Truth, lies, and the Trump Phone
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Welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of phones that for sure definitely do not exist.

It just doesn't exist. I don't know what to say. It just does not exist. But we're going to talk about this. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Jake Castronakis is here. Hi, Jake. Hey, good to be here. Your microphone works. Your headphones work. The camera works.

People should know that this is a small miracle we've accomplished to make this happen. It is. I have some fancy technical wizardry that I've just learned that I can do in this room. So we'll see. We'll see if it comes up later. Yes, it's going to get weird in here. Don Preston is also here. Hi, Don. Hey, happy to be here. We have brought you here late in the day where you are. You're in the UK. It's late. It's the evening.

But but Trump mobile exists and we have to talk about it. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's just these are the rules. I don't make them. I just abide by them.

So we have a lot of news to talk about today. We're going to talk about, there's a bunch of interesting streaming stuff happening. I think this is like a sort of moment in the history of the television industry that we're going to talk about. Some stuff on Siri, some interesting politics news, WhatsApp got ads and everybody's having a lot of feelings about it. But we got to start with Trump Mobile. There is a phone. It's called the Trump Mobile T1 phone 8002. That's

a fact that gives me a great number of questions. And then there is Trump Mobile, the wireless carrier. Dom, you wrote the original story for us when Trump Mobile came up, kind of out of nowhere. Do you want to explain what this thing is? What did the Trump organization actually launch this week?

So they've launched two things. It came almost out of nowhere. There'd been some trademark applications a few days prior. So we kind of had an inkling maybe they're working on this. But in that long term, maybe we'll see something eventually. And then all of a sudden, an hour after we published the story, there the thing was. So there's two parts to this. There's a network, Trump Mobile.

which is offering a single plan called the 47 plan. They are an MVNO, so they're just kind of piggybacking on T-Mobile coverage. But that's just this kind of single plan you can get. You could bring any phone you want to Trump Mobile if for some reason you wanted to and sign up. In theory, you can do that right now and switch to Trump Mobile. I think in practice that might not work entirely smoothly, but supposedly you could.

But then they also wanted to have a phone because you can't have Trump Mobile without the Trump Mobile. And that is the T1 Phone 8002. This I feel like we know less about in that we know a lot of things about it, but don't believe very many of them. We have a big long spec sheet. We kind of have a picture, but I'm pretty sure it's not actually a picture of a real phone in the world. And this...

this is a phone they claim will be made in America or is being made in America or will eventually be made in America, some combination of the above. And it's coming out either in August or in September depending on which part of their website you believe. Yeah, we should say, Dom, you're not like...

making different guesses here about possibilities. These are all things that people associated with this project have said out loud in public. Like it either will or won't or might be someday built in the United States is a compilation of things that Eric Trump said. Like that's just, these are not educated guesses. That is what the person responsible for this has said out loud over and over and over again. This is what we're doing here. This is all we have to work with. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I like the way you set that up because like,

The Trump mobile piece of it is just whatever, right? Like, Jake, you wrote about sort of the economics of Trump mobile, but basically an MVNO is not a complicated thing to do. You can just have a wireless carrier if you want to have a wireless carrier. I mean, this is also such a funny week to have launched it because like less than a week before this, the Smartless podcast launched a mobile carrier.

And like if SmartList can launch a wireless carrier, then first off, stay tuned, Verge Wireless. It's probably not happening, but it could. It could is the point. I will say, Nilay is not here today. He's off doing fancy people things. I pitched him on the idea of Verge Mobile as an MVNO, and he immediately greenlit it. And I am saying it in public now so that he can't take it back. This is happening. This is how he goes head to head with Brendan Carr. You know who regulates Verge Mobile. Right.

Yeah, we're coming. This is how we make it happen. But yeah, look like Allison Johnson talked to a couple of analysts about, you know, why are MVNOs like blowing up right now? And apparently it's part of it is 5G. I hate to say it, but there's just a bunch of extra stuff.

spectrum and bandwidth and capacity because of 5G. So these networks are like, how do we offload this? Number two, eSIMs make it really easy to just join whatever network you want and try them out. And then I think everybody's looking at Ryan Reynolds, who

Let's be clear what Ryan Reynolds did. He sold T-Mobile's own network back to T-Mobile for over a billion dollars, which good for him. That rules. One of the great business coups of the century, honestly. And it's actually like a perfect microcosm of the whole thing. And I think Allison's going to come on the show on Tuesday and we're going to sort of dive deeper into the world of MVNOs. But Mint Mobile, which was an MVNO, like you're talking about,

Perfect example of this, right? Because all it is, is you take spectrum that exists from one of these carriers. They give you capacity on their network.

You then build whatever brand you want to around it. And all you have to do is manage like billing and customer service, right? Like the network piece of it, it's kind of like standing up a company on AWS, right? Like the networking is no longer the problem. You just sort of solve everything else around it. And that is all stuff you can increasingly like offload to a bunch of other SaaS things. So you just like, you sign up for six pieces of enterprise software and like you have an MVNO and you can just do it. And so it's becoming...

like a branding exercise now. And I think Alison compared it to like the, the liquor companies that used to just put, you know, George Clooney's name on a bottle of liquor and call it a day. Now you can do it with a wireless carrier.

I mean, that's what it is, right? It's a branding exercise, which is like, that is what the Trump organization is. They just put their name on things. It's Trump steaks. Yes, I agree. And I think in a weird way, I actually think with Trump, this makes more sense than with some other things. But like, it's weirdly, it's the smart list one that I have not been able to get my brain around. Like,

What is there? Is there any celebrity or brand in the world that would make either of you immediately switch wireless carriers to be on that mobile carrier? Dom, like who who who would do it for you? The only name that is for some reason immediately coming into my mind is Kyle McLaughlin of Twin Peaks and so on. Yeah, that's it. Twin Peaks mobile. You're in. I'm in. Yeah.

In loving memory of David Lynch, let's launch a mobile network and we'll go from there. Twin Peaks also, ironically, a pretty good name for a wireless game.

Jake, what about you? Who would it be for you? Oh, we're going with The Rock Wireless, right? Dwayne The Rock Wireless. It's going to be in every single movie contract that he has to be like, hello, I'm speaking to you from Rock Wireless. Can you hear me now? Yes. Terrific. Of course you can. Of course. With the best connection across the 50 states.

See, that's very good. Free international calling. Yeah. The thing that's really upsetting is that would 100% work. Oh, it would crush. He would do it and it would work. Like, you need somebody who can sell it. Yes. This is very good. But wait, we'll come back to the MVNO stuff because I think, like we're talking about, that's actually...

Actually, the more straightforward part of this. And Jake, you mentioned Trump stakes like this is just it's just Trump stakes. Like it really is just a pure brand licensing exercise. And fine, if you want to overpay to say that you have Trump mobile, knock yourself out. The service will be fine. It's too expensive. It's $47 and 45 cents because he was the 45th and 47th president.

And my favorite part of that, by the way, is it would have made way more chronological sense if it was $45.47 and they did it backwards just to scam you out of more money. Yes. You know, that's true. Hate that. But we should talk about the phone. And one of the amazing Verge things that happened this week, which doesn't happen a lot, but is one of my favorite things that happens is a piece of news drops on

And like a huge percentage of Verge employees all begin the same quest at the same time. And this time it was what the hell is that phone? Because we all made the same assumption. And Dom, you got to do this before anybody, which was we saw the Photoshop of this phone on the website. And we all sort of immediately assumed, okay, it's like it's a rebadged something. And then the internet's favorite question for several days has been, what is that something?

Dom, you see more weird phones than Jake and I do by virtue of not being in the United States. How has this exploration gone for you? More challenging than I expected. I think the strangest thing about this was I did think the moment this dropped, I thought, I can find out what this is. I can absolutely go track down what phone this is. I was like rolling through my head all the names of the brands that I know work as ODMs and that do these off-the-shelf things. I can find a phone that has been reskinned.

The weird thing is we can't. We can find a lot of phones that are very similar, a lot of phones that match everything on the spec list except one bit. So it doesn't look like this is an exact version of another phone on the market that's just been given a gold spray paint and a US flag on the back.

Whatever they've done, you know, they are working with, well, to whatever extent this is real, they are working with some sort of ODM, most likely in China, to customize something a bit to make this from what we can tell. Because if there is an exact version of this phone out there, we can't find it so far. What's the closest you've found? Like if you had to pick one, where do you land? Oh, I think some of the, I've never actually known how you're meant to say it, but Ulefone is,

is always what I've gone for. I think some of the Ulefone models look very, very close. They have that perfect...

knock-off triangular camera module. And they do have some models in basically the same size and with a headphone jack, which is that weird element that narrows everything down a lot, including a 3.5mm headphone jack actually suddenly removes a lot of the phones that this could be because that's obviously a part of the chassis and part of the design that I imagine is baked in fairly early in the design of these things. So I can't say that with total confidence. That's interesting because I think...

And David, you pointed this out on the site, but the things that is most incongruous here is they say it runs Android 15, which is not true of a cheapo knockoff Android phone, and that it has a headphone jack, which is true of a very old cheapo Android phone. And so I also have been poking around, Dom, and you can find a bunch of iPhone lookalikes on AliExpress and

And the headphone jack is the thing that I think is particularly hard to come by. Jake, you sent me a screenshot. When you say poking around, you, I believe, went to Amazon and Googled big Android phone. And that was the great journalism that Jake did. I thought that was about the right starting point. And I have now, let me tell you, it was so successful. I've repeated that everywhere. You just type in big Android phone and it gets you exactly what you want. Because it turns out that people actually just want a thing that looks like an iPhone.

And you know what? That search result gets you there. I do think like what we have been finding is telling these things cost what, Dom? Like $150? Yeah. I mean, one of the closer comparisons, like there's actually a phone that did get a real release in the US. Well, almost did. It got recalled. But the T-Mobile...

revel 7 pro 5g is a pretty close match i think the camera layout is wrong it's not the exact same thing but that did you know have a proper price announced by a major american company and that was 250 dollars and it is a very close spec match for this uh if you go for one's direct from the likes of ulefone or doogie um or umidigi uh then yeah maybe you're more in the 200

150 range. True kudos for saying all of those names with a straight face. The most enlightening thing about this whole process to me has been

how truly deep the like Amazon alphabet soup of phone brands goes. I mean, it's wild. And every imaginable variation of specs you can just, you can just have. And it's, this is like a thing I like intuitively sort of knew, right. That like intellectually, I understand that phones are,

mass manufactured, unlike almost anything we've ever seen. And they're everywhere and you can have any kind of spec that you want. And they're just pulling parts out of a bit and putting them together and sending you the phone. But oh my God, can you just have whatever phone you want on Alibaba tomorrow? And like Jake, you said 98% of them will look alarmingly like an iPhone. It's just nuts how many of these are out there. And they're so cheap. Like a bunch of the specs, right? It was like a 5,000 milliamp battery,

12 gigs of RAM, uh, I think 256 gigs of storage, all this like relatively fine Android specs, right? Like slightly better than the pixel nine a way to go Google. Uh,

120 bucks in many cases. Like I'm going to start buying phones just for fun. Like I need to own more phones is the thing that I have learned at the end of this process. Dom, how much have you gotten a chance to try some of these like random cheapo phones? Because again, like the specs are, they sound delightful. And then in practice, I get the impression that they do not perform like what you would expect from those numbers. Yeah, it can be a mixed bag. I've tried a few, especially the ruggedized ones. Yeah.

I think performance is usually okay in terms of them being reasonably fast to use, depending on what chipset you're going to find in there. But once you've got the chipset and the RAM, that's pretty much baked in. The software will probably be ropey. The closer it is to being stock Android, the better a time you're likely to have. The more they've bothered to put some spin on it, the worse of a time you're going to have. You will probably be lucky to get an OS upgrade, or something.

a couple of security patches. I would never trust these things for any sort of long-term use. They're kind of almost like disposable phones. The big thing you're not going to get is camera performance. None of them have cameras worth a damn at all. And that was the giveaway for me looking at the T1 is going through and being like, yeah, a lot of these specs sound fine. It's 120 hertz OLED display. It's got a

decent sized battery 12 gigs of RAM is more generous than a lot of these phones would ship with but then you get to that camera and it's a 50 megapixel main camera with 2 megapixel depth and macro sensors no information about what those sensors and anything else are so that 50 megapixel is probably absolutely dreadful there's

There's going to be no software doing its own camera processing functionally. You know, it's going to be doing very little to improve the image you get. Those macro and depth sensors are just dead space. The cheap end of the Android market has been throwing them on phones for years as a way to goose up camera counts. It's a three camera phone. It looks like an iPhone with three cameras. You know, at a glance, that's a triple camera. You open the camera app up. There's only one camera mode to use. There's no ultra wide. There's no zoom. You just have

the camera. The macro and depth sensor might kick in at certain points. They might just not. And if they do, they're not going to do anything you care about. Yeah. Two megapixel macro sensor is not an exciting piece of camera hardware, I would say. No. Yeah. I'm so struck by like how many of the sort of specs that we have thought of as important for a long time. And like we talk about them in reviews are actually like

Not just table stakes, but almost kind of irrelevant to a lot of this stuff now. You should be worried about a phone that ships with less than this amount of storage, right? And anything below a certain number you should take as a huge red flag. Everything else is like, it's just a phone. You just made a phone. And I think...

We've come to an interesting space where I remember like I wrote this big story a bunch of years ago about this company Blue Products, which is a Miami based. They're essentially an importer of phones, but they were very early to this game of like essentially drop shipping phones on Amazon and would would bring them in and tweak them a little bit. And they started to do more and more over time. But they had like real honest to God.

performance issues because they were not using mid-range specs. And this is like in 2012 when mid-range specs were sort of a problem. Now you can get

Probably, we don't know what processor this T1 phone has, which is a very notable omission. But assuming it's like a middle of the road processor, you can sort of brute force into reasonable performance on Android, right? Like most things work fine because there is just enough performance headroom and even like a half decent processor that I think the like overall quality of a crappy phone has gone way up over time.

Which is fascinating. To get a phone that actively feels slow and laggy in that day-to-day usage, you know, I'm not going to talk about gaming performance, that's a different thing, but if you want something that really feels like slow when you open Instagram up, you would have to go below $100, I think, to find something that still feels slow like that. Anything above $100 and it's going to feel fine just for social media and email and your average app. Right. Unless...

you decide to just absolutely ruin the phone with bloatware and spyware and all kinds of stuff. And if I'm being completely honest with you,

I think the Trump organization might do that. Like, I just... Can you imagine the, like, Windows-style crap that's going to get built into this? And it's going to come with, like, a hundred apps, none of which you want, most of which you've never heard of, all of which are, like, allowed to run in the background and cause all kinds of problems for... Like...

I think we've been on a good path away from junky software coming on phones for a very long time. Even Samsung, which can barely help itself has kind of learned how to help itself. And here comes Trump mobile. And they're just like, what if we just bundled every app that would give us a dollar onto your phone? Would that be fun? Would you like that? I'm fascinated to see where they land here because, uh, I still review a lot of Chinese phones and all those Chinese flagships and, you know, phones that don't launch in the U S but would be in the like grand and a half price range if they did. Um,

you can turn those on and they are filled with apps from minute one and not not oppo apps not xiaomi apps they have every social media network under the sun every chinese food delivery app uh every different browser

browser and search engine all this stuff there's so much stuff loaded on even a very high-end device in china that is still the way that market that's so interesting and you're right like in in the west like the phones we that you can buy in in europe and the states like that just doesn't happen anymore um but it is still a money spinner uh if you're willing to make that compromise and yeah i really bet the trump organization is willing to make that compromise i

I know I've been trying to decide like what, what apps do I think are going to get built in? I think the funniest one that I've been able to come up with is signal. Like I think signals should reach out to the Trump organization and be like, just, just build us into the T one. We'll, we'll give you some money just for a bit. I think I would enjoy that very much, but I suspect that will not be it. And it will be much uglier. So Jake, here's my question. Is there any chance any of this is real? Like,

The $500 T1 phone launching on Trump Mobile in September, is there any chance that's a real thing that's going to happen? Made in the U.S.? No. I think, like, can they have a phone available to send us by September? Yeah. I think we could get a phone available to send to people by September. Yeah. One Alibaba order away from having a bunch of phones. Right. Right. And, like, you know, like, if you look at the Trump Mobile website,

But like, it does not look like a thing they put a lot of effort into it. Like, right. This looks like it was it was put together in about a day.

And so I'm not expecting this phone to be particularly great. I'm not expecting them to put a ton of work into making this wireless service all that exciting and appealing. I suspect they will get a phone out the door. Surely they have the resources to put in an AliExpress order. I think that is manageable. On that one podcast, we saw Eric Trump holding up two versions of what like

supposedly was the T1 phone, 8002. He didn't say it was the T1 phone, but he sure wanted you to think that it was the T1 phone. They keep showing it. Here's the thing. There are two versions of this phone that we have seen. There's the one on the website, which is just an egregiously bad Photoshop. And then they keep having, there's the ones that Eric has held up as well as the ones that they've posted on social media, which are either just iPhones with stamps on the back. Yeah.

Or they are, you know, the first versions of what they've imported from from China. And seriously, I've been like pixel peeping on these things. They have the antenna lines in the same spots and iPhone. They have the buttons in the same spots as the iPhone. The one thing that I have seen is that.

iPhones are really the only phones that have the volume buttons on the left-hand side. And I could be wrong, but all of the Android knockoffs I've seen, even they, the ones that are trying to be exactly like an iPhone, have the volume buttons on the right. So I don't know. I'm not sure if that's actually the C1 that he's holding up, but maybe they'll just wave around some more iPhones. Listen, I think they're probably going to ship something soon.

Do I think this phone is going to revolutionize the phone industry? No. Do I think this phone is going to convince Americans and Congress that you can, in fact, build great phones in the United States? I do not think so, particularly because I do not think this is going to be built in the United States. Yeah, I would agree with all of that. The Trump organization has said to a couple of folks that their plan is to build it in Alabama, California and Florida.

Make of that what you will. And again, we should say there is a technicality by which

you can get away with something like this, right? Like the, the rules for what it requires to be able to say something was made in X, Y, Z place are not as straightforward as you would like them to be. Like it's, it's, it's all of this sort of vague language about like meaningfully changing something. So like you could bring it here and take a thing that's facing like this and turn it like this and kind of get away with calling it built in America. Yeah.

It's nonsense, but it's true enough that I can see how someone in the organization will get up and say with a straight face, this thing was made in America. Like, TM.

by a very specific letter of a very specific law, this thing was made in America. And that just feels like where we're headed and it's going to drive me insane. Yeah, I mean, there's basically kind of two versions. The FTC has a full made-in-the-USA kind of system which is quite comprehensive and challenging and I don't think there's a realistic world in which

this phone meets that because it requires you not only prove that you've built it here but that a lot of the parts were built in the US as well and that is just clearly beyond what this phone could be but there is also basically this just kind of like I can't remember what the actual term of it is but it's functionally made in the USA asterisk

And, you know, it just gives all this leeway for exactly what you might have done. And it's kind of partially made in the USA functionally, but, you know, you can blow the lines a bit on where you use that. And I imagine that's the space we're going to see them in, where there's some sort of final assembly happening in the US, even if that's as little as, you know, putting the SSID stickers on them and shoving them in a box and calling that assembly. Yeah.

I mean, Dom, that's fascinating. This also gets at one of the other problems with the Trump organization running a mobile phone business, which is who runs the FTC, right? Is the FTC going to go after Trump Mobile for mismarketing their phone? Is the FCC, is Brendan Carr going to go after Trump Mobile because they're, you know, mishandling your data? Like,

I don't, it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like that's going to happen. Like I, I, I'm pretty sure they can say is made in America as much as they want. Um, I do not see a way in which they could possibly get in trouble under the current administration. Well, that's cause that's one of the other little wrinkles around the question of whether this thing is real is something I was pointed out to me today is that no one's been able to find an FCC ID.

for this phone. And you do need one. Like if you want to launch a phone, you've got to have that. So that could mean that this really is a full reskin. They've changed nothing of an existing phone, in which case you could get away with using that FCC ID. But as we said earlier, we kind of looked and we just can't find that phone. It doesn't seem to exist, the exact carbon copy. So then you've got to say, well, either they don't have an FCC ID and they really need one and they should have it by now for a September launch. And that's going to mean there is no phone. Or you just say, well, you know,

Brendan will fix it. And, you know, well, I'll skate by and it'll be fine. Yeah, we are we are forever watching tests of there not being any rules and just seeing what happens. I will say the optimistic part of me thinks all of this Trump stuff is a grift because it is obviously a grift to get you to pay too much money for a phone and too much money for a mobile carrier just to say Trump. And sure, if you would like to do that, do it eyes wide open, know what you're doing.

Knock yourself out. I think the, the like grand thesis of this thing and that they're trying to do, I think is sort of fascinating. Like a thing we talk about a lot is how people,

the U.S. phone market is because it is so controlled by a couple of companies, right? Like most people buy their phones in carrier stores. There are effectively three carriers. There are not that many places in those stores. And so the U.S. market is so incredibly small and controlled. And like,

Dom, I'm forever jealous of you because you have access to just like a vast ocean of cool smartphones that for a whole variety of reasons just do not come to the United States. Part of that is like politics with China, but a huge amount of it is just the way that the wireless business works here, which is that it's completely and utterly carrier dominated. And I think if we're heading to a point where what happens at the end of all of this MVNO stuff is...

that everything is sort of pulled out of basically Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, those companies become like infrastructure companies, right? In the way that like Google Cloud and AWS and Azure are infrastructure. You have on top of that, lots of new ideas about how this stuff can work. We get real competition in terms of like how you manage your wireless account and the perks that come with it and all the stuff that you get by having a wireless carrier there because there's real competition on top of this network.

They can also start to make new kinds of phones. It's actually really easy to make phones. This is what we've been talking about. More companies should try to make phones, but they don't because the pipeline has just been destroyed in the United States because Samsung and Apple own it. They've just bought the wireless industry in every meaningful way in the United States. Google is around, and that's it. And so I think if there is a world at the end of all of this,

hopefully a much less grifty one than the one that we appear to be in right now. That is actually like we, because all of this stuff is so commoditized, we're going to be able to get more of it from more directions. I think that could be really interesting. I don't think that's where we're headed because I think Apple and Samsung and the carriers remain way too powerful, but there is like a glimmer of a thing here that is like, I can get access to wireless networking and,

for a small amount of money and make it accessible in whatever way I want to other people that I think is like potentially a very powerful idea. Right now it's Ryan Reynolds and smart listen to Trump. Yeah, but there's we're starting to see other stuff. And I think like Klarna the the buy now pay later company launched an MVNO this week and it's like weird again, but like I don't know you can just start to see stuff happening when it's not like my entire life on my phone is not mediated through Verizon anymore, but

interesting stuff could start to happen. And it's just a very straightforward shift from the consumer perspective because you... If you're on Verizon, you kind of need to get your phone from Verizon nine times out of ten or at least that makes it a lot easier. They make it very appealing for you to do that. When you're on an MVNO, it's a lot easier to just buy your phone from Amazon and...

put the SIM in or activate the eSIM or whatever it is. And I think that is a shift basically the UK market went through a few years ago. I know for me, that's when I moved from getting my phones on contract from one of the big networks. I then switched to an MVNO about a decade ago and then was like, wait, I can just buy a Nexus phone on Amazon and that's cheaper than doing it on the contract. And then I just put the SIM in and that works. And

And I think that's basically the slow shift we've had. And then as soon as Amazon can be the big phone player, it completely changes who's putting phones on the market. I remember I bought my wife an unlocked Pixel 8 relatively recently. It was on this like giant sale at Best Buy. And I bought her one and she was like blown away that I could just take her SIM card out and put it in her new phone and it would work. Like this is going to sound insane to anyone who doesn't live in the United States, but we have been so...

convinced by these companies that this is like a tightly controlled thing that only a couple of companies can manage for us and that probably takes a professional to manage? No. And especially with eSIMs, like you were saying, Jake, all this stuff can just move around again now. Like there's so much potential here. I 100% agree with you. Like even when I do this with my own phones, I'm like,

Are they going to let me get away with it? Like it feels like open in a revolutionary way when it's actually just like, no, like this is just, this is just my data. This is my connectivity. This is my number. Of course I should be able to move it from here to here. And it is kind of a marvel that we're still able to do that. And you know, eSIM does make it a little bit trickier, but in some ways, but it also makes it a lot more accessible than others. Cause now you can just pop over to whatever network you feel like. Yeah. There is again,

I suspect this ends closer to Trump and smart list than it does to full democratization of wireless networks. But like, I got to have something to hope for here. You know what I mean? All right, Dom, we need to let you go here in a minute because it is late and you need to go. But before we do, what is the coolest phone you've seen recently that Jake and I are never going to get to touch in the United States?

Oh, the Vivo X200 Ultra, which I wrote about on the site the other day, which I wish I had at hand. It's like in a cupboard just out of arm's reach. But it comes with this attachable camera lens, a telephoto lens that you clip onto the main module. So you basically have this optional...

Not quite, but getting their DSLR quality telephotos strapped onto your phone when you want it to be. Which is one of those ideas that sounds stupid and sounds like it would be awful. And you really do look very stupid using it. It's very silly looking. But then you take the photos and you're like, ah, it's worth it. Jake has been making fun of me for having this particular dream for like 10 years. Okay, legitimately, I read Dom's story about this. I went, this looks insane. And then I absolutely want this.

want this like it's incredible it's like i i love that they're doing this i have no idea why it doesn't make any sense but it's delightful the trump mobile t2 8003 is going to have one of these and it's going to change everything you guys just watch all right dom you need to go we need to take a break uh and then we're going to come back and we got we got so much more stuff to talk about dom thank you for being here thanks bye we'll be right back

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This podcast is supported by Google. Hi, folks. Logan here. And Tulsi. We're from the Google DeepMind team. We're releasing Gemini 2.5 Pro, our most intelligent model. It's now available for you to test out in Google AI Studio. It's been awesome to see what everyone's been building. From creating mini games, from a single prompt, to debugging 50,000 lines of code, we're excited to see what else you create. Try it out today on Google AI Studio by going to aistudio.google.com and let us know what you built.

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Let's do it. Can I make a potentially insane sounding argument to you that I don't actually think is that insane? You're going to think I'm crazy, but then at the end, you're going to think I'm not crazy. I just have to clarify for the audience. This is our daily work. This is just how it goes. Let's go. Jake edits most of my stories and every once in a while, I just appear and I'm like, I said something absurd. Can you make sure it's not absurd as I'm hoping it might be? I would like to argue that this week is,

is a, is the end of television that, that like in, in a bunch of ways you can mark some studies and data that came out this week as the moment old school TV died. Um, I want to hear, I want to hear your numbers. I want to hear your argument. Um, this is one of those things where, uh, if it,

You're not saying it died with one grand strike, right? This is still, it's a long arc and you're saying we've crested and traditional TV is now, its moment has passed. It's more apocalyptic than that. So what I actually think is happening, so the way I've come to understand this business is that for a long time,

TV made just earth shatteringly huge amounts of money, right? Like that, that's just true. It was an unbelievable business for a really long time. And then streaming came up and a lot of these companies made the bet that streaming is going to rise and cable is going to fall and

And by cable, I mean cable and broadcast, which is an important distinction that I will make a couple of times here. That that is going to fall, but it is going to throw off so much money while it slowly dies because a lot of people who have cable are going to keep having cable. And there's a lot of money in cable. And it's a very sticky thing that like eventually everyone who has cable will die and the cable business will die with it. But until then, cable will be around. It'll throw off lots of money. So we're going to keep investing in cable.

That, as we've talked about a bunch on this show, has been slowly shifting faster and faster and faster. I think there was a sense that maybe this was like a multiple decade change into maybe it's a one decade change. And what we've learned is that it's a momentum business. Because so much of it is about where do you put ad dollars that in theory, everybody could just move it tomorrow. Because if all the ad money goes away,

none of it works anymore because for a variety of reasons that we can get into. And so what I think there is a thing that happened this week

which is the Nielsen gauge. Nielsen is the company that has done TV ratings for forever. The gauge is the thing they've been doing since 2021, I believe to also try and measure streaming. Uh, and basically everybody actually says it's an imperfect measurement, but it is sort of directionally useful over time. Uh, and what happened this most recent version of the gauge was that streaming was bigger than cable and broadcast TV for the first time ever. Uh,

This is like a hugely meaningful moment, right? So the number was that streaming accounted for 44% of viewership. Broadcasting cable accounted for 44.2%. So 44.8 versus 44.2%.

If you were to say, David, where's the other 11%? I don't have a good answer for you. There's like an other category that I... The TV is just off. I guess. You're just curious. Frame TVs. You're just looking at the art. Yeah. Something like that. But anyway, so that's a big change. And the momentum is just nuts. Can I just read you a bunch of numbers from... Yeah, I'd love that. So YouTube main, which is sort of the industry term for like regular YouTube, not YouTube TV, not YouTube shorts, just YouTube. Yeah.

the proper YouTube app. Google, as always, very good at branding. YouTube main accounts for 12.5% of all streaming, which is as big as Netflix and Disney Plus combined. It has been just dominant in this space for the last couple of years. It's up 120% in four years. We've talked about it, how YouTube's biggest platform is now the TV, which I still feel is

bewildering to me. Like YouTube, my own YouTube usage has increased dramatically over the past like five years even, which is honestly on a personal level bad. It's not good. I should spend less time on YouTube. But like for me, it's still very much a laptop thing. But you look at the numbers and you look at where their product efforts are going and it is to the TV and these numbers very much show you why.

Yeah, I remember for years I would meet with people at YouTube and they would say the living room is our fastest growing screen. But it was for a long time. It was like it went from very small to still very small, but bigger. Right. And like fastest growing is a relative term. But then kind of in the last 18 months, it started to turn to like, no, this is actually our biggest platform. And now they're starting to.

redesigned YouTube around the TV. Like we're seeing real TV first parts of YouTube in a way that I think is really fascinating. But I

I wrote a thing earlier this year for YouTube's 20th anniversary that was basically like YouTube is just winning the entertainment industry. And that is that continues to be true. But the fact that it was up 120% in the last four years just blew my mind. Like think about how dominant YouTube was in 2021 and it has more than doubled in

In, in, as on television since then. Insane. Seems impossible. So that's just one, uh, in like regular streaming services. I think we, we think of YouTube as kind of its own thing, but in the realm of like traditional streaming services, uh, Netflix has been in first place for four years running. It's up 27% over the four years that the gauge has been running. Uh, and it accounts for like seven, I think seven and a half percent of streaming. So like huge, uh,

Netflix is like the winner of the streaming wars in like every meaningful way and is still getting its ass kicked by YouTube. But anyway, so Netflix growing like crazy, YouTube growing like crazy. In that same period of time,

Broadcast, according to Nielsen's gauge, has been down 21% and cable has been down 39%. That is falling much faster than I would expect. Yes. And like that's just absent the ad dollars problem, right? This is just people are shifting their behaviors. And I really expected this industry to sort of just like chug along.

Um, pretty indefinitely. And those are some dramatic, devastating, um, declines that are really going to imperil the ability to operate those businesses. Um,

And I think I mean, I suspect for a lot of our listeners and certainly for me, it's like, yeah, of course. Right. Like I have never had a cable subscription of my own. Right. Because, you know, by the time I was out of college, right, like streaming was available. Why would I not just stream everything that I need on the rare occasions? Right. I went to I went to a bar to watch the show.

finale of Breaking Bad. I think that was, that was the, the like the one where I was like, okay, I do need cable for this. Um, but that just like doesn't even, that doesn't happen anymore. Right? Like that scenario doesn't come up where the thing you want to watch, um,

You can't get access to at home, like one way or another, you can find a way to stream it, even if you have to sign up for an entire service that you don't want, or even if you have to sign up for like a bundled cable streaming service for a month. But it's all it's all doable. And it's and it's like, you know.

There is much to complain about in terms of, okay, we've just recreated the cable bundle in a million different ways. Yep. Sure. Great. It turns out that streaming did not exactly save us a ton of money. And it is in fact, wildly complicated, but these things are all available. It's all possible. You have those options in front of you. And I,

I think like that has actually accelerated pretty dramatically, probably just over the recent like five years, maybe during the time that we've seen that big decline, right? I think a

a lot of these stragglers were the traditional broadcast networks. And now you're finally going to be able to get those like major live events that traditionally you still would have had to have a cable subscription to get access to. Now that's all streaming. There's very little that you need to have cable for. You need to have cable if you just want to like have that

of being able to flip through the channels and not really worry about it too much. And this becomes like a self-fulfilling thing over time, right? Like I'm thinking a lot about sports rights. And I remember not that many years ago, all of the leagues made a point to stick with the broadcast networks because what they kept saying was,

it's important to us that we have a product that is accessible to everybody. And in a few spots would leave money on the table in order to do so, right? Like it matters to the NFL that it is essentially accessible to everyone.

Even if that means not letting Amazon give you all of the money in the known universe to do so. But the thing that has changed, right, is that you can make an increasing case that actually if you want to reach everybody all at once, the move is to do it on Netflix. That like, I think if you just took a poll of people that you know, more of them are likely to have Netflix than to have like a quick way to watch Fox. And, yeah.

That is a giant cultural shift that I think we're only starting to see the money follow. But that's the thing. Like when I see numbers like this, it's like every everybody in this space watches the Nielsen gauge. Like say what you want about the numbers. It is. It is the gold standard of how the advertisers in particular look at this stuff. And they're going to look at this and they're going to say, oh, it moved. Not just the numbers.

Not it's moving, but like it moved. We have this this thing that we have been thinking was going to eventually changed has now changed. Well, it's funny. We were talking about Warner Brothers Discovery splitting in half last week.

And one of the I mean, part of it is because Zaslav has done a disastrous job. But another part of it is like they're splitting it into the thing that streams really well and the stuff that is cable TV. And that's just the good luck. Right. It does make a bunch of that stuff make sense. And we should like Comcast Comcast, by the way, disclosure, an investor in Vox Media, right?

fans of ours uh did the same thing they were like okay we're gonna take the thing that's kind of working uh which is peacock which is by the way womp womp like at the at the very bottom it's like the lowest one that the nielsen gauge even ranks there's like hey it's peacock and then it's other like yeah you did it they were popping champagne bottles when they made that list okay they're like we have the logo on there now that's all that's all we need um but

But they did the same thing. They took the thing that works and then split off all of the cable companies. And it was like, those companies now are just being essentially put out to pasture. Like there is this sense that not that long ago, there was this belief that like, oh, we should keep ESPN because it funds the rest of Disney and it will for a long time. And that idea is just quickly going away everywhere. And this is what I mean by, I think like,

we're going to look at this as the moment it died because like everybody has been waiting for this sort of moment of confirmation that the change has happened. And this is not young people stream more. This is not like cable nevers or this is, this is people in America are streaming more than they are watching cable. And, and even Nielsen's thing I think was like, these numbers are very close. So they're like, it'll probably shift. And you know,

sports will start and it'll jump up again. But they were like, the trend is, is unchanging. And it very soon will be permanent that the streaming number is higher. And once that happens, like,

It's going to get it's going to get weirder and like the money is going to move even faster. I do wonder if there is a floor, right? Like you still hear about like there's somehow there's still some AOL dial up customers. They're just like they're like, it works. I'm not changing. I'm sure there's a lot of people who just have cable and they're just never going to subscribe. I could see it like.

falling to a point and just staying there steadily for a while. But honestly, it sounds crazy. It really does sound crazy to be like, actually, TV's dead. It's done. But I think you might be right. Like, this actually is a really momentous occasion. You have sold me on this. Did it? It does mean that I think we're going to probably continue to see some big changes in the streaming space, too, as everybody races to take advantage of that growth, right? Because this means there is more opportunity there now. It

It also means they just by necessity have to go over there. One of the big things that we haven't talked about yet that I'm curious how much it is contributing to this is the fast channels. Because that feels like a relatively new trend to me. And it seems like they are...

You know, there are new ones launching every single week somehow that seem to be very popular. So I'm really curious if that is contributing to this, if part of this is that people are going, oh,

I can actually just watch stuff for free. Like there are maybe even fewer ads on these free streaming TV channels. Like what am I doing with cable still? Like I'm paying $100 or more a month for this giant bundle of channels. I don't even know what's on half of them. And, you know, the fast channels feel like one of those things that's like,

If you had started that, you know, at the origin of streaming services, that business model wouldn't have made sense because the ad dollars wouldn't have been there. But now that dollars are shifting there, there's all kinds of new things you can do with streaming. And so I think we are going to continue to see more and more of these things launch, but probably some new models pop up. I mean, we also already see this with like Netflix and basically every other premium streaming service shifting to this, like, actually just just watch the ads approach. Yeah.

Totally. And I think that, yeah, the fast channels are fascinating because they're just so easy in a way that I think we talked about this for years, right? That like the biggest problem with streaming services is it's a hell of a lot of work to figure out what you want to watch. And what I miss about cable is I could just turn on my TV and it was just showing me television and I would just like leave it on a channel and it would play things like that. That sounds...

different now but that's what it was and it was great but now like the Roku channel is the fifth most popular streaming service yeah it's incredible the Roku channel like

And the Roku channel is just, it's purely a fast channel. And the only reason it's popular is because it's there. Because lots and lots and lots of people have Rokus. And the Roku channel just has a lot of free stuff just sitting there for you to watch. And Tubi is also on this list. Tubi, more popular than Peacock.

tough day for peacock. But you're totally right. And these two things are starting to sit side by side, right? Where you'd like you have Netflix for like the high end premium stuff that I sort of go watch on purpose. And then you have to be in the Roku channel for just like I just just show me something. And I'm like, I'm consistently surprised at how much good programming is available on the fast channels. And

The frequency with which I will look up where I can watch a movie or TV show and they're like, oh, it's available with ads on this free thing. And I'm like, oh, with ads. And then it's like not even that many ads. Like it's they are the best value in streaming. It is really incredible. No question. I do think it's a lot of ads. And I think the problem is we are being.

sort of re-desensitized. That may be true. Do you remember when they first started showing ads on some of these streaming services again and it would be like one 30 second ad two times a show and you'd be like, ah,

I'm going to watch an ad. How dare you? Yeah. And now we're back to like, there was news last week that Amazon doubled its ad inventory. And like, I'm not going to notice. It's just, we're just back to having too many ads all the time. And so the one that kills me on the fast services, and I don't know if they fixed this because I either just stopped noticing it or they got better at it.

But they are just trash at knowing when to insert ads. It's just like something in their system is just like every seven minutes, just do two ads no matter what is going on. And so it'll be in the middle of a person's sentence. That's not good. And it'll just be like, buy Charmin toilet paper. And then it'll go back to the person's sentence in the middle. And I'm just like, this is not a good user experience. I'm fine with the ads, but like, can we put them where they go?

I've still maybe may have been lucky. I've still had the like the other side of the experience for some of them. Like, I can't I can't believe this ads on this thing. And then they will show again. It's like they'll show me 30 second spot at the beginning of something. And then I just watch a two hour movie. And I'm like, I think you guys messed up here. Like there you needed to make me pay for this.

It is the greatest scam in television when they're like, we're going to show you three minutes of ads and then you get the whole movie ad free. And I'm just like, tight. I'm going to leave for three minutes. Yeah. I'm like, you guys, what are we accomplishing here? Didn't know you had this in your catalog. Like you've, you, you just forgot to sell ads against this. Yep. Yeah. I'm just like, I'm going to go make popcorn and then I'm going to come back and I'm going to watch an ad free movie. Like,

You can play an ad on my television while I'm not here. This is part of the thing. Like, it is true. You are not always getting the best program. Sometimes it's great, but sometimes it is. In fact, it's like that. It is the C tier of movies that are on these things sometimes. But you know what? There are a lot of good, bad movies out there. Well, I mean, this is the thing. Like Netflix, you look through Netflix sometimes and you're like, I've seen all of these. I've seen like, and I'm like,

I need that like weird tier of movies that you don't feel like paying for Netflix because not a lot of people are going to watch them. But I've seen it. You know, I know you've got. Yeah, I'm completely with you. I've watched Hot Frosty five times now. Like, let's like, what's next? Okay, first of all, Hot Frosty is great. Justice for Hot Frosty. I said nothing to suggest otherwise. Yeah.

There are very few things in my life that I enjoy as much as that period between Thanksgiving and like December 23rd, where there's just an infinite supply of bad new Christmas movies. If you're ever like, who are these for? The answer is me. I watch them. I am the reason they keep getting made. And let me tell you, this is why streaming is winning.

Cause now there's more crappy stuff for me to watch. It's great times. Okay, wait on the TV is dying. Can I, can I offer you one more quick study on, I'm telling you, this was like an interesting week for, Oh no, TV's dead. So there was, there's this group at, uh, at Oxford called the Reuters Institute for the study of journalism. Uh, and every year they do a big report on sort of the state of journalism in the world. Um, it's, it's real bleak.

It's just what I'll say about that. It's not great to be a journalist. There's a lot of stuff going on. The misinformation is everywhere. But there were a couple of interesting shifts, particularly in the United States, that I thought were very interesting and also very bad news for television. So let me just read you from...

this report. It says the proportion accessing news via social media and video networks in the United States is sharply up at 54%. So 54% of people are getting news via social media and video networks, video networks being like TikTok and stuff like that. That number is actually lower than I would have guessed, but is high. And I think

Probably the younger the audience, the higher that number is going to be. That number, 54%, overtook both TV news, which is 50%, and news websites slash apps, 48%, for the first time. So now, for the first time ever, social media and video networks are the dominant place by which people in the United States...

access their news. And again, the trends suggest that number is only going to get even further away. TV is down 22%. Online news sites are down 21%. Print is down 33%. Like there's only one number going up and it's social media and social networks and everything else. Podcasts, interestingly, hanging in there, doing fairly well and are like more popular in the US than almost anywhere else as a news source.

But again, like TV news dying. Yeah. I mean, this, this makes a lot of sense, right? Like the, the, in the old days, in the old days, right. But a couple of days of in the old years ago, no, but like, right. It was a real thing. Like the evening news was on, you had to have it on if you wanted to do it right. That was also when they showed the weather, if you want to know what the wet, right. And these things become increasingly less essential. Um,

It's funny, like, you know, I don't know at what point in time I would have been like, like, goodness, like you're eschewing the great television news in favor of some. Right. Like, I know this is a commentary on quality, but it is certainly, you know, interesting.

I the rise of I think like social video news like that kind of maybe spells out where some of this viewership is going right. Like, yeah.

And a lot of it is it's super, super creator based in a way that is is very different from the sort of like giant networks that were around for the last generation. Like the whole way people experience this stuff has just changed. Well, that's I actually I have so many questions and I would love to know when somebody says, yes, I get most of my news from TikTok. Like, what does that mean to them? Right. Like, does that mean that they caught a 10 second snippet of a podcast where somebody goes?

You know, they just passed the Genius Act and that's going to regulate stable coins. And then they just like swipe up. Like, is that is that the thing? Is it somebody? Can I tell you a fact that's going to really bum you out? Oh, no. Would you like to hear a list of some of the podcasts that people said they turn to for news? Yeah. Would you like to know the most popular? Is it us? No, it's the Joe Rogan experience.

Which I think fairly neatly answers your question, right? There is also this giant change in what people perceive to be news. News used to be like a sort of put together a report of some kind and you would watch it at 6 p.m. And that's what the news was. And then the news was like,

I don't know, stuff on Twitter and NewYorkTimes.com. And now news is something else. And I feel like I can't even exactly describe what it is, but it is very clear that like, if you think, if you're sitting there being like, I get most of my news from the Joe Rogan experience, that is like a fundamentally different understanding of how to move through the world than I am like fully capable of record. It's so interesting. It's like, I mean, I,

Going to the New York Times in some ways feels like the same audience who likes to play chess. Don't get me wrong, that's me, right? But it's like, yo, you could play Settlers of Catan. You could play Fortnite. Those would be more fun. I get all my news from Fortnite, Jake. Right, and it's like, sure, you could go to the New York Times and play.

It will have great reporting and you'll get things in a timely manner and it will be accurate. Or you can hear a version of it. And I'm putting version in like very serious, like air quotes there on Joe Rogan, like some amount of time later.

And I think that that makes a lot of sense to me, right? Like news just becomes entertainment, right? You're not seeking out news. You are seeking out entertainment and you happen to find out things about what is happening as a result. The problem with it being entertainment is that it is not always accurate, you know,

Listen, this is like a podcast. We're chatting, but we also like we uphold the same like rigorous standards as as we do on the Verge's website. Every single thing we're saying we are making sure is accurate. I have never been wrong on the Verge cast before ever. Listen, our takes our takes no promises there. But, you know, this makes a lot of sense. Right. And I think like to to to go back to your argument about TV, it's like.

Yeah, people are looking for the more entertaining and engaging experiences and TV in a lot of like

Number one, it's old, it's inconvenient. And it's also just like, it is work in a way that flipping through TikTok is actually like pretty fun. Yeah. No, it just, it makes me think of like, do you remember that phase when Facebook went from like a thing that young people did? And then all of a sudden it felt like in the span of a week, everybody's parents joined Facebook. Like, do you remember that moment where all of a sudden-

everyone was on you could just assume other people had Facebook that's kind of what it feels like we're going through right now with a lot of this stuff where it's like none of these trends are surprising like you're saying like this has been happening we've been talking about it but the speed at which it happened and then this sort of immediate flip to like

Just everybody's on TikTok now. It's not like every, your parents are on TikTok now. God, I hope my parents are not on TikTok now. But like many people's parents are on TikTok now. And that thing has just happened. Like the shift is done and it will keep growing. But whatever inflection point we have been looking for,

happened. Like it inflected. And I think now we're just going to have to like, there's going to be so many downstream effects of all of that. Even like the way that these giant news organizations that are used to vast amounts of money being thrown off by their cable news networks, that's going to change. They're going to start thinking differently about how these platforms work. That's already been happening, but it's only going to accelerate. Like

All of this stuff is going to be interesting. Like news was the flagship program on a lot of these big broadcast networks, right? Like this was the primetime show. It happens like around dinnertime or right after dinnertime. So you could all watch it together. So it was there when you got home from work. Well, and then the next generation was 24 hour cable news was like the killer app of cable news or cable. And you look at Netflix. How many news shows do they have?

There's like John Mulaney's show. It's like the closest thing. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like it is just so interesting that news is just not a programming category that people are bothering with. Yeah. Yeah. It's I don't know what to make of any of this. And I think like like you said earlier, none of this is a statement of quality. There's a lot of trash on TV. There's a lot of bad news on TV.

But it is like, it is different now. And it, it happened more quickly, I think, than anybody expected it to. And we're like, it's all going to get faster from here. I think like, I just, I remember talking to folks for this YouTube story that I was writing. And one of the things they said was that when YouTube hit the top of the Nielsen gauge, when it first was on the Nielsen gauge and it was like sort of apples to apples, how big it was as a TV streaming platform, like,

YouTube's entire business shifted because all of a sudden everybody saw it differently. Right. And that is like, it can happen that fast. These people look at these things and they go, Oh, this one is winning and this one is losing. We're going to go on the winning team. And it just, that's how it spirals. It's also really funny how much this, this, this,

Like, this whole streaming thing started as a way to get away from ads and commercials. And actually, it's all just looped back around. And the thing that is driving it is that the ad dollars are now in streaming. Everybody's rushing there because that's where it is. Can't escape it.

No, this is just what we do here. Okay, wait, a couple more streaming things and then we should take a break. One, I think we just need to take like a very brief victory lap because Max or Warner Brothers Discovery announced this week that when you go into the Max app, which is not yet called HBO Max again, but will be soon. Every time I open the app on my TV, I'm like waiting for it to change and it's going to be such a joyful moment when it switches to HBO Max, I'm going to laugh hysterically. But anyway, okay.

now they're doing AI video previews and they're actually going to be mining platform data to figure out which parts of a show or movie they should show you in the preview in order to make you more likely to watch it. And this is an idea that we had on the... We invented this on the Verge cast and no one can convince me otherwise.

I don't remember what it was, but I'll find it. I cannot wait until they start showing the twist at the climax of movies. And people are just like, what the heck, you guys? Do you ever do the thing on YouTube where it has the little graph of how much people play it and you just skip right to the most replayed bit? I only do that. Why would you click anywhere else? Of course.

It's just, you go to the sixth sense. And it's just like, he was dead the whole time. Yeah, like, that of course is what, like, oh, this sounded intriguing. Yeah, the AI is going to be both right and horribly, horribly wrong. And then the other one is, we're going to talk a bunch about meta in the lightning round because there was a really fascinating set of meta news this week. But the streaming thing that it did this week was, yeah,

basically rename and rebrand all of the video on all of meta's products uh particularly on facebook as reels okay so oh my god me and uh barbara krasnov on our team tried to get to the bottom of this a few months ago we were trying to figure out like the different video products and what happened you put and facebook had at least three different video products and i want to be clear they

They looked the same. They worked the same. They were accessible through the same apps. They were just in different places. And we emailed them. And I believe they were like, yeah, some of them will play content from the others and others won't play content from the others. And so there's sort of different silos, but they're not different silos. Jake, are you saying we deserve credit for this too? Did we do this?

When you emailed Meta, somebody sent that to Mark and he was like, that's a good idea, Jake. I should do that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what was ever happening over there. I don't know how they were operating this. It was the most confusing way to operate three video services, I guess. I don't know. I don't know how this emerged. And so, yes, finally, here's the thing. It like.

On one level, Facebook says all video is now Reels. It's like, oh, man. But on the other, it's like, actually, this is so much more sensible than what they were doing beforehand that I'm actually like, thank goodness. Even if this means the Reels situation might be worse because it's going to be flooded with more stuff, it was way too complicated beforehand. Oh, yeah. I think the most...

problematic outcome of this is I think it makes very clear that Facebook's future is just as a video player. Seriously, I think Facebook is going to be groups, it's going to be marketplace, and it's going to be a video player. And I think the idea of Facebook as the repository for all of the video created elsewhere on meta properties is

is their best idea about how to bring people back to Facebook. Will it work? I don't know. But I think that is pretty clearly where we're headed. And this gives them a way to just like pour everything back into Facebook. Because again, Facebook is very important to Mark Zuckerberg in a way that I don't think any of the other products are. And they will do everything they can to get people opening the Facebook app as often as possible. Just one other thought on this is I think

It's very important to Facebook and to Meta at large to be competitive as a video platform. And...

I've written about this a bunch, but like anything you can do to juice view counts, you will do. And so for Meta to take all of these disparate video platforms and just roll them into one is going to make all of the numbers look bigger and it's going to make it a much more compelling appearing creator platform. It's going to make it seem like reach is much bigger. And so like one of the things Mark Zuckerberg has been saying is he wants Facebook to be culturally relevant again.

I think that might be impossible, but I think you can juice video numbers in such a way that will suggest cultural relevance. And that might be all you need if the goal is to just make a lot of money. This tracks me. I think I'm...

Maybe I'm underestimating them. I'm not going to necessarily work in a good quality way. But I think this actually loops all the way back to the YouTube TV stuff that we were talking about. Do you want to juice engagement? Do you want to juice time spent engagement?

Have people watch videos all day, right? YouTube, they changed their algorithm to promote longer videos. Okay, great. Now the videos are longer. Now they're better on TV. Now people are watching more YouTube on TV. You should make your videos even longer because people are sitting back and watching them.

It is just a cycle that keeps going. And now this leads to YouTube usage being super high. And part of this is not necessarily necessarily because people are just changing their watching habits. It's because there is just literally longer things that they can watch on YouTube in a way that there weren't five or 10 years ago.

And so, yeah, like Facebook, you want more people using Facebook for longer? Great. Play them more videos. That seems like the only idea anyone has in the tech industry right now is like do AI to it or more videos. Those are the moves. That's what we're doing here. Those are our new Virtua segments. Doing AI, more videos. That's not bad. Our growth is going to just go through the roof. Everybody's going to hate it, but they're going to be stuck here with us.

All right. We need to take one more break. Then we're going to come back to the lightning round. Be right back. Support for this show comes from Salesforce. You might remember a time not long ago when AI wasn't all that helpful. But today, AgentForce, the powerful AI from Salesforce, can analyze, decide, and execute tasks autonomously, operating at speeds and scales no human workforce could match.

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I feel like you get better at that every week. I mean, I'm trying. This is going very, this is great. It's good practice. Also very cool vert shirt from Eric. Uh, this is not a tease of merch that we were bringing back, but I would like to, and maybe we'll try vintage. All right. So since Neil is not here, we're going to, we're going to skip Brendan Carr as a dummy for a week. We're going to give Brendan two weeks to be a dummy and,

But there is one tiny bit of news that is related to our main man, Brendan, that we should just we should just mention very briefly, which is that the Senate confirmed Olivia Trustee, who was Trump's pick to be the new commissioner of the FCC. The vote was, let's see, 53 to 45.

And now this means there are three people on the FCC instead of two and kind of just one because Ana Gomez is just like running around telling everybody that Brendan Carr is a monster and waiting to get fired. Hooray. Great job, everybody. Good government.

Yeah. This actually has a big impact, right? There is now a quorum again, right? Because before they fired too many people. And so there just weren't enough people for the FCC to actually officially legally get things done. Now there's three of them. Now they can. This is sort of, this is like a slightly weird process. FCC commissioners are usually...

uh nominated and confirmed in pairs there's usually one democrat and one republican at the same time um now maybe you can make the argument that okay there already is uh anna gomez and there's an odd number so maybe that's why um i think some people are definitely a little worried about the fact that they only did a republican this time um the the this is actually like very strange to me um but the communications act which which established fcc um it

It's a legal requirement that there can only be three people out of the five commissioners. Only three of them can be of the same party.

So that there is some limit to your ability to stack the commission. That being said, could the other two people be like the wig party? I don't think anybody's tested that yet. So we'll find out. But yes, now the FCC back at it. Yeah. I mean, can I just can I just read you a quote?

from our story, which I feel like just perfectly, it says all the things that I would like to say much better than I would say them. So Lauren Finer wrote a story for us about Olivia Trusty and the nomination process, the confirmation process. And she got a quote from a guy named Matt Wood, who is the VP of Policy and General Counsel of a nonpartisan group called Free Press Action. I'm just going to read you the whole quote, and then we're going to move on.

He says,

I agree with every single word of that. And that seems to be what is going on. Let's move on. We'll, we'll come back to this. Just end on that light. I just, yeah. Brendan Carr remains a dummy. We'll get back to this next week. And now an empowered one. Now, now a dummy with, yeah, someone else who can sign the papers for him. Um,

Next up, we got a little tiny nugget of maybe kind of news about Siri. Everybody is doing the developer beta stuff. Liquid Glass is bad. They're out there doing more interviews about iPadOS, and we continue to hear spring 2026 for better Siri. I just want to put that out there. Do you buy it? No. No.

I thought there'd be some equivocation there. Um, yeah, I don't, I don't either. Right. Like screen 2026, that sounds like maybe an internal target. Um, it, it just, it also just seems very weird to me, the idea that they would drop such a major feature so late in operating systems release cycle. Um,

I think if, if you were to say, would I bet on fall 2026 with like the next round of software, I would say more likely because it seems possible to me that there's going to have, they will have had a lot of time to do the work. They, they are going to ship some of the features, but not all of them. Like I think, I think it's possible. Developers will have had another full year to do the app intent stuff that I think is going to make a lot of this stuff work. Like we talked about last week, uh,

Maybe, maybe I would believe that. But I think you're right. The idea that they would just like ship this thing in March as a like point four update does not. I don't know. Just doesn't pass the test for me. I don't buy it. Neither do I. One thing that I think is also going to be really tricky for Apple going forward is, you know, they have been breaking from this a little bit, but traditionally they release software once a year.

Right. And they have some small updates here and there. And that has been breaking. That has been breaking a little bit where they'll do like, you know, a little bit of an update in the fall, maybe a little bit in the spring. But basically it all comes once a year. And I think for the AI world in particular, which is moving so fast and which is seeing like some really material leaps from release to release where it's like something can go from like, oh, I can never do that. It's so broken to like, oh, it can like.

kind of do that. Which, to be clear, is meaningful. In a couple months' time, like, Apple really puts itself at a pretty big... Like,

Set aside that they have to just make Siri work, which apparently is a monumental task. Right. Just being able to keep up with all the other, you know, AI players, they're putting themselves at a really big disadvantage with the way that they make their products and ship so infrequently. So I look forward to seeing if they can.

meet this reported internal date. I suspect later in 2026 feels more likely to me, just given how much they've been struggling so far.

I was talking to somebody the other day about all of this and people have been throwing out the, you know, they should just kill the Siri brand thing for a while. And I just asked somebody like, well, would you know, you're a product person. Would you get rid of the Siri brand? And what would you rebrand it to? And they were like, dude, spotlight. It's sitting right there. People like spotlight. People know what it is. People understand how it works. It's not trying to do everything, but it is trying to do all the things that people actually want.

just call it Spotlight. Like you don't even have to retire Siri, just keep adding features to Spotlight. And I was like, oh my God, that's it. Like, I don't think that's going to happen, but I kind of think that is a brilliant idea that I wish I had had on my own. All right, next up, some news that caused a surprising amount of both consternation and funny jokes on the internet this week. WhatsApp is officially getting ads. Ads are coming to

Let's see, if I remember this correctly, there are going to be ads in the status sort of story screens that I sincerely believe no one ever looks at. There are going to be promoted channels in the channels interface, which I think is actually growing pretty fast. From what I hear, channels have actually been a pretty big hit, especially globally. So notably, the place that ads are not is in your chats. But this feels to me like...

Maybe not the beginning of the end of WhatsApp, but the beginning of a very different WhatsApp. Well, this is also right. Like the founders famously never wanted ads in the app. And like,

And look, like they had just watched Fight Club. They were like kind of like on one and they're like ads are the death of humanity. It was like a little dramatic. And like it's it's, you know, ads bring us a lot of free stuff. It's all right. But it is true. Right. I think they did like they did have a pretty singular point, which is that like.

A chat app is really intimate and personal. These are all of your friends. They're people you know and care about. Having ads inserted between that is actually pretty disruptive. It's jarring. It changes the experience in a material way. And while Meta has not yet, you know, gone and done that, you know, it's starting. It's happening. They went, hey, we need to make some more money off WhatsApp. How are we going to juice it? The obvious answer, it's ads. Right.

Right. Yeah, I mean, there was the business chat thing that I think has turned into some of a business for Meta, but this is also like...

Clearly, this is the thing that Meta does best is ads at massive scale. And this is also the thing that Meta is best equipped to do from an advertising perspective, which is advertise for businesses next to other businesses. That's what Facebook ads are. This makes perfect sense to me from a Meta business perspective. Of course, this is what you would do. And it is probably the least intrusive thing they could have done in WhatsApp.

But that's a really high bar, right? Like it's all pretty intrusive. And I think there was an interesting thing that it had to note explicitly, which is that it won't use your messages or your information to inform and tune the ads. And this is the like perception change that I think is so hard to do after the fact, which is come in and say,

Yes, of course, we've been reading all of your messages, but we're not going to do anything with them. And even though like I actually I have no reason not to believe Meta's lines about encryption. There are a million conspiracy theories out there. But if there has been a proof that WhatsApp messages are not encrypted, I have not seen it. So I will assume that they are.

But you don't, that perception goes away quickly. This sense of like, I am in an actually private place, which already became harder for WhatsApp to do when it was bought by Meta, a company that is not famous for being a good citizen of your privacy. To then say, there's ads here,

But we still don't. We're not looking. We're just putting ads. It's just a constant reminder of who is here with me in this place where I am supposed to be able to be by myself. No, that's so real. Like everybody thinks Facebook is like tapping their microphone. And it's like they just know everything.

everything else about you, right? They don't need to read your chat. Yeah, Metaparty doesn't have to read your WhatsApp. Right, right. They don't have to. They already know this stuff and now it's going to be very like abundantly clear how much they know about you. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's pushing in this very interesting like Snapchat-y kind of direction, which is very funny because

It just absolutely decimated Snapchat as a product, but they're trying to do some Snapchat stuff. But the last thing I want to say on this before we move on is just genuine kudos to Signal for immediately after this happened, screenshotting

an announcement of it and saying, this was Meredith Whitaker, the president of Signal, who said, use Signal. We promise no AI clutter, no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. We lead, we don't follow. Heart emoji.

Nailed it. No, like, it is very funny how much Signal's marketing is just written for itself. And they just, every time they're like, oh, look, somebody did a bad thing. We won't do that. Use Signal. That's their whole marketing message. And it just keeps working. And it's very funny. And I enjoy it very much. All right, a couple more, and then we should get out of here. There was this interesting change while we're talking about ads to Reddit this week that I found really fascinating. Did you...

track this at all? What do you mean by track this? Did you pay attention to what Reddit is doing at all? Reddit ads are not required to be interesting to you, but I'm happy to explain it to you if you'd like to. No, tell me. So Reddit basically forever trying to grow as a business and has realized that the best thing it has going for it is all of the posts and comments on Reddit. So Reddit announced two things for advertisers this week. One of them is that it will basically let you take all

all of the insights and all of the information from all of Reddit and use it to inform your ads, which is the sort of thing that is like true on lots of platforms, but is again, the kind of thing that

Reddit went out of its way to be like, we are a user-friendly and moderation-friendly platform. When Facebook was like, screw you, we sell ads based on all your stuff. Reddit is just fully doing that. But the thing that I find even wilder is that now if you're an advertiser, you can have an ad on Reddit and then right underneath it, Reddit will dynamically AI-driven-y

place positive Reddit posts about your product that you're trying to advertise. So they will just find people who said nice things about you on Reddit and just dump it right underneath your ad all over Reddit. That feels, that feels weird. I, it's interesting when I saw the headline for this, I, part of this feels genius and part of this feels, feels really not good. Like, um,

It makes sense to me if, you know, you're Mercedes and somebody's like, check out my sick Mercedes. Great, like go promote that. That seems cool. And like, you know, maybe that's a little weird if you're the guy who gets promoted. But just like streaming a bunch of random comments from out of context, that feels off. And I feel like users are...

are going to feel betrayed because you don't you do not believe that your comment is going to be used in that way. Right. It is meant to be in a specific spot for a specific community. And I think once you start moving that around, and particularly once you start putting dollars behind it that you the user are not seeing, that starts to get really uncomfortable really fast. So I understand why Reddit is doing this. There's like something I

I think very smart about, um, Hey, there's people saying nice things about you and like having fun with your stuff. Why don't you like just promote that instead of putting a boring ad that nobody wants to read like that. But, um, yeah, they have to be really careful. Like these, you know, community is everything for Reddit. And this is a thing that is disruptive of that in a, in a very real way. Yeah. I would just encourage everybody to go look at the screenshot in Jay's story, which we'll put in the show notes. It's a lucid air ad, uh,

that just looks like a normal ad. It has a picture of the car. It looks like a Reddit ad. And then right below it, there's an AI summary that says, Redditors show excitement for Lucid Air's performance, quality, and innovation. They also appreciate the company's service and delivery. And then it has a side-scrolling list of...

presumably positive posts about Lucid. This is, I'm looking at this GIF. This is the worst possible version of this feature. Like I just, I don't understand this at all. It feels so disingenuous and like not representative of what is actually great about Reddit. No, no, this is, this doesn't make sense at all. Yeah. And this feels terrible if you're one of these users too. Like it looks like you made an ad.

Yeah. All right. Two more things. Let me make sure you get out of here. First thing, the Senate passed the genius bill, a terrific, terrific backer name to get to genius. I'm very proud of this for everybody. And basically what it does is it establishes a regulatory framework for stable coins and crypto tokens, basically so that private companies can now launch digital coins pegged to the value of the U.S. dollar. Yeah.

As far as I can tell, Jake, this is a huge win for crypto people, right? Like everybody seems very excited that this is happening. Yeah, I think the idea is that it legitimizes stablecoins. It also means that the U.S. is not going to, you know, alternatively crack down on them, right? I think that's the bigger fear. And this is saying, nope, go ahead, go do your thing. I read through some of the bill and it does put some like, I think, you know,

know, useful requirements in place, right? It requires that you actually back your crypto token with, you know, real assets. It requires that once a month you publish what those assets are. So there is some transparency and there is some requirements here. I would say this still feels like a, you know, product in need of a market to me, but

But yeah, this is just a win for the crypto industry. It is an allowance for them to make these tokens. Theoretically, it will make them less scammy. Theoretically. Yeah. I would encourage anyone who wants to know how this stuff works to read about Tether, which is a really fascinating stablecoin and probably the most successful one we've had so far. Has also had a just long running series of shenanigans around it. And I think it's a good...

It's a good place to understand how this works and where it can both go really well and get really weird. But yeah, the incursion of crypto people into the government continues apace. And one of the interesting things about this was a lot of the Democrat opposition to this bill has been about essentially like Trump coin exists. And now this makes...

Donald Trump just lets him regulate his own money now. And that's a strange thing. And so we will we will have to see how that shakes out. Let's end on some better news, which I am much more unabashedly excited about, which is new Fediverse stuff for threads and news.

And normally this is where Nila and I just like gas each other up about how great the Fediverse is. My question for you, Jake, is are you excited about this at all? That's so funny. I was going to flip this back around because I'm the person who's I I'm a little more skeptical. I was going to ask you. It seems to me.

that some of the Fediverse momentum has maybe slowed down. And admittedly, this is a pretty big announcement because I think when Threads launched, I think it was at peak Fediverse hype. And they're like, we're going to be one the same with the Fediverse. And then last year, they're like, there's some Fediverse if you want it. And now maybe there's finally a little bit more Fediverse. Yeah.

But it does feel like in some ways, it now feels like things are even more fragmented to me, right? Like nowadays, we're like blue sky has a personality. You know what you get on blue sky. Threads is a personality. You know what you get on threads. I don't know what's happening on Mastodon, but it is there. It very much has its own personality. Yeah. Very much so. I think like, honestly, this is, it is encouraging to me to see that threads is still there.

pushing forward on this because I could very easily have seen them just being like, and letting it drop. But I am curious from your perspective, somebody who is following the Fediverse stuff much more closely, how you feel about the momentum for the Fediverse right now? I'm torn. So the news, we should say, was essentially now there is a

semi dedicated feed in the threads app for Fediverse posts. And I say semi dedicated because it's it's a feed within the following feed. So if you want to get there, you have to open the app, go to your following feed, and then there's a little menu at the top that shows you Fediverse posts, and you tap that and you go to the Fediverse feed. So it's it's there and it is like front ish and center ish. But it's not like full Fediverse integration with the for you feed on threads. But

but it is a meaningful integration of like, now you can see Fediverse posts inside of threads. And that's, that's a real thing. Um, what I find more, uh, maybe not alarming, but potentially worrisome is, uh, talking to Peter Cottle, who's a software engineer at meta working on a lot of this stuff and seems to be kind of the, the spokesperson for a lot of metas threads work and Fediverse work, uh,

Meta doesn't seem to know exactly what it wants to do here, which I think is really interesting. There's one vision of the Fediverse that is like perfectly interoperable, interconnected everything, right? Like I can post from one place to another place. You can like it and I'll see it. And we can have a sort of cross-platform conversation. And like, what if Facebook was the internet is like that way of thinking about it, right? And that is...

but also complicated. And then there's another version of the Fediverse that is basically like there are just a million things in a bucket, right? Everything is content and newsletters are a type of post and image...

images are a type of post and videos are a type of post and podcasts are a type of post. And all those posts go into one giant database of posts. And then the cool thing about the Fediverse is you can build any kind of app you want to both create and consume those posts. That's a very different idea than the sort of completely interoperable social network, right? It's just an it's a like, content machine that is not run by one company. Both very cool.

Very different. And meta does not seem to know which of those it wants threads to be. So right now it's much more like the Fediverse feed in threads is basically like an RSS reader for Fediverse posts. And that's not nothing, but it's not a completely interoperable social network. And then on the flip side, they're starting to do some of this work where like if I post and you like something in a Fediverse app that comes back to threads,

But that continues to be kind of messy and weird. And so I just, we're at this point now where somebody needs to decide what we're doing here. And I think I have thought for the last year, it would be threads that just by virtue of its size and by virtue of meta's importance to the internet,

threads would dictate a lot of things. And from what I've heard from Fediverse people, the threads folks have actually been pretty good citizens of this. They have worked with the protocol. They have played by the rules. They have been useful members of different systems and actually part of meetings rather than just like coming in and dictating how all this is going to work because platform's huge. But at some point, somebody has to just look at it and be like, here's what this is for.

And I still don't see that. And I worry even talking to them that they don't know what it is. And until someone decides what it is, it's going to keep kind of being nothing. And part of me is like at this point now where...

two and a half years into the sort of post Twitter era. And it doesn't feel like we've made progress. And I'm sort of like, what if we just had an answer? Like, I don't even, I don't even care what it is. Just pick one of the things and start doing it in a like powerful mainstream way.

And instead, we're kind of like we're half answering 100 different questions. No, I think that makes a lot of sense. And this is what I think is so strange about the current state of the Fediverse. In some ways,

it feels like there are more Fediverse products and in some ways they feel more siloed to me. Right. Somehow we've ended up in a universe where I can go on these different networks that accomplish the same thing that are all allegedly interoperable. But most of which are basically just the one network. And, you know, I think with threads, it's like,

just do it right like what like you have this technology you have a giant team just do it right um and i don't quite know why they haven't i think maybe this is because they haven't quite figured out

how they want to interact with the Fediverse, what they want their Fediverse input to be. And, you know, this is the thing, right? It comes from a very big company that has its own interests. And there's a lot that they have at stake there. And so it makes sense that they're taking a slow approach. But I think that also just makes it so much more complicated for every other player in the space, because you just don't know what they're going to do when they're going to do it. And I think, you

you know, this, this does feel meaningful to me. It feels really meaningful to me that they are continuing to build this, that you actually will be able to get Fediverse stuff. And it's just one of the things where it's like, Oh, it's in a sub menu. Right. It just feels like it's very hard for me to imagine Mark Zuckerberg, who is desperately committed to get people back on Facebook and integrate ads everywhere. Also being super enthusiastic about the idea of,

more interoperability with other platforms, right? And I just, I've hit this point now where like, as far as I can tell, which is frankly not very far,

To do the Fediverse inside of meta is one of those things you're doing and kind of hoping Mark doesn't notice. And that's just never where you want to be with this kind of thing. And so I sincerely hope I'm wrong, and I sincerely hope there's a lot more coming. But this is one of those things that I'm psyched this is as far as it has gone, but it doesn't feel like...

It doesn't feel like enough to me yet. Yep. All right, one more, and then we're going to go. All right. And this one more is a thing we just published today. We should say we're recording this on Wednesday because it's Juneteenth on Thursday. And today, Antonio DiBenedetto posted his review of the Framework Laptop 12 device that I have been personally very excited about. And boy, is it exactly what I expected it to be. Yeah.

It's so this thing is like the framework laptop. It's $800. It's cool and pink and colorful and pastel. It's very repairable and upgradable, which is frameworks whole thing. This was designed to be the like fun approachable version of what so far has been like a very nerdy brand of computers. And it's like it's awesome.

But it's not very good all at the same time. And that is like exactly what I assumed it would be and kind of a bummer. Honestly, this is exactly what I expected. And I think like what it needs to be right. Like if if if you haven't seen what the framework laptop 12 looks like, like, please Google it is the most delightful looking laptop. It really is these pastel like pinks and aquas. It is like one of the most fun pieces of tech that has come out in a long time.

It's great. And I think if you would just replace this with like a normal beige boring thing, you'd be like, okay. But I think so much of this thing is the ethos, right? Like it is repairable. It is upgradable and it is fun. And you know what? Is it a perfect laptop? Absolutely not. But I know like,

It couldn't have been. It was not going to be. But I think you can buy this thing and feel good about it. And I love that. Like, I love that they delivered on, I think, what they were promising here. And there were...

uh a lot of things that framework didn't do well here that are actually pretty easy to do well uh which i find sort of encouraging right like the webcam is pretty bad and the the speakers are extremely whatever and it needs more ram and a better processor right like a the beauty of this thing is you can upgrade some of those things yourself over time but b those are things that

a company like Framework can just go do better next time. So I think to me, I look at this and I'm like, okay, this is not the thing that I wanted it to be. The performance isn't amazing. The keyboard isn't amazing. There's just like a lot of sort of near misses, but they all feel correctable. And I think Antonio's takeaway was very much like, this is a great idea. This is a thing that should exist. This will appeal to lots of people.

It just, A, we need framework to deliver on the upgrade path here and like make this thing last a long time, which the company has done a pretty good job of so far, but also like stay at this one, right? Like keep making adorable laptops and a couple of them from now, you'll have one that's awesome. Like, you know what this is making me think of actually is, do you remember the Google Pixelbook? That was the very thin, like kind of white and gray laptop that Google made. I loved that thing to,

That thing had some fans. One of my absolute favorite laptops of all time. And the only downside of it was it had a just big, giant monster bezel and looked sort of cheap and ridiculous as a result. And I was just like, God, I can't wait for the second one of these when they have like another generation to rev this and fix it. And then they never made another one because Rick Ostril hates me personally. And-

And this is the thing. It's like, you're, you're, you're on the right track. You've, you've done the hard part, go do the easy parts. And then this thing is going to be awesome. And that is like, I really hope framework six to this because there's something very, very cool here.

I'm excited. I like framework has been like kind of on a roll putting out some cool hardware. And yeah, if they can keep at this and like keep doing this on a regular basis. Oh, man, it's gonna be really fun. And I do feel like we've spent 10 years waiting for somebody to make like a fun, not overpowered, but not underpowered, just like solid across the board.

$800 laptop. We've waited, like Microsoft has tried it a bunch of times with various devices, hasn't gone really well. Dell keeps trying weird stuff that doesn't work. Like this is a thing that should exist. And it feels like framework is like closer to it than anybody who's been in a long time. And I would very much like it to work. I just want a pink laptop. Like I don't think I knew I wanted a pink laptop until I read Antonio's review. And I was like, this color scheme like really works for me. It really works. Yeah. All right.

We have gone way over. Jake, it's been a delight to do this with you. This is good. I'm now like nearing the end of my time on the Verge cast before I go on parental leave and I'm starting to have real like

graduation sadness. It's like, I'm never going to see my friends again. This is, this is, this is terrible. We're taking your keys away. You're not going to be allowed back in the zoom. I honestly think it's possible that I'm just never going to be allowed to do the Verge cast again. Everybody's going to realize it's much better once I'm gone. And it's just going to be four hours of Brendan Carr as a dummy every week. And that's just what we're doing here.

But as always, thank you for doing this. We'll have lots more next week. More stuff on MVNOs. There's some Tesla stuff potentially happening this weekend that we will cover in one way or another next week. But until then, keep it locked. 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. ♪

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea. When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back. You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea. It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine. You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next. The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea. Time for a tea break? Time for a Pure Leaf.