Pixel 11 gets in on the digicam trend

21:15I mean, I bet. You're 120 from a 5X optical is like kind of a lot. From a teeny tiny sensor. Yeah.

21:22Nilay Patel:So, I mean, that's as close to you're barely taking a photo as exists, right? Yeah. You're just saying, look, I'm standing in Lisbon. There's a beer bike over there. Generate an image for me. Yeah. And you're handing it the barest amount of sensor data. Yeah. To do that generation. And you're like, you're very close to being over the line. Yeah. It's getting close. How many actual pixels could possibly be viewing this image at that distance, right? It's like, yeah, this is not a lot. Four by four grid. Not a lot. They're purely inventing everything. Yeah, if you pixel bin it, it's actually just one pixel is actually looking at this.

21:54Nilay Patel:Yeah. My curiosity about all this is, one, I think Google can lean way harder into this is the most artistic phone camera you can get. It will allow you to express yourself in the most creative ways. They don't have the market share. They have nothing to lose. Yeah. Yeah, true. And they don't really market this feature at all. Yeah. And then over here, there's the AI tools and all the other AI stuff they're doing. And I think they've realized they should back off of that. What they're putting in front of people now is a bunch of artistic decisions, not a bunch of when you take this photo, we will detect that there's a stray dog in the background and remove the dog on your behalf, which is what all these companies have been doing for several years.

22:39Nilay Patel:I wonder, David, do you think like the backlash of what is a photo, are these real pixels, is this reality? Do you think it's getting to them? I think that the backlash of AI in general is getting to them. Because the features that got added to the pixel this year, almost none of them are Gen AI features. And the ones that are, are very much hidden underneath all the other stuff. Like Rambler, which we'll get to, is like a new voice model that writes for you and gets rid of filler words and all of this stuff. and it is using Gemini, but they don't really talk about that. You know, Dieter presents it as this way to just like, you can have filler words and it'll cut them out and it's easier and it's faster, but they don't say like, oh, this is AI powered.

23:20Do you want to talk about Rambler a little bit more? What does it do? Because this is actually, it's this small feature and I feel like it has gotten the most buzz of all the stuff that they've added. Rambler was actually my favorite feature on this phone, which is funny. It's voice to text. It's voice to text. The Pixel has always had the best voice. I mean, in my opinion, the best voice to text on phones. The iPhone was really sad because the iOS 27 was supposed to have advanced voice dictation and it changes nothing. I do not. I do not understand. It's part of the the new Gemini like AFP core or whatever it's called.

23:55The Apple fun. I don't know. The new model on the iPhone that is the advanced model, and it is supposed to make it way better, and it just doesn't do anything. Rambler is this kind of incredible new feature that there are some areas of it where I feel like they're kind of tricking your brain. Because regular voice-to-text, you can see the words coming on the screen as you're talking. Rambler, it doesn't show you anything until you finish, and then you hit end, and then it just all pops up instantly. Which is because it's secretly going through an AI. Yeah, which they could just be showing the rearranging in real time.

24:34But I do feel like there's something where they want to be able to like just pop it up all at once and trick your brain into thinking it's happening faster than it is. But it got to the point where I could effectively just talk at the speed of thought and hit end and it would instantly be there. And it would have gotten rid of every little kind of like, oh, I mean this, because when you're thinking, you're not always thinking in the most concise way. You know what I mean? I do think it's very fascinating that in their implementation and in the scale of the features that they're adding, they are kind of pulling back on AI.

25:06And maybe that's because of the backlash. Maybe it's because they're recognizing the limitations of these tools. Yeah. Right? Like text to speech, cleaning that up. That is a thing that they can do pretty regularly pretty well.

25:16Nilay Patel:Isn't this just Whisperflow? There's like 50 apps that can do this. It is. but every time I've used WhisperFlow on a smartphone it's really freaking annoying because you have to like change your keyboard in order to invoke it like every time and it's practically the same thing yes but like being built into the phone is a whole separate thing. If Apple had actually made their feature work I would have been like happy with that in iOS 27 but it doesn't work. Look I think we're like legally obligated to say iOS 27 is still in beta. It's still in beta. They could fix everything but tomorrow That's true.

25:50Nilay Patel:The next beta could make everything great. That's true. Okay. And vault Apple into the lead. Fair enough. I really love the idea of Rambler. I mean, the idea that Whisperflow needs to be invoked at the keyboard. There's a bunch of companies that truly believe that replacing your keyboard is their way to get around Apple and Google's restrictions. Yeah. Like Superhuman believes this. Yeah. And I just feel bad for them. The operating system vendors will kill you. They're going to kill you. They will find a way to kill these things. is Rambler good enough to compete with what people like out of apps like Whisperflow?

26:25Nilay Patel:Because they've been so good that people will go through the steps and jump through the hoops. Yeah. I mean, I think that people mostly probably use Whisperflow in their laptops, right? I haven't seen a lot of people talking about how great Whisperflow is on their phone. So in my opinion, yes. I've only had it mess up once or twice. It doesn't cut out curse words, which is nice. and it does do like weird spellings of things like proper nouns, like all these things that, or like product names, things like that, that might be spelled weird. It generally gets correctly, which I was surprised about.

27:00Does it work offline? It does work offline. So it's mostly offline, but some of its full capabilities, like it'll rewrite things for you if you want. So you can use it once and you dump all of your thoughts into it. And during that process, you can say, oh actually I meant this and it'll just pop up when you're done and it'll all be correct. But if you want to change kind of the tone of it I don't know. This is where the AI stuff comes in which I'm like I don't care for these stylistic rewrites and stuff. But once you've already done all of your writing then you can press it again and you can say can you change the tone of this.

27:36That uses cloud stuff which is weird. I don't really know why Gemini Nano on the phone is fine with just the dictation and then it has to go to the cloud. I guess it's probably a more powerful model, similarly to Apple's. But yeah. All right, we got to take a break. While we're back, we're going straight into Brendan Carr is a dummy. Everybody's favorite podcast within a podcast.

27:57Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from Bitwarden. Quick gut check. How many of your passwords are actually strong and unique? If you had to think about that for more than a second, today's sponsor is for you. Bitwarden is the trusted open source solution for passkey, password, and secrets management, built to make secure password management accessible to everyone. With its free forever plan for individuals, you can create, securely store, and autofill strong, unique passwords across all your accounts and devices, so you never have to remember dozens of complicated logins or rely on the same password everywhere.

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29:04This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, But Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

29:30Nilay Patel:Elon Musk and a lot of other very smart people think we're all going to have robots at our house any day now. But when you look at where the tech is today and how far it has to go, you might reach a different conclusion. This idea that humanoid robots are coming to live in our house and I went and explored that is just not true. That's Joanna Stern, the tech journalist who spent a year outsourcing her life to AI and robots. That's on Channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

30:04All right, we're back. Neal, we usually save Brendan Carr as a dummy until the end of the show. We leave that passion. We let it get pent up. There's too much this week. Also, Pierce isn't here to stop me. Most importantly. I just want to be clear.

30:19Nilay Patel:He's gone, and there's no check on my behavior. And then on top of that, there is a flood of Brendan Carr being a dummy. This week, I'm Brendan Carr as a dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brandon Carr is a dummy.

30:40Nilay Patel:You might recall that's what we would call Brandon Carr original by Viola Di Goomba. We're still in the market for theme songs. Send them in, especially if they have drops. We've had a lot of theme songs without drops lately. And also Travis really does not like the amount of AI slop they're receiving. I'm sorry, Travis. I have fun with Suno all the time. I'm not saying it's great or that I feel morally correct about it, but Travis has much stronger feelings not to. All right. Our nation's Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been up to a lot this week. And we're going to end with something that I believe will drive our audience into an absolute frenzy of both fury and despair.

31:16I'm ready for it.

31:16Nilay Patel:Well, let's start with some simple stuff. This week, Freedom of Information Act request filed by the advocacy group Democracy Forward was published by The Guardian. It's a trove of FCC documents, including Brendan's email and calendar. They're users of the Microsoft suite at the Federal Communications Commission. You'll be delighted to learn. As we know, Brendan is just a corrupt dummy. He coordinates the White House in a way that he shouldn't as the head of a theoretically independent agency. And he coordinates with a bunch of conservative broadcasters and cable companies to give them what they want and ignores the other companies.

31:51Nilay Patel:In fact, this week, we're going to come to this. ABC is actually suing the FCC because they're so deeply corrupt and such a threat to free speech. But according to these documents, between March 12, 2025 and February 11, 2026, Brennan Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House and had three scheduled calls with administration officials, including the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and everyone's favorite, RFK Jr. RFK Jr. certainly was like, does 5G cause cancer? Like, as far as what we can tell from these documents, the call is like five minutes long. And I'm guessing RFK was just like, I have another conspiracy theory.

32:27Nilay Patel:And Brendan told him wear a tinfoil hat and go away. We also have Brendan trying to get himself on Fox News, which is really good. He reached out to a booker for Fox and Friends and saying, do you want me to come on to talk about TikTok legislation? And he shared links of his previous appearances on Fox News to prove that he'd be good on TV. I think that's kind of adorable. I think it's nice that he's proactively reaching out to Fox being like, guys, look at what a bad job we're doing. He wrote, no worries at all. There's nothing to make sense. And the Fox Booker reported there was no availability for him, which is rough.

33:02Oh, man.

33:03Nilay Patel:That's just funny on its face. But as I keep pointing out, all of Brendan's moves to censor information on the broadcast airwaves are just a trial balloon for censoring information on the Internet. And the fact that he wanted to go on Fox News to talk about TikTok legislation is just more evidence that he wants to get way outside of his statutorily prescribed role governing the nation's airwaves and actually start talking about Internet content. Because there's no regulatory authority for him over TikTok whatsoever. There is Project 2025, which he wrote the telecom chapter in, in which he would claim that authority.

33:41Nilay Patel:But it doesn't exist today. So I just, Brendan, trying to get on Fox News to talk about regulating TikTok, is just more evidence of his actual plan. And when I say more evidence, I mean more evidence today, because you can literally go read the plan. You can just go read Project 2025, which he wrote, in which he would take claim over content on the internet. Brendan leaving his office and going on shows and podcasts has not gone well for him either, right? That's like him going out and issuing his vague threats against Jimmy Kimmel and everybody being like, this is very transparently not what you're allowed to do.

34:17Nilay Patel:Oh, yeah. And this, like I said, we're going to talk about the ABC lawsuit in one second. Of course. This is going to come up. It's nice that that's that's not even the lead. It's going to come up that he's going on television and saying things like we can do this the hard way or the easy way. By the way, speaking of Kimmel, he met with the Sinclair Broadcast Group Chairman David Smith. Sinclair is the local news broadcaster that preempted Kimmel in many markets around the country. He also met with, of course, Lachlan Murdoch, the chief of Fox Corporation. And he's met with like many, many other conservative broadcasters as well.

34:45Nilay Patel:So he's meeting with the conservatives. He's meeting with the White House. He's issuing his little proclamations and he's begging to get himself on Fox News. That's the documents. Then there is the court case. So ABC this week sued the FCC over their campaign of threats, particularly around Kimmel and around Pulling the View. ABC's lawsuit is just strident here in a way that I think is good. I'm glad that we have a big media company standing up to the Trump administration in this way. It's been a long time coming. So ABC, Disney, says, The consequences of the administration's campaign against free speech reach well beyond ABC.

35:20Nilay Patel:If the administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable. tell only the stories the administration deems favorable or face the coercive machinery of the federal government in such a world the press can in no way be described as free. That's just straight from Brenda Carr's a dummy. I just want to be clear. We've been saying this on the show for like two years now. The FCC has responded to this. You will love Brendan's response to this. Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC's proceeding as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation.

35:53Nilay Patel:I like this. I like that the FCC is like ABC is doing Russian disinformation. How often we have got, Brendan has gone on the air and literally said things like you can do this the hardware or the easy way or pulling the licenses early or threatening the view. I don't think that's disinformation. I think those are just the things that are happening. I'm also, is anyone in the conservative ecosystem even supporting Brendan Carr on this one? Like, no, this is the thing. The conservative ecosystem is so happy to jump on Disney for any perceived slight. And I am not seeing that when it comes to this lawsuit because he is just so transparently in the wrong here.

36:34It is incredible.

36:36Nilay Patel:Every week, Neelai and the Wall Street Journal editorial board agree that Brandon Carr is way out over his skis and the power of the FCC is being outrageously wielded to tamp down a free speech. that is very much present in the conservative media ecosystem. A bunch of conservative commentators and former FCC officials have all gotten together and written letters and filed lawsuits and amicus briefs in these cases saying, look, if you let the conservatives do it to the perceived liberal media outlets this time, when the liberals take power, they will do it to us. And the thing that they are trying to say without saying it too much is conservative talk radio is under threat, right?

37:20Nilay Patel:If you start letting the FCC reach into what's happening on broadcast, the thing you would immediately do if the other side wins power is go after conservative talk radio and say, these aren't bona fide news programs. They don't get exceptions. They have to abide by the equal time rule. And then you're off to the races because talk radio is dominated by conservatives. So there's a lot of weariness on that side. We get emails from those folks all the time asking us to point it out more often because I think they know they can't say it very loudly, but we can say whatever we want. We're on podcasts.

37:50Nilay Patel:You can't regulate us, Brendan. All right. So that is the shape of the legal situation. We know Brendan is meeting corruptly with the White House, with conservative broadcasters. We know ABC is suing the FCC over the threats to free speech. We talk about that stuff in regards to Brendan all the time. That's normal. That would be a normal Brendan Carr is a dummy segment. We would do that in third segment. The reason I've elevated this over David's protestations from the grave is the FCC actually took action this week that I find to be infuriating. And in a normal time, I would have actually just made this a segment all unto itself.

38:28Nilay Patel:So part of the crisis in government since COVID is a desire to say things are better by changing the standard by which we measure them. That's just a big idea, right? COVID will go away if we just stop testing. Keep that idea in your brain. Like there's something in the conservative mind that has held on to that idea forever. If we just change how we measure things, we can declare victory. This week, Brendan Carr's FCC eliminated the benchmark to bring gigabit internet to Americans. That was the standard set in 2024. We're going to do gigabit internet for everyone. Brendan Carr's FCC got rid of that.

39:06Nilay Patel:So, Brendan's logic here is that holding internet providers to gigabit speeds unfairly prejudices wireless and satellite internet. Oh, my God. This is really good. Here's a quote. As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we propose to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1 ,500 megabits established in the 2024 report. That's 1 ,500 down. Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in this section, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers. This is incredible because the technological winner here is fast internet and the loser is slow internet.

39:49Nilay Patel:And he's like, what if you had horrible slow internet? That's all the statute says you need to have. We're not going to put a speed goal here because then any internet counts, including, most importantly, his friends at Starlink. This is very good. The FCC said that comments submitted by the cable industry group NICTA and the wireless industry group CTI support our reasoning for polishing the long-term goal, which, again, is holding them to speed requirements unfairly prejudices them because their technologies suck compared to fiber. But they do, right? That feels like a notable reality that if you want good speeds, you just need better technology.

40:28You should hold them to that. They should deliver. They should figure it out. I don't understand. What agency does this man think he's running?

40:37Nilay Patel:So they've gotten rid of all the standards. I mean, this is what the FCC should do, right? They should promote faster speeds and lower prices. If you get rid of the standards, if you eliminate COVID by ceasing to test for it, you suddenly get to claim victory. And so what did NICTA, the cable industry, and the CTIA do this week? No, no, no, no. They declared victory. NICTA put out a press release. FCC's 2026 broadband report. Faster speeds, lower prices, more choices. So we changed the standard of measurement, and now we have declared victory. It's extremely depressing. 97 % of Americans now have access to broadband.

41:14Nilay Patel:At what speeds? 100 down, 20 up. Oh, my God. Hooray. We did it. The share of rural Americans lacking 120 megabits access has declined over two years. Rural deployment is nearly universal once satellite is included. Oh, my God. Congratulations. We've just declared victory. We had a standard. It was very high. It was hard. It was pushing the industry to succeed. We've eliminated the standard. We've allowed the industry to pick 120. 100 down, 20 up is the standard, and they've declared victory. They've also now declared victory in mobile 5G access for some reason. Mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous.

41:53Nilay Patel:What is the standard for 5G? Remember what the promises of 5G were. Remember what they promised you. You would be doing robot surgery in a self-driving car in VR with zero latency. The industry itself is now saying mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous. 95 % of Americans now have access at 35 down, 3 up. This is brutal. This is brutal. We got rid of the standard and the industry has defined it down. In 2026, we're declaring victory at 35 down, 3 up for our mobile broadband networks. I just want to remind you all that 5G was supposed to definitively defeat China. If we didn't get to 5G, China would win something.

42:46Nilay Patel:35-3. It's brutal. We did it, everybody. All right, there's more from this victory lap because we've defined this down to 100 down, 20 up, and 35 down, 3 up for 5G. 77 % of Americans now have access to three or more fixed broadband services at 120. I live in New York. Jake, you and David live in New York City. These are highly dense urban environments. Do you feel like you have massive competition for your broadband providers? So in my building, we have one wired connection. I can't get Fios. Fios, they're next door. They won't come to us. I've tried. They won't come to us. We do have other options if we want fixed wireless, right?

43:32If I want to pretend that T-Mobile is a reliable home internet provider, then technically I have a million competitors, right?

43:43Nilay Patel:By the way, the fixed wireless services are a competition. There is evidence that Comcast and Verizon are churning customers to them because they can offer lower prices in almost immediate deployment. Which is great. Which is great. I would just like them to be reliable and fast and cheap. And none of that is real. I mean, I have Fios and that's all I can say. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah, I also have Fios. What the heck, guys? I'm sorry. They technically didn't offer it in my building either. But because I live in a cellar, they will drill it through the ground directly into my apartment. You have like a legal Fios?

44:17Nilay Patel:Directly into my apartment. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went online. It said, we do not offer it in your building. and I called them and they're like, we can make that work. You can drill a hole through the cement. That's what they did. Incredible. I can't say that I have shopped around a lot because Fios is, I don't know if I can say this, but it's reliable and fast and relatively cheap. You can say whatever you want. Can I say that? I find it to be pretty good. The absolute lowest Fios service is 300 up and 300 down. And that's all I need. And it's the cheapest one. And yes, I could have gigabit, but like, why?

44:50Nilay Patel:Yeah, every now and again, we have gigabit and every now and again I look at paying for more like two up and two down I think Optimum is here Optimum is a little flakier but they offer five how many remote surgeries are you doing over there anyway every day I'm cutting eyeballs in VR in my self-driving car uh here's this last little bit from the cable industry issuing a triumphant press release because Brendan Carr changed the standard for victory and this is my favorite one of this 90 % of all cable mobile data traffic. What does that mean? Cable mobile data. Cable mobile data traffic now runs over Wi-Fi.

45:32Nilay Patel:What does that mean? This is 8K AI 5G all over again. It's very good. Enabling cable mobile providers to deliver in compelling savings and greater competition in the wireless marketplace. I think what this means is that Comcast has a bundle plan to get you, like MVNO, Verizon, or whoever their partner is. Yeah. But most of their customers are at home most of the time. Yep. So 90 % of the traffic is running over Wi-Fi connected to Comcast, and that is cable mobile data traffic. So they're patting themselves on the back for not having to pay money to Verizon. 90 % of cable mobile data traffic now runs over Wi-Fi.

46:12Nilay Patel:This is an incredible thing to say. This is basically just like most people are at home most of the time. Yeah. Fine. They go on to say, the average home connects roughly 25 devices or Wi-Fi. That number is projected at nearly double by 2030. And then they go on to congratulate Brandon Carr for unlicensing the 1200 megahertz, six gigahertz band and saying that's what enabled all this cable mobile data traffic. I only point out that Comcast this week announced that it's going to turn all of its routers into motion detectors in people's homes using all this extra spectrum. And no one likes this idea.

46:45Nilay Patel:So it's the idea that everyone in America upgraded their Wi-Fi to six gigahertz Wi-Fi and that's what's driving a massive surge in connected devices. And then we should congratulate ourselves. This is all nonsense. Just like fundamentally, what we did in our country was we removed the goals and we allowed the industry to congratulate itself for delivering slower speeds at higher prices, most people's prices have actually gone up, allowed them to claim there are now more competitors because we've expanded the definition of competition to include many, many low-speed vendors nobody cares about. And then on top of it, we've allowed them to claim that cable mobile data traffic exists and make some viable competitors and wireless.

47:31Nilay Patel:This, again, is pure nonsense. And I would just connect it to if we stopped testing, the COVID would go away. If you stop measuring the goal, if you stop literally saying what the goal is, anything is possible. And this is as clear of an example of that happening in our government over the past, you know, five years as anything. We got rid of a goal to make all the broadband be a thousand down, 500 up. And we are now issuing press releases about Americans getting 5G at 35 down, three up, which is brutal. I was getting that on LTE a decade ago. And there's press releases about it today. Whatever happened to the, what was it called?

48:12The internet that they put in your phone that was like stupidly fast and only at stadiums? Oh, millimeter wave. What the heck even have in a millimeter wave?

48:21Nilay Patel:Millimeter wave, it does exist in stadiums. Yeah. 5G accomplished exactly one thing. That's that. It's live streams of Taylor Swift concerts. at scale. Great. So you can watch any concert almost anywhere in the world. Great. Right. When they're happening live, because the millimeter wave networks in the stadiums exist and work. Nothing else about 5G is functional. Yeah. Sorry. If if they had said the race to 5G was about live streams of Taylor Swift concerts, I think people would have. It would have been fine. Really been on board with that. It really would have been fine. Raise my taxes. Let's go.

48:52So one thing Americans can agree on, you know, considering so many of these companies have rolled out so much low band 5G, which the primary purpose of that is to release congestion on the 4G networks. I get people coming to me all the time saying, why is my internet so slow? It says 5G. And I have to break the news to them that you were lied to. There was a giant campaign and they told you that it would be 5G Taylor Swift concerts at millimeter wave. And no, no, it's three, it's three up or three down. Three up is so brutal.

49:24Nilay Patel:But can you imagine being the person at NICTA who typed that line into the press release proudly. 97 % of Americans have three up. They're so happy. They're watching TikTok, you know, on the road, you know, and they feel great about it. Can you play Fortnite on your phone at three up? I don't know. Yeah, that's what people are caring about. They don't need to win. They're just like, look at this, connectivity, America. If you stop measuring, it goes away. It goes away. That's literally, I'm saying that we changed the standard of measurement. In fact, we didn't even change it. Carr eliminated the standard of measurement because he said picking 1 ,000 down, 500 up unfairly prejudices certain technologies.

50:08Nilay Patel:It's bad to have. I.e., the good ones. Like fiber over Starlink. So here we are, 35 down, 3 up. Congratulations, everyone. We won the race to 5G. We've defeated China, which remains resolutely defeated. Every day, the Chinese government issues sad press releases about how they can't possibly provide three up internet to their citizens. And Brendan Carr remains a Donnie. Brendan, if you'd like to come and defend this press release from what effectively is your organization at this point, you're welcome to on this show on Decoder. I would love to talk to you about the nature of measurement. I could bring on James Vincent, former Verge reporter James Vincent, who wrote an entire book about the politics of measurement called Beyond Measure, which I highly recommend.

50:47Nilay Patel:I don't think you can take him. He's a charming British person. he will defeat you running away. That's just an open offer, or you can just debate me. I think I can take you too. Brendan, you're always welcome. That has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast for that podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

51:10The Gregorian chant really is my favorite one. It's really quick. It's really good. Well, it feels good to win. And with that, we got to take a break. We're back. It's time for the lightning round. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome.

51:42Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.

51:50All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. And you know what? I'm power tripping. I'm just going to go first here because we have to talk about the fact that Apple leaked its own product. Something that is not expected out until next year, a pair of AirPods with cameras in them. Great idea. Yeah, there is a little video clip of them. You can't actually see the cameras, but you can see somebody talking to the cameras. Can we roll the clip? With visual intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later. There are many really weird things about this clip.

52:26From a production standpoint, it's really weird that it's just not a completed color grade at all. It's very green in the shadows. The highlights are really blown out, and Apple never ships something like this. So the fact that they included this in a macOS 26, not even Golden Gate. This was a Tahoe release candidate. It's really weird. Really strange. Really weird.

52:49Nilay Patel:Okay, here's my conspiracy theory. I just came up with this. I have no reporting to this. This is true. They leaked this on purpose to warm people up to the idea of AirPods with cameras in them. Is it doing the warming? Because we had a big story this week from Miyasato about metaglasses. Her headline is they're a workplace menace. And they really are. Like, if you're a service worker or a retail worker, people are recording you without consent. Comedians are getting heckled. Like, there's a quote in her story where a comedian said, please stop recording me. And the guy said, you're here to entertain me.

53:18Nilay Patel:I think she just cut her set short and left. This is a problem. So you got to preheat the oven. You got to say that the AirPods of the cameras are coming, let people have all their feelings so that when they're announced, everyone is already a little bit blase. This is, by the way, pure conspiracy theory. It is. I think this is very bad timing for these products to come out, right? Even if it's six months from now. Meta has been doing these glasses for a few years now. And I think people were kind of just like, whatever about the cameras for a while because people weren't buying that many of them.

53:49It is strange that it took quite a while for people to get really mad about these. I think it was Kylie Jenner, right? They did a Kylie Jenner partnership. I think so. Broke containment. That's a good point. Now everybody's like, oh, maybe we shouldn't have people walking around filming TikToks of trying to pick people up off the street while recording them. Maybe that's bad.

54:10Nilay Patel:Kylie Jenner is one part of it. Certainly, Meta is trying to be cool in a way that is very difficult for meta to be cool. I also think it's just scale. There's actually an argument in the comments of that piece about the fact that camera glasses have been available from AliExpress for like forever. Yeah. And it's like, that's great. That's pretty niche. And like literally only one class of depraved people were buying those. Right. Now they're just a product. You can just buy them. They're advertised. They're at Best Buy. You can buy them in the airport gadget kiosk before your flight. Like they're ubiquitous, scaled mass market consumer products and scale changes everything.

54:50Yeah.

54:51Nilay Patel:Right. Like the meta label is a, is a permission slip to buy the glasses and have them and put a camera on your face. And I actually just think they've hit a tipping point of ubiquity. Yeah. And so Kylie Jenner is a symptom of that, right? You sold enough, you believe in enough, you're going to pay the marketing money to the big influencer. But the other side of it is you sold enough. There's returns on this. They really believe in this form factor. And I continue to believe that Meta thinks they've made an AI wearable because it just has some garbage AI in it. And what they've really made is glasses with cameras in them.

55:24Nilay Patel:And they have not reckoned with that at all. And when AirPods with cameras come out, whether or not Apple is capable of reckoning with that and protecting people's privacy with that. Wide open questions. Yeah. I mean, there's this big question of how Apple actually implements this, right? Are these for recording what you're up to? Are these for taking photos? Or do they tell you, hey, these AirPods have cameras on them? Or do they just go, oh, it's a new AI wearable. Don't worry about it. I guarantee you they're going to call these a sensor and not a camera. That is the best way they can position these.

56:03And they say they're for - No, just pretend. Yeah. A sensor for visual intelligence. A vision sensor, yes. Censor for visual intelligence. And this is my thought process on this. I don't think they're going to let you just take photos of things or take videos of things. I think it's going to be pretty limited to the, like, what am I looking at kind of look. Which, again, the what am I looking at, in my opinion, is one of those, like, problems that nobody has that all these companies are solving. Which happens a lot. And I don't know why. They're like, save this book for later when you could just write it down.

56:34You own the book. You could just write it down. It's like in your house. Yeah.

56:38Nilay Patel:You have a line about this in your Pixel review, David. Yes. What is it? The What If Utopia Simulation? Yeah. Yeah. It's the San Francisco What If Utopia Simulator. Yeah. Yeah. Like, what if everyone was just looking at print books all day long and asking what they were? And it's like, we've built a product that can solve this problem. And the reality is it's like anthropic employees looking at books and being like, how could I most efficiently tear the cover off? this to scan into the model yeah yeah yeah i mean i do think this will reveal the true gap if there is one which i think there is of like whether people actually want this in a wearable right because if apple comes out and they say these aren't for taking photos these aren't for recording videos you can't use these to creep on people it's just for getting ai information about your surroundings about getting directions well if it turns out that that's useless which you know maybe maybe it is, then I think it's pretty revealing that Meta has not built an AI wearable.

57:32They built a pair of headphones and some creepy glasses. Yeah, well, the other question here is, do they sample the world all the time while you have the headphones in so that you can ask your phone, where did I leave my keys? That's the thing that I'm wondering if they're going to pitch it at. That I would not be happy about. That would be very...

57:49Nilay Patel:There's no way to do that in a privacy-centric way. Yeah. If you're sampling the world all the time is an amazing way of describing constantly Are they taking interest? Yeah. Flock for your ears. They're going to, I guarantee you they're going to say. They would be called ear flocks. We're like breaking the image data into encrypted strings of whatever and storing it locally. They're going to do this. This is how they're going to present it. So I don't know. What's interesting to me is how quickly the world comes along with them, you know, because the first generation of AirPods looked terrible with the giant long stems and everyone made fun of them.

58:26and they look terrible. And then a bunch of people bought them and then they normalized. And there's going to be a backlash. There's definitely going to be a backlash. But how long does that backlash last is my question.

58:35Nilay Patel:Wait, I think that to the extent there was a backlash for AirPods, it was these look pretty silly. And this looks pretty silly is overcomable by almost every product if it's good at what it does. Yeah. Right? And the AirPods were good at what they did. They were the first successful wireless earbuds of their kind. Yeah. The objection here isn't how it looks and it can't be overcome by success at being functional. The objection here is stop taking pictures of me. I do not consent to being captured. And the existing privacy laws, such as we have them in this country, are like, well, if you're in a public place, you have no expectation of privacy.

59:10Nilay Patel:Yeah. But that is a framework and a set of norms and laws that don't imagine people with cameras in their ears. Right? Like all that came up with like film SLR cameras. Yeah. Right. Like all of that, like street photography lives in that legal framework, where if you're out on the street in New York and someone just like literally taking pictures of the camera, you don't have some like big expectation of privacy. But I'm just at my job and someone shows up with cameras in their ears. I don't even know if I'm being recorded. There's something else about that, especially when the distribution is social media.

59:47Nilay Patel:And so to turn back to Meta for one second and me, a story about the glasses and workplaces. Meta has this ridiculous quote. we've built privacy into our AI glasses from the ground up. And what they mean is the light. They can't mean anything else. Because if you were going to build privacy into your AI glasses from the ground up, you would not put a camera on them that invades people's privacy. And if you're stuck with the legal definition of privacy, you're still really in a hard spot when you go into someone's home or you go into someone's private workplace because those aren't public places in the same way.

1:00:19Nilay Patel:So you've just got this huge language gap. We've built privacy in our glasses from the ground up. Meta saying this is nonsensical. They have to know it. And then their solution is, this is incredible. They said to me, Meta has begun blocking hashtags on its platforms associated with harassment, including, quote, Riz, Pickup Artist, and Cold Approach. Oh. Because people are using the glasses to try to pick up girls. and so then they're like hashtag riz and meta's like don't worry we're not using AI to detect this we're going to block it at the hashtag level got it so you make the product then you own all the platforms that people share video on moderate those platforms to make sure people aren't creepy with it so it's a really good plan but you barely do it hashtag based moderation of the word riz thought meta hated hashtags thought they were getting rid of all the hashtags doesn't seem to be working you just add this up you're like well we actually do want this We're going to say there's privacy from the ground up.

1:01:24And then, right, Jake, to your point, we also control the distribution.

1:01:28Nilay Patel:So we'll do some, we'll just like gesture at content moderation to disincentivize the bad behavior. Yeah. But we won't actually do the content moderation you want, which is using our massive investment in AI to actually detect the bad content and turn it down or eliminate it. We're going to block the word hashtag. We're going to block the hashtag Riz. Well, can I also say, it's not just disincentivizing bad behavior. it is trying to avoid bad press right if you don't see the videos then you can't report on the videos there can't be blow-ups about it it's it's not looking good over there but wait doesn't this all just come to apple i was gonna say one more quick thing about apple which is it is unclear to me if these products will even work at scale they're also leaked that there's a warning if your hair is covering up the airpods with cameras because a ton of people on earth have long hair So like this product, we'll see where Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reported that it's still on track for, I think, Q1 2027.

1:02:26So there's going to be a bit before these even come out. Lots to find out, but this is going to be messy.

1:02:33Nilay Patel:I just think there's an enormous danger for Apple releasing a product that reminds everyone of a meta product that everyone calls pervert glasses. Yeah. That's not a game they usually play. No. It would be a good way to introduce the new CEO. Yeah, John Ternus. Yeah. Yeah, great timing. Okay, David, it's time to move on. What have you got for us? Okay. Mine's much more boring than this. But I think it matters. I think it matters. A company called Fairphone you guys might have been familiar with. They are a company out of France that makes all these more fair phones where they go to these cobalt mines and they make sure that there's not as many children in the cobalt mines.

1:03:16Things like that. Nice of them. Yeah. That's nice of them. That's good of them. They're trying to break into the US. Well, the other thing, these are also the repairable ones, right? Yes. They're very repairable. But their big kind of push has always been about making sure that the working conditions for these phones are good, that they're using sustainable things, things like that. But yes, you can also they have all the parts, not all the parts but many parts available on their website. So they've different parts on your phone break. It works. I did use the Fairphone for quite a while, and I broke one of the cameras, and I just swapped it back in.

1:03:48That's very cool. They have phones with expandable storage. Their phones have removable batteries. Kind of everything that we used to have in smartphones that now are just glued directly into the phone. Anyway, they are now selling the Fairphone 6 Plus in the United States through Amazon. This is a fairly big deal, to make a little pun there. Breaking the U.S. is incredibly difficult. However, I have had a lot of people that I know, friends of mine, that have said, I really want to leave Apple. I don't know what to do. My only other option seems to be Google or Samsung, and I hate all these tech companies.

1:04:21I don't know what to do. And I'll point them in the direction of these Fairphones. The biggest problem with these Fairphones is that they are trading the Fairness with a very mid-ranged Android phone, which is still the case. People want premium, they want low cost, and they want not Apple or Google. You can only choose maybe one. Maybe one. So they are selling on Amazon. They are officially supported through T-Mobile and AT &T, which is a decently big deal. I think if they can get store space in T-Mobile or AT &T, that's a big deal. MediaMart in the UK has been selling these Fairphones for quite a while now, and they've expanded from like 40 stores to like 180 stores.

1:05:03Not in the UK, sorry, in Europe. They've expanded to a lot of stores. So this Fairphone 6 Plus is a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, notably very mid-ranged, 12 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage, 4 ,450 million power battery. But again, it is expandable storage, replaceable battery, and it's verd purple is the color.

1:05:25Nilay Patel:That's pretty good. It's blurple, David. Blurple. Blurple. Blurple. That's the official color. We should do – am I allowed to just assign you YouTube videos that I think I can do? The other day, but I'm like, I can assign him stories all the time. Someone, you, should make a video about how the entire tech industry would be different if the concept of the mid-range Android phone was more successful. Yeah. Like so many things live or die on whether or not people will want to buy a mid-range Android phone. Yeah. Like Fairphone is a good example, like a healthy, you know, competitive. We're going to sell values, but you have to want a mid-range Android phone.

1:06:07Nilay Patel:Like that's that's one end of the spectrum. Yeah. The entire thesis of AT &T buying Time Warner was people will love our mid-range Android phones more if they have bite sized Game of Thrones apps on them, which is psychotic. But like it also required people to want mid-range Android phones. I think they were just a couple of years too early to that. Right. If they were putting out a micro drama, House of Cards, House of Dragons, what is it now? House of the Dragon. House of the Dragon. House of Dragon. Sorry, everyone. That's what it is. Yeah. You know, there's an audience for that. It is tough.

1:06:39They are$650. So people are going to need to be able to, you know, trade their willingness to have a$650 mid-range Android phone in the United States. Not a great sell. Very difficult. It's very niche. It's very niche. But it is like if you're going to pick a mid-range Android phone, there needs to be something that is driving you to that. And Fairphone does have, right? Yes. I personally do think that there's a lot of people that I know even personally who are like, they think a lot about, you know, the sustainability of these phones. The fact that they don't want to use as much Apple and Google stuff, especially in Gen Z.

1:07:16They think a lot about those things. Whether or not they're willing to actually use them is a whole nother question. and especially pay$650 for them. But similarly to the Framework laptop, which the more premium one came out recently, and it was more expensive than almost every laptop, it's one of those things where the value, at the very beginning, the value does not seem great. But over a long period of time, if you're able to fix things and maybe even upgrade things, because some of Fairphone's camera modules were upgradable, you could just swap them in. Okay, that's very cool. And that was great.

1:07:49Then the value becomes a little bit more apparent. so I mean I feel like the people who test these phones seem to really like them but it's true like you're getting a mid-range Android phone at the end and you've got to really like what it comes with for sure

1:08:02Nilay Patel:I'm telling you if we could just pull off mid-range Android phones I mean I know we have some listeners who are mid-range Android phones this is great but they're not the thing and if somehow they ever became the thing we would experience vastly more competition in lots of ways yes yeah but they're just super not the thing yeah So close. You got to make the stream come to life. Yeah. I should have brought it with me because they shipped me one, and I just have not opened the box yet. I think this is going to be very interesting to see if they're able to expand their market share because it's been just Europe for now.

1:08:34It's been almost exclusively Europe. It's very low, but they're growing a lot in Europe. Which is already a bigger Android market, so it'll be interesting to see if they can have any headway in the U.S. where that is a very tough rep. Very, very, very tough. Cool, I'll say. All right. Nilay? What have you got for us?

1:08:52Nilay Patel:So I was going to do the Meta trial. There's another Meta trial where it's very obvious they know bad things are happening to teenagers on their platforms. They're not doing enough about it. We had one in New Mexico. They lost that one. This one is California, New Jersey, a bunch of other states. It's ongoing. We expect to see Zuck and Maseri and everybody else on stand. It's going to be the New Mexico trial again. And I bet they're going to lose. And Meta is so afraid of losing that they keep saying they're going to be fined like$1.2 trillion to make it really scary. And the states are like, no, we're asking for$200 billion, which is still an enormous number, but not one point whatever trillion dollars.

1:09:29Nilay Patel:That's the state of that one. Fine. We're going to cover that. You can read about it. Meta is in trouble because whatever. We've asked for their executives to come on Decoder. I get the sense that they are scared of that idea. That's what I'll say at this time. I want to talk about something else. I'm going to stay on measurement for one second. YouTube this week announced how it's counting views is going to change. And so previously it was a number of seconds. You had to watch some seconds of a video for it to count as a view. And YouTube was like, screw it. The instant one frame of a video plays on any surface in the YouTube app, that counts as a view, which is going to massively inflate view counts.

1:10:13Nilay Patel:They know it. Yeah. And I think, David, the reason for that is because the YouTube ecosystem is getting bigger. They're competing with TikTok and all these other platforms. And a lot of the creators I know are saying view counts have kind of been drifting down. So, like, how do you fix it? You just literally say any time one frame of the video plays, that counts as a view. And skyrocket all accounts again. Yeah. I feel that it feels like a very defensive posture for YouTube, which I'm surprised that they're taking. because they have always been the one metric that people care about. You know, like everyone just makes views.

1:10:45As David Pierce will say, view numbers are fake. Everything is fake. They change the way that they work all the time and X is changing the way it counts views and Twitter, all these things. YouTube did shift the way that YouTube Shorts views worked quite a while ago to be in line with TikTok and all of those things. And so now their reasoning is that they want to unify the way that the views work across all their platforms. They now have a different metric name for the ways that views used to work because the way views used to work is still the way that people are being paid. This is what's a little bit weird about this.

1:11:24Nilay Patel:Wait, I didn't realize this. This is true. So there's the public view count, which is just going to be massively inflated. Oh, sure. I think it's called qualified views or qualified view hours or something like that. And that is the way that people will still be paid. So now this is going to cause an insane amount of confusion between creators and the people who pay them because their views are going to be way up. And the people who pay them will be like, wow, you're doing a great job. And then they'll actually ask for the real data and they will be way down comparatively. But I just want to note that there are so many tensions that YouTube gives creators between the amount of watch time they have, the watch percentage that they have.

1:12:06You know, if if someone doesn't finish your video and they only make it 40 percent of the way through, that tells the algorithm like, oh, I guess this wasn't that quality of a video. Right. The only way to make people watch a video all the way through is to randomly cut off your video at a random moment. So creators will now, instead of saying, thanks for watching, I hope you subscribe, hit the bell, whatever. They'll just like end the video because they want people to just finish the video. Now, if that happens and then it just instantly auto plays another video, that video that you did not click on, that you had no interest in watching now gets a view.

1:12:39So there's just a whole can of worms here that is going to change the way that YouTube numbers work completely.

1:12:45Nilay Patel:When you change how you measure things, you can declare video. That's exactly what this is. That's precisely what this is. I would put that right up against another piece of news this week. YouTube is in talks to offer select creators millions of dollars if they keep their videos exclusively on YouTube for a set period. Two people familiar with those efforts said that to Business Insider. Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw also had that. The move is described as a direct shot at Netflix, which has been ramping up the licensing of creator videos. So Netflix is going to license more high-end YouTube stuff. YouTube obviously wants to compete in television, and YouTube is responding to this.

1:13:22but juicing view counts and then paying you money to not take the Netflix money. This is another very defensive posture. Like it seems they have never really had to worry about these people in the past. And it's strange that they are actually coming out and saying we're a little bit worried about Netflix. And they should be a little bit worried about Netflix. But it's weird that they're publicly worried about Netflix in this way.

1:13:44Nilay Patel:Netflix can offer you the best of YouTube, right? They've licensed all the best videos that they like the most or the most popular creators on Netflix. And you can just watch them in the same app. Maybe you're not going to open the YouTube app. And YouTube's watch time on television, which has been dominant for quite some time, will go down a little bit. Yeah. Right? And if you're also going to count views the second one frame of video starts playing, your view counts will go down a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is a lot. There's a lot of swirl here. Uh-huh. Oh, I wanted to make a quick clarification.

1:14:16It's called engaged views now. So it's not qualified views. It's called engaged views. And this is important because literally like a week ago, YouTube changed the way that their YouTubers can get into the partner program, both through shorts and through the actual long. They call it long form now. Long form YouTube partner program used to be that they needed 4000 watch hours in order to become a YouTube partner. Now it is 8000. And so when they did that and then they changed the way that views were counted, people were like, oh, they're just changing it to 8000 because it's way easier to get a view now.

1:14:50No, because it has to be 8000 engaged views. So there will be a different engaged views metric in the YouTube studio app in which you have all this data. So YouTube still understands that engaged views are real views. I mean, it also like the name kind of implies everything. The other views are disengaged views. They're not actual viewers.

1:15:10Nilay Patel:They're technically called public views. Their autoplay views. But that's the number they're going to show under the videos. And those numbers will look gigantic now. Yeah. Right. And I think that's what the thing that they want. They want those numbers to look gigantic. They want those things to look dominant. You're saying defensive posture, but I think they want to indicate dominance. Like if you go on YouTube, look at all these videos with tens of millions of views that you can also watch as opposed to, boy, the number of people watching things for more than whatever, 30 seconds or whatever mysterious number of seconds counted as a view before, that number seemed like it was trending down as more and more people were watching shorts, as more and more people were watching TikTok or whatever else.

1:15:51Nilay Patel:And now those numbers are going to skyrocket. I just also feel that we are getting worse and worse indicators of the quality of a video because they got rid of the dislike button. So we have no idea what that's going to mean now. And then now if the algorithm just decides to serve this one video to everybody, which it likes to do. There are some videos that get served to almost everyone on the platform no matter what your algorithm looks like. And it will just have a view because it will have autoplayed or you'll have hovered your mouse over it for a frame. It is a frame. That seems insane to me.

1:16:22Nilay Patel:I mean, I'm going to find a way to do a YouTube scan. The click farms are coming. As a parent of young children, I'm quite mad that I didn't invent Cocomelon. We should have all invented Cocomelon. Let's be honest. We didn't. But now I'm going to find something. If you've got ideas, email us. Vergecastattheverge.com. Tell me what your YouTube scam we should run. We're going to run. All right, that's it for The Verge Cast. Remember to subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more. We'd love to hear from you. Email us, vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline at 866-VERGE-11.

1:17:01The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. See you next week, Nilay.