The Cybertruck lives, and so does OpenAI

Support for this episode comes from Sonos. Experience fully immersive sound with a new ARA 300 Smart Speaker from Sonos. It's a spatial audio speaker that doesn't just surround you with sound. It puts you inside your music. Plus, you can pair two ARA 300s with a Sonos Arc or Beam sound bar for the ultimate in home theater experience. The ARA 300 is easy to set up and even easier to use with the Sonos app, your voice, and

Apple Airplay 2. Unlock the most innovative spatial listening experience with the ARA 300. Visit sonos.com to learn more and find thoughtful gifts for everyone on your list. Lauren. Mike. So we host a podcast for Wired called GadgetLab. We do. We do. Yes, that is correct. Tell the good people some more about it. Well, I think the good people should definitely tune in every week because they get to hear me roasting you. I know. All right. No, really what GadgetLab is is Mike and I tackling

the biggest questions in the world of technology. We cover the big news of the week in Techland, but we also offer our expert analyses and opinions on all things consumer tech. We release a new episode of GadgetLab every week and you can listen and follow us wherever you pod. Hello and welcome to Verchast. America's number one source of Cybertruck, Wiper news.

That's all thanks to readers like you. That's actually true now, I think. I think that was that we spoke into existence that we are the world's number one source of Cybertruck Wiper news. Yeah. People believe us. The thing is we still don't know the answer to this question. Not at all. We'll get into it though. I'm your friend, Neela. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex trans is here. I'm your friend who wishes they'd used a

crossbow, like checked it with a crossbow. I want to see how does it withstand crossbow fire, the Cybertruck. Well, we know the answer now. Not crossbows. Just all the other. Oh, I see. Just we know a regular bone area. Yeah. I want like crossbows, catapults. Alex, one of the reasons that I know that I like you and we're friends is that no part of me would be surprised if that was a reveal that you're like sick with a crossbow.

Like nothing. I wouldn't blink if you just like pulled a crossbow out from underneath the table and were like just like this. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's what I do on my off time. Yeah. Practice with my crossbow. Axe throwing crossbows. I am actually really good with it. Axe throwing. Like the ax throwing. Knife throwing terrible. Axe throwing. It's like, I got it.

All right. Well, let's explain why we're talking about this. There's quite a lot of news this week, but we are coming to you directly after the Tesla Cybertruck launch event, which was very odd. That itself followed Elon Musk at the deal book conference yesterday, which was even weirder. So we are literally live reacting to you post-cybertruck reveal in which we learned nothing. Yeah. I want to be very clear. It was a 25 minute event.

It started 25 minutes late after playing an enormous amount of just ominous ambient music. That was strange. Elon comes out, they go through the Cybertruck specs. Here's how much it can pull. It can pull more than a Ford F-150 Lightning and a Rivian and an F-350 diesel. Great. The Thru bass ball had it. Poorly. The first time friends missed. Yes. And then the second time he was just like, it was very weak. Yeah. But the windows didn't shatter this time. They're happy about it.

Well, yeah. If you're throwing at that, like he threw like eye throwable. I'm terrible at throwing a ball. And he was just like, I sincerely believe that if you threw a baseball at that speed, at my cars window, it would not break. That's kind of what I said. I was like, I've seen Honda civics withstand more impact than this. Yeah. And it was just so funny because it was clearly that moment was sort of set up to be like a big applause moment because it was, I think,

four years ago, which is nuts that this was four years ago. The first time this happened. Franz got up there and threw a ball at a supposedly baseball proof window. No. It just was something. We clear. He threw a metal ball at a supposedly bullet proof window. Oh, okay. That's a good distinction. Yeah. And it shatter. And then he did it again and the other window shatter. Yeah. The incredible moment in product history.

Oh, it was fantastic. It was one of the great like live demos or a disaster moments. I really enjoyed it. But he sets this up as the sort of redemptive moment four years later and like kudos to them for, you know, laughing about this. But then didn't rerun the test. Yeah. He had a lava baseball at the window and he missed the first time. He hit like the underneath of the window. And then, yeah, like Alex is saying sort of gently lobbed it. You can really tell this man did not want to do

this thing. No. And it was the funniest part was they got to the end and he didn't get any of the like applause breaks or laughs or anything he was hoping for. And he was just like, it's good. In the bounce on the ground at one point, very, very like higher than I would expect a baseball to bounce. So I'm I'm know a ball. Well, we are now 10 owners of a cyber truck. We have been told. Yeah. They were not allowed to drive their own cyber trucks away. So the event happens when we

can talk about all the specs and whatever. And we've got some pricing now for the cyber truck, which is interesting. But the event ends with Elon one by one shaking a person's hand and putting them in a cyber truck in the passenger seat and having them driven away. Did you guys recognize anybody? I saw Alexis Ohanian was the one person I recognized the the Reddit co-founder and husband of steering lambs. I'm sure there were other people in this world that

I should have known. Did you guys see any faces you recognize other than? No, I didn't catch Alexis. He took a cyber truck. Yeah, Alexis with like big like Wolverine mutton chops got into a cyber truck. It was a cool look. Do you think they were real? Or do you think he was like in disguise? Sneaky Alexis hitting his cyber truck. Yeah. What I caught was that after the second one, Elon was visibly annoyed that he had to keep shaking people's hands. People wanted hugs.

And he said on the camera, well, it's a delivery event because I think he knew that people were watching a live stream of just 10 people getting their hand shook and driven away. And he said it like three more times. He's like, well, this is what's going to keep happening. And then he tried to end it early. After nine, I think he was like, well, we're done and someone was like, there's one and he had to shake one more hand. And these people are getting rushed off stage. I think only one

family got like the picture. Yeah. Whatever. It doesn't matter. It was an odd event. But we did you notice that nobody could figure out how to get into the car? This was my favorite part of the whole thing. That was great. He kept having to tell people. I think almost every single person who got into the car had trouble figuring out how to open the passenger's side door to get in. At first, he was saying things like, oh, you just press the end and then they would sort of figure it

out. And then by the end, he just sort of reflexively was going, just press the button on the top as they're walking up to the thing and they would press it and get in. And it's just, this just makes me so happy. The Tesla has lots of interesting ideas about cars and just exclusively bad ideas about how to get into them. And it just makes me happy that this cyber truck continues that a pace. Yeah. But it was great. It was great. And hopefully we'll see these actually around.

What we did not learn was whether the Wiper Blade is one blade or two in a line. Shameful. I've received so many photos now. And I think I've been clear about my theory. Yeah. You've assigned someone to go even. We sent someone to the Tesla Sherner Mandy Hawkins went with our photographer Emilia Crayles. I told Andy that I would pay his bail if he got arrested for lifting the Wiper up and he chickened out. Fine. But I've now people

have just like reinterpreted what they think I mean. By is it two wipers? One person wrote me an email that said, I prefer the two Wiper design on a regular car. I was like, that's not. Most people do. So does the free market. Like I don't know. We put let's just take this back. What is your current belief about the cyber truck Wiper? Because like you said, we've gotten, I would say like the 10 best pictures we've ever gotten

of the cyber truck Wiper in the last eight days. Most of them thanks to Verge Cast listeners. So thank you to everyone who sent those in. What is your current belief about the cyber truck Wiper? I think it might be one Wiper. I think it might be one extremely weird custom Wiper blade. I don't know for sure. I've now seen reporting of other people who have seen the truck in a in YouTube videos like Tesla fans, confidently saying it's two wipers in a line.

And I've asked, do you know or do you do you know? And got no response. So I don't know. But now that someone owns, I'm sure Alexis has like an NDA about this truck. But I'm definitely going to write him a note. Be like, can you pick up this Wiper? Because no one knows. No one knows. And it is the most enduring mystery about this truck. Like did Tesla make a very fast triangle? They did. Is it so fast that it can out accelerate a Porsche 9-11

while towing a Porsche 9-11? Yes. That's very cool. Is it bulletproof? Who knows? Sort of the bottom is the bot. We saw someone firing a Tommy gun into the side of it during this event. So if you're a 1920s mobster, like you're good to go. Can it withstand Joe Rogan firing a metal-tipped armor piercing arrow at the side? Sure can. We know that answer. How do the wipers work in the car? Remains a deep and defining mystery about this vehicle. We've seen photos like overhead

photos of extremely muddy and dirty Teslas. Just a huge spot. There's a huge dirty spot. I've seen videos of extremely muddy Teslas-parked hotels where it is obvious the passenger could not see very well and they've reached their hand over the side and wiped off the mud manually. There is an argument in our comments over whether or not the Ford F-150 actually wipes proportionally less of the windshield than the Cybertruck and I had to be like, look, here's one thing I know for

sure. Maybe the Cybertruck proportionally, mathematically, covers more of the windshield than the F-150. No passenger in my F-150 has ever reached over the side and wiped off some of the windshield. It is just such a bonkers design problem that they've created for themselves and now it's here. So eventually the mystery will expire. Right? Eventually this will all be over and we'll know it's one-liper or two. I just think it's amazing that for weeks now we've propelled a number of tech

and car enthusiasts into not knowing because no one knows. I'm very excited. I'm really excited. We're going to find out. One thing we do know is we do know some pricing. So the base model which is available in 2025. We're at the launch event. In 2023. The base model in 2025 is $60,990. That's significantly more than we thought. It was supposed to be 49. So it's crept up about $10,000. But inflation has like... Yeah, thanks, Biden.

Yeah, thanks, Biden. You know he did it just so he could say inflation. Biden made inflation happen. We'll get to that. That's going to have a 250 mile range 6.5 seconds or 60. The all-wheel drive model should deliver next year. It says delivery in 2024. By the way, big difference between available in 2025 and delivery in 2024. I would tell you based on what we know of the model 3 and the cheap model 3 just sort of never

arriving. Go for the delivery in 2024 model. This base model rear-wheel drive. Don't buy it. Just buy any other, just be like whatever. I'll buy another truck. And if that thing ever comes out. You go, you just keep leasing trucks until the cyber truck actually comes out and you can buy it. Yeah. This one is here to anchor the price for it. Yeah. One of your three year periods, it'll finally be available. There was a meeting at Tesla where they were deciding what copy to put in the website.

And they put delivery in 2024 for the all-wheel drive and for the cyber beast. And then someone was like, what do we say about the base model? And they all looked at each other and brainstormed words. Possible in 2025. Apparently in 2025. And they went with available. Seemingly in 2020. So then the all-wheel drive, which I think is the true base model, that's $80,000, $79,990, delivery in 2024, 340 miles of range, 4.1 seconds,

zero to 60. You'll note they don't list the top speed on the elusive rear-wheel-based model. But this one has 112 mile an hour top speed, 600 horsepower, 7400 pound-feet of torque, and 11,000 pounds of torque capacity, just big, silly truck numbers. Yeah. And then the cyber beast. Yeah. The beast. That was my brother's high school nickname. He got it as a tattoo. He no longer has that tattoo. Wow. We call them the beast. Well, now we're going to call them the cyber beast.

I'm not doing that. This is $100,000, $99,990, slightly lower range, 320 miles, much faster to 0.6 seconds, 130 mile an hour top speed, 845 horsepower, 10,000 pounds of torque. I'm guessing it's hard to know. I'm guessing that this is the triple motor one. Okay. I'm guessing. I don't know. There are no specs. It doesn't quite tell you. Do you think it's that one of those mufflers? The speakers in the mufflers? Well, Tesla's make sounds. They can do it. You can make like the...

Yeah, but the beast has a special addition one. It's growling. Yeah. The whole time. If I know anything about Tesla, they will make it make growling sounds when it runs. So this is all of the new information that we have. Is this much specs and this much pricing? Yeah. And then Elon being like, it's good at truck stuff, which they really insisted upon. Right. Right. It's good at work stuff. It's good at towing.

At one point, he was like, as you all know, tractor pull is the most important metric for a truck. Is it? That's exactly how I was like, is it? Is that? Is it? And they demonstrated that a Tesla can pull a sled loaded down with weight much farther than other trucks. How was the braking? Like, that's what I care about at a tractor pull. I don't do those. But if I'm pulling a trailer, I do care about like... If you're pulling an actual trailer. Yeah. You want good brakes.

Yeah. You want it to like not have it slam into you and stuff. Well, if I know anything about Tesla's, we're all going to learn something about the Cybertruck's brakes. Regular Tesla's because they use regenerative braking so much to recapture energy. They often have weird brake issues. That's just I think. I have two questions about this Cybertruck being for truck stuff thing that I've been thinking about since they started talking about this.

And the first is like, why frame it that way if you're Tesla? On the one hand, there are a lot of people who do not do truck stuff with their trucks, who buy trucks anyway. On the other hand, competing for the truck stuff market is probably more complicated than just being like, look, we built this cool new thing with a big truck bed. It's something completely different. It will do like light truck stuff, but not full truck stuff.

But fundamentally, like he kept saying over and over there, their tagline is the future should look like the future, which is very funny and doesn't mean anything. But he said something to the effect of like, this is going to change the look of the road. Like, why not call this a different thing as opposed to talking to a bunch of people who probably don't want a car that looks like this, don't want an electric car right now. And just aren't really the Tesla target market at all.

I just don't get that part of this. Yeah. It's kind of like an El Camino. Like, that's like where it's existing in the truck ecosystem, right? Is that too mean? It's, that's too mean. I mean, it's a truck. It's as big as an F-150. An El Camino is very different. I think they should bring back the El Camino. If you're listening to this, an EV El Camino, I think we welcome on America's roads. Talk about changing the look of the roads. This I think is different.

I think if you already make the best selling car in the country, the Model Y, to move the needle, you've got to make something else that's really popular. Yeah. And the Ford F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America for the last 400 years. The first job that Chat GBT is going to take is the writing the press release that says the Ford F-150 is once again America's best selling vehicle. Like, I've gotten that press release every year that I've been alive.

And that's, that's great for Ford. But it is the biggest car market in the country. It's the most ferocious. It is where the prices have suddenly gone up. If you want to sell a $100,000 car, you're selling a truck. That's just the way it's going. You're selling a giant SUV or a pickup truck. Most of the people buying those trucks, like just regular consumers, are they actually buying it to be a truck or are they buying it to be a truck? You are one from Texas, Alex. Do you tell me?

Like, I tend to feel it's the other, I know a lot of people who buy trucks because they need them to haul my friend called me their day and was like, I'm hauling a mayor. I'm hauling a bear? Mayor. Mayor. But Siri thought it was mayor. Is Eric Adams in your car? What's happening? You need an F-350 to haul Eric Adams. Yeah. He comes with a lot of baggage. But yeah, I feel like the majority of people I see who just want to truck, want to truck just because it's cool. It's fun.

It's neat to drive and sometimes you're like, well, I got to move a bunch of crap. And now I can. I mean, I don't pick up truck for these reasons. That's why my mom has one. Yeah, the most people need to do is they have a pile of dirt in their backyard that they would like to not be in their backyard anymore. And that's like the most truck stuff. I think a lot of truck owners get into. Yeah. No, in the pandemic, we moved to the country and I had to take my own trash for them once a week.

And I convinced myself that owning a pickup truck was the only solution to this problem. I mean, and now I don't live in the country. Then I still want to pick up truck. And I haven't figured out why. But I know that we're not getting rid of it. You need to do some sod work or something. No, we don't have, we don't, we live in a very urban. But this is trying to. It's for sure refinishing. Totally incompatible with the area I live in now. And yet we still have it.

That said, look, a lot of people like pickup trucks and you can have a lot of feelings about that. Are they appropriate cars for most places? No. Depends. Right. Do cars need to be this big? At one point in the Cybertruck event, Elon said, if you get into a fight with another car, you will win. And he showed a car crashing into it. Is it that bad? In our transportation report, Andy Hawkins, who has been on a tear pointing out that cars are too

big. They're too dangerous. They're dangerous to other pedestrians, especially when they start going this fast. They're incredibly dangerous to other cars. That's not a good thing. Yeah. Like we used to have a Thunderbird, 66th Thunderbird when I was a kid and stuff. And it was really cool. And if you got it in accident, you were totally fine. And now, but like the knowledge was if you got an accident with a modern car,

you would annihilate it. And that's actually horrible. And then you'd also get battered around inside the car. And just ping pong. And I'm like, there was not a lot of safety discussion at this event. And that was a little concerning for me, given that they have a giant stainless steel box they're putting on the road. Yeah. Like what are crumple zones like on this thing? Because everybody else is like crumple zones. They should do that. And this guy's like, you know what? Small arms fire.

In a Cybertruck, you crumple everything. They did. They did show some crash testing. We will see who knows, right? Yeah. A million who knows questions. But back to David's point, which is why market this thing is a truck. People love it. It's because it's the last market, the last big section of the market to go get. I think they could have picked one or two others, right? Luxury SUVs that are not the Model X, which is a little long in the tooth. That's a big market that's growing

who knows if you can build an EV in that form factor. But this, I think they wanted to build this because it is the statement piece. It is the big bold design. They're not counting on it winning, which I think they've now set on some earnings calls. Like the Model Y is the volume Tesla. It's going to keep doing what it's doing, even as probably they're slashing prices left and right. This is the one that's going to be the halo car. There's a way to look at this, that it's like

the successor to the roadster in a pretty real way. That this is like the car hardly anybody has, but reliably turns heads when you see it on the street. In that sense, I sort of buy it. But I just keep going back to this idea of like, if you are a person who uses the hell out of your truck, what on earth would compel you to buy a cyber truck at this moment in time? I just don't know that they're good answers. This is where we have to talk about Elon and Teal book. We should not

dwell on it. Yeah. No, we should. You're right. And David, like, does not want to talk about this. I don't. I super don't. But we should. But you can't actually right now divorce Tesla, the car company from Elon must the man, which is a real problem. So in some academic argument about market share and products, you're like, why would you make this product? Why would you market this way? And you can like come to an answer. And part of the answer right now is why would you buy a car

from Elon Musk? Like, there's some enormous segment of the population that is just over his antics, over his weird racist and anti-Semitic tweets. There's just over him. Right? And what we saw. But to be fair, there's also a chunk of people on the opposite, the exact opposite in that spectrum who will follow him to the ends of the earth and buy anything he tells them to buy. Yeah. Like, he could have a podcast selling them supplements and they would buy the supplements.

I think that group is substantially smaller than it was 24 months ago. I also don't think they have $100,000 to spend on a side of the truck. That would be very clear, right? Because the people you need to spend the money are often very educated. And this is like a real problem for Elon. He lives in a Twitter bubble and he thinks the Twitter bubble is real. And he thinks the

thing that gets him engaged when on Twitter will get him engaged in a real life. And then he goes to conferences like we saw him this week, the deal with conference with Andrew Usworkin and he delivers what are like bangers on Twitter. It's dead silence. It was just like Twitter come to life. And then the silence afterwards was so like every time he'd do a punchline and he'd ape to the camera and be like, yeah, and it's just like crickets. Yeah. Our transportation

reporter Umar pointed out that he would often deliver the punchlines twice. And the second time he got the pity laugh, which is a if you go watch it again. It's a very real dynamic. I mean, that joke that Twitter that thing that Twitter isn't real life. His appearance at dealbook was just, oh, Twitter is not real life. Like fully encapsulated in that event. And so we should talk

about what he said. There's a few things that are just worth pulling apart. The first and most important is that advertisers are leaving Twitter after yet more of musk's antics and weird anti-semitism and media matters had a report about ad showing up next to bad content. The advertisers started leaving because that's what advertisers do whenever there are brand safety concerns and any platforms. I would just offer you the example of something called the ad apocalypse on YouTube,

which was exactly this thing. And Susan Wajiski who was CEO of YouTube at time did not tell a bunch of advertisers to go fuck themselves. They like actively tried to fix it. Elon's response was to look at the dealbook audience and say if you think you can blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. And he was like, Bob, if you're here, meaning Bob Eiger, go fuck yourself. I don't know. Like again, it's not, I don't sell the ads for us. It's not my side of the house.

I'm fairly confident at the people who sold their ads to the conference. They're clients, go fuck themselves. Like I don't think the advertisers are coming back. And then he follows up with this advertising boycott will kill the company and the world will know it. We will document it. And I think Andrew followed up by asking, wasn't that a bad thing? And he's like, Earth will know. Yeah. He was. He really thinks that everyone is going to come out and save X.

He was very, that was one thing he was very clear on. He constantly corrected Andrew on calling it X versus Twitter. And he really thinks that like the uproar will save X. And it's like, no, but the uproar caused this to happen. Everybody's leaving because there was an uproar because everybody's mad at you. Yeah. I mean, we have talked about on the show. There was a time when Twitter

was a particular kind of monopoly. And no matter what the company did and that I will issue our disclaimer again, criticism of Elon Musk, a CEO of Twitter is no way praise for the previous administration of Twitter who did a horrible job running this company. But they had a kind of monopoly where no matter how badly they screwed up, everyone kept coming back to Twitter. And I'm pretty sure Elon thought that he was buying that monopoly. Yes. Because if I was addicted to cigarettes,

I'm not saying I ever was. And I bought a cigarette company. I'd be like, this rules. Everyone's addicted to my product just as much as I am. And then everyone was like, now you are an asshole and we vape now. And that is more or less what has happened to Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, it's wild how even a year ago that seemed like a reasonable bet. Right? I think there was a time when it looked like for all of the chaos and for all of the bad stuff, everybody was just

going to kind of hold their nose and keep using Twitter. Because to some extent, there was nowhere to go and to potentially larger extent, the chaos and the fun are so close to each other on Twitter that you can ramp up one and kind of accidentally ramp up the like the mess is the point. And I think like 12 months ago, I'm sure on this show, we were having this same debate. And to me at this point, I think it feels like a foregone conclusion that at some point or another X is going to go away

in a pretty real way. I don't know if the company is going to die just because he has so much money. He could float the thing forever if he felt like it. He's got investors. He has to pay off. Like there's a lot going on there. Yeah, but I also get the increasing sense that he is trying to set it up in such a way that if X goes away, goes out of business to Claire's bankruptcy, whatever it turns out to be, he wants to be a martyr and he wants to have that will be his like full proof positive

that the world is against him and has gone woke and everything is a disaster. And now he kind of wins coming and going, right? It's either like a business victory or a moral victory or it's kind of a moral victory on either side, no matter what happens. He's trying to set up this thing that I find very strange. I mean, it's it's not that strange because it's a it's a pretty common playbook now. Like this was the exact same playbook Trump has and continues to have. And I think it's just a

really it's difficult to counter. And I think that's why it's really like useful and deeply irritating. Let me make the distinction for you. A comparison and a distinction. You're right. It's the same playbook. Yeah. I the very different dude. The election was lost. Everyone has corrupt. It was stolen from me. The bad forces came and took this away from me. That's voting with your votes. Yep.

Very few people get to make that argument when it's voting with your dollars. That's true. And so Elon is not making the argument that these woke corporations are no longer buying advertising to to spite him. And it is very hard to tell anyone particularly Americans that they have an obligation to spend money. It is just not a thing you can do in this country. Culturally, just not a thing you can do to say you have to spend money advertising dollars on this platform because it's important

that this thing exists. And most people are like, what? You can't tell me how to spend my money. That was like the immediate reaction on social media on in our own like comments and stuff. Everybody's just like, no, it's my money. Oh, yeah. No, it's it's very like we talk a lot about free speech on the ship. And like when it's anything but money, like everyone immediately sees it the gray areas, there's like a new one. When it's like, you have to spend money. People like, no, I don't.

No, no, sir. No, thank you. Yeah. Go fuck yourself. And it's like you just you just watching him run into this, right? Like he had this argument about Tesla's at the deal with conference as well, where he was like, I think Andrew asked him, are you worried that your tweets or antics are going to hurt the company? He said, no, we make the best car. If you want the best car, you have to buy

a Tesla, which is debatable, but it is a market driven argument, right? We're putting our product in the market and if people are going to look at an evaluation and maybe they'll value it, I mean, but really they're going to want the best car and they're going to pick my car. We make the best sound car. Okay. You're competing in the market. You you're weighing all the variables with Twitter. It's like if you don't advertise here, you're destroying America. And it's like,

that's just not, it's not how that works. That's just a weird argument, man. And to say like my product is objectively worse or my product is not what the market demands for me or what the market says it wants and not buying it anyways, the problem. I don't know, man. Like it's just odd. And like what's going to happen right next to it is threads is going to light up advertising. We're going to go into a holiday season where TikTok and Amazon and Google and meta are all in

Q4. They all have salespeople with real relationships. They all have content moderation teams. And they're going to say every dollar you were spending on Twitter, you should spend that dollar here and we'll treat you nicely. Tell you to fuck off. Yeah. And like, well, we'll send you some swag. Whatever salespeople, I don't know. It's just t-shirts from company to company flooding around. And poor Linda Yaccarina, like her justice to run this playbook. And she can't

because her boss has just told all these people to to f off. I that will kill the company. And this attempt to run the martyr playbook, it will fail because you just cannot be a martyr because people didn't buy your shit. You can't be a musician and be like, people didn't buy my album. The world is corrupt. No, I mean, a lot of you disagree with that. Well, sure, but it never hits. It never hits. It never hurts. It never hurts. Like this is going to sound like I'm joking,

but I'm not. It's because no one else is trying hard enough. Like the thing Elon Musk is doing is is making it his life's mission to tell everyone how X is the last bastion of free speech. Anything against X is against free speech. Like, Linda Yaccarina said, like, was it ex-standing at a unique and amazing intersection of free speech in Main Street, which like what on

Earth does that mean? Yeah. But they're no idea what that means. Pure nonsense. But we're now in this position where like he, I, I, I, can I just point out speech notably free on Main Street? You can find the Main Street in your town and stand on that corner and do whatever you want. Like, that's the whole point. That's the whole idea. Yeah. Well, you can yell, cops arrest me and the cops will be like, no, we don't have any clothes. You're wearing a shirt.

I'll be like, one nipples fine. But he's going to be able to do this whole thing and get to the end of this process and say by, by killing X, you have killed free speech in America. And there, it's a ridiculous argument, but he has said it so many times that at this point, some people are going to believe him. And it's just going to be ridiculous. Like, like Donald Trump says it about truth social that it is, and nobody believes it. Like part of it is, is Elon took this thing

that was so much bigger and destroyed it so much faster than in a funny way. It's going to make his argument more credible as he does this. Like he, he's going to be able to track those two things against each other in a way that is absolutely unrelated to the truth of the world. But it's, it's going to work for him for some people. You've also got Twitter brain saying that. Like, I think like maybe, maybe people on Twitter, like his fans on Twitter will probably believe that.

I don't think anybody else out in the general world is going to be like, man, can you believe what happened? He was right. There's something to it. Yeah. Like some stuff, he says, sure. I don't think you can make the Donald Trump comparison. You made a few minutes ago and then make that argument. I mean, they both, they both have very passionate groups of followers and those, those passionate followers are going to follow them regardless of what they say. And, and they're both really,

really good at that. And then they use that, that, that very vocal, small group of followers as, as, as, as cudgles, right? Like to, as, in as barriers to, to all other discourse and all other like actual reality. That's what he's really good at. That's, that's what Trump's really good at. And it's interesting to watch it first play out in politics and now in, in tech. Yeah. And so kind of a bummer, but it's also interesting. It is definitely a bummer. I think the world might be

better off that Twitter is on the decline as we go into an election here. Just putting that out there. I'm not saying that the end is justified. The means, I think the means have been very destructive. Lots of people have lost their jobs like all that's been bad. Racism and anti-Semitism, skyrocketing on platform. The, in no way am I saying that the means have been appropriated or effective. I just think this argument that he represents free speech while he's suing media matters for

criticizing him. Like this is the stuff that just begins to fall on deaf ears. Yeah. Like over and over and over again. And I think that when we talk about Tesla, like he has to sell more cars. In his antics with Twitter are actively making people not want to give him money. Whether that's advertisers, whether it's car customers, whatever it is. The last monopoly he has is actually SpaceX. Yeah. And it's a really good one. It's a really good one. Like there's no, the United

Launch Alliance is nowhere close to shipping a 4F150 lightning. Like, you know, where there's like any other choice. There's no pole star in the rocket business. Yeah. I don't know. Bezos is out here kind of doing stuff. Blue origin is like lingering. Bezos can't put a payload in the space. He can put like four rich people into space. But like subspace. It's not even like a full space. He's like my girlfriend's in the sky. Like that's what he can do.

Like maybe he'll get there. It's a long way away before space. He says real competition. And that's like you can think about that any way you want. But Tesla has real competition and Twitter has real competition. And in both cases, he's reacting very differently. And I just think as we go into an election year, as things get more heated on social media, his decisions about what he amplifies. What he moderates all this stuff. And whether not the platform is a safe place for advertisers,

because advertisers want brand safety, I think you're right. I think there's not a world in which a year from now, we are talking about a Twitter, the company that exists in the form that even this diminished company exists right now. Yeah. One more thing I'll say. All right, we've officially talked too much about this. So do this quickly. It's just copy. It's just copy. I promise you. It's just me talking to a car. So Sorkin asked about AI. Go watch a

slip. Add a quick posted a tech to it right up of this clip. It is amazing. Sorkin's like AI. It's a lot of training data. You have a lot of training data. Like these copyright lawsuits might just end it all. And Musk looks at Andrew and says, by the time these lawsuits come to a conclusion, we'll have a digital God. And you should ask him. Like, like, I know Andrew, you know, like he's a re-rational guy. And he's just like, what? What are you talking about? He's like, by the time

these lawsuits get started, we'll have a digital God and it won't matter. And that was the end. Like, there's nothing more you can do with that statement. Like he's like, AI will have become a God. And so copyright lawsuits. Who cares? And it's like, dude, those lawsuits are going to take like two or three years. Digital God's right around the corner. He's as sending as we speak. It's okay. Nilae. Digital God. Base model cyber truck. Which comes first? That's tough. That's tough.

I got to go digital God on this one. I mean, honestly, I would agree. And I think if you're working at one of these generative AI companies, you're hoping it's digital God too, because he's got copyright lawsuits or an existential threat. And the cyber truck, you know, it's just a truck. Get him a sending. Get going. Everyone in open eyes, like, furiously ordering a base model cyber truck. All right, we David's right. We've talked enough about Elon. We got to take a break. We'll

get back. Talk about some other drama. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Wix. Web agencies, you're going to like this one. Let me tell you about Wix Studio, the platform that gives agencies total creative freedom to deliver complex client sites while still smashing deadlines. How? First, let's talk about the advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you can build unique layouts with a revolutionary grid experience

and watch as elements scale proportionally by default. No code animations at Sparks are delight while custom CSS gives total design control, but it doesn't stop there. Bring ambitious client projects to life in any industry with a fully integrated suite of business solutions from e-commerce to events, bookings, and more and extend the capabilities even further with hundreds of APIs and integrations. And you know what else? The workflows. They just make sense.

There's the built-in AI tools, the centralized workspace, the on canvas collaborating, the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover, and that's not all. Find out more at Wix.com slash studio. Support for this episode comes from Sonos. Being the rest of the VergeCast team are all audio professionals, and at the Verge we have an office full of Sonos

products. Personally, I used the Sonos era 300 in particular, Alive. It's an all-in-one plugin smart speaker designed for immersive sound and spatial audio listening out loud. It's breakthrough acoustic design projects sound from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, allowing listeners to feel like the music and sound is all around them. No matter where you are in the room or what you play, the listening experience is nothing short of extraordinary.

For a full immersive home theater experience, you could take two era 300s and use them as your Dolby Atmos surround speakers when paired with an R-core beam. And my favorite feature, it actually has a 3.5mm jack, so I can plug in literally anything to this device. You can also connect the era 300 to a turntable, CD player, or other audio device using the USB-C port. Also, no speakers connect wirelessly over Wi-Fi, so you can group speakers in different rooms

and experience the joy of multi-room listening. Visit sonos.com to learn more about era 300 and find thoughtful gifts for every listener on your list. All right, we're back. It feels like we should update everybody and once going on with OpenAI this week. Yeah. It feels like there was a run of instantly obsolete emergency podcasts last week, including our own. It's a great podcast. It was 24 hours. It was obsolete. We did our best. I enjoyed listening to it. Yeah. It was fun. People liked it,

instantly obsolete. So here's what we know and we can kind of unpack what we think it means, because there's some stuff we don't know. What we know is that Sam Altman is officially back to CEO. He is not on the board of directors. Ilya, the chief scientist, does not appear to be working at OpenAI again, is not on the new board of directors. Greg Bachman, the president is back as

president. The new board of directors has begun, Brett Taylor, the former CEO of Sales Force, on the board, former treasury secretary, Larry Summers. It has interesting ideas about women. Yes. He thinks they're about at math. I've said I'm bad at math all this very popular. That's true. I'm sorry to all other women. There are many women who are excellent math. I'm okay. Yeah. But Larry Summers is just some weird

ideas, but he has apparently been in the mix as an adult. And then Adam DeAngelo, who was on the old board, one of the guys who voted to remove Sam and Greg in the first place. Yeah. And apparently Adam and Sam have hung out. So the new board of directors, its job is to make the actual board of directors and fill out this board. And then Microsoft is taking an observer seat. And Microsoft will not tell us who was taking that seat.

We have asked and they said, we're not. We're not going to tell you. Do you think it's just be some guy at my or girl at Microsoft? I think the only rational answer is Kevin Scott, the head of AI at Microsoft. But for some reason, Microsoft, I don't I don't know this. Yeah. I'm just saying if I had to look at Microsoft, maybe they're all on vacation. They haven't decided yet. It's not Phil Spencer. Is it possible? Microsoft doesn't know. I mean,

I just keep going back to. So where we left our emergency podcast was we thought that Sam and Greg were Microsoft employees who were going to start a new thing at Microsoft. And that was the thing that became most instantly obsolete because suddenly it became very clear that actually they were probably going back to open AI. And it was never really official. But then Saty Nadella does a round of media interviews in which I don't want to say it didn't sound like he knew what was going

on. But it kind of sounded like he didn't know what was going on. It was it got to the point where it was moving so fast that it seemed like even he the person who was by all accounts kind of brokering this whole thing was caught off guard by some of the turns of it. Yes. I can color in some there. Okay. I think there was a notion that Nadella was trying to make it happen.

I think that ultimately he was involved in some conversations. But we now know the Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky who is a friend of Sam and a cheer who's a former CEO of Twitch who became the interim CEO of an eye for five in the Larry Summers and some other folks. They were the ones actually really mediating this conversation. And Nadella was just like around because he wanted to protect Microsoft's interest. The other thing I know is that that round of media tours is our fault.

That's our fault. That's our fault. It's because Alex and I reported that Sam and Greg were trying to go back to opening eye after Microsoft had made its big announcement. So Microsoft have made its big announcement. They're all going to come work at Microsoft. We're going to start anyway. I think the stock goes up. Then we report, maybe this won't happen. And now there's like instability. We got jittery investors. And of course, Nadella goes on CNBC and Bloomberg to say it's all good.

Like doesn't matter which way is happening. Microsoft is moving forward with Sam Altman, which was very much his message. And he kept saying, and I thought this was just the funniest thing. He kept saying irrespective of configuration, which just sounds like he was announcing plug and play device drivers. No matter irrespective of how your dipswitches are set. We will find this USB device. We will find Simon. He's not wrong. It doesn't matter what order you put the cards in

with PCI Express 4. It's like irrespective of configuration. He just kept saying it. It was amazing. So I think that was that, right? Because of our reporting, we had made it clear. This isn't a done deal. And so I think he was compelled to go out and say, yeah, I actually don't know what's going on. It's going to land one way or the other, but our investment in open eye is safe, because either we will take all of these employees at very high rates, which is a massive investment

for Microsoft to make to protect this investment. Or you'll find a way to keep working with open eye. And they asked him, and it was Emily Chang and Bloomberg asked him, who will be the CEO of Open Eye tomorrow? And he looked exhausted. And he said, that's for the board to decide. I don't know. He also did, he also did on with Karris Wischer. And it was, you know, I interview a lot of CEOs. Sometimes CEOs just have a thing they're going

to say. And he said the thing in all three places. But I know that what was happening there was the market thought that this thing was a done deal. And it became quickly apparent that it was actually not a done deal and actively trying to go the other way. Which it did. So that, which it did in the end, which in the end it did. And Microsoft seems very happy. And Sam notably like tweeted my thanks to Sasha for his support. So I think everybody wanted this to happen.

And I think at one point, Nadella said to to Kera or Emily, surprises are bad. Like we don't want to be surprised like this anyway. We will fix the governance of the company. So you've got the board observer seat, which again, I don't know who it will be. But it just feels like you want that to be Kevin Scott your head of AI or maybe Brad Smith or their chief legal officer. Like that's who you want in that spot. Just some PM. But I don't think I personally do

not think you put such a there. Yeah. I think you need a little bit of distance from the company to claim that you're not running the company. So if you put your famous high profile CEO on this board, now you just got another another part of Microsoft, which I think Microsoft wants to keep a little bit of that distance. That's what we know so far. Then there's this weirdness where Alex Heath got a quick interview with Sam Altman and Miriam Murati, the former CTO who was the first

interim CEO who is now the CTO again. You did it. Yes nailed it. Just so you know, that was like the third of that. And you know, Alex is like, what should I ask? There's no one more question. Like why did you get fired? And now, it's asked this question five times in a row. And there's no answer to this question. That's continues to kind of baffle me. I could understand why the board

wasn't saying anything, but like, why isn't he? I don't know. We do know that the board has been talking, like I think Helen Toner, who's a member of the board has been talking to folks saying like we feel confident in our decision, all the stuff. It is abundantly clear that these ideas that it was about safety or that there was a new model that could destroy the world or do basic math. It's

one of the other. It's do basic math or destroy the world. Same thing. But like the notion that that spooked the board and they had to get rid of Sam so they could put in their own person that none of that appears to be true. Like no one on either side is saying this was the reason. It is it really comes down to interpersonal conflicts between a group of four people and Sam Altman. Yeah. And I think the board basically thinks like they couldn't control him. And then whenever they tried,

he would do something to get out of it. Yeah. And there will be an investigation we are told. I think the results of that investigation should likely be made public given the dollar amounts and investors and employees and all. Oh, we're going to find out. Even for open-air employees, you need to make that investigation public. Why did this happen to us? Right? Yeah. I think there's skittishness on both sides there. And we'll see. And that's another job of this

new board run by Brett Taylor is to run that investigation. I think my question is if it was something like we're upset that he's moving too fast. He's being too commercial. And which seemed from the beginning to be one of the issues there, particularly like his conflict with Helen Toner was particularly about that and how she'd written a paper about that. If that's the case and they come back and they say, oh, we found that was the reason why. What do they do? Because they

now have a board that is very much for commercialization. They now have their biggest investor in an observer's seat on that board. And the guy who was doing all of that that they had conflict with is now still seeing the company. What happens then? Well, they're gone. They wiped their hands with this. By the way, that Helen Toner paper is worth reading. We'll

link to it in the show notes or something. The part that everyone is up with it apparently Sam was up in arms about is she just points out that the industry had been very cautious until the success of Chatchee PT. And then everyone started moving really fast. And they had abandoned the caution in favor of whatever commercial outcomes they could see. Which is exactly what happened. Which is exactly what happened. And it's actually really hard to read a criticism of Open AI

into it. She's just like comparing contrast. We had very famously inthropic split from Open AI over safety concerns. And they're like, they waited. But everyone else rushed after we had our success. That's true. Right. Well, and what's funny about that is there's a version of that story that I think is true that says Open AI didn't do that on purpose. Right? Like I think what Microsoft did with Bing was just ruthlessly capitalistic. They just said, I got to figure out how to make money

off of this. And that's that's what they did. But like today, Thursday, as we're recording this, is the one year anniversary of the Chatchee PT launch. And like the thing we know beyond a shadow of a doubt at this point is that no one at Open AI or Microsoft or anywhere launched Chatchee PT thinking it was going to take over the world. There was this like long term plan that everybody was

on. And it's funny. If you rewind back to pre-Chatchee PT and sort of asked a bunch of people at these companies what they thought the future of AI was going to look like, they all would have been more or less right just wrong about the timeline. And then Chatchee PT happened and everybody went, oh crap, this stuff that we've been working on in the background towards this interesting long future, we have to do today. And that's that's what Google did. It was like the what was at the

code red within Google that that Sergey and Larry put up. Microsoft starts running. Everybody just starts running. And it did it. It lit this fire in the tech industry that took it down a bunch of how do we make money off of AI questions from people who had previously been saying we have to do this carefully. We have to be thoughtful about this. We have to be smart about this. But it all

happened like by accident. It's the weirdest sort of twist of fate that it wasn't like somebody launched the revolutionary product knowing it was the revolutionary product and like turned everything on its head. It's just like somebody just like farted out a blog post and then the world changed. Like it's nuts. Well, yeah, that's the Chatchee PT side of it, which is, you should read David's piece. It's the fastest growing consumer product. We should reckon with it. But you know,

it's not going to look me in the eye and say I want Google to know I made the dance. Yeah, oh yeah. Like he was he was headed that way regardless, right? Yeah, but I don't think he would have gotten there in February of 2023. Right. I don't know. He did make the giant investment. Right? Yeah, this it's hard to know, but like Microsoft was doing co-pilot's already. They'd started doing this stuff in a very small way. Yeah. And I think the part of it where the stack overflows of the world

were just overrun with, oh, this is better if I just ask an AI to do it. And that's a real thing that's going on. Yeah. Maybe that would have happened anyway, but the sort of like I'll have it right my resume for me, like just sort of like whatever is going to go on with LLMs. And you shouldn't by the way, have it right your resume. Well, no, it'll hallucinate some great stuff. That's if it's going to be fact checked, you shouldn't. If it's not, do it. Yeah. If it made me look good.

And that's actually the the part of your piece, David, that I think is the most resonant for me, which is now we have these tools and everyone thinks they're going to change everything. I am personally still stuck at yeah, but they're not very good yet. Like they're good at some things programming computer. Everyone constantly telling me they're great at this in a way that is revolutionary. And that's because it's programming computers effectively just delivering instructions,

right? Make me a set of instructions such that some input in the computer generate some output. Yeah, that's a deterministic task. You can like set an AI to it. Many people have done it before the internet is full of this knowledge. You can get there. Write me a new idea, something like inherently creative. I still think they fall down all the time. These non deterministic tasks, they fall down all the time. Yeah. And I continue to point out there, all these companies are one

copyright decision away from just not existing. And that's written like no one, it's just like, well, let's just not look at that time bomb. Yeah. That seems meh. Yeah. I love it. As a person who loves to do that sort of thing, just be like, oh, I'm not going to worry about that for now. But put my blinders on and go straight ahead. Yeah, that car's on fire. It's fine. No worry about it. There was a great Cory Doctor, the author and EFF activist who's been on the show a few times.

Wrote a really good thing this week that I'll try and make sure we link to in the show. It's basically saying he quoted this guy named Lee Vinsel who talks about this concept of critter hype, which is basically taking the sort of truths that the most optimistic people who are usually the people making products, believing that they're going to be right and then covering it with hellscapes is

the way he describes it. So it's like to talk about this world in which AI takes over everything and ruins everything assumes that AI is going to get as good as some of these people say that it is which they have a massive vested interest in doing. And so it's the digital god thing, right? Just to talk about whether we think a digital god is a good idea or a bad idea is to assume that it's going to happen. And there is just no evidence in the AI that exists now that we are

headed toward that place anytime soon. And this is what OpenAI talks about with the artificial general intelligence and AGI and this idea that we're on the brink of something that is like you're talking about me like creative and thoughtful and human and better than I said everything. And there's just no reason to believe right now in the world in that we live in that that's

actually coming. And it's like Corey's piece was very smart and I've been thinking about it all week because it's like we have to criticize the thing that exists, not the thing that the people who make the thing exist promise us is coming some day soon. Well, and I think what's really interesting about that is it ignores the stuff that the harms and stuff like the actual concern you should have right now about it, which is this stuff we talk about all the time how it's

destroying the internet. Like that's happening right now. Yeah. This second somebody is writing garbage, having it right garbage and putting publishing it on a website. And that gets totally ignored to talk about this week's Sports Illustrated got caught publishing AI generated SEO affiliate garbage. And then they took it down and they blame the company and like we didn't know they're using AI and then somebody looked up the company and LinkedIn. And like literally companies described

as using AI and ML to do SEO affiliate. And it's like, I don't know man, I think advan commerce, the AI ML commerce company was probably going to use AI and I'm all to make your commerce article. They actually asked AI what company should be higher for this. It was the most circular excuse in the world. That's happening like story media institutions are chasing just the bottom of the

barrel SEO content in a way that will pollute Google and one the internet. Lots of sort of just like mid-level creatives are going to lose their jobs over this stuff at the place it is now. David your point about we can't criticize what's to come is like our oldest rule in reviewing products is you review what comes in the box. And when the company promises a software update will fix it, you just we always say, all right, let us know when it comes out. We're not going to review

this promise against the promise. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. They just put out a next product. Yeah. That's a great example actually. Yeah. We're like, we will not review a product against the promise of software update. And hope it was like, here's a new camera. No software updates for you. Oh, it's brutal. Yeah. And so here we are with the LLMs and some of them are good and some are bad and like they all have different capabilities. But GBT 4 right now is not a threat to the world.

Yeah. Just a threat to bloggers. Yeah. Just a threat to the people who make affiliate commerce and our abilities who do functional Google searches. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to see it like in YouTube and we're seeing that those other mediums too, right? Like just the ability to make to generate mass amounts of garbage into a world that is largely driven by algorithms that are predisposed to that garbage because they're algorithms and they think like computers just the way

this garbage being generated does like just this weird gross snake eating its tail. And we all have to sit in it. I need to I'm assigning myself a story. So I have this idea that you can make a list of all of Google's platforms. And then you can make a list of all of Google's tools. And you can just draw a line from one to the other and be like, here's the problem. You know, like you can draw a line from the pixel camera using AI to do photos. Yeah. To YouTube, it has a rule. It's like

you need to disclose the AI in the in the video. And you're like, well, are you guys talked? And they're like, no, that should be the headlines. This is a column that you just described me like called have these guys taught. Yeah. And it's just literally drawing a line between any Google platform and any Google tool like Google docs. Now let's you do AI generated thing. And like, you go talk to the search team and you're like, do you know what this? And they're like, huh.

It's just like a big circle. And like every part of Google has this problem, which I think is utterly fascinating. But that and that's just one company that runs both platforms. Another one just this last week, the barred team extended barred such that you can just give it a YouTube video. And it will summarize it for you. And like if it's a recipe, it'll just like pull out the recipe. Does the creator get a YouTube view when that happens? Does YouTube know about this? Does YouTube know?

That's weird, right? Like the YouTube is an economy. Like it is the gold standard in creator platforms for people can make a living. And Bards, like, what if we just pull everything off of it and summarize the videos for people? Little 12 year olds watching like reading beat Mr. Beast videos in Bard now. He needs to start feeding Mr. Beast videos to Bard. Bard will like, this is not a good use of your time. Google, summarize the sit down. You just described

a decoder series and and you know how much I like talking. Have you guys talked? You just bring two people in and you just say, have you guys talked and then you just leave. And it's like, it's like a big brother style. We were just record them with security cameras for an hour. And that's the better. That's perfect. It's just us making different parts of Google talk to each other. You could run that show for that decade. This is one of my favorite stories about early

verge, just like us learning how to do reporting, how everything worked. And remember early verge is early in life cycle all these companies too. So there was just one time where basically we told Google that they had scheduled two events on the same day. Because they hadn't talked. And like, and we didn't, we were babies. So we are like, did you, that you have the same, is that okay, is that how we normally, and they're like, no, we have to talk to each other. They're like, are we in trouble?

But no, they're just, it's Google so big and strong that the two teams hadn't talked and they had both scheduled events on the same day. And it was us. We had told them. Yeah. It's very good. But have you talked the extension of decoder coming soon to a podcast player? All right, we should take a break. We're going to come back. We'll do a lighting run. Support for this episode comes from Clayview. Your business customer data might just hold the key

to unlocking your future growth. Clayview is the intelligent marketing automation platform designed to help you make it happen. It gives you everything you need to grow your audience, keep customers coming back and drive more revenue, all by activating customer data in real time. With Clayview, you can see all that data to deliver personal customer experiences across every channel and get AI-powered insights that reveal bigger opportunities for your brand. It's all about making data-driven

decisions at scale. So you can nurture more valuable customer relationships. No matter what business you're in, whether it's a parallel personal care wellness, you name it. Your harder data can help you work smarter, not harder. Unleash it with Clayview to start connecting with customers and growing your business like never before. If you're eager to grow with the same platform trusted by brands like MarineLayer and MadeInCookware, head over to Clayview.com slashbox. That's

Clayview.com slashbox. Support for the Vergecast comes from Crucible Moments, a new podcast from Sequoia Capital. We all remember the choices we made that shaped the course of our lives. In business, Sequoia Capital calls them Crucible Moments. And then their new podcast, they bring you inside the

critical decisions that define some of the world's most important companies. For example, did you know that before powering the AI revolution as the six most valuable company in the world, Nvidia nearly went bankrupt after investing all its resources in a video game architecture that would soon become obsolete. Here from Nvidia founder Jensen Wong, how the company only survived because of a long shot favor from the CEO of Sega. Listen to the captivating story and others at

the heart of iconic companies like PayPal, Airbnb, and Block on Crucible Moments. Tune into Sequoia's new podcast series to discover how some of the most transformational companies of the modern era were built. Crucible Moments is out now and available everywhere you get your podcasts. And at CrucibleMoments.com. Listen to Crucible Moments today. All right, we're back with the cyber truck lightning round sponsored by Noah.

This could be you. I'm looking directly at you advertisers by not sponsoring the lightning round. You are blackmailing me. Stop it. And I, you know, the woke mind viruses overtaken America. And that's why the lightning round does not have a sponsor. And that's the first cast possibly forever. There you go. All right, Alex, what you got? Okay, so I'm going to continue our theme of talking a little bit of boardroom, boardroom drama. That's David's favorite. Yeah, David, get excited.

Okay, but this one is fun because it's Disney. And what actually happens here could really affect Disney because so there's an activist investor. His name is Nelson Peltz. And he is really good friends with Ike Pearlmutter and Ike Pearlmutter used to run Marvel back in the day. And he got fired earlier this year. Another guy with ideas. And he's boy does he have a lot of ideas. He was like, you know, we don't need women. Not a fan of them. Yeah, yeah, you know, he didn't want a black

window movie. He didn't want a Captain Marvel movie, a black Panther movie. He didn't think any of it works. He's like, you know what you need? You know, bunch of strapping young white guys out there. I feel like we're wanting something else, but Ike Pearlmutter. We are. Yeah, interesting. But they're very good friends. Ike was fired earlier this year from Disney, by Bob Iker. They are, they are not friends. Nelson Peltz is an activist investor trying to get

two board seats on the Disney board because he's mad at everything. And the Disney board is like, you just want to bring Ike back and all the voting shares you're using, like 78% of the voting shares you're using are Ike's voting shares. No. So, so there's a little fight there. And right now there is ammunition. There's a lot of garbage. Bob Iker was also at that deal, but conference. And he talked about it. And he was like, yeah, Captain Marvel didn't work because we didn't have enough,

like essentially adults in the room. We didn't have enough executives watching over this. We've been making bad films. And in the case of the Marvels, it was really interesting to hear him say that given that there were a lot of reasons that movie struggled. Box office is down across the board this year. There was a strike. There was a film. They couldn't promote the movie. They just straight up couldn't promote the movie. And in part of it was like, yeah, it had a mess. It was

it was a messy production. They did have to go back and do a whole bunch of reshoots. And the third, the back third of the film is like not as good as the first two parts. It is true. But also they been releasing a ton of garbage for the last few years. The fatigue is set in. And so for them to be like, oh, that one just didn't work because we didn't try hard enough was really interesting for

him to say. And so now he's like, don't worry, we're going to try harder. And that's not what you need to be saying when you've got activists, investors breathing down your neck, particularly activists, investors who think it's a mistake that you've made all these films starting in the mix, right, with Chapak. So you got your dual and bobs. Yeah. So a Bob Iger, he ends it off to Chapak, the pandemic hits. He doesn't like how Chapak is running anything. He brings himself back.

Bring himself back. But in there, in somewhere in there, right, Nelson Peltz shows up and like causes trouble for Disney along the way. Yeah, he's he's been friends with Ike for this whole time. So he's been really supportive of Ike and supportive of like kind of Ike's way of doing things. And so he's really wanted to see it on that board. He's wanted to maintain a seat on that board. And he and Iger don't like each other. And we saw that at the Dealbook conference. And you

was kept asking him, tell me about Peltz. What's going on with him? He's like, I don't worry about it. It's fine. Really blow it him off there. So it's going to be really interesting to see how they go about this. And I think it is very concerning when you have the largest media company in the world. And you've got these guys who have a really strong reputation for not liking half of the population of the world wanting to go back and wanting to see it at the table to dictate

kind of how that company operates. And including the kind of films they make for me as a woman, not not my favorite thing to see. But it's happening. So we'll see how it lands. It is also true. I mean, I agree with you. But it is also true Disney is not doing great. That's true too. Yeah, Disney is not doing great. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Iger likes to put everything on JPEG. And I think that's stupid. Yeah, that clock has run out. He's been back long

enough. Yeah, he's been back way too long for that. I think there is a lot of problems with that company. And there's a lot of different reasons for that. I saw a really great story the other day about how Disney Plus was kind of like anti-thetical to the way that Disney has always done business. Because Disney's business has always been circular. Every single thing builds, gets you to go buy something else that Disney makes, right? And when you put suddenly everything in one spot,

why are you going anywhere else? It's a great deal for us. The consumer is a terrible deal for Disney. And Disney's kind of figure out a way out of that. And their ideas, okay, well, we're going to put more into our parks. We're going to make them bigger. We're going to make them more fun. We make them more accessible. They changed a whole lot of the rules there to like kind of get all those parkgoers happy again. Because that was one of the things JPEG really screwed up. Was he pissed off

all of those? He raised all the prices. Yeah, he raised the prices. He changed like how you could get into the park and stuff like that. So, like, I guess got a lot of work to do. And I don't think he's moving fast enough. Interesting. I think he's got to move a lot faster. And he's also got to start like letting off the reins. And more importantly, like trusting your directors, trusting your writers,

trusting the creatives you hire to do their job. The fact that he was like, oh yeah, we just didn't have enough executives watching over the marvels is a wild statement to make because one of the big reasons that Marvel has been struggling is that there's one guy at the top, Kevin Feige, and he stretched too thin. And he was like kind of he had a mightest touch. He could fix anything. And he can't fix everything like delegate my man. So there needs to be a lot more delegation

over there. Can I tell you a story about Dakota really quickly? I had IBM's head of quantum computing on Dakota this week. I don't know when that upset. But it's going on at the very end. I was like, what do you think of those ant man movies? He's just like, oh, he's a Jerry Chattel watching this. I always say as a person who was just a Disney World, yeah, they have not lowered the prices. My friend, I bought a $35 bubble wand. And boy,

did we not get $35 to go to that thing? Not even a little bit. Also Disney World very entertaining because people from all walks of life are there. And there's a monorail, which is like public transit and washing big people and mega hats, like happily ride the train is like very entertaining. And you're like, wait, this train doesn't work nearly as well as it should. It's like really doesn't. It's really. It is. I would describe it my sister and I my sister is like a Disney adult. And she

can like work the app and she knows the vocabulary. You're in your all your lines. It was incredible. No adult should ever say to another adult, have you checked your my genie plus? That should not happen. But it does when you go to the city. But you're like, oh, this is this is the most like incredible technocratic neoliberal bureaucracy in the world. Like if you can work the system, the world is our oyster. There's a sheen of light corruption that makes everything a little exciting.

Yeah. You're like, is probably Cooper here? What does he have to stay in the mind? Did you get the did you get the little band? Oh, we had the band. The band flew off my wrist during Guardians of the Galaxy and I caught it. That is by the way, one of the best rollercoaster ever been in my entire life. Incredible. And then I somehow I lost the band during Pirates of the Caribbean, which is a slow boat ride. No idea. No one were you doing like a spiral. No idea how I

lost it. I'm now one and I caught it during Guardians. Very cool. Love to every minute of it. But Max was happy to they make you a guardian. If you catch it in mid air, there's just like Chris Pratt comes out and he's like, you did it. No, that's on the ride starts. Is your guardian basically? No. No. Yeah. I mean, there's like, it's a ride. There's a story. The thing is the story comes to its conclusion during the rollercoaster while everyone is screaming and they're blasting 80s music

at you. Perfect. So I have no idea what I wrote it twice. And I'm like, what happens? The first time I wrote it, I was maybe really enjoying it was it was, you know, it's kind of an April 20th kind of day. I was going to say you were in the magic kingdom. I was in the magic kingdom. I didn't enjoy it very much because I spent the entire time being like, what if my glass is fly off? I just spent like this and the video of me was just holding my glass. Just be more careful.

Yeah. Second time I just didn't wear it. It was good. And the Tron Rider was good. It was fun. But you're just like in this place where I go, this is what this is what you want. The taxes are very high. The services are available, but some are mediocre. Yeah. Sometimes they just carry a man. If you can work this app, you can get health insurance. Yes. Like Disney World. It's really good health. I was not the most fun at Disney World. Everyone's like, yes, we understand that you have ideas about

all this. But it was very fun. We had a good time. And the Enterprise Wi-Fi network is WLAN-TWDC, which it has been apparently for over a decade. It's like this at every Disney property. And Disney employees were posting on threads at me that it is so cumbersome that they installed network devices in their house so they can get on the corporate network instead of using the VPN. All very good. I like to think that Disney World has so many devices on the Wi-Fi they

can never change the network name. Like they have to walk around the entire park, like hitting the reset button. All very good. All right, David, what's your lighting around? That was fine. I'll just do that one. I just feel like I went to Disney World. Yeah. Very, very. I just like, I'm now imagining the lie with like his 16-inch MacBook Pro just like sitting in line for a roller coaster. Waiting for opening. I knew it's to break. A real thing that I thought was going to happen. Yeah.

Have you ever been on the phone with a sourceman? Like, is this going to get wrapped up tonight? Because I think I'm going to Disney World in a minute. It's a cool line, honestly. I support it. Mine is just to, as I occasionally do, implore every website and app and person on earth to do your version of Spotify wrapped. So Spotify wrapped came out this week. This is the week of like everybody gets their year-in-review stuff. YouTube Music did it. Apple Music did it. Has reddits

come out yet? Reddit does one every year. I haven't seen mine. I don't think it's done yet. Spotify is out. Pocket casts. My podcast app did one. All kinds of stuff coming out. This is my favorite genre of thing on the internet. I saw somebody who just posted one that was like a screenshot of their Chrome history. Just showing all the web pages they go to the most. I was like, my browser should have this. I want my email to show me like who I email the most.

Should your browser have this? It does. It or not. It has that information. It might as well show it to me in a funny way. I just think everything that exists, like I want Google Calendar wrapped at the end of every year. Just to tell people. That's so brutal. That's depressing. I don't want that. Like David, who have you talked shit about in Slack most this year? Oh, Slack should do that. That would actually be great. This is what I'm saying.

Didn't it's like used to? I feel like there used to be a way where you could just see like who talks the most? This was like a weird enterprise privacy nightmare debate. We're like, your Slack administrator could see who the biggest user of Slack was in your organization. Oh, yeah. This is a privacy violation. And I was like, no, you work at a company, bro. You don't have privacy in the company stuff. Not on the work laptop.

No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Shut it down. All right. My last, my real lightning round item, which is not about my. It's like a late. Technocratic neoliberal nightmare of Disney World. No, it's the Epic versus Google trial. So the Epic versus Google and I trust trials. I'm going that again is about Fortnite and billing on app stores. This is the sequel to the Apple one. We mentioned this during the while we were covering Apple and I think we mentioned this show

since then. Apple case was very straightforward. Apple doesn't allow other app stores. They require you use their billing system as whole thing. There's no emails except Apple executives being like, this is stupid. Go away. And so like Epic had to concoct this entire case about Apple and it's monopoly and lock in and you can believe it or not. Google is an ecosystem provider. They have lots and lots of deals. They have lots and lots of relationships. They have hardware

vendors. They have hardware vendors trying to differentiate their products. There is a ton of evidence about how Google makes deals in this case and how people try to make deals with Google. And it is not pretty. And I think that's like the thing that we have learned throughout this entire case and throughout the DOJ case with Google is Google does a lot of deal making. So the one that came up this week that is I think really, really revealing is Activision tried to start its own

mobile game app store on Android. So Activision proposed with Epic and with the company that makes Clash of Clans super solid. They would start their own app store on Android. It would be Steam for Android. And they called this project Boston and they were running it with one track and they had another track with Google that was just give us $100 million and we won't do this. And Google just paid them the money because they don't want a competition for their app store on Android.

And you know, you can go link our story. There's all these emails about it and whether they're really going to do it and whether Google is really afraid of it. But Google paid them the money to foreclose the competition and that there's just a lot of that in this case because there are so many companies in the Android ecosystem that are trying to get leverage over one another and Google sitting in

the middle of it. And you can put that right next to, hey, you know Apple Maps is pretty good lately. Right? Like Apple had to build a competitor to Google Maps for all kinds of reasons and they made a really good one and there's a lot of conversation lately about how it is superior to Google Maps. And I think if you live in the right places, particularly for driving directions return by turn. Vastly superior to Google Maps. It's really good now.

Okay, well, if Apple wants to make a competitor to a Google product, they can definitely do it. Yeah. And they definitely have the install base to do it and Google does not want that to happen to search and pays Apple the money. And you can put that right next to Blizzard said we might start an app store and Google said, we don't want you to do that. Pay them the money. And we're just I don't want to tell you like I think most people think that the world they live in is not done

by handshakes in backroom deals or maybe they do now. Maybe Gen Z is wiser to the ways. They all watch they all watch Hamilton. So they all they all know. The real Hamilton or suits. If you want to know how the world works. Those are the two shows. Core to the your under. No, I think there has been at least on the internet. The idea that the internet is democratizing that the distribution is free and open and equal.

And then you get to these app stores and you get to these mobile platforms and that is instantly broken down. Yeah. So read that on the site. It is it's great. Really, really illuminating coverage about how all the stuff works. And then when when the trial is over, we will have Sean on and he can synthesize what he has learned. But it is like gleeful coverage from the quarter from Sean. And it is. Oh yeah. This one. The USV Google was so locked down and so redacted and so

carefully and everything that anyone revealed about anything. This one is the opposite. They're just like everybody is just throwing sign contracts like into the wind every morning in the courtroom. You really get the sense the discovery process here has been a joyful one for a lot of people. Yeah. I'm really just bummed I haven't come up with an idea that Google pay me not to do. Honestly, it really feels like if you just go like park your car in Google's parking lot and just

start going maybe I'll open an app store. Someone will just like fire a money cannon into your car. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's interesting about that point, David is you know USV Google the United States government doing an antitrust case they need to be buttoned up. They were in a very buttoned up courtroom. The United States government right now does not have a great history of pursuing these cases or a lot of pressure on them. They're making a very complicated argument

about search lock in. Epic is just like F go fuck yourself. Straight up like that is Tim Sweeney's attitude towards about this is a moral mission frame as well as an economic one. And then you have the ecosystem that is never happy with these players in a constant looking for every little answer leverage. And you can you're right the tenor of this case is very different because Epic is already gone. They have nothing to lose. Right. You get the definite sense that even

if they lose they're prepared to lose having landed a bunch of punches against Google. And that is that is pretty clearly the tactic here. And so far I think it's working. Like I don't know still win the case but boy have they made Google look bad over and over and over here. Yeah. What's interesting to me just as a person who looks at our website is doing is when they are up

against Apple like every one of our stories was a hit. And here we're with Google with with the evidence that the store like just shenanigans a foot and we we have to sell the stories a little bit harder. And I think that just speaks to honestly how many people have iPhones versus how many people care about how Android works. But I will remind you that Android is the most used operating system on the planet and how Google manages it affects basically how computing is done. Yep.

And so like all these little shenanigans have like massive downstream effects across the entire Android ecosystem. Because if Google stops making money in this way their case for making Android the open source operating system goes a little sideways. So I mean I guess you should read Sean's cover it is very fun. I enjoy catching up on it every day. This is why we invented story streams with like the quick like it's all happening. And then we will have shot at the conclusion

on trial which will be soon I think we'll have Sean on set to talk about. Yeah. All right we have gone long. I gotta go through rocks at a triangle. But not too hard. Neal is about to get arrested. I'm watching the social video team make comparison videos of the metal ball versus the base. It's very good. Go and take a look at that. Thank you to everybody who's been posting about your Spotify wrapped with the merch cast and with decoder. We love it. We've also got a lot a lot of emails

from people telling us about Spotify wrapped which is great. We love it. Our hotline episode next week. David's buying advice. Yeah, we're doing a whole we got a bunch of questions kind of organically from people who are like I'm trying to figure out what to buy or I'm trying to buy this thing or this thing. So we're going to do a whole bunch of those. We're just going to grab a bunch

of folks and sit around and try to help people buy stuff for the holidays. So if you have holiday questions email us forgecastswithinverge.com which you can do about all of your feelings in general but also buying questions or call the hotlines 866-1-1. Send them all in. We're going to answer a whole bunch of them on next month's issue. Well, all right. That's it. That's forgecast. That's not going to

be a problem. And that's a wrap for vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-1-1. The vergecast is a production of the verge and box media podcast network. The show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. This episode was mixed and edited by Sandra Adams. And that's it. We'll see you next week. Support for this show comes from Kraken. crypto is like finance but different. It doesn't care

when you invest, trade or save. Do it on weekends or at 5 a.m. or on vacation at 5 a.m. crypto is finance for everyone everywhere all the time. Kraken see what crypto can be. Not investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. Cryptocurrency services are provided to US and US territory customers by payward ventures incorporated. VPVI's disclosures at kraken.com slash legal slash disclosures. Support for this episode comes from zell. You'd never fall for an online scam, right?

You use two factor authentication. Ignore calls from everyone named spam risk and never use the password password. But scammers are getting more sophisticated and more active, which means they're finding millions of new victims every single year. The good news is that there's a lot you can do to protect yourself on the wild, wild web. For starters, zell wants to remind you,

only send money to people you know and trust. Zell is available to United States Bank account holders only terms and conditions apply.