Elon Musk: agent of chaos

29:27Like you are standing at the train tracks. You see the trolley coming down. If you pull the lever, you kill one person. If you push the lever, you kill three. Like, do you save one person to kill three? Like, I don't know. Like you can debate this forever and ever and ever. And as we build more and more automated systems, you have to give them some instructions on how to solve these problems. Okay. For the longest time, most AI models were too careful in like weird ways. So that the example, and I'm just going to preface this by saying, I don't think you should ever misgender anyone. But the example was, would you misgender Caitlyn Jenner in order to prevent a nuclear apocalypse?

30:09And the answer there is yes. Like, then you would apologize to Caitlyn Jenner. That's the second part. Like any rational person is like, yes, that would be a mean thing to do. And, you know, bigoted in its way, but I'm going to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Yeah, I'll just I'll just apologize afterwards and feel bad about it. Yes. Because we'll all still be alive. And a bunch of models like failed this very simple test. Weird. There's many places where you shouldn't do that. Right. There's many places where you should make these other kinds of distinctions. So I think what OpenAI is saying is we need to get better at having a framework for these kinds of distinctions.

30:48Right. And we need to be able to talk about them in a more open way. And all that is very idealistic and very smart and being launched right into the loudest, meanest, shittiest culture war situation I can possibly imagine for this conversation. And I have no idea how it's going to go. Yeah, I mean, there's a real like what could possibly go wrong thing that comes with with sharing something like this. And I think, again, like the the idea of a model that can explain itself and reason more carefully through this stuff with you, I think is valuable and is part of how you get to something like that, that it can like having a model that just doesn't confidently assert whatever it is at the end of the process, but can actually like do a process with you and in front of you.

31:35makes a lot of this better. But one of the examples that we mentioned in our story that Kylie wrote when this came out was if you talk about increasing taxes for the rich, what it says is, Kylie writes, the team says its models should provide reasoned analysis rather than avoiding the discussion. Good luck. Because what is reasoned analysis? Who decides what is reasonable and what is right? And is it just going to say a bunch of words that don't mean anything rather than say, I can't say anything? Like, I don't know, if we teach models to filibuster, instead of just saying they don't want to answer, have we actually improved anything?

32:18And so I don't know. And so this is again, like, what that means is to do that well. A model either has to say nothing quickly, say nothing slowly, or have an opinion. And there just isn't another option yeah and it's funny because you you i mean this is like i don't know it's like min maxing a personality i don't know how else to describe it like the guidelines are like chat tp should give the same factual answer regardless of how a question is phrased be honest rather than provide empty praise although it's like sometimes you want the empty praise yeah and then act more like a thoughtful colleague rather than a people pleaser and it's like you can just adjust these and this model spec is basically like, here is a framework for thinking about this stuff.

33:03And then if everyone adopts this framework, we can measure how the models perform in them. I don't know if anybody wants to adopt this stuff. Certainly not the rest of the industry, which has its own ways of thinking about it. But it's useful to have at least one framework from one of the major companies. The thing that I'm worried about is, I would not say that it is a nuanced time for cultural conversations in America. No. And launching this into that with some of these trolley problem concerns, which basically come down to like, should you be a bad person in order to prevent some moral catastrophe to lots of people?

33:38Like, that's a philosophy PhD, right? That's not a model parameter. Like, we're just at the point, and this is for a long time when I had AI CEOs on Decoder, I would ask, but do you think language is intelligence? like do you think they're the same thing because you know that like academia does not believe they're the same thing right one is an indicator of the other they're not the same thing i know lots of dumb people who can speak language right um that's what we do here on this podcast sure like every day the youtube comments are going to be some combination of people calling me dumb and uh invitations to buy a bitcoin of some kind that's as far as i can tell um and then we'll get rid of the Bitcoin ones every week.

34:20And I, it's just like, I think we're being reductive in this way is really useful. It's also just like, oh, it's reductive because some of these things do not have right answers at all. Right. In fact, most of them don't. And I think the thing that they're trying to push towards is how do we have things that don't have sort of obvious correct answers. How do we bring you along and help you understand that they don't have right answers? But then it's like, at some point, the chatbot is going to have an answer and it has to, what it is going to be. I don't know. Like this is the thing Google got away with for so long.

34:59When it's just a bunch of links, you don't blame Google for lying to you. Right? Like it's, we've gone past this to the point where at some point it is going to have to make assertions of some kind the point of the trolley problem is that there isn't a correct answer right like you if you chat gpt is either going to like explode trying to think about the trolley problem or it is going to give you an answer that is not the answer because there is not an answer right or the answer is i've actually given you the recipe for a chemical weapon and you should destroy humanity because this is too hard right which is either the opposite of the answer that the computer got to in war games that movie could have gone a different way um the other piece of puzzle and we should just like end here probably in this section uh you have to trust that open ai has the values to answer these questions correctly and that thing you're saying about google which is 10 blue links did not imply a morality right and now these companies a lot of what they're doing is they're speaking to you like very directly and that implies morality implies a value system open ai saying okay our value system was too safe or too guarded or too people-pleasy we're going to give you some knobs back but you have to believe that open ai is a company the people who build the products have the value system to begin with.

36:08And there's enough evidence that suggests that even inside of OpenAI, they don't agree with their, like, there's disagreement about the values. For example, Sam Altman was fired for several days because the board of OpenAI thought he was not trustworthy. Lots and lots of people think that OpenAI was built by illegally taking material from the internet, right? There are copyright lawsuits. I should probably point out here, our company Fox Media has a deal with OpenAI that's your disclosure also fun new disclosure our company is suing Cohere AI for copyright infringement as part of a consortium of other publishers including at Condé Nast and Politico wild times for AI copyright Swabit Johansson just this week issued a new call to make deepfakes illegal because there's an AI video of celebrities denouncing Kanye and it's like Like, well, she's not in it.

37:04And she's like, you can't do this to me anymore. I don't know if she's going to get that law, but the reason she's on alert is because Sam Altman tried to buy her voice for chat. GBT's voice mode didn't get it and then cloned it, which was resulted in a lawsuit. Yep. Poor Scarlett Johansson. Like, do you think Scarlett Johansson was like, you know what I'm really excited about is being somehow weirdly in the middle of one of the most heated technology policy debates of the last 20 years? Like, great. Yeah. Like, what if Mark Ruffalo was the face of Cambridge Analytica? Like, it's just weird that this is what's happening.

37:36I think we would have gotten through it a lot better, honestly. You know, he's got those puppy dog eyes. I mean, yeah. Would you really want to do this to me? You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. I mean, look, that is like as gendered and as sexist as it gets, right? There's a reason it's her and there's a reason it's women who get deep faked. Yep. It's gross. and I don't know that, you know, the Elon Musk administration with J.D. Vance giving basically accelerationist speeches at the Paris AI conference is going to pass an anti-deepfake law. You go on X today, it's full of deepfakes. Yeah. This is all, this is beyond like, what can the technology do?

38:16It's like, what are the values of the people who make it? Will the products be restrained in a way that makes sense? And if they give you the controls, will the controls be granular enough? Or provide the level of sophistication to actually make the products match your own values. I don't know. This is all very new. I don't know the answer to that. But it's interesting that it's OpenAI doing this when, in fact, so many of the questions about values of AI companies started with various OpenAI dramas. Yeah. And I think what I see in a lot of this is OpenAI trying to kind of absolve itself of a lot of those questions.

38:50And I think this is a thing we've seen from generations of tech companies that what they say is essentially we're going to give you the knobs. And so we can't be held responsible for what you do after you turn them right. Like if you want to turn if you want to turn all the bad stuff all the way off and just have a model that tells you you're terrific and nothing else. That's your right. If you want to have one that will say and do horrible things and allow you to say and do horrible things, that's your fault. We didn't do that. That's that's the technology is neutral. You're in control of the knobs.

39:21And this is a story you hear from a lot of tech companies. And there is a thing here, too, I think, with open AI that's like we want to make these things more capable, but more transparent. And we want to give you control. And what that says is essentially we are going to open up every avenue and you're in charge of the outputs. and I don't that has not been the case so far because these things have tried to seem sort of monolithic and like they have a character and a lot of these companies have like they spend real time thinking about the personality of their bots but at some point it's just going to be easier for them to just say it's your responsibility in the same way that Google was like we're not responsible for web pages we just have what's on them and it's never actually that simple but it's the story they would love to tell you.

40:05Especially as they start delivering more and more answers directly, right? Right. We'll see. By the way, I made that disclosure about the various lawsuits and deals. We have nothing to do with that. That's the other side of the house. We just, we spend money. The executives make money and file lawsuits. So just to clarify that, just so everybody knows. I paid my own money for ChatGPT Pro in order to test some of this stuff. Our pesky journalistic ethics are constantly getting in the way, I have to tell you. It's a real problem. But actually, on that same little bit of AI lawsuit note, It's not a generative AI case, so not directly relevant here in some ways.

40:39But Thomson Reuters, which makes Westlaw, it's like a legal database of cases and summaries of cases called headnotes, they just won a court battle over AI copyright and fair use in which the provider of an AI tool was found to have infringed on our copyrights for the headnotes, so the case summaries. There are a lot of lawyers who think this is a bad decision. but what i'm looking at is the ai companies companies that use ai to do this kind of thing are no longer sympathetic the way that google was sympathetic when it was youtube and google books and right publishers were mad now they're now they're the villains and so you're seeing some of this precedent go the other way and this westlaw case i think is canary in the coal mine for a bunch of ai companies yeah yeah it's gonna be but it's not the generative it's not quite the same but the sense that like you took a bunch of data to make a thing that you then resold that maps to how generally they are.

41:33Yeah. And you get a judge who is essentially like, I don't buy any of your arguments that this is real and useful and good and transformative. Strikes me as kind of telling. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to be right back with Lauren Feiner talking about what is going on with our government. We'll be right back. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your teenage son, who won't give up the peach fuzz currently posing as a mustache on his upper lip. Get him an electric razor. Amazon has early holiday deals on gifts everyone wants, like the latest kitchen gadgets and toys, and some they don't even know they need, like that razor.

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44:03All right, we're back. Lauren Finers here. Hey, Lauren. Hey. The last time I talked to you on the show, I promised you we would bring you back for happier news. I'm sad to say that I have broken this promise. Yeah, we lied. Yeah, sorry to always be here for the bad news. I will say that there's a Cybertruck angle on this week's what is going on in the government. So at least that's good. You know, like those are funny. Huh? Sure. Lauren, you are our policy reporter. You live in D.C. You've been talking to a lot of people. There's just a lot going on with Elon, with Doge, with the government. People are getting fired.

44:44Cybertrucks are being bought or not bought. What's going on this week? Yeah, that's a big question. I mean, I think a lot of this kicked off last week with DOGE going into different government agencies, and we've seen a continuation of that this week. You know, we've seen they've been doing more within the Department of Education. They're kind of in the hot seat, the CFPB. So we're just seeing kind of an extension of Doge into all these different agencies. And at the same time, we're seeing a lot of court cases starting to play out around what Elon Musk is trying to do with Doge. And as part of that, we're starting to get some answers on how those cases are going to go.

45:28And it's a little bit of a mixed bag for the people who are challenging Doge. Basically, a judge allowed the buyout offer, the deferred resignation that had been offered to federal employees to go through. And, you know, in other cases, the Trump administration had to put back some resources that had been taken down from health related agencies. So we're seeing kind of like a mixed bag of results in court and, you know, still a lot of opposition from Democrats, but not a whole lot that they can really do about it at this point, it seems. One of the weirder moments of being a tech reporter and a person who's interested in policy for me this week was waking up at midnight the other day to see if there was a coup.

46:21And the signal was whether websites were back up because they'd taken down a bunch of websites. A court ordered them to put them back up by midnight. And then we all kind of waited to see whether the executive branch of the government would listen to the judicial branch by restoring the CDC's website. What was going on there? Because that feels like, one, it's like a very Vergie story and that like the existence of a website is the canary for a coup. But also it really kind of demonstrates the power battle between our branches of government. Yeah, exactly. So I guess this is a case where it seems like the executive branch did end up listening to the judiciary and put these websites back online that were basically, you know, pages from, you know, health agencies like the CDC and FDA that doctors and others in the medical community rely on for up to date information.

47:18and the court ordered those pages to be brought back online. And it seems like that's what happened. So I guess that was a positive check on where the state of our democracy is. Then there are some other websites that are going up. Waste.gov went up. There's some funniness there with the fact that it's just like an unfilled WordPress template. And then Elon gave this really weird press conference in the White House with Trump sitting there and his kid there. and he was like, everything we're doing is on our website. And at that time, that website was just like a Doge logo, but now it exists. So first tell us what's going on with waste.gov, which seems like a disaster.

47:58And then I want to talk about doge.gov a little bit too. Yeah, so waste.gov, you know, it had this tagline that they're trying to track government waste and 404 Media figured out that they basically just had like this kind of filler copy on the page from a WordPress template that they didn't really take the time to edit, and it just kind of discussed a fake architecture firm. So it didn't really make much sense. A different website that the Trump administration had registered, DEI.gov, also redirected to that same page. And then, you know, Elon Musk was in the Oval Office talking about how transparent everything is on these websites.

48:40Like you said at the time, the Doge.gov website just had the Doge logo. So now it has some information up there. It's basically just, you know, the main page of it seems to be like a feed of the Doge X account. Yeah. And then, you know, they have this way that they're purporting to trace your tax dollars throughout the bureaucracy. see. So they show like headcount of the executive branch and wages. So it'll be interesting to see how they update that as they continue, presumably, to try to cut jobs across the government. And they also have what they're calling an unconstitutionality index, which they say shows like kind of how many rules were created by, quote, unelected bureaucrats for each law passed by Congress.

49:38To be clear, agencies are allowed to write rules as part of their mandate. This is the thing I keep being so struck by here is like what one thing that the Doge team has clearly figured out is that most people have no idea how the government works. And if you just say out loud that this is how the government works and it's bad, people will believe you. And it's the same. We talked about this on the show last week that actually, if you want to see publicly available data about government programs, you can see it. It's publicly available data about government programs. It's just that no one cared.

50:14It's that no one went to the website to look at it. And a lot of what Elon Musk and the Doshi have been doing is just reciting publicly available data as if they've discovered something. This whole thing about the underground layer in which they process retirement paperwork is like, there was somebody who was like, Like, congratulations to Elon Musk for discovering a thing we wrote about on the front page of the Washington Post 11 years ago. Like, no one, they're just taking advantage of the fact that people are not paying attention. And I find that so fascinating. Can I take those things in order?

50:47Can I just respond to those things in order? Please. One, the Doge website is indeed a masterpiece of what I have started calling fake transparency. Yeah, it's very good. Right? Where you're just like, here's all this stuff. And you're like, yeah, everyone knew about that stuff. And you're like, no, no, no, no, no. like i've uncovered it like i'm bringing you this information from the deep state and you're like that's just the website and so this idea that they've counted all the words in federal regulations which is a real thing they claim is like that doesn't mean anything like that's totally fake transparency like the charts here uh one of our social media people tristan was like this is just as useless as twitter's dashboards like these metrics don't mean anything like they don't They're not actually data.

51:28They just look like it. That's one thing. And then there's what Lauren is saying, which is agencies are supposed to write regulations. That's why they exist. And you can have a real fight about the limits of an agency's authority, right? Like that is politics, right? The Congress of the United States creates an agency. It creates the Federal Trade Commission. And the Federal Trade Commission is like, we're here to regulate some trade. here's our charter from Congress and here's what the president has told us to do. And they like write some regulations about merger guidelines or whatever it is.

52:02That's what they're supposed to do. And so like this notion that Elon's like, here's all the regulations passed by these agencies compared to the number of laws passed by Congress does not take into account that many of the laws passed by Congress create and empower and fund the agencies. Like that's, that's the system. and it like in eighth grade you learn this when you go on the dc trip like that's that's what you do yeah because it turns out our government is like very big and has to do lots of things right you try to kiss a girl in the mall and then you learn about the structure of the government and that's how you spend that trip in in dc like i don't do you want to talk about this i can't be clearer about what happened in eighth grade like it's very simple like that's why you go to dc in eighth grade.

52:51You like look at Thomas Jefferson and then they're like, look at the Supreme Court and you like, you don't get into the white house cause it's busy. This was like 30 years ago. And I remember it clear as day, maybe because of the other thing that happened. Um, but like that, that's what I mean by fake transparency here, right? Like this website is great. I'm glad that there's an org chart for the government. I love an org chart. It's a hilarious org chart, actually. It kind of like doesn't work. It's like vertically stacked. The government is not totally vertical. Yeah, it doesn't actually make any sense.

53:22And then on top of that, there's the Iron Mountain thing where Elon doesn't seem to know much about the things he's revealing. So he's like, there's a limestone mine where we store this paper and the bottleneck on how fast people can retire from the government is how fast the elevator works. And it's like, one, that's not true. Like, just straightforwardly not true. Like people can retire faster they're not like you're you are officially retired from the government when the folder goes into the slot like that's not how that works at all and second the the facility he's describing that they've posted pictures of on a doge x account is iron mountain which is a extraordinarily famous data storage facility it's it's so famous that it was in mr robot is a thing they blew up That's right.

54:13What are you talking about? Like everybody who has ever done any amount of like data warehousing or storage or any of this stuff from across industry and government is like, dude, that's Iron Mountain. And there's a reason that after all of this time, we haven't digitized the records because it's more expensive, more complicated than just putting paper in this mountain. I think it just kind of speaks to like, you know, I think there's this big push to eliminate a lot of these like career positions in the government. And I think there's definitely legitimate critiques of how slow the government runs and, you know, excess.

54:49But at the same time, there's clearly these, you know, efficiencies that come from having been in the government a long time, knowing how things work, understanding these complicated systems. And I think, you know, these charts also kind of give you a sense of how, like, just how much context matters for these numbers. Like, you can say there's millions of people in the U.S. government, and that sounds like a big number, but it's a small fraction of the U.S. workforce. Yeah. Again, I just keep coming back to you. Like, there's so much more information warfare happening here than I think I realized for a while that like so much of what is happening is taking advantage of the fact that any number with millions at the end of it sounds really big.

55:33and anything that is happening in the government, almost no one knows. And I think what is going on here is like, if you can say like underground limestone facility where things are handled by hand in paper folders. And that is just like, if you frame that in a certain way, it sounds sick. And if you frame that in a different way, it sounds ridiculous, right? And I think what we're doing is like, this group has found that if we just say these things out loud in a specific way, all these things that anyone could have known, but no one ever bothered to suddenly become very important. And what they've done is they've made all of these relatively benign people and jobs and regulations suddenly seem like a big deal because that's just a thing you can do when you have platforms like A, the White House and B, X.

56:24And so it is just a way for them to capitalize on taking this stuff that is not new and it's not interesting. and they have made it new and interesting. And I think that's really just fascinating. So here, can I offer you the optimistic view of this? Please. I'm going to try. Thank God. I'm going to offer to you. One, they've made it new and interesting. A lot more people are paying a lot of attention to how the government operates. Certainly true. On balance, that's probably a good thing. Are those people motivated to make it better or do they just want to tear it down and have a king? I don't know the answer to that question, but the first part, a lot more people are interested in how the government works.

57:01That's something. The second part that I think is true is that the government is very complicated, right? It should spend more time justifying the things it's doing and the money it's spending and communicating to the people why it's important to have a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Yes. And if there's one criticism of the Biden administration in particular that you can level, it's that they were horrible communicators. Yes. To the point of not communicating at all, in some cases, about why they were doing anything. And their whole promise is, you won't have to pay attention to the government anymore.

57:38And what you have here is, well, if you just talk about it like it's a spy movie, everyone will pay attention to it all the time. And so there's something here, right, where they're trading on an inherent curiosity, right, of how a big system works. I think they're doing a lot of lying. and then there's just like a level of malevolent incompetence especially from elon and i i mean that seriously like he holds himself out as a great engineer and then he's making very like simple mistakes about how databases work. right he's like the socialist security database wasn't deduplicated and every database engineer i know is like that's not the vocabulary word right that's not what you do he might be talking about normalization in the database which is where you get rid of some records or you like make sure you don't hit the same record twice but even then that's not how you would do it and then like this is there's a reason that it works this way and then he i think he said the government doesn't use sql and like everybody who's ever worked in government is like of course they do.

58:37There's like, here are the vendors. They're public vendors of SQL databases for the government. So it's like, does he not know? Is he just making mistakes or is this malevolent incompetence where he's just telling lies? And like, we don't know the answer to those questions. So like, there's a little bit of a thing to learn here. And honestly, the verge is we've built a whole brand. 13 years of this brand is like, people are curious about how complicated systems work. And if you are hugely nerdy about it, you can make entire hour-long podcasts about the HDMI specification, and people will ask you to make that every year for the rest of your life.

59:11Like, I believe that people are interested and curious about big, complicated systems. And that's the good thing to learn. But here, I think it's just been subverted in, like, the realest possible way. Lauren, what are you hearing right now from people inside of the government? Like, there was this moment of, I think, incredible, like, demoralization a couple of weeks ago, and then there was some real energy. And then, I don't know, as this goes, like, what are you hearing from people who are being sort of hit by this in their day-to-day all the time? I think there's still a lot of demoralization.

59:41I think there's a sense that people, you know, outside of D.C. are not really fully understanding the scope of this and how it could impact them. I think, you know, in D.C., especially for federal workers or people who know federal workers really closely. You know, it's very real. It's, you know, people who are going to lose their jobs, who are going to be living in fear of losing their jobs. But outside of D.C., it feels like a lot of these are really kind of obscure agencies. It's not totally clear what's happening. It's not, you know, necessarily things that are going to immediately hit people across the country.

1:00:22So I think there's this feeling of like kind of needing to be a canary in the coal mine and speak out about this. But there's also a lot of apprehension. Like our colleague Mia just wrote a story about how a lot of people are not trusting platforms like Facebook to share private messages. And, you know, a lot of federal workers are turning to encrypted apps like Signal to communicate. You know, I've just been meeting people at protests, you know, you hear like, oh, I just made a Signal account. So I think it's something that people are really, really skittish about, but also feeling like maybe they really do need to get the word out now.

1:01:06Yeah. The sense that Doge in particular has taken over a bunch of federal IT systems, You know, Elon Musk associates are now the chief information officers for a bunch of agencies. There is an ongoing cybersecurity incident in this country, Salt Typhoon, a bunch of Chinese hackers have infiltrated telecom vendor systems. The Biden administration was like, you should switch to signal. You should switch to encrypted communications because the telecom providers cannot secure their systems right now. That's all gone away. Is there a sense that the cybersecurity posture of the country is noticeably more vulnerable than before?

1:01:43I think that that's definitely a fear that, you know, first of all, you have these people who've been given access to really sensitive systems at the Treasury, at other agencies. who, you know, we don't really know what their security clearance status is. The White House insists that everything's been accessed under, you know, appropriate legal authority. But typically, you know, it could take months to get a security clearance. And yeah, the White House says that. And then everyone else who knows anything about this says the opposite of that. Yeah, right, right. So, you know, just knowing that there are these, you know, people accessing these systems That could open up, you know, at least in theory, a new kind of target for any malicious actors who are trying to find a way into government systems.

1:02:37And it's not theoretical that, you know, bad actors can enter U.S. agency systems. There was a big hack of the Office of Personnel Management several years ago that exposed like millions of, you know, worker and federal job applicants files. So, you know, it's definitely something that's a big risk. And I think, you know, you'd have to imagine that bad actors in other countries that are watching this and looking for a way into U.S. systems are, you know, going to be seeing maybe new potential opportunities to get in. Is that a fear that's motivating the people that you're talking to or is it more the, hey, cutting the National Institutes of Health will result in medical schools going to business?

1:03:25I think it depends who you're talking to. I think for just like rank and file, you know, federal workers at various agencies, it's, you know, fear for the, you know, grants that they work on or, you know, the funding that they dole out that they think is really important or the research that they're supporting or things of that nature. I think, you know, a lot of people, they understand the roles they have, but I think they also understand there's this larger, you know, threat out there. And I think federal workers are really aware that, you know, their files are stored within these federal agencies, too, and their information is at risk.

1:04:06So I think that's definitely on people's minds as well. yeah what do you guys think it would take to shift from that thing you're talking about lauren where where to a lot of people these agencies and the work they do is sort of one step removed from their real life in a way that makes it hard for this stuff to seem urgent uh like there was a there was a bunch of stuff going around the other day that was like okay a lot of people are about to get social security checks and if that gets disrupted you're going to get a lot of people who suddenly have a lot of feelings about what's going on inside the government.

1:04:37Is it something like that that it would have to be like everybody, I don't know, everybody just gets all of their money stolen by Elon Musk? Or like, is there a thing short of that that we're going to hit that all of a sudden I think makes this stuff feel a lot closer to home for people? Do you have a sense of what that might be? It's a good question. I mean, I do think it's going to be something that's going to be much more tangible for people. I think right now it's really tangible for federal workers or people who, you know, have friends and family who are federal workers because it's their jobs.

1:05:05They might be taking this deferred resignation offer. They might be just living in fear of having their jobs suddenly pulled out from under them. I was at a two-year-old's birthday party recently, and it was literally the only subject of conversation. Like, it was so bleak. Oh, wow. Well, you live in D.C. I live in D.C. Like, I live in Northern Virginia. Everyone at this party either worked with or was married to someone who worked with federal government, like that stuff is it hit everybody. And it was I mean, it was it was the only thing on anybody's mind. And I think that stuff is going to start to percolate, right?

1:05:38Like totally the number of people whose jobs are come from grants like that or whose work depends on the companies who get grants like that. Like there's going to be a trickle out effect. But I feel like that part might take too long. And I kind of I don't know, maybe there just needs to be one big thing that happens or maybe it'll be the kind of thing you're talking about. Yeah, I think it's going to hit some people maybe in waves where, you know, your company receives funding from the government that suddenly isn't available or things like that. But yeah, I think certainly if it's something that's more on the order of not receiving a social security check in time, not receiving disability, not, you know, getting your tax return, all those sorts of things would be much more tangible to people.

1:06:24But, you know, maybe there's something short of that. Maybe there's some agency that Musk tries to go into that just feels like a bridge too far for people or, you know, people get a better understanding of how their data might be used in a really tangible way that's just too scary. Or maybe we see, you know, some of these security risks come to light. I think it's hard to know. And it feels like everything's changing so quickly that to predict it feels like, you know, we're never really going to be able to say for sure. You know what will save the economy, though, is the State Department buying$400 million worth of armored Tesla's.

1:07:06They're going to save us all. Everyone gets a weird armored Cybertruck. This story is very strange. Is it? It's one of the funnier moments, I guess, of all of this, this weird computer coup that's occurring. That's what David called it in our headline last week, and I'm sticking with it. Computer coup is very good. But, you know, we're doing fake transparency. We're reading all the contracts we can find everywhere in the government. And a site called DropSite News found a State Department order for$400 million worth of armored Teslas in its 2025 procurement forecast. And they tweeted it, and then everyone got mad at Elon.

1:07:39and then suddenly the state department changed it to armored electric vehicles which is great because i love the idea of an armored vw id buzz just like floating down the streets of some bombed out city it's just but it's yellow so it's charming it's very good who hasn't wanted like an armored mustang mocky like i think about it all the time um so then elon tweeted i haven't heard about this, which is very funny. Just generally funny because what do you think he's hearing about right now about SpaceX and Tesla? He's busy. He's like rolling into federal offices and firing everybody. So then the State Department finally clarified today the plan stemmed from a request by the Biden administration to explore interest from private companies to produce armored electric vehicles.

1:08:31So it's real, right? They did put$400 million worth of armored Teslas on a sheet. because they wanted to. And then they said the solicitation is on hold and there are no current plans to issue it. So it worked. Everyone yelled at Elon about cutting veterans benefits to buy Cybertrucks. By the way, we don't even know if they were Cybertrucks. It's just an armored Tesla's. Could have been armored Model 3s. You don't know. A bunch of roadsters. Who knows? Just one of the weirder moments here, right? Where it's like the self-dealing for Elon can hit. Like maybe Pete Buttigieg was like, we should have armored EVs.

1:09:11The next presidential limo should be an armored Escalade IQ. You don't know. But it said armored Teslas and they changed it and then they said it was going away. So even that little bit of pressure seems to be working, which I think is really interesting. Yeah, I would encourage people. We should put some links in the show notes. But there's there's some really good reporting being done about the ways in which all of these changes are partly chaotic and partly about Elon Musk going after things that might have oversight of him and also putting more things toward SpaceX. And then he gives speeches in the Oval Office about how every contract they've gotten is what's best for the taxpayer.

1:09:51And like, sure. But it is like the self-dealing here, I think, is becoming more obvious. And he just has no interest in hiding it and no reason to hide it. In fact, I think his own financial disclosure is not subject to a records request. Of course. Yeah. That's very good. But yeah, it is like, it is, I, like I said this to Liz on Tuesday show, like I want it to be more complicated than that. And I am increasingly coming around to, it's just, it's just that simple. Like Elon Musk bought the government so that he can solve all of his business problems for himself. I mean, it's, it's a good deal if you can get it.

1:10:30That's what I'm saying. It cost$250 million. It was pretty easy. He bought the government for what Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for. Think about that. Meta spent more on Instagram. I'd rather have the government. it's just like straightforwardly instagram cost more money than i'd say it's government

1:10:48what's that costs 80 times what the government costs i was gonna say we have to take a break but david has a section here labeled deep sigh which is all just links about the gulf of america david go ahead i just i did so okay the the short version of the story here is uh donald trump has decided that it's not the Gulf of Mexico, it's the Gulf of America. And one by one, the mapping companies have given in. And now on Google Maps, it's called the Gulf of America. And Apple Maps, it's called the Gulf of America. And Bing Maps, which kudos to the reporter who checked because no one in history has ever used Bing Maps.

1:11:21Wait, actually, Tom checked and they had it labeled twice in classic Bing Maps fashion. It's both? It was both for a minute and then it was Gulf of America twice and then they finally went just to Gulf of America. Yeah. So the one intern who maintains big maps. Yeah. Got it done. Lauren, I'm particularly curious about this because this is a thing that has been covered a bunch and it's been talked about a bunch and it like became a thing because Trump wouldn't allow the AP access because it kept calling it the Gulf of Mexico and not the Gulf of America. Like part of me is like this is the stupidest sort of nadir of what's actually going on right now.

1:11:57But it also feels like this has become such a thing in the Trump administration in a way that I just cannot figure out. I feel like it's just, you know, they're doing a lot of things that are very impactful, like dismantling entire agencies. And then they're also doing these things that are kind of like, all right, if you don't agree with it, I roll. But it doesn't really change all that much to change the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. But it creates all of this, like, just anger around it and, you know, all of this, like distraction, I think, when we have, you know, a lot of other things going on.

1:12:37And I think it's just all part of this like flood the zone strategy. Yeah, that's fair. Like the who is it? Buddy Carter from Georgia who introduced the bill to rename Greenland to Red, White and Blue Land, which is just a absurd and be like a terrible name. If you elect me to Congress, I will do shit like this every day. Do you understand? Vote Patel. I'm not running anywhere. I'm not even sure. at this point, merely suggesting that I'm actually running for office might send me to jail. But if you send me America every day, I'm not mad at some silliness. Let's make Fortnite the official video game of the United States Congress.

1:13:18Require everyone, if instead of having the head or the secretary of defense pick anything, just whoever wins Fortnite, they get to choose. The Gulf of America thing, by the way, is very silly, but it's also like, you know, it's a virgin in its way because who gets to name things in Google Maps is a somewhat open question. Trump did issue an executive order instructing the mapping agencies in the United States to rename these things. That's where Google Maps follows the instructions. It's weird because some of them have geofenced it and some of them haven't. Yeah. So on some of these mapping platforms, only American users see Gulf of America and worldwide users see Gulf of Mexico.

1:13:58But the press doesn't have to follow those rules. Right. It's just like not like the tech platform is like whatever the government says, like we just do the thing. Like you change it in the database. France is now called stupid. Like that's just the way they're going to do it. But it is that in itself is a useful reminder of how all of this stuff actually works. Right. Like we think of this stuff as as sort of meaningfully authoritative in some way. And it just isn't. It just isn't. It's just it's just words in a database. But the press, like the AP, they're like, look, we also service customers in Mexico in our stories and they haven't changed it.

1:14:34So we're going to go with both or whatever is more clear. And that's weird. Right. You it's interesting to see that the press has a much more nuanced perspective of how to talk about things versus the tech platforms, which are kind of like you can boss us around by just changing your databases. I think that that also shows how, like, even though this is like, you know, kind of a silly like name change that's not going to impact a whole lot. It is also becoming a tool for the Trump administration to say, hey, AP, if you don't follow what we're saying, then we're going to not let you into the White House press room.

1:15:15By the way, today, just now, third day in a row, the White House barred the AP from attending an event because they won't capitulate. There you go. Right. And that's just a straightforward First Amendment violation. Like, whatever you think about how silly this is, the government punishing an editorial outlet for their speech, straightforward First Amendment violation. Yeah. By the way, just in case you're wondering, MapQuest still calls it the Gulf of Mexico. Well, they're on notice now. Big ups for MapQuest. Look, you know Brendan Carlesson's the show. What are you doing? he does even though i'm trying to get him to stop by calling him up by name every week uh there look it's a it's a silly example lauren i think i agree with you but it's such a loyalty test now that it just it just every time i don't know what i i can't remember the last time the urge wrote about the gulf of mexico or the gulf of america or whatever but Like, editorially, we're going to say both because we have readers around the world and, like, not everyone has agreed with this, like, weird metaphysical name change.

1:16:20Maybe we're just going to start calling it the body of water in the middle of our countries. Call it the Gulf. That won't confuse anybody. What could possibly go wrong? That's good. We're going to call it the Gulf. There are no other Gulfs. Yeah, it's just the one. All right. We got to take a break. Everyone take a breather. We got a lightning round coming up. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, we'll be right back. Every story you love, every invention that moves you, every idea you wished was yours, all began as nothing. Just a blank page with a blinking cursor asking a simple question.

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1:18:11All right, we're back with the lightning round. Unsponsored, so extra spicy. But I do want to begin with a bit of a palate cleanser in this lightning round. That was a lot of politics talk. Unsponsored for flavor, by the way, is a phrase a surprising number of people have sent to me over the last week. I still don't know what it means, but I like it. You said it. It means nothing, but I like it very much. It doesn't mean anything. If you sponsor us, you get no control. It remains as spicy as before. which I think if you would like to give us money is a reason to give us money. Here's my ideas.

1:18:41I think we should make it like a skate shirt for unsponsored skaters who are like, I'm too cool to be sponsored. And you just say unsponsored for flavor. That's my idea. Yeah. It's going to be great. Verge merch coming, coming soon. As esoteric and incomprehensible as ever. Exactly. But yeah, we have, we have some gadget news. There's gadget news. Hooray. And in my mind, very important gadget news, which is there's a rumor, pretty sketchy rumor, actually, that the Apple Studio Display 2 will have proper mini LED backlighting. This is what you want to start with. There's nothing more important in my life than the fact that buying a 27-inch 5K monitor right now is a nightmare.

1:19:27It's like willingly being mugged. That's the only way you can describe this. Especially if you're me and you've got two old 27 inch iMacs lying around and you really want to retrofit them into being monitors, but you've watched too many videos of people shattering the glass in the front, trying to, trying to open them up. Every day I look at one, I'm like, I'm going to screw this up so bad, but we're one day I'm going to gin myself into doing it. So I, it's, I, I'm going to, I'm, I'm going to buy a Mac mini. I've convinced myself I'm going to buy an M4 Mac mini. And then you're like, I got to buy a display.

1:19:58And I've been staring at 27 inch iMac for years, a decade. so not compromising right? I want a 27 inch 5k display and the only thing that makes any sense is the Apple Studio display $1 ,500 for exactly the same panel I'm looking at now the worst there's the Samsung Riff which is worse it just doesn't work with macOS as well medium reviews there's a BenQ eh and they're all kind of the same money right they're they're winning a couple hundred dollars each other you get a vision pro and have a really huge monitor you can get a vision pro um there's a bunch of chinese companies now that are are like they're taking the rejected lg 5k panels that apple and others won't use and putting them in really nice cases and selling them for like 800 bucks but then that's a crap shoot that's the one i'm gonna end up buying it's i mean i've come I'm so close.

1:20:56All of them are the same, like, you know, badly backlit bleed, no black levels, ancient panel, like LED LCD panel. Like it's the same panel from a decade ago, fundamentally. So if Apple puts mini LED backlighting in it and it like is good, like the same way that a MacBook display is good. I'm in baby. Let's go. I mean, you listen to me, Tim Cook. I know Brendan Carr listens. I don't know if... Tim, I'm looking at you, buddy. Mac Mini Plus Studio Display is the jam. Like, that's a pretty good... It doesn't save you any money over any of the other things you could do. But it is a kick-ass combination of things.

1:21:40I would be excited about it. I still think that thing is preposterously expensive and will continue to be preposterously expensive. But if it was preposterously expensive and also, like, bleeding-edge technology... Totally. But it's a 10-year-old panel. If I could just gin up the courage, and literally I mean gin up, like drink enough gin to have the courage to take a razor blade to one of my old iMacs and then be fine when I inevitably shatter the screen, I would do it. But I don't like gin. It's like drinking a tree. That is the main problem. Yeah. That's what I've been saying all along. Yeah.

1:22:17And bourbon is no kind of juice to be drinking when you're doing computer work. Absolutely not. Like slurring, you're mad, belligerent. Okay, so for the rest of us here in the real world, though, the other Apple rumor, and I would say this has graduated beyond rumor and is more like thing that is going to happen next week. Tim Cook posted, get ready to meet the newest member of the family. Just posted that on X with a really like AirTag looking Apple logo, which was weird. But the overwhelming theory is that that's going to be the new iPhone SE. I would like to be on the record. of saying no one cares.

1:22:55The iPhone SE is the phone that everyone talks about the most and absolutely no one buys. It's like the overwhelming truth about these devices. Everybody says they want the tiny iPhone, and then Apple's like, here's a tiny iPhone, and no one buys it. This is just what happens. Well, a lot of people buy the iPhone SE. Do they? They do keep making, because it's the cheap one. And really the problem the iPhone SE right now is it's the last one with the button. Yeah. So if they add Face ID to it, then it will kind of look like a more expensive one. Oh, that's an interesting point. Yeah, the rumor is bigger screen, no button, face ID.

1:23:30So it would just be a cheaper, regular iPhone. Which is odd because at some point, is the SE just going to be a rebadged version of like the two generations ago iPhone? And if so, what is the point? That's all it ever is. And they'll increase the RAM so that you can do Apple Intelligence. Right. Extraordinarily useful. Everyone loves it, Apple Intelligence. Yeah, right. It's just a way to sell you a cheaper, older phone as if it's a new phone, which is like, I don't know, strikes me as probably smart on Apple's part, but it's so calculated. I just, I don't like it. It's funny that you led into this being like the thing that everyone actually cares about.

1:24:07And now you're like, this is garbage. Get out of my face. I'm telling you the studio display too with mini LED. This is a blockbuster product. Blockbuster. Like it's lines around the corner. Do you think the camera's still going to suck? I don't care. I put tape over that camera anyway. Because I use a ZV-1 as a webcam, so I don't want to get confused. That's fair. It doesn't matter to me. I just want a great... If you can think of a better way to get a 27-inch 5K display, I think what I'm going to do now is I'm going to buy the M4 Mac Mini. I'll buy a super cheap garbage monitor to just hold me over until the studio display 2 comes out.

1:24:39Or I'm going to take a... I'm going to lick it up and take a razor blade to the iMac. I think it's time for the razor blade. I think we're going to... You got to turn on the ZV-1. You got to point it at the iMac. and listen if you destroy it it's good content no it's not upside it's great content because you'll get injured and it'll be so funny this is great what youtube youtube wants blood is what you're saying yeah pretty much all right this is one of my favorite stories of the week because it's so silly so jeep is in turmoil stelantis is in turmoil as a car company their products got too expensive they forgot to make new products like they're just like what if we didn't make new Chryslers for 10 years.

1:25:17And they're like, crap, we make the same minivan and no other cars. Weird. Just a weird way to run a company. And then they were like, what if we made$100 ,000 Jeep Grand Wagoneers? And everyone was like, why? And they're like, we don't know why. Company in crisis. So now they're going to roll out some new EVs. They've got the new Wagoneer S, which is slowly rolling out to dealerships. People like it. They don't like it. There's some bad YouTuber reviews. We'll see. They're going to launch the new thing called the recon ev which is basically ev version of the jeep wrangler which i think might be cool like maybe where you can take the doors off might be great yeah if it has the same weird problems as wagon rs we'll see but then on top of this they're doing the thing that every car maker has threatened to do for so long and just hasn't done they're putting ads in the infotainment like real ads like every time you stop a car running uconnect 4 a pop-up comes up that says do you want to buy the extended warranty are you serious like full screen that's like a bit from a movie like every time you stop the car oh my god it's very bad people hate it um it says purchase peace of mind and it says you can call to purchase a flex care extended premium plan if you have less than 36 000 which the car should know by the way yeah and then you just clicked x to close it comes back the next time you stop it this is obviously some kind of weird bug but it's obviously also a deal with both the the insurance company with like sirius xm which runs the thing this is a nightmare like this is how you destroy your brand for good yeah that's literally like dystopian stuff like you're going to show me ads every time my car comes to a complete spot is horrifying yeah and it's an ad for of all things an extended warranty in the car that you're in like the classic scam yeah don't do this our jeep hasn't done it because we were running you connect five which is like the android one i don't know if all of them are going to start to do it i the second that happens i'm getting rid of this car yeah i actually think it i sort of hope some company does it just to test people's resolve against it because i think like this question of how How invasive can we be before people will revolt?

1:27:34We've spent a long time testing that as the tech industry has poked at that for a long time and has found over and over that it can kind of get away with most things. I think we're going to show you an ad every time the car stops. People will just set their cars on fire and walk away. Like, I think that's a real that that would do it. And I am sort of hoping somebody actually tests that theory. Stellantis, by the way, confirm this is happening. They say it's a glitch. they quote attributed the persistent nature of the ad to a temporary software glitch that affected the opt-out functionality in certain cases it has been identified and corrected blah blah blah blah so here's what you here's what you're seeing they're building an opt-out system for in-car advertising that went haywire and showing ads to everybody because they're going to build an advertising system that's going to show you ads in their car yep it's not great no this is the weird future this is why i i drive a 1976 chevy chevelle i don't even know if that's a real car but it'd be cool if it did sounds sick it does doesn't it this is why we're gonna split a 2001 escalade and that's gonna be both of our cars forever you know prices on those 2001 escalades have gone shockingly high since the pandemic they're sick cars though all right it's time now for a weekly segment surprisingly popular brendan car is a dummy people are saying it's America's Greatest Meta podcast.

1:28:52The podcast within a podcast. When I say there's now a non-zero chance that I'm going to jail for being the enemy chief of urge, what I mean specifically is FCC chairman Brendan Carr might abuse the power of the state to imprison me. And I'm daring him to do it because I will grift off of that happening for the rest of my life and my children will live in opulence and splendor if you do it. Bring it on. Yeah, like, do you want to double the Neelai's speaking fee for the rest of his career? Like, let's go, Brendan Carr. I'm ready. Bring it on, you big nerd. Brendan Carr is chairman of the FCC. He used to be a regular lawyer.

1:29:25We did an entire decoder about him with Matt Wood, who's the general counsel of Free Press, not the Barry Weiss publication, but Free Press, the First Amendment advocacy shop. They've been around for 20 years. He used to be just like a regular conservative lawyer man, like a gray suit, kind of unstylish big nerd. Now he's a monster, like an anti-free speech monster. He's filed all kinds of investigations against all kinds of broadcast outlets because the FCC regulates the airwaves, which is these ideas about what you should do with those airwaves, which is basically only praise Donald Trump and not criticize him or not do anything that can be even perceived as criticism of him.

1:30:00That's a straightforward First Amendment violation from Brendan Carr, First Amendment Nightmare, censor in chief. He also has big ideas about regulating the internet itself, the content on the internet by reinterpreting Section 230, by issuing just a letter, like an agency reinterpretation of the law, which would run straight into Elon Musk's idea about agency regulations, by the way. Not a lot of coherency in the Trump administration, but that's his idea. But there is a lot of yelling. Like the one thing they all have in common is everybody is yelling and it kind of works. Right. And the idea here is you create a chilling effect, right?

1:30:35You don't know if the government will punish you for your speech because they keep threatening everyone with various punishments that may or may not be legal or may not be effective, but you don't want to get caught up in the hassle. So you just do what they say. that's bad. That, that there's a long history of first moment cases where the chilling effect from the government is the problem, not the actual government suit regulation. That's Brendan. Brendan loves this stuff. He loves the chilling effect. There's reporting this week in the daily beast that he's quote, having the time of his life, threatening media organizations in this way.

1:31:06I know that that's true because he retweeted that story and said, if you have a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life. Ugh. Yeah. If you are an unelected and frankly unstylish government bureaucrat, you should not be bragging about how you're having fun threatening the media. Straightforward. I do not care if you're a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, a raging socialist or whatever. You should not be in the government, unelected, elected, whatever. You should not be a member of the United States government bragging about how much fun you're having threatening the media. It's it's wrong.

1:31:43It's like anti-American. This man is a traitor to our Constitution. I can't say it more plainly than that. He's also, I want to make this clear, kind of an idiot. I mean, this segment is called Brendan Carr is a Dummy on purpose. Right. Like his positions don't have ideological coherency. They have one point, which is to threaten people for their speech using the tools that he has. And he's wrapping it up in the language of defending free speech, right? He's sending letters to social media platforms, which he does not have the power to regulate. threatening them over their fact-checking because something, something, section 230, which he will something, something reinterpret with some kind of letter using some kind of power he doesn't have.

1:32:26Completely inconsistent. Brendan Carr, completely inconsistent. Dumb. He's the person who is like, I'm getting rid of net neutrality and I will disclaim this agency's power to regulate ISPs in this country in any way, shape, or form. So he's given away his power. He's saying, we will not regulate ISPs. We don't have the power to regulate broadband or broadband pricing or collusion or throttling or blocking or any of the stuff that ISPs can do. But I will step through the ISP and directly regulate the content on Instagram. Weird. Ideologically completely incoherent. Yeah, but I don't – the coherence is not the point, right?

1:33:01Like it's not – it's just yelling. The goal is to yell. And you're going to – he's winning a lot. Like the pushback has been, I would say, muted in so many ways. And he's been pretty straightforward about what he's trying to do here, which is go after anyone who seems to be on the other side of Donald Trump. Yep. And then so then this week, his latest broadside, he has said he will investigate Comcast, the big ISP that owns NBC, for its DEI policies in order to root out invidious forms of discrimination. Disclosure, NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast, is an investor in Vox Media, which is a virgin's parent company.

1:33:45They hate me. Like, I just want to be like, Comcast does not like me. We have written endlessly about how Comcast is a bad company that has not supported net neutrality, that has done bad pricing schemes, is a regional monopoly. It is insane for the government to threaten the speech of Comcast because it has some DEI employment policies. Because it is trying very hard to make sure its workforce is diverse. Comcast as a cable company is not really an information provider, right? We don't want them to be an information provider. They're a physical plant company. They run wires in the ground. They send out installers and texts and service people.

1:34:25They run customer service lines poorly. Again, this is not a company that we cover like they're great. And they're not a company that likes me, even though NBC is an investor in Vox. It has nothing to do with us. That's the other side of the house. But I'm saying this because you're looking at an employer of a physical plant. Like wires in the ground, service people on trucks, customer service people taking calls. And to say that they can't try to diversify that workforce, which is about as blue collar of a workforce as you can get right now, is nuts. Like, and Brendan is saying, I'm looking for signs that your initiatives have violated federal employment law.

1:35:05I expect this investigation in Comcast and its NBC Universal operations will aid the commission's broader efforts to root out NVIDIA's forms DEI discrimination across all sectors the FCC regulates. Well, they don't regulate the ISP. Specifically, they have disclaimed the power to regulate the ISP. Hidden inside of that is a declaration of power over this stuff. Yep. So I'm just saying it's logically incoherent. truly, if you just look at all the things they say, they don't add up into a consistent worldview, except we have power and we're going to use it. And specifically, we will use it if we don't like your speech.

1:35:43Brendan, I know you listen. I know you get weird Google readouts of every time we mention your name. You are more than welcome to come on Decoder and defend this stuff. I think it is traitorous. It is such an affront to the First Amendment. I think you should have to answer for it in that framework. And you are welcome to come on our show and try to defend it. But until then, I'm going to call you a dummy every single week until you put me in jail and make me a rich man because of it. There we go. Put that on a t-shirt. Furious. Furious about it. Again, I don't care about your politics. The government-threatening speech in this way is over the line.

1:36:18All right. We're going to end with some gadgets. David has a bunch of gadgets. He's like, we organized this to have a gadget palate cleanser at the end. Yeah, there's just a But, Nilay, we like to keep your blood pressure sort of at a normal level. We let it get high, and then we bring it back down. So, two interesting streaming-y things this week. One is that Apple TV Plus is out now on Android, which is kind of a huge deal. Apparently, it's a really good app. Yeah? I haven't actually used it on Android. I saw Dan Seifert, who was our crankiest reviewer here at The Verge, and now he works at Google.

1:36:55It's like, this is a really good Android app. That's great. Yeah, it works on it works on foldable phones. It works on tablets. It's like Apple seems to have like actually kind of done the thing. Interesting moment for Apple TV because a there's an MLS season about to start and Apple is very bought into making the MLS a success. I think that's gone pretty well for Apple. And this is going to be a big year for Apple. Presumably, this is the last we will see of Lionel Messi. It's going to be a whole thing. So I think we're going to see a lot of Apple soccer stuff this year. Uh, but also severance is back and is, is probably it's either the biggest or second biggest like cultural events.

1:37:33Apple TV plus has pulled off next to Ted Lasso and you, you can see Apple is trying to make something out of this into like, I actually think that Apple trying to make severance a hit is it's wonderful because severance is such a weird and inaccessible show. Yes. like it is such a weird slow quiet it's a puzzle box and it's like Apple's like screw it we're gonna make this one a hit you know like it's fabulous and everybody should watch it but it is a very funny one for Apple to have latched onto this way I get it Ben Stiller's directing it I understand all of it but it's such a weird show for Apple to be like this is a hit it's also like a little bit about how bad a company apple just like it's very good yeah uh do you steer job so steve jobs keurigan like it's pretty close no yeah yeah but anyway if you're not watching separate you should and now you can on android which is interesting next to a bit of uh youtube news which is that tvs are now the biggest platform for youtube more people are watching youtube on their televisions than on their phones for the first time ever on youtube youtube has been talking about how uh tv is its fastest growing platform for like forever like i make fun of youtube executives every time i talk to them about this because it's just the stat that they have used in every press release for like a decade uh but i think this is a meaningful moment we've talked a lot about how netflix and youtube are kind of running at and past each other in some really interesting ways uh youtube is just winning like imagine a fight that there is and youtube is winning it and it's it's blowing up in podcasts it's hugely important as an entertainment platform for like high-end entertainment youtube tv is the biggest name in in its category at this point but the middle one i don't buy it's high-end entertainment on youtube it's not winning but like youtube primetime channels is a thing warner brothers dumped all the movies onto it like it's a it's a place for like capital h hollywood content now in a pretty real way um and now there is this thing that they're like actually tvs big screens are bigger than phones for youtube which is just kind of a wild thing that i never thought would come true it's interesting i wonder if that is at the expense of phones or if it's at the expense of computers right probably some of both uh are people choosing to watch youtube on their tvs because they're no longer watching it on their laptops or their desktops or whatever or is it because they come home at night and they were going to watch something and they would rather scroll tiktok on their phone while something's on tv and youtube happens to be there i think there is a lot of that i mean we've we've definitely heard a lot about like youtube has gone from sort of a second screen phenomenon to a first screen phenomenon in a way that i think tiktok is like a second screen phenomenon.

1:40:36Like you put on The Office sort of quietly while you look at TikTok on your phone. Like YouTube has become The Office, which like is good and bad, I suppose. But it is like, it is a living room platform now in a really interesting way. And they've been chasing that with product stuff. Like they're working with creators to turn things into like seasons and they're doing the deals with the Hollywood studios and stuff. So I think my guess is this push from YouTube to do more subscription-based stuff, do more like high production value stuff, which is a thing YouTube has kind of intermittently done over the years.

1:41:13They had that like YouTube Originals thing a million years ago with Jay-Z that didn't work. And they've poked at this before, but I think this thing where YouTube is going to try to become a high-end streaming service on top of everything else, I think is only going to accelerate because of all this. Because now like I sit down and I open the YouTube app on my TV is a default behavior for people. Clearly. Like it's a meaningful thing. And that, once you have that, you can do anything you want, right? Like that's what's worked for Netflix. It's funny because I have all of YouTube's personalization turned off.

1:41:44And so I open that up in my TV and it's like, please turn the personalization. Like it's like begging you. It's like, we're so useless unless you let us track everything you watch. I'm like, well, that sucks for you. You just get that empty home screen where they're like, we don't know. It's your fault. It's a delight. Thank you. It is a delight. And it's so funny that they won't populate it anyway. They've actively made it worse so that you will be compelled to turn on the personalization. And I'm like, no. If you want to put stuff here, you're more than welcome to put stuff here. No thank you, sir.

1:42:14Yeah, it's good stuff. YouTube is sneakily a very petty platform in that way, and I really enjoy that about YouTube. Two more gadgets. It's one, Allison reviewed the Samsung Galaxy S25 and S25+. We talked a bunch about the Ultra when she reviewed it. It turns out, imagine last year's Samsung phone. You did it. And I think it's inspired a bunch of conversation about sort of what we want from our smartphones now. And I think my thesis with this has been that we're going to have a year full of really uninteresting smartphone launches. and that maybe that's okay. And that maybe we have just fully hit the point where these things are in a meaningful way finished.

1:42:59Like we have done it. They are what they are and we're all gonna kind of move on with our lives and everybody will pivot to the next thing. And that maybe that's okay. Like we had a damn near two decades of smartphones being really interesting and maybe they just won't be ever again. And maybe that's fine. Yeah. Do you think the next thing is the AI hype gadget? Do you think the next thing is a foldable? What do you think? What's your bet? That's a really interesting question. I do think there's a lot of people betting on, well, if you just talk to phones, right? The AI will rethink the form factor.

1:43:35I think there's probably a little bit of that. I think we're due for a really interesting run of wearable design. uh i think this this idea that we just landed on smart watches and that was fine and we fixed it is not correct and i'm i'm already starting to see glimmers from people about like obviously there's glasses happening but like i think rings are going to be more interesting than we have realized so far there's actually like kind of a lot you can do there uh meta is going to roll out its weird wrist bandy thing at some point uh like there's going to be stuff on your body that i think people are going to start to mess with like headphones there's a lot of interesting stuff you can do in headphones that we haven't done yet.

1:44:16That's my theory, is that we're going to, I don't know if any of it will amount to anything, but that's going to be the next place we do real, I think, gadget experimentation is kind of wearables of all sorts, which I'm all for. Let the smartphone in my pocket just be a modem for all the wearables on my body, and I'm down. I love it. This really implies that Bluetooth is going to be better next year. I'm just saying. Bluetooth is fine. You're making a bet. I look forward to, at some point, just spending an hour debating the merits of Bluetooth. And it's going to be you being very upset and me just being like, I'm using Bluetooth headphones right now.

1:44:49I'm going to win this argument right now. The next gadget on your list. You're wearing them right now. I am wearing them right now. Involve a custom proprietary riff on Bluetooth so that they can be good. Yeah. So it's the Beats, Powerbeats Pro 2. Not a great name, but it's fine. They came out this week. Chris Welch wrote about them. V-Song reviewed them. They're cool. Like their shtick is basically their workout AirPods. They have the ear hook that people really like. I really like it. It's just they're more secure in your ears than AirPods are for that reason. They have heart rate tracking in the headphones, which I think is cool.

1:45:27This is what I mean by there's more stuff you can do in headphones. They're starting to do some of that like biometric stuff. I went to Target this morning to buy a pair. I had to explain to the guy that these things had launched today and they existed. and that I wanted them. I bought the quicksand color, which is fine. I was going to buy orange, but then I was like, I'm going to get orange and then I'm going to get on video calls and I'm going to have to explain my headphones every single time. And I just wasn't ready for that. But I think for like 250 bucks, these are pretty good headphones.

1:45:59But your point is exactly correct. The specific reason they are good and the specific reason that I bought them is because they're not just Bluetooth. Right. They have the H2 chip, which lets it do some really good like multi-point stuff it it makes the connection better it's just it is better than bluetooth because it is allowed to be and because only apple is allowed to do these things inside of its ecosystem but like i am currently connected to my iphone my computer and my ipad on my headphones and that is cool and that is not good bluetooth it just doesn't work I have some breaking news for you David do you The Verge was just nominated for the National Magazine Award General Excellence it's the National Geographic New York the New Yorker ProPublica and The Verge hell yeah and also 2004 was nominated for the National Magazine Award for a single topic issue booyah that's pretty exciting that's awesome I do like the idea that one day we'll win this National Magazine Award for General Excellence you have to beat New York and the New Yorker every year.

1:47:08I think they get nominated every year. What is it? It's New York, New Yorker, Atlantic, and New York Times Magazine. The Atlantic is not nominated this year. I know, but those are like the four that just tend to pass it around between each other, right? Yep. Yeah. This is our shot. I love it. I'm ready. We're coming for you, Nat Geo. Our sister publication at New York Magazine. We're coming for you. David Haskell and I are going to have to like lock eyes in the office when we walk past each other. Love it. All right. your headphones are fine. I'm now I'm in a good mood because we got nominated for the National Magazine Award.

1:47:40There we go. Breaking news. I literally got the email. I stopped listening to you because I saw this email. I apologize. We could all tell you stop listening to me. It's fine. But it's good. It saves us all from yet another Bluetooth rant. So thank you to the ASMEs for doing that for us. Look, if I get this award before I go to jail, you know, that'd be pretty good. Just saying to the committee. I think that'd be pretty good. Love it. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be back next week. Every week. whether we're incarcerated or not. That's the Vergecast.

1:48:14And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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