How tariffs will change your gadgets

28:45TikTok was banned, which means they just shut the app down as a stunt. Trump said, I'm giving you 75 days. Here's a waiver from Pam Bondi, the attorney general, that says she won't prosecute you for breaking this law. Everyone said that was good enough, which is weird all into itself. Totally weird. But here we are at the end of 75 days. There's a rumor that Trump is going to do something called TikTok America, where he creates a sovereign wealth fund out of stolen Bitcoin, as near as I can tell. And then that will buy a huge chunk of TikTok. ByteDance will remain on the cap table, which might be illegal because the law says they can't control the app or the algorithm.

29:30So I don't know what's going to happen there. The thing that I have been predicting would happen has apparently happened. Amazon has sent a letter saying they would buy TikTok. the founder of only fans wants to buy tiktok perplexity keeps insisting that it is a serious buyer for tiktok and sending extremely petty notes to kylie whenever she notes that that is doesn't seem realistic really yeah they are like no we're for real and there's just nothing you say to it upstart ai company that really wants you to believe it can buy tiktok um and then And there's Project Liberty, which is Frank McCourt and Alexis Ohanian and Mr.

30:10Beast. And they've got whatever idea about putting TikTok on the blockchain. Don't forget Applovin. Oh, Applovin. And Steve Wynn somehow is involved in that. I'm sure VertiFast listeners are aware of Applovin. I'm excited for more people in America to wake up and be told that a company called Applovin now owns TikTok.

30:38uh it's a lot that's a lot what do you think is gonna happen okay here's where i land on this which is nowhere i think the the thing that i have come around to is i think it is true that there is the money out there in the united states to buy tiktok in a way that would satisfy everybody right like i i'm increasingly convinced that there are actually lots of people who could gin up the money to make this happen relatively quickly. Like it's, it's every investor wants to be part of this. That's increasingly clear. Jeff Bezos just has to sell a support boat, not even the big boat. Right. What I've learned by watching open AI is that like a hundred billion dollars is not that hard to come by.

31:19Like you can just get it. You can have a hundred billion dollars if you want a hundred billion dollars. Uh, so I think that part, I actually am, I thought for a while it was going to be impossible that there was just nobody who was going to be able to do it for a mix of like financial and antitrust. I no longer think that's the case. And I think it's it's pretty clear that the Trump administration would happily just bend its antitrust rules for whoever it blessed as the new owner of TikTok. There is still still to this moment, absolutely no evidence that ByteDance or China is interested in their part of this deal.

31:52Just not especially now that the tariffs have happened. Right. If what you need is the blessing of the Chinese government to do this, why on earth does that seem more likely to happen now than it did yesterday or three months ago or a year ago or the first time Trump tried to do this? Like, if anything, it seems to me the likelihood of this being possible has gone down over time for that reason. And so I think, I think ByteDance might be willing to call the administration's bluff again. and just shut that i like if if i had to bet i think it goes dark again richard i think that the most important thing here is that we're having the wrong discussion about tiktok we're having the wrong discussion about bite dance china the trump administration the discussion we need to have is that we should buy tiktok this is the number one 100 million dollars is not hard to come by any of us will ever have in our lifetime you see everyone's putting in bids for TikTok.

32:54Why haven't we? We need to put in a bid for TikTok. We could own TikTok. This is like, let's buy a bar. It's that conversation because we're getting to that late hour and we're saying, you know what? We could just buy a bar. I've had that conversation so many times in my life. Oh yeah. When I lived in Chicago. We're going to start a band, buy a bar and buy TikTok. Okay, having been in a band, don't start a band. Don't do that. You will come to a point in your life when you have played the Metro in Chicago, you've reached all of your dreams, and the only available next step is to spend time in a van with the people in your band going to mid-sized Midwestern cities?

33:31And you'd be like, nah, it was the wrong choice. Just saying. But at that same period of time in my life in Chicago, we would walk by an empty bar, like on the corner by my house, on our way home, hammered. And we would be like, we should buy that bar, man. That could be the spot. Buy the bar. buy TikTok. It's historically a bad idea. Most of them go out of business. I feel the same is true about our bid for TikTok. I'm actually curious why there are not more bidders, right? This is a historically important asset in the American media ecosystem. I'm honestly curious why we haven't seen the New York Times or News Corporation or whoever, Viacom out of nowhere, Paramount Plus is now TikTok, right?

34:19Like where is that energy from the media conglomerates that all are desperate for distribution? Where's Netflix? Like this is all stuff that would make sense for a bunch of these companies. I understand why Amazon wants TikTok because TikTok shop represents an entire marketing channel that connects to purchases that Amazon does not have. That is a meaningful, I don't know if it's a competitor, but it's just a place where people go to find stuff to buy. And then they buy. Oh, it's definitely a competitor. buy. Amazon has been desperately trying to do TikTok for years now and with essentially no success.

34:55And so like, instead, if you just took TikTok and just plugged in the Amazon logistics system behind it, it's actually the cleanest fit of almost any of these things that I think of. Like Amazon has the cloud services to make the infrastructure work. It has the business angle, which is all the shopping stuff that you just talked about. Like it, it works. Amazon could buy TikTok and the whole thing would make sense immediately in a way that it it's it's much more there's much more of sort of an underpants known thing happening for a lot of these other companies. But I also think I mean, the answer to a lot of these questions is because Trump won't allow it to happen.

35:30Right. Like he is so at the center of all. I don't know if that's true. Trump wouldn't allow Netflix to buy TikTok. You think Trump would allow the New York Times to buy TikTok? Who app loving, which is just a mobile advertising company that everyone has to say app loving is like out here being like, we'll do it. Why not? Like perplexity is like, we'll do it. Like why? Honestly, why wouldn't Netflix, which desperately needs a discovery mechanism, right? They all do. Why wouldn't, why aren't they in this mix? Why isn't Apple in this mix? Like it's just interesting to see how many people must have kicked the tires, right?

36:03They all have big M &A departments. They all have big business development departments. It's funny to see how many people are like, no, that's too messy. Social media is too messy. But you can see how any number of media organizations desperately need distribution, and they're just not in the game. And maybe that makes$100 million. It's too hard to find. We just need to do Quibi again. Where's Katz? Where's our guy? By the way, we should point out, in all fairness to Katz and Perkin Quibi, not a sentence I thought I would ever say. Vertical micro dramas are apparently very popular in other countries around the world.

36:42we should do a story on that it's their time quibi had been free it would have worked season two of golden arm is coming i can feel it that's my prediction and that's that's life um quibi was just early i will point out is a take i will go you're having exactly the same conversation on who will buy tiktok except now there are some bids but we're having the exact same conversation today as we did 75 days ago and the deadline is and tomorrow as you're listening to this on Friday. The deadline is Saturday. It's the fifth. And there's still absolutely no indication that it's for sale. Like this is a bunch of people standing outside of a house being like, I'd like to buy that house.

37:22And the person inside not selling the house, you can't buy a thing that's not for sale. And there's no evidence at all that it is for sale. Yeah. Again, and it's just funny because the number of people who should be beating down the door to buy this thing should be by all rights much higher than it is. Yes. I do think, I mean, we've seen this before, like when Disney kicked the tires on Twitter. And I think, I think there are a lot of companies who understand the, the mess that is social and just are not set up to do it. Like Netflix buys TikTok and immediately becomes a completely different kind of company.

37:57Right. And I think it's not crazy to sign up for that, but it's not just a thing you can do. Right. But every single time we have some streaming executive on decoder or some product person from one of these companies on decoder i get notes from product people around the industry they're like you don't understand what they're all saying in every meeting at disney at paramount plus at max is why can't we have a youtube yeah like they're all staring at the the thing that is going to kill them down the line like at disney there are meetings like why don't we have a youtube at max there are meetings are like, why don't we have a YouTube?

38:33Because they see the thing and there are obvious reasons they don't. But in this one case they could buy a thing that's almost like it. Yeah, no, it's certainly the closest to just going from nothing to something that has been available maybe ever. Yeah, and yet yet it's going to be Apple and everybody. No, no shade to Apple and it's just a very funny name and I'm dying for the TikTok conspiracy theories that will occur if a company named Apple and buys this buys this platform. TikTok by Applovin has a really great ring to it. We'll find out. Either TikTok will exist next week when we do the show or it won't.

39:08Or Trump. We're going to buy it and it's just going to be Detroit Pistons highlights and trucks jumping over stuff. I love you, Richard. And I'm here for it. We're buying TikTok and it's just us forcing Richard to purchase and rehabilitate a bar. Yep. That's it. Like, you've got to find one. You've got to do the TikTok thing. You know, like the time-lapse video of like tearing down the drywall and putting it back up. we're going to make Richard install gray floors in one of those like bronze chandelier things it's going to be great, I'm excited for it alright, we've got to take a break, we're going to come back we're going to start talking about tariffs, it's going to happen we'll be right back

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41:59All right, we're back. We have to talk about tariffs. We do. It is the only story, like in the biggest way. Usually with politics, we have to draw some line to like phones. You know, like here's why The Verge is covering politics. And I want us to cover politics. We do it. we cover policy very deeply like usually you have to make an argument for politics and policy in our stories right we we cover consumer tech there's a line to politics and policy and i want us to explain why we cover things like the fcc or why we cover things like the national institutes of science like there's or the national institutes of health like there's research that gets done at the federal level there's policies at the federal trade commission all this stuff affects the gadgets we make tariffs is much different because the prices are just going to go in the supply chains that create all the hardware is going to go sideways.

42:52And there's not a great argument for any of these tariffs right now. So Trump announced them. The stock market literally crashed while he was speaking at the White House. You just saw the numbers go down. I watched CNBC today. People I know, the anchors at CNBC, just openly confused. Carl Quintanilla, who is a great anchor at CNBC, a friend, he said, you're burning down the house to cook a cheeseburger, which is an incredible quote. That is good. Steve Mnuchin, who is the Treasury Secretary in Trump One, said to Sarah Eisen, I believe, don't think too hard about how these tariffs were calculated.

43:29I mean, that's the thing. Like, I think when you say there's not a great reason for it, I think that is that is actually like far too kind. Like, this is this is pure nonsense. And it's nonsense. What we have seen from the reaction, like you cannot find someone who can give you a measured reason why this is a good idea. Right. You can find something. You can find chat GPT, which will yes, which will deliver you the calculation that is used to calculate tariff rates. Well, so but that's the thing, right? And it's insanity all the way down because it's like you rewind back through the campaign and everybody was like, well, Trump clearly doesn't understand how tariffs actually work.

44:10It's just like a thing he likes to say. It's like a hobby horse of his. He won't do them. And then immediately took office and started doing them. And everybody's like, well, they won't be as bad as he thought. And so over and over and over, the people who believed in him as an economic driver for the United States were like, he won't do this. And then he did this and it was so much worse than anyone, anyone thought it was going to be. And then the more we've learned about why it is the way that it is and how it was calculated and how it was created and how it came to be, the more the only possible logic has become none of this makes any sense.

44:46It is true. The United States trade representative put out a fact sheet about the tariffs with a formula in it that was supposed to explain how they calculated these tariff rates. And the formula contains a bunch of Greek letters, two of which, when you back them out to the numbers, just cancel each other out. What you have is a trade deficit divided in half to calculate the rate, and then the floor is 10%. And the rates, the tariff rates, are against islands that have nothing but penguins on them. But it's so important to keep saying, that's nothing. What you just described is nothing. And they're described as reciprocal tariffs against countries that have no tariffs on us?

45:18No. None of this makes any sense. These are not trade deficits. It's countries we buy things from. Like, those are not the same thing. It's like, I saw a thing this morning that was like, you don't have a trade deficit from your dentist because your dentist doesn't buy anything from you. You buy things from your dentist. Like, it's just nonsense. sense. And we're at a point now where it's like we've gone way beyond even like even now the Trump administration being like, this is about fentanyl crossing the borders and this is how we punish the countries who allow this to happen. That seems reasonable compared to where we are now, which is just they went in and they were like, oh, well, we have a trade deficit with them.

45:57Let's tariff the opposite of that and that'll sort it out. That's nothing. So I want to say there's been a lot of reporting, including from us, that it's the AIs that come up with this kind of math. And it is true. ChachPD comes up with this math. Claude comes up with this math. Grok, important one in the Trump administration, because that's Elon's, comes up with this math. Gemini will come up with this math. But if you switch to Gemini 2.5 Pro, which everyone got mad at us for ignoring last week, but now I'm using it, because y 'all yelled at us. And you ask it to show thinking on this prompt.

46:32It's basically like, the user's an idiot like like it's like literally the second one analyze the user's premises the user assumes tariffs are a simple direct tool to achieve balanced trade and that a single calculation method can achieve this across countries and then it just scrolls down and it gets to a place it says address the easy way request and it says given the complexity there is no easy way to calculate tariffs that will precisely bounce trade the premise itself is flawed so look i'm not saying that they used ai or not i'm just saying maybe they should have used gemini 2.5 pro which would have gently let them down it's tough i am i'm generally suspicious of the like they wrote this official document with ai argument i think like people are dumb is usually a more compelling outcome than the like the occam's razor is people are stupid not people used AI.

47:27This one is really, really, really hard to disagree. Like you put it in and over and over people have run this experiment over and over again. You can get it to give you that answer as long as you ask a stupid question, which no human economist will give you that answer. No, this is what I mean. Like the reaction has been so universal that it is, it is unreal. Anyhow, look, this is going to affect the price of iPhones. It will affect the price of the nintendo switch 2 we have a piece uh trying to guess how much the price will go up with the switch 2 uh it's a debacle of epic proportions for the auto industry that's a quote we ran uh in a story that andy hawkins wrote we're gonna track all this fallout across the board there's a chance that trump just walks them all back that's a thing that he does all the time there's a chance that this is all just a weird racket we we've been calling it gangster tech regulation he just wants people to deal so he he does this gangster stuff we'll see how this shakes But I actually wanted to make this real for our audience.

48:24I think you can go get a bunch of pie in the sky tariff coverage everywhere. But we cover people who make things, right? Not just big companies, but small companies. We love an indie hardware maker here on the show. So you might have heard me talk about a company called Toonshine before. And the founder of Toonshine is a guy named Tobias Butler. I've read notes about tariffs from him on the show before he's emailed me. um i was like i should write a story about the toonshine and tariffs and then all this news happened and i thought to myself oh we should just have tobias on the show so let's bring him on now tobias butler you are the founder you the sole proprietor of toonshine welcome to the roach cast thank you neli glad to be here so as you as tobias knows i have a toonshine i love it explain quickly what it is so toonshine is a lo-fi album art display that uses this kind of pixelated very tasteful almost artistic screen to automatically show the album artwork for the music you listen to works with spotify apple music and sonos i definitely recommend like if you're listening to this on a podcast app checking out a picture of it it's a very visual experience and often it'll kind of click with people uh but yeah it's basically supposed to add this nice ambient artwork to decorate your room and it connects with the kind of music you like and help represent that visually in your space so i started talking to tobias because i demanded features and he delivered them.

49:46So I will point out that you just added Shazam support to the TuneTrend. So if you're listening, if I'm listening to vinyl at my house, I can just push the button and the album mark shows up there. It's choice. I love this thing. Cool. Really appreciate it. It's just you, right? There's no one else at the company? Yeah, it's just me. Increasingly, I'm kind of doing some things with contractors. I just recently got set up with a contract manufacturer based in the US in Chicago, doing contracting with fulfillment companies to actually mail things out, which is great because that means that I don't have to be home every weekday of every week and tune signs will still go out to people.

50:25But as far as the product development, coding, marketing, admin stuff, that is all me. And there's a part of the story, which I am very taken by, which is you worked at a tech company and you quit to start this company, right? Yes, that's basically correct. I quit kind of thinking okay i have like a little bit of a nest egg enough to sort of explore different options because i sort of thought okay there's a good time in my life i don't have kids yet i my budget is still pretty flexible maybe i should just see if there's other things that i like that aren't web development which is basically what i was doing before uh and i basically discovered that i did want to continue to do coding but i really wanted to give toonshine a try it was just giving me good indications that it could be a business, not only that I would be able to start and had the skills enough to get pretty close, but also that it was something that people were wanting.

51:21My friends were asking about it. And I love music. I'm a musician. I studied music in school. So working on a music product just sort of made sense. So that's why I decided to give it a go. This might be a really stupid question, but it is like before the now times is when you go to start a business like this and you're like, OK, I'm starting to source hardware. I kind of know the thing I want to build. I have to meet. Do you have to become a tariffs expert anyway? Like, is that a thing that's on your mind as you're starting a company like this? I mean, prior to the first Trump tariffs, which applied a 25 percent tariff to a lot of things.

51:56So I've always had tariffs on the circuit boards that I was getting from China and the LED screens, which I think are also in that classification, or at least among the classifications that get those things. I mean, I think that, yes, you are thinking about this. However, if you're trying something out for the first time, especially if it's your first time doing this as a hardware founder, there's going to be so many unknowns anyway that that is probably just going to be one of many unknowns that you encounter along the way. I think people who are maybe on their second or third go are probably thinking a couple steps ahead on this, which, of course, is much harder to do now that things are changing like twice a week.

52:38But so that's it's it's a mixed answer. Let me ask you just a really reductive question, because I have the product and I like it. I see that it's like thoughtfully created, but at a very abstract level, it's a circuit board, a microcontroller, some Wi-Fi chips and a display. And then I think you make the case. I actually discovered this product because there's videos of you on TikTok making the cases. And I was like, well, that's cool. I'm assuming the wood for the cases is not tariffed yet, but it might be soon. We'll find out. So I, for a long time, I was doing the assembly myself, but I don't have a CNC machine to actually carve the case out of the material.

53:17I am going to continue to, there's going to be some special editions, limited runs, and I will continue to assemble those at home just because I think it's very, I like having that physical connection to the product. And while I can't scale up enough to do all of these things, I think people really like knowing that they bought something that was, you know, not artisanal. I'm really just screwing it together, but they like having that connection. Right. But those parts, right? Wi-Fi, chip, controller, circuit board, display, all of that was coming from China before, right? You weren't getting that domestically.

53:51And so you're paying some rate, and the rate might have gone up because of Trump won tariffs. but you could basically go to suppliers and say, I want to buy this stuff and get prices back. Yes, yes. And the easiest way to do that is to get on Alibaba. People are super responsive. You hear this, Simone Yetch, the robot creator was talking about this recently where you reach out to a bunch of manufacturers in the US and Europe and your response rate is really low. I think some of that is just because they are not as optimized for small clients. I think some of that is just a company culture thing that's pervasive here.

54:30But if you go on Alibaba, you're able to find these manufacturers, buy from them, get samples, and everything is consolidated into a single app. It's sort of a weird janky app, and they're a little bit iffy with their push notification policies. But you can talk to everybody in the same app, and it makes the whole thing very streamlined. So I emailed you when the first round of tariffs in this Trump administration was happening. You said, my prices will go up and down. I'm not sure what's going to happen. Now we're here in the second round. Who knows what's going to happen? What's going to happen to Toon China?

55:04Are your prices going to go up? Is the company still sustainable? Yeah, so I was kind of before I was fell asleep last night, you know, I'm doom scrolling a little bit and I'm just like, oh, no, like, maybe I am. I'm gonna have to raise prices. And when I double checked my numbers this morning, because I just put out a video talking through the effects I think it might have. It looks like what actually came out to was basically a 10 % increase in the price of each manufactured to shine and the real life and the reason it's not the full like 54%. 54 % increase that is going to be applied as the tariffs from China is for a few reasons.

55:42One is that some of this stuff was already tariffed. In fact, much of this stuff was already tariffed. So the increase is more like 25-ish percent, not the full 54. The other thing is that the labor cost, like the most expensive parts of the Toonshine are screen, circuit board, and labor at the moment, the way I'm manufacturing it. labor cost is not tariffed because that's done in the US. So that is not included in how the tariff multiplier would work. And the third thing is that I actually did recently meet someone who might be able to move some of the parts into their spot in Wisconsin with very competitive prices.

56:21So I'm getting samples there. I think that's pretty unusual. I was kind of amazed. There's not a lot of PCB manufacturers in the US. People talk about how I think Starlink's SpaceX stuff, is like one of the biggest pcb facilities but in terms of just quick low volume uh and by low volume i mean like a thousand to three thousand ish uh manufacturing for pcbs is not very common but this guy has given it a go and um i thought that was exciting that i might be able to beat that so all of that together amounts to a smaller increase than you might think based on the 54 but it's still an increase and i'm making orders of a thousand and so if it costs 10 more that's like thousands of less dollars in profit for me for each batch of Toonshines that's coming in.

57:08And all the indications are that it could still be profitable. But since I've been scaling up in each order of products that I make is bigger than the last and it eats into the profits I've already made. And because I had legal costs associated with filing a patent, then I don't know for sure yet, but it looks like it should still be okay. And especially if I can get a little bit more efficient at marketing, which is my second biggest cost after manufacturing, then I could potentially make up for that. So if I'm getting more organic social reach, or if I'm doing better PR, then that helps because I'm less reliant on paid marketing channels.

57:47So that's kind of how I've been thinking about it. It seems like part of the challenge here is the not knowing of it all. Even just in the last two months, we've gone back and forth so many times. And And like you talk about ordering these parts and like it's not like this is a thing you can do on a sort of day by day basis, depending on the state of the economics of it all. You're having to make sort of months long decisions at a time. Right. Like how do you even do that in a moment like this where everything is up and down from like 15 minutes to 15 minutes? Yeah, I mean, the uncertainty is definitely a huge factor.

58:21And I think my reading is that a lot of the stuff that's happening with the stock market is related to uncertainty as much as anything else, because we just don't know what's going to happen. for me um there are some funny day-to-day things like uh if i'm getting parts shipped um like over the ocean for example the delivery times can be very unpredictable but often this is a much cheaper alternative so i literally had a package that i think like got delivered yesterday and i don't know if the timing perfectly works out but the tariffs did seem a little high so i was Like, darn, like if I just arrived one day earlier, I could have saved like 400 bucks.

59:01But what I think about really, like I can sort of plan this stuff out. But as I was saying, when you start this stuff, there's so much uncertainty. And I think about the people who are starting Kickstarters and they're trying to make their best guess at whether they have a viable business model. because there's kind of an epidemic, I'm sure you've noticed, of people who raise a bunch of money on Kickstarter and then ultimately realize like, oh, this business doesn't actually work though and so products lose support. I think there's a much greater risk of that now because you have less certainty about how much money you want to raise on top of all the uncertainty you already had.

59:36Your prices might go up. I think it just adds another factor on top of all the other risks starting a business that might make people think twice about whether they want to turn their little home-built DIY Arduino or Raspberry Pi gadget into a real product, which is a bummer because I would love to see more diversity in hardware, more power to smaller hardware players to experiment with all these ideas that are out there that aren't really seen as much in a very homogeneous hardware market. That seems like the important part, right? That you are living a version of the American dream where you had a job.

1:00:13You said, I have an opportunity to start a company. I can open the Alibaba app and connect with a bunch of suppliers halfway around the world and start a business. And now there's a regulatory environment that might make that surprisingly harder. Do you think you would have started Toonshine right now with the tariff uncertainty? It's hard to say. I might have tried to price it differently. The way my initial strategy was working with the pricing is that... Thank you. I would read things online that were basically saying, take the price of your materials and multiply that by four. And that's what you should sell it for.

1:00:50I am not doing that. which has interesting side effects where I basically am very resistant to selling in retail environments because they immediately want to buy your product wholesale for half of the sticker price. And for me, that basically puts me underwater and I can sell direct to consumer better than that anyway. But when I was first making these, I kind of had the attitude of like, well, more likely than not, if these sell, I can get the price down some way. I can take the time once i know that people will buy them for the price that i've set it at then i can maybe i can scale up maybe i can find a different supplier i can get better at this and that um so i oh through that process i already brought the price down a lot um it's going back up now but um i honestly like since i came from the software world i'm not so certain that i would have had the the foresight anyway to be able to incorporate this into the overall calculations I was just sort of thinking, all right, I'm going to start small.

1:01:49I'm going to sell 50, then I'm going to sell 100, and then 200, 500, 1 ,000. Price comes down a little bit each time, and we're getting more and more into healthy business territory where I can look ahead in the next year and be like, yeah, this is probably going to work. But as I said before, there's so much uncertainty with these things. Having another thing thrown into the mix does not, I think, make it more likely that people will try experiments like this. Why not just throw it in and raise the price? I mean, I think we're going to see a lot of people who are just like, ah, tariffs, everything's more expensive.

1:02:21Why not do that? It's a good question. I think part of it is just the fact that I'm somewhat new to this. And I think I'm maybe a little bit more nervous than many people would be about my customers' loyalty. I thought about that when I was switching to manufacturing outside the house. And I did get people who emailed me who were saying, oh, this is a bummer. Do you actually have any that you still made with your own hands that I can get? Like, literally, somebody asked me to like sign one, which was funny, but and send it out to him. So I do stress a little bit about customer loyalty. I think I've done a pretty good job of building that by just trying to be really transparent, talking about how this process works, trying to be like the opposite of whatever corporate sheen you usually get from marketing communications.

1:03:12So maybe I've built up enough goodwill where people would say, hey, like, yeah, this is still fine. On the other hand, I get some repeat customers, but not a ton. And so those people, I wouldn't necessarily have built up that loyalty to. So I mean, coming from a big, I used to work at change.org where we would just A-B test everything. It's a little harder to A-B test a price. I kind of wish I could do that, even though it's maybe a little ethically questionable. but I at least for now I want to try it out I think that 200 as a starting price it's already a somewhat expensive gadget it's a very niche thing I'm not pretending this is like a toaster or a microwave oven or anything it's it's an art piece basically that you can get from your home or not um 200 is I think a pretty fair price but it is a bit high and so I want to keep it there and hope that it works out, basically.

1:04:07I think I bought a walnut one that you actually did make by yourself. You said two things that are really interesting to me. One, you said American and European manufacturers kind of don't respond. They're just like not in the game the way that the Chinese supply chain is just in the game all the time. And then you said, there's a guy in Wisconsin who might be in the game now. The point of the tariffs is to get you to move your production to Wisconsin, right? The point of the tariffs is to get more of the supply chain in the United States. Do you see that happening? Right. I mean, you obviously have at least one person in Wisconsin who wants to help you out.

1:04:40Do you see more of that? Is that ecosystem actually developing? I, my experience with this is somewhat limited, but the, as you said, the, the Chinese supply chain is just so well set up for this stuff. Uh, there is absolutely no American answer for Alibaba and just how easy it makes the overall process. Maybe there are individual suppliers out there that can compete on price, especially with the tariffs. And maybe they do respond. But having everything so streamlined, it feels like you're kind of going back to the previous century when you are trying to do things with American manufacturers. It's not out of the question that maybe someone's out there trying to build the American Alibaba.

1:05:24That would be awesome. Like if someone's out there and feels that spark, you have my full encouragement. But there's a lot of stuff that's also just not made here. I mean, the ESP32 microcontroller that I use, it's just it's a Chinese company. Like, you know, maybe something using the TSMC factory in Arizona or wherever that is, is going to come up and make a competitor to that. But how long does that take? How long does it take to build the ecosystem of libraries that support this operating system and and all of this stuff uh i think some people make these led screens in the u.s they don't have pricing on their website it's a you know it's one of a contact us for sales sort of deals um but it's it's lots lots of obstacles because uh they just really have a system for this that's modern in a way that we do not how long do you think it would take to build a system here i don't know that i would say that's out of my wheelhouse but uh certainly almost certainly longer than a single presidential term for for one i asked that question because i think that's the answer go ahead dude well i was just the alibaba of it all i think is really fascinating and is a piece of this that i think is not getting talked about a lot that it is that this it is just so much easier and faster and more straightforward to do the kind of stuff you're talking about on alibaba and in china than just about anywhere else so i i am curious like where that puts you sort of long term like let's assume the the tariffs are real uh it feels to me like you have a couple of options one is like hope everybody moves part production to the u.s one is like find new parts that they make in the u.s or two is just figure out how to incorporate the costs uh is the answer one of those is it some mixture of those i think it will be a mixture i I mean, I ultimately the PCB people in Wisconsin, I didn't switch to them because I was like, I'm going to buy American made.

1:07:22But more because I think the contract manufacturer I was using, I think they were getting PCBs made in India. And I actually didn't check how much the tariffs are going up on India, but I think they were 10 percent. But still, I switched because they were able to beat the cost when they incorporated shipping. And when they incorporated that tariff, they were able to beat the cost. They were also able to make a 3D printed part and they were down to bundle it together. They even now to do some electronics engineering for free to throw that in, which is huge because, you know, for these 500 ,000 here, that really adds up at the point that I'm doing this business.

1:07:56So I think it'll be a mix. And maybe I just kind of put a call out on my Instagram and TikTok where I was saying, hey, if you know people in the US who might be able to do this, like, sure, I'm open to it. But I haven't seen that. I mean, I used to be getting cardboard boxes with foam that just protected during shipping. Price in the US,$18. China,$4. Wow. So that's 350 % more. I would be a bit surprised, but it doesn't mean it's not out there. The other thing is that I, just by the nature of my business, I think I do have a little bit more flexibility. I don't have people on payroll yet. I'm not even on payroll yet.

1:08:35Hopefully this year. But I don't have people on payroll. If you're Apple, and they'll probably maybe be able to get some exemptions, but if it is a 10 % or 20 % increase in the price for your items, that is billions of dollars. It represents tons of people's jobs and an entire big corporate strategy ocean liner that needs to be turned. Whereas for me, I do have a bit more flexibility because it is just me. And so I don't have to fire people because of a 10 % price increase, which is great. Maybe it means that I'm skipping on the fancy four-pack of beer and instead drinking Pacifico a little more.

1:09:19But it's more flexibility. Tim Cook switching to Pacifico is actually the most obvious. Yeah, that's his first thought. put this in a range for me right there's terrace went up and maybe your costs go up 10 and you're drinking sadly some cheaper beer and that's fine and then what's the number that says this is no longer sustainable um i mean if if my manufactured costs went over a hundred dollars that's sort of that's kind of game over i mean it's certainly without raising the price i don't know maybe there is a market like maybe you know maybe in a couple months people will be like well like my tv was like 900 and it used to be 400 so a toonshine for 250 doesn't actually seem so crazy but for if it were over a hundred dollars i i would be very surprised if people would be able to pay what would make sense uh to to make that sustainable certainly with retail because i if I kept it at$200 and I'm paying$100, I literally would make zero on each retail sale unless I get a good deal.

1:10:28I'm only in one store right now, and she's sort of a friend of a friend, and she gives me a little bit more than 50 % of the cost. But if I'm aiming to be in Urban Outfitters someday, I don't think they're going to cut me a good deal. And that suddenly goes off the table, I think, if my manufacturing costs go over$100. Tobias, what do you think is next for ToonTrend? What are you looking at for? I'm really going for consistency this year. I just placed an order for a thousand, which is my biggest order yet. And now that the manufacturing and the filament is out of my house, I'm just trying to get that running on a kind of clockwork basis while I can add new features.

1:11:03So I really want to support more home music servers this year. Plex, Rune, like Logitech Media Server. People are always emailing me more and more bespoke media servers. I want to support as many of those as I can. trying a special edition maybe some colors just got some samples in and maybe a big one maybe a vinyl record sized one so that's those are the things that are on my mind right now as soon as you said Rune a bunch of Vergecast listeners started like fist pumping at their phones the Rune and Plus audience here on the Vergecast is strong I see you Rune fans when you make the big one let me know built in microphone for the Shazam that's the game That's sort of maybe it.

1:11:49$5 ,000 TuneShine with an AI microphone in it. Yeah, it's got like eight mics so that it knows which direction the music comes from for some reason. Why not? I love it. Tobias, thank you so much for joining the broadcast. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Bye. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back with Lightning Round and America's favorite podcast for the podcast. We'll be right back. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin? Or what that clunking sound from your dryer is?

1:12:24With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. 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. What do you see? Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash Mac. Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them.

1:13:17It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us. With eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. Alright, we're back. It's the lightning round. Unsponsored. For flavor. Does it need an ellipsis? There's been some debate about whether it's unsponsored dot dot dot for flavor or if it's just unsponsored for flavor.

1:13:51so i don't know you you tell me i will tell you that we the decoder tagline which is big ideas and other problems is a impossible to say tagline like it looks really good with that built-in ellipsis right big ideas and then every week i say it i'm like uh this sucks so i might just be having like it's hard to say you try saying it so i might just be having a response to that ellipsis I think the pregnant pause is like good, right? It's unsponsored for what? Flavor. Like that makes sense to me, but I don't know that you want to formally. You tell me. Maybe it's like big unsponsored little for flavor.

1:14:33Maybe that's kind of, that's the vibe. The reason I keep saying it is to cement in the listener's mind the idea that if something is sponsored, it lacks flavor, which is the entire media now is just branded content deals, right? It's just everything is sponsored or paid for. And I just want you to think every time you see that, you just think there's less flavor here. It's good. It's also a way to make sure that this show never makes any money ever again. So we're doing great. But we don't lack for flavor. Richard just sighing. He's like, what have I signed up for? All right. It's time. Oh, my goodness.

1:15:15Richard, have you been here for this yet? America's, it's a top two podcast within a podcast. Again, I keep getting emails about Munch Squad on My Brother and My Brother and Me, and trust me, I hear you. I love it too. But it's time for America's other favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. We're so bad. It's my first one. It's, honestly, I'm thrilled for you. And this is the part where we just sort of sit quietly and Eli talks for like an hour and a half. It's great. It's my favorite part of the show. People have asked me if I write these, and the answer is no. I just start yelling.

1:15:47And that's how much it builds up with me, within me, week after week. All right, this week on Brendan Carr is a dummy. Two things. One, last week we pointed out that he's threatening all kinds of companies, that he will investigate them and not let them do deals unless they cancel their DEI programs. Because he just likes making threats. And so this week, T-Mobile closed a deal with a fiber company called Lumos. They're doing a joint venture to roll out fiber. But only after it dropped all of its DEI pages. This is the dumbest story in the world. T-Mobile had a bunch of pages up that outlined, quote, a culture of fairness, respect, and inclusion.

1:16:23They were online until March 26th. They took them down. Deal got approved. Bing, bang, boom. We're closed. And because this is the current world and this is Brendan Carr, the pages, they changed the pages. They don't say DEI anymore. The URL that said diversity, gone. gone. Many of the groups that were listed that championed diversity, gone. But they're just kind of different pages. Yeah, they just moved them. Good enough for Britain and Gar. They say stronger together now instead of diversity and inclusion, which literally all that does is it doesn't get caught in whatever scraper the AI tool is doing on their website.

1:17:04Like, what we've learned about Doge is that Doge is just like running a bunch of AI checks to see when they use words like probation and diversity and trans anything. And this is the same kind of thing. They're like, oh, we're just going to 404 a couple of webpages. Don't look over here at these webpages, which are different because they say together and not inclusion. So it's fine. This is the level of stupidity we have reached to. And apparently it worked for Brendan Carr. that there are words you just can't say. I want to be very clear about this, David. And it works. That's the worst part.

1:17:40That's all he, that's all Brendan Carr wanted. It's true. The transcontinental railroad is broke now. That's what you need to take away from this. You know I'm right. You know that's how it's going. So that's one. That happened, right? And that's just naked corruption of the dumbest kind. Like, there's just stupid. But it worked, and that's just the nature of corruption. And am I saying that telecom companies aren't inherently kind of stupid and corrupt? I'm not saying that. I believe telecom companies are inherently kind of stupid and corrupt. And whether it's promising the chairman of the FCC that upon leaving, he will get a plum job as president of the lobbying organization for our nation's wireless carriers, which is a real thing that just recently happened to a GPI or saying we're going to remove the word diversity and replace it with the words stronger together.

1:18:24It's all just corruption. And that's fine. Stupid, a little bit racist, but the sort of corruption we're used to. Then there's Brendan just saying things that are demonstrably untrue in ways that are quite honestly easy to check. So this week, the Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives said they were very concerned about Brendan's general censorious attitude and they wanted an investigation. So ranking member Frank Pallone from New Jersey, ranking member Doris Mitsui from California and Yvette Clark from New York wrote a letter to Brendan saying, We write to express deep concern over your actions to target and intimidate news organizations and broadcasters in violation of the First Amendment.

1:19:07These troubling actions assault the constitutionally protected freedom of the press and violate the FCC statutory prohibition against engaging in censorship. Directing FCC staff to devote time and resources to bogus investigations constitutes a violation of the law, gross mismanagement, extreme waste of funds, and an abuse of authority. I just want to point out that that's what it sounds like when you write it. Neelize what it sounds like when you just yell it into a microphone. I'm very mad about it. It's the same thing. They're just saying the same stuff you've been saying. It's the same thing.

1:19:36It's all the same stuff. So they shared a letter with the Office of Inspector General, and they are asking for an investigation into Brendan. Okay. The government's fighting. Brendan is furious about this. Oliver Darcy at Status, who is doing an amazing job reporting on Brendan Carr, I should say, and often gets comments back from Brendan, which is fascinating, asked Brendan about this. And Carr, in response, accused the Democrats of weaponizing the country's communications laws against Republicans, which is wild because he is the one being accused of weaponizing the communications laws. And in response, he's saying, even asking you about this and saying I'm injuring the First Amendment is weaponizing those laws.

1:20:19And then he points out in classic Brendan Carr fashion. And then he claims in classic Brendan Carr fashion that everything he's doing is fine because he thinks the Democrats who preceded him were doing it worse. So he says, if your last name was Soros, you got special streamlined treatment on an expedited basis by the previous FCC. If your last name was Musk, then you got millions of dollars worth of awards revoked for partisan political reasons. If you were a conservative outlet, then your FCC licenses and distribution deals were held up or subject to government-backed cancel campaigns. This is demonstrably untrue.

1:20:52Like, fully and completely untrue. Because one, if your complaint is that the previous administration was corrupt and politically motivated and biased and fair, that does not mean that you should do it too. It just doesn't. It's actually an admission of guilt. It says I too am corrupt. You're saying these people were evil, so I'm going to do the same stuff. That's bad. That just makes you a flunky of a different stripe. But you're still a flunky. second the if your last name was musk and your licenses got revoked that's because starlink was trying to defraud the government into getting grants by saying it would provide service to like shopping malls like they were they were making fake maps you can read it's on our site we covered all of this ars technica covered all of this in detail the reason starlink wasn't getting awards for these rural broadband programs is because they were saying they were going to cover densely populated suburbs with shopping malls in them, not rural America.

1:21:49Which Starlink cannot do. It doesn't matter if they can or can't do it. They were looking at the maps and saying, no, that's not correct. This is not what you should be doing. So then Carr goes on to say, for those that have benefited from the two-tiered system of justice that prevailed during the Biden years, even handedness may feel like discrimination, but that does not make it so. This is also just fully warped thinking, right? If you think that there was a two-tiered system of justice in the Biden administration, you don't pull the pendulum back by investigating broadcast outlets in violation of the First Amendment.

1:22:23That is absolutely wrong. It is just, it is censorious. It goes against the American system of justice. And it is so outside the realm of authority for the FCC that it, like, boggles the mind that I talk about it every week. This is not what you want the Federal Communications Commission doing. You do not want Brendan Carr, who is unelected, saying that he alone can control what is distributed over the airwaves because he understands what public interest is and he can reopen investigations that like many, many, many former FCC chairmen and commissioners from years past have said are inappropriate.

1:22:59This is not what he wanted to do. And then on top of that, I have done a lot of reporting on this over the years, and I know that what he's saying about the Biden administration is fully bullshit. I know this. Because the problems in the Biden administration were that big telecom companies made the Biden FCC corrupt and ineffective, so it could not forcibly open up our nation's networks. They could not open up cable companies. They could not do net neutrality. They could not get the votes to regulate our systems to make sure that they respected free speech by being open to all. And in fact, it's not Republicans or Democrats that prevented this from happening.

1:23:37It is the big telecom companies that got together and made it impossible for Biden to nominate Gigi Sohn to the FCC, completing his commissioners of Democrats so they could pass votes. We did a whole decoder on this. And in that decoder, the star witness on that episode of decoder, we talked to a ton of people. You can go listen to it. The star guest was the CEO of Newsmax. Who is not a Democrat. Chris Roddy, the CEO of Newsmax. I'm telling you, this man is not a Democrat. We are not aligned politically on a number of things. But he came onto our show and said, the problem is the big cable companies are trying to keep Gigi Sohn out of the SEC so that there are not votes to open these systems up and actually protect access.

1:24:28Here, let's just run the audio. Here's Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, talking to me on Decoder last year about the actual problem in the cable industry under the Biden administration. The cable industry is a bit of a racket, and the big broadcast companies are part of the racket, and they benefit it. The people that get screwed are the consumers, the cable customers. and so the way the racket works is if you own a lot of television stations that a local cable company needs your abc cbs mbc fox affiliates they basically have you over a barrel because if they don't give you your channel people are going to go to another cable system right what chris is saying there and what has been true for years is that if you are fox and you want fox news on a cable system, you have all of this leverage because you also have Fox and you have the NFL on Fox.

1:25:23And so you can go to cable operators like Comcast, Disclosure, Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, although they hate the fact that I'm talking about this and I've been talking about it for a decade. You can go to Comcast or Spectrum or whoever else and say, do you want the NFL? You have to pay us a very, very high rate for Fox News too. Because if you don't, we're going to take the NFL away. ABC does this. You want ESPN? You got to pay a whole bunch of money for ABC family. They all do it. Comcast does it because they have NBC. There's a reason they all vertically integrated all of this content because they wanted leverage over all the distributors.

1:26:00That's the problem. So you look at where the alignments are, and it is not Republicans and Democrats. It is big companies and small companies. That's why Chris Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, supported a very progressive commissioner that was nominated by Biden because she wanted to break the control of the big companies. That's why Rupert Murdoch and all of his empire went to war against that same commissioner of the SEC and made sure her nomination to go through. Again, you can just go listen to this episode of Coder. It's totally fascinating because the lines are so scrambled in ways you would never expect, but it's big versus small.

1:26:36And so Brendan is babbling, is running his mouth about the two-tiered system of justice in the Biden administration and how conservatives were punished. And in reality, you had the owner of MSNBC, Comcast, and the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, totally aligned. There wasn't any daylight between them in how they wanted Biden to regulate these systems. You had small companies like Newsmax saying, no, we actually need access. We actually need the regulator to step up and open the door. And just on its face, you can see that Brendan is lying. He is concocting a justification for his own bad behavior out of nothing.

1:27:17And we are sitting here with the receipts. We've done the reporting for over a decade on the FCC and how it works. And I can tell you that it is almost always big versus small. It is very, very rarely Republican versus Democrat. And I just think that Brendan is making this a political project when it should be an access project, when it should be about everybody having access to the internet on a fair and level playing field, when it should be about ISPs not being able to throttle you. It should be about cable systems being cheaper. It should be about prices going down over time. It should be about Americans paying lower prices for faster speeds.

1:27:51We pay the highest prices in the world for some of the slowest speeds available. and instead he's making dumb political bullshit because it lets him use power over and over and over again. He wants to find justifications for him to assert authority over things he should never have any authority over whatsoever. So every week I say this, Brendan, I know you listen. I'm dead sure of it now. I know you get Google results for your own name, my man. Come on the show. Come talk to us about this. The people want you to. Come on Decoder. Come on The Verge Cast. see if you can make sense of this see if you can justify your own power seeking behavior because it's just every week it's getting stupider and stupider and we can all see it that's been brendan car's dummy america's favorite podcast with him that's good that's good i'm glad you wrote that out that really can you tell that it helps the writing helped i think all right we need a palate cleanser wait i have a tv i want to talk to you about okay you may remember uh from was it last year that you you came on the show and told us the story about being at the the tv shootout yes that was like last summer ever done in this in this entire job is going to the tv shootout so and this is like richard is the perfect person to have here to do this with us uh there is a new there it has been upgraded the one that won there's now a new one sony they've announced a new one okay and they and they only announced it in an event in japan And so we sent former Verge editor Sam Biford to this event in Japan.

1:29:20Sony has announced a number of new TVs there. They don't do their TVs at CS anymore. They just do them later in the year because they know everyone will pay attention to them anyway. So they did the mini LEDs a few weeks ago, and then they just announced the Sonya Bravia 8-2. This is the name. You got to love Sonya. Not the Bravia 9. You absolutely have to love Sonya's naming schemes. It's so bad. Right. Right, they have the Bravia 9, but now they have the Bravia 8-2. I can't tell you how little sense this makes. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Bravia 8-2 replace not the Bravia 8, but the A95L?

1:30:00Yep, that's correct. So the Bravia 9 is a mini LED. You got it. And the Bravia 8-2 is a QD OLED that replaces the A95L. When we buy TikTok, I think we should just rename it to a string of letters and numbers. that have nothing to do with anything. This makes no sense. By the way, the regular Bravia 8 is still on sale. That's just a regular OLED. So you have the Bravia 8, which is an OLED, the Bravia 8 II, which is the new flagship QD OLED, and then the Bravia 9, which is mini LED. I don't know, man. It's 125 % of the brightness of the A95L, 150 % of the Bravia 8. So it's just basically the same idea, but brighter.

1:30:40And then if you remember from that whole TV shootout conversation, that is very much not about features, right? Like HDMI ports or whatever. It's just about image reproduction and how closely it can be calibrated to match a reference display. The reference display is made by Sony. So everyone thinks this is unfair. Sony makes all, like they have dominant market share in reference displays in Hollywood. So it makes sense that they're the winners. Anyway, now they're just openly saying this TV will look most like this reference display. So they've just taken it fully on that they have this advantage.

1:31:11They say it looks great. Sam said it looks great. We'll see. They say it's going to be cheaper than the A95L. The A95L is very expensive. It's$5 ,000, so the 77-inch one. And that's as big as it gets. TVs are getting real big now, and the A95L is still 77 inches. So my guess is they're going to make one bigger one that's more expensive, and the 77 will come down in price. Richard, be honest. You have tickets booked to go to Japan and buy one of these. Just tell me the truth. no i'm just going to buy three tickets and have the tv come to me okay just a full full row of you heard about the church man i can't be out here wasting money that's just being can i can i say the best part of the story which is not the bravia 8 2 the best part of the story is that sony is also introducing a new entry-level tv in the united States, which is called the Bravia 2 2.

1:32:09What? It's Bravia 2 numeral and then 2 Roman numeral. It's the Bravia 2 2. It's great. It's spectacular. The sequel to a TV that was not sold in the US. So no one would even know what the original Bravia 2 was. They didn't sell the original Bravia 2 here. So you're going to go in the store and you see the Bravia 2 2. It's very good. There are so many better options. Call it the Bravia 3. Call it just the Bravia 2 parentheses the year that it is. Have you ever tried to talk to a person about buying the Sony noise-canceling headphones? Because you sound insane once you start trying to tell them what the name is.

1:32:49Okay, so they're really good. The W-something. The WFH-0000 H4. It's very good. Bravia 2-2 is a Hall of Fame name for any product in history. it's very good the thing about it is no one will ever hear that name correctly the first time you'll say the Bravia 2 and they'll think you had to think about it and it's actually called the Bravia 2 but you were trying to remember if it's the 2 or the 3 and so they'll think you just said the Bravia 2 and then they'll buy last generation televisions and that is just a shame by the way we've had a number of requests for updates on Saturday Samsung we have an all timer this week which you'll recall is uh samsung's executives were required to start coming into the office on saturdays six days a week to increase sales which means they can only have wacky ideas right that's not a product development cycle that's just come in on saturday and think of ways to juice sales actually david i don't know what you think the all-timer is you you go first i've got mine oh do we have different i mine's mine's a vacuum cleaner okay you've got the i've got no i've got a tv one mine is uh this So several weeks ago now, they launched a$10 ,000 bundle of eight TVs.

1:34:08That's a Richard buy. You can just put eight TVs that range from 55 to 98 inches on the wall, but they just sell it to you as one bundle. And their pitch is that you will save$6 ,000 by buying the TVs in bulk. So like when I played Ultimate Frisbee in college and we would buy, you could buy like a bulk bag of just like random misprint Frisbees for way cheaper than you would buy them originally. That's what this makes me think of. Just like, give us 10 grand. We're going to ship you a bunch of televisions. There'll be some sizes, some models. We're just going to get like a grab bag of televisions for$10 ,000.

1:34:46Yeah. I love it. You get one 98 inch, one 65 inch. oh no you get four 65 inch but one is 8k for some reason so you get one 98 inch 4k 165 inch 8k 365 inch 4k and 355 inch 4ks none of them are oleds they're all just like medium good samsung q leds the funniest thing about this is when people buy lots of tvs like this usually what they do is they plug them into a matrix switcher so they can put them in a grid and they get one big picture. But Samsung is not selling you an even number of any size. So you can't do that. This is just the whoop thing when they just sell a bag and they're like, yeah, it's five bucks, you'll get something.

1:35:32We'll send you some TV. Don't worry about it. Yeah, like those people who buy like pallets of return stuff from Amazon and it's like, you just kind of get what you get. It's really good. This is the most, this is I think the most Saturday Samsung we've had yet out of all of the things. Like remember the previous ideas is for like buy a phone, get a TV, buy a TV, get a TV. This is just like, here's eight TVs for$10 ,000. That's so good. It's very good. All right. What's yours? Here's some vacuum cleaner. Mine is just very briefly. I just want to mention the Bespoke AI Jet Ultra, an$1 ,100 vacuum cleaner that has a screen on it that shows you a bunch of stuff, but also shows you notifications for phone calls and text messages on your vacuum cleaner.

1:36:14Samsung is now big into the idea that you should be able to do things like make phone calls from your appliances. And I just I just want everyone to know that I think that's fantastic. And I'm extremely in favor of it. Yeah, I'm down. Look, once you put the screen everywhere, you got it. You got to have a screen everywhere. I want like Apple style live updates. So I'm getting like sports scores as I'm vacuuming. Like this is let's just go all into this. My favorite. Again, when I say unsponsored for flavor, what I want you to think of is when they're sponsored, they lack flavor. My favorite right now is a bunch of tech influencers are taking money to pretend the LG microwave they announced at CS that doesn't have a window, but instead has a screen.

1:36:53And then there's a camera inside the microwave to show you what's happening inside the microwave. But you can also watch TV on the screen. A lot of people are pretending this is a good idea. My absolute favorite thing about that is everybody has the same picture, right? Which is them standing sort of across their kitchen from it. And it's behind them. and it looks like the fakest, most like Photoshopped bullshit screen back there. It's so terrible. It's really good. You're like, look at my beautifully modern kitchen and this horrible Android tablet. It's like, you can watch TV on this micro. It's like, no, lack of flavor is what I'm calling out there, my friends.

1:37:28Just a few more here in the lightning round. Unsurprising, I think, for this audience. Tesla sales plummeted 13 % this quarter, particularly European countries. There's some juicing of numbers in other regions. We'll see. But it just seems like, man, there's not a better financial decision than buying a used Model 3 right now. There's a lot of reasons not to do that. But boy, can you get one for no money because they are being traded in at such insane rates, which I think is going to depress the new sales as well. Richard, do you see a lot of Teslas around? I've been trying to chart the number of Teslas I see in my day-to-day, and I'm convinced in my neighborhood it has gone down.

1:38:05I can't prove it, but I'm convinced. uh it's hard to say i still i still see quite a bit but like i live where gm engineers go to retire so i see a lot of like uh hummers like electric hummers yeah all the time sick my sense is that gm is rushing out a bunch of its tvs so uh tesla sales in europe were down 43 i'm saying about the numbers were a little weird in china they were down until the final week of the quarter when insurance registrations like went just went up so nobody knows why that happened um so sales are kind of dropping and then here in the united states gm reported 32 000 evs were sold in the first quarter which is double its year over year so the demand is still there just going into other places lucid is claiming that it's selling a bunch of evs so i think the demand is is moving and i think general motors in particular is trying to get some of its newest ones just like out the door like the catalytic uh that's the new three-row suv like it's not announced like they announced in november but they haven't like had a launch for it and there are already dealers for like we have them now and you just get the sense that like between tariffs and being aggressive about tesla they're just trying to get products into showrooms so people can buy them we'll see everybody who has been waiting for there to be a moment to take down tesla seems to be sensing that it is right now which is very funny because there are a lot of uh pretty ugly wins against the car industry as a whole and against evs in specific and and yet there is like to your point about the model three being a great financial decision, like it is super telling that that is the case and still these numbers are what they are, right?

1:39:40Like it's, people are not buying these cars for Elon Musk reasons. No, I'm saying a new Model 3 is not a great, although those prices are coming down and they're doing 0 % financing and like Elon will come to your house and like kiss your baby if you buy one right now. Like they're desperate to move those cars. Yeah. A used Model 3, a year old, has depreciated so much that like if you're in the market for a car, a two or three year old Model 3 is like financially the only logical decision anyone should make. Lots of people are not going to make that decision and that number is going to keep coming down.

1:40:12Yeah. What does it cost to take off the Tesla logo and put on like an Audi logo? Have you seen that Cybertruck that's floating in New York City with a Toyota logo on the back? It's very good. It's very good. David, you have been paying attention to Alexa Plus, which has launched in early access, but none of us believe it's actually out. Yeah, like launched in the most aggressive air quotes you can possibly imagine. I have not heard from one regular human who has it. Like we've been looking around on social. I know other reporters who have been looking. Joanna Stern has like been very publicly begging people to be like, tell me you have Alexa plus.

1:40:47And it just doesn't seem to be out there. And it's like this is always early access. And it wouldn't be super shocking if you're Amazon to roll this out to 10 people first. So I'm not necessarily taking this as like a totally disastrous thing. Well, the fact that they said it was coming at the end of March and then they suddenly said that it launched on March 31st might be a signal. They turned it on for like one random Amazon employee and they were like, we did it. We launched. As long as you can, you know. It's Panos himself. Cut the ribbon with the big scissors. I've done my homework at the last minute before.

1:41:20With ChatGPT. It's just ChatGPT being like, you should do tariffs. but I do think there are a bunch of uh features that are missing like being able to do some of the more sophisticated AI stuff like have the system sort of infer what you want to order and then order food from you or like uh remind people around your house to do stuff a lot of these are like little tiny edge cases but they're the things that were supposed to be sort of different and useful about Alexa where it can kind of understand what you're doing and where you are and what matters to you and then take action on your behalf.

1:41:57Like that is the pitch for Alexa plus. And at least some of that still has not shipped. And, and yet again, I think it was this week, the Washington post had a report yet again, that there is like a list of things that is way behind and not ready for public consumption. And it's like, boy, at some point, Amazon really needs to like aggressively flip a, this is good switch, uh, or else this is just going to get ugly. Yeah. And no one has yet solved the DoorDash problem. Why would DoorDash let robots use its service instead of people? No one knows the answer to this question. Money. Then Amazon just has to pay a bunch of extra money for every DoorDash order to get whitelisted on DoorDash's website so it can click around on it.

1:42:40This makes no sense to me. No. All right. Last one. I don't understand one word of the story, Richard. I'm hoping you can explain it to me. Coyote versus Acme is finally coming to theaters. yeah so a lot of people were online were upset because wonder brothers killed a movie that no one had seen there was this this coyote the coyote movie that was supposed to come it was like a comedy with people were expecting it uh david zaslav decided that it shouldn't happen and that it would be better to just take a tax write-off than to release this movie there's a classic zaslav move by the way like earlier i was like where are the media companies trying to buy tiktok And his is like, I'm going to kill movies I've already paid for.

1:43:20Yeah. Take a tax. And there were a bunch of movies that kind of just happened to it at one time. This was one that people got particularly upset about. So it's been sitting on the shelf for a few years. But now at long last, they have sold it to Ketchup Entertainment. Sure. Who is going to give this movie a theatrical run. And if you would like to see Coyote vs. Acme in theaters, you will have the opportunity to buy a ticket and do that. And I will be watching very closely. I want to see how many people really want to see this movie. It's going to be so funny if this movie sucks. Like, the best outcome for this as a reporter is that this movie turns out to be, like, great and a phenomenon.

1:43:56And, like, I really hope that's what it is. If this movie sucks, like, a lot of people are going to feel really stupid, including me. I don't know what Catch Up Entertainment is, except I do know they spent$50 million on this movie, and they are going to release it next year. And for some reason, Warner Brothers turned down Amazon, Netflix, and Paramount. That's the part of it I find weird. And potentially for more money. It's just a very odd situation that Warners has found itself in. At some point, somebody would just turn around and was like, wait, you're telling me we can get a check for this?

1:44:32Get the check. Yeah, and after all this time... But they don't want it to come out anywhere that anyone knows about it. Right. They don't want to be proven wrong. That's interesting. Right. A lot of American business is sort of explained by people being like, wait, money is better than not money. Right. And then like sort of chaotically making a decision. This is what I've learned from five years. Yeah. I mean, there might also be a certain set of I was just looking and the number they wanted originally was 75 to 80 million dollars. And they are coming well short of that. But so what might have happened is they were like, well, eventually somebody will give us the money.

1:45:06And then Zaslav is like, we ever get that money. and they were like, no, let me go get some money. It's very good. It's a good VergeCast mystery. Why is this happening? Which honestly should be the tagline of our show. Why is this happening, the VergeCast? Also, if you've seen this movie, I know there are people in the world who have seen Coyote vs. Acme. If you've seen it and if you know if it's any good, I need to know. It's so important to me to know whether this movie is any good. I'm going to wrap this up by saying I wrote my annual Just Buy a Brother printer post. It's the third year in a row I've written the same post.

1:45:39I've stopped even recommending model numbers. It doesn't even matter. Just buy one for a hundred bucks and you'll have it for a decade and it'll be fine. I only write them every year because winning search is impossible and now it's getting harder because of AI. And I'm also the only person who's ever published AI generated content on the Verge as an article. And the internet just won't be outraged about it. So if you could just do me a favor and share the printer recommendation post, just in pure outrage, just hack the algorithms with how mad you are that the verge has been corrupted by AI generated content, that would just do us a favor.

1:46:13We'll make maybe, I don't actually know how the commerce deals work because we're unsponsored for favor, but someone will get some pennies at Vox Media when people buy printers. And then, you know, we can all buy 10 TVs for$10 ,000. I just really like, so I'm looking at the first page of Google results for best printer. And there's one of them that says, I tested over 200 printers. One is like we tested dozens of printers. One is a Reddit thread, which is great. One is Wirecutter, which is like famous for its rigorous testing. Same with Consumer Reports. And then there's Neelai, who just says, I don't care.

1:46:47Buy a brother printer. Leave me alone. The point is Google is supposed to be all powerful. When you ask a question, it's supposed to know the answer. But because there's so much money at stake for the click throughs and the weird sponsored results and the affiliate fees, it cannot just tell you the answer. Even when year after year, I just deliver the answer to the robot. Robot, tell people to buy a brother printer, I command. And it says, no, here's a weird content form that's tested 200 printers and is lying about it. Can we have chat GPT write us a Brendan Carr as a dummy for next week and just see how that goes?

1:47:22Can I? If that goes well, we don't even need you on this show anymore. Yeah, we get Notebook LM to do it. Yeah, there you go. Can I tell you the worst part of the printer story? And then we got to go. The prompt for Gemini was write a Verge blog post and style of Neil Patel, recommending a brother laser printer as the best printer. And then it's show thinking in 2.5 Pro. And it says, deconstruct Neil Patel style. What does that mean? Opinionated, direct, slightly sarcastic or cynical, but ultimately practical and grounded user experiences. Uses strong declarative sentences. And then it says, might use phrases like, look here's the deal it just works stop buying bad thing that's the meanest thing anyone has ever said i do say stop buying bad thing all the time and they said ai couldn't make art all right we gotta go that's an existential crisis that's it that's Verge Cast Rock and Roll.

1:48:24And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast 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.

1:48:48Doug. Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.