Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of slightly dystopian pet finders. I'm your friend David Pierce. The optell's here. Hey buddy, what's up? How do you feel about using the full surveillance industry to find your pets?
This is why I don't have pets. Get them out of my face. Too complicated.
The moral quandary of pet ownership is... We do a lot of moral quandary on the show. I will say, you know, do you really own a dog? Let's talk about it.
Yeah, you just let it poop inside your house for a while. At least that's my current experience.
Lots going on this week. We have some Super Bowl follow-up to do. The Packers weren't in it because they never are, so that sucks for you.
Patriots did lose, which was important, I think, for America.
Agreed. The world is a little brighter now that the Patriots lost the Super Bowl. We have a lot of surveillance camera stuff to talk about. We have some OpenAI news to talk about. We have some hardware that doesn't exist. We have some hardware that might someday exist. We have lots to talk about, but I think we should probably start the same place we started last week, which is unfortunately with the Epstein files. You asked in particular people to give us feedback on how we're talking about this stuff, how we're covering this stuff, what they want to see, what's interesting, what did you hear, what have the vibes been like?
I would divide this feedback into two discrete categories.
There's the one I care about a lot, which is the actual people talking to us. So you can just look at the comments on YouTube. You shouldn't look at our email directly, Pam Bondi, but I will tell you what is in our email, and it's people emailing us and saying, 'Keep doing this. It's important. We appreciate your approach to it. We want the stories.' Your quandary about the source and the mechanism by which the material is being released, you can set that aside. We understand.
Sure. So we're going to keep talking about it.
Then there is just the data, and the data says people desperately want David and I to talk about real estate. Like the numbers are higher, and we can't quite explain why. We don't do a lot of data-driven content decision-making at The Verge, which is why I haven't started a fully automated Android bot farm overseas to manipulate YouTube. I should.
Every good content creator who cares about their numbers does this.
You've come to meetings with that idea.
Yeah. Can somebody buy a hundred Android phones and just do a bot farm for me? That would be great.
We don't do a lot of that here. Famously, our reporters don't get paid fees. Like all the stuff we don't do. But in this case, it was particularly notable that there was the qualitative feedback from actual people that we care about a lot that said, 'Please do the stories.' And then there was just the straight views and downloads on the podcast. And so, all right, that's enough signal.
I'll mention two that are important to me. Two Epstein stories we covered this week that are very important to me, that I think are very Verge in their scope. One, and this has come out in every version of the Epstein files that has been released so far: Jeffrey Epstein cared about SEO a lot, just a lot. And he employed people to manage his Google presence. He employed people to go on Wikipedia and clean up his bio. He did offensive SEO. He was all over it. His digital footprint was a thing he cared about. And he had people constantly emailing him telling him how they were cleaning up his digital footprint.
Right. And to be clear, by cleaning up, you mean Jeffrey Epstein is a criminal and a pedophile was at the top of the rankings.
Yep. And Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time and energy and money trying to move that down in the rankings.
Yes. And he was seeding stories with oppositional links again, monitoring Wikipedia and making sure there's like edit wars about his entry, taking out negative information about himself from the internet.
There are a bunch of really fascinating back and forths with reporters from people in his orbit who are basically like yelling at reporters and threatening them in order to get them to remove stuff from stories, and then reporting it back to Epstein saying, 'Look, we did it. We got your name out of this story.'
Mia S and our team has a great story about this. There's one back and forth in particular where the report back says they didn't know I was working for you. They don't know that we're talking. And so you just see there's this... We kind of hint at it all the time, right? We spend a lot of time talking to comms people and PR people. And I love writing a spicy response to what is obviously like a secret legal demand and then looping our lawyers on it. It's one of the funner parts of my job that no one ever gets to see. I really do enjoy it. There's a lot of that in our world that you all never see, that you should never see, right? We're just pushing back on people who want to shade our stories in some way. And then you see how effectively Jeffrey Epstein was using that as a weapon, not just to shade the coverage, but connecting the dot all the way to his own search results to SEO. And so that's just a straightforwardly great story. And Mia did a great job. We've been making Mia cover SEO for a while. She's the one who wrote all the content goblin stories for us about like the SEO industry, the last days of disco before AI showed up. That was a huge package she did for us. She saw this and was like, 'Oh, I see what's happening here.' So the story is great because she has so much depth.
Yeah. And I think on that front, we talked a bunch last week about how one of the odd things about these files is how just sort of plainly they lay bare how all of this stuff works, right? Like we talked a lot about Steven Sinofsky who was running Windows at Microsoft and his negotiations for his package when he left Microsoft. It's like it's the sort of thing nobody ever talks about in the way that they are willing to email their colleagues about it. And so you just see a different version of it. And there, this was so striking to me for the same reason that you see with no spin, no nothing, just a perfectly completely laid bare plan for how to spin up a bunch of essentially fake websites designed to launder somebody's reputation. And Mia has links and an explanation to this about like somebody who is basically buying and hosting domain names, starting fake websites, filling them with a specific kind of content all in the name of gaming the SEO algorithms to move stuff up and down to their liking. And this is, I would remind you, a game that Google has said for decades is unwinnable and doesn't exist and no one is trying to do it, and it is just so fabulously clear that this is a game that everybody plays and can win with enough money and resources. And it's just this is the sort of thing you just don't get to see it laid out in front of you like this.
Yeah. You never get to see the vendor talking directly to the client saying, 'I spent all this money, here's exactly what we did, and here's how well it worked.'
Yeah. And you know that's a gold mine if you are researching the dynamics of information on the internet. So that's one big story. Again, Mia did an incredible job here just because we forced her to cover SEO for a year. Like her understanding of that space I think really comes through in this story. So that's one. The other one that I would point people to: last week I mentioned sort of in passing that Epstein had a connection to 4chan and in particular /pol/, the politics board. And so we thought about who can explain this? There's so much history. So we asked Cat Tenbar, who used to be an amazing misinformation, disinformation reporter at NBC News. She now writes a newsletter called Spitfire News, which is very good. You should subscribe to it. So we asked her to just write about the connections between Epstein, Christopher Poole, who ran 4chan, whose name is Moot, his handle, and /pol/, and the dynamics between all of that, between Gamergate, between the first Trump campaign. And you can see there's a straight line in Epstein's support for eugenics and his hatred of women and his weird ideas about just how to destabilize the country. There's a lot of Steve Bannon in the mix who understood early that you could weaponize foreign culture and turn it into the culture war and then turn that into politics and then here we are in 2026. So it's not as straight of a line as people have painted. You can't say that they had a meeting and the next day the thing happened, but in the emails you can see, yep, they definitely met. Epstein said, 'I really like this guy. I think he's so bright. I drove him home.' And then a series of things unfolded where everyone's goals were being met. And that to me is maybe the most undercovered story of our time, that, you know, there's always this push that you shouldn't take what happens on the internet seriously. The Twitter isn't real life. And to some extent that's real, like the reality outs, like the truth outs for people. They go live their lives. They move their meat sacks of their bodies around in real space. You can't tweet everything and you can't overcome the metaphysics of reality with Twitter. But boy, you can come close.
Yeah. And you can see like just as you're saying about SEO, you see them talking about it nakedly, openly, cynically, pushing the ball forward while everyone else is, you know, saying very sincere things about the nature of content moderation and like the systems are being gamed at every level and Epstein's right in the middle of it. So that story is also I think very good, very Verge. Cat did a great job. So those are the two I wanted to call this week. We're going to have more. Again, you know, I value people writing to us and saying things to us more than I value the data, but in this case it's both. Like clearly both says that we should cover this more. There's more to be said here, and in particular Epstein as a force in the digital world is like overwhelming. You can just see that he clocked it, he figured it out early, and then all of these people came to him for advice, and then his money influenced a bunch of platform dynamics and tech dynamics across the board.
Yeah. And that this group understood the power of the internet to move their own awful worldviews into the norm in like really structured and deliberate ways. Like you read that thing from Ryan Broderick last week who writes the Garbage newsletter who's basically saying, 'I've been covering misinformation and the alt-right for decades and I'm realizing that I may have just been following Jeffrey Epstein.' The more we learn about these files, the more it feels like that is the case.
Yeah, it's in there. And you know, there's more to come, assuming our Department of Justice does the thing they're legally mandated to do by... there's more to come. I suspect we're going to be covering this for quite a while.
Yeah. And I think folks should go read the stories. We'll link them in the show notes. But the particulars of how all of this works, I think, continues to be the hardest thing to mine of all of this. And our team has been doing a really good job because there's just so much. And like we talked about last week, it's just this unordered dump of PDFs. And if you want to, you can read almost anything you want into it, right? And so trying to go through and be like, okay, what is real? What is conspiracy? What is stuff that Jeffrey Epstein, who had a lot of reasons to vastly overstate his own importance? It's hard to parcel out, but there is just like the raw data of this. The more we start to put the pieces together is like a very different version of the history of sort of the modern internet than I think people are used to.
And that's even just looking at through the slice of what's here. Like we don't know what happened at the parties. We don't know what happened at the dinners. We don't know what happened on the island. We don't know what happened on the plane. Like we don't know what happened on the phone. There's just a universe of stuff we don't know. But what we can just see paints a very different picture of the history of the culture and the internet colliding in this specific way.
Oh, by the way, I have one for you. You and I were talking about this briefly on the show last week and then we talked about it afterwards and I went out and assigned it. The equal signs.
In the weird things that feel like censored redactions but like kind of clearly aren't. We're chasing that down. I'm not going to give it away, but I think by next week we will have a good answer. We will have a story about what's going on with the equal signs.
Oh, that's awesome. I'm so glad you assigned that story.
Yeah, I was like, I'm the king now. Like, am I the editor-in-chief? Can I just do this?
That's what happens. That's what all my meetings are like. Can I do this?
To be clear, most of the time people say no and then Eli does it anyway. That's the dynamic here. I had a good call today with a longtime tech exec and he was saying the way to think about oclaw and these AI agents is like what if, like don't think about it like you have one employee, think about like you have a whole team and like how much more in control you would feel. And I was like, I don't know man, I have a whole team. I look at my phone, I'm always like, what happened now? What are you talking about?
Yeah. All right. Let's move on from this. We're going to keep covering the Epstein stuff. I think this story is a long ways from being over, even in our zone. So we'll keep talking about it, but for now, let's talk about a different kind of a scandal, surveillance, a different scandal. So the beginning of this, I think, is there was a Super Bowl ad that Ring ran about a feature called Search Party. And I'm going to describe this in the most milquetoast way and then we're going to get into it. Search Party is a feature that is designed to help people find their dogs. That's it. If your dog runs away, you can activate the whole neighborhood of cameras to help you find your dog. I'm just going to share my screen with you real quick and I'm going to play this ad because it's 30 seconds long and I just watched it again and it is really something special.
This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Since launch, more than a dog a day has been reunited with their family. Be a hero in your neighborhood with Search Party. Available to everyone for free right now. Join the neighborhood at ring.com.
So Nilay, I don't see the problem. What a lovely ad about how to find your dog. I don't... So Jamie was on Decoder not so long ago talking about this and I would characterize that conversation as very pleasant. I like Jamie. He's very smart and also just me for an hour being like, is this dystopia? Are you describing dystopia? And we just went back and forth on that. And do you have a Ring camera?
I do. We were grandfathered into the one on our front door when we bought this house. And it has actually been a really interesting process of deciding whether we want to keep it. It's fascinating to me that this is a moral quandary. We have Ring cameras in our house. They're good. It is a product. They work and that's fine. Do you have the Neighbors app or do you have Neighbors notifications turned on in the Ring app?
No, I turned them off because it made me feel icky to be completely honest.
So we have them on. Again, I don't think you should feel moral quandary about this. Like, I'm very curious. You know, I have the get out of jail free card of like, I'm a tech reporter. Like, I have to pay attention. But like, it's fine. You can just turn them on. It's anonymized. And at least where I live, there are only two things that show up in the Neighbors app. Was that an explosion? By far and away. Number one. Just all day long, people asking if things are explosions. Couldn't tell you why, but that is it.
Are they ever explosions?
Sometimes. Okay. Like once a year there's an explosion.
Right. Like I don't know what to tell you. Once a year at the ConEd plant a transformer blows, you know, like...
The rest of the time it's like nope, big truck.
Yep. It's almost always big truck or nothing. Like nothing is a shockingly popular answer. And then the replies are always like hilarious lies like yes it was an explosion. Like go in your basement now. Like I actually asked Jamie about this. He's like yep. A lot of people asking about explosions in the data. Okay.
And then the other thing is my dog is lost.
That's it. That's all day long people like I lost my dog or like I saw a dog, here's a dog, here's a pet, whatever. And so you can see how anyone looking at what people are talking about and sharing their footage about would get to we should just automate the process of saying we see a dog.
Sure. And I just want to say that like if your concerns about the surveillance apparatus are valid, like everyone's listening to this, they're already yelling at me.
I'm just saying the logical, like outside of the world we live in, conclusion from why do people hit share on video footage in our app.
One, again I cannot overstate this, is this an explosion? Like if they could solve that problem, maybe they should have started there honestly. And then two is my dog is lost or I saw a dog and you can see how you would just get there. You would just very quickly arrive at we should push a button and let people be like here are some dogs, right?
And I'm only pointing that out because it is the reality of the platform. That's the thing people are doing.
It's also the sort of feature that in a vacuum no one's going to have a problem with, right? Like, can I all at once reach out to all of my neighbors to see if any of them have found my dog? Near 100% approval rate on that idea, that big.
And again, this is what people are already doing in the app. Now, in different neighborhoods, boy, do you run into different things people are doing that cause all kinds of problems, right? Is this an explosion? Did you see my dog? Right. On the scale of moral...
We got a lot of this is a teenager in a hoodie. They're probably a criminal.
There you go. I saw a guy looking at my car comes up in the data that I'm mad...
The delivery person for my food order didn't look like a citizen is one that is rising in the rankings. Like this is all bad stuff that you can do once you have this level of surveillance. And Ring has been in the mix of this problem since the day it was founded because Jamie, who again smart person, founded the company, you know famously founded it on Shark Tank as Doorbot, like very compelling story, very compelling actor founder talk, the whole thing. Since the first day he's been like this is to fight crime.
Yeah he's never wavered, he's never been, he didn't find, it wasn't like he had to find product market fit. He's like, 'Why did I make this video camera? To fight crime.' Like straight up, his pitch has been surveillance from the beginning. And on Decoder and to Gen 2, the last time we talked to Jamie Siminoff at the launch of the last round of doorbells, he's like, 'If you put enough of these in certain neighborhoods, we will zero out crime.' And he and I spent an hour talking about that. And next week, we'll have a Decoder episode just like really unpacking that conversation one more time. So I won't go into it too much here, but he and I spent an hour being like, 'What do you mean if you have enough cameras, you roll zero crime?' What is the mechanism by which these cameras will bring crime to zero? And the answer is well people will know there are cameras, they will misbehave, and you know to some extent it's we're going to share the footage with law enforcement.
No please. That gives Jamie so much less credit than he should get for the aggressiveness with which he wants to give all of your... They keep signing deals with police departments. Like this is a feature not a bug. Like actually can I play you one more 30 second thing? So Wyze, a smart home competitor to Ring which hilariously has a whole bunch of its own like security issues and privacy issues, got a lot of credit after this Ring ad came out and sparked a lot of people's fears because immediately like you look at that ad and it's like oh replace dogs with anything else and this is a horrifying dystopian hellscape that you've just described. I am confident there is a reason that Ring launched this feature with dogs. Do you know what I mean? But anyway, so Wyze makes this thing. Let me just play you this 30 seconds because I think it is a useful and important piece of the equation here. This is Milo. Pets are family, but every year 10 million of them go missing. And the ways we look for them haven't changed in years, except for all of these. But what if we could make finding one lost dog require the computational power of a small dictator-led nation? Search Party from Ring.
All right, you get the idea.
I get the idea. Can I just point out Wyze has had massive security issues.
Yeah. Strangers can control your Wyze cams over the internet.
Here, let me... Yeah, I'll just like... cameras outside your house. Yeah, you got weird surveillance problems. We're going to talk about how complicated all that will make you feel. Do not put cameras in your house.
Completely agree. The number of like feel-good clips I watch of like babies breaking out of their cribs and going to the kitchen to like get juice. It's like first you feel great. You're like, 'This is very funny. That baby jumps out of your crib.' You're like, 'Why is there a camera in your house?' Why is there an internet camera in your house? Why is there one in your kitchen? Why is there one in your living room? Why is there one all the way from the baby's crib to the kid? What are you doing? And there's no way to like reach through your phone and disconnect the camera, but I want there to be... Nilay and I will come to your house and slightly disconnect all of your cameras. I have a lot to say about the fact that the baby monitor camera that we bought got discontinued and now the only one you can buy from the same brand has a Wi-Fi option embedded in it and they know it's bad so there's a hardware switch in the camera.
But I'm like I don't even want... Don't put a camera in your house.
But anyway, to the point of this ad, like I think if you're Jamie and Ring, that Wyze video is not a good burn because you're like, 'Yeah, that actually is exactly what we're trying.' That's what we're doing. Yeah. They again, he will tell you. He will. He...
Look, I like people who are honest. Yeah.
Right. And Jamie is very honest. He's like, 'I started this company to fight crime. I'm going to do it with pervasive video surveillance.'
He's not hiding the ball.
I think he's a little annoyed that the nature of law enforcement and how people feel about the police using their data right now are radically different than when he founded Ring in like 2012 or 2013. It was back then, right? The nature of all this has changed, but his point of view has not. But again, all of this stuff is a feature, not a bug, right? Like, and I think to your point about them being honest, I think the challenge here is that everyone is able to make those decisions for themselves, right? Like is the possibility of lowering the possibility of someone breaking into your house worth the intrusiveness of having a camera? I think reasonable people can disagree on where you land on that. The other thing that's happening is my camera is also watching you. And so what we've now created is this big society-wide problem that not all of society gets to participate in. And I think that has been the part that Ring has not done a good job of reckoning with. It's like, sure, would I consent to you lighting up my camera in order to find your dog? Sure. Fine. Is it unbelievably obvious to me what opting me into that automatically does and what you can very clearly do next with that exact same technology? Like yes of course. And do we as reasonable consumers in the year 2026 have any reason to believe tech executives when they tell us they'll never do the bad thing? No. So, like I'm at this point now where I struggle with this because I don't know how to reckon with the fact that my block is filled with these things. And if my dog ever gets out, I will be grateful for the fact that most people on my block probably didn't know to turn this feature off.
But I also sort of feel like I should go door to door and tell everybody to turn this feature off.
I have this theory about just what is happening in our politics right now. I think about it a lot. Right now we are convinced, like culturally convinced, that our actions do not affect other people. You just see it everywhere. You see it in there's a rise in measles cases. Why? Because we've decided our actions don't affect other people even though they very clearly do like all over the place.
And Ring cameras are an incredible example of this where the cameras on my house are fine. They're fine. Sure. And I can turn them on and off and whatever. But they are, to your point, they're taking video of you. And so my cameras can invade your rights, but me turning that on has no impact on me. So here's this button in, you know, an app distributed by Amazon on the hardware that Amazon owns where you have like a moral quandary that is should I affect someone else's rights? And I would just say American culture in 2026 does not equip people to think about that.
Well, yeah. True. Like it's just that you kind of you see once you like start looking for it like do you believe that all of us working together is a better solution or problem than everyone working individually like do my actions affect you and should that have any impact on how I behave there just no no the answer is no one wants to think about it like please open TikTok and move on and you just I think this button is very challenging for people for that reason because your individual decision will never affect you.
It will affect others and the collective decisions of other people will affect you. But you have no agency here really. And I don't know how to reconcile that. But to your point, if you lose your dog, maybe this will be helpful. There's a reason they're starting with dogs. At the same time, Savannah Guthrie's mother was kidnapped.
And everyone was like, 'Where's the doorbell footage?' And she didn't have a Nest subscription on her Nest Cam, and everyone thought it was lost. And it turns out that the way the Nest cams work meant some data was sent to Google at some point and Google was able to recover it. We should talk about the mechanics of that because that's equally confusing. But the fact that the FBI then released the footage that Google had was, I would say, widely celebrated.
Yeah. This was deemed to be a win by Nest and by law enforcement and by the existence of these cameras. And you know, somewhere Jamie Siminoff is like, 'I told you this is what this is for.' But to me it's like I don't know. I also reacted to both of those things the ways you just described. And I think having those... you can't hold both those ideas in your head at the same time. You just can't have it both ways. Either this stuff is too problematic and too invasive and we need ways to roll it back and not have it be this kind of incredible ongoing permanently stored surveillance complex that can find anybody at any time or it's awesome that this piece of information about what happened at Nancy Guthrie is coming out and might help solve a crime. You can't have it both ways.
Well, you can chart one middle path.
Can you? You can. So, you know, 20 years ago, CCTV cameras became absolutely prevalent in England, like this is a 20-year-old story, like and there was a controversy about just the number of private CCTV cameras.
And this is like the old technology, right? This isn't even like digital internet technology. This is closed circuit. There's tapes in the back of the convenience store.
And they were everywhere. And there was a privacy debate in that country at that time. And you end up with a series of regulations and laws and social norms and I don't know that it has worked out any different but there is one other path right which is to say we should have privacy laws like the way the government accesses the private surveillance footage on everyone's front door is regulated in some way and transparent in some way and there's things the police can't do and that is just not where we are in America as a society right now like we are not going to have some wholesome debate about what it means that everyone has a camera and the cops want all the footage all the time. Especially because so many people no longer trust the intentions, the methods, or even their interactions with the police. Like just that's not where we are, right? So the idea that you're going to have some good faith debate outside of a high-profile true crime story, it seems lost, right? So now these companies are just going to do whatever they want and it seems like what they're going to do is chase the check. And the United States government is going to write a lot of checks.
Yeah. House by house we are neatly solving a law enforcement problem.
Yeah, there's the one middle path. And you could write that law. You could write a privacy law, right? You could say you can't light this up all the time. There's a million ways to do this. And maybe not everyone will be happy with any of those ways. I think the failure is no one is even proposing them. And even if you did propose them, no one believes that any of them will pass into law or be effective.
Right. What do you make of the Nancy Guthrie thing before we move on and get out of this? You know, I keep hearing a lot of cliches like you're only paying for access to your data, but it is true that the Google cameras work differently than the Ring cameras work differently than the Wyze cameras work differently than the Arlo cameras. And Google's system in particular, we don't know which camera she had. So this can be like depending on which generation of Nest camera you had that it works slightly differently, but it seems very much like you always get a few days of video history for free. And so there was a motion alert. The data was sent to Google and it just didn't get overwritten. And so the only real insight we have into what happened here was of course from Kash Patel who's not a reliable narrator who said they recovered the footage from quote residual data located in back-end systems. I think Google should explain exactly what that means. Yeah. I think you have a right to know if you're a Nest customer exactly how residual your data is to what level on what backend systems. But our best guess given the way the Nest camera system works is that the video went up because you do get some amount for free and it just had not been overwritten and given the high-profile nature of this case, Google assigned some engineers to go get it. I don't know this. I'm just saying this is the logical result of what they're saying.
Yes, I think Google should absolutely have to explain if your data goes away. And Ring, you know, again, they're trying to claw their way back into everyone's good graces said to Jen, 'We have no idea what the words residual data mean because that's not how their system works, right?' And I believe them, right? Like it's purely a system architecture question what you're doing here. But yeah, I agree. I mean, the way Google and the FBI make it sound is that it was like this is like the 1970s and somebody like left the VHS in the room without meaning to. And that is like if that is how it works, that's because Google made a deliberate choice in how it stores and eventually deletes and eventually overwrites the data on its servers. And a the idea that that data still existed and b that it was clearly in relatively short order retrievable by Google is just wild. And again, like I think it is possible in this case to both think it's good that this information is out there and I'm glad that there is this clue as to what happened in Nancy Guthrie. It is also like deeply weird and alarming that this was possible.
Yeah. I mean, again, I think all of these companies owe us way more explanations about what's going on with their data. I think they should be required to give us those explanations by law. That's what a privacy law would do. Yeah. And I think law enforcement needs far more guardrails on how they access our data. And that is especially under the Trump administration. That's a long way away from being reality. There are no more guardrails for these companies. And so, yep, I have a problem with Ring, but I also have a problem with Clearview AI. Sure. Like I have a lot of problems with a lot of the systems that are being deployed against us. I'm not making apologies for Ring. I just think I know that company and what they care about. They're designed to be like we will stop crime with video surveillance. And so, you know, yes, every camera kind of works this way. Yes, you can complicate this by talking about Nancy Guthrie, but if you don't want to participate in that mission, you can actually make a market decision, right? You can be like, I'm going to buy one from a company that isn't like we're here to zero out crime. That is a choice you can make with your dollars. But if you're the Door Dasher who has to go up to someone's door to bring them food and they get to take a picture of you and post it wondering if you're a citizen, you have made zero market decisions.
Yeah. And this is what I mean. Your choices affect other people and really not yourself. And that's a weird thing. That's a weird problem in app design. Yeah.
Right. How are you going to communicate this in a switch box in an app? It is also just a weird problem in our society right now that no one really has the tools to evaluate that kind of choice. And you're actually pushed away from thinking about those choices in that way. Right now, again, this is big and small, but once you see it, it's everywhere. And these cameras are like a particular instantiation of that that just happen to be a gadget. So, we're good to talk about guys.
Yeah, indeed. All right, we should get off of this. I think we will keep coming back to all of this. I'm going to go make sure the camera on my Ring is not running. But we should take a break and then we're going to go back. We're going to talk about some other gadgets that don't exist and some other gadgets that might. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. We have, believe it or not, Eli, one more Super Bowl ad to talk about, but it both is and is not a Super Bowl ad. The Schrodinger Super Bowl ad that we're going to talk about. We've talked a lot on the show and we've been waiting for OpenAI to release its hardware. OpenAI is working on something with Johnny IV, potentially many somethings. There have been rumors, there's been reporting, there's been a lot of stuff out there. And then this week there was a weird leak that started as a Reddit thread from a supposedly disgruntled employee explaining why they were mad that their Super Bowl ad about OpenAI hardware didn't go on the Super Bowl, and then they quote-unquote leaked this ad. Have you seen this?
This is a crypto scam. Can we just start with, I'm not 100% crypto-scam positive, you know, but I've seen a lot of Photoshops in my time. This is a crypto scam.
When in doubt, crypto-scam is a non-incorrect way to live your life at this point in time.
Especially the way it worked, because they leaked it and there was like what? There was like a file name on a server and then someone was like, 'I've discovered the file name on a server.' It got all the way to Alexis Ohanian being like, 'Reddit cracked it again.'
Crypto-scam. All of that just reads crypto-scam to me. I'm not sure where the crypto-scam was.
But just that sequence of events where a bunch of people were a little too smart, a little too fast. Crypto-scam.
Somewhere in there, Elon Musk asking you for your Bitcoin is like that's the turn. But the ad I think is sort of fascinating. It's Alexander Skarsgard wearing...
It's AI Alexander Skarsgard.
Sorry. Fake Alexander Skarsgard. Very convincing. Fake Alexander Skarsgard wearing what look like sort of open-ear headphones and playing with this little orb called Dime. Again, all of this is fake. Everyone at OpenAI has said it's fake to the point where it would be wild for this to be true.
No, it's definitely fake. The whole thing is fake all the way up and down. But this ad ostensibly showing OpenAI's hardware really kind of caught on in a really funny way. Did you believe this ad the first time you saw it?
No. No. No. Because again, look, I've seen a lot of Photoshops.
Like, my scam detection ability is under threat every day because of this. But the thing here where there was like a Reddit post from an account that had never existed before, and then the people in the Reddit figured it out so fast, and then there was a full ad that was leaked with a celebrity in it that wasn't run because OpenAI chickened out because of the Meta executives who work... like you just look at all that, like none of that happened, right? Like 0% of this went down, especially if you have ever watched Johnny IV introduce a product ever in history, which we have done a lot of. He does not make an ad where nothing is said.
True. And there's a moment at the very end where AI Alexander Skarsgard picks this thing up and does a sort of like checking-his-teeth face into it that is just so immediately tonally incorrect that it's like, why would even the person trying to fake this out do this? This was apparently a pretty elaborate procedure to try and fake this. They were sending people proposals to feature this ad. Really interesting thing. But I just found this whole ad so fascinating. And it very clearly to me points to: people are so desperately curious, a) what any of this AI hardware is going to be, and b) they're so deeply skeptical of this being anything, that immediately there was this very funny feedback that was like, 'Of course this is real, and of course it's this stupid.'
So I read this more, and we should talk about the AI industry as a whole. I read this more as, like, OpenAI's own actual ad during the Super Bowl wasn't any good, and the Anthropic ads were really good on Twitter, and then in a room where people were actually watching the Super Bowl, they played nothing. They felt...
None of it hit in a room.
None of it. Like, you just, no one's paying enough attention to these ads. Like, the best ad was the Coinbase ad where they just did karaoke to Backstreet Boys.
Because it at least got everyone's attention. And then you know what happened when they showed the Coinbase logo? At least in the party I was at, everyone groaned and said, 'Fuck Coinbase.'
But everyone sang a Backstreet Boys song for a minute. By the way, in the ad industry, that's called a pattern breaker. Did you know that?
And they're very successful, and they're good at this, right? So like whatever. Like, but what you saw was the actual ChatGPT ad isn't any good. The ChatGPT product, because it's about to get ads in it, people think is about to get shittier in some way. And then as we have talked about so much, like Claude and Claude Code are having this incredible moment, and OpenAI doesn't seem to be poised to compete with that anyway, except to try to light up ads to compete with Google search.
And so I looked at this whole kerfuffle as like, in order for this hoax to work, in order for this crypto-scam to sell one Bitcoin or whatever the hell they were trying to do, you had to believe that there was a better ad on the shelf. And that was believable. You had to believe that there was an ad executive somewhere at OpenAI who was furious that his better ad was shelved in favor of the thing they actually ran. And if you don't believe that, then of course this is a hoax. If you look at the state of the advertising, you're like, 'Yeah, that's possible.' And then you or Alex and you're tweeting this out.
Yeah. Fair. Meanwhile, the actual OpenAI hardware news of the week is that it appears OpenAI's actual hardware launch has slipped to next year.
I would, I'm just going to keep pointing out, the all-knowing voice assistant that can do things for you is a long way away. Even if you're the biggest OpenAI fan in the world, that thing is a million miles away from being a mass consumer product.
Yes. And it is increasingly clear that everyone, including Johnny IV, might know that. But let's talk about some of the weirdness going on in this space right now, because you just alluded to this, but one of the things that has been happening all week is a bunch of people have been leaving high-profile jobs at AI companies and sort of sounding alarms behind them.
Yeah. An OpenAI executive left and wrote a sort of scathing essay in the New York Times about how problematic it was that ads are going to be in ChatGPT. An Anthropic safety person left and wrote a similarly sort of catastrophic thing about the state of AI and where we're all...
Not similarly. 'I'm mad about ads' is one thing. This dude wrote, quote, 'The world is in peril.'
All right. Yeah, that's worse. 'There is a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding at this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.' I would say that's a little different than 'I'm mad about ads in ChatGPT.'
It's a little worse. I would agree with that. But and then the other thing is this big group of xAI people left, and I think there's a chance that that one belongs off to the side, because xAI just became part of SpaceX. There's going to be a lot of corporate changes. A bunch of people presumably just got very rich from this thing, which created the largest private company I think in America or maybe even the world. But there is something happening here where an increasing number of important people are finding cause to sound the alarm about what's going on with AI. Do you make anything of all of this happening at the same time?
Well, you keep saying that this is my pet theory, but I think this is real. I think this is an important thing to...
I already know where this is going and I hate it.
I think Anthropic thinks Claude is alive. Like I really do. And I think this might be shared at other labs, but Anthropic is particularly kind of hinting that they think Claude is live. They just did a big New Yorker profile called 'What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn't Know Either.' And it's like, dude, it's an LLM. I know what it is. But they think it's live, and they keep running these tests on it, and it keeps surprising them in different ways. And yes, Claude is very powerful. And yes, if you give it a vending machine, it will sell everyone a tungsten cube for a dollar, like whatever mistakes it's going to make. And yes, they release reports on scheming. But like, there's something in this industry where they have decided, the people who work in the industry sort of collectively have decided that they're touching consciousness. Maybe not human consciousness, but consciousness of a kind. I don't know how to evaluate that. I just see it, right? Like particularly I think Anthropic thinks Claude is alive because they keep hinting it. They keep talking about it like it's alive. They don't say it the way that Sam Altman is like, 'We're going to do AGI,' right? They just keep hinting at it. So if you're there, right, of course your safety researchers are like, 'Well, you're doing stuff to make money with the thing that's alive that might kill us all. We should stop until we figure out how to make it not kill us all.'
And then you see that happening at OpenAI, which has to make way more money way faster because they don't have the enterprise business that Anthropic has, and they're just disbanding their quote mission alignment team, and their head of platform safety is now the head futurist. It's like, well, what do you think is going to happen in the future such that your head of safety has to be the head futurist? Oh, it's going to kill us all. And like, I don't want to buy into doomerism. I think I'm personally still the most skeptical person about AI that I encounter on a regular basis. But this industry right now is marked by a sense that the people who work there are afraid of the capabilities that they've created, and they do not think there's sufficient controls.
Right. There is a measure of true belief that you have to have to quit your job in this way, which is a weird thing, right? Because it would be one thing if they were like, 'I'm quitting my job because I think Sam Altman is a scam artist who is just milking people out of money and is going to ruin the economy.' That's not what these people are saying. They're saying essentially, we've created God and we're not doing enough to rein it in.
You're more on the speaking circuit given that talk than you are like cashing in your Anthropic stock.
I'm sure that's true. And I think this is, to be fair, a sort of long tradition in the tech industry. People left Facebook saying the same kind of thing. People left Google. Tristan Harris made a whole...
He did make more money on the speaking circuit.
Oh, no question. Out of saying essentially the same things, like we have created this thing that is very powerful, and we are neither honest about nor reckoning with the consequences.
And we're seeing, you know, we haven't really talked about the fact that Meta is on trial. Adams was on the stand this week, and there is just a lot of documentation coming out of Meta that proves that they knew what they were doing to people.
So this is the thing that I struggle with, right? A, the people who have come out and loudly said this have been proven right historically in the tech industry over and over and over again. We should have believed Tristan Harris quicker than we did, right? Like he eventually helped make a documentary that I didn't like very much, but that's beside the point. The idea that these people were coming out saying we have built a machine that is changing the way that people live their lives and we're not talking about it enough. Like if we had recognized that at a bigger level about Google and Facebook much sooner, things might have been different in better ways. And so part of me looks at this and is like, okay, maybe what we need to do is take these people at their word that they see what they've built more clearly than we do because they see the dashboards, they see what's happening, they see how people are using these things. And this is why I bring up the ads thing too, right? Is like the people alarmed about putting ads in the experience are the ones who are seeing the kinds of information that people are giving to ChatGPT. And you put this next to like everybody's up in arms about OpenAI retiring GPT-4o, which is like the truly sycophantic thing that everybody turned into their best friend, and it's like that stuff is real, and I think we do need to reckon with it. And I have to remind myself sometimes that even though I'm confident that AI is not nearly as good as the people wanting to sell it to me say that it is, it's still good enough that it is causing people to do these kinds of things and make these kinds of trades, and we should worry about those things. And so I'm just stuck in this thing of like, I don't believe it's as good as any of these people say that it is, but maybe that doesn't matter because maybe the people are still doing the things that are scary even if the tech is not as good as Sam Altman says that it is. Well, it's good enough to cause harm.
Yeah. Yeah. Well said. That much is true. It's obviously true at this point. It's good enough to cause harm.
Is it going to destroy humanity? Like, probably not yet. But is it doing a lot of harm?
