The video game disc is dead

21:47David Pierce:I agree with that. I also think everybody is just waiting for GTA 6. I mean, we keep hearing about the games being moved around for GTA 6. Like, the stakes for that game are so high, both for Rockstar, which is like existentially dependent on this thing being the biggest game in history, and it's sort of everyone's clue as to whether people will pay money for video games. And that is a lot to put on the back of one game. Yeah. I suspect people will pay money for GTA 6. I mean, I planned. I literally, I would like to. I don't know how. This is because you buy everything at the very last dying gasp of the life cycle.

22:27David Pierce:I do. It's a real problem. I have an Xbox One that I used for an alarmingly small amount of time, and that might be my most recent console. It's a real problem. Yeah. All right, we should take a break. We have more gadgets to talk about, including some weird open AI hardware that we just need to discuss. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

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23:47David Pierce:All right, we're back. Let's talk gadgets. Specifically, Neela, your very favorite thing, AI gadgets. There's nothing we enjoy more than a good AI gadget. So the news is that OpenAI is building new hardware specifically for codecs. Don't get excited about this. This appears to be basically a little macro keyboard that sits next to your keyboard that you can use to do some basic codecs things. Mostly what I want to talk about, Eli, is this trend I've been noticing recently where there is this ongoing thesis that actually maybe I can start to use AI and ditch this keyboard. I'm not going to ditch my phone.

24:30David Pierce:I'm not going to ditch my laptop. But what I don't need anymore is a big old QWERTY keyboard. What I actually need is, did you see this tweet that went like lightly viral where somebody he was like, oh, our senior engineer replaced his keyboard with a microphone. And he had one of those like Bob Barker skinny microphones that he was just sitting there talking into, presumably talking to, you know, Codex or Cloud Code. But there is this thing out there now that is like, what we're going to do is build specialized input hardware that isn't typing for basic, like AI coding experiences. And I can't tell if all of this is like, essentially a bit by a bunch of engineers who are just unnecessarily optimizing everything, or if there's actually something to this idea of specific coding hardware for AI.

25:19And doesn't it all just seem like attempts to lock you into ecosystems with hardware because it's so easy to switch between them in software?

25:27David Pierce:Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm totally a cynic about all of this. That's super cynical, yeah. Like, sure, Cursor has an app now, but make sure you use Cursor. Sure. Right? Right. Like Cursor launches iOS app is just you're going to have Cursor on your phone and then you'll use Cursor. Do you know what I mean? But that's another example, I think, of this sort of macro trend, right? Like the idea that anyone would need to access their coding IDE from their phone is a brand new idea. And yet I keep talking to people who are like, I actually spend a lot of time interacting with CloudCode or Codex or in this case, Cursor.

26:08David Pierce:from my phone. Like Paul Ford came on the show a while ago and was telling me about like all the weird little projects he's doing from his phone on his commutes home. And that is like a brand new kind of software development activity. And it just, again, I'm still at this place where I can't decide if this is a bunch of people tinkering with workflows that won't actually amount to much and everybody will go back to typing. Or if there is some actual change in how people want to input long lines of code and this kind of prompt happening in front of us. I think it's both. Keyboards are going to stick around.

26:44Confident predictions. Keyboards will stick around. Keyboards are going to stick around in software engineering because we keep learning over and over again that these software engineering projects are vastly more complicated than anyone gives them credit for and require a bunch of senior software engineer attention to make them work the way they want to. Over and over, the evidence of this is vast. So I do think there's a bunch of people who are AI-pilled, who are convinced that because they can now talk to a computer in natural language, that everything about computing is up for grabs. And I totally respect that belief.

27:18I think it is valuable and fun and interesting to be like, I have changed our core assumption and now everything is up for grabs. The music is no longer on 12-inch vinyl records. It's on tapes. And now Walkmans exist, right? Like, this is all fine. And you can just go through the history of technology and you're like, this core assumption changed. And now the entire ecosystem can change around it. I'm just not at all convinced that any of them have set upon a path that is sustainable in the way that it's being expressed today. Interesting. What do you mean? so like you I know a bunch of engineers who are like constantly basically texting their coding agents and I think that's great because what they're doing is tinkering in their spare time sure they're like I now write software while I play video games by texting my phone uh that's not work like if you're like I do my actual job as a software engineer by texting a handful of agents and then just like sitting around you're not actually doing anything like your time will get filled up by other things.

28:21Right next to this is a bunch of weird gadgets that engineers in San Francisco are using to keep their laptops open while their agents run locally because they need their laptops around for their agents to run locally. So I do think all this is just up for grabs. And I think part of the rush to the models are good at coding, we're going to redefine how coding works, is because that is the domain where the models are verifiable. And you hear this, if you're paying attention to AI, you're hearing about this so much, right? Verifiability, running loops. This is the hot new thing where you have the model make something, you see if it gets verified by a compiler or other software testing tool, and then it tries again.

29:03And you hear the sort of like senior AI people be like, I write loops now. I don't even write prompts, I write loops. And off it goes and it does its own thing. And like, maybe they're just all burning a lot of tokens because that is the thing that makes them all money.

29:17David Pierce:Prompts are so like April, 2026. Like loops are very July, 2026. Loops are in, man. And you just kind of look at this and you're like, does this extend to anything else? Sure. If you want to build a bridge, do you know how you verify that a bridge won't collapse? Right? Like there's just like many, many other domains in the world besides software engineering, where the verifiability and the ability to make a loop against that verifier happens outside of a computer. All over the place. I'm always using the legal system as an example, but the verification in the legal system is a judge who are very unpredictable and often hungry.

30:02And you can't be like, well, we're going to run that again, judge. No, you're going to jail. The judge is like, you're off to jail with you. There's no loop will occur here, my friend. And this is like my worry with the AI industry is they try to generalize everything from the experience of software engineering over and over and over again. And so, yeah, it's cool that they're building hardware. I think that is just to lock software engineers into like muscle memory for macros.

30:30David Pierce:Yeah. It's a fair theory. None of this is the thing that we are promised from AI. No, I agree with that. I think the one part of it that I have been most personally compelled by is just dictation as a sort of system-wide thing. This is not the thing everyone is building. Like, for a minute, everybody was vibe coding, like, habit trackers and to-do list apps. And now everybody is vibe coding a Mac local first dictation app. There are 400 ,000 of them every single day, and they're all the same thing. and the idea that you can just speak into your computer and have it spit out properly formatted text i think is very powerful uh there are a lot of messy complicated things with that and again the idea i'm i'm sure that that tweet with the guy who replaced his computer with the or his laptop keyboard with the bob barker mic was a bit but like that is that is a thing that people are out they're saying.

31:27David Pierce:I barely type anymore. I do. I just do all of my talking. I'm like, A, are you ever in public? Are you ever doing anything other than writing perfectly formatted emails? Or like, how do you actually do a real life computer work with this kind of tool? So I, but, and yet there are times where I can write an email much more quickly by saying it out loud into Gmail than by typing it out loud into Gmail. And so like, there's some version of what if we didn't have to do every single thing available to us on a QWERTY keyboard that I think is going to be very exciting. I just, I think I agree that it's not adding macro keyboards to your desk.

32:08I just put, take that outside of the domain of software engineering. Yes. It's great that you're like that app isn't any good. Make it better, which is basically what happens in design reviews across the industry every single day. Right. Fine. Take that into Photoshop where graphic designers now can use AI prompts in Photoshop. What I want you to do is talk to this picture instead of just clicking on the parts you want to fix. And it immediately breaks down. Yeah. Like make that sharper is actually not a deterministic command the way that sliding the sharpness slider is. There's a reason we have graphical user interfaces and I just think there's, it's good and useful to start from zero and try to build it back up again.

32:55In many ways, the success of the iPhone itself is because Steve Jobs and Apple threw away the Mac. Yeah. Right, they built it on the same Mac OS X foundation as Macs of the day, but they threw away the app model, they threw away the interface pair, they just started it over and they threw away copy and paste and they just started layering it all back in. And now the iPhone, regardless of its utterly nerfed application model, is like as powerful as any Mac, as evidenced by the fact that the Mac with Neo is an iPhone ship, right? Fine. You can see how powerful that willingness to start over is, especially the whole industry does it once.

33:31But, like, we can definitely get over our skis because we're trying to impress our friends on X, the Everything app. And I think there's a lot of that going on right now. And I think that is driving as much antipathy towards AI as anything.

33:44David Pierce:Yeah, there's a real sense of kind of what you said. Everybody has looked at this as a chance to reinvent everything. And has decided that that actually means we are required to reinvent everything. And I think that just leaves a lot of people feeling exhausted. Where it's like, actually, I actually know how to do a lot of things on my computer. Do you know what I mean? Like, there are some things I don't know how to do on my computer. And it would be great to have systems through which to do those more successfully. But I'm pretty good at a lot of things on my computer. And I don't actually need help doing those things.

34:17David Pierce:And I think there is this sense of like, well, no, actually, you have to relearn every single thing you know how to do. Even the things you really know how to do and have no problem doing, you have to relearn them anyway because of technology. And I think that just makes people feel bad. Yeah. I mean, I do like the idea that OpenAI hired Johnny Ive and Love From and did all this hype around phones and laptops being, quote, legacy devices, which is what Sam Altman said to Johnny Ive in that video. and their first thing is like a macro keyboard. It is very good. Like the most legacy device you can get to.

34:53David Pierce:And ironically, if anything, I think the actual winner of the AI revolution so far has been laptops. Yeah, without question. Laptops are so cool now in a way they have not been cool in a very long time. What did I just say about the utterly nerfed application model on the iPhone? Yeah, it's true. It's because you can just run anything you want on a laptop. Yeah. And I think that's great. Like, again, I think it's fun and exciting to be like, what if you could talk to the computer and not change everything about computers? And I think the overreading of that to be like, oh, I can definitely do software development because I can run my code against some sort of external verification does not translate to anything else.

35:33Like, literally any other domain gets caught up in the reality of reality. And so there's just this weird moment where it's like, of course it's a codex keyboard. That's the thing it can do. Of course you can build on the foundation of the thing it can do. But your big plan to ship a pen or a necklace or a bracelet that replaces your laptop because you can just issue commands and have your agents run around the internet doing stuff for you, none of that works yet. Right. And it might never. Like, have you caught this? Like, the AI industry is slowly starting to concede that the models don't know anything and, like, can't learn.

36:12David Pierce:Interesting. No, I hadn't actually really clocked that. Like, it's just, at some point, you can't hype your way past the idea that when Gemini gets it wrong, and you're like, it's wrong. And it's like, I'm so sorry. You're so right. It will get it wrong exactly the same way the next time. Interesting. Like, you can't tweet your way past that lived experience that all of us have had now. And so there's just a little bit of concession here that the models, they know what they know, but they don't learn anything. And a vast amount of the supposed project of the AI industry is that these things will eventually become recursive and able to teach themselves.

36:54David Pierce:And once we get to self-improving AI, we take over the world. Yeah, all bets are off. Then it's AGI. Yeah, it's all super intelligence or whatever. Yeah. Whatever definition that thing is. But like right now, the industry has models that don't learn. They know what they know at the time of training and that's it. And if they hallucinate and get things wrong, like they aren't smarter the next day. So like you just see there's like a little bit of like, you can make a lot of promises about what AI can do in every single industry, in every single situation. But now we've all been doing it for three years.

37:30Right. And that experience of, you're so right, you shouldn't drink bleach is like, it's just like baked into the human experience now. And you can't just like tweet your way past it.

37:43David Pierce:Can I tell you my new favorite horrible thing that my AI system does to me all the time? It's starting a paragraph with the word honestly. Drives me nuts. When it's like, I was doing a thing this morning. I need like a little tiny Chrome extension. And I was just like, what approach would you take? How would you do this? And it gives me all the lists, all the possible options. And then it goes, honestly, I would go with number three. Or like, here's my honest recommendation. And over and over and over, it's like, here's a bunch of shit. And then it's like, honestly. And I'm like, I don't just answer my question.

38:16David Pierce:It's very bad. Stop using any of these words. Every time you use the word honestly, it's like a word I don't want to use in my writing anymore because it's now the thing that makes you sound like AI to me when you use the word honestly. I hate it. Anyway, there are a couple of other gadget things we should talk about here. And I want you to know that because I love you, Neelai, I'm not going to make you talk about the working demo of the Clix Communicator, a device that I think is very exciting. and we will cover more on this show. But you, as somebody noted hater of physical keyboards on phones.

38:49Yeah, very dumb.

38:50David Pierce:We'll leave that alone. Everybody should go watch the Clix Communicator. I think it's cool. We should talk about what appears to be a couple of different leaks of the iPhone 18 Pro. Have you seen these pictures and these videos of the drop test? The way this has all come out has been very strange to me. Has it felt weird to you? There's like a Reuters story about how there's photos on the dark web and then they end up on X and they get taken down on X. But then that like Streisand affects it. And so now it's everywhere. It's everywhere. I first encountered the video of this drop test on a TikTok.

39:23And it was a TikTok of somebody talking over somebody talking over a TikTok, like three generations deep into this video being shared. Apple's smarter than this. I don't know why they did this. They verify that this video is real by issuing the takedowns, right? It's weird.

39:36David Pierce:Yeah. And it apparently it all goes back to this company. Was it called? I think it was Tata Electronics had a data breach. And the security researchers said seem to think that one of the files that were breached and got posted to the dark web included Tata Electronics customers like Apple. And I think Tesla was another one. And so all this stuff like there's a drop test video that is not the sort of thing you normally see in leaks like this. Normally it's like marketing images, right? Like somebody finds the Best Buy URL ahead of time and that's how these things get leaked. This has come out in a very different way.

40:13David Pierce:But I was surprised at the same thing you were, which is that by clearly making an effort to take this down, they turned it into a thing. Like, I'm now 100 % sure this is the iPhone 18 Pro. And it's because of the way that this has gone down and the speed with which someone seems to be trying to scrub it from the internet. Yeah. I mean, we don't know that it's Apple, right? Like, X hasn't been particularly forthcoming about where these takedown requests are coming from. It could be the manufacturer themselves. There is some amount of, like, you know, ransomware attack happening on the supplier.

40:51so it's just like it's unclear who would even own this video and where where it got lost and how and the idea that it the thing went viral and you should have paid the money is like the whole industry wants to stop that like when we've had cyber security folks on decoder they're just like look pay the ransom like you're you're you're in a spot where if you don't then the cost of not paying the ransom goes up because they will want to inflict maximum damage. So just pay the money. Which is not, I think, what most people right? Most people do not feel this way. Like, I don't negotiate with terrorists.

41:28Rule number one is don't negotiate with terrorists. Yeah. But there's enough diffuse cybercrime in the world where all of them have an incentive to make it so costly if you don't pay the ransom. So there's just this weird back and forth there that I can't understand. But yeah, you get to the point where it's like, yeah let it leak and then just like deny it you know like you're you're fighting criminals you don't have to play a totally honorable game you can just let people let people believe whatever they want and it's the it's the strideson effect of trying to take it down i think it's interesting what do you think of the actual phone itself i mean it looks exactly like the 17 pro except

42:03David Pierce:the camera bump is huge okay i've been trying i'm very glad you said this because i've been trying to figure this out because there's like there are angles at which it looks like it might just be a sort of trick of perspective that the camera bump is huge. But then there are other times where it just looks like the camera bump is huge. That we're going to get like full on pixel style Cyclops thing along the back, which I got to tell you, I really do not like at all. Well, so presumably we're looking at the Pro in these videos, right? It appears that way, yeah. So if you have a folding iPhone that has kind of like an iPhone Air setup, right?

42:43Right. Thinner cameras, maybe not as good. Maybe no zoom or no ultra wide, depending on the configuration Apple goes with. This sets up the opportunity for the Pro to be even better. Right. So you're the halo iPhone of this generation is the folding phone. The camera isn't good. But don't worry if you want the best camera. Apple has made the Pro the best Pro phone that has ever Pro'd.

43:05David Pierce:And you think that's the whole push for the Pro is it is the camera. I think at this point, what else? I mean, I guess that's kind of, yeah, that's sort of been true for the last couple of years. It's going to run iPhone apps slightly, slightly better. Do you prefer rectangle apps or square? Now the iPhone. Yeah, like it's fair. It's the only differentiation for the pro in ages, right? Like the screens are better. Like is promotion. I'm like the person who buys a phone because of promotion on the display. Right. Not most people. and i think all the people who are dazzled by the most impressive specs are the people apple is going to try to convince to buy the fold or the ultra or whatever the hell they call it like the folding iphone is going to be the one for the people who want like the best shiny thing uh the case for the pro is i think you're i think you're right it's going to have to be about the camera or battery life true i have a lot of questions about the battery life on this folding iphone will be based on the case mock-ups I've seen, which might be nothing.

44:04David Pierce:That's the other way these things always leak, by the way, is the case companies. But yeah, so I mean, like, you know, I think the folding iPhone, there's going to be some set of compromises to come with the folding iPhone. The camera looks very obvious. Battery life is another one that could potentially be obvious. You've got to drive one larger display and the secondary display, the cover display. A lot of ways battery life can go sideways. So then the Pro phone can get bigger and thicker and have more battery life and more cameras. And you're like, yes, you can have the thin one, you can have the folding one, or you can have the monster.

44:34And I'm just telling you right now, I'm all monster all the way. If that's actually how this lineup goes, if there's like a cool folding phone, you're like, wow, that's intellectually very interesting. I'll go with the monster, please. The biggest battery life and the best cameras I can get.

44:48David Pierce:Okay, wait, this lineup is amazing. So now there's the cheap one, which presumably is just like the base 18. The iPhone 18. We've heard some rumors that might not be a thing. Oh, weird. I don't know. The rumors are all over the place. But anyway, so it's, yeah. So you have the base model, the cheap one. You have the thin one, the Air. You have the wild one, which is the foldable phone. And then you have the Monster. Is that the, this is the lineup now? Yeah. You've got base model, skinny one, foldy, and Monster. That's how Greg Joswiak is going to introduce them. John Ternus' first Apple event as CEO.

45:27He's like, this one's called Foldy and that one's called Monster.

45:31David Pierce:This is like a Disney Plus show waiting to happen. I'm dying. VirtuHouse listeners should reach out. Like, tell me which one sounds more compelling there. Do you care about folding or do you just want the biggest battery life you can get? The biggest battery with the longest battery life. I've been thinking a lot about this. And there's a part of me that is like, as a tech journalist who has been using new products for a very long time, I feel obligated to get the Fold just because it is the newest version of the thing. But I also feel like I have now been very happily a base iPhone user for the last two cycles.

46:04David Pierce:And other than the battery life, which is, I think, demonstrably better on the Pro, there is nothing about this phone I would like to upgrade specs-wise. Like, just nothing. and I am consistently amazed by the fact that I do not miss things about the ProPhone. Don't you have children? Yeah. Do you take pictures of your children? Eh, sometimes. I let the AI do it. You just like prompt the children. Yeah. I'm like, look, I already took some pictures of them. Imagine pictures of them in a pool. That's what I want. Yeah. I mean, we get new iPhones every year because we have kids and I just want the best cameras every year.

46:42And whether or not the new cameras are the best cameras is open to debate. every year.

46:48David Pierce:Yeah, I think this year I am unusually excited about this year, even though I think next year is probably going to be the year and Apple will save a bunch of stuff for the 20th anniversary iPhone. Whatever is about to happen with all of the rising prices and all of the complicated stuff with supply chains and which products continue to make sense, like figuring out what Apple is about is most possible to do at the iPhone event. And I think this year is going to be a particularly interesting one. Oh, we're just going to hear about Siri the whole time. You think? You know it's true. It probably is, especially now that it's gone very well.

47:27David Pierce:Like the early Siri AI returns continue to be really good. They're probably just going to like double and triple down on, we've done it. Siri is here. Yeah. All right. One more bit of news, which is just, I was thinking about this in particular. We just had a short little quick post on the site about a future cheese standard for charging that might bring 50 watt wireless charging to more devices. Some can do it right now, but you need a fan in your charger. That's how fast it goes. I was thinking about this this morning because I was charging my phone with a laptop charger that is not like, you know, excellent, highly rated, technically competent laptop charger.

48:10David Pierce:and the thing damn near set my phone on fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That happens all the time. Boy, was it hot trying to charge this thing. And I was like, this is the stuff I'm looking forward to. I want my phone to just be boiling hot all the time. So I track a lot of this kind of tech in the weirdest way possible. I pay attention to what car TikTokers say when they're making the fun feature videos. Okay. So like Forrest Jones is like, I think the single best car feature TikToker there is. Like he set the model. Everyone does it. He's great. And so the fact that Forrest just waves at giant screens that cost billions of dollars of R &D to produce.

48:48And he's like, and it has CarPlay. Tells you one very important thing about the whole industry. That's so brutal. He does it all the time. Right. He's like, and it's got a 90 inch screen that runs CarPlay and Android Auto. And then he just moves on and he never looks at the automaker interface at all. And if it's a Tesla or something, he's like, and it runs Google Maps. And that's as far as we go. and like you just know something very important by what car tiktokers prioritize in this way yes

49:14David Pierce:meanwhile an entire building of people at gm just sigh deeply every time right but they've got to make like a two-minute tiktok running through all the features yeah right doug de mero's like here are all the quirks and features you make a long youtube video right car tiktokers have to do it in like that's it's a much more ruthless prioritization yeah so the one that i've noticed that keeps coming up now is they will wave at the wireless charger and they'll say, and it has a fan. And it's a ventilated wireless charger. Because this is important. Because when the car makers started putting wireless chargers in the cars, they weren't ventilating or cooling them in any way.

49:50They would get hot and the phones would stop charging. And so people would obviously notice this. So the car TikTokers have all taken to asking or otherwise finding out that the car chargers, that the wireless chargers in new cars are ventilated because the audience gives a shit.

50:07David Pierce:That's so interesting. In the prioritization of what I'm going to say, what features I'm going to talk about in my two-minute TikTok, the wireless charger is ventilated, makes the cut now, like, more often than not. That's really interesting. My, the wireless charging pad in between the seats in my car is probably the single least used feature in my car. Yeah, I don't know if it's mine ever. In part because it was, like, it's a 2022 car, and so it was like, you know, it's a few years old. We've made some wireless charging progress since then. And this is like, you have to set it exactly right.

50:40David Pierce:And then if you go over one bump, it stops charging. Like it's not a good system, but also it's where all of my stuff goes. Like it is, the charger is in the spot where when you instinctively get into the car, that's where you put your keys or like the sandwich or like whatever. All of my stuff goes into the thing that is ostensibly charging my phone. just a terrible, terrible feature. And I have never understood why anyone would want it. But maybe with a fan, I'll be into it. This is why I always end up buying a MagSafe charger for my car and mounting it somewhere on the dash, because the magnets hold it in place.

51:15David Pierce:I've been meaning to tell you this. I got a long way down the road of wanting to buy one of these the other day, like to the point where I'm sitting with one of these in an Amazon cart because I couldn't get CarPlay to work. I'm running the iOS 27 developer beta. and CarPlay is so flaky with this. And that's like, it's no one's fault. It's a developer beta. It's my fault. Like I get it, but I also need Google Maps to work. And so I was all the way down the road of I'm just going to buy a mount and plug it in in my car. And then the vision of you taking a victory lap on that popped up in my head.

51:49David Pierce:And I literally, I could not make myself buy it. That's right. I'm right. I'm right about this every time. I cannot. The slate truck is an entire product, an entire truck built around the reality that most people should just mount their phones to the dash. I just knew that every time I looked at it, it would just be you cackling at me from my lock screen about how you were right, and I couldn't do it. It's very, look, it makes sense. You put the map in CarPlay, or you put the music in CarPlay, and you run the map on the phone screen. I think that is - This works. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to talk about this anymore.

52:21David Pierce:We should take a break, and then we're going to come back. We got Hypedesk, we got Brendan, we got the lightning round. We'll be back. So good, so good, so good. New summer arrivals are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Get ready to save big with up to 60 % off brands like Rag & Bone, Levi's, Adidas, and Free People. Join the Nordiclub to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Are old batteries the same? That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever.

53:06David Pierce:Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with Power Boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Goats only trust goats, because they're built different. And Messi only trusts Duracell.

53:28David Pierce:All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype Desk. Where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us what's cool in the world and on the internet. You're both here today. Hi, Ross. Hi, Ashley. We are, in fact, not the same person. We have been seen in the same room at the same time. Get that mistaken all the time. It's the hair, I gotta tell you. It's just long, luxurious hair in all cases. I went for a summer phoenix. No joke, what I would get for Ashley's hair right now. Like, truly. What do you guys have for us this week? I, okay. Wait, can we just go back? Ross, you can. I'm working on it.

54:07David Pierce:There's nothing stopping you. There is nothing stopping you. This is a multi-year project. Anyway, I know, this is going to get cut. My promise to all of you is that we will do a hype desk about all of our respective hair care situations at some point in the very near future. I'm just putting that into the universe. Will this also be the Widow's Bay watch party? Yeah. Oh, I'm so very ready. But not this time. What do you guys have for us this week? Total, sort of horror. It is actually horror directly related instead of kind of horror comedy. So I am super excited because Unhinged is out, which is this new Netflix game by Night School.

54:49And I played it. and it's, I played it last night and maybe that was a poor choice. I did not realize that I would feel actually as scared as I ended up being. Okay, so I love it when, I love interactivity. This is like very exciting for me. So the one, so Unhinged is this horror game. Netflix has a studio called Night School that developed this and it seems like there's a special thanks for David Fincher and in the credits. So it seems like he was involved in some sort of capacity. And so it's a survival game. And the lead character is Zoe Kravitz. And you're this character. You wake up, it's like a storm.

55:33And then you realize there's like a killer in your apartment building. And the neat thing about it is, so you can only play this game if you go to your Netflix account on a web browser or a smart TV that supports this game, which is my one like bummer about this. Like I wanted to play it on my couch, like sitting on my couch using my Apple TV.

55:56David Pierce:One of my questions for you is going to be, do you know anyone who actually earnestly plays Netflix games? And I feel like that sentence you just said answers no for everyone on planet Earth. This is like the most frustrating thing because I feel like if this was more accessible, like literally everyone would play it and be raving about it because the experience itself is so visceral because you connect your cell phone to the experience and your actual phone in your hand is your flashlight in the game and you can text people who are in the game. Like Troy Baker plays the superintendent of the apartment building.

56:33You have your best friend, which is Sadie Sink. And it's really stacked like voice cast, which is amazing. And you can literally mess, you get messages from them. Like, it is so immersive and visceral and interactive. And it's so, there's, like, a bunch of ways you can die, like, in the game. And it's, like, it's not, like, a no-fail state. Like, this is a thing where, like, you really do feel like your virtual life is on the line. And it's very good. And it's about a half, it takes a half an hour. It's not a long, like, experience. It's like it feels like you're experiencing a very scary episode of horror television in real time.

57:18And it's it's so cool and like I loved it. And I like I said, the only thing I wish I could have done was experienced it like on my couch chilling at night instead of at my computer because it sort of felt a little more like work.

57:33David Pierce:I do like this, though. It feels very Netflixy. Like this is the first Netflix game anyone has ever described to me that I'm like, oh, I kind of get why this would be on Netflix. Yes, very much so. Like, this is a thing that feels very organic to the Netflix brand, but also is such a cool thing for Night School to have developed. Like, the way that the technology, like, the way that your web browser is, like, interacting with your phone, like, you have your flashlight set, it's really cool. Wait, can you explain that more? I don't think I, so, if you were watching this on a TV, the TVs all run sort of like HTML5 apps.

58:05So, is this just Netflix, like, running a web browser on your TV? What's happening here?

58:10David Pierce:It's kind of, I think it's like an HTML5 streaming thing because your phone becomes basically a gyroscope controller. So as you kind of rotate it around, the flashlight also kind of rotates. So do you have to like log in your, do you just open the Netflix app on your phone? There's a separate one. So it's kind of like how Jackbox Game works a little bit. Jackbox Game lets you use like a web browser. Here, you'll get a QR code. That'll let you download the Netflix game controller app. Connects the thing. Yeah, sure. So yeah, you're using the gyroscope. You kind of move around a little bit. And then when you kind of get your cursor to the edge of the screen, you get a button that basically says, go right, go to the next scene.

58:39David Pierce:So unlike, let's say, like the Bandersnatch Black Mirror thing, which was just purely choose your own adventure or some of the other like early Netflix experiments. This really does feel like a full streamed game where you were having kind of real time. Yeah, I wouldn't say decision. It feels much like if you play this PlayStation game until dawn. So those choose your own adventure horror games where you kind of have to make some motion decisions. It's very much like that. That makes sense because Bandersnatch and all the other Netflix games have either been like mobile casual games. or I'm going to pick what the next cut scene is.

59:11Yeah. And so, okay. So in this one, I died a few times and every time I died, there's like a cut scene of the cops like talking about how you died. And it's like very good. Like they talk about like the specific, they comment on like the crime scene. Like, and so it's like, this is like, it's really cool. Like I can't, I'm just really, I was so surprised and delighted by how cool it was.

59:35David Pierce:This is a good case. I will say, Ashley, you should know that after your Masters of the Universe recommendation, the trust level with Ashley was at a record low on the hype desk. I'm sad to hear that. I'm so sad to hear that. I'm going to go down with the ship. Who could have seen this coming? I'm going to go down with the ship and agree with Ashley here because Unhinged, it is great. I will say 60 minutes because I kept dying. For those out here who want to try it, there is a story mode, which means you cannot die. But you should, though. You should die. You should, though. It's fun. Like, it's worth it to...

1:00:09Just to see the cops standing over your body being like, she was resisting. Yeah, to, like, go through... Just die. Like, die a few times, and then if you feel like, okay, I kind of get, like, I'm over-dying, then switch to the story mode. Don't start with the story mode.

1:00:22David Pierce:Right. But I will add that, like, it's hard to find a comp for this, even on the gaming side. Like, it is a clever experiment. It's only 30, maybe 60 minutes if you're bad at the game like I am. And I do... I'm very curious if this is what Netflix does going forward, because they've tried interactive. They've tried to figure out what the games program is going to be. This feels like a step in the right direction. And in many ways, and just finding something that just feels uniquely theirs and can uniquely kind of handle, let's say, like their infrastructure to make the streaming work seamless.

1:00:49Like, this is a thing I feel like is so unique to a place like Netflix. Like, it's something they can say, like, you really can't get this almost anywhere else. Like, there are so few places that you could actually, platforms that you could actually get this. And that feels, to Ross's point, like that great, really good, like solid step in the right direction.

1:01:08David Pierce:Yeah, I dig it. Ross, you have one for us? I do. I was scanning through kind of like Steam's different like PC demos, checking us out. And I found what I really do feel is kind of like the ultimate Vergy game. It's in a demo now. It's going to come out later this year. It is called Restory Chill Electronic Repairs. And here's the gist. It's called Find That Party Speaker. Yes. You are running like a mom and pop little gadget repair store in the 2000s in Akihabara District of Japan. And so people come up and you can take your time with this. They'll hand you old knockoff Nokia phones, Motorola Razors, like Nintendo DSs and PSPs.

1:01:45David Pierce:And you just kind of very slowly and casually unscrew them, take the parts out and just kind of dust off and clean all the gadgets and give them back. It is a cozy game. If you've ever played this kind of cleaning games like Power Wash Simulator, where you just very satisfyingly do menial chores, that is exactly what this game is. And there's a demo out now. It takes about an hour to play. I have a really important question about this. Is this the kind of game where you look at the gadget and then you press a button that says repair and it is magically repaired? Or do you have to, like, do the work to repair?

1:02:17David Pierce:You have to do the work. Okay, good. This is what I want. Because Power Wash Simulator is great because you are actually doing the full activity of power washing. If it was just like, press a button and it will be power washed, you lose all of the fun of it. No, this is like the gentle look at every detail. It's like the Tamagotchi. This little girl comes up and goes, hey, can you fix my Tamagotchi? You take off the front panel, the screen cover, the screen, the circuit brick. You unscrew every little bit of it. And then you take each piece and you can just kind of dust it off or you can order new parts and replace it.

1:02:45David Pierce:And like, it really makes you appreciate one, how repairable everything was in this kind of joyous mid 2000 days where you could just, you know, take apart a Nokia 3310 and go, oh, that's how that works and put it back together yourself. You are doing that. And then you have this kind of like very gentle, like brushing animation. The sounds in this game are amazing. Every time you like unscrew and like put a little piece of plastic on the on the table, it's like so joyous. I love this. I'm looking at the picture. This is so charming. this looks like what every one of the VR games I played for years was trying to be no that's a good point like every VR game was like we're gonna put you in a workshop and you're gonna make beautiful things and this one is just not trying to do such weird stuff but it's like charming and animated in exactly the same way I have a question it's a Steam game right?

1:03:35it's a Steam game right now yes can you take apart a Steam deck on a Steam deck? oh they should add that as DLC yeah it should be good it's like obvious it's like the first thing they should have done to go print your own Steam Deck you do have an Atari if you die in the game do you die in real life

1:03:53David Pierce:and we're back on Unhinged this is the Netflix 4D experience no when it comes to ReStory it is a lot of like legally distinct so I think I wrote a few of these down it is the Noni PMP is your Sony PSP of course your I think ElectroGachi is what they call it a Fokia Fokia And of course, of course, they officially licensed Atari. So it's just a flat out 2600. Atari will take money from it. You can like, we could officially license Atari right now. You can send them like a handful of loose change in the mail. And they're like, yeah, you're an Atari now. All right. I'm going to go play Restory like as soon as we finish recording this podcast.

1:04:29David Pierce:This is like extremely my kind of game. I hope it makes the newsletter. I'm just really hoping. Yeah, I'm excited about it. All right, Ross, Ashley, good to see you both. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Cheers, y 'all. All right. Now it is time once again, For America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Makes me sick to my tummy.

1:04:52David Pierce:That's from Arthur Lahren. That was beautiful. Short and sweet. That's going to be stuck in my head for a long time. It's playing out, by the way. Did you hear that? That guitar tone is real. It's still in the background. It literally lingered. It gave me like immediate, do you remember the Disney Robin Hood movie? That's where my brain went as soon as that started playing. Oh yeah, now I get it. It's very cute. I was expecting like the metal breakdown like we had last week. Which, by the way, maybe the most response we've ever gotten to a Brendan theme song. the now with merch really really hit for people yeah we'll play it at the end of the show every week now it's gonna be the end of the show 10 minutes of silence a bunch of ads and then that Brendan Carr every time it's gonna be amazing that's how we finance everything from now on what did Brendan do this week so Brendan did do some stuff this week we're gonna set that aside though this time because a thing that happens was he just like kicking it at the country fair or whatever it was called Brendan issued some new rulings about, like, spectrum allocations that means Elon Musk will get more spectrum.

1:05:56Like, sure, you've heard this story before. A thing that happens with Brendan consistently that I have to keep pointing out is that he's such a censorious traitor to the Constitution of the United States that he keeps scrambling partisan divides. so this week Brendan is so stupid that he caused Neil Gorsuch to point out that he's a danger to the Constitution whoa and like I don't spend a lot of time agreeing with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch do you know what I mean yeah so the coalition is now you Ted Cruz and Neil Gorsuch yeah it's like every now and again in the show actually like Ted Cruz he gotta hand it to him or like the Wall Street Journal editorial board once again issued a stunning indictment of Brendan's whole deal, which I once again agree with.

1:06:45Turns out, by the way, free speech, relatively bipartisan issue. Yeah. A lot of people like free speech. So, Neil, this week it's me and my buddy Neil Gorsuch, who is otherwise like a crazy person. So this was a big week at the Supreme Court. Bunch of big partisan decisions, six to three. The one you've probably heard of is the birthright citizenship case, where they decided that the Constitution protects birthright citizenship. You're hearing that as like a big six to three win for the Constitution. It's actually like 5-4. Brett Kavanaugh's like in the middle. So you just have this spread of like Trump lost one big one, but actually the Trump administration won a bunch of other big ones that make the presidency even more powerful.

1:07:24So the centerpiece of all that is Trump v. Slaughter, which is about whether Trump can just fire the members of independent agencies, in this case, the Federal Trade Commission. And former Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter is actually on Decoder explaining why she filed this case like ages ago. The idea is that independent agencies are supposed to be apolitical, right? The Congress set up all these agencies, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, what have you. And the president says, I'm going to appoint members of these commissions. Congress will confirm them. The Senate will confirm them.

1:07:56And then they will have independence from either the president or from Congress so that they can operate in a bipartisan way outside of the demands of politics and make good decisions over the long term. and this has been the case for 100 years and there's like famous law school precedent and this time the supreme court threw it all out and that they even said john roberts even wrote in the opinion whatever remains of this former precedent that said the president can't fire these uh commissioners is gone it's overturned it's overturned this is like a big deal if you are a lawyer or like somebody who studies the federal system this is the biggest deal in the world I bring all this up because Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence in this decision, saying we have to do this.

1:08:39These agencies have gotten too powerful. They're fundamentally undemocratic. Making sure the president can feel the pressure from the public and fire the people and be accountable is important. This is his big argument. You can believe this argument or not. It's kind of a wild twist of logic to get into that. It is, right? The whole point is that you insulate the agencies from politics and, like, heated public debate so they can make good long-term decisions about spectrum. Things that should not be political.

1:09:09David Pierce:Yes. And if you make them more political, they will inherently get more corrupt. As you can see right now with the Federal Communications Commission run by Brendan Carr, which keeps handing everything to his friend Elon Musk. Right. Right. So the idea that the agencies are political is very bad, but this is like a centerpiece of the Trump administration, a centerpiece of the conservative movement. There's this whole idea called the unitary executive. You can fall down the rabbit hole. None of this actually matters. What matters is that Neil Gorsuch wrote in his concurrence in Trump v. Slaughter, independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the nation's affairs.

1:09:40They regulate our businesses and our financial markets. They set the rules for the internet airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, and the manner of our employment. Often, these agencies do this with hardly any statutory guidance based on broad grants of legislative authority. So he's saying, Congress says, you can have a federal communications commission, and then they're the kings of the airwaves, and that's bad. And there should be some political influence over them, because then if you're mad at Trump or if you're mad at some decision that the FCC makes, you can put that pain on the president and he'll fire the person.

1:10:11Again, this is some twisted logic. Yeah. Yeah. So then Gorsuch goes through this like laundry list of like ways agencies are too powerful, almost all of which are like, I hate the environment, you know, like whatever it is. And then he comes to, and then there's late night comedy. Last year, taking objection to a network host on air remarks, the chairman of the SEC suggested there would be additional work ahead for the agency if broadcast companies did not find ways to take action. And then he cited, we can do this the hard way or the easy way, which is what Carr said about Jimmy Kimmel. And so the centerpiece of we will tear down the administrative state is Brendan Carr being a traitor to the Constitution and trying to censor comedy.

1:10:54And now that a conservative justice is pointing out we should not have an FCC chair who's that powerful. Wait, but OK, hold on. Unaccountable to the people. This doesn't make any sense to me. This is a lot. This is a lot of jumps to get there.

1:11:08David Pierce:Yeah, this just broke my brain in half because what— Neil Gorsuch is saying is that we have to make sure that these people can be fired by the president. Yep. In fact, the whole problem that we have is this person was put into their job and given every incentive to be completely corrupt in favor of the president. You see what I'm saying? This feels bad. You see what I'm saying? Neil, I love you, but I don't think you understand what we're doing here. Right. It's not – I don't think that enough voters are going to be so mad about Jimmy Kimmel that they throw Trump out of office, right? The idea is that the agency should be independent so the president can't pressure them – To be mad at Jimmy Kimmel.

1:11:58to be. Yes. Now, look, you can make the argument that it's better for the president to operate the government that actually, if you look at the frustrations of everyday Americans, the amount of bureaucratic process between a campaign promise and a policy being affected is too high. Sure. Right? Like, sure. I buy all this. But I think it's very funny that Neil Gorsuch, of all people, is like, man, these agencies are out of control powerful. My best example of them is a guy doing the bidding of the president. Thus, the president should have even more power to fire that guy. What? It's good. But what Gorset's project here and John Roberts' project and the conservative project generally is to get to the point where the agencies are the president.

1:12:49David Pierce:Yes. And so everything the agencies do is a reflection on the president and there's some political check on the president's worst impulses. Or that the president's worst impulses are allowed to run completely rampant because this is a purely political system. What Americans want is a king, I'm told. Famously, here are the three days before the 4th of July, we fought a war to have a king. A king of late night comedy. Great movie, by the way. Anyway.

1:13:23Anyway, that's been Brennan Carr as a dummy. Neil, you're also welcome to come on The Verge Cast. I welcome any of our Supreme Court justices. I think Clarence Thomas would bang on The Verge Cast.

1:13:33David Pierce:I think that would be one of our best episodes of all time. That would be based on some of the, I think it was the birthright citizenship dissent he wrote was like 90 pages or something. Yeah. To be fair, he wrote it in 48.5. He's very old, Clarence Thomas. That's another one. we'll just play a lot of silence over top of that episode. You can imagine it however you want. Here's my idea for a VergeCast segment. Our nation's octogenarian men of power come on the show and I just ask them what font size their iPhone is sent to. And that's it. That's the whole segment. I love it. We just call it old heads.

1:14:11Be great. What is it? How big are those icons? You tell me. How much power should you have based on the size of your phone icon? Pretty good. That's been Brennan Carr's a dummy. As always, Brennan, you're welcome. Anyone's welcome, really. If you can explain yourself or the amount of corruption it has taken to have the Supreme Court cite your actions in an effort to increase executive power, I would love to talk about this with you. That's been Brennan Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast from that podcast. Brennan Carr is a dummy.

1:14:50It's a good one.

1:14:51David Pierce:No context. I'm just going to read you a Wall Street Journal story that just dropped a few minutes ago. Elon Musk's SpaceX has developed a prototype for a handset-like device designed to reshape how humans interact with artificial intelligence that SpaceX has shown investors recently. The rocket and AI companies showed the prototype, which features a sleek design that is slimmer than an iPhone, to some investors and other stakeholders ahead of the company's mega IPO, according to people familiar with the matter. SpaceX is building a phone. Sure. We're doing AI phones. Sure. Okay, the funniest part about this to me, I just want you to imagine a phone in which X is presumably a crucial part of the operating system.

1:15:29David Pierce:Grok is how you interact with everything. And presumably Starlink is how you get service. This is the all-time worst idea about cell phones that I've ever heard. I love it so much. I think it's very funny that there are rumors that SpaceX will buy T-Mobile. I was going to ask you about this. I genuinely want to know what you think about this. And there's another rumor, you know, Comcast is splitting itself into two, that eventually the Comcast broadband business will get to be acquired by SpaceX as well. They're a telecom firm. At some point, we're all just going to have to admit that SpaceX is a telecom firm with worse margins than T-Mobile.

1:16:06Yeah. Right? They have way higher costs, and they have to deliver competitive broadband prices. So you inherently have worse margins than T-Mobile.

1:16:16David Pierce:I mean, SpaceX is like, it's Starlink, and then it's a really expensive marketing department that launches rockets. It's like functionally how that business works. And it's funny because, you know, Starlink is profitable on space, but they have to pay the launch cost to the other part of the company. And like, it's great that the rocket, every time you talk about SpaceX, you have to concede. It is very cool that the rockets land themselves. Absolutely. No one thought anyone could do it. Gwen Shotwell has done a great job running that company. And obviously Elon Musk can just overpower the laws of physics.

1:16:46through nothing but charisma and racism or whatever combination of traits that he has. Great. The reality of that business is that it's a telecom provider. At the end of the day, it is a broadband company, and we know the economics of broadband companies extraordinarily well. And for as uncompetitive as that market is, it's not like the most lucrative market in the history of the world. I also think it's funny that they're going to make a phone. like you're going to have a Starlink phone that has AI in it you have to this is the same bet we were talking about earlier you're going to rethink all the computers you're just going to talk to AI and it's going to do stuff for you are you going to have an Instagram app is it going to run TikTok people like doing things on their phones is it going to have Candy Crush like will it support Outlook like I can just go down the list of things that like X is the

1:17:43David Pierce:everything app I don't know if you know this phones can do. You don't need anything else. You just run into some pretty obvious problems right away. There's X money now. That's the thing. It's true. And it's not just one bank account. It's a sweep across many bank accounts in order to... It's very good. It's like, oh, we're doing financial engineering now as well. I love this. I'm very happy about it. Yeah. The whole thing is just deeply, deeply silly. By the way, it's the same idea that Sam Waltman has. To build a phone. It's exactly the same idea that Sam Waltman has. Yeah. Like, there's no point in making this a Starlink phone.

1:18:13Most people are around places with cell service. The idea is that you will make a device that replaces your phone and you just talk to an AI model and the AI model runs around doing stuff for you. And it's like, that's really hard. No one has pulled it off yet. And there's no true application model for AI yet in that way. Right.

1:18:29David Pierce:It's worth saying, by the way, that Elon Musk has denied for a very long time that SpaceX is building a phone. This rumor has been floating around for a long time. It also just makes a lot of sense, right? Like even for Starlink in particular, having a sort of Halo device kind of tracks. He also on this one even has said he called it utterly false, a statement to which I put almost no stock, but that's what he said. And I think that there's going to be a very funny turn that a lot of these folks have to make where they're going to have to convince you that the phone that they made isn't a phone.

1:19:06David Pierce:Do you know what I mean? Like there is, there are a bunch of reasons that we have cataloged extensively on this show that the thing you should make is a phone, but you can't because Google and Apple own that. And there's no, there is no winning that game anymore unless you are Google and Apple. So you have to build something else. But if you like make the stack of things that people want, you end up making a phone. And this is the incredible challenge with all hardware right now is the only way to win is to build a phone that somehow isn't in Google or Apple's orbit, and that's very hard to do.

1:19:39David Pierce:And so what we're going to see with all of these devices is them try very, very hard to explain to you why this isn't a phone while shipping you a thing that looks and feels like a worse phone. And all of it's going to be input. All of it's going to be, you just talk to it. Yeah, I think it's going to be fascinating. And in a way, like these open AI headphones that keep floating around, like you can sort of understand why they would do that and what the case is there for, right? It's like easy interaction with your AI assistant. Like, great, well and good. The thing with a six-inch screen that goes in your pocket is a very different kind of game to play next to somebody's phone.

1:20:18But if you run a telecom provider and you want that fee on top of your Starlink broadband fee, you almost have to make a phone. Yeah, absolutely.

1:20:31David Pierce:And it is certainly true that a phone made by SpaceX and Starlink and Elon Musk will sell. Like that thing will do numbers, whatever that thing is. It will. You shake your head at me all you want. It will sell. People will buy it. Whether it's good or not. No, everything is so expensive. How expensive will that thing be? And it will not have Instagram. There's this Wall Street Journal piece. So, I mean, who knows? The prototype was designed to run a proprietary operating system and integrate AI technology from SpaceX's ex-AIs, some of the people, running a Snapdragon chipset. It's a phone that groks.

1:21:05David Pierce:It's a grok phone. Cool. It's not going to run Android, right? That's a proprietary operating system. It feels like a fork of Android. Yeah. No, you don't have Instagram. And I'm keying on Instagram, but just think of any edge case app for any human being that's on their iPhone. I think for most people, it's Instagram. I think a phone without Instagram almost is a non-starter for like 90 % of people. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I think you make that list 10 apps long and you've captured everybody, right? Like, it's not super hard. But I do think, I mean, the galaxy brain thesis of all of this puts together the idea of X being an everything app.

1:21:41David Pierce:And you look at what like WeChat is in China, where essentially that becomes the most important thing. And you could essentially build a phone that only ran WeChat and it would work if you like Elon Musk could talk himself into all we need is Grok and X and we can solve everything because X is the everything app and Grok is this agent that accomplishes everything on your behalf. And that's all we need. It is utterly divorced from reality, but you can see why he might be very excited about the idea. Right. You don't need a bank app because you're use X, the everything app for your bank. Yes, exactly.

1:22:13This is nonsense. I can't be. Is it going to run Outlook? Do you know what most people need at work? They need Outlook. it's it's it's like i can ask you the dumbest questions how many times have we covered a new phone platform yeah it's true is it going to support rcs i mean that's a good one yeah uh no i agree what version of bluetooth does it run all day i could do this to you all day long

1:22:41David Pierce:yeah listen i i wanted the trump phone to be real and it kind of is ish it's like real ish No, I'm told that our review units have shipped. Yeah, that's still real-ish. I'm sure there are some Trump phones. But at least the Trump phone runs Android. Like, I know that that phone has gone through Play Store review. It does have Instagram. Yeah. Like, I first knew that the Trump phone was closer to real when, like, Google people told me it had gone through Play Store review. Very true. Because you know what that means? It has Instagram. It comes preloaded with True Social, to be clear. but you can download Instagram on it yeah by the way the Trump phone supports RCS because Android supports RCS I can answer the questions is any of this good no but it's it's more of a phone does it illegally mine crypto for Eric Trump in the background probably that's a phones do that's Android baby what's your next landing round alright well I mean I obviously have to do Comcast splitting in too yeah this was the setup yeah you do I mean first of all what an incredible personal victory for me.

1:23:51You did it. You brought down Comcast all by yourself. Just through the power of disclosure alone. So let me do the disclosure. So all, if you might've noticed, it is all the rage for media companies to cut themselves into lately. This is what we're doing. It's that time. There's only two business models. There's bumbling and unbumbling. And we are going through unbumbling. Yep. That is the time. So Comcast has not been part of our disclosure for ages because the NBC Universal investment in Vox Media went to Versant. That's right. so versant is an investor in vox media our parent company a parent company that is splitting in two and so there will be a new vox media uh which will sell our ads as part of the vox media podcast network and then there's going to be a new company called pmx and versant is a joint that's a joint venture with an old vox media that versant is an investor in this is all so tortured i feel like it it can't possibly matter anymore.

1:25:02David Pierce:Do you know what I mean? Like I, yeah, we've really like ship of Theseus to this investment at this point. Right. Our disclosure is going to look like we talk about South by Southwest and our parent company on South by Southwest. Yeah. Something like that. If we talk about New Year's Eve, I think we're going to have to disclose that our parent company owns Dick Clark Productions. It's going to be great. It's a, it's a new season of disclosures for us. You, you know, this means our, our new goal now is for you and I to host New Year's Rockin' Eve. Oh, it's happening. This is now the stated goal of the Vergecast.

1:25:31We're going to be there. Okay. And it's going to be amazing. Just making sure. David's going to sing. Done. Anyway, so Comcast had the thesis. If you will recall, a huge part of like the 2010 to 2016 net neutrality fight was Comcast buying content to put on its pipes. So they're like, we're going to buy NBCUniversal, and then you will have preferential access to NBCUniversal content on Comcast Network, which just flies in the face of net neutrality.

1:26:08David Pierce:To be fair, everybody was doing this. Everybody had this idea. AT &T bought Time Warner, and their entire idea was they would preload Game of Thrones shitware on mid-range Android phones. This is zero rating. That was the term, right? Yeah, so zero rating was the thing. So if you're a Comcast subscriber, peacock would not hit your data cap if you're an at &t subscriber hbo max would not hit your data cap there's all these ways you can bundle the content to make the pipes more valuable this was the thesis of this industry and they all ran into reality which is that their content distribution platforms suck they just suck they're not as good or compelling as a user-generated platforms like tiktok or youtube or instagram or whatever and so is it true that i now watch lots and lots of bite-sized clips of Game of Thrones?

1:26:55I do. I watch them on TikTok, illegally uploaded by crazy people who make fan edits of Oberyn Martell. I don't know who those people are. I don't know where they come from, but this is provided to me all day long. Yep. This is just like crazy stuff. I'm actually convinced HBO is behind it to promote House of the Dragon. Like they've concocted an army of overseas clippers to promote Game of Thrones really hard on TikTok right now. but the thesis didn't work right that you would put the content and the pipes in the same company and you would switch from charter to comcast because you wanted nbc content this never worked it never made any sense the idea that the distribution the content should be in the same place and now i think we're just at the end of it in like a very real way the content businesses the big overwrought overhead driven hollywood cost structure content businesses are getting crushed by creators, like just devastated by creators.

1:27:57The actual distribution platforms people care about, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever, pay nothing for content. Effectively nothing. YouTube pays the most, it pays nothing. So what are you going to do? Well, you're going to go back to being a pipe and say, you know what? We're just going to charge people money to access YouTube. Just straightforwardly, that is the business we're going to have. Yep. And even that business is declining. Comcast lost, I think, 700 ,000 subscribers in 2025.

1:28:23David Pierce:Yeah. And they're losing them to fiber. They're losing them to fixed wireless, all this stuff in broadband. And it's saying we'll charge you more money and give you Peacock for free is not compelling to anyone. So they're going to split into Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, and sit on the boards of both companies and be involved in some way. And they're spinning this very much as now both companies will get to grow independently of each other. It's finally time. And it's like, yeah, dude, that's what we all told you a decade ago, that this would never work. It didn't work for AT &T. It didn't work for Comcast.

1:28:55You can go down the line. It didn't work for AOL Time Warner, which tried to put content on top of its distribution. It simply does not work.

1:29:02David Pierce:I'm going to give you two outcomes you have to tell me what you think is more likely. Outcome number one, both of these companies continue to exist as kind of their ongoing concerns. And if anything, become like buyers in the market and try to go and sort of grow on their own. Outcome number two, within 24 months, both of these companies have been bought by somebody else, which you think is more likely. It will be two. It's got to be, right? Well, I mean, it just depends on whether you think the pendulum swings back to bundling fast, right? So you can see outcome two. Well, bundling parentheses by right-wing billionaires.

1:29:37David Pierce:Sure. Those are the bundlers. Everybody else is unbundling. I mean, Brian Roberts, he's the guy who ran MS Now. You know, like, Donald Trump does not like Brian Roberts. True, true. He's going to emerge in some way as a shareholder of two companies that go on whatever term they go on. But I think maybe Comcast, the cable company, merges with another large telecom provider, maybe Charter. And they're just a big national fiber provider. The Trump administration, very amenable to that kind of deal. and if you don't own the content, you can't squeeze the broadcast, right? You can't say, oh, I would let you do this merger if only NBC was acting better.

1:30:19So you create some ability to do M &A just outside of the political influence. By the way, the completely inappropriate political influence of the Trump administration. You create a way to go do that. And then I think the peacock division is just like, whew, I bet Netflix buys you. You know, like that thing is not long for this world all by itself. Like NBCUniversal will get swallowed up in some way.

1:30:41David Pierce:Yeah. By the way, they claim up and down that this is not going to happen. So everybody always says that until the minute the deal gets announced. Yeah, but the big Hollywood businesses are all chasing scale in a way that is fundamentally doing. And I just want to point out, I'll end this now. It's the lightning round after all. If we had just had appropriate net neutrality regulation in place, no one would have ever thought that mixing pipes in the content was a good idea because it would have, even the thesis that you could zero rate Peacock on Comcast Pipe and that would generate more subscribers, it would have been prevented.

1:31:14So you'd be like, whoops, I'm not allowed to do the thing that would make this work. I guess I won't do it. I'll just invest in my fiber network, which is the thing Americans want. Just pointing it out. Just saying I was right the whole time.

1:31:27David Pierce:We're allowed to have many things, but fast, cheap internet is just not one of them in this country. All right. I have a very quick one and then I want to end with your last lightning round item. Mine is just a very brief PSA. I mentioned this in 90 seconds on the verse the other day, but I have now had a personal experience with this and just want to bring it back up. WhatsApp is launching usernames. Instead of needing your phone number, you can now give people your username. I think that is going to be messy and complicated, especially with something like WhatsApp, which is very private and not as easy to publicly verify people's identity.

1:32:03David Pierce:there are going to be lots of ways this goes sideways also you should try and reserve your username the feature is not out yet but for a lot of people uh you can now go and reserve your username in the app um as someone with a very common first and last name all of the possible iterations of my name were gone by the time i try to go and reserve it um so either um convince your parents to name you something more interesting than david pierce or uh go fight very hard to go get your username now uh it's in settings in the whatsapp app um this is it's like i just think back to how quickly it became impossible to get like a normal human gmail address whatsapp is gonna speed run that so go go get your whatsapp nickname as soon as you possibly can yeah that means i have to use whatsapp but i'll do it if i open whatsapp there's just a million messages from my parents' friends in India being like, good morning.

1:32:58Aw, that's nice.

1:32:59David Pierce:How awful. How awful for you. People want you to have a good day. Have you seen the chart? Like, every morning in India, WhatsApp slows the global internet to a crawl because of the amount of good mornings. It's a great story. It's like one of the great all-time internet culture stories. I'm very jealous that we didn't do it. That is really cool. Alright, you have one last one that I know you're very excited about. What do you want to talk about? It has become a running theme on the show. I want to point out that car design has gone completely bananas and leading the charge are BMW and Mercedes.

1:33:27Some of the leading lights in car design, luxury automobile design. Where these companies go, the others tend to follow. And so, David, I regret to inform you that the people at BMW have lost their fucking minds. You sent me a TikTok. I have not watched it yet.

1:33:45David Pierce:We're going to watch this now together. The BMW X5 is out. There's a new BMW X5. And these are the headlights. Okay, so, oh my God. So the blinkers are Xs, four of them. And the headlights are just two tall rectangles in the middle of the car? They're not Xs, David. It's the X logo. Oh my God, it is the X logo. It looks for all the world like the X logo. Which is literally just a Unicode symbol. Thank you, everybody. Yep. And if you don't like it, there's a button to turn them into just plain slashes. And it lights up from the inside out. I mean, they look like nostrils, Neal. The headlights are nostrils.

1:34:24No, it looks like, you know, in cartoons when a stuffed animal dies and you turn their eyes into Xs? Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I'm talking about? Wait, okay. That's what it looks like. I can't even figure. So the blinkers are the Xs? No. I mean, you know, modern cars, the actual headlights are hidden away, right? So there's like the LED light show that looks like headlights and there's actually protectors. elsewhere. So the things that look like headlights in the new BMW X5 are X's. And the X's look exactly like the X logo, a solid slash and then a hollow slash. If you don't like it, there's a button on the inside of the car to turn off one of the slashes and just have a plain slash.

1:35:06I would submit to you and the designers at BMW that if you have to put a button in your car to turn off the design element that makes it look like the logo of a company that people have a lot of feelings at. Maybe you shouldn't have that design element. But, you know, maybe around the world people think differently of X. Then there's like a million other buttons on this car. It comes with 10 different drivetrains, including a hydrogen drivetrain in 2028. The battery technology seems amazing. It's like up to 400 kilowatt charging. It's like over 400 miles of range. Like, it's all very cool. New stuff.

1:35:39The interior is bananas. It screens for days, including the new BMW. weird, not a square screen. The door handles are electronic. You can open the doors electrically from the key fob. All this stuff. But I'm just focused on these headlights, which are literally the X logo. So much so that there's a button to turn them off and turn them just into slashes.

1:36:01David Pierce:My wife, Anna, one of her most closely held theories, I think I've mentioned this before, is that there should only be one kind of acceptable headlight and all other headlights should be illegal. that like we should That was the 80s. In 1980s America there was only sealed beam headlights. All cars had the same headlights. But like they should be the same shape. They should be the same size. They should have the same amount of like light. Headlights should not be a thing you get to have design theories about. And I could not agree with her more. Like even the little thing I think it's I'm going to buy you like a 1980s Camaro with like pop-up sealed beam headlights.

1:36:36David Pierce:But I think even the is it the Mustang that does the thing where it points the arrow from left to right and from right like it - Those are the taillights. It sort of blinks out on the taillights. I hate those. That also should be illegal. Taillights are different than headlights? Blink your lights and when they're blinks, they blink. They're called blinkers. Your blinkers should blink. Your headlights should be on and they shouldn't blind me and they should be obviously headlights. This is not, you can have so many things, car designers. Just make the headlights headlights. This is not complicated.

1:37:06David Pierce:You want to go back to sealed beam headlights like the 1980s? Yes. also i'm still worried that we're not 100 clear on the difference between headlights and taillights listen all if i have to look at it on your car i should be in charge of it you know what i mean i i get it it's it's a real it's like an inversion of like the john stuart mill harm principle you know like everything harms me thus society should be in charge of it exactly this i these are terrible headlights. And like, this is one of those things where you're like, how many meetings were there where nobody raised their hand and said, you know that's the logo of that other thing, right?

1:37:45Yeah, that's the X logo.

1:37:46David Pierce:Yeah. Well, I mean, there was obviously one meeting because they put in a button to turn it off. At the very last second, somebody's like, guys, this is horrible. This looks like a cartoon bunny had a drug overdose. I'm sorry to everyone who's just listening to this, but I promise, if you close your eyes and picture what Neelai is describing. It is exactly that. Picture a BMW X5. We didn't even get to the grill, which looks like beaver teeth. It does. But picture a BMW. That's what I'm saying. It looks like nostrils. Yeah, picture a BMW X5. And where the headlights are, picture blinking X logos.

1:38:20That is 100 % what it looks like. Terrible. I don't know what's going on over there.

1:38:26David Pierce:I'm out on this. Thank God I don't have enough money to buy a BMW. That's what I always say. All right, we should get out of here. uh neil i it's good to see are you going home one of these days will i will i see you home next week natural habitat at some point let's assume i get this book right now i'll be home next week okay what are you doing for the fourth uh we're gonna light some fireworks we're gonna eat some hot dogs yeah the baby is born on july 8th oh yeah so we we've got a big party coming up the weekend after the fourth that's very exciting well we just had we just had a june 30th birthday uh so that was very exciting uh and uh i'm i think we're gonna take the three year old fireworks.

1:39:02David Pierce:Okay. Which will either go really well or really badly. So we will see how that goes. What's Decoder next week? Decoder next week is the heads of the creator division at UTA, the giant talent agency. They rep everybody. They rep Alex Cooper and Alex Earl. Kai Sinat, who are not the same person. I'm reliably told. Yes. But like all the biggest creators, they are their agents and they build them businesses. So we spent some time being like, how does this actually work? How does this money actually work? It's really interesting. That's cool. I like that. Um, version history this weekend is the story of the Keurig, which is one of the most fun episodes we've ever made.

1:39:38David Pierce:That sounds amazing. Also on that episode, uh, Morgan Eckroth, who is a coffee influencer and a barista champion. Uh, I found the most coffee snob person I possibly could to litigate the future of Keurig with. And we had an absolute blast. That's right. It was a really good episode. Um, lots of good stuff going on on the verge. Um, we published, I think my favorite thing this week that we published was a really great explainer about quantum computing. Uh, basically trying to figure out where are we in the history of quantum computing? Uh, really good, really smart story. Is it nowhere? It's the answer is nowhere, but not forever.

1:40:11David Pierce:Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's, it's inching towards somewhere. That's the name of my memoir. Um, anyway, uh, we should get out of here. We've got a long weekend to head off to. We've got one more episode for you. We're doing stuff sort of out of order this week. So you'll be hearing this on Thursday. we've got a fun holiday thing for Friday and then we're off for the weekend I hope everybody has good fun weekends I hope you have a good long weekend I'm sure I will not see you until you go do July 4th thanks I'm out of here, you're never going to see me again alright, The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network you can subscribe to The Verge theverge.com slash subscribe to get all of our podcasts ad free including this one, and Decoder, and Version History you get all of our newsletters, you get all of our coverage of everything theverge.com slash subscribe You can also send us email, vergecastatverge.com.

1:40:59David Pierce:Call the hotline, it's 66-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you about all of your Brendan Carr theme songs and everything else. This episode is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Lacasio. We will see you tomorrow. Nealai. Rock and roll. You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more.

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