The Vergecast - The fake promise of better Siri

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Big tech companies are forever making promises about the future. And you might (or might not) be surprised how often they don't come true. On this episode, Nilay and David start by discussing the good and bad of Apple's new iPads and Macs, before diving into the supposedly AI-powered, all-powerful Siri that is delayed indefinitely. Maybe this whole "AI will fix everything" plan wasn't such a good one. After that, The Verge's Andy Hawkins joins to discuss what's going on with Tesla: why sales are down, how the perception of the company has shifted as Elon Musk's job description has changed, and how it happened that President Trump did a Tesla sales pitch on the White House lawn. Everything's computer, you know? Finally, in the lighting round, the hosts discuss Brendan Carr's ongoing shenanigans, Jay Graber's sartorial burns, the future of Pokemon Go, and much more. Further reading: Apple is reportedly planning a design overhaul for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Apple’s plans for a smart display suffer a Siri-related setback Apple adds Siri disclaimer to iPhone 16 pages. Apple pulled its iPhone 16 ad showing off the good Siri. ‘HomePad’ delayed to post-WWDC to ensure iOS 19 design consistency All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets Apple MacBook Air M4 review: a little more for a little less Apple Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) first look: a weekend with an $8,000 powerhouse Apple iPad Air 2025 review: what the M3 upgrade really gets you Is Tesla cooked? Trump says he’ll label attacks on Tesla locations as domestic terrorism The Tesla protests are getting bigger — and rowdier Trump hosts a Tesla ad at the White House. Everything's computer Tesla protests continue to escalate. Sonos has canceled its streaming video player Home Assistant makes it official. FCC chair asks if YouTube TV ‘discriminates against faith-based programming’ Brendan Carr on X: FCC chairman asks the public to list every regulation he should remove A Trump official has been moonlighting as a fashion influencer Pokémon Go developer Niantic to sell gaming business to Saudi group TikTok’s mood music will tell teens to ‘wind down’ after 10PM Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has a message for Zuck. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 Skyler 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 Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome with Verchast. The flagship podcast of being forced to buy Tesla by the United States government. Which Tesla will the government force you to buy? The triangle or the round one? Can I get a roadster out of this?

Do you feel like if I play my cards right, I can at least get a roadster? The roadster is more vaporware than full self-driving. I just want to be 100% clear about this. Yeah, I agree with that. All the Tesla's in the world will drive themselves before the next roadster comes out. even the ones that don't have the hardware to support full cell driving, they will get the ability to drive themselves before the next roadster comes out. I agree with that.

They don't even talk about the roadster anymore. No, they put one in space, and then they're like, well, we're good with that. Yeah. It's the literal final frontier of the roadster as we have gone to space. Have you seen this unreliable triangle? Let's do it. I just want to alert everyone to the fact that just before we started the show, David said that he had too many tads open on.

his computer and his computer was freaking out. And David, I want to remind you, you are the world's foremost proponent of only having eight gigs of RAM on your Mac. I will just say, 16 is better. This is my great take from the last couple of years of my life and gadget reviews. I now have 16 gigs of RAM on this M4 Mac Mini

that I bought last fall. It's better. That's the takeaway. I still think eight is basically fine, mostly because most people are not tab monsters the way that I am a tab monster. But if you can get 16, life is good here. I just agree. I think most people are tab monsters. I think most Macs are used as Chromebooks.

Oh, I totally agree with that. I think most computers are just browsers now, which is like makes it all the funnier that Google has sort of botched the Chromebook thing so badly because like the thesis was exactly correct. which is that most people just want to do web stuff on their computer all day. And yet, Chromebooks are awful at that. Yeah. What if we made this cheaper and it still didn't have enough RAM? My advice for everybody is that it, kind of your CPU and your GPU don't matter unless they matter to you. Well, you know, if you're the sort of person for whom those things matter, you've already self-identified and be free.

Yeah. Run with the alphas. Go nuts. But for most people, the number you should care about is RAM. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it goes RAM, storage, CPU, GPU, everything else. It's like how I would stack rank that for most people. There's a number of people who think GPU should be higher than CPU in that chart. But that's like a new phenomenon. Yeah. And I think that's a reasonable case to be made depending on what you do on your computer. But in terms of like what makes your computer feel smooth and fast and good so that you don't like think about your computer a lot, that's that's still how I would rank them. And you're still in that ranking going with eight gigs is enough.

Listen, I have an M4 Mini that I sit here and use every day, and I have an M1 Air that is my travel computer. Eight gigs of RAM works just fine. As long as I don't make it do anything complicated. Well, I still have a tab open with the M4 Max Studio, Macs, 21999. You know, I'm just thinking about it. As many Americans know, I've been thinking about buying a new computer. We have one. People are excited about it.

They are. And we should talk about that. We have reviews of all the new Mac stuff, the M4 MacBook Air, sort of a half review of the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, which is really interesting. Some of the early benchmarks are interesting. We should talk about that at length. And Chris is going to keep reviewing that stuff. He's got a bunch of ideas about AI reviews there, which is interesting. And then David, you reviewed the new iPad Air.

It's punishment. I did. Yes. I really, one day I just want Apple to just sneak something weird into an iPad just to see if people noticed anymore. So we should talk about all that. Apple is delaying the new Siri. David, you wrote a piece about just AI and gadgets in general that I want to talk about. We've seemed to gotten way out over our skis in the tech industry with AI. Andy Hawkins is going to join us.

We're going to talk about Tesla. Andy's going to show up with a government-issued Tesla. Let me get out of lightning around. Brendan Carr. won't shut, he won't shut up. I was going to say an F-phone there. That's illegal now in Brendan's America. And we got some other, I guess what I'll shut out later on.

It's a show. We got a whole, we got a whole Vergecast in front of us. Do you want to start quickly with reviews and then talk about Siri? Sure. I mean, I think we can do this quickly because this is sort of a fascinating case of Apple doing just precisely exactly what you would think Apple would do. and I think in one case with the M4 MacBook Air, that is terrific news, right?

Like Antonio DiBenedetto on our team reviewed it, and basically it's like, this is the computer that you would hope it would be. Battery lasts a really long time. Performance is good. It throttles when it gets hot, when you tax it too much because that's what MacBook Airs do, but most people who buy an air aren't doing that kind of stuff anyway.

The sky blue is like whatever. Even in Antonio's photos, It's often hard to tell whether it's sky blue or silver, depending on the light. It's just a computer. But it is like this thing is now $100 cheaper and it's great. And that is like fabulous news, right? And they're like little bits that you can quibble with about the screen quality and whatever. But like it is an awesome computer for $100 less than it was before.

And that's awesome. And then on the iPad, I come out of this. I'm like, oh, it's sure. This is like the most iterative upgrade. in a long run of incredibly iterative upgrades on the iPad. And like, is it still good? Yes. But if you bought an iPad, like, since COVID, you don't need this iPad.

We actually got a bunch of really interesting feedback to the last episode where we talked about how long iPads last. And a number of people said that they overbuy the iPad because they want it to last a decade. Yeah. Which I would say tracks generally with. my overarching gadget advice, which is I think everybody should buy the best thing they can afford, even if it's more than they need, and then keep it as long as humanly possible. Like, I think that's a perfectly rational way to handle an iPad. And if you do that, you can probably

squeeze a decade out of an iPad without trying too, too hard in many cases. Like, the thing that goes away is you start to lose app support, because like one by one streaming apps will stop supporting it and you'll just sort of piece by piece lose your iPad's ability to do stuff. But like, if you just dig out a 2015 iPad right now, it will still do the basic things that it does pretty successfully, which is awesome. It's 10 years ago. Yeah. Well, it's the base, it's, you got to over buy, right? So we had people who are like, I'm buying an iPad pro in the hopes that it will last a decade. I think you buy the base model, it's a reasonable assumption that that thing will have a shorter life than if you buy a pro model or an air or something.

Here, it's the iPad Air, right? They're talking about it. Upgrade it. It has the M3. I would guess that this thing will last you. Maybe not a decade, but seven years, right? Yeah, I think that's reasonable. That feels right.

And the only thing that might change that is if there's some sort of paradigm shift in how much compute you need to do something. Right. I'm not sure what that is. Apple hasn't come up with it in the long. time. Right. Like iPad apps have not gotten more complicated, that whole application model has not allowed more complicated apps really to exist. I mean, there are, I don't want to, I don't want to underplay it. There are some very intense iPad apps, but it's not, it's not the ecosystem. No, and there's really nothing. It was actually really funny testing the M3 because there are so few apps out there

that are willing to push the boundaries of the thing, specifically, because lots of people own iPads, lots of people own older iPads. So actually, if you're a developer, you shouldn't really target like the bleeding edge new technology. So there are a few that do because they have to because they're trying to do really complicated like 3D image rendering stuff in real time that is just hard. And you can like feel it because the iPad gets warm as it's working. But for the most part, like even some of the most intense, intensive games I'm using at max settings, you can tell. They made this and they tested it on like an iPad mini. And so it's like if you're going to make something that works across this whole lineup,

you just can't target the really intense stuff, which is good news because by the end of a seven-year lifespan of one of these things, it will be down at the bottom of that spectrum, but it'll still be supported. But for right now, it's even the M3 is overkill for most things. And that's next to the M4, which is now almost a year old and is. still overkill for almost everything. I want to issue a very specific feature request bug report. Accusation of pure hypocrisy.

Whatever it is. However you want to, the game Dreamlight Valley, which I don't think your child is old enough to play, but which is a very big game for six-year-old girls. And thus you. It's a whole life. It's a popular game. It's supposed to work on the baseball model iPad, and it does not. You know, it does work on.

my phone. Oh, you're screwed. Let me tell you how plane rides with my child have gone recently. She is playing Dreamline Valley on my phone and I am using YouTube kids on her. Just watching whatever weird stuff we've downloaded in the background. It's great and I love it. And if the whole point of Apple having total control over that store is making sure that the listings are accurate.

And this listing says it works on the base model iPad and it absolutely doesn't. And you can find very confused parents on forums across the internet saying, why did you lie to me? Yeah, there's a lot of that going around right now. Got any listeners out there at Apple or Disney, two of America's most important corporations. Just help me out, guys. Yeah, just fix this one thing. Just make it run on the base model iPad or change the listing. So other people don't end up like me on a plane watching YouTube kids on a base model iPad and a rainbow case.

Wiggles are doing stuff. It's fine. They're around. Let's talk with the studio. The studio is really interesting. Like I said, I'm just goading myself into paying $2,200 for a computer. On the theory, that the marginal cost, which in this case is like $1,000 more than I haven't spent on a Mac mini, will make that computer last five more years. That's what I'm convincing myself up, because I do keep my Macs for a very long time.

Once I get them set up, I don't like to monkey with them. It's very hard to perceive the difference year to year with a Mac as we can tell from Mac with Air. But what's really interesting is Chris Welch has the M3 Ultra, which is the top config. The M3 Ultra means it just has a lot of GPs. It's basically four M3s all put together using their interweaving technology to make the chips work as one. Ultra Fusion, I think it's called. And it's really interesting because the single core performance of the M4 max is higher than the single core performance of the M3 Ultra. But if you need all the GPUs or the multi-core performance, obviously the M3 Ultra is going to do it for you.

And that's fairly unusual for an Apple product line. I'm sort of torn on it because on the one hand, the people who are specking this thing out at that level are going to know which one they need more, right? Like if I'm doing a lot of graphical, heavy image rendering or like one of the examples Chris Walsh used is crushing huge data sets of medical information, like whatever, that's the kind of stuff you're like, okay, I need the GPU cores

and the sort of single thread CPU cores are less important. But he makes the point in his piece, and I think he's right that minute to minute fastness of your computer actually depends a lot on the single core performance of your CPU. Except this stuff is so beyond

what any of that will require anyway that it does feel like, this is an interesting benchmark, but I suspect even if you were to flip the results, most people would not perceive any difference at all. But it is. I think I made a joke last week about Apple sort of muddying understanding of this by making the M3 ultra more powerful than the M4 Max. And I got a bunch of people who are like, well, the last generation pro models are more powerful than the current

generation regular models. I'm like, sure, whatever. This is confusing. Like there is a, this, this is not a simple thing that you can just ladder up in the buttons of Apple's buy process and figure it out that way. It's, it is, it's an interesting quirk of how Apple puts these things together, that this is the case, that what they seem to be able to ramp is GPU more easily and sort of linearly with more chips than CPU, which is kind of fascinating. Because they are just fusing them together. Oh, right. I mean, and that's, I'm not saying that's easy. It's very hard and they haven't yet been able to really do it with the M-4s. Right. But it is the case that what they're, they're doing is they're creating one giant virtual CPU GPU monster out of individual ones,

which is a lot. I mean, that's a lot of how the ship industry has developed over time, but it makes sense that the big multi-core parallel processing workloads would benefit from that approach. Whereas it just doesn't seem like they're motivated to do it on the M4 side yet or they figure it out. Yeah, it also just strikes me as a slightly harder problem, right? Like to take,

to take one thing that is designed to work. work in parallel and shove more parallel at it is just an easier math problem to solve than like how do you make the thing spin faster, right? Which is not what it's doing, but is like still the metaphor in my head of how a CPU actually works. It just spins around really fast. There's a hamster in there. Just running. Just juice the hamster, man. Just pour some prime on it and see what happens. Yes. So Chris Welch tested a, what was it, a $9,000, $8,000 studio. Did it make you want a studio more? It made me very confident that the M4 max base configuration with only one upgrade, which is to get a terabyte of storage, is almost a perfect price performance computer.

That's $2,200. I'm not saying it's cheap. Yeah. It's a very expensive computer, especially because the base M4 mini is like $600. Yeah. So that's a huge jump, but am I convinced that that computer will sit at my desk for a decade and I won't be mad about it for a very long time? Yeah, I'm pretty convinced of that. Yep. And it has a faster SD card slot, which matters to me. It has Thunderbolt five ports, which I don't think the mini has. Like, there's just a bunch of, like, future proofy stuff that I, you know, is it worth that much more money?

Maybe not. But if I end up buying a new computer every four years instead of every 10, like, maybe that adds up. Yeah. Probably doesn't. It probably still doesn't. But, you know, there's inflation and tariffs. The prices go up. You got to get in there while you can.

Yeah. how many Mac Mini, like, how quickly would you have to rev your Mac Mini before it hits the price? I guess it's like four Mac Minis. If you just keep buying base Mac Minis, yeah, but you have to assume that Apple is going to, someone should help us. Someone make a model.

Someone make like an Excel model of this of what, because I'm never going to buy the base model MacMany. That's true. Right. I'm going to add to the RAM. I'm probably going to add to the storage. I want the 10 gigabit Nick. Yeah, so you're buying at least the $1,000 Mac Mini.

Yeah, and then you're like, well, I'm just going to buy a $22 Mac Studio to run email. It's going to be great. Occasionally turn the Dehase slider up in Lightroom and we'll call it a day. That's the stuff right there. I will say the only AI workload I regularly do is the new AI powered Denoise and Lightroom. And it is magic and it is very slow on my current Intel powered iMac. And so even just speeding up is like worth it. Yeah.

Do I need this computer to speed it up? I do not, but do I think I can make the argument to myself? Let's wait a couple more weeks and find out. The most interesting thing about the M3 Ultra at Mac Studio is that it is powerful enough if you spec it with enough RAM to run an AI model like DeepSeek R1 locally, which we have not really seen from other consumer computers. You can run some of these models locally, but you need to build a giant power-hungry desktop PC with a giant power-hungry card

and then to scale it, you need to network the cards together. And you kind of just get very expensive, very fast. Yeah, there was a bunch of stuff on Hacker News a couple of weeks ago about people sharing their like somewhere between $3,000 and $3,500 builds to run Deep Seek locally. And even that was like very exciting that they had figured out a way to do it relatively easily. The idea that this is just an off-the-shelf thing that can do it is a pretty big deal. Yeah.

And like, Nvidia just launched a whole line of computers designed to do this kind of of stuff. And I'm, I suspect that will be more powerful for some of this stuff because it's designed for this stuff. But like, this is the kind of thing that Apple is doing in the AI world that I actually think is interesting. But they're not doing it. Unlike everything else Apple is doing the AI world. They've just gotten themselves a computer with enough memory and enough processing cores to run a Chinese model that might be banned by the Trump administration. Love it. Perfect. So Apple's lead in ships have gotten into the point. Their lead in software, AI development, potentially sending them even farther back. So,

Chris is going to finish reviewing the Mac Studio. I will just continue looking at this shopping cart with a $22 Mac Studio in it for weeks. We'll keep covering that. There's not much to say about the MacroCare. You can just go look at the benchmarks and see if you want to buy it. The only thing we're saying is jump by the base model, spend a little bit more money. Yeah. Like we're saying, buy more RAM and more storage.

It'll be fine. But the big news out of Apple is they officially announced in a name statement to John Gruber that they're going to delay Siri. or the AI-powered Siri that is the thing that everyone wants. And David, you have, like, a lot of thoughts about this. I do have a lot of thoughts about this. I think Apple deserves a lot more shit for this than they're getting, to be completely honest. So let me just read you the whole quote. This is John Grubber got this, I think, over the weekend.

Can I just say this, by the way? John's a friend. People know we go on each other shows. We've talked for years. We've known each other forever. Initially, he was like, why are you doing this background policy where you insist on naming all the spokespeople? and he has totally come around recently. So he has a statement where Apple it's named, which I'd just say a little victory,

a little victory for journalism here. Anyway, carry on. So this is from Jacqueline Roy at Apple, who we all know. And she says, Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly. And in just the past six months, we've made Siri more conversational, introduce new features like Type to Siri and product knowledge and added an integration with chat GPT. We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps.

it's going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. That is essentially Apple saying we've been lying to you since last May. Yep. Like that just is what it is. Like this is the flagship feature of the iPhone 16 was Apple Intelligence and the flagship feature of Apple Intelligence was this new series. We've been saying all along that there's a bunch of like window dressing and stuff going on. There's Gen Moji. There's like the writing tools. There's the terrible notification summaries. But like the thing, the thing that everybody thinks of when they think about AI, period, and Apple intelligence specifically, is this better Siri, the Siri that can use your apps for you, the Siri that

knows more about you, this like multimodal Siri that can search the world and understand about you. And Apple is basically like, oh, never mind. We didn't do that. Buy our phones next year. Maybe I'll get it then. Like, this sucks. And this is like Apple, Apple pulled an ad from its YouTube channel that it had with Bella

Ramsey that was showing a feature on an iPhone 16 that doesn't exist. Like I don't know how to be clearer about that. Like that phone could not do that thing in that ad. And it is like, it is wild to me. By the way, she asks it, who did I have like coffee or lunch with at this restaurant? Yeah, she's at a party and somebody waves to her and she's like, oh, it's that. And she goes around the corner and she's like, who did I have coffee with a couple of weeks ago at whatever place? And it gives her the name and then she goes around and says high to the person.

You know what can't do that is Siri. And so, and this is just like this, it's so indicative of everything that is happening. right now in all of the Apple universe, but really the gadget universe in general. Like everyone made this bet that AI was going to just magically make your whole technological life better. And that all they had to do was give you a thing with a chip that was powerful enough to do the AI stuff. And then the AI stuff would sell the gadgets. And we are so, so, so very far away from that world existing.

And I mean, if I were a betting man, I don't think the coming year is even going to come true for Apple here. We anticipate rolling them out in the coming year is not a thing Apple says on the record, really ever. Apple generally refuses to acknowledge that it's making products in the future. Well, they've already announced this one. They can't say it's delayed indefinitely. That is true. We anticipate rolling this out in the coming year is about as indefinite as it gets.

But also the mere existence of this statement to anyone, is a thing Apple traditionally doesn't do. And this is like for Apple to acknowledge that it is having problems and is delaying something is a big deal and is indicative of something going deeply, deeply wrong with Siri. So I agree with you that we should be more critical of this

and don't worry, we will be. I will just point out the timing does make a little bit of sense because it's March, WWC comes up in June, they've got to get the invites out, They've got to prep everybody. They get to figure out whatever they're going to announce. And if what they don't deliver is any set of hooks for developers to participate in the new series, they're called app intents.

If this stuff isn't ready, they need to be well clear of it by WWC. So you throw this out in March, you can spin up whatever is going to happen in June. Sure. But think ahead to WWDC. One of two things is going to happen. Either Apple is going to essentially pretend that none of this exists because it doesn't, which is weird, because they launch. it all a year ago, or Apple is going to relaunch the same thing it launched a year ago. That's what they're going to do.

That's so weird. It's going to be, but ever so slightly more real, right? Like last year they were showing concept videos, which Apple never does. This year, they're going to be like, we've worked with Shazam, which they own or like. It'll be DoorDash. It's always DoorDash. The most commoditized company in history is going to be DoorDash. Right.

We've worked with Uber and we've done all this stuff, the same as Amazon just did. And actually the comparison that should make Apple feel bad is the comparison to Amazon, which had exactly the same problem and exactly the same perception in the market of its voice assistant. It's for timers and music. And then they hired Pannos Pinae. They've had their own share of problems along the way that's been well reported. But, you know, Panos launched the product. He showed it to people.

Gen 2, we talked to it. It's going to arrive in some way, shape, or form. And they've talked about what they needed to do to build. it, which is create this big orchestration layer where you talk to Alexa with natural language and it figures out what to do and then it can do it, we'll see, to some level of execution. Apple doesn't appear to have built any of that yet. Or if they have, they just took a hard look at it and said, this isn't ready. We're delaying it.

Right. Well, and I mean, you look at the first half of the statement and it's like, in just the past six months, we've made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like, typed to Syrian product knowledge and added an integration with chat GPT. Do you know anyone who thinks Siri is better today than it was six months ago? Siri is substantially worse. I totally agree. I honestly believe it has gone significantly backwards in both its ability to even understand

you, but also like to do useful things. It punts to chat GPT for things that don't make any sense. And like, and it's a bat integration is kind of flaky in my experience. Like it just, the whole thing sucks. And so to the extent that we're seeing this, it's bad, which makes it not surprising that it might even be worse than we know. So, you know, it's really interesting is to just think about this on the long arc, right? Siri launched when we started the verge, a weird thing to think about. Yeah, 2011.

Like the iPhone 4S with Siri came out in 2011. That's when we were sitting around our first office in Union Square, basically, in Manhattan. It was tiny. the bathrooms were right next to the office. It wasn't great. And I remember sitting in that conference room when the first Siri launched and were covering as fast as we could.

And if you remember how that series solved problems, they had done the voice assistant so that you could talk to it. And then they had actually built what amounts to a very primitive orchestration layer. So sometimes Siri is going to do the math locally. Sometimes it's going to kick out to Wolfram Alpha.

Do you remember how often series to kick to Wolfram Alpha? And sometimes it would kick to other service. And they had built this, like, you know, if you just like sort of look at it abstractly, they had built primitive versions of all the things that they need now. Like, we're going to accept the input. We're going to figure out what to do with it. We're going to go out to another service and we're going to come back to you with some kind of answer response or something. And it worked. It didn't work as well as it should.

But kind of the promise was they would add more and more services on the back end and that orchestration layer we get smarter and smarter. and then voice recognition would improve, and all of that would just sort of get better over time. And instead what Apple did was they kind of just let it go. I don't know why they just let it go, but they just let it go. This is also basically what happened with Alexa. Here's this voice assistant. We're going to build all these skills.

You're going to talk to it. The skills are going to fire. Or you're going to learn how to talk to the skills. And they just let it go. Like it just didn't happen for them. I think what everyone got confused about was one part of that equation got so much better. right, AI and LLMs made the natural language input so much better. Yes.

That everyone else assumed that all the other parts were, had also gotten better. Yep. And then they didn't. Like, they just didn't. Like, the LLMs hallucinate.

They get things wrong. They, they go haywire. So you have this system where the input has substantially changed and everyone sees a paradigm shift. That's what all the CEOs have told me undercutter. It's a paradigm shift because the input has changed. Mm-hmm.

And the history of computing is these big inputs that change or input methodologies that change and then computers change. We use mice and keyboards, scroll wheels. Everyone knows the digital crown was a revolutionary computer on the Apple Watch. That's why they endowed the digital crown the way they did with the Apple Watch. Apple knows that changing the input changes the nature of your relationship to computers. So they fake it. Even when they don't have it, they make sure to mention it. Yep.

Multi-touch, obviously. Everyone thinks it's voiced now because LLMs can do voice at this level. but underneath that is nothing. Right. And so they haven't built this layer where you can actually it's good at going to order the Uber. They have to do a bunch of business deals basically.

Or they have to build an agent or in the case of Rabbit, fake having an agent until they actually build an agent and click around on a website. And I don't think, I wonder if the problem for Apple is as much the building the orchestrator or the API hooks or whatever as it is getting all of the app developers

to participate in a way that makes everybody money. I think Apple's theory was that developers would solve this for them, right? That by virtue of Apple being Apple, and we talked about this when fancy Siri first came out when Apple Intelligence was first launched at WWDC was like, if there's any company on Earth that can marshal enough of its developers to play this particular game, it's Apple. Right? And so I actually, I actually think it is, it is yet again more damning. the fact that Apple has not been able to pull this off because Apple is able to point at its developers and say, hey, we put this weird thing on the home screen, you have to support it. And they do. That is what Apple has done forever. And it keeps working. Like the dynamic island exists because Apple is like, look, here's a round thing. You figure out what to do with it. And people do. And so Apple's big idea, what I think was that this would solve itself because they would give people app intents and they would plug in and everything would be fine. That, again, misses that orchestration middle that you're talking about that is

actually very complicated. But I think also this is just anecdotal having talked to developers, but I've talked to a lot of developers who don't understand and are not excited about the idea of Siri just abstracting their app away. Yeah. I mean, I keep calling this the DoorDash problem. And you can actually understand by thinking about why these companies support the Dynamic Island and why they're not excited to support a Siri that makes their app disappear. here. So let's say you're the CEO of Uber, David, Mr. Steve Uber. Please, he's my father. It's obvious why you would support the dynamic island because somebody uses your app and then they close it.

And then the operating system is like, remember that app? Right. And it's a logo sits there. The logo sits there. And there's constant status communicated about your app. And then the only thing the user can do with that is open your app again. So there's a perfect feedback loop, a perfect incentive match between, yep, I want to communicate constant status. And when the user wants to do anything, they can just bop back into my app and I can show them another ad or sell them on Uber Eats or whatever it is I want to do.

Great. I wish any CEOs of any airline companies would like understand this message. Yep. But like it's a perfect incentive match between the needs of the operating system, the needs of the user and the needs of the app to the upper. you say to Siri, I need a car ride to the airport, and Siri just decides to, like, fire off the Uber request. Well, you haven't touched the app at all. Right. Right.

Like the app intent has abstracted your app away. And so you run Uber, you run DoorDash. Suddenly you don't get an absolute opportunity. You don't get the chance to show an ad or, say, put something else in your car or even remind people that you exist. And then your rates start to fall. Like, the amount of revenue you're making falls because now you're just the only thing you're competing. on is telling Siri how cheap your service is. And that's great for the user.

Perfect incentive match for the user. My robot Butler has picked the cheapest car to the airport for me. But none of the app developers want to be in that game. And I think this is true of the Apple model, but it's true of the Amazon model. I ask Panos about it. You didn't have a great answer for it. I asked the CEO of Rabbit about it. And he was like, well, no one's paying attention to us.

Which is actually a great answer, right? In its way, a great answer. He's like, we're not big enough to be a threat. We're just going to build the thing until no one can say no to us. in its way a great answer. But everybody has this DoorDash problem, which is why would DoorDash play this game that eventually results in their destruction?

I don't think Apple has a great answer for developers right now at all for anything. Yeah, their answer is put in-app purchases in your app so we can take 30%. And like, no one's happy about that. Right. Yeah, Apple has become a very extractive company. And I actually think all of that is stacked together, right?

Like, I think Apple has burned a lot of its goodwill with the way that it has thought about things like in-app payments that has cost it trust with developers who are now wondering about things like app intents where they're like, okay, I just talk to developers all the time who are less and less convinced every day that Apple is actually caring about what is good for them as a developer. And there is a sense that Apple is now in this

to get what it feels it deserves from the success of its devices. And that is 30% of every single thing that happens. And so you burn all that goodwill and then you say, abstract your Appleway, don't worry, we'll take care of it for you. And that just that sales pitch becomes really hard to make to developers. Right. And it doesn't track it all with the idea that this is a paradigm shift where we'll reset the balance of power

and everyone will make more money and there'll be new winners and losers. And now it's, I think it's just a tough sell all the way around. It also doesn't work. Like I feel like I have to, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, not saying this more off. It doesn't work. This technology is bad. There are like things that are cool and interesting about it But the fact that the most sophisticated thing anyone has developed

Is this thing will go click around a Chrome browser for you Is not success This thing is these things are bad And I think I am absolutely fascinated To see what the new Alexa is going to be Because to its credit, I think Amazon has actually done a lot of the work That we're talking about. They've made the deals.

They have worked very hard, it seems, on this orchestration layer of figuring out what goes where they're integrating different models. They're integrating with different partners. They have pulled all the right pieces into one place in a way that I think is potentially very exciting. It might still be bad. Yeah.

Like it really might still be bad because this is a really hard problem and no one yet is close to making this work. Like forget all the business incentives. It just doesn't work. Yeah. I mean, Amazon might have the right pieces, but they might all be misshapen, might not fit together and then the picture is bad. Like, that's sort of what that puzzle might be.

Like, we don't know. We have to use it. But, you know, I asked Panos in the same conversation, do you think the orchestration layer is something that everyone will land on the same solution? Or is this like a moat? Like, is this an advantage that you have. And he was very confident. This is an advantage.

Like, we have spent our time figuring this thing out because it's what we need to make everything else work. And you can just see that everyone else to figure. Google could pull on stuff. Like, who did I have a meeting with at this cafe a week ago? that's information that's a my Google Hounder. Yeah. Right? Like Gem and I should by all rights be able to just do that on a pixel phone

and Google hasn't flipped that switch yet. They're very close to flipping that switch. Yeah. Very, very close. You can see that they're coming right up on it because they do have all of your data. They are less worried about you talking to the cloud than Apple in like very specific ways. They're Google.

They're like, ask us a question, here's an answer. Maybe the robot made it up. Or maybe this is actually a person you met with at the cafe a week ago. Who knows? But we're all going to have a good time. They haven't flipped the switch yet because I don't think they think it's good enough yet. And I'm just looking at this and I'm saying everyone is confused by this input method. Everyone is confused by the fact that you can talk to the computer and the computer can do a reasonably good job of talking back to you.

And now we all think the paradigm shift is here. And it's like, oh, wait, the computer lies a lot. So like Sam Altman was saying Chatsby has gotten better at creative writing this week. maybe it has. Like I read some of the demos. And it's like, yeah, it's a little less stilted than before. It's still not good at like running my life.

Right. Like, I think Addy Roberts and our team said it writes like a 2010s blogger, which hits me to my core is because that, that is what I am. To be fair, that's probably what it's trained on. Yeah,

that's the most, I mean, I've written millions of words in the 2010s. There you go. Good. Thank you. You're welcome, everybody. But like,

that's improving. The part where it's, agentic is not improving. Right. I saw my, at the, at the Amazon event, I saw Mike Krieger from Anthropic. Formal, even Instagram, form of artifact, we've talked a bunch. And he was laughing. He's like, it's very funny that every time someone says agentic to you, you just say,

you mean clicking around on a website? Because that's, they all know. That's what they're doing. That's what it is. It's very good. Are there any products used to, I mean, I know you talked to a bunch of hardware makers. Are there any, any products that are close outside of Amazon, sounding like they're close? No.

And I think this is the thing that I have come to find so sort of alarming. It's like there's one set of AI features that I would think of as like features you'd never notice that just make things better in your devices. Like we saw a ton of this at CES, right? That it was like, what if we used generative AI to better map your living room so that your Rumba can get around a little faster? Like that's a terrific and real use of AI. They can use it to like, your lights can do a better job of matching the mood of the music that you're listening to.

That's like a real thing AI can do. That's a good use of it. That's not AI as a product. That's like AI as an underlying technology enabling a feature. Everything I see that is like AI as a top line reason for this thing to exist is a problem. And this is like that was the thing that made me write this piece. is like, we're at this point now where everyone has decided that AI is finished, and they're building gadgets that would be great if AI was finished.

And AI is not finished, and AI mostly sucks, and thus so do these gadgets. And so, I mean, you look at like, it's the smart home stuff, I think, that is probably the easiest, right? We were like, we've talked on the show a million times. Ambient computing is the thing, right? This is all anybody talks about. And that is purely AI enabled, right? Like, that's how we get there. Tons of data, tons of context, sensors of.

abound and it just like understands who I am and where I am and what I'm doing and I can just have a computer and an assistant that's around me all the time. That is pure AI. Do any of those things exist or work? And so what you've had instead is Amazon basically hasn't launched like a meaningfully new echo product in at least a year and a half, maybe longer, because this company has been so captured by this idea that we have to do AI in order to make any. gadgets any good because AI is the only reason gadgets should exist. And Apple just keeps shipping shit that they're like, hey, it does Apple intelligence. Like, we get like briefings to explain new Apple devices every time there's a new Apple device. And I'm sure you've gotten them too,

but like over and over it's just the same Apple intelligence demos on different screens. Like, this is a problem. All of these things exist in service of AI that doesn't exist. So what is the point of any of these gadgets right now? And it's just starting to drive me insane. Yeah. It's funny because AI driving the gadgets. Again, I would put that in the category of we made multi-touch and now we think smartphones are all like this way. So the whole industry is about Blackberry Storms. Right. Like that's kind of what this feels like. Like we're doing Windows mobile 6.5. So it's a resisted touchscreen and that honeycomb grid, but it's still Windows mobile. It's not even Windows phone. You know, it's like this was a by the way, in the annals of like Virgin and gadget

history, some nuclear stuff where we were like, this is still Windows mobile. They just added resistive touchscreen support. That's where we're at, right? We made this new interface where someone, open AI showed off a new interface, and everyone is like, we can build what the consumers want is poking these screens. And no one thought about the software underneath it, except for Apple and then a little bit later Google. And then you had iOS and Android.

And we don't have those products yet. We have chat suites, which people love. And then we have a bunch of the coding products. And we've gotten some notes from people who are like, you're not paying attention to what's happening on the software development side. These are very useful tools in software development. Great. But the consumer paradigm shift that all of these companies are betting on does not exist yet.

Right. Yeah. The thing I keep saying to people when I talk to is like I think the B2B implications of AI are huge and real and present. Right? Like there are so many ways in which companies are using AI to do interesting stuff. Some of that I find hugely problematic, but some of it is really interesting. None of that is regular people things. And I'm like, I am here asking you about regular people things.

And those are just the lies that people tell to make themselves sound more interesting than they are. Yeah. That's what this is right now. I will say, as we've been talking, another part of the story that we were going to talk about is flip-flopped. Oh, Lord. So Apple announced this delay of Siri or AI-powered Siri that led to some rumors that their smart home display, which felt like an iPad on a stick, would also be delayed because what enables that product is being able to just talk to it. Right. And now there's rumors that it could still ship this year.

Okay. But instead of having the new Siri, it will have this rumored big design overhaul for iOS and macOS that people have been talking about. Interesting. So instead of the thing that would make it useful, they're going to ship it with the thing that makes it pretty and call it an upgrade. You know, I don't want to, this is what we do here. I will say, everything that I have heard about the new iOS designs, I'm actually very excited about. Like, there are all these, all the reporting from Mark Herman and others is that it's going to be more vision proe, which means much more sort of colorful and glassy and spatial and kind of three dimensional. And I'm into that. The iOS 7 aesthetic is long in the tooth and deserves to die. So, fine. That is not the same thing as Siri.

Right. The paradigm shift is not a translucency. It's not making, speaking of Windows, Windows Aeroglass is very much the aesthetic of the version of Pro. Yep. But look, the kids today don't even know what I'm talking about, all right? You didn't have to live through Windows Vista, and it's fine. You're going to think it's beautiful.

My hottest take is AeroGlass was not all wrong. Yeah, Aero Glass Vindicated will be our headline. Three people will understand it. Tom Warren, it will explode and then we'll move on with our lives. All right, we've got to take a break. We've talked about us to death. If you have a solid use case for how AI has changed a consumer gadget, you let us know. I'll offer you just one.

I think my daughter is very into space recently, and we just sit there with my iPhone talking to chat Shoepe about space. almost every night. It's fun. But that is not the gadget, right? That's just an app on a phone. Right. Yeah, that's the thing, right? Like, what in here goes beyond app on a phone or chatbot in my browser? Beat that, and I will have a really fun conversation with you about AI gadgets. Also, none of this company is making money. All right, we got to take a break. Hopefully, by the time we come back, all the AI companies will figure out a revenue model. But in the meantime, you're going to listen to these ads. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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We're back. Andy Hawkins is here. Hey, Andy. Hi. Andy, you are our transportation editor, which means the last time I talked to you on a podcast, I asked you why the planes are crashing. Yes. So same level of complexity. We're going to talk about what's going on with Tesla.

Oh, boy. And there's quite a lot going on in Tesla. There are protests at Tesla dealerships. Charging stations around the world are getting vandalized, burned down in some cases. Elon Musk is obviously running rampant through the government. the stock is down. I think it's up today, but it might only be up today

because Donald Trump and Elon Moss stood in front of a bunch of Teslas at the White House yesterday, and Trump sort of sternly instructed everyone to go buy Teslas. So now the police are going to come to your house and force you about Tesla, is what I understand.

What is going on with this company? You wrote a story, the headline is just, is Tesla cooked? It's a good headline. And just based on the reader reaction to it, it seems like a lot of people would like the answer to be yes.

Yes. And a significant number of people believe the answer is yes. Yes. What's happening here? Well, I think sort of the top line issue that we're dealing with here is that the company had a huge spike in its share price. Immediately after the election, it went up like something like a ridiculous amount to a point where I think in December, individual stock shares were selling for like over 450 bucks. incredible, right? The investors were clearly rewarding Elon Musk for making what they saw was the right bet in the election. Trump won, and so therefore Tesla needed to be in Elon Musk specifically needed to be rewarded. But then we started to see a couple of things. First, the company reported its end-of-the-year earnings, and it was kind of shocking and pretty sobering that their sales were down.

Not a lot, but essentially they were flat. And for a company that is supposed to be on this exponential growth projection, I think that that was pretty surprising to a lot of people. And then the Elon of it all, as Neely, you like to say, sort of came crashing down. And he was put in charge of this Doge project and just basically started vandalizing the federal government, shutting agencies down, firing people, you know, barging into. places where he wasn't allowed to go and sort of trampling the Constitution in the process. And that sort of gave rise to, obviously, a groundswell of anger and opposition. I think a lot of people, especially people who consider themselves as progressives and Democrats and liberals were sort of kind of despondent and depressed after the election,

really kind of found a way to focus their anger. in January. And then in February, we saw this protest movement take root and people were demonstrating outside of Tesla showrooms and then sort of separately to that, you know, all those protests were pretty peaceful. But separate to that, there's been lots of reports of vandalism. Cars being vandalized, superchargers being set on fire. Someone took a few shots at a Tesla showroom in Oregon. By it took a few shots, you mean fired a gun at? Yes, bullets were fired at the showroom. in Oregon. They didn't just like go on Instagram live and start talking shit. They fired a gun at the show. Shots fired. As Musk himself said in an interview recently, he talked, he said with a, with a big grin

on his face, he thought that that was a really good joke when he said shots fired. So then the stock started to slide. It had already been going down since January. It took a steep drop earlier this week. One of the biggest drops that we'd seen in over five years to the point that I think at its nadir that, you know, it had essentially shed 50% of its value. The company itself lost around $800 billion in valuation, which is just a staggering number when you consider how highly value Tesla was at that point.

And Musk himself lost around $100 billion off of his net worth. Poor guy. Still the richest man in the world. Don't worry about him. He's going to be fine. But I think what we're seeing now and is now a concerted effort by the government. namely by Trump to prop Tesla up. He's, you know, sort of bringing the cars to the White House and they're having themselves whatever that was that we saw on the lawn outside.

So some have called it, you know, sort of like an infomercial for Tesla, essentially on government property. And he's talking about, you know, going after people who vandalize or to face Teslas with terrorism charges now. So it's clear that, you know, Trump and the administration are interested in bringing sort of the full force of the federal government behind Tesla to protect Tesla and to make sure that it is not subject to the whims of the market, I guess. You know what's fascinating about this to me. Andy, you and I have talked a few times. I think we've actually, the three of us have talked a few times on this show about the one of the strange things about Tesla is trying to figure out what of the Tesla and what is the Elon of it all. And that those two things have always been really hard to pull apart. Like there's a company that for a long time was way ahead of the game and very successful and has kind of lost its lead over time.

And then there is the Eon of it all. And I think it seems very clear to me that the thing that has happened over the last 10 days in particular is that it is just about the Elon of it all now. Oh, wait, no, I disagree. No? I disagree. Not in like a big way. Okay. But just on one element, which is that the Elon of it all for Tesla was what propped up the meme stock bubble of the stock price.

right sure Elon says all the cars will drive themselves I'm going to do a robo taxi and everyone believes him or they don't believe him or they think well the man landed two rockets at the same time of course he's going to pull this off and then the stock price goes up because people think it's going to pay off right and I think what has happened very recently is the bloom is so fully off the rose and even if you want to believe Elon it's undeniable that he is not paying attention to the company because he's he's set up in the secretary of war suite at the Eisenhower executive office building with a gaming PC with RGB lights. That's a real thing. You can go look at the picture. It is very funny to see that computer in that office. And there's no way he's paying attention to Tesla. And so even people who are nominally like pro-Elon or impressed by Elon are like, dude, pay attention to your company and the car's not going to drive themselves unless you pay attention to your company. And then you can see the multiple is coming down off the stock. And then you can see. see the sales are falling. And then you can see the sales are falling even more sharply in Europe,

for example, where doing Heil Hitler gestures is not taken with the same amount of. He's just trolling sort of responses in this country, in this moment, for whatever insane reason. So you've just got this, like, the Elon of it all has always been the dreams will come true. And I think now those things are just, they're pulling apart. So I'm not saying I disagree with you, David. I'm just saying, like there's nothing inside of Tesla that makes it more than a car company anymore. The best example of this I can give you is Mark Kelly, Senator Mark Kelly. Elon called him a traitor the other day on Twitter. So Senator Kelly went to Ukraine.

He said, we stand with Ukraine. This is all about democracy. Elon responds that by saying, you are a traitor. And then today, in the Capitol building, reporters asked Senator Kelly, are you going to sell your Tesla? And he said, well, it's a great car. It's pretty cheap on the inside, though. I love the acceleration. I don't get to drive much.

I'm looking into selling it. And he was just able to evaluate the car. Not everything the car represents or everything the car might mean or robotaxies. He just said the truest thing, I'm presuming this is a Model 3, the truest thing you can say about a model 3, which is it accelerates really fast. And on the inside, it's a little bit cheap. That stock, you don't get 1,200 times. your valuation and stock price against it's very fast and a little cheap. That's a Camaro.

We are barreling towards a moment where buying a Tesla is like buying stock in truth social. That it is like it is it is such a political animal now. And I think, I mean, this was true when when the election happened like you're talking about, Andy, like this company hit a record high after the election, not because it sold more cars, but because Elon Musk won the election. Like that is just a thing that happened. And everybody assumed he would use that to Tesla's benefit. And he didn't. He used it to destroy America. But that's that that was the assumption then.

And I think for me, that was the moment that any question of like, is this, is this company or is the perception of this company about cars or is it about politics just flipped entirely? Like this is a company about politics. And it shouldn't be. And it is. And it's weird that it is. I think what's also really fascinating too. is that, you know, sort of like trying to make a bet as an investor or someone who wants to play the stock market on Elon Musk used to be a pretty easy bet. That would pay off.

For a number of years, you could invest in Tesla and see returns on that investment because of the way that the stock market treated that company. Not as a regular car company as what Eli was saying, but as something that's sort of, you know, about robotics and artificial intelligence and self- driving cars and energy management and honestly saving the world, right? For a long time, he was framing the mission of Tesla as being one about saving the world. And I remember the last investor day that they had a couple of years ago, he talked about very plainly about how it's not that hard to take all of these gas powered devices off the road and replace them with clean energy powered devices. And he framed it very clearly as an effort to save the world.

At the same time that that was going on, he was also in the process of trying to buy Twitter. And we saw sort of like throughout that whole process about how his viewpoint and his worldview became slowly very much informed by conspiracy theories and hard right politics. And then it became sort of clear after a while after that that he wasn't really interested in running Tesla anymore. He didn't want to just be like a car salesman. He wanted to be sort of the guy who was on the vanguard of this AI. this AI revolution that we're seeing. And then now it seems like that's not really even of interest to him anymore. Now he wants to be the co-president, which I mean, like, can you blame the guy?

Like, who wants to go from me to car salesman to like, maybe I'll make robots to now like, I am like co-in-charge of like the biggest richest country in the world? Sure. Like I can't really see like, you know, how that that argument doesn't really pan out for him. So, you know, maybe he's not interested in Tesla anymore. Maybe he's not even really interested in robots. Maybe he's more interested in just being sort of like this iron-fisted ruler of the country. I just don't see how that's going to sell them anymore cars.

Like at the end of the day, Tesla, I think the reason the Tesla take down protests have succeeded, and I think they are a success. I don't think you end up doing an infomercial for Tesla's in the White House lawn unless the protests are having impact. I don't think you see the stock price dropping unless the protests are having impact. The reason is that's an incredible point of leverage, right? you make these cars toxic tone. The cyber truck in particular has become a toxic car tone. And some people are quite happy about that. Like, I'm,

as somebody who has a big, loud, stupid car, like, I get it. I understand why people like big, loud, stupid cars. But you see the videos of people spray painting them and putting stickers on them. There's a great video I sent to Andy, which is pure Andy Hawkins Bay today, which was somebody parked a cyber truck in a bike lane in New York City. And a guy picked up a city bike and. rode it off the cyber truck like a ramp, like down the windshield to just because it was in the bike and then the way.

That's very good. Like there's something about that. Beautiful. Great. I appreciate some funny protests in that way. But the products themselves, to your point, David, they now symbolize a politics. Right. And that's not going to keep sales up.

No. And so you end up with this weird situation where Trump is at the White House sort of like dunking on Joe Biden, complaining about the economy. and then turning around being like, this car is beautiful. And it was just a weird scene. I will say I watched it. It was 35 fan song somewhere I bet. And just to get through it, I watched it at 2X speed on YouTube.

And watching Elon and Trump Talk at 2X speed is like an out-of-body experience. I don't recommend it, but I also think everybody should experience it one time. Didn't he say everything is computer? What a good tee-up that just was, Andy. I have three clips I would like to play for you three from this. There were so many moments during this, but I just pulled out a couple that I would just like to play for you very quickly that I think neatly summarized the deep strangeness of this event. Here's the first one. That's beautiful.

This is a different panel that I've had. Everything's computer. So that's Donald Trump getting into the car. He sits down in the driver's seat after like 10 times. It's a red model S plan. It's a red model S, right? And he says many times that Joe Biden could never, basically. Like he couldn't get into this car.

He doesn't even know what Tesla's are. And then he gets in and he just, he sort of waves around and he goes, everything's computer. And I really believe the Verge's official tagline now should be everything's computer. I feel very validated because years ago when we hired Andy to cover cars, I was like, here's the deal. Everything's computer. Can we make T-shirts that say everything's computer? Like, why does the verge cover cars because everything's computer? I feel like I have to note, though, that a big reason why Musk reportedly turned away from

Joe Biden and the Democrats is because he didn't get invited to a White House summit during the Biden administration that was supposed to bring all the automakers in to talk about electric vehicle policy. And they snubbed Musk because supposedly because he doesn't allow unions in his at Tesla. And Biden was a very pro-union president. And that was something that he really kind of wore as like a chip on his shoulder. Musk finally got his White House summit. And he got it all to himself. And I think that I hope he feels good about that. No, I think he felt like Donald Trump went wandering towards the Model Y and he had to be like, no, no, no, come back, look at the cyber phone, which is a real thing that happened. Okay, I have another clip to play for you. This is, they're sitting in the car and Trump continues to just sort of marvel at the existence of a car, it seems like. Like, you get the real sense that Donald Trump may never have driven a car in his life. It's like driving his old car basically. It's very simple.

It's very simple. So it's literally like the whole part that goes really fast. There's no gears. This is really amazing. It's like driving a golf cart that goes really fast. I think it's like not the sales pitch. Elon Musk thinks it might be. I also have to say there's no gears is a ridiculous thing to say in 2025.

It's hard to buy a car with a manual transition in 2025. Calling it a golf cart, I mean, that's just talking to Trump in his language, right? I mean, that is probably the only vehicle that he drives. You don't think Trump has gas-powered golf carts in Marlago? No, they're too loud. You got to have quiet. when you're hitting your terrible bunker shots. David, I will say that I have to register a fact check on you.

I know Donald Trump has driven a car because there is at least one video of Donald Trump driving a car that I... Was it the one where he was sitting in the fire truck and did the woo-woo gesture? No, no, no, no. Okay, because that doesn't count. It's him. I believe the video was taken by Baron Trump, a young Baron Trump. He's riding around in a Rolls-Royce driven by Donald Trump. Melania is in the passenger seat and they're listening to Blank Space by Taylor Swift.

There's a real video. You can go look at it. Interesting. But I will say that rolls, I'm looking at a video right now. It does have analog gauges. So everything is not computer. But now it is. Everything's good.

So that was, Donald Trump drove that car and then this car. And that's a, it's a big change from a, from a rolls to this. I could see how that would. Do you think I don't, there is a sequence of that video where people keep telling him to start the car. And then you hear one of the photographers say, start the engine. And like, I couldn't see Elon. face, but I could see Trump's face, and he just didn't, like, none of that made any sense. Like, you can't start a Tesla. There's no, there's no key to turn. There's a engine, somewhat,

somewhat famously, no engine. I would, the whole situation was confused. All right, what's the third one? All right. I have one more. I'm just going to play it for you. Thank you all very much. I love Tesla. That's it. That's the whole clip. It's not great. Do you say Tesla? Tesla. Yeah. And that's right.

I think S-L-U-R-R is... Combining Tesla with the word slur, I think, is very appropriate in this moment. Yeah, it's about right. You did not run any of the clips of Donald Trump just sort of beholding the cyber truck. He was like, can you imagine what kind of brains in this guy's head? I know. He at one point, like, double-tapped the side of it and was like, what a great... Oh, yeah, because Elon was like, it's bulletproof.

And Trump goes, whack, whack, as though he's going to test it out. Yeah, it was really something. But if your test of something, whether or not somebody was bulletproof is, like, wrapping on it twice, you're going to believe everything is bulletproof. It was weird. It was a weird event, a weird moment. It was, again, scattered with questions about whether there'd be a recession, about whether Trump needed the notes in his own hand that had the prices of Tesla's listed on it.

Weird all around. He went on a long rant about Columbia University at one point. Like, yeah, it's another First Amendment disaster that's unfolding. But that's kind of my point. All this is so tied up together. now that it is like, and maybe this was the inevitable outcome of Elon Musk becoming so entrenched in our government. But like, I don't know, I look around my neighborhood now and there are everyone who has a Tesla, I live in a very like liberal area. And overwhelmingly, I'm starting to see

Teslas with some version of the I bought this before Elon Musk went crazy sticker, including on cyber trucks, which debatable. Yeah, that's not a choice for you. Although they did announce a cyber truck 500 years ago. fair. It was the first car ever invented and then they shipped it. But yeah, I just, I don't see how this goes back either. It really feels like we are at a place where the protests feel like they're going to continue to get worse because this thing is becoming increasingly politicized. And that what Trump and Musk have decided is that actually politicizing it is a way to to ban it. No, it's it's either to sell more cars to Republicans, ideally, who traditionally have not been the people who buy electric cars,

or who cares juice the stock price, right? Like, you turn Tesla into a meme stock for Republicans, which has made Donald Trump an awful lot of money over the years. Yeah. I think Tesla, like Neil, I said, it's been overinflated. It's a meme stock. It's overvalued.

It's traded more, you know, sort of at a similar level as tech stocks are and not as a car stock. And I think that a lot of people assumed that taking a face plant on robotaxies or the optimist robots, you know, falling down a flight of stairs or something like that was going to be what sort of ultimately deflated. And I don't think anyone really assumed that it was going to be this sort of like politicization that we're seeing and Musk taking such a prominent role in the administration. But I think that that's, that is ultimately what is going to bring Tesla sort of back down to Earth as this this hyper political environment that we're in now. Yeah, you never thought it would be the fundamentals of the car sales would bring it back down to Earth. Right.

Like that seemed insulated because of the promises about robotaxis and all the other stuff. By the way, the best sticker on a cyber truck situation is the couple who wrapped their cyber truck white and put a Rivian logo on the back of it. So good. Oh, my God. That was so good. And then they discovered that they became a meme and had to go on Reddit and try to like laugh it off and explain themselves and nobody bought it. Well, and their explanation was we sold our other Tesla, but we can't sell this one. no one will take it.

Yeah, I've seen videos. I have a weird TikTok algorithm. I have a lot of, like, car dealerships on the phone, negotiating deals on my TikTok feed. And I've watched a lot of car dealership guys, like, totally make lowball offers for cyber trucks. And then basically, you know, the person's like, no. And now, like, call me back. This is the number you're going to get.

Like, at some point, you're going to call me back. And I'm going to give you $60,000 to the cyber truck. And that is, that's just bad news. Now, are a bunch of car dealerships trying to artificially lower the price of Cybertrucks by making TikTok videos, potentially? But you can see the dynamic for that car in particular is getting worse.

And I think some people like the attention. There's a cyber truck in Westchester where I live that is spray painted and a lot of people believe the owner spray painted it himself. Oh, wow. As a defense mechanism. As a defense mechanism is a way to get pictures of his truck on Instagram. No one knows.

Yeah. But, like, that we're entering the second phase, you know, where people are like, oh, you're doing it for clout. And it's like, that's weird. That's a weird outcome. Yeah. A lot of, I know a lot of small business owners bought cyber trucks to, like, wrap with, like, their name of their business. If, like, yeah, like a small solar company or like a coffee shop or something like that. And now we're starting to see a lot of them sort of reverse on that and, you know, take the wrapping.

Take the wrapping up because they don't want their business logo on it instead. Yeah. We should talk just briefly. we talk a lot about the first minute on the show. Tesla Takedown is the name of the protest. It's pretty loosely organized. Like, I don't, there's not a head of Tesla Takedown, you know? It's certainly not, like, command system.

You know, it's like an army. People are just showing up Tesla dealerships and protesting in certain times, like organized on social media like you do. Trump is basically saying this is going to be terrorism. We're going to prosecute this. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, said the House would start investigating these protests. The police are out in force at Tesla dealerships now. There's an incredible picture of, I believe a store in Chicago with just a line of police officers in front of it last weekend, which is just incredible, right?

There's a video of a cyber truck in New York being guarded by six police officers, which is very funny in its way. The politicization is running right into the weird First Amendment environment, right? Where, yes, we talk a lot about free speech. Elon says he's a free speech absolutist, but if you protest a Tesla dealership, the full power of the state's police force will be there, to greet you. There's something weird there. It hasn't broken yet, right? Like, there aren't, no one's been arrested for protesting at Tesla dealership yet. And I don't think you should burn down the charging stations, but we're in a real fuzzy place. How do you think that's playing at, Andy? Well, I mean, we already saw this week ICE agents detain and disappear a pro-Palestinian

activist for, you know, basically for no crime at all, but for, you know, speaking out in support of Gaza. So it's not a very huge leap to go and start doing the same for people who are speaking out against Tesla. I mean, I think that, you know, what Trump is saying specifically is people who are vandalizing and are doing things that are considered to be violent and dangerous are potentially going to face some of these charges. Whether or not that extends to the people who are peacefully protesting, I don't think we've seen yet. I don't think that that was necessarily what he was saying. It's hard to parse what Trump says too much. And I know that Musk has made claims on X about how these protests are astroturf and are being funded by, you know, Soros or whomever else, you know, sort of are the enemies that lurk in his brain.

So I don't really know how this is, I think, like, if anything, the protesters are probably now even more motivated to turn out at the locations now that they know that they're on Trump and Musk. radar. You know, I think that a lot of this was about getting their attention and now that they know that they have his attention, I think we'll see something of an escalation, at least in numbers, which I think is going to cause, I think, a lot of disruption and, you know, police overtime salaries are going to go up. So, you know, it's going to be really kind of interesting to watch. And I know that the, you know, in talking to some of the local organizers and some of the people who are promoting the protests online, I'm blue sky, are adamant. about, you know, this is a peaceful protest. You know, we might occasionally, like, get arrested

peacefully for occupying space, but we're never going to be defacing or vandalizing. That's not the mission of this movement. The mission is to cause Tesla's sales numbers to go down and to hurt Elon Musk's net worth and stock price. That's all that they're interested in doing. So I think if they can sort of hold that line, it'll really, I think, sort of be on the other side to really kind of escalate things if they want to. I will know that Trump has called the boycott movement an illegal boycott, which is not a thing. It's not a thing.

Also tracks with Elon saying it's illegal to not advertise an X. I'm just saying the police are coming to your house and you're going to buy a Tesla. That seems very clear. The end result of America, that what color do you want and how much of your personal income do you have to give up to the government in order to receive your Tesla is the only question. That's how, that's the end state of Doge. We're going to fund Social Security by forcing everyone to buy Tesla so now. It's going to be good. All right.

We're going to see what happens this weekend. It feels like the protests are getting louder, right? Like, the protesters have gotten the validation they need from the White House. Like, it's working. They're, they are bothering the people in charge. That usually means it gets louder. I'm very worried about the free speech environment of America. As every listener of the show knows, that dynamic is something we're watching very closely.

But in the meantime, let us know if your Tesla starts driving itself. or if you are the person who spray panted you're on the cyber truck for attention. I'm dying to talk to you. Andy, thank you so much, man. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling,

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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 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.

We have breaking news. We do? There's breaking news right as we're recording. Wait, can I guess? Guess. Open AI launched something esoteric that no one understands. No, okay. That's not it.

I have no more guesses. All right. As we were recording, we recorded this on a Wednesday, one day earlier than usual, for various calendar reasons. But as we were recording, Chris Welch broke the news that Sonos, in an all-hand's reading, his canceled its streaming video player, which was called Pinewood. Oh, that's sad. Pinewood, yeah. So this was Sonos' big push, right? Its next big market under the previous administration was streaming video.

They had to deal with some advertising company. They were to link everything together. Presumably, there would be some AI talk. That's just the way things go. And they would have a stream video player. And now the new interim CEO, who I suspect will become the permanent CEO, Tom Conrad, says, A push in a video is off the table for now. And the team is being reassigned to other projects because they got to turn around the company. This sounds really interesting because I would say clearly the correct call for Sonos. Sonos has had a brutal year and what it needs more than anything is to get back to proving it can do the thing that it does really well.

And so like forgetting everything else and being like, oh, do you remember how we made speakers that you love for 20 years? We're going to get back to making speakers that you love. is the right call. This is a bummer, though. Like, I think, uh, I wouldn't say I had super high hopes for this thing working the way that Chris in particular has reported that it was going to work. Uh,

the like all encompassing universal TV guide thing. Really hard to pull off. Sonos has done a really interesting job of trying to bring various voice assistants together over the years and has not really had a ton of success with that. Like, I just, I would have been very curious to see Sonos try this, and I'm a little sad that we're not going to get to see them try. But I think Tom Conrad is probably right to kill this project. Sonas has a statement in the story. We don't comment on our roadmap, but it has been previously announced.

We have a long-standing relationship with the trade desk, which was the software provider for this rumored streambox. We have a long-standing relationship with the trade desk, and that relationship continues. Weird, weird statement. I don't know. I don't want to make of that. Yeah. Maybe there will be some advertising in other Sonos products. But I agree with you. They need to focus. They need to make that app great. You can see how launching another product to a hostile user base was not a great idea. Also, I think the headphones don't pan out the way they wanted to. I think they're just, they're just buttoning up.

Yeah. And I think if I'm Sonos, the thing to focus on, A, is obviously software first. but I think Sonos should go out and like rev the headphones and try to make the Ace a real hit. Because I think they could have been. Like, by all accounts, they're good. They were a little too expensive. They didn't really have a thing. But they're very good headphones.

Every time we talk about it, I hear from people who are like, I have the Ace and I love them. But because the Ace shipped at the same time as this terrible app, all goodwill that might have come to the headphones just got eaten alive by the bad stuff that happened with the app. So if I'm Sonos, it's like,

okay, this product wasn't a miss. This thing, we weren't wrong about this. We just have to get back to doing this correctly and then go worry about other stuff. But there's like, there's room to go try and do headphones well and successfully before you go try and do video, which is a much more competitive, maybe not more competitive, but also very competitive and very different market. Yeah. There's dumb feedback on the ace. I think it's very hard to market headphones that look so much like every other headphones.

Yeah. I think that's right. But like if you were putting Sonos's odds of doing a very good job over time, wouldn't you say it's more likely that Sonos will eventually figure out how to make genuinely great differentiated headphones than a set-top box? Yes, but my caveat is, I don't think... I'm so surprised you even had to think about that. I think it is really, really hard to make genuinely great differentiated headphones

when most of those headphones connect to an iPhone, and Apple makes it very, very, very hard to out-innovate any of the AirPods products on the iPhone. Yeah, I'll give you that. That was my hesitation. It's like, yeah, there's a natural instinctive answer, and then there's the reality, which is the TV space is there's more opportunity in it.

It's more of a free-for-all. Yeah, that's fair. I'll give it. But it's not like TV is a wide-open space with easy games to play. Well, hopefully they just focus on the speakers. Tom Conrad, interim CEO, again, I think we all suspect

when we become the full-time CEO. Welcome on these shows. Anytime you want, Tom. We've known time forever. So, come on. We'll talk Pandora for a while, and then we'll move on to Sonos. How's that?

Yeah. He used to be at Pandora. All right, it's time. It's time, David. Oh, my God. America's favorite podcast within a podcast. This one's going to be wonkier than normal. That is a high bar, my friend.

It's time for Brendan Carr's a dummy. everyone everyone's favorite so brenden car uh as some of you know i don't know why you're listening to this you know now brenn car is the chairman of the FCC under donald trump a notoriously uh hostile presence for the first amendment and freedom of speech in this country this man wants to regulate speech on every wire and wireless transmission he can get his hands on it's not subtle and he does it by wrapping himself up in a cloak of defending free speech which is just pure he hypocrisy. I will say this at the top of this segment. I'll say it at the end of the segment. I know Brendan listens to our show. I know he gets Google alerts for his name.

I know it. You're welcome. Come on, Brendan. Come on the show. Try to defend yourself. You won't because you're a coward, but we've sent the emails. You've been invited on Decoder. Show up. I'm just saying. So this week, Brendan, our little man, Brendan, sent a letter to YouTube, asking if YouTube TV discriminates against faith-based programming. And then he posts on X, I have received complaints that Google's YouTube TV is discriminating against faith-based programming. These concerning allegations come at a time

when American public discourse has experienced an unprecedented and unacceptable surge in censorship. I am asking Google for answers. So there's like four things that just aren't true in that. By using the power of the state to censor Google. Yeah. So this is all based on what appears to be one complaint from one channel. Great American family,

which apparently is a face-based channel. It's distributed on Fubo and Sling on DirecTV stream on Hulu. Here's the thing about this. You can get some of these, you can get some content from this company on YouTube. Right? YouTube is just wide open. You just put stuff on YouTube.

People do all the time. they're not on YouTube TV because YouTube TV is a cable company. And to get on YouTube TV, you have to negotiate rates and carriage with YouTube, the same way that you would have to negotiate rates and carriage with DirecTV proper, with Comcast, with Spectrum,

with any other cable company you can think of. By the way, I should disclose here that Comcast is an investor in RoxMedia, a parent company. I do not have great relationships with cable companies. So take that's for what it's worth. But I know how cable companies work, and my coverage of them over the past decade has led them to hate me. So, yeah, it's about right.

That's how it goes. But I do know how they work, because I've covered them a lot. Here's the thing about Brendan Carr. He has no power over YouTube TV. Zero. He doesn't have power over YouTube either, even though he keeps fronting like he wants it. He keeps saying he's going to, he personally will reinterpret Section 230, which he has no authority to do. But he keeps saying it keeps threatening it.

it and now he's threatening YouTube TV. And the lack of power over YouTube TV is actually even more obvious. Right? His lack of power over the internet is you have to, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to explain it. Right? You have to say, well, yes, it's a federal communications commission. Yes, they have some authority to regulate wireless services.

They allocate spectrum to Starlink, all this stuff, all this internety stuff. But they don't have the authority. to regulate the content on Instagram, which is why he wants to reinterpret Section 23. Right. You have to, like, wind your way to it, right? Do you have a difference? Yes, they regulate the ISPs, but not really because they got rid of net neutrality. Like, you have to construct this argument for why he doesn't have the power, but the

answer is because the FCC gave away the power. Here, the FCC never had the power before. So if you think about why the FCC regulates cable companies at all, there's a very wonky word for cable companies and satellite companies, MVPDs, multiple. video programming distributors. I'm sorry. I told you it was going to get wonky. So the cable companies at the outset, at the very beginning of cable, you had all these people in like rural America who were getting crap network broadcasts at their house. They put up big antennas and then like, you know, the CBS affiliate from the big city would like kind of come in and it would be bad.

So the original cable companies were kind of like renegates, right? They would set up their own big antennas and then run wires to all the houses in these rural areas. And they're basically stealing the signals. And the history of cable is full of these big characters who are basically doing piracy at scale. Right. Weird. Like that's just a weird history. And now they're big monopoly monoliths and they hate me.

But the history there is kind of like these like wildcats, like big, big colorful characters setting up like community cable systems. Do you know how sometimes they call cable cat TV? Yeah. Like you ever see that on an input on all TV? That's community access television. And that's because. Is it really? I didn't know that.

That's a fun fact. And that's because some guys would be like, screw it, we're setting up a big antenna and running wires to everyone's house. So this is where it came from. And the FCC is like, wait, we regulate broadcast. And so the broadcast stations are saying, hold on, you're free riding on us.

You're charging people for access to our signals. The FCC gets involved. And we end up in this huge system where the FCC manages things like who gets to retransmit what stations, who gets to bundle what stuff, a big arbitration framework for if some cable network wants to rerun ABC programming, but ABC won't give them a license to it unless they pick up like ABC family and the Disney channel.

Now we have like a weird contract dispute. The FCC manages all that. That's all built out of these wildcats, basically stealing broadcast signals and running them over wires people's houses. So you have this whole framework for all this built up. Okay, fine. And that's, so the FCC has some authority over like traditional MVPs. your direct TVs, your Dish networks, your cable companies.

YouTube is not that. YouTube TV very specifically is not that, right? They're a virtual NPD, which is a horrible name, but it basically means they're a cloud service. Right. So YouTube. The internet. So YouTube and Google start YouTube TV. And they're like, well, if you want to be on our thing that feels like cable, you can be.

Show up at our door. We'll cut you a deal. And the reason they were so cheap to begin with is they didn't have all of this bad. of the traditional cable companies. Right. All these like pre-negotiated deals. And they had immediate national distribution. Right.

They didn't have to dig trenches and set up antennas. Right. They're running over the internet. So the FCC never had authority over it. Like it just is not the thing. Like there's there's no part of YouTube TV where they're like capturing signals from the air and rebroadcasting them and you need this whole retransmission consent regime. This is all like complicated telecom law stuff.

Right. that no one cared about because YouTube TV is different and new. And they're allowed to pick and choose what channels they put on their cable service, the same way that, I don't know, whatever preloaded Samsung fast TV service is allowed to pick and choose whatever channels show up and you turn on a Samsung TV for the first time. And that's the market at work, right? In the most direct way, that is the free market at work.

What channels do you get for your $80 a month for YouTube TV that goes up every month is a decision YouTube gets to make in the free market, and consumers can decide whether or not to pay for it? So you end up with, should great American family be on cable systems, in a time when cable systems were the dominant provider of video services, the FCC had this like interest. It wasn't really played out. It wasn't really flushed out, right? The interest was based on how do people get the broadcast networks? It's the cable systems. Are the cable systems running well because they are such a monopoly provider of information? The FCC is like, all right, we're to make sure the bundles are equal, blah, blah, blah. YouTube is not that. YouTube TV operates in the biggest, most vibrant market of video programming services

that has ever existed in world history. If you want great American family, you know what you can do? You can leave YouTube TV and sign up for Fubo. Any of the other ones. Like that, right? Like in one second, on your phone,

you can just do it. You can sign up for Sling or Hulu. You can maybe pay them directly. There's no plausible interest for the United States government to regulate the market in this case. case. And what makes it particularly galling is in the same breath, Brendan Carr is saying, list every regulation I should remove the market is more vibrant.

You know what regulation you should remove, Brendan? Yourself, you should stop meddling in the free market of information on the internet. You should go away. Well, and he's not even pretending in any meaningful way that this is about free markets. It's just about speech. Yeah. Like the whole YouTube TV thing is not. not accusing YouTube TV of being a monopoly or abusing its power against its just pure censorship

discussion. Yeah. He wants to put pressure on Google to moderate YouTube, like big YouTube, the way that he wants. And so the way he's going to do that is by saying Google is unfairly discriminating its faith-based programming on YouTube TV, over which he has zero. And I mean truly zero authority. Right. In a way that it is easier to make an argument that he has authority over the internet. I don't, he doesn't, but it is actually easier to make that argument because he had, he could in another world would have had authority over the ISPs. But YouTube TV is a thing that exists outside of the FCC's historic frameworks for how cable companies are regulated in a way that he should, and there's competition, right? Like, you can just get Comcast, dude. Like, it exists.

Like, it's there. It's right there for consumers that they want these channels. they can switch away from YouTube TV. And if there exists any of that market competition, it is completely inappropriate for the government to step in and say, I want information. I want you to answer to me. Especially at the same time,

just in like in a different tweet, he's like, what regulations do I need to get rid of to make the market more competitive? Fire yourself. Like, it's just, it is, it is the most blinding hypocrisy from this fan. Week in and week out, and all of it is incoherent,

and all of it only serves to increase his own power as opposed to making the markets more efficient, to making the networks more trusted. That's a good goal, right? You want more Americans to perceive that the information networks that they exist in are unbiased or delivering more fairer or accurate information or that the processes by which content is taken down or removed or has reached outled are fairer and understanding. Those are all good things, but he's just about power. And you can see it in the course of two tweets. He's like, I'm demanding this private company over which I have no authority answer to me. Also, I think the market should be more open and have less regulation. Well, dude, solve your problem.

Get rid of yourself. Or come on Decoder. I'll fire you on Decoder. I will say, I really enjoyed, I very rarely enjoy a company response to something. But this one I very much enjoyed from Audrey Lopez at YouTube, who said, we welcome the opportunity to brief the FCC on YouTube TV subscription service and the strategic business decisions we make based on factors like user demand, operational costs and financial terms and then a bunch of other stuff, which is just a long way of saying, we don't have this because

no one wants it. If there were a market reason for us to have this channel, we'd have this channel. I mean, this is like every time we get a carriage dispute, right? Like I find carriage dispute is really fascinating for exactly this reason because it is purely about a company with content that people want. trying to get a distributor to pay as much as possible for it. And the distributor, it's like perfect supply and demand economic bargaining. And I find it so fascinating.

And in this case, like, it's actually just YouTube is like, no one wants this and we'd have to pay them for it. Why would we pay them for it? Yeah. It's just that simple. And it's funny because in a different, if I described to you how cable company negotiations work up at the FCC, I think most of our younger listeners or viewers on YouTube would be utterly perplexed that the government is involved. Yeah, right?

There used to only be three major broadcast networks the entire country, and people set up antennas. And then when the cable company showed up, the government showed up and said, you have to carry the broadcast networks. Weird. That's just a weird thing that's embedded in the history of our telecom law, that we have these things called must carry provisions.

And because of the must carry provisions, the broadcast networks can get bigger and have more channels and demand other channels get carried by these cable companies. And you end up in the situation where, The United States government is resolving a dispute about the tennis channel. This is a real thing that happened. That's awesome. And that just doesn't happen on the internet.

I do think everyone should be required to watch tennis. So I'm actually good with that one. But you see that kind of stuff play out in the history of telecom because there was so much scarcity. Right. So the government had this interest in saying, okay, we've got these three big national broadcast networks. We know they touch everyone in the country. The cable companies have to carry them. Right.

That's a lot. Like, that's a big step into what the government says about the information you receive. And that made sense in the previous era. It makes no sense in the modern era. And I think most people, if we showed up and said to YouTube, you have to carry Mr. Beast. Like, most people are like, what are you talking? Right. Like, that doesn't make any sense.

You can go. I just see Brendan trying to bring us back to that era, but doing it incoherently and without any point except his own power. Yep. So like I said, Brendan, I know you listen. I know you're going to get the Google alerts. Here's one for you. Brendan Carr is a coward. That's just the thing I say on the show every week.

You can come on Decoder. You can defend this stuff. You can try to make it make sense. I'll give you the shot. I'm just well prepared. And I know you. So good luck. But you're welcome.

Anytime you want. All right. We got it. We need a palo cleanser, David. Yeah. All right. I have three more for you. And then we're going to get out of here.

Yeah. Thing number one, TikTok did a thing I think is sort of interesting, which is everybody is forever trying to come up with ways to make their platforms less horrible for teenagers. And basically TikTok now has a sort of, it's a parental control thing that essentially starts to wind you down off of TikTok starting at 10 p.m.

So it gives teens a reminder that's basically like it's late, get off, and then starts to play you out essentially. it's like the Oscars music where it just like plays you off the stage of TikTok. I think this is a great idea. And I think this is a thing that I would also like for me, an adult who should not be looking at TikTok after 10 p.m. But I think like I've been talking to a lot of people about the sort of regulatory environment about this stuff for years. And Lauren Feiner does a really good job of covering a lot of that stuff for us. And watching all of these platforms just like flail to figure out features to make themselves of slightly better experience,

especially for young users. It's just really complicated and really interesting. And I actually think this is like a smart idea from TikTok. That it's just like, we're just going to make it harder and harder for you to use this app because you should go to bed. It's time for bed. Totally hard. Not totally hard, but harder.

And I'll, I think a lot of parents would accept the hard 10 PM curfew on a TikTok account. Probably. But Casey Newton had this great line about TikTok this week writing about this. He said TikTok is now. in quantum super positioned. There's a TikTok that's illegal. That's good. Yeah.

And then there's a TikTok that exists and a shipping features for teens in America. I would say I forget about the TikTok ban like every three days. You know what I mean? Yeah. I just sort of look around and I'm like, oh, right, TikTok's going to get banned. Like it's banned. It's banned. That's true.

The law has passed. Yeah. The Supreme Court said it was constitutional. Donald Trump is just not enforcing it. I know we've talked about this already, but the first week of April when all the tariff stuff comes crashing back down and the TikTok ban delay ends is like, it's going to be weird times in America. We might not,

the government might be closed by that, like, stuff's going to get real weird here. Thing number two that I just think is really interesting is Niantic, the company that makes Pokemon Go and a bunch of other stuff, sold all of its gaming business to Scoply, which is a like old social gaming company that I think is now owned by some Saudi government company thing

that I don't pretend to totally understand. But I just have been obsessed with Niantic for like years. Pokemon Go I think remains like the most interesting AR experiment anyone has done yet and was a huge giant hit. And then they tried to do it a bunch more times and none of it worked. Yeah, no one cared.

There was like the Harry Potter game that people were really excited about. There was the one with the characters with the flowers coming out of their head that I can't remember the name of. But like, Niantic was like way out in front of this idea of like, how do we make stuff that is fun on top of the real world? And just never, it turns out it was just Pokemon.

And they just never found an X thing. Well, they never found an X thing and they never figured out what to do with the enormous amount of data they collected from all those Pokemon Go users. Like, Niantech was building a world map and they were clever to the point where if they found a place where they didn't have sufficient data, they would put Pokemon there. And then people would go and map that location. And I don't think that anyone figured out what that was for. Like, it was very clever.

Like, in that way, and it's like, do you know Pokemon Go is secretly data collection? And it's like, yes, what's going to happen? And there's some of that stuff. Niantic still owns some of that. Yeah. Like, it kept a couple of its games and a bunch of the mapping stuff. So it's, yeah, the thing they've been saying, which is basically we're like building an AR map of the world is now their only move left, which is really interesting. Like, there was a, Pokemon Go was just like, flip.

it forever until they figured out the next thing. And now they, like, really have to go figure out this next thing. Yeah. And I don't know what it's going to be, but we'll see. All right. I have one more for you. Well, I have one and a half. Okay.

The one is that home assistant now supports matter. And I know this is big for you. So I just wanted to give you a moment to really talk about this. Well, it's certified. I think it was, it was like not officially supported before. I mean, that's basically what Paul was telling us. And he said it's now officially supported. The certification is complicated.

It's a cherry on the cake. That's the quote. This is good. I have a home assistant green box now. She's like sitting here. I'm thinking about swapping at my home bridge for home assistant. Only because we have these very complicated smart vents that open and closed to try to make all the rooms in the house the same temperature. It's like the podcast studio.

I'm sitting here is in our attic. So in the winter, it's very cold up here. But I don't want to run the heat and burn out the family. So we have these vents at open and close. And Home Assistant can run them locally instead of going to the cloud. Oh, all right. None of this has anything to do with Matter. I'm just saying you can see how Home Assistant is like, there's a server in my house that runs everything.

Having Official Matter integration, what's all of that stuff run locally? And I think that's cool. Right. Yeah. Home Assistant continues to be more impressive, I think, than I gave it credit for for a long time. I was always like, Home Assistant is like the Raspberry Pi of the Spartan home world. It's like it's a thing for people. who want to tinker and that's about it and they are like pushing further and further down into just like put this in your house that'll be fine.

I think that's pretty powerful. I I I we talked about Amazon and Apple and all their smart homes stuff and on say I stuff and all of that that kind of requires you just believe that those services will run in the cloud and be reliable for you for a long time and home assistance like what if you just had a computer in your house that was there. Yeah, that just only did those things. Yeah. Yeah. I'm into that. And then last one did you see Jay Grae T-shirt. Truly the greatest thing that happened all week. And now I think Blue Sky's going to sell it. So Zuckerberg wore a shirt

at MetaConnect, right? That said... I believe so, yeah. It said Zucker, nothing in Latin. And so Jay Graber's shirt at South by Southwest said, Manda Sine Cesarbius,

which mean a world without Caesars, and now they are fully selling that shirt. Spectacular. I have no notes. They were giving away stickers, I think, that said the same thing at Southby.

It's extremely good. It is good. We're still working with better at yours. It's very complex. accepting the fire hose of incoming social media content if you federate a quick post it's not small it turns out turning your website into social network moderation challenges abound but we're we are still focused on yeah there's some blue sky uh one i will say one deeply fascinating thing that happened this week was x had a huge outage uh and everybody went to blue sky like all the it was uh x went down right as nif free agency started, and it just, like, that flipped a blue sky. And I thought that was so interesting that, like, my threads did not get more exciting,

but all of a sudden, like a million sports reporters I know were just appearing in Blue Sky. And Mina Kimes, who works at ESPN, had this, like, starter pack of Blue Sky sports people, and that blew up. And it was like yet another, like, Blue Sky has the juice kind of moments, that it's like every time X gets a little worse, Blue Sky gets a little better. And X gets a little worse a lot. And so it was just another one that it's like blue skies, blue skies for real. Can I add one?

It's Trump-related, but in the funniest way. All right. I'll allow it. Mia wrote about this this week. There's a Trump official. I believe in one of the offices that's firing everybody, like in the Office of Personal Management. She is also a very, very bad fashion influencer.

And she's been doing Get Ready with Me's in the office while she's firing people. it's very bad but like very bad in a way that is just indicative about everything else is bad yeah she's like I need she needs a side hustle too she's like I don't know maybe I'm gonna get fired

by Doge one of these days so I gotta have a sidehouse but it's pretty bad it's pretty bad and Mia's post is scathing in the best possible verge way so I encourage people here this is the thing that I saw

somebody just like posted a link in slack and it was like you could tell the like the Mia siren had just been activated and Mia just came in and was like, I know what to do with this. That's good stuff. Mia had a great line. She referred to her outfits as Sears Catalog-esque. Oof.

That's rough. It's rough. Every night and our policy desk, just let's sit out and you can see it. All right. That's it. We've gone way over. This episode's been six hours long. I think I was in a fugue state talking about Brendan Carr this week.

That was yesterday. It's what the people come for. That's what we sell here. Brendan, you're welcome anytime. Thank you to Andy. Poor Andy. Every time I talk to him lately, I'm like, so, what disaster are we talking about? Thanks, Andy, for coming on.

That's it. That's for a podcast. Bye. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer.

And that's it. We'll see you next week.