The ups and downs of the iPhone 16E
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Neil, I is out on vacation somewhere. I don't even know where he is. He's on a beach doing vacation things. He's gone. Jake Castronakis is here. Hi, Jake. Hey, thanks for having me. It's been a minute. I'm very happy you're back. Allison Johnson is also here. Hi, Allison. Hello. Allison, you're going to hang with us for a while and then you're going to go do more fun things than hang with us. But we have a lot of stuff to talk about. The Humane AI pin is dead.

And I think we are obligated to spend several hours talking about that as the leading publication on all things Humane AI pin. There's a new iPhone. Amazon Chime is dead, which no one has talked to me about yet and I have really strong feelings about that I cannot wait to discuss. There's a lot of politics stuff that we're going to wait and get to at the very end of the show. We are going to save as much Trump, Elon, Doge stuff for the very end. And we're going to tell you when you can stop listening if you don't want to hear it anymore.

All that is coming. But let's start with the iPhone. This is this it's this like turned into sort of an accidental iPhone launch. Allison, you you wrote the story. You've talked to folks. What is going on here? Tell us about this new phone.

Yeah, so we've been kind of expecting a new iPhone SE successor for a little while now. The rumors were swirling. And what we got is the iPhone 16E. The SE series is dead, question mark? Do we know what E stands for?

Okay. I like David Immel's explanation. It's E stands for eggs, and that's why it's so expensive. No. Okay. Cool. Because SE, was SE officially special edition or was it one of those where like Apple just sort of makes up letters and refuses to explain what they are? I feel like Apple probably circulates a rumor that it was special edition and we all just like repeat it and then it becomes fact. Yeah.

Yeah. Do not know. I do not know what E stands for. E-Z? Extra? I don't think either of those terms apply. So the gist is like it's sort of an SE successor, but they're really positioning it as like part of the 16 family. So it's a 6.1 inch screen. It's basically like an iPhone 14 kind of chassis screen.

So it's a modern phone, which the last SE was not. It had a tiny screen. And it does Apple intelligence, of course, has wireless charging, but no MagSafe, which is a very weird reality. And all the kinds of like...

Modern iPhone things you would expect, like what are we on A18 processor now? Oh, and the new Apple modem, the C1. So this is its debut appearance. So I want to talk about the C1 separately because I think that's super interesting. But the more I look at this phone.

the less I think I understand why it exists. Except, like, if you just want to say Apple should sell a phone for less than $800, sure, fine, whatever. Apple itself has never bought into that theory. Like, this company has spent the entirety of its smartphone-selling life

refusing to sell cheap smartphones because it can make a lot of money and sell a lot of phones for a lot more money. So I don't buy that as the whole reason for the existence of the 16E. The SE...

Weirdly, I understood more because it's like, look, you want the little phone. Here it is. They did it with the mini. They did it with it's like, look, it's cheaper. It's smaller. It wasn't the little phone. It was the we kind of forgot about this. We still have some lying around. If you'll take it, you'll give us money. Sure. Yeah. It's like the leftover bin of funds, which weirdly is a strategy. I actually understand more. I understand.

I was offended by the SE line. The SE was embarrassing. That should not have been allowed in stores. This is a hot take. I think it's a completely reasonable take. This phone, it had the design of essentially the iPhone 6. It has been a decade and they were still selling that thing. Apple should have made the SE and just had it only be refurbished.

Like just just never even acknowledge that it's a new phone. Just jump straight to like it's in the clearance section at a Best Buy. Like that's that's what the SE should have been. Someone's old iPhone. Yeah. Right. And even though no one's ever had it, it's been sitting in a factory for six years. So like, sure, it's old. Yeah. The previous SE, the outgoing one, it was bad. I mean, the screen was way too small for like a modern phone. It did feel like kind of leftovers. I but but.

It cost $429 with like paltry 64 gigabytes of storage. So that's like kind of you figure out that's like a $500 phone. So that was something that was like, hey, you want a cheap kind of iPhone that exists. Yeah.

I didn't think anybody should buy it, but it was there. So this one costs $599 with 128 gigs of storage, which is like a reasonable amount of storage in a modern screen, but that's like way more expensive. So yeah, we're not talking about a cheap iPhone anymore. We're not talking about like

the like cost to feature trade-off is just like all out of whack this time i feel like from the apple making money perspective i will agree i don't i don't totally understand right because they they want to go high-end expensive um from the value prop for the average buyer it you know

My early take is this is going to be the phone to buy. Interesting. This is almost everything you'd get from the standard iPhone 16 for $200 less. $200 for MagSafe, whatever. I could not disagree more. This is so fun. Really? We've all been reviewing phones for a very long time. And I think the thing that I have had drilled into my head over a decade is that the difference in accuracy

actual cost in terms of like how people feel it between a $500 phone and a $1,000 phone is smaller than you think. And there has been no market for a $600 phone for 10 years because it doesn't matter because that's not how people buy phones because people trade in their phones to remove the costs they pay them over time. So it comes out to like a couple of dollars a month. The

Like, people keep their phones a long time, so they're able to amortize the cost over a long period of time. So the idea, like, if this were $199, I would be all in on it. And I would completely agree with you, Jake, that like, bang for your buck, this is the best iPhone. At $599, I'm like, okay, you're looking at, I don't know, $1.50 a month less on your thing. And that is a bad trade. And so I'm at the point now where like, I want to talk about the trade-offs Apple made here, because I think they're actually really interesting. But

And even absent all of those, I'm like, even if every trade-off is the right one, and I don't think they made all the right trade-offs, it's not that big a savings. I don't know. Like, cut this price in half. And I think it's super interesting. I think there are so many people who are just like, what iPhone should I buy? If you have to ask that question, get this one. Yeah. So the test keys is my husband's.

He has an iPhone XR. It barely, you know, gets through a day. And he was just like, it's time to buy a new iPhone.

He's the person who will just be like, which one's the cheapest? I'll take that one. I asked him, I was like, are you going to miss MagSafe? And he said, what is MagSafe? So there you go. All right. Well, you have done your husband a great disservice, Allison. I know. We have to test it. We have to see if it's good. But assuming it is as, like, expected, yeah.

I don't know what you would be missing out on, right? Like, I think if you got the old SE, I would be like, that looks like an old phone, right? You're going to have a very different experience. The 16E, same processor, same screen. Everything is essentially the same as the standard 16. You're just like not missing out in the same way that you used to be. I do largely agree with that. Yeah.

And again, I think the only thing I'm really thrown by here is that this thing is like $200 more expensive than makes sense for it to be in my head. But let's put that aside for a minute. So I do think the tradeoffs Apple is making here are really interesting for exactly that reason, Jake, because what they're clearly trying to do is...

is get rid of all the things you don't care about down to a price that is more affordable, but essentially solves the, it'll still do all the iPhone things you need it to thing. So Allison, I, this is a complicated thing to ask you to do off the top of your head, but like between the, the iPhone 16, which until this week was the base one in the line and the 16 E the

What are the things you lose by downgrading the $200? I think MagSafe is a big one. I mean, the complicating thing in there is that the iPhone 15 is still a thing you can buy. Right. So Apple... Ignore that for now. We'll come back to that. But I think the like...

The should you buy last year's phone thing just makes everything complicated. So let's just throw that out for now. Let's just go 16 versus 16E for now. Yeah. So 16E does the thing where it has one camera. So you lose the ultra wide. And with that, you lose the macro capabilities. So there's that. Again, not a thing my husband is going to care about. I keep coming back to.

Yeah, it's not a huge list of things, I don't think. The camera control obviously is not there. You get that action button. That's kind of it. Am I missing anything huge? You lose the dynamic island. Dynamic island. You get the notch instead. Yeah, yeah.

So if I'm being completely honest, you are a dynamic island fanboy. I know. I know the opposite. I had to tap on my phone screen to double check and make sure that the 16 didn't also have a notch. Like I cannot. I don't know. The dynamic island is actually neat. Like as somebody who follows sports a lot, the idea of having the little live activities is great. I actually think Apple has done that really well.

Don't think it's a thing I would like miss in a huge constant way if I didn't have it anymore. Pay $200 more and get better access to sports scores. That's a selling point. I feel like that would work. The one other spec I think that has made a lot of people feel feelings is the 60 hertz display on the 16E. And I think...

Again, if the rubric is, does Allison's husband care? The answer is almost certainly no. We've talked about this on the show before, but I downgraded from... I've had a pro or a pro max every year for years. And I downgraded to the 16 because I wanted the blue one, a decision I have never for one second regretted. I'm not kidding. It was such a good decision. The blue one makes me so happy. Yeah.

The 60 hertz display thing is like it's really noticeable if you hold two phones side by side, one with a 60 hertz display and one with 120 hertz pro motion display. It is a real meaningful upgrade. I do not believe it has changed my day to day experience of using an iPhone one tiny iota. Like I don't see it. I always notice it like.

Right. When I switch from a 120 hertz display to a phone with 60 hertz for like a day and then I kind of forget about it. And then it's nice when I go back to the 120 hertz display. I'm like, oh, this is really smooth and nice. But yeah, I think it's it's a thing you can put out of your mind or a lot of people can. Some people can't and that's fine. It's like weird. The Apple doesn't include it. You know, we when we're comparing this to regular phones.

iPhone 16, it's like, yeah, they all have a 60 hertz display, but that kind of forgets the fact that like maybe they shouldn't. I think it sort of highlights. I mean, you can pick up any Android phone that's $500. It has 120 hertz display, but that's I don't know. So the rumors, the rumorati out there are suggesting that the iPhone 17, just the standard one, is going to get the promotion 120 hertz display. Oh, interesting. Which I think

maybe actually puts the 16E a little bit more in perspective. Like you can see they're gonna level up the baseline one. The pro model is already has a bunch of differentiators. I think it starts to separate those levels a little bit more clearly than the E versus the standard right now where it's like,

You know, that is yet another piece of evidence that suggests something that I don't want to believe and have no evidence for, which is that the whole iPhone lineup is about to get more expensive. Oh. Which I think would make the 16E, I think, might seem cheaper in September than it does right now. And that is a thing that I worry about.

Yeah, I believe that. I mean, I know you said we would save politics for later, so I'm going to give you a brief. But, like, tariffs are allowed. Tariffs matter to every gadget we buy. That counts. Is this phone $600 if the tariffs didn't hit? Or is it $600 because they know the tariffs are here, because they know the other phones are probably going to have to get more expensive? That feels really possible to me. The thing, if this phone was $500, like...

sold, you know, MagSafe, fine, whatever. It feels like a $500 phone that they're charging $600 for. So I'm I will accept any theory about why that is. I do think there is an interesting piece of math in there that is is what people are upgrading from and how much they're getting in trade in value right now, because I think like if you're coming from

I don't know, an iPhone 13, let's say, and you're getting like three or four hundred dollars in trade in value. And that would turn a five hundred dollar 16 into like a hundred dollar phone like that suddenly becomes pretty compelling. And I think this is why the phone price thing is so complicated, because everybody is actually paying a different price.

The price of a phone is not the price of a phone. It is actually dependent on so many other things, especially in the U.S., where everything is mediated by carriers and everything has long-term deals. It's just a mess. Like, I have to buy my wife a new phone every...

because she is just spectacularly good at breaking her phones. I love her very much. And she just can't keep a phone alive. And just try. She's basically in she's an Android diehard and absolutely steadfastly refuses to get an iPhone, even though it would make it easier to video chat with our entire family. We have her on the show. She would love to be on the show and tell me how irritating her phone choices are. Yeah, I need this. I need this. But she is basically like all I want is like a pretty good phone that's pretty cheap.

Which one do I get? And I have found that to be such a more complicated question to answer than I ever expected, especially because like now I'm like, oh, well, the Pixel 9a is probably coming soon. But then as soon as that comes out, like the Pixel 8 will be a lot cheaper and that's probably a better. It's just like all of this is so confusing. And so I find myself spending less time worrying about how much a phone costs unless it is like.

$300. And then it counts, right? Yeah. This is a very cheap phone now. That's what it kind of feels like. The SE was in the territory of like, you could pay that out of pocket. Or I think a good chunk of people could pay that out of pocket. It wasn't out of the question. An $800 phone is different. And then, yeah, once you get to $600, does that push it into the bracket of like,

well, I don't have that lying around. I'm going to subsidize this through my carrier. And then you get into what are the deals right now? What are they offering? And I did this with my hairstylist recently. It's like, what phone do you buy? And we ended up starting with like, what

Carrier deals are there right now. And that's how we got to, like, she has the Pixel 9 now. It's such a sad state of affairs. It is. It was like, what is Mint Mobile going to give you for free? And it was like, well, that was the better deal than paying for something else out of pocket. It says an awful lot about the state of smartphones that that is the case. Sure does. Let's talk about MagSafe because I think

This is the... Of all the trades that Apple made, this is the one that I stuck on. And Allison, it sounds like you did the same. That it was like, is this...

Is this a correct trade-off to make in exchange for making a phone cheaper? Jake, I don't know how you feel about MagSafe. Notoriously, Jake runs around the office hating MagSafe. It's true. Well, I have a Pixel 8, and so I have never even seen a magnet in my life. Not sure what they're used for. The thing everybody says about MagSafe is that it's for wireless charging, and that is true.

But it's also only part of why I really like MagSafe. Like, I have no case, but I have a MagSafe pop socket on the back of my phone. And this is how I hold my phone. And that stays on there? It stays on. It slides around in a way that is, like, very fun to fidget with and also very dangerous. But it has never once actually fallen off while I have been using it. Okay. Okay.

For now, we're still alive. But also, like, I have a stand here that I put my phone on when I'm sitting at my computer so that I can look at it directly and unlock it that way and do, like, two-factor authentication and that kind of thing. I have one in my car that MagSafe's to. It's like, I see it less as a charging system and more like an accessory system. And the MagSafe accessory system is actually really good now. And I think...

Like, there are going to be a lot of people who get this phone and switch from lightning to USB-C, and that's going to be annoying but good because all of your gadgets are going to be USB-C and life with all of your gadgets being USB-C is better. But I think there are going to be a bunch of people who miss out on a big part of what makes the iPhone ecosystem great.

Which is increasingly filled with MagSafe stuff. So we don't have a lot of MagSafe in my house either with my husband having the XR. And you having every phone that exists simultaneously. And I have all the phones. So I just do like regular wireless charging, which the 16E does do wireless charging without the MagSafe. Right.

But something that our colleague Jen Toohey said was that one of her kids, her like kind of older kids, doesn't have, is the last person in the house without MagSafe. And it's becoming a problem because everybody else can use the MagSafe accessories and she's the one stuck without it. So that was really like, okay, this is maybe like,

if your household is invested in this, I can see how that would be annoying. And the thing I'm thinking about is if you hold onto this phone for seven years, which my husband, Charlie, would do that, is it going to be annoying in seven years that he doesn't have MagSafe? And I'm like, can't you just stick your phone to the wall over here or whatever we're doing then? I don't know. It is the thing that feels like,

Why? Like on a $500 phone, maybe I could see no MagSafe. Just why? Why did they leave it out? It's irritating. Yeah, it struck me as the most obvious sort of missing feature. Like the rest of the stuff is downgrades on things. And I'm actually coming around to the camera choice. I think...

One of the things I saw, and I forget who was posting about it, but basically the argument that they made is you can now make iPhone decisions based on how much you care about the camera. And I actually think that makes a lot of sense, right? Like if you just look at the iPhone as a series of kind of base camera to excellent camera and you just pay more for more camera, that's actually like the simplest way to think about the iPhone line now and kind of works. And I think most people...

just want a thing that takes pictures, right? Like that's it. It'll take pretty good pictures. You don't have to think a ton about it. You open the thing with the action button and take a photo and move on with your day. Like I think that describes most people's iPhone photography. And if it doesn't describe you, you're not going to buy the 16E anyway. So that I think I've actually come around to. We also know cameras are a really expensive part of smartphones. So if you want to save money on smartphones, that is one way to do it. MagSafe is one that it's like, this feels like a thing that you've gone from

not just having better to having worse, like the screen or the camera, but to just not having anymore. And like the camera control I can happily lose because I don't ever, ever use the camera control on my iPhone. Maybe that's just me. I just don't, I don't like it. I don't use it. I forget it's there for weeks at a time.

MagSafe is like a core part of the iPhone for me now. And I feel like it would be very hard to get rid of that. What they're doing in the Android world right now is that because basically none of the phones have a MagSafe equivalent, which they should. There's a whole standard for it called She2. It's existed for a year and a half at this point. The case companies are just

putting a ring of magnets in their cases. So if you have a phone that supports wireless charging, you just buy a MagSafe compatible case, slap it on, now you've got MagSafe. Now it's obviously not quite as good because you can't use those accessories like the super slim wallet that just smacks right onto the phone itself. But if you are somebody who

just really wants max if you can get it there's ways to get it and i suspect that's a possible outcome for that for the 16e here surely somebody's going to fill that market um

you know, it's not as elegant. I agree with you. I think there's probably gonna be a lot of people who are bummed about this, but there's, there's some options in the Android world has lived slightly unhappily without it for a few years now. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think the case thing is actually a pretty good argument. And, and like, you can get into this ecosystem if you really want to. And like,

Like, honestly, the way Apple is going to sell this based on the way that they sell everything else is like, well, if you want all that stuff, it's only $200 more. Like, it's such a, they now have the thing where they're going to be able to sell you, start with the $599 phone, and then you're going to accidentally leave the store with like a $2,000 Pro Max. And you'll be like, I don't understand how this happened. All I wanted was MagSafe. And that is a thing Apple is extraordinarily good at. Before we get off this subject and

Allison, you're going to review this thing at some point. And when you do, we'll have to check back in because I'm very curious what it's like to actually live with some of these trade-offs after using the big fancy iPhones. But we should talk about why this modem is a big deal. Jake, can you explain why this modem is a big deal? Yeah. Apple has been trying to make its own cell phone modems for years at this point. I think we all know they have increasingly been trying to make

more and more of their own in-house parts. And that has worked out really phenomenally well for things like processors. They have really struggled when it comes to the modem. At one point, Intel really wanted to get into the cell phone modem game. And so Intel had this big unit working on cell phone modems, and it was not going well at all. Apple, at the same time,

Wasn't going well for them either. Apple bought Intel's entire team. Oh, that's right. An entire team that was failing. Yeah. And so fast forward several more years, they have taken that team and they have finally put together a modem. And we haven't got a chance to test it out. I think this is really interesting because if you look at the iPhone 16E, we've essentially tested every part of it in other phones before.

The one new thing here is the C1, which is what Apple is calling its first modem. And whether it can keep up with the standard Qualcomm modem that has been in every other iPhone is going to be the big question here, because that is a thing people will notice if their cell connection is spotty and drops out. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but the conspiracy theories about this are just

rampant in our comments, on Reddit, everywhere. And the leading conspiracy theory is that Apple has actually been sabotaging the Qualcomm modems in the other iPhones in order to make it so that the performance gap between those phones and the 16E is small. I should be clear that there's absolutely no reason to believe any of this. I think somebody was like, oh, there's a Qualcomm chip, but they use the other more mysterious Qualcomm chip. And I'm like, I don't know what a mysterious Qualcomm chip is. But like, it is...

it is a really interesting and measurable thing, right? Like, to your point, Jake, you're going to be able to hold two iPhones next to each other and the only reason one would get faster speeds than the other is because Apple made one and Qualcomm made the other. And...

I have a feeling actually both companies are going to be very nervous about how that's going to go. Because like if you're a Qualcomm, you look at what Apple has done to the silicon world over the last several years and has the way it has just lapped Intel in particular on all kinds of different devices.

And for Qualcomm, that suddenly starts to seem sort of nerve wracking. You're you've been like the only company in this game for decades and you have made an awful lot of money by being the only one who makes modems that are any good. And then if you're Apple, you're like, oh, God, we've we bought this crappy team from Intel. We put all this time and energy into it. We've we've sort of staked our thing in the ground. And it's not like if we have antenna gate two because the C1 isn't very good, that's going to be a really tough look for Apple. I'm going to.

be careful to hold it correctly. I don't know. It's a weird thing. I think the way is you hold it sort of by the top middle and just kind of dangle your phone. That's not what I plan to do. No, it's a really strange thing to be contemplating a review of this device. And it's like,

A modem is a solved problem, you know, in every other phone where I'm like, it's something I'm like aware of when I test a phone. It's a solved problem, parentheses, by Qualcomm, right? In every way, it's just Qualcomm all the way down. You put the Qualcomm thing in your phone, it works. I rarely notice like, oh, the signal seems to be dropping out and it shouldn't. But yeah, this is something I'll be on

obviously, you know, very interested in with the 16E. So we'll see. I'm kind of excited about it. I first got into...

tech journalism and reviewing phones, like right as LTE was becoming a thing, which feels like thousands of years ago now. But like doing the thing where you just wander around on the streets, taking a hundred speed tests just to see what happens is like a surprisingly joyful part of the experience. Yeah, it's going to be a throwback. Yeah, it's great. I'm going to run some speed tests. I'm very curious to see. I will say the other thing that has come up a bunch in our comments is people who are now wondering why

If Apple making these modems in-house is going to make it easier slash more compelling for Apple to put modems inside of MacBooks, which is a thing that I have hoped for for many years and would very, very much love to see. I have no idea why any human would pay for that. But I understand, like, I do not understand why Apple has not done it.

Charge you an extra 200 bucks for that. Done. Sure. I don't understand why they haven't done that. I would have agreed with you until an experience I had last year with the M4 iPad Pro, which was the first time I had my whole life sort of e-simmed. And I literally just turned on the iPad Pro. I never I was like out at a coffee shop. I didn't connect it to Wi-Fi. I didn't do anything. And it was just online. I logged into my account and was just online.

And it was one of the coolest technology experiences I've had in years of just like, it's the difference between when you had to turn your computer on and off every time you used it and just opening the lid and it started to be on again. That all of a sudden, like the whole thing just feels better and more accessible. This idea that everywhere I am, I can just pop my laptop open and start working is like,

There's something real there. I would use a Starbucks hotspot from my house if it saved me money on my cell phone bill. What, what, like...

Adding another device to your thing. I understand. I think it makes a ton of sense for business users. It does sound amazing and magical, but it's a lot of gadgets, a lot of gadgets. I say all that, but I've always been too cheap to buy the cellular Apple Watch for like, and it's the same thing, right? It is like magically connected everywhere is the whole pitch and I get it and I want it and I wouldn't pay any more for it. But I think I would on a laptop.

I would almost never use it because I just sit at home on my Mac mini every day, but like it would make me feel good. Yeah, I would enjoy it. All right. We should talk about one more phone before we get off of phones. And that phone is the Oppo Find N5, a phone that is not coming to the United States. Don Preston on our team reviewed it. Allison, I just want to know how jealous you are that you have not gotten to try and review this phone. This is the thinnest foldable phone in the world.

According to Dom, it got a lot of the hardware things right. It's basically as thick as a USB-C port, plus like the least metal you can possibly imagine.

I believe, let me see, I'm just going to read a sentence that he wrote. When closed, this is less than a millimeter thicker than an iPhone 16 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and weighs only two grams more than the Apple phone. Open, it boasts a bigger screen than an iPad mini, but is thinner and weighs less. It's lighter than any of the foldables you can buy in the U.S. right now and is a full three millimeters thinner than the Galaxy Z Fold 6. Like this is this looks like what a foldable is supposed to look like. Like they did it.

They did it. Yeah. And I kind of I love Dom's kind of thesis on this review is like, now what?

You know, it's still a pretty expensive phone. I think we just got word of the pricing is like around. Well, it's not coming to the U.S., which we've established, but it would cost around eighteen hundred dollars if you just did the calculation. Which, to be fair, is like that's the going rate for foldables. Yeah. That is still pretty expensive.

literally 100% too expensive. Yeah, yeah. It should be half of that price and then I think these things would have a real shock. It's only three iPhone 16 E's.

I can see you get it. On screen amount alone, that kind of adds up. It's interesting. Yeah. You could take three 16Es and make a trifold. Yeah, like accordion style, your three 16Es. Dom asked, is this the end? And the answer is no, more screens. Yep. What if I took all these and just took them apart into many screens? Yeah, it looks so beautiful. I'm going to find out.

find one at Mobile World Congress and put it in my pocket and run out of the convention hall. No, and it sounds silly. You're like, well, they were already pretty thin, like comparably. But like every millimeter really does make a difference, especially when you're folding in half. And I just keep coming back to the Pixel Fold 2, 9 Pro Fold, where it's

You're like, could that really be as nice as it seemed? Like the specs, the dimensions seem right. And then you pick it up. You're like, this is right. It feels so nice to use this. That's the impression I got from Dominic on the Apple phone. And I want to pick one up and not give it back. I do think it's really exciting that it seems like we are getting closer to the point where

the hardware works, right? Like I quibble with Dom a little bit on the idea that like you can't see the crease and it's like, no, it's right there in the picture, in every picture. Like I see it, there's still a crease and these things all need to be sturdier. They need to be more durable. They need better cameras. Like I actually think there's quite a bit of refining and improving left to do in a lot of these devices, but

But as a pure piece of hardware design, like we're actually we're getting close. And then it's like, OK, now we just have to take this thing and cut $700 off it. And sincerely, I have no idea if that's possible. But I think if it's not.

we're sort of done here, right? Like I think the market for an $1,800 phone of any kind is just never going to be very big. I just don't see it. And I think most people are like, if I could have this phone exactly or this phone exactly, but it opened up to be bigger, I would take the one that opened up to be bigger. But that's I'm not willing to make any trades in service of that thing, I think, is where most people are. That's 100% where I like it.

Like, huge nerd. Would love a folding phone. Really cool. The cameras are ever so slightly worse and it costs $600 more. Yeah. That's not worth it for me. Right. Yeah. And it's like, I think it's a phone that like my parents would really like. Like they would love to unfold their phones and read something and be able to make the text bigger or whatever. See pictures of their grandkid and bake pancakes.

bigger size, but I am never going to recommend one to them. It's, you know, the durability is just too much of a question mark. And Don makes a good point in the review that if you can't afford to

replace this phone or make a very expensive repair to it, then you should not buy a folding phone. And I think that's exactly right. That's a good rule of thumb. Yeah. Like if you couldn't afford to walk into the store and buy two of these, you probably shouldn't walk into the store and buy one of these. Have they fixed the like your fingernail will crease the screen forever problem on foldables yet? Because that's horrifying. That's better. Yeah. Better is still...

I still don't risk it too much. And you definitely don't want to like have a piece of debris in your bag and like that, like the phone folds over on. I've carried a lot of folding phones in the bottom of my tote bag, which is dusty and gross and they have all been okay. But I haven't done that for like two years or three years, you know? So. Yeah. The, the long-term, um,

durability of one of these is still the biggest question to me. Like the, is it going to break the first time you open it thing? Um,

Not completely solved from any of these, but like mostly solved. It's gotten a lot better than the like, oops, I accidentally peeled off the screen, which was not that long ago. But we're still at a point now where like that thing you just said, Alison, about like debris in your pocket is like you're going to get a little nervous every time you just throw this into your purse or your backpack. And until you solve that, we're just not quite there.

But we're getting there. And I think the idea that there are a bunch of companies pushing really hard at this design stuff is cool. And I wish they'd stop worrying about thinness and start

fixing the durability stuff. But that's how I feel about all phones right now. The iPhone Air, I'm going to say this again in September, and whenever we get the Galaxy S25, was that the Air 2? Edge. Edge, that's right. I feel the same. Like, we're doing a thin phone year, and I'm like, what if our phones didn't break? That'd be cool. I'm into that. We would like that. Yeah. But yeah, this thing is not coming to the U.S., which is sad. It's devastating.

We're going to find one. There was a world in which we thought OnePlus might take this and launch it itself. I don't understand. OnePlus just came out and we're just like, we're not going to do it. I know. They just came out and broke our hearts. Yeah, they didn't have to. I don't understand what was in this for them. They could have kept us going at least for a little longer. All year. All year we could have been pleading with them. There's like, hey, you know that phone everybody's really hyped about this week? Like the one that people are more excited about maybe than this iPhone.

Not going to do it. We're just like, we could. Fast. Don't bother. OnePlus, the company that for years, all it ever did was build hype. This time it's like, no, no, no, no, don't get excited. We have nothing for you. Anti-hype. All right. We need to take a break and then we're going to come back and we are going to talk about the saddest little gadget sitting on my desk right now. We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from Shopify.

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All right, we're back. Enough phones. It's time to talk about the gadget that will inevitably for sure replace your smartphone. Who cares about the iPhone? No one needs it anymore. The Humane AI pin will solve it. Everything's going to be just fine. I'm so excited. I think there's a lot of potential here. David, what's the latest? So I think it was about, what, nine months ago that the AI pin had launched.

It went poorly, I would say. I was mean to it and not as mean to it as I should have been in retrospect. We'll get back to that. But there was this rumor going around that Humane was actually looking to sell itself, right? This company had raised a ton of money. It had brought on a ton of hype. It kind of bombed with its first product. We didn't think it was going to work. And then it was trying to sell itself to HP for somewhere between $750 million and a billion dollars. And we were all like,

That seems high. Also, LOL at HP paying a billion dollars for Humane's weird AI operating system and this thing, the AI pin that basically didn't work at all. That never came to anything. Humane kind of went quiet. They were like slightly apologetic and then were like, well, we're also making an operating system. That's going to be a whole thing.

batten down the hatches, do their thing. And then this week, it was announced that HP was buying technology from Humane. HP actually reached out to us to very carefully confirm that HP was not acquiring Humane. It was buying some technology and assets and hiring some people from Humane. But that Humane, as we know it, including DAI PIN,

is shutting down. And as of February 28th, so a week from Friday, today as you're hearing this, the AI pin will essentially be dead. They're turning off the service. It won't do any cloud stuff. There's a thing in Humane's FAQ

Uh, one of the questions is basically like, what will my device be able to do? And it's like, it'll be able to tell you it's battery level. Yeah. This thing, this is really, really rough. Like, like you, if you bought one, you knew you were an early adopter, but like, like straight up your $700, $800 pin just is just dead. Like it's doing nothing. And basically nobody's getting a refund.

In less than a year. That hurts. Just gone. Yeah. That's bad. Yeah. Humane is doing refunds for people who are in the 90-day window in which people could normally get refunds. Would love, love to know how many people that is. Oh, my God. I had the same thought. Like, if you bought... You think they set aside any money for that? Let's see. Three months ago would have been, like, Thanksgiving. So if you bought...

a humane AI pin, let's say between November 1st and today, please email us, vergecastsattheverge.com and tell us everything about why and who and under the influence of what and what has happened since. I want to know everything. Who got one for Christmas? Oh, no.

Oh, my God. I bet that happened. There are people who are like, oh, I have a I have a nerdy nephew. Like, what can I buy? Oh, no. A $700 pin. Oh, man. With required subscription as well. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Love love to spend all of the money in the world. You could buy an iPhone 16E for less.

Okay, David, you reviewed this thing. I did. Right. They had these big promises about the future of AI, the future of wearables. They were trying to redefine gadgets, right? Move into a post-smartphone era. Were they onto anything? Well, this is where Allison and I have been fighting for a year and will continue to fight because I still think the answer is yes. I think the answer to...

how much are they onto and how meaningful is the thing that they were onto?

TBD, right? But I think the idea that you should have a way to interact with AI that doesn't involve taking your phone out of your pocket. Yes, I am convinced there is something there. And I think after this happened, Wes Davis on our team DM to me and he's like, this thing would have been better if it was just a Siri microphone that you could wear, wouldn't it? And I was like, yep, it would have. And I think that's really true. But Humane's thing was they just went

too hard at it. And they did a bunch of stuff that was...

technically sort of impossible that they made a laser projector as one of the key user interfaces. All this stuff sounds absurd in retrospect, and it seemed absurd then, frankly. It seemed absurd the whole time. But they had a laser projector instead of a touchscreen, and it's like, we're all pretty good at messing around on screens now. It was designed to do everything by voice. It was designed to have everything be totally abstracted away from you. And

The vision of that is actually what a lot of people have. Like people talk about agentic AI and the idea that all of these systems should be able to go work for you. OpenAI is working on that. Google is working on that. We've seen some of the stuff that they're working on. They're all working on it as like,

chatbots in web browsers and apps on your phone. Humane was like, okay, well, what if this is actually a dedicated device and requires a complete rethinking of how everything happens? And I think that was where it got the thing wrong. So it's like, if you boil it all the way down, I think Humane's like the very first like

meeting at a bar where they were like, here is the thing we should do, I think was not that far off. And then every decision they made after that was the wrong one. I think what's so hard there is like what they wanted to do within the current, you know, world of phones is just impossible for a third party app. Right. And what they were trying to do even a year ago when they launched was

was not something you could do on your Android phone, was not something you could do on your iPhone. Fast forward a year and you have AI built in natively that is starting to be able to do these things. And so it's almost like they were, you know, they're pirates trying to board the ship and it

It just wasn't going to happen. Allison, where was it that you were clashing with David on this? You were in the just do it in the smartphone camp? Yeah. The future of the AI gadget is it's a phone is my stance. And I love a gadget. And I saw the humane pin a year ago at Mobile World Congress and was like,

this is a gadget. Like, it's kind of fun. Is it a good idea? No. Clearly, that's how it panned out. But yeah, it's like, why take all of these things and try to, like, reinvent the wheel and, like, put a worse processor and, you know, make a whole new interface system that people have to learn and figure out heat dissipation, which they did not because the

thing would shut itself down all the time. And yeah, clearly like that didn't didn't work out for them. So, Alison, I think that it's a real bummer that the AI pin didn't work out because it makes your argument look even stronger than it did already. I noticed. But I do think the thing to me that gives me the strongest evidence against everything

everything should just be a phone is the camera on the meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, because that is a thing in which my experience of taking photos is meaningfully different and in many ways better because I'm not holding my phone in front of my face. And so it's like, that's the thing that I look at is like, okay, there are things we can do if we're going to sort of disintermediate the phone and put those components in different places that can be better for it. And that's...

Unfortunately, the only one that I have found so far. But it is like that's the one I hold on to that. I'm like, maybe there is something to this. And I think the idea of a microphone that is also more accessible than the one in my pocket feels meaningful to me in that same way. And I think it like like building on what the phone already has, like it already has a processing power. It can already connect everything.

most phones can already connect reliably to cloud services with their Qualcomm modems or whatever. Like, instead of throwing all that away and starting, like, way out here with something else, like, the Meta Ray Bands makes so much sense because it just sort of starts with, like, okay, here's one capability and it...

works with your phone and you don't need it if you don't want to carry it at that particular moment. And then kind of building on that, the way they've been adding the AI features, I think is way more compelling than just throwing it all out and being like, what if no phone? I've been thinking a lot about last, let's see, it would have been

Right about now, last year, I went to New York to Humane's offices and actually spent some time with Imran Chowdhury and Bethany Bongiorno, who are the co-founders. And it was right before the product was launching, so they had one of those rooms set up where they had the exploded parts and walked me through how it all works and all the stuff they had developed and they had early prototypes. And we were just talking through basically how they had built this thing and where it came from. And one of the questions I asked them was...

why do this much the first time? Like you're, you're a first gen hardware startup. You've never done any of this before. Nobody has seen any of this stuff before. Why push this hard on something this expensive and this complicated and this new on your first try. And I believe it was Imran said, because if now that we've done all of this work, it will make doing the lesser things much easier. Uh,

And I actually like there is something sort of compelling in that argument, right? It's like we've done the incredibly complicated things. So now we're going to strip out the cellular modem. We're going to basically make this thing an accessory to your phone and it'll it'll be easier and cheaper and better. And now we can do that because we've done the hard work already.

the thing that they didn't reckon with is that they were never going to get the chance because this thing went so badly. Right. And I think what I look at the opposite is like the rabbit where like this thing couldn't do anything, but it was two hundred dollars and it was like cute and fun. And I think it bought that company some time because people didn't have the same sort of like visceral negative reaction to how bad it was because it wasn't

trying nearly as hard. And I think the lesson there was like,

And frankly, like Apple, where Imran and Bethany worked before, learned the same thing with the Vision Pro. Like what Meta did with the Ray-Bans is like do the least and then try to build from there. And Apple was like, what if we did the most? And it turns out that's actually in a lot of ways the wrong approach. And I've just been thinking like the prototype for the simpler, cheaper phone attached thing that I think would have made more sense for Humane, I am very sure exists. And they should have shipped that instead. Humane won't.

way too far in the hardware, which is, I think, part of the thing that was attention-grabbing about Humane was, right, it's this mysterious gadget. It has a projector. It's tiny. It doesn't have a screen. Obviously, this is a disaster, but I am curious. You got to use it. You tested it. You reviewed it. We know what was bad about it. Was there anything about the hardware that you're like, you know what? There's something there. It's...

No. I tried. I tried to find something. I'm torn on this in that in a certain way, it speaks very highly of the team that made it.

that it exists at all. Like it's a beautifully made little thing. Like it's, it's small. It's, it's really nice to like fiddle and worry with it. Had a really clever set of accessories. The magnet works really well. It has really pleasant noises. Like the, the touch reaction is good. There's like all the little tiny details that most companies don't get right on the first try. They got right on the first try, right? Like there are, there are surprisingly few of those sort of rough edges we're used to from startup products, right?

But then they had the opposite problem, which is that all the big things they were trying to do didn't work at all. And the big swings that they made were things like the laser projector, which just essentially was useless. Like the interface didn't make any sense. You functionally couldn't use it at all in any kind of light. And it just didn't, they just didn't need to exist. Right. And so you could tell that all of the stuff they spent like real huge money and resources on didn't,

were just pointed in the wrong direction but then there's a team who was tasked with like making the thing nice and they did a really good job like the we talk about like polished turds a lot and it's it's a real like we we kind of mean this is an insult but this is like a really nicely polished turd it really is i mean it's like right yeah like you said it like the rabbit sold because it's 200 and it's bright and it's colorful and it's nice and this thing uh also very pretty just just

way in a different world yeah i mean and i think the other mistake that humane made was the way that they went about talking about this thing like in writing about it this week i went back and watched the first ted talk that imran chowdhury gave uh where he like described the thing and a uh

That demo is fake. Like I just please lawyers come at me with evidence that that is not true and I will happily recant it. I have now watched that demo a hundred times. I've been using this product for a year and it is it is impossible that he was able to do those things on stage to get it to translate between languages without any prompting to get it to answer a phone call. I know how you answer a phone call on this thing. And it is by doing a gesture with your hands that he doesn't do standing on stage and it answers the phone call.

It's just impossible. But anyway, so they made it out to be this very, like, you know, hugely important, like they were very quiet about it. And they made this like very dour, serious video about how important this gadget was going to be. And they got it named to Time's Inventions of the Year. And it was like they set this up to be some huge consequential moment in the history of technology, right?

and it sucked i mean it's very funny like it couldn't do what they promised it would do which you know is kind of a big strike to start out with but i think there's also this element of like they promised it would you know bring in this sort of new world of ambient computing where um you're not staring at your phone so much things just sort of happen uh in front of you you don't have to worry about it and i think what we see with uh the meta ray bands is um

People already wear glasses and sunglasses. That's really natural. And putting a chunky pin on your shirt that is kind of uncomfortable and may not stick on and then having to like hold your hand up and look at a projector, that's actually like more obtrusive than just quickly pulling out your phone and doing something. And so like there was clearly this kernel of an idea that that.

I think really resonates with like everyone. Like it would be great to use our phones less. It would be great if things just sort of happened a little bit more ambiently.

And executed on it in, I think, one of the most perplexing ways imaginable. Yeah. So Josh Miller, the CEO of the browser company, I don't think he'll mind me telling this story on the Verge cast. We'll see. Josh, sorry. Introduced me not that long ago to this concept of novelty fatigue, which is basically that if you try to do too many new things, even if they're the right things at

At the same time, it will feel wrong to people. And that actually what you have to do in product design is...

build slowly, like you can have improved everything imaginable all at the same time. And you'll still leave people behind because it won't it won't feel right. It won't feel familiar. And so that that cadence of introducing novelty to people is actually a huge part of the process of product design. And I think like the most generous possible interpretation of

of what happened to Humane. And I don't believe this at all, but I think one of the mistakes that they made and one way to look at all of this is they just went...

way beyond novelty fatigue with everybody. They're like, we are going to reinvent everything about how you do everything all at once. And I think even if it had all worked, it wouldn't have worked because it just it felt wrong and it wouldn't have made sense. It's funny, like I understand exactly why he's saying that. And it's because his browser arc is really perplexing when you first use it. I bounced off that thing like five different times and now I use it every day. And I'm

I do. I think you're probably mostly right there, but I do think there's also this thing of like, you know, the two of you have tested every phone under the sun. Yeah.

I feel like usually you can tell if there's if there's a little kernel of something in there that is working, you can see it. And it I think you are right that they they tried way too many things. But I'm not even sure if there was one thing that was clicking there for people. Yeah, just seems like the concept really. And the the way they sold it was like.

Yeah, don't look at your phone. Just talk to this thing. Just be free in the world. And like, who doesn't want that? But yeah, it has to work. But like, how are you free in the world when there's this like heavy, chunky thing, like literally pulling your shirt down? I think ultimately one of the most convincing arguments against the humane pin from the beginning was everything about this makes more sense in an Apple Watch. Right.

And I think that is true. Even the things about it that I like, which are like, it's not in my pocket. It's easier to access. It's something I can sort of discreetly talk to without having to stare at a screen. Like we've found the wearable spot for that. And I think it's probably on your wrist. And I would say like straight up, I think it is like troubling and unfortunate and bad for technology as a whole that basically.

we have to wait for Apple or Google to do this, right? It would be great if Humane could come along and say, hey, we made a watch. It's going to hook into your iPhone. It's going to do all the iPhone things. And we've added all this stuff. That, right, in a world where they could do that, I would not be surprised if they had just done that. Yeah, this is why I'm so curious to see what Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are working on. Because there is a version of some AI gadget that is essentially...

headphones or mostly just a microphone or something that is like, like, give me a tool that just lets me do the sort of advanced voice mode stuff with my AI bot. And there's something pretty interesting inside of that, especially as these models start to get better and more capable. But again, you can't. It is not allowed because Google and Apple will not let you.

Which also like Meta is freaking out about this. Like this is going to be the big limitation on future versions of the Ray-Bans, which is I think like a little frightening if you look at it because the Ray-Bans are one of the most interesting and sort of exciting products because they're doing so much with so little. And clearly they have big dreams there and it's not quite clear, even if they could pull them off, it's not clear how much they can pull off. Metaphone. We need the Metaphone. Yeah.

What was that called? Was that the ChaCha? Was that the Facebook phone? Was it the HTC ChaCha? Before my time. No one has said out loud in a really long time. I just, I literally just, I think that is still in the reviews closet. ChaCha was primarily designed for text messaging and also features tight integration with the social network Facebook, which includes a dedicated Facebook button below its keyboard, which allows users to quickly share content on the service. I just like, imagine like a...

poorly designed blackberry that they finished making and at the very like the like the last second five minutes before they shipped it somebody went oh god we were supposed to have a facebook button and just slapped it on the bottom that's the acc cha-cha i never saw one in the wild i'm gonna go looking for that and if you owned one get at me i have a lot of questions for you um all right so

This HP thing, we're just writing off, right? Like, there's no reason to continue to believe anything is going to happen here. The press release for this was so, like, damning in the way that it came out from HP. Like, can I just read you a sentence from HP's executive? This is from Tuan Tran, who is the president of technology and innovation at HP.

Humane's AI platform, Cosmos, backed by an incredible group of engineers, will help us create an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices, from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms. Like, just the fall from grace from we have found the successor to the smartphone to connected conference rooms and smart printers is just tough. I can't think of a place I want AI less than a printer. Yeah.

Like printers are annoying to start with, with no extra, with no chat bot, like making things up. Like, can you imagine? It's a nightmare. Listen, if they put one of those projectors in the printer, I think there's something there. It's like instead of printing, I guess projectors exist. I don't think it could get worse, is my theory on the smart printer thing. It's like,

Sure, ChatGPT. Like, let me just tell you the website I'm trying to print and you figure it out. I don't care. What could possibly go wrong? I'll describe it to the printer and it can invent the thing I'm trying to print. I love it. Before we switch gears, we should briefly talk about Rabbit, which I think is actually continuing to, like, push it the thing it's trying to do. Like,

The R1 sucked. I like watching you very gently try not to over, over, uh, give him too much credit. Yeah. Like I want to, I want to give rabbit the least possible credit while still giving them credit is where I'm at with rabbit. Uh,

But they're trying to do the thing. The big promise of Rabbit and the R1 at the beginning was this thing called the local action model that was going to actually go and do stuff for you. This is what we now call agentic AI. Like, again...

These are the right ideas, at least if you believe the rest of the tech industry. This is what everyone is working on right now. And Rabbit was actually relatively early to be like, we're going to build a thing that lets you do stuff and we'll go do stuff on your behalf. That stuff didn't work ever.

in any way because all it's doing is clicking around a virtual instance of a really insecure browser for you. But Rabbit has continued to poke at this and I think smartly got pretty quiet for a while. Like the thing came out, everybody was like, this is stupid. And then everybody's like, ah, whatever, it's $200. I won't worry about it. And I think that like bought Rabbit a minute to

it to just kind of go do their thing. And they've been slowly launching some of the stuff that they've been talking about. So the thing that came out this week is an agent that can actually go and use Android apps for you. And it's just a research prototype. And it's essentially like if you've used operator or any of these other things, or even like read the white papers, it's exactly what you think. It's basically like clicking around an app on your behalf. But like,

It's starting to be able to do those things. And so I think, again, this question of do I want it to happen on this device that is going to go in my pocket or do I want it to happen on my phone that is already in my pocket? That's that's a big hurdle even once somebody figures out this technology. But like genuine kudos to Rabbit for continuing to plug away at this thing. And I think it'll be interesting to see where it goes.

It's the other answer to your question, Jake, of like, how do you build AI for people if you aren't Apple or Google? How do you get in, you know, without getting into those ecosystems? It's like you make a little flashy gadget and release it and get a lot of attention. And then maybe they were just

always going to do this, you know, the large action model. And maybe it's like sort of tangentially related to the hardware, but it just clicks around for you. And like, it's interesting, it's intriguing, but I still, I see it and I think like, well, the app intents that's coming, you know, with like Smarter Siri and iOS 18 is,

kind of going to be able to do those things for you, it seems. Like, it seems like they're trying to shortcut their way around, like, we can't get into the operating system the way that Apple obviously can. And it's like a weird, wonky kind of workaround. I do think there's something really delightful in that...

we were like, well, it's too complicated to get all the APIs and nobody can give us access to all this. Let's just train computers to be able to understand everything that they see and move a mouse around and just do all the things a human can do. And then we don't have to get actual access, which is just so wildly complicated. But also like, I get that works that you can do everything if you can do that. It's such a damning critique of like,

regulatory systems and capitalism that is the case. It's like, oh, you can either make Apple play nice or you can invent several unforeseeably new technologies that just end around the whole process. And it's like, well, I guess we'll just go invent the new technologies and it'll be fine. To that end, actually, one more thing we should talk about before we take a break and then go to the lightning round is Amazon is having an event next week where they're

I would say we're somewhere between like kind of confident and extremely confident that they're going to finally launch this new Alexa we've been hearing about forever. It would be so funny if this was just like, here's some new Eros, like the ones we launched this week. Look at Eros. Here it is. We did a ring again. But I think it's going to be the new Alexa. And I think Amazon is the company maybe best positioned other than Apple and Google to

to build this AI stuff in a much more coherent way, right? Like it has lots of business relationships with the companies it would need to get the data to do this stuff. We've heard that it's working with providers more directly instead of like trying to do the hacky, go to use the DoorDash website. They're actually going to like integrate with DoorDash in a more meaningful way. And if anybody has the literal resources and time and energy and whatever to,

bake this stuff in in a way that feels sturdier than just clicking around a virtual Chrome instance, it would be Amazon. And yet every single piece of reporting and rumor about Amazon suggests that the new Alexa is going to be very bad. And I just, I don't know how to feel about that. I still do not think people are going to pay for this.

Yeah. Oh, I have. Yeah. Are they going to charge? That's the rumor has been that it's going to it's going to come with an upcharge. And I don't think that's a good idea. I mean, Google and Microsoft have both found very quickly that people will not pay extra and they're starting to roll it back. So like now in workspace, you just get it for free. And you're like, can I turn off Gemini? And Google says absolutely not. Under no circumstances will you turn off Gemini. Gemini is going to ask you every time you try to type anything.

if you wanted to type in your address instead. They put the Gemini button in the spot where the comment button used to be. Oh, no. And oh, my God, this is driving me insane. Command shift M, Jake. What? Command shift M. This is, ooh. It'll change your life.

That's how you do a comment. Select the text, command shift M. They'll change that. They'll change that to be Gemini. And then what will you do, David? Then I'm done. I'm switching to Teams after that. I don't know. All right. Allison, we're going to let you go. Thank you for joining us. You're going to have to come back once you've used the 16E and report back on life without MagSafe because I'm very curious. Sounds good. Thanks for having me. All right. And we're going to take a break and then we're going to come back in a sliding round time. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Time for the lightning round unsponsored for flavor. I just want to say, I suggested on the show, Jake, you were not here for this, but Neil, I just randomly out of nowhere called the lightning round unsponsored for flavor like two weeks ago. He didn't know what he meant by that, but it has stuck in my brain ever since. And last week I suggested that we should make t-shirts that say unsponsored for flavor on it. And you would be amazed at the number of people who have since told me they would buy these t-shirts. So,

I can't promise this is going to happen, but this is now a thing I'm increasingly excited about. I mean, you guys talked literally the entire lightning round into existence. So, listen, I think there's something here. Listen, if we can make a shirt that just says emails that is a reference no one gets, I think we can do unsponsored for forever. I feel good about it. All right. We have a lightning round. We're going to do this lightning round in two parts. First, Jake, you and I are going to run through some news. We're going to talk about some stuff, and then we're going to stop. Right?

We're not going to take a break. We're just going to stop. And then we're going to call Lauren Finer, who is going to come in and she's going to tell us about the week in Trump and Elon and Doge and various governmental shenanigans. Everyone's favorite segment, Brendan Carr is a dummy, is on hiatus for this week while Neil is on vacation. But we'll be back with a vengeance on next Friday's show. And so if you we will give you a moment.

to stop listening if you want to stop listening or watching or experiencing us in whatever way you experience us when we start talking. So that's what we're going to do. But first, Jake, let's run through some news. The first thing I would like you to do is explain quantum computing to me. Yeah, easy. We have one much time now. OK, so there's these little blah. Yeah. OK.

Sorry, should we describe the story? Yeah. So Microsoft announced a thing called Majorana 1, which is a new chip for quantum computing that includes several amazing words that I would just like to say to you out loud very quickly. Microsoft called it the world's first topo conductor, which kicks ass. It also has a new material made from indium arsenide and aluminum.

also kicks ass. There is a thing called a topological qubit. Love this. I don't know what any of this means, but it appears, as far as I understand, that Microsoft made a chip that it thinks is going to make quantum computing more accessible for more things. Am I close? So I think...

it's one of those, I think with all of these quantum computing achievements, there's a little bit of like a, maybe like nobody's quite sure. Uh, you know, it's a stepping stone towards something bigger. I will say, I think, you know, with AI, if you would ask me three years ago, is AI going to happen in our lifetime? I would have been like, not a chance, not even close. Um, and with quantum computing, I have been the same way where I'm like, I,

I don't need to worry about this. This is like, it's not a thing. It's just not going to happen. And there have been a bunch of really big announcements about quantum computing recently. And it feels like, you know, the researchers in the field are maybe finally taking steps there. And I don't think the answer is that we're going to have Meyer-Ronald-1 chips in our houses anytime soon.

But I also, one thing I'm starting to realize about quantum computers, you don't necessarily need them to be everywhere. You just need one quantum computer and you can do a lot. And I think we're still quite a ways away, but it's a cool name, cool chip. Yeah, I think the thing that is making it feel more real for me is exactly what you just said. The idea that this is not...

like the next, next computer that you own in your house. It's the next, next thing that exists in a data center that makes all of this stuff vastly more powerful. And it's really interesting. I would encourage everybody to go watch the video that Microsoft published because the way that they talk about the possibilities for quantum computing is a lot of what we hear companies say about AI, which is just the things you can do when you massively scale the amount of processing and the amount of information that a system can understand and

are very similar. It's really interesting. So that's one. Thing number two is I would just very quickly like to pour one out for Amazon Chime, the funniest and worst piece of video conferencing software.

that I have maybe ever used in my life. Amazon is shutting down Chime, which is, it's, I think there was a brief period where Chime was going to be like an important part of an Amazon suite of business services, but then video calling became completely commoditized and that just everybody kind of gave up. And the only time I've ever used Chime is when I'm forced to, in order to talk to people who work at Amazon. And even the people at Amazon, even the people who use Chime

think it's bad. I know that for sure. But the thing I just want to say is that this thing was announced and a bunch of people were in our comments talking about it. And all anyone said was, Chime sucks. I worked at Amazon. It was awful. And it was great. And I just enjoyed it very much. A bunch of people who had AWS reps who forced them to use Chime, and now they will not have to. It's a good day for everybody. I just have to say that before this segment started, David said to me, Jake,

Are there any of these stories that you don't want to talk about and you can't say Chime? And the only story that I did not want to talk about, Chime. Jake, this is the last time I'm ever going to get to talk about the AI pin and Chime on this podcast. You have to let me have this. I feel like Chime...

was just invent like who was using this thing why were they using it why did it exist I have always thought there was like a 50,000 word feature in company choices of business software why did Amazon think they needed a video calling service there are 900 of them well do you remember that moment surely they have a team subscription I

One would think. Do you remember that moment, though, at the beginning of the pandemic? Didn't Verizon have one? Yeah, Verizon bought blue jeans. Remember blue jeans? This is what I'm saying. A PR person got mad at me once because I used blue jeans wrong. I was like, this is your fault. I didn't choose blue jeans. I'm pretty sure Meta used blue jeans for a minute. Like, truly, I have always thought there is a big story in how companies pick brands.

conference call providers. Like Apple uses WebEx and demands that everyone who speaks to them uses WebEx. I'm just going to say there are two acceptable video calling services. There's Google Meet, there's Zoom, and anything else, get it out of my face. 100% agree.

I have no notes. Also, normalize phone calls. If you have a team subscription, bring back phone calls. I'm sorry. I'm so with you. Listen, people don't answer their phone anymore. I'm going to sound so old and crotchy. Listen, anytime I get a phone call, I'm like, ooh, who's calling? I want to pick this up. This could be anything. It's a surprise.

It's exciting stuff. It really is. It's always spam, but, um, I had a, I had a person I was talking to for a story this week, text me right before we were supposed to get on our, uh, Google meet. And she was just like, Hey, can, can we instead just do a phone call so I can like go on a walk? Uh, and I responded to me like, that sounds like that's an awesome idea. Yeah, of course. Uh, and truly the, the joy in her voice when I called her and she was like, I'm outside talking to you. I was like this, let's bring that back. Um,

Anyway, enough chime. RIP chime. You were a real one. Mira Marotti, former CTO of OpenAI, joins the OpenAI diaspora in starting a, I would say, somewhat mysterious new AI company.

I don't know that we know much about this company at all yet, do we? Yeah. She's spoken a bunch of vagaries. They're like, we're going to release research. And I'm like, oh, great. Listen, Mira, obviously a wildly talented AI engineer. Clearly. You know, she was the CTO of OpenAI while they did some very impressive stuff. So I think there's a lot of potential here. She's attracting a lot of major talent. Yeah.

However, to your point, there are a lot of companies in this, you know, AI diaspora. And I don't know if there's room for all of them. It is sort of fascinating how much of this industry is going to be people who started their company first.

Because they disagreed with Sam Altman in some meaningful way. Like that's the anthropic story. That's the Mira's company is called Thinking Machines Lab, which is not a good name. I like it. I like it. It's like it's like the browser company. If it was Thinking Machines Labs. If it were Thinking Machine Labs. It's fine with that, too. They put the S in the wrong place. What about possessive thinkings machine lab?

Oh, I like it. It's Dr. Thinkings. Yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah, he's their mascot and, you know, he's got a little lab coat on. Dr. Thinking, he's like a question mark with a cloud above. That's pretty good. Yeah. I like that a lot. Dr. Thinking, TM. That's who you chat with. Yeah. But yeah, and we're just in this place where it is kind of open AI's ideas percolating out in these sort of mutated forms in lots of different ways. In the same way that like,

A huge portion of the electric car industry is people who cut their teeth at Tesla and then went on to do other things. And I think that has made that industry different as a result. Open AI is very much doing the same thing around the AI world. Yeah. Fascinating. We'll see.

Everybody's raising the most money it is possible to raise on Earth. So congrats to everybody. Next one, The New York Times speaking of companies against OpenAI, which is suing OpenAI. Oh, we should disclose here that Vox Media has some kind of content sharing deal with OpenAI that that's all I know about. So.

Disclosure. The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, has put out some guidance to its team about how to use AI in their actual work in journalism. And I put this one on here for you, Jake, in particular. You are our executive editor. You run our newsroom.

How do you feel about this? I mean, it's funny because I don't think there are any reporters who want to use AI, like at least for the writing, right? Like the writing is the fun part. Like that's the part of the job that we want to do.

And so, and it's funny, if you look at the New York Times guidance, they're kind of, they're like, don't write with this. The thing that the New York Times suggested that their teams do with AI is like, I don't know that everybody will know this, but like when you publish an article onto the internet, you know, you would think there's a headline and an image and then the entire article and you'd be like, great, I put those things in, I'm done. But there's actually like

50 other really annoying and kind of tedious fields you have to fill out. You got to fill out a separate headline for Google. You got to fill out a separate headline for Facebook. You got to fill out separate descriptions for all of those things. And this kind of just multiplies. And so New York Times is like, maybe you could use to fill that stuff out that you just don't want to do. Maybe you could use it to like write copy for a tweet or whatever. And

You know, I think those are the areas that people find this stuff tedious. I want to say like currently we are not using it for any of that. And I do think it is really interesting to see the New York Times like a pretty clearly like a very, very traditional newsroom space.

trying to offer their their team some leeway um but yeah i think like for us internally again like the writing is the fun part we're not uh going to be using that yeah i think the question of kind of where does a good use of ai end and a problematic use of ai begin is like the open question right because i think a lot of what uh the time said is is the stuff you're talking about like all this sort of metadata and the kind of the work around the work but then it's like uh

there was a training video. A lot of this is according to good reporting from Samophore, a training video that included using AI to like develop news quizzes. And that's a really interesting one because to some extent that's a, that's a real like honest to God editorial product. And I think the thing ultimately becomes for me with AI is like, okay, great. If it can like do this stuff faster, like I can like potentially see it, but once you're,

Having AI put together a large body of work, the amount of work you personally are going to have to put in to fact check it to make sure it is correct is is potentially going to be more work than if you had just done it. Yeah. Yeah. The whole I have to let AI do it and then I have to fact check every part of it. So it actually takes longer is extremely real. All right. Two more.

kind of breaking-ish news today, Thursday, as we're recording this. Amazon now has creative control over the James Bond franchise. This is something I suspect you and I both have feelings and maybe deep misgivings about. Okay, this is hilarious because, like, a

Like a month ago, the Wall Street Journal had some like blockbuster report about how the Broccoli family, which controls, you know, the bond rights in some manner, just like hated Amazon. And so now it sounds like maybe they were paid a lot of money. Like that seems to happen.

happens okay i'm glad we're on the same page about this uh i i went through exactly the same uh like a lot of money like here here is a quote from the wall street journal story uh to friends broccoli barbara broccoli who has for decades overseen all of the james wan stuff has characterized her thoughts on amazon this way these people are fucking idiots that was december 19th

That was two months ago. And now, yeah, the only answer I can come to is Amazon wrote a big giant check, which makes sense. If I were Amazon, I would write a big giant check. Amazon bought MGM for a huge amount of money. James Bond is the most important IP that MGM owns. The franchise is a disaster. Like it's been a while since they put out a movie. The franchise is

Great. Like I love James Bond movies, but in recent years, it's been a mess. They don't have a movie. They don't have an actor. They don't have a script like James Bond does not exist because the Broccoli's and Amazon have been at the stalemate. So at some point, write the check so you can start making James Bond movies.

is just the obviously correct thing to do. There's something very like old school and nice about, you know, the franchise having, um, I don't know this, this protector. Um, and obviously it relies a lot on, on the broccoli is having good taste and making correct decisions with the franchise. Um, you know, I, I think they've done okay. Uh, I'm not a bond expert. I don't, but, um,

You know, I do think like, oh, good. The megacorporation that owns lots of things now controls one of the most lucrative franchises in existence. Like, yeah, like this. If you want more Bond content, this is fantastic news. If you want more good Bond content, TBD, strong TBD. It really does feel like we're like one turn of this away from like a

Prime video series where James Bond is wearing like Amazon basics t-shirts and this all just like James Bond is going to start appearing on Thursday night football. Okay. But the bond Alexa voice, that's going to be good. Oh, that I would be into. I would take that. Yeah. But then it would have to say Alexa at the beginning of every single, like as if it was bond. That's good stuff. Yeah. So I, that one as somebody who has almost universally loved James Bond movies, I,

That one is exciting because I think we'll get movies, but also does not bode well for them being any good. So we'll see. All right. Last one before we switch gears. A headline I swear we have run 600,000 times on TheVerge.com. Spotify's hi-fi streaming could finally arrive this year. We can't help ourselves, Jake. Chris Welch has a tradition every year on the anniversary of Spotify saying it would launch

a hi-fi streaming service posting, hey, they still haven't done it. It is now been four years. But hey, this could be it. This could be the one. You know what I think?

I think no one will care anymore. I think ironically, it has been so long that the number of people who were like psyched about the idea of truly lossless streaming has gone down to almost zero. Everybody just bought AirPods and moved on with their life. And so the rumor is or the story here is, um,

Spotify is going to add an additional subscription for $6 a month that gets you hi-fi and like early access to concert tickets and some other features. And I think like it feels like a hard sell because I think you're right. Like, do people care? It was hard to tell that you were listening to FLAC under even the best of circumstances. And every other music service just includes it in their default plan. So like, you know...

I'd like it, but...

Yeah. Yeah. It'll be, it'll be interesting to see. Yeah. The, the report is that there's going to be a new tier called music pro. Uh, and it'll be fascinating to see what Spotify can put in there because obviously Spotify needs to figure out a way to charge people more money, uh, in order to make all of its investments in Joe Rogan worth it. And, uh, the question of like, what else will people pay for remains, uh, relatively hard to know, I would say. Um, all right.

hard pivot time. If you do not want to listen to us talk about Donald Trump and Elon Musk and politics for the next, I don't know, 20 minutes, turn off the first cast. We're done. We're already way over. We did it for you anyway. That's that's it. That's the first cast.

But there is a lot going on and we have to talk about this stuff because it matters. And it is important to everything The Verge covers. So Lauren Feiner is going to join us right now. And she's going to walk us through all of the latest in Doge and Elon and Trump and chaos. So let's get into that. Lauren Feiner, welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. We have brought you here for a new way of talking about

governmental chaos on the show, which is quickly and at the very end. I think this felt like a good week to do this because there's been... Like, a lot has happened, but not that much sort of hugely new stuff has happened. So this felt like a good moment to just kind of catch up on all of the goings-on because I think unless you're paying attention minute to minute, all of the little stuff adds up to so much that it can be hard to keep track of. So...

at the risk of making you do a completely unfair thing that is impossible. Walk us through what has happened this week. Let's start with Doge. What's Doge been up to this week?

Oh, Doge. Well, Doge has been continuing to be showing up at different government agencies. Yesterday, there was some reporting that the 19-year-old Doge staffer, who's gone by big balls in the past, showed up at CISA, which is the cybersecurity arm within DHS. Can I just say, by the way, that the...

speed with which we've all just gone to saying big balls without it like being you don't even notice that it's like just saying a person's name you're like oh yeah big balls was there the other day it sucks and I hate it yeah we do have a federal office named after meme coin so at this point everything is fair game yeah but anyway keep going yeah so I mean we've seen you know Doge continuing to do its thing we've seen some attempts to you know

pull back on that. So far, there's kind of been this mixed bag from the courts. A judge ruled this week that Doge could keep accessing government data for now. Basically, they said, this emergency motion, there wasn't enough there to keep Doge from transferring data from

a handful of government agencies immediately. But the judge also indicated there could be there could be a different ruling on the merits later on. So, you know, they're continuing to move forward at this point. And, you know, in the meantime,

Even in an accelerated way, the courts are going to take time to sort all of this out. And in the meantime, a lot of government employees are still being laid off. The CFPB was gutted late last week. Pretty much all their technology staffers that help investigate the tech side of things within fintech have been let go. So a lot of this is already...

already the damage is going to be done. And it's still causing a lot of chaos around here. And that's kind of the bet, right?

right, is that the speed with which this team can work will outpace anyone's attempts to stop it. And the damage will essentially already be done. Exactly. I mean, Musk has been known for, you know, sleeping and on factory floors, trying to just work around the clock to get these things done. And there was reporting earlier on that this is part of it, that he's thinking he can kind of

outpaced government staffers that he sees as, you know, lazy or not that productive, which, you know, a lot of government staffers that I've talked to find pretty offensive. You know, these are people who have devoted their lives to, you know,

to these jobs that are in the civil service. And they, in a lot of cases, especially in tech roles, take big pay cuts to work in these sort of roles. So, yeah, that does seem to be the bet here that they can just move forward at a pace that accomplishes what they want to accomplish before the courts can catch up. And it also seems like it's not like Doge's like

covering itself in glory and getting everything right and making a series of incredibly smart, thoughtful decisions too, right? Like, what was the...

The $8 million versus $8 billion, you know, teeny tiny miss that they made this week? Right. So there was a... On the Doge website where they try to keep track of everything they're cutting, there was this, I guess, decimal place error where there was a contract that...

They claim to have cut that was that they listed as eight billion dollars, but it actually was eight million. And, you know, the problem might have stemmed from an issue in how that number appeared in a different, you know, government database. But, you know, it kind of just goes to show that this is something that's being discussed.

done very quickly, maybe with not a lot of checking on the finer details here. And, you know, I think that Elon Musk has even said, you know, there'll be some error. You know, we're not always going to get it completely right. But, you

And that's to be expected. But at the same time, when you're talking about government services that impact a lot of people, it's really important to get it right in a lot of these cases. There was a Wired headline this week that was like the Doge incompetence is a feature and not a bug. And I've been thinking about that ever since, like,

doing well is not the point, right? Like you call this whatever you want. Every, I keep talking to people who are like, well, they're not even like identifying the things that would save all that much money. And I keep being like, that's the money is not the point. I mean, this is the Twitter playbook, right? Like Elon didn't care if it broke a little bit. He, he, he gutted the company and he let things break. And then he just sort of built on top of that broken core. Um,

And, you know, it's one thing when it's a micro blogging service or whatever. And it's another thing when it is the federal government of the United States. And there are millions and millions and millions of people who rely on getting checks and services and benefits to to survive. Like, you know.

In many ways, we optimize to make sure that everything happens correctly. And he is optimizing to make sure that there are no, you know, he claims, he claims to be optimizing for making sure that there's zero error. But in doing that, there's going to be so much error in what gets missed because he's just pulling stuff apart.

Yeah, Liz Lopato and I were joking on the show a couple of weeks ago about like, thank God we filed our taxes early before Doge got into the IRS and blew it all up. And it now seems like Doge is in the IRS blowing it all up. And I think like we've talked a bunch about what will be the thing that

really makes this feel real for people because so much of this is like theoretical, right? Like big balls has your social security number, right? Like that seems bad, but it's hard to know what to do with that. That's like a very 2025 sentence, but I think most people don't really know what to make of that piece of information. But this thing about like, oh, it's my tax refund is going to be massively delayed or canceled or

taken away from me for political reasons is like, those are the things that may start to happen fairly quickly here. And it's going to be some mix, like you're saying, Jacob, of like commission and omission, right? Things that fall apart on purpose and things that fall apart because there's literally no one left to pay attention to them.

Yeah, I definitely think that's going to be the thing that gets people kind of clued into what's going on here. If things that they rely on start to break or, you know, they're not getting their VA benefits or Medicare benefits or things like that. I also think that there might be some things that won't become apparent for quite some time. You know, for example, at the CFPB, the

Who's checking on the consumer complaints now? Who's getting back to those? And that might not be something that you file every day or even, you know, every year. But at some point, it's going to become apparent if, you know, those sorts of complaints aren't being answered to. Yeah. Wasn't there a bill last week to

Like, increase bank fees. That's like, this is the sort of thing that the CFPB exists to make sure does not happen. And that overdraft fees can't kill you as a person who made a mistake with your ATM card. Like,

These are the things that we just don't have in place anymore. Lauren, a couple of specific things I do want to touch on here. One is Trump's executive order about the FTC and the FCC. Can you explain that? I can try. It's the best we can hope for. Yeah. Basically, in this new executive order this week, President Trump basically asserted that the president

the White House has this kind of authority to supervise what have typically been independent regulatory agencies, agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission. And these are agencies that the president does get to select who leads the agency and therefore sets the agenda, decides what things get voted on or not. But at the same time, they're staffed by authorities

other commissioners from different parties. There's rules about how many commissioners from each party there can be. So there's somewhat of a balance there. And it's hard for a chair to just unilaterally lead an agency in a certain direction. But in this way, it seems like the president is trying to assert this kind of oversight over these independent agencies to, it seems, make sure that they're

agenda is in line with what he wants. So that's really contrary to how these agencies have worked in the past. You know, obviously, he's already installed people that he seems to think align with him and his political values. If you look at Andrew Ferguson at the FTC and Brendan Carr at the FCC and some of the recent statements they've made. They have been just thrilled to talk about how much they love doing Donald Trump's bidding. Like,

If anything, you're underselling the extent to which he already has lackeys in charge and has decided that was not enough. Yeah, I'm confused why he would even need to do this. Like, is Brendan Carr going to go rogue and be like, oh, net neutrality is pretty good? Yeah, I think, you know, obviously, I think this applies to many more agencies than just those two. I think it would apply to agencies like the SEC, for example. Yeah.

But, you know, I think it just is another way of Trump asserting his power and asserting his influence over as much of the federal government as he can. And I don't know exactly what it will look like for this to be executed. You know, it seems like he kind of wants these agencies to run by what he calls significant regulatory actions by the executive office of the president. Right.

what does that entail? I guess it remains to be seen. But

But basically, it's just another way to exert this sort of influence. And, you know, whether that's going to be through official or unofficial communications with these agencies, I think there's going to be some level of kind of trying to get these agencies to work in a way that's in line with the president's values. Clearly, there is no pretense of separation of powers anymore. Like, that's not...

The Trump administration has let go of the idea that they even need to pretend they're interested in the separation of powers. I mean, you have you have Trump saying, well, was it when when someone saves his country, no laws are broken? They're all saying they're just going to ignore the judges like it's it's pretty straightforward what is happening here. It's just been interesting to see, Jake, to your point, where they feel like they need to actually put pen to paper on this stuff and where they're

Trump can just like truth social it into existence and hope that that works. Yeah, everything's just like YOLOing, like seeing how far they can go with it. Well, I think a lot of these executive orders, it's, you know, we've seen an executive order, I think, on maybe the first day of his presidency, where he kind of just said, yeah, the First Amendment exists and

we can't censor. And it's like, yeah, that already, it already said that. That one's been there a while. But I think there's just this sense of wanting to assert via executive order. Here are my values as president and here's how I am going to lead this office. Yeah, makes sense. All right, last one, tariffs. We got tariffs going so well for everyone, I would say, have gone just swimmingly for everyone involved. So,

No strangeness. So we're doing more of them. We're doing more tariffs now. Yeah. So Trump was threatening a 25 percent and higher tariff on chips. And we've already seen Acer saying that it's going to raise laptop prices 10 percent in response to the 10 percent tariff on incoming goods from China. So, you know, this is it.

they're kind of saying, all right, we see you're raising this. We're going to raise our prices. And I think that's exactly the thing that a lot of economists have feared is that this is really going to raise prices for consumers. I think the Trump administration would say in the long run, this is going to be better for consumers. It's going to make things more fair. It's going to provide more opportunity within the U.S. But

That's a pretty big gamble here. I love Acer's response here where they're just like, it's like, yeah, price can go up 10%. Like what? Like 10% tariff, 10% price hike, like...

It's kind of it. That's literally how it works. Like we're just like, wait, like we've been waiting for somebody to say this. And, and finally, you know, as your CEO came out and was just like, that's yeah, it's math. Your government made it 10% more expensive. So now it's 10% more expensive. Yeah. It's just science. What is your sense, Lauren, of how this is working as a political move? Cause I think it's like there, there are all kinds of

complicated economic rationales behind all of this. But I think one thing Trump has always said is that this is like a move of power and strength for the Trump administration. And it is like a statement of purpose in the world. And with Mexico and Canada, they were kind of like, we're doing it, too. And then Trump was like, never mind. And it doesn't feel like it's working. Is does it? Is it working?

That probably depends who you ask. I think maybe he's thinking all along this is a negotiation tactic. And I'm going to start from this really strong stance on how we're going to do trade policy and land somewhere in the middle. But on the other hand, you're talking about putting tariffs on a

historical ally like Canada that has really changed the dynamic with that country. So I think it's really I don't know if it would necessarily be the way that Trump anticipated it would work out. Maybe it is. But it's certainly causing a lot of chaos around the world. Yeah. And I just feel like I keep thinking

I'm reading all the stuff that Trump says about like, you know, they'll just build factories and plants in the United States. And it's like, oh, that's that. It's fine. That just takes like what's that like two weeks? Like, my God, you're a real estate developer. You know how long buildings take. And then Intel's over here. We gave them all the money in the world. They still can't build chips that anybody wants. Like maybe this stuff is hard and maybe maybe that's not the fight that we should be fighting. Yeah.

But I digress. Anything else, Lauren? What else is top of mind in the Trump and Doge and Musk universe right now before we get out of here? Oh, I mean, there's just so much. I think, you

You know, I'm just going to be continuing to track all of this and, you know, continuing to see where Doge goes next, what sort of data they're trying to get and hopefully eventually get an understanding of what they're going to use it for. I don't know if that's something that even they know right now, but I think that's the thing that we really want to understand ultimately. What's your read on how the pushback is going?

Because like you said, there have been some court decisions stopping things that have gone. I would say that those court decisions have been some.

degree of respected and disrespected over time. But there's definitely been more energy on the other side of the aisle fighting back against this stuff. How is that going on that side? Yeah, I think we've seen a little bit of success from the opposition. You know, we've seen some court orders that, you know, at least put some sort of pause on, you know,

accessing or changing data or, you know, further firings. But it's definitely been kind of all over the place. We saw that the

Treasury Inspector General said that they'd investigate Doge's access to the payment system, and that was in response to Senate Democrats who had asked for that kind of investigation. So, you know, we're starting to see a little bit of this opposition gain some traction. That said, you know, like I mentioned earlier, there's a lot that it seems like Doge is already doing that could...

you know, mess up some systems or access data or lead to layoffs that are really hard to undo later on.

Totally. All right, Lauren, thank you for coming and doing this with us. This was extremely helpful. And I think we're going to have to do this more. We need to get out of here. I have officially made Jake late for a meeting that I promised I was not going to make him wait for. We've gone way over. Thank you both for doing this. This was incredibly fun. Hopefully, Neelai just stays on vacation. We don't need that. We'll be back next time. Lots of stuff left going on. Thank you both. Thank you all. That's the Verge cast.

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