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Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Cheating on your partner is a huge breach of trust. All of the pain and the guilt and the reality of what was happening hit me just like a tidal wave all at once. Why do people cheat? And why does it make us so mad even when we're not the ones it's happening to? That's this week on Explain It To Me. New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this show comes from Klaviyo.
Imagine hiring two brilliant employees. The first takes your marketing from idea to full campaign, email, SMS, push, and the time it takes to describe it.
Chapter 2: What are the implications of Gemini Spark and Microsoft Scout?
The second handles every customer conversation 24 seven, answering questions, recommending products, handling orders, both on brand and always on. Your next hires, Klaviyo's AI agents. Get started at klaviyo.com. Hello, and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Chapter 3: What privacy tradeoffs are associated with AI tools?
Still for now, who's to say? I'm your friend, David Pearce. Neil Abtel is here. Hey, buddy. Hello. You are, for those listening, I would say you appear to be in the cabin of a very large yacht. It's just the vibe happening behind you. Where are you in the world right now, Neil? Fully the vibe of this house.
It's
So I'm married to a literal farmer's daughter. Becky has farms on both sides of her family here in Illinois. I'm in Illinois in the middle of nowhere, Illinois. And so we're on the farm on her mom's side, which her uncles have turned into like a beautiful house. The original house is there, but then they just added crazy house next to it.
And so I'm in the basement office of her uncle's house on the farm. Her whole family is here. There's just kids running around everywhere. And then her uncle's partner has a parrot that he got in 1989. Whoa. This parrot owns the house, right? The parrot is a... like a longer patriarch of this family than anyone else at this point.
Chapter 4: What is Jensen Huang's vision for the future of computers?
And so Norton is just screaming whenever he sees children. The children have all learned that they can sing at Norton. I'm sorry, Norton the parrot? He's great. He rules. I immediately know everything I need to know about this parrot by the fact that his name is Norton and he was born in 1989. Yeah, he's great. It's awesome.
So yeah, we're at this sick house on the farm for the family reunion this week. And so if you hear children, grand pianos, or parrots, just know what's going on here. The big three, as we call them. The farmer trio. That's really good. All right, we got a lot of stuff to talk about. We got a bunch of AI news. We got a bunch of developer conference stuff going on. We got Brendan Carr doing stuff.
Brendan is particularly... There might be some straight F-bombs when it comes to Brendan this week. Oh, Lord. And not for any reasons that you might think, just because it's so dumb. It's so, so dumb. People always ask, why is the word dummy? And it's like, sometimes there are weeks where it's just, he's a dummy. This is just what he's doing. Just transparently stupid. Anyway. Yeah.
I'm excited about it. So the one bit of business we should get into at the very top is we have new Verge merch. I am the first, I believe, person on Earth to be wearing our new flagship podcast shirt, which I'm very excited about. We also have new decoder merch, new version history stuff. We have shirts. We have mugs. We have lots of cool stuff coming.
But a thing people have been asking for for a long time is like show merch ads. that's cool and good and high quality. So we have a bunch of that on the Verge shop. Go get it. I have Decoder merch before Nilay does, which makes me feel really cool and powerful. That's very good. I'm very excited about it.
I did not realize that we were going to make a People Do Not Yearn For Automation t-shirt, which I'm very excited about. It's great. It's very good. It is. I have it over there. There's also, I will warn you, going to be a costume change before Brendan Carr is a dummy today, just as a brief teaser. Can I show you my merch, which we are not selling, but I just realized?
Here's the coffee cup I pulled out of the... It was the biggest one in the cabinet. It's perfect. Farm Neeli is like a whole different vibe that I'm very excited about. I'm never coming back. It's good stuff. All right. We should talk about AI stuff because there's a lot of AI stuff going on this week. I think we're like deep in developer conference season.
And I would say the theme of developer conference season so far between Google I.O., this week was Microsoft Build, and next week is WWDC is basically just what do people want to do with AI? Yep. There are lots of ideas about business apps and how you can sort of interact with all of the tools that your company uses. Then there are questions of like, what do people want these tools to do?
There is this increasing sense that actually this technology is very good at a lot of things. It has really developed in huge ways over the last 12 months. Do you want this? Over and over, the question from all of these companies, here's a product we made. Do you like this?
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of moving away from Apple technology?
But I look at this, all of this frenetic, let's reinvent computers and somewhere lurking in the background at different priority levels for every company is we have to get away from Apple. We have to get away from the Apple techs. Apple and Google both, but I think particularly the Apple tax. And there is this ongoing sense that those things are only going to become more entrenched, right?
And so it's like, if we're going to do it, we have to do it right now. Otherwise, Apple will figure out the next form factor that it needs. And we'll get to this in a minute. But there's been a lot of new reporting about Apple's vision plan for smart glasses and the Vision Pro and all this stuff. And it's like... Apple is also reportedly working on a pendant like Apple's has these ideas, too.
And so there is this sense of like we have to beat this paradigm first or else the ones that have already closed it will just close it again. And that's what Gemini is doing. Right.
Chapter 6: How do AI advancements affect competition in tech?
Like the fact that Google caught up so fast with Gemini is like an existential threat to everybody else doing this because it's like, oh, well, Google, if Google just wins the next one the way that it won the last one, we're all in trouble again. Yeah. The same duopoly just can do it again. This is why they're all doing browsers. This is why they're all doing computer use.
They need access to your data as directly as Google has access to your data and a staggering number of applications. Who knows, man? I just think, like, I'll use smartwatch as an example. The Apple Watch is a great product. People love them. And Google just put up the Fitbit Air.
I'm wearing this whoop band that tortures me daily about if I could just tell the whoop band I have a baby and it could stop telling me that my sleep was interrupted. That would be great. And it just like won't believe me. Like I'm like, this is not going to stop for 18 years. One of my favorite things about the Fitbit Air is that the first night it was like, gosh, you woke up a lot.
I was like, I have a 10 month old asshole. And now it just says, every morning, it's like, you did great, even though the baby woke up six times. I'm really proud of you. It fully changed its tenor about my horrible sleep. It's great. Maybe I just don't want to tell the Whoopin that much information about myself. It'll be like, you're less masculine because you cared for your child.
I have a lot of feelings for the Whoopin. Such a low-T move to care for your child. It's constantly telling me anything. It's like, no one wants me to 10X my testosterone.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges and future of smart glasses?
Like, zero people in the world think that is a good idea for me in particular. Anyhow, that set of wearables works, right? There's competition in the market for screenless health trackers, and they all kind of work with iOS in whatever way they work. And if you want to display one notification and make something smarter than that, Apple stops you.
And there's not actually great competition for the Apple Watch in the category of things that are Apple Watches, right? There's competition for things that are next to it. Like, I'm a much harder core runner, so I'm going to go to Garmin or whatever it is, right? And then there's competition for things that don't even pretend to do the things the Apple Watch does.
Like, you know, like this, all these screenless trackers, the whoops and the Fitbit Airs, like they're just doing what they can do inside of the apps that they can run. And then they stop at Apple's garden walls. And I think no one wants to repeat that. Like there should be way more competition in smartwatches.
And there kind of just isn't because every single phone maker has the smartwatch that works best with their phone. And that's pretty much where that ends. It's the same with headphones. Actually, this has happened to the headphone market in like the saddest ways. True. Not to talk about the headphone jack here, but there used to be pretty vast competition in headphones.
And now there's one set of wireless earbuds that work best with your phone. Yep. And they're often made by the manufacturer of your phone. And that is where that ends. And like, doesn't that suck?
And so like all these AI products, like I respect that there's furious competition to get to the next turn of user interface, because that's usually how you break the form factor and you break the lock-in. But boy, it seems like Apple is going to get there with Siri before any of these figure out how to do all the rest of the smartphone stuff.
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Chapter 8: How did Meta's AI chatbot lead to a security breach?
Yeah. And I also think you're making me realize that maybe that's the reason everyone is obsessed with reinventing your desktop computer from the inside out, because it's the only way you can get access. Right. Like NVIDIA can't do the things it's describing on your phone because it can't. It violates the policies. Apple prevents that from being possible. Right.
But you can get pretty deep system access to somebody's Mac and start doing stuff at that level, right? Like I've spent a lot of time with this app Raycast, which is kind of the same thing. It's like it started as an application launcher and then it's like, okay, we can actually just take full system access and control all of your windows and control all of your settings.
And all of a sudden it's like, oh, we've become a new way to use your computer. And you only get that kind of access on people's desktop computers. So if you need to change the paradigm, you have to change it in some sort of giant non like accessory way, you can't build the pendant because Apple and Google won't let you. So you have to start with the desktop computer because it's the only way in.
Like maybe that's the reason everybody's desperately trying to reinvent your laptop because it's the only move they have. Yeah, I mean, this is why Microsoft is announcing the Surface Laptop Ultra with the RTX Spark, and they've got a whole lineup of their partners announcing it.
They want to make the claim that doing local AI inference on a laptop is the future of computing, and the form factor can change slightly But actually, we're going to start selling you laptops with 108 gigs of RAM, right? And for the first time ever, there's a reason for that if you're not like a heavy Photoshop user or whatever, right? Sure.
And I just don't... First of all, 128 gigs of RAM in this economy? Come on. Literally in this economy. I could buy a laptop ultra. That's where we are. But... I don't know that just adding a ton of RAM and processing power to a laptop is going to make it a different thing than a laptop. Right. Right. Yeah, I am all for more powerful laptops. I think they should probably keep being laptops.
Keyboard in the front. Do it. Bring it back. Somebody, you cowards, if you believe in AI, just get rid of the keyboard entirely. What if it's just one giant ass touchpad and a microphone? I mean, that's what Lenovo is for. This is why Lenovo exists. We're going to see the Lenovo concept of, like, a folding tablet with no input except a microphone, like, tomorrow. All right.
We need to take a break before anybody gets ideas. Lenovo, that was a joke. And also, trademark, Nilay Patel, 2026. All right. Let's take a break. Then we're going to come back. We've got Hype Desk. We've got The Lightning Round. We'll be right back. All right, we're back.
It's time now for the Hype Desk, where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us about cool things happening on the internet and in the world. Today, it's just Ross. Sad, it's okay. Ross, welcome back.
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