The Vergecast - Pixel 11 gets in on the digicam trend

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

Smart phone cameras have been getting better and better at capturing flawless, true-to-life images. But is that what the people really want?David Imel joins Nilay Patel and Jake Kastrenakes to talk through the Pixel 11's Camera Looks. They're Google's nod to the trend of retro digital and analogue cameras, and alter how a photo is processed on the sensor level. At the same time, its super zoom is still hallucinating text and making stuff up. Then it's a supersized Brendan Carr is a Dummy, with increasingly infuriating tales of how Brendan Carr is being a Dummy, culminating in the FCC's quest to make sure your internet connection remains slow. Plus, we talk through the confounding AirPods camera leak, the Fairphone, and YouTube's new method for counting views. Further reading: Google is making the Pixel cameras better by making them worse Revealed: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s close coordination with White House and rightwing media ABC sues the FCC over Trump and Carr’s campaign of threats FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods appear in leaked video Meta glasses are a workplace menace Apple reportedly won’t launch AirPods with cameras until next year. Fairphone’s latest repairable phone is going on sale in the US YouTube is changing how it counts views to give the numbers a boost YouTube is reportedly offering channels “millions of dollars” not to cross-post videos on Netflix. We’re also on video! Check us out on YouTube. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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than you think. Our earliest childhood memories can feel so visceral. I have this memory of my mother standing on the beach, you know, the wind whipping her hair and her jacket, calling into the wind with my siblings out in the lake and the dam, you know, looming in the distance. But none of these memories were true. This week, Unexplain It to me from Vox.

Why can't I remember being a baby? Hello, and welcome to the Bridgecast, the flagship podcast of David Pierce's baby. Yet another baby. Hi, I'm a friend, Eli. Jay Castanakis is here. Hey, good to be here. And we have a special guest, David and Mel is here. What's up, my friends?

It's time, David. It's your first time guest hosting in place of Pierce, one David for the other, and we have, like, a camera fight to have, like, already out the gate. That's what I'm here for. I'm always done for a camera fight. I've never been more excited. Okay. Pierce's baby is good. I talk to him.

Everyone's doing well. Send congrats his way. Maybe he'll come back. Maybe he'll just have more children. You never know with him at this point. They do seem committed to repopulating the earth, Elon style. But everyone's doing well. Congratulations to David.

He'll be back in a few weeks. Until then, it's going to be the three of us. It's going to be great. Jake, what are we doing today? There's a ton coming up. We're going to talk a lot about pixels and pixel cameras in particular. We talk about Apple. leaking its own AirPods news.

There's a whole bunch of stuff. Obviously, Brendan is going to be back. First, I want to start with pixels. We already had one episode of Vergecast this week talking about all the reviews. David Emel was not there, though, and we did not dive into the cameras nearly enough. That is the main thing I want to talk about with these phones.

There's just a ton of camera upgrades. David, do you want to just give us, like, big picture, what is new camera-wise on these phones? So there is technically a new main camera sensor on the pixel pros. It saves a little bit of power. That's the only reason they swapped it in. They're really pretending this sensor didn't change. Well, yeah, it's strange.

I think that's the reason. I think because if they made it bigger than they would say it was a different sensor, but I think that people are going to be upset if they just say it's the same size, but it's a different sensor. They told me, so I had an interview with Isaac Reynolds, who heads the pixel camera team, and he told me it saves a little bit of power, and that's actually useful for them. His quote was, we can fit some of my favorite computational photography. photography features in that much power that we're saving.

So that's something, at least. Right. If you think about it as a camera system, you pull some power from the sensor and you give it to the processor. Yeah. Your camera system is using the same amount of power. That really implies that people are going to use all of these computational photography features. What were Isaac's favorite features that are inside the power budget?

Well, the biggest new feature is definitely camera looks. So we had a long conversation about this, and it is very interesting. interesting. And it's something that feels like a response to things that people in the industry, including myself, have been shouting for many years. And maybe you and I will fight about this, Nelai. That could be fun. But Camera Looks is effectively, if you've ever used a Fujifilm camera before, they have a thing called Fujifilm recipes. And basically, there are these film simulations where you can, I don't know, they do simulate actual film. But you can also just tweak them to your liking, you can change things like saturation and white balance and all these things and save

different presets. So now Google has added this. Now, Isaac Reynolds did not want to admit to me that this was the right decision. He over and over and over again was saying, oh, we made the perfect camera in the pixel. We know internally, there is no, there's no discretion here that this is the wrong way to do photography on the smartphone. Like, we know. We know, absolutely. However, there was a growing, and the phrase that he used was bimodal distribution of people. No, boy. That wants something else from the smartphone camera, which just means that people want less processing. Particularly a loud contingent who is often on TikTok complaining that their photos look bad.

Although I should say look bad on iPhones, not on pixels, because those are the people who are recording TikToks about. But I think it is just clear that, you know, there are. there's a wide swath of people who want things that do not look like reality. They look a little bit nostalgic. They look a little bit soft. You know, those things. I understand why Isaac thinks that they perfected the pixel camera. If you want something sharp, if you want something bright, if you want something with a lot of contrast, that's what people use their smartphone cameras for most of the time.

Smart phone cameras are not, they're not artistic cameras. They're information transfer cameras. And that makes sense. This is a very sad way of thinking about it. But I get it, right? It's a tool. Yes. And, Eli, you and David were talking about those when they were announced.

It's like, it's for menus, right? It's like. Yeah. I mean, there's, I would slightly disagree with the information transfer aspect of the camera. I think that's, it's a huge component of what a smart phone camera needs to do. I think the bigger thing is they can never fail to take a photo. Right. And if that is the, that's what you're trying to solve with their camera.

you have to even everything out constantly. Yeah. And so the examples are, yes, a menu, or you're on a bright beach and then 25 minutes later, you're inside of a restaurant and you're totally backlit and you're taking a selfie. The camera just has to deal with all of that. Yes. And you shouldn't have to deal with any settings. And that means everything ends up looking the same.

Everything ends up looking oddly bright and flat at the same time, which is something David has pointed out many, many times and many camera reviews. Many, many times. It's the problem. Like, the idea that they've perfected the camera to me, it is funneled through the goal of the camera, which is to never fail. Right.

And Apple in particular will never fail. And so iPhone photos have just an incredibly particular look at this point in time. I think the pixel has always been, like, that team, they sell like five phones a year. Like, they're a little bit more willing to get out there. And I think camera looks is them being way more willing to get out there. because, David, correct me if I'm wrong, these are destructive settings, right?

If you shoot in a camera look, you can't get back out to the, you know, the averaged out ultra-processed HDR photo. There's no going back to default. Correct. You've made this choice and you've shot in it. Yep, yep. It's changing and processing.

And they can, you can tell that they know that it's destructive because actually, unless you dig very far into the settings and change some of the settings, every time you close the camera, it will go back to the default. Which makes sense, to your point, Eli. I mean, if you're, you know,

taking an artistic photo and then you go to take a photo of a menu so that you can open the QR code. You need it to be able to do that. I think this is fascinating. They do not trust the user enough to know how to get back to taking a good photo. They think that people are going to be upset if they get stuck using one of these new themes. Yeah. So you spent, you know, a week shooting in these different styles. You've also spent a long time shooting all kinds of camera systems and definitely Fuji camera systems.

Yeah. How do they actually compare to a Fuji film sim, right? Is this, do they look good? Do you feel like you have real meaningful control over how the photos come out? Yeah. This actually, there's a lot more control than you have on the iPhone, right? The iPhone gives you a two-axis grid with a couple of settings. It's basically saturation and brightness.

And then you've got the different tone settings that basically misses with white balance. These give you a lot of settings. You've got sharpness. You've got contrast. You've got all these things. I'm just going to bring it up for you so you can see. And the film simulations that you have, like on the default camera,

you have four different settings. There's original, natural, shadows, and vanilla. And that's sort of just a, yeah, I don't know why they called it vanilla. What's the original and vanilla? Vanilla is warmer. And I don't, it's, why do they call it vanilla instead of just warm? I have no idea. Yeah, strange, strange.

Okay, my going theory for that is that people just like slightly warmer photos and they will confuse vanilla with original because it looks, it's the same word in many, in many ways. Yeah. And they're going to pick the slightly warmer setting. When I think of vanilla, though, I think of, like, white. I don't think of warm necessarily. You don't think of plain?

I don't think most people are, like, vanilla. Wars were fought over the Indians' guys. I think they're like, plain. It's the plane setting. It is notably much warmer than the default setting. It's very strange. And then from there, you have the stylized looks. You have editorial, which is much more contrasty, like really contrasty.

You've got Velvet, which is Velvia, Fujifilm simulation. By the way, they wouldn't tell me that they said, these are not film simulations, but they're film inspired. It's very clear to me, and Isaac Reynolds is a big Fuji film person too. So it's pretty obvious. Velvet is Velvia, which is a high saturation, high contrast. There's Classic, which is classic Chrome on Fuji film, which is low contrast, which looks pretty nice.

There's Digi, which is a Digi-Cam simulation. That obviously was such a. strategic move because digitcams are selling like crazy. They should just made that to a fault, right? I think if they just and marketed the pixel as like the digit cam phone, they would double their market share. Two percent baby. Yeah, they didn't really talk about that at all. And in the event, they didn't talk about it much. I'm so surprised. If they had just been like, you don't have to buy a G7X. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for $1,200. Right. Like, if you're an influencer on the make and you think you need a G7X, just push this button and we will effectively recreate a pop-up flash. 27x experience. Yeah. I think they would have been great. There is a black tie setting, which is, I don't know why they call it black tie, but it's black and white.

They should have just called it black and white. And for the film photographers out there, they have a bunch of filter processing settings too. So they have a red filter, a green filter, a blue filter, a yellow filter, an orange filter, which on black and white photography effectively changes the contrast of certain tones in the scene. So if you know what you're doing, you can make it look cool. there's minimal, which does less processing.

So what I really want to get to here is the fact, in the most Google wave possible, they are intelligently doing less computational photography based on the default setting that you change. So if it's minimal, if it's black type, if it's diggy, whatever, they're already doing like less image bracketing to have less information in the shadows and less sharpness, things like that. But also when you change the settings, like the contrast, the highlight, the shadows, the vibrance, the tint, the warmth, the sharpness. All of these settings contribute to the amount of bracketing that they do

when they do that computational photography, HDR. I mean, that's fascinating that even when you're telling them to dial a debt, right, there's no just like off mode, right? This is what they're saying. No. They're saying, like, we don't believe in the... There are a couple modes that are more obviously off, like the minimal mode. Is Digi off?

Because the whole point of the digicams is they're shooting a single frame and letting things well out. Digi is not quite off. because it feels sharper but also lower contrast. But it is definitely less HDR bracketing. That's what Isaac told me. And it's dynamic. Just to say it out loud for people who aren't huge damage. Why are you listening to this if you're not a huge camera door?

HRA bracketing is when you just take a bunch of frames and you layer them. You take the frames of different exposure and layer them. And I think the iPhone is like nine or 12. I don't remember how many that previous pixel did. They add them more every year basically. Yeah. It's a spec race and how many frames are taking it, how many exposures.

Yeah. And so you take one that's really, really under-exposed, and then you take, like, 50 frames, progressively higher exposures, until you're really overexposed, and you merge them together to get that flat HDR look. You're saying Google is intelligently saying, what if we just took three to achieve this effect? 100%.

To get everything you need. Yeah. How are they making those decisions? Are it obvious to you? That is... I find this whole thing fascinating. Not something that they will make obvious to you, which is actually a theme in the pixel.

There are multiple things in this new. phone that they do not tell you exactly what is happening or how to make it work. And we'll maybe get to that later with the Gemini intelligence stuff. But yeah. So these are camera presets. And what they're doing is they're screwing with basically a tone mapping, right? Because they have less information. You mentioned Apple's tone control. Yeah. And I think you described it as brightness and contrast. I think that's basically how it feels to people. Apple's description of that technically is that that is a tone map. control.

Mm-hmm. Right? They have the big stack of photos of different exposures, and if you move the tone control around in styles, you change how much tone mapping is happening. Yes. Right? So you allow things to blow out.

You allow shadows to get under-exposed. Like, you basically just allow clipping to happen. Yeah. I have actually mapped the tone control to my camera button, which I think is going away. It's going to make me really sad. And that's the only control I use on my iPhone is I change tone all the time. Oh, interesting. Because sometimes you just want a contrasty art photo and sometimes you just

want everything to be fine. And I never put it in the middle. It's always like negative 100 or 100, right, in the way that every slider is always kind of maximal. Yeah. Does the pixel feel that way? Like you're just changing how a bunch of frames are cooked or does it feel meaningfully different? That's the main thing, especially with artistic styles. Like, the main thing that you're going to see a difference in is the tone mapping, but they also do big, like, hue shifts and stuff like that. Like the editorial look and the velvet look, much more saturated, the hue is different, things like that. And then when you, they give you a lot more settings than the iPhone does. Because the iPhone is just sort of that 2D matrix that changes a bunch of things. On this one, you get, let's see,

you get contrast, highlights, shadows, vibrance, tint, warmth, sharpness. There's a grain setting, which is simulated as well, annoyingly. But yeah, it's strange. It's clear that like... Wait, sorry, you want, like, real noisy digital grain. You want like... It depends. I mean...

Clocky artifacts. In Google, like, Fuji film, basically, they scanned a bunch of actual film and did, like, frequency separation. And I'm guessing that's exactly what Google did, too, because that's exactly what they would do. And Isaac's also a nerd like that. So I, I, the other part of this that I think is very complicated and very tricky is that Google does not have a developer ecosystem to rely on when it comes to offering these kinds of options to users.

On the iPhone, if Apple doesn't get it right, which like they kind of didn't, you have all of these other apps that are willing to give you incredibly detailed tools to tune your camera, right? Process Zero has become an ecosystem of an idea. And you just cannot get that on Android. There are like a couple of apps that try it. They don't work with every phone.

They don't have as much detail. Yeah. And so there's this real, I think, very interesting problem for the Google Camera team, where if they don't provide these tools, they pretty much don't exist. And then they have to decide, okay, how much are we actually going to expose to every single user who buys this phone? Yeah. Are we going to give them the tools that the super nerds would go and find a specific app on a different platform would download? And it seems to me that they've actually given quite a bit of control here,

despite the fact that this is built into the default camera app for everybody. Yeah. And you can still also shoot pure raw on the pixel, which you cannot do in the iPhone yet. It's pro-Raw. So that's a big deal, in my opinion. Although Apple likes to move every single year. They like to offer a little, little bit more of a pure raw experience, but just they'll never get there.

I think they might this year. That's a whole other conversation. But yeah, Google is definitely at the point where it's like, okay, we have to offer a certain level of pure control to the user on the camera because otherwise who's doing it. How can we compete? We should talk about one other thing on the pixel camera, which is that last year, and actually, Neelah, you were out for this last summer, so I didn't get to hear your, I have a passionate feelings about this. They added an AI-powered zoom. It was to 100x last year. Now it's to 120x. How is it and has it gotten any better? Because last year, it was a mixed bag, to put it politely? Yeah.

I'm going to show you a couple of photos. Yeah. In some cases, it's good at creating text. In some cases, it's just really not. Well, this is the thing. I, like, scoured the internet for photos of these 100 X zoom shots. And there are some that I was like, this is incredible, right? Like, there's just like a little more texture here and it's smoothed out some sharp edges and it looks great.

And then other times, there's just garbled text, and you're like, oh, this is just pure AI. Yeah. This is fully made up. Yeah. I remember seeing some photo of like rooftops in the distance. And it was just like, they were just going at all kinds of different, like, jaggedy angles that was not what was happening in the world. Yeah. Yeah.

I was in Lisbon. There was a beer bike really far away from me. That's just something they have in Europe during the summer. Obviously, you know, it got some of the sharpening semi-euro. correct on this, but then when you look near the bottom here, I don't know, be bore, Billy. Right.

I am very uncomfortable with that. Yeah. That's really bad. It's really bad. You know, but on like on this top part, which is a little bit bigger, at least you can make it out. It's something. I could not see it with my eyes for what it's worth. Is that the standard?

I mean, here we go. Let's just do it. Is it, I will confidently hallucinate something you cannot see and verify? at least I got a photo. This is what I mean about these, the cameras have been designed to always generate a photo. Yeah.

In a way that, I don't know, a film camera sometimes just didn't get a photo. Yeah. Right? If you like pick up an old SLR, loaded up with the film and you don't mess with the settings, sometimes you're just like,

well, I took a bunch of overexposed frames and no photos were taken today. Yeah. These cameras are, these companies have got it religiously in their bones. They have to generate. photos. Yeah.

Like, you have to be, you have to look at something. And I think that's led them to be like, yeah, you can just hallucinate the text. Like, you zoomed in, there's got to be something there. If we show them blurry nonsense, everyone will get mad. And so we'll just make up some letters. Yeah. Because we're like five generations into making up letters. Yeah.

And the letter generation has not gotten better, as you can see in this Lisbon photo. I mean, that's even actually the, maybe the funniest thing about it. Like the models are solving unsolvable. problems, but we can't accurately detect the words beer bike. Yeah. There's one I want to show you here. This one, there was a reflection. And it just made anime stars on the reflection, which I find very funny.

I mean, I find that this is way better. Yeah. And I mean, for what it's worth, like the upscaling of the roof tiles looks good. Like the text, the things where it's like, okay, this fundamentally changes the point of what I'm looking at. Those are the bigger issues, I would say. This is what I find so complicated about this, where it's like, okay, yeah, they just smoothed out the roof tiles. Like, it, that, that feels like a regular, I don't know, cleaning algorithm in some way. That's just upscaling.

Yeah. But then it's, then you see the letters and you're like, no, no, they're actively changing things here. Something that's funny on the phone, too, is that you can't, when you transfer the image files to the computer, you can't, you don't have this data anymore. But somewhere in the container on the phone, it will show you what the photo was like before the scaling happened. And it's really bad. I bet. You're 120 from a 5x optical is like kind of a lot.

From a teeny tiny sensor. Yeah. So. I mean, that's as close to you're barely taking a photo as exists, right? Yeah. You're just saying, look, I'm standing in Lisbon. There's a beer bike over there, generate an image for me.

Yeah. And you're handing it the barest amount of sensor data. Yeah. To do that generation. And you're like, you're very close to being over the line. Yeah. It's getting close. How many actual pixels could possibly be viewing this image at that distance, right?

It's like, yeah, this is not a lot. Four by four grid. Not a lot. They're purely inventing everything. It's actually just one pixel is actually looking at this. Yeah. My curiosity about all this is, one, I think Google can lean way harder into this is the most artistic phone camera you can get. It will allow you to express yourself in the most creative ways.

They don't have the market share. They have nothing to lose. Yeah. Yeah, true. And they don't really market this feature at all. Yeah. And then over here, there's the AI tools and all the other AI stuff they're doing. And I think they've realized they should back off of that, right?

What they're putting it in front of people now is a bunch of artistic decisions, not a bunch of when you take this photo, we will detect that there's a stray dog in the background and remove the dog on your behalf, which is what all these companies have been doing for several years. I wonder, do you, do you, David, do you think like the backlash of what is a photo, are these real pixels, is this reality? Do you think it's getting to them? I think that the backlash of AI in general is getting to them because the features that got added to the pixel this year, almost none of them are Gen AI features. And the ones that are very much hidden underneath all the other stuff like Rambler, which we'll get to,

is like a new voice model that writes for you and gets rid of filler words and all of this stuff. And it is using Gemini, but they don't really talk about that. You know, Dieter presents it as this way to just like, you can have fill words and it'll cut them out and it's easier and it's faster. But they don't say like, oh, this is AI powered. Do you want to talk about Rambler a little bit more? What does it do? Because this is actually, it's this small feature and I feel like it has gotten the most buzz of all the stuff that they've added. Rambler was actually my favorite feature on this phone, which is funny.

It's voice to text. It's voice to text. The pixel has always had the best voice. I mean, in my opinion, the best voice to text on phones. The iPhone was really sad because the iOS 27 was supposed to have advanced voice dictation, and it changes nothing. I do not understand. It's part of the new Gemini, like, AFP core or whatever, it's called the Apple.

I don't know. The new model on the iPhone that is the advanced model, and it is supposed to make it way better, and it just doesn't do anything. Rambler is this kind of incredible new feature that there are some areas of it where I feel like they're kind of tricking your brain because regular voice to text, you can see the words coming on the screen as you're talking. Rambler, it doesn't show you anything until you finish and then you hit end and then it just all pops up instantly. Which is because it's secretly going through an AI. Yeah, which they could just be showing the rearranging in real time. But I do feel like there's something where they want to be able to just pop it up all at once and trick your brain into thinking it's happening faster than it is.

But it got to the point where I could effectively just talk at the speed of thought and hit end and it would instantly be there. And it would have gotten rid of every little kind of like, oh, I mean this. Because when you're thinking, you're not always thinking in the most concise way. You know what I mean? I do think it's very fascinating that in their implementation and in the scale of the features that they're adding, they are kind of pulling back on AI. Maybe that's because of the backlash. Maybe it's because they're recognizing the limitations of these tools.

Yeah. Right? Like text to speech, cleaning that up, that is a thing that they can do pretty regularly pretty well. Isn't it just Whisper Flow? There's like, yes, they can do this.

It is. But every time I've used Whisper Flow on a smartphone, it's really freaking annoying because you have to, like, change your keyboard in order to invoke it, like, every time. And it's practically the same thing, yes, but like being built into the phone.

is a whole separate thing. If Apple had actually made their feature work, I would have been happy with that in iOS 27, but it doesn't work. Look, I think we're legally obligated to say iOS 27 is still in beta. Still beta. They could fix everything but tomorrow, David.

The next beta could make everything great. That's true. And vault Apple into the lead. Fair enough. I really love the idea of Rambler. I mean, the idea that Whisper Flow needs to be invoked at the keyboard, there's a bunch of companies that truly believe that replacing your keyboard is their way

to get around Apple and Google's restrictions. Yeah. Like superhuman believes this. Yeah. And I just feel bad for them. Like the operating system vendors will kill you. They're going to kill you. They will find a way to kill these things.

Is Rambler good enough to compete with what people like out of apps like Whisperflow? Because they've been so good that people will go through the steps and jump through the hoops. Yeah. I mean, I think that people mostly probably use Whisper Flow in their lab. I haven't seen a lot of people talking about how great whisper flow is on their phone. So in my opinion, yes. Like, I've only had it mess up like once or twice. It doesn't cut out curse words, which is nice.

And it does do like weird spellings of things like proper nouns. Like all these things that or like product names, things like that that might be spelled weird. It generally gets correctly, which I was surprised about. Does it work offline? It does work offline. so it's mostly offline, but some of its full capabilities, like it'll rewrite things for you if you want.

So you can use it once, and you dump all of your thoughts into it. And during that process, you can say, oh, actually, I meant this, and it'll just pop up when you're done, it'll all be correct. But if you want to change kind of the tone of it, I don't know, this is where the AI stuff comes in,

which I'm like, I don't care for these stylistic rewrites and stuff. But once you've already done all of your rights, then you can press it again and you can say, can you change the tone of this? That uses cloud stuff, which is weird. I don't really know why Gemini Nano on the phone is fine with just the dictation and then it has to go to the cloud. I guess it's probably a more powerful model, similarly to apples. But yeah.

All right, we've got to take a break. While we're back, we're going straight into Brendan Carr is a dummy. Everybody's favorite podcast without a podcast. Support for the show comes from Bitwarden. Quick gut check. How many of your passwords are. actually strong and unique. If you had to think about that for more than a second, today's sponsor is for you.

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Elon Musk and a lot of other very smart people think we're all going to have robots at our house. any day now. But when you look at where the tech is today and how far it has to go, you might reach a different conclusion. This idea that humanoid robots are coming to live in our house, and I went and explored that, is just not true. That's Joanna Stern, the tech journalist who spent a year outsourcing her life to AI and robots. That's on channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. All right, we're back. Neelai, we usually save Brendan Carr's a dummy. Until the end of the show, we leave that passion, we let it get pent up.

There's too much this week. Also, Pierce isn't here to stop me. Most importantly. I just want to be clear. He's gone, and there's no check on my behavior. And then on top of that, there is a flood of Brendan Carr being a dummy. This week, I'm Brendan Carr's a dummy. America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

Brendan Carr is a dummy. You might recall that's the, that's the, that's the, what we would call Brennan Carr original by Viola de Gumba. We're still in the market for theme songs. Send them in, especially if they have drops. We've had a lot of theme songs without drops lately. And also, Travis really does not like the amount of AI slop we're receiving. I'm sorry, Travis. I have fun of Suno all the time.

I'm not saying it's great or that I feel morally correct about it. But Travis has much stronger feelings not too. All right. Our nation's Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been up to a lot this week. And we're going to end with something that I believe will drive our audience into an absolute frenzy of both fury and despair.

I'm ready for it. Well, let's start with some simple stuff. This week, Freedom of Information Act request filed by the advocacy group, Democracy Forward, was published by the Guardian. It's a trove of FCC documents, including Brendan's email and calendar. They're users of the Microsoft Suite

at the Federal Communications Commission. You'll be delighted to learn. as we know, Brendan is just a corrupt dummy. He coordinates the White House in a way that he shouldn't as the head of a theoretically independent agency

and he coordinates with a bunch of conservative broadcasters and cable companies to give them what they want and ignores the other companies. In fact, this week, we're going to come to this. ABC is actually suing the FCC

because they're so deeply corrupt and such a threat to free speech. But between, but according to these documents, between March 12th, 2025th and February 11, 2026, Brennan Carr attended at least eight meetings to White House and had three scheduled calls with administration officials, including Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and everyone's favorite RFK Jr.

RFK Jr. certainly was like, does 5G cause cancer? Like, as far as what we can tell from these documents, they call us like five minutes long. And I'm guessing RFK was just like, I have another conspiracy theory. And Brennan told him where a tinful hat and go away. We also have Brendan trying to get himself on Fox News, which is really good. He reached out to a booker. for Fox and friends and saying, do you want me to come on to talk about TikTok legislation? And he shared links of his previous appearances on Fox News to prove that he'd be good on TV.

I think that's kind of adorable. I think it's nice that he's proactively reaching out to Fox being like, guys. Can you let me on? Look at what a bad job we're doing. He wrote, no worries at all. There's nothing to make sense. And the Fox Booker reported there's no availability for him, which is rough.

Oh, man. That's just funny on its face. But as I keep pointing out, all of Brendan's moves to censor information on the broadcast airwaves are just a trial balloon for censoring information on the internet. And the fact that he wanted to go on Fox News to talk about TikTok legislation is just more evidence that he wants to get way outside of his statutorily prescribed role governing the nation's airwaves and actually start talking about internet content.

Because there's no regulatory authority for him over TikTok whatsoever. There is Project 2025, which he wrote the telecom chapter in, in which he would claim that authority. But it doesn't exist today. So I just, Brendan trying to get on Fox News to talk about regulating TikTok, just more evidence of his actual plan. And when I say more evidence, I mean more evidence today, because you can literally go read the plan. You can just go read Project 2025, which he wrote in which he would take claim over content on the internet. Brendan leaving his office and going on shows and podcasts has not gone well for him either, right? That's like him going out and issuing his vague threats against Jimmy Kimmel and everybody being like,

this is very transparently not what you're allowed to do. Oh, yeah. And like I said, we're going to talk about the ABC lawsuit one second. Okay, of course. This is going to come up. It's nice that that's not even the lead. It's going up that he's going on television and saying things like we can do this the hard way or the easy way. By the way, speaking of Kimmel,

He met with the Sinclair Broadcast Group, Chairman David Smith. Sinclair is the local news broadcaster that preempted Kimmel in many markets around the country. He also met with, of course, Lachlan Murdoch, the chief of Fox Corporation, and he's met with many, many other conservative broadcasters as well. So he's meeting with the conservatives. He's meeting with the White House. He's issuing his little proclamations, and he's begging to get himself on Fox News. That's the documents.

Then there is the court case. So ABC this week sued the FCC over their campaign of threats. particularly around Kimmel and around pulling the view. ABC lawsuit is just strident here in a way that I think is good. I'm glad that we have a big media company standing up to the Trump administration in this way. It's been a long time coming. So ABC, Disney, says, the consequences of the administration's campaign against free speech reach well beyond ABC. If the administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable,

tell only the stories the administration deems favorable or face the coercive machinery of the federal government. in such a world the press can in no way be described as free. That's just straight from Brenda Cars a dummy. I just want to be clear. We've been saying this

on this show for like two years now. The FCC has responded to this. You will love Brendan's response to this. Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC's proceeding as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation.

I like this. I like that the FCC is like ABC is doing Russian disinformation. How often we have Brandon has gone on the air and literally said things like, you can do this the hardware or the easy way, or pulling the licenses early, or threatening the view. I don't think that's disinformation.

I think those are just the things that are happening. I'm also, is anyone in the conservative ecosystem even supporting Brendan Carr on this one? Like, this is the thing. Like, the conservative ecosystem is so happy to jump on Disney for any perceived slight. And I am not seeing that when it comes to this lawsuit because he is just so. so transparently in the wrong here. It is, it is incredible. Every week, Nilai and the Wall Street Journal editorial board agree that Brandon Carr is way out over his skis and the power of the FCC is is being outrageously wielded to tamp down in free speech. That is very much present in the

conservative media ecosystem. A bunch of conservative commentators and former SEC officials have all gotten together in written letters and filed lawsuits and amicus briefs in these cases saying, look, if you let the conservatives do it to the perceived liberal media outlets this time, when the liberals take power, they will do it to us.

And the thing that they are trying to say without saying it too much is conservative talk radio is under threat. If you start letting the FCC reach into what's happening on broadcast, the thing you would immediately do if the other side wins power is go after conservative talk radio and say,

these aren't bona fide news programs. They don't get exceptions. They have to abide by the equal time rule. And then you're off to the races because talk radio is dominated by conservatives. So there's a lot of weariness in that side. We get emails from those folks all the time asking us to point it out more often because I think they know they can't say it very loudly, but we can say whatever we want. We're on podcasts.

We can't regulate us, Brendan. All right. So that is the shape of the legal situation. We know Brendan is meeting corruptly with the White House, with conservative broadcasters. We know ABC is suing the FCC over the threats to free speech. We talk about that stuff in regards to Brandon all the time. That's normal. That would be a normal Brennan Carr's Dummy segment.

We would do that in the third segment. The reason I've elevated this over David's protestations from the grave is the FCC actually took action this week that I find to be infuriating. and in a normal time, I would have actually just made this a segment all unto itself. So part of the crisis in government since COVID is a desire to say things are better by changing the standard by which we measure them. That's just a big idea, right? COVID will go away if we just stop testing.

Keep that idea in your brain. Like there's something in the conservative mind that has held on to that idea forever. If we just change how we measure things, we can declare victory. This week, Brendan Carr's FCC eliminated the benchmark to bring gigabit internet to Americans. That was the standard set in 2024. We're going to do gigabit internet for everyone. Brennan Carr's FCC got rid of that. Brendan's logic here is that holding internet providers to gigabit speeds unfairly prejudices wireless and satellite.

Oh my God. This is really good. Here's a quote. As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we propose to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,500 megabits established in the 2024 report. That's 1,500 down. Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in this section, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers.

This is incredible because the technological winner here is fast internet and the loser is slow. And he's like, what if you had horrible slow internet? That's all the statute says you need to have. We're not going to put a speed goal here because then any internet counts, including, most importantly, his friends at Starlink. This is very good. The FCC said that comments submitted by the cable industry group NICTA and the wireless industry group CTI support our reasoning for polishing the long-term goal, which again is

holding them to speed requirements, unfairly prejudices them because their technologies suck compared to fiber. But they do. Right? Like that feels like a notable reality that like if you want good speeds, you just need better technology. Like you should hold them to that. They should deliver.

This is, I don't understand. What agency does this man think he's running? So they've gotten rid of all the standards. I mean, this is what the FCC should do, right? They should promote faster speeds and lower prices. If you get rid of the standards, if you eliminate COVID by ceasing to test for it, you suddenly get to claim victory. And so what did NICTA, the cable industry and the CTIA do this week?

No, no, no, no. They declared victory. They put out a, NICTA put out a press release. FCC's 2026 broadband report, faster speeds, lower prices, more choices. So we've changed the standard of measurement, and now we have declared victory. It's extremely depressing. 97% Americans now have access to broadband at what speeds? 100 down 20 up.

Oh, my God. Hooray. We did it. The share of rural Americans lacking 120, and I give it's access, has declined over two years. Rural deployment is nearly universal once satellite is included. Oh, my God. Congratulations. We've just declared victory. We had a standard. It was very high. It was hard. It was pushing the industry to succeed. We've eliminated the standard. We've allowed the industry to pick 120. 100 down 20 up is a standard, and they've declared victory. They've also now declared victory in mobile 5G access for some reason. Mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous.

What is the standard for 5G? Remember what the promises of 5G were. Remember what they promised you. You would be doing a robot surgery in a self-driving car in VR with zero latency. The industry itself is now saying mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous. 95% of Americans now have access. at 35 down, three up. This is brutal.

This is brutal. We got rid of the standard, and the industry has defined it down. In 2026, we're declaring victory at 35 down three up for our mobile broadband networks. I just want to remind you all that 5G was supposed to definitively defeat China. If we didn't get to 5G, China would win something. 353.

It's brutal. We did it, everybody. All right. There's more from this victory lap because we've defined this down to 100 down, 20 up, and 35 down, three up for 5G. 77% of Americans now have access to three or more fixed broadband services at 120. I live in New York. Jake, you and David live in New York City. These are highly dense urban environments.

Do you feel like you have massive competition for your broadband providers? So in my building, we have one wired connection. I can't get Fios. Fios, they're next door. They won't come to us. Yeah. I've tried. They won't come to us.

We do have other options if we want fixed wireless, right? If I want to pretend that T-Mobile is a reliable home internet provider, then technically I have a million competitors, right? By the way, the fixed wireless services are competition. There is evidence that Comcast and Verizon are churning customers to them because they can offer lower prices in almost immediate deployment. Which is great. Which is great.

I would just like them to be reliable and fast and cheap, and none of that is real. I mean, I have Fios and that's all I can say. Yeah. Congratulations. Yeah, I also have Fios. They didn't... What the heck, guys? I'm sorry.

They technically didn't offer it in my building either, but because I live in a cellar. They will do drill it through the ground directly into my apartment. You have like illegal Fios. Directly into my apartment. Oh, my God. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I went online. It said, we do not offer it in your building.

And I called them and they're like, we can make that work. You can drill all through the cement. That's what they did. Incredible. I can't say that I have shopped around a lot because Fios is, I don't know if I can say this, but it's reliable and fast and relatively cheap. You can say that? I find it to be pretty good.

The absolute lowest FIO service is 300 up and 300 down. Yeah. And that's all I need. And it's the cheapest one. And yes, I could have gigabit, but like, why? So. Yeah, every now and again, we have gigabit. And every now and again, I look at paying for more, like two up and two down.

I think optimum is here. Optimum is a little flake here, but they offer five up and five down. How many remote surgeries are you doing over there anyway? Every day, I'm cutting eyeballs in VR and myself driving car. Here's this last little bit from the cable industry, issue. a triumphant press release because Brendan Carr changed the standard for victory. And this is my favorite one of this. 90% of all cable mobile data traffic.

What does that mean? Cable mobile data. Cable mobile data traffic. What is? Now runs over Wi-Fi. What does that mean? This is AKAI 5G all over again. It's very good.

Enabling cable mobile riders to deliver. delivering compelling savings and greater competition than wireless marketplace. I think what this means is that Comcast is like a bundle plan to get you like MVNO, Verizon or whoever their partner is. But most of their customers are at home most of the time. So 90% of the traffic is running over Wi-Fi connected to Comcast. And that is cable mobile data traffic. So they're patting themselves on the back for not having to pay money to have these. 90% of cable mobile mobile.

Double data traffic now runs over Wi-Fi. This is an incredible thing to say. Wow. This is basically just like most people are at home most of the time. Yeah. Fine. They go on to say, the average home connects roughly 25 devices or Wi-Fi. That number is projected at nearly double by 2030.

And then they go on to congratulate Brandon Carr for unlicensing the 1,200 megahertz 6 gigahertz band in saying that's what enabled all this cable mobile data traffic. I only point out that Comcasts this week announced that it's going to turn all of its routers. into motion detectors in people's homes using all this extra spectrum. And no one likes this idea. So it's the idea that everyone in America upgraded their Wi-Fi to 6-Gighertz Wi-Fi, and that's what's driving a massive surge in connected devices. And then we should congratulate ourselves. This is all nonsense.

Just like fundamentally what we did in our country was we removed the goals, and we allowed the industry to congratulate itself for delivering slower speeds at higher prices, most people's prices have actually gone up, allowed them to claim there are now more competitors because we've expanded the definition of competition to include many, many low-speed vendors nobody cares about. And then on top of it, we've allowed them to claim

that cable mobile data traffic exists and make some viable competitors and wireless. Again, it's pure nonsense, and I would just connect it to if we stopped testing, the COVID would go away. If you stop measuring the goal, If you stop literally saying what the goal is, anything is possible. And this is as clear of an example of that happening in our government over the past, you know, five years as anything.

We got rid of a goal to make all the broadband be a thousand down, 500 up. And we are now issuing press releases about Americans getting 5G at 35 down, three up, which is brutal. I was getting that on LTE a decade ago. Yeah. And there's press releases about it today. Whatever happened to the, what was it called, the internet that they put in your phone that was like stupidly fast and only at stadiums? Oh, millimeter wave. What the heck you would have in a millimeter wave?

Millimeter wave, it does exist in stadiums. 5G accomplished exactly one thing. That's that. It's live streams of Taylor Swift concerts at scale. Great. So you can watch any concert almost anywhere in the world. Great. Right.

When they're happening live, because the millimeter wave networks in the stadiums, exist and work, nothing else about 5G is functional. Yeah. Sorry, if they had said the race to 5G was about live streams of Taylor Swift concerts, I think people would have been fine. Really been on board with that. It really would have been fine. Raise my taxes.

Let's go. This is the one thing Americans can agree on. You know, considering so many of these companies have rolled out so much low-band 5G, which the primary purpose of that is to release congestion on the 4G networks, I get people coming to me all the time saying, why is my internet so slow it says 5G? And I have to break the news to them that you were lied to. There was a giant campaign and they told you that it would be 5G Taylor Swift concerts at millimeter wave. And no, no, it's three up or three down.

Three up is so brutal. But can you imagine being the person at NICTA who typed that line into the press release proudly? 97% of Americans have three up. They're so happy. They're watching TikTok, you know, on the road, you know, and they feel great about it. Can you play Fortnite on your phone at three up?

I don't know. Yeah. That's what people are caring about. They don't need to win. They're just like, look at this, connectivity, America. If you stop measuring, it goes away. It goes away. That's literally, I'm saying that we change the standard of measurement. In fact, we didn't even change it. Carr eliminated the standard of measurement

because he said picking 1,000 down, 500 up unfairly prejudices certain technologies. It's bad to head. I mean, the good ones. Like fiber over Starlink. So here we are, 35 down, three up.

Congratulations, everyone. We won the race to 5G. We've defeated China, which remains resolutely defeated. Every day, the Chinese government issues, sad press releases about how they can't possibly provide three up internet to their citizens. And Brennan Carr remains a Donnie. Brendan, if you would like to come and defend this press release from what effectively is your organization at this point, you're welcome to.

show on Decoder. I would love to talk to you about the nature of measurement. I could bring on James Vincent, former verge reporter James Vincent, who wrote an entire book about the politics of measurement called Beyond Measure, which I highly recommend. I don't think you can take him. He's a charming British person. He will defeat you running away. That's just an open offer, or he can just debate me. I think I can take you too. Brandon, you're always welcome. That has been Brandon Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast for that podcast. The Gagore Enchant really is my favorite one. It's really quick.

It's really good. Well, it feels good to win. And with that, we got to take a break. We're back. It's time for the lightning round. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion.

Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash H-I-S-A to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. All right. We're back. It's time for the lightning round. And you know what? I'm power tripping. I'm just going to go first here because we have to talk about the fact that Apple leaked its own product. Something that is not expected out until next year, a pair of AirPods with cameras in them.

Great idea. Yeah. There was a little video clip of them. You can't actually see the cameras, but you can see somebody talking to the cameras. Can we roll the clip? With visual intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later. There are many really weird things about this clip from a production standpoint. It's really weird that's just not a completed color grade at all. It's very green in the shadows.

The highlights are really blown out, and Apple never ships something like this. So the fact that they included this in a Mac OS 26, not even Golden Gate. This was a Tahoe release candidate. It is really weird. Really strange. Really weird. Okay, here's my conspiracy theory. I just came up with this.

I have no reporting this. This is true. They leaked this on purpose to warm people up to the idea of AirPods of cameras in them. Is it doing the warming? Because we had a big story this week for Miyazato about meta glasses. Her headline is they're a workplace menace. And they really are. Like, if you're a service worker or retail worker, people are recording you without consent,

they are, comedians are getting heckled. Like, there's a quote in her story. where a comedian said, please stop recording me. And the guy said, you're here to entertain me. I think she just cut her set short and left. This is a problem. So you got to preheat the oven. You got to say the AirPods of the cameras are coming, let people have all their feelings

so that when they're announced, everyone has already a little bit blazee. This is, by the way, pure conspiracy theory. It is, I think this is very bad timing for these products to come out, right? Even if it's six months from now. Meta's been doing these glasses for a few years now. And I think people were kind of just like whatever about the cameras for a while because people weren't buying that many of them. It is strange that it took quite a while for people to get really mad about these. I think it was Kylie Jenner, right?

They did a Kylie Jenner partnership. You think so. Broke containment. And that's a good point. Now everybody's like, oh, maybe we shouldn't have people walking around filming TikToks of trying to like pick people up off the street while recording them. Maybe that's bad. Yeah. Kylie Jenner is one part of it.

Like certainly meta is trying to be. cool in a way that is very difficult for meta to be cool. I also think it's just scale. There's actually an argument in the comments of that piece about the fact that camera glasses have been available from Ali Express for like forever.

And it's like, that's great. That's pretty niche and like literally only one class of deprave people were buying those. Now they're just a product. You can just buy them. They're advertised. They're at Best Buy. You can buy them in the airport gadget kiosk before you're

flight. Like they're ubiquitous, scaled mass market consumer products and scale changes everything. Yeah. Right. Like the meta label is a, is a permission slip to buy the glasses and have them and put a camera on your face. And I actually just think they've hit a tipping point of ubiquity. Yeah. And so Kylie Jenner is a symptom of that, right? You sold enough. You believe in enough. You're going to pay the marketing money into the big influencer. But the other side of it is you sold enough. There's returns on this. They really believe in this form. factor. And I continue to believe that Meta thinks they've made an AI wearable because it just has some garbage AI in it. And what they've really made is glasses with cameras in them. And they have not reckoned with that at all. And when AirPods with cameras come out, whether or not Apple is capable of reckoning with that and protecting people's privacy with that, wide open questions.

Yeah. I mean, there's this big question of how. Apple actually implements this, right? Are these for recording what you're up to? Are these for taking photos? Or do they tell you, hey, these AirPods have cameras on them? Or do they just go, oh, it's a new AI wearable, don't worry about it? I guarantee you they're going to call these a sensor and not a camera. That is the best way they can position these.

And they say they're for just pretend. Yeah, a sensor for visual intelligence. A vision sensor, yes. Sensor for visual intelligence. And I, this is my thought process on this. I don't think they're going to let you just take photos of things or take videos of things. I think it's going to be pretty limited to the like, what am I looking at and kind of look, which again, the what am I looking at, in my opinion, is one of those like problems that nobody has that all these companies are solving, which happens a lot. And I don't, I don't know why they're like, save this book for later when you could just write it down.

You own the book. You could just write it down. It's like in your house. Yeah. Yeah. You have a line about this in your pixel review. Yes. What is it the what if utopia simulation?

Yeah. Yeah, it's the San Francisco What If Utopia Simulator? Yeah. Yeah, like, what if everyone was just looking at print books all day long and asking what they were? And it's like, we've built a product that can solve this problem. The reality is it's like anthropic employees looking at books and be like, how could I most efficiently tear the cover off this to scan into the model? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do think this will reveal the true gap if there is one, which I think there is, of like whether people actually want this interwearable, right? Because if Apple comes out and they say these aren't for taking photos, these aren't for recording videos, you can't use these to creep on people. It's just for getting AI information about your surroundings, about getting directions. Well, if it turns out that that's useless, which, you know, maybe it is, then I think it's pretty revealing that meta has not built an AI wearable. They build a pair of headphones and some creepy glasses.

Yeah, well, the other question here is, do they sample the world all the time while you have the headphones in so that you can ask your phone? where did I leave my keys. That's the thing that I'm wondering if they're going to pitch it at. That I would not be happy about. That would be very... There's no way to do that in a privacy-centric way. If you're sampling the world all the time

is an amazing way of describing, constantly taking pictures. Flock for your ears. I guarantee you they're going to say... They would be called earflux. We're like breaking the image data into encrypted strings of whatever and storing it locally.

They're going to do this. This is how they're going to present it. So, I don't know. What's interesting to me is how quickly the world comes along with them, you know? Because the first generation of AirPods looks terrible with the giant long stems, and everyone made fun of them, and they looked terrible. And then a bunch of people bought them, and then they normalized. And there's going to be a backlash.

There's definitely going to be a backlash. But how long does the backlash last, is my question. Wait, I think that to the extent there was a backlash by AirPods, it was, these look pretty silly. And this looks pretty silly, is overcomeable by almost every product if it's good at what it does. Yeah. Right? And the AirPods were good at what they did. They were the first successful wireless earbuds of their kind.

Yeah. The objection here isn't how it looks, and it can't be overcome by success at being functional. The objection here is stop taking pictures of me. Yeah. I do not consent to being captured. And the existing privacy laws, such as we have them in this country, are like, well, if you're in a public place, you have no expectation of privacy. of privacy. Yeah.

But that is a framework and a set of norms and laws that don't imagine people with cameras in their ears, right? Like, all of that came up with like film SLR cameras. Yeah. Right? Like, all of that, like, street photography lives in that legal framework. Or if you're out in the street, New York and someone just like literally taking pictures of the camera, you don't have some like big expectation of privacy.

But I'm just at my job. and someone shows up with cameras in their ears. I don't even know if I'm being recorded. There's something else about that, especially when the distribution is social media. And so to turn back to Meta for one second, and me a story about the glasses and workplaces. Meta has this ridiculous quote.

We've built privacy into our AI glasses from the ground up. And what they mean is the light. Yeah. They can't mean anything else. Because if you were going to build privacy into your AI glasses from the ground up, you would not put a camera on them that invades people's privacy.

Yeah. And if you're stuck with the legal definition of privacy, you're still really in a hard spot when you go into someone's home or you go into someone's private workplace because those aren't public places in the same way. So you've just got this like huge language gap. We've built privacy and our glasses from the ground up. Like meta saying this is nonsensical. And they have to know it. And then their solution is, this is incredible. they said to me,

Meta has begun blocking hashtags on its platforms associated with harassment, including, quote, Riz, pickup artist, and cold approach. Because people are using the glasses to try to pick up girls.

And so then they're like hashtag Riz. And META's like, don't worry, we're not using AI to detect this. We're going to block it at the hashtag. Cool. Got it. So you make the product, then you own all the platforms

that people share video on. moderate those platforms to make sure people aren't creepy with it. So it's a really good plan. But you barely do it. Yeah, barely. You do hashtag-based moderation of the word Riz. I thought meta-hitted hashtags. Out there, we're getting rid of all the hashtags.

Doesn't seem to be working. Yeah, you just add this up. You're like, well, we actually do want this. We're going to say there's privacy from the ground up. And then, right, Jake, to your point, we also controlled the distribution. So we'll do some, we'll just like gesture at content moderation to disincentivize the bad behavior. Yeah. But we won't actually do the content moderation you want, which is using our massive investment in AI to actually detect the bad content and turn it down or eliminate it.

We're going to block the word hashtag. We're going to block the hashtag Riz. Well, can I also say it's not just this incentivizing bad behavior. It is trying to avoid bad press. Right? If you don't see the videos, then you can't report on the videos. It can't be blowups about it. It's not looking good over there.

But wait, doesn't this all just come to Apple? I was going to say one more quick thing about Apple, which is it is unclear to me if these products will even work at scale. They're also leaked that there's a warning if your hair is covering up the AirPods with cameras because a ton of people on Earth have long hair. So like this product, we'll see where Mark German at Bloomberg reported that it's still on track for I think Q1, 2027. So there's going to be a bit before these even come out. Lots to find out. But this is going to be messy. I just think there's an enormous danger for Apple releasing a product that reminds everyone of a meta product that everyone calls pervert glasses.

Yeah. That's not a game they usually play. No. It would be a good way to introduce the new CEO. Yeah, John Turner. Yeah, great, great timing. Okay, David, it's time to move on. What have you got for us?

Okay. Mine's much more boring than this. But I think it matters. I think it matters. Company called Fair Phone, you guys might have been familiar with. They are a company out of France that makes all these more fair phones where they go to these cobalt mines and they make sure that there's not as many children in the cobalt mines, things like that.

These of them. Yeah, that's nice of them. It's good of them. They're trying to break into the U.S. Well, their other thing, these are also, these are the repairable ones, right? Yes, they're very repairable. But their big kind of push has always been about making sure that the working conditions for these phones. are good, that they're using sustainable things, things like that. But yes, you can also,

they have all the parts, not all of the parts, but many parts available on their website. So they have different parts on your phone, break. It works. I did use the fair phone for quite a while, and I broke one of the cameras, and I just swapped it back in. And it was nice. They have phones with expandable storage. Their phones have removable batteries, kind of everything that we used to have in smartphones that now are just glued directly into the phone. Anyway, they are now selling the Fairphone 6 plus in the United States through Amazon. This is a fairly big deal. To make a little pun there. Breaking the U.S. is incredibly difficult. However, I have had a lot of people that I know, friends of mine, that have said, I really want to leave Apple. I don't know what to do.

My only other option seems to be Google or Samsung, and I hate all these tech companies. I don't know what to do. And I'll, you know, point them in the direction of these fare phones. The biggest problem with these fair phones is that they are trading the, the, the, the Fairness with a very mid-range Android phone, which is still the case. People want premium, they want low-cost, and they want not Apple or Google. You can only choose maybe one. Maybe one. So they are selling on Amazon.

They are officially supported through T-Mobile and AT&T, which is a decently big deal. I think if they can get store space in T-Mobile or AT&T, that's a big deal. MediaMart in the UK has been selling these fair phones for quite a while now, and they've expanded from like 40 stores to like 180 stores, in the UK, sorry, in Europe. They've expanded to a lot of stores. So this Fairphone 6 plus is a Snapdragon 7th, Gen 4, notably very mid-range, 12 gigs of RAM,

256 gigs of storage, 4,415 million power battery. But again, it is expandable storage, replaceable battery, and it's verd purple is the color. That's pretty good. It's blurple, David. Blurple. Purple. That's the official color.

We should do, am I allowed to just assign you YouTube videos? I think I can do it. The other day, but I'm like, I can assign him stories all the time. Someone, you should make a video

about how all, like the entire tech industry would be different if the concept of the mid-range Android phone was more successful. Yeah. Like so many things live or die on whether or not people

will want to buy a mid-range Android phone. Yeah. Like, Fairphone is a good example. Like a healthy, you know, competitive, we're going to sell values, but you have to want a mid-range Android phone. Like, that's one on the spectrum. Yeah. The entire piece of AT&T buying Time Warner was people will love our mid-range Android phones

more if they have bite-sized Game of Thrones apps on them, which is psychotic. But, like, it also required people to want mid-range Android phones. I think they were just a couple years too early to that, right? If they were putting out micro drama, House of Cards, House of Dragons, what is it now? House of the Dragons. House of the Dragons. Sorry, everyone. You know, there's an audience for that.

It is tough. They are $650. So people are going to need to be able to, you know, trade their willingness to have a $650 mid-range androfoote in the United States. Not a great sell. Very difficult. It's very niche. It's very niche.

But it is like if you're going to pick a mid-range animal. Android phone, it is, there needs to be something that is driving you to that. I do. I do have. Yes. Right. Yes. I personally do think that the, there's a lot of people that I know even personally who are like,

they think a lot about, you know, the sustainability of these phones, the fact that they don't want to use as much Apple and Google stuff, especially in Gen Z. They think a lot about those things, whether or not they're willing to actually use them as a whole other question. And especially pay $650 for them. But similarly to the framework laptop, which the more premium one came out recently, and it was more expensive than almost every laptop, it's one of those things where the value, at the very beginning,

the value does not seem great. But over a long period of time, if you're able to fix things and maybe even upgrade things, because some of Fairphones' cameras modules were upgradable. You could just swap them. Okay, that's very cool. And that was great. Then the value becomes a little bit more apparent.

So I mean, I feel like the people who test these phones Seems to really like them Yeah, but it's true. You're getting a mid-range Android phone at the end And you've got to really like what it comes with for sure. I'm telling you, if we could just pull off mid-range Android phones. I mean, I know we have some listeners here are mid-range Android phone. This is great, but they're not the thing.

And if somehow they ever became the thing, we would experience vastly more competition in lots of ways. Yes. Yeah, 100%. They're just super not the thing. Yeah. So close. You got to make this stream out.

We come to life. Yeah. I should have brought it with me because they shipped me one, and I just have not opened the box yet. It's very, I think there's going to be very interesting to see if they're able to expand their market here, because it's been just Europe for now? It's been almost exclusively here.

It's very low, but, you know, they're growing a lot in Europe. Which is already a bigger Android market. So it'll be interesting to see if they can have any headway in the U.S. where that is a very tough, tough. Very, very tough. Cool, say. All right. Nilai.

What have you got for us? So I was going to do the meta trial. There's another meta trial where it's very obvious. They know bad things are happening to teenagers on our platforms. They're not doing enough about it. We had one in New Mexico. They lost that one. This one is California, New Jersey, a bunch of other states.

It's ongoing. We expect to see Zuck and Messeri and everybody else on stand. It's going to be the New Mexico trial again. And I bet they're going to lose. And meta is so afraid of losing that they keep saying they're going to be fine like $1.2 trillion dollars to make it really scary. And the states are like, no, we're asking for $200 billion, which is still an enormous number, but not one point whatever trillion dollars.

That's the state of that one. Fine. We're going to cover that. You can read about it. Meta's in trouble because whatever. We've asked for their executives to come on Decoder. I get the sense that they are scared of that idea. That's what I'll say at this time.

I want to talk about something else. I'm going to stay on measurement for one second. YouTube this week announced how it's counting views is going to change. And so there was, previously it was a number of seconds. Like you had to watch some seconds of a video for it to count as a view. And YouTube is like, screw it. The instant one frame of a video plays on any surface in the YouTube app that counts as a view, which is going to massively inflate view counts.

They know it. Yeah. And I think, David, the reason for that. is because the YouTube ecosystem is getting bigger. They're competing with TikTok and all these other platforms. And a lot of the creators I know are saying view counts have kind of been drifting down. So, like, how do you fix it? You just literally say any time one frame of the video plays that counts as a view and skyrocket all the counts again.

Yeah. I feel that it feels like a very defensive posture for YouTube, which I'm surprised that they're taking because they have always been the one metric that people care about. You know, like everyone just makes views. As David Pierce will say, View numbers are fake. Everything is fake. They change the way that they work all the time

and X is changing the way it counts views and Twitter, all these things. YouTube did shift the way that YouTube Shorts views worked quite a while ago to be in line with TikTok and all of those things. And so now their reasoning is that they want to unify

the way that the views work across all their platforms. They now have a different metric name for the ways that views used to work because the way views used to work is still the way that people are being paid. This is what's a little bit weird about this. Wait, I didn't realize this. This is true.

So there is a, there's the public view count, which is just going to be massively inflated. Oh, sure. I think it's called qualified views or qualified view hours or something like that. And that is the way that people will still be paid. So now this is going to cause an insane amount of confusion between creators and the people who pay them because their views. are going to be way up and the people who pay them will be like, wow, you're doing a great job. And then they'll actually ask for the real data and they will be way down comparatively.

But I just want to note that there are so many tensions that YouTube gives creators between the amount of watch time they have, the watch percentage that they have. You know, if someone doesn't finish your video and they only make it 40% of the way through, that tells the algorithm like, oh, I guess this wasn't that quality of a video, right? the only way to make people watch a video all the way through is to randomly cut off your video at a random moment. So creators will now, instead of saying, thanks for watching, I hope you subscribe, hit the bell, whatever. They'll just like end the video because they want people to just finish the video.

Now, if that happens and then it just instantly auto plays another video, that video that you did not click on, that you had no interest in watching, now gets a view. So there's just a whole can of worms here that is going to change the way that you do. YouTube numbers work completely. When you change how you measure things, you can declare videos. That's exactly what this is.

So, that's precisely what this is. I would put that right up against another piece of news this week. Yeah. YouTube is in talks to offer select creators millions of dollars if they keep their videos exclusively on YouTube for a set period. Two people familiar at those efforts said that to Business Insider. Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw also had that. The move is described as a direct shot at Netflix, which has been ramping up.

the licensing of creator videos. So Netflix is going to license more like high-end YouTube stuff. YouTube obviously wants to compete in television and YouTube is responding to this but juicing view counts and then paying you money to not take the Netflix money.

This is another very defensive posture. Like it seems they have never really had to worry about these people in the past and it's strange that they are actually coming out and saying we're a little bit worried about Netflix. And they should be a little bit worried about Netflix.

But it's where that they're publicly worried about Netflix in this way. Yeah, if Netflix can offer you the best of YouTube, right? They've licensed all the best videos that they like the most or the most popular creators on Netflix. And you can just watch them in the same app. Maybe you're not going to open the YouTube app.

And YouTube's watch time on television, which has been dominant for quite some time, will go down a little bit. Yeah. Right. And if you're also going to count views the second one frame of video starts playing, your view counts will go down a little bit. Yeah. Like this is a lot.

There's a lot of stories. swirl here. Uh-huh. Oh, I wanted to make a quick clarification. It's called engaged views now. So it's not qualified views. It's called engaged views. And this is important because literally like a week ago, YouTube changed the way that

the YouTubers can get into the partner program, both through shorts and through the actual long, they call it long form now, long form YouTube partner program. Used to be that they needed 4,000 watch hours in order to become a YouTube partner. now it's 8,000. And so when they did that and then they changed the way that views were counting,

people were like, oh, they're just changing it to 8,000 because it's way easier to get a view now. No, because it has to be 8,000 engaged views. So there will be

a different engaged views metric in the YouTube studio app in which you have all this data. So YouTube still understands that engaged views are real views. I mean,

it also like, the name kind of implies everything. The other views are disengaged views. Yeah. They're not actual viewers. They're technically called public views.

Their auto play views. But that's the number they're going to show under the videos, and those numbers will look gigantic now. Yeah. Right? And I think that's what the thing that they want. They want those numbers that's gigantic. They want those things to look dominant.

You're saying defensive posture, but I think they want to indicate dominance. Like, if you go on YouTube, look at all these videos with tens of millions of views that you can also watch, as opposed to, boy, the number of people watching things for more than whatever, 30 seconds or whatever mysterious number of seconds. found it as a view before, that number seemed like it was trending down. As more and more people were watching shorts, as more and more people were watching TikTok or whatever else. And now those numbers are going to skyrocket.

I just also feel that we are getting worse and worse indicators of the quality of a video because they got rid of the dislike button, so we have no idea what that's going to mean now. And then now if the algorithm just decides to serve this one video to everybody, which it likes to do, there are some videos that get served to almost everyone on the platform, no matter what your algorithm looks like, and it will just have a view because it will have auto played, or you'll have hovered your mouse over it for a frame. Like, it is a frame.

That seems insane to me. I mean, I'm going to find a way to do a YouTube scam. The click farms are coming. As a parent of young children, I'm quite mad that I didn't invent cocoa melon. Like, we should have all invented cocoa melon. Let's be honest. We didn't. But now I'm going to find something.

Yeah. If you've got ideas, emails. Vergecast to the verge.com. Tell me what your YouTube scam. We should run. We're going to run. All right. That's it for the Vergecast.

Remember to subscribe to the Verge for ad-free episodes of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more. We'd love to hear from you. Email us, Vergecast at Theverge.com, or call the hotline at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larich.

See you next week, Nilai. Crackerel.