The Vergecast - The speech police came for Colbert

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Once again, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and his bad ideas about free speech have rankled a late night host. And once again, Nilay and David talk through what the equal-time rule actually means, why organizations keep caving, and why it's apparently up to people like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel to fight back. After that, the hosts discuss the facial recognition feature Meta hopes to launch for its smart glasses, plus the gadgets we're likely to see Apple launch in the couple of weeks. In the lightning round, we get some bleak news on Tesla's self-driving skills, a robovac security disaster, and the future of Warner Bros. Further reading: Why CBS Didn't Broadcast Stephen Colbert's Interview With James Talarico Stephen Colbert says CBS banned him from airing this James Talarico interview  Why Everyone's Talking About Stephen Colbert, CBS, The FCC And James Talarico Meta reportedly wants to add face recognition to smart glasses while privacy advocates are distracted From the NYT: Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses Apple’s doing something on March 4th  Apple is reportedly planning to launch AI-powered glasses, a pendant, and AirPods  Apple starts testing end-to-end encrypted RCS messages on iPhone  Apple’s Podcasts app will let you ‘seamlessly’ switch between audio and video shows  Looks like we can expect more AI from the Galaxy S26 camera. | The Verge Google announces dates for I/O 2026  Western Digital says it’s “pretty much soldout” for 2026.  Valve’s Steam Deck OLED will be ‘intermittently’ out of stock because of the RAM crisis  Switch 2 pricing and next PlayStation release could be impacted by memory shortage  Tesla’s robotaxis have crashed 14 times in 9 months.  Tesla won’t use the term ‘Autopilot’ in California anymore Why are Epstein’s emails full of equals signs? 4chan’s creator says ‘Epstein had nothing to do’ with creating infamous far-right board /pol/ DJI’s first robovac is an autonomous cleaning drone you can’t trust The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor, this man remotely accessed thousands of them DJI says yes, it will fix its other Romo robovac security hole within weeks Samsung ad confirms rumors of a useful S26 ‘privacy display’  Warner Bros. Discovery gives Paramount one week to present its ‘best and final’ offer  WordPress’ new AI assistant will let users edit their sites with prompts  Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of using your TV show to promote your YouTube channel. I'm your friend David Pierce.

You have to tell us here. Hey, buddy. I keep saying it. No one's watching the TV shows, David. No, it really is. It's like we talked for so long about like social media as like a marketing platform for other stuff. Other stuff broadcast television is now a marketing platform for your YouTube channel.

this is what we've come to. Yeah, you're just selling ads at really high rates to local real estate agents, healthcare firms. That's all it's there for. Yeah, this is what we do. So we have a lot of news to cover. There's a bunch of Apple stuff coming. We have new pixels.

We have information about what's coming from Samsung. We're like ramping up into gadget season again. There's also some AI stuff going on. The word autopilot is being debated. We're going to talk about that. But we have, every once in a while, our boy, Brendan breaks containment. And it is time.

We have, we just have to do this at the top, Ney. It's just time. We are going to begin today's show with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. We should say we're recording this on Wednesday morning, which is earlier than we normally record because, Neelai, I think you have to go do, like,

little kid winter break things. We're vacation. It's winter break. Yeah. You got to let the kids run free. Yeah. So we're recording this early. And our other option was to have you, like,

call in with a peanut calada. again. But we're here. This story will keep changing. We're recording this on Wednesday. To be clear, I was going to do the peanut colada call in, but Brendan ruined it. This is, yeah. Thanks, Brendan. With new theme music submitted by Christopher Sullivan, who described this, which I have not heard and I'm deeply terrified by, as, quote, a free jazz slash brain rot remix. Good IDK, unique. Yes. Here we go. All right, we're back. Okay, so today I'm doing something a bit different. Is it time? Is it time? No. Do we have, Neil, is it time?

He did it. He was particularly done this week. Is it time? Is it time? It is time now. It's time once again. For America's favorite podcasts or the podcasts. It's so delicious.

Brennan Carr's a dummy. Brennan Carr is a dummy. Renan car is a dummy. Eli, what do you do? He's such a dummy. That's great. Doot-to-do. Beautiful.

Okay, I don't want anyone to submit theme songs. The party horns really got me that one. The do-to-do is nice, though. I think anyone who does submit should use the Nilai d-to-do as often as possible. That was everything I wanted it to be. It was ominous. It was scary. It was oddly pornographic.

One more can you ask for? Thank you very much. That was lovely. Christopher, thank you. Let me just very briefly set up where we're going here. And then, Nilai, I'm just going to, I'm going to leave for a while and you can just yell. So the other night, Stephen Colbert comes on his show and says that he had originally planned to interview James Talleyco, a Texas Senate candidate for his show. And then goes into a long explanation about why that's not going to happen, which starts with an explanation of our buddy, Brendan Carr, who has just made himself a character on late night television shows.

So Colbert explains this out. It then then posts James Talarico's interview on the late show YouTube channel. that I'm looking at it this morning. We're recording this on Wednesday. That video now has 5 million views, which is substantially more than the number of people who watch Stephen Colbert's show. This becomes a whole thing. We can walk through the chronology of this.

But starting at the very beginning here, Nilai, this is like exactly the stuff you have been talking about on this show for months, once again just brought to the biggest possible stage, right? Yeah. Yeah. Brendan Carr cannot help but make himself the speech police of American television. It's what he wants. And there's this concept in First Amendment law called the chilling effect where you don't even do the enforcement.

You don't even, you know, arrest the people for the illegal speech. You just talk about it so much that the speech stops. You chilled the speech. You make it go away. This is the chilling effect in action. Brendan has been talking about the equal time rule, which basically, Like the FCC hasn't enforced in years and years and years because, again, I will remind everyone that people do not watch broadcast television. They watch stuff on their phones over the internet and the FCC cannot say what happens on the internet in that way.

They can only talk about what happens on broadcast television and broadcast radio. So the FCC has just not been enforcing this rule forever. But Brendan, because he pulled it off the shelf and started making noise about late night talk show hosts interviewing Democrats, news programs like The View, interviewing Democrats. and needing to provide equal time to conservatives because of the horrible bias in American media has chilled the speech of Stephen Colbert. He has made it so Stephen Colbert, on his own program, cannot air the interview because CBS's lawyers are so worried about triggering an equal time review or having to comply with an equal time rule that hasn't been enforced in forever in a way that they don't understand how to do.

Right. Like, this is a real problem. Like, even if you say, we're going to have Tala Rico on. and we'll provide equal time to the other candidates, it is unclear what that compliance would look like because Brendan hasn't said what that compliance would look like. And we all know that Brendan's version of compliance is just whatever he wants, whenever he wants it.

Right. So even if you pull the equal time rule off the shelf and you say, okay, on broadcast television, all the candidates in a given race get equal time, if you don't know how to follow the rule and at every turn you could still be punished by a capricious idiot, you're definitely just not going to do anything

that might trigger the rule. Your speech will be chilled. And that is 100% what Colbert is saying. He's saying the lawyers at CBS showed up and said, don't do this. The cost of doing this will be too high. The cost of your speech will be too high. So instead do something else. And I think if you're Stephen Colbert and you've been on television for as long as

Stephen Colbert has been on television, this is rightfully maddening, right? This is infuriating behavior on behalf of a network, which is owned by billionaires who are so rich they can do whatever they want. And obvious, and I think he points this out, it's obvious that what they're trying to do is Curry political favor of the Trump administration so that they can buy Warner Brothers.

Yeah, he says at the end, which I very enjoy, he goes, the audience is booing. And he goes, but I just want to assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is, this decision is for purely financial reasons, which I just enjoyed very much. But the timeline here, I think, basically starts with this January 21st letter that we've talked about now like a bunch like one letter from the FCC

should not come up this often on the verge cast and yet here we are um in which brendingar basically says he's thinking about doing away with the exception to the equal time rule that has been made for talk shows for forever he has not gotten rid of it he has not begun the process to get rid of it he's just sort of announced out loud that he's thinking about getting rid of it uh and this is this is a thing that Colbert brings up over and over and over again. Let me just play one of the clips. This is from the first night when he explains what's going on. Let me just hear.

Here's how he explains to, again, this is the broadcast TV audience. This is on his show why they're not going to see the James Salterico interview. Now, as I said at this point, he's just released a letter that says he's thinking about doing away with the exception for late night. He hasn't done away with it yet. But my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had. So that's the thing, right, that CBS takes this letter that is binding in no way as just sort of a letter, which Brennan Carr clearly intended to be, you know. Intended to chill speech, was it?

Right. And CBS says, great, done, let's chill some speech. Colbert takes exception to this, puts all of this stuff on the show. And this becomes, like, the story kind of on Tuesday was this big back and forth, right? That the, the Tala Rico interview blows up because tons of people are watching it, because all of a sudden it's news that it's out there on YouTube. Colbert is, you know, fighting against the chilling of speech. And then it takes this other turn.

Well, first, can I say something. One, in the history of free speech controversies, saying you can't watch something is the best way to get people to watch it. Oh, it's spectacular. Yeah. And Colbert knows this. Like, this is a deliberate play. Yeah.

Colbert absolutely knows this. The producers at Late Night absolutely know this. CBS knows this. Right. Because their show is pre-taped. All of that that we saw sat in a can for several hours. Like, everyone knew what would happen here. I've been thinking about that a lot that, like, for six hours, this thing was just recorded and everyone was fine with it.

Everyone just sat and had to wait. Our friend Mike Masnick, who runs TechDirk, named this. It's called the Streisand effect, where you try to get something to go away. And instead you draw more attention to it. It's named after Barbara Streisand. He tried to get something taken on the Internet. It's like a famous term. And this is the Streisand.

in effect. Colbert said, CBS doesn't want you to watch this. Everyone watched it. This is, by the way, the opposite of what Brendan Carr would want. He just can't regulate YouTube. I suspect he's going to try and find some way. There's a reason that last week we were talking at the Federal Trade Commission going after Apple News. This government, this administration, is going after every source of information and trying to chill speech.

That is the thing that they were organized around doing. Brendan just has this particular power over broadcast spectrum, and he's using it. to chill speech. The amazing thing about this is that if you were CBS and you have a lease to the broadcast spectrum, you have a great argument here. The law is clear. I'm looking at it. It's 47 United States Code 315.

And it just says bona fide newscast, bona fide news interviews, bona fide documentaries, if the candidate's appearance is incidental to the subject on-the-spot coverage of bona fide news events, shall not be deemed to be used of a broadcasting station. So it's not the longstanding exemption. It's written in the law. The Congress of the United States wrote a law saying these are the exceptions. And for 20 years, more than 20 years, the FCC has said talk shows are news. Like this thing, it's too hard to parse out what is and isn't news here that talk shows are news.

And there's a long list of cases where they went back and forth. This wasn't always the case. And they made this exemption over the past 20 years because the available media got so vast. that parsing out what was and wasn't news on a talk show became a bad use of resources. Like, it was obviously stupid to say, okay, well, this candidate appeared on YouTube and this candidate appeared on Fox News, which was just cable. And this candidate appeared on local origination public access cable, which falls under this rule of a facility. And none of this makes sense. It's like a bad use of time.

And so for 20 years, more than 20 years, the FCC. he has said this is fine talk shows are news uh harold felt who is a lawyer at public knowledge has a great blog post about this we'll link it it's all in detail like the long bloody history of this exemption but the point is in the statute in the law that the congress passed news is an exception to the equal timer and you just have to read talk shows as to being used and instead and i and i think cbs could have fought it i think they could have said you're this one letter does not undo all of this precedent if you want to change this rule brendon you have to do what every other FCC is had to do whenever they wanted to change a rule, you've had to put out a notice of proposed

rulemaking and go through their process and take public comment. We cover this all the time. The FCC wants to make it easier for you to get cheaper, faster broadband. This is like a 20-year fight in a notice of proposed rulemaking. Yeah. Brendan Carr wants to chill speech on CBS by saying he might reinterpret a rule. Everyone caves right away. That is just a pure moral failure on the part of CBS. Yep. Which CBS, I would say, tries to fight. back on while thus immediately doubling down on the thing. So the thing that comes out is, right, all of this happens on Monday night and then on Tuesday, CBS puts out this statement to lots of different, this becomes like the official CBS statement. And actually, Colbert ends up reading

it in a delightful way that we'll get to. But let me just play you the clip of Colbert reading this statement that was like CBS's go-to statement. Without ever talking to me, the corporation put out this press release, this statement. Now, this is a surprisingly small piece of paper considering how many butts it's trying to cover. In it, they say, The Late Show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Representative James Telerico.

The show has provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal time rule for two other candidates, including Representative Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled. The Lay Show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on-air promotion on the broadcast rather than potentially providing the equal time options. So that's the statement.

This becomes the official CBS response to this whole thing, which is Colbert is saying the lawyer said in no uncertain terms, you can't put James Taylorico on the TV, you can't show his picture, you can't use his voice. Colbert makes a meal out of this. And CBS is like, no, this isn't true. All we did was provide legal guidance and legal options. So, Neely, you had kind of a, you had a delightful experience with this particular statement over the course of the last couple of days. Well, let me just say so. We published a lot of things. And I love our lawyers here. They're very good. We have very good media lawyers. The lawyers saying they're providing guidance while saying no is the art of being a media lawyer. They're always just providing guidance. That's what media lawyers do.

They're always like, here's what you can and can't do, and here's the amount of risk. And they're very good at making sure that you were aware that the amount of risk is so high that you should shut up. That's what they do. That's like, as editor-in-chief, that is what my conversation with our lawyers looks like all the time. Yes, there's a risk that that alligator will bite you if you put your head in its mouth. It's very much like parenting a toddler. I'm like, can I put my finger in the album? They're like, you can.

again. Anyhow, so I read this back and forth. I'm like, I know what the lawyers thought they were doing. Like, they're lawyers. They were like, the risk will be so high. And the late show correctly read that as we're saying no. Right. Fine.

And maybe there's some ambiguity there. Colbert also alluded at one point to the fact that the lawyers vet all of his scripts because, of course they do, because that's how it's broadcast television. Like, of course they do. But that at one point, he had to go backstage between his, His monologue and his explanation of why the Tilariko interview wasn't going to air to talk to the lawyers again, which he said it never happened. Like, lawyers standing backstage waiting for the commercial break is lawyers saying no. Right?

Yeah. That's all it is. That's some like Soviet stuff, right? The government minder is standing backstage to tell the talk show host what the government would like them to say. That's bad. Okay. So let me just make this about the verge for one second. Yes, please.

So this is CBS's statement, right? So we're covering the story. We reach out to CBS. We're like, can you send us the statement? They sent us the statement. And we have a really strict background policy. We do not let PR people be on background these. So we have to put your names on things.

And the reason for this is just a long history. We linked to the background policy, but a long history of companies putting the burden of trust on us, right? So making it so that if you read their statement, you have to trust the verge for some reason. And all the companies used to do this to us all the time. They still do it to everybody all the time. And we just got tired of it.

And we said, no, you got to put your name on it. You want your statement in our story. You need to put your name on it. And that way, the trust is on you. We're not some amorphous corporation, but you, a person have to stand by the thing you're saying. And if you look at our site, everyone plays ball. Everyone understands exactly why we do this. And when we push back, it's always like one little turn of pushback.

And then everyone's like, fine, here's a name. And we've done this for years now. This policy is five years old. And it works. It's fine. So everybody has a statement on background, no name. Here's what CBS says. We reach out and say, look, our policy is you got to put a name on it.

Phil Gonzalez, the SVP of Coms at CBS, writes back to us and says, no, respectfully, you don't need to use the statement. We will keep that in mind next time the Verge asks us to reply. They don't even want to put their name on this cowardly statement. And like, we just, I'm burning him now. We burned him in print because we insist that you put your names on a statement. if you're going to say this stuff. If it is your job to speak publicly on behalf of your company, we require that you put your name on it.

Anyway, the reason that you pay us money for the subscription is so that we can be brats like this. You're buying the ethics policy. I keep saying it. This to me is if you are going to cave to the government, if you're going to cave to pressure from Brendan Carr, you got to put your name on it. You have to be accountable for that. And I know exactly why Phil Gonzalez did not want to be accountable for the statement

because it's just weasel stuff. And at some point, you're going to run into us, and we're going to say, nope, if you want to be a weasel, you've got to put your name on it. Sorry, Phil. Yeah. So this all leads to this second round with Colbert, who goes on his show on Tuesday night

and does another screed against Brendan Carr and the equal time rule and all of this nonsense. And at one point, so he's holding this press release that CBS sent out with that statement, and he winds up crumpling it up and picking it. it up with a with a doggy poop bag, which I really liked as an image. But the thing I've been thinking about through all of this is like, on the one hand, Brendan Carr has inserted himself into the media and that is clearly a thing that he wants, right?

Like, this is a game he keeps playing. It must be getting him what he wants out of this. Like you would think if the whole thing with Jimmy Kimmel, which was another time that the whole world sort of immediately turned on the free speech police was not what Brendan Carr wanted. He would have gone about things differently, but he continues to do this. And so what I've been trying to figure out through all of this is like, is Brendan Carr winning or losing this fight?

In his own head, is he winning or losing this fight? Oh, in his head, he's winning. He's absolutely winning. He is the speech police in America. If you are a major corporation in the business of distributing speech, and Brendan doesn't like it, he's either going to dig up some 500-year-old authority that the FCC hasn't used to insist that he has a power to regular speech.

He's going to sign on to some nonsensical FTC interpretation of your terms and service and say that Apple News is biased and that's illegal in some way. He's going to use the phrase illegal speech, which is a thing that he uses. He's turned the FCC into a weapon against free expression. And he's done it at every level of that organization. And that is a tragedy. You know, Colbert mentioned Nipplegate. That was on CBS, right?

When Justin Timberlake pulled down Janet Jackson's top at the Super Bowl. Yeah. But the FCC went into overdrive. This was like, we're going to sue Viacom. We're going to punish. That case went on for years. It eventually came to nothing. And out of that, the chairs of the FCC, Republican and Democrat alike, said,

we have to get out of the business of policing speech. The internet exists. These companies are in competition with a universe of content that we cannot regulate, putting regulatory burdens on them is a mess. Our job is to connect Americans. Democrats, Republicans alike, running the FCC, I've known most of them. We've covered them deeply for years. What they have all said is the FCC has to get out of the speech business and into the connectivity business.

I have had meaningful disagreements with a lot of the people who have run the FCC about what it means to be in a connectivity business and how to achieve those goals and all. that. But, like, I've never thought to myself the FCC should do something other than connect Americans to broadband and figure out how to make broadband cheaper and more accessible. Brendan has thrown all of that aside and run headlong back into being the speech police. It's what he wants. So if he asks me if he's winning or losing. In his head, he is winning. I mean, we as American people are losing. And I think over the medium term, not even the long term, over the medium term, I think he will lose. I think most Americans, Americans understand that you should not have government minders standing backstage at a talk show,

telling the host what they can and cannot say. That is just an affront to everything people on both sides believe. And if you showed up on any right-wing YouTube talk show and said the government is going to have a real interest in what you're saying, they would throw you out of the room, the idea that your distribution should meaningfully change that dynamic is so foreign to most people. If you went to some Gen Alpha kid and said, look, there's this thing called a TV antenna. And if you use that, the government gets to tell you what you can and can't say. They would, I mean, I just know.

They would look at you like you were a space alien. Yeah. And so if that's what you can regulate, you can regulate the broadcast airwaves, it's only a jump before you say, you know what? Google is a national utility. We should regulate that too. It's only a small jump before I say, look, the entire internet runs on people's phones, which come from AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile, that's broadcast spectrum.

We have a real interest in making sure AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, only broadcasts the stuff that is good for America. You can see it coming. You can see where it will come from. You can see the slippery slope. And it's great that Stephen Colbert is pushing back. It is very bad that the Ellison family,

which owns Paramount and CBS and wants to buy Warner Brothers with Trump administration approval is not pushing back. Right. And this is where, if you want to be a big media owner, David Allison wants to be the big media mogul. The thing he needs to show the creatives who make the content

is that he will fight for their free expression. Because otherwise, none of them are going to want to work for him. And I think Colbert is the tip of the spear here. Yep. Part of the way that they got this deal done to buy CBS in the first place was by paying off the Trump administration for a made-up argument that they had about a Kamala Harris interview. And this is the other bummer of all of this.

is anyone who decided to fight would win. Any thoughtful person in the world agrees that every single one of these trumped up things against these media industries has been ridiculous. And it keeps working. It keeps working. And it's only not working in small ways. Barry Weiss took over CBS News.

Anderson Cooper just quit 60 minutes. Yeah. This is what I mean. You're going to drive the talent away. And once you've done that, because you won't protect their expression, And yeah, they're all going to land somewhere that will. They're all going to land on TikTok or whatever it is.

They're all going to get into fights with content moderation on those platforms. They're all going to start doing now. Gooseweek. Whatever that thing is is going to happen. And you will have spent millions upon billions of dollars to own a network that distributes nothing to no one. And truly, that is the lesson of the media mobile. Like, if you want to be that character, a fight you are going to be in all the time is saying, no, you can't tell me what to say. And you have to say it to the government.

You've got to say it to the parents resource council. You've got to say to whoever it is who shows up to chill your speech, you have to say, nope, we agree with you. There should be some limits, but we are going to protect our creatives. And you can just see the Allison family, what they are communicating most strongly is that they will not protect creatives. And all this money they want to spend will, they're going to flush it down the toilet if they don't protect their creatives against dummies like Brendan Carr, who haven't even changed the rules yet, who are just chilling speech. It's the same story with Bezos and the Washington Post. It is just these institution after institution being. lit on fire because somebody bought it who doesn't want the game. Doesn't want the game. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to end Brennan Card's dummy by once again finding faint praise for Rupert Murdoch. I'm going to do it.

I'm going to make this comparison every time. The unlikelyest bedfellows of Brendan Carr's dummy. I do not agree with nearly anything Rupert Murdoch does. David, he used to work at the journal. The Wall Street Journal in the entire Murdoch Empire, the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal is a crown jewel. It makes real news to the highest standards. You know, Joanna Stern, our friend just left the journal to go independent. She and I talked about that for years.

And one of the reasons she loved the journal was she loved the standards of the journal. And she and I talked about it all the time. She's like, I love meeting these standards. That's Joanna, right? She's like very competitive. She wants to hit the highest standard. The journal is the highest standard. Murdoch knows that that is the thing he needs to protect.

He knows that is the truest source of his power and authority. It's not Fox News, scare and old people all day. It's when the Wall Street Journal publishes a story, it moves markets and it brings down empires. That's power. It's because he's a newspaper man, like old school. Yeah. And all these new guys, they don't understand that if you seed that authority, if you let that get tainted, you're going to end up with nothing. And you can really see that dynamic playing out with this new class of billionaires that thinks they can just play in the news.

Murdoch, again, he understands one thing that you can't screw with the journal's newsroom because when the journal says Theronos is full of shit. Yeah, Theronus is full shit. Anyway, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on this show, which you currently cannot regulate. I would love to have this debate with you. I would love to see where you think you can just unilaterally change FCC administrative law precedent. That's a fulsome debate we could have. I could also just yell at you for a while because it seems like you like being humiliated. Brendan, as always, you're welcome on this show, or Dakota.

That has been Brennan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast. We did it. All right, we're going to take a break, and then we're going to talk about gadgets because God help us. We need to talk about gadgets. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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All right, we're back. A lot of gadget news this week, actually. Some of it, huge bummers about ongoing availability of gadgets, but we'll get to that. Neelai, we have to start with a thing that I think you did to us as a society. You have been saying forever that you think the killer. app of smart glasses is essentially facial and name recognition of everyone. If I could walk around with glasses and just immediately know who everybody is, that would be awesome.

Yes, but can I just point out, I've always said the other half of that idea, too. Which is? In order to build that product, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is bad. Okay, well, Nelai, I have such good news for you. Meta. I just want to just hammer that down. Go back and listen. I just, You said this a lot. I'm like to get the thing everybody wants, you have to build the bad thing. Well, I have, again, really good news for you, which is that meta appears extremely interested in building the bad thing and in shipping it in, I would say, the grossest and most cynical possible way. So the news this week was a story from the New York Times about meta planning to add facial recognition tech to the meta-rayban glasses, which is a thing I think we have all assumed was coming. There's been some reporting that this was a thing Meta was interested in for some time.

There was that project that college kids did a while ago that you could use it for that freaked everybody out. And Meta, by the way, disclaimed that whole project. Yeah. Just to be clear about what that project was, they bought the Meta Raybans, and they hacked them up to send live video to a tool called Pymize, which is very problematic all unto itself. And then that would feed back who you were looking at and, like, their LinkedIn. and they made a video where they were just like running around the subway, like walking out to people and like, don't they know you? And then like sort of like reading their LinkedIn to them and blowing lines.

And meta was like, this is an official. We didn't do it. And it's like, dude, you're so close to doing this. But anyway, so according to this New York Times story, they got a memo from a meta executive who is not named in the story. I have a guess, but it's not important. I don't know they're the same guess. I think we have the same guess.

This feature is going to be called name tag. And this document, which I believe is from last May, basically lays out the plan to launch name tag. And the idea was to release it at a conference for blind people to attend these there, which is already sort of cynical in a way. It's like we're going to take this thing and put the best possible version of the spin on it in a way that it is like accessibility feature and it is valuable to this group of people. just ignore all of the other use cases and horrors.

But anyway, there's also a line in the memo that specifically, I'm just going to read you this line because it's just, I mean, like I could set it up, but it tells on itself. It says, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.

Rough. That's just, I mean, like. Right. ICE is putting babies in prison, and that's a good time to launch a worldwide facial recognition. Nobody's going to have time to be mad at us about this because they're mad about other things. I will point out to the credit, the civil society groups, the ASLU, the EFF, all of them are like, no, we'll find time. That was like all the energy.

They're like, no, we'll find time for you. Yeah. Wait, so who's your guess as to who wrote this line? Andrew Bosworth. Yep, that's my guess. The CTO. I think we've both met Boz before. We've spent time with him.

He very famously wrote the memo called The Ugly, which was about the cost of connecting the world. And it was basically like, no matter what we will connect people. If you go read that memo, it was very controversial at the time. And his argument was, I wrote it to make people think about all these costs, but the style is like dead on exactly the same as this line. Yep. I'm not saying we know, Bos, if you want to come on the show, by all means, I would love to talk to you about this. But I just, I'm guessing, Boz runs reality labs. That's why that's my guess. Same. Yeah. But I think this raised all of the issues you would think

that it would. Lots of people are very nervous about this. I just want to know how you feel knowing like A, of course, if anybody was going to do this, it was going to be meta. Of course, right? Like, yeah, of course. But even in this, in this same document, meta outlines its supposed safeguards for this feature, which are nothing, right? Like, the idea is that this was sources that told the times this in their reporting. The facial recognition technology isn't just supposed to work on everybody. It's supposed to find people that you're connected to on one of meta's platforms.

But it also is looking into, quote, identifying people whom the user may not know, but who have a public account on a meta site like Instagram. That's everybody. That's everybody. That's real bad. Yeah, what you want is the influencer tracker 5,000. That's going to make hot girls across America feel safe. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, you follow her on Instagram.

It's real bad. That's real bad. Uh-huh. I mean, first of all, you should not build this product. Like, I keep saying it's the killer app because it's the killer app. If I could just remember people's names and faces, I would be the president of the United States. It's the only thing stopping the rapid ascent of my political career. Your one face blindness problem away.

I am horrible at names and faces. Again, for 20 years of this career, I've just been apologizing every day of my life. I'm pre-apologizing to you now. I'm not going to remember your name. It's just I'm really bad at it. If I had some pair of glasses that could just solve this problem, I would be the most powerful person in world history. But I know in my heart that the cost. of that power, it's too high, right?

You should not de-anonomize everybody all the time and do it in a way that allows every government on Earth, which now thinks the gargails are off, to go access that data and track where everybody is all the time. And that is what our government will do. The second meta has a database of where and when it saw people, which is the thing that they inevitably have to create. There was a time when maybe you would trust a tech,

platform to say, no, we'll stand up to government pressure. We'll do warrant canaries, right? Do you know about these? They all have these, like, compliance statements on their websites. And if every year they publish one, it's like, we have not received any incoming requests for information. And then, like, every night and again, they subtly changed language to make it clear that they've received requests they don't like. Yeah, there was a time when, like, this was a game everybody played. And, like, the civil society groups, like, the ACLU and the EFF would, like, watch those.

That's all over. all of them want to be defense contractors. All of them want to sell AI to Pete Heg Seth except for Anthropic. I don't know what's going on with these companies. I don't know why they think they should participate in the widespread abuse of our civil liberties. But I don't trust them to do the right thing. Money is, I mean, that's money. Money, but Sarah Zhang has this line.

She says when she describes their attitude, which is they just want to fly their helicopters over the favelas. Like, yeah, they will have all the money and we will all live in the tent city. and they will fly over us. And like, that's what this is if you release this product. I want it so badly. I cannot, I've said it for so many or so many people pinged me about this. This is the killer app. Putting digital information over the real world on a pair of glasses is the killer app for the next generation of devices.

It's not chatbots. It's not VR. It's not anything. It's literally putting digital information over the real world. and augmenting your reality. And the killer app for that is saying you can be at a conference and know everybody's name. It will, the second that feature is released,

everyone will buy those classes. And you shouldn't make it. Because the social cost of that product is building a worldwide database of facial recognition and surveillance that will be used for nefarious purposes. Yep. And meta saying out loud,

we don't think the people will be there to stop us because they're busy with the rest of the civil liberties abuses is as cynical as it gets. Well, and inside of that is, I think, a recognition of that exact dynamic that you're talking about, right? Where I think what a lot of these tech companies want you to believe in the way that they act publicly is that all of the ideas about the tradeoffs are overblown, that we can solve them with product, that we can just handle this the right way, and that actually that tradeoff doesn't exist. It's a false dichotomy that you're creating. What this makes very clear is that meta fully understands all of those ramifications and, all of the ways that this is going to be received and discussed in all of the problems that it will

cause, and it has decided it's worth building anyway. Again, we're recording this Wednesday morning. Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be on trial today. He's supposed to be on the stand today in the case alleging that meta and other social media companies designed products defectively. Not speech, not 230 concerns, but that the literal product design of their platforms caused harm to people. That's a big deal. This is unusual. We're going to see how these cases, go, but Adam Osteria is on the stand, Zuckaburger Riggers on the stand, the rest of the social media companies are going to be on the stand in this way. This is just the next turn.

I mean, last week we spent however long talking about ring cameras and pervasive surveillance and the collective action tradeoffs of wanting a camera on your property, even though it will affect other people's rights, just wait until you get the benefit from the glasses and everyone else gets the pain of being stalked. And a thing that's going to happen is you can't product your way out of glasses getting ripped off of people's faces. Right, you can't product your way out of people physically demanding that you take the thing that's tracking them off of your face. Yeah.

We saw it with glass holes, and I guarantee you if this product is released, that we'll see it again. And there's a line in a story where Zuckerberg is saying he thinks they should turn off the recording light. Oh, wow. Or not have it to be so prominent. And you know why. It's because that is the social cost that will make people say turn that off or take those off. That becomes the problem. You're watching the ring outcry, and then you're like, and then we'll be.

put the glasses in everyone's face. These are not compatible ideas. Like, we'll see how that goes. I've been thinking a lot about, like, a decade ago now, when all of the sort of first stuff was happening in public about Cambridge Analytica and the way that these platforms, in particular, Facebook at the time, was being misused and the way that, you know, WhatsApp was being used in genocides around the world. And, like, there was this idea that the mistake these companies had been.

made was not considering the downstream effects, right? They had this one idea. They're like, we want to need this thing. And that the thing they didn't do was think through that thing the whole way, right? Like, what if this works? And either what has changed or what we just realize now that we didn't then is they actually did. They understood the consequences. They understood the potential. They knew what the cost would be and they just pushed on anyway. And whether that is a new behavior now or it has always been like that and we are just still continuing to learn about it, I don't know. But it is very clear to me that like Mark Zuckerberg is eyes wide open about what these things will be in society and what they will mean and what they will cost. And he doesn't care.

He doesn't care. And again, it is the killer app. If you want everyone in the world to buy these classes, you're like, it can just tell you people's names. And nothing about how particularly Americans are currently wired will make them stop and consider the social cost. They will, they will fly off the shells. And then we will have the same as we saw with. social media, the same that we're currently seeing with AI, we will have a wave of what are called unintended consequences, but which are actually clearly foreseen consequences. And again, that's this trial. Lauren Feiner is actually in the courtroom today.

We're covering it. And the idea that they know that the products are defective is very powerful. We'll see. I'm hopeful that there's more outcry here. I'm not hopeful that we'll get a privacy law. I'm not hopeful that meta won't push the boundary in some way, no matter what they do. But I am hopeful that just seeing how they talk about it actually changes the calibration of how they might release a feature like this. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Some other gadgets we should talk about. Apple is doing something in New York on March 4th. New York, Shanghai, and London. Yeah, that's right. Notably not Cupertino. I would guess what appears to be happening here.

And this is like John Gruber said something to this effect. Mark Herman at Bloomberg said something to its effect that rather than have some big event where they launch a thing and make a whole video, Apple is just going to sort of press release, announce a bunch of new products on its website, and then let reporters look at them all at once on this date on March 4th. Is that your read too? about the, they've done the staggered press releases before. You know, I just think my real takeaway here is flying everybody to California to make you watch an infomercial. You can only do that so many times a year.

This is why I bring this up, right? Because you can tell a lot about how interesting an Apple product is, by the way that Apple announces it. And like, we talk about this all the time, right? When they launch something by press release, it says a lot about Apple's own interest in this product. And my guess is this is going to be a series of relatively minor updates to things. What do you think it is? We've been hearing a lot about new iPads with updated chips, which I think would be fine. We've been hearing a lot about new MacBooks.

The one wildcard idea is there's been a lot of reporting recently about a new lower cost 12-inch MacBook, like bringing back the MacBook MacBook MacBook, but rather than have it be. super expensive and bad, have it be cheap and good, that would be really interesting and maybe bigger than some of these other ones that I'm thinking of.

But to me, this just seems like just a giant round of spec bumps, right? Like, that's what we get from Apple every once in a while now. Is there anything you're thinking about that I'm missing?

The thing I'm honestly thinking about the most is how are they going to handle RAM prices? Yeah. Right? Like, you can do a round of spec bumps and Apple can be like a thousand eggs of RAM

for the 50s. year in a row. Yeah. But they're running up against it, particularly they want to do more local AI, which I think they want to do. So I'm actually just most curious about what everything costs because the RAM market is just fully out of control. And Apple's having these gangbuster quarters, but that's all against high-end iPhone

sales really and services revenue, which is really just candy crush whales. And like something has to give. And I'm actually sort of dying to know, like, if this really is what, an iPhone 17E, in a low-end MacBook and some iPad spec bumps, the news is going to be, and everything got $100 more expensive. Yes. And I, who knows?

Who knows? I'm very, very curious about that aspect of it. Yeah, the news this week on the RAM shortage, by the way, continues to be brutal. We had a story that the price of the Switch 2 might go up. The PlayStation 6 might be delayed. The Steam Deck OLED is going to be intermittently out of stock. It's hard to buy right now.

Western Digital and I think other drive manufacturers have said they're essentially out of stock for the rest of the year. It's the middle of February. It's crazy. And meanwhile, then Meta and Nvidia signed a huge deal this week for many, many, many, many, many AI chips. Like that's that is the story, right? Like the companies with infinite resources building monstrous data centers have just absolutely cornered the supply of memory in the, world. And the idea now of like you're just a person who wants to buy a gadget, it seems like $100 more expensive might be the best case scenario for a while. The worst case scenario is like you're not going to be able to buy anything for a while. The worst case scenario, and there are some CEOs who are hinting at this out there, like memory supply chain CEOs, the worst case scenario stuff gets so expensive that the products go away or the companies go out of business. Yes. And I think we might just see, you know, mid-range consumer electrical companies be like, we can't do this anymore.

Like, so many products are really just like tiny Linux computers, like tiny embedded Linux systems. And if like the RAM is so expensive that it's not cost effective to ship a tiny embedded Linux system, you might not have a product. And like, I think we're coming up on that time. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're a relatively small company without much leverage.

Like I've been talking to startups and folks trying to do hardware for the first time now. And it is, they have no moves because you haven't. Like, if you're Apple. Apple has a lot of leverage in the industry. It has a lot of pre-existing deals. It is one of the few companies that feels like it might be able to continue to get its way, even in the face of all this AI spending. But if you're just like, if you're a Kickstarter, your inventory just went away.

Like it's gone. You have no moves left. And there is going to be like a whole generation of these small and middle-sized companies that just get frozen by this. Yeah, and it's funny, I think, you know, the bleeding edge indicator is, boy, it got way too expensive to build a PC, right? Like, you want to buy a GPU and some fast RAM, like, well, meta's right there. Like, we want all of it. So that's like the bleeding edge indicator of this. I think the Apple pricing at this next event on the fourth. Like, I'm, you know, I love a spec bump. I'm interested to see what they think in iPhone 17E should be, given where they are in the iPhone lineup right now. That's, you know, I love a spec bump. I'm interested to see what they think in iPhone 11E should be. Um, given where they are in the iPhone lineup right now. Um, that's, that's, It's all interesting. Yeah. But if they're just like, you said you wanted a small cheap phone, here it is.

It's $200. All the parts are from eight years ago. Enjoy. Right. We've been collecting all those refurbished iPhones to give me trade-in deals. Here you go. It's the iPhone 4. But now with a big screen, like, who knows?

Like, by the way, iPhone 4 with a huge screen would be sick. I was just about to say there are at least two people in my life who are going to text me after this episode saying they want that exact phone. That would be amazing. Just like, it's fine. I'm interested in the products, but I'm like equally interested in what the pricing will be. because Apple has a lot of leverage. It had the most leverage for years.

And now all of the AI spending for chip capacity at TSM, for memory, they have competitors who want to pre-buy a year's worth of output. So we'll see. Yeah. So gadgets not coming in March, but that Apple is reportedly working on.

We got a big report from Mark German at Bloomberg this week about Apple's AI gadget plans. And since you and I have been talking about this, I'm very curious to your reaction. So the idea is three different gadgets are being worked on inside of Apple. And the useful disclaimer here is Apple works on everything. Like any shape of thing you can imagine exists somewhere on Apple's campus. They try a ton of this stuff.

And it eventually gets winnowed down to a few. And then it eventually gets winnow down to one. And like the three types of gadgets I would be shocked if all of these end up shipping. But the idea is there are sort of three things being really actively worked on right now. One is smart glasses, which are essentially a sort of straightforward rival to what meta is up to, according to the reporting. They don't have a display. They're designed to be in really close concert with your phone, which I think is really interesting. Like, what if Apple's leverage here is just that it's the only one allowed to do stuff on your iPhone in a powerful way?

Worked for AirPods. Might work. Yeah. The other one is essentially what I would describe as AirPods with a camera, which is a thing we have sort of been assuming they would do for a while. And then the third one is like, what if air tag, but AI gadget. It's the friend idea. You just don't want to say pendant. It's a pendant. It's a pendant that you wear around your neck or you put in a case or whatever,

but it is a little puck of a thing that is a microphone and a speaker, presumably, that you talk to. This is the ecosystem Apple is thinking about. And I think, I will say my biggest takeaway from this is that Apple continues to see the phone as the thing and that all of these other devices are sort of like the phone is heliocentric in that sense and they all operate around the phone and use it for connectivity and use it for processing and I think that is a an extremely good idea and be like an unbeatably good tie-in for Apple as the first-party manufacturer of this stuff yeah the apple can't not have a phone right you can't turn off the candy crush whales well that but also like if you just think of the

iPhone is basically a brick of battery and connectivity that you can plug stuff into. You have a lot of extra utility you can provide without having to like accomplish the physics miracles that meta is trying to accomplish to put it all inside of the glasses. That's true. I think that's right. But I also straightforwardly, Apple is hopelessly dependent on Candy Crush Whales. Like the services line that they constantly talk about is not severance. Yeah.

It is Candy Crush Whales. It's in-app purchases. and like mostly in that purchases and games. And like, you've got to contend with it. They can't turn that off. Somebody should make a reality show called Candy Crush Whales. Like the Real Housewives of whatever. Just forget that candy crush whales.

I do feel like that would be like someone should make a reality show about the people and casinos who are there 24 hours a day. And you're like, actually, I don't want to watch this show. It's one episode and then I'm sad. I don't want to watch any way. No, thank you. Yeah, that might be true. Well, I mean, that's just a business reality for Apple.

and so many of their decisions are warped around that business reality. I do think that it should just be a brick of connectivity and battery. That's where they started with the Apple Watch, and they ended up having to put way more processing in the Apple Watch and make that thing way more independent of the phone. And so I think there are physics challenges there, too. There are latency challenges there too. It's less so at the AirPods, right?

AirPods can use Siri and Live Translate, all that stuff works well with AirPods, but there are challenges there too, as we saw with the watch, which eventually had become its own little iPhone. It's shocking to me that all this effort is not going into the watch. I totally agree. And I think a lot of it, German's report, says a lot of it is dependent on these devices having cameras, being able to see the world and having visual intelligence.

And you can see Apple's big move for however long has been AR. Tim Cook has talked about it forever. The Vision Pro, right, the nicest thing anybody said about the Vision Pro was that this is just the dev kit for the true AR glasses they're going to build. I don't know if I believe that, but that was the nicest thing, people, that's the excuse you get for the Vision Pro existing. Yeah, for like a decade. Yeah. You can see how they're going to try to stagger step into it. They have all of the same problems as meta, and I say this charitably to Meadow, which after the previous segment might be surprising.

Meta is way better at the we're going to label reality game because meta has a giant content moderation apparatus. Like, if you're like, I need to see the world and tell you. useful information about it, you are now in the business of content moderation, whether or not you want to be. Oh, yeah. Whether or not you want to admit it, that is the business you're in. You're going to put information in the world in front of people's eyes. Or you're going to say, you're looking at this, here's what you need to know about it.

You are now in the business of collecting, sorting, and displaying information, ranking information. That's recommendation algorithms. That's algorithmic semantic analysis. That's content moderation. And so meta, for its many, many, many, many flaws. That is just the thing they do. that's the thing Google does.

And so Apple, you know, you can put the camera on the AirPods. And then someone is looking at something and they're like, what is this? Apple has to go get the information, understand it, rank it, and tell you what it is, like, very quickly. Not their core skill. I wonder if they're going to lean on Gemini for that stuff. Because that's the big deal. I was actually just going to say a thing that I have noticed recently, just kind of at random, is that the Google lens activity where you point your phone camera at something,

to search it or identify it is like utterly completely mainstream. Like everybody uses that in a way that I didn't realize until very recently, but it is not, it's not novel, it's not new. It is just a like normal everyday phone activity for everybody. Because it got way more useful with AI. Yeah.

Yeah. It's really good now. Like I, it is. I mean, at least in my experience, it has been my three-year-old does these bath bombs that come with little tiny toys inside of them.

And I can point at it. And A, it identifies what, like, unknowably weird animal it is. And B, it finds an Alibaba link every single time. It's so funny. It's like, here's this little resin toy that you could buy a billion of on Ali Express. That's great. But, like, that behavior, pointing a camera at something and saying, tell me more about this, I think is like a completely normalized behavior.

How to make that leap to new kinds of devices is very important. But then also, you're right. For anybody who doesn't already have that. that skill, which is basically everybody with Google, building that capability is hard. Google's been at that a long, long, long time. Yeah. And, you know, my joke, not to make everything dire, is I've asked a lot of CEOs who are doing VR stuff about this over the years.

I'm wearing your glasses. You're looking at the United States Capitol building and you say, what happened here on January 6th? And you have a big decision to make. Yep. Like that answer is very, like literally very political. and right now, particularly fraught. And there's the truth,

and there's some bullshit, and you have to make a choice. You cannot split the difference when that's happening. And so everyone wants to say, you're walking through the art museum and you're looking at the painting, and we're going to tell you about the painter,

and the reality is people are going to ask much more fraught questions. And you are going to have to make decisions, and you can't the community note your way out of the truth in that product. Yeah. Right? Like, you have, like, we've covered the crisis at Wikipedia.

We've covered it a bunch of times this year, because that's a fight. It's like a literal fight about values and truth and you're going to express it with labels and your air glasses when people are just like asking what's up. There's a lot here.

And, you know, it's great that Apple wants to build the form factors. I think they will probably do a better job of the form factor. But the actual product as expressed is what information you're going to put out into the world to overlay the world.

And whether that is, I'm just asking for stuff and staying it in my AirPods, whether it's I'm looking at it and showing it on display of the glasses or What will certainly not be the case, it's I built a pendant for you to wear all the time. Yeah.

Yeah, this is the thing I'm most curious about is how does Apple bridge that gap? And does their big deal with Google lead them to just rely on Google for that set of knowledge? Yeah, I think Apple may end up being very happy to not be the arbiter of that information. Well, yeah, but then if they really want out, they have to have multiple providers. Like, you can change the search engine on the phone. It's very, this is very complicated. I don't know how you build that product without getting into this fight. Like the first thing that will happen is Apple will release this product and political bad faith actors across the spectrum will start asking it questions.

And then Apple will be in a firestorm. And like, are they going to be the same question? Are they going to be good at it? Are they going to stand up for what's true? I don't know. But this is, to me, I'm very excited about these products. Right now, when you play with the friend or the rabbit or one, it's like the stakes are so low. these products, the stakes are very high.

Yeah. Apple is rapidly running towards being hauled in front of Congress so that somebody can read the equivalent of bad tweets to you. Like every company that does this eventually gets there. And that is that is what Apple is just running towards. Here's my question for you. I know why they're doing this. Tim Cook has said AR is the future for 15 years. Like some incredible amount of time. the bet is that one of these things is the new interface right the chat is the new interface and that will displace the phone that voice in vision is the new interface and that will displace the phone that you need these devices otherwise open AI will release whatever they're going to make with johnny I've and that will kill the phone do you believe that's true no i think the the thing that is ripe for change is input right like the idea that in order to do every I have to take my phone out and unlock it and open an app and enter into a thing and log in with my credentials and do something is incorrect. Right. And I think the thing that people have seen with things like chat GPT and part of the reason it's so compelling is that it just works. You don't have to learn the systems. You don't have to log in to do new things. It is just a box that contains lots of functionality. And that's really powerful. Again, this is what Siri was supposed to be the whole time. Like this is not a new idea that. what we need is better input systems for information. And that the idea of me needing to hold up my phone, like again, you mentioned this with the iPad on stage.

Like them running around playing games by holding up an iPad in front of their face is clearly not the correct idea. Yeah. But I think Apple believes very strongly that most things are going to happen on a screen for the foreseeable future. And I think it's probably right about that. So like what this looks like to me is Apple saying, okay, you need an easier way to point your camera at stuff

and you need an easier way to input bits of information, whether that's voice or whether that's capture of the world around you or whatever. I think Apple is pointed less at how do we do AR glasses here and more at how do we just get more stuff onto your phone more quickly. Yeah. For now, at least I think that's probably the right move. Like, is it possible that AR glasses will obviate all of that someday because the display will be in front of your face?

maybe I don't think we're anywhere near that in reality. No. The hardware challenging air glasses, I think is many, many years from being solved. Plus, you've got to solve the fact that they're on your face. Yeah. Don't do the display speech now. Everyone can listen to Neely I do the display speech every other Vergecast episode we've ever done. I won't do it.

I'm just saying, look, I've been right about a lot of things on this particular episode. I could be right about a third one. I think my personal feeling about this is, you know, Apple just got rid of its headded design. Like there's a new head of design in Apple now. It seems like Tim Cook is retiring. But this company needs to attack the problem of, is there a platform shift? Is there an input shift? Is vision?

And it's actually like shocking to me that they've sort of cost played this idea for every new product they've introduced for years. Steve Jobs' big innovation almost every time in every product category was an input device right? The iPod out of click wheel the iPhone had a touchscreen and then Tim Cook would be like

it's a watch, it's got the digital crown like we did it and it's like you're just this is like when you're a little kid and you put on the firefighter jacket like I'm a firefighter like you have no idea what you're doing. Yeah.

Like the input device is only part of the puzzle it's using the input device to unlock the product. The mouse and the keyboard, Steve Jobs right? Being like we're doing mice on the Mac. Yeah.

Always a big input revolution that led to a new product category for him. Here is one. Here is an input revolution that might lead to a new product category. And you don't see Apple have a strong point of view about what that means for all of its devices. And there's all this executive turnover.

It's like, who's going to show up and have the strong point of view about what the actual new input device means for computing? Maybe there's someone there. Maybe it's Sean Turner's who's rumored to be the next CEO. Maybe it's their new head of design. I don't know. But it's funny that they've sort of like,

played at it for so long. The Apple TV, you could, the remote has a clicker on it. You're like, that's a horrible idea. The buttons back. Like, all of that was like, cosplaying at the move that Steve Jobs would so often do, which is tell you about how the new input device would make the device easier to use and better. And here it is. Like, here's the ultimate new input device. I'm, I'm just very curious to have this company in that literal moment of transition does the thing for real this time. Agreed. And it's not just Apple in that sense right now. Everybody is doing the thing where they just point at the same ideas that are sort of in the ether and are like, well, we're doing that too. And no one has done the thing that you just described. This is going to

be a year filled with a lot of people trying. And I would not say I'm like massively optimistic about somebody really connecting those dots. It will be ridiculous. It's going to be a year of ridiculous. It already has been like two years of ridiculous. Agreed. All right. Well, we should move on. But there is one more gadget we should briefly talk about, which is the Google Pixel 10A. which is a new pixel phone. And that's basically all there is to say about it. It is the Pixel A series we've always liked because it is a good sort of lesser version of the flagship

for a lot less money. Like Google has generally made a set of really good tradeoffs between the flagship phone and the mid-range phone that has made the mid-range phone really compelling. Todd Hazleton on our team who saw the phone and has used the phone, I would say, is less impressed than normal by that set of tradeoffs. Can I just read you this subheadline of his hands-on? Yeah.

It's like everything we need to say. It's a minimal update. Google didn't bring many pixel 10 features down to the pixel 10A by the berry color. It's pretty good. But Todd went to the event and saw the thing and he sent us back a video. So we're going to play the video and then we're going to take a break. I just got out of Google's pixel 10A event. And really, I think my biggest takeaway is that it's more like a pixel 9A plus.

It's a lot like this phone. There's some hardware differences. The bezel around the screen is a little bit. thinner, which Google said they made based on user feedback, and there's no camera bump that you have on this phone. The back cameras are the same. There's a 13 megapixel ultra-wide and 48-mapixel main camera. Meanwhile, the screen got a little bit brighter. It's up to 3,000 nits peak brightness, so that means it might be a little bit easier to see outside. But other than that, not much has changed hardware-wise. He still has the same Tensor G4 processor and 8 gigs of REM, which limits the AI

features that you can get on this phone versus the regular 10 series. But some software features we're already familiar with are coming to this phone like auto best take, camera coach, and satellite SOS, which will be useful if you get lost in the woods and need to contact friends and family. Oh, yeah, there's also some new colors, and really Barry is the best color and the one that you should pick. That was my favorite in the briefing. So that's a quick look at the pixel 10A. I really do think it's more of a pixel 9A plus for most people. It'll be available to pre-order on February 18th. Starts at $499 for 128 gigs of storage.

Back to you, Davey. Okay, I will say if you weren't watching, go look at the pictures. Todd's right about the berry. But also, flush camera. Big deal. I'm very excited about the idea of no more camera bumps in my phone.

I've been using the Pixel 10 Pro, and this camera bump is just monstrous. Are you a no-case person? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You've got to live your life, Nealai. I drop this thing 500 times a day. No way. I've gotten over a camera room, so I'm like, well, they know you're going to put a case on it. That's fine. Yeah, no, I think that's right. But live the no case life. It is the way to be. Also get the insurance on your phone.

All right, we got a second break, and then we're going to come back. We're going to do some lightning round stuff. A true lightning round because we're already way over. We're still over. Nelai has a vacation to go to. It's lightning round time. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

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Unsponsored by Brendan Carr. Ungovernable. You can't tell us what to do, man. That's why you pay the money. That's why you subscribe to the Verge. No one can tell us what to do. Unsponsored except by you, all of you who's subscribed to the Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. You also get ad-free podcasts. Neely, what's your first lighting round item? All right.

We have to talk about this DGI RoboVAC that Thomas Rucker was supposed to review, and then Sean started reporting on, and then we caused a huge scandal. Oh, this is fun. I know nothing about what you're talking about. Hit me. So DJI released a new RoboVAC. It's called the Romo, which is an incredible name for a vacuum. Like, this thing just throws interceptions, drop of that.

That actually is really good. Chokes in the playoffs every time. Incredible. And I love a Tony Romo game. But it is sneakily handsome. Yeah, right? It's like everyone loves it. loves him and it's like, ugh, he did it again.

Anyway, so we're reporting on this, and Sean discovers this guy named Sammy as Dufal, was literally just trying to control his vacuum, and he discovered that he was actually controlling 7,000 vacuums at once through a back door that the DJ had not secured. What? So we had one, right, because Ricker is reviewing it. So Sean calls Sammy, and he basically just gave him the identifier for Ricker's review unit and he was in it. He was driving around at this PlayStation control. He was looking at the cameras. He had the full map of Ricker's house. Like just totally unsecured DJI vacuum. On top of this,

there was another security flaw so big that Sean didn't feel comfortable disclosing it in the story. DGI has said they since patched both flaws. But this is just last week, I was like, don't have cameras in your house. Like all of this stuff is so sketch. Wow. And, It's a roboback. It's a camera on your house on wheels. Yeah. They can go places. No, thank you, sir.

That's the sort of thing that you only ever sort of imagine in the science fiction possibilities. You know what I mean? It's like, well, what's the worst that could happen with this vacuum in my house? Oh, I can make this even worse for you. How? As to fall, he figured it out using Claude Code. Oh, Jesus. So he just asked Claude Code can control my vacuum.

And it found 7,000 vacuums. And then there's actually another set of devices that use the same. servers so you had access to 10,000 DJI devices. So this isn't like high-end hacker behavior. Yes, this is a person who works in AI and they know how to use cloud code. This is some like Terminator singularity shit right here. Right, but this is how the machines take over. You've got a, yeah, you've got a way to make hacking way more democratic for good or bad.

And you're like, I want to find a security vulnerability and it went and found it. Anyway, DJI says it's patched it all up. It says it's patched the other one up when we're going to. was so bad Sean didn't even feel comfortable putting it in the story. What a story. Man. And it's like classic bird stuff.

I wanted to have this one because it's like the virgious verge stuff. It's like, here's this vacuum. It's like pretty good. It's pretty fun. Oh, no. Whoops. And the idea that we are now building these increasingly resourceful AI machines that can go

just spend all of their time hunting for these vulnerabilities suggests that this is going to get a lot worse. Because, right, we've had these bug bounty things forever, and they essentially rely on, A, most bugs are so hard to find that most people won't find them, that most of these vulnerabilities, even the ones that exist, just sort of lay unfound for a long time. And B, that they are able to quickly be patched

in that you can win the cat and mouse game with hackers. These AI tools are just going to completely invert, all of that in deeply scary ways. That's horrifying. And now I'm like, I have a internet-connected robo-vac in my house that maybe needs to not be in my house anymore. You know what's funny is we don't have a robo-vac. We just have a regular step-back.

And for some reason, it's on our Wi-Fi. And I don't know why. So this is actually what I was just thinking as you were talking about this is like maybe the idea of, you know, somebody being able to remotely control my robot vacuum is, is not on its face all that alarming. It's the camera of it all that really, I think, tips it into truly, truly scary potential. And so it's like maybe what's about to happen

is we're going to have this incredible referendum on anything that has a camera, regardless of what it is being used for. Right? Like, I think people have long made fun of the people who put the shutters on their webcams to keep them closed. Like, maybe that's where we're all headed.

Do you know who famously has a piece of tape over his laptop? Bobcambe. Who? Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, perfect. Great. Knowing and there's doing, you know what I mean? Okay, speaking of being invasive, my first one is we're getting, we think, a Galaxy S-26 from Samsung at the end of this month, they're having a big unpacked event, a lot of stuff coming, we've seen a lot of leaks for it. One of the leaks that came out is an ad that seems to confirm that there's going to be basically a privacy display. built into the S-26.

I love this. And the idea is, right, that as with all privacy displays, if somebody looks at it from an angle, they won't be able to see anything. You can only see it when you're sort of at your own vantage point looking at your phone. I have two questions for you. One, is this a feature that's interesting to you?

I love it. Okay. And two, do you also constantly look at other people's phones? This is why I love it. I constantly look at other people's phones. And I feel really intense guilt looking at this phone because I'm like, well, hey, this sucks because, like, I love to stand on the subway and watch people, like, go through breakups in text messages on their phones.

Wow. Your way. You're in it. You're okay. Nilai, I, this is, this is not an exaggeration. I have deliberately missed my subway stop in the past because I was watching someone send. I had to be a 3,000 word text message. How big was their font size? And I just refused to leave. They were, I was standing in the subway well and they were sitting in the first seat. And I just stood there and watched over their shoulder. like it was a TV show for solidly 45 minutes. I was not being coy. I don't know.

But they were going through something very emotional, so I think they were not paying attention, particularly to the world around them. But this is a special, important moment for me that I enjoyed very much. And now this is going to go away. Well, no, not if you were hovering directly over them. That's true.

You're fine. From that vantage point, maybe I'm okay. Creeper David Pierce is still in the game. So this is probably a good thing, right? This is as phone screens have gotten bigger, it has, I think, become more and more required for people to have these things. I ride this subway here in New York all the time, and I'm basically just watching TikTok on other people's phones. Totally. That's just everyone's doing it.

And it's so normal now that you're just like having a shared social experience, but you're all kind of alone. You can't talk about it. But it's like full volume all the time everywhere. I'm all for this. Like make the phone a little more private with a private screen. I'm wondering if it can be turned on and off. Because if it's odd, if it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like. If it's like the things you can buy, then sharing your phone will be very difficult.

Right. Right. Let's all look at something together. Something gets way harder. So I'm curious that they find a way to turn that filter off. That's an interesting one. There is also a real. I think people look at their phones from sort of oblique angles more than they realized, right?

Like your phone's on the table. I remember this at the beginning of face ID. It was sort of annoying that you were like, oh, my phone's here. And if I want to open my phone, I can't just sort of reach over and hit the thing. I have to like huge gesture lean over and look at my phone. There's just little bits of that that I think are going to be interesting to work out with the UI of something like this. But it will protect a lot of people from me. So I suppose it's a good thing.

But anyway, that phone, whatever that phone turns out to be February 25th. So a week from today as we're recording this, we'll talk about it on next week's show. We'll have lots more information. Neely, what's your next one? All right. I have an Epstein update. that's my that's my lightning round it's good okay i just want to say epstein updates will not become a podcast within a podcast on the merch cast brenda cars the dummy i think has carved out a niche on this show that

is good and important um we will not be giving that to geoffrey upstein that's true although again the people seem to love them so i have two very minor ones uh both updates last week we talked about how epstein has this relationship across like the far right internet and on online harassment and Gamergate and all these things. And in the files, there is a meeting between the founder of 4chan, Chris Poole, and Epstein, the day before Chris Poole started the politics board on Fortune slash pole. So we wrote about this. Kattenbar did a great piece for us. I encourage you to go read it.

Anyway, Chris Poole, the founder of Fortune who never talks, sent us a statement on the record. Take that, CBS. Chris Poole talks to us on the record and denied it. Here's the statement. Epstein had nothing to do with the reintroduction of a politics board to Forchan nor anything else related to the site. The decision out of the boarders made weeks beforehand, almost 24 hours prior to a first chance encounter at a social event. I did not meet with him again nor maintained contact. I regret having ever encountered him at all and have deep sympathy for all of his victims. We are now at the point of the Epstein story where the founder of Forchan is like, get me away from the sky. If you know anything about Fortune, that is wild stuff. That's my one update. Chris Poole fully denies Epstein. anything to do with 4chan. Too toxic for the poll board on 4chan. Too toxic for the founder 4chan. My second upstate update is I promised an explanation of the equal signs. People have done this. There's a great YouTube video. There's a great blog post by a guy who actually wrote email clients digging into like the actual encoding of mime and emails like this series of hacks

upon hacks over the years. Josh Jezza, our great reporter, also dug into this because he's been working on a story about AI and PDFs, which are not a compatible set of technologies. Two things. One, there is some just encoding weirdness as you move between systems. And in particular, it seems like moving from Blackberry emails to a Windows encoding, really screwed things up

and introduced a bunch of equal signs. That's sort of the technical explanation and that YouTube video is very good and that blog post is very good on it. Then there's also the fact that it appears the FBI attempted to strip the metadata out of the Epstein files

by first taking them all into JPEG and then OCRing the JPEGs. Oh, wow. Which is an incredible hack. And then there's just this quote that I want to read to you. It's from Peter Wyatt, the chief technology officer of the PDF Association who talked to Josh for a story about equal signs the Epstein Files. And he's saying, he's explaining why they were paying so much attention. And he goes, it was in the news.

And it was a lot of PDFs. Generally speaking, we're interested in anything to do with PDFs. That's what we do and what we're about. Many people have reacted to this by saying that the next holiday spectacular has to be about PDFs and the existence of the PDF Association. And so I think we know, David. will say, do not tempt me with a good time. PDFs are fascinating. And the, like, backstory of how a PDF became the, like, universal file format of the internet is weird and in many ways really bad and would actually be a very fun holiday spectacular.

So I'm writing that down. That is now officially the leading candidate. There's a lot of comments on this story. They're like, this is a perfect first story. I just, like, quote, it was in the news and it was a lot of PDFs. I mean, you've got to assume, like, a bunch of PDFs come out, and there are a bunch of people of the PDF Association who are like, this is our time.

We've done it. This is the moment, boys. That's very good. Yeah, I read the email encoding blog posts. We'll link to it in the show notes. I need to go watch that YouTube video. But just the way that blog post lays out how bonkers email is as an underlying technology is fascinating. Like, it is a miracle that your email ever gets delivered correctly.

It's very bad. It's nuts. Yeah. All right. My next one, as I am required to do, apparently, every week now, is I have a silly, ridiculous update on the Warner Brothers Paramount Netflix shenanigans. This week's update is that Warner Brothers is now given David Ellison and Paramount one week from Tuesday. So next Tuesday, the 24th, to give its best and final proposal. Paramount has said it's willing to pay more money, that it wants to reopen. the negotiations. But there was this very important thing that happened when the first round of these deals started

to happen, which was that David Ellison reached out to Warner Brothers and was basically like, just so you know, this is not our best and final offer. That it was like, he made very clear, like, we're willing to negotiate. They essentially seem to be coming from a place. So if we have all the money in the world, we will pay whatever it takes to get this done. And Warner

Brothers over and over has kind of just been like, no, thank you. Please lose our number. Goodbye. And And so now what is happening is essentially Warner Brothers Discovery is saying, tell us the actual number. Like at this point, where we can negotiate up forever, Paramount keeps raising the number, keeps coming up with new ways to pay shareholders, like keeps trying to argue regulatory things. And at this point, it is like, what is your best and final? Well, there's a little bit of, there's a little weakness there. So the sort of like total number has gone up with some of the fee structures and the blah, blah, blah.

because the actual price was only $1 more than Netflix's price. But it was for all of it, including the cable networks like CNN, whereas Netflix was only going to buy the studios. So Ted Sarandos was on CNBC, I believe with Julia Borson, and she said, how are you going to counter? And he said, well, usually you don't do this over the phone. Like, let them make an actual move, and then we will make our move in return. So you get the feeling there's going to be a little bit more of a bidding more here,

because the actual number is only going up $1 a share, which is still, you know, millions of billions of dollars. But you just got the sense that Netflix is like, you want up by a dollar? Like, okay. Yeah. We can do. Would you like $2? And there's going to be some of that back and forth.

Yes. But it is also, I think, very clear that everyone involved with this would like the nonsense back and forth to end. And so it's like. I think what to end. I also, I'm just going to point this out that Ellison's want to buy the whole thing, including CNN. And they are very much in the business right now of forcing their talent to constrain their speech for political purposes. that's not going to win you a lot of hearts and minds at the thing that you're buying.

No, but it sure might get the deal through. It might get the deal through, but then who's going to work there, right? And then if the people who work there, I'll leave and you're left with, like, the C team that loves having their speech chilled, what are they going to make? And now you're just blowing money,

like, in ways that are so stupid. Again, I just, someone should just, like, call Rupert, man. Like, he will tell you. You have to preserve the source of your authority if you want to be in this business. Yeah. Well, there's a whole, that's a whole. that's a whole rabbit hole we should go down sometime because it's like,

why doesn't Jeff Bezos just sell the Washington Post? I think is one particularly cynical and terrifying answer to that question that we should come back to another time. But anyway, that's my update and suggests that maybe next week, we will have a more concrete update that might stop changing every week, which would be really exciting for me and for the lightning around the purchase. What's your last one? My last one's very simple.

Tesla has updated its Robotaxy crash figures. in Austin. Electric ran the numbers. They've added five more in a month. The robot taxis are now four X worse drivers than humans. It's bad. 14 incidents since the service launched in June 2025. They quietly added one more crash that led to someone being in the hospital, which is very bad. Also, the taxis don't work in the rain because Tesla is entirely vision-based. It's going to happen, you guys. They're going to, they're super going to, everyone in America is going to have a self-driving model three tomorrow. So you know what's fascinating about this to me is I think a piece of the self-driving debate I have always, like, struggled with, but always sort of found

really fascinating, is this idea of like, okay, it is demonstrably true in most cases that these things are better drivers than humans. And so... No, it's demonstrable true that Waymos are better drivers. So that's fair. That's a good distinction. But if we take as gospel, right, that there are lots of questions, there's lots of ideas that we have to figure out about insurance and responsibility and how we reckon with these things being on the roads, but they are safer drivers than humans. We should keep pushing forward with this technology, right? It's an argument you hear over and over. There's a lot of stuff left to figure out, but that is already true that if you get in a Waymo, you are safer than driving your own car.

Like, lots of data supports that. It is so nuts to see just the opposite thing happening on the road. And I'd love to, like, it's, it's very funny that it's Elon Musk and it's Tesla. And like, of course it's Elon Musk and of course it's Tesla. Like, this is, this is obviously how this would go. But this is such a like dramatic inversion of the whole case for continuing to work on self-driving cars that it is just like, what are we even doing here, guys? Well, again, I'm going to point out that the whole industry has sort of been collapsed to Nguamo for a long time. And you have to split up Tesla's with full self-drive, quote, full self-driving

from actual autonomous robo taxis. Sure. And actually, Tesla no longer is able to call autopilot, autopilot in California because it's confusing people, but supervised FSD, you take for granted that there's a driver in the car behind the wheel. And so it's safer because you actually have a hybrid system there in its own way. Now, lots of people try to hack FSD and, like, get drunk and watch their phones. But, like, theoretically, there's a human minder in the typical FSD scenario.

So that's safer. Waymo is just very safe because Google, Alphabet, has dumped tons of money into every generation of the Waymo driver. It has multiple redundant sensors. And every ounce of data shows you that a Waymo car is safer than a human. Just taking FSD and being like, it's a taxi now. doesn't do the job. Nope. Which is what Tesla did.

And so you're kind of like, you're uncollapsing the product from Waymo and saying, okay, we just let FSD run around Texas. Is it safe? And it's like, no, I could have, I could have told you that. And now we have the data and it is not safe. Electric points out, it's 14 crashes over roughly 800,000 miles. That's a crash rate of one crash every 57,000 miles. Tesla's own data indicates that a typical human driver has. a minor collision every 229,000 miles.

So this thing is just like one in four. Just bumping into stuff. It's ridiculous. It's very good. Man. First of all, this suggests that my wife is an even worse driver

than I suspected. Anna, I love you. I hope you're not listening. Can I tell you a very quick story about growing up in Wisconsin, the 80s before the entire industry before the world was financialized,

to tell him back. My dad was the ER doctor in small-time Wisconsin in 1980s. And my mom in the parking garage at her hospital was very tight. And she scraped the shit out of her cars. And so my dad just had a deal where the local body shop guy just would come to the ER and fix my mom's car outside for free. Just in the parking lot?

No, you would be like, like we dented the car again. So you would like drop it off of the body shop guy. And he's just like in the 80s. They just bartered out that like, it's amazing. There's something happened. He would come to the ER and that would just get handled on the side. That's a pretty good deal, honestly. You're like, oh, my ER doctor owes me one.

is like not the worst thing to have going through. Yeah, it was just the full barter economy. That's amazing. Growing up with your dad is the ER doctor in small time in 80s, Wisconsin was very much like knowing the mayor. Because everybody knew my dad. It was crazy.

I grew up with my dad being a pastor, and so I had that same thing except everybody thought he could get them into heaven, which also has a lot of like really, really real upside. Same but opposite. You don't I mean?

Yeah, 100%. We were very much trying to avoid that outcome on a night shift at St. Mary's Hospital. Right. But if your dad can't fix it, it mine can. You know what I mean? Very good. It's good thing. All right, my last one, before we get out of here, is I think a bit of AI news that sort of snuck under the radar, which is that WordPress launched an AI assistant. And I just, I think this is really

interesting for a couple of reasons. One, because one of the things everybody seems to do when they start vibe coding is build a website, right? Our friend Casey Newton made a lot of noise about redoing his own personal website when he got his hands on Claude Code. This is just like, it's sort of a normal use case. I just, this is a hard thing to do with existing tools is manage a personal website.

I'm just going to point Claude code at it and let it build me a website. And it can do a reasonably good job and it's pretty interesting. And so everybody has been saying all over social media, a thing that I've really enjoyed

is people being like, WordPress is dead because now you can just ask Claude Code to do it for you. And WordPress, I should remind you, powers like half the internet. Like it is one of the most important

pieces of software on the internet. And it does just, it doesn't get talked about that much because it is sort of fundamentally uninteresting infrastructure. There's a lot of drama with WordPress that comes and goes. There's a lot of drama with WordPress, but it is like at its best, it is boring infrastructure.

Yeah. Like, it's designed to be boring infrastructure. But they just released this AI assistant that actually now just lets you interact with and change your website just by talking to it. And you can request font changes. You can move stuff around. Like anybody who has used WordPress knows it is like a developer tool.

built for developers and just pretends to be very user-friendly, it's not. If you've ever tried to mess with your WordPress template, it's a lot. And this idea of like, I just, I want this thing to be a bullet or I want this thing to be that font and this thing to be a little bigger and move this thing over there is like a big powerful, meaningful thing that is now being baked into WordPress, which I actually think is pretty cool. WordPress.com. There's some distinctions here. You're right. Oh, God. Yeah. It's a lot. It's WordPress is very complicated. There's, there's, WordPress.org, the open source project, then there's like WordPress, VIP, which is what the verge runs on, which is like the enterprise grade hosted WordPress.

And then there's WordPress.com, which is like all the way down at the bottom, which is like the Squarespace competitor. And that is still running WordPress, but for consumers and like small businesses in a different way. And that's the thing that's getting the AI system because they do have to compete with Squarespace and Wix and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way down to Casey's going to vibe code is on website. Right. There's some part of Casey's story where he's like, and then it's signed me up for a hosting

account. It's like, I don't know, man. Now the DGI RoboVax can see everything in your house. Yeah. Yeah, it's real. But anyway, I think I'm curious to see if folks who are listening to this or watching this are on WordPress and you do mess around with the AI assistant. I'm very curious how it works.

Because it's actually, it's the sort of thing that ought to work really well. It's like websites are very structured data. WordPress knows how WordPress works. Like you ought to be able to point an assistant. at this and actually have it do a pretty good job of most things. So if you've used it, let me know. I'm very curious about it. Yeah, we should do a whole episode on just software,

because there's a lot of confusion about what software is and what products are right now because of AI. We do not have time for it right now. I would just say I'm open to people's thoughts about that too, because boy, does that seem like it's confused. You're talking about the Saspocalypse that either is or is not coming. Yeah, and it's like, I don't know, man. I think people like products, not Legos, you know, like, I don't know. I'm very curious what people think about it.

I've read a lot of stuff lately, but I think that's a different show. Yeah, if you think business software is dead, email nelai at the verge.com and pitch yourself to be on the decoder podcast. And I would point out that famously, I refuse to use Enterprises. Just don't do it. It's very true. All right, we should get out of here. Nealai, you have a vacation to go on. What are you doing, by the way?

Anything exciting? We're going to Boston to go to all the kids museums. That sounds amazing. It would be delightful. Well, enjoy. We've gone way over. We will be back. You're going to be back next week.

You're just gone for a couple days. So don't. People stress when you leave, but I don't want anyone to stress. It's going to be okay. I'm encoding my own website. You just have to take a couple days off and clod code your way through it. Everything will be fine. We will be back.

Remember, as always, the best thing you can do to support all of this and keep us out of the clutches of Brendan Card and everybody else is subscribe to Theverge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. You can also, if you're a subscriber, get ad-free versions of all of our podcast, this Decoder version history. It's in your account settings if you're already a subscriber. It is actually remarkably easy. I've done the ad-free podcasting places before and it sucks.

Our team did a very good job. So go do that. It rules. Also, we love hearing from you on all things. If you're having weird robot vacuum hacks happen to you, if you have thoughts about the Epstein coverage we've been doing, if you want to talk about anything else going on in this space, if you want to keep sending us Brendan videos, which I hope that you do.

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The show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back next week. Neelai. Brock Nome.