The Vergecast - One company's quest for the perfect charger

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

We've talked many times on The Vergecast about the dream of the perfect charger. We call it The God Cable, and imagine it would charge everything, at full optimized speed, no matter what you plug in. Well, one company tried to make it – sort of. TwelveSouth founder Andrew Green joins the show to talk about how his company developed its newest product, the PowerCord, and why actually the God Cable might be both impossible and a bad idea. After that, The Verge's Tina Nguyen joins the show to talk about her experience at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, the rise of $TRUMP, and how crypto and the government became so intertwined. Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about AI agents, and the tasks we should (and shouldn't) offload to our chatbots. Further reading: The TwelveSouth PowerCord The Vergecast USB-C Holiday Spec-tacular Everything you need to know about switching to USB-C How a crypto bro shorted $TRUMP coin — and scored a dinner with the President Presidential seals, $100,000 watches, and a Marriott afterparty Trump’s media company says it’s buying $2.5 billion in Bitcoin The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act will soon ramp up in Congress. Crypto funds seized by the government may go into a ‘digital Fort Knox’ Google’s future is Google googling OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent can do things on the web for you Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Fill out a brief survey and tell us what you want from The Vergecast: voxmedia.com/survey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of very fast charging. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I currently have a problem I have not had in a very long time, which is that I'm out of podcasts. So I had a friend's wedding this past weekend, which meant all in all between going up on Friday and back on Sunday. I spent like 20 and a half hours in the car, which A, too much, do not recommend. But B meant that for the first time in a really long time, I just sat there and absolutely cranked through my podcast backlog. Normally, I'm sort of oversubscribed to podcasts and I'll pick and choose as I go. This time I just opened up pocketcasts, put on the new releases queue,

and just jammed through. And I've finished. That has never happened before. I have listened to all of my podcasts. And some of them, I'm sure, have, you know, back catalogs that I should go back and listen to. And I was listening to a bunch of the Adventure Zone, which is a Dungeons and Dragons podcast that I like, there's like 40,000 of those episodes I haven't heard. So there's like stuff I could do, but I had this very strange experience of getting to the end of my podcasts. It felt like getting to the end of the internet. And it was weird and also kind of lovely at the same time. And now I'm like, either I need to go in and get 100 new podcasts or I need to just revel in the idea that I have finished the internet in one very specific way.

That said, I think I'm going to do the first thing. So if you have really great podcast recommendations, please do send them my way. I'd love to hear them. Anyway, this is a podcast, but we are not here today to talk about podcasts. We're here today to do two things. First, we're going to talk to Andrew Green, who is the CEO of a company called 12 South, which makes gadget accessories, about basically the company's recent adventure to try and perfect the charging cable.

It's a tricky thing, and it's a thing we've talked about a lot on this show, and 12 South tried to do it. So we're going to talk about it. Then Tina Nguyen on our team is going to come on and talk to us about crypto, and particularly how crypto and the Trump administration and the tech industry all have gotten sort of smushed together. She was at a Bitcoin conference last week, called us from her hotel room in Vegas, and we're going to talk about it.

We have some really fun hotline question about AI agents, lots to get to, lots more to come. All of that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I'm going to go listen to more podcasts, because I'm sure in the time that I've been doing this, more have shown up. So I'm going to go refresh the queue. We're going to see how we're doing. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. So we've talked a bunch on this show in the past about this thing that we call the God cable. Basically, we've talked a lot about the sort of sneaky mess that is the USBC standard. The idea that all of this is supposed to be standardized, the theory that all you really need is one cable to charge all of your devices.

And if you own more than one device, you know. How straightforwardly incorrect that is. And so a question we've been asking, and a thing we've been trying to figure out for a long time now, is, is the God cable possible? Could you build the one true USBC cable to rule them all? I think the answer's no, but, you know, there's still hope. Andrew Green, who is the CEO of an accessories company called 12 South.

12South makes a bunch of really great, mostly Apple-centric accessories. If you've ever used the thing that props up your MacBook vertically that sits next to your monitor, that's probably a 12-south thing. And more recently, the company launched this thing. It's just called PowerCord. And it is what it sounds like. It's PowerCord.

It comes in 4-foot and 10-foot versions. And the idea is that you just take this thing out of the box, plug it into the wall, and trust that it will charge your devices. I find that really fascinating and sort of complicated, right? They had to go through the questions of what does it mean to make one cable that can do everything? Is it even possible to do one cable that can do everything? So I made Andrew come on and basically just walk us through the process of how it all works. And we started at the very beginning with why build a thing called the power cord at all? Let's hear it. It all began with

the first mobile phone, right? The OG Razor, the Sony Erickson's, the Nokia's. When you got those phones in your world way back in the day, you took out a power supply and you put it in the wall, and you took the other side of that power supply and you plugged it into your phone, right? So at the beginning of mobile phones and mobile accessories in general, it was typically a power adapter with a fixed cable that went to the device.

Sure. And that was about as simple as it got, and anyone could understand that. Jumping way ahead and to our world today, we're in the world of standards, which is wonderful, USBA, USBC, multiple wattage that can go through all of them and then mobile phones that don't even ship with a plug, right?

So compare the simplicity of the first generation of powering and charging up a mobile phone with where we're at today, with immense flexibility, with immense speed and all sorts of things that come with that, but nothing that looks like simplicity, right? Interesting. Like, I think the argument for the way that we've landed now is sort of two things. one, it is a safer and safer assumption every day to assume that everybody has lots of chargers and that maybe adding another charger to the mix is not worth the cost and the e-waste and everything else. And B, that actually assuming everybody wants a dedicated charger for every device is wrong.

Right? And I feel like, and that's like, you rewind back. And the problem with the simplicity of it all was I had to remember which chord went to which thing. And then I had to go. go unplug the one from the wall for my phone so that I could plug in the one to the wall for my laptop. And like, it is funny in a sense that we've made it both simpler and vastly more complex all at the same time. But I do feel like the idea of having a dedicated separate charger for every single one of my devices is not a good outcome. I don't disagree. Okay. For you and me.

Okay. But for my mother-in-law, who doesn't want to understand any of this. and they go down to the Verizon store, of which they're still over 5,000, and they get a new phone that might be replacing a phone that's five or six years old. And they go back to their drawer of things,

and none of it works. And they're like, why can't I charge my phone and why doesn't this phone come with the plug? That's fair. And so, right? And that's all you, that's not me. We enjoy the flexibility in that,

but there are still millions and millions of people that don't live, eat, and breed this every day, where the simplicity has been lost for them and a product like the power cord brings that back. Verizon or any other, like, mobility store could hand them a power cord, and they know that that person's going to have a flawless experience. That, like, there's so many ways it can go wrong with an uninitiated person. they could have their old iPhone 5 watt power adapter, for example. And they could find a cord that connects them, right? Oh, here's this USBA that I got with my razor last month, by the way, that does connect

to a C-L, I'll just connect that. And then they're having a horrible, poor experience underpowering their new phone, right? Or they have a drawer full of A cables and micro-USB cables. They all still have all of those. And so they have a drawer full of stuff that doesn't work with the phone that they just took home from a mobility store next to Walmart. So that I do think, by the way, is a fairly universal experience. And this is something I think you and I probably both deal with too.

Like I have a drawer here full of charging stuff. And it is a game of Tetris every single time, right? I have the wall plug. I have a cable and I have a device. And figuring out which three of how those things are supposed to fit together in order for this to like work in the optimal way is a pain. And you have to do it every single time. And I think I'm very sensitive and compelled by the argument that, like, something should come in the box because I want to be able to take the thing out and plug it in and use it.

So when you sit down to make something like that, I'm curious, like, where you even start trying to design a product like this? It's funny. I can, I know exactly. So Apple makes a lot of lovely things. And on IMac, or at least some of the previous generations of IMA, they had this, like, a larger plug that had a ground. plug that was like unbelievably well designed and beautiful, the most beautiful plug ever. And it was that like triangular one that kind of like swooped down. Oh yeah.

I know we were talking about it. Right? Yeah, that was a good one. I haven't seen that thing in forever. So anyway, I was playing with that and I was like, well, wait a sec. There's a lot of volume in that overmold of that U.S. based grounded cable. If you took the grounding off and you didn't really need that grounding, but you still had that cavity of volume in there, Could that fit a charger?

Interesting. You know, I'm like, at this point, all the chargers were getting so small. It's like, you know, that's like an arms race to like, you know, cost and size, right? And the charger itself was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And so, honestly, inspired by Apple's several generations back plug that had this beautiful shape, but had volume in there, I'm like, could you fit a charger in there? And if you could fit a charger in there, you could make this like magic all in one again just for giggles. So the initial initial idea was the idea that in a larger but still beautiful overmold of a plug itself, can you hide the charger in that and then connect the cable to where it's an all in one scenario?

And so actually when we ended up with this design, it's still kind of a little bit larger than it needs to be because it's hiding. a 30-watt charger behind the plug itself. And then so this design was really interesting because at first we had it going out and then I was working with another designer here, Christina, and she's the one that said, well, let's play with this. I get that we can kind of hide a charger in there,

but we started playing with this. And actually she came up with this kind of new shape. And when we saw it, we actually were like, well, that's really cool. That looks like my grandmother's like, ironing board plug. Yeah, it kind of does. Right?

There's like something retro to it. See, I immediately went like hotel room hair dryer when I looked at it. But yeah, it's the same kind of thing. Right, right. And so how cool is that? And that's also how we got to cord instead of cable. We kind of decided that cables are dumb things that need to plug from one thing to another. But a cord, again, if your grandmother said, fetch me the ironin board and then plug that

cord in, right? Or the old vacuum cleaner has a power cord. They never said power cable, right? And so that's kind of how we started zeroing on cord as cord was kind of old school for like a permanent power thing that you use. So in terms of the why it didn't exist yet thing, I think my running theory would be that just that it seems like the sort of, I don't know, call it the cord industry, the cable industry, like whatever you want has sort of stratified into separate directions. One is the like, you just buy the anchor thing

you find on Amazon. And then on the other side, you have like the, the very expensive Apple cables and the Kevlar wrapped stuff and the like really sort of durable, cared for high end, very expensive cables

that are like several multiples of the price. The sort of middle path you're trying to find is so interesting because they're either competing on price or they're in some spec arms race or another, right? Like the other place all these companies are pushing is like wattage and millie amp hours of attached battery, right? Like those are the two things you can push on and everything gets bigger and heavier and faster and like becomes a fire risk and whatever.

And I think one of the things that most immediately interested me about the power cord is that it's a 30 watt charger. In a world where like when we always talk about that we call it the God cable, that's just like the one perfect cable for everything you want to. to do. It's like that thing it needs to be, it needs to be fast. Like I want, I want, I want to be able to charge my like cordless drill in 10 minutes on this thing. But you went with, you went with 30 as a, as a sort of catch-all for all of your devices. Is that sort of the spec that you start with as you're building this thing out is like, how powerful should this thing be? It is a catch-off for all of your mobile devices. Sure. It is a catch-off for anything currently sold and a

T&T or Verizon, right? Going past 30 and you're into laptops and tools and a whole another thing. And that's fantastic, but that's not what this product was. And at 30, we can charge every single thing in a mobile phone category and even a tablet category and even a MacBook Air. But we're not, this isn't that cable. And I mean, like, you know, the plug, even today on a 90 isn't going to be this. And, and I mean, and when you're in that space, you're going to also make other decisions that you want multiple ports. I don't think you would want to trap 90 watts

in a fixed cable scenario like the power cord design presents. But for 30 watts, charging every single thing in a mobile phone category and even a tablet category, 30 watts is great. It's perfectly fine.

As you're thinking about this as sort of a specifically mobile thing, does that make the vagaries of the USBC spec a little easier to work with? I mean, even just to be able to say, here is one USBC cable that will functionally do all the things you needed to do to charge your devices. I think people, we think of that as like a small accomplishment, but it's actually a pretty big one because USBC is a weird constellation of different things rather than sort of one individual spec for one individual cable. How do you solve that problem here?

So USBC is still the new thing that even allows us to like do like a solution like this. Back to like that mobility store, it is only now that that store is full of only USBC. Sure. Last year it wasn't. So even doing something that you can say USBC will charge every single thing in this store is less than 12 months old. Right. Well, and I think even to say, you know, every cable in this store will charge every phone in this store is in many cases still not true. Correct.

And so that's kind of what I'm getting at, like to be able to do this. in a genuinely universal way, even with a universal plug, I think is still harder than it gets credit for. That's why they're connected, because it's not universal unless they're connected.

Because a person can go in, and I mean, they've sold solutions, you know, before, and they're still separated. And you can still get in trouble separated. You're like, oh, I'll just use my old thing. I can make it fit. Or I can use this cable and make this fit.

So until it's, connected, you can't say it's universal. You can't say it's going to work because a person has the ability to go to that drawer and pull out something that's going to like wreck the whole game, right? So that's one of the reasons why we connected it. There's a bazillion adapters with USB ports on them and there's a billion cables and they're all in the drawers that we all have. There was never something that was universally from plug to device, at least in, you know, in recent times, that could guarantee that. Like, Grandma could still get in trouble

with the Belkin device that they might have bought from Verizon in her kitchen drawer. Sure. But she cannot with this. We know. And by the way, the stores can guarantee

that they're going to have a perfect experience with this because of its simplicity, because it's fixed. It actually keeps you out of trouble. I think trying to figure out, okay, what can we charge for this that both accomplishes the goal

of these users, but also doesn't price these people out. Because if I have a, if I have a five-year-old phone, I probably don't have a super high tolerance for a $129 power cord. No, if we say that we're going to operate in a retail compatible pricing structure, all we have to do is to be about the same as them buying it separately. Like what is the typical retail for the cable and the adapter separately that they were going to sell anyway? And as long as we are competitive to that, it is what it is. And I mean, And, you know, we're going to have, like, you know, retail pricing. It's going to be 29, 39, 49, 49. It's going to be that.

Even though this is a unique product, it can't have a unique price. It has to be competitive with doing it separately. And it has to be the right idea at the right time with the right price. Right. And if any one of those three are off, it's a failed product. Yeah. No, I agree with that. And that actually, I think, maybe answers some of the, like, why doesn't this have X,

X, Y, and Z features that I wondered about. And the one I'm particularly curious about was a built-in battery because I think you could make the case that the exact user you're describing is also somebody who would love to have a little bit of backup power that they don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about. That actually maybe this cord should charge my phone even when it's not plugged into the wall, at least a little. And my assumption is there are both like price and engineering challenges with that. But I'm curious if that's something you've thought about in this process. So, no, no way. I mean, because again, it would blow out the pricing on it. Sure. And two is that, so by the way, like, we always knew we were going to do a long one.

It's sold in four foot and ten foot. In my mind, it was always ten foot. Interesting. Okay. Right. Because, because, back to my mother-in-law, I love her so much. She has a place. She has a chair where she watches TV a lot. And that's where she charges her phone. And when she's sitting in that chair, she's charging her phone. So, like, a lot of people don't charge their phone and then use it wireless, when they're in their place in their home, they have it plugged in. Right. So it has to be this like living cable and like enough to kind of like do that. And so the length of the cable was actually part of the design as well because in my experience, a lot of folks actually plug in and charge their phones in this same space in their living room and their

couch. And it was never a mobile kind of accessory. And they would never think of carrying that with them if it had a battery because they're just not going to. It's going to be where where their place is they're at most of the time in their home is where they're probably going to charge their phone most of the time in the home. And they don't even charge it. They just plug it in when they're there just for security. Right. So I mean, that's an interesting, again, sort of product design thinking question there, right?

Like, you actually are not imagining this thing is going to be unplugged and moved around all the time. This is a thing that will sort of live in the wall. And I think that's not how people think about a lot of their chargers right now. Like, you have maybe the one next to your bed. I think everybody has, like, one permanent charger. And then we're all sort of used to carrying around cables with us. Yeah, but so, but like, there's these huge long cables actually sell crazy. Yeah.

You know, the 10 foots, the 15 foot and stuff like that. And so nobody bundles that. Nobody puts that kind of thing in there, but that's absolutely a thing. And it's that one, maybe two places that you always want that in your home. That's not what you put in your bag, but you know where it is in your house. There's both sort of a lot to think about in terms of how you make something like this and only so much you can do at the prices you're talking about. Like what's something you spend a lot of time trying to match to those things as you were building this?

Well, the cable. The cable is going to be a big deal. it's going to be the thing that everybody touches the most. So I'd be nice to take your plug, and you're going to plug that in and maybe not unplug it for two years, right? If it's in your, like, by your chair, right? Yeah, you might never see it again.

You're going to, like, you know, you're going to touch this cable over and over and over again. And if you have a 10-foot one, it could get, like, bunched up and stuff. And so, you know, once you kind of solved all the little questions around this, that it can, like, hide a charger that it can actually be a really distinctive little shape

that's really kind of comfortable immediately to people for lots of interesting reasons. Then you run straight to the cable. And a 10-foot cable in specific, because you have to solve for 10-foot first, and then you just go backwards to four, obviously. And when this was like a little bulkier than some plugs, the cable had to actually kind of like talk to that

and like interface with that. And so we didn't want a tiny, thin cable. We wanted kind of a chunky, kind of meaty cable that actually kind of like interface with our, you know, plug appropriately. Like if this had like a dinky little cable that looked like a tail, it really wouldn't work that well. And then we had experience with the flat versions of these that they didn't tangle as easy. And so that was like super cool. So and kind of like making every little element as kind of nice and kind of deluxe as we can. And after we solved the functional challenges of this and came up with this kind of fun design that is retro and modern at the same time, we focused our tensions immediately to the cable.

Is making a 10-foot cable that works the way you're describing like a meaningfully harder prospect than doing it at four feet or three feet? Yes. How so? Power. The power traveling over 10 feet needs a higher gauge to do it successfully. or you actually have electric power loss. So you solve all your problems with 10, and then to make it match,

you just pair that to four. I see, okay. Right? There's several, like, meaningful elements that you have to solve in a longer cable adapter combo like this. Is that as simple as just basically buying higher quality materials

so that they don't lose the power as they go? It's the thickness of it in there. Interesting. Okay. You see that in Apple's cables, right? And like, so like a Thunderbolt 4, like when they want to go beyond their kind of typical meter, it starts getting thicker and thicker. That's for gauge. Got it.

Okay. The wire and the thickness of the wire in there to transmit all of that stuff and longer distances requires more pipe. So, okay, so I'm, I agree with you and I understand the principle of like you want to do a specific thing for a specific person. But you've now been down this road deep enough to know the answer as to whether it is even. theoretically possible to build the God cable that we have been talking about and I have been describing this sort of like one USB cable that works with all of my things. You can even be integrated if you want it to. But the sort of one thing that I can plug into the wall that will charge everything that I have at every correct speed and with every correct version of USBC that

it is just like this is the one cable I need to charge everything I own in an optimized way. Is it even impossible to do that? So one thing that pops up is that used to be Apple's power adapters. Like their MacBook power adapters when they were proprietary was the God cable, but just for the MacBook. But never mind that. What's the God cable for USBC now? And what you're saying is I need 100 watts permanently into my USBC.

You would be so pissed if I trapped 100 watts in something that you can't connect to other stuff too. Fair. Because you don't always need the 100 watts. Right. What I want is 30 and 30 and 30. Right. And that's when you want the flexibility of the multi-ports. That's when the magic of C and these flexible adapters comes to fruition.

You would hate having 100 watts trapped in like a permanent cable because that's not always what you need. So once we go there, we are in kind of charging utopia because there's so many options and they have batteries and you can run out of picnic table in the middle of nowhere. and there's four ports of everything for everyone. And so, yes, you could do it, but you wouldn't want it because you would want the flexibility of splitting out that much power to other things when you want to do that. Okay. The problem with that approach is it's a much more complicated shopping expedition, right?

That's like, now I have to make sure that I am buying the right adapter and the right set of cables to go into that adapter in order for all of this work. And then I can only use all of those things together or else it's just going to, it all falls apart again. Well, and so by the way, a lot of people selling devices that need that still do include the plug. All the MacBooks still include the plug. Sure. And that's because when you get to that level and stuff like that, that's still a reasonable expectation.

And they want to know that they have an end-to-end solution in that box over that price point and solving those big problems and stuff. And so, by the way, even Apple offers the double port. When you buy an air, you have the choice of a 70, or like a two-port-30. So I think once you're over $50 or you're over-charging small mobile devices, it becomes a little bit of a different game, and you would always choose that flexibility.

All right, last question, and then I'm going to let you go. Tell me about colors. You did black and white, which is like, fine. But why black and white? Why not, you know, other colors or let people choose or get really weird with it? I have a deep orange USBC cable that I love to pieces, and I want more people to have weird colors. So why black and white? Well, so that's funny you mentioned that because.

All right, so we released PowerCore yesterday, right? And we released it. I mean, it's not black and white. It's like dove and charcoal or something like that. Sure, it's black and white. Sure. You call it a real thing. No, dude.

Listen, this is where we were. Right? Up until yesterday, a lot of 12sauce hardware, certainly around power, was like our glossy white with red. Sure. And that goes back to like a plug-bug 15 years ago. And so I would say we made a huge step forward yesterday in our charcoal and like Heather Gray. No, we're not afraid of that, but you're not going to not do a black one.

I mean, listen, you can ask anybody. and they can make like 15 colors, and the black one's still going to outsell it like a million to one. Oh, yeah. So we're going to start out with like your basics and to get the job done, but we're not afraid of colors at all. But I would tell you that if we had like an orange, say, for example, with the black and the white solutions yesterday, it would have distracted.

When we have a new product that has a new idea, we wouldn't want a color to distract from it. And we want to put it out there and make sure that we talk about the important parts of the product and its function and its solutions before we get into it. And did you see the purple one and the orange one? Okay. That's fair. But we're not afraid of that at all. Yeah. But you just don't want to start with look at this cool orange USB cable.

Right. Because we would rather talk about the solution first. Yeah. That's fair. And that's typically in basics. Yeah. Color-wise. Yeah.

No, I get it. I buy it. And I do. I still remember, and I've mentioned this to people before, but like years ago, I had a meeting with Lenovo. And they had this very cool orange laptop. And I was like, that thing is awesome. Tell me about it. And he was like, straight up, that thing only exists so that people will walk over to the shelf and then buy the black one.

It's like, that's why we made an orange one. People will look at it and then buy the black one. They're not wrong. Yeah. I mean, and so consumers, you know, I mean, I do the same thing. Sometimes I'm like, oh, that's great. I'll take white or, you know, whatever. So, I mean, you know, the bold thing is to not do that,

but you still have to, like, put something out that, like, meets people where they're at and meets their comfort level. Totally. All right. Andrew, this is great. Thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. David, this is a fun.

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you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Tina Nguyen is here. Hi, Tina. Hi, David.

This is your first time on the Vergecast. This is very exciting. presumably for you, but definitely for me. I'm very happy you're here. I have been waiting to be on the Vergecast for the longest time. I have been here for over three months now. And the entire time I'm here going like, do they like me? Will they let me on their podcast?

Am I cool? Have I like successfully integrated myself into this company? That's perfect. That's exactly the thing we're trying to engender when new people come. But you've made it. Congratulations. You're here now. So stoked.

So you're currently in Vegas at some kind of crypto conference, right, which is like perfect timing for all of what we want to talk about. But tell me about the conference. What's going on? How are the vibes? This is not just like some crypto conference. This is the Bitcoin conference. It is the biggest one in the country. I think it was like one of the first.

It's hosted by Bitcoin magazine, which has now turned into some like weird crypto version of Fox News. I think that people will be bad at crypto if they tell me, if they say that it's Fox News. But it has this like extremely broad power over not just the crypto community, but also now this wave of lawmakers that are coming to this thing, this wave of big businesses that are coming to this thing. I was talking to this guy who's been at the conference for like five years, and he was like, this is the first time I've seen more people wearing suits than not.

Interesting. I believe there are four senators, several members of the House, a whole bunch of like deputy secretaries of the Treasury and whatever, people from the administration, David Sacks, who is the White House's AI slash crypto czar, was there as well. And I don't know, there were in points here where I was like, I don't think this is a crypto conference. This reminds me of CPAC. And CPAC is the conservative political action conference that used to. to be the giant hub for every single Republican activist, elected official, what have you, to, like, gather in Washington and, you know, do panels, hear speakers, have an expo floor, super duper Republican.

I walked into this conference, and there were people in, like, every variation of MAGA hat that you could possibly find. Oh, wow. Steak and Shake was there. There's a really weird thing going on with steak and shake. I really would, it's a much longer story. But Steak and Shake was there with a big booth saying Steak Toshi over it, referring to the mystical founder of Bitcoin, a dude who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto.

But they had a booth there that was showing off how steak and shake now accepts Bitcoin. And they were also selling beef tallow. They were selling jars of beef tallow, $9 for a jar of grass. fast-fed tallow $12 for a jar of Wagyu tallow. And if you bought a jar of tallow, you would get a hat that said, make frying oil tallow again. What on earth? So we've just, this is just like a full we've completely lost the plot kind of moment that you're describing here. But the thing is, okay, let me, I would like to make the case very quickly that what steak and

shake is doing is actually like a super normal thing in the Bitcoin community. It feels like I've been seeing that in the crypto world like for forever. Everybody, the like we've started accepting crypto and now we're going to go all in on this because it's like a some version of a PR win. Sure. What strikes me is very different is the like Bitcoin 2025 turning into CPAC thing. And this is kind of what I want to talk about with you because it feels like that's like a perfect microcosm of a thing that has happened that I still don't totally understand, which is that somehow the sort of right wing mass. Maga crowd and the crypto crowd, two groups that you would not historically think would have anything to do with each other or anything that they agree on about how anything works are

suddenly all tied up together. And I want to talk through some sort of specific pieces of that, but you've watched a lot of this happen. How did this happen? I can talk very thoroughly about the Republican side coming into this. So for people who are listening, I don't know. I used to be a full-fledged political reporter. My beat was the MAGA movement. And I had been covered Donald Trump for like Vanity Fair, Politico on the White House team. I've been covering Trump since 2015. 400 years ago at this point.

400 years ago, I am this old withered crone of political journalism. So during the 2024 election, Trump actually made this unusual for, I guess, a politician, outreach. the crypto community, engaging with people who are in the field, going to the Bitcoin conference last year. And then when he won, he actually started implementing policies that were friendly to the crypto community, like removing tax regulations, removing the Department of Justice's crypto tax evasion division. And then like pardoning Ross Ulbrick, who's the founder of the Silk Road, pardoning all these other crypto bros who had committed SEC frauds. All of a sudden, Coinbase donates $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration committee that celebrates him becoming president.

Oh, man, wow, I can't believe the SEC dropped its investigation into Coinbase. Whoa. Right. But I remember someone saying on the stage during a panel with, like, other Republican lawmakers, that the crypto community is a, I, very loyal community and they will always remember that someone who did something for them that was beneficial to them did that thing. Now, I don't know how long that loyalty will last. And that's sort of the thing that I kind of want to figure out as someone who's new to this space. But the thing is, is that everyone I talked to who went to the conference were like,

okay, yeah, it's great that these guys are doing stuff for us right now. And it's great to see that like these policymakers are coming to us, and this is not just like a political nod. Last year, you just had Donald Trump show up this year. It's like actual lawmakers, people who are really deep in the weeds. But like what happens when those politicians start trying to regulate you again? What happens when they start going overboard and like have you as a community ceded too much power to said lawmakers just because they came in and like told you some nice things? There was this one panel that. I caught yesterday.

It was called like, are Bitcoiners becoming sick offense of the state? Oh, boy. Which was, I think, what I had been hoping to see play out on stage. Like, are people in the Bitcoin community really accepting these Republicans coming in? I do think that there is a really strong strain

in the crypto community, a strong strain of suspicion in this community about the Republicans coming in. Well, and of the government in general. I mean, right, there's so much of, the whole crypto movement that is is like anarchists in a certain way, right? It's a belief that like we actually shouldn't trust any government.

It's fiat currency. Like that's what they call it. And and crypto is supposed to be this thing outside of that. And so that's why this tie up has always been so fascinating to be. But that like that first sort of trade you describe makes some sense to me, right? Where it's like, okay, the crypto industry is like, well, we have a lot of money and you are regulating us. We will give you some of our money and then you will stop regulating us. And that basically happened, right?

Like, it's in, more or less, they donated a lot of money to Trump, helped get Trump elected. Trump pardoned a bunch of people, removed a bunch of lawsuits, took away a lot of regulation. And then it's like everybody at that point could have just sort of shaken hands and walked away, right? Everybody got what they wanted. Number went up. Congratulations. But it feels like we're getting deeper and deeper into the ties between these two. And that's the thing you're talking about, like, these lawmakers who were like really starting to dig in and care about this stuff and like make it,

more of the Republican platform than ever. And that's the part I still can't wrap my head around. So a lot of why I think the Republicans are here is a bit of a reflection of how Donald Trump operates. It's always been a little bit of like, oh, wow, nice thing you've got here. It would be a shame if it disappeared. Sure. And I think what you're seeing all these tech companies realize from like Apple and Google and Microsoft to like literally the Bitcoin people is Trump will not. be happy if you just give him one thing one time. You cannot just do one transaction. He becomes president. He does this one thing for you. That's it. Like, you have to keep feeding that beast. And like generally happens in politics or whatever. Like, but this is the most nakedly brazen way that you've ever seen a president and subsequently the party that he leads do it.

Part of me keeps wondering sort of how far this goes. Because again, even that trade, if you're Coinbase, and you just want to keep making that trade for four years and hope that you get to the end of this and you still get to exist and the number keeps going up, fine. But then there's like, we have lawmakers who are like, we need this strategic Bitcoin reserve

and we want to be the capital of crypto in the world. And Trump seems to be endorsing this. And then there's the whole Trump coin thing, which we're going to talk about. But that feels slightly separate from all of this. I guess what's your sense, both sort of at this conference and in general, how serious the government,

is in a bigger way about like really earnestly getting into crypto? There's definitely a faction of the elected officials who really want this. Granted, I think it's to win them support in their home states. But they're like some genuine crypto evangelicals in both the House and the Senate. Cynthia Lemmiss, who is the Wyoming senator chairing the Digital Assets Committee, was here. Everyone kind of treated her as a bit of a superstar. The administration, on the other hand, is in this really weird.

position where the evangelists have to somehow convince the rest of the administration that this is actual money that is worth holding onto for a long period of time. Right now, the strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which was established through an executive order, is like, all right, well, establish this reserve. We can fund it with things that the government already has. We cannot buy more Bitcoin unless one of two things happens. One, either, act of Congress passes into law, the Congress holds the power of the purse, they can like write into the budget.

We will set aside this much money to buy Bitcoin. Much harder thing to convince 520 something people or the administration can find ways to purchase Bitcoin in a budget neutral manner. So something has to get cut in order to fund the government's purchase of Bitcoin. David Sachs was on stage saying, We should try to convince Howard Lutnik and Scott Bissand, who lead commerce and treasury respectively, that they should just like start cutting some of their programs so that we can buy Bitcoin with the money that they have cut from their programs.

I don't know if that's going very well. And I don't know whether people behind the scenes are willing to actually cut their own budgets for the purpose of buying Bitcoin. There is definitely some sort of tension going on behind the scenes between not just like Elon and. the administration, because that's obviously the most visible. But this other one that is like a much quieter power struggle behind the scenes over, all right, what are these tech people doing here? What is it they want from us? And do we feel okay giving it to them?

Considering how much the Elon thing has blown up into the open, I don't think they would like that. And I am fascinated to see how much this battle now plays out, when the player is someone who is, you know, way more subtle, way less explosive, way fewer chainsaw wielding, like a guy with fewer chainsaws than Elon Musk has. Right. Well, yeah, and I think it's an interesting thing to see happen, this idea that, you know, let's cut all this stuff so that we can buy Bitcoin. And there's, there's a small group of people who I can completely understand why they would be very excited about that. And then there's the question

of like, is there any world in which that is a popular idea except for the people who would like to make their Bitcoin go up? And I don't know, my sense is probably not. Like I have a hard time imagining crypto being sort of on its own outside of the money of it all, a winning political battle. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's changing. Maybe there are more people who are like intellectually into crypto than I think that there are. I think they would first have to understand crypto at a much larger scale. And I think that is happening, but there also is the broader political consensus to consider of like, can you convince enough voters that crypto is real money, that Bitcoin is more stable than all of the other like scummy crypto things that you have seen floating

out there? And once you agree that, yes, the Bitcoin holds value that we should protect it somehow. And that's a very complicated thing to explain to people outside of the Bitcoin community and crypto overall. Yeah, that's a high bar. Yeah, Lumis was actually saying that on stage that working on the stablecoin bill, she was talked by how many of her colleagues, like, still do not understand crypto. And stable coins are, I think, the easiest to, like, grasp onto piece of technology around crypto. Because, you know, one stable coin, one U.S. dollar. We are regulating the amount of U.S. one-to-one units of currency.

That should be kind of straightforward if you were like a septuagenarian elected official who was like trying to figure out how to use a flip phone. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's something. So speaking of scammy things, before I let you go here, let's talk about Trump coin just for a couple of minutes. Because there was this big dinner. You got a bunch of really great reporting on what happened inside of this dinner.

but just sort of very quickly walk me through the Trump coin story because I think there's an argument to be made that one of the reasons Donald Trump cares about crypto in general is that he is very aware of what is going on with Trump coin. So I think these two things are both very separate and I think in a certain way also kind of tied together. So just tell me the story of Trump coin briefly. Okay. So Trump coin launches right before his inauguration and all of a sudden this whole. company that his sons are involved in, not Trump, of course, but his sons, it's very separate from Trump himself, launched this coin. Suddenly, there's a fric ton of hype around it because that's how meme coins do be. And the price of Trump coins shoots up to like $75 a token or something. Eventually that crashes to, yeah, maybe like less than 10 bucks. But there's an unlock schedule that the

creators and holders of the majority of Trump coin have to follow. And I think they hold like 80, 90% of the actual coin value itself. Everyone else is just trading on the 20%, but like their hype around the coin ultimately drives up the price of the entire coin, and then like that increases the paperwealth of what World Liberty Financial and Trump and whatever are holding. But if you're in crypto long enough, you understand that when the people who create the coin start selling their coin after they are able to in the next 90 days period, several month period, whatever, once they dump their coin and try to sell it at like a higher price, that floods the market, the value of the coin like dilutes. And so this contest, as one of my sources told me, was really timed to keep the price of the

coin juiced up as high as possible by ascribing a utility value to it because you can't like buy stuff with Doge coin. It's just like a meme that you hold and you hope that everyone else gets hyped over it. If you can buy a dinner with the president or like an NFT, you could like win something with this Trump coin, then wow, doesn't that make that coin far more valuable hold? If you're the top 220 holders of this coin by the end of the contest, you get to have dinner with the president. You get to go to Trump National, which is a golf resort in Starling, Virginia. It's Black Tie Affair. You will, like, get to see Trump. It'll be such a cool dinner. It'll be so amazing. And if you think about it in, like, a surface-level way and don't

understand crypto at all, you look at this and you're like, wow, this is brazen corruption. Look at all these crypto bros coming in from overseas, spending all of this money to have dinner with the president. But Trump was really only there for an hour. And, and, you know, and, you know, and, And only the top 25 people in the contest had dinner with him. Everyone else just got to see him give a speech. But the actual purpose of the contest was to drive up the price of Trump coin by getting everyone excited about it for like a prize. The prize being hang out with the president. To be fair, that does still sound like naked corruption.

It's just like it's just clever corruption. Oh, no, no. I'd say this is absolutely corrupt. But it's a much more subtle type of corruption. Like the way I've been trying to explain it to people is that like it's sort of like appraising a house or something. If you can get someone to write down on a piece of paper, this house is actually worth a million dollars. And the house is maybe not worth that. In fact, it's like a, you know, like I don't know, supposed to be bulldozed down and is worth actually nothing.

But if someone says this coin's actually worth a lot, you can do a lot. with that house is collateral. And it's imaginary money, but like someone believes it's real money. And so like the Trump contest was a way to inflate the asset of Trump coin that is being locked somewhere for like 80 and owned by several private entities who are not buying this on retail. And the idea is that like if the price is high enough and these guys dump it, they make the money that the coin is worth when it's high. The moment they dump it, though, that's when it crashed, the value of the coin crashes, which was why I found the story interesting. Oh, that is also another way that the Trump family profits from this contest, which is they collect the fees on every transaction made of Trump coin. Oh, interesting.

So, yeah, if there's activity on the coin, too, they make money. And if you incentivize people to buy your crypto, some money is better than no money. Yeah. No, I agree. All right. So I should let you go here. but at the risk of asking an incredibly general question. I am curious sort of how the vibes are shaking out to you right now,

again, both of the conference and in general. Like, in crypto, there has always been the kind of number go-up community of people who are like, it is good for me and for people I know if Bitcoin is worth more tomorrow than it is today. So I will do what is required to make it worth more tomorrow than it is today. And then there's the people who are sort of the true technology believers who are like think this is sort of interesting internet infrastructure and are really interested in all the things that Bitcoin could be for the internet and the unbanked and whatever.

It seems to me that the number go-up community has all the power right now, but are you still seeing sort of the true believers at these conferences? Like, are there people out there who want to sort of reckon with what it means as a technology, or is this just a money thing that we're all doing at a conference in Vegas? The technology community you laid out, I think, is still pretty powerful. And it's because crypto relies on actual technology and science in order to continue being mined, continue being made. You need programmers and IT specialists to, you know, man the data centers. You need legislation to pull energy to fuel set data centers.

You need lawmakers on the ground who will help, like, deal with all the people who are really mad that your data farm is now polluted. all of their air. Sure. There's a real cost to how to make number go up. And I think at some point, the technologists and the number go up people will have to reckon with the fact that you need the technologist to make the number go up. I don't know how that's going to play out, at least from my coverage area in Washington, but I think it's going to be really fascinating.

It might be the environmentalists, actually. The environmentalists may once start getting into this game. Yeah, that makes sense. And it does feel like the deeper this gets into the political community, the more sort of tentacles it's going to have into other things other people care about. Like, we have mainstreamed this stuff in a very sort of specific way that is going to make a lot of people, I think, want to get involved in all of the different sides of it. And I think we're like just beginning to see how weird that might get.

It's going to get so weird. It's going to be weird, especially when most of the lawmakers in Washington still have no idea how any of the technology works. Everyone's old. It's like a notorious problem in Washington that most of the elected officials, especially the most powerful ones, are like over the age of 65, someone who's 70s considered young and sprightly. So it's also going to be that big wall of ignorance that happens with this. So it's going to get really stupid. I am so sorry. It really, it really, really is.

All right, you need to go do more Vegas things. I hope you survive. Godspeed the next couple of days. Pray for me. But thank you for being here. This is really fun. Thanks, David. This was really fun.

All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and take a question for the first guest hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling.

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Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge 1-1. The email is Verge at theverge.com. You can also reach out to me directly. I'm David at theverge.com and I'm David pierce.1-1 on Signal. Any way you want to reach us, please do. But frankly, the hotline's the most fun.

So keep on calling. This week, we have a question about AI agents. Hey, David. This is Brayden. I got a question about agents and how we use the Internet or how we will use it. So I believe that there are some purchases and some decisions that are big screen decisions. For example, buying an airplane ticket, you're a freak if you do that on your phone. That's a big screen decision.

I want an mouse and keyboard to do that. I want my multiple tabs. I don't feel like I can do that on my little iPhone 12 mini screen. It's not right. It's not how the Lord intended it. But, like, in the future, if agents are doing everything for us, like, am I going to be, like, a boomer and be like, oh, you kids, you're letting agents buy your plane tickets? I go to the website every time. Like, is this going to be the equivalent of that where I'm going to be, like, looking at other people being like, I don't let it do it for me?

me, I do it myself, and everyone will make fun of me and wait for me to die. Like, I don't know, I just don't understand what the world is going to be like if we let AI do everything for it, because I don't think I'm going to trust AI to buy me a plane ticket. Because I want to do it for like buying a house or big boy decisions deserve not AI. I don't know, am I crazy? Am I going to be an annoying old man? please tell me. Anyway, rock and roll.

I love this question because it gets in a thing that I've been thinking a lot about over the last few weeks. And I frankly don't have a pat answer. The reason I'm bringing this one up is that I want to hear from all of you. And the thing that I want to hear in particular is how big and how high stakes a decision or an action would you count on AI to do for you? And I think in a lot of ways, we're in the middle of figuring out the answer to that question, right? I think I love the framing of big screen decisions and small screen decisions. This really resonates with me. And I think it does in part because I'm a person of a certain age who didn't, like, have a smartphone

when I was 10. And so I'm not used to everything being a smartphone activity. But I do think of certain things as like things I do when I sit down at my laptop, right? Anything that needs a lot of typing, anything that is like big in sort of visually comparative where I need to look at a bunch of stuff at once, those are big screen activities. And I have a set of them in my head that just feel ridiculous to do on my phone. And I never would. But I think that has shifted in a real way to the sort of mobile native generation. And to the, am I just going to be a cranky old man as a burgeoning cranky old man myself?

I wonder about this. I wonder if, as a lot of these companies hope, we will get quickly to the point where younger people first and then everybody after gets used to the idea of just offloading tasks to AI agents. But there is a difference there because the thing that changes there is instead of going from a big screen to a small screen, which is sort of a user interface difference, but fundamentally the same activity, right? Like I'm on booking.com whether or not I'm on a giant monitor or a tiny phone screen. The interface is different, but the sort of steps are the same, and your involvement is the same, with AI agents, it turns completely.

And suddenly, I am no longer doing the thing. I am trusting something else to do the thing. And I think for me, the biggest question, and frankly, for a lot of these companies, the biggest question is, how far can they push that? Right. And what we've seen so far,

frankly, is not super enticing from a lot of these companies. I think one of the things Amazon really hoped when it started investing in Alexa is that people would start shopping with their voice. You just say, you know, buy toilet paper and it would buy toilet paper. That hasn't really panned out. That hasn't been a business for Amazon so far.

And I think that's partly because of the technology. It just hasn't been good enough or interesting enough or fast enough yet. But it is also because there's something in the process of doing complicated things that I think we want to be involved in. Right. Like even if I had a very smart person in my life who I trust who was buying plane tickets for me, I would still want them to check and ask. me if this is the right time and do it, like, involve me in the process in some way. And so the idea that I'm just going to be like, I'm going to Italy, go, and the AI agents will do it all for me.

Even if the technology is good enough that that happens successfully, I still think that's going to feel good to people. And so for me, a thing I've been trying to figure out is if we've gone from big screen tasks to small screen tasks to, I guess what you'd call like agent tasks or no screen tasks, in my own life I'm trying to figure out what to move around right and there's a certain set of things that I think will move

to the agents very simple stuff very like make a little app that'll do this for me on my computer I just vibe coded a giant stopwatch that just like shows the time

in really large letters on my computer when I hit a button simple thing I don't need anything more complicated than that that is a perfect agent task that it can just go and do for me

but like I would not use chat GPT to buy me toilet paper because then something will show up at my house maybe but it might not it might not be the thing that I wanted I don't know how much it costs I don't know how whether it's the brand that I wanted I don't know why it's that right there's just so many middle questions that I think we have not yet answered but I do think it's useful to interrogate that line just as I've tried to figure out okay what is worth doing on the small screen that I used to do on the big screen because I can do it right now and without getting up and from the couch, right? There's something to that trade of it's convenient and it's easy and I can do it before I forget

about it versus I can sit down and kind of do it properly. And agents are going to push that boundary again, right? What can I offload so that it is good enough and I don't have to do it at all? What is that list of things? And I think the technology to do almost all of those things is not yet good enough. enough to be interesting, but that line and the sort of Overton window of those things as it moves down towards agents, I think is going to be really fascinating. So that said, I think anyone who tells you that you are eventually going to offload all of your tasks, specifically shopping,

anyone who tells you that you're going to use agents to buy things has a really, really, really, heavy incentive to tell you that because they are going to get a cut of the things that you buy. That's all I would ask you to remember. I think there's lots of interesting AI tasks out there, And I think one of them might be shopping and buying of stuff, but I will tell you for sure that there is a reason everybody is doing that, and it's because it's the business model. So just keep that in mind as you're thinking about this stuff. They all want you to buy plane tickets with AI agents.

I know why they want that, and I'm not at all sure that it's a good idea. Anyway, lots to think about it. And I do want to hear from you. I think both right now and in the future, what do you think the right set of tasks is to offload, to AI. Things that you can just prompt it to do and trust that it will happen with little or no extra interaction from you. If you're using stuff like that today, if AI is currently buying you toilet paper, I would love to hear from you. But also, how far down the rabbit hole of that do you

think we get as this technology gets better? I'd love to hear from you. 866, Verge11, Vergecast at theverge.com. Keep it all coming. Listening to how all of you do AI and are thinking about AI and incorporated into your life has been fascinating and really helpful. And I want to keep doing more of that on the show. For now, though, that is it for the show. Thank you to everybody who came on this episode. And thank you, as always, for listening. Like I mentioned, you can email us, Virgcast at theverse.com. Call the hotline 866, Verge11, about AI, but also about whatever you're thinking about. We love hearing all of your questions, all of your party speaker updates, all kinds of good stuff. Thank you, as always, for reaching out. It is one of the most fun things

about making this show. This show is produced by Willpore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. Vergecast is Verge production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about what's coming at WWDC next week. Lots of other AI news. Anything we can hopefully learn this week about Johnny Ive and Sam Altman, I think there's a lot of stuff coming this summer, and we just have an awful lot to talk about.

We'll see you then. Rock and roll.