The high stakes for AI Alexa

31:45And then if Amazon has done as good a job as Panos is saying, which I think it reasonably probably has of understanding all of those endpoints, it can actually put all of that together in a way that strikes me as like it would work. And then I'm just at a point where all I have to do is learn how to explain what I want rather than like program it in detail in the Alexa app. But even the explain what I want, their examples were come up with a bedtime routine. And it was like, Alexa just was like, I don't know, I'm going to play some music. I'm going to turn off these lights. I'm going to dim these other lights.

32:18Call it a bedtime routine. I really don't think that's a real use case. This is one of the things that drives me the craziest about all of these things is it's like, I still have this picture on my desktop for some reason for like years of this Apple event from years ago. I think it was an iPad launch where they had this picture. they were showing like the lifestyle photos they always show and it was it was a guy sitting in like the crook of two beams on the brooklyn bridge sketching on his ipad and i was just like no one does this like talk about your products when you lived in new york i did it the once and they took my picture and they paid me for it and then i went home it's fine but it's just like all of these things is like i i spend a lot of time wondering if part of the problem here is that no one actually understands what any regular human would ever want to do with these products.

33:06Because the idea that I'm going to come home one day and be like, Alexa, make up a bedtime routine. I'm so sorry to everybody who's hearing us say Alexa over and over, by the way. Wait, you never just ask a computer to make it nice when you're sleepy? No. Yeah. Never. And no one is going to. And the idea that I'm going to ask it to, and then I'm going to live with what it creates for me for the rest of my life is just preposterous. And so I hate this stuff now because it's like, show me this product as it's going to actually work for people instead of like a fake thing that seems vaguely impressive until you poke at it at all.

33:36Yeah. It seems to me that most of these companies extrapolate this stuff to the furthest degree where they're like, how can we reduce as much friction as possible between the user and doing what they want to do? And they just forget that people don't want to just give up complete control of these systems. The famous book me a travel itinerary and book my plane and book my hotel. Nobody wants to do that. And yet every company uses it as their example. Luckily, Amazon did not actually have them book the itinerary. They just made the itinerary, which is better. That is better. I agree. I like that.

34:11But still, that is like the extrapolated version of that, right? Like nobody, even in the home, nobody wants you to bedtime routine. I don't know what it's going to be. Let's just find out. If that's going to be the case, let me like test five of them out and then I will pick. People don't actually want to just give up complete control to a system like this, especially when it's completely random. You don't know what it's going to be. Totally. Well, so I have many things to say. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to everyone. One, I think the hard part here is not the reduction of friction. It's letting people know they can do this stuff at all.

34:45And that, I think, requires. But does anyone want to? Yes. To some broad approximation, just have stuff happen is a thing people want. Like, when I get home, turn on the lights is nice. Yeah. It's just nice. And I am convinced that, like, my family does not know how lights turn on or off anymore because many lights in our house just turn on or off throughout the day. Interesting. Like, we have Hue lights in our kitchen, and they're in adaptive mode, so they just go from cool in the morning to warm at night. I think this is the coolest shit in the world. No, that's great. Someday Max is going to go to college and, like, call you from her dorm room being like, why is it dark?

35:26so uh jen too he told us that her kids her teenage children don't know how to use house keys oh my god uh which is incredible ruining future generations neilay but so i got a text from becky uh and she was like the light the kitchen is the wrong color and i was like this is victory i'm getting divorced now but this is victory the kitchen is the wrong color like the the lights are warm in the morning and she's like why is it so orange in here and i was like i've won and i've also lost in like equal measure so it's true that people like it when things just sort of like happen the right way at the right time sure and i think most people cannot express that in structured if then statements right like if i come home between these times turn on lights when garage opens is people do not speak and going through every single little thing in your home and having to create an if that statement it's just really tedious but you can say when i get home turn the lights on and alexa figures out how to script that for you that i think is very powerful yes the the jump is getting people to even understand that this is now a thing you can ask for and then delivering it in a way that is consistently good enough that they they tell their friends about it and then their friends buy alexa and a bunch of smart lights i'm like i don't know about any of that right like the comparison that i have to that is i keep talking I always talk about the local news test.

36:49Okay. Like what piece of technology will like break through on the local news? And like the first iPhone was like, look at this. You could pinch to zoom. And like, that was all you needed. And then they sold all the iPhones. This one's like, here's what you do. You buy this weird screen. It can talk to you like a person and tell you stories. Also, you need to change all of the light bulbs in your house. And it's like, well, this is just, what are we doing? And to your point, you know what that thing was the first time around with Alexa was music. Yeah. You can have it play music just by asking for it.

37:16It was like that was that was the breakthrough. Yeah. And I think everybody has wanted the smart home to be that next thing. And it hasn't been. But but so now the question is, like, if you've made it easier to the point where you can just do this as quickly as asking for it, like maybe it becomes that thing. Yeah. And I do think there are an awful lot of people out there who have bought Govi light strips or weird smart bulbs. There's an awful lot of smart locks out there. like some of this stuff is ready to go yeah and to be linked together in automations like this and i like you know ai is good at coding and like really what we're talking about is like write a little script for me okay like there some of this all clicks together but i'm still just at like you have to get people to even want it i also i cannot stop thinking about how important cameras are to all of this and how many feelings this is going to make people feel about cameras Like one of the demos was being able to ask if somebody had walked the dog recently, I think.

38:18And it'll actually like comb back through your security camera data to see. Oh, no, actually, I know how that one works. There's another demo that was scarier from the camera sense. Oh, OK. Tell me more. You were there. I wasn't there. Let me know. Someone has walked the dog recently is that's just Amazon owns a bunch of stuff, including Ring. So if you have Ring cameras today without any of this Alexa stuff, it will detect pets. It will detect people. It will detect packages. That's a service that you have to get from Ring as part of the Ring service. But that's just a Ring video search product that Alexa as an API can just call.

38:51So that wasn't Alexa doing any of that. That was just Ring. Okay. It was just being expressed through the Echo Show. Still a little creepy how accessible you've made the archive of that recording. But sure, fair enough. What was the other demo? It's the same accessibleness as it is in the Ring app today. Sure. Right. Especially because they... They already owned it. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's fair. The problems with Ring accessibility are like, and then they send it to the cops. Like, that's a different. Right. There is that. But like inside of your Ring archive, like it gets indexed and searchable.

39:23The one you're thinking about, I believe, is when you see my daughter play this music. And that one is very creepy to me. Oh, that is creepy. I don't like that at all. Yep. And that thing is like, again, so much of what we're describing works way better if you have cameras. If you have lots of cameras that do lots of things really convincingly, like the play music or turn on the lights when I get home thing. Like you can do that a bunch of ways, but the actual cleanest and most reliable way to do that, to know that it's you coming home is cameras. And this this this system in general, A, requires a vast amount of data to really work.

40:06And one of the things that Panos talked about a bunch and that Amazon is making very clear is like it's going to ask and remember a lot of information about you. You can forward emails, you can send like Alexa would like to know every single thing that happens to you all the time. Always. Everywhere. All the time. And like, on the one hand, fine. Google has that data anyway, just by virtue of like, we are all alive. But Amazon wants it too. And it wants your camera data. And the more data you give it, the better this system will be. And that linear scale is going to be deeply fascinating to see people try to walk through.

40:40It's just so funny because I can tell that you have not tried to set up any smart home automations. Do you know what the best way to know that your home is? Amazon has no access to it. It's when your fucking phone connects to your Wi-Fi network. Amazon owns Euro, so sure they do. Oh, that's interesting. But that's, like, too creepy. It's, like, one step too creepy. But, like, that is how a bunch of HomeKit automation. Sure, no, you're right. That's a good point. Right? So, like, when you do, if you've ever set up a HomeKit automation. Yeah. Right? There's run this when no one's home or just I'm home or anyone is home.

41:12And all it's looking for is whether various devices signed in iCloud or on your network. You can do it. I think there's a little bit of geofencing in there, but it's the network connection that tells you you're home. And it's funny because the other day, my wife and I were both not home, and Max came home, and none of the lights turned on because she doesn't have an iCloud device. Ooh. She doesn't know how to turn the lights on. No, she turned on the lights, but they were on, I would say, wrong. You go, well, Max is just sitting in the dark. I was like, why are all the lights wrong is actually what I said.

41:45She's like, now I need an iPhone, Dad. Yeah, basically. But it's really interesting to think, oh, they'll link Eero into this and know like network states of devices. There's a lot they can do. Was this compelling to you? Yeah, in some ways. I mean, the fact that the Echoes were sort of the first ways that people interacted with any form of voice based AI. Yeah. I think was interesting to me because Amazon was so early to that. And then they were so late to everything else. And so this like a dream of my mother can set up something and come home and start talking to her smart speaker and it actually does things instead of me having to teach her voice lessons or like specific lessons on how to talk to the AI is a big thing.

42:30the automations I if they work is going to be the giant question I would love it if you could ask it to have an automation and then it just randomly it creates a bunch that you can pick from yeah because I just I don't know I understand some people probably just want things to be made for them and just be developed but having no no say in any of the development of these things and just letting it do things for you just feels very sketch almost as sketch as the pick up my friend from JFK. I don't know if it will work. This is the thing. That's one reason that I think pushing really hard towards screen devices is really smart for Amazon because it just lets it do that kind of stuff where it's going to be able to be like, hey, here's the thing I was going to do.

43:14Make sure this is make sure we're cool. Like, is this is this what you want? Is this your grocery order? Like, do you want this or this? Like, it's the kind of sort of quick back and forth. Did they show any of that? Yes. They did. The grocery demo in particular one was like so far from what anyone would ever do, but also the coolest one. Yeah. So they were like, go to Amazon Fresh. I want to do this recipe. Here's ingest. Like, I want to make these cookies and start filling it out. And then he was talking to it while he was like clicking quantities on the screen. And so he was adjusting one row of data while it was like adding this kind of thing.

43:51And it was just like very cool, like multimodal. Are people going to do that? I don't. I have no idea. It's a big question. Jen, too, he will and no one else. Yeah. But that is the kind of interaction that if you can get it makes all of this stuff work better. Right. Because it's like the first time you ask a question and you get like a 600 word long spoken answer. You're like, this is nothing. I hate this. That's the part that it needs to fix. Yeah. But then it's and this is the thing I've always gotten a kick out of this in like sci-fi and stuff like they always just gravitate towards. Let me show you.

44:24Right. And then it's like put it put it on a screen and I can look at it, which is like better movie making than listening to something talk for four minutes. But it's also just better user experience. It's like, do you want this or this? And I don't have to show them or I don't have to read them to you. I can show them to you. Right. Famously, the Google Home Mini is that every carrier on the planet throws 15 of you at at Christmas. every single time you ask it, what's the weather or turn the light on, it goes, just so you know, in the morning, we can also do this. Just ask me what to do every single time.

44:52Every time. And I just want, okay, bing, you know, that's it. Or just turn the light on. What if you didn't talk? And then I knew it worked because the light was on. What if you didn't talk? Yeah, that's a visual cue. I think as long as you have some sort of cue, which is like why the screen is important, especially when you're having it do these tasks that you cannot see because they're APIs or because they're like agentic or whatever. Oh, this is one of the coolest parts of the whole thing. They call them a lexicons. I do like that. So the little blue bar on the bottom of the screen turns into like line animations.

45:21Pana told me that he wants there to be like 200, but right now there's 33 because he's approving all of them individually. Okay. Which is great. I love it. That's good. They're very cute. And then Alexa just sort of picks whatever kind it wants. Like it turns into like a little line drawing of music notes or like a picture of, if it thinks it's arguing with you, it shows you a ping pong paddle going back and forth. because you're, you know. I don't want to argue with it. All this is great. I hate that I really like that, but I really like that. It was like easily the cutest part of the whole thing.

45:53And so they're trying to show these interactions. Look, we got to get the stuff, like I said, but you'll listen to this on what, Friday? Or sometime after that? On Tuesday, Pondus will be on the Coder. You might hear even more about the new Alexa and how it works. There's a bunch of questions about what models it's using, when, how they're managing all that cost, Anthropic is involved. Which they're a major investor in, right? Yeah, they're a major investor in. They built their own model called Nova, which they're using. Does anyone know anything about the Nova model? The rumor is that they were trying to build this for a long time and it was delayed.

46:23Yeah, I remember that. And then they had Anthropic swoop in to help them. And we should say, we should take a break. We've been talking about this for way too long. But all evidence and reporting so far suggests that Alexa Plus is super late and sucks. And so this thing is not shipping until at least several weeks from now. We've seen a few demos that Amazon did as I wasn't at the event, but everything I understand is it was all super on rails. It's all canned. So like, I actually think the big picture ideas here from Amazon are both really ambitious and pretty close to right. And if you made me bet right now, I would say I bet it's not any good.

47:02Yeah. Yeah. But I sincerely hope I'm wrong and we will see. I'm very curious. Again, to underline what David is saying, all of the demos were canned. Yeah. We were not allowed to just like freely talk to this thing. So who knows? And for months, like I would also remind you that this thing launched the first time 18 months ago. And Dave Limp, we've had a whole regime change on this team since this thing launched the first time. Amazon has been talking about this for a long time. And for, I mean, a year, the reporting and everything we've been hearing has been that this thing is not very good and it has been massively delayed.

47:38And I think there is a there is an argument to be made that Amazon is launching this now because it had to not because it's ready. And I hope I'm wrong. And I'm very curious to try this thing. But like, what is the primary pressure? Do you think like who who are they worried about coming after them? Because Google is not doing anything agentic right now. Google Smart Home is still Google Assistant, which is the artist formerly known as. you know and it's not really doing anything i think everybody's still worried about chachvati if you find yourself talking to advanced voice mode instead of alexa yeah you're not switching back yeah and operator is out there google is doing stuff like project mariner is real operator is not out there operator is out there in the way that like a like a like a baby goat is out there just like stumbling over shit like it doesn't matter i used operator today you know So what I can't use today is Alexa.

48:27Yeah, what did you use it for? I used it as a test to see if it could buy me something on Amazon, and it could not. Baby goat, baby. That's what I'm saying. Yes, it's good. There's a toddler out in the world who's just falling over itself all the time. I think they're a little worried about Apple, right? That's the larger context of this is Apple's way of doing agentic stuff is going to be app intense with Siri on the phone. It has perfect access to all those apps. those developers can get strong-armed into playing ball. Apple's very good at that in particular. Apple's going to do some iPad on a robot arm in their house, right?

49:04That is true. There's a lot there that is going to be difficult. Can Apple actually pull any of that off? We don't know. Siri is getting worse by the day somehow. I think they just needed to put a stake in the ground and say, actually, we put AI capabilities into Alexa in the way that everybody wanted us to. Yeah. And Panos has said this to us before, but I think I suspect probably said it to you on Decoder too, is like they see this as like a full on platform shift. Oh yeah, he very much said that in like the most intense Panos way. There is a sense now that missing this would be like missing mobile 15 years ago, right?

49:44In the sense that it like, it crowned a generation of trillion dollar companies and killed everybody else. And there is right or wrong, real belief in the industry that this is that moment again. And there is a sense that you cannot afford to be late at all because A, your investors will kill you for it and B, you'll just miss the future. And I think for Amazon, which is deep down this hole of we have to make Alexa work, like it's now or never. And I think they feel that. We haven't actually mentioned the most important part, which is Alexa Plus is$20 a month or it is free with Amazon Prime, which notably costs$15 a month.

50:18Yeah, it's free with Prime. Like the$20 a month is such a fake price. It drives me nuts. It's like it is cheaper to get Prime and everything else. Yeah. Then like for$5 less, you can get everything else on Prime, which is obviously what Amazon wants. And the sort of overlap of like Alexa owners and Prime customers is like 100%. Right. So they're just what and this is where we started. I use my Echo to buy exclusively from Walmart. It's like an amazing. um but they're basic they have the big they have the advantage yeah no one else has a distribution advantage like amazon has maybe google but they're google yeah i mean i think they're just they just want that recurring revenue you know it's like they've got a 180 million users in the united states on prime they've got 200 worldwide 200 million they just need to keep growing that number because it accelerated very fast at first yeah it's starting to Peter off, even though it's still one of the most popular services in the world.

51:19I don't know who the user is that is like, I don't have Prime, but I want Alexa LLM. Who is, who are you? I don't know who you are. Email us, let us know. Maybe the like really hardcore AI heads that just want to try everything, but I also don't know why they wouldn't have Prime. We'll find out, I guess, eventually. Yeah, but if anyone can do it, it's Amazon because they have scale. If anyone can make the platform shift happen. Yeah. Because they already have the microphones in everybody's house. Yeah. They've already, like, and they own that whole platform tip to tail. It was probably a way for them to say, it's$20 because everyone else is$20, and in that way, they're kind of saying, we're just as good in every way, but you can get it if you have Prime for cheaper.

52:03Well, I'm excited to see just how chaotic it is. We'll see. Again, and next week on Decoder, Panos answers a bunch more questions. in classically intense Panos Pinot way. It was a fun conversation. Also, we finally get to do the assistant battles between all of the major assistants. Well, once Siri is actually out, out. So never. I don't think Siri counts as a major assistant anymore. It's rough. Yeah. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back and we're going to keep talking on Siri. We'll be right back.

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53:09All right, we're back. to Siri Dunks, the new podcast of the version. Guess what I asked Siri to do today that I couldn't do? Oh, no. That's the whole show. It's just us listing things that we asked Siri to do that it cannot do. It would be the longest Vergecast episode in history that it used to be able to do and can no longer do. I asked it how many days until something the other day and it was like, do you want me to ask Chad ChippewT? It's rough. And Chad ChippewT famously is not good at math. Yeah. I was like, this is the most powerful phone in history. Nice. um speaking of iPhones we should probably talk about the iPhone 16e at some point but actually I want to talk about the Sigma BF this camera I just want to say it's very telling that the iPhone 16e is handily the second most interesting gadget that came out this week uh which in part says something about I would say third I just think we're like legally obligated to be like there was a new iPhone you're right it is it is at least third it might be it might be fourth given some of the framework stuff but it's certainly not first and i think sigma is clearly first my proposed headline for allison's review was no one should care about this phone they didn't they didn't go with it she did go with it's fine and give it a seven which is the most seven headline in the history of headlines yep i still don't know who's gonna buy this thing so what what's going on here with the the camera or the phone oh well i still don't know who's going to buy this thing actually applies to both let's start with the camera that is true that is true let's start with the camera because it's vastly more interesting than the iphone and we can come back to the iphone uh sigma bf is it's just a beautiful camera right and it seems like no one should buy it yeah there's a new camera from sigma uh it is a japanese camera brand that has made famously extremely weird cameras they have done very weird things with sensors they made something called a foveon sensor which has uh different pixels on the color filter array all on the same pixel.

55:03You get better quality. They did not do that with this camera because they got rid of it a while ago and everyone is sad about that. Sigma stuff is generally pretty good, right? Like it's weird, but they make good cameras, right, is my impression? They're weird. They're good. They are part of the L-Mount Alliance, which Panasonic and Leica are also part of. So that's nice. Weirdly enough, you don't really see them on the street almost ever. Mostly because they're so weird. And I think that people just go when you're going hiking in Utah, you see 100 million of the cheapest Canon camera and the cheapest Nikon camera.

55:32Sigma always does weird stuff. That's kind of their angle. They released a camera this week called the BF. Does not stand for boyfriend or best friend. It stands for beautiful foolishness. Really? Really, really. I love this. So this is kind of like when someone says, I know that this is stupid, but, and in that way, it's very difficult to critique. You know what I mean? It's like, there are many things about this camera that I'm like, but they're like, we know that it's dumb yeah here it is anyway and you have to respect that in a way right so this is a full frame 24 megapixel camera they tried to remove as many buttons as physically possible it is machined out of a block of aluminum they can make nine per day so it's not a high yield which not that many people are going to buy it anyway so that's probably fine uh famously fujifilm can only make 15 000 x106s per week and that still was not enough because they had over a million pre-orders in china alone on the first day wow so this camera i don't even know to say what it looks like it is just a small block of aluminum in a in a weird way uh it has a lcd screen on the back that does not tilt this is my this is actually my only complaint about this camera that it has no evf no the screen doesn't tilt oh okay well i don't and i have a very specific reason why but that i'm like i love you i'm buying this camera i'm mad the screen doesn't tilt yeah it's a very very minor complaint in the scheme of things i don't think it's that minor yeah i think screens should tilt even though they break easier yeah uh it has no viewfinder that is also horrible in my opinion i feel nothing about this especially for a two thousand dollar camera Like the number of people who can afford that camera, want to buy that camera, and have strong visceral feelings about how far away from your eye you should hold your camera.

57:27Yeah. It's just one group of people. It's just that that makes it with no articulating viewfinder and no EVF or OVF, you can only do this. Yep. And this is why I think the screen should tilt. Yeah. That's it. Any other angle than right in front of you. You know what I mean? Uh, it has this knurled kind of, uh, jog wheel on the back that you're supposed to do most of the stuff through as a play button. It has a menu button for going to the menus. The menu looks not great. Not great. Um, yeah. You see, uh, Seb from Halide was looking at this interface is why I make camera apps. Yeah. Yeah. It's not great.

58:08Uh, it has an extra little screen that tells you like the aperture and things like that. even though I just I hate when you hide the aperture behind a sub menu. It's horrible for cameras. I don't know. I think that the biggest reason that people really like this camera is because it is super basic. It is just a square of aluminum with a couple little knurled parts. No, let me tell you why people like this camera. Because people like this camera because it is sexy as hell and I want it so. Yeah, this is like, yeah, this to me is like, imagine like a cave painting of a camera. where it's like yeah you go back like 8 000 years and it's like oh someone in you know someone just drew a camera and if this is the first camera that anyone ever imagined that's this camera and i love it for that yeah i will say the fact that it doesn't have a memory card slot yeah and it has a built-in ssd it's like oh this thing has a has a shelf life oh yeah you're either gonna have to get it serviced which i'm not really sure how they're gonna get inside of it when it's a solid block of aluminum without taking a lot of stuff off of it uh or you're just gonna have to get a new one but hopefully it doesn't die before you know memory cards famously die a lot yeah but at least you can put a new memory card in so here's my argument in favor of this except for the tilting screen which i agree is a huge problem okay um again because i mostly take pictures of a six year old who is uh notably down here right so i'm always shooting at like hip height which means i want to tilt the screen up yeah that's it that's like i need to solve that problem this camera doesn't solve that problem it is sexy as hell and i do want it um i think it is like well beyond time for a camera manufacturer to get rid of like camera controls as we know them like as a person who mostly shoots an ancient nikon d7500 still the greatest hands-on camera ever made um uh it's like fine and there's just a million buttons on it and i know what they all do and the reason I've never upgraded that camera is because I know where all those buttons are and I know what they'll do.

1:00:08Right. And that's, it's cool. I like having that relationship with the camera and I've got most of them set so I never have to touch them again. I just know where they are. And the reality is if I could just set them and then set this one dial to mostly ever control shutter speed, I'd be fine. Yeah. Right? Or like exposure compensation. The only problem with that approach is you want that camera but to be like the size and quality of like a sony rx 100 right like give me all of what you just described a basically designed to shoot in auto super simple all in one piece more or less unbreakable thing that that is like a really fun cool point and shoot and i think it'd be gangbusters i'd be all over that thing yeah you're kind of describing x100 in a few ways that's i mean that's why people love them but uh this one to me i just like i just like the idea that sigma is like we have no history of nikon f-series slrs to honor that's fair like screw it we're just changing how the controls work have you seen the old sigma cameras because they are much weirder than this yes they're really really weird like it's funny because sigma started out as like a like a lens brand and they're like screw we can do whatever we want yeah it would be a lot more compelling in that way you just described nilai if the menu was better yeah here's a really usable thing unless you have to do anything have you guys driven the eqs the the new one the electric one yes you've used like being in a korean nightclub on wheels yeah i don't know how else to describe but you've used the infotainment system right yeah it's like windows 95 yeah it's no one has good ideas about software design no and like the fact that most products are now our software means that we live in a like a world of crime yeah but yeah i see what you're saying yeah it's pretty and i just want it on i understand i want i want to put a two thousand dollar knickknack on my shelf also the fact that you it is removable lenses means that it will never actually be as small as it looks that's true but this is also like david i feel like we're in such an era where like the camera is both a tool and an accessory right and this is like this is the x100 story right where like a lot of people who bought x100s bought them not to shoot with them but to be shot shooting with them like a leica yeah it's like it's a creator camera because i want you to see me using it and it's a fashion accessory as much as anything and I feel like this is Sigma just kind of acknowledging the same thing.

1:02:30They're like, yeah, you'll take some pictures with this but it's also going to look cool as hell and that's like 60 % of the price. I was thinking about that in a lot of ways because the M11 is over$9 ,000 for the body. This is$2 ,000. Think of the savings. Much more affordable. Looks very beautiful. People will ask you, what is that? It shoots about two and a half hours of video if you want to do the highest quality video and then you have to offload it. I do like this idea of offloading everything onto your computer from the USB-C port and not having to worry about an SD card at all because SD cards are sort of like, I don't know, Bluetooth standards or Wi-Fi standards where you got to read the little three or the nine on it and there's no five for some reason.

1:03:13And you just have to decide what is the speed and the fact that you can just plug it into USB-C port and then into your computer. Very nice. But you know, that comes with its trade-offs. It's not great that this conversation has inspired me to start searching for an X100. Good luck. I mean, they're very hard to find. I can pay a$700 premium for one right now. Yeah. Yeah. Or you could get the five, which is not that different. But, you know, let's just wrap up the show. I've got some show. Eli's busy. All right. Let's talk about the iPhone briefly. Can I say one more thing? Yeah, of course. The LCD has a sub, like a sub bezel.

1:03:50And I just want to acknowledge that. none of the press photos show the lcd on it well it doesn't show it on but it shows it it shows the sub bezel which is not something apple would have done i just want to acknowledge that um i'm buying all the cards oh no it's bad you're right i just looked and you're right how does that make you feel do you not want it anymore have you bought an rx100 take pictures of a kid yet no this is the single greatest purchase you can make if you're a parent yes it's the right one of those like everyone's always happy with the photos no one's ever sad the screen tilts.

1:04:22yeah they're they're i would i would not say indestructible they're very destructible but like they're tough enough you know yeah uh you don't have to worry about interchangeable lenses yeah they're great but like they are in fact destructible like you get some dust near that lens mechanism you don't have an arcs 100 anymore it's all over um okay they are i think all these cameras are ultimately to david's point kind of competing with the concept of the accessory kind of well it's just the arcs 100 it solves the most problems in that zone yeah and it's it's very hard to solve all the problems better than that camera.

1:04:58Yeah. I also want to acknowledge that they made an RX1 a long time ago, which was full frame, and they just never updated it. Yeah. And it's been around for a long time, and they could be dominating this space, but they decide not to for some reason. I loved that camera. Yeah, it was great. Holy crap, I loved the RX1. It was great. It was fantastic, and it hasn't been updated in like over five years. So, I don't really know what they're doing. No, Leica is like the only one right now that makes a full frame fixed lens camera. Weird. Yeah, and it costs$6 ,000. And no one can afford it. See, the Sigma's cheap, man.

1:05:31What are we doing here? You're getting one. It's an impulse purchase. We did call one in for a review. So we did not go on the influencer trip to Japan that everyone else went on because we have this annoying ethics policy. But we did ask for a review unit. I think someone's getting it. Yeah, well, they can make nine a day. So presumably we'll get it in 2034. We'll get one. It'll be awesome. Someone on our team is getting one. And then I'm going to look at it with a lot in my eyes. You know, like cartoons with my eyes in my hearts. All right, we should talk about this iPhone. It's like amazing how much we want to avoid talking about the iPhone 16e.

1:06:07Yeah. I know we have some Vertice listeners who just totally tune out when we talk about cameras. I was much happier talking about the camera than I'm going to be talking about the iPhone 16e. Never has a phone been so thoroughly exactly what we expected it to be. Oh, I was going to say never has a phone been so thoroughly exactly not it. Yeah. It's funny because on social media, usually the few days after a new iPhone comes out, people are trying to justify the reasons why they want to upgrade. I've not seen one thing about this from anybody saying why you should get this necessarily, except for people that are insane.

1:06:44And on the one hand, look, like this phone is so clearly not meant for those people. And that's fine. That's fair enough. Right. Like it just it's this is a thing that Apple, I think, struggles with is that it operates at such scale and with so much attention that everything it launches is ostensibly geared towards everyone everywhere. And this is just so not that right. Like, I don't think anyone who is considering a pro phone will ever look twice at this. Right. Like, Neil, your proposed headline, no one should ever have to care about this. I actually think is like very descriptive because this is for people who don't care about their phone.

1:07:20This is like, I want to have a phone. But it's$599. If you're that person, you should buy a used iPhone 15. Or a new iPhone 15. If I had used 15 Pro for like the same amount. Right. And you'll get MagSafe and you'll get way better cameras and like, you'll just make a happier person. No Apple intelligence, Neelai. That's a plus. I cannot be bothered. To what end. Yeah. I think Apple really thought Apple intelligence was going to drive a huge cycle. And it was the super cycle. This was the this was the thing last year. Do you remember this? They were talking about the super cycle of smartphone upgrades because of Apple intelligence.

1:08:01Yeah. And oh, boy, is that not the thing? Well, have you noticed that the billboards have changed? They used to be hello, Apple intelligence. I don't see those anymore at all. Now it's all Genmoji billboards because they know that's what people actually care about. Do they, though? It's all I care about. Do you? So is this just a phone that can get Genmoji? Is that what we're saying? This is your cheapest Genmoji access? Wait, okay, hold on. I no longer care about the 16e, David. I need to know everything about your Genmoji life. Oh, God. What are your use cases for Genmoji? How long do you have?

1:08:34I'm frustrated by Genmoji and the same reason that I'm delighted by Genmoji. Okay. In that it's just like they tried to make Genmoji exactly like Emoji in every possible way. And in that way, it's very useful for regular people as long as they know where the button is, which it's glowing. So I hope that they know where it is. But they look like Apple Emoji because they're trained on that Apple Emoji character set. And there just aren't emojis for everything like Unicode. They add three or four a year. Everyone has to vote on them. That's great. But when you want to make very specific things, you know, like stickers, I think, were one of the biggest upgrades to the iPhone in a very long time.

1:09:15time or at least to iMessage because when you can press and hold on something make a custom sticker everyone uses that people love it that is cool Genmoji is like that but it's more it's like it abstracts it away a little bit so that it's more usable with people that you do not have that specific relationship with what was the last Genmoji you made we're doing this now oh gosh all right I'm gonna look right now I've never made a Genmoji maybe I should buy an iPhone 16 Yeah, like, is this in your day-to-day? Like, you're just out here Genmoji-ing up a storm? Somebody's like, do you want to get dinner?

1:09:50And you're like, Genmoji, make me a person eating spaghetti. Wait, is that how you invoke a Genmoji? You have to say Genmoji at last? Genmoji, Genmoji, Genmoji. I'm not sure if we can put this in the show, but if you just Genmoji gun, it will make you a gun. Cool. I just wanted to test that. Very strange. So you're just sending cartoons of guns to me? Oh, laughing, crying, throwing up. Very good one. Oh, this is your Genmoji. These are Genmoji. This is the one I'm saying. They mix stickers, Genmoji, and Emoji in the same area of the keyboard because they want people to think of them as the exact same thing.

1:10:29I will say I like laughing, crying, throwing up as a Genmoji. That's pretty good. It's quite good. I will send it to you because it is very good. I'm just going to send you some guns. Just in the middle of the night, David. I just wanted to test how many different types of guns it would make, and it's a lot. You could do a pipe. Wait, so. Oh, this one is good. This is the pumpkin and the devil emoji mixed, and I use them for Halloween. That's very good. I do like that you're just spamming, David, with the worst emoji ever. This is fantastic. That's very good. So, again, to just bring this all the way around, our thesis is that people will buy a$600 not good iPhone.

1:11:12to send cartoons of guns. No, but I have noticed all of the billboards have changed to Genmoji billboards. And I think that they looked at Apple Intelligence and before it was just so abstract. Before it was just, hello, Apple Intelligence, iPhone 16. Now it's Genmoji it. That's their whole thing. It has lasted longer than the Apple Intelligence ads. Like there are more Genmoji ads. They've lasted a longer period of time. It's funny because they started all those ads before you could get Apple Intelligence. and then people got Apple intelligence and they stopped advertising it yeah and yeah I see what you're saying my experience with Apple intelligence outside of Genmoji was that I took a script that I had in uh Apple notes and I did the rewrite feature intending to revert back to the old script because you know I was just testing it and then it crashed Apple notes and then I could not revert it to my actual script and that was my only copy of the script um woof and that was my mistake so i just i don't think people really care about can i but the only true feeling i have about the 16e is that not having mag safe on it is criminal it is like almost all of the phone mounts in my house all the batteries that i use now like it's all mag safe all the way down the line in the car.

1:12:34I have one next to the mirror in my bathroom and I just like put the phone on the next to that in the morning. Yeah. Have it played YouTube TV at me. That's amazing. It's like all that is super fun and interesting and that is the only like really great accessory ecosystem that Apple has ever created. Yeah. And they're just like the cheap phone. The$600 phone can't have it. Why? People are now going to go into the Apple store. They're going to buy an iPhone 16e. They're going to go over and they're going to look at the MagSafe charger because everyone wants that MagSafe wireless charger that is$50.

1:13:08And the Apple employee is either going to say, oh, that doesn't work with your phone, even though it's new, or they're not going to know that. And then they're going to be like, I don't get this. Like, I have to hold it against my phone and it charges at 7.5 watts. Like, how does this work? It just seems like a horror. Like, why would you take this out? Yeah, this is the one completely perplexing thing about this phone is MagSafe. Yeah, I actually think you can make a pretty strong case for every other one of the tradeoffs. I think it lands$100 too expensive. Like, I really agree with Allison's takeaway, which is like the idea of we need a cheaper iPhone and we're going to make some sacrifices to get there.

1:13:48I think other than MagSafe, Apple got almost right. There are like a couple of little things about it, but whatever. Like it's kind of mostly right. But I agree that the MagSafe thing just sucks. And we talked a little bit about this last week and heard from a bunch of people who were like, whatever, just buy a MagSafe case for your phone. And would I bet that Apple is going to sell you some of those? Sure. But like that's not a solution to the problem. They just get rid of MagSafe altogether and everything's Chi 2 and Chi 2 ready. That sounds like Apple. Yeah. I don't know. It's a phone. Let us know if you're the target market for this phone.

1:14:24Who is this? But this is like the weirdest iPhone launch I can remember. Like never has an iPhone come out with such a, okay. Do you think if this thing were$450, we'd be having a totally different conversation about it? Yeah. If it was$350. Well, I think that's unreal. That's like unrealistic for what phones cost right now. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard of that inflation, Neelai. Yeah. And tariffs. Like, is this the first tariff phone? That's the other question. I read Ben Thompson makes the argument that this is the first tariff phone. But we'll see. I mean, like, Tim Cook is, you know, we're going to get to it in the next segment.

1:14:59And it's probably letting you around. Tim Cook is just throwing fake numbers to Donald Trump to get out of the tariffs. Smart move. We'll see. And also, realistically, no one ever buys this phone. Like, you go to your Verizon store, and Verizon's like, this one. And you just leave. And that's the end of that. Did you watch Marquez's review of it, by the way? No. He has a skit at the beginning. It's like 90 seconds long. And one of him plays the employee and one of them plays a customer. And the customer is just asking, I want a phone that does exactly this, exactly this. And the employee just gives him everything but the 16-y because it just makes no sense.

1:15:36And I just, again. Yeah. Who is this? I'll go watch it. Apologies. It's like one of the few I haven't watched. But it's like, I don't want to care about the 16-y. I just didn't give it the time. It's a way in the door. and then Apple can sell you more expensive things. I do love that. Except for MagSafe accessibility. This is my favorite, my favorite ongoing like thesis about Apple is that they have some products that don't exist. Like they just have like this, the 16e only exists on the website. It's like the lobster at a diner. Like it's not there. It's like they're not manufacturing it. It's not real.

1:16:08It's like the illusion of a phone to get you to buy a more expensive phone. It's like, no, I think they're manufacturing the phone. We'll see. All right, we got to take a break. We were supposed to talk about the Framework Laptop, which looks really cool, but David tells me that Framework CEO Nirav Patel is coming on the show next week. Yeah, he's coming. Sean and I are going to hang out with Nirav actually later this afternoon. And we're going to have a lot to say, but I'll put all the Framework stuff in the show notes. I think that company is fascinating. The desktop looks really cool. I'm especially excited with the Framework Laptop 12, which is their lower-end touchscreen flippy one that I think is going to be maybe the most kind of mainstream-y thing Framework has made yet.

1:16:46this company is very exciting and I think up to some really cool stuff but yeah we're going to have lots more to talk about on that one on Tuesday yeah cool alright we're going to take a break we're going to come back with the lightning round we'll be right back morning Zoe Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you teach 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.

1:17:17You 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. Lightning round. Unsponsored for Flavor. The people have started saying it to us, so we're going to start saying it back to you. It is marching up the charts of the most demanded merch in the history of The Verge. is an unsponsored for flavor t-shirt. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything, but we're going to make it. When people spot, you can't tell us what to do.

1:17:52It's their defining principle here at the Verge. For some reason to me, that belongs on the bottom of a skateboard that just says unsponsored for flavor. That's where that goes. You could throw away the entire, it's a long ethics policy on the website. It's very complicated. You could throw it out and you can replace it with, you can't tell us what to do. and that would pretty much get you there anyway if you'd like to sponsor the lightning round you can call someone at box media and pay that money and then we will still do this but today we're unsponsored which means there's not even a hint of corporate control because you again to repeat myself you you can't tell us what to do unsponsored for flavor okay david take it away okay so the the The first thing here is that YouTube announced this week that more than a billion people now watch podcasts on YouTube, which is a kind of a number we knew, right?

1:18:47Like YouTube has been creeping up as the most important podcast platform for some time. YouTube music exists, but this is not YouTube music. This is YouTube, YouTube, YouTube main, as they call it, which I forever think is very funny. and basically YouTube is very proud of this fact they're like we are a massively important podcast platform I think there are several dozen issues with the fact that YouTube is this powerful a podcast platform in part because it's not a podcast platform like there's a non-zero chance you're watching this on YouTube right now YouTube is not a podcast app for a bunch of reasons you can't get background audio playback unless you have YouTube premium you can't sort out shows correctly.

1:19:32The audio versus video playback just sucks on YouTube. And YouTube's answer to this is YouTube music. But again, no. And so I just think we're at this really interesting moment where YouTube is both becoming the most popular podcast platform and is kind of changing what podcasts are. And it has changed it so much to the point where now, like Spotify is racing to do video. And it is because it's trying to catch up to YouTube, in part because video is very popular, in part because video is very shareable, and in part because video is really discoverable in a way that audio is not. And so everybody now is turning to video.

1:20:10You didn't like the TikTok, Spotify thing for music, where you heard a clip of a song you've never heard before and decided you wanted to listen to the whole thing? What could possibly go wrong? No, it's a terrible user interface. And I did this whole thing in the installer or the newsletter I write last week where I basically was like, tell me your music setup. And the overwhelming piece of feedback from people was I use Spotify. I hate Spotify, which is like precisely how I feel about Spotify. Like perfect. No notes. And it's because all of this stuff is trying desperately to chase YouTube. And YouTube, meanwhile, is just out here flexing.

1:20:45It's like, yeah, if you want to be relevant on the internet, you have to be on YouTube. And that is increasingly true for people who make podcasts. And I think like Spotify is number I think was that it had a hundred million podcast listeners. And Spotify is like what everybody thinks is either the most important or second most important podcast platform next to Apple podcasts. And YouTube is just after crushing everybody. It's nuts. Let me ask you a foundational question. What is a podcast? Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna ask that too. Cause I, are we just talking about YouTube videos that say they're podcasts?

1:21:21Well, what is that then? Well, I, I mean, we have been making this show for a long time, and it is true some people watch it on YouTube. Lots of people actually watch it on YouTube. But I don't know. Like, what is the difference between waveform and a regular Marquez video? Is it just the microphones? The editing, the microphones. But do you know who broke that distinction? YouTube. YouTube. This is the point, right? Like, what has happened? And I think YouTube has actually done this to a lot of different forms of art is YouTube has just collapsed everything into YouTube. And now everything looks like YouTube and works like YouTube and follows YouTube's particular like trends and systems and norms because it's YouTube because YouTube is the only platform that matters.

1:22:10And thus everything has to be YouTube. How do you categorize a late night show? Because that's a podcast in the way that a YouTube show is a podcast. It's a podcast, but it's also just a bunch of YouTube clips in a row. Yeah. I mean, no, cable news has just been podcasts for a long time. Yeah. If you ever just like watch whatever cable news channel you want to watch, but you just like watch CNBC or CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or whatever, you know, like, oh, this is just the most chaotic podcast in the history. Yeah, very unstructured. At all. It's just happening all at once all the time. A lot of them actually run podcasts that are just the full audio feed of the show.

1:22:45And it works. Like, I don't know if 60 Minutes still does it, but they did for a long time. And like, it works. Well, 60 minutes makes sense. Yeah. People can visualize things in their heads. Is that different from an audiobook? I don't know. So we, I'm trying to remember the headline. The narrative podcasts are running into audiobooks story was a big story. Yeah. And then narrative podcasts like Serial like fell out of favor in like a real way. Yeah. Because I hear you on YouTube and I do love to criticize YouTube at basically any turn. But like really what you're seeing here is platforms pushing everyone to lower the cost of content because they don't pay enough money.

1:23:24And so like YouTube, as if you're like a YouTuber, the amount of money you get from YouTube, from AdSense and the partner program is just going down over time. The amount of views everybody's getting is just going down over time because there's so many more YouTubers. Right. so everyone is just trying to make cheaper stuff and we've been making the show for a long time so i will just tell you like hanging around talking is a very cheap way to make content like we try hard you know we got like graphics there's frame tvs everywhere those weren't cheap let me tell you uh samsung's making a pretty penny off all the podcasters in this world with the frame tv graphics that are everywhere but like that's what's happening is like we're just pushing the cost of content down.

1:24:08So YouTube was able to take podcasts and say, really, we're going to film your podcast and now we're just going to ingest hours more video from every creator who's doing podcasts. They don't have to be scripted. They don't have to be structured. We don't take cameras on location. Here you go. Here's hours and hours of more video. What I don't know is whether that's actually taking share away from Apple podcasts. I know why Spotify's scared, right? This was Spotify's big bet and they're losing to YouTube in one very specific way. Right. But I don't know if the Apple podcast listener was always an audio listener, is like, screw it, I'm going to watch this on YouTube instead.

1:24:49Yeah, I don't know. I have a lot of, I mean, we get a lot of anecdotal information and feedback from people that I would say, by and large, what we've heard from people who are watching and listening to this right now is that it is more sort of additive than cannibalizing. Like there are definitely people who have found the show on YouTube and only consume it on YouTube. But we also get a lot of people who are like, oh, I listen to it while I'm on a walk and then it's like fun to watch clips or I watch the show later. I put it on the TV while I'm in the car, like whatever. So I think it's from what we've heard so far and what we've seen in our data, they're not kind of killing each other.

1:25:27But also, right now, if you're launching a new show, I absolutely guarantee you're spending more of your time thinking about YouTube than you are thinking about Apple podcasts. And that, to me, is the real shift over time. I think that people, the shift towards passive consumption, like needing just things to be playing at all periods of time that they can check in on kind of passively and when they want to. We have a lot of people that tell us, oh, I do the dishes while I have waveform on the TV. Yeah. And I look over every now and then. And I think some form of like ingestion through their eyes while it's also being ingested through their ears every now and then is like what people want.

1:26:03They just want things playing all the time. There's a reason people leave their apartments. They go to the subway. They realize they don't have their headphones with them and they have a panic attack. And people just need more longer things. Yeah. And the fact that the audio medium of podcasts has companies that are like, don't worry, we made sure this is less than 10 minutes. No one wants a less than 10 minutes. Is anyone asking for that? Because you can just pick it back up. Like, nobody is asking for that. If anything, people love the length of, you know, this show. People want a two-hour Vergecast, David.

1:26:32That's what I'm telling you. That's exactly right. We're very close to delivering it here. I've never heard. In this lightning round that is already on 10 minutes on a single item. No one's told me that they want a shorter one. That's all I'm saying. All right, David, we're changing your job. You're just doing Twitch streams 24-7 from now on. Justin TV is back, baby. From your green screen basement. I'm leaning into that conspiracy theory. It's David's basement, so green screen. I have begun occasionally subtly moving things around in my background. And if anyone would like to tell me what those things are, I welcome it.

1:27:03All right. Let me add up these next two lightning round items for you. I forgot this was the lightning round. Apparently. Yeah. That's what I was told. Instagram Reels may get its own app, presumably to compete more directly with TikTok. And then TikTok is upgrading its desktop website. To compete with YouTube, they say. To compete with YouTube. What do you got? Uh, first one. Yep. Makes sense. I mean, I think people go to Instagram for reals at this point. So I think all of this is based about the TikTok ban. Yeah. I think if, because remember, TikTok is technically banned in this country. Yeah.

1:27:41Like the law passed, the Supreme Court upheld it, and then Donald Trump was like, no, we're not doing that. Yeah. And the app stores, Apple and Google were like, that's too much risk. And then Pam Bondi, the new attorney general, sent them a letter, which we have still not seen, that made them feel comfortable to put TikTok back. So now we're in this weird period where this app that is banned, they got a 75-day reprieve from the Trump administration of enforcement of the law. That's coming up in, what, April? Right, David? So in April, this app might go away again or get sold to, I don't know, Don Jr.

1:28:15Limited, whatever's going to happen. Like, I don't know what's going to happen. And if that, what that moment, whatever that moment is, will be a change. And so if you're Instagram, you have to be ready for it. Right. So here's Reels, like not Instagram, like this much more direct competitor to TikTok. And if you're TikTok, I think you have to be like, well, you can't ban a website. Yeah. Realistically, Instagram is just Reels. I think it's, it's almost just like a rebranding thing. And I wonder if it sticks around because Instagram has tested having dedicated apps for things that Instagram already does.

1:28:49quite a few times and they've shut them down quite a few times. Remember IGTV? That was fun. That was a period of time. Someone very senior in Instagram told me recently that IGTV was exactly the right idea and the only thing that got wrong was the videos were too long. Oh, that's interesting. He's like, we had TikTok. It was just long videos and what people wanted was short videos. I mean, that's kind of true. They tried to do the like Hollywood thing and it's actually like, no, just let people film videos of themselves. People want garbage. All right. Just set up some microphones. and start a podcast about gadgets and Brendan Carr and you're going to be fine.

1:29:23Famously, why Quibi worked, for sure. David, I think I disagree with you saying that Instagram is just real. And I actually think my theory about why this is happening, and I'm just going to throw this at you both, and I'm curious what you think, is I watch these Adam Masseri AMA videos every week where he talks about what's going on. And that man cannot figure out what is the most important thing on Instagram, right? There's stories, which a lot of people watch and care very much about, that they are forever like making more important in the product and then denigrating in the product there's the feed which is like a dying thing but is also like the central pillar of instagram so they're trying to make the feed a thing again and they're like we want to let it we want to let you post to your feed without it being such a big deal to post to your feed and i think instagram has just producted itself into total chaos and i think a knows that clearly the easiest thing to spin out and make its own is Reels, because then you have an app that opens to video that is playing with the volume on, which is really important and is a really important part of why TikTok has been so successful, because you open it up and it is playing with the volume on.

1:30:25And that is not, you can't just turn that on on Instagram, but you could if it's just an app called Reels. And then it also says, okay, now we understand what Instagram is again, because no one knows what Instagram is anymore. You just post things, places, and hope that people see them, which is not a recipe for success. And so now everybody's like, what happened to my reach? Where do I post if I want to reach people? And this like this might actually help Instagram tell a story about itself that makes sense for the first time in a long time. Do you think they know what that will be if a Reels app launches, though?

1:30:56Because they fame it meta famously just takes the best part of every app from their competitors and then puts it in Instagram specifically. Right. So now, you know, they've got the Snapchat in Instagram, which is stories, and they've got the Reels in Instagram, which is TikTok. And then And they've got the Instagram and Instagram, which they have long forgotten about. Well, but I think that goes back to your point about it. Reels is the most important part of Instagram. Like, I think a I would bet that if this app still exists, Reels will still be in Instagram and they'll still be in Facebook.

1:31:25And then what meta gets to say is actually we have this video app, but we also have this gigantic distribution across everywhere. So it's like we have TikTok, but we also have TikTok attached to Instagram. It's like the Fediverse, but for one platform. For one company. Which I would just point out is what we call a monopoly.

1:31:46Boosted TikTok videos everywhere you look on meta platforms. I'm telling you, I think it's just so that when people lose access to TikTok again, meta can say, download a new app. It's just TikTok. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think there's probably some conniving, clever motivation, but then there's also a very dumb thing, which is like, are you mad? Push this button. Yeah. And that solves a lot of problems. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, wasn't Instagram notes supposed to be their Twitter competitor? Oh, yeah. And then they just like shut that down? That became threads. Became threads. Okay.

1:32:17Are you mad at Twitter? Download this app. And it worked for five minutes until they're like, what if this algorithm was the worst? Yeah. That was the end of that. Okay. We got to do – it's a lightning round. So we're going to move through politics very quickly. David, I'm assigning you to this job because I can't. You know what I'm saying. Okay. Okay. I'm just going to say a bunch of things in a row, and you can stop me whenever you feel like it. Does that sound good? Yeah. Doge remains insane. The big news of this past week was that Elon Musk, a lot of federal employees got an email telling them to respond with five bullets about what they did, and then Elon Musk posted on X that if they didn't respond to that email, they would take that as resignation.

1:32:59uh that's nothing and is nothing so a bunch of departments said don't answer this email a bunch of departments said answer this email everybody's up in arms about it nobody knows what to make of it uh musk and then donald trump continue to kind of say it's a real thing and people should do it but it appears to be nothing except just more abject chaos uh doge god only knows what it is or who works there but the the new thing that happened this week uh was that amy gleason who was formerly an employee at the U.S. Digital Service, was named, scapegoated. I don't know what word you want to use. In the executive order that creates Doge, it says there will be a Doge administrator.

1:33:44Then no one knew who that person was. Right. Judges were asking United States Attorneys General, who is the administrator of Doge? And they'd be like, I don't know that at this time. Right. Because I think literally they didn't. And a lot of reporting from from us and Wired and others suggest that even the people who work there didn't know who they were reporting to. Elon Musk is in every meaningful way in charge. He is not a government employee, so that's not how he's a special government employee. Sure. What is a photo, David? That's where we are. I mean, knock yourself out. Yeah, you can have whatever you want.

1:34:16He was in a cabinet members meeting like none of this is real anymore. I don't know. I think the thing that makes all of this just break and not and weird and all the reporting kind of be weird. is that all of this assumes that there are processes and things that you can and cannot do when you're in certain positions, and they are just saying none of that matters, and we're going to do what we want anyway. And in certain ways, they're subverting these things and saying, okay, here's the administrator because you asked so many times, but none of that matters for them. They just do not care. So it's important that the reporting is happening, but also what do these facts mean?

1:34:52Right. There's that paragraph in all of these stories that is like, this breaks with longstanding, norms and understanding of how they say and it's like yeah like every single other thing no other president has had a full cabinet meeting where just some guy wearing a shirt that reads tech support and wearing a baseball cap with those things talked the most yeah that was elon that's that's just so okay so then i say all of this uh which led to i would say the funniest thing that happened this week uh which is in in the housing and urban development department somebody put on tvs all around the department uh an ai generated video of president trump sucking on elon musk's feet like i don't know how else to say it other than that uh and it became it became a whole thing it got shared a bunch of places uh and it is it is it is hysterical if you have not watched it don't but also i will put the link in the show actually the funniest part of this is it is an ai deep fake and so like blue sky had a content moderation controversy about it because you're not supposed to share ai deep fakes but then it was a newsworthy video of a tv in a government agency being hacked so then they undid it and they're like we're very sorry we we've rethought our moderation decision here just weird but if If there's anything that's going to get us to an anti-deepfake law, it's deepfakes of this caliber.

1:36:18That's true. It's real. Weird. Yeah. Okay. So that's like Doge and everyone's reporting on Doge and like the Times say has a whole list of all the people who work there. It's long and extensive. It's definitely a coup. I just want to be as clear as I can be. There's a weird coup happening in our government. Yep. And it's by weird nerds. Okay. We're going to keep reporting on it. Then there's like the regular Trump stuff that also happened this week, which I find very funny because it just rhymes with the Trump one. So like Tim Cook had a meeting with Donald Trump and promised him$500 billion of U.S.

1:36:54investment. They put out a press release about it. They said they're going to build a school in Michigan for manufacturing. They're going to build servers for Apple intelligence. I guess they're all just going to do Genmoji all day long. they're gonna build those in houston yeah those guns don't generate themselves right so trump is happy because he got you know i think whatever tim cook promises in american manufacturing he's like screw it they're making iphones in kansas like he doesn't know he's not paying attention in trump one uh famously tim cook opened a factory that was already open and invited trump to the grand opening of the already open factory where they were going to start making the mac pro that they had already been making at the factory.

1:37:35Yeah. It's fantastic. You can go look at it. It's a very confusing situation. I'm glad that Tim Cook knows that he can do this at least. Tim Cook is trapped on a treadmill of his own making. Yeah. He can never retire. His job is to manage Donald Trump forever. Anyway, so they announced this$500 bill investment, which is great. I want Apple to invest in the United States. I think we should manufacture more things here. All this is good. Great for the economy. We should build manufacturing centers of excellence in Detroit all day long. I have no qualms with any of the things that they are doing, the substantive things that they are doing.

1:38:07What I will point out is that the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, looked at the numbers and they're like, these numbers are fake. I love that. So I'm just going to read you this paragraph in the Wall Street Journal. Apple's$500 billion is mostly already on the books is the headline. Apple spent about$1.1 trillion in the past four fiscal years on total operating expenses and capital expenditures. Wall Street expects nearly$1.3 trillion in total spending over the next four years, according to consensus estimates. While Apple doesn't break out expenses per geography, about 43 % of its revenue comes from America.

1:38:43Assuming the U.S. constitutes the bulk of that number, if spending is in line with revenue, then a rough figure of 40 % of projected global spending through 2028 equates to about$505 billion. So if you just math out how Apple spends money, there you go. They used Apple intelligence to rewrite their expenses and show Donald Trump the expenses. This is just the money they were going to spend. They took an Excel spreadsheet, or I guess a numbers spreadsheet, and said, Apple intelligence, make this a press release. And that's what it was. You can argue with this, right? You can say Apple almost certainly does not spend, does not invest in line with where revenue comes from.

1:39:21They do most of the manufacturing in China and other places overseas. You can see all this stuff, but the plan from Apple is always the same. is they manage Trump in particular because they cannot accept tariffs. So they manage Trump in particular by making him promises that they've already made to themselves. And they just re-announce things. And somehow Tim Cook has just made an art of this. It is wild. Yeah, I mean, the show is the thing, right? And there's a bunch of really fun details in all of it. I think Apple's plan that they said was to hire 20 ,000 people over the next four years, which is roughly in line with Apple's ongoing hiring plans.

1:39:59They hire about 5 ,000 people a year. They were going to, there was like a big thing. They were going to spend a bunch of money with TSMC in Arizona. Apple is already the largest customer of TSMC in Arizona. It's like, all you have to do is look at it, but you get to write the thing that's like, thank you, Donald Trump, we're spending$500 billion and like everybody wins, right? Like, is it, is it ruthless and calculating and not really true? Yeah. But I feel the same way about it that I do about everybody sending a million dollars to go to the inauguration. It's like, I get it. Like, it is obviously straightforwardly good business.

1:40:34And also, you should feel bad about yourself. Yeah, it's just weird because there's this big split between, you know, like classic Trump corruption. You know, like, he's a real estate developer, so you got to spend money on his party. You know, and it's like, oh, he's a club promoter. You got to do some, like, club promoting stuff. Like, great. You know, like, Trump won. Like we lived it. And this is substantially better than, for example, Fox comment announcing an LCD factory in Wisconsin that they never built. Apple announced some stuff. It's already doing great. That's right next to the Doge corruption, which is like weird secrets and like straightforwardly illegal and unconstitutional power grabs by Elon Musk that everyone's like, oh, that's new.

1:41:15There's a good one of those this week, in fact. This FAA thing. What's going on there? So basically the short version of it is it looks like the FAA, which has been kind of infiltrated with SpaceX employees who have showed up to, you know, quote unquote, fix the FAA, may take a$2.4 billion contract that it had given to Verizon in order to do, I don't know, FAA things. I don't pretend to know what the FAA does, but there was$2.4 billion that now they would like to give to Starlink instead. And there's been a big focus of a lot of very good reporting over the last couple of weeks about the very straightforward ways in which Doge is going into departments that either regulate Elon Musk's companies and destroying them or give money to Elon Musk's companies and taking more money from them.

1:42:07and this is just this is just that again and like this is money that was give was awarded to verizon that is now being reconsidered and a bunch of people who work for spacex are now at the faa saying oh actually this money should go to spacex and everybody's like isn't that corruption and it's like yes and no one who cares so here's how elon is justifying this which is a delight so I don't know if you've been noticing this it's not been great for air travel in the United States lately so Elon has decided to blame this not on firing a bunch of FAA employees which is a thing that he did including the head of the FAA what if you traumatize everybody who works at the FAA and then you're like but we made your internet connectivity a little bit better do you think that will fix it you know I run a podcast that's largely about management that has never come up as an idea so So he's traumatized this workforce.

1:43:05He's stressed them. He's cut them. They're, they're mad. And then he's blaming all the air traffic problems on a communication system that is quote, breaking down very rapidly. And also quote from Elon, not backed up by the FAA itself. FAA assessment is single digit months to catastrophic failure, putting air traveler safety at serious risk. That's a big claim. Like, you got to back that one. Someone at the FAA should be like, here's the report that says we are nine months away from catastrophic air control failure. That hasn't happened. Just putting that out there. It hasn't happened. Also, you know who didn't make that system is Verizon.

1:43:48Right. They haven't started yet. This is the new system. So it's unclear what he thinks is breaking. he's saying he's providing starlink terminals at no cost to taxpayer on an emergency basis to restore air traffic control connectivity no cost to taxpayer right well there's that but it's also like so wait is it just internet access because that's what starlink is yeah are is it are you saying the system that's just the internet yeah are you saying verizon can't put some fios in at the airport what are you like what are we talking about here like yeah i know I have many problems with our nation's ISPs.

1:44:30I think most of them are bad. I think if any ISP CEO wants to come on the show, I will look them in the eye and say, I think you did a bad job. You're charging people too much money. Great. Provisioning internet access at the airport is actually not a problem. I was going to say, I don't think I've ever said poor Verizon before. Yeah. And I still, you know, but in this case, it's like, but he's taking a$2.4 billion contract for himself. There's just a lot of that going on right now. And there's like, there was some really fun follow up on the$400 million State Department plan to buy Cybertrucks that they originally tried to blame on the Biden administration.

1:45:11But it turns out when it was the Biden administration, it was$400 ,000. And then they made it$400 million on the Trump administration. And then they canceled the whole thing. It's like, it's just, it's just nakedly obvious what everyone is doing here. And the question is just, is anyone going to stop them at this point? And that to me feels like a very open question. I think Elon's drug use will stop it before a person. That's my, my current going theory. That period of time could be any period of time. My man's obviously like living hard right now. Yeah. I've seen him on many stages talking. All right, Neelai, it's time.

1:45:47for America's Favorite Segment, the podcast within a podcast. We took a break last week and the people demand it. All right, let's wrap it up. It's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy. A new segment here on America's Favorite Podcast about the FCC. Brendan Carr is a dummy. So let me just say, I'm just going to say this sentence to you. This week, Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has decided the best use of his authority is an unelected censorship cop is to attack a country music festival. That's not where I thought that sentence was going. That's the opposite of where I thought that was going to go.

1:46:24That's what our man is doing this week. I want to be 100 % clear. This is a real thing that notable idiot Brendan Carr has decided to do this week. So the iHeart Media runs the iHeart Country Festival, and he sent a letter to Bob Pittman, the CEO of iHeart, saying, hey, are you doing some payola? Are you saying if people take cheaper rates to play the iHeart Country Festival that you'll give them more airtime on iHeart radio stations? In a vacuum, this would be a great story in 1954. In reality, I don't know if anyone has heard of this company called Spotify, which just does naked payola all the time.

1:47:09But because iHeart runs radio stations, and Brendan has regulatory control over the airwaves, he gets to make political hay with a certain constituency by saying, I'm attacking a country music festival to make sure there's no liberal corruption in country music. No problem that has played country music for years now. Just stupid. Like, it's, iHeart's a monopoly. Like, yeah, dude, there's weird corruption in iHeart media and Clear... iHeart used to be Clear Channel. If you're like a 90s kid like me, Clear Channel is like one of the most nakedly corrupt media enterprises like in this country's history.

1:47:53Yeah, dude. They're doing some payola at the Country Music Festival. Good job. Yeah. Good job, Brendan. He followed that up, by the way. He had a closed-door meeting with Republican members of Congress to talk about George Soros owning radio stations and what he can do about that. I would just point out Rupert Murdoch also owns a bunch of radio stations and TV stations in this country. He doesn't seem to be a problem. It's definitely George Soros. So we're just doing partisan censorship by Brennan Carr. None of this makes any sense because none of it stands up to even the slightest bit of intellectual scrutiny.

1:48:29He just likes having the power of being an unelected censor. And that brings us all the way to the stupidest thing that he's doing, which he's making these noises about reinterpreting Section 230 to, I don't know, make it easier for him to put Mark Zuckerberg in jail or something, right? Section 230 is a law that says the big companies are not liable for what the users post on their platforms. So if I put something on Instagram, you can't sue Mark Zuckerberg over what is on my Instagram account. The whole internet relies on this law. Our comment section relies on this law existing. Reddit, you name it, next door.

1:49:04But he's like, we got to reign in big tech and I will reinterpret Section 230. Unelected. deeply unstylish. Brendan Carr will reinterpret this law, which was written by the way, by people who are still alive. Like Ron Wyden wrote section two 30. He was on decoder two weeks ago. You can just ask him what he thinks it means, but Brendan Carr is going to just reinterpret it. Somehow he released this in a story in the New York post that I swear to you is written like the worst LinkedIn poetry I've ever seen in my entire life. like just one sentence long paragraph in the story just says social media has replaced chat rooms end of sentence end of paragraph why uh it's very confused we'll link to it just i want you to know this is some this is like the vogon poetry of policy writing in the new york it's like it's so bad uh and the idea is that he will somehow reinterpret section 230 to make facebook a publisher and then ever can sue facebook defamation this is absolutely not how that law is supposed to work.

1:50:07This is the height of stupidity from Brendan Carr. And I know this because, again, the guy who wrote the law talks to us all the time. He was just on our shows like two weeks ago. And this is not what he meant when he wrote the law. I do feel like it's dangerous for you to say at any time that this is the height of Brendan Carr's stupidity, because like, it's still early, my dude. We're only like six weeks into this. That's true. Well, look, he's going to take down a country music festival. There's one thing you want the FCC of this country doing. It's attacking the country music industry. What are you doing?

1:50:38Anyway, Brendan, as always, I know you listen. I know your staff gives you readouts. I've known it for years, buddy. If you want to come on Decoder or come on this show, you can tell us about your smart home setup. I bet it sucks. You're welcome too. You're just not very smart, Brendan. You're welcome to come on the show and face an actual hostile interviewer who questions your use of the government's power to shut down speech that you don't like because that's what you're doing every single time and we're just not going to let you off the hook. All right. That was our weekly segment, Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:51:08We need theme music. Brandon Kiefer on our team, I will tell you, has been quietly creating theme music for Brendan Carr is a dummy. And there is a chance we are going to roll that out at some point in the near future. So get ready. Can you just imagine waking up and being like, huh, I should control speech in this country. What I will do with that power that I've given myself for no reason is attack a country music festival. Yeah. Run by iHeartMedia. That's the consequential stuff right there. When I think of complete corrupt, it's IRs meeting. Go after Coachella first and then we'll talk. You know what I mean?

1:51:41David, I'm going to read you this sentence and you got to tell me. It's a palate cleanser for a two-hour broadcast. Okay. Automatic combines Beeper and text.com messaging services. What does that mean? So this is two hours easily.

1:51:54So we talked a lot on the show about Beeper, the messaging app that ran afoul of Apple in some really interesting and complicated ways. beeper eventually sold to automatic the company that owns wordpress.com uh they'll email me if i'm not that specific about which part of wordpress automatic oversees uh automatic kind of a mess because matt mullenweg is having a weird time on the internet right now uh they're in lawsuits but anyway uh they made this big bet on messaging they bought both beeper and this company text.com which is doing the same kind of thing that beeper was doing basically trying to like unify all of your messaging apps into one messaging app uh eric midzikovsky who was the head of beeper at least as i understood it was going to run this whole new thing the combination of the text.com team and the beeper team at automatic eric midzikovsky since left and is now doing pebble again uh and so kishan bagaria who was running text.com is now in charge of this whole team and they just put out betas of the first new apps which are essentially just reskinned text.com apps into a thing that is now called beeper so beeper is the new name but text.com appears to be the actual technology uh they redid an iphone app but they're still at this like unified messaging everywhere thing i downloaded the betas they're as interesting and messy as ever uh but they appear to be still for real at this game uh i had a i wondered if after all of the Apple kerfuffle if they would just spin out a different direction and try to do something else in messaging, but Automatic appears to be actually pushing towards this.

1:53:35Huh. That all made sense. I think Brendan Carr should arrest them. There you go. I'm here to help. Also, before we go, I have some breaking news. Yeah. Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, said this afternoon on Bloomberg television that Amazon is going to be releasing some new Alexa devices this fall. And he said the sentence, I think there's a sustainable business model, which is always what you want to hear. That's good. That makes sense. That tracks basically what Panos was saying. Yeah. So this is 2025, I think, in two runs just became the year Alexa is either going to work or collapse in a really fascinating way.

1:54:15Yeah. It's definitely going to turn on all the lights in your house for booking you a ticket to Japan. Get out of here. And then an Uber will show up and bring you to JFK. Yeah. Or drugs. It's one or the other. All right, David, thank you so much for being here. That was incredible, my man. Appreciate it. We'll have you back soon. Father David, you're fine. I'll take it. That was it. That was the Verge Cast. Rock and roll.

1:54:40And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. and that's it. We'll see you next week.

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