How the tech world is responding to tariff chaos

28:04How big is it? Like, what's up, guys? The whole country is depending on you. And they fit in like the back room of a Denny's. They're like, the pressure is out of control. I mean, that's the problem. If you want it, you have to invest in it. And no company is going to look at this tariff chaos and say, okay, this is a good investment based on expected return. I need to avoid these tariffs. So I'm going to start training multiple football fields of tooling engineers so that I can build one product. They're just going to find another way to do it. Well, and the uncertainty is so much a part of that, too, that, right, like, I think you could make a much more compelling version of that argument if there was a coherent plan, even if you disagreed with the plan.

28:50It was like, here is the future as it is laid out, and we are not going to go away from it. But what I keep hearing from folks and what lots of folks on our team have been reporting about is just the uncertainty is what kills you. Like you don't actually even know where to invest your time and energy and money right now because the tariffs might go away. They might change. They might move. They might just suddenly evaporate all of your possibilities in one country or another. And everyone is just frozen by it. So the idea that you're going to redirect investment actually becomes harder in that.

29:19Yeah, I think there's also like even if you know this is going to last for four years, can you even do it within that time to a reasonable scale that will be valuable for you? And that's not clear. And then additionally, like to your point with uncertainty, we don't even know that it would last beyond Trump, given that everybody seems to hate this. There's one person in America who likes tariffs and we just happen to elect a president. I'm not sure, by the way, if what Tim Cook was saying there was a football field densely packed with tooling engineers or like a football stadium. I imagined the former.

29:54Because if it's football stadium, you're like, you're OK, you're doing the math. Like, okay, that's between like maybe 75 and 100 ,000 people per stadium. You know, your biggest college football stadium is like 100 ,000 people. So you're like, okay, it's like 300 ,000 tooling engineers. But if it's one densely packed 100-yard football field, maybe it's way less than that. I've been thinking about this since 2017. I like imagining that what he means actually is just it's three football fields, but it's just 11 on 11 on each field. It's all he means is it's actually six football teams, but he said it weird.

30:30But it's the full 53. Right, exactly. Look, that is from 2017. That's not today. That's not Tim Cook disagreeing with Donald Trump today. That is years ago. And even that itself is seven years after Steve Jobs made the same exact argument to Obama. Right. And all that it has done since then is accelerate. Right. It hasn't gotten better. We haven't invested more into these kinds of roles and this kind of training. And by all rights, the only party that can actually do that is the government because the government is not expecting that to return on investment in the form of a product tomorrow. And so, yes, we should build the iPhone here.

31:13We all did this round of coverage in 2012 and 2013. We did it again when Trump got elected the first time in 16 and 17. Now we're doing it a third time. Only all of us have to be like, no, we are real men, which is deeply confusing. All of my cars are faster than yours. I'm just saying it out loud. One is real loud. It's ridiculous because the problem is the same. The problem is you need apparently six football teams worth of tooling engineers. And I just, I don't like how, what's the plan there? Because if you want to, it's, you can't just punish people into training engineers in the United States.

31:50Right. And it's not at all clear that we're going to do anything to make that possible either. But we'll decide in 75 days. Sorry, 90 days. That's right. They're not even permanent. It's like the pause is just 90 days. So we're already seeing a bunch of reactions to this. Apple shipped 600 tons of iPhones on planes to beat the tariffs. Anything that was already on a ship that was like en route beat the tariffs. So there's a lot of that going on. So I don't think we're going to see immediate changes. um the sheans and timus of the world are in real trouble because the de minimis exception that basically let those companies exist is going away we don't know what's going to happen we know that haul creators like fashion haul creators are just buying everything on timu which is getting ready amazon has a weird timu copycat that's they're already changing where stuff is coming from uh we sort of asked around you can see other changes tobias butler from toonshine who's on the show last week.

32:47He emailed us. He said, so with the new 104 % tariff, the cost of each manufacturer to shine goes up 28%, which will cost$90 each, which gets pretty close to the figure he called last week as this would kill me. So yes, he would have to raise price from$199 to$255. And it's still not worthwhile to switch to US suppliers. So he's the like little creators are like coming to these existential points. He says, I'm not sure what my immediate plan is except to reach out to the community and see what people think about$250. Framework, which we cover a lot, they've just stopped selling their cheapest laptops here because of tariffs.

33:26I think they delayed pre-orders. Yeah, they've gone back and forth in a really fascinating way. And I think actually Framework is a company a lot of other startups look to to see how to do this because Framework spends a long time working on this stuff and is also sort of unusually transparent in how all of this works. Like Framework will sell you an individual part of a computer. So it just like has to be able to tell more stories about how it makes those things. But Sean Hosser wrote a thing for us earlier this week. And basically in the span of 16 hours, tariffs were enacted. Framework announced it was going to increase the price of all of its computers by 10%, uh like 45 minutes later trump announces the pause 30 minutes after that framework announces that it's bringing the prices back to normal and then two hours later it says it's still going to increase prices and then it it was not going to add for pre-orders uh it was not going to open pre-orders on the laptop 12 which is its new cheap one but then it decided to anyway and it's just like this company they just keep basically being like look we have no idea what's going on either We're just going to keep updating this blog post as best we can to tell you what's going on.

34:42Yeah, that's great. Super certain. Makes sense for everyone who wants to invest in a small company if the company doesn't even quite know what's happening. Not just small companies. The biggest companies in the world totally caught off guard. Speaking of updating blog posts, we just have a list of automakers and what they're doing. And Hawkins has to keep updating because the plans keep changing. It's basically chaos. We'll link to that post. But VW is adding import fees. Stellantis is idling production at various places, putting 900 jobs on hold. Jaguar Land Rover, like the people who live in the town around its factory are basically like, this is the end of us.

35:21Ford has so much inventory that they're just cutting prices across the board, which is very good. Audi is just holding 37 ,000 cars at docks until something happens. because as long as they're there they don't have to pay the tariffs they just you just leave them i think they haven't brought them in yet right they're just sitting they're like they're like we gotta get these in eventually and like they're on the other side of the fence uh it's nuts like that's that's all nuts and then the main thing that we should talk about is the switch to which it feels like there's the weird cultural like tariffs make you manly and And then there's the Switch 2.

35:59And in terms of just weird reactions, like the Switch 2, I think, bore the brunt of it. It's also been the most public because Nintendo had the just like terrible luck of announcing the Switch 2, I don't know, 30 minutes before the tariff threats began. And so they're doing this press tour as this information was unfolding. And so normally companies can kind of hide from some of these questions if they just don't put their executives out there. But Nintendo is in the middle of putting their executives in front of every single journalist they could find. And all of them only had one question. And it was, what are you going to do about these tariffs?

36:38And the price is already high. So there's this assumption that Nintendo priced the thing high for tariffs. And the answer, and I think Doug Bowser said this to our own Andrew Webster, he's like, no, that was how much we priced it at. And we'll see what happens now. Yeah. Which is not a great answer. but then pre-orders were supposed to have been this week uh and were not this week and that was that was the thing that really set everybody on fire was nintendo went from we're going to sell you our very expensive console that you're going to be slightly mad about but definitely for sure buy anyway to actually you can't buy it yet because we don't we don't know what it's going to cost i think pre-orders for something like this is the worst possible situation to be in because because they're importing millions and millions of these things.

37:26And if you're going to sell them at$450 today and you have zero idea what they're going to cost you to bring in two months from now when they actually go on sale, that could just devastate them. And obviously, they are going to be bringing a bunch in early to avoid the tariffs as much as they can. Allegedly, they've been stocking up for months already. But it doesn't really change the fact that they could be put in a position where a bunch of people bought these things early at one price and they actually have to start selling them at a much higher price two months from now. That's just going to lead to a complete disaster for them.

37:59Yeah. And there's no good answer at the end of that either, right? Like you either immediately increase the price of an already pretty expensive thing. And you can blame that on whoever you want, but it's going to hurt demand. or you say, you know, get it now. Maybe the price will go up, which is weird and bad. It's also for a company that big, it's like logistically really complicated to change the price of something. This is something I've heard from a couple of people that I hadn't really thought about before that like you have to change your marketing materials and you have to change like signs that you've made and you have to change like commercials that you've put out in the world that people are going to be running on television.

38:37Like it's actually not as simple as just changing the price of a thing on your website when you want to change the price of something it actually becomes a real process and it's i just like that alone is very complicated but like this is that that exact thing uh is everywhere not like the this guy dan soroker who is the ceo of a company called limitless uh they make one of those like ai voice recorders that listens to you all the time and tells you what interesting stuff you said uh i have one upstairs I haven't used it yet, but we'll report back. He tweeted this yesterday. He said, our customers pre-ordered our product for as low as$59.

39:12We have the product ready to ship, but with tariffs, it will now cost us$189.38 per unit. Should we, one, wait until it gets better? Two, ship now and eat the tariff cost? Three, cancel the orders and eat the manufacturing cost? This is the worst SAT question I've ever heard in my entire life. But those are your options, and they're all terrible. And if you're a Nintendo, maybe you can eat the cost, right? Like if you're Apple with famously high margins, you can eat the cost. None of these companies want to because they like money and that's the job. But a lot of these companies, especially these smaller companies, literally cannot afford to eat that cost.

39:50And so now they're like, okay, do I triple the price of my thing or am I out of business? And am I out of business either way? Yeah. Well, we're also saying like they might be able to eat the cost. That's like at 10%, they might be able to eat that cost at like 34%. That becomes a completely different equation. And then at some point, we're talking about these 100 plus percent tariffs. And I, you know, I think depending on the country that they're manufacturing in, they're going to have different levels of existential crises here. But all of them are pretty existential, even 10%. You know, I think we're looking at that's what some of the stuff that frameworks is dealing with.

40:24Even that is enough to cause them heartburn and go, I don't think we can sell this anymore. Yeah. The interesting question is going to be where the money moves. So for a product, an AI voice recorder, there's a service component with that. So you might sell the hardware at a loss and then make the subscription price five times higher. Yep. I think we're going to see a lot of those moves, which will suck. Just like flatly, that will suck. And then we're going to see the end of discounting. Most people price in sales, that stuff is going to go away. so that we don't know what's going to happen and I think the switch to is going to be kind of like the leading indicator how certain anybody feels because it is a product everybody wants and they could probably raise the price and still sell a lot of them but I don't think they want to I think they already know it's high and they're already getting yelled at because it's high there's other stuff weird stuff happening in response by the way China is considering showing fewer US films which would just basically crush the Marvel machine right I mean less so than a few years ago like it's that's shifted a little bit already but it is still a huge part of the industry and it's like we it was very funny we were talking about this earlier that like do you remember how all the bad guys in mission impossible movies are now called like the entity uh nobody like fights foreign countries anymore they're all just like nameless bad guys that's because they wanted these movies to play in other markets mostly china and so like and then china like took all the stuff that it learned from Hollywood, built its own, now has a huge homegrown movie industry, and is now just like, yeah, get out.

41:59All that money you used to make from showing movies in our country, goodbye. China has a lot of those moves to make if it wants to. It does have a lot of those moves to make. I'm just saying that I watched the three-body problem, and I'm less worried about it than maybe you are. Not so worried about that one, but it's fair. Yeah, and not the new Netflix bad one. I mean the Chinese bad one. Just to be clear. The Netflix one was worse. That's like worse evidence. And longer. What are we doing? I'm just over my alcoholism was a real plot point in the Netflix one. Alright, we gotta take a break. Maybe by the time we're back, we'll know what's going on with Paris.

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46:02We're back. I want to issue a correction. It was just called Three Body. It aired on Peacock in the United States. There you go. Also, I just want you to know, people sometimes ask what we did during the break. I went to NewYorkTimes.com because I literally thought it was possible that there was new tariffs news while we were at break. There's not. So that's exciting. Yeah, good. We'll see. We'll see how this goes in the next 30 minutes. There's tariffs. Then there's AI. AI also had, I would say, a messy week. starting with meta which i think tried to release a bunch of exciting news about llama and then all of it quickly became unexciting what's going on here jake can you explain this one yeah so uh zuckerberg i i think you wanted to have a little bit of um elon energy here so last weekend i think it was middle of saturday he was just like boom llama four here it is everybody go have fun um And just, you know, kind of try to catch people by surprise, drop this big new model that people have been expecting.

47:00And, you know, at first glance, everybody was like, wow, very impressive, great benchmarks. And this is the thing. Every single time a new flagship model comes out, the companies brag about these benchmarks and they show how they perform against all the other models. And inevitably, inevitably, their best model beats out all the other models on the market. And that's what happened here with one of the Lama 4 models. And then eventually people started to look a little bit closer, started to look at some of the fine print on this. And they realized that Meta had actually benchmarked a secret model that only they have access to, that they're not actually releasing.

47:37And so it's like an experimental chat-specific version that is sort of potentially designed to beat these benchmarks that they're not releasing to the public. It was just used to look great on benchmarks. And so people have been freaking out about this. The specific benchmark that they nearly topped the leaderboard on was like, hey, guys, that's not how it's supposed to work. And Meta was just like, we have lots of great models. I don't know what to tell you. And so I think it has not been the reception they were hoping for for Llama 4, which is supposed to be this big release, supposed to get them back in the conversation.

48:16Meta has been trying to make Llama the big, quote unquote, allegedly open source option to get a lot of big adoption here. and you know i think if they wanted to curry favor with the community this is sort of off to a bad start because now they're starting to feel a little bit misled and they're already also starting to i think complain about some of the restrictions and limitations around meta's uh you know so so-called open source um approach to it anyway i really genuinely respect meta's inability to help itself from doing stuff like this. Like you go way back and, you know, meta got in all this trouble for massively inflating the view count of all the videos so that publishers would make videos and like screwed up a whole generation of publishers on the internet.

49:03As a result, this company just cannot help itself from making up numbers about things in order to look impressive. I kind of love it. I love this. Like, let me be clear. Don't do this. This is bad. But also So it really just shows how nonsensical these benchmark charts are. Like, what does it mean that it gets 98 % of some random benchmark? Like, I don't know what that does. I don't know what that means. Number just goes up. And I think it's just increasingly clear that these do not actually correspond to, does the model give you a correct, accurate, good, and useful output? It corresponds to, can this model beat this computer test?

49:46And in this case, they specifically designed it so that it could beat this test a little bit better than the other models. Isn't this particular benchmark, doesn't it have humans in a loop? It does. This is a really interesting one where they pair it against output from other models. And so you choose which one is better. And so they're specifically tuning it theoretically so that humans will respond better to their thing. That's the best part of this. It's not designed to be better. It's designed to do whatever it takes to make the humans think that it's better, which is so funny. It's like we don't have to build a better model.

50:17We just have to build a model that convinces the idiots that it's better. And then we've done it. Perfect. That's one of the most meta instincts of all time. Like we don't have to be sincere. We just have to be convincing. By the way, meta loves to game benchmarks. Like there's a whole thing here about companies gaming benchmarks in the history of tech. Like every GPU company has been caught gaming benchmarks. It's just a thing they all do. Every laptop company has been caught gaming benchmarks in one way or another. Intel has been caught gaming benchmarks, but this one is like particularly meta in that they inflated their own video numbers for years.

50:54And then they kind of admitted it and they're kind of like, but whatever, like number was so big. Right. And it's like very much the attitude they're taking with this. I agree with you, Jake. At the end of the day, what really matters is can anyone build useful products out of this stuff? Like these benchmarks do not matter. Like every week there's a new one and another thing is slightly better than the last one. And we're still all looking at fundamentally the same chatbot products with the same distribution. Maybe Meta is going to do the glasses like we've heard about them that will obviously rely on Llama in some huge way.

51:28But I don't think that matters if it's Llama in there or ChatGPT. It's really the interface and the distribution that carries you forward, not the capability of the model. I agree with you in every way except one. And I think the one is that I think we're still early enough in this industry that momentum is really important. And what is definitely true is that LM Arena, which is the website that runs these benchmarks, is a website people who make AI stuff look at a lot. And so being at the top of that leaderboard is a signifier of stuff to the people you want to come work for your company to build cool AI products or come build with your API and pay you a bunch of money to use it.

52:13Like these things are not meant for regular people to care about, generally speaking. They're meant for like the people in the business to care about. And I think that's all the more reason to try and game it, right? Like these benchmarks exist to try and get AI researchers to want to work at meta and not open AI. And coming out like you're cheating is a tough look. And I think there's been a lot of that forever, right? Do you guys remember in the early days of this, there was this whole big kerfuffle with Apple where Apple wasn't letting its researchers publish publicly their research? And so it was having a hard time getting researchers because one of the things these people want to do is like publish their work and share it with the world.

52:53And so Apple has had to rethink the way that it talks about its AI stuff in order to get good people to come work there. And so I think in that sense, playing these games really does matter, but it's in a much less like human relevant way than like actually making good products, which none of these companies are doing. No, I think that makes sense. And, you know, I think that community is that community is the people who freaked out about this. They are the ones who feel betrayed because they're, you know, they were excited about this. And I think Meta has made big promises about, you know, how you'll be able to use Llama because of its, you know, allegedly open source approach.

53:35It's the opposite of DeepSeek. You just made me realize that. DeepSeek was the one where everybody's like, it can't possibly be this good. And then started using it. They're like, oh, my God, it's incredible. This is the one everybody's like, whoa, it's really good. And then it's like, oh, never mind. You know, it's funny you mentioned Apple there because what I was going to say is, you know, who's not on the LMA arena boards is our friends in Cupertino. I mean, they have some models. They're not building their frontier model at scale. Big story in the information this week about Siri actually at Apple.

54:05It's a lot. There's a lot going on in this story. It's basically here's why Siri is bad, which keeping with the theme of this episode is a story we have been telling for 15 years. But this one in particular has a lot of details. Some of them shakier than others about what actually happened. And here are the three that just jumped out to me. And you tell me, I know you guys read that story too. You tell me if these are the ones that jumped out to you. One, we've talked a lot about the WWDC video of what like agentic Siri could do on the iPhone with App Intense. And you just ask it where your grandmother is and it like finds her and sends her a note or whatever was happening in the demo.

54:41The Siri team, according to this information report, had not seen any of that working. So that was just a pure demo. and the Siri team was surprised at what they were seeing. That's really bad. That's real bad. Second, I'm just like a decoder org chart aficionado. John Gianandria ran his own AI team. He was apparently a very sleepy manager, didn't have a lot of fire, and Craig Federighi built his own team to do stuff with machine learning inside of Apple that got bigger and bigger and bigger and started competing for researchers and engineers with the main AI team. which led to him taking over Siri in the end.

55:22Which is very bad, right? That's not good news. And then the last one, which is particularly funny, is there was apparently a big debate in the aftermath of the WDC demo about how many models Apple would use. If they would have a local model on the phone that responded to local stuff like timers called Minnie Mouse and then a big model in the cloud for big stuff called Mighty Mouse or whether it should all be Mighty Mouse. And I think they landed on all Mighty Mouse and none of that shipped and none of it worked and who knows what's going to happen. They picked wrong. I really like really. I think the one of the lessons we are learning here very quickly is that actually single behemoth models that do everything have their place.

56:00But ultimately, the answer is lots of models for lots of things. And Apple seems to have just it's like it's like picking the Vision Pro instead of picking smart glasses. Right. Like it tried to do the whole thing. And in so doing, prevented itself from doing the thing that actually works. I'm also really curious about, you know, they took this, we're going to do it very heavily lean on local processing for the AI approach. And I think, you know, if you go back, what, like two years on the pixel, they were like, hey, you know, you have to have the highest end pixel in order to use Gemini, because you need the local processing abilities, you need the RAM.

56:39and then fast forward like I don't know six months and all of those abilities are just on all the phones anyway because they're all just doing it in the cloud and so I'm kind of just wondering also if Apple's still just picking wrong by trying to do so much on the iPhone because it is sort of against their constitution to offload this stuff to the cloud because of the privacy concerns around that which you know that's fair it's a really great perk to be able to say hey, this is all local, it's all secure, it's all safe. But it's just one of those things where it's sort of a self-enforced limitation that's continuing to hold them back.

57:16Totally, and the way that they're getting around that when they have to go to the cloud is just by punting it on the chat GPT, which is absurd. Actually, the best way to do it, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, probably, but it sure doesn't make Apple look very good. Okay, wait, while we're talking about org charts, we should move on from this. There's other stuff to talk about, But I just, I want to read a paragraph to you guys from this story. It's by Wayne Mott, The Information. Shout out to Wayne. It's a good story. And I want you guys to tell me whether this sounds like people want AI or that they don't want AI.

57:47It says, former Apple employees have referred to Siri as a, quote, hot potato, continuously passed between different teams, including those led by Apple's services chief, Eddie Q, and by Federighi. However, none of these reorganizations led to significant improvements in Siri's performance. There's one way to look at this that says... everybody is trying to get it, but nobody can pull it off. And there's another way of looking at it that says Siri is poison and no one wants to be in charge of it. And I'm starting to wonder if it's the second thing. It's the second. I don't know. I read that same thing and it's funny that you saw ambiguity in it and I was like, oh, it's poison.

58:21Okay. Okay. I mean, that was my initial read too, but then I'm like, okay, there is another way you could look at this that is like, it's very competitive. Everybody wants to be in charge. I think you're right. I think it's poison. Well, I think there's, you can intellectually make the argument that being in charge of Siri right now at Apple makes you the most powerful person at Apple. Because all of the things that might kill the iPhone are things that look like what Siri should have been doing 10 years ago. Yeah. Like OpenAI has this project with Johnny Ive for a screenless device. That's obviously some sort of like Siri puck.

58:55Right, and maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but like that's the thing. The metaglasses we've talked about a lot, that's gonna be a voice activated assistant thing Samsung is going to release the Bolly robot. Let's just pretend it's in the mix here. What you want is a ball that rolls around your house and projects Samsung's fast TV service on the wall in response to your voice. Hey, no other AI product has that kind of physical presence. It's true. It's very good. None of them even have a shape. Do you want a small rolling ball in your house that shows up and commands you to exercise on command?

59:31The Bolly is there for you. I do. I like, I earnestly do. Every Bali demo is like at the end of it, it's like, and now do jumping jacks. It's like very good. All of this is predicated on voice working. Alexa is predicated on voice working. So anything that might kill the iPhone has this one interface idea embedded in it, which is natural language voice commands will work and the computer will have natural language voice output. It will, it will, it will work. None of it works to be clear. like humane existed and then went 90 you know like famously no longer exists uh none of it works yet but if you're apple being in charge of the Siri team is being in charge of the thing that might kill you.

1:00:16yeah and i think they can't figure it out because they also can't break it like i think one of the hardest things about siri is everyone knows that voice is a thing that might disrupt the touchscreen but which i don't necessarily agree with but that's what everyone thinks but everyone knows the voice is a thing that might disrupt the touchscreen and then you've got however many years of siri existing and doing timers and starting music and pretty much doing those things that you cannot break. Right, and Apple talks all the time about how often Siri gets used. And even if it's just for those two things, it is still, it's an entrenched user behavior now that you can't screw up, even though they are doing their very best to screw it up.

1:00:56Yeah, so I just see it as, here's this thing where if you get it, the stakes are so high, your opportunity to make change is so limited because you can't break it. And then you also have to invent the cutting edge of AI. What you're describing is just what Google did with Gemini already, right? And the advantage they have is that they have a functional AI division. But they had Google Assistant, which was like roughly as good as Siri. And it set timers. It added stuff to your calendar. And when they launched Gemini, it broke all of that. Couldn't do any of that. And then they've just slowly hacked each one of those things on to Gemini.

1:01:33And now they're just like, we're done. Forget Google Assistant. We had 10 years of brand equity. Whatever. Nobody cares. Gemini's new thing. And they just like they're just fundamentally wasn't that much good stuff about these old era of assistance that you can kind of just start from scratch and rebuild timers. Because as much as it pains us that it takes like five years to add a multiple timer feature to each of these things like that surely isn't the hardest part of building AI. And so we've seen another company do this already. And it feels like what Siri needs is that start from scratch moment.

1:02:05And theoretically, they had that. And it's just like not quite clear why that isn't clicking. Well, two things about that. One, Google had its own bloody org chart battle over making an AI, functional AI division. Google also invented most of this technology. Like there might be no other company in tech as equipped to do what you just described as Google. And even it was a giant mess for Google. Right. And then they did have two products, Assistant and Gemini, coexist side by side in the most Google of fashions. And then I think if you go and look at the Google Home forums and the Google Assistant forums, the switch to Gemini just being there isn't going about as well as Google Home goes.

1:02:42You know what I mean? Yeah. Sure. There's enough people in those forums who believe that Google Home is effectively abandoned that it should really worry Google. Right? So, like, yeah, they're in the middle of this transition and maybe it will all come out on the end as sunshine and daisies. But right now it's like, oh, the thing that we depend on feels like abandoned. For example, this is just a really dumb one. We have Google Homes in our house, and they are meant to control our Sonos because we have Sonos speakers from the time when those two companies got along, and they just stopped working.

1:03:15You could be like, yo, play me the music. And it's like, I'm doing it on the kitchen. And you're like, no, you're not. Do it again. And it's like, I'm super doing it. I'm playing this music on kitchen. And it's not. And there's just – you look at the Reddit post, and it's like 400 days ago someone said that Google Homes stopped working. And they just don't care. And I think that's – I agree with you, Jake. Google has done a better job. Like Amazon hasn't pulled this off with Alexa. If I can defend Google Home for one second, it's been bad for years. Fair enough. Other AI stuff. Jake, you want to talk about the Shopify CEO saying that no one can make a new hire at the company without proof that AI can't do the job?

1:03:58And you're like, this is more reasonable than people think. and I'm excited for you to defend this take. Wow. Sorry. Sorry. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Sorry, Jake. Here's this smoking stick of dynamite. What would you like to do with it? Yeah. That is, in fact, part of what I said. So Shopify, not Spotify. Let's be clear with that. Shopify's CEO, Toby Lutke, if I'm pronouncing that ballpark, you know, this memo got leaked, and so he just posted the entire thing on X. So you can go and read it. And, you know, the headline of it is, you know, Shopify CEO says, like, you can't hire anybody whose job can be done by AI.

1:04:37And you know what? It is true. He says that in there. But I do think, you know, if you read the entire thing, it is both more reasonable and I think less reasonable than you think. Because on one hand, he's just like, actually, we just all sort of need to learn AI. On the other hand, he's like, we will 100x our productivity. um so you know i i think one thing that occurs to me is that the people who are using ai the most right now it is the engineers it is like the developers who are just coding all day long using these things um separately anthropic just launched a 200 a month tier this week where they're just like yeah we think that engineers will just pay for this when their work won't so they can just like use it all day long um so this is our i i think when you send this memo out to an organization that is substantially built out of engineers, this is not necessarily as scary as it would be if you send it out to your news organization, which would be like, ooh, sorry.

1:05:33And so I think, you know, there's parts of this memory says, here's just some of the preface where he goes, quote, what we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by using it a lot. And it's like, okay, yeah, this is actually like, this is like pretty reasonable. You actually should test these tools to see if there are ways to build them into your workflow. but at the same time he is saying I think the very big scary thing that has everybody worried which is yeah these tools are going to number one change how we work and in doing so start to potentially replace roles that would otherwise have been hired and so I think this is you know this is a very scary memo I think it's also just worth reading and understanding because this is actually just how a lot of these companies are going to be thinking about this and I think is AI ready to replace a single human right now?

1:06:24I sure wouldn't make that bet. Is it ready to do little bits and pieces of some people's jobs? I think the answer is clearly yes, especially if you look to developers. And I think we have an engineering heavy organization here that is saying, hey, let's start using this more and more to get a little bit more efficient. Some of the stuff he's saying is like, actually, you should just use this in your prototypes, right? It's not necessarily you should go and replace your coworker with it. You just like, it's like, I'm making it mandatory that you use this in your prototyping phase. Okay. Seems fine.

1:06:57It's funny because I didn't read that as being about the engineers. I read that as being about like product managers and salespeople and like people have ideas for new features and it's like, you're just going to vibe code out a garbage version of the new feature so you can push the buttons and play with it and see if it's any good. And I, there's something about that that really speaks to me, right? Because I can't do that. And I, this is the thing I keep thinking about is our own company is putting out ads, being like, stop AI theft government. Disclosure of Box Media is putting out an ad with a bunch of other publishers being like, stop AI theft government.

1:07:30And our team has thoughts about AI, and I certainly have thoughts about AI. I think I'm a better writer than AI. To this day, declarative sentences be damned. That's what AI thinks I write like. But I can't code. I certainly couldn't code a prototype feature of a thing that I wanted. And the idea that this tool can let me do it is super interesting. And then you see even in creative industries, people are complaining about it, but then they use the features like mad. So I would pair the Shopify thing up with what I think is kind of the most interesting AI feature that's been announced in a long time, which is Adobe building AI agents in Photoshop and Premiere Pro, where you're just like doing Photoshop work.

1:08:09And it's like, do you want to do this thing? And it's like super clippy. And then it just does it for you. Like it clicks around the Photoshop interface for you and just does it. I think there's something super interesting about this photoshop example too where if you watch the video of what it shows that that it's suggesting you do it's stuff like add a blur to the background and it's like three years ago nobody would have called that ai that like google photos just auto suggests that on literally every photo it really does and and so like there's just this broad spectrum of what like quote-unquote ai is now and there are i think these these small uh tools that people are just sort of using instinctively every day without quite considering them to be AI because it's just, oh, this is just making me like 2 % more efficient.

1:08:54And I, you know, we sort of freak out when it changes from this 2 % thing to the like, I must replace my coworker because my boss won't give me more resources, which is like concerning. I mean, and a funny thing to do is like, if you just sort of in your mind, find and replace every time somebody says AI with software, the temperature on everything goes down a little, but it also sounds exactly like the conversations everybody had when we were first inventing computer software, right? Like the sort of moral panic around computers kicking everybody out of jobs has been around as long as computers have been around.

1:09:32What's different now is that everybody is telling you that they're building God to do it for you. Well, right. But I mean like the I don't need the accountant because I have Excel as like one version of this. I I'm a marketing director and I can build a fully functional prototype of a feature that I want to ship in the main software. Very different. But I think the second thing is less existentially frightening than the first thing. I think we won't need accountants anymore because Excel exists was much more plausibly threatening to people's jobs than now I can make a crappy prototype by myself.

1:10:08It is true, by the way, that Excel got so complicated that we need accountants more than ever. and maybe that's just the trajectory that we're on. Accountants just use Excel now. That's the only thing that changed, is accountants use Excel. All right, I don't know on what timeline Google Assistant will be good, but I do know that we should probably put Shopify in charge of it. We got to take a break. 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?

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1:11:58Alright, we're back. David, it's time. Oh my God, it's time. We've waited this long. Once again, we are here for America's first or second favorite podcast within podcast, for which we have now received theme music that I have to figure out if I'm allowed to play on this show, sent in by listeners, once I know if that's legal for me to do without asking permission. Starting next week, we have theme music. It's time for Brendan Carr as a Dummy. It's funny because on this America's Favorite Podcast within a podcast, except for the other podcasts within a podcast that people love. Top two. Yeah. We've started to receive fan submissions for parts of the segment.

1:12:40Like more so than I think the main Verge cast at this point, which is very good. Good stuff. So this week, a few things to talk about this week, but the main thing, so many people sent me this photo of Brendan Carr, chair of the FCC, smiling in his dumb suit, wearing a pin that is the gold head of Donald Trump. Just so proud of himself that he's wearing a pin that is the gold head of Donald Trump. Look, there are some like overheated blog posts about this thing, about how this is Maoism and this is what Mao did. Like, Brendan's not that smart. You know, he's not intentionally making a callback to the Maoists in the cultural revolution.

1:13:21No. He's just a dummy who wants to impress his buddy Donald Trump and doesn't realize that being the head of our nation's communications infrastructure should require him to be nonpartisan. Instead, he's making it plain that, in fact, he is a political flunky who shouldn't have this job by wearing the gold head of Donald Trump on his chest. You don't want that. If you had a Democrat wearing the gold head of Barack Obama in charge of the FCC during the net neutrality battles, I'm pretty sure the Republicans would have burned the building down. Yeah. You don't want that. You don't want it on either side.

1:13:55You want these people to be relatively neutral. The reason you have a commission that's made up of Democrats and Republicans by statute is so that when they take votes, they're not political. That's not how it's supposed to work. Right. They're supposed to reach some compromise and regulatory affairs. But anyway, you got this dummy wearing the gold head of Donald Trump. that's that's just that's our boy brendan making it plain that he's just a political flunky he's there to do the president's bidding and the president's bidding is to chill speech across the board it's not important but this pin itself is is pretty spectacular like i have to say it's it's definitely like some bs fake gold stuff but in it uh trump has substantially better hair than he does in real life but is also making like a a little bit of a kissy face and the direction it's facing on our man Brendan's lapel kind of makes it look like Trump is about to like kiss him on his neck and that's just that's just a visual I really appreciate the first time I saw a photo of this I was like this is 100 % AI there's just like there's no chances is real this is too insane um and regret to inform you all I was wrong yeah it's a real bummer I can't believe I want to say this but you know if you pay attention to Trump he's always kind of making a kissy face that is It's true.

1:15:08He does have sort of like resting kissy face. It's really true. He's not lost in thought. He's just pursing his lips. I don't know what's going on there. I want to call out our friends at Ars Technica who wrote a huge profile of Brendan this week. They called him the speech police. They're going through all the news distortion cases that we have covered endlessly on the show. So it's just very clear to a lot of people that Brendan Carr wants to censor the internet and censor broadcast regulators. It's not just us talking about it. We just have the most fun doing it because my brain is broken. It's out there.

1:15:45It's out in other publications. I think Rolling Stone did a piece. The ours piece is particularly good in a way that ours is particularly good all the time. It's also starting to hit the other commissioners in the FCC. So I'm going to do something we don't usually do here on Brennan Carr's Dummy America's Favorite Podcast. I'm going to point out that the other commissioners of the FCC are doing a good job. So in particular, Anna Gomez, who is a Democratic commissioner, was recently at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, the NAB convention. And she directly, openly called it out.

1:16:17She basically said that Brennan is a censor and the FCC is totally out of bounds. She said it is particularly important for media regulation, which is why the FCC was set up as an independent agency a long time ago, because the fear was the type of interference that you are now seeing today with the White House with media, whether it's broadcasters, public media, internet platforms, in the attempts to control speech. And then she went on to say, we've seen this administration throughout the administration threaten tech companies for their moderation practices to give consumers an environment that they want to stop fact-checking.

1:16:45It is an absolute pattern of censorship and control. If we let them do this, it will be to the harm of the country. So you have at least one FCC commissioner saying what we're doing here is wrong, just fully wrong. and we're actually doing the thing the FCC was set up to make sure it didn't happen, which is censor the speech of Americans. So good job, Anna. If you want to come on Dakota, you're more than welcome to. We've extended that invite. I've got one last one on Brendan. This is maybe the single most predictable Brendan Carr is a dummy item in the history of America's favorite podcast with a podcast.

1:17:25It's an increasingly high bar, that one. I mean, I'm just going to start to say it and you will complete my sentences for me. This week, Brandon put out a blog post announcing the FCC's next open meeting, which is when they go through agenda items. He titled it Spectrum is back again because he thinks he's your buddy instead of being a vicious internet sensor. And what he's excited about is opening up more Spectrum, which is basically the job of the FCC. And they want to open up a satellite spectrum that is currently being used by geostationary satellites. You can guess. You can guess what's happening here, right?

1:17:56Right. SpaceX filed a petition to open up satellite spectrum that's currently being used by geostationary satellites. And Brendan is taking up so he can open it up without once mentioning the fact that Elon Musk asked for it. Not even a passing mention of this. Just I believe satellite Internet for rural Americans would be great. It's like what you're not talking about Hughes net dog. Let's get real. You're talking about your buddy, Dr. Doge. Not even a mention. It's buried in the open meeting notes that they are responding to a petition by SpaceX. By saying, yes, of course, absolutely. Sounds great.

1:18:31Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. It's a good response. You know, he's a huge proponent of SpaceX over fiber. There's a lot of complaints about the Biden era bead program. Our buddy Ezra Klein is like basically selling his book by being like, this program sucked. But the reason the bead program sucked is they took it away from the FCC. I'm not saying it didn't suck. I'm saying that one of the reasons it sucked is because the FCC was so politicized and stupid that it didn't have accurate broadband maps deliberately so that it could roll out the infrastructure that we were going to pay for. So they moved it to another agency that had to start the maps over without like Verizon and Comcast getting in the way, which is a real thing that like a GPI and Brendan Carr like advocated for back in the day that we're not going to we're not going to demand these accurate maps.

1:19:17so brendan is like satellites will fix it don't worry about this dumb bead program that didn't give you fiber and you're like dude you don't even know where you're going but anyway yeah he's gonna he's gonna reform the spectrum and look maybe maybe this is the right choice maybe it is but the reason that i'm calling it out is when you start with i'm wearing the gold head of donald trump on my lapel and you end with i'm doing what elon musk wants you've lost your legitimacy as a regulator. You just look corrupt. And that is because you're a dummy, Brendan. So again, Anna's welcome. Brendan, if you want to come on the show and explain your behavior, or even just prove that you can complete a sentence without sucking up to Donald Trump or Elon Musk, you're welcome.

1:20:02I know you listen. I know you listen. Come on in, Brendan. It'll be fine. The water's warm. That's been Brendan Carzadone. One more thing about this blog post, which you shouldn't read. It's very boring. But he does the thing that Republican FCC commissioners really like to do, which is mention robocalls. They're like, we're doing, and Ajit Pai did this masterfully. He was like, I'm going to ruin the internet in the following several ways. But because I am a man of the people, wouldn't it be awesome if we stopped robocalls? And that hasn't worked at all. But then Brendan in here is like, we're doing, we're giving elon what he wants and then he's just like of course spectrum is not the only area where we're moving fast we're continuing the fcc's long-standing efforts to crack down on illegal robocalls that segue doesn't make any sense it's just him being like but you hate robocalls right i'm gonna fix them by the way it's 37 gigahertz spectrum not 36 i apologize brendan if you want to brendan's like ready to tweet how wrong i am man loves to tweet um it is Which, by the way, true.

1:21:07A G-Pi was all about stopping robocalls. It wasn't successful because he didn't actually regulate anyone. He just incentivized the industry to regulate itself. Straight up, not an exaggeration. I have gotten two robocalls since we started recording the podcast. It's very good. Anyway, that is Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's Favorite Podcast within a podcast. If you know where he got the pin from, let me know. I'm sort of dying to know. All right, David, we need some power. I will make Neelai wear the pin on the show. If you get us one, I will make Neelai wear it. It's the closest we're going to get to Trump or Brendan on the show.

1:21:36Let's be honest. All right. We need a palate cleanser, my friend. Theme music TK, by the way. All right. Can we talk about TikTok for like 35 seconds? That's all I want to do. That's the opposite of a palate cleanser. All right. Well, then we're going to get to the palate cleanser, but we got to talk about TikTok just for 35 seconds because we spent a little bit of time on it last week. Nothing happened. Everybody says it's against the law. Nothing is happening. Is that a fair summation of what's going on? Trump delayed it another 75 days. uh pam bondy the attorney general is is out there essentially demanding that apple and google keep the apps alive which is what they've been doing all along saying we're not going to enforce this you have to keep it in the store on and on and on uh and then senate democrats are saying uh it's it's against the law to do this delay uh which of course is true all you do is read the law and you know that that's the case uh but i don't imagine any of that changing much of anything is it a Particularly bad situation for Apple and Google because they just get exposed to another 75 days of liability just hoping that everything works out for them.

1:22:38They're just these like weird pawns trying to hope nobody notices them. And they're just going to have to keep waiting this out because it's maybe never going to end. But they want tariff relief, too. So they've got to keep it. Like the level of just like base corruption here is wild, right? Like everyone has to fly to the golf course and be like, please, sir, not 104 percent. and they're all going to leave with different numbers and compare them in the parking lot. They cannot take TikTok down because they want the number to be lower than the next guy. TikTok is doomed. That's my prediction. It is the ultimate pawn in this entire situation.

1:23:16China is not going to want to sell it. And at the end of the day, what they're going to say is turn it off. We don't want 104%. Donald Trump is not going to keep this promise. Oh, you think China is going to say turn it off? It's the last bit of leverage. they did it once right they wanted to leverage the first time they just turned it off the last leverage you have we don't want 104 we want zero tiktok's gone trump will blink it it that will work i think you're right that that is that is like if you start at we're not going to release your movies here anymore we're like a few escalations up to we're going to turn off tiktok and that will work yeah in every way that china would need it to it would work yeah and china's not afraid to play these games China's like oh you're the CEO of Alibaba what if you weren't around for a while it is an authoritarian government as it's just a move they play so we'll see all right now can we have a palette cleanser I have two bits of exciting news for you before we leave uh one is that it it appears to be plausible possible that Instagram is actually going to get an iPad app 750 years after the launch of Instagram wait can I tell you the funniest thing about this story yeah it it made me laugh so hard this is also from the information which is doing great work um this it's in the context of a story that's about adam assari and instagram being ready to be super aggressive if tiktok goes away and there's a long list of stuff you might do and they're like it's time to ship that ipad app and it's like no that's not it guys that's not if tiktok goes away and your answer is also there's an ipad app now i i don't know if that's going to be it but i do love it i don't think that is how you do it like tiktok famously also not a great ipad experience but i think there's a there's a case to be made for instagram just attempting to be everywhere as it goes through all of this right uh and one way to make people happy and get a bunch of headlines is to launch an ipad app like i think it's not crazy that meta has been sitting on a finished ipad app for a long time just sort of waiting for the right moment.

1:25:22I mean, there's no way this requires, I'm going to say like any work on their part, right? Like you like click a couple of buttons, it goes, it's wider. You've got an iPad app. They were just like mad at Apple, right? Yeah, they just didn't want to do it. Yeah, yeah. And I also, I was just talking to our friend Casey Johnston for a Verge Cast thing that's going to run in the next couple of weeks. And one of her theories is that Meta doesn't like iPad apps because they want you to be on your phone because the phone is the more addictive and harder to put down device, which just strikes me as a good theory.

1:25:55I have no evidence for that theory, but it's a theory that makes sense. But I think there are a lot of people who have iPads and want to look at Instagram on their iPads. And I think if you claim to be a media first thing that is great on screens, iPads kind of make a lot of sense. Seems like a good idea. This also, I'm curious if this extends to Threads, which also does not have an iPad app, which feels like a little embarrassing as well, particularly given that it is in the heat of battle with these other platforms. Instagram is at least like singular in its way. There's also no WhatsApp for iPad.

1:26:29Like, Meta has made a calculated effort to not do the iPad. And I think it is in part because of this ongoing beef with Apple, but I think there may be a moment here where it is so useful to do that that they'll do it. I mean, that's wild. Again, I just think it's very funny to like list of things to do if TikTok goes down. And they're like, they moved the card on the Kanban board from jail to immediate, you know? All right, what's the next one? The last one is the Pixel 9a, which Allison Johnson just reviewed for us. And it is great. It is the mid-range phone you would want it to be. It comes in a cool color.

1:27:09It's like pink that I'm very into that Allison had. And this is like, Google continues to make good phones. This phone is still$499. There's been some sketchiness with the release date and all this stuff, but the price is right at a time when it might not be for long. This is just a really good phone. And this has become the phone I tell most people who are not tech people, but Android phones, to buy. And I feel like this easily continues that in a way that I find very exciting. Yeah, Google seems to be killing it with this series. And I think it's particularly interesting this coming like a month after the iPhone 16e, which is$100 more expensive.

1:27:49And I think that Delta and just a couple extra little like, you know, friendly tweaks on the 9a, right? the fact that it will do both fingerprint and face authentication, the fact that it has a higher refresh rate screen, go a long enough way to make it feel like a deal in the way that the 16e doesn't quite get there. Yeah, I think Google, ironically, like the big tradeoff here that Google made is it does less AI stuff, which is a very surprising tradeoff for Google to make, but also a really good one. It has all the other stuff you'd want your phone to have. It just doesn't do quite as much of the AI stuff.

1:28:27And spoiler alert, most people are pretty willing to make that trade. It turns out. All right. I just want to end the episode by pointing out that in the time that we've been talking, the tariff on China has risen to 145%. 145. The White House has clarified. The tariff in China is now 145. You know what's manly, Eli? A thousand percent. Real men do a thousand. I'm just saying. It's a very loud V8 engine, my friends. Wait, can I ask one more question about phones before we go? This is the thing I've been thinking about, and I'm curious what you guys think. I think my sort of ongoing thesis for a while now has been that phones are not actually that price sensitive anymore.

1:29:08that you get the trade-ins, you get the financing, that actually the sort of$100 delta between one fund and another is not that meaningful. But I wonder in a tariff-y world where people are more price-conscious about everything, are we as people who write about these things going to have to care about price in general more than we have in the past? It's interesting because we run a reviews program and so much of a reviews program is like, is it worth the money? and so i want to say the answer is yes because that just changes the heart of the thing that we do but i i also think what's going to happen is like there's going to be more bloatware on the phones right like people are price sensitive especially right now and i you're just i think you're just going to be like you open your pixel line a and google is like do you want three free months of max yeah right like it's just that thing is going to start happening in extremely weird ways or they're going to lower the base storage and be like do you want google one like you know like there's something shittier that's coming that like will keep the price the same i'm not sure what it will be but i it feels like they're not going to up the price right because that's a drastic measure yeah and it is easier to sneakily make the phone worse than to sneakily make it more expensive.

1:30:29That's definitely true. Yeah, like if you're any one of these big, if you're Apple or Google, you can go to one of the big carriers and be like, here's what we need to do. We need to adjust the terms of our revenue sharing. And so the phone contract lengths will be six months longer or add on a provider service upcharge fee that's labeled like the Cook Doctrine. Like what it doesn't matter. You know, like there's just other places to sneak the money in that isn't the selling price because of the way we've structured all of these things. I think I buy that. It feels like bad news. Yeah. But I think that is where this goes.

1:31:03We're going to see... Chris Mims, my old colleague at the Wall Street Journal, was tweeting about the thing people don't realize is not that a lot of stuff is going to get more expensive. It's that a lot of stuff is going to go away. And I think that and the sort of in-shittification of things ahead of their time are two sort of non-obvious things to look out for here. Yeah. By the way, the 145, they clarified it's because of fentanyl, which is one of those things. It's not a crisis coming from China. Yeah. What's the trade deficit on fentanyl? It's very confusing. Like, there's a hole in the heart of this whole argument that's like, oh, but your emergency is fake.

1:31:42So we'll see. By the time you listen to this, the number could have gone up or down. Who knows? Tell us. Email us and tell us what the number is right now as you're hearing this. I desperately want to know. Yeah. All right. We got to get out of here. That is the Vergecast.

1:32:02And 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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