The 'AI is inevitable' trap

23:59Every other big technology trend has been bottoms up. It's been led by people who are like, this is exciting. Right. As opposed to being top down in this way. And then the characters pushing the top down change, by and large, are not cuddle bugs. They're not making the case. They're saying this is happening. And if it doesn't happen, we'll lose to China. And also we've taken over the government and gotten rid of everyone's health care. And you're all stupid except for me. and like, what are you doing? Like, how do you expect to fix that? You can't fix it by buying TBPN for$200 million and saying they're going to handle your marketing.

24:38You have to fix it by, you know, like winning people over. And that's why I think you, when you propose that we do this segment, you're like, should we just call the top of AI? Like, I don't know, like business-wise, if this is the top, but I do know that public perception-wise, something is over for the tech industry.

24:55David Pierce:Yeah. And it increasingly to me seems like that divide is not fixable. And it's possible that I'm wrong and it's possible there will be some version of these products that is so mainstream, good and useful that it'll work. But I increasingly don't see it. I mean, you look at all of these trends, right? There's been all this stuff this week with Anthropic basically neutering Claude in order to make it work better with the amount of compute that it has. And these companies are desperately trying to figure out how to make any money at all, or at least lose less money before they go public. So the products in a lot of ways are actively getting more expensive and worse simultaneously.

25:34David Pierce:Like they're sort of in shitifying in real time as these companies have to figure out how to make some money. they're also getting more and more aggressive about like trying to take your whole life inside of them open ai is just nakedly calling it a super app and they're like we want you to live our entire your entire life inside of chat gpt there is just all of the business incentives that these companies have are actually against make the best product right and it's like that's that is not how you win the hearts and minds of people that you have to win and I think that the only thing I can surmise and I think this has been true for a while and continues to be true is that the people who are truly AI-pilled are still so AI-pilled that they earnestly believe the line it's happening whether you like it or not and the only responsible thing to do is get on board.

26:25David Pierce:I think a lot of people would look you in the eye with all of your best intentions in mind and say that to you and I think those people are wrong and I think that is about to be pulled like further and further apart all the time. And this is the thing that has happened for me this week because I've just gone from like, I don't know how you come back from somebody saying we need to be Luigi-ing the tech CEOs and getting like pretty broad support from a lot of corners of the internet. Yeah. Like that's a line that is very hard to uncross. The moment for me that I like really had to sit and think about was how hard we had to moderate our comments.

27:07on the stories about the attacks on Sam Alvin. And, you know, I love our audience. We have a good audience. Usually our audience is pretty anti-violence. Usually our audience is pretty anti-war. We were like, oh, we got to do it. This is not the publication we want to run. This is not the audience we want to have. This is not the image we want to promote. And, like, when it's the tech audience turning on you in this way, something bad's happening. And, you know, you see these guys. Mark Andreessen is blaming the media. Mark Andreessen famously is out there on podcasts saying you should have no introspection whatsoever.

27:43Right.

27:44David Pierce:Because our ancestors didn't, which is just a lie. They're not motivated to think about this very hard. Yeah. Like literally he's saying I refuse to think about the consequences of my actions or have any interiority whatsoever. That is not the right approach for somebody with money and power. Right. If you're going to take over the world, I think people would like to think that their leaders are thoughtful. Historically, that usually works better than I'm the mad king, you know? Yeah. And I have no introspection, even as everyone hates me. And the only thing I can say is the media is lying to you about everything.

28:19And we need to control the message. It's not going to work. How many times on the show do we talk about Brendan Carr and he's like railing about how he will censor every local news station in the world? we're going to talk about it again this week because he's doing it again. And I'm pointing out the people are on social media talking to themselves. They are not under your thrall in this way. And you can see that they've lost it and they've decided that everyone listens to the media. And it's like, nope, they're listening to you. And they are making up their minds. They're listening to you and they're using your products and they are making up their minds.

28:54Casey Newton had a good piece in Platformer last week. Kyle Chica had a good piece in The New Yorker this week. just pointing out that Sam Altman calling for an end to the overheated rhetoric is true. Yes, we should drop the overheated rhetoric. Also, that means Sam should stop saying that he's going to take everyone's job away. Like, it came from one side of the equation, not the whole thing. I don't know, man. I agree. I don't know if it's the top economically. I think there's a lot more money to be made and boy, are these folks good and making money. But I think I keep coming back to this. I'm going to get in trouble for it again.

29:34The products are speaking loudly. And if you don't show people why they should love the thing you're making such that they demand the change themselves, they're going to fight you. And if you make them feel helpless, which I think a lot of people feel helpless right now, bad things are going to happen.

29:51David Pierce:Yeah. All right, well, we should switch gears in this, but I just want to offer you one more example before we take a break, which is Reese Witherspoon, our girl Reese, who I would say among celebrities in the world is about as universally liked as anybody. She's Reese Witherspoon. Like, if you hate Reese Witherspoon, don't at me about it. You know what I mean? So Reese goes on threads, I think, on Wednesday of this week and posts this video of her in her kitchen making a smoothie. It's very, like, influencer-y. And she says, I've decided it's time. The AI revolution has begun and I need to learn as much as I possibly can about AI and share it all with you.

30:27David Pierce:Basically says, women don't want to be left behind. So do you want to learn with me? And the comments, I would say about 100 to one amount to, oh girl, no, don't do this. Roxane Gay replies, oh Reese, absolutely not. Is this sponsored content? Because it feels very scripted. I want to know less about AI, but thanks. oh Reese did the body snatchers get you this is like like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these and this is about as like earnest let's embrace AI thing as you're going to find from anybody and just reflexively the overwhelming response is like this is so bad you can't possibly be serious what is happening here it's the same as crypto what you're describing is when people are like I'm Tom Brady and I'm here to sell you Solana or like whatever he was selling, whatever SPF's coin was.

31:20David Pierce:But I think with crypto, at least at least there was if you dug a little, you could sort of understand that they were just getting paid for it. Right. Like, yes, they didn't disclose that they were getting paid for it. And yes, that became a whole thing and whatever. But I don't think most people really believed that Tom Brady like loved crypto and thought it was an important backbone to the Internet. that AI is like, we're going to change your way of life. And Reese Witherspoon is like, let's talk about it. And everybody's like, let's not, Reese. Let's go back to the book club, not about AI. Yeah.

31:54It's also just like, you know, I vibe coded some nonsense this week. I know you did too. I know you're talking to people about what they're making. Like, it's the best part about AI is how small it is actually. Right? Like, if you're a regular person, like the best thing that can happen with AI is like, you can make something for yourself that maybe you weren't able to make before. And that is, I keep coming back to this, that's empowering. And like, boy, have we gotten far away from that. Like most people cannot, they're not going to pay however much in tokens to have that experience. And I think everyone's just missing it.

32:31Like, how do you get people to feel great about it? You empower them. You don't put re-scripted on threads being like, let's do some prompts together. Like, no, absolutely not.

32:40David Pierce:Yeah, it's Reese Witherspoon's prompt club is not an idea whose time has come. All right, we should take a break. Then we're going to come back. We're going to do the hype desk. We're going to just barrel through some more news because there's a lot going on. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

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35:58David Pierce:Welcome back. It's time now for the segment where our friends Ross Miller and Ashley Esqueda come on and tell us what's cool in the world and on the internet. It's time for the Hype Desk. Ross, Ashley, welcome back. Great to have you guys. Hello. Hello. Neil, this is the last time you get to give the speech. Do you want to give the speech? So as you know, Ross and Ashley do not work at The Verge. They're influencers. I feel influenced. So per our precious ethics policy, you can't buy me and David. but you can buy them and so eventually we're going to get to the one line which is you can't buy us but you can buy them it's pretty good see it i like it today we're unsponsored for flavor so it's fine but you understand what we're trying to do here yeah ashley i think this is your story i think it is yeah uh i'm building a new computer and um this uh i was very fortunate that a friend sold me a 5070 Ti, like at reasonable, like MSRP.

36:55And I was very excited for that until I started putting together the rest of it and remembered that the RAM-pocalypse is happening. And I have built my own computer since 1999. I remember having an old beige PC I was very proud of that I built. And I hate pre-buying them. And so I want them to look exactly how I want them to look. And so imagine my shock when I went to go buy two sticks of 48 gigs of RAM and it was $1 ,200. I felt like there was maybe almost an aneurysm, a pre-aneurysm moment where I was just It's like, uh, and so this is where it gets kind of weird because everything's always weird when it has to do with me.

37:45It never can be normal. The rampocalypse is weird enough and horrible enough. But I made a joke on my Instagram saying like, oh, I'm going to start selling feet pics now. Like, haha. And somebody DM'd me and said, actually, you already have a wiki feet page. And I was like, stop. No, this can't be. I'm not important enough for this. And so, yeah, I went and looked at the WikiFeet page. First of all, very insulted to find out that I have a 4.4 score. Wait, out of five or out of 10? Out of five. I have great feet. And I'm, no, no. Is this like the Uber ranking when you look at your own Uber? Yeah, if it's under like five, it's bad.

38:24I'm pretty sure a 4.4 on Uber gets you fired, though. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. If you get through a 4.2, you get kicked off. No, you get fired as a rider. You don't get fired as a driver. You get fired as a rider. You can't ride anymore. So this, I'm like, this is deeply upsetting. I was very insulted by that. But my favorite thing was, there's one of the pictures, they have like comments. And one of the comments on the picture was, I have a tattoo on my ankle and someone described it as graffiti on the Mona Lisa, which like. So we started with, we built a PC and we ended with what amounts to an invitation for people to go juice your wiki feet.

39:03ranking. Guys, I need a five-star ranking, please. Do we think this is going to get you enough cash to buy two sticks of RAM? The RAMpocalypse comes for us all. Yeah, it's brutal.

39:15David Pierce:Well, I don't have a single segue out of WikiFeet. So, Ross, what do you have for us? I've been thinking, what can I do to transition out of this? I cannot. Feet to walking, walking to festivals. I'm going to talk about Coachella, but here's a spoiler. I did not go to Coachella. I never go to Coachella. I love the Coachella live stream. And this year, they went 4K on all the streams. They've got the multi-view, so it feels like you're watching, you know, if you do Premier League or the Olympics on Peacock, same idea. You can watch them all at once. You can jump between the audio. They do a fast channel now.

39:45David Pierce:It's just radio. But I will say there was one thing that felt very different this year, and I don't know how quite to put it, but I feel like more than I've ever seen in the past is the headline artists played to the cameras more than they did to the audience. they've been doing a lot of like really nice 4k live streaming for a while the main stage has been doing that but this is the first year where i saw a lot of songs that they were clearly directed just for the camera themselves like trent resner and his wife mara quinn did nine inch noise there's amazing performance closer and if you are in the crowd you cannot see what was happening but they had a full choreographed concert they had camera people right up to trent's face heavy in the bokeh effect.

40:24David Pierce:I think it was 24 frames per second this year. They really wanted to make it look like concert footage, like from a documentary. Do you think that that's because they're going to release it as like a, like a purchasable, like by Coachella? I think that every year, but no, I think it's just because they know these are the breakout clips that are going to travel. Because like Coachella's biggest marketing thing is FOMO, right? Like they've sold out 120 ,000 people every day of the weekend, sold out tickets. In many ways, I think it's just like, hey, Aren't you sad you're not here? Look how cool it is.

40:53David Pierce:And I'm looking at this going, this is the best seat in the house. I have air conditioning. I do not have to be in crowds. I'm just enjoying a really good sound bar. But no, it's like, it's the favorite thing to do. And it just surprised me how much they've really upped the production. And I didn't even realize until just doing research for this, how long YouTube has been the live stream partner. Like, this is just a thing they've been doing for over a decade now. And we talk over and over again, like, you know, obviously, YouTube's getting the Oscars coming up soon too. And like, they've just been laying the groundwork for all these like premium streaming tools with TV, with Coachella.

41:28David Pierce:And I cannot recommend enough. It's weekend too. Please just put it on the background and learn some new music. Okay. Ross, the two things that I feel like we're all over the internet were that the nine inch noise set was unbelievable. Like generationally incredible. I haven't seen it. And then there are, I would say a lot of very conflicted feelings about Justin Bieber. What did you think of Justin Bieber's set? Okay, so for people who do not know, Justin Bieber did a full set, but it was a lot looser. And then toward the end, this is the part that's been really viral, he just opens up his laptop and he starts playing YouTube clips.

42:02David Pierce:But to do that, he literally just goes to YouTube.com and he searches for them. Everyone has to do brand deals, Ross. That's what I'm thinking. I think a lot of people are calling it lazy, and I don't think it's lazy. If anything, Bieber came from YouTube. He's discovered. His story is so indebted into the YouTube history. I actually thought it was very poignant. I do question, was that a Bieber, I thought? Or did Google go, hey, I've got a great idea for you, and it's a great integration? Can I tell you, one of our most popular stories on the entire site all week has been the debunk of the conspiracy theory that in order to play his old songs, Bieber had to do the YouTube thing.

42:38David Pierce:Because he sold his catalog. Because he'd sold his catalog to, like, private equity for hundreds of millions of dollars. That is so silly. And so there's this conspiracy theory that he was forced into, like, karaokeing his own YouTube. And it's like, no, like, one, everybody's got lawyers. The people who own the catalog are thrilled when this stuff happens because the value of the catalog goes up. And also, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And so we wrote a debunk. We got all the quotes in it, all the reporting. And it has just been at the top of the site all week. People want to know.

43:09It's amazing. You're doing the good work. That's good journalism. It's something. Go do the Justin Bieber story, yelled the editor-in-chief. You remember, Ross. Every now and again, I have ideas.

43:23David Pierce:I will tell you, I am choosing to believe that that was authentic. Because you're a believer. You're choosing to believe. The moment that he went up an octave singing Baby and sounded like his old self, magic happened. You were just like, I just want my youth back. The internet was changed. I want to be who I was when Baby came out. And so does Justin Bieber. Yeah. I think we all do. That's 15 years ago. Don't we all want to be who we were? When YouTube was but a baby. Exactly. Those were the days. All right. Ross, Ashley, thank you so much. Always great to have you here. Always great to be here.

44:00David Pierce:See you again next week. Bye. That's it for the hype desk. All right. Thank you again, Ross and Ashley. Neil, I let's just lightning round our way through the end of this show. Does this sound good to you? Yeah. Okay. So lightning round one. we're just going to barrel through a bunch of news. We should probably start with Ticketmaster, which we sort of left off with at an odd point, which is that Ticketmaster Alive Nation had settled with the DOJ in its case about whether Ticketmaster Alive Nation is a monopoly. It's a fascinating, interesting case, but it looked like it might go away, and then it didn't, and it kept going because a bunch of state attorneys general decided to keep prosecuting this case.

44:42David Pierce:And they won. I like that you got attorneys general right on the first go. I appreciate you, David. Listen, I've been working with you a while. This is what we do now. Man, talk about people feeling helpless. The Trump administration corruptly settling the most obvious antitrust lawsuit in the history of the world. It's bad. But yeah, it's true. The states kept it going and I think everyone knew what would happen. Are you even really surprised they were liable on two counts of being a monopoly? Not a big. A legal monopoly, I should say. there's still no remedies and the judge should still break them up we're just very much at they illegally monopolized the market for live event ticketing and they tied their concert promotion business together with the use of their venues which is illegal and so if you don't know I mean everyone knows how Ticketmaster works but if you like run a theater let's say David and I ran a small theater and we had to keep it going we had to put on one last great show which I think is a movie everybody would watch it's also the plot of the Muppets movie And we're like, all right, we got to get some acts in here.

45:42The problem is that Ticketmaster would literally run the business that sells tickets, the Ticketmaster part that everyone thinks of. They run Live Nation, which owns competing venues. And they are the artist's contract with to promote their shows. So I'm like, hey, I, you know, who do I? Billie Eilish is one who keeps coming up.

46:03David Pierce:Billie Eilish. Billie's going to headline our night saving event. She would do that for us. Right. Like, I was thinking on Justin Bieber. I really want Justin Bieber to show up and just watch YouTube with the audience for a while. Hell yeah, dude. Right. And in the case, you saw, like, the CEO of Barclays Center and the CEO of Live Nation argue on the phone. And the threat was, if you don't extend your ticketing deal, we'll take our artists to the other venue across town. And that is just straightforwardly illegal. That is just cartoon villain stuff. And there was no chance they weren't. they weren't going to be found liable by a jury of regular people who deal with this.

46:42Anyhow, we don't know what's going to happen next. You know, I continue to believe that, like, the intense monopolization and control of the American economy is a root cause of helplessness. So just score one for the good guys.

46:54David Pierce:Absolutely. You know, this case took a long time. The Trump DOJ corruptly tried to leave because, like, Kellyanne Conway was lobbying for Ticketmaster. The state's got it done, and there's some glimmer of hope that you can fight off the big bads. Yeah, it definitely remains to be seen how this thing will actually end. But I am not surprised, but still sort of surprised that they lost this. I mean, who knows? I mean, they're going to appeal. All kinds of dumb stuff. It's a long way from over. Yeah. We're trying very hard to get some of—Live Nation is not going to come on our shows. We're trying very hard to get the competitors to come on the shows to be like, okay you've got this ruling how much change can you make right away so that while the appeals process happens some other kind of change can actually take root oh that's interesting can you like make cultural music business change in this weird sort of chilling you've got this weird moment in time before clarence thomas has to weigh in on the pricing of billy eilish tickets what can what can you get done before that happens because who knows what happens in that case yeah Yeah, we've already talked about it, but Justin Bieber, you are welcome anytime.

48:01David Pierce:I loved it. Justin Bieber can play YouTube videos at me as much as he wants. These are the wolves. All right, next up on the list, the sort of ongoing MacBook Neo effect in the world has caused a bunch of action from Microsoft in a really fascinating way. Tom Warren, fresh from parental leave, wrote a really great piece for us last week arguing that actually the MacBook Neo is a very good thing for Windows because Microsoft is nothing if not a fast follower. I would argue that that piece is very funny because what Tom describes is Microsoft's fast follows are a series of things that just didn't work.

48:36David Pierce:Microsoft has a history of fast following with products that aren't successful. But in this case, the thing it does seem to have inspired Microsoft to do is push much harder for students and try to make Windows better. I put this in here because I think you are as fascinated by what is happening with the Neo as I am. The hottest gadget in the world is an iPhone chip running macOS. Isn't that nuts? It just bears repeating. It's an iPhone chip that runs macOS. You unnerf the chip and let people do computer stuff with it for real, and everyone loses their minds. Yeah. um do you what do you make of the the sort of microsoft response here it's like do you think can this company actually sort of pull up its bootstraps and compete here it's hard to talk about microsoft's response here without talking about microsoft and open ai okay i think microsoft remember that when they introduced bing and nadella was like you literally said to me i want to make google dance like they were riding high on what they thought was an interface revolution that would let them just upend mobile and search and computers.

49:53And boy, did that relationship not turn out how they wanted. Yes. At all. Like just this week, you know, OpenAI leaked another memo about focus, which is hilarious because the thing that is distracting OpenAI is how many memos they write about having to focus. Every week another executive is like, it's time to buckle down again, I said. And it's like, didn't your boss say that last week? Okay. Okay. And it, but in that memo, uh, it's like the CFO of open AI, it says we're now on AWS, which is what our customers wanted always. And it's like, yikes, like Azure was the provider for open AI. And it literally says Azure was great to help us get started, but we're now where we need to be on AWS.

50:34And it's like, this whole thing fell apart from Microsoft in like very specific ways. And I bring all that up as a foundation because I think they really thought co-pilot it PCs were going to be the thing.

50:44David Pierce:Yeah, I think so too. That you would just talk to your, they ran the ads. You just can talk to your computer. It's going to do stuff for you. And it turns out none of that worked. Like Antonio tested all that. And then Antonio tested a 599 MacBook Neo, which is an iPhone chip running bog standard Mac OS. And it's the hottest gadget that anyone has going right now. I would just say, I would only tweak what you just said very slightly, which is to say, none of it worked and everybody hated it. Hated it. Like the overwhelmingly negative reaction to Microsoft shoving Copilot onto every single surface of every single Windows computer has been like so sweeping and so huge that Microsoft almost immediately started unwinding it.

51:26David Pierce:Like this company not that long ago was loudly and proudly betting the company on Copilot being everything to everybody forever and is now just quietly pulling buttons off the screen. Yep, and saying that they're doing it. Yeah, and they're like, we're gonna relax the experience and bring it back and we're gonna make everything feel a little better and less in your face and we're gonna get it out of like the stupid text editing software. Like we don't need Copilot in all these places, Microsoft, it's gonna be fine. But yeah, this thing, Microsoft, I think you're right. I think it thought that it had the answer and all it had left to do was put it everywhere.

52:02David Pierce:and now I think it maybe knows it doesn't have the answer at all and is going to flail pretty spectacularly as a result. I mean, just the fact that the agentic computing revolution is not really consumer software yet, like in any real way, like go do a bunch of tasks for me is just a thing that costs a billion dollars in tokens now. Sure. Like you can't make that a consumer problem. Also, I don't think people think in loops in that specific way. It's also happening on Mac Studios and Mac Minis. Like, no, like importantly, people are not running OpenClaw on their Windows computers. They're running them on Macs.

52:41David Pierce:And there was also news this week about Microsoft, you know, trying to figure out how to do OpenClaw type computer. You see things through Copilot, which is sort of an obviously good idea if you're Microsoft and they should have been doing this a while ago. But like it is just they've lost every possible version of this advantage so far. It's wild to me. Right, especially because sort of the price performance of Windows is backwards compared to a Mac Mini or now a MacBook Neo. I think they can get that back, right? They're starting to deeply discount some Windows PCs. Like Best Buy is going to sell an IdeaPad Slim 3X for$499.

53:17It's got a Snapdragon in there. Like maybe the battery life will be good. Walmart is going to do a 16-inch HP Omnibook 3. Why are they all 3s? For$429, like they're going to discount and they're going to make it compelling. selling price-wise, I think price performance ratio is going to draw people to Macs because Macs have a performance advantage. And then it's also when you boot up a Mac, like all you have to do is tell Apple one time that you don't want Apple intelligence and it's not in your face. And it's just a blank canvas for you to do stuff on that occasionally reminds you to use Apple Pay because Apple can't help itself.

53:56Yep. But you can, like, Windows is not that experience right now. No.

54:01David Pierce:And I think to Microsoft's credit, I think the right thing to do is to holistically take a look at Windows and say, OK, how have we lost the plot on this a little bit? I would just say that the history of Windows getting that right for long periods of time is not super strong. Yeah. And I think as we just heard from Ashley, like the other thing people wanted to do with Windows was build gaming PCs. And now you can't. because of ai perfect segue like we were talking about with with ross and ashley um the the pricing apocalypse continues to apocalypse um there was a bunch of news on this front this week and i think i i pulled a few of these out because they are like exceedingly mainstream things right we talked we've talked in the past about like building gaming pcs or raspberry pies or things that are less sort of in most people's day-to-day life but like samsung is making galaxy phones more expensive for ram reasons because memory is expensive uh microsoft is hiking the price of the surface pro and the surface laptop uh meta raised the price of the quest 3 all all of this is just this stuff is too expensive the prices keep going up youtube premium got more expensive this week.

55:20David Pierce:That sucks. That's not a memory problem. That just sucks. That one particularly sucks. Wait, why? I agree, but I want to know why you're mad. YouTube premium, not YouTube TV. I sort of understand the pricing dynamics of YouTube TV. Sure. Right. There's a bunch of big companies that spend a bunch of money on content and YouTube has to pay them just like a cable system has to pay them. YouTube premium is just turning off the ads on YouTube and the ads on YouTube make YouTube a lot of money. They do not make the creators a lot of money. And YouTube does not pay creators high enough rates to subsidize it.

55:55They all have to do brand deals. I keep ranting about this like almost every week now. Like, the YouTube economy, the cost structures are so upside down that all these creators basically have to run little ad agencies. And more power to them. Go do it. It's a hard business to run and a lot of them are real successful at it. But YouTube raising the rates to turn off the ads only benefits YouTube. Like, straightforwardly, the creators are not going to get more money. And that sucks. Like at least when YouTube TV raises the rates, I'm like, yeah, like some Hollywood masters of the universe smoked cigars in a room.

56:26And they demanded more money and they got it.

56:28David Pierce:YouTube's in a fight with Disney. It's like that's what normal happens. And it's like, I hope you all kill each other. Like whatever happens. Let them fight. And it's like, whatever, that's fine. YouTube premium raising the rates is, oh, they want more people on the ad tiers because they're going to shove more mid-roll ads onto other people's videos. And that money will not go to the creators. And if YouTube would just say, we wanted to make sure that some creators can be sustainable without having to do brand deals, and this rate increase will help us do that, I would calm down. But I just know Google is lining its pockets.

56:58There was a report this week that says, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, Meta is on pace to become a bigger digital ad provider than Google. And the pressure is coming for YouTube. And so I'm just so, I'm very cynical about YouTube raising their rates on premium. because up until recently, I think it was the single best bargain in media.

57:17David Pierce:I totally agree. I have been saying that for years and for the longest time, the two responses we get on that, which I always enjoy are, are you insane? Ads are fine. And whatever, my browser blocks ads. It's not even a big deal. Well, get ready because guess who owns your browser, my friend? Yeah, exactly. But no, I agree. I think YouTube premium, especially because it comes with YouTube music, it comes with some good features. Like YouTube premium as a sort of holistic entertainment experience is very good. And I read this exactly the same way that you do. This is not YouTube saying we want to do a better job of distributing money to an increasingly large number of creators who are doing an increasingly important amount of work.

58:00David Pierce:This is YouTube saying we are underpriced and we're going to spend more money on it. I mean, this is how I feel about Netflix. Because the ads are more lucrative. we've seen every single streaming provider realize that if they turn on ads they can make more money and i think youtube sees the same dynamic here we are they're gonna they're doing the same thing netflix says they are going to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until you go back to watching ads and if you don't go back to watching ads that's fine they are going to absolutely figure out the top of what you are willing to pay in order to not watch ads which i think for you neil patel is like thousands of dollars.

58:37My parents are on my, I shouldn't say this because I'll like, they'll figure it out. My parents are on the Google family plan that gives them my YouTube premium and it like lapsed the other week. And my mother called me in like a sheer panic. She's like, I saw an ad on YouTube.

58:54David Pierce:I, so my, my wife is one of seven kids and her siblings and her parents have all had, I would say, sort of a light competition to get into the limited slots on my Google family plan, which is the most important piece of leverage I have over everyone in my family. You should be rotating a minute out. I think that's probably right. Who's been most helpful this week? Yeah. Like a MySpace top eight situation. Yeah, exactly. Like, like I will bless you with YouTube premium until, until you wrong me. We need a babysitter. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Especially at this price. Dear God, no one's going to be able to afford it for very long.

59:31David Pierce:All right, we should take one more break, and then we're going to go back. And it's time for Brendan, and it's time for the laying around. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Amazon. There are the things you can plan for. A first birthday party, a movie marathon, a renter-friendly bathroom reno. And then there are the things you can never plan for. A surprise rainstorm, a Blu-ray player calling it quits, stick on tiles that looked way better on the package. For all things planned and unplanned, Amazon has you covered. You'll find low prices on everyday essentials and last-minute lifesavers.

1:00:09David Pierce:Shop Amazon and save on essentials. Save the everyday.

1:00:23David Pierce:day.

1:00:43David Pierce:April 9th through April 29th. The U.S. only C-Store online for details. In a classroom of sodas, most stay quiet. Then there's Mr. Pibb. Sweet cherry, bold outbursts. The kind of flavor that gets attention. Bold kick of cherry. Hey, yo, Mr. Pibb. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Or I guess in this case, lightning round part two. Still unsponsored. Still full of flavor. Neil, I assume, I mean, listen, I know. It's time once again for America's Favorite Podcast within a podcast. I hate that he keeps doing this to me. It is time for Brendan Carr as a Dummy. We got a dumb car.

1:01:25David Pierce:His name is Brendan. Hope he goes away. Cause when he gotta make a decision, he's bound to make it in the dumbest way. Anyone else would be better. Cause communication's about what we say. And Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:01:49I'd like to think both Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs would have appreciated that.

1:01:53David Pierce:I think so. I have also never hoped so much that we get a copyright strike on YouTube for that. That's from Billy in Santa Fe. Thank you, Billy. We also, just a little teaser, we have some fun Brendan Carr's the Dummy theme music news coming. Yeah. But not this week. Neal, what did he do this week? He did a lot this week. We're at the point now in the Brendan ecosystem where people send us stuff and I have to choose what idiotic stuff he did this week. You're spoiled for Brendan choice. It's a lot. You know, he climbed a cell tower for no reason. He does this all the time with like a hard hat.

1:02:30Really? To prove that he's a man of the people. He loves it. Yeah, Brendan Carr, 2 ,000 feet in the air, just waving, being like, I'm helping your cell service. Like all the time. And then people send me these pictures. uh he did there's a nothing he did this week but we're going to talk about later because it's not technically something he did it's it's the absence of doing so we'll come we'll come back to that this week i want to talk about two things in particular one is just very dumb it's the logical conclusion of a thing we've been talking about here on brennicars the dummy america's favorite podcast podcast for over a year now and the other thing is so dumb that it might be smart which

1:03:02David Pierce:where do you want to start um let's let's do the dumb thing first let's just get the dumb thing out of the way. Okay. So, Brendan, his main authority that he loves to wield to become America's top censor, to be the number one enemy of free speech in America, the authority that he wields is authority over local broadcast radio and television. So he's always threatening to take your licenses away, right? Which we should remind people in 2026 is like a teeny tiny power. Yeah. Because everyone's watching TikTok. Yeah. Over the air television. not that important come for us brendan i haven't broadcast over an airwave in my life and i never will right like but that's his power and he wields it with impunity uh and the you know local broadcasters don't have a lot of money or time and they tend to cave abc kind of cave with jimmy kibble like this is what happens so as part of that power he is also very favorable towards big companies he likes.

1:04:01So he allowed Nexstar and Tegna, two companies that own an awful lot of TV stations to merge against the FCC's own rules, which say there should be competition in local broadcasting. So you get a multiplicity of viewpoints. He allowed these companies to merge. And now they own a lot of local news stations, a lot of local news stations. And what is Nexstar going to do? They're going to replace the national news programming from ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox with their own programming from News Nation. So if you are like Brendan Carr and you keep running around saying, I need to let these things merge so there's more viewpoints and conservatives aren't held in contempt by the mainstream media and you got to compete with Google, I need to let these companies be bigger.

1:04:49You've allowed these companies to be bigger. You've broken the SEC's own rules about media ownership. And now News Nation will be part of the default broadcast news that millions of Americans receive every night. Good work, Brendan. I mean. It's so dumb. It's exactly what everyone said would happen. It's also exactly what he wants. It's what he wants. He's a censor. He removed some voices and he's allowing these companies to promote other voices. They obviously say they're going to have favorable news coverage to continue to get favors from the Trump administration. You just see it playing out exactly as everyone said it would.

1:05:24And Brendan along the way is like, this is competition for Google, which makes no sense. Anyway, I look forward to News Nation's programming continuing to sync the ratings of local news just as CBS News pivot to whatever it is they're doing has absolutely cratered their ratings because Americans are not stupid.

1:05:42David Pierce:Yep. So that's one. Then he did a good thing? I don't know. Okay. I don't know. Because again, Brendan is not a savvy operator. He has just managed to twist himself into a circle that sounds good, but I suspect it will come to nothing. He's had a couple of like, what's the onion headline? The worst person you know has a good point. Like Brendan has, I would say, sort of walked ass backwards into a couple of those so far. Is this another one of those? This is definitely another one of those. And it is very much like it's another sort of let them fight situation. Sure. Or no, I guess it's Alien versus Predator.

1:06:23Okay. You know, whoever wins, we lose. So the NFL, as you know, is addicted to money and they keep moving games to streaming services because they know that people have streaming services and they don't have local antennas. And increasingly, they don't have cable. So the NFL is just kind of like chasing the money. and they historically for years and years of decades have had an antitrust exemption which allows NFL teams to come together as a single unit and cooperate on pricing. So every NFL team is a different company. The league obviously is the league and they all agree to the rules, but they're all different companies.

1:07:02So they should compete for things like broadcast rights and payments, but they have an antitrust exemption that says you are allowed to come together and essentially collude on pricing.

1:07:14David Pierce:They're essentially a legal cartel is like the way it's been described. And the idea was, you know, in the 60s or whatever this past that everyone loves the NFL. We want to put the games on TV. We're going to give them an antitrust exemption so they can go deal with the networks like as a group and everyone gets paid and everyone's happy and everyone gets their games. And for a variety of reasons, this kind of no longer makes sense in 2026. Right? Like maybe you want there, there's more providers, right? There's not just the three big networks who are jockeying for position and maybe one ESPN.

1:07:46There's like a lot of streaming service providers. There's a lot of companies. There's a YouTube and a TikTok and whoever else that exists. And so basically what it feels like to people is in order to watch every NFL game, you've got to spend thousands of dollars a year now. because even your local market team might be on Prime one day and ESPN streaming another day and like whatever it is that's happening that's taking this away from your local broadcast stations.

1:08:10David Pierce:And the NFL seems to have a vested interest in increasing that over time, right? Like they're talking about going to more games, more streaming services. Like the NFL has really enjoyed the process of finding more places to give them money for football games. The greed of the NFL knows no bets. Yeah. By the way, I still I want to say this clearly for our audience. The 16 game NFL season was perfect and they are going to continue ruining it until they ruin the NFL. Just laying it out there. I may have never agreed with you as strongly as I do on that particular take. But anyway, so what did Brendan do?

1:08:42So Brendan is not even involved in this. Right. He's he's not involved in this. He runs the Federal Communications Commission. the Department of Justice is investigating the NFL and wondering if the antitrust exemption still holds water when the goal, the policy goal of getting games on TVs in a way that was cost effective for everybody has been subverted by the rise of streaming services. So the DOJ is investigating the league to see whether the antitrust exemption is still relevant. Brendan can't stay away from this because some broadcasters are involved and he just keeps running around being like, I think there's a point at which the NFL reaches a tipping point where they're sticking too many games on a paywall, in which case it really raises a lot of questions about the scope of the antitrust exemption.

1:09:28He's so stupid. He's smart. He has nothing to do with this. He's just threatening the NFL because he kind of can.

1:09:36David Pierce:But like, I think I agree. Like, I think he's right. Like, wouldn't it be great if we could all watch more football games for free? He's like, yeah, I would, Brendan. I agree. Okay. So then here's where it gets particularly done. Again, these are not savvy operators in this administration. You know, he used to run the DOJ? Pam Bondi. These are not savvy operators across the board. Pam Bondi, who, by the way, forced out her head of the antitrust division because she wanted to settle the Ticketmaster case and Gail Slater, who ran the antitrust division, didn't. And guess what just happened? Not savvy operators across the board here.

1:10:08The problem they have is they can take the antitrust exemption away from the league. But the league is composed of billionaires who have every single incentive to find another structure that still gets them all paid. And these structures exist all through sports. F1 is owned by Liberty Media. The teams are companies, but Liberty Media owns the broadcast rights and recently took them and sold them to Apple. Do you think the NFL is going to be like, oh shit, we lost our antitrust exemption? nothing to be done we'll just compete and make things cheaper for everybody what do you think is going to happen and I think the streaming providers are all very excited to lose the antitrust exemption and watch the NFL walk away from broadcast television entirely because that is what's going to happen here and so Brendan is like latched onto this fight because he thinks he can force the NFL to put more games on broadcast television for free.

1:11:13And I'm just telling you, Brendan, it is, you know, I'm not a prediction markets person, but if I was to put money on the NFL defeating you in this way, I would put money on the NFL defeating you in this way.

1:11:27David Pierce:Yeah. Will the NFL decide to make less money is not typically a winning bet. They're not going to be bullied into putting more games on TV for free. It is absolutely not going to happen. The demand for the NFL is so high that if they have to put everything behind a paywall, they will find a way to do it. And you can feel about that however you want. You can sail the stormy seas, my friends. I know you're taking those bites, but I'm just telling you, Brendan wants to be a man of the people here. He wants to wave the flag 2 ,000 feet in the air on a cell tower and say he's going to make the NFL free again.

1:12:01And I just think Roger Goodell can take him. That's all I'm saying. You just get the sense that NFL owners... Can you imagine going up to Jerry Jones and being like, here's what we want to do. Make less money.

1:12:15David Pierce:Good luck. A lot of good guys in this fight, I would say. Really a lot of heartwarming stories. Real underdog situation. The NFL versus the U.S. government. It's rough. We'll see what happens, but my prediction is that Brendan, he's come around to say a thing that everyone wants without thinking through for one second how to actually get that result. You can just say things, Neelai. It's been a week filled with you can just say things. Oh, no, not my antitrust exemption that allows me to bargain collectively with local TV broadcasters. I'm sure Amazon doesn't have$110 billion to pay for the next deal all by itself.

1:12:55David Pierce:I will say the funniest possible outcome of this is like, you know, how many years everybody's been like, Apple should just buy Netflix. What if Apple just bought the NFL. Do you see what I mean? You could just do it. Oh, brother. All right. Is that is this all Brendan did this week? That's been Brendan Carr's dummy. I mean, it's not all he did this week. Again, he also did nothing in a very specific way, which we will come to. We will. But, Brendan, as always, if you can explain your actions or even how you think the mechanics just straightforwardly, ice cold, you know, facts only, how you think taking the antitrust exemption away will make the TV more free.

1:13:31You can call me. I'm available. You can come on this show. You can run a show. Fight me in the street, Brendan. I await your call. That's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast within podcasts.

1:13:41David Pierce:Okay. On to the lightning round. My first one, I have a news story and I have a question. The news story is that Amazon bought a company called Global Star and is basically trying to juice its satellite internet ambitions. Globalstar, I would say, is like a Starlink competitor nobody talks about. Is that a fair thing to say? No, no, no. I don't think it's that fair. No? No. Globalstar is a tiny company whose main thing is that they provide satellite connectivity to Apple for the iPhone and the Apple Watch. Fair. Okay, that is fair. They have like 20 satellites. Yeah. So this ends up being an interesting part of this deal is that Amazon and Apple, which was an investor in Global Star, now have a deal by which Amazon is going to provide satellite internet to various Apple devices.

1:14:32David Pierce:That's pretty interesting, but I think the bigger picture here is Amazon is very clearly trying to sort of build a spring for its Leo satellite business. Amazon has been at this for a while. First, it was called Project Kuiper. Now it's Leo. it is trying to build a Starlink-sized internet satellite business. Fine. I get why you would do this if you want to jumpstart that. It makes sense. I have spent a lot of time reading about this. This is a big deal for Amazon. They spent more than$11 billion on it. I think there's some regulatory questions about whether this deal will get through. But I find myself increasingly wondering, who cares about satellite internet?

1:15:19David Pierce:Like, we talk a lot about this with iPhones and stuff. And like, as a backup communications tool, I think it's really interesting, right? Like, the Apple made a big deal out of it with the Apple Watch Ultra. You can get satellite messaging and satellite calls as a sort of emergency tool. I think that's great. Totally get why that exists. I also understand why better plain Wi-Fi is a good and valuable idea that should exist. and I support there being satellites in space to make that better. Beyond that, it seems like every experience we have had with satellite internet so far suggests that it is really useful to people in places that are otherwise inaccessible to broadband internet, right?

1:15:56David Pierce:Very rural places, places that companies have historically not been willing to like dig trenches to lay fiber. Again, really good, really valuable thing. I just don't totally understand why a company like Amazon is willing to invest this much time and energy in even the combination of those things, which seems relatively small to me. Like, am I missing some big, huge satellite internet vision here? Can I give you a cynical answer and then like a thoughtful answer? Yeah. Go cynical first. The cynical answer is that Jeff Bezos has a rocket company and he needs a customer. Okay. Fair. Sure. You got to put something into space.

1:16:32Just like Starlink is basically SpaceX's biggest customer. There's some reporting, I I believe in information. You know, we're awaiting the SpaceX IPO, and we're going to get their financials, and there's some early reporting in the information. I believe that Starlink is, like, the only profitable part of SpaceX, and the rest of it is, like, a money hole that the government subsidizes. Sure. Which I think won't surprise most people, but we're about to find out for real. Yeah. So that's the very cynical answer, is, like, you build a rocket company, you need a customer. Have you heard of Amazon?

1:17:02Sure. Like, there they are. So I think that's very cynical. I think also in Amazon's character is to spend a bunch of money in infrastructure in the hopes that something happens. And that is like the AWS story. And if you run Amazon, you've got fleets of trucks and drivers. They're all in places where there's maybe not great cell service or internet, or maybe you don't want to be beholden to the AT &T and Verizons of the world. And now you've got your own network in the sky. You can run it however you want. A lot of packages moving all over the world. You're Amazon. You don't have to do all these deals in all these places to get content.

1:17:34There's something there. Sure. Then you got your first customer in Apple. And so you were like, you're going to build Leo. You're going to add Global Star's spectrum because Global Star owns some spectrum. Again, it's not a lot of satellites and they're not the same as Starlink in any way, shape or form. Like Leo is closer to Starlink. The Global Star network is device to satellite connection. So it is for iPhones. But now you've got a big customer in Apple, which probably didn't want to continue propping up Global Star just for one feature. and definitely did not want to take Starlink's terms.

1:18:07I think Apple and Elon are in a real rough place right now. Others are reporting this week that Apple threatened to pull Grok from the App Store over the AI deepfix stuff.

1:18:15David Pierce:Yeah, and then didn't, which is ridiculous. But that is neither here nor there. Because, again, this is a rough dynamic between these companies. Yeah. So I don't think they want to be in Starlink's pocket. So they stood up, and they already have a deal with Amazon. And Amazon is a much more normal company to deal with. I'm not saying it's totally normal, but a much more normal company to deal with. So you've got a big customer in Apple already. You have the potential of a big customer in the rest of Amazon. And you're, you know, you're founder as a rocket company. I got to say, none of that adds up to that much for me.

1:18:46I don't think, I mean, it seems like new forms of connectivity are important to a lot of people as you think about the world globally. Have you ever tried Starlink? I had Starlink for a while in the woods when we lived upstate in the woods here in the pandemic. and I wrote this story where I was like, look, I would have needed to put up like an 80-foot tower to have this thing clear trees and if you have one tree branch in the way, at that time, this was years and years ago, Starlink was like a little iffy. And now it's like better because there's more satellites in the sky. Thomas Ricker, our deputy editor in Europe, is a committed van lifer and this dude loves his Starlink and every time he writes about Starlink being good, the audience screams at him and he's, this is my point, about great products winning out, he's like, there's no competition.

1:19:32There's nothing that can do what Starlink does for me. And there's a lot of people who feel that way. I have a lot of family in rural Illinois. My wife's family is all farmers. And they're like, get me off of HughesNet, get me a Starlink, let's do this thing. That network is starting to get congested. Like, it's slowing down, they're changing the prices. Like, stuff is happening with Starlink that reminds everybody of every ISP they've ever had. But there's still no, like, head-up competition. So I'm sort of excited for Bezos and, You know what kind of contest it is. You know what they're measuring.

1:20:02You know what that rocket looks like. Like, let's go get it. Sure.

1:20:06David Pierce:I mean, and I guess there's something to the same thing that animated Google and Meta trying to do this for many years. They had, you know, everybody did, like, balloon Wi-Fi and Meta did planes that would fly around with Wi-Fi. Meta straight up lied to our face. Casey Newton went and looked at one of those planes and they lied to him about whether it landed. Oh, cool. Great. I don't think he's ever forgiven that company for being lied to in that way. He probably shouldn't have. That's good. But there's something to, okay, if we can connect more people more of the time, they'll use our services.

1:20:40David Pierce:And I guess you can make the same kind of case with Amazon, both with its like Amazon.com, but also all of its other stuff. So fine. This just feels like a particularly huge bet on a relatively small version of that. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is some big, giant, ambitious thing that we don't know about inside of the Global Star acquisition. But a big tie-up with Apple, at the very least, I think, goes a long way. If you know the truth about satellite internet and you want to tell me what the big idea is here that I'm missing, VergeCast at theverge.com. I want to hear from you. Neal, what's your next one?

1:21:21All right. This is my Brendan did nothing and it was still stupid. Okay. So a couple weeks ago, the FCC banned all foreign-made routers from the United States, which is all routers. And so routers that were already on sale were allowed to stay on sale. And then you needed to get an exemption from the FCC, which amounted to filing a formal plan committing to build your routers in the United States. And so all these companies scrambled. Sean Halster and I did a bunch of reporting. He called all the router companies. They all did no comments because they're all a little terrified and scared. and no one wants to cross the Trump administration.

1:21:56I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know what this was. The idea was if you make a router outside the United States, it is inherently a security risk. And so you have to make it in the United States, except for the routers you're already making, which are fine, and you don't have to update them.

1:22:08David Pierce:Right. They actually didn't ban routers. They banned theoretical future routers. Yeah. But everyone interpreted this as all routers. Right. Okay, so we're waiting to see what happens. Like, what is the process for getting one of these exemptions? Are these router makers going to commit to making the routers in the United States? Like, how is this going to work? Well, the way it worked is that Netgear up and announced out of nowhere that it has been given a specific determination that its devices do not pose risk to U.S. national security. Out of nowhere. Just like, here we go. We filed it with the SEC because our public company CEO made a statement.

1:22:44Netgear, famously, their routers were primarily targeted in the Volt Typhoon incident. Like, they have security problems that have been exploited at massive scale. They said nothing about preventing these problems in the future. They said nothing about building the routers in the United States. They said nothing except we have this approval. So Sean, because Sean Hosser can be a dog with a bone, and I love him for it, asked Netgear and the FCC whether Netgear had submitted such a plan to manufacture routers in the United States, whether they had submitted the required description of planned capital expenditures, financing, or other investments dedicated to U.S.

1:23:22manufacturing, which is also required. And they've said nothing at all in any way, shape, or form. And hilariously, the approval they've granted is not model numbers. It's like model names. So here's the list. It's Nighthawk Consumer Mesh Mobile and standalone routers. the R, the RAX, the MK, the MR, the Orbi mesh and standalone routers and cable gateways. Does this mean Netgear can make a new router and just call it a Nighthawk? Sure sounds like it. I don't know. Is just any new Orbi count? I don't know. Like, completely insane. Like, the worst process that anyone has ever put forth, it's all Brendan, and they've said not one word about what they've done to ensure these routers are not a national security risk.

1:24:19And we have been asking over and over again because that's what we do. We just ask over and over again for statements on the record and no one is saying a word.

1:24:26David Pierce:It's also just abundantly clear that this didn't happen in any meaningful way because it couldn't possibly have happened this quickly. Like the ban was the last week of March, which was like two and a half weeks ago, call it three weeks ago, just to be generous, three weeks ago. That was three weeks ago. And this very clearly caught everyone in the industry by surprise. And so the idea that Netgear had time to put together a comprehensive thing that was actually properly investigated by the FCC is just impossible. It's just impossible. There is no way real process was run in three weeks in order to get all of this done.

1:25:11There's no way the Pentagon bought every single Nighthawk available and did a comprehensive battery of security tests to say they were safe for national security.

1:25:21David Pierce:Or even a Google search that would have suggested that they are extremely not. I don't know. The last line of Sean's story, we'll wink it. We asked Netgear if it has voluntarily improved its security in any way. We have not yet received a response. I encourage the listener, the viewer, you ask Netgear if they've committed to manufacturing in the United States or what they've done to improve their security for their routers, which have been targeted at scale by Chinese hacking groups because they haven't told us. So we might as well crowdsource it. Love it. All right. My last one is very quick and is mostly just a short update.

1:25:57David Pierce:The Trump phone continues to seem slightly more real every day, Eli. You know, we made that image as the Trump phone real. It's a meter and we made it as a static image because we just assumed the needle would always say it now. And we ticked it up a couple weeks ago. Yeah. It's like it's getting there. It is not a 90 on the go 90 scale anymore. It's like an 88 and a half. Yeah. My favorite part about this, this is mostly a shout out to Dom Preston on our team who has heroically stayed on this beat far longer than any sane person would. Dom basically caught an in-progress rollout of the new Trump Mobile website and basically like bug fixed it in real time by writing about it on our website.

1:26:39David Pierce:And one of the things that he found, he wrote a really good story about it. We'll link to it in the show notes. But one of the things that he found is new photos, a new design for the phone, which he saw first on a Zoom call with a Trump mobile executive, I think in February. He was on the show talking about it at the time. The phone has a new design. It does not sort of scream any other particular phone. It does look a lot like the HTC U24 Pro. It screams HTC U24 Pro. What are you talking about? Does it? Okay. It's an HTC U24 Pro. Yeah, no, you're right. It kind of does. It's really, it's - I'm putting my fake dollars on the line here.

1:27:18David Pierce:It has a different camera bump, but you could fake your way around the camera bump. But at any rate, this phone is now gold. They've made one, I would say, terrific design decision, which is that the enormous T and then subscript one that was on the back that took up like a third of the back of the phone is now gone. And all that's left is the words Trump mobile twice on the back, which is a very Trump thing to do. And a sort of weird American flag. No, it's a very weird American flag. Our commenters caught this. It's an American flag that only has 11 stripes. Like two colonies have been deleted.

1:27:59It is, in fact, not an American flag. It is like a Trump mobile flag. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Unless you count the words Trump mobile is the last stripe. In which case it still works. But I would not say a designer did that with intention.

1:28:14David Pierce:No. Yeah. Anyway, we have reached a point again where I desperately want this phone to exist because it will make for tremendously fun reviewing and and content process. And it might. Like it might exist. Will they sell six of them? Will they be vastly more expensive than anyone has promised on that team? They still claim it's$499, but now they're calling that a promotional price. Like this thing is going to be a disaster, but I hope to God they ship at least one so that I can hear about it. Oh, I mean, what's the phrase? Tremendous content. Tremendous content. Tremendous content. One of my favorite tech TikTokers is Carter PCs.

1:28:59I don't know if you're a Carter PCs fan. I've been trying to get him on Decoder to tell me about how his business actually works. So go tag him. But he has been doing hilarious posts on the Trump phone. And I literally am just excited for a phone to come out so that we can review it because I think we'll have a great time. But then so I can watch those videos.

1:29:16David Pierce:Yeah. Normally, like, Verge infighting is like who gets to review really cool products. This is going to be the stupidest product that 12 people on our team have ever wanted to review. Every week, people are like, why do you keep paying attention to this? And then like another group of people in our comments are like, they have to, this is their Fox God. And I'm like, no, we've committed to this bit. Now we have to see it all the way through. It's a lot. This is what we've signed up for. Do you want to do your last one before we go? I'll just, just a brief call out. I think it's just one of the most interesting stories we've published in a minute.

1:29:46Alyssa Weil, who is one of our fellows for a minute. She was a great sort of science writer. She was on our team for half a minute, just as a fellow for a short duration. She wrote a piece called Did Neuralink Make the Wrong Bet? And I know that all of you are thinking that it was just like a, we're just out to slam Neuralink. But no, the piece is about the brain-computer interface community moving on from one style of interface to the next one. And Neuralink has started investing in it too. So Neuralink was speech-to-motor, which still has a lot of proponents, and a lot of people are very happy with them, and that's what they want.

1:30:21That's where your brain moves a cursor on a computer screen. and they've now moved to speech where your brain directly generates speech. And this is just one of those like ultra cutting edge, how do we build the technology that's going to help the most people at the most accessible price in the simplest way with the least invasive surgery? And she's a really good reporter. This story cooked for a long time. There's a ton of reporting in it. And it was just one of those where I read it and like your feelings about Elon and your own side, you're like, oh, a lot of people are trying to solve an impossible problem and the approach on how to do it the best way is not settled and like I just think that's when the verge is at its best so I just want to call it the story because it's really fun to read there's like very smart people in the comments like being like here's the next layer of analysis which is really interesting and then there's people freaking out about Elon as you would get but to me this actually has nothing to do with Elon it's how do you build a product like this yeah how is it supposed to work and there's there's not consensus which I think is super interesting.

1:31:23David Pierce:Yeah, like what do we want from this is a really interesting underlying thesis of that story. It is really good. You should read it. We'll link to it in the show notes. I'll put a gift link to that in the show notes. So even if you're not a version subscriber, you can go read that one. Oh, I love that. All right, we should get out of here. Quick version history plug. The season of version history is over, so we're taking a break to make the next season. The next season is going to be all smart home stuff. And the six episodes we're going to do are the Philips Hue, the Roomba, the Nest Thermostat, the Logitech Harmony Remote, the Clapper, which is maybe the most excited I've ever been about a Virgin History episode, and the Keurig Coffee Maker.

1:32:02David Pierce:It's going to be a really fun season. You're doing a couple of episodes. Gen 2 is going to be in a bunch of them. We got really fun guest plan. It's going to be a really fun series. If you want to have questions or be in that show or tell us stories that you remember about any of those things or you want to just give us feedback on all of our feelings about AI and everything. As always, the hotline is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. Hit us up about everything, especially about the clapper, because that episode is going to be 16 hours long and I could not be more excited. Neal, what's on Decoder this week?

1:32:34So I don't know if you're paying attention to AI news, Verge has listener, but this week Adobe announced that you can control all of Creative Cloud by just prompting it. They called it Interface Revolution. And then Canva announced the AI 2.0 update, where you can also just prompt Canva now, and it'll do stuff. And Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, who's the founder of Canva, is on Dakota this week. She is, like, very smart. She's, you know, she's a designer. She's a founder. She has a great accent. Great conversation. Like, Dakota has been on a run of, like, just me yelling at people. This one is like, let's talk about design.

1:33:11Like, everyone needed a break, you know?

1:33:13David Pierce:That's good. That's good stuff. That's coming out on Monday? Yeah. Love it. Very much looking forward to it. All right. And as always, if you subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe, you get this podcast, all of our other podcasts, everything ad free, plus all of our newsletters. Plus, you don't need gift links. You can just read theverge.com all the time. It's the coolest website. It's what I do all the time. I open all of our links 10 different times. Just a reminder, the subscription is so no one can tell us what to do. It's exactly right. It's the thing I hold dearest to my heart.

1:33:40David Pierce:I love it. All right. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you next week. Neel Eye. Rock and roll.