Everybody wants to rule the AI world

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If you look at our like audience stats, like the website stats, which we don't talk about a lot, everybody just wants to read about AI guys being extremely dramatic. And boy, do we have a lot. There's a cornucopia of AI guys being dramatic in the world right now. Alex, he had a good tweet. He's covering the trial and he goes, the entire AI industry is basically just how seven guys feel about each other. That's really true. It's not wrong. And by extension, like the entire United States economy. It's just how seven guys feel about each other. We got a lot to talk about. There's a new Fitbit product that I think you and I both have a bunch of thoughts and questions about. OpenAI is maybe making a chat GPT phone. We got a bunch of stuff to talk about, but we got to start with the trial, right? Elon Musk versus OpenAI continues. This is week two of the trial. I sort of expected it to be less bananas in week two after Elon Musk left the stand. I was wrong. Very wrong. It is only increased in amount of bananas, a bushel, if you will. A bushel of bananas. Can I just say this like one thing that's been on my mind throughout this entire trial? And maybe it's because, you know, I have like ex-lawyer in me and married to a lawyer and we think about the lawyer stuff. to make ai good you have to tell it everything right right like it needs access to all of your email you got to write down everything you want you got to write these long system prompts all this stuff all the context that it needs we're now watching the fruits of that in discovery in a lawsuit oh that's such a good theory do you know what i mean like greg brockman why did you keep a journal uh in this journal is extraordinarily damn he's like i shouldn't steal this charity what are you doing man I'm not saying that drove this set of characters to keep the notes and send the text that they sent I'm very grateful that they did because some of them are frankly hilarious and honestly a huge part of this broadcast is just going to be me and David reading other people's text to each other and it's going to be amazing but we're entering an era where every executive is talking to Claude all day long on their way to work or dumping context into AI systems and boy is the next generation of lawsuits going to be amazing like just straightforwardly amazing and i'll tell you one there's a reason i brought up becky her law firm just sent around a reminder that when the clients take the legal advice and go ask chat gpt about it it loses its privilege sure and like courts in new york have like ruled on this that if you if your lawyer sends you something that's like, here's what I think we should do in this case that is protected by attorney-client privilege. And then if you, the client, go to chat GPT and say, hey, what do you think about this thing my lawyer said? You lose the privilege. Right. It's the equivalent of telling someone else. You've now told someone else. And that, like, on both sides, lawyers are like, oh, I can discover that now. Also, I have to tell my client. Like, the next generation of discovery in all these cases is going to be bananas because everyone is telling their computers everything all the time and you can just see in this case like everyone is so online that everything is in the computer like yeah zoolander style like it's in the computer that is a really good theory and it actually makes me think like one of the funniest characters as we're going to get to in all of this is satya nadella the ceo of microsoft who throughout this whole saga everyone is desperately trying to get to leave a paper trail and he just refuses he's like yes he's a he's the public company CEO, the longest tenured, most experienced, you know, multi-billion dollar public company CEO. Microsoft is the economy. Like, he can't screw up. This man can only be reached on a phone through cutouts. Yes. That's it. Yes. And they keep being like, I'm trying to loop him in. I'm trying to get him in. I'm asking him questions. I'm texting him. I'm reaching out. And then every once in a while, it's like, long pause. And it's like, just got off the phone with Satya. And it's like, you, I get it. Satya was well played. But I know that Nadella, just like the rest of them, in his interviews, he's like, I talk to Copilot every day about my next meeting about this stuff. I love talking to him on a commute. And it's like, oh, that. Get ready, buddy. Yeah. I mean, it is funny. Like, it's useful to remember that all of the events that are being discussed in this trial are from somewhere between two and 12 years ago. and that a lot has changed. Even since the most recent stuff in this case, a lot has changed in a lot of people's relationships. So you're right that the stuff that is happening right now, discovery is going to be just outrageous. Yeah, you're wearing one of those B bracelets that records all of your meetings so you can be a cool startup founder. Guess what happens? Your next deal goes sideways. Yeah. Like the audio or the transcripts of all your conversations will not. I'm excited. As a reporter, I'm excited. I also refuse to use computers at work even more than ever. Yeah, totally fair. So we should just walk through some of the stuff going on in this trial. But I feel like the stuff that's been the most interesting to me personally has kind of split in two ways. There's either the stuff we've learned about the early days of OpenAI and particularly the circumstances under which Elon Musk ends up leaving. We learned a lot about that this week, particularly from Greg Brockman, who is one of the co-founders and is now the president of OpenAI. um and then there's also the what happened during what everybody refers to as the blip the the brief period of time where sam altman was not the ceo let's should we start with the early days because there's a lot of interesting stuff that comes up um a bunch of stuff that i didn't know that maybe i just missed in the course of all of this stuff including things like at the very beginning opening i was going to be part of y combinator uh that where where sam was running y combinator this big vc firm for a long time and like i think more and more it's becoming clear that a lot of the internal consternation at open AI over the years has been all of the stuff that sam altman and greg brockman did around open ai and in the ways in which they were semi-sketchily enriching themselves all while claiming to be have no interest in a non-profit and just trying to save the world and if you're nolan musk it seems like a really good idea to try to prove as much of that as you possibly can right is that is that a fair description of what's going on i think that's a fair characterization what's going on you will recall that sam left his position as ceo of y accommodator in totally mysterious and extremely sketchy circumstances yes and it is probably because he was double dealing all over the place and no one has ever really ever come out and said it but a lot of people have basically been like if you connect all these dots that i keep leaving everywhere you will you will deduce that sam luttman did a bunch of weird double dealing stuff that is no longer the ceo of y accommodator and i think we're starting see that in this case as well which by the way is totally in character with the same altman that is like routinely profiled by everybody including ronan farrow like there's a lot of weird double dealing talking out of both sides of your mouth trying to make everyone happy getting very rich along the way yeah and this ends up being really important in the firing of sam altman but also appears to have existed since the very beginning right that they're they're running this non-profit they're starting this thing they're trying to save the world and sam altman like famously didn't take equity in this company has spent a lot of time talking about how he didn't take equity in this company and then you start to poke at it and it's like well he has equity in that company that is now doing a deal with open ai and he has equity in that company which is doing a deal with open ai and like you just there i think elon musk's lawyers have a real vested interest in building a pattern of sam altman being unreliable and trying to make himself rich while building a non-profit on elon musk's money but there are parts of that case that appear to be very straightforwardly compelling from musk's side of things there are parts of the case that appear to be very straightforwardly compelling and i i'm going to issue the disclaimer like criticism of one character in this lawsuit is not praise for the other character and both sides get to put on their case and so when open ai's lawyers are putting on their case elon looks maximally bad and when elon's lawyers are putting his case sam altman looks maximally bad and that's the way trial coverage goes and i say this every time because everyone gets very confused about how we feel when we're just talking about the cases the lawyers are putting on but the out that i have for sam and greg it just in this process yes the evidence against him is compelling that they they basically did a bunch of safety stuff they are not sly by any stretch of the imagination they're just out in the open being like so we're gonna do some like circular financing stuff um like you know greg is like leaving himself journal notes it's like man i shouldn't i shouldn't steal a charity. They know that they're operating out in the open. They're sending Elon these extremely long notes that all start with this staggering amount of praise because everyone's basically afraid of Elon, it seems, and they have to be really nice to him to get to one decision. And they keep laying everything out. At no point are they being shady about it except that the thing that they're doing seems kind of shady. Do you know what I mean? They're like, we're going to do a shady thing you know i was like i don't know and then that proceeds until they get it done well ironically it's not shady when they're all on the same team right and then it then it just becomes you know we all we there's so much money in this that we're all going to get rich and it's going to be fine and this is like what you see in in we work another thing where there was just an outrageous amount of self-dealing uh as long as the numbers keep going up and as long as everybody's getting rich the things people will turn a blind eye to in that realm are outrageous right but then we we come to the the you know falling out between elon musk and the open ai team and uh i think this is the part where elon's case kind of even in the very best case scenario looks bad because essentially what it seems like is again and we said this a little bit last week there was this big fight over who is going to control open AI. Elon Musk demanded everything. He at one point tried to make open AI part of Tesla. He said he was going to run open AI inside of Tesla in secret and apparently offered Sam Altman a board seat at Tesla. It was like he wanted to subsume this whole thing. He would say his motivations were to save the world. You can feel about that however you want. um he lost that fight um basically because the the others teamed up and said giving essentially unilateral control to elon musk is not the right thing to do and he took his ball and went home making aggressive threats about starting up a competitor about how they were going to fail about how demis is habis who was running deep mind uh who is like the looming big bad in everybody's mind which is very funny in retrospect is going to like ruin the world because opening I can't do it. He has such like sore loser energy in this whole split that it's like it just it just looks bad. There's also some just extremely weird Elon stuff in the mix. Siobhan Zillis, who is the mother of some of his children, is part of OpenAI. His her job is to take notes basically on what everyone is talking about. So there's a lot of notes about what Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, Ilya Sitzkever, and Elon Musk are talking about. and then when Elon leaves she's still there she's passing intel back to Elon and then reports come out that she's had his children and she has to go and tell OpenAI that she's also the mother of Elon Musk's children and everyone is like what are you talking about? Changes the dynamics slightly. It's just like one of the more Elon situations in all of this that now the mother of his children is on the stand and even the way that she talks about things and her affect is just very Elon. On the stand, instead of saying, I don't recall or I don't remember, she would say, it's not in my neurons. I hate that. I got to tell you, there's something about that that just makes my skin crawl. That when she said it, our entire slack room of reporters tracking the trial, they all typed, it's not in my neurons at the same time. Perfect. Yeah, that's exactly right. So yeah, this whole thing is just bizarre. And it really does seem like The further we get into this trial, that it is the outlines of this split were that Elon Musk wanted control of opening eye. He lost the fight and he went away. He says one thing in 2017 after a discussion about going for profit, which again, this is a big piece of this, right? Who wanted to go for profit and when? Was Musk for this? Was Musk against this? Did they steal a charity? Like this is the big part of the whole thing here. This is Brockman writing this. He says at the end of the meeting, he said, you guys are great, but I could start another ai company tomorrow one tweet is all it takes which is a five years before elon musk bought twitter there's the whole reason elon musk bought twitter uh and b just a perfect summation of what a sore loser he is in this particular way i thought this one this one is very interesting to me there's so much in this that is just about who is the talent and where will they work sure this is why they're all afraid of dennis asadas he's got google's resources he's got runway he seems to be attracting the talent they all think he's very smart uh and elon's like i'm gonna take andres karpathy i'm gonna take ilia suits cover i've recruited this person and it's just a handful of people at the bleeding edge of this technology especially at this time it was like a really really small number of people who were really leading this stuff yeah and they were all basically deciding whether they were gonna go out on their own or go work for demos at google like these are your choices at the time one tweet is all it takes really implies that there's like a bunch of ai people you can like address by a tweet it's it's a very odd empty threat at this moment in time when so much of the drama is basically where's ilia gonna work can we keep him away from demis right and maybe there's more characters in the mix maybe there's vastly more ai researchers at that time just waiting for a tweet. But it just struck me as such a classic Elon threat. Like I can tweet this into existence when every fact that had preceded it indicated that actually you need to hire one of like four people to make this work. Yeah. And then there's the moment where he hires away Andres Karpathy to Tesla and he goes back to OpenAI and is like, oh, I have an announcement and a confession. I've hired this guy who was like, Very important and is now like a celebrity in the AI world to go work at Tesla, which is a thing that if you care about open AI and want it to succeed, you probably don't do. Yeah. At the same time, there's emails in the record now, Sam emailing Elon apologizing for having recruited even one person away for Tesla. Right. Like, I'm so sorry about this. There's some real, you know, I'm watching the boys. There's some real Homelander vibes around Elon throughout this entire, you know, everyone's just like afraid of him. And then he's but his instead of lasers from his eyes, he has Twitter. Like, that's basically what this feels like at all at every turn. Well, it's more than that. I wrote down these texts from Ilias Hutzkever came up where he says, Elon might spend half a day a week with us. I imagined how it will be. And I worry that our work environment can become very stressful. And since he'll be bankrolling it, it'll be hard to stop it. Like, you're right. it is fear and flattery in equal measure. And there is this sense of we have to take his money to do this thing, but we also have to figure out how to keep him out of it as much as possible because he will ruin it. Yeah. And then they're talking about all these conversions and what structure it will be. And the whole time he's like, I'll just take it. Give it to me. Yeah. Yeah. Which, by the way, he insistently filed. He's trying to kill OpenAI. Elon Musk wanted this lawsuit. This is all happening because he wants it to happen. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. So the other thing, which I think is, frankly, vastly more fun in terms of the things we got to learn, is all the stuff that happened during Sam Altman's firing. This very brief couple of days where Sam Altman was fired unceremoniously and kind of out of nowhere. Stage the coup is like a non-generous but not wrong way to say it. A lot of people on the team threatened to quit. It became a whole thing. gets reinstated as CEO. We learned a bunch about what happened in the midst of this. What jumped out to you as somebody who covered this in real time, particularly aggressively? Was there new stuff that really jumped out to you? All of these people text like children, like just pure children. And I'm not saying I'm like the world's best texter. It's just. You read these texts between Mira and Sam, Mira Maradi, the CTO, who is also the CEO for five minutes for all of us. and if you will recall we broke a lot of news during this time on the verge like heath and i broke a lot of news throughout all this and we were texting and calling everyone all the time other great reporters broke a lot of news too like everyone was talking yeah shout out to ashley vance now at core memory who shows up in the one of the messages yeah he's like in the screenshots as a notification be like there's gonna be a new ceo uh-huh mike isaac is like he's doing a victory lap because he was he was correct that mirror marati try to lead some of this charge to push sam out but everyone was like talking and everyone was reporting and i just remember my texts were like very formal you know i was like i'm gonna text somebody and see we can get some news out of this person um and it's like here yes pretty much and i'm like you're on the back end and you're seeing what they're all saying and they're like there's chatter blah blah blah like it's all lowercase yeah no one knows what's going on uh there's something about that you know it's like it's always interesting to see the other side of a thing you were even loosely a part of. Yeah. I do think the back and forth between Mira and Sam as all of this is going on are maybe the best thing that came out and have led to some really delightful memes. There is, to your point about Mike Isaac, who wrote a story concurrently as all this was happening, saying that Mira Marati was one of the people intimately involved with ousting Sam in the first place. Got a lot of criticism for that piece. A lot of people who said that wasn't the case. um turns out it functionally was the case and on the stand she said over over and over essentially like no i didn't trust him no when he came back i still didn't trust him and that's like that's that's under oath what she said yeah um and meanwhile as all of this is going on she seems to be the person sam is most consistently messaging trying to get information about what is going on because as we know he basically like a lot of this comes up in that new yorker piece you're talking about he just like holed up with a couple of his confidants and lawyers and desperately tried to figure out what was going on yeah like spent a weekend basically frantically calling and texting everyone uh and mira marati is like a source of his in the room uh and and the one exchange that has come out that is now i think just the most useful meme we've had in a while is sam sam texts uh can you indicate directionally good or bad satya and others anxious and Mira detects directionally very bad. Which is such a brutal, incredible own. Well, no, it keeps going. And he goes, okay, can you wrap up soon? Lots of pressure for Microsoft for an update. And then Mira replies, Sam, this is very bad. She's like, no, no, no, you don't understand. There's not an update. Like, you're fired. Yeah. You know, the background here, and I will say this again, criticism of one person in the context of the story, has nothing like praise for the other people. Everyone screwed all of this up from top to bottom. The board never communicated why they had taken the step of removing Sam as CEO. They never put out a statement. They never said, here's all the things that went wrong. Here's our evidence for doing this. They had asked Mira to collect evidence of Sam's management trial and these challenges, and Mira had done it. She testified she didn't know why she was doing it. It's like, no, you definitely... what we've all like you put them on a tip like what you well know what's going on here right you want me to prepare a dossier on my boss that's probably fine like where do you think this was going the boss that you had concerns about you were supposed to document your concerns um and so when the board fired sam it was like the shot out of the dark and no one knew why and there was all they said was he was not consistently candid in his conversations right this like totally opaque thing that could mean anything and so he's texting her he's legitimately like what happened and i think he thought there was some middle path and there's this one set of text here that is just it and again they're all text like children sam says to mira can you please tell them i just want to resolve this however and would like to join and mira says they're convinced about their decision and i just want everyone to pay attention to this response which indicates everything about this process and how this company works and sam says in response to they're convinced about their decision for me to be fired or some other thing mira has to confirm yes for you to be gone and sam just says okay he's like so i'm still fired right like what what decision have they made this time you can tell no one was communicating successfully at any level of this entire process no one is communicating and the again the entire process here is they're communicating through mira so both sides are communicating through mira and i think at one point she becomes the ceo of open ai yeah so just a lot of back and forth confusion here uh and then we have to we have to talk about emmett sheer being the ceo for five minutes so sam text mira can i come in and talk about a path forward with them mira says no they need more time once again more time for what which is just a totally reasonable question And then Mira says they walked me through all the reasons and the issues with you and why you can be the CEO Again we still kind of don know There been a lot of reporting but we still kind of don't know. And then Sam says, can you ask why they've been saying all weekend they want me back? Mira says they want a new CEO in place. Sam oddly says, can you say you will call back in 10 minutes? And then Mira says they want to have a new CEO in place tonight, not me. Sam says, do they know who? Can I tell Satya? Is it final? Mira says, trying to add Satya now. Sam says, please, still don't want me? Somebody is texting Satya a Zoom link and Satya's going, what? It's not happening. And then Mira finally ends all this with, new guy is a rando Twitch guy. Which is so good. That rando Twitch guy, by the way, Emmett Shear, who was the CEO of Twitch for a long time, I think by most accounts, like a good egg in Silicon Valley circles, had a weird moment in the sun as part of this entire story. yeah i mean he's enjoying it i remember again during this reporting when they announced it was emmett sheer there was some amount of like oh we know him you know sure yeah that's a that's a guy that we were all in like the incubator with but wait the texts keep going here so mira says new guys rando twitch guy and then she says before sam can even respond she goes they don't want you and then sam responds emmett with two question marks she says yeah but hold on i'm pulling satya like it's it's just bananas and then mira is telling sam that she is trying to bring him back which may or may not be like it seems very clear she is like engaging in different ways on both sides of this as this is all going down it's just it's just bizarre and then they bring in satya to try to get him to undo it because he is he ends up being like the grown-up in the room in a lot of ways throughout this entire thing uh it's all just so insane man there's a moment where they they're gonna sell the ip to anthropic and mira says they just don't want your hands on agi which very funny it's years later we are no closer to agi you have sam's hands on it or not um this by the way did you finally get sasha nadella sam goes let's actually get on the call at mira says yes with him sam says wait i have an interesting idea miracle still with sacha just totally sets him aside. You will recall, this is where, um, Nadella decided to react to all of this, which I both fully believe he regarded as completely juvial and nonsensical and very threatening to the valuations of a lot of companies, a lot of things invested in OPA. Including his. He was like, I'm just going to hire everybody. Yeah. Microsoft will just hire. You can have whatever shell of opening eye remains. This is his famous quote about, we are above them, below them, around them. He's like, I'll just hire everybody. Sam is going to work here now. And that was a bunch of leverage in the middle of this. I mean, this is all very funny because it is just evidence that these things happen in a much more casual way. Like this isn't lawyers. This is just people texting each other, obviously being pulled in five different directions, talking to all the same people who are also pulled in five different directions. I'm pretty sure, you know, Musk's attorneys brought this all up to indicate that Sam was unreliable, untrustworthy. At one point, he was fired from OpenAI. I have no idea if this is going to convince a jury that the structure of OpenAI constituted stealing a charity from Elon Musk, who was again and again presented with this exact scheme and didn't read the paperwork. Yeah. I mean, it does. It really seems like the easiest takeaway from all of this is that all of this is just a gigantic mess. And that is like you could make a lot of arguments about how poorly run this company has been throughout this entire process. I will say there are two things that came up in the why they fired Sam Altman bits of testimony that I thought were really interesting. And the one was like we were talking about this sort of circular set of deals, that there was a sense that the board, Helen Toner, who's also a board member at the time, testified and talked about some of this, that the board felt like it wasn't being properly made aware of all of Sam and Greg's financial entanglements. they made this deal with a company called Helios which is a nuclear energy company that both Sam and Greg were invested in that's a weird thing for OpenAI to be spending its time and resources on and they felt like they maybe weren't properly notified that one reason to make this deal is that it's going to help make Sam and Greg rich another one that came up that I thought was really interesting is Siobhan Zillis said this too that OpenAI's board was really concerned that it hadn't been notified in advance of ChatGPT being released which is totally sensible in retrospect right like the the launch of chat with gpt like legitimately changed the tech industry forever like it really did i don't think that's an overstatement at all um i am i am quite confident that no one at open ai up to and including sam altman knew that was going to happen on the day they shipped chat gpt right it was a little research preview that they barely announced it was a research preview they just they just they just put it out into the world in a very sort of academic way they were like look we made a thing Test it out. Let us know what you think. And then it caught like wildfire. So the idea that they should have known ahead of time to warn the board that this earth-shattering thing is coming strikes me as obvious in retrospect, but sort of implausible at the time. Wait, I can academically argue the other side of this. Okay. I tend to agree with you. Google had something that looked very much like ChatGPT in its labs forever. forever yeah we saw google remind you it invented all of this technology the t and chat gbt is transformers which were invented at google there now the google executive hiding in my bushes to remind me of this sundar you can go home now they say it all the time um uh they had this they had this technology they had transformers they demoed it in a variety of ways it never made any sense because they always did it in increasingly esoteric ways i will never forget the io where Sundar was like, and now I'll have a conversation with Pluto, the planet, about what it's like to be a planet. And no one knew what was going on. And if instead he was just like, look at this chat, GPT. Like everyone would have been like, Google has invented the future. You can see that split here in all these texts and emails because everyone's afraid of Demis who's building the Transformers at Google. Right. Like they've all seen the actual product and the public is like, Sundar's talking to Pluto again. Oh, that's interesting. Right. And they knew, Google knew not to release this product to the public. Their own safety culture kept them away from releasing, what was at the time, like a GPT-1 or 2 class model to the public. This is dangerous. There's all this stuff that can go haywire, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're going to do Pluto demos instead. All of the principles were like, this is the future. Literally, paper is called attention is all you need, right? Right. And so I can see again, I'm making the argument academically because I agree with you that no one knew what would happen. But. I can see why a bunch of people immersed in the safety culture of that time were like, everyone knew that you shouldn't do this. Open I exist because Google wouldn't do this and you did it anyway without asking us if you should. That's fair. And especially if you come from a safety first perspective, which in theory, OpenAI at the time did. And you would say, oh, this is a potentially like problematic thing we're putting out into the world to see what happens when it's out in the world. You should know that it's coming. Right. This is the thing that Google won't do. Yeah, I suppose I buy that argument. I also still think it's true that they, honest to God, did not think anybody would care. Like, I really earnestly believe opening. I ship chat to chat GPT. If you if you think you're releasing a product that's going to change the world, do you call it chat GPT? No, no. I agree with you on balance. I think I'm making this argument for the sake of making the argument. I understand. But there was a reason Google did not release this product. And then OpenAI did. Now, OpenAI was nowhere ready to be a company. They were not ready to commercialize it. They were still chasing AGI. All this stuff. And now they're a totally different company. It's heart of hearts wants to be a for-profit enterprise competing with Google. That company is positioned very differently. And the OpenAI was like, look at our research preview. Right? But I understand why the board, which was our job is to keep everything safe and to like pull the ripcord as we get closer to AGI, was like, wait, this is the one thing the big player in the space wouldn't do. Yeah, no, that's fair. I buy that. Wait, can I just add one more thing? Oh, please. So I keep forgetting this as well, but Liz is in the courtroom. You should read her live blog and her coverage. It's very funny. She's so angry. Everyone appears to be very tiresome. also this is Liz at her finest Liz being annoyed that she's watching billionaires through each other is perfect this is why The Verge exists Hayden's doing great coverage on the exhibits but I keep forgetting myself that Microsoft is a party to this case because they had the big investment in OpenAI and Liz keeps mentioning that every single witness ends with Microsoft's lawyers standing up and saying something like and Microsoft wasn't there and then following that up with and Satya Nadella wasn't there either and she's like this is literally the only thing they're they're adding to this trial so we didn't do that right see you later uh it's just a very funny dynamic in this case that i can't get enough that's that would be a really fun job as a lawyer you just stand up be like but not not me though right and they're like no not you and you're like see ya no further questions it's very good pretty good yeah uh i really hope at some point we get some satia texts some tips. He's too smart for that, man. He is. Satya wouldn't even be caught on a Zoom call, it appears. So kudos to Satya. All right, we should take a break and then we're going to come back. We got some gadgets to talk about. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. 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Support that never sleeps. Join more than 193,000 brands, including Away, Patrick Ta, and Dollar Shave Club. Already growing with Klaviyo, the autonomous B2C CRM. Get started at klaviyo.com. All right, we're back. just as a transition out of open ai we should talk about this uh rumor slash report that's now floating around that suggests that open ai is building a phone for chat gpt it's a it's a phone gpt what do you make of this neil first of all uh no no side quests i was told code red we have to focus uh now we're making a phone the the one product that will not succeed what it just what There's no way it will succeed. It's very hard to disrupt the iPhone. I don't know if you're aware of this, David. Killing the iPhone. Good luck. I know. It's weird. It's almost like no one has tried. Why has no one ever tried to take down the iPhone? It's just sitting there. Yeah. I mean, have you heard of Windows Phone? It's got this Metro UI. It's beautiful. Okay. Can I make an argument for why you have to do this even though it won't work? Oh, let's do it. Let's do it as an exercise. Okay. Because I have a similar argument. Okay. You have to make it out of a place of optimism and opportunity. Oh, here's why it will work. I will do cold realism. Okay. Here's why chat phone is a terrific idea that should exist. And I very much look forward to it. If what you need for the AI future is a device that is able to capture everything about you all of the time, you need something that isn't an iPhone. That is not a new idea by me. That is a thing Sam Altman keeps talking about. He loves the iPhone, thinks the iPhone is great, but he thinks the future is constant capture of your context. This is terrific for legal discovery. It's also the idea of AGI right now, right? I need to have a thing that is constantly recording so that it can get all the action items from my meetings. I need a camera that is constantly recording so it can tell me what's going on in the world. That requires a different kind of hardware. you can't do it with the iPhone in part because you can't access the hardware in that way because you're not Apple if you're OpenAI but also you just need a different kind of hardware that operates differently so you have to build a phone to do the things differently and you also have to build a phone because everybody owns a phone and the only way to beat the iPhone is to make a phone that can beat the iPhone. OpenAI has lots of users, ChatGPT is very popular, maybe lots of people would buy a phone that offers easier access to ChatGPT The other thing that it offers, and this is, I think, the real reason you do this if you're open AI, is that the only possibility for an AI first world is to get around the App Store. Apple is systematically removing apps that let you build other apps from the App Store. It is not into the idea of being able to like vibe code on your phone, other apps that work on your phone. that is in fact the whole premise that you would need for an open AI phone to work that all of a sudden I have a device that I can just tell what I want it to do and it can actually spin up local software to do that for me if you believe in the agentic future if you believe that all of this is going to work on the fly and custom gpt's and all this stuff it has to start from the hardware and you have to start from whole cloth and that actually having a thing that I just talked to with my voice and it builds its operating system for me on the fly that has to come from someone other than Apple or Google who will never allow it to be built. So, of course, OpenAI is going to do it, and it's super going to work. Okay. I think my perspective, the more cynical, realist perspective, is exactly the same argument. I'm going to make exactly the same argument to you. I'm going to add two things to it. One, Sam hired Johnny Ive to come build hardware at OpenAI. Famously hired Johnny Ive, the designer of the iPhone and many other legendary products, and they made a video that cost somewhere on the order of $25 billion where they walked down the street together and went on a date at a coffee shop. And they talked about phones and laptops as, quote, legacy devices. And the entire promise of this thing was they were going to build something else and there were rumors that it was headphones, there was rumors that it was a pendant, that it was a puck, that it was a pen, and all the stuff that wasn't a phone because a phone and laptop are legacy devices. And I agree with you. Sam thinks you just need a bunch of contacts and it's seeing the world around. then it can run around the web and call you an Uber and do whatever you think is going to happen. And then the reality, this is my other addition, the reality is that the AI products are not good enough to do that. They can't do the thing that everyone thinks they can do, that everyone wants them to do. No matter how many Mac minis you put in a colo bin and running open claw for every individual user, you can't actually make this product, right? And so what are you stuck with? You need a bunch of applications running on something local that chat GPT can address, that it can control, whether that's through MCP, whether it's through like Google is doing on Samsung phones and literally opening the apps and like virtualized containers and clicking on them, whatever way you're going to do it, whatever Apple's going to do with Siri. It turns out you need the applications, not just the data, the application. You need to do stuff. You need the logic to exist. You can't just write a custom Uber app and be like, now there's Uber. Like, you need them there. And even if you can, Uber did that already. Yeah. Like, you just, they're not going to let you be like, you can use the Uber API. The CEO of Uber, Dara, was just on Decoder, and he's like, I want my pixels in your face. He said it out loud. So what you're stuck with, yeah, he was like, I want my pixels there. He kept calling them pixels in, like, a very specific way. And I was like, you mean your interface? Okay, I get it. anyway um uh and so you have johnny ive you made this big promise about the future of computing and i think maybe johnny ive who likes to make good products realized that chat gpt can't do it like the the technology cannot deliver the result right and so what are you going to do you're going back into the right solution which is it's a phone and the phone's going to have apps on it And the AI is going to run around using those apps on the user's behalf because the apps have all the services that people want. And also, if you make a thing that's supposed to replace your phone and it doesn't have Instagram on it, people are still going to carry their phones around. Yep. So what are you going to do? So poor Johnny Ive is stuck making a new iPhone. Because it's the only thing. Because it's the only. I'm telling you, I'm agreeing with you. This is what you have to do. I'm just saying I could have called it the first day that they sat down in an empty coffee shop and called the phone a legacy device. Yep. Because at no point has been clear that any of these LMs can actually do the thing. Right. But, yeah, this is what I mean by it's not going to work and you have to do it anyway. Like even this whole accessory ecosystem they're describing requires a base device that neither Android nor iOS will give them the permissions to be able to do. iOS is not going to just let you attach a third party camera that's recording all the time. It's just not just not a thing you can do. They might make it themselves. Sure. Apple would do it for itself. Well, and this is where like Apple's AI reputation is like annoyingly turning in its favor because it screwed up so badly that everybody's like, oh, four dimensional chess like Apple is like, no, Apple screwed this up super bad. And to whatever extent this is going to work out, it is pure dumb luck and not good planning. Let's be so, so, so clear about that, which I have proof for that we will get to in just a minute. but the idea of having basically a new version of siri which we think is coming very soon at wwdc and there was a report this week that one of the features of that siri might be that you get to pick your own model inside of it becomes hugely powerful right because apple is the company with the access to that data and to those services and to those applications uh the thing it couldn't figure out how to do was build a model that could manipulate any of them with any kind of success now it has this big deal with google it's possible it's going to open up so that you can pick chat gpt or claude or whatever you want to operate this siri for you that becomes a really powerful model but it's because apple already did the rest of the iphone right like if you if you just start from whole cloth with here's a model build the phone you can't it just doesn't work but you don't have another option this is why like we've been talking for a decade about how desperate all of these other tech companies are to get past the smartphone. This is why they are desperate to sell you some other kind of hardware that so that they can get around the platform controls that Google and Apple have and absolutely will not relinquish. Well, they are Mark Zuckerberg tried to do the metaverse, the whole thing. And they all have this belief, which is historically correct, that it's an interface paradigm shift that makes people buy new hardware. Yeah. And Apple has ridden this better than anybody. Right. You go to mouse and keyboards, you get the Mac, you go to click wheels you get the ipod you go to the digital crown obviously you get the watch this is a staggering display of interface superiority that changed everything forever um but it's very hard to get past the multi-touch screen in the phone and so natural language voice commands look like a thing that get you away from the phone like this is an interface step change we can just do natural language but you still need it you need a camera right your kids are running around you want to take a video of them and it needs to be a great camera like it's very hard to compete with the most important product in tech history. Even if you think the interface is going to change and Apple is just like, we're just going to bolt it on when it makes sense. Right. And we're rapidly realizing that chat as that interface is not the answer. Right. There was a minute where everybody's like, everything you do on every computer forever is going to happen inside of a chat window. And when we need to, we'll just load a browser inside of your chat. It turns out that's an awful user interface. Yeah. We got past the command line once and we're doing it again. and Apple already built the other stuff. Well, so, you know, command lines are brittle because if you typed in the wrong thing, they just didn't work. The modern sort of LLM chat interfaces are actually brittle in a different way. And it's not the way everyone's used to. So I'm really opposed to hidden user interface. Like no one ever discovers the user interface. You have to put all the controls on the screen is like my point of view. Like tell people what they can do and then they'll do it and they'll feel empowered. somebody at samsung just got promoted when you said that they're like put more tool tips on the screen it's a dog with shoes it'll help you more pop-ups and you know there's a big trend in in consumer the pendulum swings back and forth like the users get more sophisticated we give them more controls we let them customize more things and then we've gotten too far and we hide all the buttons again and this just keeps happening uh mac os tahoe is a perfect example of apple just believing everyone is stupid like we've been shipping the mac for 50 years uh you're all idiots now like we've taken all the controls away we've learned nothing we just think you're a bunch of dumb iphone users right like there's something in there that is confusing natural language interfaces are kind of the opposite in that you can just say anything you want and it will respond to you like it's not brittle in that way it's not hidden there's nothing to hide like it's all just You like do whatever like make me a bomb And it like sure maybe I allowed to that Maybe I just lie to you Like who knows But they can actually do all the things you always saying to them And people run into that really fast And I think Apple in particular with the iPhone, uh, it like, it wanted to over promise on the Siri part of it and say it could do everything. And like the models at the time couldn't do it. And only lately with all the agentic stuff and like the building of harnesses and like, there's just a method of doing it now that might work and might not work. But I don't think you can build a phone or a new device whole cloth out of LLM chatbots because it's still brittle. It's just brittle in a different way that doesn't immediately appear to be brittle. It confuses everyone in thinking that it actually is resilient to users doing random stuff. But it's actually even more broken because it can't do the things that literally will just confidently tell you it can do. Right. Yeah, it has such an incredibly different kind of structural problem, which it fails without telling you it failed, which is very different than the other kinds of failure. Yeah. On this note, actually, we should we should talk about the other thing that happened with Siri this week, which is that Apple settled a class action lawsuit for two hundred and fifty million dollars that is based all around essentially the promises Apple made about Apple intelligence and Siri. I didn't even link these two ideas in my brain. This is perfect. I mean, this is what it is, right? Apple spent whatever it cost to get Gemini and $250 million for a bunch of problematic ads that it made that made promises about phones that didn't exist. Let me just really quickly, to refresh your memory, play you one of these ads that came out after Apple Intelligence. This became the flagship feature of every Apple device. And you couldn't do it. Let me just play this for you. This is the Bella Ramsey to party ad. Siri, what's the name of the guy I had a meeting with a couple of months ago at Cafe Grinnell? You met Zach Wingate at Cafe Grinnell. Hey. Zach. I didn't think you'd remember me. Yeah, of course. So this is like, it's Zach. Nobody looks like Zach. Doesn't work. Fake feature. that was an ad with a celebrity that Apple ran for a feature that didn't and doesn't exist like we just shouldn't forget how wild that fact is I mean you want to talk about software brain that ad by the way is built the whole concept is built in the idea that all that data is in one calendar that Siri can go look at which no part of that exists in the real world this story has been like burning up all over our site this week because a people can go and claim money there's a if you bought a phone i think it's basically between like june of 2024 and may of 2025 uh you can get 25 uh potentially up to 95 we'll see how it goes probably 25 um congratulations to everybody on your 25 but this is like this is a continues to be a bad look for apple this is what i mean by apple did not successfully stand aside dai capex problems that other companies have apple screwed up so badly that it might actually have turned out okay yeah i mean they sold more max than ever because people are running open claw which apple also didn't see coming and they have supply issues like this company fell ass backwards into being an ai power player and and good on you for falling ass backwards into it but like Like, what is it? The line was that Twitter was a clown car that ran into a gold mine. Like, that's Apple and AI in such a real way. Absolutely. I mean, you know, WDC is right around the corner. I think we're expecting to see a bunch of this Google deal pay off. I think we're expecting to see the new Siri. I think Apple understands more than any company, like, how to use a new user interface paradigm to make products. We'll see if John Ternus can pull even more rabbits out of a hat here. But it is true that at that time, the conventional wisdom was that chatbots would displace the iPhone. And if Apple didn't have an AI narrative, that it would be in some kind of existential danger. So they just concocted one. They never shifted to the point where they're paying millions of dollars out, hundreds of millions of dollars out for making fake ads. and it was all fine because it the fundamental truth was that the natural language interface was not powerful enough on its own to stand up a competitor to the iphone yep and that is that's why you have to build a phone that is the funniest thing here is like strategically open ai is doing the exact right thing and it's gonna fail and i bet they know it but like what you don't what other choice do you have right because you know the other player in phones is also not sitting still no also also uh the big bad of open ai's entire history it turns out demis saw this looms holding a samsung s26 yeah he's just like have you seen what i did to big speed big speed has lasers coming out of its eyes smoke coming out of its ears exactly uh google actually launched a sort of aie gadget this week um which i'm actually very curious for your take on this so it's called the Fitbit Air, and it is a screenless Fitbit. It's sort of a throwback to the old ideas of Fitbit, where it's just a little, like, bracelet of a thing that you can wear. They also make one that you can clip. It's a little modular fitness tracker in a very sort of 2012 kind of way. The big pitch here is not that it's a very old Fitbit, but that it connects to a bunch of Google's AI stuff. They've rebranded the Fitbit app as Google Health, which I think is just a horrifically bad idea, but we can talk about that. And the idea is it's this Gemini-powered health and fitness thing that can collect all of this data and give it back to you in a sort of AI coach kind of way. The thing is $99. I will say personally, I am very enthusiastic about the idea of a pretty straightforward screenless fitness tracker. This is actually a thing I have been wanting for a while. are you still a whoop guy? you're a whoop guy right? I need to just be very clear yes I'm wearing the whoop you're a whoop guy one it's just like fun to try new products which is I hope everybody understands I love gadgets and technology and two Chase gave them out to everyone for free everyone's a whoop guy now everyone I know who has a Chase credit card has a whoop now because they just gave them to you like like all the reddits were aflame with like free whoops so i just got one i was like sure i'll take a free gadget and there's nothing more whoop guy than having a chase sapphire card can i just say like that is that just screams whoop guy it's a lifestyle i have it it's fun it's very dumb like it it is a good step tracker i wear it as a sleep tracker because wearing an apple wash my sleep is like too heavy and like whatever so it it consistently tells me that i haven't slept enough and it's like yeah dude i have a baby yeah what do you think is gonna happen here oh i wake up at 5 a.m every morning yeah my apple watch told me last night that i did a better job than usual and gave me a 58 i was like great things are going well yeah we drag him into the bed every morning between 4 30 and 5 and he punches me in the face until 7 a.m i didn't get restful sleep you're saying i have a sleep deficit what a surprise yeah so it's like fun to wear it's fun to see that side of things. You know, V and I are constantly talking about the wellness tech complex. I get why Google is putting one of these out. The point of these is not the tracking. It's the data analysis and the recommendations that come after the tracking. And if you're Google, you're like, oh, we're just good at that. There's a huge opportunity here to give cheap trackers away to whatever version of RFK's FDA is going to decide that the secret to health is personal responsibility and tracking. By the way, I'm just doing an impression of the song right now. Just a straightforward B impression. This is what we talk about almost every day. And then we're going to do a bunch of data collection and tell you to sleep more and drink less and blah, blah, blah, blah, which is all the Whoop AI ever says. Yeah. Like, oh, you had one athletic non-alcoholic beer. You're in a deficit. Like, what's happening to me? But you can see why Google's doing it because this is them being able to leverage their entire AI stack. also i think what i mean it's inexpensive for you know anything being inexpensive anymore it's like 100 bucks right and it has like modular bands people really like fitbits and i think they're going to really like this thing yeah i think so too i think the the idea of cheap tracker is smart and good right for all the reasons you just said i think the idea of i want to wear a thing that counts my steps is good and fine but actually what people do want is that one extra step uh i agree with v and that most of these ai coaches are incredibly annoying uh and and they just like tell you how terrific you are all day and it's like just what if you just left me alone like what if you just left me alone and it would be fine what i don't agree with is the google health of it all um let me just read you a quote from this is from rishi chandra who has been at google a very long time has run a bunch of products was like on the chromecast team a million years ago when i first met him was when the chromecast were coming out yeah so here's what he says he says i I know it will be hard for people, referring to the rebrand. It was hard for us internally, but as we think about the future, where the health app needs to go, the health app is not going to be specific to Fitbit hardware. We want to be a health coach to an Apple Watch user, too. That's why we had to make the brand change. I would argue he just made the opposite case that he should have made. To say it's called Google Health, A, signs you up for a bunch of what I would call Google baggage, which is very real. Including the design language of this app. Yeah, absolutely. Um, which is, yeah, Google's software design continues to be just terrific. But the the idea of Google Health signs you up for people understanding a different kind of data collection that Google is doing. People are going to start to think, oh, are you going to use this to show me ads and search results? And they will they will promise you up and down that the answer is no. And people won't believe them because the thing is called Google Health. It just has attachments that I don't think Google understands that it has. Well, they're the ads. they are going to use the data as context in your Gemini results. Yeah, oh, absolutely. And that's what that buys them. Do you remember the... Did you ever watch Parks and Rec? Yeah. Do you remember the company Grizzle, this mythical bad guy company at the very end of Parks and Recreation? Do you remember this at all? No. Okay, so Grizzle is basically Google. It's this company run by skateboarders that becomes the biggest thing in the world. And they make this... case to the main characters in the show where they're like, oh, yeah, here's why we're collecting all your data. So if we detect that you're down, we can like direct you to a cup of Joe as a pick me up. And if we see that you're having a great day, we can I don't know, like direct you direct you to your favorite coffee shop to go hang out. And Leslie Knope, the main character just goes, so it's it's a coffee finder app. And he goes, yeah, we're making it with Starbucks. That's what this makes me think. It's like, this is just it's just that you're just you're going to take a bunch of things and then you're going to sell it to starbucks so they can recommend coffee to me all day every day depending on how yeah you're going to open gemini and you're going to say like i'm hungry and it's going to say based on your heart rate you should eat less salt like that's what they want and they're going to recommend you whatever blue apron integration right i can see like go to kava which is ironically sponsoring us in google match right now i don't know man i i get why they're doing it. I understand that, again, this is every single morning V and I talk about this because I try not to slack our reporters after hours. So I schedule a lot of insane wellness TikToks to send to V in the morning and then she's mad at me every morning. I was going to say, I don't know that that's better at 9am. Everyone's gotten used to it for me. There's a handful of reporters that get the craziest TikToks from me, like spot on the dot at 9 and I always forget to vary it to seem like I'm a real person. It's always at 9. But every morning V and I talk about more crazy wellness stuff and all of it is quantified self AI health coaches data collection data collection data collection and so of course it's google health because what they get with the brand is data collection sure everyone knows what's coming fitbit being like we're part of the google family is like you get the weird conspiracy theory facebook posts you know like I order Sundar Pichai to not share my fitbit data with google it's like you don't gave that with google health it's just google yeah that's a fair point i'm i'm sort of thinking of it next to meta rebranding all of its apps do you remember when it was like whatsapp by facebook yeah and everybody's like hold on facebook owns whatsapp yep and on the one hand it was like well yeah where you been guys but on the other hand it's like don't don't tell them what are you doing people don't know that people like whatsapp and hates facebook don't shove the facebook logo into the app. What are you doing? Boy, did he ever take that advice. Yeah, that went great. Anyway, I think there's one other gadget we should talk about before we take a break here, which is this company, Familiar Machines and Magic. Sure. Fabulous name. Founded by Colin Angle, who is the longtime CEO of iRobot, which made the Roombas. This is like a guy who knows home things. Just launched a new... I almost called it a device, but it's not. It's like a weird little robot animal called a familiar sure i'm gonna play the the brief intro video here and then i just i just need your thoughts on what this is so it's like i would describe this thing to you as a robot alien dog yeah that is also a polar bear yeah what if you made like a lamb look ominous yeah like they They call this thing a familiar... Again, ominous. Yeah. What do you make of this? They call it basically an embodied AI system. And Colin Engel's whole theory is that these things should be companions, right? This is not like a smart home controller that is also adorable. It is explicitly designed to be adorable and to connect with you and to be your best friend. I want to know what you make of this. there's a lot of desire for there to be robots and the humanoid robots don't work as we've all seen and so can we get a bunch of training data about navigating a house by making a cute fake dog that your kid can knock over and talk to boy i bet we can yes that's what i got for you i would never let this thing in my house zero percent chance i would let this thing in my house i'm i'm with you i mean what's funny to me about this is the the funniest lesson of rumba from 20 plus years ago is that people will fall in love with anything they put a round vacuum on your floor that bumped into the walls and people fell in love with it and became best friends with it so to then be like oh i have to make it look like a dog actually feels like you're learning the wrong lesson that it's like put put robots in people's houses let let them fall in love with them if they want to this thing creeps me out if i'm being completely honest with you even if i were into the theory of this which i'm not the specifics of this sort of medium-sized animal just padding around my house i've been watching a lot of sonic the hedgehog recently my three-year-old is super into sonic right now um this looks like a knockoff sonic character and i do not mean that as a compliment yeah i see that again sinister lamb yeah yeah exactly right uh yeah so i like i'm i'm torn i'm fascinated by this to see if it technically can do any of the things it is supposed to do i just am not at all sold on like the thesis behind any of this stuff especially because it doesn't actually talk so it's llm based uh but it make it meows and purrs uh and they don't talk because by quote by design it will avoid giving factual advice about things it shouldn't be giving factual advice about sure you can't just say it's a dog so it's gonna it's gonna patter around and be kind of alive and kind of like a dog but it's gonna meow and purr does your dog play music by the way the price is not announced uh but angle does say uh the cost will be quote around the same as pet ownership, which depending on how you count is millions of dollars. I was going to say, in my life, so, so, so expensive. Do I need to take it to the vet when it eats grapes? That's your subscription fee. You're going to get a subscription dog. And the point, I think this is just such an interesting quote. The next era of robotics is not about dexterity or human form. It's about machines that can build and sustain human connection. First of all, I'd point out that there are so many machines that can build and sustain human connection. Including vacuum cleaners. we did that already uh ask any car guy about their car like it's fine um but yeah i i mean i'm fascinated by this thing i'm fascinated by the fact that one of the it's just it comes up in everything one of the use cases is help with wellness activities yep everyone's doing wellness yeah i who knows what this thing will be i and i think it is very funny that it is this big it's a big guy it's a big guy yeah it's not a tiny little robot wandering around your house it is it is like a it's a guard dog yeah anybody who gets one of these I am desperate to hear from you if these things ever should final quote there is enough to it that it's beautiful wonderful to pet and give a hug to and keep up with you for some definition of alive it's alive hmm so you're saying Anthropic is going to release one of these very soon but it can only meow and purr yeah but it is by some definition of alive that's how i feel when i wake up in the morning uh all right we should take one more break and then we're gonna come back do the lighting rounds we'll be right back hey it's francis lamb host of the splendid table podcast every week on our show we celebrate the intersection of food and life and this month we're highlighting some of those iconic people in the food world it's a new collection called culinary masters and we revisit interviews with some of the people who have really changed how many of us cook and think about food. People like Martin Yan. When I was so small in the first few years, I can only work and help out the washed vegetable, to cut up something, and I help to bone the chicken. So that's why now I can bone a chicken in 18 seconds. Dr. Jessica B. Harris. Well, you know, I now know that it was neither the iron pots nor the wooden spoons, but there were multiple, unspoken, and as yet still unheralded, and in many cases unknown, gifts that Africa gave to the cooking of not only this hemisphere, but the world. And Claudia Rodin, to name a few. Why is this dish here? Who was here before? What kind of life did the peasants have? That's why this dish is the way it is. Search for The Splendid Table in your podcast app to listen to the series now. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored. For flavor. That was like eight dots, in case you were wondering. There are a lot of people tracking the dots. First up, the hype desk, where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueda come tell us what's cool on the internet and in the world. Hey, guys. Hello. Hello. Ross, there's a picture in your background that makes me think I know one of the things you want to talk about today. What do you have for us? Yes, I have manifested this, and I am so excited because late last night, out of nowhere, Nintendo announced a new Star Fox game. Or rather, a new old one. It's the fifth time they've made the same game. And it's still amazing. I'm still excited for it. There is just one Star Fox game, right? And they just make it over and over and over and over again. Well, there's that one we don't talk about with the dinosaurs. We don't talk about that one. So what's the deal with this game? Yeah, so, it's been rumored for a little bit. One of the first Hypedesk we ever did, we talked about the Mario movie and how weird it was that Glenn Powell was there to play Fox McCloud, the titular Star Fox character. And then out of nowhere, Nintendo usually does surprise direct announcements, but they give you a day heads up. This was 10 minutes. Like, literally, all my slacks, all my messages, all my little work chats were like, everyone, drop what you're doing, watch YouTube. They're going to announce a new Star Fox out of nowhere. Yeah. And sure enough, they did. And I think you already kind of alluded to it, David. Why break a great thing? It's a remake of Star Fox 64, which is itself a kind of definitive edition remake of the original Star Fox. So this is truly the fifth time they've made this game. But it looks amazing. It's got cinematic quality graphics, which hit or miss on what you feel about Fox McCloud looking like an actual fox now. But it's the same game. It's the same gameplay from what they're saying. There's a little bit of Nintendo Switch. Do you still do a barrel roll? You can still do a barrel roll. Hell yes, you can. That's the only important part of this game. Literally in the direct. They made sure you knew you could do a barrel roll. You could do a somersault. Peppy hair and slippy toe will still bother you to no end. In the middle of your missions, there's still all that cross ship chatter, which is very nice. That's classic Star Fox. It's great. We're so excited for that. There's also, okay, wait, but we have to talk about the defining feature of this game. to me, in my opinion, which is if you use game chat to have your face, like if it's looking at your face, it basically makes like a VTuber version of Star Fox that tracks with your eyebrows and your mouth and you become Star Fox. Wait, are you mo-cap animating the fox or does it make you a furry? No, no, no. You're mo-cap animating Fox McCloud and then you become Fox McCloud which to the delight of furries everywhere a virtual fursona onboarding move a VTuber a fursona VTuber kind of thing but really genuinely the sound that emanated from me the joy I felt this is the thing I love about Nintendo they are so deeply weird and they just do not care and i and they don't care about what the the the community thinks of these like very strange like alarmo is another really good example of like something where it's like nobody was asking for it and they made this cute little alarm clock and they were just like it's just cool and we like we want to do it and like this is like another example of them just being like hey we're just gonna be a nintendo on our own terms and this seems really funny and weird and like we're gonna just roll with it yeah tomodachi life also another great example of like the weirdest thing that could possibly come out of nintendo and somehow it works i've now been looking at pictures of the new starfox for several minutes i've been ignoring all of what you just said i'm sure it was great i can't decide if this is like do you remember when they first they first showed the new like real sonic and everybody freaked out and they had to redo Sonic. Yeah, yeah. This is like, there's a version of this that is that because there is something that is slightly horrifying, but this is also the coolest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. Because Star Fox is cool. He's got the not quite zipped up jacket. Yeah, what do you see? James McCloud. He's got the deviators. Like, oh my God. Like, it's just going to be, really, it's, this is, I'm excited about this. It like Uncanny Valley parentheses complimentary Do you know what I mean I keep seeing the the uh the the the tried meme like dsl dlss on dls off right like it is just a little too realistic and i think i think i'm gonna get used to it it took a while they just redid donkey kong's eyes about a year ago for the movie for the new donkey kong game it was a big deal because they haven't changed that look in forever yeah i've gotten used to it i i have to believe it's going to be the same case here but Yeah, my initial reaction is, that's really real. It's really real. But also there's the whole generation of kids, Gen Z and kids, who have just, they've never played a Star Fox game. Like, they don't know. This is all they're going to know. I'm like, that's fine. And now they're going to think Star Fox is like a very cool guy who like flunked out of the Air Force Academy for partying too hard. Oh, he dropped out on purpose. Here's the thing. He dropped out on purpose because he was too good for the Academy. You know what I mean? Like that's the lore I choose to believe. Okay. So don't Google Star Fox fursona. Nope. Nope. Don't do that. In an effort to find a GIF of how it looks. Because the first result is a Reddit thread from two years ago about audience overlap within subreddits. And I'll just read the headline. Apparently half of all Star Fox fans are furries. that number honestly feels quite low when you're like nintendo's doing stuff no one asked for i feel like the data pointed them directly to let the starfox fans have for so is some important context here because there's also a very famous uh fighting game uh champ sonic fox who is a furry he's also the number one mortal kombat player in the world i think he still is he has been for many years he just happens to be someone who always wears like a blue sonic fox furry mask i do feel like in back-to-back hype desk we've done wiki feet and furries it's not back-to-back but it has happened enough that it might become a regular thing i don't know finding our stride this is this is great news uh what else do you have for us today um gardening we have gardening ashley you want to talk about this just the concept of gardening yeah so zach galifianakis has a gardening show. The man loves a plant show. I was going to say, this is between true ferns. Yeah, sure. I'm going to call it that. I like that. It's not between two ferns, it's between true ferns, which we both thought this was going to be kind of like a silly, snarky, Zach Galifianakis jam where it's like, oh, it's like a funny little garden show. No, the man just really likes gardening. And it's like a really wholesome, it's a really wholesome little show on Netflix. I don't understand. I love it, but also I did not peg Zach Galifianakis for a plant girly. So is this one of those things where Netflix was just like, Zach Galifianakis, we'd love you to make a show. And he's like, cool, I'm only going to do one where I just sit in my garden and talk about plants. And Ted Sarandos is like, okay, kind of. So here's kind of this. So it's directed by Brook Linder, who also did John Mulaney's Everyone's Live in LA or whatever. So it has a very similar kind of rough vibe. Like you think it's going to be Zach Galifianakis being weird, like it's earnest every episode is first off every episode is 15 minutes 15 minutes super easy to them you can binge the whole thing in 90 minutes uh every episode has like three parts one he talks to actual farmers about the true history of a tomato or a mushroom or an apple like every episode is like a item based and then the other part of it is like he just goofs off with kids like kids say the darnest thing style like he's just being a clown and just having a good time like i it just feels in a weird way like a pg adult swim show it feels like something you would see on nickelodeon in the 90s at like 4 p.m yeah sure is this because netflix is doing vertical scrolling video in its mobile app now and they're just like make clips sec that seems like maybe a strategy that like yeah i would say that would that would certainly i mean that would certainly lend itself to that but it also just feels like um if it genuinely feels like this is like content for like if kids watch it like it's like safe content for them but also like keeps them in netflix i don't like i don't know i like i i find stuff like that really fascinating because it's just so odd and it's like maybe a parent would like let i don't know like if i saw that just randomly didn't know what it was and hadn't seen i don't know that i'd let my kid watch it if i was familiar with zach alfinakis right but also it is totally like appropriate for kids like it's it's very actually like very educational i think he i think he makes a joke about lsd once but otherwise it is a very like g-rated show so just the one lsd just the one like shrek has like at least four lsd trick is itself an lsd joke but no um no i think it's one of the things we got really surprised like just how earnest he came across in everything like usually you're used to like zach alfanak is the character or even like the heightened version of himself on camera where he's still being like a weird deadpan goof this is where i'm like they constantly show like the wrong take for like talking or he's talking to his producer off camera like they want to make it feel very rough kind of just truly authentic off the cuff he's laughing at his own jokes and he's just having a good time doing what he does it's kind of like if you watched a conan o'brien must go the travel show yeah and every now and then conan o'brien just drops the facade yeah it's that but the whole time yeah that is very zach alfanakis this is also very in his character this is also giving like early YouTube when like the Broad City girls are making their web series before they made Broad City. We're just doing it in reverse now where like A-list celebrity makes webisodes. We've gone back. I'm fully here for this. Speaking of Conan, by the way, Zach Galifianakis was on Conan O'Brien's podcast like this week, I think. Shockingly thoughtful about internet regulation. This is how I feel like whenever I see Ben Affleck talking about AI, I'm like, oh, I was unfamiliar with your game, sir. Affleck was like, and then he sold his AI company to Netflix. I know, and then he sold his AI company. So what startup does Zach Galifianakis have that's policy-based? Yeah, exactly. Zach Galifianakis is going to run for Congress in 2020. He's starting another MVNO, like Mitt Noble. You know it's coming. Between two phones. Between two phones. Thank you. Thank you for hearing that joke. It just hit. It finally hit. That was the funniest thing I've ever said on this podcast. we can't say anything else we gotta end on that note that's incredible all right i'm gonna go watch that show 15 minute episodes by the way fabulous more things should be 15 minutes ross ashley thank you as always we'll see you next week good to see you bye all right neil i this means it's time once again for america's favorite podcast without a podcast we got an email this week calling it the world's favorite podcast so we're going global buddy uh it's time for Brendan Carr as a dummy. What did he do this week, Neilai? He did a lot this week. As always, he did a lot this week. The main thing is that he cheered on the Eighth Circuit overturning the FCC's broadband equity rules that passed in the Biden administration where broadband companies had to try to provide internet access equitably to people of all kinds of backgrounds. And they basically, the court overturned it and Brendan cheered it and said, we don't have to do that, Which is just the most Brendan car thing in the world. Let's not give people who need internet, internet. Hooray. Yeah. I mean, you can talk about it lots of ways, but Brendan, there's nothing he loves more than allowing telecom providers to charge higher rates and provide worse service. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's his thing. Like, that's where he came from. Like, it is poor. Well, and importantly, not do any work at all. It's like Brendan is really trying to protect the work-life balance of carrier executives everywhere. Yeah. Before the FCC under Brendan became all about speech regulations, every single FCC chair, and I knew them all, was all about bridging the digital divide, closing the homework gap, making sure that rural communities had broadband. And Brendan is like, screw that. We don't need to overbuild. This is one of his favorite phrases. And then he's cheering on these court challenges to, you know, forcing what are essentially monopolies to provide coverage equally to people. So that's just very bad. He's very dumb. This is like I'm saying it this way without a lot of fire because this is just the most Brendan Carr thing. Like he's like a cartoon character villain in that sense. Yeah. But like this is also that this is the thing I'm used to arguing with my GOP FCC commissioners. Like I are edgy pie with like we would argue about this sort of thing. Like at least he's like true to form. You know, it's a classic Brendan car. Yeah. Then the other thing this week that I, I feel the need to issue a disclosure. Um, a few weeks ago, we mentioned that Brendan had bullied himself into a discussion of whether the NFL should lose its antitrust exemption. Oh, right. So big sports leagues have an antitrust exemption because the owners all get together and they go collude basically on prices for broadcast rights yeah and so in any normal market you would have them all compete we call those things cartels they're not generally allowed but big sports leagues tend to have these anarchist exemptions the nfl is maybe the most important one um so that the owners can come together and the league can go negotiate for broadcast rights and there's lots of structures and you don't necessarily need that one that's one we have um so because the owners have now started going to streaming and getting deals and in particular or the NFL is so expensive to watch legally, there's a lot of fulmination about breaking the antitrust exemption and making sure that it's not all on streaming or if it's going to be on streaming, that the local stations can do whatever they want. So the DOJ is investigating this. Brendan can't help it because he loves muscling his way into any sort of TV dispute. He decided that he's got the power too as well. There's going to be Senate hearings about it. Everyone's talking about it. And it's true that fans generally do not like the way that sports broadcast rights are set up right now okay it is expensive it's complicated a lot of people are sailing the the seven seas if you know what i mean so this is my disclosure the green bay packers this week uh sent a letter to congress it's a lot it's basically a letter it's like hey just like we're a small market team we're owned by the community if you upend the economic structure of the nfl like we'll be disproportionately impacted and the last sentence says it as clearly as you can. Put simply, any disruption to the current Sports Broadcasting Act model, eliminating our ability to negotiate as the NFL writ large would pose an existential threat to the Green Bay Packers and their existence in Green Bay as we know it. This comes the same week as Brendan saying out loud, actually, this inquiry might not lead to any action because there's a lot of pressure. Like the NFL is full of lobbyists and billionaires and they're like, no, no, you're not going to touch us it is as powerful an organization as we have in america this is a cultural institution they're like you know what uh brown trump is president here's bad money yeah like they just have the authority to do whatever they want in a way that many other places don't have the authority to they want so i'm sure they're lobbying brendan said this week we're just trying to make sure that we're educated on these issues it's not clear whether there'll be a regulatory outcome or not so you just have the nfl speaking with a woman voice being like screw you as corrupt as it gets in the way the nfl is corrupt and then you have the packers being like this might kill the packers I'm dying to know what your disclosure is here. Is this like Neelai Patel is secretly the backup quarterback for the Green Bay Packers? I don't think anyone would enjoy that. I do think I should be allowed to call both the offense and the defense in the fourth quarter to our playoff games. Based on my record in Madden alone, we would have gone to the Super Bowl 500 times in a row. Anyhow, no, I'm from Wisconsin. I was raised in Wisconsin by my father, a Brett Favre fan, and my family owns four shares of the Packers. No way! you were the owner of the greenback. You know, every now and again, like the sports media will run these trolls. It's like Packers owner says they're going to trade for it. It's always like one guy. Yes. The Packers are owned by the community. When they want to raise money to build stadiums, they issue shares, which give you nothing. And you buy it and they hang them on the wall. And that's, and you can, you can get some of the worst merch in history at a 20% discount from the pro shop. That's, that's what, and you can vote, but you, it doesn't matter. you can vote on the board of directors of the Packers, which I never do. So there's your disclosure. My dad and I each own two shares, the Green Bay Packers. I'm now going to start angling for a change to the Verge ethics policy that says you're not allowed to also own any sports teams. If you want to comment me for that one, I will take it on the chin. We did a quick post about the Packers thing. One of the commenters was like, I feel like this needs a disclosure. And they just meant that I'm a Packers fan, but I like thought about it. And I was like, nope, I own four shares. That's great. backer comcast is an investor in vox media the parent company of the no we got to change that one too and neil i owns uh we have to change that disclosure as well by the way i didn't even realize this um uh they're they're with the spin out of versant from comcast the nbc investment is not it went with a versant oh no now we have to say versant is a minority investor i think comcast Ventures is still up there somewhere, but NBC is not. Interesting. Okay. So there's your disclosure update. I own two shares of the Packers. That is my dad. Neil, I owns the Green Bay Packers. I own the Green Bay Packers. I'm trying to get the new president of the Packers at policy on Decoder, and I'm just thinking how funny that episode will be for a variety of reasons. As your boss. That's my question. That's really good. Anyhow, those are our disclosure updates. So this is now your most direct fight with Brendan Carr ever. We're getting closer. The Neelai-Brendan showdown inches ever closer. If Brendan ruins the Green Bay Packers, I will be very upset. I don't think it's going to happen because I think the NFL's ability to lobby on its own behalf is very high. Yeah, they're largely doing fine. And I also do also think that the streaming landscape and the cost of watching sports is untenable for most people. and actually maybe you should renegotiate and rethink the entire structure that led to those outcomes. And maybe the Packers are overplaying it. I'll find out when I, Ed Policy's boss, is the owner of the Green Bay Packers interview Ed Policy. I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm willing that into existence here at the end of Brendan Carnes. As always, Brendan, if you'd like to talk about any of this, in particular, your absolutely regressive approach to broadband deployment in the United States, which is keeping the internet from poor people uh you're welcome to come on the show uh i can tell you that i'm pretty sure we're going to federate brendan carr's dummy to one more podcast very soon it was already on steven robles's podcast but there's another one coming you might be able to guess what that is so we're we're expanding we're america's favorite podcast within every podcast the brendan you're welcome i a d c u is exploding that's right anyhow that's been brendan carr's dummy america's favorite podcast within all the podcasts it's good stuff all right my first lightning round item um i would just like to alert everyone to the existence of a company called dreamy if you don't know about dreamy uh jen tui wrote a terrific piece for us about this company basically it's a it's a company out of china that started as a robot vacuum company on kind of a dyson grind where they're like we know how to make a kind of motor what can we put motor in and started doing stuff, built robot vacuums, built a pretty successful robot vacuum business, and then decided that the next thing to do is to make everything for everyone, everywhere throughout the world as we know it. And last week had a big, huge U.S. launch event and has basically begun rolling out some of the most spectacular vaporware the world has ever seen. And this just, I just, I'm like earnestly proud of this company for with a straight face saying all of the things that it has been saying over the last week or so one of the things they said was we will turn our ceo into elon musk yeah just yeah it's like it's just a thing they're saying out loud um they announced uh i think like two dozen smartphones in in the aurora line of course of which have weird ideas about things including one uh that is a modular phone that you can attach different modules including a telephoto camera lens too there's also a satellite communications module just i want to be so clear that none of these things are ever going to exist and if they do you won't buy them anyway but i love so much that a company can get on stage and be like look at all this weird crap we made uh they also made a car i think no no it's not just a car david it's a it's a rocket car oh right it's a rocket car yeah it can do zero to 60 and they claim uh 0.9 seconds so it literally would have to be a rocket car it's a it's a rocket car it is uh it i don't understand i mean our deck is so straightforward andy hawkins is our transportation reporter and the deck of this piece is the chinese vacuum company has automotive aspirations but its claims of rocket boosted acceleration don't add up it's like yeah i don't think that the math ain't math in my friends yeah uh yeah they also launched smart rings smart glasses uh a laundry robot i would say there is no more classic vaporware genre than Robot That Will Fold Your Laundry. It has been... Somebody has been shipping that since time immemorial and I believe it will never actually exist in the real world. But Dreamy's making one. They got a bunch of robot vacuums and lawnmowers. All kinds of wild... Every product you could possibly imagine, Dreamy believes that it will sell you at some point in the very near future. And it's all a bunch of nonsense and I just admire the hell out of it. Can I come back to the rocket car? Sure. It's very important that I come back to dreamy announcing a rocket car. It's called the Next 01 Jet Edition car. It has Batmobile-style fake jet engines on the back. And again, the claim is it can go from 0 to 60 in 0.9 seconds. You can't do that on regular tires, as our transportation editor, Andy Hawkins, points out. You will hit the limits of traction. So you can put all the power to the wheels, but the tires will explode. So they're going to launch this thing briefly into the air as it accelerates. You might have made a top-fueled drag car, but you actually just made this Kia-looking thing with your jet engines on the back. Fantastic. Unless the reason that it's jet engines is because they're not driving the wheels. This is what I'm saying. They're going to launch the car into the air. The wheels are not important. The jet engines can just push the car forward. Yeah, the wheels don't have to turn at all. The wheels are just ancillary. When you talk about the most spectacular vaporware in the history of the world. Honestly, it has a real claim to it. Like, there's not a lot of better vaporware. Everybody go check it out. We have a great photo essay of all this stuff. Go read Jen's piece. We'll put it all in the show notes. This company is absolutely fascinating. Whether it ships or not, I think Dreamy is fascinating, and you should go check it out. Neal, what's your next one? I just want to point out that the Autopian sent an engineer to check out the Nebula Next01 jet car, and his assessment was, quote, feels like horseshit. Perfect. I like the idea that this person was not like an automotive engineer. They're just like an HVAC engineer where they're just like, nope, wind didn't work that way. It's really good. It's very good. What's your next one, Neal? I've got one more. It's just one of my favorite. stories a week we started with elon we're going to end with elon elon out of the nowhere just announced that he is further consolidating the spacex empire and xai which was its own company which also contained x the social platform and everything out that we all use for everything right so they yeah they started x then started xai xai swallowed x yep and it all became xai it all became xai and then spacex swallowed xai right now he's formally dissolving xai as a company Okay. And it's just going to be part of SpaceX, and they're just going to call it SpaceX AI. So wait, the whole thing is now SpaceX AI? Yes. They did not quite announce it. They put out a press release announcing a compute partnership with Anthropic, in which SpaceX referred to itself as SpaceX AI over and over again in the press release. So that's what we got. The whole Anthropic thing, by the way, very weird. They're getting all of this compute from, I guess it's called SpaceX AI, But there's like a clause in it that if Elon Musk decides it's bad for the world, they can pull the compute back. Weird stuff going on. Weird stuff going on. It's also not clear if SpaceX itself is called SpaceX AI or just the products, the AI products of SpaceX. Right. Are an umbrella brand called SpaceX. None of this makes any sense. X is a feature of XAI, which is a feature of SpaceX AI, which is a branch of SpaceX. Yes. And by the way, X, just to be clear, is the everything app that we all do all of our banking and real estate transactions in. Right. Pretty soon you might bank with a division within a division within a division within a division of SpaceX. Yes, which is also selling compute to Anthropic. I love it. When you're like, oh, this whole episode started with a long trial about corporate structures and you end with and it's called SpaceX AI. It's like, well, we've learned nothing. I have no notes. I mean, I will give you a just to just to button that with a better example of a company. doing a good job asha sharma who is running the xbox team now um continues to do good smart things which is to say make obvious decisions to make xboxes less bad uh there she announced this week that they're they're getting rid of the co-pilot ai stuff on the xbox uh they're they're making some big changes to platform they started teasing the like universal look across all kinds of different devices uh just before we get out of here just a brief shout to asha sharma who has basically shown up and just systematically reversed all of the bad decisions made by people before her which is actually a pretty good way to uh endear yourself to fans of xbox and it seems to be going very well there was a lot of skepticism about asha sharma when she took over this team and uh people are coming around really fast there's a lot of enthusiasm yeah she's been up to recently i mean I'm taking the AI out of it. Everyone's like, you're the best. Yeah. And meanwhile, Microsoft is out here being like, oh, do you know all those MSN widgets that show up in your face every time you open the start menu? We're going to get rid of those too. And everybody's like, oh, my God. Microsoft gets it. What if we made our products less horrible? Yeah. It's perfect. The fate of Windows. I'll take it. All right. We should get out of here. Lots going on on the site. Go read everything. Liz, literally as we speak, is still in the courtroom. There are still shenanigans. This trial has weeks left. We got a lot left to do. We'll keep covering it. But we will not be covering it next week because we are off next week. No show Tuesday, no show Friday. We're going to be back with a live show on the 19th after Google I.O. Neela, you're going to be at I.O. I will be at I.O. TBD on connectivity situations, whether we get you on the show or not. But we have some other folks here that are going to help me run through all the news. We're going to talk about all of it. We're going to go live kind of right-ish after the keynote on Tuesday. So no Tuesday episode. that morning, but we'll be back that afternoon. We're just trying to give everybody a break. There's a lot of stuff coming up. We have some really fun plans that we're going to start to tell you about pretty soon. Lots going on. We just figured we're going to give everybody a week to go stare at trees before the true chaos of developer season gets us off. I'm going to see if I can get my car to go faster than any car has ever gone in the history of the world. You're going to put several rockets on your car and see if tires even matter anymore. It's going to be great. Who's on Decoder this week? Joanna is on very soon talking about new things and her new book and then I will just hint that there is a wave of big interviews coming that I'm very excited about. It's going to be good. All right. Remember, as always, you can subscribe to The Verge to get this podcast and all of our podcasts ad-free. Theverge.com slash subscribe. That is what makes us ungovernable. They can't mess with us as long as you subscribe. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's episode is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. we'll see you what in two weeks Eli, rock and roll