The Vergecast - The AI wearables are always listening

Episode Date: May 6, 2025

The Verge’s Victoria Song joins the show to talk about a new genre of gadget, which both she and David have been testing a lot: the AI-powered, always-on voice recorder. Vee shares what she’s learned from devices like Bee, and why it’s going to be so hard for AI to figure out what really matters in our lives. After that, The Verge’s Nathan Edwards and keyboard maker Ryan Norbauer tell the story of the Seneca, a $3,600 keyboard that Norbauer built to his own incredibly exacting specifications. They tell David about what it really takes to make a great keyboard, and why making one is worth the effort. Finally, in the lightning round (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]!), we answer a couple of questions about the future of Chrome. Further reading: Bee review: I outsourced my memory to AI and all I got was fanfiction The Plaude NotePin is a great AI voice recorder, and it’s totally doomed Friend: a new digital companion for the AI age The Norbauer Seneca The $3,600 keyboard that’s optimized for joy. Why are companies lining up to buy Chrome? Sundar Pichai says the DOJ’s antitrust plan could kill Google Search Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of outrageously expensive keyboards. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am on my couch, in my basement, and I think I live here for the next several weeks, hopefully. So I'm not a particularly superstitious person in general. I don't have a lot of, like, rituals. I don't have a pair of lucky socks. But here's the thing I know for sure, is that I sat in this spot on this couch for every single, Warriors playoff game in 2022, and the Golden State Warriors won the NBA title. Did they do it because I sat on this couch? Who's to say? But these are the rules. I have to do this now.

So ironically, it's possible that by the time you're watching or listening to this, you'll know who won the game that I'm sitting here about to watch, but I don't. And these are the rules. And maybe I can leave the couch, and maybe I live on the couch. Maybe this is where we've Vergecast from from now on. I don't know. Go Warriors. We'll see what happens. Anyway, today on the show, we have a bunch of fun stuff to talk about. V-Song is going to come on, and she and I are going to compare notes on a device category that we've both been testing. We have these recorders that you're designed to wear and kind of have on and with you all the time that say they can keep track of all the important stuff in your life without you having to do any extra work. I find it

fascinating and weird, we're going to talk about it. Then Ryan Norbauer, who made maybe the most expensive keyboard I've ever seen is going to come on the show with Nathan Edwards from our team, and we're going to talk about fancy high-end keyboards and why they might matter more than you think. I think there is a cool, spiritual story to tell about keyboards, and we're going to tell it. Also, have some hotline questions about what's going on at the Google trial.

I have been at the Google trial a bunch of the last two weeks, and I have some answers for you. All that's coming up in just a second, but first I have to figure out how to... how to drag myself off of this couch and not feel bad about what happens next. Wish me luck. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data.

And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports. and mom. And this is and mom, a community for athletes,

game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold

is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on a explain it to me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. V's song is here. Hi, V. Hi, V. We have to talk about the weirdest gadget category that you and I, I think, are both, like, needlessly obsessed with. Are you ready for

this? Yes. I'm so ready for this. Okay. I also feel like I'm going to wear, I'm going to wear this while we do this, because I'm, I'm recording us currently in two ways, and now I'm going to record in a third way with this weird necklace around my neck. How do we describe these gadgets we want to talk about? They're like, I've come to talk about them as like AI voice recorders. Is that reasonable? I think AI voice recorders is reasonable and or the way that B described it and we'll talk about B is your AI memory.

And that's like ultimately where they want to go with it. So, like, AI memory wearables is like, I think, the high level of what they want to be, but what they are essentially now is AI voice recorders. Yeah, they're all sort of different spins on the same thing, which is basically a dedicated device that is mostly some kind of wearable microphone. And the idea is that it records things. How many things and when and what I think is interesting and we should talk about it. But it's designed to be sort of an easily accessible. recorder that then uses AI models to summarize the stuff that happened in your day-to-day life or let you search through it or pull out action items. They all have like slightly different

versions of the same idea, but it does all feel like roughly the same idea. Is that a reasonable description? Yeah, it's like I guess if you had like an AI stenographer in your pocket that was just also telling you what you said, giving you a transcript of your life, and then sometimes depending on the thing, giving you, like, action items based on the crap that you just randomly say. And will, like, nine out of ten times forget to write down. Yeah. Which, like, I actually really love that description because, like, if you just think about it that way, it sounds so compelling. Right?

But the like, keep track of everything you need to keep track of including all the things you forget to write down. My brain immediately goes, yes, I do want that. That is a thing that would be useful to me. And yet, my experience with the thing has been very different. So you wore the bee in particular for a long time. So let's start there. Tell me a little bit about just like day-to-day life wearing the bee. So the bee is they kind of marketed as you're like outsourcing your memory to AI.

You can wear it one of two ways. You can wear it as a little fitness trackery looking bracelet, or you can wear it as a pin. I have limited real estate on my wrist, so I chose to wear it as a pin for most of the time. It just records all of your conversations. It's one of the ones you're supposed to have on like 24 hours a day, right? Like charge it at night, wear it all day. It has seven-day battery life, so you don't even have to charge it at night per se. Charge it on some days, wear it all week.

Just like wear it all the time. And it's supposed to, like, as it currently functions, they have some bigger ideas about how it's going to go, but, you know, that we're not there yet. But as it is right now, you basically get a transcript of your life, summaries of your day, like little AI diary entries of how your day went, notable moments, a suggested AI to do list based on the things that were said. and it wrote very interesting fanfictions of my life. There's a little section called, they call it, I think, like, fact review. I called it AI fact Tinder because you're basically swiping left and right about assumptions that it learns about you throughout your day. And that's supposed to help it learn extra context as to whatnot. So it could be something as mundane as Victoria has a living room and a kitchen, an actual fact that it gave me.

I see. And then another one was Victoria has a friend named Kendra Montesha who likes mustard and turning TVs off. And that's because it cannot interpret the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar's TV off. So, yeah. And then you get ones that are mundane that you're like, this never happened, which was Victoria had, like, I forget exactly what it was, but it was something about my dietary restrictions and lollipops. And I was like, I did not talk about lollipops. though now thinking back on it, was it thinking about me talking about olipops? I don't know the drink.

So, you know, you just review these fact tenders on like a revolving door basis, and you just look at them and you're like, I never fucking talked about lollipops. What's it talking about? But yeah, so there you go. I've had a really weird experience wearing this thing, even around people who don't know I'm wearing it and thus don't live their lives any differently. I feel weird knowing, like, in the sense that I feel like if you were, if you were like working for the FBI wearing a wire, you would always be aware of the conversation that you were having. I became that just with this thing. And I've been using it for a while and that has not gone away at all.

Did it feel that way for you too? I started talking less one in my actual day-to-day life. I stop. I don't, I'm not like a big talker to myself, but every once in a while I'll be like, shit or something like that. I just stopped. doing that because there was an incident, a gastrointestinal incident in a bathroom, and I said something, and it summarized it, and I was like, this is freaking rude. And then it told me to start taking lactate again. And I was like, I don't need this. But as regards to how the people in my life feel about it, I'm just going to quote my spouse, they said, this is not powerful or useful enough to violate my privacy consistently in this way. Because are you a human using an AI memory tool going to remember to mute in appropriate conversations?

Like if you're in the middle of a fight and the fight just like pops up spontaneously because I don't know, maybe your cousin called you and wanted to hash out an argument that you've been having for three years randomly out of the blue one day, a thing that happened to me. I'm just going to say purely hypothetical. Purely hypothetical. Are you going to remember while you're screaming about like lifelong grudges you've held against each other to mute? No, you're not. You're just going to be in the moment having that fight. And then you're going to look at a transcript later and you're like, cool. I get to relive this tense moment because it's analyzing your emotions through the tone of your voice and what's being said.

So that it's like, I think one time I was like, Victoria had a tense conversation with her cousin who, and because my cousin has a Korean name, they got their name wrong. So it sounded like I was fighting with the BGs, which was funny. So it was just like, do I want to realize that? No. Is having this transcript here helping me be the bigger person and move on from this argument? Also, no. So it's very strange. I often forgot to turn it off while I was in the office or commuting.

That gave me useless to-dos, told me to check on my patient in Louisiana, who was at danger of harming someone. And I was like, well, that's not my patient. That's someone on this New Jersey Transit bus. Oh, wow. Either watching a medical drama or discussing private patient things out in public, which is wild. Can't differentiate between TV shows and actual conversations. So, you know, forgetting to mute the B while watching Severance this season was funny. Wait, can I read you one that I had?

So I, out of curiosity testing the thing, sat down and turned up the volume most of the way and just watched TikTok for like 15 minutes. It was just like curious what the thing would do. I just want to read you what it came up with for TikTok. It goes, recounting a sleepless night with children, which was a TikTok that I watched, a confusing exchange, another confusing exchange, discussing headphones and a music lesson, random thoughts and observations, Spanish conversation and cooking, golf commentary, musical interlude, waiting for someone who isn't coming, playing a game and stopping a drug dealer. TikTok.

But so this is the thing that that was so crystallizing for me listening to this because it's like the actual individual things it's pulling out, it actually does a reasonably good job with. Right? Like if I just sit here and I play some audio for it or I have a conversation, at least the I've used mostly the limitless pendant and the plod stuff. There was the thing you attach to the phone and then they had a, a pin that was kind of like another thing you wear on a lanyard. Both do a pretty good job of like summarizing information had in some kind of conversation. They have absolutely no idea what real life is like. And I like this has made me realize how high the bar is for all of this. Like to your point about the what what is important what is important that I want to remember? What is important that I would prefer never to think about again? What is not important at all? and you should just throw it away and understand that actually saving this at all is the wrong thing to do. Like the bar for this stuff, understanding how a person moves through their life is so high.

And with all this AI stuff, none of it works in any kind of meaningful way until you do that. And that is tough. It's tough. And then as you, the person who has to review it, you feel emotionally and mentally gaslit a lot of times. Like you become kind of a fact checker of your own life and you look through these transcripts and like these summaries like because B was very big on summaries of what happened to your day. And I'd be like, listen, I never told my boss Todd about my bowel movements. I would die before doing that HR complaint of a thing. But it said that my boss found on a public social media platform that I had vocalized my bowel movements. And then we laughed about it in our one-on-one. And I was like, no, that is not what happened. that is not what happened whatsoever. I, you know, human memory is fallible, but I would, I would never do that. It doesn't understand humor. It doesn't understand riffing or things like that. It doesn't understand when you're listening to music. It doesn't. I watched several episodes of season four of Abbott Elementary and it gave me to do saying like, keep an eye out for the septa strike because it'll affect how your students get to class. And I'm like, I'm not a public school teacher. in Philadelphia. It can be useful.

I thought I recorded some briefings as journalists do, and it was able to distill some facts like pricing, launch dates, the general idea and the concepts behind things got the product name totally wrong, but that's besides the point. So that's an interesting one for me, though, because I think the pro case, I think the most generous case you can make for these devices right now is to use them as kind on-purpose recorders, right? Like, the limitless one that I'm wearing right now. You can use it all day

if you want to, but they mean it much more specifically as like, I'm sitting down to have a meeting with somebody and I turn it on and record it and I get summaries and action items. That's fine. And actually, like, AI is reasonably good at that kind of thing. If you're just like, here's 20 minutes of audio, pull out the most important stuff from it. A lot of models can do that fairly well. That stuff is so unbelievably commoditized already, though. Like, if I just gave you 20 minutes of audio and told you to pull out action items from it using AI, there are a hundred places that could do that, all to the same, like, B-minus level of quality. And the idea of this as a, like, dedicated device, to me, only makes sense if you're going to do it

in the, like, always-on sort of wearable kind of way. And actually, Abbott Elementary is an interesting one where, like, one thing I would like for this to do for me, is keep a running list of all the shows that I watch. Right? Like, every year I read Steven Soderberg's blog post where he just keeps a daily list of like, here's how many episodes of the show that I watched and here's the movie I watched tonight.

And he like, publishes at the end of the year. And I'm always like, that's so cool. I should keep that record. This should do it for me. It should be able to listen to the thing. Like, this tech exists. Shazam exists. It should be able to tell me all the songs I heard,

all the shows I watched. Like, it should give me a compendium of all the TikToks I laughed at today, right? Like, that's the kind of stuff that you can actually make something out of. But none of these are within a country mile of pulling off anything like that. They're all like, you should know every word you said out loud because that's valuable. And like, maybe I'm just a boring person, but it's not. Like, it just, it's super isn't and it's been my experience.

No, it's not. Most of, you kind of realize just the scope of all the conversations you're having in a day. because one of the things that it doesn't do is make a note of your silent conversations, your text messages, your emails, your Slack messages. Actually, B does have some integration with email as well, and we'll summarize the things that you need to do from your email, which could be useful. But there was one instance where it's like, oh, you got notified about a Park Mobile Clack's action suit.

Here's your ID number. Went to search four separate email inboxes. could not find this email. And I'm like, did you hallucinate this email for me? It was a real class action live lawsuit with a real deadline. I could not find this email in any of my inboxes. So I literally had an existential meltdown in crisis with that. But also it can't differentiate for like the I shop on Stylvana to stockpile my Korean suncare. It always has a sale. And it's just like, oh, you got to take advantage of this last minute sale from Stylevana. I was like, no, I don't because it'll be a new one in two days.

Like, it can't differentiate that as well because I can't really. The idea is compelling because there's just a lot of junk in our lives and trying to sort and memorize what is and isn't important. That's a thing. But at the same time, it's just like, I have a lot of really deep and meaningful conversations over texts with friends who live far away. and those are not like jotted down anywhere in the app because it wasn't spoken aloud. So it's that whole thing of like if a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, did it happen?

Well, if a conversation didn't happen out loud, does your AI memory even know it happened? Unless you grant it like integrations with your messages and then that feels icky. That feels no bueno. So it's a lot of, I think the most interesting thing that people could learn from wearing these things is what you say in a day? Like, what do you actually say aloud? And what is the value of keeping your mouth shut? That was, like, one of the things I learned, I was like, oh, you really don't have to say anything during your day. But then your transcript becomes very boring. It's just like, yeah. Yeah, it's funny you find yourself talking less. I found myself talking more. Again,

like, I became very aware of the fact that I had a microphone and I'm like, okay, I'm doing something that my recorder doesn't know about. So literally I caught myself last night narrating myself playing video games because I wanted to communicate to this thing that I was playing video games for some reason. I think humans in general just have this

or at least people in media and people who become journalists and writers have this impulse to document what is happening. And it's not like I wasn't doing some degree of that. I'm an avid junk journaler or just a journaler in general. So I write every day

like three or four bullet points of things that I find memorable that happened to me. And then comparing that with what B said was memorable and what happened to me was very interesting at times. Because one thing that I noted that it just didn't pick up on was there was like a, so we work, we share offices with Eater and they were having a Paddington day and they had marmalade sandwiches and tea cookies in the office. And I really, really liked one of the cookies. It was like a transformational thought process. But I ate the cookie in silence. I had this thought in silence. There was no one around with me to share that moment. So I just wrote it down in my little journal and I was like, this strawberry shortcake cookie was phenomenal. And that's nowhere in that record. And that's

like kind of one small example of a thing. I still think about this cookie from time to time when I see other cookies. So that's how transformational this strawberry cookie was to me. But that was, there's no record of that in my AI transcript of life. And it sometimes is, it's a weird thing because you're navigating consent at all times if you're wearing this device. I have a bunch of friends who are like, oh, she's on her bullshit again. Yeah, whatever. Tell me what the AI says about me. But, you know, there are people who don't want that.

Like, my spouse is a very intentional tech Luddite to a degree. It keeps me sane and healthy. Yeah, it's fair. But, you know, there was, that caused friction in my household, too. because he's just like, is it listening? Could you like turn it off? And so that's another thing that you have to learn to navigate. Especially when you have tense conversations about like household finances or you both dogging on that one friend in your friend group who is making some questionable life decisions. Do you want to have a record of that? Like if you're a doctor, how does this relate to HIPAA? How does that, is that even ethical for you to have? Even though it might be a thing. that you as the doctor want to have to think about certain things. I think B's people were telling me like, oh, yeah, lawyers, professors. And I was like, a lawyer should not be worrying this at all, just because you are working on sensitive things.

So even when we talk about it in a professional capacity is like, is it even ethical to do that? Do we need things recorded all the time? The coolest thing about an analog recorder is that as analog. The data is not going to be uploaded to a cloud server per se. So it's just you start to have existential crises when you wear these for a long period of time and how people move. Because if you are using it ethically and responsibly, starting out a friend dinner going like, hey guys, I'm actually testing this AI thing. Do you guys all consent? Are you guys all okay? I won't use it in this way. Ethics aside, it's also illegal in a lot of states.

Like if you're in a two-party consent state, you are texting. committing crimes by doing this to people. Like, it's, this stuff is just messy. And I think to me, the big challenge here is this kind of on by default status that a lot of these want you to have. And I think, again, I'm actually pro the idea of AI voice recorders. I think, like, I've started using some of this stuff to, like, journal just by sort of spouting thoughts at the end of the day and have it sort of pull out an outline of my day for

me. That's really great. I really like that. But the idea that I should just be able to. walk around and capture my life all the time and that it will be useful. I think, like, I kind of agree with your spouse that, like, maybe there's something there, but it's nowhere near good enough to be worth all the other strangeness and tradeoffs. And I will say, to your point, I had a very private, personal, long phone call last night, and I was wearing this and forgot about it,

just while I had it. It had been on for hours, right? Like, I've just been testing this thing for a long time. It had been on. I wasn't even thinking about it. I go to open up the app this morning and the whole damn transcript of that phone call, or at least my half of it, is just sitting there in this app, which means it got uploaded to somebody's servers. All these companies have very serious privacy policies. I believe them when they say they care about it. But, like, that private conversation is by definition now no longer private. And I would be doing that to me.

I'm doing that to the person I talked to on the phone who didn't know about this. I'm doing it to all of the strangers whose conversations I hear while I'm standing next to them on the subway. Like, it's, it changes the nature of what it is to, like, be a person in the world. And I think we've reckoned with this with cameras in a really interesting way, this is like that on a completely other level. Because I can at least sort of see that you're pointing a camera at me. Like, the ray band glasses and all that stuff makes it all really messy. But, like, I can probably see your camera. If it can see me, I can probably see it.

These are different. And, like, in ways that freak me out. These are way different. and like the conversations that I heard in the, that I heard, not me, but this pen heard and then memorialized in the office. Right. And decided we're just, and we're decided like, I'm hearing snippets of conversations of our colleagues talking about videos on other verticals that I have no business knowing but have been recorded. It really just kind of, it made me feel paranoid in some ways of just like you never know who's listening. And to a degree we know that because like in the early days of the internet, I don't know if you knew this site, but it was like called Overheard in New York. And it's just like little conversations that people over here and upload online.

And that's fine in a way because it's anonymous. You're not describing who these people are. But it captures names. It captures projects. It like capture that two people somewhere in the Vox Media office were talking about big cats sanctuaries on a day in February and that I had no business knowing this. but I overheard it and they don't know it. I know it. And you just sit there with that knowledge and how like immense it feels and how icky you feel having perpetrated it on someone that no amount of disclosure can really fully make you feel right again having done it. You feel like a spy.

Like it's a weird transition to these AI wearables like the smart glasses that can record, the AI recorders that listen to everything. I'm getting a pair of the new ones. wants audio glasses that like enhance your hearing. And the lens crafters lady sat there and she's like, oh, so you're signing up for our latest spyware tool. You're going to hear everything. And I was like, what? Oh, oh God. Am I just on like the spy beat now? It's frightening on some degree because I consider myself, a person who thinks about the ethics of it quite deeply, but I just know there are people who are not. Do you think there's a version of this thing that works for you? And I think like, take the sort of, we are journalists who record our interactions with people a lot out of it.

Because that is like true and valuable, but kind of a niche use case, right? Like, most people do not need to record that kind of thing all day, every day. But lots of people have meetings, lots of people need to remember things from class, things like that. Like, is there a, is there a, turn in kind of either the like ethical approach or the sort of way that you use this thing that would make you feel better about them? I think if it could just listen to me, my voice only, and differentiate my voice only. And the thing that I was most attracted to for using this was the to-does. I am constantly like, yep, got this, got that, going to get this back to you. And I write maybe 70% of them, which means 30% someone has to come back and go, did you do the thing? And I'm such a

forgetful person. But then it really just has to negotiate the knowledge and the human wisdom of knowing what's important to remember and what is very important to forget. Because forgetting is a survival mechanism as well emotionally and for a lot of different things. And the AI is like, I will remember everything. Yeah. And I think before I started these tests, I would have guessed it's like, you know, 50-50 throughout the day, right? Stuff that's, even if it's just tune to my own voice, stuff that's interesting and important, lots of that, also stuff that is uninteresting and unimportant and it can throw it away. And actually, I think it's like, it's like five percent important 95 throw away. And I think the actual value of these things will come from

proactively throwing away the correct 95 percent. It's just that that's a really hard technical problem. And so none of these things want to try making that assumption because if they get it wrong, it kills the whole value of the thing, right? So they seem very happy to just over. overshare everything all the time in service of having the one thing that you're looking for. And that just creates a lot of labor for you. Right. To get a little philosophical here, part of the human mission is trying to decide what is important in your own life. And we have dedicated millions of human hours to like what is the right answer to that question.

I think it's a little silly to expect that AI would be able to do that when emotionally it's not very intelligent at this point in time. Who knows if it will ever be? But it's like, I think we talk a lot about how AI is smart. We don't ever talk about whether AI is wise. So it's sort of like, I need AI to be a little wise if it's going to help me, because that's actually what I'm looking for. Maybe I'm not looking for an assistant. Maybe I'm looking for my own Mr. Miyagi to point me in the right direction.

And an AI, Mr. Miyagi, is a lot harder than I think we're, like, ready to acknowledge at this point in time. All right, I do, I just want to leave you with the best thing that has happened to me. And then we're going to get out of here. Yes. So this morning, my two-year-old son has been up since three o'clock this morning. So I just left the pendant on all morning. We're hanging out. And here is just a chunk of our day, as described by the limitless app.

Going to the playground and observing a garbage truck, suggesting a trip to the playground, pointing out a garbage truck, expressing awe, identifying a garbage truck again, discussing going to the playground, identifying a garbage truck. Which, A, unbelievably good description of my point. And there's like, there's a little bit of that that I really enjoyed. And it can play some of the audio of him pointing at a garbage truck and yelling garbage truck. And that's nice. But just give me that. Forget all the rest of this stuff. Just give me my son saying garbage truck over and over and I will pay for this thing.

And I'll be happy about it. It's the best experience I've had with any AI product ever is just the thing that shows me the recording of my son yelling at garbage trucks. Garbage truck. Yeah. It's the dream. There's the AI solution right there. That's all we need. All right, V, thank you as always. Thanks for having me. All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back,

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Before we get into the next segment, let me just explain to you a little bit about the keyboard that we're about to talk about. It's called The Seneca. It's made by a guy named Ryan Norbauer, who we're about to talk to and you're going to hear a lot from. This keyboard is $3,600. And the only way I can explain it

is it's this sort of giant, heavy monolith of a mechanical keyboard. It has gray keys around the side, and for the numbers, it has a couple of these like really lovely sort of salmon-colored accent keys. The thing weighs, I think, seven pounds. You can buy it in a bunch of different finishes. It has this huge sort of thunky metal casing. I mean, it's a truly lovely keyboard.

And it is the product of this guy, Ryan Norbauer, building himself the perfect keyboard. You're going to hear a lot about switches, which are essentially the actual, mechanism that moves the key up and down. You're going to hear a lot about key caps. You're going to hear a lot about the force that gets applied and the brass plate underneath. All of these are like the sort of component parts of a keyboard that most people never think about. But they're actually individual pieces that you can buy and put together and tune and reshape and rethink and you can invent your own. And they're made by different companies. There's different ideas about how all this stuff works. The keyboard world, frankly, is much bigger and much wider than I ever realized. And

And so Ryan's story is just what it looks like to go through it and find the exact right thing for you no matter what, no matter how complicated, no matter how expensive. And I think it's really cool. And it was really fun to talk to him about not only what this keyboard is, but why it is this way and why it was worth the work to make a $3,600 keyboard. I don't think I'll be buying this keyboard, but I love that it exists and I really enjoyed talking about it. So you're going to hear from Nathan Edwards on our team and you're going to hear from Ryan Norbauer. Let's get into it. Nathan Edwards, welcome back to the Virchcast. Hi, David. Hey, buddy.

Ryan, Norbauer, welcome. Thanks so much for inviting me. We are here to talk about very expensive keyboards, and I'm very excited about this. So, Ryan, a thing you should know, you've known Nathan a long time, Nathan's keyboard guy. I would say I'm like keyboard curious.

I know nothing. I'm on a keyboard switches for beginners website right now that I was using to prepare for this podcast. I know nothing, but I am fascinated. And so this is the energy we are all bringing to this and I'm very excited to talk about it.

Welcome to the fold. I'm happy to report that you don't have to start with a $3,600 keyboard. There are many excellent options now. It's like, especially since COVID, the options available have really transformed. It's never been a better time

to get started as a keyboard enthusiast for sure. So, Ryan, I think mostly what I want to do is sort of talk about your story and your descent into, I don't know, something like madness trying to build this keyboard. But I kind of want to start at the beginning. You've been working on keyboards for a long time.

Why keyboards? How did you get sort of into this world in the first place? I feel like once you're in the keyboard world, it just pulls you deeper and deeper and deeper. But most people seem to have a story about kind of why they got into keyboards in the first place. What's yours? So, I mean, there's two phases to that, I guess.

There's Y keyboards as an object. And then there's why keyboards as like a profession and community. And those were actually, you know, different for me. My actual enthusiasm about keyboards per se as objects and devices stretches back to like the fifth grade when I was first learning to program on an Apple 2E, learning Apple Basic in my schoolroom and was very excited about the future of technology. And, you know, this was in sort of the late 80s, early 90s period running into, you know, when I was in high school into the beginning of the internet. And there was just this immense culture of optimism around the future in general, and specifically how computing would transform our relationship with other humans on this planet and sort of interconnect us and make us, you know, as individuals, more capable of doing,

doing more interesting things. And for whatever reason, that idea, like, really captured my imagination as a kid. And so just the memory of my first experience typing on an Apple 2E or an IBM buckling spring keyboard. And just this period of extreme excitement when I was a kid about computing correlated with a time when computing hardware was rarer and treated as more valuable. And therefore, manufacturers could invest more in making them actually satisfying and durable. So they were not commodity products. And so they had a certain sound and feel to them that I associate with that kind of techno excitement, you know.

And so that's the original spark. And I think for most of us who have weird sort of enduring obsessions as adults, they usually spark in childhood. But it wasn't until probably the, you know, maybe 2009, 2010, when I discovered that there was a whole online subculture of people who are really into this too, right?

And most of us who came to it at that time, and I think to some extent still, had that same spark about keyboards having that vintage quality, and it's why we were sort of drawn to what are somewhat vaguely described as mechanical keyboards. It's a kind of slippery and maybe not entirely accurate term, especially in the case of my keyboard, because it's hybrid capacity and mechanical. But nevertheless, the term came to be called mechanical keyboards,

but I think a more accurate term would be like vintage feeling or vintage style keyboards. And so, you know, I discovered this community of intense enthusiasm on the internet. There was a website still is called GeekHack, which still looks like it was programmed in 1998, if you check it out. But is a very, like, positive and interesting community of people, especially in those early days. And it was very small, too. It was like, I don't know, maybe a thousand people on geek hack or something. Maybe Nathan has researched this and could give us actual figures.

But, you know, it was very, very small, not that long ago. And now, you know, I go to keyboard meetups. Like the Seattle keyboard meetup is over a thousand people, I think, the last time I went to it. And there's just like, one in San Diego, I think, also was in the four figures for sure. And so you can regularly find people all around the world who know about this. But like even 10 or 15 years ago, this was an extremely obscure, weird thing that nobody knew anything about.

And it was mostly people, with the exception of people building their own keyboards out of chariamic switches and a few vendors, it was mostly people, restoring old keyboards like the IBM Buckling Spring is this sort of legendary keyboard in this space and whatever so anyway I found these people

I realized that these people are my people in a very weird way and I got really kind of deeply involved in that community so where does the Seneca story start in all of that? Because you were making housings and sort of

building around building your own full keyboard here for a while but then at what point are you like it is time to make my own creation. I didn't intend for this to even be a business in the first place.

I kind of stumbled into it because I was making my own keyboard housing for myself. I took a machining class at the Artisan's Asylum in Boston and I learned how to do milling of metal on an old Bridgeport mill

from World War II, right? And so this is not a scalable process. I just literally, you know, I had been learning these skis because another one of my hobbies is making replicas of props from science fiction, particularly the Star Trek.

and I took these classes in order to learn how to like, I want to make Dr. Crusher's laser scalpel, you know? And then I did all those things and I realized, hey, actually, maybe I could make one of these keyboard housings that I like so much now that I know a little bit of metalwork. So the very first one, I prototyped on that mill, totally manual, no CNC. And I'm like, oh, okay, I guess this actually works.

But the surface finishes I was able to get out of the machine were pretty poor, mostly because of my inexperience as a machinist. And so I wanted to get the same design made, which I had proved by prototyping at a factory that knows how to actually machine things and then bead blast them to a uniform surface finish and then anodize them. And so I did what people did and still do on geek hack all the time, which is I started a group buy, which is, you know, in order to buy one thing for yourself, you order 10 so that you can kind of split the costs among other people. And so the first one was just one literally made for myself. And then the second one was a very small batch that I did on geek hack. And for whatever reason, that just kind of caught on. And people kept asking me to do it again and again and again.

And then I realized that there was much more of an appetite for this kind of thing than I thought. And so I started using the resources from each subsequent run to do more creatively interesting things. And so an obvious conclusion from that is to move from just making aftermarket housing, which is pretty limited in scope because it's a very sort of DIY project. It's a big ask of people to buy a keyboard from Japan and wait six months for it. Sometimes they're not even available. Void the warranty, take it apart, put it inside. Only so many people on Earth are going to be willing to do that.

So the obvious idea for if you're interested in creative possibilities is like make your own keyboard, the whole thing. because then you can control every aspect of the experience. And so I knew, I think, pretty early on maybe the first few years that that would be the fun and interesting thing to do. But I knew that there were a lot of skills and abilities that I had to acquire in order to get to the point of being able to do that. And so I had various intermediate projects of increasing technical ambition that sort of got me to that place. So, you know, sometimes I vacillate between whether this was like a project that took me 10 years to do or five years. So like 10 years to learn everything and to get to this point. But I think I only started actively working on the Seneca as a like a named project.

You know, what it became this keyboard about five or six years ago. Nathan, when you've mentioned Ryan's name to me like years ago. When did you first become aware of this man and his many goings on? Were you a heavy grail user? I still to this day actually do not own any Norbauer housings. I knew about, I think he first came onto my radar pretty early. When you did these Galaxy Class key caps, which ended up being officially licensed eventually, but I think I heard about them back when they were a little bit bootleg.

Well, they weren't bootleg because, so this is a Star Trek-inspired key set. They had no IP on them. That's correct. They were just like vaguely inspired by the graphic design user interfaces of Star Trek the next generation. Right. They weren't Star Trek. They were Star Trek-ish. Exactly.

Yeah, I got you. Exactly. I was actually a columnist for tested for a couple of years back in the day. Oh, cool. And then I worked with Ryan at wirecutter. It doesn't matter. Anyway, I found out about that. Then you made a housing called the Heavy Six for the Leopold FC 660C, which is to this day, the best keyboard known to man, in my humble opinion.

This is mine. So, Ryan made a housing. He put it up for a group buy. I saw it on Geekak during the interest check. And then I was like, okay, there was a week where in a fit of mania, I ordered a heavy six. I ordered a keycap set called GMK Space Cadet for a different kind of keycaps. And I ordered a minivan, which is a 40% keyboard, much too small for me. And then like three days later, I had to go cancel all three of those things because I'm like,

I don't need the key caps and I don't want my keyboard to be five pounds. But in the process of emailing Ryan to be like, hey, can I actually, it was very embarrassing. Can I actually cancel my order for this beautiful thing that you've made that I realized I don't actually want because I specifically, I used to throw this thing in my back, like I was a keycap. I used to throw it in my backpack to take it on planes. Like if I was traveling for more than a couple days for work, I'd take my keyboard with me. And I can't do that if it weighs five pounds and it's going to like break your laptop. So I emailed him to cancel.

He was very nice about it. We exchanged like five or six emails back then. And then talked about Star Trek, talked about keyboards. He mentioned actually starting this project to make a, ready to type keyboard. And then, like, six years later, when I heard about the Seneca, I just shamelessly necrowed. I just replied to that thread from my now work email address.

I'm like, hey, remember me? Can I check out your keyboard? So let's talk about those six years. Part of this process that I'm fascinated by is, like, it's very clear that you went in and were like, I'm going to build the best keyboard. Like, end of sentence, right? Is that a fair character?

You weren't thinking the best keyboard for whatever price, the best keyboard with whatever specs. You're like, I am going to build myself the best keyboard. Is that where it started? Absolutely. But there's an important caveat there with or an acknowledgement that we must make, which is that the definition of the best keyboard is enormously subjective. Yes. Right. And so it's my definition of the best keyboard. And I've rigorously held to that, but with the acknowledgement that other people will probably not agree about some of those choices, but that other people, certainly, and sort of people who are,

I think we're inclined to like my old products, would also agree, okay, that's pretty much what I would have done if I had to go from scratch and engineer everything. So, you know, it's subjective. Right. So it's that thing is the sort of subjectivity of it is what I'm really interested in because how much of that could you have sort of sat down and made a list of on that first day? Where you're like, here is what I know I want out of this keyboard that is still true today

of the Seneca that you finished. Did you know what the perfect keyword for you was when you set out to build this thing? That's an interesting question. Nobody's asked me that before. And I think it's interesting because I think my answer is yes. I did know exactly where I wanted to end up. The only thing I didn't know is how I would get there

and how incredibly circuitous and challenging the path to get to that place would be. I wanted something that was electrocapacitive and had this very vintage sound to it but was an acoustic improvement on anything that was out there. I wanted something that had a more tighter on-axis key feel relative to existing capacitive keyboards out there, and that really hyper-engineered the acoustic and tactile nuances of the board,

and also just had this kind of retrofuturist visual aesthetic that this really appeals to me. That's probably what I'm sure that's what I had told you at the time, and I think that's what we actually are shipping right now. Okay. And this is kind of a question for both of you, this is where I start to reveal how little I know about keyboards. How much of that stuff is subjective versus objective? Like talking about the sort of tactility and the sound and the way it

feels to use. Like, are those numbers you can write down and dial in? Or is that just something you're going to sit there and touch a hundred keys and one of them feels right and you go, it's that one? I'll let Nathan answer that one. He knows the MX world much better than I do. Like, Nathan, you spend all your time with keyboards. Is this, how objective can you, you be about this stuff? There are people who will publish force curve graphs. And they'll be like, oh, well, this switch has this amount of, you know, this actuation force, this amount of return.

People try to quantify it. I think for me and for a lot of people, it's just about how it feels and how it looks and how it sounds. Like, does it feel good? Does it sound good? That is subjective. Objective is, is the spacebar rattley? Is there a crunch?

does the key cap hit the housing of the switch before it finishes its travel? Is there, like, when you press it down, do you hear, like, do you hear it when the key smacks against the PCB or the stabilizer smacks against the PCB? Do you hear upstroke clack when you let go as the slider slams into the housing? Whether or not you like those things or care about those things is subjective, whether they have to. is objective. I think, you know, it's like any human thing, it falls sort of a long and normal distribution. And there is a kind of objectivity, especially in, like Nathan said, the things that sound bad, right? And people tend to agree more on things that they don't like rather than the things that they proactively do. And so there's, as with so many things in life, most of the gains in

improving something come not from like adding something great, but removing bad things. And so that was sort of the obvious initial low-hanging fruit of this project is find all of the things that people generally agree sound bad and make sure there are no possible sources of that in this keyboard. Right. And so you actually, it's not that objectivity doesn't exist in a sense in the keyboard world. And I certainly notice that, especially if you talk to people who aren't, like, who don't go to meetups all the time and who aren't on the mechanical keyboard subrider all day, if I just lay a Seneca in front of a random person and I, like, I have one, where the switch plate is aluminum and one where the switch plate is brass, everyone,

literally everyone will say they prefer the brass plate, which is why ours has a brass plate. Because I actually personally sort of, in some ways like the more noisy aluminum one, because it's more like retro nostalgic for me. But everybody's like, oh, that's obviously better. And so that is a kind of objectivity, but a lot of that is just removing something that people perceive as unpleasant, like this sort of pingingness. I think one, general trend you could describe, it's pretty common or uniform across individuals, is a preference for deeper pitches.

People don't like high-pitched, pingy, medley-sounding things, or, like, rattley, like, thin-walled plastic sounds. Right? That's probably a good way to reduce the quest of the keyboard community for the past two decades is to move away from those things, which were sort of the default of, like,

a Dell keyboard you might be. by in 2005, right? And so there is a kind of objectivity, but then once you get into the nuance of like what switch type, what switch curve, things then become immensely subjective. And people do try to characterize them with things like force curves. But it's like you can make a waveform of the Beatles and Bach and look at it and be like, yeah, this isn't, they're objectively different. But what do you do with that graph, right? Like you have to hear it and be like, oh, I like that or I don't like it. Right. And, you know, I just make keyboards for people who like electrocapacity, which has a very distinctive sort of thawky, clacky, vintage sound signature, just because that's

what I like. Did you have a sort of specific reference thing in mind? Like, you mentioned, you know, some of those vintage keywords, like, did you have one in mind that you're like, this is, this is the gold standard of one part of this or another? Or are you purely sort of going by what you like and what feels right to you as you, as you're building through it? I think in many ways I always come back to my vague impressions of what the old Apple Alps keyboards were. Because that's what I, really the keyboard that I had the first emotional, or computer that I had the first emotional relationship with, you might say. But those are really not, they're not as good as a keyboard switch can be.

When I first discovered that there was this community called Geekhack around keyboard customization, around 2010 or whatever, I got very excited because most of it was around Cherry MX type switches, which certainly the most prevalent and well-known, probably if your listeners are sort of casually familiar with keyboards, almost all of them would have been Cherry MX, right? And so I got very excited about that. I got into them. I tried every single switch that was available at the time, including sourcing them from, you know, Asia and getting people to like swap the springs and the sliders and do all sorts of crazy stuff. But somehow I just stumbled into keyboards from this Japanese company called Topra, which were in no way made for enthusiasts. They were made for industrial

applications to be highly durable and to sort of survive many actuations without changing their performance, right? And they just happen, I think, to be accidentally really good if you like that kind of feeling that I associate with those vintage Apple keyboards, even though they're not the same. And one thing I've seen you say a few times is that part of the process here was about constantly like forced to choose between the thing that is more like, you know,

efficient or economical or whatever and the thing that feels right, you just kept choosing the thing that felt right. And part of me wonders if you just intentionally kept choosing the thing that was more expensive. And I want to talk about that because there is a thing here

and, like I was reading your blog and stuff and I think you seem to have this real appreciation for sort of things that are like deliberately luxurious. And so I think like I guess this is a long way of asking, would you like this keyboard as much if it cost you a third of the price to make? But also, like, what did those tradeoffs look like?

Give me an example of something where you're faced with, okay, I could do this the easy way and the economical way or the straightforward way, or I could do this the way that's going to take longer and cost more and be harder, and you just have to, like, bite the bullet and go that way. Yeah, so that's a very deep and nuanced question. I have lots of thoughts about it,

so I'm happy to blabber about it for a while. it is very commonly the case that people, when they pay a lot for something, will rationalize that it's great, right? And there's obviously that danger in luxury goods. And I'm very, like, I'm a very uncomfortable relationship, even with calling my product a luxury product in a way,

because much of what advertises itself as the luxury industry these days is very much not. It's just not my good definition. of what luxury should be. It's capitalizing on that phenomenon of simply like, let's start with the price and work backwards towards the perception of value, right? And let's sort of sell it as a status object and then figure out how to make it as cheaply as conceivably possible. There is a more reasonable, there's this French business theorist named Jean-Nuel Kafka. And I really like his book called The Luxury Strategy. And he kind of analyzes the industry

as like luxury as a way of facilitating the low-volume manufacturing of creatively interesting goods, right? It's a business model for low volume, for doing things that most people wouldn't want to buy. And that I find actually very compelling. As I said, in some ways, this business grew up accidentally and it was just sort of for fun.

So I think it's a viable business model and business strategy, and it's a nice, therefore I can plausibly rationalize doing what I wanted to do anyway, which was to make the cool an interesting thing, which oftentimes correlates with being more expensive, but it's certainly not so for its own sake. There are advantages to selling things that are expensive, I will say. So one thing, for example, is it just like it sort of filters out people who just don't care, right, and who are going to just like whine about dumb shit or about, you know,

It just like, it sort of filters out a lot of the internet entitlement, like, because people were just not going to buy that thing. Like, it's the people who are seriously engaged with us about buying our stuff, like, they actually really think keyboards are cool and are very excited about what we're doing. Because otherwise, why would you even be considering spending so much money on a keyboard? So, Nathan, I'm going to make you do a very uncomfortable thing, which is explain a product to the person who made the product. But I think, I think this will be fun.

So I, like, what is it about the Seneca that made? makes it interesting other than the fact that it is just a keyboard that costs $3,600, which I think to Ryan's point is not sufficiently interesting in and of itself. It has to be interesting anyway, and then we can talk about the price. The thing that I think is most interesting about the Seneca, as a keyboard nerd myself, is this, it's the switches and the stabilizers. Like, the fact that Ryan just went out and developed your own Topra-style switch, that is better than Topra in measurable ways and develop drone stabilizers.

And you're just like, I'm just going to fire the cash bazooka at the stabilizer problem until it's solved. That to me is the interesting thing about the Seneca. It is a fantastic keyboard to type on. Like, it is, it's a joy to use. The things about the Seneca you've said is like, this is the keyboard for you. It's 10 keyless, or it's a 10 keyless layout, you know, it's a flat slab. It's not the layout for everybody.

the layout for you. The finish is great. It looks like stone. It feels amazing. That part is, that's like a straight line from where you started to just like, be like, hey, here's my keyboard. By the way, I invented new switches. I invented new stabilizer. And like those things are good is the punchline. Like they're very good. That's what's so cool about the Seneca to me. Full disclosure, I cannot afford the Seneca. I will not be buying a Seneca. I think it's lovely. What does it weigh seven pounds, right? You said it weighs seven pounds, right? That's just, that's the one thing I want to any keyboard that weighs seven pounds, I think is inherently interesting. It's so heavy. Yeah, it's, most of the weight comes from the brass switch plate, actually.

And that is, it's actually, you know, the keyboard is maybe a little bit heavier than I would have chosen it to be. It's just that the plate is brass for acoustic reasons. I would, again, if we had made it out of aluminum, the keyboard overall would have been much less heavy. But, you know, I think there's an interesting analogy to draw here from what Nathan was saying, which is my mental model, I think, for what I do in keyboards is very much like mechanical watches. Like, you know, not in terms of the actual mechanical details necessarily, but the sort of social, commercial, cultural role that they play is that, Everybody has a computer in their pocket that will tell them the time.

A mechanical watch is completely superfluous in 2025. And yet there's this enormous industry and culture of people who are very excited about and derive enormous pleasure from mechanical watches. If you guys ever, you know, the website, Hodinky, it's like an entire publication dedicated to daily publishing extreme deep dives into this industry and how nerdy and how excited people can get about it. And there are people who, yes, absolutely, very wealthy people who are super into it, but also just very nerdy people who are super into it. And all for a thing that is totally unnecessary and just a way of, you know, adding a little bit of joy and satisfaction and something to be excited about in our otherwise boring daily computer-based lives, right?

And I think that actually is pretty analogous. Like, in no way am I pretending that this solves an essential or important problem other than, then, you know, the, I suppose, actually deeply essential and important problem of, like, having something to give a shoot about in life for a little while, right? Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think any of that is this, is, like, it's, there's a sort of utilitarian superfluousness to it, but there is also something, like, deeply essential about, like, I have this thing on my watch and it means something to me that is, like, powerful stuff.

Yeah, so I acknowledge being at both ends of that spectrum, and I think that's just okay, because, you know, as Nathan pointed out, like, this is an optional purchase. It's not compulsory. No one is required to buy it. The stuff that's happening in the, like, low end of premium keyboards is really interesting right now, and it's never been a better time to be getting into keyboards and having that be more accessible I'm extremely in favor of. I'm just doing another thing, and I think it's okay for there to be a diversity of things

in the world. Does this feel like the end of a project or the beginning of one? It's both. For sure. I mean, if I'm fortunate, then it's both. If it's just the end, well, that's fine, and I'm happy with the way I made, and that's, you know, maybe people aren't interested in it, and that's fine. But so far, you know, we've already done a first edition offering, and it's almost entirely sold out. So it's probably the beginning of something. I do have a lot of interesting ambitions for what we could do after this keyboard. And some of that does involve

catering to tastes that aren't necessarily exactly my own. So I think in terms of the subjective sound signature and tactility of the switch, that will remain. But as we've discussed, there are people who prefer different layouts of keyboards, smaller, especially more compact keyboards. Like Nathan wants to be able to have a keyboard he could put in his backpack and take with him while traveling, but still have it be a huge upgrade over a laptop keyboard. Right. And I, you know, even in LA here, I see people with, who bring mechanical keyboards to cafes and, put it on top of their laptop because they want a more satisfying experience. I would like to enable that. And so in some ways to make a keyboard that is the opposite of the Seneca, the Seneca is this

sort of, you know, desk monolith that weighs seven pounds and is optimized for a certain sound signature that I really like. But it would be interesting for me to go all the way in the other direction, to make one that's instead of more like deep and thawky a little bit, or what might be described as clacky, where you have a more resonant housing that's made out of some type of polymer like CNC machine polycarbonate, or I'm actually really interested in forged carbon fiber, if we can figure out some way to do that in an economically viable way, where you have a housing that is actually really high aesthetic quality,

but is light and durable. And that would also involve injection molding a switchplate, like I described on the heavy grill, so that it would also impart an entirely different sound signature to the board by giving it like a, polycarbonate plate. And we just know from existing keyboards in the enthusiast world that that radically changes the sound signature in a way that some people really like and some people don't like. But it would be a way of answering those desires that are a little bit differently tuned from my

own desires. And I find that interesting because they're hiding around all of those corners, I know, is a bunch of weird and interesting technical challenges, which tends to be the thing that actually gets me excited. Wouldn't it be fun to go the other way and be like, what is the cheapest possible pretty good thing I could do. Like, I'm going to make a $49 mechanical keyboard, and it's going to rule. Norb by Norbauer. No, no.

The trouble is everyone has that so covered, right? Yeah. This is the, there's been this, especially since the COVID era, when everybody was doing work from home, there's just been this massive surge of people into that space. Like, there was a time when I was thinking about doing stuff like that. But at this point, everybody, like,

everyone can do that much better than I can. That's just not my specialty. is, you know, operating at scale and that kind of optimization. So I think I'll probably just keep on doing my thing. And I'm okay with that. So in short, everybody else has that well covered. Which puts you in a fun place. You get to go do the weird stuff.

It's great. All right. Ryan, Nathan, we've kept you long enough. Thank you both for doing this. This is really, really fun. I really appreciate it. Thanks, David. Thank you for asking.

All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast hotline. Be right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era.

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Terms and conditions apply. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is,

and essentially a hopeful enterprise, that you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that.

That's like secondary, third. Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast, line. As always, the number is 866, Vorge11. You can email Vergecast at theBurge.com. Please keep sending us party speakers. We love the party speakers. But keep reaching out about anything and everything.

There's actually a lot of really complicated news going on. And even just getting questions from all of you has been really instructive on how we should be talking about and covering this stuff. So please know that when you call or you email, even if we don't explicitly reference it on the show and we try to do lots of them here on the show, it matters. And it makes the show better. all the time. And we are incredibly grateful to everybody who reaches out. This week, I want to play two questions that both have kind of the same answer. And I'll explain that in a second. Let me just play them really quick. Here we go. Hey, I'm Dave. And I have a question. I'm a teacher. And my students use Google Chromebooks.

And on them, they use Google Docs and Google Drive and Google Sheets. And they submit assignments in Google Chromebooks. classroom and there are probably millions of other students in the world that do this. So if Google gets forced to split from Chrome, what happens to students, Chromebooks, Google Apps for Education, and that whole ecosystem? That's it. That's my question. Thanks, guys. Okay, so we have a question about what happens to Chromebooks if Google.

is forced to sell Chrome as the result of this search antitrust trial. Hold on to that one. We also have a question from Jason. Hey, this is Jason from Nova Scotia. From the recent podcast, you guys were talking about Chrome. I'm glad you guys mentioned chromium, but I did have one thought, and I still don't really know how it would go, even if they were able to pry chromium away from Google, and unless they explicitly stated in the remedies that they weren't allowed to make another browser, I wonder what would stop Google from just making a second browser because I think you could make the argument that what people like about Chrome isn't actually just that it's good, it's that it's part of Google.

And I think, I would think that none of the passwords or bookmarks or all the stuff that people have with their Google account would just go with it. So like what would stop making Chrome too, this time more blue electric boogaloo, or God forbid the biggest side's why forking, Firefox and then making another mouse and with that, yes, yes, I know. Yeah, let me know your thoughts because unless I explicitly stated that, I would just think they'd make another browser

and maybe they even already have. Who knows? Anyways, thanks. Bye. Okay, so there's a simple answer and a complicated answer to these two questions. The simple answer in both cases is that Google would have to get out of the browser

business. I think the DOJ what it has asked for, specifically, would prevent Google from making another browser. It's that simple, right? And so what that looks like is Google just wouldn't own a browser. Chrome would be its own thing. Somebody would buy Chrome. A name I keep hearing floated is OpenAI as the company

with the most interest and money to pull this off. But let's say OpenAI owns Chrome. All of that goes to Chrome. The Chromium project, I think, is slightly more complicated because it is technically an open source thing, so it could either be administered by a new company that cares about it in the way that Google has cared about it, or it could completely languish. Or best case scenario, it becomes a truly open source project.

The fact that it is an open source project essentially run by Google means, for all intents of purposes, it's not an open source project. It's a Google project that anyone can download. And I've heard from a lot of people who make browsers that actually the idea of it being a more equitable thing, that everyone agrees, this is what we're going to be. we want to build browsers on, but we can't let it be run by one company, that could be a good thing. That would be something more along the lines of what the Matter Consortium is doing, right, where they say, this is a group of companies who agree that this is a thing we need to build together,

and it'll benefit everybody. Could be great, but the way that it has worked until now is that Google has done the vast majority of the work. We talked a little bit about this on Friday's show, but Sooner-Bushai, the CEO of Google said during the trial that Google, I think, is responsible for 94% of the code commits over the last year to Chromium. It does most of the work. It has most of the people. It provides most of the funding. It is very much a Google project. So I think Google would not be allowed to use it to build another browser. I think the question of whether Google would be allowed to be part of building chromium is separate. But again, if Google can't build a browser, why would it continue to invest in Chromium? Would open AI or whoever else invest in Chromium, who knows? The ChromeOS piece of it is in a certain way just as simple. Google would have to get rid of ChromeOS.

ChromeOS is Chrome. It is part of Chrome. There is Chrome tech inside of it. And if Google were to get rid of that, it would lose it. Whether it had to officially sell ChromeOS and the Chromebook business to somebody, if Google can't do Chrome, it can't do ChromeOS. It's pretty much just that simple. And so that is another thing that would essentially get thrown out with this deal.

this is why this is complicated, right? Right after Sundar Pashai testified, there was an expert who basically came in and said, I don't even know that it is technically feasible to divest Chrome from Google. And it's for all the reasons that these two callers are describing. What Chrome holds is not just a window to look at a web page, right? Like, we think about it as you open Chrome

and it's an interface to Google search, and it is that. but it also holds a ton of data about your bookmarks and your passwords, and it has a lot of history, and it has an entire operating system built around it that millions of students use all over the place. Chrome is baked into the fabric of Google, and the fabric of Google is baked into Chrome in many more ways than I realized. I mean, think about Android. Chrome is the default browser on Android, and what would essentially happen is that there would be no default browser on Android. Like by the letter of the law here, Google would not be able to make a browser

that came bundled with Android. That just doesn't make any sense. Like your phone should come with a web browser. How are you going to download a web browser? It just sort of boggles the mind. So what Google has argued is that a Chrome is not a piece of the search business and that fundamentally this trial is about the search business. I don't find that nearly as compelling as the other part of the argument, which is Google says we can't divest Chrome because it is all over Google. It would be like saying get rid of, I don't know, HTML inside of Google. Like, it just doesn't work. It's not a thing you can do. And increasingly, that is a thing that is coming up from a bunch of different sides in the trial. That it's not as simple as Google makes

a web browser, take that web browser and give it to somebody else, sell it to somebody else for $20 billion or whatever the number turns out to be, that actually Chrome and its many offshoots, again, which is Chromium, which powers lots of other browsers, it's Chrome OS, it's Chrome on Android, it's Chrome on desktop, it's Chrome everywhere. It would just change the nature of how Google works and all of Google's products. And a lot of the underlying tech inside of Chrome powers other things. Chromium is hugely important, not just to other browsers, but across the web. And you could make the case that a lot of things kind of fall apart as soon as Chrome does. That is obviously Google's case.

And I think so far, just from sitting in the courtroom, I think the judge, omit Meta, finds that fairly compelling. But we'll see. It's possible that Google is going to have to sell Chrome. We've seen there are a lot of companies lining up to buy it for obvious reasons. I mean, right, if you got Chrome and the Chromebook line in the deal, that becomes pretty interesting. You buy not just the most important browser, but one of the most important operating systems.

that becomes really meaningful. But then Chromebooks without the access to the rest of Google, probably less valuable. This is why this is all so messy and so intertwined. And this is a thing we're seeing in all of these trials

that it's not just as simple as like a company has several parts. You cleave off one of the parts and give it to somebody else. All this stuff is so intermingled and intertwined that figuring out how to pull it apart is in many ways the real challenge

of the antitrust fight. We'll see. There's lots still to come there, and I would not rule out the possibility that Google is going to have to figure out how to do that pulling apart. But it's going to be really complicated, and it's going to have vastly bigger ramifications than just when you open a new tab in Chrome. It shows OpenAI and not Google. We'll see. Lots and lots left to do there. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. As ever, if you have questions, thoughts, feelings, I don't know, if you want to buy Chrome, if you've seen a party speaker, send us an email, Virgcast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866, Verge 1-1. We really truly love hearing from you. This show is produced by Wilpore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. The Vergecast is a Verge production, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Neil and I will be back on Friday, presumably to talk about more antitrust stuff. We're getting a lot of new information about what's going on at the app store. Lots of new stuff in the meta and Google trials. Hopefully some other gadget news to talk about. because boy, have we talked a lot about courthouses the last couple of weeks. Hopefully more to come. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.