Samsung's thin, big, boring AI phones
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Hello and welcome to Vertcast, the flagship podcast of whatever the hell is going on right now. Does that feel right, David? Yeah, I don't know the answer, and there are thousands of answers all at the same time. Whatever it is, we're here for you. It's going to be great. We're super into it. We have a lot to talk about this week. I think we're talking on, what, day three of a flurry of Trump and big tech merger. We'll get to that later. It's basically a lightning round. We're just going to have to...

get through that every week. Like I was going through and putting the rundown together and it's an unusual number of things that we just have to say out loud in a row. It's like there's just this is kind of the moment that we're in is a lot of things are happening and I don't know what to make of any of them, but it feels useful to say all of them out loud. Yeah. So we're going to do that in like two minutes. And then David's going to talk about Netflix increasing prices for an hour and a half.

Oh, good. We have the same idea. This is great. Okay. That's how that's going to go. Well, let me just start by saying it's my first Friday VergeCast of 2025. It's nice to be back with all of you. There's quite a lot going on. And we should start, I think, with Galaxy Unpacked. Of all the things. I think that's right. We looked around and it is Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. That's where we should start this VergeCast.

because there's new phones and like truly what is the verge except new phones yeah if you listen you you boil any of the other stuff that's happening down far enough and you get to new phones which i think is like the whole theory of the verge yeah uh so this works out it's actually i will say this this is very true we have a lot of very smart very capable reporters on our policy desk reporters senators and every now and again they're like yeah we work for the phones website

And every now and again, they also point out that only the phones website can do some of the policy coverage they do because you have to understand the phones to do the policy coverage. It all makes sense in the end. It's going to be a little whiplashy here at the top. But let's start with Samsung Galaxy Impact because it was a big one, not a big one. There's a lot to say about Gemini and what Gemini means to people. And then it was also apparently very exciting.

And to tell us about the excitement level, I want to actually bring in Allison Johnson, who is, I believe, we've called her in from the side of the road. Hello, Allison. Are you here? Hello. How are you doing? Great. It's beautiful in California. Who knew? But I'm on my way back to Seattle, so...

It's going to be short-lived, I think. We'll see how that goes. I feel like in the annals of Verge casting, pull over in your car and call us to talk about Samsung Galaxy Impact. This is a high-water moment. Yeah.

Literally what has happened here. Yeah, yeah. So you were there. They announced the Galaxy Edge, which is the really thin one. I hope people saw the video you made from there. The vibes were high. Just a ton of excitement at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. Tell us what was going on. Yeah, it was kind of a roller coaster ride because the bulk of Unpacked, you know, the S25 Ultra, the regular, the Plus,

They are very, very minor updates, like in the most extreme way, because that's been the case for a long time. But this is it's going to be a review of one UI seven. Let's put it that way. So we kind of get through the presentation. We're like.

These phones are mildly interesting. I'm not going to lie. And then right at the end, it was like a, and one more thing, the Galaxy S25 Edge. And then it was like curtains. And then run out to the, they had this area set up behind kind of where they did the presentation and had the

had some sort of phone there, the S25 Edge phone. So it was, yeah, it was full on. And if I understand correctly, the salient things that we know about this phone are that it is a phone and it's very thin. Yes. Is that right?

Am I missing anything? Those are the two things I confirmed viewing it from a distance. No, it was a really funny experience kind of like coming off of this announcement of like some pretty familiar devices. And then I think we were all just thirsty for something different. And so they had this slim phone out there and it was a full on like

CES from 10 years ago kind of scrum where we're all trying to get in and get photos of it. So, yeah, but that's... We were not allowed to get close to it. We were not allowed to touch it. We weren't allowed to breathe too close to it. But it's very thin. I can say that. It has two cameras instead of three. We could tell that. Did they say why it's so thin or why that's important? Like, if Samsung was like...

this phone is twice as thick as last year's phone, but the battery lasts for four days. I'd be like, let's talk. Let's get in there. It's way thinner. To me, it's like we...

We all lived through the Johnny Ive experience once. We're just doing it again. What's happening? It feels a little bit of that. It feels like a style thing. I don't know. Just from the very, very little we know of it. Um, supposedly it'll be lower price than, well, than the ultra, which is like the most expensive phone you can buy anyway. Um, but,

Yeah, it's kind of a curiosity. I think it's sort of an answer to like, phones are all the same, you know, folding phones aside, what do we do that's different? And I guess they can make the phones slimmer now. So that's what we're going to have.

I will say to Samsung's credit, and I've only seen this on the video, but the way that they showed this thing off is extremely cool. It was on this big table and the phone itself looked like it's sort of suspended from a little chain. And then there are like thin slabs of what looked like stone in them. It's this very like earthy, cool, like.

thousands of years ago kind of vibe on this table. It looked like they were painting cabinet doors. What are you talking about? Oh, right. That's how you would hang a cabinet. It looked like at any moment someone was going to come up with a spray paint can. Yeah. So the other little slabs, it was like... Is that it? So that's the whole thing. It's thin. They didn't...

It's thin. Go ahead. You go ahead, Allison. No, they were saying that the other little slabs were the previous phones, the S24 and I don't think the S25. It was like thick phone, thick phone, slim phone for comparison. And yeah, I think that's the whole vibe. It's just a phone that's slimmer and they're like, isn't that cool? Yeah.

So we'll see. Can I throw a thing at you that might be a bit of a problem for Samsung? I didn't clock that these three things were different thicknesses. Like even looking at them in the video and even in the pictures now, I thought they were all the same thing. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So we should just mention there's a big rumor that in September Apple will do an iPhone Air that will be very thin.

Do we think that this is Samsung just showing off like vaporware to get ahead of Apple, which is a thing people believe? Or is it just something about the modern smartphone supply chain is like you can make thin phones now. So everyone's just going to do that. It feels like a little bit of both. I think Samsung absolutely is always thinking about Apple and they're like, we can sneak this one in.

ahead of whatever you know tim cook is gonna do i do think it's a supply chain thing of like well we can do this now so this is what we have i i think it's interesting that they they call it an s25 so it should ship this year in 2025 you would you would presume um

but that's, yeah, that's all we got. What year did Zoolander come out? I feel like we're on the Zoolander curve. Oh no. Zoolander is 2001. So we're, we're, we're exactly 25 years later and we don't remember that there was a movie in which one of the main jokes is that phones were super tiny. And so now we're just going to do, we're going to do marketing. That's like, this one's really thin and it's,

We're going to be like, yeah. Does it bend a lot? Like that? The iPhone six was really thin and it bent a lot. Yeah. Yeah. They say anything about durability. They said they did not say one word about this phone, except play like a sizzle reel of, of some like metal pieces coming together. We're really just coasting on vibes, but the vibes were high. Like I, that was the thing that really struck. I watched your video. You're like, this is, people are stoked about this phone. Uh,

Did anybody say why while you were there? I think it really was. Were they just like, it was a thing to take a picture of? I think it was a thing to take a picture of. We were all kind of starved for like, I think at the end of the presentation, I was like, is this it? Like these S25 phones, like they're not much to write home about. And then it was like,

no, here's this other thing you can all take pictures of. And it was so crowded. Like they had security for the thin phone and they were like pushing us back.

I saw Dieter. He was like trying to get in line too. And he just gave up. I was like, yeah, this is, this is old school. Let me just ask you for a vibe comparison. Unscientific. They had the thin phone and then they had the new headset, the Muhan, which is not a great name, but it's their headset, right? It's our Apple vision pro competitor with Google, like embedded. They're going to do a whole thing. Um,

What were people more excited about? A hundred percent. The skinny phone. It was like not even, it wasn't even hard. It wasn't even hard to get up and take a picture of the headset. And there were just a lot of people kind of standing around going, Oh, it looks like a vision pro. And you're kind of like, yeah. And we,

Same rules. We couldn't approach it. We couldn't touch it. You would get yelled at if you moved your camera too close to it. But yeah, the slim phone, the Edge won the day, I think. It says a lot. I would just say that that might be the entire story of the tech industry. They are desperate to get a computer on your face. And then you show up with like Skinny phone and everyone rushes to Skinny phone. We're like, yes, this is it. We talked a little bit about the iPhone Air on YouTube.

show last Friday. I continue to think there is nothing particularly interesting or compelling about like an eight tenths of a millimeter thinner phone. But you use all of these phones all the time. You can sense eight tenths of a millimeter in a way that very few can. Is this exciting? Like, is the idea if 2025 is going to be the year all of our phones get thinner, is that like a good, cool, exciting thing? Are we happy about this? I'm not necessarily sure. The thing I come back to is the

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold, like the second Pixel Fold, was one of those things you read about on paper and they were like, we changed the dimensions. I was like, sure, sure. And I went and picked it up at the event and immediately was like, oh, no, this is right. Like, this feels so much better. I don't know if a thin phone is going to have that same kind of like you pick it up and use it and you're like, oh, this is different. Like, yeah.

I don't know. I'm not committing one way or the other. I'll reserve some hope, I guess. I'm mostly skeptical. But I think it'll be a thing we have to pick up the phone and live with it and see if it cracks in half if you sit on it.

Yeah. All right. We will let you get back in the car. All right. Thank you so much for joining us, Allison. I eagerly await the thin phone review. Oh, me too. Thanks for having me. Right as we were hanging up on Allison there, the police came. So...

This is what you do for podcasting. This is the last time anyone will hear from Allison on the Verge cast. This is how devoted Allison is to the Verge cast. I feel like left unsaid in that conversation is the fact that the other phones are tremendously boring. It's a weird year. So one of the things about Unpacked is that every year Samsung shows up to Unpacked and launches what are basically guaranteed to be the best selling Android phones of the year. Yeah. Every year. It's just, it just is what it is. It is clockwork. Yeah.

This is maybe the least interesting phone announcement I can remember from

Period. Like for all the pomp and circumstance, these phones literally aren't upgrades like the so there's the S25, the S25 plus and the S25 Ultra. And they are in in every meaningful and meaningless way, the same as the S24 with a slightly newer revved chip from Qualcomm.

They bumped up the RAM a little bit in, I think all of them, but at least a couple of them. The prices are the same. The cameras are the same, except for one camera on the Ultra. They look the same, like they just shipped the same phones again. And I'm like, I'm sort of blown away by that fact. And especially, you know, they had this big arena event. They talked a ton about AI and then like, oh, we're actually rolling all that stuff back to the S24s again. And so part of me is like,

Why ship new phones? Just have a software event. Just be like AI and be like, oh, we are the first company ever who made our old phones, new phones with AI. Like,

That would have made more sense to me than we just made more of these with a new name. Or lower the price in the S24, where one year into this cycle, we're actually taking the radical step of making the phones a little bit cheaper and adding more software to them. Now, I know why they can't do it. There are carrier executives who are furiously sending me emails right now. Yeah. Because the carriers need the full spectrum of all the price points from all their partners. And Samsung, maybe more than any company, just does what the carriers want.

actually maybe motorola doesn't like motorola made the phone for like the dish network 5g true um but like samsung has to be on a cadence save all these like there's all this machinery that is built around the notion of a new phone coming out every year yes we're just at the point where the phone doesn't matter to the machinery

Like to just unlock the T-Mobile's marketing spend for Q4, something has to be called a new phone. Yeah, I think that's right. It just has to be a thing. You have to, it doesn't, and it matters much less what that thing is. Or honestly, in Samsung's case, if it's any good. Like it's the same thing as the iPhone in so many ways. Yeah.

People who have iPhones at this point will buy the newest iPhone when their current iPhone stops being viable. That is the upgrade path, right? Almost everybody gets the latest iPhone, uses it until they can't anymore, and then gets the latest iPhone. And so if you're Samsung, it's the same path. And it has, I think, made phones boring, all of them. But this just felt like a real...

I don't know, low moment or maybe just like saying the quiet part loud of like, yeah, there's nothing left to do here anymore. So here's the same phone again. It's thinner now. Yeah. Even like the YouTubers who have a lot of incentives to pretend things...

Nothing just total flat across the board. The thing that really struck me about all of this is the AI of it. You wrote about Gemini sort of being the winner in the assistant wars has just bundled in the Samsung phones now, but I was watching the, the demos of AI. Like we're year two into it, essentially like here's the AI stuff you can do with our phone.

Maybe year 10 if you count Google for years, like not shipping it but talking about it. But it's like year two of like we're shipping it on phones. And we're sort of past now the Apple intelligence moment where I think the newest version of the software, the newest version of iOS that's in release candidate right now, it's on by default. So we've hit the point, right? This is just part of phones now. And I'm watching the demos and there are no new ideas.

No. Everyone has the same, like, four ideas. Right. They did the, you can search your photos, which is very smart. I'm very excited about that one. Great idea. Yep. But they spent a long time being like, so what happens is you say a name, location, person, and clothing, and then the AI understands you. And it's like, yeah, we, people

People have fallen in love with robots. Yeah. Like we got that one pretty covered at this point. Like we're really good. Yeah. Actually. Yeah. People are doing a lot of illegal stuff with those things. Like we, we know, we understand. Um, then there's the, like you can change a setting by just talking, which Samsung to its credit dog was shoes. Bixby did. That was the whole point of Bixby. Right. And no one cared. So like getting rid of it and then doing it again with Gemini, I don't,

But you can do it now. Maybe it'll work better. If it works better, maybe people will use it. But that's the other demo. And then everything else is kind of the same. Like, it does transcriptions. It can record phone calls. Like, we can just process language a little bit better than we could before. Did you catch anything that was like...

Oh, this is a step change because we have this capability? The one thing that feels meaningfully new is this multi-step, multi-app thing that Gemini can now do where it can essentially direct actions to multiple apps at a time. It can just do several things with one prompt. It doesn't work very well.

Because of course it doesn't. I'll give you an example. So right before we're getting on here, one thing I think Gemini in particular is actually very good at is as a YouTube research tool, because it has an extension into YouTube and you can just say like, find me popular YouTube videos about whatever. And it does a pretty good job of that in a way that like regular YouTube search actually doesn't. So I use it for that all the time when I'm just like, I want to watch a bunch of videos about how GPUs work.

Gemini is actually very good for that. So it's like, okay, cool two-step thing. I'm going to say, Gemini, go find a bunch of videos about how GPUs work on YouTube and then put them all into a note in Google Keep.

Two steps, right? That's the thing that this stuff is supposed to be able to do now. And it plugs into WhatsApp. So you can be like, find me a restaurant to go to and then and then text it to Anna. That's where we're going tonight. This is like these are the kinds of things they're starting to put together. And again, this is the idea everybody has. Yeah, this is open AI's operator. This is series app intents like this is the agentic thing everybody is talking about. But anyway.

So I do this in Gemini. The first thing it does is pull back five titles of videos. And it's like, do you want to save these to keep? And I go, sure. Sounds great. It says, okay, I've created your notes. The notes it created were the titles of the videos and nothing else. Five individual Google Keep notes with just titles. Wait, wait, it made individual notes? It made individual notes. So then I'm like, okay, let's try this a different way. So I go and I'm like, okay, can you just find me a bunch of YouTube videos about GPUs?

And it's like, sure. And I was like, OK, next step. So we're already out of the interesting multi-step thing here. I'm like, what if we just do the simple thing? Great. You found all these videos. Looks good. Can you put all that into a note for me in Google Keep? And it's like, sure, done. So now what it does is create a list with a title like videos about how GPUs work and five empty bullets.

We've done nothing here. And I think like the point I keep making and I said a snarky thing about Apple intelligence on threads a few days ago that was like, I can't wait till iOS 21 when the only feature is getting rid of Apple intelligence and it's the best upgrade in years. And people like raped me over the coals for it. And I just I keep coming back to none of this is actually useful for me.

for much of anything. And even the things that are useful aren't useful reliably enough to be worth trying to use. Like the Samsung Bixby thing

was a good idea, right? The idea of like, most people don't know how to find the Bluetooth switch on their phone. And so to be able to just ask my phone how to turn on Bluetooth is like a good and useful idea. And it just didn't work enough. So people would just go find Bluetooth on their phone. And if you can't, if you can't beat the reliability of swiping up through a settings menu until I find the thing labeled Bluetooth, then you're not going to be able to find the Bluetooth switch.

You have nothing. And we're now 10 years into that problem. And I don't think we have meaningfully solved it. So like this thing Google keeps demoing.

which is like the multi-step, multi-modal, multi-action stuff is like, it's cool. The idea is very cool. It feels like the right thing. My phone can just sort of take in all the information that I need it to and then give it back to me in ways that are useful and natural. That all makes sense. It just doesn't work. And I'm so stuck on it. None of this matters until it works. And we're just not there yet. Yeah. The piece of the puzzle that I think just really eludes me is...

I like, I do know how to turn Bluetooth on on my phone. Like I'm cursed with this knowledge as, as is our, most of our listeners.

And it is so much faster for me to learn how to use the thing than to fight the other tool that will do it for me. A hundred percent. And maybe that, and I understand that that, again, I think the Verge cast audience and the Verge staff is like a uniquely positioned group of people in that we also all like figuring it out. And most people would just like to move on with her day. But I,

The danger is you're going to bounce off of it doing it badly and then you will never try again. Right. Which is with Siri and Alexa in history, why they're perceived to be bad products. Yep. And I think these companies have underestimated how high that bar is for people of like how quickly it will feel like I'm fighting this thing. And I will just go back to the definitely less efficient and hackier way that I can figure out how to do.

Okay, so here's the flip side of that, which I've been thinking about a lot. There is the section of the audience that's like, please shut up about AI. We don't care about it. I can hear you already. You're screaming at me and coming back through the internet as you listen to this. It resonates in my heart. I hear you. It's the same group of people that whenever we write about some AI feature on theverge.com.

You're in our comments. You're like, I hate this. Make it go away. I just want to turn off Apple intelligence. I'm there with you. It's all a fraud. Great. Then there's the people who ferociously read everything we read about AI.

Um, they're out there, they love it. And then there's the companies who are all telling us that their own usage statistics suggest people are using the hell out of these tools. Right. Uh, so the example I'll give, which is old now, but it's just the one that is in my brain all the time. Um,

The CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Ryan, came on Decoder and you can go listen to it. He's like, the usage of generative fill in Photoshop is as high as layers, which is basically I opened Photoshop. Yeah, that's what Photoshop is for. Right? Like that's where he's at. He's like the take rate on generative fill is as high as layers. So,

Yes, everyone's yelling, everyone's mad, everyone hates it, and then everyone's just using the hell out of it. We can see it on our site. People are reading about it like crazy. And then you – I want to bring this to Gemini specifically on these phones. Gemini is going to be the default on the Galaxy phones. Samsung is not going to do its own thing. And Google is like Gemini is more popular than ChatGPT now because it's just there and people are using it. And I don't know how to square that with –

It's not very good. Like most of the time, it's not very good. Uh, chat, the day we're recording this on Thursday, it was down this morning and there are people being like, I'm not getting any work done because I've just like rely on this so much. And I'm like, well, you're, I hope your work is good, but like you can see it's, it's, it's wound its way into so many different places, even though I think the core criticism is,

boy, you hit a wall of this not being very good is still very real. Yeah. I think like gender to fill is actually a really interesting one because it's, it's the kind of feature that is AI, but it's not in the way that we mostly talk about AI. Like everybody wants us to think about AI as these, like, you know, all knowing all purpose, omnipresent companions that can just do everything. I think that is like completely the wrong way we should be developing these things. Like,

AI as a tool, which is basically a smarter thing to plug into generative fill, makes a lot of sense. And so it totally attracts me that's working. And I think even in chat GPT, like I'm very compelled by the stories I hear about people who use it as like a force multiplier for writing code. I think that's real. Even if it doesn't write very good code, like I have talked to enough people who are like, it is so much faster for me to take

middling code and make it good than it is to start from scratch and write the like incredibly basic stuff that is required in order to write good code. Like all good code involves lots of bad code. And so I can do the bad code automatically. And then I just have to do the good code. Like that kind of thing I think is, is really powerful. The problem is for like regular people in their day-to-day lives, these companies have not yet identified the,

a ton of good versions of that. And this is why we keep landing on like, it'll help you write email and summarize email. That's like, that's the only normal person use case any of these companies can think of for what this stuff can do. So I think while in the background, all this interesting stuff is happening in, in like back offices are being reinvented by AI that can do some of this work for them.

All this stuff is happening. But the idea that like there's a button on my phone that I'm going to press and it's going to do things for me 100 times a day. We just haven't figured out yet. And we haven't we never figured it out with Siri. We never figured out with Alexa. Like the take rate is high because it's so present.

but i think the the thing these companies know and have figured out and are pushing so hard towards is that if you don't stick it in front of people's face they won't by and large go looking for it right there's nothing compelling about it that makes you go be like i need to get this app right i buy it except uh chachi is the most popular app right the fastest growing consumer product around

I have many theories about chat GPT, but I continue to think that the novelty of chat GPT is a huge part of its appeal. And that's not nothing. But like we are still so deep in the like it's wild that this thing works at all that I think we're not yet.

really having to reckon with the use cases here. Like chat GPT search stuff doesn't really seem to be setting the universe on fire. This operator thing that they launched to the $200 a month folks today seems interesting, but like, I don't know, people like chat GPT in theory, I think more than they are spending a lot of like useful day to day phone time with it. All right. So that's my prompt to the audience.

Cause I, I disagree with you. I think we are just old guys who are good at writing. Like I think, I think we are just like out of the audience. We will do voice disguisers if you don't want to admit it, but call the hotline and, and tell us how you're using Chachbi because I'm very curious. I think there's, there's just a weird split here. There's like a very vocal minority. It's like, screw this all. I hate it. There's a lot of people are just using this stuff. And then there's like, again, there's,

there's sort of the middle. I think a lot of people are in the middle where you're indifferent because it's not very good. Yeah. And the caveat is I don't want to hear stories about how it makes you better at your job because there are, there are lots of those. And I think that's, that's fine and good and all of that is really interesting. I'm talking about like stuff that you would press the side button on your phone to do with AI. Like that's, that's the stuff I want to know. All right. Like I said, voices will, we will, we will protect you. The verge is always protected at sources. Yeah.

And now in this time of increased threat against the first amendment, I promise you, you can admit to us that you say, yeah, I will protect you. We will love you anyway. We should break. But before we do, I just actually want to, I want you to talk about Gemini for one second. Cause you wrote this piece about how it's one, which is a big claim, especially cause like real AI Siri isn't here yet, but Google was behind. And now they've, I mean, they're the default on the most popular Android phone, which is a big deal for,

Do you think Gemini is good as an assistant or do you think it's just one by default of the placement? I think it won by default of the placement, but I actually don't think the difference between those two things is all that big. Like I've been thinking so much in the last couple of weeks about the Google search trial, which essentially amounted to if you have a good enough product that people want to use it and you can put it in front of everybody, like everybody, you almost immediately build an insurmountable lead.

because what you need is you need data on how people are using your product that you can use to make the product better, which makes more people use it, which means you get more data, which means more people like on and on and on. I mean, like,

I will never forget Satya Nadella sitting up there being like, I will give Bing to Apple for free. Like they can just have it. We don't just take all, keep all the money. I just want the query data. Like that's real. And we're going through that with AI too. This stuff gets better the more people use it. And what Google has is a...

It has unstoppable distribution advantages because it has things like Chrome that it can just stick it in the address bar. It has things like a very popular Google app. It has Google Maps. It has Gmail. Like Google can both use Gemini underneath all of those things and get you to interact with Gemini on top of them.

Then you make it the side button on essentially all of the Android phones that matter at this point. And you've built yet another place where you're essentially untouchable. And then throw in the fact that Amazon just seems unable to get its shit together with this new Alexa. Like whatever that is going to be, it does not seem like it's going to be very good or ship anytime soon at this point. Yeah.

Siri TBD, but nothing about the history of Siri suggests that it's going to be great. Nothing about the present of Apple intelligence suggests that Siri will be great. Yeah, there is nothing that leads me to believe there is some radical reinvention of that assistant coming anytime soon. So Google is in a place where it's pretty good. I think Gemini, by all accounts, is at least in range of

of ChatGPT and Claude, which I think have been kind of the two gold standards for a while now. And the difference between the two is like,

personal taste and some are one's better at some things and the other is better at other things. But the thing neither of those have is the distribution. They don't have a gadget they can be part of. They don't have web browsers that they can be built into by default. Google has a pretty good product and every other advantage you could possibly want in this space. And that that just feeds itself. And so we're hitting a point where Google is going to get this like escape velocity before anybody else can build themselves the things that

They need that Google already has or make a dollar from them. Like the other thing Google has is like a cash machine and search. Right. That has now just shoved Gemini into. This is going to we're going to figure this out over the next four years. But this is where like the weirdness of the Trump administration just runs right into the reality of the tech products, especially now in Trump to.

Like Sam Altman standing on stage at the White House. Not stage. Just around. They were just in a room. I kept saying it looked like an SNL set. Yeah. It's just like, here's a wall and like a podium. Yeah. They were just like, here's a sitting room that we're in. Announcing these, quote, raised $500 billion to build data centers.

Google isn't talking about raising money to do AI. They have the data centers. And actually, what Sundar Pichai talks about most of all is bringing the cost of inference down. He's like, we're great at this. And so you can just see they're starting from two radically different positions.

I don't know if any of those opening eye announcements are real. Certainly Elon Musk does not think they're real. Um, Donald Trump thinks you're real. Like there's a lot of that just like weirdness embedded in there, but you're just looking, I'm just looking at this much more broadly and abstractly from who are the competitors, how are they funded? How long will they last? Who can sustain? And Google is just in a position where, yeah, maybe it's not the best one. There's an argument that it's, it's very good at some things compared to the others. Yeah. Um, but maybe it's not the best one overall.

But it's in so many different places that are already popular and Google can just lose money on it in a way that Sam Altman has to go raise half a trillion dollars of weird laundered money from Middle Eastern states through SoftBank and then announce data centers that may or may not. Like he's got to do a whole other thing and Google just has to be like, would you like to buy ads on YouTube? Right. And that's different. Right. I mean, like in a very real way, Sam Altman has to build Google.

And all Google has to do is convince people that Gemini is as good as ChatGPT. And that thing is not nothing. Like I think the, maybe the biggest thing ChatGPT is going for it right now is like a huge perception advantage. Like it was first, it blew people's minds. It is the thing when people think about this space, like it is, it is the closest to the like Kleenex of the AI space as there is. And that's a powerful thing. Can you surmount that before Sam Altman can build Google and,

Yeah, I think so. All right. We should take a break there and come back with Lauren Feiner and actually talk about Trump stuff because that is it's right there. It's like here's a transition from the consumer product to the weird politics of the tech industry right now. And Larry Elson is going to stand in a room. We're going to take a break. Hopefully Lauren can help us sort it all out. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital.

We talk a lot on this show about the tech companies that shape our world, for better or worse. But the stories of how these companies were built are often surprising and just as interesting. Hosted by Rolof Bota of Sequoia, Crucible Moments pulls back the curtain on some of the most tumultuous and defining milestones in tech history. You can go inside the decision-making and hear the unvarnished histories of some of tech's influential companies told by the founders themselves.

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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Miles Bryan. Senior reporter and producer for the program. Hello. Hi. You went to public school, right, Miles? Yes. Go South High Tigers. What do you remember about school lunch? I remember sad lasagna shrink-wrapped in little containers. I remember avoiding it. Do you remember the nugs? The chicken nuggets? No.

Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch, that was a pretty good option. I actually liked them. But in addition to being very tasty, those nugs were very processed. And at the moment, America has got processed foods in its crosshairs. It's true. We are collectively very down on processed food right now. None more so than Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert Florey Kennedy Jr. I'll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.

About half the school lunch program goes to processed food. Penn, the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack, fixed school lunches. Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Lauren Finer is here. Hello, Lauren. Hi. Sorry that you're our policy reporter. Hi.

Thank you. I'll accept the condolences. You have been very busy. The Trump administration kicked off on day one with a flurry of executive orders, some of which are fully nonsensical, some of which have already been put on hold by courts. Like literally, as we're speaking, the birthright citizenship order was – I think the court was like, this is stupid. I don't think I've ever seen a judge just say this is stupid. And he was like, this is stupid. So there's all this activity happening.

Trump, as everyone remembers from the first Trump administration, talks a lot. And then you have to evaluate whether what he's saying is real. So I would start with Stargate announcement. We were just talking about opening. I, they announced this 500 billion dollar plan to build data centers with Oracle, with NVIDIA.

It was very odd. Softbank is involved. Masa-san was in the White House next to Larry Ellison and Sam Altman. Sam Altman did the thing that people have to do when they announce anything with Trump. They're like, we can only do this because of you. There's some amount of like, you were already planning on doing this. And there's some amount of like, is this real? Like, did you just do a Foxconn? I got huge Foxconn vibes from this. And then on top of all of that is Elon Musk, who is a senior White House advisor in charge of Doge, tweeting, they don't have the money.

Lauren, can you...

Just like over under, how long do you think he's going to last as a government advisor criticizing the president's deals? Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's got to be an expiration date on this. I mean, it's hard. It's been hard enough that, you know, it's two big egos in a room. And now, you know, Musk is really clashing with things that Trump himself is putting out there as these like big accomplishments. And I feel like that's really where we're going to see a potential for a break.

Yeah. I mean, again, when I say I get Fox 10 vibes, we have some new listeners. It has occurred to me several times over these past few days that Trump won was eight years ago and that we have listeners who are in their 20s now who were teenagers then. So if you don't remember the things that happened in Trump won, let me just cut you up. They took golden shovels to my hometown in Racine, Wisconsin, and announced an LCD factory. And Trump ceremoniously broke ground with a golden shovel. They never built the factory.

We'll put some links in the show notes. We did a lot of coverage on this. It was a substantial portion of my life. They built a dome. There's a dome. They built a dome. They continue to claim it's a data center and is actually just a party zone. What's the difference, really? There are some servers in a shipping container outside the zoo.

The dome. Anyway, but that's like real vibes here, right? Like we're just going to make big announcements about building stuff in America's back. And eventually all you get is a dome in Wisconsin and Microsoft saying it will build a data center there. And that's all that happened. This to me had all that, right? OpenAI and Microsoft are like headed towards this breakup. They're announcing this other funding. We're going to stand in the White House and announce this big deal. And then right next to it, you have Doge.

And Elon being like, no, that's fake. I like I'm better. I hate Sam Altman. Like he's like jealous. Like, I don't know how else to describe it. He's jealous of Sam Altman getting to stand in the White House to make an announcement. And they've been like beefing and subtweeting each other ever since. I mean, it is a remarkably like juvenile thing that's happening here. But I think at the risk of asking a really stupid question.

If this is a real thing, and I think one thing that we have learned is that Sam Altman's ability to raise money is not to be questioned. That man can raise any amount of money for anything at any time. Just seems to be the case.

What is the point of standing at a podium in the White House and doing this with Masa Son and Larry Ellison? Like, just go spend the $500 billion on open AI infrastructure. Like, why does the Trump White House have anything to do with this at all? I mean, I think...

Ellison makes sense for sure, because he's been a Trump ally for a while now. And I think, you know, maybe Trump kind of wants to get his buddies in a room and make a deal. Um, so I think he just likes the optics of having all of them up there, having people working together for him in a sense on this project that he is championing. Ellison also, by the way, uh, CEO of Oracle, uh,

which is technically operating TikTok illegally right now. Is it? What's legal, Neil? Define legal. Right. And at that same Stargate press conference, Trump was like, Larry, are you going to buy it? Let's negotiate in front of the media.

And so there's just a, there's a weirdness here. Um, we should talk about Doge for maybe one second. Like, uh, the executive order creating Doge renames an existing part of the white house called the United States digital service, um, to the United States Doge service, which means it's a nesting acronym. I want to kill myself. Um,

And it basically says we're going to put Doge people throughout the government and you have to tell them all your unclassified information. Weird spot for Elon to be in to run that. He kicked out Vivek Ramaswamy, which is very funny, before he even started. If you don't know about the USDS, the digital service, they're basically the product management organization of the government. Like they built healthcare.gov and they ran the VA website. I have no idea what Elon is going to do with those websites.

Like, those are very important websites. The USDS has had a lot of very smart people over the years doing interesting work. I suspect it will be different now. Yeah. So we'll see. And then, you know, Elon is doing, like, Nazi salutes. And so, like, how long will this last? Like, how long can this last when he is the focal point for all of this stuff and he's attacking the president and he might hurt the VA website? Like, I'm giving it 90 days. That's my call. Lauren, what do you think?

I'm going to say, I think after the first hundred days he's out. He's only got until July 4th, 2026. So that's his own deadline. It's in the EO. Oh, okay. Okay. But just to logic this out for a second.

I feel like the over-under on this has to be like five days. Like, if there's no recrimination or change from what has happened so far, including a Nazi salute on Inauguration Day, two of them, in fact, what problem is there going to be that undoes this? I think, like, we have already seen...

what this looks like. This is just what it's going to be. And if everyone is comfortable with it now, why would they get uncomfortable with it later? Hang on, I feel like I have to very pedantically note, he did a thing that looked like a Nazi salute that Nazis believe it was a Nazi salute. Governments around the world, the German press believes it's a Nazi salute. His fans say it's not.

The point is to make us argue about the ambiguity. That's the point of the troll. We don't know what was in Elon Musk's heart, but the thing he did looked more like a Nazi salute than any other thing that exists on Earth. Then he supports the German fire party. Like, you can just add it up, but the point is to make everyone yell about the equal sign. You know what I mean? Like, anyway, but that is how he gains attention. But the person that wants the most attention is his nominal boss.

So you might be right about five days. I'm just saying it might be more like 90 because Trump is busy just like lecturing the world. Just like forget Elon is there for a while and then and then this will happen. Wait, so I just want to clear. I said 90. Lauren said 100 and you say five. I'm going to go 15. I'm putting the over under 15 days. Like I think if we get to Valentine's Day and Elon Musk is still has an office in the West Wing, I will be surprised.

I think he's had remarkable staying power so far. So I'm just betting that he's going to continue to surprise us. All right. That's Elon. That's Doge. We'll see how that turns into reality. It just I think for the Verge audience, you should go listen to the administrator, the outgoing administrator of the digital service on Decoder. Like that's a software company. There's a tiny little software consultancy in the government that makes all the websites go. And now it's Doge.

So I think I say this a lot, like you can't know how something is changing unless you know what it was. So go listen, if you're interested, go listen to that episode because how Doge changes is going to be, I've seen a lot of USDS people say, actually, this is the right place for it to go because they're the software consultancy.

And this is like software helps you find efficiency. I suspect those people are coping. They're, they're processing, but anyway, wouldn't that also mean that the job of Doge would be to decide if the government should use like Microsoft teams or Slack for its communication systems? Like, is that, is that where we're headed? I've met a few PMs in my life. I don't think that's how they spend their time. Wait, Lauren, before we move away from this, can I just ask you one like big broad question that I have been having all week? And, uh,

There's this flurry of executive orders. And my impression of what this moment looks like in a presidency is some mix of like...

Real policymaking and some like Michael Scott in the office yelling, I declare bankruptcy. Like how how real should we be thinking about all of this stuff? He's talking about everything from like the Paris climate agreement to AI safety to all this stuff on electric cars. Like how real are you tracking this stuff in your head right now?

Yeah, I think that's definitely the perfect analogy for it. I think it's a mix. I think, you know, there's some things that are going to have real implications, or at least we'll really have to see a big fight play out over it to know where it's going to end up. And then I think there's other stuff that's either like, all right, well, this kind of already existed, like the executive order basically saying the First Amendment is a thing. And then other things that, you know,

are just obviously not consistent with the Constitution, like ending birthright citizenship. So I think a lot of it is, you know, just shouting something, just declaring that things exist. But, you know, mixed in there are things that will at least have to be dealt with in the courts and, you know, in people's lives. So I think it is definitely a mix. Okay.

This brings us inevitably to tech talk. I just want to, that's true. Oh yeah. There was a tech talk. EO wasn't there. Yes, there was. It's too many. It, well, let's just focus. Can AI summarize the, all the executive orders? Well, I think AI wrote a lot of them. Um, I'm kind of not joking. Um,

The TikTok one, I think, synthesizes everything you're saying, Lauren, right? Like it's some of it is just yelling. Some of it is just pointing out things that already are true. Some of it is going to get litigated. Some of it is like, does the president even have this power? I guess we're going to find out. Describe what's going on with the TikTok EO. And I mean, TikTok is running, but like in a weird way.

Yeah.

And basically saying to the companies, like, don't worry, we got you. We're not going to prosecute you if you bring TikTok back online, which sounds great, except that it doesn't really mean anything when you have a federal law on the books that the Supreme Court has upheld that all of these companies risk facing billions of dollars in fines if they violate. It's like $5,000 per user. Yeah.

You have 170 million users. It's just billions of dollars. And it's weird because Oracle, if you recall, when TikTok was trying to save itself during the first Trump administration when he threatened to ban it, they built this thing called Project Texas where Oracle ran its data centers and it was all walled off from China or ByteDance or however they were. Project Texas to me always felt like a kid's museum.

You know, like you could go there and be like, here's our content moderation. Like nothing was real. So Oracle runs it. Akamai, who's their CDN, you know, moves the data actually around the internet and delivers content to people. And then Apple and Google obviously distribute it in their stores. And by the way, so does Amazon. So does the Samsung store. It's not in the Samsung store, in case you were wondering. So it's really interesting to me that Oracle, which hosts the data, Project Texas, Akamai, which delivers the data, have decided this is fine. They're going to take the risk. TikTok is back. And then the app stores...

have decided it's not worth the risk. Like if you search for TikTok in the app store today, it's not there. I have not yet figured out why some people think it's okay. I actually think Oracle and Akamai have more liability because TikTok is already on the phones, right? So like Apple isn't delivering it to more people. I guess software updates or something. But every time all of those people open the TikTok app, like Oracle is liable for it. Exactly. And so that's where I get to like Larry Ellison standing in the room.

Like Larry Ellison delivered this win to Donald Trump, and that means he's a little bit more secure that he won't be prosecuted.

Right. And Larry Ellison appears to be one of the only people in the U.S. to be comfortable enough relying on Trump's promise here in this executive order that doesn't really hold the force of law more than the actual law on the books does to believe it. You went and talked to some lawyers about this. I think I want you to explain their read. My read was.

Well, if you read the executive order at the bottom, it's got the same boilerplate that every executive order has on it, which is this does not create liability for the United States. And you're like, well, if you make a promise that you won't enforce a law that, you know, kind of looks squint, that looks like a contract. And at the bottom of the contract, you're like, you cannot rely on this contract.

Well, you shouldn't rely on it. Exactly. I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward from the legal analysis that I've seen where it's just it's basically just, you know, this does not negate the fact that there is a law that defines all of these service providers for TikTok.

$5,000 per user for accessing the app. And that can amount to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in fines for these companies. And even if you're like one of the richest companies in the world, that's a lot of money. And while it might

insulate you in the long run from actually having to pay those fines because you could make a decent due process argument that there's some sort of, you were operating under this kind of promise from the executive branch that you wouldn't be prosecuted for this. I think ultimately it's a big risk to take when, you know, the penalties are that large. I keep trying to figure out why Apple and Google aren't like distributing this app. And I

I guess, you know, if Oracle doesn't play ball, there is no TikTok. If Apple and Google don't play ball, well, people still have the app. Right? And, like, so maybe they're just like, look, this isn't worth it. The people who have it already have it. And all that's really happening is people aren't going to download this app for a while. Right. And I imagine what Trump would notice more is, like, can people see –

content on TikTok or not versus like can a marginal few who don't already have it on their phones. I mean, there's 170 million people in the U.S. who already have been using TikTok. Can like a marginal few like get it now? And, you know, eventually if Apple and Google don't bring it back to their app stores, the app is going to degrade. And, you

You know, it won't work as well as you'd expect it to. But how long will that take? We don't really know. It might be a long enough time that it doesn't really matter in the end. Well, yeah, 75 days. I know when I know when something ends. Right. Two really interesting things about that. One, some people did delete TikTok from their phones. They are very sad because they can't get it back.

There's a weird black market for phones with TikTok on them on eBay where they're selling for thousands of dollars. And then we had the very weird experience of our posts saying TikTok is not available in app stores, like our little quick post, ranked in Google. It was the number one search result for TikTok app store. Weird. And a flood of comments, thousands of comments from people who thought we were a social network and were posting things like, what app is this? Where did everybody come from?

Which was a lot like we're like, is this about a tech? And then our like head of community is like, it's teens. It's teens. Who have never seen a website before and we're just trying to find TikTok. Yes. Yeah. I have seen that some people have found a workaround for redownloading TikTok if they somehow deleted it. Wait, what's the workaround?

From what I saw, it has to do with like logging out of your iCloud account and then like logging in like you're in another country and downloading it. So I'm not endorsing this, but that's something that I've seen. There's a you know, there's like a lot of like controversial science around like cell phone addiction, like and you can have a lot of arguments. And it's like, well, would you do you see what's happening here?

The teens will find a way. The teens. It was just like really like someone was like, this post is getting thousands of comments. Like we must it must be a bot attack. It is currently the most commented post in our new commenting system. Wow. More comments than my endorsement of Kamala Harris. Like I got a note that was like, your record has been broken. It's teens making friends in the TikTok post. Maybe Trump was right to save it after all. Well, no, it helped us.

You know, this is a new Trump too is very transactional. All right. We should keep TikTok shut down so teens can make friends in our comments on QuickBooks.

So there's – that's the shape of it, right? We got 75 days. There's also the politics of TikTok where they took the app down. They said we are thankful for President Trump working on a solution. They brought the app up. They said thanks to President Trump, we're back. They thought they were getting 90 days because in the bill, there's this provision to extend the deadline by 90 days if there's a sale in the works. There is no sale in the works as far as we know.

They didn't even get 90 days. I got 75 days. Trump shaved 15 days off their deadline, which is very funny. And now, you know, he, he's given a number of press conferences since, and he talks like a real estate developer. He, he has, you know, shoved all of this into his internal framework. He's an 80 something year old real estate developer. He's got one framework and it's real estate. And he's like, oh, TikTok needs a permit.

Which is not the case, but he keeps saying, I have to give them a permit to operate. If I don't give them a permit, it's worth nothing. If I give them a permit, it's worth a trillion. They have to do a deal with me.

Right. So there's like a bunch of things in there. First of all, the 75 days is interesting because it kind of just goes to show how like not a thing this executive order is, because in the law it says that the president can give TikTok 90 days if there's like

very much a deal happening. If the president is certifying that there's a deal happening, and, you know, then they can get 90 days. And it was like a little ambiguous, like, could that 90 days be granted once the ban takes effect or not? But it seems like it's like ambiguous enough that it might have been available to Trump. Trump didn't do that. He did something totally different, pulled out 75 days and said, just like, let's not enforce this for 75 days. And

And then, you know, we also have that, like,

It just is a completely different way of going about this. So it just kind of shows that this is not really something that's like following the law itself and nothing in the law says like permits. And we don't know that, you know, it's not just like Trump can decide to sell it and then the deal will happen. The main, you know, point of blockage here is China. And we still don't know if China will really ultimately agree to a deal that would put

uh, TikTok in compliance with the law. Yeah. And there's been a lot of reporting that China is like open to it thinking about it, but there's like, it's, it's all so squishy that it's hard to make anything out of right now, especially when you have, uh, president Trump now running around saying that what he actually wants is a joint venture with the United States of America in which it owns half of TikTok, which a what, and B I can't imagine is a thing that is going to be palatable to the Chinese government.

And it also doesn't seem like it would put it in compliance with this law anyway. It just kind of does this like other third thing, because under the law, it seems like

Most likely ByteDance could not be involved. You know, we still couldn't have like more than 20 percent ownership by a Chinese entity. So I don't know how exactly this works. Is the U.S. government owning a speech platform? Like, it's not really clear if Trump himself knows the answer to these questions. We said this a lot in sort of the Elon Twitter takeover era where criticism of the current administration is in no way praise of the previous administration. Right.

And I feel like that's just very clear on all sides here. Like this is pure Trump chaos, right? Like I invented an executive order at the end of seven days. If this thing isn't sold, he doesn't get to pull the 90 day lever because the expiration date has hit.

Right. You can't delay a deadline 75 days after it's passed by 90 days. Like the law isn't written that way. So we're, you know, by the time you're listening to this, we're down to 73 days, 72 days. Like you got to sell TikTok. Yeah.

like that's what you have to do april 4th is the day right so by april 4th tick tock has to be sold that's a huge transaction that two world superpowers have to agree upon in some way that trump has to do they're going to give him a big novelty permit to hand over like he runs city hall like i don't know what he's going to do um inside of that like like tick tock itself has to change ownership it does feel like tick tock misplayed this completely

and this is what i mean about like it's not praise for any other administration like tick tock thought they could roll the bite administration which totally blew this like

The Biden administration should have been pressuring TikTok to sell every single day. Yeah. And they just didn't. They did not communicate. The failure of the Biden administration is they fundamentally did not communicate very well. But they didn't. So then TikTok thought it could run. And Biden signed it on the day which set off the clock, which landed it on the day that it did, which is effectively in between administrations. So he, I'm sure they could count, but he signed it on a day knowing what day the ban would hit.

and he landed it right in the middle creating this weird vacuum where he was like i'm handing enforcement over to the trump administration and trump was handed this ability to say i'll figure it out sure and then tick tock had no plan b they have no deal in the works and the fact that they have no plan b i think is the like the most essential failure here because you might think trump is going to save it and certainly he saved it for 75 more days sort of because it's the app stores

But it's so obvious that he wants to make this deal. Right. Right. That he wants to be like, there's a transaction. And the U.S. government owns a 50 percent or whatever. We can we haven't even talked about how bananas that is. But like there will be a sale. And so TikTok is maybe not going to sell to who it wants to on its terms. They're going to sell to who Trump wants on Trump's terms.

And I don't know that the Chinese government is super down with that idea. I think there's an art. There's a way to see this where ByteDance didn't misplay it. They played it the only way they were going to play it, which is to ride out the legal process. And, you know, if it doesn't work.

China's not going to let them sell in a way that complies with this law. And, you know, the Chinese government might be OK with that because they might think that this makes the U.S. government look bad in the eyes of other governments around the world. So I think it's possible that that's one that's still one way it goes. And I think there's a lot of

I've been surprised just how quickly people on TikTok have been cheering that it's back and like kind of taking it for granted all over again. But I think it's a very real possibility that this goes away again.

Yeah, and it'll be even more fascinating as we get towards that deadline in April because there is now such a sense of this was all a nonsense misdirect. This isn't real. TikTok's never going to actually go away. Like the we're so back vibes on TikTok are just everywhere. And I think the...

If it does happen and if it does go away in some meaningful way in April, it's going to weirdly, I think, hit even harder the second time because it doesn't seem like people are leaving. All these other apps are desperately trying to get people to come. Like X launched a videos thing. Blue Sky launched a videos thing. Instagram is out here like redesigning the app and trying to pay people to come make reels like this.

All these other companies sense a moment, and at least as far as I can tell, that moment did not materialize, except for the one day everybody went and made jokes on Red Note, which means, I think, that if it comes crashing down, it will crash even harder the second time. Oh, totally. I think people are not...

prepared for the possibility that it could go away again. And just like there were such short memories the first time because, and I'm not blaming anyone for feeling this way because we've heard over and over, oh, TikTok's going to be banned, TikTok's going to be banned, and then it doesn't happen. But I think it's always been a much more real threat than anyone really processed. It just has been

You know, a far amount of time off. And I am really curious what Trump is going to do when those 75 days expire. And more likely than not, if there is any kind of deal, it's probably not going to be completed. And then does he extend it again? He can't. That's what I mean. Like, right. He can't.

He can write another executive order being like, hereby give you another 75 days. But triggering the 90-day deal clause is –

I think that's an immediate like state attorney general lawsuit. Like Tom Cotton, who is a Republican, he's like, I will bring down ruinous liability in these companies. Like I want this app gone. I want China out of my country. Right. And you can agree or disagree. Like strange bedfellows in the second Trump administration. Right. Yeah.

And in the TikTok ban, like it's useful to remember that this is about as bipartisan a thing as we have had in this government for a very long time. Like part of me wants to respond to all of what you're saying, Eli, with you're assuming like a rational government operating in a rational way. And there's no evidence that that's what the second Trump administration is going to be. But every Republican wanted to ban TikTok and every Democrat wanted to. So it's really like it's not it's not a.

sort of swinging back in the new administration. Like, everybody in Congress voted for this already. Wait, let me just offer you... This is a Lauren Finer quick post. I'm just going to read it to you. The repeal TikTok ban act was introduced by Senator Rand Paul and Representative Ro Khanna. Speaking of strange bedfellows. It's weird. That is a weird combo platter of people. Yeah. Yeah, I think...

Another kind of weird combination that's coming up on the other side of things is like people who actually supported TikTok in their case, who wrote amicus briefs are now saying like, yeah, we don't like this. But also it's like generally bad to just like ignore a law.

and just like not follow the process. Yeah, it would seem like if you're in Congress, you should be pro-laws. That's like one of their main things is doing laws. No, but it's the EFF that wrote that one. It's like one of the major digital civil liberties groups is like, this law is bad. The Supreme Court is bad.

all this is bad, but then having a law that the president can be like, that law doesn't exist equally bad. And I think people are like banking a lot on Congress, just like realizing like, this is such a mess. But at the same time, like hundreds of lawmakers voted for this in the first place. And, you know, these are people who have egos. They don't want to just like undo their own work. Um,

So I think like relying on something like that happening, even after all this is like a really big leap of faith. Okay. I just want to say this literally for the tape.

The United States government owning a social network is one of the stupidest First Amendment first-year law school hypotheticals I can possibly come up with. It will not be possible to run a social network if the government owns it in this country, especially with Trump doing his big EO that's like, I've circled the First Amendment. You know what's legal under the First Amendment? Spam.

Just straightforwardly spam is legal under the First Amendment. So the government can't filter spam on the TikTok it owns pretty much brings an end to TikTok. I'm going to go ham on this social network. You don't even know what I'm capable of on the government-owned social network. There's a whole bunch of other stuff. TikTok, by the way, the most moderated social network, right? The social network that gave the world the word segs because people are afraid to say sex.

That's tick tock. Uh, you know, it is because there's so many kids on it. Uh, do you know what is legal in the first amendment? Uh, just pornography, all kinds. It's available. The United States government cannot, they would have to come up with some straightforward, like digital version of a time, place and manner restriction. This is all like very technical first amendment lawyering that doesn't exist. If the government wants to own a social network and filter anything and it probably can't. So,

I'm just like that. I'll just set that aside. It hasn't happened yet. I don't know if it's going to happen, but someone should explain to Donald Trump that the government taking interest in TikTok in this way would actually result in the destruction of TikTok. I think that actually kind of goes to the idea that I think like TikTok users are just expecting now that TikTok's back. It's going to stick around. It's going to be kind of more or less like it's always been. And like,

Under a lot of these scenarios, it would look very different. Like if the U.S. government owns it and can't moderate content, if like Elon Musk owns it. And I've seen people commenting if, you know, if Musk buys this, I'm leaving TikTok, which who knows if people actually would. But, you know, it's not going to be most likely the same TikTok that you're using today. Just to put this in perspective for folks, yeah.

In what, 2017 after Trump Trump won became president, he blocked people from his Twitter account. And that was a First Amendment lawsuit that went for five years. Like just that, like, can the president block people? It was a Supreme Court level First Amendment challenge. And eventually they get it because he lost. Right. Like he he lost the election. He wasn't president anymore. He gave up. But like.

That is the amount of lawyer just on the block button alone That was the amount of wearing that occurred about the First Amendment social networks Can the president block someone from his official account the government owns a social network? It's like a nuclear Armageddon a First Amendment issues

It's just such a deeply- All right, you've talked me into it. Let's do it. I'm ready. Joint venture. 50% China, 50% U.S. Let's go. I'm in. All right. That's enough to- We'll see what happens, right? We got April. Yeah. April is upon us already. But it just- Everything about the Trump administration, it comes together in the TikTok. Why is Larry Ellison in the White House talking about a data center project? Because he's running TikTok. And he-

The TikTok CEO is running around the inauguration being like, don't ban me, please. It's a lot. There's other stuff. It's a lot. We're going to end up covering it. We're going to find ways to cover it here on the Verge cast and on the site in ways that split up. The beginning of any presidential administration, as David was saying, is a flurry of activity that

Trump administrations are typically very chaotic activity the whole time, as we know from the first one. Poor Lauren. I want to hear from everybody, like, how you want us to handle it. Like, again, in Trump One, we spent a lot of time talking about Foxconn because Foxconn was just such a big symbol of a lot of things all at once. This time, there's a bunch of climate science impacts. There's a bunch of EV impacts. Brendan Carr is in charge of the FCC. You will be hearing this man's name a lot on this show.

He wants to censor the internet. He just straightforwardly does.

There's, as Lauren was saying, the birthright citizenship question, which a lot of our listeners and readers care about because they are H-1B visa holders in the United States of America, work at tech companies. And whether or not they're children or citizens is a pretty meaningful question that I think we're going to end up talking about. And then there's tariffs. Trump announced, what, 10% tariffs on China, Lauren? Yeah, or he at least floated it. Sure. So everything is made in China. Like, how will Apple deal with this? What trade will Apple make with this?

to reduce tariffs on the iPhone. Tim Cook managed it the last time. We're going to end up having to talk about it because at the same time, I think it was today, Trump gave a speech where he was like, these cases, they're losing the EU. That's a tax on our great American companies. That's a lot. That's a lot of moving pieces at all. Like literally he's talking about Apple. So I want to hear from all of you.

Again, I think if you want to call us and send us a note about how you want to discover Trump, I'd like you to begin that note with a formal apology to Lauren. I think it might be nice to just send her all those. But we have to strike a balance here. There's a lot. It's going to be really noisy. And, you know, our goal is to always do good, rigorous journalism and also to make sure like we're pointed at places that matter, not just all of the noise. Because if you do all the noise, you're just going to burn out. Right.

Yeah, I remember like it was eight years ago. It's a long time ago, but it wasn't so long ago. And I want to make sure we get it right. So let us know. We're obviously going to keep covering the TikTok ban, but there's just a whole bunch of other stuff happening. So let us know what you think is important. Neil, do you still think it's going to be Walmart? Oh, that buys TikTok? Yeah. It's got like 71 days to pull it off. Yeah.

There's the project Liberty with Frank McCourt, which I think is really interesting. And Mr. Beast now, apparently. Is Mr. Beast in that one? Apparently he's part of it. Is he part of that one? That one's interesting just because I think on a technical level, they're interested in like federating TikTok. I have no idea what that means.

Right. But he's like, we're going to rebuild the tech stock and give you your own algorithms. And it's like Federation-y noises. Okay. I'm rooting for that one. As much as I can pick anything, that seems, that one has Mr. Wonderful. It's just like, there's just characters just like opening doors and being like, I'll buy TikTok. Like, I think Amazon's in the mix. I think Jeff Bezos is sitting on that stage. Yeah. If I were Walmart, I would be

They were, Lauren, weren't they in the mix the first time? It was like Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart were like a consortium, right? They were, yeah. Yeah, I think the Mr. Beast one might be separate from Project Liberty. So just a bunch of different characters. No, they at least were talking. Are they the same? Okay. I don't know if they're like technically in it, but they had a confab. Okay. At least.

Maybe there was like lunchly stock involved in the, I don't know. I don't know all the details, but I'll do it. Mr's Beast and Wonderful are both part of this. None of it's good. None of it's good. Yeah, I think they don't sell. And I think it actually goes dark in April in a way. That's that's my current stake in the ground.

I agree. I think there's a possibility that some like crazy deal comes out of nowhere after it goes dark eventually. But I do think I if I had to predict now, it does go dark after the 75 days. Yeah, I just I want to believe you. I also know that Donald Trump wants nothing more in his life than to hand a novelty permit to someone.

Like a big red ribbon. There will be big scissors for sure. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I'm betting on novelty permit. I don't know who the buyer will be or whether that will actually be effective under the law. The novelty permit is happening. All right. We got to take a break. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us again. We're very sorry. We'll have you back very soon. Thank you so much. All right. We're back.

We're already over. It's weird. Again, we got to figure this out. I don't think every week is going to be like this, but I think we also kind of spent four years saying that the last time Trump was in the White House. So...

I don't know. I'm tired. The last time this happened, and again, I recognize this was a long time ago, we got to the point on the show where I was getting angry anonymous letters from Foxconn employees telling me to leave the company alone, and then our listeners were turning those letters into songs. So I just want to set... We have a long road to go. It's like no one's broken out of guitar yet. It's a long way. All right. Lightning round. Unsponsored.

You know, we're starting here off slow. It's Q1. It is sort of. It's Q1. Everyone blew their extra Q4 budgets sponsoring the lightning round in 2024. And here we are in 2025. It's going to happen again, though. We got some ideas. All right.

Netflix is raising prices again. I said it was a lightning round, but I think David is about to talk for one full hour. This is the most mafia thing that has happened this week, and that's a pretty high bar. So the thing that happened in the last month, really, and I think this is even more true than I realized. I spent some time with some Netflix folks talking about

how they're thinking about live ahead of the football game, kind of between the Paul Tyson fight and the Christmas Day football games. I spent some time with the NFL folks or with the Netflix folks, wrote a story about it and came away from it being like, okay, they're really committed to this like always on live programming. What I didn't realize is Netflix is pretty sure it has already won television.

They have proven now that this sports thing can work and drives real audience. They've proven that they can manufacture huge events out of nowhere, essentially. Like, they had a YouTuber fight an old man and 65 million people watched. Like,

just on his face, that is nuts. And that's not a thing you can do infinitely, but it is a thing that Netflix continues to prove it can do whenever it wants. And so now if you're Netflix, you say, okay, we have a bunch of big hit shows that people like. 2024 is kind of a down year for those shows. Stranger Things is huge. Wednesday is huge and coming back. There's a third one that I can't remember the name of. Sure, there you go. Keep going. I think Ryan Reynolds is probably doing stuff. None of those count.

Those are all so weightless as to not exist. I think Stranger Things is actually the only one I would put on the list of biggest things on television. I think Stranger Things belongs there. But what Netflix actually has is just an infinite library of C-plus stuff that people will watch, which actually turns out to be very important because that's most of what people watch. Yes.

I will watch as many seasons of the ultimatum as you want to watch, as you want to make Netflix. Like, sure, I'm into it. But so anyway, so Netflix is now in this position where like it is making money in a time where it's very hard for entertainment companies to make money. It is more powerful than ever. It's driving more audience than ever. It is just winning. And so what they used to do is like make these grand cases for why they had to raise the prices because they wanted to reinvest in amazing tech. And now they're just like, yeah, we're raising the prices.

It went up a dollar. What are you going to do about it? I have two things to say about this. One, it occurs to me that you have a garbage TV and you watch garbage TV. Correct. And I haven't,

Those things haven't, those puzzle pieces never came to my head before. We can't all have Bravia core. Right. That's what I said. I'm like, I'm going to watch one movie a week and 75 glorious megabits of streaming. Right. And fine. I'm worried about you, but it finally clicked into me. I turn off Deal or No Deal Islands to watch, to make this podcast and that's it. I'm just generally worried about you.

Uh, the other thing, uh, is K I think Casey posted this on blue sky this week. He's like, Netflix had better content when it costs seven 99. Like, and that I think is straightforwardly true. When they were playing the big prestige TV game, they were making better stuff when they're like, we're HBO. Like,

And now the quality has just dropped. Sure. But you know what happened in the interim is Netflix went from losing billions of dollars to making billions of dollars, which it turns out if you're Netflix is a pretty good trade. We made our content worse and our money bigger is the thing they are happy with. But the other thing is there is this big macro trend away from

premium, high res streaming to ads. And that is the push here. And what Netflix is doing is a thing that I have been saying for a while that it was doing. It is just going to price you out. Like it is it went from so the ad supported tier, which is now the base tier of Netflix, went from $6.99 a month to $7.99 a month. A dollar a month is a lot, but

whatever. The standard ad free tier, which is standard Netflix, which used to be $7.99 a month, went from $15.49 to $17.99 a month. That's a $2.50 increase. That's a big number. And then the premium tier, which I think is how you get 4K. I don't know. My TV doesn't do any of that stuff, so I don't even know. Went from $22.99 to $24.99 a month. So to have the best possible Netflix experience, just Netflix is $25 a month. Netflix

does not want you to pay that. Like, I cannot be clearer about this. Netflix is trying to price you out of every tier except the ads ones. And it is going to keep raising those prices as fast as it can until it does so, because it makes more money when you do ads. And the more people go to ads, the bigger a scale advertising business Netflix can build, which is what it needs to go after who it really wants to be, which is YouTube.

That's where those two companies are on like a collision course with each other. And Netflix needs to get bigger in order to like really try to play YouTube's game. And YouTube's growth is on television, which they've said over and over again to you, to me, to anybody who will listen, we're growing faster on smart TVs and URLs. Um, this actually hilariously Netflix raised prices by $2. YouTube announced this week, a price decrease by $2.

But only if you also buy Google One, which you have to pay more money for. And it's like, this is one of the saddest announcements of all time. And the way that I know it's one of the saddest is in the press release, they didn't say how much the bundle would be cheaper. And we had to go ask them. And they were like, it's $2. And we're like, all right, it's $2. Cool. I'll take two bucks. Like, sure. Yeah.

They don't have so much other features. You get higher quality audio streaming. They're going to let you do picture-in-picture. Basically, you can run two of their beta features at once now. Can I just say my favorite thing about this is one of the experimental features that they have is you can automatically download recommended YouTube shorts to watch offline, which is...

Like if I were to make you a list of features that YouTube users do not want, download shorts to my phone. Without asking me, just like fill up my storage with YouTube shorts. Yeah. Everybody wants a thousand YouTube shorts just taking up space on their phone. That's definitely what YouTube users are asking for. I guess if I could tell one of those platforms, like my subway ride from Grand Central to the office is about 22 minutes. Like just make sure I have 22 minutes of garbage to watch.

You know, I could see it. If there was a button called download garbage, I would take that. It would have to be like a dial. Like I need about 25 minutes of garbage. How much time do you have to kill? Just make sure it's here. All right. Like I don't, it should actually, it should be like a system wide setting that all of the social garbage apps can feed into.

So you're like, you know, I'm going to bounce between like Instagram and Tik TOK and YouTube, like just between the three of you, I'm giving you about 25 minutes of garbage storage. Like figure it out.

You know what's great is in a Fediverse world, that can happen. You could build that app on ActivityPod. 25 minutes of garbage. Finally, an app idea that's really sticky. Yeah, no, I agree with you. They're on a collision course. I think YouTube has better economics because they don't pay anyone. I understand some people make money from YouTube Premium, but again, the math on YouTube is just so staggeringly good. They make so much more money than they pay out.

Netflix just has a problem. Netflix has headed to a place where it makes no content and everyone in America watches TV shows made in Korea and Australia because those markets have better economics for content and reselling it to America is cheaper. Yeah, I mean, I think Netflix in a really interesting way is going to eat

the business of Hollywood and then discover how actually small that business is in the scheme of things. Like if you add up all of the movie studios and all of the TV studios and all of the like interesting distributors, you're not at Google sized. You're not, you're probably not even a YouTube size as it comes to the business. So like Netflix, I think is desperately trying to figure out

how to do Hollywood at tech money and scale. And it's going to get to the end of that quickly, and it's going to be very expensive for us as the viewers. But I think the question of whether Netflix can get beyond that kind of ceiling of Hollywood remains to be seen. Right. And then Google has, you know, a million kids every day being like, I'm going to be a YouTuber. Right.

Right. YouTube is, that's the strange thing about it is it is a completely different game that is also competing increasingly on the same screen as Netflix, which I think is a scary thing if you're Netflix. Right. Again, I say this, but it's a lot scarier if you're anybody other than Netflix. Right. By the way, CNN today, after launching a streaming service and then killing it immediately four years ago, announced a streaming service.

Yeah. By the way, we're way out of practice on disclosures. This is where we have to tell the people that Comcast is a minority investor. We haven't talked about Peacock exists. It sucks. You EP'd a Netflix show that actually came up in my recommendations not that long ago. That was pretty exciting. Did it have my face on it? It was like, hey. No, it was like the animated poster. Oh,

Oh, sure. Yeah, no, I did. It's called The Future of You Should Go Watch It. It was very good. Netflix doesn't pay residuals, so I'm not biased by telling you to go watch it. I didn't get paid the first time. Straightforwardly. It was just like a fun side project we did. Sure. That's how that was supposed to work. We only made one season. Disclosure.

Yeah, I think that's it. Comcast owns it. Oh, and we talked about OpenAI. Somewhere our work is RSS fed into some chat GPT database. Do you ever use the search thing? No. This is why I always forget to do the disclosure. Yeah. It just doesn't matter in that way. That seems to have kind of come and gone in everybody's mind pretty fast. Is it copyright infringement? Who knows? But there's a deal in the background. Great. We don't pay any attention to it. Okay, two more lightning round things.

They're like the same thing, but also different. The entire tech industry is figuring out how to make light bulbs watch you. I don't know what else to say about this. Less optimistic than I was hoping for. Okay, cool. Okay, so Gen has the scoop on Sensify. Gen 2A has a scoop on Sensify, which is tech that can turn Zigbee radios into motion sensors.

So light switches, plugs, whatever. Notably, Philips Hue bulbs are Zigbee devices. So if you have a lot of Philips Hue bulbs in your life, the Sensify people are saying like, this is a firmware update away. Like there are, they're ready to go. Put in the firmware update and suddenly the Zigbee radios can do motion sensing, which, you know, solves a lot of problems like smart home problems. Like you walk into a room, the lights know you're there. They turn on. Right.

This is very cool. Also, your life helps for watching. Yeah. I feel like this is a, yet another hard to remember name on top of all of the other smart home standards. So that's exciting. But I would, I would argue if this works, it's on balance, a good thing, right? Cause like, like you're saying this, this sort of ambient awareness of you in your home has always been a requirement of making the smart homework. Like,

If my home is very smart but has no idea that I exist, it can't actually do that much. So we've signed up for this already. And it's weird because it's your light bulbs. But if it's not your light bulbs, everybody would have to eventually put some other sensor in their living room. So it might as well be the light bulbs. Yeah, and I call this out all the time. The way my hacked together smart home works is like the motion sensor in my Ecobee thermostat is wired into an automation device.

That turns on lights in the morning when it senses that my family is awake. That's too much. Like that's no, no normal human should figure out how to do that, but it works for us. Um, having the bulbs themselves do it is great. I will say to your point about the smart home being very complicated. I'm just going to read you this full sentence from Jen's piece.

There's been speculation that Hue is working on a Zigbee sensing technology since its sister company, Wiz, debuted a similar tech called SpaceSense in 2022, which uses WNS over Wi-Fi.

Did you know whiz ran space? The only words in that sentence I understand are like the prepositions. It's very good. Uh, it's, it's all, it's all very good. Okay. So that, that's, uh, right. So Hugh bulbs might be doing wins over Zigbee. I mean, I've been waiting for that for years. And then at the same time it was, um,

Samsung did have its event, and so they had a bunch of sort of other things. They're bringing ambient sensing to smart things. So Samsung TVs, speakers, fridges, air conditioners will become motion sensors for smart things if you run a smart thing smart house.

Unclear if they're using the whiz supported technology space sets or this new Sensify thing that is running. Like this idea has been around for a long time. I feel like I covered it in Engadget years ago where if you have wireless radios, they can detect disturbances in the radio waves that they're sensing. So this idea has been around for a while. So I think we're just getting to a place where you can do it at scale and

And so there's different ways of doing it. So Samsung is doing it in different way for smart things. And because they have TV speakers, fridges, all this other stuff, it will just be in your house. Now I think it is weirder if your TV is the motion sensor for a lot of reasons. Um, but I will point out Samsung TVs, the frame TV, famously emotion sensing product because it lights up and does the frame thing when you walk into the room so that you can see they're kind of like building towards the

The puzzle pieces already have. Yeah. Well, it's a fun one because the the usefulness factor and the creepiness factor are perfectly correlated on all of this stuff. Right. Like the idea that I could just walk into my living room and flop down on the couch and the TV turns on and I don't even have to find the remote. Nifty.

It's all the same thing. Do I want to be able to walk into the room and have my lights automatically turn on? Yeah, that's a fundamentally good thing in the smart home that it knows when I'm there and it turns the lights on and it turns them off and I'm gone. Also, a constant reminder that I am being watched by my house. By Samsung. Let me just read you another paragraph from Jen's story. For example, Samsung says...

motion sensors in a Samsung TV can quote, detect what kind of exercise you're doing, guide you on your form and provide the optimal exercise time for maximum results. Can you imagine your fridge just suddenly going three more knees out? I'm going to keep going. If you sit down in a chair,

Smart things can automatically turn on the nearby reading lamp and adjust the room to your preferred temperature. Samsung says it can also, quote, identify your miniature pincher jumping onto the couch, activating the air purifier to remove allergens from the air. And if you are drying your hair.

A device for the speaker, like the music frame, can hear the hairdryer and tell the Samsung robot vacuum to come vacuum up the hair you have shed. Utopia and dystopia. That is the smart home story. I just want to point out these were Samsung's own examples. Someone was like, all right, I've got a little dog in an air purifier.

Yeah, like what's... Maybe brush your dog. I don't know. The air purifier doesn't need to do that much work, I don't think. I'm just telling you that we're headed towards a place where...

Like having to demonstrate that linking up everything in your house in a smart home, all these companies are going to start making up just absolutely absurd scenarios. Yeah. The lights are watching you. It's the hair dryer one that really does it for me. Like, can you imagine just you like plug in your hair dryer and it's like set to on. And so it automatically goes on for a second and your robot vacuum has to be like, ah, shit, here we go again. And just like comes rolling in from the other room.

Well, no, David, because obviously Samsung's AI platform will be involved. I see. Right? You'll be like, hey, I've got this hair dryer problem. Can you get the – every time I do this, can you make the vacuum come in? And then we're going to sit through another interminable demo that's like the computer understands language. You know what I mean? Like it's happening. It's happening. And then we're all so screwed. I will say – I mean I love a smart home. I just – the lights are watching you is –

That's what you have. Like Apple's like, we're going to do a door lock. It's like step one. But we're going to put a motorized iPad on a stick in your house. You need all this other stuff to be there. Yeah. Because otherwise your house isn't going to be very smart at all. And then there's going to be a software bug and it's going to beat you to death when you try to use your hairdryer. That's where we're headed. Welcome to the future. I do love that they specify that it was a miniature pincher.

Yeah, other dogs, whatever. They're not a problem. Our air purifier isn't strong enough. All right, that's it. That was the lightning round for what it's worth. Like I said, we want your feedback on how to manage all this coverage. I know that it's polarizing. Some of you want a lot of it. Some of you would prefer that we filter all of it on the homepage. We're going to find ways to do that on our website. We need to calibrate it on this podcast. So let us know. We're going to work it out.

But we can't ignore it because all of the products you make are downstream of some of these politics. They were all sitting there. They were all sitting there. Mark Zuckerberg was sitting there. He was looking at stuff. Yep. That's it, everybody. That's The French Cast. Rock and roll.

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. ♪