Previewing Apple's 2025 WWDC

23:39And all of the built for Apple intelligence stuff came to nothing. But if they actually did build the phone for Apple intelligence, Well, maybe they built the phone to run some models that are useful for app developers. And private cloud compute, which I think they want to keep selling. They obviously put a lot of investment, we think, into that. So I think that that's one way they get into the AI story this year without getting into Apple intelligence. To all of our conversation about the developers, they try to say, hey, we're going to give you access to small language models that run on the device.

24:11We're going to give you large language model access and private cloud compute. and you can build great things. We don't even know what you're going to build. You go, go build it. My issue there, and like, you know, it's like, are the models any good? Good is a, has a relationship to cost. So if the model on the phone is like kind of crappy, but it's free to use, well, it's fine. You know, like, I think that's the case for them to make because I don't think that they can run a GPT-4 class model on private cloud compute right now. Maybe they will. Maybe that's what they're going to announce. But like, that's your problem.

24:43If you want that thing, you got to go pay OpenAI or you got to pay Google for Gemini or whoever. That class of model exists on someone else's data centers right now. But even like just all of our complaints that we probably have about Apple intelligence, the issues are largely because the models just don't feel that smart. Right? Like you even just take the image editing, right, where you want to get something out of the background. That is not as good as what you see from a Google level type of experience or model or whatever. Take summaries and notifications. Those summaries make very little sense.

25:20And to the point where most people have turned them off. Like, yeah, that's the intelligence. And so if the intelligence that they're going to give access to isn't actually all that intelligent, I'm not sure what the sale is. cheap. It's really interesting because in theory, if Apple were good at this, it is actually like perfectly positioned to do this in a really cool and coherent way where like, like you said, it has more stuff to work with locally than almost anybody. And there are a lot of good and useful things you can do on your phone with local AI models, right? Like it solves a lot of search problems.

25:54It solves a lot of like, how do I do small things on my phone? What if it made timers faster? Like there's just a lot of things you could do. Wait, can we just unpack what if it made timers faster? Yeah. Okay. I don't want to cut you off. What if it's sped up time? You're like 30 seconds now goes by in 25. No, I'm talking about the gap between me saying timer and the timer. Oh, I see. There have been these moments with Siri in particular in the past where they took a thing that had to go to the cloud and they made it run on the device and it immediately feels better. So I just know all three of us are parents and we've often all made pasta.

26:27and it's like if I could get this done in six minutes instead of nine we're gold you know I would buy every iPhone the power of Apple intelligence bath times just gets going from like 10 minutes to two and you're like it's 10 minutes I swear yeah we this we just solve some things get on it Craig timer's faster what was that quote was like time is not a Trump's like head of like yeah White House technology was like we can now travel through time and space Yeah, that's it. And everyone's like, are you sure? That's it. That's exactly what I'm thinking of. Because I'm good on space. I know we can travel through space.

27:04Yeah, we're doing that already. Very confused about time. Sorry, David. Go on. Yeah, well, now we'll come back to that. That's a Verge cast. But you start with that, right? And you have this sort of base layer of on-device, private stuff. Apple gets to tell its big story about privacy and all this stuff. That all works great. Then the second thing is the private cloud compute stuff that Apple, like by all accounts, the infrastructure for that is actually pretty good. We have not seen it do anything interesting, but like as a theory and a product, it seems to be pretty interesting to a lot of people.

27:40that's where you can do a lot of stuff and then for the most aggressive, impressive sort of needy stuff you have this seamless integration out to ChatGPT and one of the rumors this time is that they're going to bring more partners into that so you could route to Gemini you could route to Claude, like you basically have this thing where you need your phone to do something and it has every available option to choose from from fast to slow and from cheap too expensive, right? That's very cool. Except that Apple sucks at this. And it's like, and there is just, it's so frustrating because like you can see the idea being right.

28:18And the execution just being a disaster over and over and over again. And so with all of this, I do think one of the things Apple is going to do is point some of the Apple intelligence stuff at developers as a bunch of APIs you could call, right? That like, it's going to bring them in as features, but it's also, I think going to start to give developers more access to the underlying models and technology. And that's, again, potentially really interesting. And it is a very Apple-y thing to do, to be like, hey, rewind all the way back. And Apple's like, you don't have a phone with a camera that knows where you are.

28:51What do you want to do with that? And people found really interesting stuff to do with that because there's interesting stuff to do with that. But the product sucks. So it's like, Apple's going to be like, hey, here's a bad model that doesn't do anything. Is this interesting to developers and i think developers are just gonna be like no yeah because they can just go build on the cloud on gpt4 or gemini or clod or anything else and that part to me is fascinating because the history the reason apple has all this cloud with developers is because you got a bunch of stuff in the 80s and 90s developing for the mac got you a bunch of stuff for free that like you had to basically hard code into windows and then nothing was cohesive right so you got like proportional fonts this was like steve jobs favorite thing to always like he did proportional fonts and windows proportional fonts and windows proportional fonts were like really bad for one time you got that stuff for free so a bunch of developers like oh i want to make beautiful stuff here you can go on and on and on down the line all the way to on the iphone you got iphone's like theming toolkit for free yeah like they would upgrade to ios 7 and everyone like ran to use ios 7's design language and that was cool here the capability you're talking about the thing you're supposed to get for free is like oh there's a bunch of ai on the phone that i can use and i to build the next class of applications.

30:01And I think developers are like, yeah, but I can just use Gemini on the web. And then that rules. I can get that from other places. Apple is by a mile not the best provider of that stuff right now, even if you're building iOS apps. But they do, to your point, they do own the phone. So until someone displaces the phone, I think they do have a little bit of where you're going to go. So we should go through the other features that are rumored. As David mentioned, more integrations with outside AI partners. I'm actually really looking for how they integrate Google Gemini. I think it's in both Apple and Google's interest to move the money from Google paying Apple for Google search to be the default in Safari to something else because that is under antitrust pressure.

30:44You know, there's this stat about Google searches and Safari falling anyway that Sundar basically doesn't want to talk about. So if you move that money to a Gemini integration, interesting, right? Maybe you escape the problem. We'll see. But I'm curious how that plays out. Have you guys changed your search default on Safari to anything? It still goes to Google? Yeah. No, I just added ChatGPT to my action button. Okay. So I changed my Safari search to ChatGPT. And it's a really poor experience. Like ChatGPT has this extension. So it's there as an extension. And so I think there's a lot of potential for them to change that, to tap into, and we know they're talking to perplexity, we know they're talking to these other companies, whether they do it as default or, you know, they could keep Google as a default because we all, there's all that baggage, but they could make it considerably easier for you to use the address bar in Safari to get to an AI chatbot, which I would love to see.

31:46um what i was going to jump in and say is like the chat gpt integration with siri is terrible it's awful it's very bad yeah so either they have to improve that considerably and add extra partners like if they do add an anthropic and they do add a google there like they say you know what just like we let you change your whatever default of whatever over the years they've given us more of those options we'll let you change the default on the you know siri will default to go to Claude or Gemini, but they have to improve that experience because otherwise there's no benefit in it. Well, the baggage you're describing, to be clear, is literal bags full of$20 billion.

32:25Yes. Right. So they have to move that money, right? And to say to Google, okay, you were paying us to be the default search provider. We might change that to perplexity because it's a better experience. We would still really like your$20 billion. Here's this other integration. And that integration is the Siri? I don't know the answer. I just, I suspect because there's antitrust pressure on the deal as exists now, they will find some other place to make Google and Gemini the default that lets them preserve$20 billion. But then while this is happening, you also have the DOJ pointing at that possibility going, we cannot allow that to happen, right?

33:02They're like, we have to get this trial done now so that Google can't make this next deal with Apple the way that it is currently attempting to do with everybody. Yeah. But it's like, you know, I have like the action button opening chat GPT. This is a very dumb example, but because we are whenever Joanna's on, we only talk about home repair. I hung up a light fixture yesterday and had weird connectors for the LEDs inside. And one of them broke and I hit the action button. I took a picture of the weird connector and I said, how do I fix this? And chat GPT just told me how to pry out the little pin that was broken, recrimp it and stick it back in there.

33:32And it was fixed. And I was like, oh, this is very useful. Yeah. But you're not using Apple's visual intelligence to do that, which could do it. But I'm using Apple's button. It's like if Apple can get$20 billion to set that button to Gemini instead of chat GBT, we're like they're in business. Well, and the visual intelligence taps into Google. So maybe that's another place. And we've heard about that, I believe, a little bit in the trial that that's another place that they're building that future of the relationship. So that's one aspect. We're looking for those integrations and who will be the providers and who will be the defaults.

34:03I'm very curious about that. the second one that's on the list is this idea that they're going to redesign shortcuts and then Apple Intelligence will help you like write better shortcuts, which is super fascinating, not because I think it will be any good. David, you actually, when you worked at the Wall Street Journal, did a column on shortcuts and I'm still go back to that column to try to figure out how the fuck to use shortcuts. Okay. The thing I say on this podcast sometimes that I get emails about every single time is that shortcuts is a bad app and a failed experiment by Apple and everyone who made it should feel bad.

34:31And people get very upset with me about that, but also I am completely correct. Yes. Yeah, but like the potential of it is amazing. Yes, it's such a good idea. Back to home stuff. I know there's so many home things I can do with shortcuts. But none of them work because the phone forgets to run your shortcuts. Yeah, and David didn't write about it like six years ago and I don't know how to do it. Yeah, you don't have a PhD in software engineering so you can't possibly use the shortcuts app. So this is what AI should fix, right? You have this automation engine inside the phone already and then you're like, robot, do something.

35:04It's like, I'm going to use this automation engine. And so much of AI stuff right now is just basic automation wrapped up in a natural language interface. Yeah. Like, it's not as complicated as anybody is making some of this stuff. I will say, you say that like it's a small thing, but that's actually a huge thing. Like, automation, natural language automation, if that's the extent of what AI ever turns out to be, is still like an enormously huge deal in how we use computers. which is the thing that drives me so crazy. It's like, it's just, it's sitting right there. It's also the easy part. Like all the developers have said, here are all the building blocks that I have.

35:41And you have a thing that in theory is very good at assembling those building blocks all by itself. What are we doing here? You know what I'm sort of thinking? I know I'm cutting off your list, but like - The rest of the list I would say is bad. I have one more. This conversation has like made me feel like maybe Apple really isn't going to fail at AI in the same way like Apple failed at MobileMe but still pulled through on cloud. Like, let me go a little bit to explain that a little bit more. Like Apple intelligence as a term is a thing that is not good or associated with good things with at least our community of people that work and think about tech a lot.

36:19No, and everyone. I don't know anyone in my life who is like, you know what's tight is Apple intelligence. Well, I think actually those people in your life, like they didn't even know it was there, right? And so like maybe this is Apple's like mobile me moment in AI. And now we're going to they will unlock the things that where AI will actually play a big difference on the iPhone. And this race towards making Siri like maybe we let them go for a little bit and go and hopefully fix that. It's very important. Don't let me say like it isn't important. It is absolutely important. If they do not get Siri right, they will lose to these other companies that are building great conversational AI.

36:57but like I have hope in the things we were talking about right now. I do too. And it's actually, it's the kind of thing Apple historically does really well, including with like machine learning and the neural engine stuff. Like so much of what everybody is now calling AI features, we used to just call like features. It's just software in so many ways. It's like stuff you use. Yeah. And so I think there's a bunch of things, right? Like the idea that you can, you can essentially prompt your way through shortcuts is fundamentally just an AI feature, but we don't think about it the same way. And one of the big things that has been rumored is AI-powered battery management, which is also just called battery management.

37:36It's just software, but it is using... Went through this with the cloud, too. This is where I'm going with the MobileMe iCloud situation. MobileMe was not good. MobileMe famously prompted a meeting where Steve Jobs said, Walt Mossberg said, we were bad. Whose fault is this? And we got mad at everybody. Right. Not great. But when you say they came around, they did iCloud. They did, yeah, they did iCloud. And then a big innovation iCloud is not giving you enough storage by default so that you have to pay them more money every month. I don't know. Photos, iCloud works pretty great. Except it fills up your storage and you have to pay them more money.

38:10That's what they solved in the cloud, right? They backed everybody up and they made a business out of it by selling. It's capitalism. I don't know what to tell you. But it's true. It's not broken the way that MobileMe was. The problem you have with shortcuts with a, you know, a prompt engineering interface is shortcuts doesn't work. Right. Right. So it would be really cool to be like, hey, every single day when I wake up, I check these four apps. I need you to go check them for me and tell me if anything good happened. Right. This is like a thing that a lot of people would love to automate. and shortcuts today will be like i uh am drunk and i didn't do it like well you are a bad friend like you're just untrustworthy and i'm going to check the apps on my own and you can put a whole layer of ai on top of that but the the core engine of that product doesn't work and like i don't know if apple can solve that i'm not even going to see what my shortcuts are do you have shortcuts i have short because i've tried over the years like you're the only shortcut i ever had that was any It was, I would say, Vergecast famous in like the mid-2010s when Mike McCarthy was the coach of the Packers and would consistently lose in the playoffs.

39:21I had a shortcut on my home screen that just tweeted the words, fire Mike McCarthy. And I pushed it without fail every Sunday. That's pretty good. Okay, this is amazing. This is very Vergecast. All my failed shortcuts are for the garage. I tried so hard. I must have tried so hard. Siri, where are my keys? Yeah, I've got some stuff. We're going to fix Joanna's garage one of these days. No, we fixed it. My garage is great. I didn't want, like... I'm killing it. My garage is great. You saw my garage. It's great. I did. I was there. It worked. Every time I say, hey, Siri, I'm going to say it on the podcast so everyone's garages will open or, like, the two people that set up their garages, every time I say, hey, Siri, open the garage, it works.

39:59Shit. I'm the other one of those people and my garage is open. Opening the garage. Did it actually just do it? Yes. And my wife is going to text me and say, there's somebody in the house who opened the garage. Yep. Just got an alert. All my devices just said smart garage door opener. This is great radio. Hey, Siri. Close the garage. Oh, my God. Closing the garage. Very good. Two things on the list are kind of the same thing. One on the iPhone and one on the iPad. And basically, every year it's rumored that they will fix the iPad in some way. Yep. And by fix, I mean just make it a Mac or add better multitasking.

40:35So there's either a menu bar. They'll add free-form multitasking. And then on the iPhone, there's the idea that they will add like stage manager or make it more like decks that lets the iPhone itself connect to a monitor and be a computer. If they did no AI stuff and they were just like, you can plug your iPhone into a bigger monitor and use it like a computer. I think people would lose their minds. I would just die of happiness that day. It would be managed so badly. It would be such an unusably chaotic feature, and I would love it to absolute pieces and use it every single day. But isn't that what they did last year?

41:12No. So now you can have it so that you have a separate monitor when it's plugged in, but you're essentially just moving an app. And that's only on the – that's like – the iPad is like slightly better at this. You can do stage manager on an external display. Like it's all well and good. Sorry. I mean, I guess I mean iPhone mirroring. Right. You can plug a mouse into your iPhone and look at it on a monitor. You have multiple monitors on an iPhone. And then ideally what you have, Google basically announced a riff on this. Samsung's had DeX for a while where you plug your Samsung phone into a monitor and a keyboard, and you get a Linux desktop with a weird Samsung browser.

41:48Neil, I valiantly tried to do it. This is my dream. I tried to use this for a while. It was not good. But Google's going to do it, and I think that might be really interesting if that's part of Android. we actually get proper Chrome instead of weird Samsung stuff. I mean, plug your phone in and it becomes a Chromebook is like the dream. Like it would work. It's just sitting there. Just like this doesn't make any sense for Apple. They want you to buy a Mac. They want you to buy the iPad. So why would they want you to plug your iPhone into a monitor? Because they got to compete. They got to do stuff.

42:17I don't think so. They're behind over here. What about your phone's a banana? Like they got to come up with ideas. Like let's do it. I just think there's like no, there's no upside for them here on this. This rumor is pretty thin. Yeah, I don't believe it. And I would bet against it coming true. But it also like, Neil, I just think about something like you and I every year sit in meetings with Apple executives and every year the Apple executives tell us the story about how the devices are different and they're for different purposes. And it is like, it has reached a point now where, A, I believe Apple when it says these things, that it perceives the devices to be differently.

42:50But I also think it is so obstinately clinging to that idea that these devices cannot run into each other, that they're leaving like obviously good ideas on the table. I think the iPad is fully in the where are you going to go zone. Yeah. Like they don't need to have more iPad ideas because like someone's got to watch Disney Plus. It's like where are you going to go? And like so it goes. And eventually I think it will just ease its way into being more Mac-like. I think that's just happening every year. But the idea that the phone itself would get this deck stuff, kind of interesting. It would be super interesting.

43:24There's other stuff. We can just go through them. you're going to get chat GPT access on watchOS. Maybe. We'll see. There's literally no rumors about macOS, except they're going to name it Tahoe, which Mark Gurman reported like it was a big deal. He's like, they've been waiting for this one for it to use the name like Tahoe. Cause they all have houses. I'm like, they always are on vacation there. I think they should start naming them after small Midwestern towns. MacOS for scene, Wisconsin is available. Craig. Um, there's much at air pod rumors, sleep detection, camera control. Sure. I mean, what they, the AirPod update everyone wants is you can just talk to a voice assistant.

44:01Yeah. Still waiting on that. The camera control thing is neat, I will say. I think that would be just from like a pure UI perspective. I'm fascinated to see that one because it's like, are we going to get to a point where half of everybody's photos now just have them with like two fingers on one of their ears? Or is there going to be like, we're going to get the new like millennial pause while everybody clicks the thing and then waits for it to start the video? Like, I don't know. I have so many questions, but it's like, it's a smart idea. to let you have a remote on your AirPods? I would use this feature once a year at like our family.

44:32You like you do the big family picture and you set your like right behind you, David. You set your like camera up on the like above the fireplace on that little mantle. And then you have to like like struggle with your watch to figure out how to take the photo. I don't know why I would have my AirPods on. It's because you're not a cool zoomer who just wears AirPods all the time. Yeah, I guess. Like, but when am I ever going to want to take a photo? I guess like you want to take a selfie. But you have your arm out. I don't know. It's I'm really interested to see the video that they like show this feature in or like the still shot.

45:06Like what is the real life scenario when you want to touch your iPad, your AirPod to take a photo? A bunch of people in our Slack were suggesting that Apple should let you just hold it in your hand and do it and just have it as like a little discreet clicker. That would be very cool. Oh, like the selfie clickers that they like sell the little like cheap China. Exactly. Button with a little camera button. All right. Fine, I'm sold on that. I can't think of a more dad situation than me being like, get this out. I'm going to get my AirPod out of its case, hold it upside down, as opposed to just being like, someone else will take this photo.

45:36We'll see. I don't know. Joanna's out here going everywhere in meta smart glasses so she can take pictures of her kids on another AirPod. Oh, I love my meta smart glasses. I don't think we're talking about that here. All right, last one. There's like half a rumor. I just want to do a time check on it. people think we might see Apple's smart home device. I think this is 0 % happening. What do you guys think? Same. I'm pretty close to zero. I think the only thing I can think of is if you're Tim Cook right now and you've gone through all this stuff and you've said, we need a thing. Because there isn't a thing in here, unless the redesign.

46:18I think the redesign is the thing. This is the thing. I assume it'll be the thing that they mostly talk about and it probably but like i don't know maybe my hopes should be higher my hopes are not super high for what that's going to turn out to be but uh like maybe you're tim cook and you look at this and you're like we need a one more thing to just like get everybody's minds going and they just preview it in some way and they're like apple has gotten increasingly comfortable being like here is a thing that's coming later uh and i i could see it i wouldn't bet on it but i also like i could see the logic for like running the video at the end of the keynote yeah i just think they got really burned with apple intelligence last year and they can't do that again yeah i also think the point of the smart home device is siri to is siri is to say like you can just talk to this thing and i'll talk back to you and you can do automations by just saying out loud like when joanna gets home just open and close the garage door 50 times in a row.

47:14Just to like, and celebrate that it does it. Do a dance. We'll see. I mean, it would be exciting. Joanna, are you going to be there? You're going to be there. We're going to be there. I have made a list of three things I would like to see. Would you guys like to hear that? Yeah. Maybe you guys can share your list. We should have prepared this. But my number one want is in iMessage, in group messages, typing indicators for everybody. Oh, that'd be good. like multiples each person gets a typing indicator yes just like i like that every other chat app has basically i would love them to fix this reactions problem on the mac it's happening to me right now why does this pop-up come up all the time i don't know what's pop-up what are you talking the one where you do a thumbs up and it does the it does the wild thumbs up emoji or just like has an like an alert here that says like your reactions are enabled yeah it sucks just turn Turn it off.

48:09No one wants this. This has a 0 % approval rate, this feature. This is a real COVID idea that just needs to go away. I know what you're saying. A hundred percent. My last thing is a Siri thing because this happens to me every morning when I want to ask the HomePod to do something, but all the other Siri devices are doing them, like my iPhone or my watch. And I just think some improvement. And I actually think that's one of the main reasons. There's a lot of reasons people hate Siri, but I think that's one of the most frustrating real consumer pain points of Siri, which is like you want your Siri here to do a thing, but the Siri in the next room is doing it or your spouse's Siri or whatever is doing it.

48:48You're like a Siri power user. Yeah. I mean, I have that problem with Google Assistant, but I don't have that problem with Siri. I'm so sorry to everybody whose devices just went off 25 times. Yeah, I'm sorry. Open the garage door. Yeah, like I have HomePods. I've got iPhones. I've got watches. We've got iPads. Anyway. I have Siri wakeboards disabled on all of those things. I have a multiple device wishlist too, which is if they just spend an hour being like, we've made it so that the important notifications come to your actual phone instead of disappearing into the void on whatever other device we think is alive.

49:21Fair. Yeah. That would make me very happy. Yeah, it would be an interesting version of this year's WWDC if instead of like announcing, you know, big giant sweeping changes to how everybody is going to do everything. They were just like, hi, we spent a year just fixing things. Snow Leopard, baby. Yeah, this is Snow Leopard. We're just doing it again. And because there's so many little things, it's like, for me, it's like, fix headphone routing so that when someone calls me on my phone, it doesn't ring every device and decide to put my AirPods on my MacBook, which is closed in my backpack. Like, what if we did that?

49:57Wouldn't that be cool? There's just so many of those little things that it's like, actually, if put enough of those together, and I think you might win a lot of people over in the course of like an hour. Can I just issue my wonkiest feature request related to headphone routing? Yes. You ready? So I've got, I have a computer. As many people know, I have a computer. And my computer has multiple monitors. And one of the monitors is like the video conferencing monitor. And it's got like a little Logitech speakerphone dealy. And I can't be like the windows on this monitor, the audio needs to come out of that thing.

50:30And the windows on this monitor need to use these speakers. That's a good one. And if I could just assign speakers to a display so that audio playing from a Chrome window on this screen came out of these speakers, And audio playing on this screen came out of it. I would just be, that's it. That's WDBC. I'd be like, Apple stock price should go up 30 % to 40 % today. Like, don't worry about this AI stuff they fixed. I can assign speakers to displays. And I think I might be the only person in America with this problem. No, I have this problem. Not as like, I don't have as many monitors as you, but I feel that problem.

51:06This should be the one more thing that Tim Cook announces. It's a, you know, they did all the stuff around the calculator last year. Was that last year? It's a tariff calculator. Rough. The numbers just magically change every five minutes for no reason. It's like you wanted to calculate it today. Here you go. That's what AI is good for is non-deterministic math. We're like, how much does this cost? It's like, I made up an answer. It's very good. All right. We should take a break. Speaking of tariffs, we got to come back. We got to talk about the switch too. And we'll see how much David paid for his.

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54:57All right, we're back. Yeah, Switch 2 launch week. We started Apple rumors because, you know, it's developer season and there's a lot going on over there. And also the Switch 2 literally came out this morning. So there's not much to say except David has one. I do. lots of people on our staff have them actually what's it what's it like are you happy it's well i i really like it so far so let me let me tell i had a really interesting experience trying to get it um so the it launched at midnight and we've been covering kind of the run-up to it and there are like discords upon discords of people trying to figure out how to get one and gaming the system and keeping an eye on what's in stock and when and there are i live in a pretty sort of dense urban area so there are lots of places around me that were open at midnight but there are two, two doors apart from each other.

55:45There's a Best Buy and a Target. And I was like, all right, one of them will have it for me. So I went over at like 1030 last night just to see. I was like, if the line seems plausible, I'll sit in it and try and get one at midnight. Like 100 plus people in line, super nuts. So I just turned around and bailed, came home and I was like, well, I guess I'm not getting a switch. I won't have one to talk about on the podcast today. And then this morning, I'm sitting around looking at my phone, ignoring my child as I want to do from time to time. And I just like went to Target.com and was like, I wonder if they and it just said like, oh, in stock at the Target right next to the Best Buy.

56:21So I literally just drove to Target and bought a Switch 2. It was like it was the most mundane launch day experience you could possibly imagine. And I got there and there was a steady sort of rush of people. Like as I was walking in, two people walked out with switches, both of whom were like clearly pumped that they had scored a switch. But then I went over and there was a case full of them. There are probably 15 of them just sitting in this case. They had three bundles left. The woman in front of me bought one for her 13-year-old son for his birthday and was like the relief on her face that she had managed to get.

56:55Like I cannot describe to you how happy this woman was. And then I got one and then the person behind me got the last bundle. and nobody wanted anything other than the bundle that comes with Mario Kart World. And so there's just a bunch of them lying around. And so I just like shot, just sort of without even meaning to, just like came home with a Switch 2, set the thing up, giant pain in the ass. And then like posted something being like, I can't believe how easy this was. And I have heard from so many other people who were like, yeah, Nintendo put us through this weird rigmarole for months trying to, you had to get an invitation from Nintendo for a specific time.

57:32Like, insanity. And then you could just wake up and go to Target and get one. Like, truly bizarre launch day experience. Should I get one? You should definitely get one. What accessories does the bundle come with? The bundle comes with, it comes with the dock. Mm-hmm. It comes with the weird controller-y thing that I can't find. It comes with that pillow. Amazing. It comes with a pillow. I also bought the camera. You bought the camera. I was going to ask. So you have to buy the camera separately, right? I have not set this up yet. There's the this was the switch to camera. I think it was like fifty five dollars, which is absurd for like a little camera on a stick.

58:10And then there's the pro controller, which everybody on our team tells me I need to buy, which is eighty five dollars. So I'm like I'm like six hundred and fifty bucks deep on this thing by the time I actually get it fully like up and running. But I will say I played it a bunch this morning because it was it was journalism for work. And the first game I played was FIFA, which is technically called EAFC 25. And I get emails every time I don't say that. I'm aware of the name of the game. It's still called FIFA. Unbelievably faster. Like night and day faster from the Switch that I was using. And that was the main thing I was wondering about.

58:43There's lots of new games. Mario Kart World is big and very fun. And I've played a little bit of it. But just the raw speed upgrade of the old games that I had been annoyed by on an eight-year-old console. like it like new games which is very exciting to go buy one i don't want to buy one but my seven-year-old is like he doesn't actually know that there's a new switch out i don't think but i am mad like it is a maddening experience experience downloading games on his switch like the slowness the everything is just like at the parent the parental control i mean talk about software that needs a refresh like i don't know if that's been done is that done on the on the to is there it's sort of stylistically similar but it's it's clearly not the same software if that makes sense like they didn't blow up the model but it is it is noticeably better and faster in basically every interaction that might be worth it i've been i've been very impressed so far um but what's been really interesting is like the the vibes around this launch are not that good i don't think uh we've been talking a lot about this internally but also like there were there There were these big lines, but also Nintendo didn't do reviews ahead of time for a couple of different reasons, which is like fine.

59:56But I think also there is something to the like coverage in the lead up to this thing that would have been exciting for people. But then also everybody I talked to is like, I'll buy it when there's better games. Yeah, that's kind of how I feel. You're 650 deep into Mario Kart world. I'm like, I can wait. So that's where a surprising number of people seem to have landed. And I think there's there's the Donkey Kong game coming. like they had the the announcement that the nintendo direct of all these games what in april uh and people came away from that being like great there's an awesome slate of games lots of stuff is coming but on day one it really is a 500 mario kart machine like in a really real way with a bigger screen with a bigger screen i mean that's a big boy hold it up again yeah it is big so this is the switch too oh yeah and i'll just just to compare There.

1:00:42this is the regular switch so it is like oh yeah look at that meaningfully bigger thing yeah uh yeah I mean, the only game we play on the Switch is Untitled Goose Game, and I think we'll make it through. Think about how fast the goose will play. We play a ton of Mario Kart. My son's obsessed with Among Us. Oh, I got to start doing that with Max. Obsessed. So, I mean, that very simple 2D game I'm sure is not necessarily any better on the Switch 2. So, we're good. All right. We're going to have lots of Switch coverage coming because so much of our staff has a Switch 2. They want to talk about it a lot.

1:01:19I suspect next week, David, you're going to have a whole switch to. So, yeah, I can just tell people the schedule here. So Tuesday is going to be our big post WWDC episode. And then I would say most of next Friday and then all of the following Tuesday is all going to be switch stuff, because that's when we'll have we'll have reviewed the thing. We'll have played all the games. We'll have tried all the accessories like we're sort of deliberately waiting a minute to like really do this thing big. So we will we have a lot more coming. and also call the hotline and send us emails if you have questions because like two-thirds of our staff has one of these so we're going to get a lot of them on to talk about it with us yeah all right jen i know you gotta you gotta jump out here real quick before you go there's a bunch of new news about metas like experimental smart glasses aria you are like you're you know you're the meta glasses stan on the show what do you and then they're gonna start to i mean you wear them and you take pictures.

1:02:11I do. That's more than I do. I do wear them. I bought the clear Ray-Bans when they announced them and I was so excited to get them and I bought them and I put them on my face and I was like, no, thank you. And I sent them back. You're mad that you have a big head. It's fine. They were not big enough for my head, like even a little bit. I also have a big head, like I get it, but it's not Meta's fault that we have big heads. I was just like, I have good cameras that are fun to use and this is, I don't know, what am I doing? And then they, there's some quest stuff coming along. Like there's a little bit of our armature between Apple and Meta about like exclusive VR content.

1:02:43I don't know. What do you think of these new glasses? Because it seems like no one has solved the display issue for augmented reality glasses, but we're adding more and more sensors to the prototypes every single day. Well, I feel like this is what like a step towards more towards the Orion type of dream. And Orion were the augmented reality glasses that cost$10 ,000 a unit that Meta could not manufacturer at scale right and this is what a something that's supposed to come out later this year for researchers to work with and developers to work with i believe so there's like some real actual movement towards this um which i think has like been what meta does that i think and i think intentionally does that apple doesn't right they're like building out in front and they're just saying hey here's where we're having issues here's where we're trying to build i think we're seeing google We'll try to do that to a degree right now with, I get very confused, the XR glasses, which are not the XR headset that's supposed to come out this year.

1:03:41Is that right? Right. Yeah, there's the headset, which is Project Muhan, which I always remember because it's such a stupid name. It's a very bad name. Also, Sundar referred to the headset as goggles. Right, goggles. Which is an incredible term. Oh, interesting. Well, I loved that, actually, from him. He was like, we're going to have goggles or we're going to have glasses. Do you think he knows that Google already made a thing called goggles? A long time ago. Of course they did. No, no. Muhan. But Muhan. Back to Muhan. Muhan is also, like, considered under Android XR. Is that right? Like, is that?

1:04:13Yeah. Yeah. Very confusing. But what's happening, like, it's like everyone has these two paths going, right? Google, Meta, Apple. We think Apple, at least on the glasses, but for sure they do. There are some efforts that are going towards the goggles, as Sundar said, and some efforts that are obviously going towards the glasses. And hopefully eventually they think these things will converge and they'll come together. But like the focus on the goggles right now is really interesting. The journal had this story that Meta is trying to go after Disney with exclusive content. It's like, is this a world?

1:04:46Like we're going to probably hear more about the Vision Pro last year. Like you just feel like no one's really using that type of device at scale. I mean, not we don't feel like it is. It's true. The numbers are there, right? Like the number of people aren't. But yet they still keep pushing into those directions. My guess, though, is like for the hope that eventually that stuff comes when we're down the path that it comes to the glasses. Well, so you look at these new glasses and I mean, it's just a bunch of sensors, really. Right. They've added more spatial mics. They've added ambient light sensors, more track movement trackers, more eye tracking cameras.

1:05:24Like, no one has solved the problem of the display, right? Meta's Orion glasses were an attempt to solve the display problem, which is why they were so expensive and unmanufacturable at scale. So, like, we can put stuff in front of your eyes. The Google glasses we just saw were like, we're going to put stuff in front of your eyes, but they were teeny tiny field of view. And it wasn't, like, mapped to reality in any way. It was just, it's basically a screen in front of your face. there's this big problem where no one has solved the core component of augmented reality glasses which is putting stuff on a screen that is like mapped to the world and i think that's why everyone is doing these like ski helmets because they can do it there you can do right camera pass through vr xr and then it's like you've built a simulator of the thing but at least you're working on it well you know some mad scientist is solving your display problem but it's none of it's convincing.

1:06:18Well, that's how I know, like how we all felt about the Vision Pro, but it's like they still keep going at it, which I guess if you're the size of these companies, you can. Well, David, you were saying this, the sensor problem is so big that maybe they're just focused on that while someone figures out the display problem. Yeah. I mean, I think the thing I keep hearing about smart glasses is that the people who are making them are like, everybody is wildly underestimating how hard every single part of this problem is. Like I remember years ago, some of the folks who were running this at Google were like, you don't understand how different a thing it is that I have to make a product that if it gets in your way at the wrong moment, once it has ruined the success of that product.

1:06:56Like if I, if I push a notification while you're asleep or like, I don't know, whatever, having sex, like once the whole thing falls apart. And they were like, the bar for the user interface is so high. And what it means is I have to have perfect awareness at all times of both you and the world and both directions of that are incredibly hard and so i think what's interesting to me about this meta thing is like uh the idea of how do we put all this stuff in these glasses that can just look at your eyes all the time right it's like blink detection and and directional like following your eyes where you go and looking at per eye detection like this stuff is so hard and it's such cutting-edge science and it is just one piece of the equation here I just have this.

1:07:41You said this. And now I have to think about Mark Zuckerberg is like, I need to know if you're banging. We got a hotline question maybe 10 days ago that I will. We will answer on the show from somebody who was like, I have smart glasses. Do I need and they have my prescription. Do I have to take them off before I have sex? Otherwise, there's cameras on my face while we're having sex. And I have been not I have not been able to stop thinking about it ever since. Yeah, I was wondering where that came from, David. Get some other glasses, bro. It came from nowhere in your example. that was the question do i need dumb glasses for the bedroom and smart glasses everywhere out of nowhere it's like like your instagram followers have sent you three messages and it's like no yeah pretty sure you're throwing those things in the trash first time that happens you know what i mean like a pure growth hacky instagram notification would be horrible v song heard that hotline question and immediately demanded to talk about it with me on the show uh as did my wife so we will come back to that but the idea that like getting all the sensors i mean we've gone through this list so many times smart clock you need the display the displays are impossible though no one can literally no one has built one that works at scale that is manufacturable uh you need to put compute in there that you need a lot of it to detect the world and then like immediately overlay graphics and then you need connectivity and then you need a battery that can support all that compute and that connectivity in real time that is running all the time and then you need like a content moderation system so that if you're looking at the united states capital on january 6th it doesn't tell you like this was the site of donald trump's greatest triumph like you've got a million problems to solve and bang detection apparently is very important to everyone it's a big one yeah i don't we're just years away from this i think this is why you get i think it would be better if the industry is like these mixed reality vr headset they are the simulators like i think if everyone was honest that these are not products meant to scale but this is how we're going to work our way towards building the appropriate applications, it might just like change how everyone perceives them.

1:09:39But I think like also to your point, Joanna, about the content thing, I think one of the reasons everyone is chasing that idea so hard is that it feels doable, right? If it's just we're going to build all this wild stuff, but if the first thing we can build is just like a sick personal television that you wear on your face, maybe that'll work for people. And I'm suspicious of the idea that that's a thing anybody wants, but I think it is at least like it is a version of this that feels achievable for these companies. And so they are like pushing relentlessly after it. Yeah. I mean, obviously, that's what Apple's been marketing still with the Vision Pro, right?

1:10:16It's like your personal TV. Have you seen an ounce of Vision Pro marketing in the past five months? They just put out like a Bono video that no one watched. Bono's everywhere right now. Any of the pitches you get from PR, anything they post to the newsroom, like, is all about the content. It's really not beyond that at this point, right? Watching sports, watching this, watching that, like, maybe using your Mac, right? They had the improvement or the Apple Intelligence came for that. I mean, yeah. Did you see the Price is Right clip where people try to guess the price of the Vision Pro? Yes, amazing.

1:10:50It was very good. People were like,$100? It's funny. Have you guys, somebody, I believe, wrote about these there. You've seen these? These are the X-Real glasses that are with the space top. I can't get them on right now. Those are pretty hot, I have to say. Yeah, I mean, they look pretty sick. I mean, they look like Wayfarers, but they are very, very chunky. Yeah, they look awesome. Everyone here keeps telling me that I look like, you know, one of those like glasses with a mustache. But they have a cord. That's a cord. Yeah, the cord connects to the laptop. Yeah. I'm going to go ahead and say we're far away from air glasses.

1:11:25I will say the only use of those that I do like there's everything aside. I do like having multiple monitors when I don't have when I'm away from my computer. Yeah, that's fair. Joanna, you have to go and we should also take a break here. But I we have not heard what you think Johnny Ive and OpenAI are building. And we got a little bit of stuff this week. There was like Johnny Ive did an interview with Lorene Prowl Jobs talking about the unintended consequences of the iPhone and how they wanted to fix all the harms that smartphones have done. and ChatGPT wants to be like a universal life assistant, but we still don't know anything.

1:11:58What do you think they're building? I don't think they're building glasses. I mean, they've basically said that, right? There was a lot of chatter at Davos this year, like before this deal was announced, but there was a lot of chatter already about the partnership between these two. Yes, in the Swiss South. Everybody's clinking champagne glasses and talking about opening night. Yeah, they're like, what are they building? What are they building? There was chatter about the headphones, headphones like earbuds with cameras or like which would make sense but I believe now like people have shifted and said they don't think that I've been straight up told it's not headphones interesting I'll just I don't think I think it's like I think it's like a necklace oh I hope it's not a necklace but I will say so I did a piece a few weeks ago on these recording devices Neil I went to a dinner with me and I was wearing the recording device and I tested both the limitless and the B.

1:12:49These are both like AI recording devices. They listen all the time and they summarize and make notes and to-do lists for you. And I will say there were some very positive uses of those. So if they can figure out the privacy stuff and they can do this in a smart way where like you can talk to your chat GPT assistant all the time, but it's also listening, maybe looking and again they need to get the privacy stuff right there's a lot of potential there but all those things had phone apps right the interface was a phone app they all had phone apps it was just a little piece of hardware but you don't have to like be looking at that you just live your life with the device listening all the time yeah i just don't think johnny ive and sam are building a device whose fate lies with an ios phone app yeah yeah that just seems really hard to me.

1:13:40So by the way, it's all the same problems minus the display. They need compute. They need connectivity and they need a battery. It needs to be unobtrusive. And then I think they've got this other problem, which is if at the end of the day, the way that you set it up and use it is by configuring it on an iOS device, like you've accomplished very little. I think that though, he said that in the video, he said that in the, I love San Francisco. I want to have sex with San Francisco video. Why did this podcast get so horny in the past 10 minutes? I know. Well, I just, David said we could say sex. So here we are.

1:14:08This is the energy I bring. This is what we're doing. All right. So Johnny wants to bang San Francisco. And he said something about the iPhone during that time. They said about the laptop and that we've moved beyond. They call those legacy products. Legacy products that are still staples in your life. Like, I mean, I don't remember exact wording. I don't have the transcript. But there was a lot of, like, implication. Like, we're not going to replace those things. We will still have them. This is the new thing. Yeah. I don't know. We'll see. The only thing I know is I've heard a lot of chatter about headphones, and I was kind of told it wasn't headphones.

1:14:41And there's a lot of chatter about a pendant, and I have no idea if it will be a pendant. That's it. I love a new necklace. But I think they have to build something that does not rely on a phone. If they build basically a phone accessory, they're not going to get to where they want to go. But then you have the same issues of the Humane Pen, which you guys have talked about. But that had cellular built in, and that was a big problem. Yes. It was a big problem for that device. It might have been the biggest problem for that device. There was a lot of it. Sorry, let's not. It's a long list of possibilities on that one.

1:15:11It's very high up on the list is the fact that there was cellular in there and that it ran hot and it caused the bad. Yeah, anyway. It's a big set of problems. And the way you solve it is by offloading all those problems to a phone, which has already solved them at scale, right? Yep. But if you do that, you're not like, you know, you're not taking a big next step. You're like, I made AirPods, but weirder. And like that, I don't think that's the ambition. Though I spend a lot of time talking to ChatGPT now and I would be happy if they were on my headphones. Like if they were in my AirPods and could work well, like we talked about, like that would be great for me.

1:15:46Also, like Sam Altman listens to this, right? Like the only thing I want is a CarPlay ChatGPT app. I know. That makes sense. I was like, please, no, please. You could be one of those people who, instead of talking to their friends on car rides, just talks to ChatGPT. which is cool and not bleak at all. I'm already that person. This is why, and I'm just worried about you as a friend. Yeah, no, you should be worried about me. I am available to you if you would like to talk to someone. Well, this is why we have to podcast with Joanna. It's the only time she talks to humans. It's the only time I talk to people.

1:16:14It's the only time. I'm just saying, if you want to talk to a confident liar, you can just call me and I'll just make shit up at you and it will sound super real whenever you want. Eli, please prepare me for this meeting I'm going to. Honestly, that would be far better. And I'll be like, here's what you do. You say, Rupert, double the salary, I'm out the door. You say, Siri? Okay. Thank you guys for having me. See you at WWDC. It's a delight. We'll see you soon. Bye, guys. We'll be right back. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to.

1:16:51Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin? Or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Every great company's story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions. These are high-stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rulof Boota, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell and more.

1:17:37Share what it's actually like to navigate the make or break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on seasons one and two wherever you find your podcasts.

1:18:15The New iPhone 17 Pro Check them out and see how much you can save versus the other big guys at cmobile.com slash switch.

1:18:27All right, we're back. I'm excited to see Joanna just mumbling to Chachi Bt in the corner of WWC for a couple of days. That'll be good. It's really like, give it to Joanna. She doesn't half-ass things. You know what I mean? When Joanna decides to make AI her life, she goes for it. She's going for it. I mean, she's writing a book about making AI her life, so she's going for it. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, which I am told is sponsored. As you know, we exist free of the business pressures of our company. We just spend the money. Eric, what's going on here? That's right.

1:19:01This week's lightning round is presented by Google Gemini. Eric, that's great. Great job. I'm really proud of you. Good work. That's the information. Still flavorful, I would say. Very flavorful. And in fact, I know it's going to be flavorful because, David, it's time. It is. It's once again, it's summer, but it is still time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Future Webby Award winning podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Eli, how does this keep happening? Like every week I'm like, I have a line in the rundown that just says Brendan Carr is a dummy. And I'm like, oh God, there's not going to be any links.

1:19:38This is going to be so great. We can finally not talk about this stupid man. And yet here we are. We do this every time. We do. And there's no shortage of it. I will say this week, usually we get notes like he's not a dummy. He's a threat to free speech. And I agree with those people. The thing is that he's also very stupid. Right. Right. So he does all these investigations and threatens the companies for not being racist enough. Brendan Carr stuff. But he's also not good at executing or thinking more than one step ahead. Right. He's a dummy. I can't say this clearly enough. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, the regulator in charge of our nation's communications infrastructure, is a dummy.

1:20:18And sometimes it just expresses itself because the only thing he succeeds in doing is shooting himself in the foot. And I think it's starting to weigh on the other people at the FCC because they're all quitting. So we're down. We're supposed to have five FCC commissioners. and depending on the president's party, you're supposed to have three of the majority party and two of the minority, right? And then, you know, you kind of, the votes go either way, but you have this like bipartisan agency committee that like makes decisions altogether. And ideally they make them unanimously because they've done the hard work of hashing out good policy from both sides of the, you know, stuff.

1:20:58Yeah. Government stuff. Government stuff. The thing you're supposed to do. Brendan is such a dummy that he's not doing that at all, where he's just like issuing proclamations about how there should be more censorship in America or whatever he wants. And I don't know what he's doing. So this week, two different FCC commissioners from different parties just resigned. Jeffrey Starks, who has been on the Richcast before as a guest, Democratic commissioner, quit. Goodbye. I think people kind of knew he was going to leave, but he's gone. And then surprisingly, Nathan Symington, who is sort of just like another toady, like another revolving door Verizon toady.

1:21:36He's just been there for a while. He was an assistant to Pi and Carr in different ways, and then he became a commissioner. He bailed, too. He was appointed by Trump in the first Trump administration, wasn't he? Yep. Yeah. Cool. I don't have a high opinion. These guys are all just sort of like, we're here to do what the cable companies tell us to. Like, fine. Like, you're interchangeable, Toadies. But you would think that he'd be riding high in a Carr FCC because, you know, he gets rubber stamp stuff, too. Yeah. But no, he's gone. And the reports are that he wants to do other things. Presumably he's going to go work for one of our nation's telecoms.

1:22:10Like that revolving door is just going to spin really fast and spit out millions of dollars in lobbying fees. And Nathan Simitian is going to collect them. I know this is what happens to all of them. It's a lie. G.Pi, the CEO of our nation's preeminent wireless industry lobby right now. That's how it goes. But so we're down to two. We're supposed to have five. In a Trump administration, you have three Republicans and two Democrats. and we're down to one Democrat, Anna Gomez, who is literally touring the company saying that Brendan Carr is a threat to democracy and free speech right now. And is also like operating under the assumption that she's going to be fired at any minute.

1:22:42I think she's trying to get fired. Yeah. So, and to prove a point, which is I think one of the reasons they're not fighting. What if it's just Brendan? Do you see what I'm saying? And then there's Brendan. Oh my God. And he's pushed everyone else out and the government is such a disaster right now because Elon and Trump are fighting that like, There's no chance we're going to nominate four more FCC commissioners, two of whom have to be Democrats by statute. It's not going to happen. No. So we're down to Brendan and Anna. They don't even have a quorum. They can't do anything anymore because they don't have enough of them.

1:23:18Right, because it'll be one-to-one on everything and they just leave. And there's a lot of stuff to get done. There's broadband to roll out in America. There's spectrum auctions to be held. Like there's all this stuff to do. And Brendan is so distasteful and so stupid that he, you know, Brendan his way into not having a functional FCC. Very good, Brendan. You succeeded. And the only other person who works there now hates you so much that she is literally touring the country, calling you a threat to free speech. Well done. Just when I think of like pure political operators, you know, People who really work the system like they're playing a video game, it's not Brendan Carr.

1:24:02Whatever this is, it's not that outcome. So that's one. Very funny. Just pure idiocy, so distasteful that everyone else quit, including the other Republican, who is himself kind of a toey. Insane. Then there's like, this one is a winding road, but it might be even funnier. so you will recall Brendan launched an investigation into DISH Network's use of spectrum to build what was supposed to be a nation's fourth wireless network and he said you're not using the spectrum I'll come to why they are not using that spectrum but the reason he launched that investigation is because Starlink put out a report saying it had investigated DISH all by itself and they weren't using the spectrum right that is just corruption that's not how that's supposed to work straightforwardly that's not how that's supposed to work.

1:24:49You're not like, oh, Starlink has a good point. We should trust them and take the spectrum away from another private company. I'm doing a great job, says me. So they launched this investigation. Now, I believe wholeheartedly that DISH network is not using the spectrum appropriately, because it turns out there is not a fourth wireless network in America. Correct. If you see it, if you see the fourth nationwide wireless network that is striking fear in a T-Mobile, you let me know that I've looked around. And by look around, I meant waved my phone in the sky. However you look around. It's not there.

1:25:24It's not there. It's supposed to be there because Brendan's predecessor, Ajit Pai, allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint, consolidating the wireless industry, rubber stamping some telecom stuff. This is what these guys do. And made them promise they would turn over Spectrum to EchoStar, Dish Network, and they would light up a fourth wireless network, a 5G network. And EchoStar made all these promises about how they're going to take over Boost and then use these MVNO agreements with AT &T and T-Mobile and use that to bootstrap a network while they built a cutting edge 5G network using Open RAN technologies running on AWS.

1:26:01We've covered this at length. And Ajit Pai hoodwinked fully into believing this and said, okay, we're going to let T-Mobile buy Sprint. We're going to cut the amount of competition in America in wireless. I'm sure prices go up, but Dish Network will show up to save the day and restore competition. It is 100 years later. They have 20 subscribers. They still run Boost Mobile, but they're constantly roaming on AT &T. None of this exists. Just none of this exists. This is failed Republican policy from the first Trump administration. Okay. Starlink has said they're not using the spectrum. We'd like it.

1:26:33No process. Brennan's like, yeah, I'll give it to my buddy Elon. Elon has now fallen completely out with Trump. Like as we are speaking, they continue to tweet at each other about how much they hate each other. That seems like a poor political move from Brendan who can't see two feet in front of his face. And EchoStar, Dish Network, what have they decided to start doing? They're going to start missing their interest payments on the loans they took out for the spectrum so they can declare bankruptcy and get out of this whole deal. Wow. They're actively missing their payments on the spectrum now.

1:27:05And they're doing it in response to this investigation. They're saying, you investigated us. We're headed for the exit. So Brandon, who again, threw his lot in with Elon Musk to take Spectrum from a company that wasn't using it under a plan that his own predecessor launched. He's now put himself on the wrong side of Donald Trump, his putative boss, and in a position where Echo Star might outplay him by just declaring bankruptcy. We will still not get a fourth wireless network in America out of this. Super not going to happen. But we'll burn a bunch of money and jobs in the process. Burn a bunch of money in jobs.

1:27:39And I think Brendan has, because he's so dumb, didn't see the two moves ahead of him that perhaps Charlie Ergen, the CEO of Echo Star, the parent of Dish, would have another card to play. He's just a moron. Right. This is just what we're doing here. That's been Brendan Carr's dummy. As always, Brendan, if you can show up on the podcast and defend these moves or any others, you're welcome to come. We'd love to have you. You're not doing anything else. All of your coworkers quit. There's literally no one else. Ana Gomez is on tour. Go on tour. Go on tour to the Vergecast. This is what we ask for.

1:28:14Make the case that you didn't just get thoroughly outplayed by like a wildcat satellite operator who's going to declare bankruptcy and you're going to have to resell the spectrum. And you're probably not going to be able to just give it to Starlink the way they want. I also I was just reading Brendan Carr's blog post on the FCC website that he wrote sort of announcing these changes. Uh, he's just so annoying. Let me just read you a paragraph. There's a lot of time between now and our scheduled June 26 commission meeting. So I wanted to lay out a couple of items that I would like to get done at the meeting if we can.

1:28:50Stay tuned on that front. What does he mean by that? I just said stay tuned. That's all. I just read words. That's what he wrote. That's what he wrote. He wrote what does he mean by that? He wrote stay tuned on that front. And then in italics, what does he mean by that? End italics. I just said stay tuned. We always make a final decision about the commission meeting and its agenda closer to the meeting date. We will do so again here. That's a whole paragraph of no words. What are we doing, Brendan? Again, he's not smart. I know a lot of people are like, you should call the segment something else.

1:29:20You know, you should really. We do get this out. You should really make sure that people understand the threat. Yeah, there's some threats. I've called him a traitorous moron many times on our podcast, which is not regulated by the FCC. Sorry, buddy. but he's just stupid yeah and like you you see it play out like he doesn't he can't think two moves ahead anyway again i repeat brendan you're you're welcome i know you listen i i know that you hate it if you can show up you can show up on decoder you know people come on decoder all the time they answer the questions they do their best they leave you know you can show up here david will tell some jokes about you to your face i just read him blog posts you can yell at him i'll just edit his writing on his stupid website.

1:30:05Anyhow, that's been Brennan Carr is Dummy, America's favorite podcast within podcast. That was beautiful. David, I think we need a little bit of a palate cleanser. Let me get it up. You want to talk about the Fediverse for a minute? Yeah, I would love to. It's my favorite thing. So Fediforum, which is like a big Fediverse event, is this week. But did you see the news about this tool called Bounce? Oh, this is the one that lets you move things around? Yeah. so bounce is basically it's it's pretty straightforwardly just like a migration tool from blue sky to mastodon uh not all that exciting it's built on top of uh this thing called i think it's called bridgie fed which is some like underlying work that ties the two things together um but it basically it connects these two accounts so that you can move uh all of your stuff from one to the other and still be able to post where you were this is like this is the stuff right it's just like every once in a while we get an announcement or a new product or a thing that people are explaining that it is like this is the stuff this is what we're doing when we talk about the fediverse and like bounce a in the fact that it is kind of messy to explain and uh the reason they call it bounce is because they're trying to get you to bounce from blue sky to mastodon which is like pretty good uh but it's like the idea that i can just pick up my stuff on a social network and put it down on another social network like that's it baby that's the stuff and we're like starting to see this there's a bunch of stuff out of fedaforum where it's like new ways of thinking about the protocols i really broadly i think we spent the last year or so talking about capabilities like here are some technologies that will enable capabilities the fediverse is absolutely that thing activity pub app protocol whatever it's like look at these core technologies and you got to build them and now in the same as trivia look at these models and how they can lie to you and now we're in the products phase and like you can see the fetterus products are coming pretty fast and furious now it's taking a little longer than i would have hoped i will say i think there's been there was so much energy 18 months ago that i think got a little bit wasted is too strong but didn't quite get fully utilized and I think a lot of people are excited about what Threads is doing and the Threads Fetaverse momentum seems to have slowed pretty aggressively Blue Sky is doing great, Blue Sky is a version of the Fetaverse but is not sort of the whole story in a way so it's like we continue to be like right at the edge of the thing but I think you're right that the answer is just people just have to start building things people like to use and then we're going to start to be there and it is like every every version of this that comes out where it's like we're getting another piece of the puzzle together uh and i think especially the stuff that touches blue sky because that's just it's just the one with the juice right now right and so like any piece of it that is like let me just attach a little bit of the open web to blue sky i think is is super exciting uh and i suspect there'll be more stuff coming out of the the fed forum there was a lot of news at the last one i suspect there will be more this time um but it is like the the momentum is still there i just wish it were like shipping a little faster you know what i mean i feel like there was a the momentum slowed because you had the vhs versus beta moment with at protocol and maston and activity pub and threads yeah and everyone thought threads would just make activity pub win and then it turns out meta runs it yeah and that just made people be like what if i choose blue sky which exists and it's just a different protocol.

1:33:39And so stuff like BridgetFet is really interesting because it shoves that down. And part of the promise of a lot of stuff we've seen on Feddeform is we made interoperability happen, but those still aren't products. And I think now we're just headed towards... Surf Social is fascinating. It's just an app that connects to all these services. So I'm excited for these products. We still have big ideas about how we will integrate the version to them, but you've got to pick VHS for paid. And we'll get there. We'll get there. I'm excited about it. And I think there was another one at FedEform. I think it was called like channel.org or something that's poking at some of the same stuff that Surf is doing, where it's like, how do I take a bunch of different feeds from a bunch of different places and make them one packageable thing that you can then like share to lots of different places and read from lots of different apps?

1:34:28And it's like Surf's big idea is like everything is just going to be feeds and you can create feeds from anywhere. You can consume feeds from anywhere and feeds can be anything. And it's like, that is an incredibly powerful idea that we have like only just begun exploring. And so I think every, again, every, every piece of that, that I see, I'm like, this is, this is the stuff. Yeah. It's going to get there. Yeah. This is, it's, it's product time. You gotta, you gotta make some products, everybody. Yeah. It'd be great if Apple's like, we're going to do a full hour in the Fediverse. We're bringing back ping and it's the Fediverse this time.

1:35:00That'd be great. All right. We are at WWC next week. We'll have lots of that. We have lots of switch coverage to come. We should say, by the way, our WWDC episode is going to be late on Tuesday just because the way WWDC works, we're not going to get to record until late on Monday. And then we will have it up as early as we can on Tuesday. But if you're like waiting for the episode for your morning commute, just know that I'm sorry. And it will be an afternoon commute kind of show for you. Yeah. I mean, I have to get to a hotel room and record the episode after WWDC. Exactly. Lots to come. That's for Chess.

1:35:32Thanks, Joanna. Bye-bye.

1:35:38And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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