The Vergecast - The iPhone Fold could make concerts even worse

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

This week Apple announced a Mac Mini made for AI and a Mac Studio made for AI, both with faster M6 and M5 Pro chips made for AI. But that's all an amuse-bouche to Sept. 9's (expected) main course: the long-awaited folding iPhone. Nilay Patel, Jake Kastrenakes, and David Imel run through all of this week's Apple news, including the most important story: a surprise discount on the legendary polishing cloth.Then, they react to Meta's settlement in its latest kids safety trial, geek out about Grand Theft Auto VI with the Hype Desk's Ashley Esqueda, check out the Pokémon Fitbit, and decide if Nvidia just saved the global economy. Further reading: ⁠File a comment with the FCC⁠ ⁠Apple announces September iPhone launch event⁠ ⁠Apple’s new M6 chip gets more cores and more AI compute⁠ ⁠Apple launches new Mac Studios with its ‘most powerful chip ever’ — the M5 Ultra⁠ ⁠Apple’s new Mac Mini has fresh M6 and M5 Pro chip offerings — and higher prices⁠ ⁠Apple’s ‘new’ polishing cloth is the same except $10 cheaper⁠ ⁠Meta agrees to heavy restrictions on teen users in major lawsuit settlement⁠ ⁠Meta is planning an ad blitz urging TikTok and YouTube to follow its lead.⁠ ⁠All the ways Instagram and Facebook are changing for teens⁠ ⁠Rockstar finally responds to ‘heartbreaking’ GTA 6 leaks⁠ ⁠Fierce Network: FCC opens comments on E-Rate as the program gets attacked in court⁠ ⁠Nvidia is about to be a hundred-billion-dollar-a-quarter company⁠ ⁠Panic is passing Playdate tariff refunds on to customers.⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 0:00 Welcome to the Vergecast01:26 Apple Mac AI Hype02:26 Mac Mini Agent Craze06:32 Mac Studio vs Nvidia11:43 Price Hikes and Cloth17:01 iPhone Event Invite17:38 iPhone Fold Debate21:30 Camera Crash Out26:57 Meta Settlement Breakdown28:59 First Amendment Fallout36:59 Age Verification Push39:30 Filter Rules and Loopholes44:11 Will Teens Just Switch Apps45:20 Reels Versus Shorts46:35 Government Next Steps47:39 Break And Reset47:50 GTA VI Showcase54:29 Leaks And Spoilers57:12 Can GTA Save Games01:00:51 GTA Online Money01:02:04 Brendan Carr is a Dummy01:03:45 E Rate Fight01:08:46 Nvidia Earnings Hype01:17:50 Pokemon Sleep Fitbit01:22:41 Waymo Versus Tesla01:28:34 Decoder And Goodbye Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I've got a text. The summer might be almost over, but a new bombshell has entered the villa. Meet the voices of DeepGram Flux TTS. I'm Drew. Low-key casual. I'm Alexis, an upbeat morning person. I'm Haley. Always cheerful.

Flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak. You can interrupt, pause, and keep talking without losing the plot. Fancy a chat? Come try all the voices free through September 12th at deepgram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply. I'm Ina Garten. This fall, join me for Happy Hour with Ina, my new video podcast. Each week on the show, I'll invite guests for a delicious drink and a conversation at my kitchen table in New York City.

And you're invited. Subscribe to Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube or your favorite podcast app for new episodes every Wednesday starting September 16th. Hello, and welcome to our podcast, flagship podcast of Lake America. federally mandated database change that our nation's mapmakers will now have to contend with. I'm your friend, Neely Patel. Jay Castanakis is here. Exciting week, Neelai. Glad to be here.

So much going on. David Bell is here. Welcome back, David. Hi. Happen to be back. We didn't scare the audience away with our camera crash out last week. No, there was a lot more I would have loved to crash out with you about. But there's still time, guys.

We don't have to talk about Macs. We could just go straight into photos. They didn't notice that we were on time last week due to your interference. I know everyone is mad at me for not letting the show go for another two hours. It would have been fun. I would have talked about 3D models of fake tracks of phones on video, and it would have been great. Oh, but this is just our Slack chats put into a podcast form. The problem is, and this has come up years depending on all the hosts change, but the demand that the Vergecast speed ever longer exists.

The problem is that it just slowly fades away into like a video of me crying about. computers. Which I think people would also be okay with. That's just the last 30 minutes of your four-hour live stream. It's just me looking at like an original Macintosh and being like, what we lost. It's not good. How we got banned from Twitch. See you, Macintoshes. There's a lot going on, Jake. What are we doing today? Yeah, there's a lot to talk about. There was some big ban of news. And Vida might have saved the U.S. economy. But first, we've got to talk about Apple, big week for Apple news. So Apple did two things this week. One was announced the next iPhone event, and we'll talk about that in a little bit.

But first, they announced new Macs. So there's a new M6 chip and the M5 Ultra, there's new Mac Studio, and Mac Minis. I'm going to read Apple's descriptions of all the new devices, and I wanted you guys to tell me what stands out here. All right? So the Mac Studio is, quote, the ultimate desktop for on-device AI

and the most extreme pro workflows. The Mac Mini, quote, delivers a massive leap in AI performance, supercharging a leading desktop. for always on agentic computing. And the M6 and M5 Ultra deliver, quote, a big leap in performance and AI compute. So what market are we looking at here?

Preschools. Yeah. For sure. Well, at least we've gotten away from every computer for creators and creators a lot. This is true. That's a nice improvement.

The thing that I am really interested in here is the way that most people use AI today is through cloud compute. Yeah. And Apple has gotten really into bragging about their local AI compute possibilities. And I am interested in how many people are buying these devices for that purpose, right? If they're advertising a MacBook Air as being, you know, the leading machine for AI compute, I would be very confused.

But the Mac Mini is sort of the sweet spot, right? Like those were blowing up at, you went to like ClawCon, right? The Open Claw Convention. Is that still, are the Mac Mini's still the whole? hot device for this local AI stuff. So I saw some people tweeting a couple weeks ago, like, remember when everyone bought Mac minis for OpenClaugh? But all of the replies were, but it's still my favorite computer I own and I don't regret

buying it. So Apple is in this kind of unique position where it's like, people are starting to sort of toy with this idea of local models. You know, maybe the M4 Mac Mini was not the fastest local model runner on the planet. But people see a day in the future where they will. relinquish their chains from Anthropic and Open AI, and they're going to be able to run mini-max or whatever on their 512 gigabyte Mac Studio.

So I feel like Apple's kind of just dipping their toe in that market and being like, we know people want this, and it's an aspirational idea to be able to unchain yourself from Open A&A Anthropic. Maybe we can kind of sell to those people, but if we're not there yet, we can still sell to all the same people we've been selling to for the last 40 years.

And it sounds very cool that they have all. us new additional AI compute abilities. I mean, this is the direction that Apple's headed in some ways, right? Like, Mac OS 27, my understanding is there is already a split happening in where the compute is. There's some serious stuff that happens locally and some that's in the cloud. Nilai, is your impression that Apple wants this stuff to be happening locally as part of their sort of big privacy promises? Or is this just sort of marketing still? This is a lot of marketing.

I would actually pull apart the Mac Mini in the Mac Studio. Yeah, that's fair. So the Mac Mini delivers a massive leap in AI performance, supercharging the leading desktop for always on agenda computing. They're just talking on OpenClaw. A leap in AI performance is like meaningless on this scale. Like some AI is happening here. Maybe you're running a local model somehow, but the leading desktop for always on agenda

computing is like a bunch of people bought this to run OpenClaw. There's a new one called Instinct, which just raised a bunch of money. And it's a privacy nightmare from whatever we can tell. Like, they will literally train on your user data and they got to fix it. But, like, you're going to buy a small computer to sit in the corner of your house and do computer stuff that you command over WhatsApp or I message or whatever. Like, that's the Mac Mini. And I think that the AI claim there about performance has almost nothing to do with always on agenetic computing. Like, I think that that's one sentence with two parts.

And Apple is just excited for you to conflate the two parts. Yeah. The OpenClaw fans were enough to what put the MacMoney on back order for months. Yeah, but this is also a pretty small market. It's a small market, but what I'm getting at is, you know, if you bought a cheap Windows PC with enough power to sort of be a computer, you, like, you would spend a lot of tokens with Claude just trying to close pop-ups, which is, like, not a problem on the map. And that's, like, honestly a reason that I think a lot of people bought these products.

In the footnotes of that press release, they're comparing it to the M1. So these leaps are not all they're made out to be. Well, I'm just saying I think the Mac Mini is one kind of product, and it is in many ways the best sort of price performance out-of-box computer to let a thing like OpenClawe run on, which is the always-on agenda computing. And most of those tokens are being burned in the cloud to control your computer. Yeah. Right?

And you're just giving Claw to computer, and it happens to you. Mac Mini. So that's one thing. The Mac Studio is the ultimate desktop for on-device AI is a wild claim. Just a wild claim because another kind of desktop you can buy is a PC with an Nvidia GPU in it. Right. And I don't think there's a world in which Apple is truly claiming that the M5 Ultra compete with high-end Nvidia GPUs. inference. If that's what they're claiming, then we should run some benchmarks and find out, but I don't think that's the thing that they're saying. And I'm very curious to see in this context what that means. It's the ultimate desktop for the most extreme pro workflows, which is the other thing they're saying.

Yeah, by that, that's the thing it's been good at for ages. But the ultimate desktop for on-device AI, like I feel like a lot of people running actual GPUs on their desktops have a lot to say about that. Probably true. They do offer a 512 gigabyte RAM model now. They do keep uping the amount of RAM that they can have on these things. So I think they're trying to court those people. I mean, I ran open, I tried to run OpenCla. I couldn't figure out to really get it to work. We didn't send enough tokens. But you didn't ask Claude to configure your open properly. This is the loop you have to give yourself up to. Yeah. I'm not Silicon Valley Pilled enough for this. But, uh, you have to set up one agent to set up your other agent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. But you have to download, you know, this large local model, you know, and I was running this on like a Surface Book 2 from 2015 or something. Could not really run a large local model on there with 8 gigs of RAM. So I feel like they're trying to court those people that are like, I want to run the 2 trillion parameter models. As far as inference speed, I'm not sure, you know, in comparison to like Nvidia's GTX computers or whatever they're called. Well, this is what's so interesting. Like, I combed the announcements to see all the different specs they're highlighting and the benchmarks and how what percentage better all these things are. And you know how Apple is with fake charts and numbers. And when it came to the M5 Ultra chip, which is what's in the Mac studio, what you can spec it out with if you really want power, they had almost nothing when it came to AI, right?

Which I think speaks to Neelai's point about, they're just trying to add to AI hype there, right? But the Macs Studio is by all means a very capable computer, I think for creatives who are doing video editing. Yeah. I don't know that it's really the thing for running LLMs and doing inference. Yeah, probably true. Probably true. Yeah. I mean, we're going to find out.

They're going to come out. People are going to put them into the test. And certainly we'll see if the upgraded neural engine can compete with the blah, blah, blahs when you're running Quinn, right? Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do with these computers that are interesting. I think in the context of them also announcing the iPhone event this week, it's a pretty big signal that that event is packed. And here are the new Macs. And these Macs just kind of sell themselves.

Yeah. Right. Like you don't need to go market a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio. The people who want to buy them can buy them. And especially the people who are super serious about doing local AI workloads, know exactly what they want to buy. Yeah. Like those are not consumer products yet.

That's not a thing regular people do. It's a thing people who are really invested in wanting to do it are doing right now. And they're having fun. I'm not saying they're not having fun, but they know exactly what computer they want to buy. I'm also extremely curious exactly how much power you can get out of open local models that you can run yourself these days, right? You can do something on the Mac Mini. You can do something a little bit better on a Mac Studio if you spec it out.

But at some level, these open models are, they just, they don't hold a candle to the tip, top, flagship models from Open AI and Anthropic. And if you want to do the beefiest work, you're probably just paying those. And you're running your whatever agentic harnesses, you can have 100 different agents in a bot swarm, you know, run all of your coding for you. I think it kind of depends on what you're benchmarking against, right? Because if it was like, I think it was Minimax or the Chinese model that basically was open source and free and definitely distilled on Anthropic because when you asked it

what its name was. It says, hi, I'm Claude. That, you know, whatever benchmarks they released were like 95% of what Anthropic had at the time. And I think that, I think what people are buying these $18,000 computers for is the dream that they can be freed of this leash. Whether or not that's actually true, I feel that is a whole other story. I mean, I would dramatically prefer to talk to these things locally, and it just does not feel like an option. And to the extent that I even could run something on my computer that is, you know, somewhat capable. I'm like, listen, this computer is going to fall apart if I ask it too many questions for this LLM. Like, I don't want to destroy my MacBook Air just to get some bad AI answers. Okay, so a couple other things about these.

Number one, we should point out there are some price hikes here. Everything's getting more expensive. They actually very quietly hid a pretty big price hike for the Mac Mini. All the news is that it went up by $100. But that's because they dropped the 256 gigabyte config this spring, and then they added it back. So it's actually a $300 price hike, which is, I think, you know, one of the bigger ones for Apple, I think we're expecting probably some more next week.

Yeah. There was one price cut, though. And have you guys seen this? I'm not saying it in person, Big news. This is big news. It is the Apple polishing cloth. It is now $9 instead of $19.

I have heard the legend of this cloth. It is allegedly a very good cloth. It is. It's really good. You've used it? Yeah, because it comes with like a few different expensive Apple products you can buy. It comes with it. And it's like, it's beyond microfiber.

It's nanofiber. Nano. Oh. However, it is. Is that real? No. They got to. No.

They would have tried to find it. My God. But it is very good. at polishing things that are already clean. How do you know it's polishing then? Well, that's, wouldn't that be what the polishing is? You know, getting the dirt and grime, no. You got to do you.

You got to use something else. But if you want to polish your screen, which is why it has compatibility chart, that's what it's for. But it is a good non-patented nanofiber cloth. Yeah. That's very good. Wait, hold on. I have a number of questions about Charming.

Are you really sitting on the word polish? Is it, like, definitionally important word here? Because actually to polish means to slightly, like, remove an amount of material. Like, do you know what I mean? That's fair. Yes, that's true. I don't think that that's happening on this iPhone screen. No, no.

Right? It's just wiping grease away. Grease, grease and fingerprints. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm just saying, if we're calling it a polishing clock, what we're technically doing is very finely sanding our phones. I think that would be.

Maybe that's why there's a compatibility list. These are the products that you can finally abrade in order to achieve a mirror-like shine. For the record, it only goes back to the iPhone 5. So if you're going earlier than that, your screen will be damaged. Here's what I want you to do, David. I want you to make one of those time-lapse videos. It's like polishing this phone until it's a mirror. But instead of one of those, like, cast iron pans, it's just you and the polishing clock.

And it's like every day you give it a wipe, but it's like 10,000 years long. Think about it. My big question is, why did they reduce the price by like 60? Because they had to say something on a price cut. Do you think that they actually, I mean, it did get them the goodwill that they hopefully were probably going for. But is that the reason? Do you think why they cut the price on this thing from $19 to $9? Listen, I'm just going to say, we reached out to them and said, you got to tell us what happened here.

Did the materials change? Did the product change? It's a size different? They would not comment on the record. So I don't know the truth. We're going to have to put this thing to the test is the only way to find out the truth about this. I mean, ironically, it did kind of make people just talk about it,

which takes away from as much noise about how expensive everything else got. You know, there's some goodwill. No, here's my, I mean, I'll just do my like, Tim Cook supply chain spreadsheet conspiracy theory. Yeah, let's go. So you got to imagine Tim Cook. It's his waning days as Apple CEO.

Right? And he's like, what is my legacy going to be? I got to set, I got to set this kid up for success. He doesn't know what's about to hit him. And he, he opens Excel in his Vision Pro because he uses every Apple product every day. So he puts on the Vision Pro and he's got like 40 Excel windows open in mirroring, obviously, on his Mac studio. And he's looking at where all of the margins for Apple products are. And he's like, man, I can't charge a 400% margin.

on a RAM upgrade on a MacBook anymore. The prices are through the roof. That's gone. Where am I going to reclaim this margin? So then they reprice the storage. And they bring back 256 gigs, but it's a huge price increase. And he's like, all right, I need to get some goodwill.

I'm not going to sell accessories, dongles at 200% margin anymore. Because I'm going to build in enough overhead on the storage and the RAM to make sure that further price shocks don't knock John off his game. So he's just moving the cells around. And he's like, all right, we're bringing down polishing cloth. I don't need to make the $10 extra dollars here because I'm going to make $300 extra

dollars on storage to hold this over until this market stabilizes. And he's just saying all this to himself in his very charming Southern drawl alone in his office in the Vision Pro in the dark. And this is why Apple's share prices through the roof. Is that kind of superb supply chain management? I'm so excited about our new RAM prices. That's what he's saying. Yes.

We are so excited. So that was on Tuesday. All the Macs, the polishing cloth excitement. Then Wednesday comes. Apple sends out invites for its next iPhone event. Tagline is, surprise and shine. They are going to run out of these someday. They're going to have to figure out a new approach to the taglines.

It's September 9th. It's the Wednesday after Labor Day. Notably a Wednesday, because usually they're Tuesdays. Yes. I don't think that they like press having to fly on holidays. They probably also don't like having their employees have to fly on holidays. That's probably the number one thing. So this is going to be Ternis' first event as CEO.

And normally, this is the iPhone and Apple Watch event. We're expecting the full lineups. Some things we're expecting different this year. There's supposed to be no standard iPhone 18, just the pro models. And we're supposed to get an iPhone full. I'm curious, from both of your perspectives, it's been a big year for foldable phones. Do we think they are compelling enough yet?

Right? This is Apple's putting their flag down. They're saying this is enough for mainstream audience theoretically. Do we think that foldables have gotten there? The price is going to be important. I think it's notable that they just recently announced the leasing program because they're going to be leasing a lot of these foldables. everyone from my hairdresser to my oil change guy

has been like, I love my iPhone. I really love my iPhone, but some of those foldable phones on Android are kind of cool. I might switch over to that if Apple made that. Interesting. Really? I'm serious. I am serious.

Really? You're all change guy? My old change guy. You're talking to Trump voters and diner. I mean, it's after I tell them what I do for a living. Maybe they're just trying to do and reporting. I'm just, I think. I think people are intrigued.

I don't, the price is going to be important, very important. Yeah. Every time I see anybody with like a razor, other people always ask about the razor. Because they're fun to look at. I think the question of whether you can go into an Apple store and look at something that will almost certainly cost north of $2,000. Yeah. And be compelled to say, you know what I want an iPad? I mean, maybe that is a question, right? Are they trying to make this a mainstream product?

No. No, I think the answer is no. And I think one of the reasons you don't have an iPhone 18 is that you would have no choice but to raise prices on an iPhone 18. Whereas keeping the existing base model iPhone lets you keep riding the cost curve down. Like all that tooling is long since paid for. Right? Like you don't have to pay new cost into that phone. So you can hold the price, which I think is very important for Apple right now.

And at the very high end, you're just like, is this going to work? not to be totally rude about it, but it feels more like a Vision Pro shot than a future of phone shot. Right. So they can introduce this at whatever price they want, they can see what the market will bear

and what the worst case scenario is, they attract a bunch of people to come to their stores and check this thing out. Yeah, I think that, absolutely. Again, we haven't seen it. We don't know how it's going to work. Mark German had some reporting from Apple employees who've used it,

and they're like, we love it. And it's like, what else are they going to say? Yeah. Yeah. But I do think the promise of these devices always rests in how good is it when you unfold it? And we have just seen over and over and over again that people buy these phones and then they do not unfold them. Yeah. They end up using that cover screen a lot. And so maybe the form factor shift here into that more square form factor will lead to a new usage pattern.

I don't think we've seen enough people with the Fold 8 to know if that actually happened, but that's the new form factor. form factor. And I think Apple has to answer a great question about, do you want to use an iPad Mini sometimes? And maybe that I, if you're reading this as cynicism, it's not cynicism. It's just Apple basically has to sell people on iPad Mini. Like the software experience here is going to be, and you get an iPad Mini. And whether or not Apple wants to say it or cop to it or think about it, it's going to be the thing people say, oh, it's an iPad when you open it up. And then that comes with all of that. And I'm just very curious to see how that unfolds, both on Apple's side and how they talk about it and on the consumer side and how people react to it.

I do think that's going to make for a very interesting event beyond the fact that we're getting new Apple hardware, which is not that common. It's going to be a software event in a way that the September event usually is not because we're going to get to see what they are doing to try to make the foldable experience feel like something that is worth opening your phone for. David, do you want to have a camera crash out? I can do it. I can do it. I can do two of them right now. Neilie felt me trying to move along. No, no, absolutely not. We're going to sit in this for one minute.

Because there's no telephoto. Is that you're talking about? No, the telephoto is one thing. I do think having the most expensive phone not have the best camera system is an interesting tradeoff. Although, I think at the high end, not everyone buys the pro phone because it has the best cameras. That's just like an interlinked causality. Like, that has been true for the longest time so that people think it is necessarily true. Yeah. I think people spend money on all kinds of things

that are not the best thing all the time. So maybe you're buying the form factor. Maybe you're just buying the ability to unfold your phone. You know, like 2000s rappers would always talk about how they would drop their Bentley keys in the club. Yeah. Maybe this is just the thing that I grew up.

But this was like a thing. You're flashing your keys. Like, maybe you just want to flash your phone. Great. The thing that I'm really curious about is we have spent all of this time verticalizing video. Like we have switched the aspect ratio of culture

in like very serious ways. And Apple's like, it's landscape again. And I'm very curious if you have a point of view on this. Yeah, I've heard a lot of takes about this from a lot of people. There have been people that I've talked to that have said, I really think the future is we're going to go back to horizontal. I don't think we are. I think that when you unfold this phone,

you're then going to turn it vertically and use it like, an iPad mini. And that's going to be the way that people are still used to using their device. But I don't think that there's, I mean, there's a world in which, you know, it's the content consumption device. So you watch videos in a vertical format, but people still turn their phone sideways to watch long form video. So if you're watching long, or short form video with the screen open, you're still turning your phone sideways. I don't think it's going to have a tangible effect on how. Wait, I just want to be clear. Your bet is that iPhone fold owners are going to open TikTok, unfold their device, and then turn it, and then scroll on a giant iPad format.

Maybe the first two times they ever do it, yeah. I'm very curious about that. When I say, like, we verticalize the culture. What I mean is the hottest money in Hollywood is, like, AI-generated vertical microdramas. Yeah. Because that's the format. Who don't? I'm just like, I'm dying to find out how Apple contends with the TikTokification of media.

in this event when they're like, and then you unfold the phone and you have a giant landscape display. Yeah, where you can fit two vertical video feeds. Yeah. That's the move. That's the move. That's 100% of it.

They're not even super vertical, right? It's like, because it's not the same candy bar style where you have two full screen displays on the side. It is very squared off. So, I don't know. I don't think people are going to start watching more long form content again.

I don't think that's going to happen, but. Okay, and then here's my other camera crash out question. Okay, I'm ready. Again, I just want, I can't wait to figure it out. You're going to open it, and then you're going to have, it's going to be a big viewfinder. This is the other piece of the German reporting. Yes. You got the big viewfinder, which means you are taking landscape photos with a giant viewfinder.

Yeah. That feels like we're going to get some really weird photos out of this thing, right? Like, just framing-wise, everyone's going to go from vertical default framing to landscape framing. That's one thing. But then they will have a giant viewfinder, which necessarily just changes how you would pose a photo. My bet is that nobody is going to do that. I think that everyone's going to keep the phone closed while they take their photos personally. That's that's when you get a weird like paperback book to you. I mean, these are the same people who are holding up their iPad at a concert, right? Like that's what this

that's what it boils down to. Yeah, the first moment that you get the person with the unfolded iPhone fold at a concert. It's going to be like broadcasting behind them. Yeah. iPad side screen. That's a Like, we're just waiting for that to happen. Yeah. The countdown is on as of today. If you see it, you need to send us the photos immediately. I already get annoyed when people are recording the concert and I can't see because their phones in front of me.

If it's the size of an iPad mini, I'm going to be really. Well, your view will be better because the screen will be bigger. No, the only rational thing to do is to bring a full-sized iPad and then stand in front of that person. Get to the front. Like just a full-arms race. Because doesn't the full-size iPad have the full camera array? I think it has two.

I don't think it has a telephoto camera. It's got LiDRRs. It has a LiD sensor. Yeah. For some reason. So you can map the concert and relive it in 3D. In your Vision Pro. That's your 3D scanned on a rail.

You're like, I've got a full 3D avatar of you saved on my iPad for further use. I don't need your Alicia Keys concert. I got my own. We got Alicia Keys at home. Okay. Those are my camera crash out questions. Obviously, more will be revealed, but I'm dying to know. More will be revealed.

I mean, people are going to use this thing. It's going to get away from Apple in the best way, right? Yeah. That's the nature of these things as people start using it in ways. No one can predict. And everyone's cameras, aside that I've had many, is just one of the most unpredictable changes to just how we have thought about making and taking photos in quite a while.

That's true. It's going to be fun. Very excited to find out September 9th. All right, we've got a lot more to talk about. We're going into the meta settlement when we're back. All right, we're back. So big news this week in the world of meta. Meta has had a lot of lawsuits flying its way.

One of the most important was a lawsuit from Attorney General across the United States who had sued Meta claiming that its platforms had been made addictive to teenagers and children in particular, and that meta had deceived people about the design choices they were making. Lauren Feiner and Addy Robertson were on the show earlier this week to get into the weeds on that, but I really want to talk about what this actually means for Facebook and Instagram as apps. because there are kind of two halves of this settlement. One is that meta has to pay some money. The other is that they have to make a bunch of changes to their apps.

David, can you kind of break down for me what some of those changes are? Yeah, there's quite a few of these changes. And honestly, I would love to see some of these as changes or at least options in my app, as I am not a team. One of them, two-hour daily time limit. That's cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, which can be turned off with the parents' permission. Am I my own parent?

I hope so. There's a night mode where you can default block the apps from midnight to 6 a.m. To help you sleep. School mode, so notifications can be muted from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. By the way, a lot of these exclude DMs, which is an interesting sort of idea there. I mean, obviously DMs are extremely common in all of these apps, and arguably Instagram is a DMing app that has reels. There are screen time prompts every 15 minutes to let you know you've been on the app for another 15 minutes, which is helpful. algorithmic feed control.

Teens can now choose non-alorithmic feed as their default, and parrots can adjust the default. I want all of these things. This is really like a wish list of features for people who are like, these apps are too addictive. I do want to step back for a second. So the states had gone very aggressive at meta. Neelai, my question is, you're looking at this list.

Who won this trial, right? Or not this trial. In this settlement, who comes out ahead? It depends on. who you think is getting what. Like in a very real way. This is a list of regulations that if the states had passed laws to get, they probably would lose in court.

Because a lot of these implicate the First Amendment very directly. And there's not some great body of precedent or academic research that would overcome the First Amendment problems with this. These are speech regulations. You can only speak on Facebook for two hours a day, says, the state. Straightforwardly is speech regulation. Straightforwardly implicates the First Amendment.

So if you're the state regulator and you're like, look at this big addictive platform that's hurting our teens. How do we get Mark Zuckerberg to do anything about it? You've won because they have agreed to the limitations that if they had fought you on, they might have won. And in fact, almost certainly would have won something. Right. This would have been a 10-year battle that would have gone to the Supreme Court, and we would have had 50 episodes of the verge cast about whether night mode implicates the First Amendment for teenagers. You could feel a lot of different ways about that. So in that very narrow view, the states have won here because they've accomplished a series of regulations that might help teens be less addicted to this one platform in a way that if they had literally passed a law and META had taken them to court, they might not have gotten as cleanly and easily.

as they have gotten here. I think a lot of people who spend time thinking about platform moderation and regulation are looking at this and saying, oh, META just ran away with this. Right? Like, META just hoodwinked these states because the money part of the judgment

only pays out over 10 years. 10 years. And only in 70% of it actually gets distributed over those 10 years. So that's like $10 billion over 10 years. and the last 30% only gets distributed if TikTok and YouTube agree to the exact same restrictions, which is bananas.

Because Meta has every incentive in the world to keep TikTok and YouTube from agreeing to this because they'll save money if TikTok doesn't agree to this. But they've also agreed to run an ad campaign agreeing to this. And they've given a huge sign-off on these. These are the gold standard teen safety regulations that all of the other platforms have to contend with. Whether or not you are worried about the First Amendment implications of the state's imposing speech regulations on these platforms. This is a big swirl.

If you're a parent, you are looking at this. If you have like me, your parents are senior citizens who are addicted to WhatsApp, you're like, oh, can I get this for WhatsApp? That'd be great. There's a lot of this that on its face is good and smart. It's the stuff we all want. We can see that this will disrupt the engagement cycle. This will disrupt the business model built around making the platforms more addictive, making them full of rage bait, all that stuff.

This will disrupt that. This will disrupt meta's ad revenue for young people because they're going to be using the platform less. But hidden in here is a bunch of regulations that I don't know if the states would have gotten all on their own, that Facebook is now going to impose on the other platforms. And I think that's pretty wild. So I think from that perspective, meta has kind of run away from this. They've been like hoodwinked the states into age verification at scale across the internet. They've hoodwinked the states into going to TikTok and YouTube and whoever else and snap and saying, hey, if you don't voluntarily impose these restrictions that may or may not have speech problems associated with them, we'll bring a lawsuit and we'll say to the judge, well, Facebook settled this way.

And we'll tie you up in knots for it. or you could just do age verification, whether or not you agree with it. So on that perspective, you know, all of the policy people that I pay attention to are kind of like,

what? What? Don't do that. Yeah. So, I mean, there's some real back and forth here. I think it's very funny. You mentioned it, but Meta is running these full page ads

in the New York Times and the Washington Post, egging on TikTok and YouTube to adopt these exact same rules. And I'm curious, is there any, reason either of these platforms would voluntarily agree to any of this, right? It seems to me the answer is no, which is why Facebook did not, right? Like they waited until they were sued by basically

every state in the U.S. Yeah, I don't see a reason other than garnering goodwill, but it's not enough for the amount of money that they're making from all of these things. And I'm not sure that anybody's going to buy that meta is coming from like a righteous position here. No. No. No, no, no, no, they were going to lose this. The weird thing about this is, you know, Adam Masseri was on the, on the stand a few days ago. And it was brutal. Yeah. Because he's reacting to documents that literally say, don't show this data to Adam. It will create litigation risk for us. And he would have to say things like, well, I want my team to be honest with me. But sometimes, sometimes they can't be because of this. And he's like, looking at the lawyer. Like, they would. were stuck in a very complicated trap where their own research into what the harms actually were and how to combat them was being used against them to show that they knew there were harms and they weren't doing enough. And so, you know, Zuck's response to this was we should stop doing this research. Every platform's response to this is we should stop doing this research. Yeah.

Because if you create the knowledge that something bad is happening, then you have created the liability that you didn't do enough to stop it. This is a very bad set of incentives. On top of that, you're getting, well, the way to stop it is to impose controls on how people communicate on your platform, which you as the private company can do. But maybe you think that the government should not be able to mandate. In this country, the government usually can't mandate that stuff. Other countries around the world, very different. But in this country, the First Amendment usually prohibits the government for mandating that stuff. And you end up in this place where, oh, you can concede to the government all of these things. And you can neuter your competitors who get to do those things by saying, oh, we're going to make it so every attorney general in the country who participated in this can now run around with a huge incentive, monetary billions of dollar incentive to punish Google unless they agree to these rules, to punish TikTok, unless they agree to these rules. And that is pretty, you know, it's like, it's pretty sharky.

It might be the right outcome. I don't know that answer because I am a parent and I dread the day my children get phones with social media on them. And I'm looking at two hour daily time limit and night mode and school mode and algorithmic feed control. I'm like, oh, these are the things that I want. Yeah. Right. If you don't build them into the software, I can't parent enough unless I impose draconian surveillance on my children to make them stop doing these things.

Well, it's very interesting. Like, these are, these are all features that we all believe, we think that these will make the app less addictive, right? Like, there's no auto play on video, right? That you can choose a non-alorithmic feed. We all kind of just have this belief that these things will reduce usage. I think it's probably true. But this is probably the first time we're going to find out at scale if that is true,

which is a very big but important if. right? Like if these things don't work, then it's just the time limit. It's just we're cutting you off after two hours, which is still a lot of time. And the other question becomes, as part of this here, it says that they have to do better age verification, which I feel like we've been through a hundred times. And teens are very good at getting around the age verification things. And medicans say we're doing more intense age verification systems. We're using more of the data that we have to actually track how old you are and all this stuff and your time on other apps, etc. But people are still going to get around them. Oh, but that's built into this. The age verification systems they have to use. Meta has a choice here where they can use an accredited third-party verification service. And ostensibly the idea there is to create a market for these third-party verification services. Or they can build their own.

And there are some acceptable levels of tolerance in that rule. And I think it's 10%. So they can have a 10% error rate. And that is acceptable. And I think it's different in the different age ranges. So there's a little bit of tolerance built into this. It's like the 17-year-olds, you expect more of them to be able to fake their ID. Yeah, there's like some thing in here where it's like if we detect that you're an actual child,

we need to be more tolerant of that. There's some amount of we understand the technology is not perfect and they will try to defeat it. So we will allow for some error rate. But what you're really getting, and this is true in all age verification, is you have to tell a big centralized service provider what your government name is. You have to identify yourself, even if you're an adult, because there's no way to only do it for kids. And that obviously creates a huge burden on adults who are not subject to these regulations and META just horsepowered it through. Right. And like, great. We all agree that this is a good thing. This has

been up and down to the Supreme Court. And the arguments against it are super real, which is, making adults in this country submit government mandated identification to the internet every time they want to do anything is actually a huge burden. It's actually another restriction on your speech and your liberty. And here we are. Maybe the states couldn't have gotten it if they just passed this law because of that burden. But they got it because meta caved. And there's an incentive to get YouTube and TikTok to do it too. And there's some piece of this.

Like again, when you say who won and who lost, boy does that cut in 50 different. Yeah. And it gets messier. Like the state's job is not done, right? Like, because there are, there are parts of this where the states still have to figure out where the line is. There's this very weird thing going on where meta agreed to limit the use of, what is it, extreme makeup filters, but it's not defined what that is. So there's some system where the government is going to determine what that is? A cosmetic procedure filter shall mean any digital filter or augmented reality effect that distorts sculpts redefines or idealizes the user's face in a way that cannot be

achieved without cosmetic surgery or extreme makeup techniques. So nothing goofy. Now, for the avoidance of doubt, it goes on to say. This does not include, one, fantasy character effects. And I just want to be clear. With specific definitions, filters that change a user's facial structure for the purpose of turning the user into a non-human or fictional character, e.g. an elf. animal, e.g. a dragon or puppy. Okay.

Just putting it out there. A filter that turns you into a puppy. So Memoji still work. Puppy is fine. Okay. Carved out. Makeup smoothing effects filters that smooth skin or alter appearance in ways that can be achieved by ordinary makeup techniques without altering the appearance of underlying physical facial structures or meaningfully altering skin tone.

And then lastly, parody and exaggeration effects. So to help operationalize this definition, wow. The states will provide. Meda, illustrative examples and guidance of AR effects that are cosmetic procedure filters and AR effects that are not

cosmetic procedure filters in a letter to be sent within two months. So the states, someone in some government office is going to have to sit around doing puppy filters that are okay and puppy filters that are not okay.

Put that all into a letter and send it off to meta. Are they going to have to like bring in some makeup experts and have them like apply this stuff to see what is possible? where the limits truly are. When I say that this runs right into extremely weird government speech regulations,

this is your extremely weird government speech regulation. Now, it is without question that letting a bunch of teens do extreme makeup effects and view one another in filtered ways does massive harm to self-esteem. Like, those studies have been done, they have been done about meta platforms very specifically Instagram and teen girls are just the entire movie the social reckoning

is about this thing like this is not in question about whether this is bad what to do about it at the government level is a first amendment question

yeah and so instead of running that to ground what are the limits what showing does a government need to make in order to pass this

regulation meta has just conceded yep this is probably pretty bad why don't you guys send us a bunch of puppy filter pictures that are okay

and we'll deal with it. And maybe that's fine. Like, truly, I think you can make particularly parents, parents of teen girls, will make the argument that's fine because it will go into effect now, right? The balance of harms favors them acting now. If you have other concerns about the First Amendment and the very notion of some staffer in a state attorney's general office looking at filters and deciding which ones are okay and which ones are not for kids, then you have a,

totally different set of harms to balance. And we're just going to live through this version of it for five minutes before we decide if this is okay. But it's funny to think about a dragon or a puppy filter is fine, an elf is fine, but something that makes it you look like you got a nose job might not be fine. But the actual speech implication, the speech regulation implication is gigantic. Yeah. Do you know if each individual attorney's general has to submit a different example, Or is this like all 48 attorneys generals get together? It's a group project. Yeah, did they get together?

It says the settling states. So I'm, this is just going to be the worst Zoom call of all times. Yes. I am not a cat. Yeah, everyone in all. All the lawyers finally get to just full cat filter this. Yeah. There's something here, again, and we're going to write more about it.

I think Addie and Lauren has a piece up today on the site, just about how much. we, like the people have given up in terms of speech regulation here. There's, I know Addie's fired up about it. The coverage, there's a great piece from Mike Mass to get tectored about it. The amount that META gave up here in terms of speech regulation in order to make this go away is pretty massive. And then the turn of we're going to make YouTube and TikTok do it too is also massive. So I'm glad you mentioned that because the thing that I am curious about is if TikTok and YouTube, do not do this, right?

Because it's still in question, right? The states probably have to force them into it somehow. Does meta have a big problem on their hands if YouTube has years without any of these restrictions, right? And so instead of scrolling Instagram all night, you're just going to be using YouTube shorts. That's a big question. I feel like a lot of people might just go to TikTok.

I know that when I get annoyed at myself for using an app too much, I close it, and then the next thing I know I'm using a different app. So that's probably something that will be doing. There's no worse feeling than closing TikTok and getting sucked into Instagram rails, which is just a worse TikTok. Yeah. Yeah. Meta is a winner in a lot of ways in social media advertising. Like, businesses rise and fall on meta social media advertising.

That's just the way it goes. In a way that is not true of TikTok and YouTube, TikTok is big, but ever since the blip, right? Like the change of control of Oracle, it just has not been dominant in the way that it was. YouTube shorts are not really a competitor with Reels. I don't know if you have a different opinion of that. You spend more time thinking about YouTube than I do. But they're not really a competitor to Reels in that way. That is the engine of culture, is Reels going viral.

Or the engine of like social media commerce is Reels. Like it is just, that's the thing. So anything that harms meta and allows the other two to win is going to be in favor of those two. But I just I don't see them holding off the government in this way now because the government has this tool which is meta agreed to this.

Do you want these lawsuits? We got 47 state attorneys general who got nothing to do. Cross it off the list. They're just going to file the same lawsuit and do the same discovery and drag Sundar Pichai and Neil Mohan through the same appearance on the stand where they knew it and they did it anyway.

or you can just do this stuff. Yeah, make it easy. And I think that's a really important dynamic, especially as all of these companies spend gobs of money on AI buildouts. Half of them are defense contractors or owned by Oracle or operated by Oracle, which is a defense contractor. Like, they need the government to stay out of the back here. Yeah.

So what is the government's next step here, right? Because this seems great, right? If you've got a kid in middle school, you're set. But that has only agreed to this. for 10 years. And then what happens, right? Are they just like, ah, hopefully Congress passes a law? Like, maybe Congress is functional in 10 years. So they're already, I think today there were stories about Congress needing to pass the kid online, the Kids Online Safety Act, right? Which wouldn't do all of this, but it would do some of this. Yes, I think you've got 10 years now to see if these

interventions solve a problem and to figure out how to write them into law in a way that doesn't immediately lead to first amendment lawsuits. Who knows? But that's a pretty long time. Yeah. Also, short form video only took off six years ago. So who knows what's going to be happening in 10 years? This is very true.

Well, we're all going to be holding up iPads shooting and landscape and watching the Hong Kong farm. That's only two years from now. In 10 years, it's going to be a whole other story. It's going to be the creeper glasses or something. Oh, boy. Okay. All right. We've got to take a break.

We're back. The Hype Desk is back. Brendan Carr's a dummy is back and the Lightning Round. All right. We're back and it is time for the Hyped Desk. Ashley Asquetta is here with an unsponsored hype desk. Hey, Ashley. Hi.

What have you got for us today? Well, it's the only thing, right? The only thing, truly. It's the biggest news of the year. Maybe the decade. Who needs the trials? Who needs any of that stuff? Grand Theft Auto 6 Rockstar just presented a world premiere but on Netflix, which was pretty crazy.

And everyone's talking about it. I mean, it looks amazing. I, too, am hype. I am here at the hype desk feeling very hype about it. Like, I want to go commit some crimes right now. I'm ready. I'm ready. We're going to, hold on.

Please, everyone wait until the podcast is over until the crime is. Please, I can't handle this. It climbs the whole time. Right now, passively. So, okay, they've already had, I think, two trailers out. Now they have this big Netflix showcase. What is it, like 20 to 30 minutes? What is this?

Is this an enormous trailer? It is a very extended look at the game. It's the full gameplay. This was all captured on a PlayStation 5. They walk through different sections of different quests, different things that you're going to be doing. Jason and Lucia are back. This is, it's now sort of like a duo,

protagonist situation where you're able to choose who you want to play as and then text your partner to like come help you on Quest or stay and like chill out. You can make it a romantic relationship or a platonic relationship, which is kind of interesting. Can you go back and forth between the two? Interestingly enough, Eli. For college years. It's so complicated. So yeah, there's there are times where you will apparently they like whoever you're not playing as might text you and say like oh be sure to like lock up when you come home or like or if you're out too long they might text you and if you don't respond to them or if you if you don't go back home like in a certain amount of time you might actually negatively affect your relationship with the other character

sorry are we learning about how to have a healthy relationship from grant that photo this is what is happening thank you thank you because this is what I wanted to talk about I'm watching this showcase, and I'm like, this looks amazing. I can't wait to do crimes and have fun. But also, the news came out a couple days ago that you're, you will have to exercise and, like, eat properly and stuff to, like, keep your character in shape. Like, they can get out of shape. And so I'm like, now watching this showcase. And I'm like, is Grand Theft Auto teaching us to be better as a society? I'm scared. I feel a little bit scared about this, but also. Grand The Thadthotto is going to be like, like, and by the way, men, you're

spending too much time inside alone. We need to go outside, hang with your buds. Wait, I just wanted to be clear. The big innovation in GTFI was heist. I'm trying to rewind my brain. It's like, you're going to rob a doc. Self care is the new is the new thing. And this one is like you have to be nice to your partner to figure out how to like get to the

next level. Am I going to put all the effort in to take care of myself in a video game? You're going to have to learn how to exercise, how to eat properly. You're going to have to learn how to be in a healthy relationship. Guys, is Grand Theft Auto Six going to save us? I feel, I don't know how I feel very mixed feelings about this. I'm already having like full-body chills at how a certain class of X commenter is going to call this game woke while still like stealing airplanes. Yeah, yeah.

While still stealing airplanes. My favorite part of the entire showcase was stealing cars is a little bit different. Like, it's just a little different now. And one of the things, one of the clips they showed was she's, uh, Lucy. steals a car and then this kid like Gen Z kid gets out of the trunk with his phone. He's like, what's going on? You stole my friend's car. I'm doing the trunk challenge.

What am I going to do, chat? And then like, and then they cut to a clip of him like in the trunk live streaming while you're escaping from the police. Incredible. Incredible scenes from Grand Theft Auto 6. I was very like, oh, cool, a new Grand Theft Auto but now that I have seen this showcase,

I am so, I'm so on board. but also, again, to your point, Nilai, I cannot even take care of myself in real life. And so I don't know how I'm going to do that in a game. I'm not really sure if I'm going to be motivated to do that. So I guess I'm just going to have a, you know, it'll be just like me.

It'll be a super out of shape, like, gangly person, like basically running out of gas, trying to get it to 30 feet away. I just completely collapsed because my heart explodes. You're not texting your partner back. Not texting my partner. It's very, the ADHD. is very strong. And so, yeah, it might not go well for me.

Was this like the thesis of the gameplay reveal? Or was there fun parts? Oh, there's so much. All the things you love about Randthrift Adore Bat, there's strip clubs, there's drugs, there's killing, like all the things. There's like, there's cartel wars and shooting and action and stealing cars and all the things. Sealing cars feels less edgy than having to maintain a relationship. while you're out committing crimes.

That feels high stakes. I feel like this is an existential meditation on current events, like just our strange times that we live in. It feels slightly more... Are there GLP ones? Can you avoid getting flat by doing my strip clubs all day

by doing injections? Straight up, I got to be honest with you, I wouldn't be surprised if that was a thing you could like go buy. Like, you'd go buy it off market. There's peptides in this thing. Little shortcuts. Yeah. And if not,

there should be because that seems like a thing you would be able to do in a rock star game. The mods are coming. The mods are 100% coming. He's like, oh, I'm going to open up a Jeep. Maybe that's one of the secret exclusive stores that comes with the $99 version of the game. There's like an unethical pharmacist who's like, I'll sell

you everything you need. It's crazy to me that they've been working on this game for so long and they still manage to get in things that only surfaced in the last couple of years. Really wild. Maybe that makes it less surprising, but of course that's going to extend a development time by a lot.

Yeah. I also have to give like a huge, I don't know what their optimization team looks like, but this game looks incredible on PlayStation 5. Like, so good. And we clear it was a PS5, not a PS5 pro. It didn't say PS5. It just said captured on PS5.

The every man's PlayStation. Right. So it did not say pro. So it could, but I don't know. I mean, like, are they required to say a pro? Like, I'm not sure. Probably. Actually, we should talk about the leaks really fast because this comes after

what, like two weeks of kind of daily weeks of the game. Yeah. And I feel like the conversation online has suggested, like, oh, no, the game is spoiled now. And I'm curious, after having watched this showcase, does that feel true? I'm going to say pretty wholeheartedly, no. I think that the leaks, so for those who have not been paying attention to that story, there is a person or persons going by CyberLeak who had been. said that they were upset about the fact

that there was no physical edition of the game and had this trove of clips, of gameplay clips and was releasing them and leaking them and encouraging people to invest in a crypto coin. They seemed... They were mad because there's no physical version of the game, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah, they seem to have cashed out on that.

But so there may or may not be more leaks going forward. Rockstar responded to it a few days ago, said that they were absolutely heartbroken, Yes, it's absolutely heartbreaking for any developer to have their, you know, their work leaked, especially in a form that is not the finished, polished version. So it is really terrible for them. Like, that totally sucks. But yeah, so there were leaks and these gameplay clips are coming out.

A lot of people are saying, oh, now, like, these bits of the story are spoiled. But the thing is, like, I'm of the mindset where it's just like, there's always in every Grand Theft Auto game. Like, there's so much that you could. not possibly be, unless it was just, even a full straight playthrough of like the main storyline would not be spoiling Grand Theft Auto because there's so much to do in those cities. And rock stars even saying like this is the biggest, it's humongous. The map is huge. And so for them to say that is, I mean, like, I can't even imagine how much there's going to be to do. The city

feels so alive. There's just people everywhere of all shapes and sizes. They talked about they have talked about how they created like new structures for the character models, the NPCs so they could have different shapes and sizes of people with different animations to just really make the city feel lived in. So I am, I don't know that there's any way that they could spoil the game for people. And I mean, like, even if it was just the full main storyline, I don't know that it could be spoiled because someone is always going to come up with something or find something absolutely crazy in a Grand Theft Auto game that, like, you just, you can't cover all your bases.

I do feel like, spoiler you have to exercise. Might have spoiled. Just to be clear. There's like a bigger video game industry story to tell here. Is this the game that saves video games from whatever is happening to video games? There's a lot of pressure on GTA-6 to just be a hit and make everything okay.

So yes and no, this is kind of like very similar to where we are with the movies, right? Like it took so long for the movies, sort of recover after COVID for different reasons. But we're finally now seeing this has been like the first good box office year, like back to business kind of box office year in a long time. And like pre-COVID, I think with games, this is, GTA is such an anomaly that it is absolutely impossible to make this some kind of bellwether for the industry, in my opinion, because it is so singular. And, you know, allegedly, you know, some people are saying the budget's been like a billion dollars and it's just been in development for so long and it's so different from what the industry looks like for everybody else right now, like all of the other studios that are operating,

that I just, I, obviously everyone wants, everyone in the industry is rooting for it, wants it to make a bunch of money. But I don't think any, I hope, which I think we all know, like, I don't think the message here is like lean into more Grand Theftados because really you're just sort of betting the entire farm on one thing. And so it seems like, and not every game is going to be a GTA 6. Like, no game is a GTA 6. Like, it is, again, singular. So I don't know if there's, I hope, I hope the executives don't look at it and go, I want one of those. But that is usually, that's usually what happens. Is this my Fortnite?

I think fewer games would be better. Every studio should release one game every 10 years, and we should all just get very, very hyped for it. People are going to be playing JT6 for the next 10 years, so they got time. This game is built to be played for years and years and years and years and years. And so I think, again, like, it's a singular thing. I think that you can't really extrapolate the success or failure.

Like, I don't think Grand The Thadha Thott of Six is going to be a flop by any means. But, you know, I really believe, like, you can't, you can't really come. It's so incomparable to anything else that exists. It's such a big zeitgeisty moment in video games whenever we get a new one. Yeah. I mean, publishers are moving their release dates around it to just avoid the blast radius of this game. Yeah. There's, I think, almost nothing coming out in November, with the exception of one of my favorite

things happening is Devolver is putting out, they have immediately since the release date, like the first release date got released or got announced. Devolver was like, we're releasing a game on that day. We're not afraid of Grand Theft Auto 6. We don't even know what the game is, but we're going to release a game on that day. And then when they moved it, they were like, don't be, we know you're afraid of us and we're moving our release date to your new release of date. We're doing it.

And so I love that. I think that's very funny. But yeah, everybody else just wants out. They want to get away from, it's just going to be set. People are just going to sink their whole entire holiday season into that game. For the people who don't have a PlayStation 5 and can't afford one anymore, you can buy whatever indie game devolver is putting out.

That's true. It's a good alternative. Buy a bunch of indies for $100. Like, take your $100 and buy a ton of indies. I have a very naive question because I've never played a GTA game. Do you imagine that they're going to, to micro-transaction the hell out of this game for like a long period of time, or is that not something they're doing notably? I think GTA-6, probably not. But then they're obviously like you'll have DLC, but then GTA-6 online is a different thing.

And so I think that that is, you know, I think there's value there or potential there. Did that do well for GTA-5? Or they made a ton of money on that? I mean, they made enough money to make this one, so I guess. I guess so. I just imagine, like, it's a $100 game, which is a very expensive game. And they are going to sell a lot of them. But is that a billion dollars is my question, you know. That's a great question.

My understanding is that GTA5 online has been just immensely successful. Yeah, immensely successful. Huge. Yeah, okay. People, I mean, it's still constantly and consistently being, like when you look at things like Steam D.B. Like concurrent player, people are just really consistently. playing it.

Wow. Even now, they really love it. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot more to come here. There's so much more. Sweet. Thanks so much, Ashley. I was really fun to talk to T.S.6.

Thanks. Okay, there's only one thing more exciting than Grant Theft Auto 6. And it's everyone's favorite podcast within a podcast about everyone's least favorite FCC chairman. It's time for Brendan Carr as a dummy. Suddenly. Seven, four. Oh, we're so young.

Opposite drop. The breakdown. Math, math metal. Okay. That was awesome. That was very good. Very good. It's on GTA radio.

It'd be good. Yeah. Yeah, Rockstar, if you're listening, we can hook you up. Who was that by? That theme was submitted by incidental medication, who says, the most recent themes have been, quote, a bit too fluffy. look, I'm not saying I agree. I love all of our themes on submissions equally,

including the AI ones, which Travis really disliked. But it's true that we've been missing. We've been missing some edge. And you know what? If you two submit a metal theme for Brent Carr's a dummy, I will let you critique the other themes.

Oh, that's good. Yeah. I think that's your, the bonus in addition to the theme getting played. I'm saying a lot of them have been missing drops. We've had a lot of builds and no drops. You want to get on the air?

I can help you out. All right. Brendan, this week is a short one, but an important one. It's not the usual free speech disaster. That was meta in the States earlier in the show. This one I think is more important. So there's a thing called the E-Rate program, which is very boring. Every time I've had an FCC commissioner on the show, they all want to talk about it,

even though it's the wonkiest thing. It's the system by which the federal government subsidizes Internet access for schools and libraries. And there's a thing called the Universal Service Fund. It's on your bill. You see it. So when you buy Internet Access, there is a tax on your bill for the USF. And in olden days, that tax paid to connect everyone to the phone system. And here in 2027, after quite a lot of wonkery, that tax can now be used to subsize interaccess for lower income people and in particular schools and libraries.

So, of course, Brendan hates the idea of providing Internet Access to schools and libraries. He's our guy. Like, of course he does. He's a cartoon villain of a human being. And he is trying to cut it. And so he's opened a comment period to cut it. He says things like, today the E-Rate program spends around $2.5 billion a year. And a lot of new data is pouring in about the use of screen time for students.

So we got to save the children by cutting Internet access to schools and libraries. Do you see how there's not actually a connection between those things? And again, I say this as a parent in a school district where the parents are like, maybe this Chromebook situation is out of control. Like, there's a lot of that going on. Kathy Hochel, the governor in New York, Kathy Hochel is on Decoder very soon to talk about phone bans in New York State.

Like, there is a lot of question about computers and phones in schools. I'll grant you that. But we should cut access to the library because we're worried about screen time. Is not actually the move? So the comment period is open for this. The FCC, people are leaving comments,

and the comments are cut. Coming in from people like Lisa Winston, the superintendent of Huntington Beach City School District in California. By the way, I did a great piece of reporting here. We'll link it up. But she wrote, our district's connectivity is not convenience. It is the delivery mechanism for state testing, student safety and wellness monitoring, emergency communication with families and daily instructions. We get matching funding of nearly 1.5 million over the past 10 years that has helped build and maintain that infrastructure. So if Brendan cuts it, they can't run the tests anymore.

They can't communicate with families when something bad happens because it's the internet access. It is not screen time. Brendan, he's a dummy. He's connected two dots that shouldn't be connected. We got another quote here, a comment submitted to the FCC from the director of library system in Northeast Georgia. ERIF funding enables Northeast Georgia libraries to provide broadband access that library patrons use for daily activities, including computing online learning, applying for government benefits, filing, taxes and applying for jobs. That doesn't seem like the kind of interaccess you should cut.

But right next to that are a bunch of right-wing lobbyist groups that are trying to cut the Universal Service Fund entirely. And Brendan, obviously, the author of Project 2025's Chapter on Telecom Regulation, is right there with him. So he's trying to do it from the government level. There's groups trying to do it at the sort of litigation level about whether the government has power to levy any tax whatsoever. And in the middle is not a bunch of kids.

who are addicted to Instagram at school, but literal school administrators and library administrators saying, no, we actually just need to pay our bills. Like, this is the fee that pays our bills. Anyway, the comment period is open. It's as stupid as ever when it comes to Brendan. I'm particularly outraged

when it comes to cutting inner access for disadvantaged people. That's the thing that the FCC should do. That is the great success story of what you would call the post-Janet Jackson Super Bowl Nipple FCC. Like, that was a bad point in our country's history when the FCC was such a speech regulator that they went whole hog at Viacom over that. And they actually pivoted, like, both Republican and Democratic FCC chairs after that were like, we got a little over our skis.

We're going to focus on internet access. And now we're back and we're cutting internet access and we're doing speech regulations of the view. Brendan Carr, everybody. You can submit a comment. You know the FCC's website. We'll link the form. You should, and you should say that internet access for schools and libraries is generally a good thing, and the USF is generally a good thing. Anyway, Brendan, if you want to come on the show and defend taking literally candy from babies, you can do that.

I would love to have you on the show. You can respond to any of these comments. We'll dig up some other ones. Or you can say why libraries should not have their internet access subsidized, which most people, I think, are happy to do. Anyway, that has been Brennan Carr's Demi, America's favorite podcast for the podcast. Brandon Card is a dummy. I just want to harmonize with that one, it adds. It's very good.

It's very good. It's lovely. Always good when you've angered librarians quite literally across the United States. Okay, everyone, it is now at last time for the lightning round. We've got some stories queued up, a lot of big things. I'm going to start with, I think, something pretty important, which is, that my understanding is that this week, NVIDIA saved the U.S. economy.

Right. It's time for quarterly earnings. So Jensen's got to get out there. He's got to say, NVIDIA, we're doing well. They've got to be doing pretty well at a minimum, or else I think the entire economy is going to crash because everything is vested in AI and all the AI relies on

NVIDIA and NVIDIA is circularly invested in everybody else. Oh boy, did Jensen get out there? Jensen got out there and said some big things, right? Jensen, quote, AI has reached its inflection point. It's doing useful work. Its tokens are productive and profitable. Now compute is revenue. So compute is now revenue. That's big. And that is probably why NVIDIA is making a lot of money. He then goes on to say, quote, demand is accelerating. This time last year, one lab alone was driving the build out. Today, we have a golden age of new AI labs and startups, multiple frontier labs scaling in parallel, a thriving open model ecosystem system,

and a physical AI coming online. The AI infrastructure buildout is at full steam. This is all proceeding, Nvidia projecting that their revenue is going to grow by 70% in its 2028 fiscal year. 70% in one year to where it's at right now for where it's at right now. Yes. Which is most of the U.S. economy. Yes. So, NVIDIA is doing okay. Invita is doing okay. And by that fact, the U.S. economy will continue for a little bit longer. Neelah, do these numbers seem high to you? Do you feel like the AI buildout has reached its inflection point? No, definitely not. Like, we're still trying to get data centers everywhere, including space. So that's one thing, right? Yeah. So the demand for the chips is related to, the desire to build data centers.

So of course, Nvidia can forecast demand because they have pretty good visibility into all the data centers that may not get built, including a bunch of data centers that they are funding in a series of circular deals.

This is a big problem for the U.S. economy, right? Whether or not the circular financing will collapse inward upon itself. But they have a view into how many chips they're going to sell. The more interesting thing to me about all of this is

you know, Jensen is on CNBC talking about the fact that compute is an asset class, which means you can invest in it and you can see it grow and fall and it's fungible. And like the chips have this like really long life that allows compute, not the chips themselves, but compute a derivative of chips existing in data centers to be an asset that you can, an asset class that you can invest in. Liz has written all about this. But there's something that's happening here where we're seeing an earnings report. based on like a very fundamental transaction.

You need chips. NVIDIA sells you chips. Money changes hands into sleight of hand that compute is now revenue, that the circular financing deals will all pay off in the end, that NVIDIA is an investor in the data centers who are raising debt based on the value of the chips they're buying from NVIDIA with NVIDIA's money. That's all going to pay off in the end. I don't think we see any of that.

in these earnings. Do you know what I mean? I have to tell you, I was reading the Wall Street Journal's write-up of this, and people are having just like literally emotional reactions to Nvidia's earnings. The Wall Street Journal frames it as providing much-needed relief to investors and lifting investors' spirits, relieving their anxieties about the AI boom. And I'm just like, there's a little too much built around Nvidia's success here. And Invidia has made sure it is that way. Right.

The question for all of this. Jensen says it, the tokens are productive and profitable. This is Jensen's big claim. This is the heart of Nvidia's earnings. The tokens are profitable. So if you buy a Nvidia GPU and you spend the money to build a data center around it, and then you buy the energy needed to turn it on, and all of the build out associate with that,

and you spend a dollar on that, you get more than a dollar's worth out. Right? The token, generating the token is now profitable. That is actually unclear. There is some reporting out of Anthropic that they can run inference profitably, but Anthropic isn't public yet. And they also just said that their total intrustable market is $30 trillion, which is bananas. That's bigger than SpaceX said in its IPO. there's not a lot of reporting out of OpenAI about whether its tokens are profitable. There are claims. Now, there are claims up and down that inference can and will be profitable for these companies

to generate the tokens. We just don't have the actual numbers. We just don't. They're not public companies and they have not had any call to share these numbers with us. They might, and there is reporting this week. Alex Heath actually wrote a time cover story about OpenAI. And in that, he said Sarah Frye, the CFO, is running mock public companies. any drills where they pretend to have earnings so they can be ready for the IPO.

So like, it's coming, the transparency is coming. But the claim here from Nvidia is the tokens are profitable, which means if you build a data center and you run them, then you will make a profit running the data center on invidiochips. If that's true, then it's all going to be fine. If that's not true, and I'm just saying, we don't know, then a lot of things are going to come to an end pretty quickly. Then next to that is whether actually putting AI in your workplace or do a,

a big AI digital transformation with the help of your friendly local private equity or consulting firm will actually make your business more profitable. And no one knows the answer to that question. Like truly no one knows to answer that question because we've only just begun. So I, like I said, they're selling a lot of chips. The second and third order of whether those chips are profitable is not in focus yet, regardless of what Jensen's saying here. The other big Nvidia news this week that I want to just mention briefly is there is a rumor It's not confirmed.

It's a rumor that they might buy Hugging Face for $13 billion, which is kind of the hub for open source AI models. This would be a very big deal, very big hedge for them to make sure that the entire open source AI ecosystem

is optimized for Nvidia chips. So you can see the logic there. This is not confirmed yet. Who knows? Perhaps by the time the show airs it will be. But that is the next thing that has sent people into a tizzy. 13 billion is not a lot of dollars for NVIDIA.

Also, notably the company that got autonomously hacked by OpenAI. And I think we've been waiting for the day in which a company gets autonomously hacked by one of these companies and is not happy about it. Hugging face was fine. Nvidia will probably be mostly okay with it because they're all sort of circularly financing each other. The moment when it's a company that's not within that ring of trust, it might be. be a... Well, it's very funny because they're like,

we did get autonomously hacked, but look at how good the AI is. Right? Like, look how crazy this was. It shows it's working, huh? Yeah. It was very notable that when that hack happened, everyone came out and said,

this is awesome. Because it's not going to be awesome in the future. Yeah. It's going to be a little less awesome. We have breaking news here. There's an open letter signed by over 100 companies, including opening at Anthropic and Google, saying that we need a global surge in cyber defense

and that AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated so we need to put cyber-capable AI in the hands of defenders, starting with teams protecting essential services. So we need to use mythos. We need more AI to protect us from the AI that we forgot to control.

Cool. I look forward to them all taking action on that open letter immediately. Immediately. By the way, there's also reporting on just the details of the hugging face hacked have been reported now. They released their internal report.

And boy, is it worse than people thought. Right? A bunch of agents tonight at Open AI started a message board and, like, talk to each other and send each other messages and how I break out. It's very good stuff.

If you like, like, cyberpunk movies about the world ending. Heist film. Sort of a heist. But, you know, one of the reasons Nvidia might want to buy, Aogging face,

is to more closely align it with Open AI, which is they are all tied up with in different ways. And maybe keep anyone from talking about this stuff too much. Because this is how you get the regulation. Right. Okay.

David, do you have anything for us that is not going to destroy the world? Well, I was going to make it about this Pokemon Sleep Fitbit Air. Wait, Pokemon Sleep Fitbit Air is an incredible series of words. Collaborate of the century. I will talk about it, I guess. Okay, fine.

So it makes sense to me that Nintendo would make a Pokemon Fitbit Air, Sure, I guess. All these companies want to address younger and younger markets. Obviously, that's what the Chromebook was for to get it into the hands of children and schools, so they eventually use more Google products and services. It's especially easy to get into the hands of children when you can go to the parents and say, we're going to gamify your child's sleep to make sure they're on their phone less, and they are spending more time sleeping.

For those that don't know, Pokemon's sleep, I think a lot of people don't know, to be clear. Pokemon Sleep is an app on your phone where the more you sleep and the better you sleep, you befriend and level up different Pokemon.

So it is an app that is made to not be used because you're sleeping and then when you wake up you get to play with their Pokemon. And this has nothing to do with Pokemon Go. No.

Okay. No. And there's a different game where you carry things around and that helps you get Pokemon. Carry things around? Or you have to wear this thing.

Oh, no. You just sleep. You just sleep. You just sleep. Sleep. You just sleep. You just sleep and it gives you points. And it's very simple, right?

Okay. For some reason, Nintendo has released a Pokemon sleep edition, which as Marquez pointed out our podcast yesterday, it's a more blue like Steph Curry Fitbit Air than the official Steph Curry one is because it's actually like the, what is the team, the Oakland? That's in the wrong guy. I'm so sorry. What is the basketball team of Steph Curry is on? The Warriors?

Did you say, Oak? Okay. I don't know. Look, I'm not a sports guy. That was such a confusing question. I couldn't get out Warriors because I was like, is this a trick question? Is this a trick question? No.

What team is stuff? Okay, good. So this is a special edition, Pokemon Sleep. It costs $12999 instead of $99.99. So it's more expensive. It is just blue, except for the fact that on the very bottom, there's a little sleeping Pikachu. I like the sleeping Pikachu.

I will give it that. But it does say the word mark Pokemon Sleep, which I do. don't think it's great for a thing you wear all the time. Pokemon sleep. Every time you say it, it sounds like a command. Like you were ordering a Pokemon to go to sleep. A Pokemon. Sleep. Or like you push the band on someone's face and they immediately go down. Yeah. Yeah. The way that I can see this is Google wanting to address the younger market and get them into the health fitness tech stuff because Fitbit has released like kids' editions of its Fitbits. Right?

Now there's a kids edition. If I look, Pokemon is not only for kids, but it's targeted. The kids can also access the Fitbit AI agent that tells them about their sleeping. If you have the pro. How to get a better Snorlax level. Yeah. Well, because your sleep score has been bad. It is strange.

In the press release they sent me, it has the little, like, fine print in the bottom. And it says the Fitbit Air is for kids 13 and older. And I'm like, well, there's a little bit of a mismatch here. Because I think that most parents are going to be buying the Pokemon sleep model of a Fitbit Air for younger than 13. but I don't know. This both does not make a lot of sense to me, but also I think it looks nice. It looks, look, the material, I have the regular Fitbit Air, I have the blue one. The material of this one is nicer.

It is nicer. It is very deep blue. It's an extra 20 bucks. It better be. It's an extra 30 bucks. Yeah, which is 30%. Okay. I didn't want to talk about that because I just quickly want to talk about the fact that Panic,

which is another little game company, game publisher, they are passing on the Playdate tariff refunds to customers. So for those they don't remember, the government charged in the legal tariff, people that were importing things that were not made in America, the Supreme Court struck that down, and the government had to pay these companies the refunds back. And most of these companies did nothing with that. They just kept the money, they pocketed the money. Some of them kept the prices the same as the adjusted prices were. Everything's gotten worse. But this week, Panic sent out an email to customers that had bought things. like the play date during that period

and refunded them the difference that they charged for the tariff fee. That's great. Which I just think is good. Like, we need more companies doing this. We need to shout out more companies that are doing these good things. Yeah, that's lovely.

I just wanted to note that. That's really great. It's good. All right, I love that. Okay, Nilai, close us out. I'm ending with camera drama. Of the highest order. The only way it could happen.

You're just trapped in between us. I'm sorry. This is very good. All right, bring it to us. Bring it to us. So Waymo this week put out a blog post called 10 AI lessons from driving 200 plus million fully Autano smiles. Now, you would think this is just your normal blog post, right? You're celebrating a milestone where Waymo.

There's a cute little van now. People love a Waymo, especially when they all honk at each other in a circle, disrupting the operations of cities late at night. But in this blog post, Waymo takes an incredibly hard shot. Tesla. So Shrikant Thirou Malai, who's the VP of onboard software, doesn't say Elon Musk or Tesla directly in this post, but he writes, cameras are incredible, but they aren't enough. For years, there has been a debate of whether cameras alone could solve full autonomy.

Now, after more than 200 million real world miles, the data is clear. Say fully autonomous operations at scale require more. That what they mean is LIDAR and Radar, which Waymos obviously have. they create a rich, redundant worldview that no single sensor can replicate. This is incredible shots at Tesla, which is, I think, a few weeks away from the cybercab launch event, to which only, like, very friendly YouTubers have been invited. But if you will recall, Elon, years and years ago, when they took LiDAR off of Teslas, said he thought LiDar was a local maximum and that Tesla would solve full self-driving with cameras alone. And so now they're about to launch the cybercab. and Waymo, which is usually not in the market for drama in any way, shape, or form,

especially because they're also part of Google, which is rarely in the market for drama, is just out here with a blog post being like, yeah, your shit sucks. Like, as direct as they can be. After 200 million real world miles, the data is clear, safe, fully autonomous operations at scale require more than cameras. There's only one company they're talking about in Cessla, which is minutes away from the cyber. had launched. I think this is pretty wild stuff. Now, we're going to have a much Tesla fans point out that Tesla's do have FSD. It is mostly camera-based. Elon has proven to be more right than wrong about this thing over time. But FSD has a lot of problems, right? The coach of the 49ers just got himself

hurt because he was relying on FSD. And even said, I knew better and a car still crashed. Like, that's the level of FSD problems that we have in this country now. Famous people who can afford drivers like, oh, the robot will do it, and the car crashes, and they are, like, not present for the start of the football season. Like, that's where we are with FST. Some of it is cameras, some of the software, some of it is Tesla's amount of risk. But it's funny that the iPad has light our sensors and Tesla's drone. Is this a regulatory play?

Like, are they trying to get regulators to be like only safe robotaxies with LIDAR backup? are allowed and try to edge it Tesla out? I mean, I think there's a little bit of that. I think there's a little bit of just it is not yet settled how this technology should actually work, right? We're still in a race. Like, Waymos are great. There's lots of Waymos.

You can get them in certain cities in the country. They are still not great at snow. There are lots of parts of, in San Francisco, if you want to get from Mountain View to the airport, which is the last time I tried to take a Waymo, it's like, yeah, we, We can't do that. We're not going to do that. And so that's regulatory, some that's technical, some of that is mapping, some of that is safety. Like, there's a lot of that going on. And then obviously, the cyber cab launch is going to attract a lot of attention. I'm confident Tesla is going to say they can do it with cameras alone because they're going to get that question. And in Tesla's last earnings call, they're not going to get that question. Well, not from nothing. From the people they invite. But it's, it will be present because they keep talking about it. So in their last earnings call, that Tesla had a bank. AI said historically the so-called experts have always claimed that you need LIDARs, radars, H-D maps,

and the entire kitchen sink to drive safely. We show that's not true. You can have safe control and affordable autonomy with just cameras. This should be a huge validation of Tesla's entire AI approach. So these companies are fighting, right? The technical approach is not settled. And somewhere in there is safety. And whether or not you trust the car to actually drive itself, even if the camera is got included or the LIDAR doesn't work,

or whatever things can happen that can go wrong with a salt driving car. but most of the rest of the industry has added LIDAR for all kinds of very obvious reason, including the fact that LIDAR sensors are getting cheaper over time. Yes, this feels like an obvious trajectory. Like, yes, they were expensive early on. Yeah. I do not think that they are groundbreakingly expensive anymore, right?

When it comes to something as important as safety, it feels like an obvious thing to go back on, but yes, it will be very interesting to see what happens after the cyber cab officially rolls out, I'm here for this drama. I want there to be more prodding at these safety records. If Apple can afford to put a lighter sensor in the iPad Pro, which nobody uses.

And then decide to save money on the polishing cloth? Yes. I think that they're probably not that expensive anymore. Tesla is in a place where they have been so vocal about not using LiDR for so long. It's their whole personality. Yeah, it's like they got to give them. up on a core piece of themselves. And if they really give up on it, all of these cars that they

have advertised as FSD capable will not be FST capable. And that will put them in a world of pain, which there already were because they were being really sketchy about which cars were going to be FST capable. Right. It was like hardware three or something. They had promised, but now it's not. And that's like, it's going to be like lawsuit city if they ever go back on this and require a ladder. So they're, they've really boxed themselves in. Yeah. Okay, Nealai, you teased it a little bit earlier, but what do we have coming up on Dakota? Dakota next week is going to be great.

It's going to be Governor Kathy Hokel. We have a lot to talk about there. And then there's one I can't say that was just, I nerded out for an hour today. It was really fun. I'm very excited for both of these. I think it's going to be a fun week on Dakota. Cool. That is it for the Verge cast.

Remember to subscribe to the Verge for ad-free episodes of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters and a whole lot more. We love to hear from you. You can email us, Vergecast at the verge.com. call the hotline 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larcuck. We'll see you next week.

Eli? Back and roll.