Trump's confusing crusade against Big Tech
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Requires ADT-complete pro-monitoring plan and compatible devices. Copyright 2025 ADT LLC. All rights reserved. Hello and welcome to the Vertcast flagship podcast of the Cybertruck Wiper Owners Club. It's for people who don't have a Cybertruck, but they just have one big wiper. Can you just buy the wiper separately? Like, could I just frame a wiper above my mantle? I believe so. Okay. And I believe that might be Tesla's fastest growing revenue line. Yeah.

Just giant wipers. Yeah, like the flamethrower, you know, bad choice for a bunch of reasons. The tequila, probably not great tequila. But like, would I buy a comically humongous windshield wiper and just sort of have it? Like, yeah, I would. I mean, I'm sending you one right now. We're going to take a break from the show and I'm going to figure out how to buy you a Cybertruck wiper. Remember when that was the story?

Well, then we cracked it. You and I at South by Southwest, we cracked the case. People still send me photos of Cybertruck wipers. Like if they see a Cybertruck driving on the street wiping rain, I get tweeted at. You make a lot of fun of me for being the person who sold everyone on Earth a Books Palma, but yours is weirder.

Being the Cybertruck wiper guy is weirder. It is. It is also true that the wiper is not very effective. Look, we're going to talk about the Cybertruck later and Elon and the government, all this stuff. We have to start. By the way, I have a friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hello. Warren Feiner is going to join us for segment two to talk about the government. Our policy reporter is going to help us talk about the government. You see how that works? We bring in someone who's smarter than us, and then she does the show while we tell jokes. It's perfect. Highly recommended if you can pull it off.

We got to start, though, with breaking news. As we were sitting down to record, there is breaking news in the world of Apple. It appears that they have noticed Siri isn't very good. I can't tell you when this happened or who noticed it, but they're making some changes. David, what's going on? So Apple had its big executive retreat.

Last week, I don't know exactly what they call it. The Top 100. It's very famous. That's the name of the thing? Okay. I don't know how it works now, but the lore at Apple is that Steve Jobs literally picked his Top 100 people without regard for rank or hierarchy or org chart, and making that list was a big deal. And it was Steve Jobs who didn't care about people's feelings, so they got left out. It's a very different company now, but that was the lore of Top 100 back in the day. First of all, you should make...

Several decoder episodes about the top 100 phenomenon. But so basically, so Apple had this meeting and by all accounts, lots of reporting, especially from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Siri being awful and the sort of general failure of Apple intelligence.

That was one of the big topics. And coming out of this, what has happened is the person who was running Siri, who was this guy, John Gianandrea, who was overseeing a lot of their AI stuff at Apple. He's a huge name in this space. He was at Google for a long time. He was a big figure in Google's antitrust trial. He is like a person who has seen where all the bodies are buried in the tech industry for a very long time. Reports directly to Tim Cook. Right.

This very important person inside of Apple is being taken off of leadership...

of the Siri project, which is now going under Mike Rockwell, who until now was the one leading kind of all things Vision Pro. And if I understand Apple's org structure correctly, and I'm only like 60% sure that I do, Mike Rockwell reports to Craig Federighi, who oversees all of software, which would mean Craig Federighi now oversees Siri, which is sort of a meaningful coup inside of Apple's org structure. Like that would be a big shift away from this sort of

AI project, which we've seen at a lot of companies sort of slowly annex the rest of the companies. Like Demis Hassabis, who runs DeepMind at Google, is like rapidly...

becoming the most powerful person at Google because everything is becoming AI and they're just giving everything to Demis. And that's very important. This is a shift big time in the opposite direction inside of Apple and is the kind of thing that Apple doesn't typically do except to rectify something that is perceived to be broken. Yeah, we last week on the show, we talked about Apple delaying the next generation of Siri. It's I think Apple's art chart is like weirder in that everyone has worked at Apple for 500 years. Yes.

And they all just get paid a lot. Yeah. Like, it's hard to actually parse out the sort of back and forth between who's in charge of what. Like, Apple is very functionally organized. Product marketing, what they call product marketing, is what most tech companies call product management. It's all, it's just different than other tech companies. The thing that gets me at this, though, is Rockwell was in charge of Vision Pro. They gave it to him to get it out the door. He kind of insisted that,

Like around the time of the vision pro, he was a face that was popping up. We saw him at events. He was the one who really insisted that the vision pro had to get out the door this way. Right. Mark Garmin at Bloomberg has reporting that John Andrea saw Rockwell as his successor, which makes no sense to me. I'm just looking at the judgment that I can see, which is the vision pro shipped the way the vision pro is.

And it's fine. It's a beautiful piece of hardware. It is the most state-of-the-art VR headset at its price point that works the way it does that you can get. It is the best thing of its kind at its price point that has ever existed. It is also not very good. I half agree with that, right? And I think there's a way to look at this that is Apple saying what we need is somebody who will ship the thing, right? But sort of tacit inside of that is also saying like,

The Vision Pro and Siri are in roughly the same stage, which I just don't think is true at all. Like the Vision Pro is a fabulous piece of technology that doesn't have anything to do. Siri is the opposite, right? Like Siri is bursting with interesting use cases. It just sucks. The Vision Pro is like not a bad product. It's just sort of a

unnecessary one at the moment. Like there's no, it has no jobs to do. And Siri is a bad product. And I think those are actually really different. And I think for Apple to treat them as the same thing, like important technology early in its life cycle, totally, totally not true in AI's case. Siri is 14 years old and sucks. That is not the same thing as the Vision Pro. It just isn't. Sure. Okay. I grant you all that. I agree with all that. For the sake of the argument,

My response is the Vision Pro shipped for no reason. Like the error in judgment was saying we can't figure out true AR glasses, which is what we actually want. So we're going to insist that this VR headset with video pass-through that can be effectively defeated by low light is good enough to achieve our vision of mixed reality. And then app developers will flock to us. And then when we get

to where we're going and we make real AR glasses, the ecosystem will exist. None of those were the right decisions. Right. That's the thing that I'm focused on. And it's the developers will save us thing that I think might be the trap Apple is about to run into with Siri. Because as we've talked about many times, this whole promise of Siri is like the app intent machine that can go use your phone on your behalf.

That depends on developers. And so if you're looking at Apple as essentially a company that just makes screens for developers to do stuff on, like that's increasingly what these things are. They're like, here's a chip in a screen. You figure out what it's for. And pay us 30% anytime someone pushes a button. Right. That is like increasingly the story of Apple as a hardware maker. If you take that same approach to Siri and you say, okay, what we need to do is just get a working version of this out the door and then developers will figure out how to make it great.

That, man, that way lies dragons and madness and disaster. But I agree. You can see how Apple would get there in that thought process of like, what we need to do is put this in front of the people who will figure out what to do with it. And it didn't work for the Vision Pro, and I don't think it'll work for Siri. The big problem is that they very foolishly announced the product that they wanted to make.

Right. They showed the concept video, WWC, then they've had to delay the delivery of the product that they showed off in the concept video. So any pivot off of that now requires them to further eat crow. Not only is it delayed, but we changed it or reduced the specs or it will be different in some meaningful way. And then on top of that, they have to solve what I keep calling the DoorDash problem.

Which is they have to get the app developers to basically hand their customers away to the robot. Because the promise here with app intents and all this is still the agents, like everybody else is talking about agents. But instead of clicking around on a website, Siri will use the apps on your phone for you. Right. And all of those app developers have to be okay with their apps not being opened.

I still don't know how any of that works. Right. Yeah. I mean, you could, you could trace a lot of the design of iOS in particular over the last 15 years as aggressively creating more reasons for you to open apps. And like, is that the wrong direction for technology to have gone? Yeah, probably from a user experience, but like,

Everything is about giving you more surfaces to show you company logos. We were talking about this at the Dynamic Island last week, right? One of the reasons developers like it is because now when I'm on my home screen, it's still showing me the Uber icon. And that's very powerful. And Siri promises, I think for good user experience reasons, but terrible economy of the internet reasons, to just abstract all of that away. So Apple has to get them on board for this increasingly...

high risk thing, both because it's bad technology and because it's bad business. I just, I don't see it. Maybe, maybe, uh, John Andrea just like peaced out. He was like, you do it. Vision pro guy, Mr. Vision pro over here. He's drinking out of cups. Um, uh, that's a deep cut. I was going to say, I wonder what percentage of this audience got my chair. Not my problem. If you get that, send us a note. Yes, please. It's a very important, uh,

It's very important that we all know who we are, if you understand that reference.

It is notable that the guy Apple hired from Google to run AI is no longer in charge of the thing that AI should do on the iPhone. Right. And we know that there's AI. I know. Right. There's machine learning and neural engines all through the phone. And everyone's always excited about the neural engine cores. But the distribution, the reason no one was worried about Apple is that they had Siri ready to be plugged into these systems that people like to use.

And that appears to have landed them approximately nowhere. Well, yeah. And it's a really interesting way of thinking about Apple, too, because like Craig Federighi,

has a long standing reputation of like building software that people like he has good hair and they ship a lot of software. Uh, and so now thinking of Syria is like not this, uh, sort of many tentacled thing that exists across your whole phone, which is what Apple talked about Syria is for a long time. They're like, Siri is not just an assistant. Siri is, is everything. Siri is the friends we made along, like it's the whole thing. Uh, and, and,

increasingly it's like, no, maybe, maybe what you need is an app that works. Like maybe you should think about Siri as just like an app on your phone that is good at things. We'll see. This is breaking news. You heard us react to it in real time. We'll see. In the meantime, everyone gets a free vision pro. If you use Siri, that's what I'm taking away from this now. They got to move units.

Other big tech news of the week, the new Pebble smartwatches are out or they're coming later this year. David, you talked to Eric Medjugorje, the CEO of Pebble. This is like pretty fortuitous timing to be launching a smartwatch brand for a variety of reasons. What's going on there? So it's very funny because Eric Medjugorje, you might remember, before he launched

was doing Pebble 2.0, which is technically a company called Core Devices, but it's just Pebble again. Like, let's just all just be honest with each other. I do love that one of the watches is called the Core 2 Duo. It's one of the funniest names in the entire world. It's so funny. I asked him about this. We were talking about it and I was like, and

I was looking at the little screenshot that he sent me that said core two duo. And I was like, isn't Intel going to sue you? And he was like, eh, it's a watch, not a chip. It'll be fine. I was like, Eric, I don't, I don't know if you understand how this works, but, um, but yeah, so he, before he started doing the pebble thing again, uh, maybe,

made a company called Beeper that got into a big giant fight with Apple because he felt that he should be allowed to interact with the iMessage protocol with a third-party app. And Apple did not agree with that sentiment. And it became a whole thing. And we talked about it a lot on this show. And he, you know, very loudly proclaimed that it was about freedom on the internet and all this stuff. And that was all well and good. And he's now a little bit picking that same fight from a different direction.

direction. So there's two new watches, which are in virtually every way identical to the last generation of Pebble watches. So there was the Pebble 2 and the Pebble Time 2. One has a black and white e-paper screen. One has a color e-paper screen.

But they're very simple, right? They're designed to be sort of pixely and hackable and they're like gadgets. And I mean that in the most gadgety possible way. And Eric's whole theory, he has said this to me since we first started talking about this project. His whole theory is that actually the Pebble kind of had it right. And what he wants is not some like brand new spin on a minimalist smartwatch. He wants a Pebble. And so he's like, he's rich now. He's sold two companies. And so he's like, whatever, maybe I'm the only one who wants this. I'm going to go make a bunch more of them.

And that's where we are. So, yeah. So there's the Core 2 Duo, which is 150 bucks and is the like very basic one. And the part of that story I liked is there was some factory somewhere. He wouldn't tell me exactly where. That literally just had boxes full of Pebble 2 frames. Just sitting there. Just like in the warehouse somewhere. So they're just using those. They are literally just making...

out of those frames again. And then, so that one's shipping in July and they're basically like they're using old hardware, new sensors, which is one of the funny things about this. I thought you would enjoy this in particular, actually. One of the things that he found in working on these watches again was that just the

By virtue of how much more efficient Bluetooth has gotten in the eight years since they last made Pebbles, they have quadrupled the battery life of the Pebble. And he said it's lots of things like everything has gotten more efficient and stuff. But he pointed to Bluetooth specifically as like it is so much better that the battery life on these new devices goes from seven days to 30 without any other meaningful change.

That's amazing. Bluetooth, man. 2025, it's the year of Bluetooth. We're doing it. Finally got better. So yeah, and then the other one is the Core Time 2, which is just the Pebble Time 2 with some of the same upgrades. And they're pre-selling them now. That one's coming out in December and it's 230 bucks. But I kind of love this as an approach. He's just like, we did it. We made Pebbles. They were cool. And here we are. But also along with all of that,

He published a blog post angrily describing why trying to use a Pebble with an iPhone is so much worse than trying to use a Pebble with an Android phone. And this gets to, I think, what you were talking about with the fortuitous timing of it all. Eric is very interested in picking a fight with Apple again about the openness of its platforms. And as it turns out, so is the EU.

Yeah. Which I think like with within the like 48 hour period, was it the same day? It might have even been the same day. Right on top of each other. Yeah. Okay. Put out two different decisions. Yeah.

Or under the, was it the DMA, the Digital Market Tax? Yeah, it's hard to keep, look, we're not European. There's so many acronyms. All right. I can tell you what every version of Ford F-150 pickup truck looks like. I'm trying hard to keep European tech regulation straight. All right, cut me some slack. Yeah. There's the DSA, which is the Digital Services Act, which...

Meta and a bunch of other companies are super pissed about. And there's the Digital Markets Act, the DMA, which regulates gatekeepers and preserves access to markets. So inside of the DMA, the Digital Markets Act, Apple is a gatekeeper and they are under requirements to open their platforms in various ways so that there can be a functional market for things like smartwatches. And the two decisions that came out just this last week under the DMA are exactly how Apple

in particular, smartwatches need to interoperate with iOS. Okay. Yeah. And the one is essentially Apple is now required to give developers more access to some of the iPhone's features, right? So that like that other watches will be able to do things like seamlessly pair or get notifications or share data back and forth in the same way that the Apple watch can. And then the other one,

I think it's basically just transparency, right? It's just like explaining to developers how these systems work and how they can use them. Apple hates this, by the way. Yeah. I mean, Apple's whole thing increasingly is that its stuff only works properly if you buy all of its stuff. And...

Like, it's been really interesting to watch Android follow that stuff up in slightly more open ways. Like the Android fast pair system is now very good. And it's only good on iOS if you use Apple or Beats headphones. And so the EU is trying to pry all of that open and be like, no, you can't privilege your own devices in your ecosystem. That's the whole point. We are opening this up. And so like,

Yeah, Apple's the whole reason to buy an Apple Watch is because you have an iPhone. It's because everything else is trash if you have an iPhone. But there's no market for other smartwatches. Right. I think if you're a gadget fan listening to shit, that's kind of a good. It's sad. It's just sad. Yeah. It's sad that you don't think about like, what other smartwatch could I buy? You're like, I can only have this one because I can only send an iMessage in return on this one. You can't even do any other kind of interactivity with a Pebble, which is the point of Eric's blog post.

Right, they're locked down in certain ways. By the way, when I say that Apple hates this, here's the statement from the EU. "With these decisions, we are simply implementing the law and providing regulatory certainty to both Apple and to developers. Effective interoperability for third-party connected devices is an important step towards opening Apple's ecosystem. This will lead to better choice for consumers and a faster market for innovative connected devices." This is a total boilerplate. Sure. Here's Apple's response.

This is all in our story. You can go read it. Today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don't have to play by the same rules. It's bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users. Brutal. Furious. Yeah. That's fury. There's also a real...

Like, we're just going to take our ball and go home thing inside of that. Like this, this statement made me think of in sort of a weird tangential way, what Mark Zuckerberg always used to say about content moderation, where he was basically like, we invest the most, we try the hardest, we do the most, we spend the most money and...

All being this loud and transparent about it gets us is pain. So we're just going to stop. And they totally stopped. And then they stopped. And this is like this to me is Apple being like, oh, well, we've built all these cool features to make our devices work together. And now you're forcing us to give them to other. Maybe we'll just stop.

It would be amazing if they stopped selling the Apple Watch in Europe. They're like, fine, have this weird Pebble. The threat here seems to be less that and more the next time we think about inventing a cool fast pairing feature, we just won't because we'll have to give it away. Like, we're going to make our products worse because any cool thing we do, we're going to have to give away. It's like, that feels like the threat to me. And that is a bummer, but I also think is a non-crazy threat from a company like Apple. Yeah, we'll see how these things play out. The

In some cases they've played out the way we kind of thought they would. Right. Europe forces Apple to do alternative app stores. Emulators show up. Apple immediately caves on letting emulators into the real app store.

Or the Apple App Store, I should say, not the real one. I mean, the fact that it's called the real App Store is kind of the point, right? Like that is still where we are. So you just see a little dash of competitive pressure actually forced Apple to respond to a thing consumers have wanted forever. Right. If that's how it plays out in smartwatches, that's probably good. Yeah. If it plays out that Apple is just like, screw it, no more Apple Watch features. Well, they still have a monopoly on the Apple.

It's like, there's just, I don't know how that one will play out, but you can see the fury at being made to compete. And then when there is real competition or something that sniffs like competition, you can see them cave like they did with emulators. Yeah. Well, and you can also tell the EU is learning how this game is played because not just the fact that it

that this stuff has to happen, but actually expressly dictated to Apple, no, you have to tell developers how to do it. Give them a timeline for how it's supposed to work and review these things in a predictable and timely way. It's like the EU and Apple are just slowly learning each other's games and are just like constantly trying to fend each other's off from being insane. And I really enjoy it. I will say, just looking at this, the idea that giving...

Third party smartwatches, the ability to pair, transfer data or display notifications or take action on them is not like the most innovative technology in the world. You guys like, you know what I mean? But it is it is the most important thing about the Apple Watch, right? Like the difference between the Apple Watch and any other watches. If I get a text from

I can respond to it from my Apple Watch and I can't respond to it from any other smartwatch, which is just immediately a crushing blow to anyone who wants to compete with Apple. And which is why there's no market for it. Right, right. And yeah, we'll see. I hope Apple does well. We got to get these things. We'll see if the passage of time has made Bluetooth better.

Sure. I believe you. But it's well-timed that they're launching a smartwatch and then maybe they will be able to better compete, at least in Europe, with iOS users. They can already do all this stuff with Android, right? Yeah. Android has been more open in that way for a long time. And I think all that stuff will still work. Eric very proudly told me that you can still sideload the original Pebble app and it'll still work on an Android phone.

And I was like, cool, Eric, I bet a lot of people are doing that. That's our audience. Yeah, I mean, it's true. They're here for it. Speaking of Android, a little Pixel news this week, not like major Pixel news, but some weirdness in here. The Pixel 9a is out. What's going on with that thing? So I actually kind of think the 9a is a big deal. I think the a line of phones gets less credit than it deserves, where it's basically like Google just showing up and being like, OK,

we've now figured out how to make the last phone that we made and it's a little cheaper now because we we've made lots of them that's all good so we're just going to basically do that but like at half the price is that something you're interested in and like yeah it is this is google has done this mid-range phone i think actually substantially better than apple uh and allison johnson who wrote about the the 9a uh made this point very well that the 16e just came out from apple uh

I think we largely think it is a series of like pretty reasonable trade-offs except for maybe a couple, but at $699, it's still pretty expensive. Then Google shows up with the 9a and it's like, okay, it has multiple cameras, 6.3 inch screen, looks pretty nice. It actually doesn't have a camera bump, which in general, I'm of the mind of like, who cares about camera bumps? Everybody puts cases on. But then I see a picture of this one where it doesn't have a camera bump. I'm like, yeah, that's kind of slick. Like I'm kind of into it.

It's more durable than the last one. It's brighter than the last one. It has a bigger battery than the last one. Slightly smaller camera sensor, which I have a lot of questions about. All of Google's million weird new ideas about AI. Sure. $499. $499.

This is a good deal. Like this is, I think in the, in the lineup of Android phones, I think that the a series from Google is actually one of the most compelling in terms of like actual bang for the buck. Alison said in her piece that this is the phone she recommends for dads and like, Hey, I agree. And B as a dad, I'm like, yeah, I'm into this phone. It's funny because Samsung's galaxy a line is also the other cheap one that also moves a lot of units that,

Every now and again, we're like, oh, we should pay attention to these. Like these are the ones. So the A35 5G is $399. They're a little bit higher than that, but.

It's a newer phone. Yeah. And it's, it's, it all gets very complicated. So like, uh, Anna, my wife dropped two, two phones and, and destroyed them in the span of 48 hours, which is very impressive and true kudos to Anna. Uh, and I ended up buying her a pixel eight at Best Buy for $399. And I did that knowing that the nine a was probably coming soon. And I was like, did the gap between last year's flagship and this year's mid range, uh,

is like kind of vanishingly small, which is weird because like ordinarily this stuff either sort of lags a couple of generations or there's some meaningful spec difference between them. But now it's like, there's just a lot of like same e-phones and it's like whatever, any phone from the last two years at a price that makes sense for you is probably going to be very good, which is both an odd and a cool place to get in the smartphone universe. I think particularly on Pixel line, because I mean, the point of them is Google software.

Right. At the end of the day, the point of buying a Pixel is to run Google's vision of Android. Right. And that remains fairly constant among these phones. Yes. You know, what doesn't remain constant is Google's ability to make hardware that works. I would say that in a minor way, constant. Yeah, that's fair.

Google's inability to make hardware that works. So yeah, okay, I want to know what you make of this. So when Google announced the 9a, they also told us, this is Matt Flagle at Google, who said, we're checking on a component quality issue that's affecting a small number of Pixel 9a devices. They haven't shipped review units, at least as far as we know, to anybody. You can't pre-order the phone, and it's not coming out for a few more weeks.

All of which are kind of unusual for the way that Google tends to announce phones. This sets off like all kinds of alarm bells for me. What do you make of this? I think that they had their announce date locked and then they realized the phones were broken and they were stuck and they had to announce this phone and they have no idea when it's actually going to ship. It's weird to announce it without even a pre-order button. Yeah. Well, and to me, it suggests that it is there is not something you can just fix with like a firmware push.

Uh, cause what we've seen before is, you know, they'll, they'll ship phones, particularly to reviewers and be like, Hey, you know, in a few days, we're going to get an update that fixes X, Y, and Z thing. Uh, which is annoying as a reviewer, but is a relatively common thing for a phone right before it ships. But,

The fact that there is no date, there is no button, no one has seen these things suggests to me that even if it's a small number of phones, which is what they always say, it's got to be something pretty show-stopping, right? Yeah, you've got something that makes the phone not work or explode. Those are your choices. Yeah, like, oh no, the 5G chip is broken. It's got to be something at that level.

Like, we forgot to make a phone that connects to the internet. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's supposed to be here. And there's no time. They're not saying when. So there's weirdness with this one, but I suspect they were locked into this date to announce the thing. Because Google also has to be nice to its entire ecosystem. Right. So it can't step on everybody else. So, for example, this was not announced at Mobile World Congress, which was just a few weeks ago.

It's now because they let everyone else have their time. Weird. And so like that's just going to keep happening. So I think they take their window and let everyone else do what they want. Phone delayed means they still have to hit their window. Yeah, that makes sense. And let's say kudos to Google for actually taking this route if there is a real problem. We've seen a lot of companies ship things.

slightly broken things with the promise of it'll be fixed later the ai will fix it david yeah right uh so at least for google to be like okay we we are not going to sell you this thing until we're confident that it won't break uh it doesn't make me feel great about the quality of this phone or google's ongoing hardware team but at least feels like google doing the right thing

Yeah. I just wish they had a date. Yeah. They weren't like, we're delaying it by two weeks. They're just like, we're checking. Yeah. A phone, a phone that launches without a release date should like technically the nine a is vaporware. Like as of right now, the pixel nine a is vaporware. $500 vaporware. At least it's not $600. It's vapor till it ships. Those are the rules. I don't make them. I mean, I made that one, but it's bigger than me now. Yeah. It's vapor till it ships.

No matter how mad you get. Okay, let's talk about my favorite piece of phone vaporware. Huawei's Pura X, which one will not ship here. It's like a weird sort of geopolitical vapor. Also, it's only a render right now. And then third of all, it's like a wide flip phone.

Like a very, it's a very, like imagine a flip phone, but then make it really wide. Make it sideways. It's not even sideways. It, when it unfolds, it's, it's still the wrong shape. I love it. It is very weird. I want it very badly. This phone is,

Thoroughly fascinating. It really is. Like, A, it's I think Huawei's first phone with no Android app compatibility. It's like full on Harmony OS there. They have had to do their own thing again because of geopolitical insanity. And so...

This is sort of the beginning of a new era of Huawei trying to build its entire ecosystem for itself. Yeah, it's not even open source Android. It's new. Yeah, it's a completely different operating system from the ground up. And I really appreciate that instead of being like, here's a phone you really like with new software. Let's see how this goes. They're just like, what if we reinvented literally everything all at once? This is also, I should say, justice for the Surface Duo, which was the other...

bookish unfolding phone. That was a ridiculous idea that I nevertheless loved and used all the time. No, but this one you it's, it's wide, but you open it sideways and then you're supposed to rotate it. It goes 90. So you get this weird vertical tablet, but then you close it and you're supposed to use it sideways again. I don't understand a piece of it. I just know that I love it. Yeah. And I want to run harmony OS next.

in Chinese, I suppose, if I have to, but I'm ready to go. Do you remember that phone, the LG Wing, the one with the sort of like the, with the, it opened up into like a T shape. Yeah. That's what this reminds me of where they're just like, we're just going to come up with every possible way you could use a phone and we're going to make it slightly weird in every orientation. Do you want that? I love it. I love it.

I love the fact that it runs its own weird operating system that we basically try to add to build because of trade restrictions. Uh, and there's its own weird AI system in there that even Jensen Wong is like, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. All right. If you want to send us a weird Huawei phone legally, illegally, you know, arrives, we'll, we'll use it. I'll just say that actually, I think Dom Preston in the UK is probably going to get this for us. Uh, we'll find a way, but I'm excited about weird phone form factors as always.

Lastly, in this segment, we should talk about NVIDIA a little bit. They just had a big conference. It was GDC. NVIDIA had GTC. Jensen was on stage. Made a lot of noise about chips. David, you said you had a theory here. I do have a theory here. A, I have a recommendation and then a theory. The recommendation is that everybody should go watch these Groot N1 humanoid robot videos that NVIDIA is putting out. They're wild. And I think...

We all have spent, what, 10 years seeing the Boston Dynamics videos where the robot that looks like a dog can do backflips. And it's like, that's all well, this is like a whole other thing. This is like, we didn't write about a demo we saw of these because we just assumed it was a person in a suit. Like that's, and I'm still not convinced that's not what's going on, but that's how convincing some of these demos have gotten. And they're really fascinating. But the theory I want to throw at you is I think

Nvidia has stolen Apple's thunder as the most important product launch company right now, which is bonkers for a company that mostly announces chips. But in terms of like,

I don't think you're going to tell me it hasn't hit the like they cover it on the local news thing. And that's true. But in terms of like people who care about technology, there is so much enthusiasm now around everything that NVIDIA does. And they have these things in like stadiums with thousands of people. And it's this huge personal event in a way that Apple now just like releases infomercials, which I think is sort of hurt the excitement of those announcements. But NVIDIA is like

deeply like sexy and cool in a way that I think Apple used to be when it talked about new products. Yes, I agree with this. I also think that it's a small community of people like who really care about it. And then there's like a lot of people who are in this Nvidia stock who want to see number go up. That's fair. And what I wonder about this is, do you think until Nvidia starts making itself some kind of like mainstream hardware, like,

Can it ever be that cool? Mostly as a chip maker? Because I look at these things in like the, what was it? Project Digits is now the Spark, this little like AI supercomputer thing that they're making. And I'm like, there's a world here where NVIDIA like really wants to make a consumer product that people care about to get that next level of like interest and excitement going.

All their money is in data centers. I think their consumer product is chat GPT. That's fair. Yeah, I mean, like, their consumer product is Grok or whatever else is running a bunch of immediate trips in data center. Like, they're happy with that. The comparison that I would make to you is Intel, which just this week got a new CEO who's going to try harder, I suppose. Yeah.

Um, but Intel's years in the woods were marked. Like I, we knew the end was coming for Intel because they didn't do the iPhone. They were bad at mobile. And then every year we would go to CES or whatever. And Intel would be like, here's a vision of the future powered by Intel chips. And be like, are you going to make any of this stuff? And they're like, no, that would be the end of it. Like every time it would be the end of it. And they couldn't make the leap to being a consumer company. Cause I don't think that's in their DNA at all. And then nobody wanted what they were selling.

Like quite literally, nobody wanted what they were selling. And so you ended up in a place where it's like, I saw the future of 10,000 drone firework shows. That's Intel's future. That's what they were showing for years because they had the technology to make that stuff. But that wasn't the next turn. I don't think NVIDIA wants to be in that place where they're like, here's a vision of what you might build with our stuff. There are like small hints that it does though.

There's like... The Shield is a weird consumer product, but a consumer product. And they're like doing the GeForce thing. And they have the Digit stuff. It's like there are...

It seems like there is like one executive inside of NVIDIA who's like, what if we made the products ourselves? And they keep losing the fight in the meetings. But then, I don't know. It just feels like that. First of all, the NVIDIA Shield hasn't been revved in 500 years. And I know by even by talking about it, we've summoned the NVIDIA Shield people. Yeah, we're going to get emails. Welcome. You know, we love you. You're safe here.

It's it's old. I'm just letting you know, it's old. It was always a little bit crankier than any of you want to do it to, to admit. Um, also you have to, the Plex just changed its rates. I don't know what you all are going to do now. Uh, they're increasing prices. It's tough out there. Big, big news. Uh, I, I see that they wanted to package some of their core technology in ways to indicate like, oh, there's a real market here, but the shield was never going to go after the Roku.

Right. Like that was not going to happen. And I think it's the same, like, that's what I mean. The Intel comparison I'm making is Intel kept trying to invent a new market because it had lost the old one. Right. Whereas Nvidia is, it is this market. It literally he's Jensen standing on stage.

talking about the price performance ratio of inference on NVIDIA GPUs and how no one can compete with him. Right. And so maybe the fact that it has become such a huge event is less about how important NVIDIA is and more about how much it owns that market that everyone is obsessed with. Yeah. And I think the point he's making is you can't compete with us. Like it was like, what if what if everyone on Earth cared about laptops when Intel was like...

at its peak. Yeah, and there's a lot of hype in AI. So I just feel like there, I think it would be a miss for NVIDIA to be like, you can run the models locally. I think what NVIDIA wants most of all is for Amazon to feel like they have no choice but to buy NVIDIA GPUs for their data centers. And that was kind of the argument. You should go watch the thing because it's cool. But that was more or less the argument Jensen was making on stage. Yeah, I bet that.

All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back with Lauren Feiner. Boy, boy, a lot of things happened in what I have taken to calling the computer coup. It's good. Think about it. We'll be right back. Support for The Verge Cast comes from Shopify. If you stop to think about how much work it takes to start your own business, it

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Today at T-Mobile, I'm joined by a special co-anchor. What up, everybody? It's your boy, Big Snoop Deal Double G. Snoop, where can people go to find great deals? Head to T-Mobile.com and get four iPhone 16s with Apple Intelligence on us, plus four lines for $25. That's quite a deal, Snoop. And when you switch to T-Mobile, you can save versus the other big guys, comparable plans plus streaming. Respect. When we up out of here...

We're back. Lauren Finers here. Hey, Lauren. Hey. How's Washington, D.C.? Are the vibes good?

Yeah, you know, just business as usual here. Yeah, nothing. No wailing in the streets of our nation's capital. No. Have you been forcibly removed from any spaces by Doge? I have not. I'm staying put. Just hiding out. Have you guys noticed one of the strangest things about the whole Doge thing to me has been when...

you see the Doge team sort of goes to a new agency or a new place and there start to be these headlines and these tweets and stuff that are like, Doge has infiltrated the NIH. And they talk about it like it's this like marauding band of bank robbers who are just like running in with masks on and causing all kinds of ruckus. And they're like, they've infiltrated the building. And it's just, it's become this very strange, like,

militia that is just like running around DC entering buildings. And I'm realizing as I say this, that all these metaphors actually kind of work and are true, but it's, it's a very strange phenomenon. You can see the realization just coming over your face as you were talking out loud. I will say this week, the theoretical administrator of Doge, Amy Gleason revealed in a filing with the court, this is true. She said Doge has 89 people, but they have no formal org chart or front office.

Look, I'm not saying I host a podcast about org charts on the side. I'm not saying that's my hobby. I'm not saying I've asked virtually every CEO in this industry, how their company is structured. I'm saying I started the verge with a bunch of friends. David was like employee number one and we got to 10 people and we were like, oh, we need some fucking structure. Like you cannot have a totally flat 89 person organization that is infiltrating the government. Like it's, it's nonsensical on its face.

It's all I'm saying. But it's true, they're infiltrating things. Actually, Lauren, before we go into the computer coup, can I briefly talk about my favorite nonsensical Doge-related story? Please. Do you mind? Okay. So, as you might expect, Elon's real hype on putting Starlink everywhere in the government, it's just what he wants. I don't know. It's what he wants. Lauren, I've never lived in D.C. My sense of our nation's capital is that

ISPs are thick on the ground. Like you can get internet access in Washington, D.C. Yeah, I'm talking to you from an internet connection right now. There you go. It just seems very easy to get internet access in D.C. Like in most places, you're not in the woods or on the battlefield. Yeah, no, it's like a city. Yeah, they solved that problem. Yeah, David lives there too. Yeah, it's like a whole thing. Yeah. So they've added Starlink to the White House.

The New York Times reported this week they've added Starlink to the White House, but they haven't actually added Starlink dishes to the White House. The Starlink dishes are in a data center that's miles away. And then the access to Starlink is being piped in over existing fiber to the White House. And then there's a Starlink network at the White House.

Already confusing, right? Isn't that just nothing? And then we asked the White House and Carolyn Levitt, who I'm sure all of you have seen on social media or television. She responded that the goal is to improve Wi-Fi connectivity at the White House. The White House is working to improve Wi-Fi connectivity. Nonsensical on its face. I knew when we wrote this story that our audience would be mad.

If you want to improve wifi connectivity, you just add more access points. You, you know, you run, maybe you do some mesh networking. Like if you're like, it's really wild, but I'm confident the white house has the ability to run cables through the white house complex. Yeah.

and put up more access points. - Do you think if the New York Times had run a story that was like, the White House put up a bunch of Eero's around the West Wing, we would have been like, "Ah, cool." - Yeah, they put up that new outdoor Eero Pro 7. Everyone loves it, it's great. It's inexpensive, but you get all the bands. I don't know, but I'm confident the federal government has IT contractors. So if your goal, just think about this. My goal is to improve wifi connectivity at the White House. That's what I'm going to say. I'm gonna have Carolyn Levitt

Email the verge.com and say, the goal is to improve wifi connectivity at the white house. And the mechanism by which we're doing that is we're putting Starlink dishes miles away at a different data center. What it's it's, uh, it's, it's every part of covering this administration involves this.

Like just straightforwardly this, where you have to, you have to look at it and say that, you know, it doesn't make sense. Right. And then, and then they, they bluster back at you and that's the end of that conversation. Anyhow, they're struggling with the white house now. It's probably insecure. It's probably being hacked by the minute. And the goal is to improve wifi connectivity to shore. If anyone, by the way, this, the story got posted to read it.

thousands of comments from angry tech nerds on Reddit being like, that's not how you would improve Wi-Fi connectivity. You would just add access points. That's what you would do. So I think Elon just wants his own network. That's my firm belief is that he wanted a network outside of the government's sort of IT security protocols. Maybe he realized his gaming PC wasn't getting quite the lag he was hoping for. So he's like, I can upgrade my ping if I could just get the Starlink gun. You fucking use satellite internet. Yeah.

I don't know, man. It's a weird one. Speaking of Starlink, more importantly, the guy who ran the BEAD program, which is the Federal Rural Broadband Program that was part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden passed, he quit.

You know, as you do. His name is Evan Feynman, and he said that the Trump administration's overhaul of the Bede program would lead to deeply negative outcomes because they would favor Starlink. Lauren, I know you've been kind of poking around at this. What's going on with this one? Yeah, I mean, I think this is, you know, one of the things that everyone is keeping an eye on to see, you know, is Elon Musk's involvement with the government going to have tangible effects on the

you know, how his business is fair when it comes to interactions with the federal government. And, you know, I think how broadband is deployed across the country is one of the most obvious areas to look for that. So, you know, this is a major program that's meant to expand broadband access in rural areas. And, you know, it's kind of a big deal.

It's kind of placed a lot of emphasis on fiber. So the more that we see that shift to satellite, the more that SpaceX stands to benefit from that. In his email when he announced he was leaving, Feynman said the overhaul of the program to favor Starlink would strand all or part of rural America with worse Internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer. Yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington.

The thing that strikes me about this is it's not like the Bede program has of yet been a stunning success, right? The criticism is you spent all this money on broadband and no one got any broadband. And then the argument, Lauren, as far as I understand it, is, well, we gave out the money and now they got to do it. What's the holdup? Yeah, I mean, I think the holdup is there's kind of a lot of red tape here. It's, you know, this is a big

a big undertaking for the government. There's a lot of different ideas about how to do things. So this has been a long process in general, not just because of all the changes recently, but I think there is a lot of fear that, you know, adding more changes at this stage will just drag things out even further, which no one really wants. All right. Well, we'll keep an eye on this

I do think, and I know everyone's going to, the Starlink people will find me. They're going to team up with the NVIDIA Shield people. It's true that I think wired internet connections are superior to wireless internet connections. I'm sorry. We like wires and we like buttons. These are like two of the foundational beliefs of the Verge. It's also true that Comcast is an ISP and it's an investor in a parent company, Box Media, but they hate me.

So it's like, just, I'm just, I just think ethernet is superior, more reliable than wifi. And I think fiber is more secure and reliable than satellite. Yeah.

It's just how it works, man. So we'll see. I think, Lauren, we're on the wait and see phase of what's going to happen with Bede. I think that's right. All right. There's a number of other things that are sort of in this wait and see zone. TikTok is one of those, right? The Supreme Court said it was banned, like it was constitutional for the law that banned it to have banned it. And then Trump took office and he said, no, don't worry about that until April 5th.

It's almost April 5th. What's happening there, Lauren? Yeah, so I think the short version is that we haven't really seen anything come of this so far. TikTok's in the same ambiguous position, but, you know, all the companies that service it have decided they're, you know, pretty much good enough with TikTok.

the legal protections that the Trump administration has offered so far, even though it's technically illegal to service the company at this point now that it's past the ban deadline. But we're hearing that Oracle is trying to swoop in and save TikTok from a U.S. ban. And if that sounds familiar, it's because it kind of tried to do this before. You might remember a

a thing called Project Texas, which was this whole plan for Oracle to work with TikTok and, you know, make sure that all of the U.S. data, the source code was all good and, you know, there was nothing nefarious happening. And, you know, after TikTok rolled out this huge presentation about Project Texas, you

lawmakers were like, well, you know, we still don't think this is enough. So, you know, we obviously don't know what exactly a potential deal with Oracle, assuming that's what Trump is looking at here, would look like. But from everything that's been rumored, it sounds pretty similar to Project Texas, which begs the question, you know, what change? And will lawmakers get on board with this this time?

There's a J.D. Vance quote he said to NBC News. There will almost certainly be a high level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns and allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.

I don't actually know what that means. That doesn't mean anything. Wait, can I read you a slightly longer version of that quote that is more words and says even less? He says, we'd like to get it done without the extension. I think the question is, what is the equity ownership of the new joint venture? How do you do the contracts for all the investors, the customers, the service providers? The deal itself will be very clear, but actually creating those thousands and thousands of pages of legal documents, that's the one thing I worry could slip. Do you know what that list comprises? The deal.

He just described, we're going to have the deal done. We just might not have the deal done. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, actually, we're interestingly starting to see some warning from some Republicans in Congress. John Molnar, who leads the House Select Committee on China, actually said, you know, he's a quote, the law is clear. Any deal must eliminate Chinese influence and control over the

app to safeguard our interests. And he also said that, you know, ByteDance has to fully divest control of TikTok and have no say in its operation. So he's pretty clear that, you know, there has to be a clean break from ByteDance, which doesn't seem to be what Trump has indicated he's going for in his past public statements. Is it possible that

This just works out to be essentially a redux of the whole Project Texas Oracle deal, but they're going to spin it in a more politically advantageous way and then just ram it through whatever they have to ram it through because they feel like they can. Like this feels to me like they're just going to say Oracle fix it and then just yell loudly at whatever Congress people they need to make that.

I think it's certainly possible. I think it puts a lot of Republicans in a really tough position because I think the whole concern with Project Texas before was like, this doesn't get at the fundamental issue we have with ByteDance owning TikTok and, you know,

potentially still having a say over their operations and, you know, potentially, as the argument goes, giving the Chinese government some sort of access point to U.S. user information or to, you know, kind of change the levers that are being pulled over, you know, what content is surfaced to Americans. So, you know, if that doesn't change, then it puts a lot of Republicans who I think, you know, despite what you might think,

believe about the validity of that argument. I think you seem to really believe that puts them in a tough spot to just, you know, go against the president if what he wants is very different from that. It's all just so weird. The politics of this is just so bizarre that like Trump

tried to ban TikTok the first time. So much of this happened because Trump tried to ban TikTok the first time. And then it became this incredibly bipartisan thing. Like, Nilay, you and I have argued about this on the show a hundred times now. But like the fact of the matter is a bunch of senators got this briefing and then voted 50 to zero to ban it. Like,

It's everybody wanted this to happen. And then Trump changed his mind during the election season and became like the great crusader to save TikTok and now might just give it to Oracle because he and Larry Ellison are buddies. By the way, while he is hiking tariffs on China every single day, like he's Trump is a China hawk.

He's not. This isn't it is incoherent, like on its face. Right. And so even if you're just trying to do what you think the Trump administration wants you to do to stay in the good favor of the president, I don't even know how to figure out what that is. If I'm a member of Congress who has to figure out what to do with this right now. Yeah, I think it's going to be really tough for her. I don't know how they're going to kind of square that circle. I think, you know, it's.

a lot of different moving pieces. And, you know, so far, we haven't seen many Republicans go, you know, directly against Trump. So in a sense, it's kind of like, you know, why would they start doing that now? On the other hand, this is something that

an overwhelming number of lawmakers, including Republicans, voted for and, you know, seem to really believe in, even despite pushback from their own constituents. So, you know, to just completely do an about face on that would be really stunning. Yeah, we'll see. There's a big April coming up, right? It's TikTok ban. There's the big antitrust trial for Meta.

Where the stakes are splitting off Instagram and WhatsApp. There's a Google search remedies trial. A lot of things are going to happen. More tariffs. More tariffs are going to hit. Can't forget tariffs, dear sweet tariffs. Soon all of Canada will be illegal from what I understand. It'll just be criminal to even know about Canada. That'll be ironic. Another deep cut right there. Sorry.

I thought of a famous Canadian and that's what happened to me. I'm so sorry. We're going to see. A couple weeks from now, I think the world will go a wee bit topsy-turvy, especially Israeli Sedeq. The world is already topsy-turvy. Lauren, I think...

The big story of this week is what happened at the FTC. So if you're staring at, okay, next month we've got some big antitrust trials. One of them is the meta trial. That one is being led by the FTC. We've got some enforcement actions against Amazon. The Trump FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, has not been soft on these companies. They've been pretty aggressive. They've held up Lena Khan's merger guidelines.

But at the same time, Trump illegally fired two Democratic commissioners this week. Like the law there is very clear and he just did it anyway. What is going on there? Yeah. So, yeah, this week Trump fired the two remaining Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission, which was, you know, really shocking.

sudden and shocking thing to do because there is Supreme Court precedent where, you know, a president had tried to do pretty much exactly that. And the Supreme Court said, you can't do that because the Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency, even though it's, you know, technically part of the executive branch. And, you know,

FTC commissioners have to be fired for cause essentially. But that doesn't seem to be what was done here. And now there's two remaining Republican commissioners at the FTC. Just to be clear, the Democratic commissioners say, you know, they don't think they can really be fired. So they're, you know, pretty much saying we're still commissioners or we should be. And then we have a

third Republican commissioner who's set up to be confirmed at some point to the role. So, you know, what makes this even more confusing is that Republicans already would have a majority on the commission. So Democrats wouldn't really be able to sway how a lot of decisions come out. But, you know, it's kind of just getting rid of this dissenting voice or, you know, maybe a voice that would be able to sway some commissioners a little bit one way or another.

It does seem like one of the reasons for this firing is to set up the Supreme Court challenge that would overturn, I think it's a hundred year old Supreme Court precedent called Humphrey's executor. Sarah Jong, our features editor and I keep joking that everything we learned in law school is valueless. Like you learn this case in law school. It's just like, how does the government work? And like, it's on the list of cases you read about

what you can and can't do. And this one is very much, it's like on the nose. The president can't fire FTC commissioners. You just can't do it unless there's cause. And here he didn't have cause. You just fired them. So it's illegal. Like the law is clear and he did the thing that the case says you can't do. But you do that on purpose because you want to go to the Supreme Court and get the law of return, which the Supreme Court is very willing to do. So it's a very odd limbo, right? The thing that gets me though is this FTC is still set up

to be extraordinarily hostile to tech companies. Like what outside of we're, we're running this legal challenge to chase down this idea of the unitary executive where the president is basically a king, um, which is a thing like the federal society has been pushing this idea for a long time. Outside of that, doesn't it seem like they're losing their credibility to go after the tech companies the way that they've already wanted to? Like,

Bedoya, one of the fired commissioners, is like, I got fired because I criticized Jeff Bezos. But then you turn around and Trump loves to criticize Jeff Bezos. I kind of don't understand the goal here. Yeah, I think that's been kind of a big conundrum with this one. You know, I think on the one hand, maybe Trump

kind of made this decision outside of those considerations and said, you know, I just want to make sure I have full control over the FTC. On the other hand, it's concerning because if, you know, you have an FTC that does want to go after legitimate issues in the tech industry and you have a Republican chair who says he wants to take on the tech companies, I think one of the commissioners actually said something to the effect of, you know,

Ferguson, the Republican chair, is interested in going after tech. But what happens if he gets a call from the White House saying, you know, don't go after this executive who is becoming friendly with the White House? So

You know, I think it just calls into question the whole idea of the independence of the agency, which is something that Trump has already tried to assert power over in, you know, issuing an executive order, kind of trying to exert more supervisory influence over independent agencies. So, you know, I think this is just.

It's more about it being another step in the direction toward controlling what are supposed to be independent agencies that are able to kind of follow the facts where they lead and issue enforcement actions. And the, you know, continuance of that is being called into question now. Yeah, it seems dead certainty that this case will end up being.

back before the Supreme Court and we will end up writing an explainer about 100 year old Supreme Court precedents that get overturned. But the context is this is how the government goes and regulates a meta or an Amazon or seeks a breakup of these companies in one way or another. And if you make that politics

Then you get real corrupt real fast, right? You get real stupid real fast. If that is now a, like a horse traded negotiation as opposed to here's the antitrust law that's being applied. Like I I'm struggling to articulate this, but it just, the thing I want to say is like, if you make everything this political, you get stupid. Like there's like, you just start, you just lose your grasp on reality because everything has to be politically expedient or politically coherent, not logically coherent.

And this one to me is just like, they have the votes anyway. But if you're the, if you're the Trump administration and you're in a phase of, uh, testing your own invincibility, maybe it's pretty useful to make everything politics because then everything runs through you specifically and, and you get to horse trade anything you want. And I think like one of the strange things about this is, uh,

The Trump administration in certain ways is incredibly business friendly. And a lot of the reaction to this has been this is what an incredible victory for all the rich people out there who are now not going to be regulated in any meaningful way, except the tech companies like the FTC loves business and want to tear big deck to the ground. And I think that.

That whole cognitive dissonance is very loud inside of all of this decision for me. It's very strange. Yeah. And even the, you know, we mentioned that Google remedies phase of the search antitrust trials coming up. That case was started in Trump one, carried out under the Biden administration. Phase one was one under the Biden administration. And now the remedies phase, what are we going to do to Google, will be handled by a new Trump administration that is

just like a meaningfully different footing. Like the last Trump administration antitrust posture was literally we will find a way to broker a deal for T-Mobile to buy Sprint. Like we will arrange this to happen.

Boy, do I have feelings about that. Have you guys all been using your Dish Network 5G, everybody? Did that work? - That went great. - I love it. - I have Ting internet, which I think is Dish, so. - But that was the first Trump administration's posture, and they're the ones who started the Google antitrust trial.

This new Trump administration is way more aggressive, right? They've picked up a lot of the pieces from the Biden administration's posture towards the tech industry and they're carrying it out. And it's just, there's a part of this where, oh, that's great. Co-regulate tech companies. And there's a part of it's, we've been calling it gangster tech regulation, where they're just going to, I don't know, like Mark Zuckerberg's going to show up and be like, I made you a solid gold Porsche and that'll be the end of it. You know, like he gets to keep Instagram. And I just,

this level of politics, I think makes you dumb. Speaking of dummies, Lauren, welcome to the Verchest. Now you can see we can point out Brendan Carr. Wait, can I, can I tell you something very fun? Yeah. So I,

I like to call this America's favorite podcast within a podcast because it is that and it's very exciting. We heard from a number of fans of the podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me, which is a podcast that I love very much. And they also have a podcast within a podcast called Munch Squad where they talk about fast food and brand eating. So we now have a podcast enemy and it's Munch Squad. And I just wanted to tell you that because it's very exciting. These are now... It's a heated race for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. And...

I vote Brendan Carr. I, I can't believe I can pull this transition off, but I can do it. I'm going to do it. You ready? So I believe on the munch cast, they have talked about Reese's peanut butter cups. They have. Yeah. We'll get to Brennan in a second. Welcome to Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast with a podcast FCC commissioner. Brendan Carr is a notable dummy. Um, his predecessor, a G pie and Trump won.

loved to drink out of a giant oversized novelty Reese's peanut butter cup. They had a huge coffee cup Reese's logo on it. It went everywhere he went as he tore down consumer protections across the country, made internet access more expensive and worse for everybody. Literally one of the first things he did was he got rid of the privacy rules that ISPs were made to operate under. So now they can share your data. Great. Love it. But the mug, it made him, you know,

Charming. Hey, guess who the new president of the CTIA, the Wireless Lobbyist Group is? Wait, really? Yep. He's back? The Wireless Industry Association. New president, Ajit Pai. Effective April 1. Door's just spinning, baby. You just leave the government agency that's supposed to regulate the wireless industry, land at the top of the Wireless Industry Lobbyist Group. Fantastic.

Um, he's honored to lead CTIA, by the way, the wireless industry is a key driver of technology, innovation, investment in the United States. He's got the mug goes with, oh yeah, there's no way. You don't think the mug is like technically a government property. I'm going to mail him a grape and be like, do surgery on this.

No, but you can't mail it to him. You have to leave it at your house. You have to send him a picture and you have to say surgery on this. Come and get it, dude. I'll be here waiting. All right. So Brendan, this week it was revealed that he sent a letter. He's investigating 13 public radio stations, including WBEZ, which is This American Life.

Right? It's This American Life. It's WBEZ. So This American Life is under investigation from Brennan Carr over what he says is illegal advertising because they do this thing called underwriting where, you know, it says this program is brought to you by da-da-da-da-da. That's advertising. And if you're doing advertising, then you can get your funding cut. That's like the thing that NPR has been doing forever and ever, always.

That's what they do. Yeah, that's like NPR's whole thing. We do not give enough public dollars to these radio stations to operate. So you're underwriting to cover the gap and everyone gets to feel good about themselves. And there's a gala at the Shedd Aquarium or whatever in Chicago. But the argument is because they say the name of the underwriter on the thing now that's advertising. Here's what Brandon said. I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials.

It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements. I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS, given the changes in the media marketplace.

so he's just looking for an excuse to cut funding to yeah that's what that sounds like he thinks they're too woke uh for its part wbez uh says they received the letter on february 28th we can confirm we received the letter they say in statements uh they've requested detailed information we adhere to the fcc underwriting guidelines we're confident that we'll demonstrate compliance i should note here just a disclosure it's like a it's not actually disclosure but

WBEZ is part of Chicago Public Media. The CEO of Chicago Public Media is our old publisher, Melissa Bell. She's at cofoundeddocs.com. Yeah, she's my boss. I sent her a text. She hasn't responded to me. I'm going to try to get her on Decoder. Melissa, if you would like to come dunk on Brendan, that's a choice. I suspect she will not.

Just to put that out there, I suspect she will not. But there's your disclosure. This is just noise, right? This is Brandon once again going after media that he dislikes because it's too woke or too liberal or whatever he thinks, concocting some bullshit to express his power. And then he's attacking this American life by saying, I will make sure the government stops funding you because I have decided that

you're underwriting sponsorships or illegal advertising and Congress shouldn't fund you anymore.

And that is just, again, Brendan Carr trying to chill speech in America that he disagrees with. And he does this week in and week out. I barely even have to research this segment. I start typing Brendan Carr into my laptop. It auto-completes. And then there's a list of bullshit that this man does to chill speech in America every week without fail. So we're going to keep covering what's going on here. We're looking for the other stations that received this letter. If you know who they are, if you work, you can tip us. We'd love to talk to you about this.

But this is just nonsense. Like the First Amendment in this country is directly under attack in a huge variety of ways. We've covered what's going on on campus with protests and protesters being removed at Columbia. We have a great story this week about what's happening to immigrants who are landing at airports and having their social media searched and then being kicked out of the country for no reason whatsoever. And like a weird combination of databases that

Gabby, our reporter who wrote that story, called it Panopticon. Like, there's just real pressure on freedom of speech in this country right now. And Brendan remains the tip of that spear because he goes after media organizations, specifically media organizations that he disagrees with, over and over and over again, using power that he does not actually have. He concocts bullshit to express his power. So, Brendan, as always, I know you listen. I know you get the alerts. I know that there's some intern who sends you a readout of this. I know that you like it. I do.

You're welcome to come on the show and I will humiliate you to your face anytime you want. You can come on Decoder as well. But you should answer for this because it's real bad.

That's when Brandon Carr is a dummy. Everyone's favorite podcast within a podcast. Wait, I have a Brandon Carr is a dummy follow-up question. Is he connected at all to what happened with the Trump administration and Voice of America this week? The sort of full shutdown of that entire arm? I don't think so. Lauren, I think that's somewhere else. I think Voice of America was somewhere else. I think so, yeah. It's very much like of a political piece, though. This just relentless shutdown of anything political.

that they perceive to be against them politically. Yeah. And it's funny because Voice of America is meant to be like the export of American cultural values. Like it is sort of meant to be propaganda. Yeah. But they landed at we should do, we should tell the truth. And that is uncomfortable when everything is this political and stupid. And so now they're shut down.

It's fine. Just let it be propaganda. 24 hours a day. Be like, you know what? Rules America. That's fine. I know, right? Like, go make your own propaganda. Don't shut it down. Very stupid. I guess that's what Joe Rogan is for. All right. Last one we should talk about. This one is, it seems complicated because I don't know exactly what anyone is trying to get except yelled at.

But, you know, the Trump administration is new. They've got new ideas about AI. They got David Sachs, AI czar doing something somewhere. And Lauren, both OpenAI and Google this week basically said, hey, what if there wasn't copyright law? What?

That's basically how I read these letters. What's going on here? Yeah, so basically the White House was asking companies to kind of submit comments about, you know, what should we do about AI? And OpenAI and Google's response was like, let us train on copyrighted work. Let's like have some, you know, application of like fair use for AI. And obviously the copyright holders like that.

The entertainment industry did not feel so great about that. And, you know, a lot of celebrities were speaking out against this kind of idea. So, you know, just setting up kind of this big fight over copyright and AI and what the government should do about it. It's weird to me because there are so many pending lawsuits.

Right. The bunch of celebrities have sued open AI. It feels like everyone's a little bit twitchier with Google. It's a harder company to sue for a variety of reasons. Everyone's tied up with Google for a variety of reasons. Every, every celebrity has their podcast on YouTube for God's sake. What are you gonna do with that without Google? But there are all of these lawsuits.

Our company has sued Cohere. There's a disclosure. We also have a deal with OpenAI. Another weird disclosure. None of that has anything to do with us. I'm just saying you can see how even in this tiny little context, everyone's like playing different games and we'll see how these lawsuits play out. And these letters feel like, hey, what if we didn't do all that and Trump just said it was OK? Like, I don't understand that. Do they think they're going to get that?

Like, that's what it feels like they're asking for. I mean, I guess they think it's worth a shot. I mean, I think it's almost like what we've seen with TikTok. You know, the courts say one thing and then Trump comes in and says, no, actually, I'm going to give an extension that's not written into the law. So I think, you know, there's...

They're trying to go at this from all different dimensions in the courts and policy, you know, in like actual laws out of Congress. And we'll see kind of what gets there first, I think. It actually strikes me as like a perfectly reasonable thing to try if you're one of these companies. Like it might work. And the thing I think is so funny about all this is they're all making mistakes so high

And it's like both Google and OpenAI were like, if you don't let us do whatever we want with everything that has ever been created in human history, China will win. Yeah.

It's like that's that's the stakes that they're making. And then everybody in Hollywood is like, if you don't stop them from doing this, no creative act will ever occur in the future ever again. It's like, what if we all just settled down a little? Like, can we all it's just. In this case, I kind of agree with Hollywood. I think I mean, like, if you want me to pick a side, I'm on Hollywood side. It's not true that the number of movies is going down.

Right. Like it's true that we all have to pretend severance is like 10 times better than it is because it's the only good thing. Okay. How dare you? First of all, like there's nothing as good as that to compare it to except the White Lotus. And now we all have to pretend that shows in which nothing happens or like the peak of all cinema. Throw that out there.

I will say, Nila, you know I hate you. So this brings me great pain to say, but after like two episodes ago of Severance, Nila posted on Blue Sky something to the effect of they made a 40 minute episode of Severance in which the first 12 minutes is her going to a place, asking for a ride to a place to get another ride to another place. And I have laughed thinking about that post every single day since then. And Ben Stiller replied to that post. Ben Stiller did not laugh at that post.

Feel great. Ben, you're also welcome on the Verge cast. It'll go, it'll go better for you. I like Severance. I like the show. My point is just, we make so fewer shows that the bar is like, we have to pretend that like asking for a ride is like the peak of all television art and like, maybe it isn't. And so I'm just, I'm just saying Hollywood might have a point here. We should make some more stuff. We should, we should not be in this situation. True. But Lauren, to your point, like.

So if I'm one of these companies, I would very much like to be excluded from the deep hate toward big tech. And I have to like all that is still coming for these companies. And I if I'm open AI, I would super love to just kind of be over here. It's like maybe maybe use all the deregulation you're doing on me and not. I just don't know what the outcome is. Like, can you imagine Trump issuing an executive order that's like, I've decided that AI is fair use? Yes. Yeah.

Yes. What are you talking about? Sure. It's the Gulf of America. What are you talking about? Sure. But like, all right. There's a part of me where he knows he still gets royalties from The Apprentice. You know what I mean? He knows where his money comes from. And that one's particularly hard. I have personally intervened in a bunch of active court cases that I don't really care about.

It's much more likely that he would do Gulf of America. Lauren, what do you think the endgame is here? Just like give it a shot? I think so. I mean, I think they're going to try to say something on AI one way or another. So the company is want to make sure that their point of view and, you know, to David's point, maybe the most hysterical version of that point of view is heard. All right. We'll see. I mean, I'm very excited for Trump to weigh in on 17 U.S.C. 107 specifically by statute.

Look, there's a bunch of other politics stuff on the website. It is a heated time in America. It should be obvious to anybody who's paying attention. We have a great story this week about Doge straining all the USAID workers with work laptops full of data with no plan to recover them. We got stories about the Tesla takedown protests, which are starting to have a real effect on that stock price. One of the dumbest things that keeps happening in this administration is they just keep removing web pages from

By searching for words that mean other things. And so like a bunch of black soldiers got removed from the department of fence website because they just added the phrase DEI to the URLs and then broke all the URLs. Like all this stuff is just like relentlessly happening. We're covering it. I know a lot of our listeners and a lot of our audience would like a break from it. We're going to add some filtering to the website, but we're not going to stop covering it. I want to say that as clearly as I can. This is the story.

The government is breaking and a lot of it is breaking because the tech industry is insisting that it get broken in the form of Elon Musk. Yes, but also in the form of Google just writing a letter saying, what if copyright law go away? What do you think? And it's just it all of that keeps relentlessly happening. So we're going to keep covering it on. We have to build some stuff. We have some big ideas about how to filter the site. So we're going to build those tools for you as well. We'll do some RSS stuff. We can do that pretty fast.

But I just want to say clearly we're going to keep covering it. Lauren is doing a great job leading a bunch of that coverage. So thank you so much, Lauren. Lauren, I should also warn you that you're going to be on this show a lot in the next six weeks. And I'm really sorry in advance. You're also going to be in courtrooms a lot in the next six weeks. And I'm also really sorry in advance. Thank you. But it's about to be a wild spring for you in particular. And we're going to be hanging out a lot. April's going to be a crazy month. Yeah. Will we make TikToks about it? Who knows? We'll find out on April 6th.

Lauren, thank you so much for being on. Thanks. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. It's unsponsored for Flavor. I said it once and I have to say it every time. And it's getting more embarrassing every time. The calls for t-shirts keep coming in and they've gotten to the point where there are several people who are now annoyed at me for bringing up t-shirts and not making the t-shirts. If you have an unsponsored for Flavor t-shirt design, I would love to see it.

I've, that's, that's all I can tell you. I don't know. I have no promises on what will happen with it. Um, but I, I personally want both an unsponsored for flavor shirt that looks like I'm an unsponsored skateboarder and I want an everything's computer t-shirt. I can't promise that either of those will exist or that we will do them, but I want them both in my life very badly. I understand. I mean, you know, the implication is that when we're sponsored, there's less flavor, which is just not, it would repeat to everyone that,

It's fine because we exist in the creator economy writ large. And I think for many folks, the sponsorship does reduce flavor. But that's not us because we have this annoyingly precious ethics policy. It's just a different flavor. That's all. Yeah. I still directly challenge that.

FCC commissioners to humiliation rituals on the show. You can sponsor it or not. It's going to keep happening no matter what. All right. I was going to be brought to you by the FCC. If we can ever pull like an executive from an ISP on one of our shows, I'll be like, have you unsponsored? All right. I wanted to stop talking about Elon and politics, but the first item in the lightning round, it demands it. There's no other place in the show for this sentence to go.

Tesla recalls more than 46,000 Cybertrucks after trim starts falling off. Is that all of them? It seems like a lot of them. It does. I don't think they've sold a lot. They've been sitting on lots. We've known the trim has been falling off for seven months.

YouTubers are making videos about the trim. It's the triangle piece. It's just glued on there, like the part that goes over the window. It's been flying off these cars since the first day. We've known for a long time that this piece falls off the cars. We're only getting the recall now. Cool. A recall applies to every Cybertruck manufactured between November 13th, 2023, February 27th, 2025. It's the eighth recall. A lot of them were...

But a similar recall was announced last summer regarding a trim fault in a truck bed that also risked coming loose. This car is not super well made. Does not seem to be the takeaway here. It does not seem great. I think one of the more interesting things about Tesla right now, and we don't have to overdo it, is that the bloom is coming off the rose such that YouTubers are starting to chase the company.

So there's, you know, there's that Mark Rober video this week about autopilot and LIDAR. And there's a lot of weirdness with that video. We don't have to like over talk it, but there's just some, like when he drives the car through the wall, if you've seen the video, he drives over,

uh tesla through a wall that's like a wiley coyote painting of a more road because the cameras because the thesis is the cameras won't be able to detect the wall because they just use vision it's a little sea road when he drives through it like is a looney tunes cut out of like a thing you drive through like there's it's an entertainment piece you can tell it's an entertainment piece but there's that you can see jerry everything has been really harsh on the cyber truck lately

Marquez has been posting about his roadster pre-order that it's never shipping. I think he wrote age like milk. I wish we'd shot of it. You're just seeing, it's like, it's fine now in a way that, you know, they're still getting intact and there's quite a lot of angst about it, but it, it's just fine now to point out the problems with these, this company and its cars.

And that's a pretty big change. Yeah. John Herman, our friend at New York Mag, wrote a really good piece about this this week, basically looking at that turn and at how long Tesla kept this thing where it was sort of a universally praised thing in that space. And it was considered sort of the standard thing

to do to like Tesla. Like every tech YouTuber loved Elon Musk and loved Tesla. And it was like it represented everything that people in that space believed in. And that has completely shifted. Yeah, it's just totally flipped. And, you know, the protests, I think I interviewed Ed Niedermeier who wrote Ludicrous, the inside story of Tesla Motors. He's one of the leaders of the Tesla takedown protest movement. And I'm just going to say this clear. He said on the show he disavows any vandalism or violence. I asked him directly. He said it.

This is like the bot comment of the day about Tesla protests. Yeah. I asked him and he said, don't do vandalism or violence. But those protests are having an impact because people are starting to, the bloom is coming off the rose of the brand. And now investors, big investors are starting to say things like Elon needs to pay attention to Tesla. We'll see how it plays out. I'm just, I'm just pointing out the Cybertruck continues to be one of the funniest cars ever made. Yeah. Big, silly wiper, my guys. All right, David, you know what's going on with this book?

This careless people book. It's like, it keeps crossing my path. I have a copy of it.

It just seems like Meta wanted this book to go away because it's a book about Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. And now it's at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Yeah, I mean, it is like an all-time Streisand effect moment where Sarah Wynn Williams writes this book about her time at Meta that Meta, I think, perceived to be, you know,

disastrously terrible and full of lies uh and so entered into this big fight to try and issue an injunction to prevent her from from promoting and distributing the book it became this whole thing the publisher came out and said you know we we defend what's in the book this has been carefully vetted um increasingly people who are reading the book seem to be uh

a vouching for a lot of it that that what she is writing is is true um i have not read the book so i can't say for sure but i know alex heath on our team has one and has been talking to people about it um the book is just out you can just read it i should read it this weekend um but by all accounts it is actually uh it's it's a good book full of real uh allegations and implications about the workplace at meta some of them about you know harassment and real problems um

meta has just played this exactly the worst possible way if you're meta and don't want people to read this book because now like you said it is a number one bestseller which for i would say for uh even a pretty splashy like memoir of a person's experience inside of a company is pretty unusual uh to to be a number one bestseller is not an easy thing to pull off um

And now this book is a huge story. I think the book itself is a bigger story than anything in the book at the moment, which is really interesting. This fight, I think, has subsumed some of the conversation about the allegations of what has gone on inside of Meta, which is a weird thing.

way to have this conversation go, but it's very much out there now, and I suspect I, like many others, will be reading this book much more carefully and enthusiastically than I would have otherwise. Yeah, the weird thing about it is that Meta, they pulled out her arbitration agreement, went to an arbitrator and said, she's not allowed to promote the book. And then the publisher of the book, and then Meta

completely overstated that ruling. And they're like, we've been vindicated. This book is lies, which is not what the ruling said. And then the publisher of the book is like, look, that has nothing to do with us. We're going to continue promoting the book. So we're in this weird limbo where meta is,

you know, we're doing free speech now. We're going to use community notes. Everything's wide open on meta platforms is actively trying to shut down speech. And the thing that happens when you actively try to shut down speech is definitely happening, which is everyone is curious about the thing they're not supposed to read. Yeah, right. It just never works. No. And I, it, of all of the companies who should know this, meta should know this. And they are like Andy stone, like meta comms is like on threads every day being like replying to anyone who says anything about this book being like,

this book is lies. Right. How dare you? Uh, and it's just like, what are you doing? Like what, what, what has you so worked up? And maybe it is all lies, but this isn't, but then you get people like Dustin Moskovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, uh, saying essentially that, uh,

He encourages everybody to read the book and that there are lots of allegations in there, but that actually inside of all of that is a really interesting and telling read about how the company works and how the personalities inside of the company operate. Like there's a lot about Sheryl Sandberg and a lot about Joel Kaplan. And like, it seems to me, again, I have not read the book. We should talk about this once we've both read it. But that there is a lot of just sort of interesting business memoir inside of here that is not super flattering to meta readers.

that now an awful lot of people are going to be exposed to. Because there is, I think, a really interesting version of this story that is like there are big...

problematic allegations that will get talked about and will get run through the press and will become the story. But then there are, I think, the sort of lingering legacy of books like this is they do start to big picture change the way you understand how companies like this work. And I think we might get to that

much faster because this has become such a big story that it's like, oh, if for Meta to be this upset about this must mean she's telling the truth. And that becomes really powerful. And I think like this book is going to have really interesting different impact on

Even from the sort of immediately headline-grabbing allegations that it makes. You know, what's interesting is, you know, I flipped through the galley. I haven't read it closely, but I flipped through the galley and I've read a bunch of stories about the book and some of the excerpts. And what's fascinating about it is it makes meta seem really small and personality-driven. Like, Mark Zuckerberg is fiddling with individual content moderation decisions all the time.

various executives are very personally driving the company. Which is the opposite of how Meadow wants you to think about it. Right. Meadow wants to be a government. Right. That's how they set up a Supreme Court, for God's sake. Nobody cares about. I would compare that to Mark Bergen, who's a great journalist. I think he's at Bloomberg. He wrote a book about YouTube called Like, Comment, Subscribe. He was on Decoder. You can listen to that interview. I love this book. It's a good book. Because it makes YouTube seem big.

Like the scale of the problem that YouTube has to solve with content moderation, with what it is, with the interface, all this stuff, particularly under Susan Wojcicki, it,

The book doesn't shy away from the problem and it's deeply reported. It's in the weeds of YouTube. And it makes the case somewhat persuasively that YouTube has a shitload of problems. And they're like, all these people are stressed to the max every single day. But the reason YouTube is perceived to be slow is because they're taking it seriously. Right. I can issue criticisms of YouTube all day, all night, and maybe we'll do that another episode of the show. But it was just interesting comparing and contrasting these, these two books and what you're saying about the narratives that take hold of a company and

Like that book is very, very critical of YouTube. And I really do encourage people to read it or listen to episode of the cutter, but it, you just, it, it conveys the scale of the problem. It makes YouTube seem big in comparison to that scale. And I think the reason meta hates this book is it makes them all seem small. Yeah.

And Alex is Alex Heath is reading and he's doing some reporting to try to figure out what's happening. So these claims we'll have more of that. We'll probably have him come talk about the show next week or the week after when he's done with that process. But that's just my, my read of it is like, oh, these guys hate it when you make them seem small. Yeah. Speaking of meta, there's a little bit of activity pub news after a big run for blue sky.

Activity Pub. Well, some glimmers. So maybe the most important one in terms of meta, Threads, by the way, supports Activity Pub. Threads is now going to let you set your following feed by default. Just five years too late, but they're going to do it. Five years too late for a two-year-old product. It feels right. They're going to do it. I think that's smart. I think they've lost a lot of juice to Blue Sky. Yes. I think Threads, in a really funny way, I think I thought

was sort of speed running Instagram, where it was going to go and become this sort of central platform everybody was very quickly. And what it actually looks like it's doing is speed running Facebook, where it becomes the thing that everybody is on, but no one pays attention to really quickly. And I think...

Meta does not want to build another Facebook, even though Facebook has been very good to Meta for a really long time. That is a dying thing and you don't want to get to the end state of that very quickly. And yeah, I think they are desperate to make threads a place people want to hang out in the way that blue sky is a place people want to hang out. And the size advantage it has is real, right? Like they continue to dominate in terms of like raw number of users and people who, and whatever, but like blue sky is more fun.

And in so many ways, what Facebook was to Twitter, which is vastly bigger and totally irrelevant, threads now risks becoming to Blue Sky. And if I'm Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, I am fighting tooth and nail to make sure that doesn't happen. And the best thing that that has led to is better product. Yeah.

Truly, this thing where you can just see your following feed does not happen if Blue Sky doesn't exist. Oh, yeah. Without question. It just doesn't. Because this company has very specific ideas about what it believes is best and is best for engagement. And the following feed is not good for engagement. It just isn't. And it doesn't matter because they need people to use the platform. Right.

Yeah. And it's so it's so good that this that there is real meaningful competition here because it's forcing everybody's hands to actually build better products.

I honestly think one of the, the biggest successes of the Tik TOK algorithm is that it is divorced from time, but it still manages to feel relevant. Right. There's something really good about that algorithm where you're like some news happened today. And like, you see it on Tik TOK in the algorithm pretty much right away. Right. Like it just happens every day. Like whoever's on tour right now, you see clips from the concert of that night, like in real time every day. Uh,

Threads is so divorced in time. Yes. Right. It like never feels relevant. So even you get the big algorithmic juice, which is what everyone wants to copy from Tik TOK, but you lose all of the relevance and then blue sky is just a fire hose of nonstop apocalyptic relevance. But at least it's funny, you know, like, yeah, I don't think they've nailed that because once you lose the relevance, then you're like Twitter like,

becomes meaningless. So you can have everybody there, but it's like, what's the point? And in particular, the thing that I think they've utterly biffed on is sports. Because if you don't want politics, right, they keep saying they don't want politics, they want to, it's like, dude, just like build great, like,

hire every sports beat writer in America and pay Adam Schefter to put the trades there first. Right. Well, the problem is sports might move faster on the new to irrelevant timeline than anything else. Because play-by-play and signing-by-signing, all that stuff happens so fast and it ceases to be timely and new seconds after it happens. And so I think for...

threads to try and be more like Instagram where they're a little more timeless and they can show you older stuff that is still interesting. Doesn't work with any of that stuff. And like what, what I think threads is slowly learning that blue sky learned really fast is that there is no middle ground between like Twitter and Instagram. You just have to do Twitter. Like you can't do Twitter on an Instagram pace. Like usually the only way to do it is at Twitter pace and blue sky figured that out really fast. And I think to its benefit.

It's it, do you post to both every now and again, I post to both in my experiences. You just see that, uh, anything on threads just lives a life.

free of constraints. It's so true. Like random people find it. They get mad at you for reasons that are impossible to understand because they're seeing your post like six months after it happened. Blue Sky is a very tight, constrained amount of anger and then it dips. Right. Everybody gets mad at you for 10 minutes and then it's out of their face. A Threats post that goes is like three weeks of just randos being like,

I bought a Mac five years ago. And it's like, I don't remember what we were talking about. Yeah. Uh, speaking of activity pub, uh, ghost, the open source rival, the sub stack newsletter platform, they have completed the first switch of their activity pub integration. It's, I think it's still in beta. You have to go enable it, but they, so now you can ghost newsletters can go out over activity hub to, uh,

platforms like PixelFed to Threads to Mastodon. And then importantly, if you're a ghost person, you can feed all those things back into Ghost. This is the one, you know, I don't think it's going to set the world on fire, but especially because it's just in beta, it's very small. But the part where the content comes back in, and if you're a Ghost newsletter writer, you can look at Mastodon and then like,

republish that and get engagement. That's the part that I'm dying to see happen because that's the promise of all these services and none of them it's come true nowhere yet.

Right. And that's also like this is if you want to understand what makes the Fediverse interesting, it's this stuff. Right. Because this is not my Twitter clone can talk to your Twitter clone is one thing. That's fine. And that's exciting. And that's part of the solution here. But this is I can publish a newsletter that goes to my website, your email inbox and their Mastodon feed. And if they respond to my email or like on their Mastodon or comment on my blog, I'm

That actually all ends up as one conversation. And like that is the thing that is hard to wrap your head around, but is ultimately what makes this stuff work is that it's just stuff and it you write where you want and I read where I want and we both talk to each other in different places, but have the same conversation. It's like that's the magic of it.

Yeah, I can concretely, you know, we talked about that Starlink in the White House story that was on Reddit. It got hundreds, if not a thousand comments. It just did big numbers over there. And the people on our site never saw that that that whole set of engagement had happened. And if I could just connect those communities, maybe not directly, because I think there's value to having distinction between communities. But if I could just let you see, like, there's a huge conversation with this story happening somewhere else.

And that's built into the piping of the internet. Then I, we all kind of get more value out of all of it as opposed to being like, we basically just like gave Reddit a thing to generate free content about. Like if we can all pull that together, there's something strong there. So I'm happy for the ghost has done this. I'm watching it. I do think there's a protocol fight between activity pub and at protocol, which is what blue sky runs on. But like, that's pretty fun. I agree. Green shoots of innovation.

Um, okay. Last one. I just want to, I want to read you this quote. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, the, the, the content CEO, um, gave the interview to Variety and then they asked him about Apple TV. And here's what he said about Apple TV+. I don't understand it beyond a marketing ploy, but they're really smart people. Maybe they see something we don't. That's a pretty good dunk. I love this so much. He dunked on everybody in this one interview. He like came at, uh,

David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery for going with the Max name instead of the HBO name. He dunked on Amazon. He was like, they're good at football, but what else are they doing? But I agree. This was this was the best one that he's basically like, I don't know, they can they can throw some money at this if they want to. Did you see also the information had a story, I think, today that said Apple's streaming is losing over a billion dollars a year.

uh that it is it it's like maybe ted sarandos is right like maybe this is just apple uh wanting to have an in with people and be able to bring oprah winfrey up on stage at events to talk about a billion pockets and uh i i do think there is more to it than just that but it is it is not

obvious what Apple is in this for. Wait, you don't think it's obvious? I think it's totally obvious. I think I can galaxy brain my way into a theory, but it is clearly not just trying to build a competitive streaming service. No, it's definitely not that. Yeah. So, okay, what do you think it is? You think it's obvious? I think it's obvious. I think Apple's money doesn't come from the iPhone anymore, right? iPhone sales are declining. Mac sales are growing, but just not enough.

Apple's money comes from Candy Crush Whales. Sure, yeah. Meaningfully, that's the money. It comes from the base tier of iCloud being way too small and having to pay for more storage. Right. And then they upsell you into services. But it's in-app purchases. It's the App Store tax. It's 30% on Candy Crush Whales. That is the bulk of Apple's revenue now. It's the thing that's growing. Every year it's growing. And you cannot be like, okay,

We're the richest company in the world. We're the most innovative company in the world. The money is from Candy Crush Whales. They can't. They have to put a better face on services. And so you get severance. And you're like, we're the company that makes severance. That's a service. Don't you love Apple TV Plus, the service? We're a services company. And then hidden under that are some Candy Crush Whales.

So it's the sexy loss leader in the bundle that makes the bundle seem cooler than just payment processing and Candy Crush Wales. Yeah, because I think if they're that company, then they lose their sense of self. Right. Right? Like what we are is Stripe, but we have a gun. And the gun is your app doesn't exist anymore. Right.

Yeah, that's not Apple. I think we're the creative company and we make the Mac Pro and this music video was shot on an iPhone. They're that company. I think they have a lot of consternation about how much money all this is losing. Yes. But I think at the end of the day, all of it exists to make them the art company, not the billing company. That's a good take. And it is, I think, would Apple spend a billion dollars a year

on maintaining its identity as a company that does and loves creative stuff? Absolutely. No question. Which is why, like, there was all this talk when Severance season two was coming out about how, you know, super delayed and super over budget. And now it is probably the buzziest show out right now, I would say. You hate it, but what do you know? I watch this show religiously. I think it is beautiful. It is beautifully made. It is beautiful.

I'm just saying we have landed in a time when there are so few beautifully well-crafted things to watch that we have to pretend that this is the best one. Sure. But this is all ancillary to my point, which is, I think your argument would suggest that the brand value of how much people loved Ted Lasso and how invested people are in severance.

Makes the rest of the thing irrelevant that like it's not quite marketing, but it is like it's like a love engine for Apple that kind of doesn't exist anywhere else right now. Yeah. And again, they get to show up on their earnings calls and say, once again, services led the quarter with our award winning show, Ted Lassa. Right.

Not with our extremely ruthless collection of taxes from Candy Crush Wales. We extracted more value from all of our app developers. Every developer in the world is pissed at us. Yeah. Because our people call them up and demand that we add in-app purchases to their apps. And that's our money. Have you heard about Ted Lasso? He's so cheerful. No, I buy that. That's a good theory. And I do think they will reconcile costs along the way because...

I mean, what am I pointing out? There's less competition for beautifully made shows. So they will find a way to bring things. You can see it. What's that movie they just made? The Gorge? Uh-huh. Don't do that. They're bad at that. Like, they should stop spending that money. I think, have they made a movie that's, like, good? Coda won Best Picture. But they bought that movie. True. No, of the, like...

big apple originals f1 is the big swing coming this summer uh that's going to be the one i would guess it's either going to be a big monster hit or it is going to make a lot of heads roll inside of apple uh because that is i think by by some accounts like one of the most expensive movies of all time they've been talking about it forever it is it's it's a huge deal for apple and if it doesn't hit uh i think a lot of people get fired yeah i watched the trailer

It, it, it's not a very good trailer. It, it doesn't seem like it has a lot to do with F1. No, it's just Brad Pitt, like being beautiful. And he's very good at that. That's sad. Like even at this point, drive to survive doesn't have a lot to do with F1. No. Like I, I think it was Toto Wolf was like, this show is basically top gun. And I was like, yeah, it rules. So that's fine. Yeah. Uh, anyhow, uh, yeah.

They will reconcile their costs, but you can see, I think Ted Sarandos knows that Apple has this address up at services line and he's, I think he's willing to take that duck. Yeah. And I don't think, I don't think Netflix feels pressure from any of the companies Ted Sarandos named here. Like, yeah, he's not worried about that. There was that one moment where they accidentally lit up universal search on the Apple TV and everyone thought they had caved. And they're like, no, we, we, we misset a feature flag.

Yeah. I kind of hope they did that on purpose just as a flex. They're like, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? Too bad. Yeah. All right. We're way over. Like way, way, way, way over. Thanks again to Lauren for joining us. There's like a million stories on our site about all kinds of things. Tech, coups, Netflix. It's a good website. You should read it. It's at theverge.com. The show notes will be lively this week. Yeah. There's a lot going on. That's it. That's Verge. Bye. Bye.

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. Support for this show comes from ADT.

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