The speech police came for Colbert

24:29It's the same story with Bezos and The Washington Post. It is just these institution after institution being lit on fire because somebody bought it who doesn't want the game. He doesn't want the game. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to end Brendan Carr's dummy by once again finding faint praise for Rupert Murdoch. I'm going to do it. I'm going to make this comparison. The unlikeliest bedfellows of Brendan Carr's dummy. I do not agree with nearly anything Rupert Murdoch does. David used to work at the journal. The Wall Street Journal in the entire Murdoch empire. The newsroom of the Wall Street Journal is a crown jewel.

25:02It makes real news to the highest standards. You know, Joanna Stern, our friend, just left the journal to go independent. She and I talked about that for years. And one of the reasons she loved the journal was she loved the standards of the journal. And she and I talked about it all the time. She's like, I love meeting these standards. That's Joanna, right? She's like very competitive. She wants to hit the highest standard. The journal was the highest standard. Murdoch knows that that is the thing he needs to protect. He knows that is the truest source of his power and authority. It's not Fox News scaring old people all day.

25:32It's when the Wall Street Journal publishes a story, it moves markets and it brings down empires. That's power. It's because he's a newspaper man, like old school. Yeah. And all these new guys, they don't understand that if you cede that authority, if you let that get tainted, you're going to end up with nothing. And you can really see that dynamic playing out with this new class of billionaires that thinks they can just play in the news. Murdoch, again, he understands one thing, that you can't screw with the journal's newsroom because when the journal says Theranos is full of shit, But yeah, Theranos is full of shit.

26:04Anyway, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on this show, which you currently cannot regulate. I would love to have this debate with you. I would love to see where you think you can just unilaterally change FCC administrative law precedent. That's a fulsome debate we could have. I could also just yell at you for a while because it seems like you like being humiliated. Brendan, as always, you're welcome on this show or Decoder. That has been Brendan Carr is a Dummy, America's favorite podcast. We did it. All right, we're going to take a break and then we're going to talk about gadgets because God help us.

26:31We need to talk about gadgets. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from L 'Oreal Group, using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skin care. Light, straight, and multi-styler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L 'Oreal.com. L 'Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world.

27:11All right, we're back. A lot of gadget news this week, actually. Some of it, huge bummers about ongoing availability of gadgets, but we'll get to that. Neelai, we have to start with a thing that I think you did to us as a society. You have been saying forever that you think the killer app of smart glasses is essentially facial and name recognition of everyone. If I could walk around with glasses and just immediately know who everybody is, that would be awesome. Yes. But can I just point out, I've always said the other half of that idea, too. Which is? In order to build that product, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is bad.

27:53Okay. Well, Neil, I have such good news for you. So I just want to just hammer that down. Go back and listen. I've said this a lot. I'm like, to get the thing everybody wants, you have to build the bad thing. Well, I have, again, really good news for you, which is that Meta appears extremely interested in building the bad thing and in shipping it in, I would say, the grossest and most cynical possible way. So the news this week was a story from the New York Times about Meta planning to add facial recognition tech to the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which is a thing I think we have all assumed was coming.

28:27There's been some reporting that this is a thing Meta was interested in for some time. There was that project that college kids did a while ago that you could use it for that freaked everybody out. And Meta, by the way, disclaimed that whole project. Yeah. Just to be clear about what that project was, they bought the Meta Ray-Bans and they hacked them up to send live video to a tool called PimEyes, which is very problematic all unto itself. And then that would feed back who you were looking at and like their LinkedIn. And they made a video where they were just like running around the subway, like walking up to people and like, don't I know you?

29:00And then like sort of like reading their LinkedIn to them and blowing minds. And Meta was like, this isn't official. We didn't do it. And it's like, dude, you're so close to doing this. But anyway, so according to this New York time story they they got a memo from a meta executive uh who is not named in the story um i have a guess but it's not important i think we have the same guess i think we have the same guess um this feature is going to be called name tag um and this this document which i believe is from last may um basically lays out the plan to launch name tag and the idea was to release it at a conference for blind people to attendees there um which is already already sort of cynical in a way it's like we're going to take this thing and put the best possible version of the spin on it in a way that it is like accessibility feature and it is valuable to this group of people just ignore all of the other use cases and horrors but anyway uh there's also a line in the memo that specifically i'm just going to read you this line because it's just i mean like i could set it up but it tells on itself.

30:04It says, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. Rough. That's just, I mean, like... Right. ICE is putting babies in prison, and that's a good time to launch a worldwide facial recognition. Nobody's gonna have time to be mad at us about this because they're mad about other things. I will point out, to the credit, the civil society groups, the ACLU, the EFF, all of them are like, no, we'll find time. That was like, all the energy. No, we'll find time for you. Yeah.

30:33Wait, so who's your guess as to who wrote this line? Andrew Bosworth. Yep, that's my guess. The CTO of that. I think we've both met Boz before. We've spent time with him. He very famously wrote the memo called The Ugly, which was about the cost of connecting the world. And it was basically like, no matter what, we will connect people. If you go read that memo, it was very controversial at the time. And his argument was, I wrote it to make people think about all these costs, but the style is like dead on exactly the same as this line. I'm not saying we know. Boz, if you want to come on the show.

31:03So by all means, I would love to talk to you about this. But I just, I'm guessing. Baz runs Reality Labs. That's why, that's my guess. Same. Yeah. But I think this raised all of the issues you would think that it would. Lots of people are very nervous about this. I just want to know how you feel knowing, like, A, of course, if anybody was going to do this, it was going to be meta. Of course. Right? Yeah. Of course. But even in this same document, Meta outlines its supposed safeguards for this feature, which are nothing. The idea is that this was sources that told the Times this in their reporting.

31:42The facial recognition technology isn't just supposed to work on everybody. It's supposed to find people that you're connected to on one of Meta's platforms. but it also is looking into quote identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a meta site like instagram that's everybody that's everybody that's real bad yeah what you want is the influencer tracker 5000 that's gonna make hot girls across america feel safe what could possibly go wrong uh yeah you follow her on instagram it's real bad that's real bad uh-huh um i mean first of all you should not build this product like i keep saying it's the killer app because it's the killer app.

32:18If I could just remember people's names and faces, I would be the president of the United States. It's the only thing stopping the rapid ascent of my political career. You're one face blindness problem away. I am horrible at names and faces. Again, for 20 years of this career, I've just been apologizing every day of my life. I'm pre-apologizing to you now. I'm not going to remember your name. It's just, I'm really bad at it. If I had a pair of glasses that could just solve this problem, I would be the most powerful person in world history. But I know in my heart that the cost of that power is too high, right?

32:51You should not de-anonymize everybody all the time and do it in a way that allows every government on earth, which now thinks the guardrails are off, to go access that data and track where everybody is all the time. And that is what our government will do. The second meta has a database of where and when it saw people, which is the thing that they inevitably have to create. There was a time when maybe you would trust a tech platform to say, no, we'll stand up to government pressure. We'll do warrant canaries, right? Do you know about these? They all have these like compliance statements on their websites and if every year they publish one, it's like, we have not received any incoming requests for information.

33:33And then like, every now and again, they subtly change the language to make it clear that they've received requests they don't like. Yeah, there was a time when like this was a game everybody played and like the civil society groups like the ACLU and the EFF would like watch those. That's all over. All of them want to be defense contractors. All of them want to sell AI to Pete Hegseth except for Anthropic. I don't know what's going on with these companies. I don't know why they think they should participate in the widespread abuse of our civil liberties, but I don't trust them to do the right thing.

34:01Money. I mean, that's money. Money, but Sarah Jong has this line she says when she describes their attitude, which is they just want to fly their helicopters over the Favolas. Like, yeah, they will have all the money and we will all live in a tent city and they will fly over us. And like, that's what this is if you release this product. I want it so badly. I cannot, I've said it for so many years. So many people pinged me about this. This is the killer app. Putting digital information over the real world on a pair of glasses is the killer app for the next generation of devices. It's not chatbots.

34:39it's not vr it's not anything it's literally putting digital information over the real world right and augmenting your reality and the killer app for that is saying you can be at a conference and know everybody's name it will the second that feature is released everyone will buy those classes and you shouldn't make it because the the the social cost of that product is building a worldwide database of facial recognition and surveillance that will be used for nefarious purposes Yep. And Metta saying out loud, we don't think the people will be there to stop us because they're busy with the rest of the civil liberties abuses is as cynical as it gets.

35:17Well, and inside of that is, I think, a recognition of that exact dynamic that you're talking about, right? Where I think what a lot of these tech companies want you to believe in the way that they act publicly is that all of the ideas about the tradeoffs are overblown, that we can solve them with products, that we can just handle this the right way, and that actually that tradeoff doesn't exist. It's a false dichotomy that you're creating. What this makes very clear is that Meta fully understands all of those ramifications and all of the ways that this is going to be received and discussed and all of the problems that it will cause.

35:48And it has decided it's worth building anyway. Again, we're recording this Wednesday morning. Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be on trial today. He's supposed to be on the stand today in the case alleging that Meta and other social media companies designed products defectively. Not speech, not 230 concerns, but that the literal product design of their platforms caused harm to people. That's a big deal. This is unusual. We're going to see how these cases go, but Adam Mysterio is on the stand, Zuckerberg is on the stand, the rest of the social media companies are going to be on the stand in this way.

36:20This is just the next turn. I mean, last week we spent however long talking about ring cameras and pervasive surveillance and the collective action trade-offs of wanting a camera on your property, even though it will affect other people's rights. Just wait. Until you get the benefit from the glasses and everyone else gets the pain of being stalked. And a thing that's going to happen is you can't product your way out of glasses getting ripped off of people's faces. Right? You can't product your way out of people physically demanding that you take the thing that's tracking them off of your face.

36:52Yeah. We saw it with Glass Holds and I guarantee you if this product is released that we'll see it again. And there's a line in the story where Zuckerberg is saying he thinks they should turn off the recording light. Oh, wow. Or not have it be so prominent. And you know why? It's because that is the social cost that will make people say, turn that off or take those off. That becomes the problem. You're watching the ring outcry, and then you're like, and then we'll put the glasses on everyone's face. Like, these are not compatible ideas. Like, we'll see how that goes. I've been thinking a lot about like a decade ago now when all of the sort of first stuff was happening in public about Cambridge Analytica and the way that these platforms, in particular Facebook at the time, was being misused and the way that, you know, WhatsApp was being used in genocides around the world.

37:39And like there was this idea that the mistake these companies had made was not considering the downstream effects. Right. They had this one idea. They're like, we want to do this thing. And that the thing they didn't do was think through that thing the whole way. Right. Like, what if this works? And either what has changed or what we just realize now that we didn't then is they actually did. They they understood the consequences. They understood the potential. They knew what the cost would be. And they just pushed on anyway. and and whether that is a new behavior now or it has always been like that and we are just still continuing to learn about it i don't know but but it is very clear to me that like mark zuckerberg is eyes wide open about what these things will be in society and what they will mean and what they will cost and he doesn't care he doesn't care and again i'm it is the killer app if you want everyone in the world to buy these glasses you're like it can just tell people's names and nothing about how particularly Americans are currently wired will make them stop and consider the social cost.

38:39They will, they will fly off the shelves. And then we will have the same as we saw with social media, the same as we're currently seeing with AI, we will have a wave of what are called unintended consequences, but which are actually clearly foreseen consequences. And again, that's this trial. Lauren Feiner is actually in the courtroom today. Um, we're covering it and the idea that they know that the products are defective is very powerful we'll see i don't i i'm hopeful that there's more outcry here i'm not hopeful that we'll get a privacy law i'm not hopeful that meta won't push the boundary in some way no matter what they do but i am hopeful that just seeing how they talk about it actually changes the calibration of how they might release a feature like this yeah okay um all right some other gadgets we should talk about um apple is doing something in new york on march 4th new york shanghai and london yeah that's right notably not cupertino um what i would guess what appears to be happening here uh and this is like john gruber said something to this effect mark german at bloomberg said something to this effect that uh rather than have some big event where they launch a thing and make a whole video So Apple is just going to sort of press release, announce a bunch of new products on its website and then let reporters look at them all at once on this date on March 4th.

40:06Is that your is that your read, too? I don't know about that. They've done the staggered press releases before. You know, I just think my real takeaway here is flying everybody to California to make you watch an infomercial. You can only do that so many times a year. This is why I bring this up, right? Because you can tell a lot about how interesting an Apple product is by the way that Apple announces it. And we talk about this all the time, right? When they launch something by press release, it says a lot about Apple's own interest in this product. And my guess is this is going to be a series of relatively minor updates to things.

40:46What do you think it is? We've been hearing a lot about new iPads with updated chips, which I think would be fine. We've been hearing a lot about new MacBooks. The one wildcard idea is there's been a lot of reporting recently about a new lower cost 12-inch MacBook, like bringing back the MacBook MacBook. But rather than have it be super expensive and bad, have it be cheap and good. That would be really interesting and maybe bigger than some of these other ones that I'm thinking of. But to me, this just seems like just a giant round of spec bumps, right? Like that's what we get from Apple every once in a while now.

41:23Is there anything you're thinking about that I'm missing? The thing I'm honestly thinking about the most is how are they going to handle RAM prices? Yeah. Right? Like you can do a round of spec bumps and Apple can be like, it has eight gigs of RAM for the 50th year in a row. Yeah. But they're running up against it, particularly if they want to do more local AI, which I think they want to do. So I'm actually just most curious about what everything costs. because the RAM market is just fully out of control. And Apple's having these gangbuster quarters, but that's all against high-end iPhone sales, really, and services revenue, which is really just candy crush whales.

42:01And, like, something has to give, and I'm actually sort of dying to know, like, if this really is, what, an iPhone 17e and a low-end MacBook and some iPad spec bumps, the news is going to be, and everything got$100 more expensive. Yes. And I, who knows? Who knows? I'm very, very curious about that aspect of it. Yeah, the news this week on the RAM shortage, by the way, continues to be brutal. We had a story that the price of the Switch 2 might go up. The PlayStation 6 might be delayed. The Steam Deck OLED is going to be intermittently out of stock. It's hard to buy right now. Western Digital and I think other drive manufacturers have said they're essentially out of stock for the rest of the year.

42:43It's the middle of February. Like, it's crazy. And meanwhile, then Meta and NVIDIA signed a huge deal this week for many, many, many, many, many AI chips. That is the story, right? The companies with infinite resources building monstrous data centers have just absolutely cornered the supply of memory in the world. and and the idea now of like you're just a person who wants to buy a gadget it's it it seems like a hundred dollars more expensive might be the best case scenario for a while the worst case scenario is like you're not gonna be able to buy anything for a while the worst case scenario and there are some ceos who are hinting at this out there so like memory supply chain ceos the worst case scenario stuff gets so expensive that the products go away or the companies go to business yes and i think we might just see you know mid-range consumer electronics companies be like we can't do this anymore like so many products are really just like tiny linux computers like tiny embedded linux systems and if like the ram is so expensive that it's not cost effective to ship a tiny embedded linux system you might not have a product and like i think we're we're coming up on that time yeah yeah especially if you're a relatively small company without much leverage like i've been talking to to startups and folks trying to do hardware for the first time now and it is they have no moves because you haven't like if you're Apple.

44:07Apple has a lot of leverage in the industry. It has a lot of pre-existing deals. It is one of the few companies that feels like it might be able to continue to get its way, even in the face of all this AI spending. But if you're just like, if you're a Kickstarter, your inventory just went away. Like it's gone. You have no moves left. And there is going to be like a whole generation of these small and middle-sized companies that just get frozen by this yeah and it's funny i think you know that the bleeding edge indicator is boy it got way too expensive to build a pc right like you want to buy a gpu and some fast ram like well meta is right there like we want all of it's like so that's like the bleeding edge indicator of this i think the apple pricing at this next event on the fourth like i'm you know i i love a spec bump I'm interested to see what they think an iPhone 17e should be, given where they are in the iPhone lineup right now.

45:06That's all interesting. Yeah. What if they're just like, you said you wanted a small, cheap phone. Here it is. It's$200. All the parts are from eight years ago. Enjoy. Right. We've been collecting all those refurbished iPhones to give you trade-in deals. Here you go. It's the iPhone 4. But now with a big screen. Like, who knows? Like, by the way, iPhone 4 with a huge screen would be sick. I was just about to say there are at least two people in my life who are going to text me after this episode saying they want that exact phone. That would be amazing. Just like, it's fine. I'm interested in the products, but I'm like equally interested in what the pricing will be.

45:37Because Apple has a lot of leverage. It had the most leverage for years. And now all of the AI spending for chip capacity at TSMC, for memory, they have competitors who want to pre-buy a year's worth of output. So we'll see. Yeah. So gadgets not coming in March, but that Apple is reportedly working on. We got a big report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg this week about Apple's AI gadget plans. And since you and I have been talking about this, I'm very curious your reaction. So the idea is three different gadgets are being worked on inside of Apple. And the useful disclaimer here is Apple works on everything.

46:14Like any shape of thing you can imagine exists somewhere on Apple's campus. they try a ton of this stuff and it eventually gets winnowed down to a few and then it eventually gets winnowed down to one. And like the three types of gadgets, I would be shocked if all of these end up shipping. But the idea is there are sort of three things being really actively worked on right now. One is smart glasses, which are essentially a sort of straightforward rival to what Meta is up to, according to the reporting. They don't have a display. They're designed to be in really close concert with your phone, which I think is really interesting.

46:49Like, what if Apple's leverage here is just that it's the only one allowed to do stuff on your iPhone in a powerful way? Worked for AirPods. Might work, yeah. The other one is essentially what I would describe as AirPods with a camera, which is a thing we have sort of been assuming they would do for a while. And then the third one is, like, what if AirTag but AI gadget? It's the friend idea. You just don't want to say pendant. It's a pendant. It's a pendant. It's a pendant that you wear around your neck or you put in a case or whatever, but it is a little puck of a thing that is a microphone and a speaker, presumably, that you talk to.

47:25This is the ecosystem Apple is thinking about. And I think I will say my biggest takeaway from this is that Apple continues to see the phone as the thing and that all of these other devices are sort of like the phone is heliocentric in that sense. And they all operate around the phone and use it for connectivity and use it for processing. And I think that is a an extremely good idea and be like an unbeatably good tie in for Apple as the first party manufacturer of this stuff. Yeah. Apple can't not have a phone. Right. You can't turn off the candy crush whales. Well, that, but also like if you just think of the iPhone as basically a brick of battery and connectivity that you can plug stuff into, you have a lot of extra utility you can provide without having to like accomplish the physics miracles that Meta is trying to accomplish to put it all inside of the glasses.

48:18That's true. I think that's right. But I also straightforwardly, Apple is hopelessly dependent on candy crush whales. Like the services line that they constantly talk about is not severance. Yeah. It is Candy Crush Whales. It's in-app purchases and like mostly in-app purchases in games. And like you just got to contend with it. They can't turn that off. Somebody should make a reality show called Candy Crush Whales. Like the Real Housewives of whatever. Just forget that, Candy Crush Whales. I do feel like that would be like someone should make a reality show about the people in casinos who are there 24 hours a day.

48:51And you're like, actually, I don't want to watch this show. It's one episode and then I'm sad. I don't want to watch any more. No, thank you. Yeah, that might be true. Well, I mean, that's just a business reality for Apple. And so many of their decisions are warped around that business reality. I do think that it should just be a brick of connectivity and battery. That's where they started with the Apple Watch, and they ended up having to put way more processing in the Apple Watch and make that thing way more independent of the phone. And so I think there are physics challenges there, too. There are latency challenges there, too.

49:20It's less so with the AirPods, right? AirPods can use Siri and live translate. All that stuff works well with AirPods. but there are challenges there too, as we saw with the watch, which eventually had become its own little iPhone. It's shocking to me that all this effort is not going into the watch. I totally agree. And I think a lot of it, German's report says a lot of it is dependent on these devices having cameras, being able to see the world and having visual intelligence. And you can see Apple's big move for however long has been AR. Tim Cook has talked about it forever. The Vision Pro, right?

49:51The nicest thing anybody said about the Vision Pro was that this is just the dev kit for the true AR glasses they're going to build. I don't know if I believe that, but that was the nicest thing people, that's the excuse you get for the Vision Pro existing. Yeah, for like a decade. You can see how they're going to try to stagger step into it. They have all of the same problems as Meta, and I say this charitably to Meta, which after the previous segment might be surprising. Meta is way better at the we're going to label reality game because meta has a giant content moderation apparatus. Like if you're like, I need to see the world and tell you useful information about it, you are now in the business of content moderation.

50:32Whether or not you want to be. Oh yeah. Whether or not you want to admit it, that is the business you're in. You're going to put information in the world in front of people's eyes. Or you're going to say, you're looking at this, here's what you need to know about it. You are now in the business of collecting, sorting, and displaying information, ranking information. That's recommendation algorithms, that's algorithmic semantic analysis, that's content moderation. And so Meta for its many, many, many flaws, that is just the thing they do. That's the thing Google does. And so Apple, you know, you can put the camera on the AirPods and then someone is looking at something and they're like, what is this?

51:06Apple has to go get the information, understand it, rank it, and tell you what it is like very quickly. Not their core skill. I wonder if they're going to lean on Gemini for that stuff because that's the big deal. I was actually just going to say a thing that I have noticed recently, just kind of at random, is that the Google Lens activity where you point your phone camera at something to search it or identify it is like utterly, completely mainstream. Like everybody uses that in a way that I didn't realize until very recently, but it is not, it's not novel. It's not new. It is just a like normal everyday phone activity for everybody.

51:43Because it got way more useful with AI. Yeah, yeah. It's really good now. uh like i it is i mean at least in my experience it has been my my three-year-old uh does these bath bombs that come with little tiny toys inside of them and i can point at it and a it identifies what like unknowably weird animal it is and b it finds an alibaba link every single time it's so funny it's like here's this little resin toy that you could buy a billion of on aliexpress it's great but like that that behavior pointing a camera at something and saying tell me more about this i think is like a completely normalized behavior how to make that leap to uh new kinds of devices is very important but then also you're right for anybody who doesn't already have that skill which is basically everybody but google building that capability is hard google's been at that a long long long time yeah and you know my joke not to make everything dire is um i've asked a lot of CEOs who are doing VR stuff about this over the years.

52:44I'm wearing your glasses. You're looking at the United States Capitol building and you say, what happened here on January 6th? And you have a big decision to make. Like that answer is very, like literally very political. And right now, particularly fraught. And there's the truth and there's some bullshit and you have to make a choice. You cannot split the difference when that's happening. And so everyone wants to say, you're walking through the art museum and you're looking at the painting and we're going to tell you about the painter. And the reality is people are going to ask much more fraught questions and you are going to have to make decisions and you can't the community note your way out of the truth and in that product yeah right like you have like we've covered the like the crisis at wikipedia we've covered it a bunch of times this year because that's a fight it's like a literal fight about values and truth and you're going to express it with labels and air glasses when people are just like asking what's up there's a lot here uh and you know it's great that apple wants to build the form factors i think they will probably do a better job of the form factor, but the actual product as expressed is what information are you going to put out into the world to overlay the world.

53:47And whether that is, I'm just asking for stuff and staying in my AirPods, whether it's I'm looking at it and showing it on display of the glasses or what will certainly not be the case. It's I built a pendant for you to wear all the time. Yeah. This is the thing I'm most curious about is how does Apple bridge that gap and does their big deal with Google, lead them to just rely on Google for that set of knowledge. Yeah, I think Apple may end up being very happy to not be the arbiter of that information. Well, yeah, but then if they really want out, they have to have multiple providers. Like, you can change the search engine on the phone.

54:23This is very complicated. I don't know how you build that product without getting into this fight. Like, the first thing that will happen is Apple will release this product and political bad faith actors across the spectrum will start asking it questions and then apple will be in a firestorm and like are they going to be the same question are they going to be good at it are they going to stand up for what's true i don't know but this is to me i'm very excited about these products right now when you play with the friend or the rabbit or what it's like the stakes are so low these products the stakes are very high yeah apple is rapidly running towards being hauled in front of Congress so that somebody can read the equivalent of bad tweets to you.

55:06Like every company that does this eventually gets there. And that is that is what Apple is just running towards. Here's my question for you. I know why they're doing this. Tim Cook has said AR is the future for 15 years, like some incredible amount of time. the bet is that one of these things is the new interface, right? The chat is the new interface and that will displace the phone. That voice and vision is the new interface and that will displace the phone. That you need these devices, otherwise OpenAI will release whatever they're going to make with Johnny Ive and that will kill the phone. Do you believe that's true?

55:39No. I think the thing that is ripe for change is input, right? Like the idea that in order to do everything, I have to take my phone out and unlock it and open an app and enter into a thing and log in with my credentials and do something is incorrect, right? And I think that the thing that people have seen with things like ChatGPT, and part of the reason it's so compelling, is that it just works. You don't have to learn the systems. You don't have to log in to do new things. It is just a box that contains lots of functionality. And that's really powerful. Again, this is what Siri was supposed to be the whole time.

56:18This is not a new idea that what we need is better input systems for information. and that the idea of me needing to hold up my phone, like again, you mentioned this with the iPad on stage, like them running around playing games by holding up an iPad in front of their face is clearly not the correct idea. But I think Apple believes very strongly that most things are going to happen on a screen for the foreseeable future. And I think it's probably right about that. So like what this looks like to me is Apple saying, okay, you need an easier way to point your camera at stuff and you need an easier way to input bits of information, whether that's voice or whether that's capture of the world around you or whatever.

56:59I think Apple is pointed less at how do we do AR glasses here and more at how do we just get more stuff onto your phone more quickly. Yeah. For now, at least I think that's probably the right move. Like, is it possible that AR glasses will obviate all of that someday because the display will be in front of your face? Maybe. I don't think we're anywhere near that in reality. No. The hardware challenge of the eyeglasses, I think, is many, many years from being solved. Plus, you got to solve the fact that they're on your face. Yeah. Don't do the display speech now. Everyone can listen to Neel I do the display speech every other reverse cast episode we've ever done.

57:36I won't do it. I'm just saying, look, I've been right about a lot of things on this particular episode. I could be right about a third one. I think my personal feeling about this is you know, Apple just got rid of its head of design. Like there's a new head of design in Apple now. It seems like Tim Cook is retiring. What this company needs to attack the problem of is there a platform shift? Is there an input shift? Is vision. And it's actually like shocking to me that they've sort of cosplayed this idea for every new product they've introduced for years. Steve Jobs' big innovation almost every time in every product category was an input device, right?

58:16The iPod had a click wheel, the iPhone had a touchscreen. And then Tim Cook would be like, it's a watch. It's got the digital crown. Like we did it. We nailed it. And it's like, you're just, this is like when you're a little kid and you put on the firefighter jacket, you're like, I'm a firefighter. You have no idea what you're doing. Like this, the input device is only part of the puzzle. It's using the input device to unlock the product. The mouse and the keyboard, Steve Jobs, right? Being like, we're doing mice on the Mac. Yeah. Always a big input revolution that led to a new product category for him.

58:42Here is one. Here is an input revolution that might lead to a new product category. and you don't see Apple have a strong point of view about what that means for all of its devices. And there's all this executive turnover. It's like, who's going to show up and have the strong point of view about what the actual new input device means for computing? Maybe there's someone there. Maybe it's Sean Ternus who's rumored to be the next CEO. Maybe it's their new head of design. I don't know. But it's funny that they've sort of like played at it for so long. The Apple TV, the remote has a clicker on it.

59:15You're like, that's a horrible idea. The button's back. Like all of that was like cosplaying at the move that Steve Jobs would so often do, which is tell you about how the new input device would make the device easier to use and better. And here it is. Like here's the ultimate new input device. I'm just very curious to have this company in that literal moment of transition does the thing for real this time. Agreed. And it's not just Apple in that sense right now. Everybody is doing the thing where they just point at the same ideas that are sort of in the ether and are like, well, we're doing that too.

59:46And no one has done the thing that you just described. This is going to be a year filled with a lot of people trying. And I would not say I'm like massively optimistic about somebody really connecting those dots. It will be ridiculous. It's going to be a year of ridiculous. It already has been like two years of ridiculous. Agreed. All right. Well, we should move on. But there is one more gadget we should briefly talk about, which is the Google Pixel 10a, which is a new Pixel phone. And that's basically all there is to say about it. It is the Pixel A series we've always liked because it is a good sort of lesser version of the flagship for a lot less money.

1:00:23Like Google has generally made a set of really good trade-offs between the flagship phone and the mid-range phone that has made the mid-range phone really compelling. Todd Hazleton on our team who saw the phone and has used the phone, I would say is less impressed than normal by that set of trade-offs. Can I just read you this sub headline that is hands-on? Yeah. It's like everything we need to say. It's a minimal update. Google didn't bring many Pixel 10 features down to the Pixel 10a. Buy the berry color. It's pretty good. But Todd went to the event and saw the thing and he sent us back a video.

1:00:54So we're going to play the video and then we're going to take a break. I just got out of Google's Pixel 10a event. And really, I think my biggest takeaway is that it's more like a Pixel 9a Plus. It's a lot like this phone. There's some hardware differences. The bezel around the screen is a little bit thinner, which Google said they made based on user feedback. And there's no camera bump that you have on this phone. The back cameras are the same. There's a 13 megapixel ultra wide and 48 megapixel main camera. Meanwhile, the screen got a little bit brighter. It's up to 3000 nits peak brightness.

1:01:25So that means it might be a little bit easier to see outside. But other than that, not much has changed hardware wise. It still has the same Tensor G4 processor and 8 gigs of RAM, which limits the AI features that you can get on this phone versus the regular 10 series. But some software features we're already familiar with are coming to this phone, like Auto Best Take, Camera Coach and Satellite SOS, which will be useful if you get lost in the woods and need to contact friends and family. Oh yeah, there's also some new colors and really berry is the best color and the one that you should pick.

1:01:56That was my favorite in the briefing. So that's a quick look at the Pixel 10a. I really do think it's more of a Pixel 9a Plus for most people. It'll be available to pre-order on February 18th. Starts at$499 for 128 gigs of storage. Back to you, David. okay i will say if you weren't watching go look at the pictures todd's right about the berry but also flush camera big deal i'm very excited about the idea of no more camera bumps in my phone i've been using the the pixel 10 pro and this camera bump is just monstrous are you a no case person oh yeah oh yeah you gotta you gotta live your life nilai this is i dropped this thing 500 times a day no way i've gotten over camera and i'm like well it's they know you're gonna put a case on it.

1:02:42That's fine. Yeah, no, I think that's right. But live the no-case life. It is the way to be. Also get the insurance on your phone. Alright, we've got to take a break, and then we're going to come back. We're going to do some lightning round stuff. A true lightning round, because we're already way over. Brendan's fault. Neil has a vacation to go to. It's lightning round time. We'll be right back.

1:03:02Hi, everyone. This segment of Decoder Sessions features my boss, Helen Havlock, the Veritas publisher, and L 'Oreal Group's Global Vice President of Tech and Open Innovation. I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. We're going to start with a Decoder Classic question, Giv. What does tech and open innovation mean at L 'Oreal? Who is on your team? What kind of projects do you work on? Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in L 'Oreal, working with startups outside. And it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech.

1:03:34So we do all those partnerships, and our team is responsible for them. And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had a blank page. And now how can we bring beauty and tech together? How do you decide which projects to invest in? At the beginning, I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that beauty was relevant for tech. So we're really tech centric. And then over time, we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products that we can upgrade thanks to tech. And so we have a little bit more kind of process behind how we choose projects now.

1:04:07We try and kind of do things like upgrading the hairdryer to be able to do three out of four people have a hairdryer at home. And so how can we make it better? Or this year, like the flat irons that we're using and LED masks and stuff like that. So we do have a little bit of that kind of process, but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity. So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we let the scientists kind of think of some new clever ideas too.

1:04:40All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor. Unsponsored by Brendan Carr. Ungovernable. You can't tell us what to do, man. That's why you pay the money. That's why you subscribe to The Verge. So no one can tell us what to do. Unsponsored except by you, all of you who subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. You also get ad-free podcasts. Neal, what's your first lightning round item? All right, we have to talk about this DJI RoboVac RoboVac that Thomas Riker was supposed to review and then Sean started reporting on and then we caused a huge scandal.

1:05:13Oh, this is fun. I know nothing about what you're talking about. Hit me. So DJI released a new RoboVac. It's called the Romo, which is an incredible name for a vacuum. Like this thing just throws interceptions. Drop of hat. That actually hits really good. Chokes in the playoffs every time. Like incredible. And I love a Tony Romo game. But it is sneakily handsome. him yeah right it's like everyone loves him and it's like he did it again um anyway so we're reporting on this and sean discovers this guy named sammy as dufal was literally just trying to control his vacuum and he discovered that he was actually controlling 7 000 vacuums at once through a backdoor the dj had not secured what so he we had one right because ricker's reviewing it So Sean calls Sammy and he basically just gave him the identifier for Ricker's review unit.

1:06:02And he was in it. He was driving around on this PlayStation controller. He was looking at the cameras. He had the full map of Ricker's house. Like just totally unsecure DJI vacuum. On top of this, there was another security flaw so big that Sean didn't feel comfortable disclosing it in the story. DJI has said they've since patched both flaws. but this is just, last week I was like, don't have cameras in your house. Like, all of this stuff is so sketch. Wow. And it's a Robobac, and it's a camera in your house, on wheels. Yeah. They can go places. No thank you, sir. That's the sort of thing that you only ever sort of imagine in the science fiction possibilities.

1:06:43You know what I mean? It's like, well, what's the worst that could happen with this vacuum in my house? Oh, I can make this even worse for you. How? As to fall, he figured it out using Claude code. Oh, Jesus. So he just asked CloudCode can control my vacuum, and it found 7 ,000 vacuums. And then there's actually another set of devices that use the same servers, so you had access to 10 ,000 DJI devices. So this isn't, like, high-end hacker behavior. Yes, this is a person who works in AI, and they know how to use CloudCode. This is some, like, Terminator singularity shit right here. This is how the machines take over.

1:07:15You've got a way to make hacking way more democratic, for good or bad. And you're like, I want to find a security vulnerability. and I went and found it. Anyway, DJI says it's patched it all up. It says it's patched the other one up, which again was so bad, Sean didn't even feel comfortable putting it in the story. What a story. Man. And it's like classic Verge stuff. I wanted to have this one because it's like the Verge-iest Verge stuff. It's like, here's this vacuum. It's like pretty good. It's pretty fun. Oh no. Whoops. And the idea that we are now building these increasingly resourceful AI machines that can go just spend all of their time hunting for these vulnerabilities suggests that this is going to get a lot worse.

1:08:03Because we've had these bug bounty things forever and they essentially rely on A, most bugs are so hard to find that most people won't find them, that most of these vulnerabilities, even the ones that exist, just sort of lay unfound for a long time. and B, that they are able to quickly be patched and that you can win the cat and mouse game with hackers. These AI tools are just going to completely invert all of that in deeply scary ways. That's horrifying. And now I'm like, I have an internet-connected RoboVac in my house that maybe needs to not be in my house anymore. You know what's funny is we don't even have a RoboVac, we just have a regular StipVac, And for some reason it's on our Wi-Fi and I don't know why.

1:08:48So this is actually what I was just thinking as you're talking about this is like maybe the idea of, you know, somebody being able to remotely control my robot vacuum is is not on its face all that alarming. It's the camera of it all that really, I think, tips it into truly, truly scary potential. And so it's like maybe maybe what's about to happen is we're going to have this incredible referendum on anything that has a camera, regardless of what it is being used for. Yeah. Right. Like I think people have long made fun of the people who put the shutters on their webcams to keep them closed. Like maybe that's where we're all headed.

1:09:27Do you know who famously has a piece of tape over his laptop webcam? Who? Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, perfect. Great. Knowing and there's doing, you know what I mean? Okay. Speaking of being invasive, my first one is we're getting, we think, a Galaxy S26 from Samsung at the end of this month. They're having a big unpacked event. A lot of stuff coming. We've seen a lot of leaks for it. one of the leaks that came out is an ad that seems to confirm that there's going to be basically a privacy display built into the S26. I love this. And the idea is, right, that as with all privacy displays, if somebody looks at it from an angle, they won't be able to see anything.

1:10:09You can only see it when you're sort of at your own vantage point looking at your phone. I have two questions for you. One, is this a feature that's interesting to you? I love it. Okay. And two, do you also constantly look at other people's phones? This is why I love it. I constantly look at other people's phones and I feel really intense guilt looking at this phone because I'm like, well, A, this sucks because I love to stand on the subway and watch people go through breakups in text messages on their phones. Wow, you're in it. You're okay. Oh, Neelai, this is not an exaggeration. I have deliberately missed my subway stop in the past because I was watching someone send.

1:10:48It had to be a 3000 word text message. How big was their font size? And I just refused to leave. I was standing in the subway well and they were sitting in the first seat and I just stood there and watched over their shoulder like it was a TV show for solidly 45 minutes. Did they know? I was not being coy. I don't know. But they were going through something very emotional. So I think they were not paying attention particularly to the world around them. but this was a special important moment for me that I enjoyed very much and now this is going to go away. Well, no, not if you were hovering directly over them.

1:11:20That's true. You're fine. From that vantage point, maybe I'm okay. Creeper David Pierce is still in the game. So this is probably a good thing, right? This is as phone screens have gotten bigger, it has, I think, become more and more required for people to have these things. I ride the subway here in New York all the time and I'm basically just watching TikTok on other people's phones. Totally. That's just, everyone's doing it. And it's so normal now that you're just like having a shared social experience, but you're all kind of alone and you can't talk about it. Yeah. But it's like full volume all the time everywhere.

1:11:51I'm all for this. Like make the phone a little more private with a private screen. I'm wondering if it can be turned on and off. Because if it's like, you know, if it's like the things you can buy, then sharing your phone will be very difficult. Right. Right. Let's all look at something together or something gets way harder. So I'm curious if they find a way to turn that filter off. That's an interesting one. There is also a real, I think you, people look at their phones from sort of oblique angles more than they realize, right? Like your phone's on the table. I remember this at the beginning of Face ID.

1:12:24It was sort of annoying that you were like, oh, my phone's here. And if I want to open my phone, I can't just sort of reach over and hit the thing. I have to like huge gesture, lean over and look at my phone. There's just little bits of that that I think are going to be interesting to work out with the UI of something like this. But it will protect a lot of people from me. So I suppose it's a good thing. But anyway, that phone, whatever that phone turns out to be, February 25th. So a week from today as we're recording this, we'll talk about it on next week's show. We'll have lots more information.

1:12:54Neal, what's your next one? All right. I have an Epstein update. That's my lightning round. It's good. Okay. I just want to say Epstein updates will not become a podcast within a podcast on the Vergecast. brenda cars the dummy i think has carved out a niche on this show that is good and important um we will not be giving that to jeffrey epstein that's true although again the people seem to love him so i have two very minor ones uh both updates yeah last week we talked about how epstein has this relationship across like the far right internet and online harassment and gamergate and all these things and in the files there is a meeting between the founder 4chan chris pool and Epstein the day before Chris Poole started the politics board on 4chan.

1:13:40So he wrote about this. Kat Townbar did a great piece for us. I encourage you to go read it. Anyway, Chris Poole, the founder of 4chan, who never talks, sent us a statement on the record. Take that, CBS. Chris Poole talks to us on the record and denied it. Here's the statement. Epstein had nothing to do with the reintroduction of a politics board to 4chan nor anything else related to the site. The decision at the borders made weeks beforehand, almost 24 hours prior to a first chance encounter at a social event. I did not meet with him again, nor maintain contact. I regret having ever encountered him at all and have deep sympathy for all of his victims.

1:14:15We are now at the point of the Epstein story where the founder of 4chan is like, get me away from this guy. If you know anything about 4chan, that is wild stuff. That's my one update. Chris Poole fully denies Epstein having anything to do with 4chan. Too toxic for the poll board on 4chan. Too toxic for the founder of 4chan. My second upstate update is I promised an explanation of the equal signs. People have done this. There's a great YouTube video. There's a great blog post by a guy who actually wrote email clients digging into, like, the actual encoding of MIME. And email is this series of hacks upon hacks over the years.

1:14:49Josh Jezza, our great reporter, also dug into this because he's been working on a story about AI and PDFs, which are not a compatible set of technologies. Two things. One, there is some just encoding weirdness as you move between systems. And in particular, it seems like moving from BlackBerry emails to a Windows encoding really screwed things up and introduced a bunch of equal signs. That's sort of the technical explanation and that YouTube video is very good and that blog post is very good on it. Then there's also the fact that it appears the FBI attempted to strip the metadata out of the Epstein files by first taking them all into JPEG and then OCRing the JPEGs.

1:15:24Oh, wow. Which is an incredible hack. And then there's just this quote that I want to read to you. It's from Peter Wyatt, the chief technology officer of the PDF Association, who talked to Josh for a story about equal signs, the Epstein files. And he's saying he's explaining why they were paying so much attention. And he goes, it was in the news. It was a lot of PDFs. Generally speaking, we're interested in anything to do with PDFs. That's what we do and what we're about. Many people have reacted to this by saying that the next Holiday Spectacular has to be about PDFs and the existence of the PDF Association.

1:15:55And so I think we know, David. I will say, do not tempt me with a good time. PDFs are fascinating. And the backstory of how a PDF became the universal file format of the internet is weird and in many ways really bad and would actually be a very fun holiday spectacular. So I'm writing that down. That is now officially the leading candidate. There's a lot of comments on this story. They're like, this is a perfect first story. I just like quote, it was in the news and it was a lot of PDFs. I mean, you've got to assume like a bunch of PDFs come out and there are a bunch of people at the PDF Association who are like, this is our time.

1:16:33We've done it. This is the moment, boys. That's very good. Yeah, I read the email encoding blog post. We'll link to it in the show notes. I need to go watch that YouTube video. But just the way that blog post lays out how bonkers email is as an underlying technology is fascinating. Like it is a miracle that your email ever gets delivered correctly. It's very bad. It's nuts. Yeah. All right. My next one, as I am required to do apparently every week now, is I have a silly, ridiculous update on the Warner Brothers Paramount Netflix shenanigans. This week's update is that Warner Brothers has now given David Ellison and Paramount one week from Tuesday.

1:17:14So next Tuesday, the 24th, to give its best and final proposal. Paramount has said it's willing to pay more money, that it wants to reopen the negotiations. But there was this very important thing that happened when the first round of these deals started to happen, which was that David Ellison reached out to Warner Brothers and was basically like, just so you know, this is not our best and final offer. That it was like, he made very clear, like we're willing to negotiate. They essentially seem to be coming from a place where we have all the money in the world. We will pay whatever it takes to get this done.

1:17:48And Warner Brothers over and over has kind of just been like, no, thank you. Please lose our number. Goodbye. And so now what is happening is essentially Warner Brothers Discovery is saying, tell us the actual number. Like at this point where we can negotiate up forever, Paramount keeps raising the number, keeps coming up with new ways to pay shareholders, like keeps trying to argue regulatory things. And at this point, it is like, what is your best and final? Well, there's a little bit of, there's a little weirdness there. So the sort of like total number has gone up with some of the fee structures and the blah, blah, blahs.

1:18:22The actual price was only$1 more than Netflix's price, but it was for all of it, including the cable networks like CNN, whereas Netflix was only going to buy the studios. So Ted Sarandos was on CNBC, I believe with Julia Borsten. And she said, how are you going to counter? And he said, well, usually you don't do this over the phone. Like, let them make an actual move. And then we will make our move in return. So you get the feeling there's going to be a little bit more of a bidding war here. Because the actual number has only gone up$1 a share. Which is still, you know, millions and billions of dollars.

1:18:51But you just get the sense that Netflix is like, you want to buy a dollar? Like, okay. Like, yeah, we can do. Would you like$2? And there's going to be some of that back and forth. Yes, but it is also, I think, very clear that everyone involved with this would like the nonsense back and forth to end. I think it would end. I also am just going to point this out. The Ellison's want to buy the whole thing, including CNN. And they are very much in the business right now of forcing their talent to constrain their speech for political purposes. That's not going to win you a lot of hearts and minds at the thing that you're buying.

1:19:24No, but it sure might get the deal through. It might get the deal through, but then who's going to work there? Right. And then if the people who work there all leave and you're left with like the C team that loves having their speech chilled, what are they going to make? And now you're just blowing money like in ways that are so stupid. Again, I just someone's just like talk to call Rupert, man. He will tell you. You have to preserve the source of your authority if you want to be in this business. Yeah. Well, there's a whole, that's a whole rabbit hole we should go down sometime because it's like, why doesn't Jeff Bezos just sell the Washington Post, I think is one particularly cynical and terrifying answer to that question that we should come back to another time.

1:20:03But anyway, that's my update and suggests that maybe next week we will have a more concrete update that might stop changing every week, which would be really exciting for me and for the lightning round of the purchase. What's your last one? My last one's very simple. Tesla has updated its RoboTaxi crash figures in Austin. Electrek ran the numbers. They've added five more in a month. The RoboTaxi is going to have 4x worse drivers than humans. It's bad. 14 incidents since the service launched in June 2025. They quietly added one more crash that led to someone being in the hospital, which is very bad.

1:20:37Also, the taxis don't work in the rain because Tesla is entirely vision-based. It's going to happen, you guys. They're going to, they're super going to, everyone in America is going to have a self-driving Model 3 tomorrow. So, you know, what's fascinating about this to me is I think a piece of the self-driving debate I have always like struggled with, but always sort of found really fascinating is this idea of like, okay, it is demonstrably true in most cases that these things are better drivers than humans. And so. No, it's demonstrably true that Waymos are better drivers. So that's what, that's fair.

1:21:09That's a, that's a good distinction. But if we take as gospel, right, that there are lots of questions, there's lots of ideas that we have to figure out about insurance and responsibility and how we reckon with these things being on the roads, but they are safer drivers than humans, we should keep pushing forward with this technology, right? It's an argument you hear over and over, right? There's a lot of stuff left to figure out, but that is already true that if you get in a Waymo, you are safer than driving your own car. Like, lots of data supports that. it is so nuts to see just the opposite thing happening on the road where it's like and i'd love to like it's it's very funny that it's elon musk and it's very funny that it's tesla and like of course it's elon musk and of course it's tesla like this is this is obviously how this would go but this is such a like dramatic inversion of the whole case for continuing to work on self-driving cars that it is just like, what are we even doing here, guys?

1:22:07Well, again, I'm going to point out that the whole industry has sort of been collapsed into Waymo for a long time. And you have to split up Teslas with full self-driving, quote, full self-driving from actual autonomous robotaxis. Sure. And actually, Tesla no longer is able to call autopilot, autopilot in California because of confusing people, but supervised FSD, you take for granted that there's a driver in the car behind the wheel. And so it's safer because you actually have a hybrid system there in its own way. Now, lots of people try to hack FSD and like get drunk and like wash their phones.

1:22:46But like theoretically, there's a human minder in the typical FSD scenario. So that's safer. waymo is just very safe because google alphabet has dumped tons of money into every generation of the waymo driver has multiple redundant sensors and every ounce of data shows you that a waymo car is safer than a human just taking fsd and being like it's a taxi now doesn't do the job nope which is what tesla did and so you're kind of like you're uncollapsing the product from waymo and saying, okay, we just let FSD run around Texas. Is it safe? And it's like, no, I could have told you that. And now we have the data and it is not safe.

1:23:27Electric points out it's 14 crashes over roughly 800 ,000 miles. That's a crash rate of one crash every 57 ,000 miles. Tesla's own data indicates that a typical human driver has a minor collision every 229 ,000 miles. So this thing is just like one in four, just bumping into stuff. it's ridiculous it's very good man first of all this suggests that my wife is an even worse driver than i suspected and i love you i hope you're not listening can i tell you can i tell you a very quick story about growing up in wisconsin the 80s before the entire industry before the world was financialized to have him back my dad was the er doctor in small town wisconsin in the 1980s and my mom in the parking garage at her hospital was very tight and she scraped the shit out of her cars.

1:24:12And so my dad just had a deal where the local body shop guy just would come to the ER and fix my mom's car aside for free.

1:24:24Just in the parking lot? No, you would be like, we dented the car again. So you would drop it off at the body shop guy. And he's just like, in the 80s, they just bartered out that like, if something happened, you would come to the ER and that would just get handled on the side. That's a pretty good deal, honestly. You're like, oh, my ER doctor owes me one. It's not It's not the worst thing to have going through. Yeah, it was just the full barter economy. That's amazing. Growing up with your dad as the ER doctor in small-time 80s Wisconsin was very much like knowing the mayor. Because everybody knew my dad.

1:24:51It was crazy. I grew up with my dad being a pastor. And so I had that same thing, except everybody thought he could get them into heaven. Which also has a lot of really, really real upsides. Same, but opposite. You know what I mean? Yeah, 100%. We were very much trying to avoid that outcome on a night shift at St. Mary's Hospital. Right. But if your dad can't fix it, mine can. You know what I mean? Very good. It's a good thing. All right. My last one before we get out of here is I think a bit of AI news that sort of snuck under the radar, which is that WordPress launched an AI assistant. And I think this is really interesting for a couple of reasons.

1:25:25One, because one of the things everybody seems to do when they start vibe coding is build a website, right? Our friend Casey Newton made a lot of noise about redoing his own personal website when he got his hands on Cloud Code. This is just like, it's sort of a normal use case. I just, this is a hard thing to do with existing tools is manage a personal website. I'm just gonna point Cloud Code at it and let it build me a website. And it can do a reasonably good job and it's pretty interesting. And so everybody has been saying all over social media, a thing that I've really enjoyed is people being like, WordPress is dead because now you can just ask Cloud Code to do it for you.

1:26:02And WordPress, I should remind you, powers like half the internet. It is one of the most important pieces of software on the internet. And it just doesn't get talked about that much because it is sort of fundamentally uninteresting infrastructure. There's a lot of drama with WordPress that comes and goes. There's a lot of drama with WordPress, but it is like at its best, it is boring infrastructure. Yeah. Like it's designed to be boring infrastructure. But they just released this AI assistant that actually now just lets you interact with and change your website just by talking to it. And you can request font changes.

1:26:34You can move stuff around. like anybody who has used WordPress knows it is like a developer tool built for developers and just pretends to be very user-friendly. It's not. If you've ever tried to mess with your WordPress template, it's a lot. And this idea of like, I just, I want this thing to be a bullet or I want this thing to be that font and this thing to be a little bigger and move this thing over there is like a big, powerful, meaningful thing that is now being baked into WordPress, which I actually think is pretty cool. WordPress.com. There's some distinctions here. You're right, oh God, yeah.

1:27:06It's a lot. WordPress is very complicated. There's WordPress.org, the open source project. Then there's like WordPress VIP, which is what The Verge runs on, which is like the enterprise grade hosted WordPress. And then there's WordPress.com, which is like all the way down to the bottom, which is like the Squarespace competitor. And that is still running WordPress, but for consumers and like small businesses in a different way. And that's the thing that's getting the AI system because they do have to compete with Squarespace and Wix and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way down to Casey's going to vibe code his own website.

1:27:40Right. There was some part of Casey's story where he was like, and then it signed me up for a hosting account. It's like, I don't know, man. Now the DJI RoboVax can see everything in your house. Yeah. Yeah, it's real. But anyway, I think I'm curious to see if folks who are listening to this or watching this are on WordPress and you do mess around with the AI assistant, I'm very curious how it works. Because it's actually, it's the sort of thing that ought to work really well. It's like websites are very structured data. WordPress knows how WordPress works. Like you ought to be able to point an assistant at this and actually have it do a pretty good job of most things.

1:28:14So if you've used it, let me know. I'm very curious about it. Yeah, we should do a whole episode on just software because there's a lot of confusion about what software is and what products are right now because of AI. We do not have time for it right now. I would just say I'm open to people's thoughts about that too because boy, does that seem like it's confused a lot. You're talking about the Sasspocalypse that either is or is not coming. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know, man. I think people like products, not Legos, you know? Like, I don't know. I'm very curious what people think about it.

1:28:44I've read a lot of stuff lately, but I think that's a different show. Yeah. If you think business software is dead, email nealiattheverge.com and pitch yourself to be on the Decoder podcast. And I will point out that famously, I refuse to use Enterprise. Just don't do it. It's very true. All right. We should get out of here. Neil, you have a vacation to go on. What are you doing, by the way? Anything exciting? We're going to Boston to go to all the kids museums. That sounds amazing. That would be delightful. Well, enjoy. We've gone way over. We will be back. You're going to be back next week. You're just gone for a couple of days.

1:29:15So don't. People stress when you leave, but I don't want anyone to stress. It's going to be okay. I'm vibe coding my own website. You just have to take a couple of days off and cloud code your way through it. Everything will be fine. We'll be back. remember as always the best thing you can do to support all of this and keep us out of the clutches of Brendan Carr and everybody else is subscribe to The Verge theverge.com slash subscribe you can also if you're a subscriber get ad-free versions of all of our podcasts this decoder version history it's in your account settings if you're already a subscriber it is like actually remarkably easy I've done the ad-free podcasting places before and it sucks our team did a very good job so go do that it rules also we love hearing from you on on all things if you're having weird robot vacuum hacks happen to you.

1:29:59If you have thoughts about the Epstein coverage we've been doing, if you want to talk about anything else going on in this space, if you want to keep sending us Brendan videos, which I hope that you do, Stephen Colbert, if you're listening and want to come on the show, call the hotline 866-VERGE-11, send us an email at firstcasttotheverge.com. We love hearing from you, as always. The show is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back next week. Neelai. Rock and roll.

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