina Khan piece go read the other stuff it's all inside it's all very good it's good stuff the Lina Khan interview is is good um she continues to be a smart person who knows what she's doing I would say all right we should

get out of here we've gone way over way over to do this is this is what we do I blame Allison she's

not here anymore so we're gonna blame Allison not Ron Johnson who I would also like to blame for this um two bits of plugging before we go we'll three actually number one apply to be our producer voxmedia dot com slash jobs come help us make the show shorter uh number two uh version history this week is the episode about the vocoder um it is with the band chromio it is as much fun as we have

“ever had making the show uh I think you're gonna really like it Charlie Harding uh virtually has to”

in turn hosted that with me helped me helped me figure out the story the vocoder with chromio

we had a blast to really get upset um a listen to the interview that Neil I did on decoder with Jimlinson from Yahoo which I thought was fascinating um they are up what a weird company to do weird like interesting innovative 30-year-old internet ideas very fun um who's on decoder next week it's a little up in the air okay if the CEO superhuman the Grammarly guy shows up on Friday which I think he's gonna do so as you're listening to this I will know

then that will that one will be a decoder next week if not obviously but okay as of right now they say he's gonna again we keep saying out loud that shishir has to do this so he's gonna do it as of today he said he's gonna do it by the time you're listening to this I will I will now

“we said it and if you want to get in touch uh the email is versecast the verse.com”

the hotline is 866 verse 11 if you want all of our podcast ad free including all the ones we just talked about subscribe to the verge the verse.com/subscribe uh it's a good website we like it quite a bit and I think you will too uh the versecast is a production version in the vox media podcast network this show was produced by Eric Gomez brand and key for intribus large chuck we will see you next time

be like take a sad right girl from wieder be verba flaute the shaltent anzeigum anzeige that's nerfed and it's still viel to toy up stop ross that the recruiting spirit with stepstone all jobs become as you all anzeigum for a year in a package to a fixed price so sparen sie bis zu 75% kosten probewerbung and sind jederzeit flexibel

jetzt termin vereinbaren auf stepstownde/alljobs stepstown einfach die richtigen talentefinden für alle jobs