The fake promise of better Siri

33:41Like, I think Apple has burned a lot of its goodwill with the way that it has thought about things like in-app payments that has cost it trust with developers who are now wondering about things like app intents where they're like, OK, I just talk to developers all the time who are less and less convinced every day that Apple is actually caring about what is good for them as a developer. And there is a sense that Apple is now in this to get what it feels it deserves from the success of its devices. And that is 30 percent of every single thing that happens. And so you burn all that goodwill and then you say, abstract your app away.

34:18Don't worry, we'll take care of it for you. And that just that sales pitch becomes really hard to make to developers. Right. And it doesn't track at all with the idea that this is a paradigm shift where we'll reset the balance of power and everyone will make more money and there'll be new winners and losers. And now it's I think I think it's just a tough sell all the way around. It also doesn't work. Like, I feel like I have to I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, not saying this more. It doesn't work. This technology is bad. There are like things that are cool and interesting about it. But the fact that the most sophisticated thing anyone has developed is this thing will go click around a Chrome browser for you is not success.

34:54This thing is these things are bad. And I think I am absolutely fascinated to see what the new Alexa is going to be, because to its credit, I think Amazon has actually done a lot of the work that we're talking about. They've made the deals. They have worked very hard, it seems, on this orchestration layer of figuring out what goes where. They're integrating different models. They're integrating with different partners. They have pulled all the right pieces into one place in a way that I think is potentially very exciting. It might still be bad. Yeah. It really might still be bad because this is a really hard problem and no one yet is close to making this work.

35:31Forget all the business incentives. It just doesn't work. Yeah. I mean, Amazon might have the right pieces, but they might all be misshapen, might not fit together. And then the picture is bad. Like that's sort of what that puzzle might be. Like, we don't know. We have to use it. But, you know, I asked Panos in the same conversation, do you think the orchestration layer is something that everyone will land on the same solution? Or is this like a moat? Like, is this an advantage that you have? And he was very confident. This is an advantage. Like we have spent our time figuring this thing out because it's what we need to make everything else work.

36:04and you can just see that everyone else Google could pull on stuff like the who did I have a meeting with at this cafe a week ago that's information that's in my Google calendar Gemini should by all rights be able to just do that on a Pixel phone and Google hasn't flipped that switch yet they're very close to flipping that switch very very close you can see that they're coming right up on it because they do have all of your data they are less worried about you talking to the cloud than apple in like very specific ways they're they're google they're like ask us a question here's an answer maybe the robot made it up or maybe this is actually a person you met with at the cafe a week ago who knows but we're gonna all gonna have a good time um they haven't flipped the switch yet because i don't think they think it's good enough yet and i'm just looking at this and i'm saying everyone is confused by this input method everyone is confused by the fact that you can talk to the computer and the computer can do a reasonably good job of talking back to you and now we all think the paradigm shift is here and it's like oh wait the computer lies a lot so like sam altman was saying chadjuby has gotten better at creative writing this week and maybe it has like i read some of the the demos and it's like yeah it's a little less stilted than before it's still not good at like running my life right like i think addy roberts and our team said it writes like a 2010s blogger which hits me to my core is because that is what i am to be fair that's probably what it's trained on yeah that's the most i mean i've written millions of words in the 2010s there you go good thank you you're welcome everybody um but like that's improving the part where it's agentic is not improving right uh i saw my at the um at the amazon event i saw mike krieger from anthropic formerly of instagram formerly of artifact we've talked a bunch um and he was laughing he's like it's very funny that every time someone's as agentic to you you just say you mean clicking around on a website because that's they all know that's what they're doing that's what it is it's very good are there any products you see i mean i know you talked to a bunch of hardware makers are there any any products that are close outside of amazon sounding like they're close no like and i think this is the thing that i have come to find so sort of alarming is like there's there's one set of ai features that i i I would think of as like features you'd never noticed that just make things better in your devices.

38:26Like we saw a ton of this at CES, right? That it was like, what if we used generative AI to better map your living room so that your Roomba can get around a little faster? Like that's a terrific and real use of AI. They can use it to like your, your lights can do a better job of matching the mood of the music that you're listening to. That's like a real thing AI can do. That's a good use of it. That's not AI as a product. That's like AI as an underlying technology enabling a feature. Everything I see that is like AI as a top line reason for this thing to exist is a problem. And this is like, that was the thing that made me write this piece is like, we're at this point now where everyone has decided that AI is finished and they're building gadgets that would be great if AI was finished and AI is not finished and AI mostly sucks.

39:16And thus, so do these gadgets. And so, I mean, you look at like, it's the smart home stuff, I think, that is probably the easiest, right? We were like, we've talked on the show a million times. Ambient computing is the thing, right? This is all anybody talks about. And that is purely AI enabled, right? Like that's how we get there. Tons of data, tons of context, sensors abound. And it just like understands who I am and where I am and what I'm doing. And I can just have a computer and an assistant that's around me all the time. That is pure AI. Yeah. do any of those things exist or work? And so what you've had instead is Amazon basically hasn't launched like a meaningfully new Echo product in at least a year and a half, maybe longer, because this company has been so captured by this idea that we have to do AI in order to make any gadgets any good because AI is the only reason gadgets should exist.

40:09And Apple just keeps shipping shit that they're like, it does Apple intelligence. Like we get like briefings to explain new Apple devices every time there's a new Apple device. and I'm sure you've gotten them too, but over and over, it's just the same Apple intelligence demos on different screens. This is a problem. All of these things exist in service of AI that doesn't exist. So what is the point of any of these gadgets right now? And it's just starting to drive me insane. Yeah. It's funny because AI driving the gadgets, again, I would put that in the category of we made multi-touch and now we think smartphones are all like this way, so the whole industry has built BlackBerry storms.

40:47yeah right like that's kind of what this feels like like we're doing windows mobile 6.5 so it it's a resistive touchscreen and that honeycomb grid but it's still windows mobile it's not even windows phone you know it's like this was uh by the way in the annals of like verge and engadget history some nuclear stuff where we were like this is still windows mobile they just added resistive touchscreen support like um that's where we're at right like we made this new interface where someone, OpenAI showed off a new interface and everyone was like, we can build, what the consumers want is poking these screens and no one thought about the software underneath it except for Apple and then a little bit later Google and then you had iOS and Android and we don't have those products yet.

41:29We have ChatCBT which people love and then we have a bunch of coding products and we've gotten some notes from people who are like, you're not paying attention to what's happening on the software development side. These are very useful tools in software development. Great. But the consumer paradigm shift that all of these companies are betting on does not exist yet. Right. Yeah. The thing I keep saying to people when I talk to you is like, I think the B2B implications of AI are huge and real and present, right? Like there are so many ways in which companies are using AI to do interesting stuff.

42:06Some of that I find hugely problematic, but some of it is really interesting. none of that is regular people things and i'm like i am here asking you about regular people things and those are just the lies that people tell to make themselves sound more interesting than they are yeah that's what this is right now i will say as we've been talking uh another part of the story that we were going to talk about is flip-flopped oh lord so apple announced this delay of Siri or AI-powered Siri, that led to some rumors that their smart home display, which felt like an iPad on a stick, would also be delayed because what enables that product is being able to just talk to it.

42:47Right. And now there's rumors that it could still ship this year. Okay. But instead of having the new Siri, it will have this rumored big design overhaul for iOS and macOS that people have been talking about. Interesting. So instead of the thing that would make it useful, they're going to ship it with the thing that makes it pretty and call it an upgrade. You know, I don't want to. This is what we do here. I will say everything that I have heard about the new iOS designs, I'm actually very excited about. Like there are all these all the reporting from Mark Gurman and others is that it's going to be more Vision Pro-y, which means much more sort of colorful and glassy and spatial and kind of three dimensional.

43:28And I'm into that. The iOS 7 aesthetic is long in the tooth and deserves to die. So, fine. That is not the same thing as Siri. Right. The paradigm shift is not translucency. It's not making... Speaking of Windows, Windows Aero Glass is very much the aesthetic of the Vision Pro. Yep. But look, the kids today don't even know what I'm talking about, all right? You didn't have to live through Windows Vista, and it's fine. You're going to think it's beautiful. My hottest take is AeroGlass was not all wrong. Yeah, AeroGlass Vindicated will be our headline. Three people will understand it. Tom Warren will explode, and then we'll move on with our lives.

44:09All right, we've got to take a break. We've talked about this. To death, if you have a solid use case for how AI has changed a consumer gadget, you let us know. I'll offer you just one. I think my daughter is very into space recently, and we just sit there with my iPhone talking to ChatGP about space almost every night. It's fun, but that is not the gadget, right? That's just an app on a phone. Right. Yeah, that's the thing, right? Like, what in here goes beyond app on a phone or Chatbot in my browser? Beat that, and I will have a really fun conversation with you about AI gadgets. Also, none of this company is making money.

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47:12We're back. Andy Hawkins is here. Hey, Andy. Hi. Andy, you are our transportation editor, which means the last time I talked to you on a podcast, I asked you why the planes were crashing. Yes. So same level of complexity. We're going to talk about what's going on with Tesla. Oh, boy. And there's quite a lot going on with Tesla. There are protests at Tesla dealerships. Charging stations around the world are getting vandalized, burned down in some cases. Elon Musk is obviously running rampant through the government. The stock is down. I think it's up today, but it might only be up today because Donald Trump and Elon Musk stood in front of a bunch of Teslas at the White House yesterday, and Trump sort of sternly instructed everyone to go buy Teslas.

47:55So now the police are going to come to your house and force you to buy Tesla, is what I understand. What is going on with this company? You wrote a story, the headline is just, is Tesla cooked? It's a good headline. And just based on the reader reaction to it, it seems like a lot of people would like the answer to be yes, and a significant number of people believe the answer is yes. Yes. What's happening here? Well, I think sort of the top line issue that we're dealing with here is that the company had a huge spike in its share price immediately after the election. It went up something like a ridiculous amount to a point where I think in December, individual stock shares were selling for over$450.

48:40Incredible, right? The investors were clearly rewarding Elon Musk for making what they saw was the right bet in the election. Trump won. And so therefore, Tesla and Elon Musk specifically needed to be rewarded. But then we started to see a couple of things. First, the company reported its end of the year earnings. And it was kind of shocking and pretty sobering that their sales were down. Not a lot, but essentially they were flat. And for a company that is supposed to be on this exponential growth projection, I think that that was pretty surprising to a lot of people. And then the Elon of it all, as you like to say, sort of came crashing down and he was put in charge of this Doge project and just basically started vandalizing the federal government, shutting agencies down, firing people, you know, barging into places where he wasn't allowed to go and sort of trampling the Constitution in the process.

49:47And that sort of gave rise to, obviously, a groundswell of anger and opposition. I think a lot of people, especially people who consider themselves progressives and Democrats and liberals, were sort of kind of despondent and depressed after the election, really kind of found a way to focus their anger in January. And then in February, we saw this protest movement take root and people were demonstrating outside of Tesla showrooms. And then sort of separately to that, you know, all those protests were pretty peaceful. But separate to that, there's been lots of reports of vandalism, cars being vandalized, superchargers being set on fire.

50:29Someone took a few shots at a Tesla showroom in Oregon. By took a few shots, you mean fired a gun at? Yes, bullets were fired at a showroom in Oregon. They didn't go on Instagram Live and start talking shit. They fired a gun at the show. Shots fired. As Musk himself said in an interview recently, he said with a big grin on his face, he thought that that was a really good joke when he said shots fired. So then the stock started to slide. It had already been going down since January. It took a steep drop earlier this week. one of the biggest drops that we'd seen in over five years to the point that I think had its nadir that it had essentially shed 50 % of its value.

51:11The company itself lost around$800 billion in valuation, which is just a staggering number when you consider how highly valued Tesla was at that point. And Musk himself lost around$100 billion off of his net worth. Poor guy. Still the richest man in the world. Don't worry about him. He's going to be fine. But what I think what we're seeing now and is is now a concerted effort by the government and namely by Trump to prop Tesla up. He's he's, you know, sort of bringing the cars to the White House and they're having themselves whatever that that was that we saw on the lawn outside. So some have called it, you know, sort of like an infomercial for Tesla, essentially on government property.

51:56and he's talking about, you know, going after people who vandalize or deface Teslas with terrorism charges now. So it's clear that, you know, Trump and the administration are interested in bringing sort of the full force of the federal government behind Tesla to protect Tesla and to make sure that it is not subject to the whims of the market, I guess. You know, it's fascinating about this to me, Andy, you and I have talked a few times. I think we've actually the three of us I've talked a few times on the show about the one of the strange things about Tesla is trying to figure out what of the Tesla vibes are about Tesla and what is the Elon of it all.

52:35And that those two things have always been really hard to pull apart. Like there's a company that for a long time was way ahead of the game and very successful and has kind of lost its lead over time. And then there is the Elon of it all. And I think it seems very clear to me that the thing that has happened over the last 10 days in particular is that it is just about the Elon of it all now. Oh, wait, no, I disagree. No? I disagree. Not in like a big way. Okay. But just on one element, which is that the Elon of it all for Tesla was what propped up the meme stock bubble of the stock price. Right?

53:06Sure. Elon says all the cars will drive themselves. I'm going to do a robo taxi. And everyone believes him or they don't believe him or they think, well, the man landed two rockets at the same time. Of course, he's going to pull this off. And then the stock price goes up because people think it's going to pay off. Right? And I think what has happened very recently is the bloom is so fully off the rose. And even if you want to believe Elon, it's undeniable that he is not paying attention to the company because he's he's set up in the secretary of war suite at the Eisenhower executive office building with a gaming PC with RGB lights.

53:41That's a real thing. You can go look at the picture. It is very funny to see that computer in that office. and there's no way he's paying attention to Tesla. And so even people who are nominally like pro Elon or impressed by Elon are like, dude, pay attention to your company and the cars aren't going to drive themselves unless you pay attention to your company. And then you can see the multiple is coming down off the stock. And then you can see the sales are falling. And then you can see the sales are falling even more sharply in Europe, for example, where doing Heil Hitler gestures is not taken with the same amount of, He's just trolling sort of responses in this country in this moment for whatever insane reason.

54:20So you've just got this like the Elon of it all has always been the dreams will come true. And I think now those things are just they're pulling apart. So I'm not saying I disagree with you, David. I'm just saying like there's nothing inside of Tesla that makes it more than a car company anymore. The best example of this I can give you is Mark Kelly, Senator Mark Kelly. Elon called him a traitor the other day on Twitter so Senator Kelly went to Ukraine he said we stand with Ukraine this is all about democracy Elon responds to that by saying you are a traitor and then today in the Capitol building reporters asked Senator Kelly are you going to sell your Tesla?

55:00and he said well it's a great car it's pretty cheap on the inside though I love the acceleration I don't get to drive much I'm looking into selling it and he was just able to evaluate the car not everything the car represents or everything the car might mean or robo taxis he just said the truest thing i'm presuming this is a model three the truest thing you can say about a model three which is it accelerates really fast and on the inside it's a little bit cheap there that that stock you don't get 1200 times your valuation in stock price against it's very fast and a little cheap. That's a Camaro.

55:38We are barreling towards a moment where buying a Tesla is like buying stock in Truth Social, that it is like it is it is such a political animal now. And I think I mean, this is true when when the election happened, like you're talking about, Andy, like this company hit a record high after the election, not because it sold more cars, but because Elon Musk won the election like that. That is just a thing that happened. And And everybody assumed he would use that to Tesla's benefit. And he didn't. He used it to destroy America. But that was the assumption then. And I think for me, that was the moment that any question of like, is this company or is the perception of this company about cars or is it about politics just flipped entirely?

56:22Like this is a company about politics. And it shouldn't be. And it is. And it's weird that it is. I think what's also really fascinating, too, is that, you know, sort of like trying to make a bet as an investor or someone who wants to play the stock market on Elon Musk used to be a pretty easy bet that would that would pay off for a number of years. you could invest in Tesla and assume and see returns on that investment because of the way that the stock market treated that company, not as a regular car company, as what Eli was saying, but as something that's sort of, you know, about robotics and artificial intelligence and self driving cars and energy management and honestly saving the world, right?

57:04For a long time, He was framing the mission of Tesla as being one about saving the world. And I remember the last Investor Day that they had a couple of years ago, he talked about very plainly about how it's not that hard to take all of these gas powered devices off the road and replace them with clean energy powered devices. And he framed it very clearly as an effort to save the world. At the same time that that was going on, he was also in the process of trying to buy Twitter. And we saw sort of like throughout that whole process about how his viewpoint and his worldview became slowly very much informed by conspiracy theories and hard right politics.

57:47and then it became sort of clear after a while after that that he wasn't really interested in running Tesla anymore he didn't he didn't want to just be like a car salesman he wanted to be uh sort of the guy who was on the vanguard of of AI this AI revolution that we're seeing uh and then now it seems like that's not really even of interest to him anymore now he wants to be the co-president which I mean like can you blame the guy like who wants to go from being a car salesman to like, maybe I'll make robots to now like I am like co in charge of like the biggest richest country in the world. Like I can't really see like, you know, uh, how that, that argument doesn't really pan out for him.

58:23So, uh, you know, maybe he's not interested in Tesla anymore. Maybe he's not even really interested in robots. Maybe he's more interested, uh, in, in just being sort of like this iron fisted ruler of the country. I just don't see how that's going to sell them anymore cars. Like at the end of the day, Tesla, I think the reason the Tesla takedown protests have succeeded and i think they are a success i don't think you end up doing an infomercial for teslas and the white house lawn unless the protests are having an impact i don't think you see the stock price dropping unless the protests are having an impact uh the reason is that's an incredible point of leverage right you you make these cars toxic tone the cybertruck in particular has become a toxic car tone yeah and some people are quite happy about that like i'm as somebody who has a big, loud, stupid car, like, I get it.

59:10I understand why people like big, loud, stupid cars. But you see the videos of people spray painting them and putting stickers on them. There's a great video I sent to Andy, which is pure Andy Hawkins bait today, which was somebody parked a Cybertruck in a bike lane in New York City, and a guy picked up a city bike and rode it off the Cybertruck like a ramp, like down the windshield, because it was in the bike lane on the way. That's very good. Like there's something that's beautiful. Great. I appreciate some funny protests in that way. But the products themselves, to your point, David, they now symbolize a politics.

59:45Right. And that's not going to keep sales up. No. So you end up with this weird situation where Trump is at the White House sort of like dunking on Joe Biden, complaining about the economy and then turning around being like, this car is beautiful. And it was just a weird scene. I will say that I watched it. It was 35 minutes long, somewhere like that. And just to get through it, I watched it at 2x speed on YouTube. And watching Elon and Trump talk at 2x speed is like an out-of-body experience. I don't recommend it, but I also think everybody should experience it one time. Didn't he say everything is computer?

1:00:21what what a good tee up that just was andy i have three clips i would like to play for you from this uh just there were so many moments during this but uh i just i just pulled out a couple that i would just like to play for you very quickly that i think neatly summarized the deep strangeness of this event here's the first one wow

1:00:45this is a different panel than i've had everything's computer so that's donald trump getting into the car he sits down in the driver's seat after like 10 times a red model s plan it's a red model s right and he he says many times that uh joe biden could never basically like he couldn't get into this car he doesn't even know what teslas are and then he gets in and he just he sort of waves around and he goes everything's computer and i really believe The Verge's official tagline now should be everything's computer. I feel very validated because years ago when we hired Andy to cover cars, I was like, here's the deal.

1:01:17Everything's computer. Can we make t-shirts that say everything's computer? Like, why does The Verge cover cars? Because everything's computer. I feel like I have to note, though, that a big reason why Musk reportedly turned away from Joe Biden and the Democrats is because he didn't get invited to a White House summit during the Biden administration that was supposed to bring all the automakers in to talk about electric vehicle policy. And they snubbed Musk because supposedly because he doesn't allow unions in his at Tesla. And Biden was a very pro-union president. So and that was something that he really kind of wore as like a chip on his shoulder.

1:01:52Musk finally got his White House summit and he got it all to himself. And I think that I hope he feels good about that. No, I think he felt like Donald Trump went wandering towards the Model Y and he had to be like, no, no, no, come back. Look at the cyber truck, which is a real thing that happened. Okay, I have another clip to play for you. This is, they're sitting in the car, and Trump continues to just sort of marvel at the existence of a car, it seems like. Like, you get the real sense that Donald Trump may never have driven a car in his life. It's like driving a golf cart, basically. No, it's very simple.

1:02:22It's very simple. So it's literally like a golf cart that goes really fast. There's no gears. This is really amazing. It's like driving a golf cart that goes really fast. I think it's like not the sales pitch Elon Musk thinks it might be. I also have to say there's no gears is a ridiculous thing to say in 2025. It's hard to buy a car with a manual transition in 2025. Calling it a golf cart, I mean, that's just talking to Trump in his language, right? I mean, that is probably the only vehicle that he drives. You don't think Trump has gas-powered golf carts in Mar-a-Lago? No, they're too loud. You got to have quiet when you're hitting your terrible bunker shots.

1:02:59David I will say that I have to register a fact check on you I know Donald Trump has driven a car because there is at least one video of Donald Trump driving a car that I was it the one where he was sitting in the fire truck and did the woo woo gesture no no no okay because that doesn't count it's him I believe the video was taken by Baron Trump a young Baron Trump he's riding around in a Rolls Royce driven by Donald Trump Melania's in the passenger seat and they're listening to blank space by Taylor Swift there's a real video you can go look amazing interesting thing uh but i will say that rolls i'm looking at the video right now it does have analog gauges so everything is not computer but now it is everything's so that was that car and then this car and that's it's a big change from a from a rolls to this i could see how that would do you think i don't there is a sequence of that video where people keep telling him to start the car and then you hear one of the photographers say start the engine and like I couldn't see Elon's face, but I could see Trump's face, and he just didn't like, none of that made any sense.

1:03:59Like, you can't start a Tesla. There's no key to turn. There's no engine. Somewhat famously, no engine. The whole situation was confused. Alright, what's the third one? Alright, I have one more. I'm just gonna play it for you. Thank you all very much. I love Tesla. That's it. That's the whole clip. it's not great you say tesler tesler yeah i think s l u r r is combining tesla with the word slur I think is very appropriate in this moment. Yeah, it's about right. You did not run any of the clips of Donald Trump just sort of beholding the cyber truck. He was like, can you imagine what kind of brains in this guy's head?

1:04:40I know. He at one point like double tapped the side of it and was like, what a great... Oh yeah, because Elon was like, it's bulletproof and Trump goes, whap, whap, as though he's going to test it out. Yeah, it was really something. But if your test of whether or not something is bulletproof is like wrapping on it twice, you're going to believe everything is bulletproof. It was weird. It was a weird event, a weird moment. It was, again, scattered with questions about whether there'd be a recession, about whether Trump needed the notes in his own hand that had the prices of Teslas listed on it.

1:05:14Weird all around. He went on a long rant about Columbia University at one point. Like, yeah, it's another First Amendment disaster that's unfolding. But that's kind of my point. All this is so tied up together now that it is like and maybe this was the inevitable outcome of Elon Musk becoming so entrenched in our government. But like, I don't know, I look around my neighborhood now and there are everyone who has a Tesla. I live in a very like liberal area and overwhelmingly I'm starting to see Teslas with some version of the I bought this before Elon Musk went crazy sticker, including on Cybertrucks, which debatable.

1:05:49Yeah, that's not a choice for you. Although they did announce the Cybertruck 500 years ago. It's fair. It was the first car ever invented and then they shipped it. But yeah, I just I don't see how this goes back either. It really feels like we are at a place where the protests feel like they're going to continue to get worse because this thing is becoming increasingly politicized. and that what Trump and Musk have decided is that actually politicizing it is a way to - To ban it. No, it's either to sell more cars to Republicans, ideally, who traditionally have not been the people who buy electric cars, or who cares juice the stock price, right?

1:06:25Like you turn Tesla into a meme stock for Republicans, which has made Donald Trump an awful lot of money over the years. Yeah. I think Tesla, like Neil, I said, it's been overinflated. It's a meme stock. It's overvalued. It's traded more, you know, sort of at a similar level as tech stocks are and not as a car stock. And I think that a lot of people assumed that taking a face plant on robo taxis or the optimist robots, you know, falling down a flight of stairs or something like that was going to be what sort of ultimately deflated. And I don't think anyone really assumed that it was going to be this sort of like politicization that we're seeing and Musk taking such a prominent role in the administration.

1:07:07But I think that that is ultimately what is going to bring Tesla sort of back down to earth is this hyper political environment that we're in now. Yeah, you never thought it would be the fundamentals of the car sales would bring it back down to earth, right? Like that seemed insulated because of the promises about robotaxis and all that other stuff. By the way, the best sticker on a Cybertruck situation is the couple who wrapped their Cybertruck white and put a Rivian logo on the back of it. So good. Oh my God, that was so good. And then they discovered that they became a meme and had to go on Reddit and like try to like laugh it off and explain themselves.

1:07:41And nobody bought it. Well, and their explanation was we sold our other Tesla, but we can't sell this one. No one will take it. Yeah, I've seen videos. I have a weird TikTok algorithm. I have a lot of like car dealerships on the phone negotiating deals on my TikTok feed. And I've watched a lot of car dealership guys like totally make lowball offers for Cybertrucks. and then basically you know the person's like no and they'll call me back this is the number you're going to get like at some point you're going to call me back and i'm going to give i'm going to give you 60 000 for the cybertruck and that is that's just bad news now are a bunch of car dealerships trying to artificially lower the price of cybertrucks by making tiktok videos potentially but you can you can see the dynamic for that car in particular is getting worse and i think some people like the attention there's a cybertruck in westchester uh where i live that is spray painted and a lot of people believe the owner spray painted it himself oh wow as as a like defense mechanism as a defense mechanism as a way to get pictures of his truck on instagram no one knows yeah but like that we're entering the second phase you know where people are like oh you're doing it for clout and it's like that's weird that's a weird yeah a lot of i know a lot of small business owners bought cyber trucks to like wrap with like uh their the name of their business if like they had like a small solar company or like a coffee shop or something like that.

1:09:04And now we're starting to see a lot of them sort of reverse on that and, you know, take the wrapping, take the wrapping up because they don't want their business. Put their competitor's logo on it instead. Yeah. We should talk just briefly. We talk a lot about the first men on the show. Tesla Takedown is the name of the protest. It's pretty loosely organized. Like I don't, there's not a head of Tesla Takedown, you know, it's certainly not like command. It's just like a command system, you know, It's like an army. People are just showing up Tesla dealerships and protesting at certain times, like organizing social media like you do.

1:09:33Trump is basically saying this is going to be terrorism. We're going to prosecute this. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, said the House would start investigating these protests. The police are out in force at Tesla dealerships now. There's an incredible picture. I believe it's a store in Chicago with just a line of police officers in front of it last weekend, which is just incredible, right? There's a video of a cyber truck in New York being guarded by six police officers, which is very funny in its way. The politicization is running right into the weird First Amendment environment, right?

1:10:03Where, yes, we talk a lot about free speech. Elon says he's a free speech absolutist. But if you protest a Tesla dealership, the full power of the state's police force will be there to greet you. There's something weird there. It hasn't broken yet, right? No one's been arrested for protesting a Tesla dealership yet. And I don't think you should burn down the charging stations, but we're in a real fuzzy place. How do you think that's playing out, Andy? Well, I mean, we already saw this week ICE agents detain and disappear a pro-Palestinian activist for, you know, basically for no crime at all, but for, you know, speaking out in support of Gaza.

1:10:40So it's not a very huge leap to go and start doing the same for people who are speaking out against Tesla. I mean, I think that, you know, what Trump is saying specifically is people who are vandalizing and are doing things that are considered to be violent and dangerous are potentially going to face some of these charges. Whether or not that extends to the people who are peacefully protesting, I don't think we've seen yet. I don't think that that was necessarily what he was saying. It's hard to parse what Trump says too much. And I know that Musk has made claims on X about how these protests are astroturf and are being funded by Soros or whomever else, you know, sort of are the enemies that lurk in his brain.

1:11:27So I don't really know how this is. I think like if anything, the protesters are probably now even more motivated to turn out at the locations now that they know that they're on Trump and Musk's radar. You know, I think that a lot of this was about getting their attention. And now that they know that they have his attention, I think we'll see something of an escalation, at least in numbers, which I think is going to cause, I think, a lot of disruption and, you know, police overtime salaries are going to go up. So, you know, it's going to be really kind of interesting to watch. And I know that, you know, in talking to some of the local organizers and some of the people who are promoting the protests online on Blue Sky are adamant about, you know, this is a peaceful protest.

1:12:10You know, we might occasionally like get arrested peacefully for occupying space, but we're never going to be defacing or vandalizing. That's not the mission of this movement. The mission is to cause Tesla's sales numbers to go down and to hurt Elon Musk's net worth and stock price. That's all that they're interested in doing. So I think if they can sort of hold that line, it'll really, I think, sort of be on the on the other side to really kind of escalate things that they want to. I will know that Trump has called the boycott movement an illegal boycott, which is not a thing. It's not a thing.

1:12:44Also tracks with Elon saying it's illegal to not advertise on X. I'm just saying the police are coming to your house and you're going to buy a Tesla. That seems very clear. The end result of America that what color do you want and how much of your personal income do you have to give up to the government in order to receive a Tesla is the only question. That's the end state of Doge. we're going to fund social security by forcing everyone to buy a Tesla somehow. It's going to be good. All right. We're going to see what happens this weekend. It feels like the protests are getting louder, right? Like the protesters have gotten the validation they need from the White House.

1:13:18Like it's working. They are bothering the people in charge. That usually means it gets louder. I'm very worried about the free speech environment of America. As every listener of the show knows, that dynamic is something we're watching very closely. But in the meantime, let us know if your Tesla starts driving itself or if you are the person who spray painted your own Cybertruck for attention. I'm dying to talk to you. Andy, thank you so much, man. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Every story you love. Every invention that moves you. Every idea you wished was yours. All began as nothing. Just a blank page with a blinking cursor.

1:14:02Asking a simple question. What do you see? Great ideas start on Mac. Find out more on apple.com slash Mac. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin? or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? 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. Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you.

1:14:46Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch. All right, we're back. We got breaking news. We do? There's breaking news right as we're recording. Wait, can I guess?

1:15:20Guess. Open AI launched something esoteric that no one understood. No? Okay. That's not it. I have no more guesses. All right. As we were recording, we recorded this on a Wednesday, one day earlier than usual for various calendar reasons. But as we were recording, Chris Welch broke the news that Sonos, in an all-hands meeting, has canceled its streaming video player, which was called Pinewood. Oh, that's sad. Pinewood, yeah. So this was Sonos' big push, right? Its next big market under the previous administration was streaming video. They had to deal with some advertising company. They were going to link everything together.

1:15:56Presumably there would be some AI talk. That's just the way things go. And they would have a streaming video player. And now the new interim CEO, who I suspect will become the permanent CEO, Tom Conrad, says a push into video is off the table for now. And the team is being reassigned to other projects because they got to turn around the company. This was really interesting because I would say clearly the correct call for Sonos uh sonos has had a brutal year and what it needs more than anything is to get back to proving it can do the thing that it does really well and so like forgetting everything else and being like oh do you remember how we made speakers that you loved for 20 years we're gonna get back to making speakers that you love is the right call this is a bummer though like i think uh i wouldn't say i I had super high hopes for this thing working the way that Chris in particular has reported that it was going to work.

1:16:52The like all encompassing universal TV guide thing. Really hard to pull off. Sonos has done a really interesting job of trying to bring various voice assistants together over the years and has not really had a ton of success with that. Like I just I would have been very curious to see Sonos try this. and I'm a little sad that we're not going to get to see them try, but I think Tom Conrad is probably right to kill this project. Sonos has a statement in the story. We don't comment on our roadmap, but it has been previously announced. We have a longstanding relationship with the Trade Desk, which was the software provider for this rumored streaming box.

1:17:32We have a longstanding relationship with the Trade Desk, and that relationship continues. Weird statement. I don't know what to make of that. maybe there will be some advertising in other Sonos products but I agree with you, they need to focus, they need to make that app great you can see how launching another product to a hostile user base was not a great idea also I think the headphones don't pan out the way they wanted to, I think they're just they're just buttoning up yeah and I think if I'm Sonos the thing to focus on A is obviously software first but I think Sonos should go out and like rev the headphones and try to make the Ace a real hit.

1:18:13Because I think they could have been. Like, by all accounts, they're good. They were a little too expensive. They didn't really have a thing. But they're very good headphones. Every time we talk about it, I hear from people who are like, I have the Ace and I love them. But because the Ace shipped at the same time as this terrible app, all goodwill that might have come to the headphones just got eaten alive by the bad stuff that happened with the app. So if I'm Sonos, it's like, okay, this product wasn't a miss. this thing we weren't wrong about this we just have to get back to doing this correctly and then go worry about other stuff but there's like there's room to go try and do headphones well and successfully before you go try and do video which is a much more competitive maybe not more competitive but also very competitive and very different market yeah there's dumb feedback on the ace i think it's very hard to market headphones that look so much like every other headphones Yeah, I think that's right.

1:19:05But if you were putting Sonos' odds of doing a very good job over time, wouldn't you say it's more likely that Sonos will eventually figure out how to make genuinely great differentiated headphones than a set-top box? Yes, but my caveat is I don't think— I'm so surprised you even had to think about that. I think it is really, really hard to make genuinely gray differentiated headphones when most of those headphones connect to an iPhone. And Apple makes it very, very, very hard to out-innovate any of the AirPods products on the iPhone. Yeah, I'll give you that. That was my hesitation. It's like, yeah, there's a natural instinctive answer.

1:19:44And then there's the reality, which is the TV space is there's more opportunity in it. It's more of a free-for-all. Yeah, that's fair. I'll give it. But like, it's not like TV is a wide open space with easy games to play. Well, hopefully they just focus on the speakers. Tom Conrad, interim CEO. Again, I think we all suspect we become the full-time CEO. Welcome on these shows. Anytime you want, Tom. We've known Tom forever. So come on. We'll talk Pandora for a while and then we'll move on to Sonos. How's that? Used to be at Pandora. All right. It's time. It's time, David. Oh, my God. America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

1:20:22This one's going to be wonkier than normal. That is a high bar, my friend. It's time for Brendan Carr as a dummy. Everyone's favorite. So Brendan Carr, as some of you know, I don't know why you're listening to this. Brendan Carr is the chairman of the FCC under Donald Trump, a notoriously hostile presence for the First Amendment and freedom of speech in this country. This man wants to regulate speech on every wire and wireless transmission he can get his hands on. It's not subtle. And he does it by wrapping himself up in a cloak of defending free speech, which is just pure hypocrisy. I will say this at the top of this segment.

1:21:01I'll say it at the end of the segment. I know Brendan listens to our show. I know he gets Google alerts for his name. I know it. You're welcome. Come on, Brendan. Come on the show. Try to defend yourself. You won't because you're a coward. But we've sent the emails. You've been invited on Decoder. Show up. I'm just saying. So this week, Brendan, our little man, Brendan, sent a letter to YouTube asking if YouTube TV discriminates against faith-based programming. And then he posted on X, I have received complaints that Google's YouTube TV is discriminating against faith-based programming. These concerning allegations come at a time when American public discourse has experienced an unprecedented and unacceptable surge in censorship.

1:21:45I am asking Google for answers. So there's like four things that just aren't true in that. By using the power of the state to censor Google. Yeah. So this is all based on what appears to be one complaint from one channel. Great American Family, which apparently is a faith-based channel. It's distributed on Fubo and Sling, on DirecTV Stream, on Hulu. Here's the thing about this. You can get some of these. You can get some content from this company on YouTube. right? YouTube is just wide open. You just, you just put stuff on YouTube. People do all the time. They're not on YouTube TV because YouTube TV is a cable company.

1:22:29And to get on YouTube TV, you have to negotiate rates and carriage with YouTube the same way that you would have to negotiate rates and carriage with DirecTV proper, with Comcast, with Spectrum, with any other cable company you can think of. By the way, I should disclose here that Comcast is an investor in Fox Media Repairing Company. I do not have great relationships with cable companies. So take that for what it's worth. But I know how cable companies work, and my coverage of them over the past decade has led them to hate me. So that's how it goes. But I do know how they work, because I've covered them a lot.

1:23:04Here's the thing about Brendan Carr. He has no power over YouTube TV. Zero. He doesn't have power over YouTube either, even though he keeps fronting like he wants it. he keeps saying he's gonna he personally will reinterpret section 230 which he has no authority to do but he keeps saying it he's threatening it and now he's threatening youtube tv and the lack of power over youtube tv is actually even more obvious right his lack of power over the internet is you have to you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to explain it right you have to say, well, yes, it's a federal communications commission.

1:23:43Yes. They have some authority to regulate a wireless services. They allocate spectrum to star, like all this stuff, all this internet stuff, but they don't have the authority to regulate the content on Instagram, which is why he wants to reinterpret section two, three, right. You have to like wind your way to it, right? Do you have a difference? Yes. They regulate the ISPs, but not really. Cause they got rid of net neutrality. Like you have to construct this argument for why he doesn't have the power, but the answer is because the FCC gave away the power. Here, the FCC never had the power before.

1:24:15So if you think about why the FCC regulates cable companies at all, there's a very wonky word for cable companies and satellite companies. MVPDs, multiple video programming distributors. I'm sorry, I told you it was going to get wonky. So the cable companies at the outset, at the very beginning of cable, you had all these people in rural America who were getting crap network broadcasts at their house. They would put up big antennas and then like, you know, the CBS affiliate from the big city would like kind of come in and it would be bad. So the original cable companies were kind of like renegades, right?

1:24:49They would set up their own big antennas and then run wires to all the houses in these rural areas. And they're basically stealing the signals. And the history of cable is full of these big characters who are basically doing piracy at scale, right? Weird. Like that's just a weird history. And now they're big monopoly monoliths and they hate me. But the history there is kind of like these like wildcats, like big, big colorful characters setting up like community cable systems. Do you know how sometimes they call cable cat TV? Yeah. Like you ever see that on an input on all TV? That's community access television.

1:25:22And that's because. Is it really? I didn't know that. That's a fun fact. And that's because some guys would be like, screw it. We're setting up a big antenna and running wires to everyone's house. So this is where it came from. And the FCC is like, wait, we regulate broadcast. And so the broadcast stations are saying, hold on, you're free riding on us. You're charging people for access to our signals. The FCC gets involved and we end up in this huge system where the FCC manages things like who gets to retransmit what stations, who gets to bundle what stuff, a big arbitration framework for if some cable network wants to rerun ABC programming, but ABC won't give them a license to it unless they pick up like ABC Family and the Disney Channel.

1:26:03now we have like a weird contract dispute the FCC manages all that that's all built out of these wildcats basically stealing broadcast signals and running them over wires to people's houses so you have this whole framework for all this built up okay fine and that's so the FCC has some authority over like traditional MVPDs your direct tvs your dish networks your cable companies, YouTube is not that. YouTube TV very specifically is not that, right? They're a virtual MVPD, which is a horrible name, but it basically means they're a cloud service. Right. It's just the internet. The internet. So YouTube and Google start YouTube TV, and they're like, well, if you want to be on our thing that feels like cable, you can be.

1:26:48Show up at our door, and we'll cut you a deal. And the reason they were so cheap to begin with is they didn't have all of this baggage of the traditional cable companies. Right. all these like pre-negotiated deals, and they had immediate national distribution. Right, they didn't have to dig trenches and set up antennas. Right, they're running over the internet. So the FCC never had authority over it. Like, it just is not the thing. Like, there's no part of YouTube TV where they're like capturing signals from the air and rebroadcasting them, and you need this whole retransmission consent regime.

1:27:19This is all like complicated telecom law stuff that no one cared about because YouTube TV is different and new. And they're allowed to pick and choose what channels they put on their cable service the same way that, I don't know, whatever preloaded Samsung fast TV service is allowed to pick and choose whatever channel show up and you turn on Samsung TV for the first time. And that's the market at work, right? In the most direct way, that is a free market at work. What channels do you get for your 80 bucks a month for YouTube TV that goes up every month is a decision YouTube gets to make in the free market and consumers can decide whether or not to pay for it.

1:27:52So you end up with, should great American family be on cable systems in a time when cable systems were the dominant provider of video services? The FCC had this like interest. It wasn't really played out. It wasn't really fleshed out. Right. The interest was based on how do people get the broadcast networks? It's the cable systems. Are the cable systems running well because they are such a monopoly provider of information? The FCC is like, all right, we're going to make sure the bundles are equal, blah, blah, blah. YouTube is not that YouTube operates in the YouTube TV operates in the, the biggest, most vibrant market of video programming services that has ever existed in world history.

1:28:33If you want great American family, you know what you can do? You can leave YouTube TV and sign up for Fubo. Any of the other ones like that, right? Like in one second on your phone, you can just do it. You can sign up for sling or Hulu. You can maybe pay them directly. There's no, there's no plausible interest for the United States government to regulate the market in this case. And what makes it particularly galling is at the same in the same breath, Brendan Carr is saying, list every regulation I should remove. The market is more vibrant. You know, regulation you should remove, Brendan yourself.

1:29:07You should stop meddling in the free market of information on the Internet. You should go away. Well, and he's not even pretending in any meaningful way that this is about free markets. It's just about speech. Yeah. Like the whole YouTube TV thing is not, he's not accusing YouTube TV of being a monopoly or abusing its power against, it's just pure censorship discussion. Yeah. He is. He wants to put pressure on Google to moderate YouTube, like big YouTube, the way that he wants. And so the way he's going to do that is by saying Google is unfairly discriminating against faith-based programming on YouTube TV, over which he has zero.

1:29:43And I mean, truly zero authority. Right. In a way that it is easier to make an argument that he has authority over the internet i don't he doesn't but it is actually easier to make that argument because he had he could in another world would have had authority over the isps but youtube tv is a thing that exists outside of the fcc's historic frameworks for how cable companies are regulated in a way that he he should and there's competition right like you you can just get comcast like it exists like it's there it's right there for consumers if they want these channels, they can switch away from YouTube TV.

1:30:22And if there exists any of that market competition, it is completely inappropriate for the government to step in and say, I want information. I want you to answer to me. Especially at the same time where just like in a different tweet, he's like, what regulations do I need to get rid of to make the market more competitive? Fire yourself. Like it's just, it is, it is the most blinding hypocrisy from this fan week in and week out. and all of it is incoherent and all of it only serves to increase his own power as opposed to making the markets more efficient, to making the networks more trusted, that's a good goal, right?

1:30:59You want more Americans to perceive that the information networks that they exist in are unbiased or delivering more fair or accurate information or that the processes by which content is taken down or removed or has reached out are fair and understandable. Those are all good things but he's just about power and you can see in the course of two tweets he's like i'm demanding this private company over which i have no authority answer to me also i think the market should be more open and have less regulation well dude solve your problem get rid of yourself or come on decoder i'll fire you on decoder i will say i really enjoyed uh i very rarely enjoy a company response to something uh but this one i very much enjoyed from uh audrey lopez at youtube who said, we welcome the opportunity to brief the FCC on YouTube TV subscription service and the strategic business decisions we make based on factors like user demand, operational costs, and financial terms, and then a bunch of other stuff, which is just a long way of saying we don't have this because no one wants it.

1:31:58If there were a market reason for us to have this channel, we'd have this channel. I mean, this is like every time we get a carriage dispute, right? Like I find carriage disputes really fascinating for exactly this reason, because it is purely about a company with content that people want trying to get a distributor to pay as much as possible for it. And the distributor, it's like perfect supply and demand economic bargaining. And I find it so fascinating. And in this case, like it's actually just YouTube is like, no one wants this and we'd have to pay them for it. Why would we pay them for it?

1:32:29Yeah, it's just that simple. And it's funny because in a different if I describe to you how cable company negotiations work up at the FCC, I think most of our younger listeners or viewers on YouTube would be utterly perplexed that the government is involved. Yeah. Right? There used to only be three major broadcast networks in the entire country, and people would set up antennas. And then when the cable company showed up, the government showed up and said, you have to carry the broadcast networks. Weird. That's just a weird thing that's embedded in the history of our telecom law, that we have these things called must-carry provisions.

1:33:03And because of the must-carry provisions, the broadcast networks can get bigger and have more channels and demand other channels get carried by these cable companies. And you end up in this situation where the United States government is resolving a dispute about the tennis channel. This is a real thing that happened. That's awesome. And that just doesn't happen on the internet. I do think everyone should be required to watch tennis. So I'm actually good with that one. But you just, you see that kind of stuff play out in the history of telecom because there was so much scarcity, right? So the government had this interest in saying, okay, we've got these three big national broadcast networks.

1:33:36We know they touch everyone in the country. The cable companies have to carry them. That's a lot. Like that's a big step into what the government says about the information you receive. And that made sense in the previous era. It makes no sense in the modern era. And I think most people, if we showed up and said to YouTube, you have to carry Mr. Beast. Like most people are like, what are you talking about? That doesn't make any sense. You can go. I just see Brendan trying to bring us back to that era, but doing it incoherently and without any point except his own power. Yep. So like I said, Brendan, I know you listen.

1:34:13I know you're going to get the Google alerts. Here's one for you. Brendan Carr is a coward. That's just the thing I say on the show every week. You can come on Decoder. You can defend this stuff. You can try to make it make sense. I'll give you the shot. I'm just well prepared. And I know you. So good luck. But you're welcome. Anytime you want. All right. we we gotta we need a we need a palette cleanser david yeah all right i have i have three more for you and then we're gonna get out of here yeah thing number one uh tiktok did a thing i think is sort of interesting which is uh everybody is forever trying to come up with ways to like make their platforms less horrible for teenagers uh and basically tiktok now has a sort of it's a parental control thing that essentially starts to wind you down off of tick tock starting at 10 p.m.

1:35:03So it gives teens a reminder that's basically like it's late get off and then starts to play you out. Essentially, it's like the Oscars music where it just like plays you off the stage of tick tock. I think this is a great idea. And I think this is a thing that I would also like for me, an adult who should not be looking at tick tock after 10 p.m. But I think like I've been talking to a lot of people about the the sort of regulatory environment about this stuff for years and lauren feiner does a really good job of covering a lot of that stuff for us and uh watching all of these platforms just like flail to figure out features to make themselves a slightly better experience especially for young users it's just really complicated and really interesting and i actually think this is like a smart idea from tiktok that it's just like we're just going to make it harder and harder for you to use this app because you should go to bed it's time for bed totally hard not totally hard but harder and i'll i think a lot of parents would accept the hard 10 p.m curfew on on a tiktok account probably uh but casey newton had this great line about tiktok this week writing about this he said tiktok is now in quantum super positioned there's a tiktok that's illegal that's good yeah and then there's a tiktok that exists in a shipping features for teens in america i would say i forget about the tiktok ban like every three days you know what I mean, I just sort of look around and I'm like, oh, right.

1:36:24TikTok's going to get banned. It's banned. It's banned. That's true. It is technically banned. The law is passed. The Supreme Court said it was constitutional. Donald Trump is just not enforcing it. I know we've talked about this already, but the first week of April when all the tariff stuff comes crashing back down and the TikTok ban delay ends is like, it's going to be weird times in America. We might not. The government might be closed. by that like who stuff's gonna get real weird here uh thing number two that i just think is really interesting is uh niantic the company that makes pokemon go and a bunch of other stuff sold all of its gaming business uh to scopely which is a like old social gaming company that i think is now owned by a some saudi government company thing that i don't pretend to totally understand uh but i i just have been obsessed with niantic for like years uh pokemon go i think remains like the most interesting AR experiment anyone has done yet and was a huge giant hit.

1:37:24And then they tried to do it a bunch more times and none of it worked. Yeah, no one cared. There was like the Harry Potter game that people were really excited about. There was the one with the characters with the flowers coming out of their head that I can't remember the name of. But like Niantic was like way out in front of this idea of like how do we make stuff that is fun on top of the real world and just never, it turns out it was just Pokemon. And they just never, they just never found an X thing. Well, they never found the next thing and they never figured out what to do with the enormous amount of data they collected from all those Pokemon Go users.

1:37:55Like, Niantic was building a world map and they were clever to the point where if they found a place where they didn't have sufficient data, they would put Pokemon there. And then people would go and map that location. And I don't think that anyone figured out what that was for. Like, it was very clever, like, in that way. And it's like, do you know Pokemon Go is secretly data collection? And it's like, yes. What's going to happen? And there's some of that stuff. Niantic still owns some of that. Yeah. Like it kept a couple of its games and a bunch of the mapping stuff. So it's the, yeah, the thing they've been saying, which is basically we're like building an AR map of the world is now their only move left, which is really interesting.

1:38:34Like there was a Pokemon go was just like floated forever until they figured out the next thing. And now they like really have to go figure out this next thing. Yeah. And I don't know what it's going to be, but we'll see. All right. I have one more for you. Well, I have one and a half. Okay. The one is that Home Assistant now supports Matter. And I know this is big for you, so I just wanted to give you a moment to really talk about this. Well, it's certified. I think it was not officially supported before. I mean, that's basically what Paul was telling us. And he said, it's now officially supported.

1:39:09The certification was complicated. It's a cherry on the cake. That's the quote. This is good. I have a Home Assistant green box now. It's like sitting here. I'm thinking about swapping out my home bridge for Home Assistant only because we have these very complicated smart vents that open and close to try to make all the rooms in the house the same temperature. It's like the podcast studio I'm sitting here is in our attic. So in the winter, it's very cold up here, but I don't want to run the heat and burn out the family. So we have these vents that open and close. And Home Assistant can run them locally instead of going to the cloud.

1:39:41Oh, all right. None of this has anything to do with matter. I'm just saying you can see how Home Assistant is like, there's a server in my house that runs everything, having official matter integration. What's all of that stuff run locally? And I think that's cool. Right. Yeah. Home Assistant continues to be more impressive, I think, than I gave it credit for for a long time. I was always like Home Assistant is like the Raspberry Pi of the Spart home world. It's like it's a thing for people who want to tinker and that's about it. And they are like pushing further and further down into just like put this in your house.

1:40:11It'll be fine. I think that's pretty powerful. We talked about Amazon and Apple and all their smart home stuff and all that stuff. And all of that kind of requires you to just believe that those services will run in the cloud and be reliable for you for a long time. And home assistants, like, what if you just had a computer in your house that was there? Yeah, that just only did those things. Yeah. Yeah, I'm into that. And then last one, did you see Jay Graber's t-shirt? Truly the greatest thing that happened all week. And now I think Blue Sky is going to sell it. So Zuckerberg wore a shirt at Meta Connect, right?

1:40:44That said... I believe so, yeah. It said Zucker nothing in Latin. And so Jay Graber's shirt at South by Southwest said, Munda sine caesarebis, which mean a world without caesars. And now they are fully selling that shirt. Spectacular. I have no notes. They were giving away stickers, I think, that said the same thing at South by. It's extremely good. It is good. We're still working with better engineers. It's very complicated. accepting the fire hose of incoming social media content if you federate a quick post uh it's not small so it turns out turning your website into a social network uh moderation challenges abound but we're we're we are still focused on yeah there's some blue sky uh one i will say one deeply fascinating thing that happened this week was x had a huge outage and everybody went to Blue Sky.

1:41:32Like all the, it was, X went down right as NFL free agency started and it just like that flipped to Blue Sky. And I thought that was so interesting that like my threads did not get more exciting, but all of a sudden, like a million sports reporters I know were just appearing in Blue Sky. And Mina Kimes, who works at ESPN, had this like starter pack of Blue Sky sports people and that blew up. And it was like yet another, like Blue Sky has the juice. kind of moments that it's like every time X gets a little worse, blue sky gets a little better and X gets a little worse a lot. And so it was, it was just another one that it's like blue skies, blue skies for real.

1:42:10All right. Can I add one? It's Trump related, but in the funniest way. All right. I'll allow it. Mia wrote about this this week. There's a Trump official. I believe, I believe in one of the offices that's firing everybody like in the office of personal management. She is also a very, very bad fashion influencer. And she's been doing get ready with me in the office while she's firing people. It's very bad, but like very bad in a way that is just indicative of how everything else is bad. Yeah. She's like, I need she needs a side hustle, too. She's like, I don't know. Maybe I'm going to get fired by Doge one of these days.

1:42:46So I got to. But it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. And Mia's post is scathing in the best in the best possible verge way. So I encourage people. This is the thing that I saw. somebody just like posted a link in slack and it was like you you could tell the like the mia siren had just been activated and mia just came in and was like i know what to do with this that's good stuff me and a great line she referred to her outfits as uh sears catalog-esque oof that's rough brutal that's rough uh every now and again our policy desk uh just lets let's let's it out and you can see it uh all right that's it we've gone way over this episode's been six hours long i think i was in a fugue state talking about brendan car this week that was yesterday that's what the people come for that's that's what we sell here brendan you're welcome anytime thank you to andy poor andy every time i talk to him lately i'm like so what disaster are we talking about thanks andy for coming on uh that's it that's first class and 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.

1:43:55The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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