Welcome to tech in 2025, where everything's made up and the numbers don't matter. Nilay, David, and The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes start the show by running down the latest tariff news, the uncertain future facing tech companies of all sizes, and what we're learning so far about how they're responding. After that, the hosts talk about a big week in AI news, including Meta's sketchy benchmark numbers and the latest damning reporting about the future of Siri. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a Dummy, along with some news about the TikTok ban and the Pixel 9A. And then some more tariff numbers, because they just never stop.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of being nominated for the Webby Awards.
00:00:06Yeah.
00:00:07It's good. It's very exciting. David, tell the people what's going on here.
00:00:11I thought you were going to say we weren't nominated for the Webby Awards,
00:00:13but we cover the podcasts that were nominated for the Webby Awards.
00:00:17Yeah, it's not us. It's everyone else.
00:00:20The VergeCast is nominated for Best Technology Podcast, Webby Awards. It's very exciting.
00:00:25We care a lot about this award in particular because it is voted on by
00:00:30people like this. I care so much more about what people listening to this think than
00:00:34random, fusty judges. I like to think of it like the Academy, where it's just a bunch of
00:00:40old white dudes who haven't seen a movie in 50 years. I don't care about them.
00:00:44Vote for us so that we can win and we can crush our competition.
00:00:47Our competition, by the way, is lovely people, including the EFF, and I want to destroy them.
00:00:53So we'll put a link in the show notes. I think there's another week to vote.
00:00:56We'll put a link in the show notes. We'll put a link in the container post on the site.
00:01:00But please go vote for us. And I think you can vote for us multiple times. It's like once a day
00:01:04or something you can vote. So like make it your homepage and vote for us every single time you
00:01:09think about it and we will be eternally grateful.
00:01:11Have you been dying for an AI agent project? Here's one.
00:01:15Can you vibe code your way to a Webby victory is a very good question.
00:01:19That's actually a perfect VergeCast episode title.
00:01:22I want to be very clear about that. And that's what we're going to do for the rest of the show.
00:01:26We're going to live vibe code. I've opened Claude.
00:01:30And David's going to open Cursor. And then we're going to race.
00:01:32I love it.
00:01:33By the way, I'm your friend Eli. That's David Pierce.
00:01:35Hello.
00:01:35Jake Kastronakis is here. Hey, buddy.
00:01:37Hey, good to be here.
00:01:38All right. We've got basically three lightning rounds. That's how David has structured this.
00:01:42Although I will say this first lightning round is just a segment about tariffs.
00:01:45We're just calling it a lightning round to pretend it's not just a full segment about tariffs.
00:01:49Yeah, pretty much. There's just it's like it's it's tariffs is one of those things that it is.
00:01:54It contains multitudes. And so it's like, it's true.
00:01:57Lightning round is like, let's just talk about it all very fast.
00:02:00Lightning is the speed at which these tariff changes have come this week.
00:02:04Like, I'm afraid to say a single number on this podcast because we're recording Thursday afternoon.
00:02:09It's going to come out Friday morning. Anything could happen in those like 12 hours.
00:02:13It's so true.
00:02:14My favorite thing about tariffs, and this is very inside baseball editory stuff, is we often assign stories that are like, here's how something happened.
00:02:22Right. Like, here's the process by which go 90 went 90.
00:02:25And like, we talked to all the insiders and like this happened on this day.
00:02:29This happened on the next day.
00:02:30Here's the big decision they made.
00:02:32You see these stories everywhere.
00:02:34Whenever a big decision is made or there's a deal that's done, someone gets what's called the tick tock.
00:02:39And it's just like, here's all the stuff that happened in order.
00:02:41And those are really fun to read.
00:02:43They're really fun to write.
00:02:44The funniest thing about the tariff situation is that all the major newspapers tried to do a tick tock story of what is by all accounts, pure chaos.
00:02:54And so they tried to impose this structure on like, then the treasury secretary did drugs and called all of his friends and his friends were mad.
00:03:03And they called Susie Wiles.
00:03:04And you're like, this isn't a process story because there's no process.
00:03:09But that's very much the, like, the, like, Cuban beings have a desire for it to make sense.
00:03:16And this refuses to make sense.
00:03:18Charlie Wurtzel, our friend over at The Atlantic, wrote a thing earlier this week comparing kind of the response and conversation around all of this to QAnon, which I love.
00:03:28Right. And it is, it is exactly that thing.
00:03:30It is this relentless belief that there is a plan, that somebody is doing things on purpose, that this is thought out, that there is a, there is a bigger thing going on.
00:03:39And just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.
00:03:41When the blindingly obvious truth is that there is no plan, everybody in charge is an idiot and nothing is being considered or thought out.
00:03:50We just basically, it's like Trump and three people in a room and then a bunch of people around the government who just kind of let him do it.
00:03:57And that, that's everything.
00:03:59Yeah.
00:03:59It's unreal.
00:04:00I think it was Bill Ackman had a tweet that was like, this is the art of the deal.
00:04:03And it's like, bro, what deal?
00:04:05Like, no deal was made.
00:04:07I, like, I'm not even arguing that it was a good deal or a bad deal.
00:04:10I'm asking you to identify the deal.
00:04:12Yeah.
00:04:12Uh, okay.
00:04:13But because it is lightning round, the conceit of a lightning round is that it's like lots of different things jumbled up and we just move through them.
00:04:20So I'm going to start the show somewhere else.
00:04:22It's not tariffs.
00:04:23And we can see if we can get to tariffs.
00:04:27You, you, you're with me.
00:04:29Okay.
00:04:29Just, yeah, we're good.
00:04:30Okay.
00:04:30Just a gesture.
00:04:32Oh, interesting.
00:04:32Cause I, I put this here at the top for you because this is the, this is the most important news in the world.
00:04:37If you're an Eli Patel.
00:04:38And so this is where we start.
00:04:40But if you can walk me from here to tariffs, I will be very impressed.
00:04:43I think I can get there.
00:04:44Okay.
00:04:45So as you know, I divide the eras of human existence into eras of Sony providing extra base to its speakers.
00:05:00So I was born of history.
00:05:02I was born in the mega base era, which I think we all recall is when America was great.
00:05:08The eighties and early nineties, right?
00:05:10The mega base button was on the Walkman.
00:05:12We were riding high.
00:05:14Top gun had just come out.
00:05:16You all know what I'm talking about.
00:05:18But we've, you've seen the memes.
00:05:20That's when, I mean, that's, that was it.
00:05:22That was the peak.
00:05:23We were all young.
00:05:24In the mid 2000s, Sony moved to the extra base era, which I believe tracks with our decline.
00:05:33It was really weird.
00:05:34You get, you get rid of this thing.
00:05:35People love you.
00:05:36Add a button called extra base.
00:05:37No one knows what it means.
00:05:38It's going away.
00:05:39They've abandoned that into the ULT power sound era.
00:05:43So that's where we are now.
00:05:45Do we left mega base behind?
00:05:47We're in ULT power.
00:05:48We've talked about this a lot in the news is that there are now three new party speakers from Sony, which is further evidence that the market for giant party speakers with LED lights around the drivers is so huge that Sony is continually investing in new ones as are all of its competitors.
00:06:11And this market is bigger than anyone can see.
00:06:13You know how they're like, we're tracking this outbreak, but it's much bigger because just based on the time, this is what we can just see.
00:06:20This is the tip of the iceberg.
00:06:22I'm saying the party speaker market is gigantic.
00:06:25It is under remarked upon.
00:06:26And it's just the evidence that there keep being new ones that let us know it's happening.
00:06:32I'm curious for your experience here.
00:06:33And maybe this, maybe this just says something about me, but not once have I walked into a friend's home and seen a large party speaker.
00:06:41The size of a piece of furniture.
00:06:42And yet they're like cryptids.
00:06:44Have you seen Bigfoot?
00:06:46Where are they?
00:06:47Where are they going?
00:06:48I don't know.
00:06:49They're everywhere.
00:06:50Malls.
00:06:51They're filling up all the empty malls.
00:06:52It's taco shacks.
00:06:54It's weird vendors in malls.
00:06:56It's it's car dealership.
00:06:58They're everywhere.
00:06:59And I know this because every single company now has a full lineup in sizes ranging from like shelf size to to medium sized child and they keep revving them.
00:07:13So the new one is a ULT tower nine.
00:07:16It replaces, by the way, the Sony SRX SXV 900.
00:07:20It's a classic 25 hours of battery playback, a quick charge option that has three hours of playback after only 10 minutes of charging and is $900.
00:07:28It's a tough, like 10 minute party foul to charge the speaker, but then you get it back for three hours.
00:07:35The ULT tower nine offers both ULT one mode, which delivers deeper, lower frequency base and ULT two mode, which provides powerful punchy base.
00:07:45Who's using ULT one?
00:07:48Yeah, I don't know.
00:07:48Let's be real.
00:07:49I think this, this suggests that the next era is going to be the one that is deeper, lower frequency, powerful punchy base.
00:07:55All ULT three is the next phase.
00:08:00It does appear that it also has a HDMI in or optical in, so you can connect it to a TV and it has improved 360 degree LED lighting that can illuminate more floor space.
00:08:11It's $900.
00:08:12It lasts for 25 hours in battery.
00:08:13If you don't need the battery, there's a $750 version that is AC only, but you need the battery.
00:08:18Like you, you can't party a speaker without a battery.
00:08:21This is evidence that the ULT era is not only here, but like it's secretly dominant.
00:08:28Like lots of people have ULT buttons in their home.
00:08:31And I know this because Sony keeps investing in making the speakers and they're getting more extravagant and more expensive.
00:08:37They're moving up market.
00:08:38It's true.
00:08:39It's not, no one wants them.
00:08:40We have to make them cheaper.
00:08:41It's everyone wants them.
00:08:43They cost $900 that can last for a full day and illuminate your home.
00:08:46What if it was taller?
00:08:48I just want to say before we move on and you, you, you're stalling walking us to tariffs from here, but I encourage everyone to click on this story and look at the pictures because these things are so large that photographs of them look like the speaker has been photoshopped into some other scene in such a large way that it, it, it can't possibly make sense.
00:09:10It really is like, it's, it's the size of like a 10 year old and they're just stuck in here.
00:09:15It's like, it's like an alien form just being photoshopped into this photo of a concert.
00:09:21The other very funny thing about these photos is Sony is by far the most restrained in design when it comes to these products and they still look bananas.
00:09:29Yeah.
00:09:30It's very good.
00:09:31All right.
00:09:32So here that's the ULT tower nine, which has both ULT one and ULT two modes.
00:09:39This is where we are in our ULT era.
00:09:42Eventually there's something else will come, but I'm telling you, I was born in the mega base era and I, I yearn, I yearn for the simple pleasures of my youth.
00:09:50And instead I have the ULT tower nine.
00:09:51The reason I bring this up is because it doesn't appear that Sony increased the prices of these products in response to tariffs, still $900.
00:10:01But now you get two ULT modes and a winder and a wider floor illumination.
00:10:07But last week we talked about the Bravia two, two Sony's new TVs and the Bravia eight, two incredible names.
00:10:16I don't know if you saw this, by the way, we got a bunch of emails from people who were like, I straight up didn't believe you that it was called the two, two.
00:10:21So I went and looked and I would not like to apologize for not believing you about this stupid name.
00:10:26Yeah.
00:10:26One person was like, it's obviously the Bravia two Mark two.
00:10:29And then like, no, it's not just the two, two.
00:10:31It's the Bravia two, two.
00:10:33So the ULT speakers, apparently inflation proof, recession proof, tariff proof, same price.
00:10:41TV is not so much.
00:10:43So it appears that the Bravia eight to the high end OLED, which replaces the A95L in a perfect naming scheme.
00:10:51Is going to be $500 more in the United States than it was last year.
00:10:55And the price is unchanged in Canada.
00:10:57So you can already see the tariff impact there.
00:11:00The other TVs are also going up.
00:11:03So Sony is already beginning to bake in some tariff pricing.
00:11:06Samsung on the other hand announced pricing on the frame pro and it is just expensive, but it doesn't appear the price has gone up.
00:11:13The 65 inch frame pro is $2,200.
00:11:16This is for a TV that still has edge backlighting.
00:11:19They're just lying and saying that it's mini led because it's mini led is on the bottom edge.
00:11:24And that I would point out to anyone who is listening.
00:11:27Uh, Neil's argument for the frame TV always ends with, you don't want a TV.
00:11:32And now, uh, actually what you do want is a $2,200.
00:11:35People buy these things.
00:11:39Yeah.
00:11:39And then they use them to show our work while they watch TikTok.
00:11:42And now you can do that for $2,200.
00:11:44If you are, I will say, I, I'm very proud of our audience.
00:11:47Because all of the comments on this are, I thought this was a good TV of how expensive it was.
00:11:53And it turns out to be a shit TV.
00:11:56I've never been happier.
00:11:57The audience has started to figure it out.
00:11:59Uh, the reason the Samsung one is so expensive.
00:12:02We think is because they moved all the ports to a wireless one connect box.
00:12:06Right.
00:12:06So you just plug in the TV and then you've got this breakout wireless box to plug in your game consoles and everything else.
00:12:11You can put up to 30 feet away.
00:12:12And instead of improving the picture quality, they spent all the money on this wireless box.
00:12:16This is a nightmare, but it doesn't seem, but Sam, and also I think Samsung didn't have to raise prices because of tariffs.
00:12:22Cause it frame TV is such a shit panel.
00:12:24It's been pure margin the whole time.
00:12:26They could just eat it.
00:12:27That's my going theory, but we can already see here.
00:12:30I got there, David on the high end TV where there's, where people are pay the money for the highest in Sony TVs, no matter what the a 95 L never went on sale.
00:12:40It was a $5,000, 77 inch TV.
00:12:42It has, as far as I can tell, never been on sale.
00:12:45So those customers are going to pay the tariff money and Sony is going to charge it to them.
00:12:49Yeah, because they can.
00:12:50I mean, all of that stuff is easier at the top of the market.
00:12:52I mean, this is something we're going to talk a lot about here is that like the, the price elasticity question here is coming up over and over and over in tariffs.
00:13:00And it turns out it's actually easier to raise the price on something that's already $5,000.
00:13:05That has perfect demand.
00:13:07Right.
00:13:07So many sold every one of those in NFLs at full price to somebody who wanted them.
00:13:10So we, I got here, I said, I walked my way from ULT power, power nines to tariffs.
00:13:16I'm proud of you, David, your challenge in third, on Thursday afternoon is tell us what's going on with tariffs in a way that is relevant when people listen to this on Friday morning.
00:13:27Okay.
00:13:29Tariffs both do and do not exist at all times.
00:13:34And that is the state of America.
00:13:35Heisenberg uncertainty tariffs.
00:13:36Yeah.
00:13:37So I think where we are as of right now is we talked a bunch last week about this, this nonsensical set of quote unquote reciprocal tariffs that were not reciprocal tariffs that were based on trade deficits and nonsense equations that had nothing to do with anything.
00:13:50And appear to have been invented by various AI bots, set the stock market on fire for several days.
00:13:58And then Trump, after saying he got phone calls from 75 different countries that he declined to name, put a 90 day pause on all of it, except for two things.
00:14:13Uh, one, he has continued to do, uh, an escalating tariff war with China to the point where now all the numbers are over a hundred percent.
00:14:21And just, we've entered like full fake number territory on all of this, like 50,000%.
00:14:27Like who cares?
00:14:28Yeah.
00:14:28They're just bigger.
00:14:29The number it's six blades.
00:14:30That's what we're doing.
00:14:31It's six.
00:14:31Yeah, exactly.
00:14:32Can I just quickly explain the over a hundred percent?
00:14:36Cause people have been confused and I kind of get it.
00:14:38Yes.
00:14:38But let me just say the one other thing that's happening and then we can dive in the, the, because I think this actually gets lost in a lot of the back and forth.
00:14:43Uh, the one thing that was left in place was a 10% base tariff on everybody, which seems simple, but has become vastly complicated because countries like Mexico and Canada, where they have been exempted from some of these tariff deals are now suddenly like, wait, does this apply to us too?
00:14:59And it appears that it does.
00:15:00And so we are, we are back in this place of, uh, it's, it's not as bad as many people thought it might be at least for the next 90 days, but it's still very bad in the most important country, uh, in this case, which is China.
00:15:13And it is still impossibly confusing to everybody.
00:15:16Yeah.
00:15:17So that's where we are now.
00:15:18Explain the over a hundred percent thing.
00:15:20Well, it just means if you bring in something for $10, you have to pay $14 of tariffs.
00:15:24It's just fully ridiculous.
00:15:27Like that's the end of people importing things here.
00:15:30Mr.
00:15:30Beast was pointing out that it will be cheaper for him to make feastables and his other products outside the country to ship to other countries.
00:15:37Like he's going to move production out of the United States because other markets will be cheaper to manufacture and distribute to, to get away from all this tariff noise.
00:15:44That's nuts.
00:15:46Like it's just fully nuts to, to break the world trade system in that way.
00:15:50You can go read the, like, we tried to explain the decision, but the answer is like the world financial system started to teeter and Trump blinked and he was like, screw it.
00:16:0110% tariffs.
00:16:01And then there's the underlying question, which I think is one of those interesting political realignment things.
00:16:07The power to implement the tariffs is basically Trump declared a national emergency and he was like, nah, I, with the power of emergency, I command you to pay me an extra 104%.
00:16:19And the emergency is the trade deficit in many of these cases, which is not an emergency because that has existed for 50 years.
00:16:26And is also not what Trump thinks it is.
00:16:28Like what the, the definition of a trade deficit that leads you to do what Trump is doing is not what a trade deficit actually is.
00:16:35And I am not an economist, but I am confident that I am smarter about this than our current president.
00:16:40So the really interesting thing about that is a bunch of hard, right, free traders.
00:16:44Rand Paul is screaming about the trade deficit, not being what Trump thinks.
00:16:47I thought you were going to say Dave Portnoy.
00:16:49Dave Portnoy.
00:16:50I don't think he's a hard, right, free trade.
00:16:52I think that dude is just trying to make some money.
00:16:53But, you know, his number went down, number went up, like he's reacting to it in real time.
00:16:58But the Rand Pauls of the world are out there giving strong speeches and strong quotes being like, this makes no sense.
00:17:04And then a bunch of conservative legal groups are filing lawsuits being like, this isn't an emergency.
00:17:09You don't have this power, which is a thing that you would expect really conservative legal groups to do.
00:17:14Say like, actually, the government shouldn't have this power.
00:17:17So you just see the realignment, right?
00:17:20That's not the political outcome you would expect usually from Trump stuff.
00:17:24We'll see where all of it goes.
00:17:26But in the meantime, the tariffs haven't actually been rescinded.
00:17:31They've been paused for 90 days.
00:17:34They're still in massive effect against China, which has enormous consequences across the board.
00:17:39And then it's confusing how they apply to everyone else.
00:17:44Well, and Trump continues to say during that pause that what he wants is, I was going to say implied, but he's not even implying it.
00:17:51He's just saying it out loud.
00:17:53He wants people to bribe him and make deals with him in some meaningful way.
00:17:58The goal is to get everyone to come and tell him how terrific he is.
00:18:02And that's what he says over and over.
00:18:04And there were reports of a bunch of leaders flying to Mar-a-Lago to basically tell Trump to stop doing this.
00:18:11Like Jamie Dimon apparently went and was giving a whole speech to Trump about why tariffs are bad.
00:18:16And Trump thought that was really great.
00:18:18And so it's like it's very clear that the leverage he is going for here remains the same.
00:18:24And the way you do that is by putting up pause on it.
00:18:26And sure, everyone wants out.
00:18:29Like Tim Cook is going to show up and say, give Apple it out the way that you did for me during your first administration when you went into a trade war with China.
00:18:35It's true.
00:18:37I think he wants the deals.
00:18:38He wants to be flattered.
00:18:39At one point, he had Charles Schwab and he like pointed at him and he was like, look, it's a guy.
00:18:45It's like an actual guy.
00:18:46It was incredible television.
00:18:47Like all of this is nonsensical.
00:18:51There's that goal, right?
00:18:53The weird, corrupt, let's do gangster deals on the side.
00:18:57Sure.
00:18:57That's Trump.
00:18:58Then there's this other goal, which is also an echo of his first administration, where Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is saying, I want factories in the United States.
00:19:07I want the army of people with little screwdrivers building iPhones.
00:19:11I want them to come here.
00:19:12Karen Levitt, the press secretary, was asked very directly by Maggie Haberman.
00:19:15Does Trump believe we can make iPhones in the United States?
00:19:17And she said, absolutely.
00:19:18We have the workforce.
00:19:19We have the talent.
00:19:21That has been the goal the whole time, right?
00:19:25There's the little goal, which is let's do shady deals on the side.
00:19:29And then there's this big goal, which is like, let's restructure the world and build the iPhone in the United States because that will make us great again.
00:19:39We've been covering that for a long time.
00:19:42Like there's a part of this for me, and I don't know if you two feel the same, where it's just a bunch of people grew up and they're having the same experiences that we had 15 years ago.
00:19:53And one of those experiences is Donald Trump insisting the iPhone can be built in the United States.
00:19:57And then we have to have Obama insisting the iPhone can be built in the United States.
00:20:01And then we have to like go through the conversation again.
00:20:04I mean, they keep trying to bring like different pieces of Apple manufacturing into the U.S.
00:20:08And each time it becomes like a little bit of a disaster in some way.
00:20:12Like they were going to try to do a bunch of glass in the U.S.
00:20:14And like, I think that factory just like didn't work out for them.
00:20:18No, they do the glass here.
00:20:18Corning does the glass here.
00:20:20They do the glass here.
00:20:20I thought there was something for the Apple Watch where they were going to do a specific type of glass and they were building a specific factory.
00:20:26The Corning is here.
00:20:28But there's that.
00:20:29There's the, you know, they did eventually, they relaunched the Mac factory for Trump himself.
00:20:35But all these things take time, like a surprisingly long amount of time.
00:20:39And we have, you know, TSMC opening factory in Arizona that's just like, you know, we're hoping it can produce enough chips to be useful for basically anybody.
00:20:48And we are hoping that those chips are going to be on a modern enough node that we actually want to use them in our latest gadgets.
00:20:55And so it's just like there are these baby steps happening.
00:20:59But even when we put a concerted effort into it, we're never quite getting there.
00:21:04There is the ongoing question of why is this the goal that I have continued to find really fascinating.
00:21:10And I think seeing the way it's being covered, particularly by the kind of right leaning press, is really fascinating.
00:21:16Because on the one hand, I think the reasonable people that I have seen make this sort of national security argument, right?
00:21:22That it is, this is a way to control your own destiny.
00:21:25If you don't make the chips, you are reliant on somebody else for something that is like crucially important to modern life.
00:21:31Sure.
00:21:31I think it is vastly more complicated than that.
00:21:33But I at least like understand the bones of that argument.
00:21:35But we've so quickly devolved now into this place where everybody is saying that factories are manly.
00:21:42And like, and that actually the problem is, is men are sitting around playing video games, collecting welfare.
00:21:48And what they should actually be doing is working in factories.
00:21:51And that's how you make men, men.
00:21:53And this is like, this, this is what happens when there's no other move.
00:21:58Like, do you remember when at the very end of the election or at the very end of the campaign in like October and November of last year,
00:22:05there was this whole run of stuff on Fox News that it wasn't manly to vote for a woman for president.
00:22:11This became a real thing.
00:22:13And people were like repeating it.
00:22:14And now you have people on Fox News saying the same thing, that tariffs are manly.
00:22:17And, and that, that somehow this is the thing you have to appeal to in order to get people to buy into this thing that just transparently doesn't make any other sense.
00:22:24And so I'm at this place where it's like, okay, even if you want to say it is possible and plausible to move all of this stuff to the United States,
00:22:33which it's not, and we should talk about that.
00:22:35Like it, it isn't, but there still is not an interesting answer as to why,
00:22:41except that it will somehow return us to the, the beautiful past that everyone is so excited about.
00:22:46Well, there's implicit in all of that is the only market that matters is America, right?
00:22:51That if Americans make American products for the American citizens, like we will have an ounce of self-control and respect.
00:22:58And we will, I don't know, once again, smash communism in some way.
00:23:02I don't know.
00:23:03Like I find that argument very confusing in its way, because these are not only low paid jobs in most of the countries in which they are done.
00:23:12They're increasingly automated jobs.
00:23:14And a lot of Nick is saying the same thing.
00:23:16He's like, these auto, these factories we automated and job is like robot technician.
00:23:19And it's like, you're, we're very confused, like very, very confused.
00:23:24So what is actually happening in China and what that ecosystem looks like and what the supply chains to make that ecosystem go look like.
00:23:33And the thing that is crazy making to me is this new gloss of like, it's manly to work in a factory is it's still unrelated to the problem.
00:23:41Right.
00:23:42It's like, we're having a new dumber version of a conversation that literally, I think in 2010, Steve Jobs had with then president Obama.
00:23:51Right.
00:23:51Where he's like, I just don't have the talent in this country.
00:23:53You have to invest in the educational system to make me the engineers to work in the plants.
00:23:59Not as the, the people with the screwdrivers, but as the engineering managers, making sure the plants operate, you don't have enough.
00:24:06I'm never going to do it.
00:24:07Uh, the Mac pro story is really interesting.
00:24:09There's a really, I don't remember where it was from.
00:24:12We'll find it.
00:24:13Um, there's a really interesting story about that factory getting off the ground.
00:24:15It's run by a company called flex, uh, which is, uh, you know, like a Foxconn competitor.
00:24:20That's how you should think of it.
00:24:21Or one of these big assemblers.
00:24:23And flex is in Texas.
00:24:25That's where they do the Mac pro.
00:24:27They set up the facility there for Apple.
00:24:29And they could not get screws at Apple specifications in Texas.
00:24:33And the one supplier they had was delivering the screws in the trunk of his car.
00:24:38Wow.
00:24:39That's the problem.
00:24:41It is not like manliness.
00:24:43It is.
00:24:43The problem is we have not invested for years now in the ecosystem and you go to China and the ecosystem is not about like one company owning the manufacturing chain, like Intel owning the chip fab.
00:24:57It's about lots and lots of manufacturing companies serving lots and lots of customers.
00:25:02And they're good at customer service.
00:25:04And that we just, we have to, you have to like reset everything about our culture to make that go.
00:25:08And of course the, the administration is in the middle of tearing down all of those other parts.
00:25:13Also, like you can't say with a straight face, we want to train people to work in factories while dismantling the department of education, right?
00:25:21Like those two things are completely at odds, which again, there is no plan.
00:25:27There's just not a plan.
00:25:28So I don't want you to take my word for it or take our word for it.
00:25:31You can go read in the, it's the Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs biography, which is mostly a bad book.
00:25:36It has like good scenes in it.
00:25:37Uh, the, the, the story about Obama and jobs and jobs is like, I'm, this is never going to happen.
00:25:42But years later in 2017, Tim Cook on stage of a fortune conference gave the same answer about why they can't build the iPhone in the United States.
00:25:52We just run the tape.
00:25:53We just run the tape.
00:25:54The truth is China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago and that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view.
00:26:05The reason is because of the skill and the, the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.
00:26:14Like, um, the products we do require really advanced tooling and the, the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art.
00:26:28And the tooling skill is very deep here.
00:26:33You know, in, in the U S you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room.
00:26:40In China, you could fill multiple football fields.
00:26:43That's brutal.
00:26:45That's, that's rough.
00:26:46First of all, we should find out where the meetings of tooling engineers in the United States are and how big they're like, what's up guys?
00:26:52The whole country is depending on you.
00:26:54And they fit in like the back room of a Denny's.
00:26:58They're like, the pressure is out of control.
00:27:01I mean, that's the problem.
00:27:02If you want it, you have to invest in it.
00:27:03And no company is going to look at this tariff chaos and say, okay, this is a good investment based on expected return.
00:27:12I need to avoid these tariffs.
00:27:13So I'm going to start training multiple football fields of tooling engineers so that I can build one product.
00:27:20They're just going to find another way to do it.
00:27:21Well, and the, the uncertainty is so much a part of that too, that, right?
00:27:26Like, I think you could, you could make a much more compelling version of that argument if there was a coherent plan.
00:27:33Even if you disagreed with the plan, it was like, here is, here is the future as it is laid out and we are not going to go away from it.
00:27:39But what I keep hearing from folks and what lots of folks on our team have been reporting about is just the uncertainty is what kills you.
00:27:45Like, you don't actually even know where to invest your time and energy and money right now because the tariffs might go away.
00:27:51They might change.
00:27:52They might move.
00:27:53They might just suddenly evaporate all of your possibilities in one country or another.
00:27:58And everyone is just frozen by it.
00:28:00So the idea that you're going to redirect investment actually becomes harder in that world.
00:28:04Yeah, I think there's also like, even if you know, this is going to last for four years, can you even do it within that time to a reasonable scale that it'll be valuable for you?
00:28:14And that's not clear.
00:28:15And then additionally, like to your point with uncertainty, we don't even know that it would last beyond Trump, given that everybody seems to hate this.
00:28:22There's one person who in America who likes tariffs and we just happen to elect a president.
00:28:27I'm not sure, by the way, if what Tim Cook was saying there was a football field, densely packed with tooling engineers, or like a football stadium.
00:28:37I imagined the former.
00:28:39Because if it's a football stadium, you're like, you're okay, you're doing the math.
00:28:42Like, okay, that's between like maybe 75 and 100,000 people per stadium.
00:28:47You know, your biggest college football stadium is like 100,000 people.
00:28:50So you're like, okay, it's like 300,000 tooling engineers.
00:28:53But if it's one densely packed 100-yard football field, maybe it's way less than that.
00:28:59I've been thinking about this since 2017.
00:29:03I like imagining that what he means actually is just it's three football fields, but it's just 11 on 11 on each field.
00:29:10All he means is it's actually six football teams.
00:29:13But he said it weird.
00:29:14But it's the full 53.
00:29:16Right, exactly.
00:29:17Look, that is from 2017.
00:29:21That's not today.
00:29:23That's not Tim Cook disagreeing with Donald Trump today.
00:29:25That is years ago.
00:29:27And even that itself is seven years after Steve Jobs made the same exact argument to Obama.
00:29:35And all that it has done since then is accelerate.
00:29:38It hasn't gotten better.
00:29:39We haven't invested more into these kinds of roles and this kind of training.
00:29:43And by all rights, the only party that can actually do that is the government.
00:29:47Because the government is not expecting that to return on investment in the form of a product tomorrow.
00:29:53And so, yes, we should build the iPhone here.
00:29:58We all did this round of coverage in 2012 and 2013.
00:30:02We did it again when Trump got elected the first time in 16 and 17.
00:30:06Now we're doing it a third time.
00:30:07Only all of us have to be like, no, we are real men, which is deeply confusing.
00:30:13All of my cars are faster than yours.
00:30:14I'm just saying it out loud.
00:30:16One is real loud.
00:30:17And it's ridiculous because the problem is the same.
00:30:22The problem is you need apparently six football teams worth of tooling engineers.
00:30:26And I just, I don't like how, what's the plan there?
00:30:30Because if you want to, it's, you can't just punish people into training engineers in the United States.
00:30:35Right.
00:30:36And it's not at all clear that we're going to do anything to make that possible either.
00:30:40But we'll decide in 75 days.
00:30:42Sorry, 90 days.
00:30:4390 days.
00:30:43That's right.
00:30:44They're not even permanent.
00:30:45It's like the pause is just 90 days.
00:30:47So we're already seeing a bunch of reactions to this.
00:30:51Apple shipped 600 tons of iPhones on planes to beat the tariffs.
00:30:56Anything that was already on a ship that was like on route beat the tariffs.
00:30:59So there's a lot of that going on.
00:31:01So I don't think we're going to see immediate changes.
00:31:03The Sheeans and Timus of the world are in real trouble because the de minimis exception that basically that those companies exist is going away.
00:31:12We don't know what's going to happen.
00:31:14We know that haul creators, like fashion haul creators, are just buying everything on Timu right now, which is getting ready.
00:31:21Amazon has a weird Timu copycat.
00:31:24They're already changing where the stuff is coming from.
00:31:27We sort of asked around.
00:31:28You can see other changes.
00:31:29Tobias Butler from Toonshine, who was on the show last week, he emailed us.
00:31:33He said, so with the new 104% tariff, the cost of each manufacturer Toonshine goes up 28%, which will cost $90 each, which gets pretty close to the figure he called last week as this would kill me.
00:31:46So he would have to raise price from $199 to $255, and it's still not worthwhile to switch to U.S. suppliers.
00:31:55So the little creators are coming to these existential points.
00:32:00He says, I'm not sure what my immediate plan is except to reach out to the community and see what people think about $250.
00:32:06Framework, which we cover a lot.
00:32:07They've just stopped selling their cheapest laptops here because of tariffs.
00:32:10I think they delayed pre-orders.
00:32:13Yeah, they've gone back and forth in a really fascinating way.
00:32:17And I think actually Framework is a company a lot of other startups look to to see how to do this because Framework spends a long time working on this stuff and is also sort of unusually transparent in how all of this works.
00:32:30Framework will sell you an individual part of a computer, so it just has to be able to tell more stories about how it makes those things.
00:32:37But Sean Hosser wrote a thing for us earlier this week, and basically in the span of 16 hours, tariffs were enacted.
00:32:50Framework announced it was going to increase the price of all of its computers by 10%.
00:32:55Like 45 minutes later, Trump announces the pause.
00:32:5930 minutes after that, Framework announces that it's bringing the prices back to normal.
00:33:03And then two hours later, it says it's still going to increase prices.
00:33:07And then it was not going to add for pre-orders.
00:33:12It was not going to open pre-orders on the Laptop 12, which is its new cheap one, but then it decided to anyway.
00:33:17And it's just like this company, they just keep basically being like, look, we have no idea what's going on either.
00:33:23We're just going to keep updating this blog post as best we can to tell you what's going on.
00:33:27Yeah, that's great.
00:33:28Super certain.
00:33:28Makes sense for everyone who wants to invest in a small company if the company doesn't even quite know what's happening.
00:33:33Not just small companies, the biggest companies in the world totally caught off guard.
00:33:38Speaking of updating blog posts, we just have a list of automakers and what they're doing that Andy Hawkins has to keep updating because the plans keep changing.
00:33:47It's basically chaos.
00:33:48We'll link to that post.
00:33:49VW is adding import fees.
00:33:53Stellantis is idling production at various places, putting 900 jobs on hold.
00:33:59Jaguar Land Rover.
00:34:01The people who live in the town around its factory are basically like, this is the end of us.
00:34:06Ford has so much inventory that they're just cutting prices across the board, which is very good.
00:34:10Audi is just holding 37,000 cars at docks until something happens.
00:34:17Because as long as they're there, they don't have to pay the tariffs.
00:34:19You just leave them.
00:34:21I think they haven't brought them in yet, right?
00:34:23Yeah, they're like, we got to get these in eventually.
00:34:25They're on the other side of the fence.
00:34:29It's nuts.
00:34:30That's all nuts.
00:34:31And then the main thing that we should talk about is the Switch 2.
00:34:35Which, it feels like there's the weird cultural, like, tariffs make you manly, and then there's the Switch 2.
00:34:44And in terms of just weird reactions, like, the Switch 2, I think, bore the brunt of it.
00:34:49It's also been the most public because Nintendo had the just, like, terrible luck of announcing the Switch 2, I don't know, 30 minutes before the tariff threats began.
00:35:01And so they were doing this press tour as this information was unfolding.
00:35:07And so normally companies can kind of hide from some of these questions if they just don't put their executives out there.
00:35:13But Nintendo was in the middle of putting their executives in front of every single journalist they could find.
00:35:18And all of them only had one question.
00:35:20And it was, what are you going to do about these tariffs?
00:35:23And the price is already high.
00:35:24So there's this assumption that Nintendo priced the thing high for tariffs.
00:35:29And the answer, and I think Doug Bowser said this to our own Andrew Webster, he's like, no, that was how much we priced it at, and we'll see what happens now.
00:35:38Yeah.
00:35:38Which is not a great answer.
00:35:41But then pre-orders were supposed to have been this week, and were not this week.
00:35:46And that was the thing that really set everybody on fire, was Nintendo went from, we're going to sell you our very expensive console that you're going to be slightly mad about, but definitely for sure buy anyway, to actually, you can't buy it yet.
00:36:00Because we don't know what it's going to cost.
00:36:02And I think pre-orders for something like this is the worst possible situation to be in, because they're importing millions and millions of these things.
00:36:11And if you're going to sell them at $450 today, and you have zero idea what they're going to cost you to bring in two months from now when they actually go on sale, that could just devastate them.
00:36:21And obviously, they are going to be bringing a bunch in early to avoid the tariffs as much as they can.
00:36:27Allegedly, they've been stocking up for months already.
00:36:29But it doesn't really change the fact that they could be put in a position where a bunch of people have bought these things early at one price, and they actually have to start selling them at a much higher price two months from now.
00:36:40That's just going to lead to a complete disaster for them.
00:36:44Yeah.
00:36:44And there's no good answer at the end of that either, right?
00:36:47You either immediately increase the price of an already pretty expensive thing, and you can blame that on whoever you want, but it's going to hurt demand.
00:36:55Or you say, you know, get it now, maybe the price will go up, which is weird and bad.
00:37:02It's also, for a company that big, it's like logistically really complicated to change the price of something.
00:37:09This is something I've heard from a couple of people that I hadn't really thought about before, that like you have to change your marketing materials, and you have to change like signs that you've made.
00:37:16And you have to change like commercials that you've, you've put out in the world that people are going to be running on television.
00:37:22Like, it's actually not as simple as just changing the price of a thing on your website.
00:37:27When you want to change the price of something, it actually becomes a real process.
00:37:30And it's, I'm just like, that alone is very complicated.
00:37:35But like, this is that, that exact thing is everywhere.
00:37:39And like, this guy Dan Soroker, who is the CEO of a company called Limitless, they make one of those like AI voice recorders that listens to you all the time and tells you what interesting stuff you said.
00:37:49I have one upstairs.
00:37:50I haven't used it yet, but we'll report back.
00:37:52He tweeted this yesterday.
00:37:54He said, our customers pre-ordered our product for as low as $59.
00:37:56We have the product ready to ship, but with tariffs, it will now cost us $189.38 per unit.
00:38:03Should we, one, wait until it gets better, two, ship now and eat the tariff cost, three, cancel the orders and eat the manufacturing cost?
00:38:09This is the worst SAT question I've ever heard in my entire life.
00:38:12But those are your options, and they're all terrible.
00:38:14And if you're a Nintendo, maybe you can eat the cost, right?
00:38:17Like, if you're Apple with famously high margins, you can eat the cost.
00:38:22None of these companies want to because they like money, and that's the job.
00:38:28But a lot of these companies, especially these smaller companies, literally cannot afford to eat that cost.
00:38:35And so now they're like, okay, do I triple the price of my thing, or am I out of business?
00:38:40And am I out of business either way?
00:38:42Yeah.
00:38:42Well, we're also saying, like, they might be able to eat the cost.
00:38:44That's like, at 10%, they might be able to eat that cost.
00:38:48At like 34%, that becomes a completely different equation.
00:38:52And then at some point, we're talking about these 100-plus percent tariffs.
00:38:55And I think depending on the country that they're manufacturing in, they're going to have different levels of existential crises here.
00:39:03But all of them are pretty existential.
00:39:05Even 10%, I think we're looking at, that's what some of the stuff that Frameworks is dealing with.
00:39:09Even that is enough to cause them heartburn and go, I don't think we can sell this anymore.
00:39:13Yeah.
00:39:14The interesting question is going to be where the money moves.
00:39:17So, you know, for a product, an AI voice recorder, there's a service component with that.
00:39:22So you might sell the hardware at a loss and then make the subscription price five times higher.
00:39:29Yep.
00:39:29I think we're going to see a lot of those moves, which will suck.
00:39:35Just like flatly, that will suck.
00:39:37Yeah.
00:39:37I think we're going to see like the end of discounting.
00:39:39Like most people price in sales, like that stuff is going to go away.
00:39:42So that, we don't know what's going to happen.
00:39:44And I think the switch to is going to be kind of like the leading indicator, how certain anybody feels.
00:39:51Because it is a product everybody wants and they could probably raise the price and still sell a lot of them.
00:39:55But I don't think they want to.
00:39:56I think they already know it's high and they're already getting yelled at because it's high.
00:39:59Like there's other stuff, weird stuff happening in response, by the way.
00:40:02China is considering showing fewer U.S. films, which would just basically crush the Marvel machine, right?
00:40:09I mean, less so than a few years ago.
00:40:11Like it's, that's shifted a little bit already, but it is still a huge part of the industry.
00:40:15And it's like, we, it was very funny.
00:40:17We were talking about this earlier that like, do you remember how all the bad guys in Mission Impossible movies are now called like the entity?
00:40:24Nobody like fights foreign countries anymore.
00:40:27They're all just like nameless bad guys.
00:40:29Because that's because they wanted these movies to play in other markets, mostly China.
00:40:34And so like, and then China like took all the stuff that it learned from Hollywood, built its own, now has a huge homegrown movie industry and is now just like, yeah, get out.
00:40:44All that money used to make from showing movies in our country.
00:40:47Goodbye.
00:40:48Yeah.
00:40:49China has a lot of those moves to make if it wants to.
00:40:51It does have a lot of those moves to make.
00:40:53I'm just saying that I watched The Three-Body Problem and I'm like less worried about it than maybe you are.
00:40:59Not so worried about that one.
00:41:02That's fair.
00:41:02Yeah.
00:41:03And not, not the, not the new Netflix bad one.
00:41:05I mean the Chinese bad one.
00:41:08Just to be clear.
00:41:09The Netflix one was worse.
00:41:11That's like worse evidence.
00:41:13And longer.
00:41:15What are we doing?
00:41:17I'm just over my alcoholism was a real plot point in the Netflix one.
00:41:20All right.
00:41:22We got to take a break.
00:41:23Maybe by the time we're back, we'll know what's going on with Paris.
00:41:26Let's find out.
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00:42:36We're back.
00:42:36I want to issue a correction.
00:42:37It was just called 3Body.
00:42:39It aired on Peacock in the United States.
00:42:42There you go.
00:42:42Also, I just want you to know, people sometimes ask what we did during the break.
00:42:46I went to NewYorkTimes.com because I literally thought it was possible that there was new tariffs news while we were at break.
00:42:52There's not, so that's exciting.
00:42:55Yeah, good.
00:42:55We'll see how this goes in the next 30 minutes.
00:42:57There's tariffs.
00:42:59Then there's AI.
00:43:00AI also had, I would say, a messy week.
00:43:02Starting with Meta, which I think tried to release a bunch of exciting news about Llama, and then all of it quickly became unexciting.
00:43:12What's going on here?
00:43:13Jake, can you explain this one?
00:43:15Yeah, so Zuckerberg, I think you wanted to have a little bit of Elon energy here.
00:43:21So last weekend, I think it was middle of Saturday, it was just like, boom, Llama 4, here it is.
00:43:26Everybody go have fun and just, you know, kind of try to catch people by surprise, drop this big new model that people have been expecting.
00:43:34And, you know, at first glance, everybody was like, wow, very impressive, great benchmarks.
00:43:39And this is the thing.
00:43:40Every single time a new flagship model comes out, the companies brag about these benchmarks, and they show how they perform against all the other models.
00:43:47And inevitably, inevitably, their best model beats out all the other models on the market.
00:43:53And that's what happened here with one of the Llama 4 models.
00:43:57And then eventually, people started to look a little bit closer, started to look at some of the fine print on this.
00:44:01And they realized that Meta had actually benchmarked a secret model that only they have access to, that they're not actually releasing.
00:44:11And so it's like an experimental, chat-specific version that is sort of potentially designed to beat these benchmarks that they're not releasing to the public.
00:44:22It was just used to look great on benchmarks.
00:44:26And so people have been freaking out about this.
00:44:28The specific benchmark that they nearly topped the leaderboard on was like, hey, guys, that's not how it's supposed to work.
00:44:36And Meta was just like, we have lots of great models.
00:44:39I don't know what to tell you.
00:44:40And so I think it has not been the reception they were hoping for for Llama 4, which is supposed to be this big release, supposed to get them back in the conversation.
00:44:50Meta has been trying to make Llama the big, quote-unquote, allegedly open-source option to get a lot of big adoption here.
00:44:59And, you know, I think if they wanted to curry favor with the community, this is sort of off to a bad start because now they're starting to feel a little bit misled.
00:45:08And they're already also starting to, I think, complain about some of the restrictions and limitations around Meta's, you know, so-called open-source approach to it anyway.
00:45:18I really genuinely respect Meta's inability to help itself from doing stuff like this.
00:45:25Like, you go way back and, you know, Meta got in all this trouble for massively inflating the view count of all the videos so that publishers would make videos and, like, screwed up a whole generation of publishers on the internet as a result.
00:45:38This company just cannot help itself from making up numbers about things in order to look impressive.
00:45:46I kind of love it.
00:45:47I love this.
00:45:48Like, let me be clear.
00:45:49Don't do this.
00:45:50This is bad.
00:45:51But also, it really just shows how nonsensical these benchmark charts are.
00:45:57Like, what does it mean that it gets 98% of some random benchmark?
00:46:01Like, I don't know what that does.
00:46:03I don't know what that means.
00:46:04Number just goes up.
00:46:05Um, and I think it's just increasingly clear that these do not actually correspond to, does the model give you a correct, accurate, good, and useful output?
00:46:15It corresponds to, can this model beat this computer test?
00:46:20And in this case, they specifically designed it so that it could beat this test a little bit better than the other models.
00:46:26Isn't this particular benchmark, doesn't it, humans in a loop?
00:46:29It does.
00:46:29This is a really interesting one where they do, they pair it against output from other models.
00:46:34And so you choose which one, uh, is better.
00:46:36And so they're specifically tuning it theoretically so that humans will respond better to their, their thing.
00:46:42That's the best part of this.
00:46:43It's not designed to be better.
00:46:44It's designed to do whatever it takes to make the humans think that it's better, which is so funny.
00:46:49It's like, we don't have to build a better model.
00:46:51We just have to build a model that convinces the idiots that it's better.
00:46:54And then we've done it.
00:46:56Perfect.
00:46:57That's one of the most meta instincts of all time.
00:47:01Like, we don't have to be sincere.
00:47:03We just have to be convincing.
00:47:05Uh, by the way, meta loves to game benchmarks.
00:47:07Like there's a whole thing here about companies gaming benchmarks in the history of tech.
00:47:11Like every GPU company has been caught gaming benchmarks.
00:47:14It's just a thing they all do.
00:47:16Every laptop company has been caught gaming benchmarks in one way or another.
00:47:19Uh, Intel has been caught gaming benchmarks, but this one is like particularly meta in that they inflated their own video numbers for years.
00:47:28And then they kind of admitted it and they're kind of like, but whatever, like number was so big.
00:47:32Right.
00:47:33And that's like very much the attitude they're taking with this.
00:47:36I agree with you, Jake.
00:47:37At the end of the day, what really matters is can anyone build useful products out of this stuff?
00:47:41Like these benchmarks do not matter.
00:47:43Like every week there's a new one and another thing is slightly better than the last one.
00:47:48And we're still all looking at fundamentally the same chatbot products with the same distribution.
00:47:56Maybe meta is going to do the glasses.
00:47:57Like we've heard about them that, you know, that will obviously rely on llama in some huge way, but I don't think that matters if it's llama in there or chat CPT.
00:48:06Like it's, it's really the interface and the distribution that like carries you forward, not the capability of the model.
00:48:12I agree with you in every way except one.
00:48:16And I think the, the one is that I think we're still early enough in this industry that momentum is really important.
00:48:22And what is definitely true is that LM arena, which is the, the website that runs these benchmarks, uh, is a website, people who make AI stuff look at a lot.
00:48:33And so being at the top of that leaderboard is, is a signifier of stuff to the people you want to like come work for your company to build cool AI products or come, you know, build with your API.
00:48:46And pay you a bunch of money to use it.
00:48:47Like these things are not meant for regular people to care about.
00:48:51Generally speaking, they're meant for like the people in the business to care about.
00:48:56And I think that's all the more reason to try and game it, right?
00:48:58Like the, these benchmarks exist to try and get AI researchers to want to work at meta and not open AI and coming out like you're cheating is a, is a tough look.
00:49:10And I think there's been a lot of that forever, right?
00:49:12Do you, you guys remember in the early days of this, there was this whole big kerfuffle with Apple where Apple wasn't letting its researchers publish publicly their research.
00:49:22And so it was having a hard time getting researchers because one of the things these people want to do is like publish their work and share it with the world.
00:49:27And so Apple has had to rethink the way that it talks about its AI stuff in order to get good people to come work there.
00:49:33And so I think in that sense, playing these games really does matter, but it's in a much less like human relevant way than like actually making good products, which none of these companies are doing.
00:49:48No, I think that makes sense.
00:49:49And, you know, I think that community is, that community is the people who freaked out about this.
00:49:54They're the ones who feel betrayed because they're, you know, they were excited about this.
00:49:58And I think Meta has made big promises about, you know, how you'll be able to use Llama because of its, you know, allegedly open source approach.
00:50:09It's the opposite of DeepSeek.
00:50:10You just made me realize that.
00:50:11DeepSeek was the one where everybody's like, it can't possibly be this good.
00:50:13And then started using it.
00:50:14They're like, oh my God, it's incredible.
00:50:16This is the one everybody's like, whoa, it's really good.
00:50:17And then it's like, oh, never mind.
00:50:20You know, it's funny you mentioned Apple there because what I was going to say is, you know, who's not in the LMA arena boards is our friends in Cupertino.
00:50:28I mean, they have some models, but they're not building their frontier model at scale.
00:50:35Big story in the information this week about Siri actually at Apple.
00:50:38It's a lot.
00:50:39There's a lot going on in this story.
00:50:41It's basically, here's why Siri is bad, which keeping with the theme of this episode is a story we have been telling for 15 years.
00:50:48But this one in particular has a lot of details.
00:50:52Some of them shakier than others about what actually happened.
00:50:55And here are the three that just jumped out to me.
00:50:59And you tell me, I know you guys read that story too.
00:51:01You tell me if these are the ones that jumped out to you.
00:51:03One, we've talked a lot about the WWDC video of what like agentic Siri could do on the iPhone with app intents.
00:51:09And you just ask it where your grandmother is and it like finds her and sends her a note or whatever, whatever was happening in the demo.
00:51:15The Siri team, according to this information report, had not seen any of that working.
00:51:20So that was just a pure demo.
00:51:22And the Siri team was surprised at what they were seeing.
00:51:26That's really bad.
00:51:27That's real bad.
00:51:28Second, I'm just like a decoder org chart, you know, aficionado.
00:51:34John Gianandria ran his own AI team.
00:51:38He was apparently a very sleepy manager, didn't have a lot of fire.
00:51:41And Craig Federighi built his own team to do stuff with machine learning inside of Apple.
00:51:46That got bigger and bigger and bigger and started competing for researchers and engineers with the main AI team, which led to him taking over Siri in the end.
00:51:56Also, it's just very bad, right?
00:51:57That's not good news.
00:51:59And then the last one, which is particularly funny, is there was apparently a big debate in the aftermath of the WWDC demo about how many models Apple would use.
00:52:09If they would have a local model on the phone that responded to local stuff like timers called Minnie Mouse and then a big model in the cloud for big stuff called Mighty Mouse.
00:52:16Or whether it should all be Mighty Mouse.
00:52:18And I think they landed on all Mighty Mouse and none of that shipped and none of that worked and who knows what's going to happen.
00:52:22They picked wrong.
00:52:24Really, I think one of the lessons we are learning here very quickly is that actually single behemoth models that do everything have their place.
00:52:33But ultimately, the answer is lots of models for lots of things.
00:52:38And Apple seems to have just...
00:52:39It's like picking the Vision Pro instead of picking smart glasses, right?
00:52:43Like it tried to do the whole thing and in so doing prevented itself from doing the thing that actually works.
00:52:51I'm also really curious about, you know, they took this, we're going to do it very heavily lean on local processing for the AI approach.
00:52:59And I think, you know, if you go back, what, like two years on the Pixel, they were like, hey, you know, you have to have the highest end Pixel in order to use Gemini because you need the local processing abilities, you need the RAM.
00:53:12And then fast forward, like, I don't know, six months, and all of those abilities are just on all of the phones anyway because they're all just doing it in the cloud.
00:53:21And so I'm kind of just wondering also if Apple's still just picking wrong by trying to do so much on the iPhone because it is sort of against their constitution to offload this stuff to the cloud because of the privacy concerns around that.
00:53:35Which, you know, that's fair. It's a really great perk to be able to say, hey, this is all local. It's all secure. It's all safe.
00:53:41But it's just one of those things where sort of a self-enforced limitation that's continuing to hold them back.
00:53:50Totally. And the way that they're getting around that when they have to go to the cloud is just by punting it on the chat GPT, which is actually the best way to do it, unfortunately.
00:53:59I mean, probably, but it sure doesn't make Apple look very good.
00:54:02Okay, wait, while we're talking about org charts, we should move on from this.
00:54:06There's other stuff to talk about, but I just, I want to read a paragraph to you guys from this story.
00:54:11It's by Wayne Mott, The Information. Shout out to Wayne. It's a good story.
00:54:14And I want you guys to tell me whether this sounds like people want AI or that they don't want AI.
00:54:21It says, former Apple employees have referred to Siri as a, quote, hot potato, continuously passed between different teams, including those led by Apple's services chief, Eddie Q, and by Federighi.
00:54:30However, none of these reorganizations led to significant improvements in Siri's performance.
00:54:35There's one way to look at this that says, everybody is trying to get it, but nobody can pull it off.
00:54:40And there's another way of looking at it that says, Siri is poison and no one wants to be in charge of it.
00:54:44And I'm starting to wonder if it's the second thing.
00:54:46It's the second.
00:54:47I, I don't know.
00:54:49I, I, I read that same thing and I, it's funny that you saw ambiguity in it and I was like, oh, it's poison.
00:54:55Okay.
00:54:56Okay.
00:54:56I mean, that was my initial read too, but then I'm like, okay, there is another way you could look at this.
00:54:59That is like, it's, it's, it's very competitive.
00:55:01Everybody wants to be in charge.
00:55:02I think you're right.
00:55:03I think it's poison.
00:55:03Well, I think there's, you can intellectually make the argument that being in charge of Siri right now at Apple makes you the most powerful person at Apple, because all of the things that might kill the iPhone are things that look like what Siri should have been doing 10 years ago.
00:55:19Yeah.
00:55:20Like open AI has this project with Johnny Ive for a screenless device.
00:55:25That's obviously some sort of like Siri puck.
00:55:29Right.
00:55:29And maybe it'll work.
00:55:30Maybe it won't.
00:55:31But like, that's the thing, um, the metaglasses we've talked about a lot.
00:55:35That's going to be a voice activated assistant thing.
00:55:38Samsung is going to release the Bali robot, which let's, let's just pretend it's in the mix here.
00:55:43Like what you want is a ball that rolls around your house and projects Samsung's fast TV service on the wall and response to your voice.
00:55:51Hey, no other AI product has that kind of physical presence.
00:55:55It's true.
00:55:57It's very good.
00:55:58None of them even have a shape.
00:55:59Do you want a small rolling ball in your house that shows up and commands you to exercise on command?
00:56:05The Bali is there for you.
00:56:07I do.
00:56:08I like, I earnestly do.
00:56:10Every Bali demo is like at the end of it.
00:56:11It's like a now do jumping jacks.
00:56:13It's very good.
00:56:14All of this is predicated on voice working.
00:56:17Alexa is predicated on voice working.
00:56:19So anything that might kill the iPhone has this one interface idea embedded in it, which is natural language voice commands will work and the computer will have natural language voice output.
00:56:31It will, it will, it will work.
00:56:33None of it works to be clear, like humane existed and then went 90, like famously no longer exists.
00:56:42Uh, none of it works yet, but if you're Apple being in charge of the Siri team is being in charge of the thing that might kill you.
00:56:50Yeah.
00:56:51And I think they can't figure it out because they also can't break it.
00:56:53Like I think one of the hardest things about Siri is everyone knows that voice is a thing that might disrupt the touch screen, but which I don't necessarily agree with, but that's what everyone thinks.
00:57:03But everyone knows that voice is a thing that might disrupt the touch screen.
00:57:06And then you've got however many years of Siri existing and doing timers and starting music and pretty much doing those things that you cannot break.
00:57:16Right. And Apple talks all the time about how often Siri gets used.
00:57:20And even if it's just for those two things, it is still, it's an entrenched user behavior now that you can't screw up, even though they are doing their very best to screw it up.
00:57:30Yeah. So I just see it as here's this thing where if you get it, the stakes are so high, your opportunity to make change is so limited because you can't break it.
00:57:40And then you also have to invent the cutting edge of AI.
00:57:43What you're describing is just what Google did with Gemini already. Right.
00:57:47And the advantage they have is that they have a functional AI division, but they had Google Assistant, which was like roughly as good as Siri.
00:57:55And it, you know, it set timers. It added stuff to your calendar.
00:57:59And when they launched Gemini, it broke all of that. Couldn't do any of that.
00:58:02And then they've just slowly hacked each one of those things on to Gemini.
00:58:07And now they're just like, we're done. Forget Google Assistant. We had 10 years of brand equity, whatever.
00:58:11Nobody cares. Gemini's new thing. And they just like they're just fundamentally wasn't that much good stuff about these old era of assistance that you can kind of just start from scratch and rebuild timers.
00:58:23Because as much as it pains us that it takes like five years to add a multiple timer feature to each of these things, like that surely isn't the hardest part of building AI.
00:58:34And so we've seen another company do this already. And it feels like what Siri needs is that start from scratch moment.
00:58:39And theoretically, they had that. And it's just like not quite clear why that isn't clicking.
00:58:43Well, two things about that. One, Google had its own bloody org chart battle over making a functional AI division.
00:58:51Google also invented most of this technology. Like there might be no other company in tech as equipped to do what you just described as Google.
00:58:59And even it was a giant mess for Google.
00:59:01Right. And then they did have two products, Assistant and Gemini, coexist side by side in the most Google of fashions.
00:59:06And then I think if you go and look at the Google Home forums and the Google Assistant forums, the switch to Gemini just being there, is it going about as well as Google Home goes?
00:59:16You know what I mean? Like, yeah, sure.
00:59:20I like there's enough people in those forums who believe that Google Home is effectively abandoned, that it should really worry Google.
00:59:27Right. So like, yeah, they're in the middle of this transition and maybe it will all come out on the end as sunshine and daisies.
00:59:32But right now it's like, oh, the thing that we depend on feels like abandoned.
00:59:36We're like, for example, this is just a really dumb one.
00:59:39We have Google Homes in our house and they are meant to control our Sonos because we have Sonos speakers from the time when those two companies got along and they just stopped working.
00:59:49You could be like, yo, play me the music.
00:59:51And it's like, I'm doing it on the kitchen.
00:59:53And you're like, no, you're not.
00:59:54Do it again.
00:59:55And it's like, I'm super doing it.
00:59:57I'm playing this music on kitchen.
00:59:58And it's not.
01:00:00And there's just, you know, you look at the Reddit post and it's like 400 days ago, someone said that Google Home stuff aren't good.
01:00:05And they just don't care.
01:00:07And like that, that's, I think that's, I agree with you, Jake.
01:00:10Google has done a better job.
01:00:12Like Amazon hasn't pulled this off with Alexa.
01:00:14If I can defend Google Home for one second, it's been bad for years.
01:00:20Fair enough.
01:00:22Other AI stuff.
01:00:23Jake, you want to talk about the Shopify CEO saying that no one can make a new hire at the company without proof that AI can't do the job.
01:00:31And you were like, this is more reasonable than people think.
01:00:34And I am excited for you to defend this thing.
01:00:36Wow.
01:00:37Sorry.
01:00:37Sorry.
01:00:38Oh, boy.
01:00:39Oh, boy.
01:00:39Sorry, Jake.
01:00:40Here's this smoking stick of dynamite.
01:00:42What would you like to do?
01:00:44That's, that's, yeah.
01:00:45That was, is in fact part of what I said.
01:00:47So, uh, Shopify, not, not Spotify.
01:00:51Let's be clear with that.
01:00:51Shopify CEO, uh, Toby Luke K if I'm pronouncing that ballpark, uh, you know, this, this memo got leaked.
01:01:00And so he just posted the entire thing on X.
01:01:02So you can go and read it.
01:01:04And, um, you know, the headline of it is, you know, Shopify CEO says like, you can't hire anybody whose job can be done by AI.
01:01:11And you know what?
01:01:11It is true.
01:01:12He says that in there.
01:01:13Um, but I do think, you know, if you read the entire thing, it is both, uh, more reasonable and I think less reasonable than you think, because on one hand, he's just like, actually, we just all sort of need to learn AI.
01:01:24And the other hand, he's like, we will 100 XR productivity.
01:01:27Um, so, you know, I, I think one thing that occurs to me is that the people who are using AI the most right now, it is the engineers.
01:01:35It is like the developers who are just coding all day long using these things.
01:01:40Um, separately, Anthropic just launched a $200 a month tier this week where they're just like, yeah, we think that engineers will just pay for this when their work won't so that they can just like use it all day long.
01:01:52Um, so this is our, I think when you send this memo out to an organization that is substantially built out of engineers, this is not necessarily as scary as it would be if you send it out to your news organization, which would be like, Ooh, sorry.
01:02:05Um, and so I think, you know, there's parts of this memory says, uh, here's just some of the preface where he goes, um, quote, what we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by using it a lot.
01:02:19And it's like, okay, yeah, this is actually like, this is like pretty, pretty reasonable.
01:02:22You actually should test these tools to see if there are ways to build them into your workflow.
01:02:25Um, but at the same time, he is saying, I think the very big, scary thing that has everybody worried, which is, yeah, these tools are going to number one, change how we work.
01:02:36And in doing so start to potentially replace roles that would otherwise have been hired.
01:02:41And so I think this is, you know, this is a very scary memo.
01:02:46Um, I think it's also just worth reading and understanding because this is actually just how a lot of these companies are going to be thinking about this.
01:02:53And I think, um, is AI ready to replace a single human right now?
01:02:58I sure wouldn't make that bet.
01:03:00Um, is it ready to do little bits and pieces of some people's jobs?
01:03:04I think the answer is clearly yes.
01:03:06Um, especially if you look to developers.
01:03:09Uh, and, and I think, you know, we have an engineering heavy organization here that is saying, Hey, let's start using this more and more to get a little bit more efficient.
01:03:17Some of the stuff he's saying is like, actually, you should just use this in your prototypes, right?
01:03:21It's not necessarily you should go and replace your coworker with it.
01:03:24He's just like, it's like, I'm making it a cent mandatory that you use this in your prototyping phase.
01:03:29Okay.
01:03:30Seems, seems funny.
01:03:31Cause I didn't read that as being about the engineers.
01:03:32I read that as being about like product managers and salespeople and like people have ideas for new features.
01:03:38And it's like, you're just going to vibe code out a garbage version of the new feature.
01:03:42So you can push the buttons and play with it and see if it's any good.
01:03:45And I, there's something about that that really speaks to me, right?
01:03:48Cause I, I can't do that.
01:03:50And I, this is the thing I keep thinking about is our own company.
01:03:56Like is like putting out ads being like, stop AI theft government.
01:03:59Disclosure of box media is putting out ad with a bunch of other publishers being like, stop AI theft government.
01:04:03Um, and you know, our team has thoughts about AI and I certainly have thoughts about AI.
01:04:08Um, I think I'm a better writer than AI to this day, declarative sentences be damned.
01:04:13That's what AI thinks I write like, um, but I can't code.
01:04:16I certainly couldn't code like a prototype feature of a thing that I wanted.
01:04:20And the idea that I, this tool can let me do it is super interesting.
01:04:23And then you see, even in creative industries, people are complaining about it, but then they
01:04:27use the features like mad.
01:04:29So I would pair the Shopify up, uh, the Shopify thing up with what I think is kind of the most
01:04:33interesting AI features has been announced in a long time, which is Adobe building AI
01:04:37agents in Photoshop and premiere pro where you're just like doing Photoshop work.
01:04:42And it's like, do you want to do this thing?
01:04:43And it's like super clippy.
01:04:44And then it just does it for you.
01:04:46Like it clicks around the Photoshop interface for you and just does it.
01:04:50I think there's something super interesting about this Photoshop example too, where if
01:04:53you watch the video of what it shows that, that it's suggesting you do it's stuff like
01:04:57add a blur to the background.
01:04:59And it's like three years ago, nobody would have called that AI that like Google photos,
01:05:04just auto suggest that on literally every photo.
01:05:06So, and it's like, there's just this broad spectrum of what like quote unquote AI is now.
01:05:14And there are, I think these, these small, uh, tools that people are just sort of using
01:05:20instinctively every day without quite considering them to be AI because it's just, oh, this is
01:05:25just making me like 2% more efficient.
01:05:27Um, and I, you know, we sort of freak out when it changes from this 2% thing to the, like,
01:05:32I must replace my coworker because my boss won't give me more resources, which is like
01:05:36concerning.
01:05:38I mean, and a funny thing to do is like, if you just sort of in your mind, find and replace
01:05:43every time somebody says AI with software, um, the, the temperature on everything goes
01:05:48down a little, but it also sounds exactly like the conversations everybody had when we
01:05:55were first inventing computer software, right?
01:05:57Like the, the sort of moral panic around computers kicking everybody out of jobs is, has been
01:06:03around as long as computers have been around.
01:06:06What's different now is that everybody is telling you that they're building God to do
01:06:10it for you.
01:06:12Well, right.
01:06:12But I mean, like the, I don't need the accountant because I have Excel is like one version of
01:06:16this.
01:06:16I, I'm a marketing director and I can build a fully functional prototype of a feature that
01:06:22I want to ship in the main software, very different.
01:06:26See, but I think the second thing is less existentially frightening than the first thing.
01:06:31I think we won't need accountants anymore because Excel exists was much more plausibly
01:06:36threatening to people's jobs than now I can make a crappy prototype by myself.
01:06:42It is true, by the way, that Excel got so complicated that we need accountants more than ever.
01:06:46And maybe that's just the trajectory that we're on.
01:06:49Accountants just use Excel now.
01:06:51That's, that's the only thing that changed.
01:06:52Is it accountants use Excel?
01:06:54All right.
01:06:54I don't know on what timeline Google assistant will be good, but I do know that we should
01:06:59probably put Shopify in charge of it.
01:07:01We got to take a break.
01:07:07All right.
01:07:07We're back.
01:07:09David, it's time.
01:07:10Oh my God.
01:07:10It's time.
01:07:11We've waited this long.
01:07:12Once again, we are here for America's first or second favorite podcast within podcast,
01:07:19uh, for which we have now received theme music that I have to figure out if I'm allowed to
01:07:24play on this show sent in by listeners.
01:07:27Once I know if that's legal for me to do without asking permission, uh, starting next week,
01:07:31we have theme music.
01:07:32It's time for Brendan Carr as a dummy.
01:07:35It's funny because on this America's favorite podcast within a podcast, except for the other
01:07:40podcasts and podcasts that people love top two.
01:07:42Yeah.
01:07:42We've started to receive fan submissions for parts of the segment, like more so than I think
01:07:50the main verge cast at this point, which is very good.
01:07:52It's good stuff.
01:07:53So this week, a few things to talk about this week, but the main thing, so many people sent
01:07:59me this photo of Brendan Carr, chair of the FCC, smiling in his dumb suit, wearing a pin
01:08:05that is the gold head of Donald Trump.
01:08:08Just so proud of himself that he's wearing a pin that is the gold head of Donald Trump.
01:08:13Look, there are some like overheated blog posts about this thing, about how this is Maoism
01:08:19and this is what Mao did in chat.
01:08:21Like, Brendan's not that smart.
01:08:23You know, he's not intentionally making a call back to the Maoists in the cultural
01:08:28revolution.
01:08:29No, he's just a dummy who wants to impress his buddy, Donald Trump, and doesn't realize
01:08:35that being the head of our nation's communications infrastructure should require him to be nonpartisan.
01:08:41Instead, he's making it plain that in fact, he is a political flunky who shouldn't have
01:08:46this job by wearing the gold head of Donald Trump on his chest.
01:08:50You don't want that.
01:08:51If you had a Democrat wearing the gold head of Barack Obama in charge of the FCC during
01:08:56the net neutrality battles, I'm pretty sure the Republicans would have burned the building
01:08:59down.
01:09:00Yeah.
01:09:01You don't want that.
01:09:02You don't want it on either side.
01:09:04You want these people to be relatively neutral.
01:09:06The reason you have a commission that's made up of Democrats and Republicans by statute is
01:09:11so that when they take votes, they're not political.
01:09:13That's not how it's supposed to work.
01:09:15Right.
01:09:16They're supposed to reach some compromise and regulatory affairs.
01:09:19But anyway, you got this dummy wearing the gold head of Donald Trump.
01:09:22That's that's just that's our boy, Brendan, making it plain that he's just a political
01:09:26flunky.
01:09:27He is there to do the president's bidding and the president's bidding is to chill speech
01:09:31across the board.
01:09:32It's not important, but this pin itself is is pretty spectacular.
01:09:35Like, I have to say, it's it's definitely like some BS fake gold stuff, but in it, Trump
01:09:42has substantially better hair than he does in real life, but is also making like a little
01:09:47bit of a kissy face and the direction it's facing on our man, Brendan's lapel kind of
01:09:52makes it look like Trump is about to like kiss him on his neck.
01:09:55And that's just that's just a visual.
01:09:56I really appreciate the first time I saw a photo of this.
01:10:00I was like, this is 100 percent AI.
01:10:02There's just like there's no chance this is real.
01:10:03This is too insane.
01:10:04Um, and regret to inform you all, I was wrong.
01:10:08Yeah, it's a real bummer.
01:10:10I can't believe I want to say this, but, you know, if you pay attention to Trump, he's
01:10:13always kind of making a kissy face.
01:10:15That is true.
01:10:16He does have sort of like resting kissy face.
01:10:19It's really true.
01:10:21He's it's and he's not lost in thought.
01:10:23He's just pursing his lips.
01:10:24I don't know what's going on there.
01:10:26Uh, I want to call out our friends at Ars Technica who wrote a huge profile of Brendan this
01:10:32week.
01:10:32They called him the speech police.
01:10:33They're going through all the news distortion cases that we have covered endlessly on the
01:10:37show.
01:10:38It's just very clear to a lot of people that Brendan Carr wants to censor the internet
01:10:44and censor broadcast regulators.
01:10:46It's not just us talking about it.
01:10:47We just have the most fun doing it because my brain is broken.
01:10:51It's out there.
01:10:53It's out in other publications.
01:10:54I think Rolling Stone did a piece.
01:10:56The Ars piece is particularly good in a way that Ars is particularly good all the time.
01:11:00It's also starting to hit the other commissioners in the FCC.
01:11:04So I'm going to do something we don't usually do here on Brendan Carr's, the dummy America's
01:11:08favorite podcast for the podcast.
01:11:09I'm going to point out that the other commissioners of the FCC are doing a good job.
01:11:13So in particular, Anna Gomez, who is a democratic commissioner, was recently at the National
01:11:18Association of Broadcasters convention, the NAB convention.
01:11:21And she directly, openly called it out.
01:11:25She basically said that Brendan is a censor and the FCC is totally out of bounds.
01:11:28She said it is particularly important for media regulation, which is why the FCC was
01:11:31set up as an independent agency a long time ago, because the fear was the type of interference
01:11:36that you are now seeing today with the White House with media, whether it's broadcasters,
01:11:41public media, and internet platforms in the attempts to control speech.
01:11:44And then she went on to say, we've seen this administration throughout the administration
01:11:48threaten tech companies for their moderation practices to give consumers an environment
01:11:51that they want to, that they want to stop fact-checking.
01:11:54It is an absolute pattern of censorship and control.
01:11:57If we let them do this, it will be to the harm of the country.
01:12:01So you have at least one FCC commissioner saying, what we're doing here is wrong, just fully wrong.
01:12:08And we're actually doing the thing the FCC was set up to make sure it didn't happen,
01:12:13which is censor the speech of Americans.
01:12:15So good job, Anna.
01:12:17If you want to come on Dakota, you're more than welcome to.
01:12:19We've extended that invite.
01:12:21I've got one last one on Brendan.
01:12:23This is maybe the single most predictable Brendan Carr is a dummy item in the history
01:12:31of America's favorite podcast, Winner Podcast.
01:12:33It's an increasingly high bar, that one.
01:12:36I mean, I'm just going to start to say it and you will complete my sentences for me.
01:12:40Okay.
01:12:40This week, Brendan put out a blog post announcing the FCC's next open meeting,
01:12:44which is when they go through agenda items.
01:12:45He titled it Spectrum is back again because he thinks he's your buddy instead of being a vicious internet sensor.
01:12:50And what he's excited about is opening up more spectrum, which is basically the job of the FCC.
01:12:56And they want to open up a satellite spectrum that is currently being used by geostationary satellites.
01:13:02You can guess.
01:13:03You can guess what's happening here, right?
01:13:05SpaceX filed a petition to open up satellite spectrum that's currently being used by geostationary satellites.
01:13:10And Brendan is taking up so he can open it up without once mentioning the fact that Elon Musk asked for it.
01:13:17Not even a passing mention of this.
01:13:20Just, I believe satellite internet for rural Americans would be great.
01:13:24It's like, you're not talking about HughesNet, dog.
01:13:27Let's get real.
01:13:28You're talking about your buddy, Dr. Doge.
01:13:30Not even a mention.
01:13:32It's buried in the open meeting notes that they are responding to a petition by SpaceX.
01:13:38By saying, yes, of course, absolutely.
01:13:39Sounds great.
01:13:40Let's do it.
01:13:41Yeah.
01:13:41Yeah.
01:13:42Cool.
01:13:42It's a good response.
01:13:43You know, he's a huge proponent of SpaceX over fiber.
01:13:46There's a lot of complaints about the Biden era bead program.
01:13:49Our buddy Ezra Klein is like basically selling his book by being like, this program sucked.
01:13:53But the reason the bead program sucked is they took it away from the FCC.
01:13:57I'm not saying it didn't suck.
01:13:59I'm saying that one of the reasons it sucked is because the FCC was so politicized and stupid that it didn't have accurate broadband maps.
01:14:07Deliberately.
01:14:07So that it could roll out the infrastructure that we were going to pay for.
01:14:11So they moved it to another agency that had to start the maps over without like Verizon and Comcast getting in the way, which is a real thing that like a GPI and Brendan Carr like advocated for back in the day.
01:14:22That we're not going to, we're not going to demand these accurate maps.
01:14:24So Brendan is like, satellites will fix it.
01:14:29Don't worry about this dumb bead program that didn't give you fiber.
01:14:32And you're like, dude, you don't even know where you're going.
01:14:36But anyway, yeah, he's going to, he's going to reform the spectrum.
01:14:38And look, maybe, maybe this is the right choice.
01:14:40Maybe it is.
01:14:41But the reason that I'm calling it out is when you start with, I'm wearing the gold head of Donald Trump on my lapel and you end with, I'm doing what Elon Musk wants.
01:14:50You've lost your legitimacy as a regulator.
01:14:53Yeah.
01:14:53You just look corrupt.
01:14:55And that is because you're a dummy, Brendan.
01:14:57So again, you know, Anna's welcome.
01:14:59Brendan, if you want to come on the show and explain your behavior or even just prove that you can complete a sentence without sucking up to Donald Trump or Elon Musk, you're welcome.
01:15:10I know you listen.
01:15:12I know you listen.
01:15:14Come on in, Brendan.
01:15:15It'll be fine.
01:15:16The water's warm.
01:15:17That's been Brendan Carr's a dummy.
01:15:18One more thing about this blog post, which you shouldn't read.
01:15:22It's very boring.
01:15:22But he does the thing that Republican FCC commissioners really like to do, which is mention robocalls.
01:15:30They're like, we're doing energy pie did this masterfully.
01:15:34He was like, I'm going to ruin the Internet in the following several ways.
01:15:37But because I am a man of the people, wouldn't it be awesome if we stopped robocalls?
01:15:43And that hasn't worked at all.
01:15:46But then Brendan in here is like, we're doing we're giving Elon what he wants.
01:15:50And then he's just like, of course, spectrum is not the only area where we're moving fast.
01:15:54We're continuing the FCC's longstanding efforts to crack down on illegal robocalls.
01:15:58That segue doesn't make any sense.
01:15:59It's just him being like, but you hate robocalls, right?
01:16:03I'm going to fix them.
01:16:05By the way, it's 37 gigahertz spectrum, not 36.
01:16:07I apologize.
01:16:09Brendan, if you want to create it, Brendan's like ready to tweet how wrong I am.
01:16:13Man loves to tweet.
01:16:15It is, by the way, true.
01:16:16A G pie was all about stopping robocalls.
01:16:18It wasn't successful because he didn't actually regulate anyone.
01:16:20He just incentivized the industry to regulate itself.
01:16:23Straight up, not an exaggeration.
01:16:25I have gotten two robocalls since we started recording.
01:16:28It's very good.
01:16:28Anyway, that is Brendan Carr is dummy.
01:16:31America's favorite podcast within a podcast.
01:16:33If you know where he got the pin from, let me know.
01:16:36I'm sort of dying to know.
01:16:37All right, David, we need some.
01:16:38I will make me.
01:16:39I wear the pin on the show.
01:16:40I will.
01:16:41If you get us one, I will make me wear it.
01:16:42It's the closest we're going to get to Trump or Brendan on the show.
01:16:45Let's be honest.
01:16:46All right.
01:16:47We need a palate cleanser, my friend.
01:16:48Theme music TK, by the way.
01:16:50All right.
01:16:50Can we talk about TikTok for like 35 seconds?
01:16:53That's all I want to do.
01:16:54That's so the opposite of a palate cleanser.
01:16:56All right.
01:16:57Well, then we're going to get to the palate cleanser.
01:16:58But we got to talk about TikTok just for 35 seconds because we spent a little bit of time
01:17:02on it last week.
01:17:04Nothing happened.
01:17:05Everybody says it's against the law.
01:17:07Nothing is happening.
01:17:08Is that a fair summation of what's going on?
01:17:10Trump delayed it another 75 days.
01:17:13Pam Bondi, the attorney general, is out there essentially demanding that Apple and Google
01:17:17keep the apps alive, which is what they've been doing all along, saying we're not going
01:17:21to enforce this.
01:17:22You have to keep it in the store on and on and on.
01:17:24And then Senate Democrats are saying it's against the law to do this delay, which, of course,
01:17:32is true.
01:17:33All you do is read the law and you know that that's the case.
01:17:35But I don't imagine any of that changing much of anything.
01:17:39It's a particularly bad situation for Apple and Google because they just get exposed to
01:17:42another 75 days of liability, just hoping that everything works out for them.
01:17:46They're just these like weird pawns trying to hope nobody notices them.
01:17:50And they're just going to have to keep waiting this out because it's maybe never going to
01:17:53end.
01:17:53But they want tariff relief, too.
01:17:57So they've got to keep it like the level of just like base corruption here is wild, right?
01:18:01Like everyone has to fly to the golf course and be like, please, sir, not one hundred and
01:18:06four percent.
01:18:07And they're all going to leave with like different numbers and compare them in the parking lot.
01:18:10But they cannot take TikTok down because they want the number to be lower than the next guy.
01:18:18This TikTok is doomed.
01:18:20That's my prediction.
01:18:21It is the ultimate pawn in this entire situation.
01:18:25China is not going to want to sell it.
01:18:26And at the end of the day, what they're going to say is turn it off.
01:18:29Like we don't want one hundred and four percent.
01:18:31Donald Trump is not going to keep this promise.
01:18:33Oh, you think China is going to say turn it off?
01:18:35It's the last bit of leverage.
01:18:36They did it once, right?
01:18:37They wanted to leverage the first time.
01:18:39They just turned it off.
01:18:40The last bit of leverage you have.
01:18:42We don't want one hundred and four.
01:18:44We want zero.
01:18:45TikTok's gone.
01:18:47Trump will blink.
01:18:48That will work.
01:18:49I think you're right that that is that is like if you start at we're not going to release
01:18:54your movies here anymore.
01:18:55We're like a few escalations up to we're going to turn off TikTok and.
01:19:00That will work.
01:19:01Yeah.
01:19:01In every way that China would need it to.
01:19:03It would work.
01:19:04Yeah.
01:19:04And China is not afraid to play these games.
01:19:06China is like, oh, you're the CEO of Alibaba.
01:19:07What if you weren't around for a while?
01:19:09Well, it is an authoritarian government as it's just a move they play.
01:19:15So we'll see.
01:19:17All right.
01:19:17Now, can we have a palette cleanser?
01:19:18Yes.
01:19:18Palette cleanser.
01:19:19I have two bits of exciting news for you before we leave.
01:19:22One is that it appears to be plausible possible that Instagram is actually going to get an
01:19:29iPad app 750 years after the launch of Instagram.
01:19:33Wait, can I tell you the funniest thing about this story?
01:19:35Yeah.
01:19:36It made me laugh so hard.
01:19:38This is also from the information which is doing great work.
01:19:41It's in the context of a story that's about Adam Seri and Instagram being ready to be super
01:19:46aggressive if TikTok goes away.
01:19:48And there's a long list of stuff you might do.
01:19:50And they're like, it's time to ship that iPad app.
01:19:52And it's like, no, that's not it, guys.
01:19:56That's not if TikTok goes away and your answer is also there's an iPad app now.
01:20:00I don't know if that's going to be it, but I do love it.
01:20:04I don't think that is how you do it.
01:20:06TikTok famously also not a great iPad experience, but I think there's a case to be made for
01:20:13Instagram just attempting to be everywhere as it goes through all of this, right?
01:20:16And one way to make people happy and get a bunch of headlines is to launch an iPad app.
01:20:24I think it's not crazy that Meta has been sitting on a finished iPad app for a long time,
01:20:28just sort of waiting for the right moment.
01:20:31I mean, there's no way this requires, I'm going to say, any work on their part, right?
01:20:36You click a couple of buttons, it goes, boop, it's wider.
01:20:39You've got an iPad app.
01:20:41They were just mad at Apple, right?
01:20:43Yeah, they just didn't want to do it.
01:20:44Yeah.
01:20:44Yeah.
01:20:45And I also, I was just talking to our friend Casey Johnston for a Vergecast thing that's
01:20:51going to run in the next couple of weeks.
01:20:53And one of her theories is that Meta doesn't like iPad apps because they want you to be on
01:20:57your phone because the phone is the more addictive and harder to put down device, which just strikes
01:21:03me as a good theory.
01:21:04I have no evidence for that theory, but it's a theory that makes sense.
01:21:07But I think there are a lot of people who have iPads and want to look at Instagram on
01:21:12their iPads.
01:21:12And I think if you claim to be a media first thing that is great on screens, iPads kind
01:21:18of make a lot of sense.
01:21:19Seems like a good idea.
01:21:21This also, I'm curious if this extends to Threads, which also does not have an iPad app,
01:21:26which feels like a little embarrassing as well, particularly given that it is in the heat
01:21:30of battle with these other platforms.
01:21:32Instagram is at least like singular in its way.
01:21:35There's also no WhatsApp for iPad.
01:21:37Like Meta has made a calculated effort to not do the iPad.
01:21:41And I think it is in part because of this ongoing beef with Apple.
01:21:45But I think there may be a moment here where it is so useful to do that, that they'll do
01:21:50it.
01:21:51I mean, that's wild.
01:21:52Again, I just think it's very funny to like list of things to do if TikTok goes down.
01:21:56And they're like, they moved the card on the Kanban board from jail to immediate, you
01:22:03know?
01:22:05All right.
01:22:05What's the next one?
01:22:06The last one is the Pixel 9a, which Allison Johnson just reviewed for us.
01:22:11And it is great.
01:22:13It is the mid-range phone you would want it to be.
01:22:16It comes in a cool color.
01:22:18It's like pink that I'm very into that Allison had.
01:22:21And this is like Google continues to make good phones.
01:22:24This phone is still $499.
01:22:26There's been some sketchiness with the like release date and all this stuff.
01:22:29But like the price is right at a time when it might not be for long.
01:22:34This is just a really good phone.
01:22:35And this has become the phone I tell most people who are not like tech people, but like
01:22:41Android phones to buy.
01:22:43And I feel like this easily continues that in a way that I find very exciting.
01:22:46Yeah.
01:22:46Google seems to be killing it with this series.
01:22:48And I think it's particularly interesting this coming like, what, a month after the
01:22:53iPhone 16e, which is $100 more expensive.
01:22:57And I think that Delta and just a couple extra little like, you know, friendly tweaks on the
01:23:049a, right?
01:23:05The fact that it will do both fingerprint and face authentication, the fact that it
01:23:09has a higher refresh rate screen, go a long enough way to make it feel like a deal in
01:23:16the way that the 16e doesn't quite get there.
01:23:20Yeah.
01:23:20I think Google, ironically, like the big tradeoff here that Google made is it does less AI
01:23:26stuff, which is a very surprising tradeoff for Google to make, but also a really good
01:23:30one.
01:23:30It has all the other stuff you'd want your phone to have, it just doesn't do quite as
01:23:34much of the AI stuff.
01:23:36And spoiler alert, most people are pretty willing to make that trade, it turns out.
01:23:41All right.
01:23:41I just want to end the episode by pointing out that in the time that we've been talking,
01:23:45the tariff on China has risen to 145%.
01:23:49145?
01:23:51The White House has clarified that the tariff on China is now 145.
01:23:56You know what's manly in Eli?
01:23:57A thousand percent.
01:23:59Real men do a thousand.
01:24:00I'm just saying it's a very loud V8 engine, my friends.
01:24:05Wait, can I ask one more question about phones before we go?
01:24:07This is the thing I've been thinking about, and I'm curious what you guys think.
01:24:09I think my sort of ongoing thesis for a while now has been that phones are not actually
01:24:15that price sensitive anymore.
01:24:17That, you know, you get the trade-ins, you get the financing that like actually the sort
01:24:21of $100 delta between one phone and another is not that meaningful.
01:24:23But I wonder in a tariff-y world where people are more price conscious about everything,
01:24:29like are we as people who write about these things going to have to care about price in
01:24:35general more than we have in the past?
01:24:38It's interesting because we run a reviews program and so much of our reviews program is like,
01:24:43is it worth the money?
01:24:44And so I want to say the answer is yes, because that just changes the heart of the thing that
01:24:50we do.
01:24:51But I also think what's going to happen is like, there's going to be more bloatware on
01:24:56the phones, right?
01:24:58Like people are price sensitive, especially right now.
01:25:01And I, you're just, I think you're just going to be like, you open your pixel line a and
01:25:06Google is like, do you want three free months of max?
01:25:09Yeah.
01:25:10Right.
01:25:10Like it's just, that thing is going to start happening in extremely weird ways, or they're
01:25:15going to lower the base storage and be like, do you want Google one?
01:25:17Like, you know, like I, there's something shittier that's coming that like, we'll keep the
01:25:22price the same.
01:25:23And I'm not sure what it will be, but I, it feels like they're not going to up the
01:25:29price, right?
01:25:30Cause that's a drastic measure.
01:25:32Yeah.
01:25:33And it is easier to sneakily make the phone worse than to sneakily make it more expensive.
01:25:37That's like, if you're any one of these big, if you're Apple or Google, you can go to one
01:25:41of the big carriers and be like, here's what we need to do.
01:25:43We need to adjust the terms of our revenue sharing.
01:25:46And so the phone contract links will be six months longer or add on a provider.
01:25:54Service upcharge fee.
01:25:55That's labeled like the cook doctrine, like what, it doesn't matter.
01:26:00You know, like there's just other places to sneak the money in that isn't the selling
01:26:04price because of the way we've structured all of these things.
01:26:06I think I buy that.
01:26:07It feels like, it feels like bad news.
01:26:09Yeah.
01:26:10But I think that, I think that is where this goes.
01:26:12Like, we're going to see, uh, Chris Mims, my old colleague at the Wall Street Journal
01:26:15was tweeting about like the, the thing people don't realize is not that a lot of stuff
01:26:19is going to get more expensive.
01:26:20It's that a lot of stuff is going to go away.
01:26:21Uh, and I think that and the sort of in shittification of things ahead of their time are, are two
01:26:29sort of non-obvious things to look out for here.
01:26:32Yeah.
01:26:32By the way, the 145, they clarified it's because of fentanyl, which, uh, which one of
01:26:37those things is not a crisis coming from China.
01:26:39Yeah.
01:26:40What's the trade deficit on fentanyl?
01:26:42It's very confusing.
01:26:44Like there's, there's a hole in the heart of this whole argument.
01:26:47That's like, oh, but your emergency is fake.
01:26:50So we'll see.
01:26:51By the time you listen to this, the number could have gone up or down.
01:26:54Who knows?
01:26:55Tell us, email us and tell us what the number is right now as you're hearing this.
01:27:00I desperately want to know.
01:27:02Yeah.
01:27:02All right.
01:27:03We got to get out of here.
01:27:03That is the VergeCast.
01:27:06And that's it for the VergeCast this week.
01:27:12And hey, we'd love to hear from you.
01:27:14Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11.
01:27:18The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:27:21Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer.
01:27:25And that's it.