Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vergecast producer job that is now open. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here.
I'm going to apply for that job. I think that job might be easier than my job.
We are hiring. I want to get this out of the way right up top because we haven't mentioned it on the show yet because we are terrible people. We are hiring a producer to come work on the Vergecast with us. You can go to voxdmedia.com/job. Apply. Mention Brendan Carr in your cover letter.
If you are Brendan Carr, if you will for this job, I really, I think the greatest part of this is Brendan Carr wouldn't get the job, but he would get an interview. Do you know what I mean? Like, he would come in.
I would hire Brendan. You know, we're also hiring a supervising producer for Decoder.
I would hire Brendan to be the supervising producer for Pretty Good Fun just because that job is like run my business and policy show and I would just get to yell at Brendan all day every day.
He is good at getting attention on the internet.
See what I'm saying? And that is the game we all play now.
Yeah. But hey, both of those jobs are open. Producer on the Vergecast, supervising producer on Decoder. We have big plans for our shows. We want to expand them in lots of ways. So we need help. So, if you know people,
I promise we are not as unpleasant to work with as you would think we would be. We're like mostly as unpleasant as you think. It's not all the way.
Well, I'm more and you're less. Do you know what I mean? So, this is why we're a good match.
You're a delight and I drive everybody insane. And this is like a good balance we strike.
It is. It is. In the sense that David does all the work and I do none. That's really how this plays out.
It's a great move. You just sort of Kool-Aid man me five minutes before the show starts. You're like, 'What's up, guys?' Yeah, I have a bunch of hot takes I haven't done any research on. Let's go.
Which, in fact, brings us to where we should start the show today. We have a lot to talk about. There's some Apple stuff we're going to get to later. Allison Johnson's going to come on and talk about the unbelievably brief life and death of the Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold and her bizarre experiences with that phone. I'm very excited about that. But first, there's sort of a big picture thing going on here, but the specific bit of news this week that I think has been on a lot of people's minds was this memo that went around inside of OpenAI from Fidji Simo, who is the CEO of applications at OpenAI, which is a hilarious title that means nothing, but Fidji Simo is like a big deal. She ran Facebook at Facebook. She was the CEO of Instacart. Like, she's a heavy hitter in this world and has been at OpenAI making a bunch of changes. And she sent out this memo essentially saying OpenAI needs to focus, that this company has been on what she called side quests, which is a pretty accurate representation of what's been going on. Like, OpenAI has launched every single thing you can think of over the last two years and she's basically like, we need to stop doing all of that and focus really aggressively on enterprise and coding use cases because that is where the product market fit is. That's what we need to do. We need to pull back on all of this stuff and focus on those things. And in there somewhere, I think, is the bones of a bigger conversation being had right now about how people feel about AI and whether AI is going to continue to grow in the way that these companies need it to grow.
And I just think, I don't know, we can talk about this from a bunch of different angles. But I'm curious, like, how do you respond to the OpenAI thing? Like, what do you make of Fidji's memo here? Is this the right thing for OpenAI to do at this moment?
I think so. But I have like two big reactions to this. One, they just did this. Sam Altman just declared a code red.
Like minutes ago. Like, I don't even think we've settled down. I don't think we've undeclared the code red. It's not over. So what are we doing? Why are we doing it again? Did it not work the first time? Did it not take? Like literally, did people not get the code red memo? So, we're sending a different memo with different words to see if that one hits.
There's a really great line from Fidji Simo in an all-hands with the team talking about this stuff. Somebody, I guess, asked her, 'Is this a code red?' And she goes, 'We are very much acting as if it's a code red. I don't think necessarily declaring codes for everything makes a ton of sense.' Like,
Perfect. And correct. But I think you're right that this is not news to OpenAI, or at the very least it shouldn't be news to OpenAI that this is the move.
Well, this is, I think, my second reaction to this. OpenAI is stuck. Fidji is supposed to be the one making the big consumer product. They hired her because she ran Facebook, which has ads. They hired a million ads people from Meta. There are so many people at Meta from OpenAI that in Meta all-hands they talk about losing people to OpenAI. Sam kicked himself to run the lab, to do research and pretty much raise money to make digital Jesus or whatever he thinks he's doing, and Fidji is CEO of applications. She's supposed to make the big consumer product that takes market share away from Google Search, the most lucrative business in the history of technology, and they're not doing it. It is not occurring. They might be taking market share, but they're not making money. That's the thing that...
That's, I think, the important distinction. Like, there is no question that ChatGPT has been an enormous success, right? Like, tons of people use it, and we're going to get into the way that people feel about that, which is what I really want to talk about here. The feelings people have when they use ChatGPT are fascinating, but people are using ChatGPT,
and OpenAI is losing money hand over fist every time you use ChatGPT. And I think it's increasingly clear what this company has realized is there is no path from that to suddenly we make money on ChatGPT. They're trying ads. They've tried shopping. They've tried all the things that you would try, and it appears all indications are we're not running towards profitability here.
Right. You hire the person from the big scaled consumer internet business to do that again. You hire Fidji Simo to do it again, and she's the one writing the memo acting as though it's a code red saying we have to pivot to enterprise.
Because that is the opportunity. The story here is that no one has figured out the worthwhile consumer AI business.
Even Google kind of hasn't, right? Like, their attempts to do it look way more like slop than not.
Yes. AI Overviews is just so frequently wrong now that it's becoming a joke. We are planning our Apple 50 package, and I asked it yesterday, when did the wedge-shaped MacBook Air error come out, which is just a fact you can know.
There's a lot of ways to find out when that one came out.
And AI Overviews could not get that answer right.
That's brutal. Like, even Google, which is going to do the best job here because it already has the scaled consumer business that's making a lot of money and has a lot of advertisers, they are hurting their own product. They're going to hurt YouTube in a very real way. They're starting to run surveys on YouTube asking people if they think that the videos are AI slop.
Because they need to build a detector. Like, there's something going on with Google, but they already have a big business that's winning, and they have Google Cloud. They have all this other stuff. OpenAI, they got to make a business. It's existential for them. They need to make more money than they are spending, or Sam has to keep raising money forever, and that is pretty shaky.
And so I think absent a big consumer hit, this whole industry is paralyzed and starting to kind of lash out.
That people don't love them more. Like, you were talking right before we started recording about the perception that The Verge hates technology, which is very funny because we employ literal gadget reviewers. And like, I love technology, and I will spend all day and all night talking about high-bitrate movie streaming, and we'll do like spec episodes. Like, what do people think we're doing here? The problem is people have conflated tech with AI, and AI has not come up with a consumer use case that people love. They really have not. Like, none of these companies have really come up with that thing in this way, or at least in a way that makes money. And now the industry is starting to feel that pressure because they're asking for so much data centers everywhere. No more RAM for anybody. Weird ideas about what GPUs should do to video games. They're way over their skis in terms of what they're asking for,
and they haven't made a product people love. And so people are like, 'No, actually, we'd really dislike you.'
And the data kind of backs it up.
Yeah. I mean, there was this one NBC News poll a week or so ago that I've seen a bunch of people talking about that is essentially, the question was basically, how do you weigh the risks and rewards of AI, basically like, is it net good or net bad? And with the caveat that polls are always messy, people think that it's bad. This is just one thing from it. It says 57% said they believe the risks of AI outweigh its benefit compared to 34% who said the opposite. A plurality of voters view AI negatively and don't believe either Democrats or Republicans are doing a good job handling policy related to the rapidly advancing technology. That is not unclear evidence. This poll is fascinating, by the way, because they also polled people about like, 'How do you feel about Gavin Newsom and ICE and the Democratic Party and just a lot of things sort of in the ether right now.' And it's like people are psyched about Pope Leo, people are psyched about Stephen Colbert, and like everything else sucks, including AI.
And AI is like down there with Democrats generally and the war.
It's between ICE and the Democrats, which is just a tough beat for AI right now.
And I've talked to executives at the biggest companies in tech who are like, 'Gen Z hates AI and that's our problem.'
Like straight, like they will just look me in the eye and be like, 'The problem is that Gen Z hates AI. We don't know what to do about it.'
There was also this really interesting Pew study from last fall. Like, this is a building set of data, right? We've been getting real scientific research about how people feel about AI for a while now. And it's kind of been like this the whole time. It's not like people are starting to sour on it. People talk about, you know, the trough of disillusionment. It's just been like this pretty much the whole time. But in this Pew study, 53% of people said AI will worsen people's ability to think creatively compared with 16% who said it will improve this. Far more people said AI will worsen rather than improve people's ability to form meaningful relationships. 50% said it will worsen them. 5% said it will improve them. Like, this is not... there's a certain subset of people out there who are ambivalent and wait-and-see and who knows and whatever, but like, to the extent that people have reflexive feelings about this, it is overwhelmingly bad.
Yeah. And I want to make the comparison to two other things because, you know, the scale of change that AI might bring is huge, but it's not without precedent. So the internet promised a huge amount of change and it was just adopted. You didn't have to try, right? Do you know what I mean? Like, it took a while and there was a dot-com bubble and there were fits and starts and there was a lot of silly ideas going on with the internet, but people by and large just started using it and a bunch of companies were able to make a lot of money along the way and there wasn't this level of confusion.
Do you know what I mean? Like, Amazon chose not to make money for a long time. Very publicly, very loudly said, 'We're not making money because we're going to build all this infrastructure.' And the second they were like, 'We need to make money now,' Jeff Bezos owns a very large boat. You know, like, the internet, the way that economy developed overall was it was just obvious.
Yeah. It was the same with smartphones and apps, and you can feel a lot of ways about mobile. You can feel a lot of ways about social media. You can feel a lot of ways about Mark Zuckerberg. You can feel a lot of ways about the Apple tax. Like, that economy developed, and you did not have to convince people to buy smartphones, right? Facebook is actually my favorite example of this. People raced to join Facebook,
like, raced to get on it because we eventually figured out the downstream effects and there were all kinds of problems and all that stuff. Like, the initial value proposition of 'here's why this will make your life better' was so clear to so many people that the minute their college would allow them to, they started pouring their lives into the platform. Yeah.
Like, it was so straightforward a good proposition that everybody just ran for it. And I've been doing all this research for Version History, our other podcast, which people should go listen to, that has led me back to like the days of the radio and the early days of the phone. And yes, there are small panics about what those things will do to the world. But overwhelmingly, most of those new technologies were going to like solve world peace. That these were the things that when they bring us together, everything will be wonderful now and we will never have problems because we can just communicate. Seriously, this is like... these are real pervasive beliefs that radio will make the world a meaningfully better place.
Yes, connecting everybody is the goal, and there will be some negative consequences, some externalities, but we need to connect everybody anyway. Andrew Bosworth at Meta famously wrote a memo called 'The Ugly' in which he laid out all of the bad things that would happen and said still we connect everyone because we think that's the highest and best use of the technology. You can feel a lot of ways about that memo. A lot of people have felt a lot of ways about that memo. And his point always has been, 'No, I was just laying it out like these are the stakes and these are the consequences and we believe in what we're doing anyway because we think we're going to make the world a better place.' This is the line from Silicon Valley. It's Gavin Belson saying, 'I don't want anyone else making the world a better place before I do.'
Yes, that's Silicon Valley. But everyone believed in this stuff. I can make this even more narrow. YouTube is basically built on widespread copyright infringement.
Yeah. Like, those industries did not like this. YouTube took all this stuff.
The same as the AI industry is kind of built on widespread copyright infringement, but YouTube was so useful and so good and so obvious that everyone sided with them in a way that they're not siding with the AI industry, right? You can just see delivering meaningful actual value to consumers lets you get away with a lot, right? The iPhone is the vanguard of moving high-tech manufacturing to China. Apple built that ecosystem in China. So did Tesla. Everyone should go read Apple in China. It's a great book. But you see these two companies in particular kickstarted an entire industry over there. Why did we allow that to happen? Because the iPhone is great. Because it's great. It's just a great product. And so are smartphones. My point here is the AI industry is staring at these polls that say everyone hates them. And it's because they are asking for so much, and you can quantify that in a million ways. They're asking for a lot of power. They're asking for a lot of land to build data centers. They are asking for every stick of RAM that has ever existed in the history of the world. They're asking to scan every book without payment. They're asking for my identity to run Grammarly. Like, whatever it is that they're asking for, they're doing it without permission, and they're asking for a lot, and they have not given back a product that makes people feel the way that the internet made them feel or the smartphone made them feel or YouTube made them feel. It just doesn't exist yet. And so instead of reacting to that by building great products, Fidji Simo saying we need to pivot to enterprise coding because Anthropic is killing us there. And then the VCs are going on podcasts and doing what they do, which is blaming consumers or blaming the media, which I think is bananas.
Yeah. Have you been deep in the weeds of the VC podcast this week? I feel like you've been talking to me about VC podcasts more than usual.
I have. So, here's what happens. And I feel so bad for our team. What happens is at night, I try to put the baby to sleep. And he's a real cuddler. So, you got to just hold him until he's like actually asleep. But his eyes are closed and he's, you know, he's just trying to do that wiggly thrashy thing where if you put him down too early, he'll wake up. So, you got to sit there.
What are you going to do when you're sitting there? You're going to watch TikTok on silent. That's what you're going to do while you're sitting there. So, I've just...
Wait, you don't even wear headphones. You just watch it on silent.
It's fine on like dim silent. It is a weird way to experience TikTok, but it's what I do. And our poor team just gets TikToks at like 8:30 p.m. all day, every day.
I can confirm this forever.
I feel bad about it. So, I ran across this creator called Signals and Noise. She has a PhD from New York Chicago, which I love because I went there. She's the co-founder of a thing called Bookscape. Her title says AI text strategist. You go watch her videos. We'll link them. They're good. Her name is in here, so if you want to tell me what your name is, I'd be happy to say her name, but it's hard to find your actual name. And she's called out two podcasts. One, of course, is All-In with Chamath,
Everyone knows what that is. And the one I want to start with is the Big Technology Podcast, which is hosted by Alex Kantrowitz, who's a friend of ours. He had Olivia Moore, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, on. This clip, this reaction that in particular VCs are starting to have to the negative messaging around AI. So I want to actually just play the same clip from the Big Technology Podcast. This is Olivia Moore, who's a partner at Andreessen.
There's been a lot in the media in the US more broadly, these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water, that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology. I was just talking with someone this morning who is not in the tech industry and they were saying the same lines like AI is evil, it's going to watch us, like it's using all the water. And then they were like, 'But ChatGPT really helps me and it has like great answers.' And so I think part of it is a timing thing of we just need these products to kind of saturate the mainstream consumer and they can realize the value.
So there's a lot of things in there, a lot of ideas there, huh?
That we can talk about the water another time. This assumes in a certain way that these products exist and are out there, right? And the only thing that we're missing is adoption. And I would actually say what seems to be the case is that we have the exact reverse, which is that everybody has tried these things,
and found them wanting in some meaningful way. Like, you can't avoid these chatbots at this point. Like, if you open up Gmail, you get 11 popups reminding you how to Gemini in your Gmail. These things are not far away from the users. It's just that people find them, use them, and at the very least find them not worth $20 a month, right? Like, for the purposes of this conversation, we don't even have to litigate whether the products are any good. They're not worth $20 a month to most people. And until they are worth $20 a month to most people, they're going to hemorrhage money. And this to me is just like, this just assumes that all of this is out there and it's like the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. That is not at all my experience with AI right now.
Yeah. No, it's everywhere. I have a different objection to this idea from Olivia Moore at Andreessen Horowitz, and it's the one that the creator made in her video. And I brought this idea to our environmental reporter Justine Calma and to Mia, who covers the fashion industry and shopping generally for us.
Environmental objections do not do [__] for the American consumer. They've never done anything for anyone.
No, not one thing. Like, the reason I brought up fashion is fast fashion exists and no one cares about the environmental cost of Shein.
Literally no one cares. That stuff is flying off the shelves. I am a sucker for a big stupid car. I really am. I love them. The more cylinders the better. Light them up. Lots of people in this country know every inch of the environmental cost of big stupid cars. We've been talking about it forever. I have an EV. I will tell you my EV is a much more pleasant thing to drive than my stupid Mustang, but I love my stupid Mustang, right? Like, it just doesn't work. Like, you're watching what's happening in EV sales right now. If you cared about the environment, you would buy an EV. You would not buy the dumbest trucks that you can buy, which is what Americans are addicted to buying.
Yeah. Someday when you make a country album, I need it to be called 'I Love My Stupid Mustang.'
This is going to make me very happy.
I love it the most. I'm just pointing this out, like, this idea that the media has convinced everyone that the in particular water cost of AI is so high that you should hate it is just totally divorced from the reality of how people react to environmental messaging at all.
Yes. At all. In fact, I would argue that the do-the-right-thing versus do-the-convenient-thing is an easier trade for people to get over to do the convenient thing than almost anything else with environment. Like, many times the, you know, do I give up my private data in exchange for some convenience? Like, people have more feelings about that than will I burn the world down for some convenience. Like, behavior suggests that we will happily burn the world down if it gets me my clothes 10 minutes faster. Ask people how they feel about the paper straws, man.
And like, the paper straws might not be helping anything, but like, the idea that you should suffer some minor inconvenience to make incremental benefit, like, no. Everyone's like, I hate these straws. It is so easy to overcome the environmental roadblock, the moral sense that your actions will help the environment or hurt the environment. You just need a great product. That's literally it. Or a more convenient product. And so here you have a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which is effectively now just a VC for defense contractors,
saying people hate this technology because the media is lying to them.
And first of all, the media that most people consume, as we have talked about over and over on the show, is not us, right? That people are not reading The New York Times. They're just opening TikTok. They're watching the algorithmic media that is being delivered to them by big tech companies that have a huge vested interest in, as you're saying, distributing AI tools to them. Yep.
So, it's not... I'm not popping up on people's feeds and being like, 'Did you know that has a lot of...' No, it's like just not happening. And even if that was happening, you can just look at, you know, the weird dip in EV sales after the incentives went away and people rushing to buy gas cars even though gas prices are through the roof. Like, people make weird decisions when the environmental factor is the main factor. By the way, asterisk, I know we're going to get notes about this. EV sales are ticking back up because gas prices are high and the cars are actually better. And maybe that's all going to equalize, but it's not the environmental concern that is driving consumer behavior in the car market or in the fashion market or anywhere else where you have environmental concerns that should shift the market. And that's what I asked Justine about. That's what he asked me about. It's what this creator was pointing out in her video. You can get over... the point I'm trying to make is you can overcome the environmental concern really, really easily. So this is one big attempt, like one big narrative from in particular AI VCs who are saying it's not our fault, you're too stupid, right? You've been lied to, the tools are amazing, and we just have to wait and the objections will be overcome.
There's another one as well, which again, this is all an instrument, so it's like I just feel like I'm dunking on a baby, but like we should listen to it.
At least some parts of the AI ecosystem have decided that this crazy scary doomerism is the best way to raise money, where every now and then they come out and they say all the jobs will be destroyed and Demis Hassabis says that this thing is sentient and investors are like, okay, here's 10 billion, here's 50 billion, here's 100 billion.
Now we're blaming the AI founders themselves.
I find this argument to be essentially nonsensical. Like, because the whole AI will remake the economy, AI will change the way that work gets done, we're going to have to do universal basic income because nobody's going to have a job anymore. This was a feature of the rise of all of this stuff for years until a bunch of people went, 'Wait, that sounds horrible. I don't want that. I like my job. I enjoy doing my job. Please don't automate my job away with AI slop.' And there have been other lines in all of this that are like, 'Gosh, in America, we're way over-indexed on people liking creative arts.' It's like, yeah, I'm good with that actually. Like, all of these things are fine. And for the longest time, people like Chamath and podcasts like the All-In Podcast were talking in glorious terms about how terrific it was going to be when AI completely remade the economy. And so now to call that doomerism is just ridiculous.
Yeah, I totally agree in that worldview, and that worldview is really prevalent. Alex Karp is running around saying women are going to lose their political power and it's men who work with their hands who will suddenly have the economic power because AI will replace all of your dumb woke laptop work or whatever he wants to say.
And if that works to raise money, by the way, Chamath, you're the money guy.
Oh, like he is the money. He's the money.
If this is the sales pitch that works on you, you are the problem. Well, to be clear, these guys hate Anthropic because they think Anthropic is woke.
Sure. But Sam Altman is just as doomer-y in this way, right? He's the one running around saying everyone's just going to rent intelligence from the cloud.
And they're going to build AGI. Like, there's something here where their own messaging is the problem and they've convinced people that all of the jobs are going away and now they are facing the consequences of that messaging and they're blaming the people.
Yep. And I just keep coming back to the idea that we all knew what was going to happen when you put a camera on every phone in every pocket in the world. We at The Verge have been writing about the effects of that at every level from the very beginning. Like, the whole Verge is kind of founded on the insight that phones would be a big deal and it was like not obvious in 2011. It's very funny to tell people that in retrospect because it's like, 'Oh, congratulations. You thought phones might be important.' Like, 'Great job.' But I'm like, 'No, it wasn't guaranteed we need to write about technology and culture at the same time.' We were like, 'What are you talking about?' It's like, 'Well, the whole... they're all the same.' And now here we are. We did it anyway because people were like, 'I love having this phone in my pocket. I love having this camera with me all the time.' And you can just... we have written the stories. We draw a straight line from that to like the Black Lives Matter movement.
Yeah. To these huge social changes around everyone should have a camera all the time. These big conversations about surveillance and surveillance. Those are all the costs of putting cameras everywhere and the way that we put them everywhere. Those are enormous costs. I think we're reckoning with those costs now in real ways. But it all happened because people wanted the technology. They love it. That's not what's happening here. Right. The costs are being imposed. 'We're going to take your job away' is not the fault of the consumer.
Right. Right. It might be the fault of Dario. It might be the fault of Sam Altman, but the only way the investment pays off is if you remake the economy with AI.
It's the only way that the mobile investment paid off.
These are the stakes they've drawn for themselves. And I just... I'm flabbergasted that they don't see that they haven't made a great consumer product. That's the thing that will change this. I actually... we had a couple weeks from now people hear it, but we just taped an episode of Decoder with the CEO of Cisco.
Cisco sells the stuff that goes in data centers. And I was asking about this and I was like, you know, like if you just said the data center had Netflix in it, people would be happy. Like, that's where the movies come from. And he started laughing. He's like, 'You think so?' And I was like, 'Oh, that... you don't... this is just flying over your head.' Like, you have to make some case that there's some benefit, right, to all of this investment in order for the investment to continue. You know who understands it is Satya Nadella. He was at Davos of all places and he said that the AI companies need to get, quote, 'social permission,' which is amazing for a company like Microsoft to say. We should run this clip.
I would say we will quickly lose even the social permission to actually take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens. If these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large.
Okay, I have two thoughts on this. Yeah. One, Davos, famously a place a bunch of billionaires fly on their private jets to talk about how to save the environment. Perfect. Two, this is right.
This is correct. I think it's slightly ironic that it's coming from Satya Nadella, someone who has spent the last few years flailing pretty aggressively to try to find the use case he's describing and it hasn't gone well. Bing is not the thing. Copilot so far is not the thing. Microsoft, I think, in less straightforward terms is doing a pretty similar kind of retrenchment that Fidji Simo and OpenAI are talking about, that they're like, what if we just approach AI as a business software? And that has been... you and I have both been on this podcast saying AI is business software, the business of AI is B2B SaaS software and has been for a long time. And there are like... we've been threatening to do an episode about the SaaS apocalypse for a while and I think we should because I think there are actually really interesting disruptive things that AI is going to do to business software. That is not how you get to where all of these companies want to go. And I think Nadella is right that the risks that they run by not making this appealing to consumers are also going to backfire in business, right? Because they are incurring such a reputational hit and a sort of reflexive problem with AI that people are developing that is going to make it harder to even build business tools that do AI things. Yeah, I mean there are as many studies as you can count about whether or not businesses are seeing efficiency improvements by adding AI and the answer is basically not yet or no.
Yeah, it's somewhere between no and like...
Yeah, it's like it hasn't happened yet. Maybe there's going to be a new set of companies that come up and they're built on the cost models of having a bunch of AI agents instead of a bunch of engineers and that means they can make the same product as the big company cheaper and that's just the disruption life cycle. I don't know, maybe that's going to happen. Has it happened yet? It certainly has not happened yet. And so you're just seeing, okay, we're asking for all of this energy. We're asking for all of this data center displacement in all these communities. The communities are basically saying no, like, make it worth it to us.
Yeah. To what end? What is in this for me?
And I don't mean to say that AI is like totally useless. I think it's still pretty brittle as we have discussed on the show many, many times. You can run into the walls of things AI cannot do, but we know now that at least when it comes to software development, it has tremendous value that is causing a bunch of consternation in that community. You just had Paul Ford on.
I think that conversation is brilliant. People should listen to it. Once you can develop software, you can kind of go into adjacent industries. That's a real thing. There's a lot of software running a lot of companies and you can widen out.
But that doesn't mean you can do everything and it doesn't mean you can eat the whole world.
And I just see this gap where everybody in that industry is like, why doesn't Wired like tech anymore? Or why does The Verge hate technology? And it's like, no, it's literally the citizens of America who are like, I don't like this, right? Like, the polling is clear and it's not because of the media. It's not because of doomerism. It's because you're asking for so much and you haven't delivered a great consumer product. You've delivered some very compelling enterprise products.
That's not enough. And I think the hope from a lot of these companies is that something like Claude Code will eventually be a consumer product. I mean, you see it now, right? They built Cowork out of Claude Code to make it a little more accessible. They built Dispatch out of Cowork, which is basically like you can run it from a messaging app. Like, they're trying to make this kind of creative tool accessible to more people. And it's going to work, but that is not a mainstream... that is not an Instagram-level use case, right? You and I always like to talk about the sort of foundational mobile experiences, right? And the two you always bring up, which I think are right, are Uber and Instagram that are like things you couldn't do on a phone that the technology on a phone enabled that changed the way we do life. That's the stakes and there is nothing remotely approaching that for normal people living their normal lives.
Yeah, you can have a lot of feelings about Uber. We did. We just had Dara on Decoder. Boy, do people have feelings about Uber. Yeah,
but the fact that you can be almost anywhere in the world, push a button, and have a Toyota Camry appear is just bananas.
That is just a remarkable thing that happened because of the mobile revolution.
That should be Uber's new tagline.
I've said that. I said that to Dara. I once said that to Travis Kalanick in our office in Midtown and he just started cracking up. He's like, I never thought about that.
Like, it's crazy, right? Like, you push a button and something happens in the real world and in Uber's case, you either... it's a Camry or a Highlander.
It's one or the other really. Or if you're unlucky, it's a Model 3 and they'll have the regen braking on and you'll just have a bad time. A lot of complaints in Uber world about Model 3s with regen braking. It's the same with DoorDash. It's whatever, like, you push a button, something happens in the real world. You order something from Amazon, an object comes to your house. That is the thing that the mobile revolution truly delivered in a way that had never occurred before. And then Instagram and social media. We actually wrote a piece about this. James PM, our first creative director, wrote a piece about this way at the beginning. James is an old film photographer. He used to shoot the windsurfing championships hanging off a helicopter on film.
And so when like digital showed up and phone showed up and all the photographers had their moment, he's like, I'm so happy about this. Like, I never want to be worried that my film is gone and I miss the shot again. It's digital. Like, he had this totally interesting, wonderful perspective. And his reaction to Instagram was it is so insanely powerful to put the distribution next to the camera,
right? You're going... the feedback loop here is it's the story. I've come back to...
We'll link that story too. I've come back to it over and over again. Just the insight there is so powerful. You can't do that without a phone. You can make an Instagram on a desktop computer, but the camera part doesn't exist. And so most people will never close the gap. Instagram brought those things right next to each other. I think TikTok brought those things right next to each other. The dominant language of TikTok is replication. You see a trend and you make it yourself.
Yeah, that is an unusual dynamic in like the history of culture, right? Most people are like, "You copied me. I'm going to sue you." Right? But like TikTok is just about widespread replication. These are huge changes that technology brings about. I think they're fascinating. I think it's pretty hard to make the argument that we don't like technology because this is what we talk about all the time on the show and our site is like, look at how cool this is. Like we're changing how we live.
And then AI is like it's in there and it's like, would you like a girlfriend? That's the best idea they have, right? And it's like most people are like, "No, that's pretty weird." And my friend who does have an AI girlfriend is getting weirder by the day. And I just like it's bananas to me that this industry can't see it.
Yeah, agreed. All right, we should move on from this, but I will say I am curious if you have used or have an inkling to what these use cases are. If you've seen something, if you're making something, if there is a thing that you're betting on as like the mainstream consumer use case, I desperately want to hear about it. And if it has to do with vibe coding, I don't want to hear about it anymore.
Or automating anything. I'm serious about this. The idea that most people can identify a loop in their lives that is worth automating.
I mean, we got 50 years of technology development to prove that that is not the case.
Productivity nerd, AI has been so fun because it is going to remap everyone's to-do list system. Most people don't have a to-do list system. So, it's like we need to go several levels down into what it is like to be a person in the world. But genuinely if you have a theory on what that is, I want to hear about it. 86611 is the hotline. firstoftheverse.com is the email. neilithever.com is where you can send all of your vibe coding ideas. We're going to take a break and then it's trifold time. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Allison Johnson is here. Hi, Allison.
Okay, we're here to talk about trifolds, and I want to, but I just had one of the strangest parent technology experiences I've ever had in my life. This is happening to me in real time, and I just need to talk this out with both of you who have young children. So, our 3-year-old is in preschool, and for the first time, we're using the Brightwheel app. Do you guys know what this is?
I assume it checks them in and out, right?
Yeah. I assume every school has apps like this, but like we check them in and out with a QR code. They send us pictures throughout the day. They send us like information about what they're doing, all this stuff.
And a few minutes ago, I got three separate notifications. I don't know if you can see this here, that just say incident and have a band-aid emoji.
I have no other information. Presumably, he's alive. I don't know what to do with this. This is like I either desperately need to know about this and need to leave this podcast right now or this is fine and this is information I'm going to wish I never had.
Do you think there's like a second set of notifications like after incident?
Like it's just like come now.
Yeah. Like it's pretty bad, you guys.
That's a phone call when the phone starts ringing.
Yeah. So all of this is to say this was luckily this was like 20 minutes ago so presumably everyone has recovered but I may suddenly leave this podcast. Modern parenting is very strange. This is like I have both. I'm glad to have all this.
Is there incident with a band-aid and then like incident with a poop emoji? Do you know what I'm saying?
I don't know. This is my first... Well, so there is potty colon P and there's potty colon BM. So I know the ones and twos.
But like this, it's a real like how much information are we as people supposed to have? Do you know what I mean?
This is the dilemma I feel with brain.
We get very little of that information and it's honestly for the best. I'm like, well, he was alive at the end of the day.
I think that might be the correct answer. Like call me if I need to get them to the hospital and otherwise I'll see him at the end of the day. It'll be... See now I'm in a very different place with the older one. So you know Max is like almost eight and she's in second grade. So now it's just she comes home from school. I'm like what happened to him? She's like, "You'll never know. No, no information will be provided to you." And so I'm kind of like looking, I'm like waiting for Jack to like get some Brightwheel in his life.
You can know the P's and the BM's. It's going to be...
With Max, you know, when we lived in the woods in the pandemic, like my office was in the basement. I did the show from the basement and I was often down there working and Becky would be upstairs and you couldn't actually yell from the basement all the way upstairs. And so we used the walkie-talkie on our Apple Watch all the time. And it was basically just a poop notification sort of like a very expensive like I need you. She pooped again. And now this house you can just yell from his bedroom to the kitchen. Like it's trivial. And I feel bad because we're not walkie-talking about what you've called DMs anymore.
Uh-huh. Yeah. It's important parental communication to just yell it's happening to each other times a day.
I need new pants. It's a whole thing. Um, all right, Allison, you have what has become a precious object just in the last few days. This is now rare phone contraband, which is you have a Samsung Galaxy Z trifold in your possession.
Tell us what happened with the trifold this week.
I mean, you have a thing that appears to be Samsung Galaxy.
You have been trying to get this phone for months.
Yes. We have been on a whole journey trying to get one. I wrote about all in very great detail on the site, but the basics are like Samsung PR, you know, typically will send us a review unit of a new phone. They did not provide us one this time around. There are reasons for that.
Yes, exactly. And I'm realizing how much of a tell. So, we tried to get a hold of this trifold. We're like, we got to buy one. It went in and out of stock like so fast. Couldn't get one. We turned to eBay. You know, found someone selling a trifold for a small fortune and ordered it. And in the meantime, I had to fly all over the world to go see phones. And so none of us really clocked that it hadn't shipped when it was supposed to. So this was like red flag number one. We go back and forth with the seller. The thing finally shows up at my door and I open up this FedEx package. It is a box with like two seals on it that say like do not accept if this has been tampered with. And it's like very clearly been tampered with. So I was like, this is very strange. Not usually how I receive a new phone. Opened it up, took the film off of the inner screen, and there were crumbs and little hairs on like... Yeah. This was not the first time the phone had been like, you know, exposed to air.
It was gross. I turn the phone on, it's already set up, which was also a very large red flag. Also not how phones are typically shipped to a customer.
All this to say, this was a very weird experience. I was sketched out. The phone immediately asked for a whole bunch of permissions and I was like, "Deny, factory reset." And then I turned it off and I like didn't want to touch it for a little bit. So, that was acquiring the trifold. In the meantime, Samsung announced they're not going to make it anymore.
Yeah, they just up and canceled it. Like, I've been on this journey to get this stupid phone and all of a sudden I'm like, well, this is the end of our relationship. I thought we were at the beginning. We were going to have these good times together. So, here I have this phone and just the funniest part is that when I powered it back on after resetting it and coming to my senses, it wanted a SIM card to set it up. Also strange to me. I've never had a phone insist on a SIM card. And I was like, well, I don't have one lying around. I don't really trust it. And then the light bulb went off and I was like, I have this Trump Mobile SIM that is just languishing in like a Samsung S25.
It's kind of perfect actually.
This is the realest Trump Mobile has ever been, right?
Yeah. It got this phone to work. I set it up. It still asked for a lot of weird permissions, but I think these are just the... The thing is we have the serial number is a phone sold in China and the eBay seller claimed it was a Taiwan model which is a different serial number. This is where the weirdness is coming in I think. So this is why I'm getting some of these apps that are loaded on the phone are just in One UI in China which is I've never seen them. I don't think it's like a malware infested, you know, ticking time bomb of a phone, but it is running on Trump Mobile. And that's like the weirdest combination of phone and network.
A weird Chinese phone with... It does have the Play Store if it's Chinese.
So, a weird Chinese trifold with no Google Play Store, Play Services because they're not allowed in China running on Trump Mobile is an unholy combination. Like you should light a candle or something. It's actually kind of perfect. I feel like I have no notes on that. I actually feel like the Trump administration would be like, "Great job, Allison."
Or they would arrest you. Like, I don't know if we should run this podcast.
I don't know which government official is going to show up at my door and arrest me. It could be any number.
From any number of countries.
It's a lot of possibilities.
So, how far have you gotten with this phone? Is it actually up and running for you now?
It functions. It won't get on the internet on the Trump Mobile network for some reason. It'll receive a spam phone call. The phone started... I was in the other room yesterday and the phone started ringing and it was honestly like a horror movie. I was like, "Oh, sorry."
The fact that Trump Mobile says we'll provide you data but we'll provide you spam calls is also perfect.
