Elon Musk had a bad week in court

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We ask them, we steadfastly refuse to answer them. This is what we do here. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil Ippsal is here. You know, I've been deposed like two or three times in the course of running The Verge. Have you really? I've never even thought about that. There's a very funny transcript of me being deposed. For what? The important one was there was a game streaming service that Sean had called defunct and they sued us. I remember this. Saying that they were not defunct. Don't put it in the newspaper that we're defunct. And it's a long story that ends with the judge in Delaware realized that some obscure law of republication did not have enough precedent. So they allowed the case to go forward so that they could say that us linking to an old story in which we had called the company defunct did not constitute a republication that would then bring it into the statute of limitations. Oh, wow. This took six years. Goodness. It's true that I've been deposed because lawyers are like, just say you don't remember. So it's just an hour of being like, I don't recall. Which I really, this is where like lawyer Nilay and journalist Nilay run into each other in my favorite way. Like you, you, you love to gossip. You love to share information that you know. You like to be a person who knows things and that you just have to sit there and you're like, I know the correct lawyerly advice is to sit here and say, I can't recall. You just don't remember. Whatever happened in the past, it escapes your memory. It was so long ago. Yeah. Who's to say? Who knows? That's very good. So we do have a bunch of legal stuff to talk about today. The big news of this week, obviously, is Elon Musk versus OpenAI. We talked about kind of the basics of this trial and the run-up to it with Liz Lopato on Tuesday. Go listen to that if you haven't yet. We got some unexpectedly spicy early testimony from Elon Musk himself. I mean, he's been on the stand. He's on the stand as we speak. Yeah. He doesn't like it. He's not doing a great job. He doesn't like being the main character of the lawsuit that he filed and insistently drove to trial. Yeah. You would think this would be the thing that he wanted the whole time. Like, let's just get into this, actually. We got a lot of stuff to get to today, but this is clearly where we have to start. Because the dynamic of this is so strange. So Elon Musk was called as the first witness. They spent a couple of days getting a jury together, which was very funny, and we should talk about the ways in which the jury came together. But the first witness in this trial is Elon Musk himself. And to your exact point, this should have been the moment he was waiting for. All of this, this obviously losing battle, this weird process of discovery that has been kind of damaging to everybody, this whole lark of a thing Elon Musk has been on, you just have to assume, is so that he can get up and publicly say a bunch of rude things about other people in the AI world. And he just didn't pull, he just did a bad job. Yeah, I mean, everyone thinks they know how a trial will go. I'll remind the audience for the 10 millionth time that the law is not a computer. It's not deterministic. There's no predicting what will happen, especially in front of a jury. But you can do yourself some favors. You can be charming and warm and receptive and act like a human being on the stand when you're giving the testimony in the case that you filed and insistently drove to trial. And also, if you want to win the battle everyone assumes you're going to lose, doing all of the things you just described strikes me as even more important. Like, make the jury like you, Elon, becomes a very important part of this whole process. It's just very obvious that Elon Musk, in an environment where his money doesn't make him important and away from the social media platform that he controls, that algorithmically brings people around to tell them that he, they agree with him, is kind of an uncharming, unpersonable dick. Yep. And especially when he's under cross-examination for a lawyer who's being paid a lot of money to make him look like a dick. He is not prepared for that circumstance in any way, shape, or form. And you can just see it happening on the stand in this trial in ways that are potentially bad for, like, the entire AI industry. Just now, as we're recording, as we sat down to record, OpenAI's lawyers got Elon Musk to admit that XAI distilled OpenAI's models as part of its training. Oh, wow. Distillation is a process where a sort of less powerful model asks a more powerful model, like, what to do. I don't know how else to describe it. That's more or less what's happening. It trains itself by prompting the more powerful model. Yes. And you can feel a lot of ways around distillation. Like, Google calls it an attack. Anthropic has anti-distillation protocols. And they're all like, you can't steal our property. And I think anyone who is rational or sane or kind is like, but you already stole everything. Right. Distillation is just very funny for these companies to get worked up about. Yes, but they all do get worked up about it. They all get totally worked up about it. They're like, we scraped the entire internet. We fed them into our huge data centers and took all the energy away. And we didn't pay anyone for any of that. But now you can't distill the model we made. Right. OK. You can have a lunch. It's like when Anthropic's source code leaked and they're like, oh, no. And it's like, well, you might have had this coming. So there's something very funny about distillation just generally from that perspective. But you're not supposed to do it. The companies don't want you to do it. And you're especially not supposed to say OpenAI is horrible and then try to catch up as fast as you can with XAI and then do it by distilling OpenAI. And so just on the stand, minutes ago, they got him to admit that XAI has distilled OpenAI's models. And he's trying to pass it off as like, we all do it. Everyone does it. This is how you train a great model. And it's like, no, most of the companies train their less powerful models on their own more powerful models. This is a scandal. And I just don't think he was ready to walk into these kind of scandals. Evidently, he wasn't. And it seems like, so Liz Lopato on our team has been in the courtroom through all of this. She's chronicling it all over the website. This is like, we invented quick posts as a format just for Liz to live blog things that Elon Musk says in a courtroom. You know what I mean? And so we should just start at the very beginning because this becomes delightful from, like, minute one of jury selection, which is sort of a weird thing to do, right? You ostensibly need a group of people who are going to be impartial. And the list of things that it is hard for people to be impartial about in this particular case strikes me as, like, astonishingly high. You have to get a bunch of people who are impartial about AI, which is not a thing most people are. You need people who are impartial about Sam Altman, which most people are not. You need people who are impartial about Elon Musk. This is just like, this is a sort of unicorn type of person you're looking for in the jury. And basically very quickly, Liz seems to have discovered all of the possible jurors don't like Elon Musk. People hate Elon Musk. This is what I'm saying Doge master has shown up, and everyone's like, yeah, we hate that guy. YGR also, I think, made the main characters in this story agree to stay off of social media during the trial, which is a wild thing. Well, it's because Elon is posting, they stole a charity. This is going to come up again. He's got these lines that he thinks are going to be the winning lines, and you can't just say them to a jury. And he, like OpenAI has filed motions to strike some of this testimony because he's doing tweets. And so, she basically is like, well, I have to be able to trust that you're not going to leave here and corrupt this process. So she's told everyone to stop tweeting. Yeah. So before we get into all of the insane stuff that happened on the stand, I think, I want to try and very briefly explain the two sides of the argument, and I want you to tell me if I, like, more or less have it right as we get into this. Because I think it ends up being important again for all the lines Elon Musk says. So the Elon Musk stance is, I helped fund and start a thing that I believed was a charity. This whole thing was my idea. I was the driving force behind all of it. And then they stole it from me, essentially. They forced me out. They took my money, and they built this gigantic for-profit company on top of it. How dare they do so? Is that a reasonable? Yeah. That's his version of the argument. That's his version of the argument. There's some daylight between what he thinks the argument is and what's in his legal briefs. Yes. Sure. And there's a lot of daylight between his argument and what may have actually happened, which is that he just hates these guys. Right. So the other side of the argument is, as OpenAI is coming up, Elon Musk tries to basically take over the thing for himself. He wants all of the control. He wants all of the board seats. He wants everything. And when he doesn't get what he wants, he decides to, you know, take his ball and go home, leaves, says, screw this, tries at some point to subsume OpenAI into Tesla because he thinks that's the only way they can take on Google and win at AI. This doesn't work, and he gets angrier and angrier as OpenAI gets more and more successful and thus then decides to sue because he's mad that he didn't get to be in charge of this thing that is huge. Like, in a real way, the argument on the other side of Elon Musk is, he's really mad that Sam Altman is the face of AI and not Elon Musk. There's that. And straightforwardly, you didn't read the contract, which also comes up in these cases when we talk about them on the Vergecast over and over and over again. Did you do the reading? And the answer in this case, we now have evidence, is no. Elon insistently did not do the reading. Yeah, it's good stuff. So we have a bunch of, there's just a lot of good lines from the testimony. Liz has been in there talking through it all. We pulled some favorites. Neil, do you want to start with, let's just run through the testimony and do some greatest hits here. So we're on day three. As we record, we're on day three. So Elon's been on the stand for two days of the trial and several hours today. The first day was the direct examination. So if you ever watched a courtroom drama, you know this is when your own lawyer shows up and asks you questions about how cool you are. This is the time you're supposed to do very well and look very good. Right. They're like, how did you, how are you such a genius? And Elon is like, I can't possibly say. And this is what happens, right? He's like, I'm just a benevolent guy who wants to make cars. And so that first day, he was really flat because there's no conflict. Yesterday, when cross-examination began, he just became a raging jerk. And cross is when, you know, you get asked the leading question and the answer is yes or no. And if, you know, that they can say, your honor, are this hostile witness? And you just have to say yes or no. Like that whole thing, that's cross-examination. They say things like, isn't that right, over and over and over. And it's designed so that the witness is only supposed to say yes or no. And Elon hates this. And it's like he's never watched a single courtroom movie in his life. So at many points, he accuses OpenAI's lawyer of, quote, asking questions that were designed to trick me. And then he answers the questions by saying things like, you mostly do unfair questions. And then OpenAI's lawyer is saying things like, I'm trying to put the questions as fairly as I can. I am doing my best. And Musk just goes, that's not true. And this is just the entire, at one point, Liz writes, he refuses to acknowledge the nature of linear time. Oh, yeah. It was like, before you were not a board member, you were a board member, yes? And he's like, and he just won't answer the question. He used to say. So he's just like fighting the basics. Like, we're not even engaging on the basics of whether or not cutting off donations to OpenAI might create pressure on OpenAI, whether Andrei Karpathy, who he had recruited to OpenAI and then to Tesla, whether he'd asked him to stay at OpenAI. Like, just these very basic chronology questions. Elon's like, you're mostly unfair. You're mostly trying to trick me. Yeah. And I mean, there's another one of these that's just as good. And this goes to, did you read the contract? This is the one that really has stuck out in my brain for the last few days. Elon gets an email in 2018 outlining the bones of the for-profit structure. This is like, one of the things, actually, that has come up in this trial and actually, I think, will end up being important is how long has it been a discussed possibility for OpenAI to be a for-profit corporation, right? Like, there's this old clip that's going around of Sam and Elon talking. And Sam refers to OpenAI as a company and Elon goes, OpenAI is structured as a 501c3 nonprofit. And a bunch of people are like, ah! But then it's increasingly clear that conversations about a for-profit OpenAI have come up many times and Elon has acknowledged that he was okay with a version of that. But there's a moment where they send him an email outlining the corporate structure they're imagining for a for-profit version of OpenAI. And he says on the stand that he only read the very first section of it, which is, hey, he says, I read the highlighted box with important warning, which is amazing. This is very, it sounds very much like the way the Trump administration handles Trump, where it's like, you have to draw a big red box around the thing you need him to read. Otherwise, you just have no idea. By the way, the important warning was contributors should consider their investments as donations with no return. Right. So he's acknowledged that he's read that part. Right. Which is, which is important. And then Musk says, I didn't read the fine print. We're going into the fine print of this document. And then OpenAI's lawyer goes, it's a four-page document. Brutal. It's so good. It's brutal. You can just tell he doesn't like being on the stand in this way because he can't ignore your tweet. He can't downrank you. His army of fanboys isn't there to distract with memes. He just has to do it in the lawsuit that he filed and insistently drove to trial. Yeah. Crazy. It's a four-page document. It's just such a good, like, those are one of those moments where you can just imagine, like, he goes back to his law office at the end of the day and just, like, high-fiving all the paralegals everywhere. It's good stuff. He's got another line here where he, he says earlier, I don't lose my temper and I don't yell at people. And OpenAI's lawyer takes this as an opportunity to bait him into losing his temper. Which he does very successfully. Like, immediately and successfully. So in the same sequence, he says, I don't think I read this term sheet. I'm not sure I actually read this term sheet. I did not look closely at this term sheet. And then he's been deposed already. So there's already another version of his testimony. OpenAI's lawyer points out that in the previous deposition, Musk didn't say that he'd read the first paragraph and nothing else. And Musk starts yelling at him. I said I didn't look closely. I only read the headline. And it's like, my guy, you can't, you can't just be like, I'm very calm. I'm just here to save humanity. I never raise my voice and then start yelling at the lawyer. And then at the next turn, you have to start yelling at the lawyer. There's another part of this. Again, this is, if you set yourself up to be cross-examined, you do have to prepare. It doesn't feel like he prepared for this obvious eventuality. And you can't trickster your way out of it. So if anyone listening has ever done, like, mock trial in high school, this, this one to me as a person who did mock trial in high school, is just so funny because you can see him being the smartest kid in class and it not working. So Elon writes an email about DeepMind. And he says, DeepMind is moving very fast. I am concerned that OpenAI is not on Can you see my jury is buying this? There's another part of this. This is the most Elon thing in the entire world. He's arguing with lawyer. He's arguing with apparently his own lawyer. And so he says, I understand leading questions. That's a leading answer. I was just about to bring this one up. And the judge says, he can lead. He can lead all he wants. Let's remind everyone, you are not a lawyer, and you've never taken a class in evidence, which is an insane thing for a judge to remind a witness. Yep. And Musk's response is, I did take Law 101 technically, but yes, I am not a lawyer. This is a total AI pill, man. Like, he's like, he asked XAI how to do a direct examination, and now he thinks he's a lawyer. This is also, like, very clearly someone who is used to either being or at least being treated as the smartest person in every room he's in. And there's even, there's been a bunch of evidence in this trial so far of the other OpenAI founders, like, going way out of their way to tell Musk how terrific he is. And that, like, every request begins and ends with unbelievable flattery of what a genius he is and what a pleasure it is to be able to just be in a room with Elon Musk talking about AI. Like, Greg Brockman just like makes an ass out of himself being kind to Elon Musk in every single email. And you can just see this is a person who meets somebody who doesn't want Elon Musk's money, it actually is out to defeat Elon Musk in a very specific way that no one ever really is in Elon Musk's orbit, and he just self-destructs in the face of it. Yeah, he can't do it. You take him away from his money and his social media platform that he controls, where he has built himself an algorithmic filter bubble of people who think he's great, and you're like, oh, this isn't going well for you. At the very end of this, the judge says, he was at times difficult. Part of management, from my perspective, is to just get through the testimony. It's bad. This is all bad. I mean, okay, this is actually, this is where I wanted to end this one, because what I can't figure out here is the stuff that Judge Gonzalez Rogers, good old YGR, is saying seems like stuff I've never heard a judge say in the course of a trial. And again, where so much of this is going to come down to Elon Musk convincing this group of people in the jury that he is a good person trying to save the world, boy, does that all seem to bode very badly for how this is going for Elon Musk so far. The fact that, like, is it out of pocket for a judge to have to say this stuff during a trial as it seems to me? So they sometimes say it. They say it when they have, like, the sovereign citizen guys who come in and they're like, you don't have jurisdiction over me. Like, they say it in that situation. Sure. But normally, we've all watched all these CEOs appear before Congress, right? They are way buttoned up, because when the person with the power to take your stuff away shows up, you back it way down. You're conciliatory. You say, you know, Your Honor, I'm going to have to check that out later. Like, he should be playing to the jury. And he's saying things like they tried to steal a charity, and this case is going to set a precedent that will let anyone steal a charity. And this is his X workshop to applause line. And he's not allowed to say it. And OpenAI is, like, filing motions to strike his testimony because that's not true. And this is a real, I mean, you can have a lot of feelings about the legal system in the United States of America. You have a lot of feelings about the justice system in the United States of America. It is a structured system. It's designed the way it's designed to at least gesture at fairness. Right. And you can't just steamroll it. Like, that's why you have judges and procedure and rules and lawyers and all this stuff. And he's trying to steamroll it because he steamrolls everything. And he's just running into the reality of he's just a witness on the stand. Right. Again, you know, it's going to flip and they're going to put Sam on the stand. And I'm sure, I'm sure OpenAI's lawyers are going to try to make Sam look great and Elon Musk's lawyers are going to try to make Sam look horrible. And that's just the way it goes. But right now, what you have is one of the wealthiest men in the world in front of a jury that has pretty clearly indicated statistically they don't like him being a huge dick. And I just don't know what his plan is. I don't know that he has the, like, personality qualities to solve that problem on his own. Like, Liz kept noting on today, Thursday, that he was much more subdued than he has been in the past. Like, clearly there is somebody giving him the, this is not going well for you, buddy, note. And yet, he can't help himself. Right? Like, this is the third day of this. It's not unclear how it's going. This is happening while we're recording, so they've moved on to Jared Burchell, who runs Elon Musk's family office, manages investments. We've already gotten to how many Teslas he has. It's good stuff all the way around. Yeah, it is. Liz's big theory was that this is going to be a trial kind of about a bunch of things that don't make any sense, but there is going to be a lot of stuff that comes out. And I think that is already becoming true. There's just like, there's a great moment earlier today where Elon Musk took a long time to acknowledge that his for-profit companies are for profit. That's right. It's just, what are we doing here, Neil? None of it makes sense. We have all kinds of coverage on the site. Obviously, Liz is in the courtroom. Hayden Field, our senior AI reporter, is taking all the documents that are coming out over the course of the trial, looking at them, organizing them. There's a long post where if you just want to see the evidence that's being entered, you can go look at it. We're going to, I mean, it doesn't get bigger than this for us. So we're covering this in every way we can. Yeah, and there's a bunch of other OpenAI swirl happening right now. We should just talk about a couple of the things. I think the biggest one that happened this week is Microsoft and OpenAI essentially walked their deal all the way back. Like Microsoft and OpenAI for years have had this very complicated but very sort of important and lucrative deal by which they share revenue and technology with one another. This is how like Bing became what it was back in 2023. Did it? They made Google dance, Neil. Listen, this is the greatest day of Bing's life. Give it its one day. And this was like a really important tie-up for both of these companies, right? Microsoft owns a huge portion of OpenAI. Because of all of this, this is how OpenAI got a lot of access to technology and compute for a long time. And their big thing was all of this gets sort of wound down and reconsidered once we get to AGI. And right, AGI was supposed to be this magical moment that if somebody got to AGI before OpenAI, OpenAI would shut down and would give all of its technology and resources to that company. All of this is nothing. AGI is nothing. I can't believe you're not leading with this. And the final acknowledgment of it is their deal is now just a normal contract for compute. I can't believe you didn't lead with the AGI clause going away. This is the clause that started with if you make like $100 billion of economic value, that's AGI. And then it got reworked into we'll put up a panel that will evaluate AGI and they would never say who was on the panel. And I still believe it should have been like the Pope and Mariah Carey and me. Especially now that we have Chicago Pope. Like that would have been a great panel. Like I just... Yeah. We could have sold tickets. Is this digital God? Is that the question? And that's gone. Yep. We never even got to learn who they were thinking about for the panel. So in the annals of tech history, who was on the AGI panel will just be a forever unsolved mystery. But in tech circles, this is not because AGI is a fake concept that has no bearing on anything and is completely immeasurable and nonsensical. It's because we're already there. Like we've been seeing this for a while, that the Mark Andreessens of the world have been out there being like, AI and AGI are already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And other people have decided that it's not about AGI, it's about super intelligence, which is apparently a different thing of equally nebulous definition. But yeah, this whole thing has just fallen apart. And very clearly what this is, is OpenAI wanted to be able to go make other deals with other companies and not be tied up with Microsoft in this same way. Also, there have been lingering issues between Microsoft and OpenAI for a long time. Microsoft hired a whole team of people to go do Microsoft's own AI stuff. A lot of the reporting in the story about Sam Altman that was in The New Yorker that Ronan Farrow did was about the ways in which these companies have kind of, if not lied to each other, at least not been wholly good partners to one another. And so the whole thing is just very clearly like, everybody wants point in being locked to Azure in the way that they were. And I think we're going to see OpenAI be way more aggressive trying to get business customers now that they're on AWS. None of this matters to anyone normal for any reason whatsoever. This is the most boring enterprise cloud computing drama that has ever existed in the history of the world. But it is happening for a specific and important reason, which again, you and I keep talking about, which is that people, regular, normal human people in their regular normal lives are increasingly saying they don't want AI. Yep. And they're saying it in ways big and small, right? There was this company, Sensor Tower, which does really interesting analytics data on the internet and on mobile apps in particular, came out with a study that says basically uninstall rates for AI apps are way up year-over-year. Just to give you an example, Claude has the best number. Claude is the best performer of all of the major chatbots with a 90% increase in uninstalls year-over-year. ChatGPT is up 257%, and this was measured in particular around all the stuff with the Pentagon and the Department of Defense. Wait, let me understand this rate. So uninstalls are up 257%. Yeah. Not 257% of people are uninstalling it. Correct. Which is a very Trump-like percentage. Yes. But the rate of uninstalls is more than doubled, right? That's right. Okay. And next to that, the rate of downloads is also slowing down. It's going up, but the actual pace of adoption is slowing really fast. And we're just in this, we're in this fascinating moment where, we had a great story on the site this week digging more into this tension that young people feel where they feel obligated to use AI, and so they do, and most people who are in high school and college report using these AI bots all the time. And they hate it, and they wish they didn't have to, and they feel obligated to, they feel like they're being sold a bill of goods about how if they don't, they'll be left out of the job market and their world will fall apart on them, but they don't want to use these tools because they understand it to be bad for them to do so. Yeah. And there is just like, this tension is real, and it is serious. And the thing that ChatGPT has had going for it for a long time is that growth has been ridiculous. Like it is, it is one of the fastest-growing pieces of consumer technology in history. There's been a bunch of reporting recently about the fact that ChatGPT still hasn't announced that it has a billion users, which is like a big important milestone that a lot of people have been waiting for and have been, did not expect to be waiting this long for. And like there, there is just, these things are huge. They're very successful. Lots of people use them. All that is true, and yet there is just this mounting evidence that even the people who use it don't like it. And more and more people are finding ways to not use it. That billion user, billion weekly active user number is a big deal because people have been waiting for it. But the information first reported, and then the Wall Street Journal had the same bit that OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer is saying, we can't withstand the scrutiny of going public right now. Right. The kind of financial reporting we'd have to do, we can't, we cannot do right now. And that as a result, she is being in some ways frozen out of her executive roles at the company. Like there, the, the tension inside of OpenAI around this stuff appears to be pretty intense. That's reporting. I will say they keep issuing statements signed by both Sam and Sarah saying, we love each other. So. Don't put in the newspaper that we're defunct. There's something here that we keep talking about that people keep arguing with us about because the numbers are broadly big. Google announced this quarter that Google search queries have hit an all-time high. Great. It is true that people are using the tools at high rates. It's also true that they're making up their minds. Like the polling data is super clear, and everyone in tech has gotten so confused about what data is that they can't see the thing in front of their face, which is the experiences in the free consumer products are bad. Yep. Just straightforwardly bad. The experience of free ChatGPT is bad. It is nothing but like Buzzfeed-style engagement prompts now. Like every query ends with, have you thought about asking me another question? Like, it's like some leading way. Yeah. The ads are starting to get more intense. You're hitting limits faster and faster on these tools. Like it's, it is an increasingly bad experience. And the bar, the reason it became such a faster-end product to begin with is that Google search at that time, and to this day, is so intensely commercialized and shitified. So as a competitor to that version of Google search, which is 95 sponsored posts and an SEO-ified web where the economic conditions of publishing a recipe require all the poor recipe bloggers to write 2,000 words of personal narrative before the actual recipe? And that was all bad. We've written about that at length. Of course, the chatbot that will just talk to you is a better experience. Of course, that thing grew at infinite scale in the beginning. And now they have to make money. They're reverting to an in-shitified version of the product, loading it with ads, loading it with more engagement prompts, trying to drive user engagement in all kinds of ways that we understand, and people are reacting to it. Yeah. It's the same with free Gemini. It's the same with free AI Overviews. Yes, it's true. They're doing more search queries because you can just ask the thing more open-ended questions and it will deliver you the answer. It's also true that AI Overviews are generally bad. Yeah, and you have to do another search to get a good answer. Right. And like, no one, it's, I just feel like the tech industry is, is lost in the data, right? They're, they're, they're looking at these numbers and saying something must be going right. The market is telling us that we're winning. And it's like, also they're telling you that they hate the products. Tech companies love to talk about this phrase revealed preferences as a way out of the tension between people actually liking the product or not, right? That you say, oh, people are, are having a bad time on Instagram and it makes them feel bad and it creates issues with, with mental health and body dysmorphia and all of this stuff. And someone at one of these companies points to a chart that says, well, they keep opening the app, so they must like it. And we, that, that idea needs to die. It just, it just needs to die because it is not correct. Because the revealed preference of people using AI is, I would like to have a job in the future. And, and the world has spent the last four years telling me that if I don't learn how to use cloud code, I will never get a job and, and that the world will leave me behind. And so the revealed preference is not for these good products. It's, it's to continue to be a functioning member of society. And we just have to get out of this idea that because people use your products, that means they like them. This is the story of social media. We, we have spent a decade learning with social media that they don't have to be good products to be powerful and to be popular and to be like massively used. Like screw you and your revealed preferences. People, people are saying out loud that they don't like your product and that they feel like they have to use it. And if you as a tech company think that's a victory, you should understand very quickly why everybody hates you. That's why everybody hates you. Yeah. I mean, it, to the extent that, you know, when Meta still had product managers, I think they're firing them all because Meta's firing everybody every week. Um, you know, the joke was always, if Meta was having a bad quarter, a product manager could just turn a knob, increase the ad load and make the number. Yeah. Inside of a tech company, that sort of decision process where it's like, we can just make more money by making the user experience slightly worse for a few weeks is pretty normal. Like there's a reason it's a joke. Like I. By the way, Meta this week revealed that to be precisely correct. Uh, Meta, Meta revealed that it lost 20 million users in its uh in its family of apps that Meta stopped breaking out which app had which many users because I think it would make Facebook in particular look bad. Um, so it, it bundles all of its stuff together. And that, that whole number across all of them, which protects anything having kind of a down quarter, uh, went down 20 million users. That's a big deal. Do you know what went way, way, way, way up is the amount of money that Meta made last quarter. Like what a way, a record-setting jump. Like then they just turned the knob and they will keep turning the knob. Um, you know, the way they did it is super interesting. And I'm jealous of the story. So this is a New York Times story by a friend of the Vergecast, Trip Mickle, by the way, and Eli Tan. And I am utterly fascinated with how the ads economy works. I think understanding the money of the internet helps you understand the internet. And so I'm always just fascinated by it. And there's this thing that's happening on meta platforms and on Google platforms specifically where the old way of ad targeting. Where you would show up with your ad, which is called creative in the industry parlance, which is very good. You have Generate the ads for you and just deliver you results. Right. Take one picture of the shoes, we'll do the rest. And we'll do the rest. And by all accounts, this is a massive success for both Google and Meta. Yep. That small companies in particular who were never any good at advertising because they're small companies and you can't afford the big agencies that used to sell this kind of data analysis, they're just showing up and being like, find me some customers. And their sales are going through the roof, so they're just dumping more money into the system. And you look at that and you're like, well, that's actually great for a bunch of small companies. And then you also look at it and you're like, this sucks so much. Yeah, real. Like it's tearing the ad industry apart. It's certainly devaluing creative across the board. It's subjecting all of us to the creepiest kinds of targeted advertising that have ever existed in the entire history of the world. But then a bunch of small companies are finding more and more customers. I could not tell you. I have been thinking about this story since I read it, since I've been hearing all the ad people say the words, the creative is the targeting, which is a real mind bender. Because at the end of the day, like, they also want you to give up the creative. They want you to stop making the ads. I don't know, man. Like, when I say it's enterprise software, when you say it's enterprise software, it's this. They took the AI tools, they invested in all the AI tools, they built the tools for themselves to run their ad targeting system. And it is, by all accounts, more successful than any ad targeting system or any advertising platform has ever been in the history of the world, even as the users go down. But it's not like great consumer experiences in any way, shape, or form. The digital gods stuff is a marketing scheme to bring customers to your ad targeting system. That is sort of the story of the last 20 years of the internet. And it is just more nakedly that story than ever. But when we get into ad tech, that means it is time to pull the ripcord on whatever we're talking about. Get out of here. Let's turn now to the hype desk. This is where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueda come on and tell us what's cool in the world. Sometimes it's sponsored. Today, it is not. Ross, Ashley, welcome back. Hello. Thank you for allowing us to return. I'm surprised you haven't changed the locks, if I'm being honest. Neal and I have been talking. We've decided that one of your most important jobs on this show is to tell us what TV shows are cool. This is literally just like a thing that Neal and I both require in our lives at this particular moment. And this is a thing I think you guys can provide for us. Ashley has just the thing for you. I can provide. I can provide. I love television. I will binge watch TV. I'm obsessed right now with Widow's Bay on Apple TV. This is so good. It's a horror comedy. Katie Dippold of Bridesmaids created this. And it is Matthew Rhys is the star. He's the mayor of a small little island town in the Northeast called Widow's Bay. And Stephen Root is in it as like your resident weird guy. It's got all the things that you want in. And there's some elements of like, you know, it reminds me so much of Twin Peaks. And I think that this generation needs a new. We need a Twin Peaks for this gen. Is it as weird as Twin Peaks? It is as weird. It's the other person who's kind of co-creating is Hiro Murai, who did all the Childish Gambino vids. Yeah, he directed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did all of Atlanta, basically. So it's that kind of like modern weird. I will say A, kudos to Apple for being the only streaming platform left willing to release things once a week and actually stick to it. Kudos. And B, this suddenly, the Twin Peaks comparison instantly makes it make sense why all of my TV nerd friends have been excited about this show for like months. Like, this is the show. All of 2026, every TV hipster I know, all of whom love Twin Peaks, have been extremely excited for this show. It feels like it hits for me right now. Fair enough. Like, also, again, kudos to Apple for, I miss the Golden Age of TV that was like Richard Pepler's HBO. I miss that era. Like, a lot. And now I feel like Apple TV has been on such a tear over even just, I mean, like, what, five years now? I mean, they're just crushing it. And if you're a connoisseur of fine television shows, a content person, as it were, you, if you don't have an Apple TV subscription, like, you're really missing out. There's so much good sci-fi. Like, so many good sci-fi shows on Apple. Yeah. Do you think John Turnus knows them? Like, I've read a lot of coverage from the Hollywood press. It's like, who's this new guy? Will he keep paying us money? Does he know we're down here? Yeah, exactly. It's like, yeah. His job is to just ignore it, I think, is what everyone wants to have happen here. Yeah, I mean, it is a really good value add for, I think, the subscription stuff, which I, you know, I think that that's the thing that they're wanting to sell, is that, you know, all the subscription services where you have Apple One and it's that, like, what is it, 40-something dollars a month where you get, like, everything all packaged in there with, like, Apple News. And so I think that that is, I think Apple TV is the crown jewel of that package, in my opinion. All right, Ross, what do you have for us? I've got Coyote vs. Acme. I am super excited for this. We weren't here last week, but right after the show went up, they dropped a trailer for this movie. And you all may not know about this movie. It has been so long coming. It got finished in 2022 and then immediately shelved by Warner Brothers for a $30 million tax write-off. It was one of the three movies that Batgirl, some Scooby thing. This was a fully finished film. Fully finished, ready to go. Completely done. Not like, oh, it still needs posts, like production, like visual effects. Do I just not know how to do my taxes? It definitely feels like I should be like, I wrote this book I didn't publish. I'm shelving it and I'm not releasing it and it's worth $30 million. No one will ever see the light of day, but I can tell you it was going to be a million seller. No, so it was one of those movies during kind of the early Zaslav years. They're trying to get the finances figured out. All these filmmakers who had seen it, they're like, this is the next Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It's an animated kind of live action hybrid. The plot essentially is Wile E. Coyote keeps going after the Roadrunner with these Acme products, right? And they've broken every time. So he's fed up and he's finally decided to sue the Acme Corporation. And he hires Will Forte. Will Forte as the down on his luck lawyer versus John Cena, like the super fancy lawyer for Acme Corporation. Like, this is the little guy, David versus Goliath story. And of course, this is also now a metatextual read of the movie itself because it has been lingering for three or four years now. There was a couple of near misses. Netflix and Paramount tried to buy it. Warner Brothers said, no, we want $80 million. Finally, I think they just gave up. This smaller independent distributor, Ketchup, they've done a lot of like little smaller mid-tier movies. They picked it up just recently, I think in March, for $50 million. And it is finally going to see the light of day in August. The trailer just dropped. Is it funnier if this movie is great or if it's horrible? Like, just from a pure, this is the weirdest story ever. Like, is it a better ending if it's like a smash hit or if it sucks? I will be equally satisfied either way. Yeah. I think that's right. It's either a very funny story or like, stick it to the man, Coyote vs. Acme is awesome. Like, it's kind of a win-win. It's entertaining either way for us, the viewer at home. But yeah, I mean, it could be another like K-pop demon hunters, but they just didn't realize what they had. Like Sony gave it to Netflix for dirt cheap. And now it's like, shoot, now we got to figure out how to, like, monetize the backend. I will say all of the people on the internet, I'm going to, because I am terminally online and I saw the outcry of people being like, this is terrible. We can't put the Looney Tunes in a vault. You better go see this movie. Like, you better go see this movie. This movie needs to make like $500 million. Like, I don't, it doesn't need to cross a billion. We don't need to, it doesn't need to be the Mario movie, but it does need, it does need to make a statement and that requires people to actually go see it. So go see it. It's a lot to ask in 2026. I know, I know. It's like $400 for a movie ticket now. I just, I understand. I saw Project Hail Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. 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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Nilay, we have a bunch of gadget news this week, all on a really fun spectrum for me of a bunch of things that I think you might be really into and then a bunch of things that I think you may have absolutely no feelings about or interest for. So I've invented a new game and it's called, does Nilay care about this? I love all gadgets. Don't do this to me. You love, you love all gadgets in theory, right? Like you love that gadgets exist. Sometimes you don't care very much about gadgets. You're like, I'm so psyched that you're here. I want what's best for you and I hope you live a great life. Just don't talk to me anymore. It's like, that's how you feel about some gadgets. Um, so we have a bunch and I'm just, I'm just gonna name some gadgets and we're either going to talk a bunch about it or we're going to talk very little about it. The one I want to start with is, is, I think, probably the gadget of the week. It's the Steam controller. Do you care about the Steam controller? Okay, first of all, I need to say, I do believe it's the gadget of the week. Without question. People were so into the Steam controller on our site this week. I understand why. I, I intellectually understand why. Okay, I am going to convince you that you should care very deeply about the Steam controller. But first, let me just play you something that Jay Peters on our team made. He reviewed the Steam controller and he made, he made something for us explaining what this thing is and how it works. Let me just play it for you. Here's the Steam controller ringing like a telephone. I have in my hands Valve's new Steam controller, which I've been using for about two weeks to play a bunch of games on Steam. It's a great controller for playing games. It has all sorts of really cool small touches that make the experience even better. Like if you lose the controller, you can just ping it. The controller has nice chimes when you turn it on or off. The included puck that gives you a low latency connection also snaps onto the back of the controller so you can charge it magnetically. You can see a live indicator of that low latency 2.4 gigahertz connection right from Steam settings. Here are the back buttons, which open up all sorts of customizations for when I'm playing my games. And I love the quick access button that opens up a menu so I can connect wireless headphones or check performance of my games. You can even use the controller to type into text boxes on your computer. Or in a pinch, you can use it as a mouse and keyboard to navigate your BIOS. The Steam controller will be available on May 4th for $99. I'm probably going to buy one. Nilay, this is the thing. Yes, it's a video game controller. And yes, you only play Madden. But like, what a good gadget this is. It's a great gadget. That's what I'm saying. I understand intellectually. You can use it in a pinch as a mouse and keyboard to adjust your BIOS settings. It's perfect. Yes. It's such a good gadget. It's $99. People are complaining about some parts of it. Like haptic isn't a trigger. Who cares? It's a perfect gadget. It is very funny that there's no Steam machine because of the RAM crisis. And so they're just doing the controller because that's the thing they can ship. They're like, we promise we've made these. We just can't sell them, most of them, to you yet. But I think it's a great gadget. I'm not a PC gamer. It's not for me. Are you a believer in the theory that, like, maybe game controllers should do more than be game controllers? Like, there's something about what Jay is talking about there that is, like, there were those years ago when it was like, maybe you'll use your game controller to also control your cable box and watch TV, this sort of Xbox One theory of the world. Part of me feels like there's something to that. That, like, if we're going to do a universal remote in 2026 that can kind of halfway do my TV and my game console and change BIOS settings on my computer, it should be the Steam controller. This is why I want this thing. I don't even own a Steam deck. And I'm like, I'm going to get one of these. You want to use this to control your Roku? What's wrong with you? No. Joysticks, man. I feel like we have landed as a society on the remotes for your TV stuff should be as simple as possible. And your game controller should be as complicated as possible. That is fair. Right? Like, that seems like the, as somebody who has an Apple TV remote and a PS5 controller just permanently next to each other, at no point have I ever sat and been like, they should be the same thing. Like, they're just, they're different things. Yeah. I will say, in this particular case, I respect the hell out of the Steam controller for knowing exactly what it is and who it's for. Which is just endless customization, right? Like, this thing is basically not supposed to work out of the box. It obviously will, but it is meant to be tinkered with to death. And this is a thing that the whole Steam ecosystem has done really well over the years. Like, the Steam deck does a really good job of being customizable and having lots of different ways you can do things. You can map buttons to different things. You can run all kinds of software. Like, this thing is a tinkerer's paradise in a way that I think is really cool. And the Steam controller seems to have found a way to do that that is actually even, like, more user-friendly than average in a lot of ways. And, like, this thing is, you can see why people are excited about this, right? This is the exact thing you should deliver for this group of people. And I think that's really cool. Yeah, Steam knows its audience. You know the thing you were saying earlier about reveal preferences and tech companies getting all confused with their data? Big tech products, the ones that have to move the needle in billions of people, they all treat everyone like they're stupid. Like, you don't know what you want. We know what you want. 2% of people don't like this. Those 2% of people happen to be 100 million people. Who cares? Like, that's just how their brains work on the big platforms, the big products. And then products that take their own audiences seriously and let them make choices and customize in user-friendly ways, you can just see there's always love. It's just love. And, like, this is one of those. Again, it's, I understand, intellectually, I understand why the Steam controller is a big deal. I will say, I am substantially less excited about the idea of being able to ring my controller as Jay was, but, you know, props to you, Jay. But I do think the thing, and this is a thing you will appreciate as somebody who I'm sure has had to fight with syncing controllers to game consoles. That little puck that just plugs in and snaps on and immediately pairs the controller, unbelievably good idea. Yeah. Like, fabulous. I have fought Bluetooth settings so many damn times over the years because I used to, I had a one PS4 controller that I would use on my PS4, but then I would also pair it to my iPad and use it as an iPad controller. And trying to go between those two things. What are you doing there? Nightmare. Why are you trying to live that life? I just buy another controller. I don't anymore. I've learned, I have learned the error of my ways. And mostly I just don't play games on my iPad anymore because it's not worth the hassle. That's the end of that. All right. I have another gadget for you. Can I interest you in a leak of Samsung's first smart glasses, thrillingly known as the Samsung Galaxy Glasses? What are we doing? I'm never going to wear glasses and say Samsung on the temple. It is not going to happen. I don't know anybody who's going to do that. It's a really good point. It's zero percent chance of success. I think even the bar for Apple putting a logo on the right temple of your face is a super, super high bar. And Apple is much more likely to get there than Samsung ever is. I mean, there's a lot of, like, conversation about whether Ray-Ban ruined its brand by partnering with Meta. Like, Meta needed the Ray-Ban brand and no one's putting the Facebook logo on the side of the glasses. Totally. And now people see Ray-Bans and they think of creepy I still think, and I actually think a lot of people will find that too creepy. They should. Because you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database. I'm just saying my personal power will increase so dramatically that, you know, I'm open to the idea. So, that's how you get above the curve of Neilai's theory of wearable bullshit. If you can combine my just general level of wanting to talk to people and being charming with actually the capability of remembering anyone's name at any time. Whew! Like, we're ready to change a lot of things real fast. The FCC is going to get a lot different, you know what I mean? But, you know, all of these products are inching their way to making that promise. Yes. And I don't think they're useful enough yet, and I certainly don't think a Samsung clone of a Meta product that people are already starting to dislike is going to get them anywhere. No, and they're all pushing harder and harder towards being AI products, right? This is, like, they want you to think that the killer app is ongoing access to AI, the camera is an input system, the microphone is an input system, that somehow these are all going to work. And V's stance, and I think most people's at this point, is, like, none of that really works, and it's not. And even the thesis of it is cool at times, right? Like, it's a neat way to get walking directions when you're in a city and in a certain place. And that is it. And the idea of, like, occasional glasses, I just don't think works for people. That's just not going to work. The Samsung glasses, by the way, it sounds like we're not going to have to wait that long to see. They might be announced as soon as Google I/O in a few weeks. They're going to cost somewhere between $379 and $499, which is a lot of money. We'll see. They don't have a display, it seems. They're camera glasses. We all understand these products now. We really do. They're camera glasses. The camera lenses, by the way, are huge, so at least they're doing that. Good for them. Speaking of Samsung leaks, there's been some leaks. And by leaks, I mostly mean, like, blocks of metal that someone took pictures of that purport to show the wide foldable phone coming from Samsung. And I bring this up not because I think you are going to care about Samsung's wide foldable. Are we doing wide foldable? Is it a category? This is the thing. We're doing wide foldable, which, A, sucks. Apparently, this thing, this phone might literally be called the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Wide, which is the worst possible idea. Like, we did phablet once. We did phablet, and it was bad. And everyone should feel bad. We can't do wide foldable. We just can't. Z Fold 8 Wide, first of all, absolutely sounds like a high school football player. I was just thinking that too. 100%. No idea what we're doing here. Like, I can hear John Gruden screaming Z Fold 8 Wide, like, in my soul. I mean, what else is it? It's a foldable. It's a little squatter, and it's going to open up into a basically landscape tablet. Sure. So the reason I ask is because this also seems to be the ongoing theory about what the iPhone is going to be. That rather than do the sort of tall TV remote when closed, tablet when open, that Apple is also building something that is a little shorter, a little squatter, and this might just be the future of the foldable phone. And I'm curious how you feel about that. This is just another category where I intellectually and emotionally want it to win. Sure. I want there to be great folding phones because I think it's so cool. If you've ever unfolded one of these phones, you're like, oh, this rules. And then the reality is most people who have them don't ever unfold them. Yep. We know a lot of people with folding phones. They just don't unfold them because to make them good, you have to make them useful when they're closed. And then you just have a phone. And then you have a phone that you can unfold. And they don't unfold it because nobody wants a little tablet. Maybe it'll be different when, you know, it's iOS and Apple people are going to be different than the Android people. But I don't think it's the shape that's holding anyone back here. I think it is fundamentally unfolding it. You have to have use cases for a bigger screen of that size that isn't just, I'm going to watch a video. And even I'm going to watch a video, no one is deterred from watching a video at full volume with no headphones at any time on their phones at this point in time. No. Every time I see somebody on the subway, I was in New York this week, so I got to spend a lot of time riding the subway, which is when I do a lot of my anthropological technology research. That's very important. I look over people's shoulders and watch them do text messages. And the number of people I clocked watching YouTube videos vertical on their screen, like not vertical videos, but like horizontal YouTube videos where it's the video at the top and then the feed of related videos at the bottom. Just perfectly happy watching the video with it taking up a third of the screen. It's like, oh right. Most people don't care about watching on the biggest screen that they have. And they're reading the comments. Like, they're in it. Right. They're just transiently watching videos. Yep. It's fine. This is what we do. And also most videos on YouTube, I mean, we're in it. We're in the mix. They're just podcasts. Yep. So like, whatever. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, don't look at our faces. It's fine. Did you see, by the way, speaking of size of foldable things, Mark Gurman, who has been reporting the existence of a foldable iPad for like forever, now thinks that there is not going to be a foldable iPad. And the thing I don't think I realized until this supposed product was canceled was that it was going to be a 20-inch iPad. Yeah. Get it. This is a foldable television. And this sounds like you could get Neelay on board. Like, give me a 10-inch iPad that turns into a 20-inch iPad. It's like, that's some Neelay stuff right there. I'm into it. Let's go. Like, give me something other than a phone that turns into a tablet. You know? Like, I know how I feel about tablets. I don't use them. That's your answer. Can I interest you in a phone that turns into a smartwatch? Also known as the new Motorola Razr Ultra, the flip phone of my dreams. This thing is real pretty. It is. It's really nice looking. It's really pretty. Yep. It's still a Motorola phone, and it is still utterly confusing software. It's also more expensive than before. They have done the most insane job of just one-to-one pixel-for-pixel cloning the iPhone camera on this phone. Yeah, very, very much so. Not even an attempt to make it look anything other than the iPhone camera. No. They're fine with it. Alison Johnson, our senior phone reviewer, basically wrote about the Razr Ultra saying, this phone is hot and you shouldn't buy it. And I think that's largely correct. I used a Razr Ultra for a while, found it to be a cool idea that is like completely wanting in functional software. But then I look at this and it's like, they've got the wood finish back. They've got a bunch of nice colors. I like that it closes. I don't know. I still want it. There's something in me that says flip phone is the right answer to everything. I ran into somebody with an older Razr a couple of weeks ago and they were just thrilled with it. Just loved it. Loved closing it and putting it away and feeling like if they needed to look at a notification on the cover screen, they could, but they weren't going to do social media on it. And to do anything on the phone, they had to intentionally unflip it. They loved it. It's good stuff. Again, purely anecdotal. This is my subway riding anthropology. Many more Z flips out there in the world than Z folds. People seem to be buying more flip phones than fold phones at the moment. And a lot of that, I'm sure, is price. Right? Like the foldable phone is double the price. I think a lot of it's price, but I just think no one is like, I should get a little tablet. Look, I know the tablet people are out there. They're all going to send us emails. I know that pilots love the iPad mini and that there's data showing that back injuries for pilots have dropped precipitously since the iPad came out. I think I picked that one up in David Pogue's Apple 50 book, which is really fun to read. I've been flipping through it. It's great. I get it. There's a market for tablets. I'm just saying most people are not like, I should get a tablet. They're like, I should get a bigger phone. Yes. And then they get the biggest phone that it can. Okay. Which is also maybe the story of the last gadget I have to ask you about. The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo. Can I interest you in a gaming laptop that has a screen and then another screen on top of that screen? I've never been more excited about a product in my entire life. This is pure Neeli. Especially because you can make it go up vertically in like this very precarious and also Ticket, send a message, right there in the conversation without switching tools. It's AI that actually works the way you do. Learn more at AWS.com slash quick. Sometimes good business is about the things you don't do, like not paying annual fees, not wasting time on reimbursements, and not leaving rewards on the table. With Engine X, get more for doing less. It's the business card that gets you up to 10% back on travel and 1.5% back on everything else. Engine X, going up. Engine is a financial technology company, not a bank. The Engine X Visa commercial card is issued by Fifth Third Bank, NA. Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Terms and conditions apply. All applications are subject to credit approval. Actual reward rates vary by reward tier and purchase category and may change. Points have no cash value and are redeemable for rewards through our program. Rewards are subject to terms and conditions. Employees filing for reimbursements is the latest in spend technology. Oh, wait, that was the script from 1986. In 2026, there's Engine X, the business card that centralizes your spend so you can simplify, save, and earn big with every swipe. Engine X, going up. Engine is a financial technology company, not a bank. The Engine X Visa commercial card is issued by Fifth Third Bank, NA. Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Terms and conditions apply. All applications are subject to credit approval. Actual reward rates vary by reward tier and purchase category and may change. Points have no cash value and are redeemable for rewards through our program. Rewards are subject to terms and conditions. All right, we're back. Neil, I don't even have to ask. It is time once again for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I know it's time again because the man has escaped containment, as he does from time to time. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Thank you to everyone who has reached out telling us how much you love the new official theme song of Brendan Carr is a dummy. We've gotten some licensing requests. Yeah. We'll get it out there. It's going to be on the Billboard charts. It's going to be a whole thing. I want to make sure we license the remix, too. Also, keep sending us theme songs. We'll play the other theme songs. Absolutely. It's just we were playing the Gregorian chant so much that it felt that we should just make it official. Someday we're going to do like a Coachella, but every act is just Brendan Carr theme songs. Carchella. Carchella. The worst. And then he'll try to shut it down. Oh, we have to do that now, Neil. Why did you say that out loud? It's bad news. Oh, brother. What do you do this week? Brendan, you know, he overdid it in the way that he is wont to do. I think it's going to backfire. I think I have hope for America this time. He's still a dummy. So as I'm sure everyone is aware, this past weekend was the White House Correspondents' Center. There was an attempted shooting, although it is becoming less and less clear who shot at what time. Yes. Just based on what we know. But somebody did try to break into the Correspondents' Center. They did have a gun. Shots were fired. The thing was shut down. Everyone was hustled out of there. Joanna Stern was there. It's just scary all around. This whole thing is very scary. It's very bad. Don't do political violence. I'm just going to keep saying it. Before the dinner, Jimmy Kimmel had done a fake roast of the dinner on his show. And he showed a picture of Melania Trump. And he said this joke that I personally think is very funny. He said, you have the globe and expectant widow. Because Trump is not looking so great lately. And that's just a joke about Trump being old. I will point out that the president, when people die, he's like, I hated him anyway. I'm glad the bastard's dead. This is not a man who reveres death. Fine. Anyway, the White House Correspondents' Center gets shut down because of this attempted shooting. And people seize on this joke on the right. And they're like, what a tasteless joke. You're calling for an assassination. There is not a reading of that joke in which Jimmy Kimmel is calling for an assassination. This is just pure outrage culture. Yeah. At every possible level. I mean, it's right there next to, there was, I forget who it was. It was one of the Trump administration officials said something about how like, there's going to be shots fired at the White House. And everybody's like, what do we do? And it's like, no, that's just a thing people say. You know, there's an entire conspiracy culture online lately. Charles Putin Moore wrote about it for us this week. That the sort of conspiracy influencers are having the time of their life right now because they've got all these clips. That's a whole separate thing. But the right sees on Jimmy Kimmel making the somewhat anodyne fake roast of a joke. Melania Trump tweeted about how outraged she was. Trump himself tweeted that Kimmel should be fired. And this was all calling for an assassination. And the rhetoric is why this happens and blah, blah, blah. And so, of course, Brendan cannot help himself. And he's been wanting to do this. He's been searching for an opportunity to do this. He says, I'm going to take Disney's broadcast licenses for the, I believe it's eight stations that they own and operate. And we're going to pull them. We're going to call them back for early renewals. And his claim is this has nothing to do with the president's tweets. It's actually because Disney does DEI and DEI should be illegal, too. Which is just a whole other like wrong answer move by Brendan Carr. But he can't say I'm doing retaliation because the president's mad. So he's saying, actually, the president was mad about DEI a while ago, so we're doing that one. This is just straightforward, Lee Bear. Isn't it wild that that is the more like plausible, acceptable option in his head? That he's like, well, I can get away with this one. He's not a smart man. This is going to be a problem anyway. So he's going after the broadcast licenses of ABC stations that are owned and operated by Disney. It is unclear what will happen. I think Disney's actually got some fight in it. You know, they got a new CEO. Josh tomorrow is a new CEO of Disney. Bipartisan sort of pushback on this. It is rare that I agree with Ted Cruz on the show, but Ted Cruz is like, this is an affront to the First Amendment. The National Association of Broadcasters, the lobbying organization of the cable and television industry, they're like pushing back and saying you can't call early renewals like this. You're going to break the system. This is not how we as broadcasters need to operate. This is an organization that like I have been very critical of in the past when it comes to telecom policy. They're pushing back. And I think you've just got an American public that is sick of this. Right. That does not want Jimmy Kimmel to be punished for a joke that had nothing to do with the assassination. Like they're not linked in time. He did a fake roast and then there was a shooting. We've been down almost this exact road. And it was like it was a massively bipartisan group of people being like, you have way overstepped. I mean, this it is maybe the worst PR move Brennan Carr's FCC has made. And that is a high bar. Yeah. And Kimmel is not backing down. They didn't take him off the air this time like they did with the Charlie Kirk shooting. By the way, the audio of the Charlie Kirk shooting is now a TikTok meme. People are using it as a transition. Speaking of things there are conspiracies about. Right. But that thing didn't work. Right. Like when you try to shut down speech in this way, the backfire is so much worse than just letting it burn itself out. Like over and over again, particularly with Americans, if you tell them they can't say something, they're just going to say it. They're going to take it away from you. They're going to use it however you want. They're going to use. Particularly like young Americans. If you tell them they can't say something, they're going to take it away from you and they're going to use it however they want. And it absolutely happened to Charlie Kirk, which is Jimmy Kimmel round one. It's going to happen again this time because Trump looks petty. There's already conspiracies swirling about this shooter and the shooting. And people think it was staged and there's a lot here. And Brendan saying a thing that was disconnected in time is somehow a call for assassination is so nonsensical on its face and so censorious on its face that it will backfire yet again in some other insane way. So that's just one Brendan this week. Everyone saw this one coming. Before we switch out of that, I do have one. I have one like procedural question on this, which is the license renewal thing. Is it at least in theory a thing that Brendan can do, right? Like that is an actual power the FCC has, these license renewals. Okay, you made a face, which is why I'm asking. Like, is this a real thing he can do to initiate these license renewals, take potentially take them away? Like is this a threat he could actually conceivably follow through on in some way? I feel like Brendan's nights consist of not being invited to parties and instead like going into the basement of the SEC and like blowing the dust off some old book and being like Not a smart man. A bunch of former FCC commissioners and like a radically bipartisan group of former FCC commissioners and chairs and staffers filed a lawsuit this week, basically saying, we petition the FCC to get rid of the news distortion rule because we think it's such a danger to free speech, but Brendan, instead of ruling on it, has sat on the petition. So they filed a lawsuit this week asking a court to force Brendan to issue a ruling on news distortion. I'm getting real because either way, they can appeal the ruling, but as long as he sits on it, they can't do anything. Right, Which is the source of his power, which is the source of his power. It's the threat that is the thing. Yep, so Mark Fowler, who was a Republican chair of the FCC in the 80s, wrote in a statement, the news distortion policy is a loaded gun that Chairman Carr is using to threaten broadcasters. Until it is repealed, we will not have a free press. That's a Republican, 80s Republican wrote that about news distortion rule. Tom Wheeler, who we know, because we've had him on The Verge and on the show before, he was the Democratic chair under Obama, said as long as the news distortion policy remains, the FCC chair can continue to misuse it to police perceived media bias. This just keeps going on and on and on. There's Republicans and Democrats. It is the most unlikely coalition of bipartisan telecom regulators you've ever seen in your entire life. They actually pointed out at the end, one of the former Republican commissioners said in a statement, when unlikely allies share an opinion, that opinion eclipses partisanship. You could not find a group of petitioners with more divergent political beliefs than this one, yet we all agree on one thing. And he goes on to say what they agree on, but I think what they agree on is that Brendan Carr is a dummy. There's a real, like, you are doing this so badly that you're making everyone who has ever done this look bad. Everyone who has ever done this job thinks Brendan is an idiot. Right, and it's, he's doing it so poorly that it is reflecting poorly on them for previously having done the job. I mean, my joke is, I keep coming on this, I keep coming on the show and being like, I think the Wall Street Journal editorial page has it right. And it's like, what is happening to me? But that's basically this lawsuit. It's that kind of bipartisan group of former FCC officials coming together to be like, we don't agree on anything, but we agree this guy has to be stopped. That's very bad. So I'm eager to see how that lawsuit goes, because if Brendan does what we all think he's going to do, which is uphold the news distortion policy, that can go be appealed. And I think that kind of lawsuit will be fascinating to see in a world where the Supreme Court has gotten rid of all of the idea that the courts need to be deferential to agencies. So this is like Brendan wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, but the other part of Project 2025 chapter is the agencies have, no court should be deferential to these agencies whatsoever. And so like, some of this is coming home, right? Like, some of the inherent contradictions of MAGA world are starting to get laid bare here. We'll see what happens. I do have one more FCC update. I'm very sorry about this. Oh, God, we're still doing it? There's more? So, several weeks ago, you remember Brendan just sort of outlawed all the routers in the world? Yeah, for no discernible reason and on no discernible timeline. He's like, they're so dangerous, they're all illegal now. But the one you have is fine. But the one you already have in your house is fine. Who knows what's going on here? And then there was some process laid out by which router manufacturers could apply to prove that they were safe. It was totally unclear what that process would be. The one thing that they wanted to demand was, you're going to move router manufacturing to the United States because anything made overseas is inherently dangerous. Sure. Sure. So, Netgear was the first company to get a, like, a conditional waiver. It was just utterly unclear what they had said to the Trump administration. It's unclear if Netgear is going to make anything in the United States. Like, we just don't know and Netgear is not talking. This week, Amazon got waivers for its Eero routers and the routers it's going to use for its Leo satellites. Also unclear. You can go look on the FCC website, at least at the sort of questions they were asked. My understanding of all this is that these companies are filing some paperwork, making some representations that their products are safe in some ways. You can go look at the questionnaires online. And then that's going into like a black box. And then some combination of, like, what used to be known as the Defense Department, and now is the Department of War, and DHS, Department of Homeland Security, and FCC are like, reviewing this in some way and then being like, sure, you're safe. I don't know. I couldn't tell you what's happening. I don't think any of these companies are ready to manufacture routers in the United States. I don't think you could if you wanted to. And it is unclear. I don't think this is happening. I don't think they're like buying Bitcoin on the side for Trump. Like, all of the comments on the Netgear posts, at least, were like, it's bribes. And, like, I don't even think that's happening. I think it's a weird black box process that looks a lot like the process that we have for banning drones. And the only difference is there are no big American drone companies, but Netgear is a big American router company and Amazon is a big American router company. And they were able to just do the paperwork and say, we're a big American company. Here's how we are representing our supply chain is safe. And they've gotten through it. Utterly untransparent. Like, totally opaque. And in the Trump administration with Brendan, who just did this capriciously. And Trump, and everyone thinks it's bribes. It's so weird. Everyone thinks it's bribes. Like, all the comments on our post were like, oh, bribes. The best part of that is, if it's not bribes, what are we even doing? Do you know what I mean? It's actually, like, more discernible if it's bribes. Like, you can draw a straight line through this whole story as long as it is corruption. If it's not corruption, what the hell is it? Like, it's so weird. You can just sit here and be like, how serious is this guy right now? You can just look at this process and be like, how serious is the Trump administration about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, about actually securing a bunch of routers and IoT devices? You know, we have the CEO of the UL, underwriters laboratories, on Decoder this week. And they were, under the Biden administration, charged with something called the Cyber Trust program where they were going to put a safety mark on IoT devices. And Brendan was like, oh, you've got labs in China? China's bad. We're taking this away from you. And they gave the contract to run the Cyber Trust program to a friend of Donald Trump. And you're like, how serious are you? Are you actually serious about safety? Or are you just using this stuff to do hilarious corruption? And now everyone thinks you're corrupt. So even if you have the best of intentions, even if this is a bunch of well-meaning lifelong civil servants earnestly trying to run the program, you've stained it with corruption because you can't explain anything you're doing because Brendan is an idiot. Anyhow, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on the show, explain literally any of this, defend literally any of this. We'll make you the time. You can do it before or after the next Vergecast movie night. We'll even do that for you. We'll buy you a ticket to the next movie that we run. Happily. We'll play whatever movie you want, Brendan. What kind of movies do you think Brendan likes? Oh, I have an answer, I just can't say it out loud. Perfect. Anyhow, Brendan, I don't think you have the juice to defend any of this, which is why you, I know you read the coverage and you look at the links and the Google searches you do for your own name. But you never come on the show. But you're always welcome, my friend. Anyhow, that has been Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Good stuff. All right. I have two lightning round items for you. And first, these are actually like mostly a question for you. It's, I have a real, is this anything kind of question for you. So we've spent a lot of time talking about the copyright and trademark issues around AI and Taylor Swift, as she's want to do, is right in the middle of a bunch of interesting stuff right now. There have been all of these issues with people using deepfakes of celebrities to try and sell things, right? Like the idea of like, it's Taylor Swift trying to engage you in some multi-level marketing scheme has become a thing that happens online. So all of these celebrities and all of the platforms are trying to figure out a way to fight this stuff. And then on the side, Taylor Swift in particular is going further and further down the road of trying to figure out how to, I would say sort of, like, give herself certain kinds of ownership, it seems, so that she can fight these things in a more like straightforwardly legal way. And the thing that happened this week is that Taylor Swift and her team filed for the trademark of two phrases. The phrases are, hey, it's Taylor Swift Void of legal precedent, right? Like, we, we still have no idea what to do with that. The Take It Down Act is about to go into effect for some state law. Like, there's some stuff. There's some international laws. It's a pretty messy field right now because it just has never been able to be done at scale before. And so AI, you know, scale changes everything. AI is changing it. But the, the Taylor Swift is going to trademark some stuff is trying to use a body of law that's really designed for commerce to police a kind of computer imagery and synthetic media that might not line up correctly. And I'll make a comparison here, which is YouTube has rolled out its own likeness program. You and I are both in it. Right. Yeah. And it is just private law. Like, it's not the law of the United States. YouTube has made some rules about what you can and cannot do with AI likenesses of people. They will detect those AI likenesses. I, I had to take a photo of myself and like upload my license, my driver's license to say, this is me. And then it knows it's me because of the channel. And then if people use my likeness, it will do it. And I can send a flag and there's going to be some process. And YouTube has some rules about parody and stuff. And they have just invented YouTube law. This is like what happened with Content ID a million years ago, right? All of the Content ID is built on copyright law. This is actually very different in my mind. Oh, interesting. Okay. So Content ID is built on copyright law. So, you know, the, the, the core of Content ID, it's expanded over time, is the music industry. So if you want to use music on YouTube, YouTube can detect that you've used a Justin Bieber song. And then they can say, okay, that's Justin Bieber's song. We're going to take some of your AdSense revenue and direct it back to Justin Bieber. And this accomplishes the goal of letting you use the Justin Bieber song and keeping the record labels and importantly, Justin Bieber happy. Oh, I see. Okay. Right. And so like Content ID starts there and then it moves on to, okay, you've got all kinds of videos are being reused in all kinds of ways. You've got all kinds of rights holders and Content ID. We can expand it, but it's all built on copyright law because the thing copyright law lets you do is say, that's mine. Take it down. And likeness law, trademark law isn't quite there. It's not the same. It doesn't have the same thing, right? Especially likeness is like very state by state. There hasn't been a really national likeness man. So YouTube invented private law. Like there's, there's how likeness works on YouTube as a platform. And then there's how likeness works in the United States of America and the policies of YouTube and the policies of the United States of America no longer align. This is one of the weirdest things I think has happened yet on the internet. And I don't, I don't know what's going to happen next, but I think you're going to see celebrities say, hey, we've got to find ways to protect ourselves. And the, maybe the laws of the United States aren't good enough, but we're going to take shots at it while we pressure the platforms to invent some laws of their own, some content moderation policies of their own along the way until something comes together and this all makes sense. And it is, this is going to be one of the weirdest fronts in all of AI and all of social policy because you can get to some really weird outcomes. For example, should Taylor Swift impersonators be illegal? I don't, I probably not, but like you can quickly get to a place where, okay. That's my side hustle if that happens. Which is bad. You look good in the body suit. Thank you. Um, I've always thought it suits you. Um, uh, it did get a lot cheekier over the course of the tour, I thought. Um, I'm in a happy relationship. You know what I mean? That's just a David Butt joke. Um, I don't think that's the right answer, but you've got to draw the, a person doing a Taylor Swift impression and a computer doing a Taylor Swift impression are viewed differently in the eyes of the law in different circumstances. I don't know if you've met the people in Congress. Good luck. Yeah. Okay. So if you're Taylor Swift, you're like, I have to, I just have to try some avenue, some, something might work. And I'm sure they're also in heated meetings with YouTube trying to figure this out. This all makes sense. Uh, but I can keep saying, hey, it's Taylor for the foreseeable future and I'll, and I'll be okay. Yeah. Okay, good. All right. You get one more. What's your, what's your lightning round item? My, my last one, I just, I just want to say this news to you and then hear you react to it. Netflix has pushed out its redesigned app and the central feature is a vertical video feed called clips where it just shows you clips of movies and shows and stuff on Netflix. Okay. Can I, can I tell you the, the, the radicalization arc that has been my last seven days on this front? So you, to give you a lot of credit, I would say you, you became a total clip zealot and radical sometime last year. You were like, the world exists in 90 second vertical increments. Nothing else matters. Clips for days. Whatever Mr. Beast does, that's what we should be doing, is like the, the stance of Neil Patel for a long time. I have fought this fairly aggressively. Um, I think, I think in general there has been this weird tension. Like we have thought about clips as like marketing for the podcast. And so we're like the goal of you watching two minutes of us on Instagram is to then come back and watch or listen to the podcast. And then Ed Elson, who co-hosts a couple of podcasts with Scott Galloway and is a writer and podcaster, went on Charlie Wurzel's podcast at the Atlantic and gave, I would say almost exactly the speech you've given to me like 30 or 40 times. And for some reason from Ed- It's not some reason. Ed has a British accent. Yeah, he's, he's very convincing. He's very charming and he's got the accent and it totally worked on you. Yeah. And he looked dead into the camera and he said, David, listen. And his, his whole case was, no, this is not, this is not like smaller versions of the thing. The clips are the thing. And literally in the last like seven days come to see every one of my feeds differently where it's like now instead of thinking about it as like, oh, I'm seeing, you know, two minutes of a friend's episode. What if, what if that two minutes is the whole thing? Like that, that is the whole thing. That is most people's experience of that thing. And it has totally changed the way I think about everything. Like there are lots of podcasts out there that many people never consume an entire episode and yet are fans of the podcast because they've watched lots of clips. I could name you some of those podcasts for me that I love and care deeply about the hosts and I have never once experienced an episode. Um, Netflix doing this at like the highest possible end of the spectrum where it's like, what if you never watched a Bridgerton episode, but you saw lots of 90 second clips of Bridgerton is such a like mind-bending fact. But I've now come around to like, what if most people's experience of Bridgerton is six clips and they love Bridgerton and maybe that's okay. Yeah. And maybe Netflix is geniuses. So Netflix has a sort of different opportunity in its app. They're just happy if you open their app on mobile. No one does that. Right. They're, they're just thrilled if you, if the number of people who open the Netflix iPhone app goes up. Yeah. And Netflix can do a very straightforward thing, right? Which is show you what amounts to a trailer. And then you're like, oh, this seems cool. Just go watch the movie. I actually don't know if trailers is the way to go. I think it's, they have to come around to the idea that the clips are the content. I think you're right. And if they want people to open the app more, they cannot be focused on whether it's discovery for the actual shows. Netflix has to get to a place where people open the Netflix app and they flip through the clips feed and then they close the Netflix app and they walk away and they're, they're happy with that experience. And that's a success story for Netflix. And that is a huge success story for Netflix. And what they are not going to have is an army of clippers in discord channels trying to pump crypto coins, stealing Netflix content for the best parts to pump an infinite amount of stuff in the algorithmic slot machine, which is the thing that TikTok has. It's very hard to compete with that. Can I, can I tell you what this makes me think? There are two ways this goes. One is I would say Netflix and Disney are probably the two with the most unique opportunities. And Disney, by the way, also pursuing this very aggressively. You go to the ESPN app and there is the thing, they call it VERTS, which sucks, but it's, it's the same thing. It's just a feed of TikToky sports videos. Disney has been talking about doing the same thing in the app. I'm not sure if it's in the Disney Plus app or not, but this, this is the idea. And in theory, what you can do is basically lift all The armies of clippers are stealing content to build channels and eventually run scams. But like, a lot of people are watching Lifetime movies this way. This is fine for you because you're not on the hook to pay anyone. TikTok pays no one anything anyway. If you're Disney and you do this, you might be on the hook to pay a bunch of actors a bunch of residuals. This is like a problem in your streaming deals. Netflix, I think, not as much. They just don't have other stuff and they don't pay anyone. By the way, a disclosure, we made a Netflix show. They still don't pay me anything. Whatever. So I think there's like economic problems here that come when you are trying to do the ostensibly right thing and like pay people. Whereas like TikTok and Instagram, like piracy, go do it. And again, it's just very hard to compete against an army of people working for free. Yeah, agreed. We should talk more about clips. I think actually, we should come back and just like spend a long time talking about the clip economy because usually, I would say, because usually you're wrong about everything. But this one you were right about and we should talk about it. We have a big piece on the clip economy coming in a week or so from Mia. So that's a good time. Oh, that's right. Maybe you and Mia and I should just get together and hash this out on the pod for a while. It'd be good. All right, for now, we have gone way over as we are wont to do. If you found us on a clip this week, tell us about it. I want to know what clips you're seeing in your feeds. Neelay in particular has been hearing from a lot of people that he is appearing everywhere in your feeds. Oh, I saw clips of you is a sentence you don't really ever get used to hearing. But for now, we should get out of here. There's a lot going on on the website right now. There's like Liz's coverage of the trial remains ongoing. There's all kinds of OpenAI stuff happening. We've got a lot of like really fun featurey things coming in the next few days. If you haven't read the attack of the killer script kitties on our website this week, it's a delight. And it's some of the most unhinged art we've published in a minute. Go read that. It's very good. It is one of my favorite illustrations that we ever done. Yeah. It's really good stuff. Neelay, what's happening on Dakota this week? Dakota this week is the CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi. Basically, I was like, how do you run a software company in the age of AI? And he's like, I don't know, we're all figuring it out. That's the chill attitude you hope for. I basically was like, all of your peers appear to be going crazy. And he's like, yes. But it was good. And Uber announced a bunch of stuff. So you can now book a hotel in Uber. They're trying to become an everything app. You should listen to it. Everyone's trying to become the interface for everything because they don't want to get disintermediated by AI. You know what I mean? There's a lot going on there. I'm really excited to have a hundred new ways to book hotels in my future because I've always thought there aren't enough ways to book a hotel. Do you know what I mean? Thank God someone's giving me a way to book a hotel. Thank goodness. We just finished shooting Verge History. You and I spent a bunch of time together this week making podcasts. That's all going to start coming out in a few weeks. Go subscribe to that feed. We did a whole season of smart home stuff. And it was an absolute delight. And one episode ended with me very sweaty, talking very fast in the studio. It was coffee related. We did a Keurig episode that involved drinking from a Keurig. And I about killed myself with coffee. I was like, did you get a Matter-enabled cocaine dispenser? What are we doing here, David? That's a couple seasons from now. We need more budget before that starts to happen. That's it for The Vergecast. Remember also to subscribe to The Verge to get all of these podcasts and everything ad-free. You get all of our newsletters. You make sure that we can keep sending Liz to courtrooms to write down the insane things that Elon Musk says. This is what we do here. And you can support all of it by going to theverge.com slash subscribe and signing up. Also, call the hotline 866-Verge-11. Send us an email, vergecast at theverge.com. We love hearing from you on anything and everything. Send us the clips that you think. Send us clips of shows that you've seen but will never watch. That's what I want clips of. Send them all directly to us. Your favorite shows that you've never watched an episode of. That's what I want to hear about. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next time. Neelay. Rock and roll. We're not saying a visit to Bloomington, Indiana, will turn you into a forest-bathing, sandal-wearing, dissertation-defending, stray cat-rescuing, non-profit-starting, Monroe Lake paddling, guitar-strumming, march-organizing, vinyl-listening, leaf-watching, zen-finding, coffee-roasting, yoga-practicing, beer-drinking, bread-baking, co-op-joining, pottery-throwing, vintage-thrifting, bike-every-wearing, art-appreciating, farmers-market-shopping, biz-sinking football fan. But we're not saying it won't. Visit Bloomington. See how it inspires you. Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation. Use PDF Spaces to generate a presentation. 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