One company's quest for the perfect charger

26:01So once we go there, we are in kind of charging utopia because there's so many options and they have batteries and you can run on a picnic table in the middle of nowhere and there's four ports of everything for everyone. And so, yes, you could do it, but you wouldn't want it because you would want the flexibility of splitting out that much power to other things when you want to do that. Okay. The problem with that approach is it's a much more complicated shopping expedition, right? That's like, now I have to make sure that I am buying the right adapter and the right set of cables to go into that adapter in order for all of this work.

26:37And then I can only use all of those things together or else it's just going to, it all falls apart again. Well, and so by the way, a lot of people selling devices that need that still do include the plug. All the MacBooks still include the plug. Sure. And that's because when you get to that level and stuff like that, that's still a reasonable expectation. And they want to know that they have an end-to-end solution in that box. over that price point and solving those big problems and stuff. And so, by the way, even Apple offers the double port. When you buy an Air, you have the choice of a 70 or like a two port 30.

27:11So I think once you're over$50 or you're overcharging small mobile devices, it becomes a little bit of a different game. And you would always choose that flexibility. All right. Last question, and then I'm going to let you go. Tell me about color. you did black and white which is like fine but why why not why black and white why not you know other colors or let people choose or get really weird with it I have a deep orange USB-C cable that I love to pieces and I want more people to have weird colors so why black and white that's funny you mention that because so we released PowerCord yesterday right and we released it I mean it's not black and white It's like dove and charcoal or something like that.

28:02Sure, it's black and white. Sure, you call it a real one. No, dude, listen, this is where we were, right? Up until yesterday, a lot of 12-cells hardware, certainly around power, was like our glossy white with red. Sure, yeah. And that goes back to like a plug bug 15 years ago. And so I would say we made a huge step forward yesterday in our charcoal and like Heather Gray. Um, no, we're not, we're not afraid of that, but you're not going to not do a black one. I mean, listen, you can ask anybody and, um, they can make like 15 colors and the black one's still going to outsell it like a million to one.

28:42Oh yeah. So we're going to, we're going to start out with, with like your, your, your basics and, and to get the job done, but we're not afraid of colors at all. But I would tell you that if we had like an orange, say for example, with the black and the white solutions yesterday, it would have distracted. When we have a new product that has a new idea, we wouldn't want a color to distract from it. And we want to put it out there and make sure that we talk about the important parts of the product and its function and its solutions before we get into, and did you see the purple one and the orange one?

29:15Okay, that's fair. But we're not afraid of that at all. Yeah, but you just don't want to start with, look at this cool orange USB cable. Right, because we would rather talk about the solution first. Yeah, that's fair. And that's typically in basics, color-wise. Yeah. No, I get it. I buy it. And I do, I still remember, and I've mentioned this to people before, but like years ago, I had a meeting with Lenovo and they had this very cool orange laptop. And I was like, that thing is awesome. Tell me about it. And he was like, straight up, that thing only exists so that people will walk over to the shelf and then buy the black one.

29:48It's like, that's why we made an orange one. People will look at it and then buy the black one. They're not wrong. I mean, and like, and so consumers, you know, I mean, I do the same thing sometimes. I'm like, oh, that's great. I'll take white or, you know, whatever. So, I mean, you know, the bold thing is to not do that, but you still have to like put something out that like meets people where they're at and meets their comfort level. Totally. All right, Andrew, this is great. Thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. David, this is so fun. Let's do this again. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk crypto.

30:22We'll be right back.

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33:21All right, we're back. Tina Nguyen is here. Hi, Tina. Hi, David. This is your first time on The Vergecast. This is very exciting. Presumably for you, but definitely for me. I'm very happy you're here. I have been waiting to be on The Vergecast for the longest time. I have been here for over three months now. and the entire time I'm here going like, do they like me? Will they let me on their podcast? Am I cool? Have I like successfully integrated myself into this company? That's perfect. That's exactly the thing we're trying to engender when new people come. But you've made it. Congratulations.

33:55You're here now. So stoked. So you're currently in Vegas at some kind of crypto conference, right? Which is like perfect timing for all of what we want to talk about. But tell me about the conference. What's going on? How are the vibes? This is not just like some crypto conference. This is the Bitcoin conference. It is the biggest one in the country. I think it was like one of the first. It's hosted by Bitcoin Magazine, which has now turned into some like weird crypto version of Fox News. I think that people will be bad at crypto if they tell me that it's Fox News. But it has this like extremely broad power over not just the crypto community, but also now this wave of lawmakers that are coming to this thing, this wave of big businesses that are coming to this thing.

34:47I was talking to this guy who's been at the conference for like five years and he was like, this is the first time I've seen more people wearing suits than not. Interesting. I believe there were four senators, several members of the House, a whole bunch of like deputy secretaries of the Treasury and whatever people from the administration. David Sachs, who is the White House's AI slash crypto czar, was there as well. And I don't know, there weren't points here where I was like, I don't think this is a crypto conference. This reminds me of CPAC. And CPAC is the conservative political action conference that used to be the giant hub for every single Republican activist, elected official, what have you, to like gather in Washington and, you know, do panels, hear speakers, have an expo floor, super duper Republican.

35:40I walked into this conference and there were people in like every variation of MAGA hat that you could possibly find. Oh, wow. Steak and shake was there. So there's a really weird thing going on with Steak and Shake. I really would. It's a much longer story. But Steak and Shake was there with a big booth saying Steak Toshi over it, referring to the mythical founder of Bitcoin, a dude who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto. But they had a booth there that was showing off how Steak and Shake now accepts Bitcoin. And they were also selling beef tallow. They were selling jars of beef tallow,$9 for a jar of grass-fed tallow,$12 for a jar of wagyu tallow.

36:28And if you bought a jar of tallow, you would get a hat that said, make frying oil tallow again. What on earth? So we've just, this is just like a full, we've completely lost the plot kind of moment that you're describing here. But the thing is, OK, let me I would like to make the case very quickly that what Steak and Shake is doing is actually like a super normal thing in the Bitcoin community. It feels like I've been seeing that in the crypto world like for forever. Everybody the like we've started accepting crypto and now we're going to go all in on this because it's like a some version of a PR win.

37:04Sure. What strikes me as very different is the like Bitcoin 2025 turning into CPAC thing. And this is kind of what I want to talk about with you, because it feels like that's like a perfect microcosm of a thing that has happened that I still don't totally understand, which is that somehow the sort of right wing MAGA crowd and the crypto crowd, two groups that you would not historically think would have anything to do with each other or anything that they agree on about how anything works, are suddenly all tied up together. And I want to I want to talk through some sort of specific pieces of that.

37:37But you've watched a lot of this happen. How did this happen? I can talk very thoroughly about the Republican side coming into this. So for people who are listening, I don't know. I used to be a full-fledged political reporter. My beat was the MAGA movement, and I had been covering Donald Trump for Vanity Fair, Politico, on the White House team. I've been covering Trump since 2015. 400 years ago at this point, it seems. 400 years ago, I am this old withered crone of political journalism. So during the 2024 election, Trump actually made this unusual for, I guess, a politician outreach to the crypto community, engaging with people who are in the field, going to the Bitcoin conference last year.

38:27And then when he won, he actually started implementing policies that were friendly to the crypto community, like removing tax regulations, removing the Department of Justice's crypto tax evasion division. And then like pardoning Ross Ulbrich, who's the founder of the Silk Road, pardoning all these other crypto bros who had committed SEC frauds. All of a sudden, Coinbase donates one million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration committee that celebrates him becoming president. Oh, man. Wow. I can't believe the SEC dropped its investigation into Coinbase. Whoa. Right. But I remember someone saying on the stage during a panel with other Republican lawmakers that the crypto community is a very loyal community and they will always remember that someone who did something for them that was beneficial to them did that thing.

39:24Now, I don't know how long that loyalty will last. And that's sort of the thing that I kind of want to figure out as someone who's new to this space. But the thing is, is that like everyone I talked to who went to the conference were like, OK, yeah, it's great that these guys are doing stuff for us right now. And it's great to see that like these policymakers are coming to us. And this is not just like a political nod. Last year, you just had Donald Trump show up this year. It's like actual lawmakers, people who are really deep in the weeds. But like what happens when those politicians start trying to regulate you again?

40:02What happens when they start going overboard and like have you as a community ceded too much power to said lawmakers just because they came in and like told you some nice things. There's this one panel that I caught yesterday. It was called like, are Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state? Oh, boy. Which was, I think, what I had been hoping to see play out on stage. Like, are people in the Bitcoin community really accepting these Republicans coming in? I do think that there is a really strong strain in the crypto community, a strong strain of suspicion in this community about the Republicans coming in.

40:40Well, and of the government in general. I mean, right. There's so much of the whole crypto movement that is is like anarchists in a certain way. Right. It's a belief that like we actually shouldn't trust any government. It's fiat currency. Like that's what they call it. And and crypto is supposed to be this thing outside of that. And so that's that's why this tie up has always been so fascinating to me. But that like that first sort of trade you describe makes some sense to me, right? Where it's like, OK, the crypto industry is like, well, we have a lot of money and you are regulating us. We will give you some of our money and then you will stop regulating us.

41:12And that that basically happened, right? Like it's in more or less, they donated a lot of money to Trump, helped get Trump elected. Trump pardoned a bunch of people, removed a bunch of lawsuits, took away a lot of regulation. And then it's like everybody at that point could have just sort of shaken hands and walked away. Right. Everybody got what they wanted. Number went up. Congratulations. But it feels like we're getting deeper and deeper into the ties between these two. And that's the thing you're talking about, like these lawmakers who are like really starting to dig in and care about this stuff and like make it more of the Republican platform than ever.

41:45And that's the part I still can't wrap my head around. So a lot of why I think the Republicans are here is a bit of a reflection of how Donald Trump operates. It's always been a little bit of like, oh, wow, nice thing you've got here. It would be a shame if it disappeared. Sure. And I think what you're seeing all these tech companies realize from Apple and Google and Microsoft to like literally the Bitcoin people is Trump will not be happy if you just give him one thing one time. You cannot just do one transaction. He becomes president. He does this one thing for you. That's it. Like you have to keep feeding that beast.

42:24And like generally happens in politics or whatever. Like, but this is the most nakedly brazen way that you've ever seen a president and subsequently the party that he leads do it. And part of me keeps wondering sort of how far this goes, because, again, even that trade, if you're Coinbase and you just want to keep making that trade for four years and hope that you get to the end of this and you still get to exist and the number keeps going up, fine. But then there's like we have lawmakers who are like, we need this strategic Bitcoin reserve and we want to be the capital of crypto in the world.

42:58And Trump seems to be endorsing this. And then there's the whole Trump coin thing, which we're going to talk about. But that feels slightly separate from all of this. I guess what's your sense both sort of at this conference and in general how serious the government is in a bigger way about like really earnestly getting into crypto? There's definitely a faction of the elected officials who really want this. Granted, I think it's to win them support in their home states. But they're like some genuine crypto evangelicals in both the House and the Senate. Cynthia Lummis, who is the Wyoming senator chairing the Digital Assets Committee, was here.

43:38Everyone kind of treated her as a bit of a superstar. The administration, on the other hand, is in this really weird position where the evangelists have to somehow convince the rest of the administration that this is actual money that is worth holding onto for a long period of time. Right now, the strategic Bitcoin reserve, which was established through an executive order, is like, all right, we'll establish this reserve. We can fund it with things that the government already has. We cannot buy more Bitcoin unless one of two things happens. One, either act of Congress passes into law, the Congress holds the power of the purse, they can like write into the budget, we will set left side this much money to buy Bitcoin.

44:24A much harder thing to convince 520 something people. Or the administration can find ways to purchase Bitcoin in a budget neutral manner. So something has to get cut in order to fund the government's purchase of Bitcoin. David Sachs was on stage saying we should try to convince Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent, who lead Commerce and Treasury, respectively, that they should just like start cutting some of their programs so that we can buy Bitcoin with the money that they have cut from their programs. I don't know if that's going very well. And I don't know whether people behind the scenes are willing to actually cut their own budget for the purpose of buying Bitcoin.

45:06There is definitely some sort of tension going on behind the scenes. between not just like Elon and the administration, because that's obviously the most visible, but this other one that is like a much quieter power struggle behind the scenes over, all right, what are these tech people doing here? What is it they want from us? And do we feel okay giving it to them? Considering how much the Elon thing has blown up into the open, I don't think they would like that. And I am fascinated to see how much this battle now plays out when the player is someone who is, you know, way more subtle, way less explosive, way fewer chainsaw wielding, like a guy with fewer chainsaws than Elon Musk has.

45:54right well yeah and i think it's an interesting thing to see happen this idea that you know let's cut all this stuff so that we can buy bitcoin and there's there's a small group of people who i can completely understand why they would be very excited about that and then there's the question of like is that is there any world in which that is a popular idea except for the people who would like to make their bitcoin go up and i don't know my sense is probably not like i have a hard time I'm imagining crypto being sort of on its own, outside of the money of it all, a winning political battle. But maybe I'm wrong.

46:28Maybe that's changing. Maybe there are more people who are like intellectually into crypto than I think that there are. I think they would first have to understand crypto at a much larger scale. And I think that is happening. But there also is the broader political consensus to consider of like, can you convince enough voters that crypto is real money, that Bitcoin is more stable than all of the other like scammy crypto things that you have seen floating out there? And once you agree that, yes, the Bitcoin holds value, that we should protect it somehow. And that's a very complicated thing to explain to people outside of the Bitcoin community and crypto overall.

47:12Yeah, that's a high bar. Yeah. Lummis was actually saying that on stage that working on the stablecoin bill, she was stalked by how many of her colleagues like still do not understand crypto. And stablecoins are, I think, the easiest to like grasp onto piece of technology around crypto. Because, you know, one stable coin, one U.S. dollar, we are regulating the amount of U.S. one-to-one units of currency. That should be kind of straightforward if you were like a septuagenarian elected official who was like trying to figure out how to use a flip phone. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's something. So speaking of scammy things, before I let you go here, let's talk about Trump coin just for a couple of minutes.

47:58Because there was this big dinner. You got a bunch of really great reporting on what happened inside of this dinner. But just sort of very quickly walk me through the Trump coin story, because I think there's an argument to be made that one of the reasons Donald Trump cares about crypto in general is that he is very aware of what is going on with Trump coin. So I think these two things are both very separate and I think in a certain way also kind of tied together. So just tell me the story of Trump coin briefly. Okay. So Trump coin launches right before his inauguration. And all of a sudden, this holding company that his sons are involved in, not Trump, of course, but his sons, it's very separate from Trump himself, launched this coin.

48:41And suddenly there's a frick ton of hype around it because that's how meme coins do be. And the price of Trump coin shoots up to like seventy five dollars a token or something. Eventually that crashes to, yeah, maybe like less than 10 bucks. But there's an unlock schedule that the creators and holders of the majority of Trump coin have to follow. And I think they hold like 80, 90 percent of the actual coin value itself. Everyone else is just trading on the 20 percent. But like their hype around the coin ultimately drives up the price of the entire coin, a.k.a. And then like that increases the paper wealth of what World Liberty Financial and Trump and whatever are holding.

49:27But if you're in crypto long enough, you understand that when the people who create the coin start selling their coin after they are able to in the next 90 days period, several month period, whatever, once they dump their coin and try to sell it at like a higher price, that floods the market, the value of the coin like dilutes. And so this contest, as one of my sources told me, was really timed to keep the price of the coin juiced up as high as possible by ascribing a utility value to it. Because you can't like buy stuff with Dogecoin. It's just like a meme that you hold and you hope that everyone else gets hyped over it.

50:05If you can buy a dinner with the president or like an NFT, you could like win something with this Trump coin. Then, wow, doesn't that make that coin far more valuable to hold? If you're the top 220 holders of this coin by the end of the contest, you get to have dinner with the president. You get to go to Trump National, which is a golf resort in Sterling, Virginia. It's a black tie affair. You will get to see Trump. It'll be such a cool dinner. It'll be so amazing. And if you think about it in like a surface level way and don't understand crypto at all, you look at this and you're like, wow, this is brazen corruption.

50:47Look at all these crypto bros coming in from overseas, spending all of this money to have dinner with the president. but Trump was really only there for an hour and the only the top 25 people in the contest had dinner with him everyone else just got to see him give a speech but the actual purpose of the contest was to drive up the price of Trump coin by getting everyone excited about it for like a prize the prize being hang out with the president to be fair that does still sound like naked corruption. It's just like it's just clever corruption. Oh, no, no. I'd say this is absolutely corrupt, but it's a much more subtle type of corruption.

51:29Like the way I've been trying to explain it to people is that like it's sort of like appraising a house or something. If you can get someone to write down on a piece of paper, this house is actually worth a million dollars and the house is maybe not worth that. In fact, it's like a, you know, like, I don't know, supposed to be bulldozed down and is worth actually nothing. But if someone says this coin is actually worth a lot, you can do a lot with that house's collateral. And it's imaginary money, but like someone believes it's real money. And so like the Trump contest was a way to inflate the asset of Trump coin that is being locked somewhere for like 80 and owned by several private entities who are not buying this on retail.

52:19And the idea is that like if the price is high enough and these guys dump it, they make the money that the coin is worth when it's high. The moment they dump it, though, that's when it crashed. The value of the coin crashes, which was why I found the story interesting. Oh, that is also another way that the Trump family profits from this contest, which is they collect the fees on every transaction made of Trump coin. Oh, interesting. So, yeah, if there's activity on the coin, too, they make money. And if you incentivize people to buy your crypto, some money is better than no money. Yeah. No, I agree.

52:54All right. So I should let you go here. But at the risk of asking an incredibly general question, I am curious sort of how the vibes are shaking out to you right now, again, both at the conference and in general, like in crypto, there has always been the kind of number go up community of people who are like, it is it is good for me and for people I know, if Bitcoin is worth more tomorrow than it is today. So I will do what is required to make it worth more tomorrow than it is today. And then there's the people who are sort of the like true technology believers who are like, think this is sort of interesting internet infrastructure and are really interested in all the things that Bitcoin could be for the internet and the unbanked and whatever.

53:30It seems to me that the number go up community has all the power right now, but are you still seeing sort of the true believers at these conferences? Like, are there people out there who want to sort of reckon with what it means as a technology, or is this just a money thing that we're all doing at a conference in Vegas? The technology community you laid out, I think is still pretty powerful. and it's because crypto relies on actual technology and science in order to continue being mined, continue being made. You need programmers and IT specialists to, you know, man the data centers. You need legislation to pull energy to fuel set data centers.

54:15You need lawmakers on the ground who will help deal with all the people who are really mad that your data farm is now polluting all of their air. There's a real cost to how to make number go up. And I think at some point, the technologists and the number go up people will have to reckon with the fact that you need the technologists to make the number go up. I don't know how that's going to play out, at least from my coverage area in Washington. But I think it's going to be really fascinating. It might be the environmentalists, actually. The environmentalists may want to start getting into this game.

54:58Yeah, that makes sense. And it does feel like the deeper this gets into the political community, the more sort of tentacles it's going to have into other things other people care about. Like we have mainstreamed this stuff in a very sort of specific way that is going to make a lot of people, I think, want to get involved in all of the different sides of it. And I think we're like just beginning to see how weird that might get. It's going to get so weird. It's going to be weird, especially when most of the lawmakers in Washington still have no idea how any of the technology works. Everyone's old.

55:34It's like a notorious problem in Washington that most of the elected officials, especially the most powerful ones, are like over the age of 65. Someone who's 70 is considered young and sprightly. So it's also going to be that big wall of ignorance that happens with this. So it's going to get really stupid. I am so sorry. It really, it really, really is. All right. You need to go do more Vegas things. I hope you survive. Godspeed the next couple of days. Pray for me. But thank you for being here. This was really fun. Thanks, David. This was really fun. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question for the Verge Cast Hotline.

56:07We'll be right back.

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57:56All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. You can also reach out to me directly. I'm davidattheverge.com and I'm davidpeirce.11 on Signal. Any way you want to reach us, please do. But frankly, the hotline is the most fun. So keep on calling. This week, we have a question about AI agents. Hey, David. This is Brayden. I've got a question about agents and how we use the internet or how we will use it. So I believe that there are some purchases and some decisions that are big screen decisions.

58:32For example, buying an airplane ticket. You're a freak if you do that on your phone. That's a big screen decision. I want an us and keyboard to do that. I want my multiple tabs. I don't feel like I can do that on my little iPhone 12 mini screen. It's not right. It's not how the Lord intended it. but like in the future if agents are doing everything for us like am i gonna be like a boomer and be like oh you kids you're letting agents buy your plane tickets i go to the website every time like is this gonna be the equivalent of that where i'm gonna be like looking at other people being like i don't let it do it for me i do it myself and everyone will make fun of me and wait for me to die.

59:23Like, I just don't understand what the world is going to be like if we let AI do everything for it because I don't think I'm going to trust AI to buy me a plane ticket. Because I want to do it. Or like, buying a house or big boy decisions deserve not AI. I don't know, am I crazy? Am I going to be an annoying old man? Please tell me. Anyway, rock and roll. I love this question because it gets in a thing that I've been thinking a lot about over the last few weeks. And I frankly don't have a pat answer. The reason I'm bringing this one up is that I want to hear from all of you. And the thing that I want to hear in particular is how big and how high stakes a decision or an action would you count on AI to do for you?

1:00:15And I think in a lot of ways, we're in the middle of figuring out the answer to that question, right? I think I love the framing of big screen decisions and small screen decisions. This really resonates with me. And I think it does in part because I'm a person of a certain age who didn't like have a smartphone when I was 10. And so I'm not used to everything being a smartphone activity. But I do think of certain things as like things I do when I sit down at my laptop, right? Anything that needs a lot of typing, anything that is like big and sort of visually comparative where I need to look at a bunch of stuff at once, those are big screen activities.

1:00:48And I have a set of them in my head that just feel ridiculous to do on my phone, and I never would. But I think that has shifted in a real way to the sort of mobile native generation. And to the am I just going to be a cranky old man as a burgeoning cranky old man myself, I wonder about this. I wonder if, as a lot of these companies hope, we will get quickly to the point where younger people first and then everybody after gets used to the idea of just offloading tasks to AI agents. But there is a difference there because the thing that changes there is instead of going from a big screen to a small screen, which is sort of a user interface difference, but fundamentally the same activity, right?

1:01:31Like I'm on booking.com, whether or not I'm on a giant monitor or a tiny phone screen. The interface is different, but the sort of steps are the same and your involvement is the same. With AI agents, it turns completely. And suddenly, I am no longer doing the thing. I am trusting something else to do the thing. And I think for me, the biggest question, and frankly, for a lot of these companies, the biggest question is how far can they push that, right? And what we've seen so far, frankly, is not super enticing from a lot of these companies. I think one of the things that Amazon really hoped when it started investing in Alexa is that people would start shopping with their voice.

1:02:10You just say, you know, buy toilet paper and it would buy toilet paper. That hasn't really panned out. That hasn't been a business for Amazon so far. And I think that's partly because of the technology. It just hasn't been good enough or interesting enough or fast enough yet. But it is also because there's something in the process of doing complicated things that I think we want to be involved in, right? Like, even if I had a very smart person in my life who I trust, who was buying plane tickets for me, I would still want them to check and ask me if this is the right time and do it like, involve me in the process in some way.

1:02:45And so the idea that I'm just going to be like, I'm going to Italy, go, and the AI agents will do it all for me, even if the technology is good enough that that happens successfully, I still don't think that's going to feel good to people. And so for me, a thing I've been trying to figure out is if we've gone from big screen tasks to small screen tasks to I guess what you'd call like agent tasks or no screen tasks, in my own life, I'm trying to figure out what to move around, right? And there's a certain set of things that I think will move to the agents. Very simple stuff. Very like make a little app that'll do this for me on my computer.

1:03:22I just vibe coded a giant stopwatch that just like shows the time in really large letters on my computer when I hit a button. Simple thing. I don't need anything more complicated than that. That is a perfect agent task that it can just go and do for me. But like I would not use ChatGPT to buy me toilet paper because then something will show up at my house, maybe, but it might not. It might not be the thing that I wanted. I don't know how much it costs. I don't know how, whether it's the brand that I wanted. I don't know why it's that there's just so many middle questions that I think we have not yet answered, but I do think it's useful to interrogate that line just as I've tried to figure out, okay, what is worth doing on the small screen that I used to do on the big screen because I can do it right now and without getting up and from the couch, right?

1:04:12There's something to that trade of it's convenient and it's easy and I can do it before I forget about it versus I can sit down and kind of do it properly. And agents are going to push that boundary again, right? What can I offload so that it's good enough and I don't have to do it at all? What is that list of things? And I think the technology to do almost all of those things is not yet good enough to be interesting. But that line and the sort of Overton window of those things as it moves down towards agents, I think is going to be really fascinating. So that said, I think anyone who tells you that you are eventually going to offload all of your tasks, specifically shopping, anyone who tells you that you're going to use agents to buy things has a really, really, really heavy incentive to tell you that because they are going to get a cut of the things that you buy.

1:05:03That's all I would ask you to remember. I think there's lots of interesting AI tasks out there. And I think one of them might be shopping and buying of stuff. But I will tell you for sure that there is a reason everybody is doing that. And it's because it's the business model. So just keep that in mind as you're thinking about this stuff. They all want you to buy plane tickets with AI agents. I know why they want that. And I'm not at all sure that it's a good idea. Anyway, lots to think about. And I do want to hear from you. I think both right now and in the future, what do you think the right set of tasks is to offload to AI?

1:05:37Things that you can just prompt it to do and trust that it will happen with little or no extra interaction from you. If you're using stuff like that today, if AI is currently buying you toilet paper, I would love to hear from you. But also, how far down the rabbit hole of that do you think we get as this technology gets better? I'd love to hear from you. So 866-VERGE11, vergecastattheverge.com. Keep it all coming. Listening to how all of you do AI and are thinking about AI and incorporating it into your life has been fascinating and really helpful. And I want to keep doing more of that on the show.

1:06:10For now though, that is it for the show. Thank you to everybody who came on this episode and thank you as always for listening. Like I mentioned, you can email us vergecastattheverge.com call the hotline 866-VERGE11 about AI, but also about whatever you're thinking about. We love hearing all of your questions, all of your party speaker updates, all kinds of good stuff. Thank you, as always, for reaching out. It is one of the most fun things about making this show. This show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. VergeCast is Verge Production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:06:38Neal and I will be back on Friday to talk about what's coming at WWDC next week, lots of other AI news, anything we can hopefully learn this week about Johnny Ive and Sam Altman. I think there's a lot of stuff coming this summer, and we just have an awful lot to talk about. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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