The Vergecast - The video game disc is dead

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Things don't look great for console and game makers right now. With Xbox and PlayStation sales flagging, Microsoft preparing for big layoffs in its gaming division, and the price of everything on the rise, maybe it makes sense to save money where you can. You know, like making discs? David and Nilay discuss the end of the physical video game, before wondering whether Microsoft might be getting ready to get rid of Xbox altogether. After that, they talk about the new wave of hardware for AI coders, and the ongoing attempt to replace your laptop keyboard with... something, plus the latest iPhone 18 rumors and leaks. Finally, it's time for the Hype Desk, Brendan Carr is a Dummy, some breaking SpaceX phone news, and some truly wild BMW headlights. Further reading: Sony is killing all physical PlayStation game discs Xbox testing disc-to-digital feature that digitizes a physical game collection Xbox weighs canceling Blade game and shuttering Arkane  Xbox: “We’re not reducing our overall investment in games.”  Sony’s next-gen PlayStation will go ‘beyond the living room’  PlayStation and Xbox hardware had a tough May.  Xbox prices spike another $100 or more With GTA looming, consoles are getting expensive at the worst possible time 007 First Light’s developer lays off staff but claims its next franchise will continue Rockstar workers push to unionize ahead of GTA VI’s launch OpenAI is teasing new hardware… for Codex  Here’s a photo of OpenAI’s Codex hardware.  iPhone 18 Pro ‘drop test’ leaks get yanked from X  Leaked iPhone 18 Pro photos reportedly wound up on the dark web   A future Qi standard could bring 50W wireless charging to more devices.  Exclusive | SpaceX Showed Investors Prototype of Elon Musk’s New AI Device - WSJ Comcast is splitting in two The Supreme Court stops Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship WhatsApp is launching usernames: here’s how to reserve yours  Supreme Court allows firing of FTC commissioners, ends agency independence  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. (Timestamps are approximate.) 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:00 Book Pitch and Grill Week 00:04:00 Discs Are Dying 00:08:00 Live Service Shopping Malls 00:11:00 Microsoft Xbox Layoffs Talk 00:16:00 Console Sales Slump and Prices 00:20:00 PlayStation Beyond Living Room 00:24:00 OpenAI Codex Macro Keyboard 00:27:00 Voice Coding and Verification Loops 00:31:00 Dictation Hype and AI Limits 00:39:00 iPhone 18 Pro Leak Mystery 00:44:00 Battery Life Tradeoffs 00:48:00 Fast Wireless Charging Heat 00:52:00 CarPlay Beta Workarounds 00:56:00 Netflix Horror Unhinged 01:03:00 Cozy Repair Game Restory 01:06:00 Brendan Carr is a Dummy 01:16:00 SpaceX AI Phone Rumors 01:22:00 Grok OS App Problem 01:25:00 Comcast Splits In Two 01:33:00 WhatsApp Username Land Grab 01:35:00 BMW Headlights Go Bananas 01:40:00 Wrap Up And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One day, with the help of science, you might be able to live forever. Forever. Your body will just need a couple tune-ups. Injecting bone marrow in your 40s, your kidney in your 50s, your heart in your 60s, and so on, and then potentially a whole body transplant by the time that you were 90. This week on Explain It to Me, The Quest for Longevity. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Ever feel like your paycheck disappears the second it hits your account?

Like a $25 cocktail and rent that costs you a kidney is just sort of normal now? Well, I'm Vivian 2, Your Rich BFF, and on Net Worth and Chill, we're looking into what's really driving the cost of living crisis, where your wallet is hurting the most, and the hacks to bring those prices back down to something that actually makes sense. Ready to stop getting screwed at the pump, the grocery store, or on your rent check? Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you're rich BFF. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the N64 cartridge, the greatest video game object of all time.

I'm a friend David Pierce, Neil Appetals here. Lo, sir. What's up? You're in some other new place in the world today. I just, like, I forget what your house looks like at this point. Yeah, the studio at home that we spend a lot of time lighting to make me look perfect. I've avoided conscientiously for some time. No, I'm upstate.

I've recorded a lot of Vergecasts from this house before. and my book is overdue, so I ran away from my family to spend a few days here to wrap this thing up. Like any good writer, you went to the woods to finish her book. This feels right. Yeah, a person on our business side, Andrew Melanzac, who sometimes does our ad reads.

You know his voice, even if you've never heard his name. He pointed out to me that this is the beginning of a horror movie. Like, I came to the woods to finish my book. I'm definitely going to die here. This is the last podcast I'll ever be doing. You're going to get to the very last page of the book and then you're going to die. And it's going to be, it's going to be huge.

Like, honestly, you dying would be so good for book sales. I'm just throwing that out there. This is what I keep saying. Almost every bad thing that can happen to me is good for book sales, which is a real negative incentive. I love that for you. Do you want to pitch the book, by the way? Tell the people what the book is? It's not done.

So if you have ideas of what it should be, please let me know. I've got a couple days here to wrap it up. No, it's a Decoder book. We're going to take all the stuff we've learned from Decoder over the years, how to make decisions, how to structure our company and write it all down so you can hand it to people who don't know what they're doing. The book is called How to Get What You Want, and it really implies that I know. So believe that. Love it. Also, we mentioned this last week, but this week is Grill Week on Decoder, which is the best week of Decoder every year. It is very good. This is a particularly good grill week episode.

I'm excited about it. It's good stuff. Yeah. I'm just the guy who started a competitor Weber, ended up buying Weber and now he has to contend with the fact that he talks shit about Weber for years and now he runs it. It's very good. It is everyone should have to do that. Go back and like run your worst enemy that all you did was talk shit about for a long time. I really enjoy that. We have a lot to talk about today actually. It's like it's the beginning of July, which is traditionally a very dead time in the news cycle. And yet there's kind of a lot going on. We have a bunch of gaming news to talk about. Some of it really interesting. Some of it just like deeply bleak. There's a bunch gadget stuff going on. Brendan Carr remains up to stuff. We have, we have, we have a new disclosure

here on the Vergecast, which is a thing I'm very excited to get to later on in the show. We have to talk about Comcast at some point. What, what words do we say? Who owns, who is an investor in the parent company of the Verge? Who knows? It's, it's like an anti-disclosure. I literally don't know the answer. I know there's now Comcast, there's NBC Universal and there's Versant. And I know that used to be one company and now it's three companies. And one of them, I think, potentially is an investor in the company that used to be part of our company. Yep. That's all correct.

Let's start with gaming. There's a bunch of gaming stuff going on. Let's start with the stable and predictable gaming industry. Yeah, let's talk about the chill thing. There's a lot going on in the gaming business kind of writ large right now. And I think there's a bunch of Microsoft news in particular that I think is a really interesting signal about what's happening in games more broadly. and I want to get to that. But we should start with the sort of immediate gadget news

from the gaming industry this week, which is that disks are dying, like immediately. Sony announced that starting in January of 2028, they will stop producing PlayStation disks altogether. Tom Warren on our team had a scoop that Microsoft is testing a feature where you can basically attach a digital game to a disc so you can digitize the game from a disc and then give that disc to somebody else.

and it'll move the digital game. It sounds like a weird, bad idea that probably won't work as well as it's supposed to. But the overwhelming ideas here seems to be like everything is digital. Discs are dead. No one needs physical objects in games or, frankly, anywhere. Like this is the running theme of the tech industry. But in a weird way, game discs feel important. This is like a physical object people have collected and cared about for a really, really long time.

and people seem to be having very strong feelings that they're going away. Yeah, I mean, you kind of understand why. Movies and music, there's like ongoing access and ability to play back in real ways. Right. And maybe sometimes it's really hard to find a movie on streaming.

It was very hard to find pump up the volume on streaming for a really long time. Yeah. And so my physical copy of that movie is really important. But there's not a playback issue with archival music and movies. Right. And I do think the physical copies are important,

and sometimes they do just disappear forever. With games, man, once a game is gone and the console's gone, actually getting to replay a game is tremendously difficult. And if a company goes out of business, or they pull the servers, or the DRM goes away, or the servers that run the back end of the game engine, all kinds of things can go wrong with games in a way that takes the art away from you.

And I think that has led the gaming community in particular to really prize their physical copies, because you can't take those away. I do wonder, except for now you definitely can. apparently. You super can now, yeah. It does feel a little bit like that feeling has been a placebo for a while now, right?

Where even when you buy a thing, you put the disc in and the first thing it does is immediately download several dozen gigabytes of more game. So the idea that you can buy the game as a sort of perfectly preserved object on a disc kind of hasn't been true for a while. And I think you see these announcements. Like Sony is very straightforwardly, though. People just play games digitally. Like nobody wants this is kind of the, the wrong.

running line. And I think to a large extent, that that's probably true. It's also true that a lot of the games people play are increasingly live service and increasingly multiplayer. Like, even if you could buy Fortnite on a disc, what the hell would it be? Do you know what I mean? And so I think, again, to some extent, this has been a trend for a long time going away from the idea of I get to own this thing as an object. But when you take the discs away, it makes very clear, I think, in a way that is hard to see on those steps, the fact that it has actually already been taken away from you, right? That you have not owned these games for a long time.

You pay $80 to, in a very real way, not own a game. They're getting more expensive. They're getting further away from you at all times. And I think, like, especially for people who have had, you know, decades of consoles, they've bought every PlayStation, they have libraries of games. Like, I think about our friend Chris Grant. who has just an attic full of every gaming console and game you can ever think of. And it's like the ability to create that for yourself is just essentially gone at this point.

And there's just something very sad about that. Like I love and play a lot of games that I played 25 years ago. Like I was raised by the Nintendo 64 in a very real way. And I still have a Nintendo 64. I still play it all the time. And now we all sort of exist at the whim of like whether Nintendo 4. feels like putting the game that I like onto its online service that I have to pay extra for. And that is just a crappy state of affairs, especially for something as expensive as game

consoles and games have been for so long. Well, David, it's time to discuss whether or not video games are art. And I would encourage everyone to turn off this portion of the podcast and not engage with it whatsoever critically or substantively just to protect the safety of ourselves and our families. We're just going to layer 20 minutes of silence over this debate. You can just imagine us having it. Beeping sounds.

We'll come back and Nelina will both be bloody and screaming, and that'll be it. Well, the only reason I bring it up is I think the commercial imperatives of particularly the console makers and the AAA studios have run roughshod over games as an art form. And just to be clear, I think there are some games that are very clearly art. Absolutely. But the big push to live service games that essentially blew up in the industry's face, was not an artistic push. That was straightforward.

Let's turn video game consoles into a shopping mall and keep you here all the time in maximize engagement the same way meta would want to maximize engagement on Instagram. Only now, instead of selling you physical items, we're going to sell you endless DLC in this live service game. And this industry chase that dream in just like ruthless, cynical ways.

I don't think any... I mean, the game's all failed. Yeah. Like, I think real people look, at all of those life-surice games and we're like, no, thank you.

We already have a Fortnite. We don't need another one. We certainly don't need to like re-buy everything that we would want to buy. It really is wild to think, by the way, that like at the beginning, there was Fortnite Roblox and Minecraft.

Everybody spent infinity dollars and time trying to join that club. And at the end of all of that, we have Fortnite Roblox and Minecraft. Yeah. Like, it's nuts how unsuccessful everyone else has been mortgaging their future to try and play

this game. And I think, The thing that I'm just coming back to is I think those are commercial platforms. Those are the shopping malls. Yeah. And I think wanting to preserve games, wanting to have discs, wanting to maintain a collection, is nowhere close to those games, which are the industry. Right.

And somewhere in here is like a happy medium, I'm sure. And I know lots of people are going to have lots of ideas about the vast amounts of beautiful games that you can buy on Steam for your PC. But when you buy those games on Steam for your PC, they show up on your hard drive and you have them. Do you know what I mean? And you can like take your hard drive away and put it somewhere else and like store that hard drive forever and maybe that's some like Steam authentication issues.

But you're able to have those games in a way that I don't think anyone feels like they have the PS5 games or they have the Xbox games. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and what's funny about that is all of the business machinations you just described are just not working. And like, again, we talk about some of the other. news of this week, Tom Warren also had a story that Microsoft

is planning big layoffs across the Xbox team and also among... Can we just say that Microsoft is going to sell Xbox? Can I just put my stake in the ground? Like, they are skinning down Xbox. They're simplifying its business model. Yes,

Asher Sharma is saying a lot of the right things in making gamers happy, but at the same time a lot of what's making gamers happy is her divorcing Xbox from the strategy demands of large Microsoft. Yes. Right?

She's like, I'm going to get rid of all this AI. And you're like, wow, you're just cutting it off from Microsoft's core strategic imperatives. So what else are you doing except creating the separation so you can move on? Who would you sell it to? Who's going to buy Xbox? Oh, I don't know. Starlink.

Like, it doesn't matter. It's like, you know, like X will just buy more stuff. They'll be fine. SpaceX. Now in launch business, they do connectivity. They have X.com. The everything app. and Xbox.

I mean, it kind of works. You just bake the Xbox into X. I think there's a lot of, I think, a 10 cent might buy. There's a lot of big companies out there that could buy a giant global gaming brand. But I just think Microsoft has it because it's their one connection to consumer. It's the one thing that keeps Microsoft kind of cool. And yet, you look at what they're doing with it.

And maybe, sure, maybe the one read, like a very charitable read, is they're cutting it down. they're going to focus it up and then they're going to grow again. But like, why would Microsoft do that? How do you connect that to Microsoft's larger strategy of we're going to put copilot everywhere? I mean, I agree with the thesis. I also think the answer is the same.

It's been for a very long time, which is Microsoft is desperately trying to have some tie to regular people. Like, Microsoft cannot, for some reason, fully embrace the fact that it is, is a business to business company that is like a deeply unsexy but hugely successful business. That's just it's, that is just not Microsoft's conception of itself all the way back, right, to like the computer on every desk and like they wanted to be a thing for people at work, but also a thing for people in their real lives. And Microsoft, to its demise over and over and over and over again, can't stop trying to do that.

and the Xbox is the only one of them that has ever kind of sort of worked. Like, it's, Microsoft will not sell Xbox for the same reason it made the kin. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's, it just can't give up on this dream

of being relevant to regular people in their regular lives. I think they probably should. I think they should probably sell Xbox as somebody who will run it better. And I also think, like, all the news right now is really interesting because, like, our comments on this story from Tom,

which is about the layoffs coming and the possibility of, closing a bunch of the studios that Microsoft has bought and laying off those people canceling some games just sort of mass mass mass problems coming to all of Microsoft's gaming systems the comments are basically like well of course you have to do this this is all Phil Spencer's fault

Phil Spencer who was the boss before Asha Sharma was the one who like collected all of these like Pokemon let them do whatever they want all these games are over budget way behind schedule this has just been a to sort of be a giant mess because of the previous leadership of the Xbox team. So there's a sense that like, okay, actually what this is is maybe a return

to being a successfully run business. Sure. Possibly inside of Microsoft. Yeah, that's the charitable read. It is a very charitable read. It's the hopeful read. We should have never bought Activision and got totally distracted with an integration that let all the other stuff we bought fall by the wayside

that got us away from the core gaming experience, which was All anybody ever really wants and all anybody ever really says to Microsoft about the Xbox. But instead, we're going to put Xbox everywhere and do something that makes no sense and try to turn every Windows PC into Xbox or whatever that strategy was. It was very hazy. We're going to body up against Apple in proxy antitrust fights to try to put game streaming on the iPhone instead of just making the Xbox great.

That was basically the strategy. Okay, none of that worked. So now we're going to get rid of all this fat, all this. stuff that wasn't working, and we're going to focus up and we're going to run a great Xbox business. That is a very charitable read. It is on its face the thing that they are doing. And then the only question that remains is why? Why would Microsoft do this? What is the point of running the great Xbox business? And I just think Sash Nadella is ruthless enough and canny enough to know that he needs a lot of capital to go buy a bunch of GPs or whatever it is

that the AI business is going to demand. And a successful Xbox business will bring him that capital without him having to go beg the public markets for it. And he will probably be rewarded just for saying he wants to sell it. Right? Yeah, that's probably. The market will probably reward him for saying we're going to focus up and move on from this failed disaster. By the way, the antitrust argument here is really great because I keep saying mergers are bad. And the idea that they brought Activision to gain some leverage over Apple was such an obvious failure at the time, and now it's just a pure failure. Yeah, it is no part of the thesis that Microsoft laid out has come to pass. It's kind of wild. Yeah, and if they, if they hadn't done it,

would Xbox be more successful in some useful way? Like, you have to imagine, yes. Yeah. I mean, but then meanwhile, we have an analyst firm this week, I think it was either end of last week or this week that said, and I'm just going to read you this quote from Sarkana analyst Matt Piscatella, says PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to their lowest May total since May 2000, while Xbox hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May month. Put that next to, Microsoft just raised the price of the Xbox, and it is like, how on earth are they going to convince anyone to play any games ever again? Like, the proposition here, if you're any of these companies trying to build a success,

gaming business, the headwinds just seem like they get worse. Like, we're at a point now where either GTA6 is going to be so good and so earth-shatteringly successful that everyone on Earth goes out and upgrades their console in order to be able to play it. Or it feels like the bloodshed is going to get even worse because the consoles are getting even more expensive. Asha Sharma herself has been like, we're worried about people's ongoing ability to afford our consoles that, like, there is so much money tied up in this idea of we're actually going to make everyone a gamer and it's going to take over the world and this is the most mainstream

activity on Earth that all just feels like it's like collapsing inside of itself right now. I mean, the consoles are supposed to be sold for loss. Is there anybody left in the world who would ever want a PS5 or an Xbox that does not have one? I will tell you, I've heard from a number of people recently who are like me discovering how outrageously priced a console is right now and being like, what am I supposed to do? Like, why on Earth what I buy this right now? But we're like many, many years into this generation. Yeah. So the fact that raising price is not lowering them is outrageous,

but we're also just at the tail, like, this is when the sales should be slowing down. But, yes, sure. But we're looking at the lowest in 26 years and the lowest ever. This is not like the ebb of a cycle. This is worse than that. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that.

I just, people play games on the, their phones. Sure. That was the thing that Microsoft was worried about was how do I get games on your phone and they tried

all kinds of ways to do it and they couldn't do it. I just think, yes, the consoles are more expensive. The games are maybe less compelling is a bigger problem

for them all to solve. Yeah. And there are fewer of them being made because all these layoffs are happening in service of trying to build these gigantic

live service games that nobody wants to play. Like, we're just spinning in this cycle that it feels like it's going to be very hard to get out

of, and again, I think that that's the credit a lot of people have given Asha Sharma at Xbox is she seems to be trying to unwind some of this thing that's like, let's put all of our resources into games nobody wants to play, because in theory, those would be a great business except nobody wants to play them and actually get back to making things for people that they like. But boy, does that sell get harder when you're asking me to buy a many years old, many hundreds of dollars more expensive console. Yeah, I mean, I would put that right next to this rumor from Sony that the next PlayStation will go beyond the living room.

Oh yeah, I was going to ask you about this. Everyone knows what to do. It's to build a cheap handheld. Yes. Much easier said than done at the moment, but yes. That's true. But, I mean, that's going to be the thing that juices all the hardware sales for them.

Tell me what you make of this quote. So this is the PlayStation folks did an interview. And let me see, this is with, it says for the next generation platform, rather than simply serving as an alternative to PC as we aim to deliver value that is unique to PlayStation. This includes not only technological advancements, but also an expansion of usage styles,

enabling a seamless experience that can be enjoyed naturally beyond the living room. There's part of that that is like, okay, that's kind of what PlayStation already does, right? They have remote play. They have the portal you can play on your couch. But there's also a part of this that's like, we're going to go make all the same mistakes

that Microsoft has been making with Game Pass. I mean, I don't know. I have PS-Bless. Everything's a PlayStation. Everything's a PlayStation. Is this a PlayStation? I can see, but Sony has some, some credibility

and we're going to build a first-party handle that's good. Yes. And that credibility was the PSP. It was not any of the stuff that they're making now.

I can see it, especially if all the games are digital and you can play them anywhere. And I mean, they can see how the steamedex are doing. They can see how

the little Legion goes of the world are doing. Sure. Now is the time to do it. And maybe you get a cheaper console and you can sell an upsell bundle with a proper PS5.

Like, you need to get some interest back into the ecosystem. You cannot just wait for GTA6. I agree with that. I also think everybody is just waiting for GTA6. I mean, we keep hearing about the games being moved around for GTA6. The stakes for that game are so high, both for Rockstar, which is like existentially dependent on this thing being the biggest game in history. And it's sort of everyone's clue as to whether people will pay money for video games. And that is, that is a lot to put on the back of one game.

Yeah. I suspect people will pay money for GTA 6. I mean, I planned. I literally, I would like to. I don't know how. This is because you buy everything

at the very last, like, dying gasp of the life cycle. I do. It's a real problem. I have an Xbox 1 that I used for like an alarmingly small amount of time.

And that might be my most recent console. It's a real problem. Yeah. All right, we should take a break. We have more gadgets to talk about including some weird open AI hardware that we just need to discuss. We'll be right back.

No one could blame you if you thought this men's World Cup was going to be a disaster. The President of the United States isn't exactly a welcome mat for the world, and there have been plenty of embarrassing stories for the country. There was the mom of Kate Bird's goalkeeper who wasn't let into the United States to watch her son play until the team started doing well and people clamored for her entry. The team from Dr. Congo hadn't made a Men's World Cup in 52 years and hardly made this one because the United States was supposedly worried about Ebola, even though no one on the team had Ebola.

If you were watching Senegal, Norway last week, and we're wondering where all the Senegalese fans were, they weren't let into the country, but you probably noticed we let in like a million Vikings. I wonder what's different about their fan bases. Oh, and who could forget? We're literally bombing one of the countries that up until Friday was playing here. Missiles aren't the problem.

But, but somehow the vibes at this World Cup are mostly positive. The World Cup might just be healing us on today, Explain from Vox. Is Donald Trump still cool? Well, at first, there was what he was promising to America. He was promising change. Yeah, absolutely. Has he lived up to that? No.

No, I wouldn't say so. I'm disappointed. We're in Washington, D.C. for one of the events that Donald Trump is throwing for America's 250th anniversary, and it's UFC night. Pride to be American. We got free tickets. It's just going to be a great time. That's about it. It's an opportunity to talk to a group that was central in the 2024 election, young men.

Why do we think Trump and men seem to have a connection? I feel like you just know how to advertise himself to the younger proud. It aligns with masculinity, I feel like, to a certain extent. But if they don't like Donald Trump, what do they prefer politically otherwise? I care about my family. I care about my country. I want people to be safe and happy where they live. I care about my wallet too, man. too, man.

I'm a Sted Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're back. Let's talk gadgets. Specifically, Nila, your very favorite thing, AI gadgets. There's nothing we enjoy more than a good AI gadget. So the news is that OpenAI is building new hardware specifically for codex. Don't get excited about this.

This appears to be basically a little macro keyboard that's next to your keyboard that you can use to do some basic codex things. Mostly what I want to talk about, Neelai, is this trend I've been noticing recently where there is this ongoing thesis that actually maybe I can start to use AI and ditch this keyboard. I'm not going to ditch my phone. I'm not going to ditch my laptop.

But what I don't need anymore is a big old QWERTY keyboard. What I actually need is, did you see this tweet that went like lightly viral where somebody was like, oh, our senior engineer replaced his keyboard with a microphone. And he had one of those like Bob Barker skinny microphones that he was just sitting there talking into, presumably talking to, you know, codex or cloud code. But there is this thing out there now that is like what we're going to do is build specialized input hardware that isn't typing for basic like AI coding experiences. And I can't tell if all of this is like essentially a bit by a bunch of engineers who are just unnecessarily optimizing everything. Or if there's actually something to this idea of like specific coding hardware for AI. And doesn't it all just seem like attempts to lock you into ecosystems with hardware? Because it's so easy to switch between them in software.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm totally a cynic about all of this. That's super cynical. Yeah. Like, sure, cursor has an app now that makes sure you use cursor. Sure. Right? Like, cursor launches iOS app is just you're going to have cursor on your phone.

And then you'll use cursor. Do you know what I mean? Yes. But that's another example I think of this sort of macro trend, right? Like, the idea that anyone would need to access their coding IDE from their phone is a brand new idea. And yet I keep talking to people who are like, I actually spend a lot of time interacting with cloud code or codex or in this case, cursor, from my phone. Like, Paul Ford came on the show a while ago and was telling me about all the weird little projects he's doing from his phone on his commute's home.

And that is like a brand new kind of software development activity. And it just, again, I'm still at this place where I can't decide if this is a bunch of people tinkering with workflows that won't actually amount too much and everybody will go back to typing. or if there is some actual change in how people want to input long lines of code and this kind of prompt happening in front of us. I think it's both. I don't, keyboards are going to stick around, confident predictions. Keyboards are going to stick around in software engineering because we keep learning over and over again that the software engineering projects are vastly more complicated than anyone gives them credit for. Yes. And require a bunch of senior software engineer attention to make them work the way they want to.

over and over the evidence of this is vast. So I do think there's a bunch of people who are AI-pilled, who are convinced that because they can now talk to a computer a natural language, that everything about computing is up for grabs. And I totally respect that belief. I think it is valuable and fun and interesting to be like, I have changed our core assumption, and now everything is up for grabs. The music is no longer on 12-inch vinyl records.

it's on tapes and now Walkmans exist, right? Like, this is all fine. And you can just go through the history of technology and you're like, this core assumption changed and now the entire ecosystem can change around it. I'm just not at all convinced that any of them have set upon a path that is sustainable in the way that it's being expressed today.

Interesting. What do you mean? So like you, I know a bunch of engineers who are like constantly basically texting their coding agents. and I think that's great because what they're doing is tinkering in their spare time. They're like, I now write software

while I play video games by texting my phone. That's not work. Like, if you're like, I do my actual job as a software engineer by texting a handful of agents and then just like sitting around, you're not actually doing anything.

Like, your time will get filled up by other things. Right next to this is a bunch of weird gadgets that engineers in San Francisco are using to keep their laptops open while their agents run locally because they need their laptops around for their agents to run locally. So I do think all this is just up for grabs.

And I think part of the rush to the models are good at coding, we're going to redefine how coding works, is because that is the domain where the models are verifiable. And you hear this, if you're paying attention to AI, you're hearing about this so much, right?

Verifiability, running loops. This is the hot new thing where you have, the model makes something, you see if it gets verified by a compiler or other software testing tool, and then it tries again. And you hear the sort of like senior AI people would be like, I write loops now. I mean, I didn't even write prompts. I write loops. And they're off, off it goes and it does it something. And like maybe they're just all burning a lot of tokens, because that is the thing that makes them all money. Promps are so like April, 26. Like,

loops are very July, 26. Loops are in, man. And you just kind of look at this. And you're like, does this extend to anything else? Sure. If you want to build a bridge, do you know how you verify it in a bridge run collapse? Right? Like there's just like many, many other domains in the world besides software engineering

where the verifiability and the ability to make a loop against that verifier happens outside of a computer. All over the place. I'm always using the legal system as an example, but the verification in the legal system is a judge who are very unpredictable. Yeah. And often hungry.

You know, and you can't be like, well, we're going to run that again, Judge. Like, it's no, no, you're going to jail. Like, the judge is like, you're off to jail with you. There's no loop will occur here, my friend. And I, this is like my worry with the AI industry is they try to generalize everything from the experience of software engineering over and over and over again. And so, yeah, it's cool that they're building hardware. I think that is just to lock software engineers into like muscle memory for macros. Yeah.

But it's a fair theory. None of this is the thing that we were promised from AI. No, I agree with that. I think the one part of it that I have been most personally compelled by is just dictation as a sort of system-wide thing. This is another thing everyone is building. Like, for a minute everybody was vibe coding like habit trackers and to-do list apps. and now everybody is vibe coding a Mac local first dictation app. There are 400,000 of them every single day, and they're all the same thing.

And the idea that you can just speak into your computer and have it spit out properly formatted text, I think is very powerful. There are a lot of messy, complicated things with that. And again, the idea, I'm sure that that tweet with the guy who replaced his computer or his laptop keyboard with the, Bob Barker, Mike was a bit. But, like, that is a thing that people are out there saying. I barely type anymore I do. I just do all of my talking. I'm like, A, are you ever in public?

Are you ever doing anything other than writing perfectly formatted emails? Or, like, how do you actually do a real-life computer work with this kind of tool? So I, but, and yet there are times where I can write an email much more quickly by saying it out loud into Gmail than by typing it out loud into Gmail. And so, like, there's some version of what if we didn't have to do every single thing available to us on a QWERTY keyboard that I think is going to be very exciting. I just, I think I agree that it's not adding macro keyboards to your desk. I just put, take that outside of the domain of software engineering.

Yes, it's great that you're like, that app isn't any good. Make it better, which is basically what happens in design reviews across the industry every single day, right? Fine. Take that into Photoshop where graphic designers now can use AI prompts in Photoshop. You're like, what I want you to do is talk to this picture instead of just clicking on the parts you want to fix. And it immediately breaks down. Like make that sharper is actually not a deterministic command the way that sliding the sharpness slider is. There's a reason we have graphical user interfaces. And I just think there's, it's good and useful to start from zero and try to build it back up again. In many ways, the success of the iPhone itself is because Steve Jobs and Apple threw away the Mac.

Yeah. Right. They built it on the same Mac OS10 foundation as Max of the day. But they threw away the app model. They threw away the interface parent. They just started it over and they threw away copy and paste. And they just started layering it all back in. And now the iPhone, regardless of its.

utterly nerfed application model is like as powerful as any Mac, as evidenced by the fact that the MacWCNeo is an iPhone ship, right? Yep. Fine. You can see how powerful that willingness to start over is, especially the whole industry does it wants. But like, we can definitely get over our skis because we're trying to impress our friends on X, the Everything app.

Yeah. And I think there's a lot of that going on right now. And I think that is driving as much antipathy towards AI is anything. Yeah, there's a, there's a real sense of kind of, kind of what you said, everybody has looked at this as a chance to reinvent everything and has decided that that actually means we are required to reinvent everything. And I think that just leaves a lot of people feeling exhausted. Or it's like, actually, I actually know how to do a lot of things on my computer. Do you know what I mean? Like, there are some things I don't know how to do

on my computer. And it would be great to have systems through which to do those more successfully. But I'm pretty good at a lot of things on my computer. And I don't actually need help doing those things. And I think there is this sense of like, well, no, actually, you have to relearn every single thing you know how to do. Even the things you really know how to do and have no problem doing, you have to relearn them anyway because of technology. And I think that just makes people feel bad. Yeah. I mean, I do like the idea that opening I, you know, hired Johnny Ive and Love from and did all this hype around phones and laptops, we can quote, legacy devices, which is what Sam Altman said to Johnny I have in that video.

And their first thing is like a macro keyboard. It is very good. Like the most legacy device you can get to. And ironically, if anything, I think the actual winner of the AI revolution so far has been laptops. Yeah, without question. Laptops are so cool now in a way they have not been cool in a very long time. What did I just say about the utterly nerfed application model on the iPhone? It's true.

It's because you can just run anything you want in a laptop. Yeah. And I think that's great. Um, like again, I, I think it's fun and exciting to be like, what if, what if you could talk to the computer and that change everything about computers? And I think the overreading of that to be like, oh, I can definitely do software development because I can run my code against some sort of external verification does not translate to anything else. Like literally any other domain gets caught up in the reality of reality. And so there's just this weird moment where it's like, of course it's a codex keyboard. That's the thing it can do. Right. Of course you can build on the foundation of the thing it can do, but your big plan to ship a pen or a necklace or a bracelet that replaces your laptop

because you can just issue commands and have your agents run around the internet doing stuff for you, none of that works yet. Right. And it might never. Like, have you caught this? Like, the AI industry is slowly starting to concede that the models don't know anything and, like, can't learn? Interesting. No, I hadn't actually really clocked that.

Like, it's just, at some point you can't hype your way past the idea that when Gemini gets it wrong and you're like, it's wrong. And it's like, I'm so sorry. You're so right. It will get it wrong exactly the same way the next time. Interesting. Like, you can't tweet your way past that lived experience that all of us have had now. And so there's, like, there's just a little bit of concession here that, hmm, that the models, like, they know what they know. But they don't learn anything.

And like a vast amount of the supposed project of the AI industry is that these things will eventually become recursive and able to teach themselves. And once we get to self-improving AI, we take over the world. Yeah, all bets are off. Then it's Asia. It's all super intelligence or whatever. Yeah. Whatever definition that thing is. But like right now, the industry has models that don't learn.

They know what they know at the time of training and that's it. and if they hallucinate you get things wrong like they aren't smarter the next day. So like you just see there's like a little bit of like you can make a lot of promises about what AI can do

with every single industry and every single situation. But now we've all been doing it for three years. Right. In that experience of you're so right. You shouldn't drink bleach is like it's just like baked into the human experience now

and you can't just like tweet your way past it. Can I tell you my new favorite, horrible thing that my AI system does to me all the time? It's starting a paragraph with the word, honestly. It drives me nuts. When it's like, I was doing a thing this morning. I need like a little tiny Chrome extension. And I was just like, what approach would you take? How would you do this?

And it gives me all the lists, all the possible options. And then it goes, honestly, I would go with number three. Or like, here's my honest recommendation. A second. And over and over and over, it's like, here's a bunch of shit. And then it's like, honestly. And I'm like, I don't just answer my question. It's very bad.

Stop using any of these words. Every time you use the word honestly, it's like a word I don't want to use in my writing anymore because it's now the thing that makes you sound like AI to me when you use the word honestly. I hate it. Anyway, there are a couple of other gadget things we should talk about here. And I want you to know that because I love you, Neelai, I'm not going to make you talk about the working demo of the clicks communicator, a device that I think is very exciting. and we will cover more on this show.

But you, as somebody noted hater of physical keyboards on phones. Yeah, very down. We'll leave that alone. Everybody should go watch the Clicks Communicator. I think it's cool. We should talk about what appears to be a couple of different leaks of the iPhone 18 Pro.

Have you seen these pictures and these videos of the drop test? The way this has all come out has been very strange to me. Has it felt weird to you? There's like a Reuters story about how there's photos on the dark web. And then they end up on X and they get taken down on X, but then that like Streisand affects it. And so now it's everywhere. It's everywhere.

I first encountered the video of this drop test on a TikTok. And it was a TikTok of somebody talking over somebody talking over a TikTok, like three generations deep into this video being shared. Apple's smarter this. I don't know why they did this. They verify that this video is real by issuing the taketans, right? It's weird. Yeah.

And apparently it all goes back to this company, was it called, I think it was Tata Electronics, had a data breach, and the security researchers said, seemed to think that one of the files that were breached and got posted to the dark web included Tata Electronics customers, like Apple, and I think Tesla was another one. And so all this stuff, like there's a drop test video that is not the sort of thing you normally see in leaks like this.

Normally it's like marketing images, right? Like somebody finds the Best Buy URL ahead of time and that's how these things get leaked. This has come out in a very different way. But I was surprised at the same thing you were, which is that by clearly making an effort to take this down, they turned it into a thing. Like, I'm now 100% sure this is the iPhone 18 Pro.

And it's because of the way that this has gone down and the speed with which someone seems to be trying to scrub it from the internet. Yeah. I mean, we don't know that it's Apple, right? Like X hasn't been particularly forthcoming about where these takedown requests are coming from. It could be the manufacturer themselves. There was some amount of like, you know,

ransomware attack happening on the supplier. So it's just like it's unclear who we'd even own this video and where it got lost and how. And the idea that the thing went viral and you should have paid the money is like the whole industry wants to stop that. Like when we've had cybersecurity folks on Decoder, they're just like,

pay the ransom. Like, you're in a spot where if you don't, then the cost of not paying the ransom goes up because they will want to inflict maximum damage. So just pay the money, which is not, I think, what most people, right? Most people do not feel this way. Like, I don't negotiate with terrorists.

Rule number one is don't negotiate with terrorists. Yeah. But there's enough diffuse cybercrime in the world where all of them have an incentive to make it so costly if you don't pay the ransom. handsome. So there's just this weird back and forth through that I can understand. But yeah, you get to the point where it's like, yeah, let it leak and then just like deny it. Like you're fighting criminals. You don't have to play a totally honorable game. You can just

let people believe whatever they want. And it's the it's the strides and effect of trying to take it down. I think it's interesting. What do you think of the actual phone itself? I mean, it looks exactly like the 17 pro. Except the camera bump is huge. Okay. I've been trying, I'm very glad you said this because I've been trying to figure this out. because there are angles at which it looks like it might just be a sort of trick of perspective that the camera bump is huge. But then there are other times where it just looks like the camera bump is huge. That we're going to get like full-on pixel-style cyclops thing along the back, which I got to tell you, I really do not like it all. So presumably we're looking at the pro in these videos, right?

It appears that way, yeah. So if you have a folding iPhone that has kind of like an iPhone air set up, right? Thinner cameras, maybe not as good, maybe no Zoom or no Ultra Wide depending on the configuration Apple goes with. This sets up the opportunity for the pro to be even better.

Right? So the Halo iPhone of this generation is the folding phone, the camera isn't good, but don't worry if you want the best camera, Apple has made the pro, the best pro phone that has ever proed. And you think that's the whole? whole push for the pro is it is the camera. I think at this point, what else?

I mean, I guess that's kind of, yeah, that's sort of been true for the last couple of years. It's going to run iPhone apps slightly, slightly better. Do you prefer rectangle apps or square? Now, the iPhone line. Yeah. Like, it's fair. It's the only differentiation for the pro in ages, right? Like, the screens are better.

Like, is pro motion? I'm like the person who buys the phone because of promotion on the display. Right. Not most people. And I think all the people who are dazzled by the most impressive specs are the people Apple is going to try to convince to buy the fold or the ultra or whatever the hell they call it. Like the folding iPhone is going to be the one for the people who want like the best shiny thing. The case for the pro is I think you're I think you're right. It's going to have to be about the camera.

Or battery life. True. I have a lot of questions about the battery life on this folding iPhone. It will be based on the case mockups I've seen, which might be nothing. That's the other way these things always leak, by the way, is the case companies. But yeah, so I mean, like, you know, I think the folding iPhone, there's going to be some set of compromises to come with the folding iPhone. The camera looks very obvious. Battery life is another one that could potentially be obvious. You've got to drive one larger display and the secondary display, the cover display.

A lot of ways battery life can go sideways. So then the pro phone can get bigger and thicker and have more battery life and more cameras. And you're like, yes, you can have the thin one. You can have the folding one. or you can have the monster. And I'm just telling you right now, I'm all monster all the way. If that's actually how this lineup goes,

if there's like a cool folding phone, you're like, wow, that's intellectually very interesting. I'll go with the monster, please. The biggest battery life and the best cameras I can get. Okay, wait, this, I'm now, this lineup is amazing. So now there's the cheap one,

which presumably is just like the base 18. The iPhone 18. We've heard some rumors that might not be a thing. Oh, weird. I don't know. The rumors are all over the place. But anyway, so it's, yeah, So you have the base model, the cheap one.

You have the thin one, the air. You have the wild one, which is the foldable phone. And then you have the monster. Is that the, this is the lineup now? Yeah. You've got base model, skinny one, foldy, and monster. That's how Greg Josriac is going to introduce them. John Turnus' first Apple event is CEO.

He's like, this one's called Foldy and that one's called Monster. This is like a Disney Plus show waiting to happen. Verschast listeners should reach out. Tell me which one sounds more compelling there. Do you care about folding or do you just want the biggest battery life you can get? The biggest battery with the longest battery life. I've been thinking a lot about this. And there's a part of me that is like as a tech journalist who has been using new products for a very long time,

I feel obligated to get the fold just because it is the newest version of the thing. But I also feel like I have now been very happily a base iPhone user for the last two cycles. And other than the battery life, which is, I think, demonstrably better on the pro, there is nothing about this phone I would like to upgrade specs-wise. Like, just nothing. And I am consistently amazed by the fact that I do not miss things about the pro phone. Don't you have children? Yeah. Do you take pictures of your children? Yeah, sometimes. I look at the AI do it. You're just like prompt the children. Yeah. Look, I already took some pictures of them. Imagine pictures of them in a pool. That's what I want.

Yeah. I mean, we get new iPhones over here because you have kids and I just want the best cameras every year. And whether or not the new cameras are the best cameras is open to debate every year. Yeah. I think this year I am unusually excited about this year, even though I think next year is probably going to be the year and Apple will save a bunch of stuff for the 20th anniversary iPhone. whatever is about to happen with all of the rising prices and all of the complicated stuff with supply chains and which products continue to make sense. Figuring out what Apple is about is most possible to do at the iPhone event. And I think this year is going to be a particularly interesting.

Oh, we're just going to hear about Siri the whole time. You think? You know it's true. It probably is, especially now that it's gone very well, like the early Siri AI returns continue to be really good. They're probably just going to double and triple down on

we've done it. Siri is here. Yeah. All right, one more bit of news which is just I was thinking about this in particular. We just had a short little quick post on the site about a future cheese standard for charging that might bring 50 watt wireless charging

to more devices. Some can do it right now, but you need a fan in your charger. Sure. That's how fast it goes. I was thinking about this this morning because I was charging my phone with a laptop charger that is not like, you know, excellent, highly rated, technically competent laptop charger.

And the thing damn near set my phone on fire. Yeah, yeah. That happens all the time. Boy, was it hot trying to charge this thing. And I was like, this is the stuff I'm looking forward to. I want my phone to just be boiling hot all the time. So I track a lot of this kind of tech. in the weirdest way possible,

I pay attention to what car TikTokers say when they're making the fun feature videos. Okay. So like Forrest Jones is like, I think the single best car feature TikToker there is. Like he set the model. Everyone does it.

He's great. And so the fact that Forrest just waves at giant screens that cost billions of dollars of R&D to produce. And he's like, and it has car play. It tells you one very important thing about the whole industry.

That's so brutal. He does it all the time. Right. He's like, And it's got a 90-inch screen that runs CarPlay and Android Auto. And then he just moves on. And he never looks at the automaker interface at all. And if it's a Tesla or something, he's like, and it runs Google Maps.

And that's as far as we go. And like, you just know something very important by what Car TikTokers prioritizing this way. Yes. Meanwhile, an entire building of people at GM just sigh deeply every time he does that. Right, but they've got to make like a two-minute TikTok running through all the features. Yeah. Right. Doug DeMiro's like, here are all the quirks and features.

You'd make a long YouTube video. Right. Car ticker cars have to do it in like, it's a much more ruthless prioritization. So the one that I've noticed, it keeps coming up now, is they will wave at the wireless charger and they'll say,

and it has a fan. And it's a ventilated wireless charger. Because this is important. Because when a car maker started putting wireless chargers in the cars, they weren't ventilating or cooling them in any way. They would get hot, and the phones would stop charging.

Uh-huh. And so people would obviously notice this. So the car TikTokers have all taken to asking or otherwise finding out that the car chargers, that the wireless chargers and new cars are ventilated because the audience gives a shit. That's so interesting. In the prioritization of what I'm going to say, what features I'm going to talk about in my two-minute TikTok, the wireless charger is ventilated makes the cut now, like more often than not. That's really interesting.

The wireless charging pad in between the same. see it's in my car is probably the single least used feature in my car. In part because it was like it's a 22 car. And so it was like, you know, it's a few years old. We've made some wireless charging progress since then. And this is like you have to set it exactly right. And then if you go over one bump, it stops charging. Like it's not a good system.

But also it's where all of my stuff goes. Like it is the charger is in the spot where when you instinctively get into the car, that's where you put your keys. or like the sandwich or like whatever, all of my stuff goes into the thing that is ostensibly charging my phone. Just a terrible, terrible feature. And I have never understood why anyone would want it.

But maybe with a fan, I'll be into it. This is why I always end up buying a mag-safe charger for my car and mounting it somewhere on the dash because the magnets hold it in place. I've been meaning to tell you that I got a long way down the road of wanting to buy one of these the other day. Like to the point where I'm sitting with one of these in an Amazon cart because I couldn't get CarPlay to work.

I'm running the iOS 27 developer beta, and CarPlay is so flaky with this. And that's like it's no one's fault. It's a developer beta. It's my fault. Like I get it. But I also need Google Maps to work. And so I was all the way down the road of I'm just going to buy a mount and plug in in my car.

And then the vision of you taking a victory lap on that popped up in my head. And I literally, I could not make myself buy it. That's right. I'm right. I'm right about this every time. I cannot have. The slate truck is an entire product, an entire truck built around the reality that most people should just mount their phones to the back. I just knew that every time I looked at it, it would just be you cackling at me from my lock screen about how you were right, and I couldn't do it. It's fair. Look, it makes sense. You put the map in CarPlay, or you put the music in CarPlay and you're on the map on the phone screen. I think that this works. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to talk about this. We should take a break. We should take a break. and then we're going to come back. We got Hyped Desk. We got Brendan.

We got the lightning round. We'll be back. If you want a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad free? Don't worry.

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Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. All right, we're back. It's time now for the hype desk. Where our friends, Ross, and Ashley, come and tell us what's cool in the world and on the internet. You're both here today. Hi, Ross. Hi, Ashley. We are, in fact, not the same person. We have been seen in the same room at the same time. Get that mistaken all the time. It's the hair. I've got to tell you. It's just long, luxurious hair in all cases. I went for a summer Phoenix. No joke. What I would get for Ashley's hair right now? Like, just a long, just.

Truly. What do you guys have for us this week? I, okay. Can we just go back? Ross, you can. I'm working on it. There's nothing stopping you. There is nothing stopping you. This is a multi-year project.

Anyway, I know. This is going to get cut. My promise to all of you is that we will do a hype desk about all of our respective hair care situations at some point in the very near future. I'm just putting that into the universe. Will this also be the Widows Bay watch party? Yeah. Oh, I'm so very ready. But not this time.

What do you guys have for us this week? I totally. Sort of horror. It is actually horror directly related instead of kind of horror comedy. So I am super excited because Unhinged is out, which is this new Netflix game by Night School. And it's I played it. And it's, I played it last night. And maybe that was a poor choice.

I did not realize that I would feel actually as scared as, as I ended up being. Okay, so I love it when, I love interactivity. This is like very exciting for me. So the one, so unhinged is this horror game. Netflix has a studio called Night School that developed this. And it seems like there's a special thanks for David Fincher and in the credits.

So it seems like he was involved in some sort of capacity. And so it's a survival game. And the lead character is Zon. Joey Kravitz and you're this character, you wake up, it's like a storm, and then you realize there's like a killer in your apartment building. And the neat thing about it is, so you can only play this game if you go to your Netflix account on a web browser or a smart TV that supports this game, which is my one like bummer about this. Like I wanted to play it on my couch, like sitting on my couch using my Apple TV. One of my questions for you is going to be, do you

know anyone who actually earnestly plays Netflix games? And I feel like that sentence you just said answers, no for everyone on planet Earth. This is like the most frustrating thing because I feel like if this was more accessible, like literally everyone would play it and be raving about it because the experience itself is so visceral because you connect your cell phone to the experience. And your actual phone in your hand is your flashlight in the game. and you can text people who are in the game. Like Troy Baker plays the superintendent of the apartment building. You have your best friend, which is Sadie Sink.

And it's really stacked like voice cast, which is amazing. And you can literally mess, you get messages from them. Like, it is so immersive and visceral and interactive. And it's so, there's like a bunch of ways you can die like in the game. It's like, it's not like a no-fail state. Like, this is, this is a thing where, like, you really do feel like your, your virtual life is on the line. And it's a, it's very good.

And it's about a half, it takes a half an hour. It's not a long, like, experience. It's like, it feels like you're experiencing a very scary episode of horror television in real time. And it's, it's so cool and impressed. Like, I loved it. And I, like I said, the only thing I wish I could have done. was experienced it like on my couch chilling at night instead of at my computer because it sort of

felt a little more like work. I do like this though. It feels very Netflix-y. Like this is the first Netflix game anyone has ever described to me that I'm like, oh, I kind of get why this would be on Netflix. Yes, very much so. Like this is a thing that feels very organic to the Netflix brand, but also is such a cool thing for night school to have developed. Like the way that the technology, like the way that your web browsers, like interacting with your phone, like you have your flashlights. It's really cool. Wait, can you explain that more? I don't think I... So, if you were watching this on a TV, the TV is all run sort of like H-TML5 apps.

So is this just Netflix, like, running a web browser in your TV? What's happening here? It's kind of a, I think it's like an H-TM-L-5 streaming thing because your phone becomes basically a gyroscope controller. So as you kind of rotate it around, the flashlight also kind of rotates. So do you have to like log in your, do you just open the Netflix app on your phone? There's a separate one. So it's kind of like how Jackbox game works a little bit. Jackbox games lets you use like a web browser, here you'll get a QR code. That'll let you download the Netflix game controller app. Connects the thing.

Yeah. Sure. So yeah, you're using the Dioscope. You kind of move around a little bit. And then when you kind of get your cursor to the edge of the screen, you get a button that basically says, go right, go to the next scene. So unlike, let's say, like the Bandersnatch Black Mirror thing, which was just purely choose your own adventure or some of the other, like, early Netflix experiments, this

really does feel like a full streamed game where you were having kind of real time. Yeah. I wouldn't say decision. It feels much like if you play this PlayStation game until done, on. So those twoser on adventure horror games where you kind of have to make some motion decisions.

It's very much like that. That makes sense. Because Bander Snatch and all the other Netflix games have either been like mobile, casual games or I'm going to pick what the next cutscene is. Yeah. And so, okay, so in this one,

I died a few times. And every time I died, there's like a cut scene of the cops like talking about how you died. And it's like very good. Like they talk about like the specific, they comment on like the, crime scene.

Like, and so it's like, it's really cool. Like, I can't, I'm just really, I was so surprised and delighted by how cool it was. This is a good case. I will say, Ashley, you should know that after your Masters of the Universe recommendation, you see it? You're, the, the trust level with Ashley was, was a record low on the hype desk. I'm sad to hear that. I'm so sad to hear that.

I'm going to go down with the ship. Who could have seen this coming? I'm going to go down with a ship. And agree with Ashley here because unhinged, it is great. 30, I'll say 60 minutes because I kept dying. For those out here who want to try it, there is a story mode, which means you cannot die. But you should, though. You should die.

Like, it's fun. Like, it's worth it to. Just to see the cops standing over your body being like she was resisting. Yeah, to like go through. Just die. Like, die a few times. And then if you feel like, okay, I kind of get like, I'm over dying, then switch to the story. Don't start with the story mode.

Right. But I will add that, like, there, it's hard to find a. comp for this, even on the gaming side. Like, it is a clever experiment. It's only 30, maybe 60 minutes if you're bad at the game like I am. And I do, I'm very curious if this is what Netflix does going for. Because they've tried interactive. They've tried to figure out what the games program is going to be.

This feels like a step in the right direction. And in many ways, and just finding something that just feels uniquely theirs. And it can uniquely kind of handle, let's say, like, their infrastructure to make the stream and work seamless. Like, this is a thing I feel like is so unique to a place like Netflix. Like, it's something they can say, like, You really can't get this almost anywhere else. Like, there are so few places that you could actually, platforms that you could actually get this.

And that feels, to Ross's point, like that great, really good, like, solid step in the right direction. Yeah, I dig it. Ross, do you have one for us? I do. I was scanning through kind of like Steam's different, like, PC demos, checking us out. And I found what I really do feel is kind of like the ultimate Vergi game. It's in a demo now. It's going to come out later this year.

It is called Restory Chill Electronic Repairs. And here's the justice. It's called Sign That Party speaker. Yes. You are running like a mom and pop little gadget repair store in the 2000s in Akihabra district of Japan.

And so people come up and you can take your time with this. They'll hand you old knockoff Nokia phones, Motorola razors, like Nintendo DSs and PSPs, and you just kind of very slowly and casually unscrew them, take the parts out,

and just kind of dust off and clean all the gadgets and give them back. It is a cozy game. If you ever play this kind of cleaning games like PowerWash Simulator, where you just very satisfyingly do menial chores, that is exactly what this game is. And there's a demo out now. It takes about an hour to play.

I have a really important question about this. Is this the kind of game where you look at the gadget and then you press a button that says repair and it is magically repaired? Or do you have to like do the work to repair? You have to do the work. Okay, good. This is what I want. Because Power Wash Simulator is great because you are actually doing the full activity

of power washing. If it was just like press a button and it will be power washed, you lose all of the fun of them. No, this is like the gentle look at every detail. It's like the Tamagashi. As a little girl comes up and goes, hey, can you fix my Tamagashi? You take off the front panel, the screen cover, the screen, the circuit brake, you unscrew every

little bit of it. And then you take each piece and you can just kind of dust it off or you can order new parts and replace it. And like, it really makes you appreciate one, how repairable everything was in this kind of joyous mid-2000 days where you could just, you know, take a part of Nokia 33 10 and go, oh, that's how that works and put it back together yourself.

You are doing that and then you have this kind of like very gentle like brushing animation. The sounds in this game are amazing. Every time you like unscrew and like put a little piece of plastic on the on the table, it's like so joyous. I love this. I'm looking at the picture. This is so charming. This looks like what every one of the VR games I played for years was trying to be. No, that's a good point.

Like every VR game was like, we're going to prove. put you in a workshop and you're going to make beautiful things. And this one is just not trying to do such weird stuff, but it's like charming and animated in exactly the same way. I love it. It's a steam game, right? It's a steam game right. Can you take apart a steam deck on a steam deck?

Oh, they should add that as D.L. Yeah, it should be good. It's like obvious. It's like the first thing they should have done. You go put your own Steam day. You do have an Atari. If you die in the game, do you die in real life? And we're back on Unhinged.

This is the Netflix 4D experience. No, when it comes to Restory, it is a lot of, like, legally distinct. So I think I wrote a few of these down. It is the NONP PMP. Is there a Sony PSP, of course? You're, I think Electrogachi is what they call it. A FO Kia. Fokia.

And, of course, of course, they officially licensed Atari. So it's just a flat-out 2,600. Atari will take money from it. We could officially license Atari right now. You can send them, like, a handful of loose change in the mail. And they're like, yeah, you're an Atari now. All right, I'm going to go play Restory, like, as soon as we finish recording this podcast. This is, like, extremely my kind of game.

I hope it makes a newsletter. I'm just really hoping, yeah. I'm excited about it. All right, Ross, Ashley, good to see you both. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Cheers, y'all. All right, now it is time, once again, for America's favorite podcast with our podcast,

Brendan Carr's a Dummy. Brendan Carr's a dummy. Mark. Oh, my dog. That's from Arthur Laird. That's good. Beautiful. That's going to be stuck in my head for a long time. It's playing out, by the way. Do you hear that? That guitar tone is real. It's still in the background.

It gave me, like, immediate, do you remember the Disney Robin Hood movie? That's where my brain went as soon as that started playing. Oh, yeah, no, I get it. That's very cute. I was expecting, like, the metal breakdown like we had last week. Which, by the way, maybe the most response we've ever gotten to a Brendan theme song. The Now with Merch really, really, really, hit for people. Yeah. Don't know. We'll play it at the end of the show every week now. It's going to be at the end of the show, 10 minutes of silence, a bunch of ads, and then that Brendan Carr every time. It's going to be amazing. That's how we finance everything from now on. What did Brendan knew this week, Neelai? So Brendan did do some stuff this week. We're going to set that aside, though, this time. Because a thing that happens... Was he just like kicking it at the country fair or whatever

it was called? Brendan issued some new rulings about like spectrum allocations that means that means Elon Musk will get more spectrum. Like, sure, you've heard this story before. A thing that happens with Brendan consistently that I have to keep pointing out is that he's such a censorious traitor to the Constitution in the United States that he keeps scrambling partisan divides. So this week, Brendan is so stupid that he caused Neil Gorsuch to point out that he's a danger to the Constitution. Whoa.

And like, I don't spend a lot of time agreeing with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So the coalition is now you, Ted Cruz, and Neil Gorson. Yeah, it's like every nowting in the show, actually, like, Ted Cruz, he got a handed to him. Or like, the Wall Street Journal editorial board once again issued a stunning indictment of Brendan's whole deal, which I once again agree with. Turns out, by the way, free speech, relatively bipartisan issue. Yeah, a lot of people like free speech.

So, Neil, it's this week, it's me and my buddy Neil Gorson. who is otherwise like a crazy person. So this was a big week at the Supreme Court, a bunch of big partisan decisions, 6 to 3. The one you've probably heard of is the birthright citizenship case where they decided that the Constitution protects birthright citizenship.

You're hearing that as like a big 6-3 winner for the Constitution. It's actually like 5'4. Brett Kavanaugh's like in the middle. So you just have this spread of like Trump lost one big one, but actually the Trump administration won a bunch of other big ones

that make the presidency even more powerful. So the centerpiece of all that is Trump v. Slaughter, which is about whether Trump can just fire the members of independent agencies, in this case, the Federal Trade Commission. And former Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter was actually on Decoder, explaining why she filed this case like ages ago. The idea is that independent agencies are supposed to be apolitical, right? The Congress set up all these agencies, the Federal Communications Commission,

the Federal Trade Commission, what have you. And the president says, I'm going to appoint members. of these commissions, Congress will confirm them, the Senate will confirm them, and then they will have independence from either the president or from Congress so that they can operate in a bipartisan way outside of the demands of politics and make good decisions over the long term. And this has been the case for 100 years. And there's like famous law school precedent. And this time the Supreme Court threw it all out. And that they even said, John Roberts even wrote in the opinion, whatever remains of this former precedent that said the president can't fire these. commissioners is gone. It's overturned. It's overturned. This is like a big deal. If you are a lawyer or like somebody who studies the federal system, this is the biggest deal in the world. I bring all this up because Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence in this decision, saying we have to do this. These agencies have gotten too powerful. They're fundamentally undemocratic, making sure the president can feel the pressure from the public and fire the people and be accountable is important. This is his big argument. You can believe this argument or not. It's kind of a wild twist of logic to get into that. It is, right? The whole point is that you insulate the agencies from politics and, like, heated public debate

so they can make good long-term decisions about spectrum. Things that should not be political. Yes. And if you make them more political, they will inherently get more corrupt. As you can see right now with the Federal Communications Commission run by Brendan Carr, which keeps handing everything to his friend Elon Musk. Right. Right.

So the idea that the agencies are political, is very bad. But this is like a centerpiece of the Trump administration, a centerpiece of the conservative movement. There's this whole idea called the unitary executive. You can fall down the rabbit hole. None of this actually matters. What matters is that Neil Gorsuch wrote in his concurrence in Trump v. Slaughter, independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the nation's affairs. They regulate our businesses and our financial markets. They set the rules through the internet airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, the manner of our employment. Often, these agencies do this with hardly any statutory guidance based on broad glimates.

grants of legislative authority. So he's saying Congress says, you can have a Federal Communications Commission, and then they're the kings of the airwaves, and that's bad. And there should be some political influence over them, because then if you're mad at Trump or if you're mad at some decision that the FCC makes,

you can put that pain on the president, he'll fire the person. Again, this is some twisted logic. Yeah. So then Gorsuch goes through this, like, laundry list of, like, ways agencies are too powerful, almost all which are like, I hate the environment,

you know, like whatever it is. And then he comes to, and then there's late night comedy. Last year, taking objection to a network host on-air remarks, the chairman of the SEC suggested it would be additional work ahead for the agency,

if broadcast companies did not find ways to take action, and then he cited, we can do this the hardware or the easy way, which is what Carr said about Jimmy Kimmel. And so the centerpiece of we will tear down the administrative state is Brendan Carr being a, like,

a trade. to the Constitution and try to censor comedy. And now that a conservative justice is pointing out, we should not have an FCC chair who's that powerful. Wait, but okay, hold on. Unaccountable to the people. This doesn't make any sense to me. This is a lot.

This is a lot of jumps to get there. Yeah, this is, this just like broke my brain in half because what, what Neil Gorsuch is saying is that we have to make sure that these people can be fired by. the president. Yep. In fact, the whole problem that we have is this person was put into their job and given every incentive to be completely corrupt in favor of the president. You see what I'm saying.

This feels bad. You see what I'm saying? Neil, I love you, but I don't think you don't understand what we're doing here. Right. It's not, it's, I don't think that enough voters are going to be so mad about Jimmy Kimball that they throw Trump out of office, right? The idea is that the agency should be independent so the president can't pressure them.

To be mad at Jimmy Kimmel. To be mad at Jimmy Kimmel. Look, you can make the argument that it's better for the president to operate the government that actually, if you look at the frustrations of everyday Americans, the amount of bureaucratic process

between a campaign promise and a policy being affected is too high. Sure. Right? Like, sure, I buy all this. But I think it's very funny that Neil Gorsuch, of all people, is like, man, these agencies are out of control powerful. My best example of them is a guy doing the bidding of the president. Thus, the president should have even more power to fire that guy. What? It's good. But what Gorset's project here and John Roberts project and the conservative project generally is to get to the point where the agencies are the president. Yes. And so everything the agencies do is a reflection on the president, and there's some political check on the president's worst impulses.

Or that the president's worst impulses are allowed to run completely rampant because this is a purely political system. What Americans won is a king, I'm told. Famously, here are the three days before the Fourth of July. We fought a war to have a king. A king of late-night comedy? Great movie, by the way. Anyway. Anyway, that's been Brennan Carr's a dummy.

Neil, you're also welcome to come on the Vergecast. I welcome any of our Supreme Court justices. I think Clarence Thomas would bang on the Burgecast. I think that would be one of our best episodes of all time. That would be based on some of the, I think it was the birthright citizenship dissent he wrote, was like 90 pages or something. Yeah. Yeah.

To be fair, he wrote it in 48.4. He's very old, Clarence Thomas. That's another one. We'll just play a lot of silence over top of that episode. You can imagine it however you want. Here's my idea for a Vergecast segment. Our nation's octogenarian men of power come on the show, and I just ask them what font size their iPhone is sent to.

And that's it. That's the whole segment. I love it. We just call it old heads. Because what is it? How big are those icons? You tell me, how much power should you have based on the size of your phone icon? Pretty good.

That's been Brennan Carr's a dummy. As always, Brennan, you're welcome. Anyone's welcome, really. If you can explain yourself or the amount of corruption it has taken to have the Supreme Court cite your actions

in an effort to increase executive power, I would love to talk about this with you. That's from Brennan Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast for the podcast. It's a good one. No context. I'm just going to read you a Wall Street Journal story that just dropped a few minutes ago. Elon Musk SpaceX has developed a prototype for a handset-like device designed to reshape how humans interact with artificial intelligence that SpaceX has shown investors recently. The Rocket and AI company showed the prototype, which features a sleek design that is slimmer than an iPhone to some investors and other stakeholders ahead of the company's mega IPO, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sure. We're building a phone. Sure. Okay. The funnyest part about this to me. I just want you to imagine a phone in which X is presumably a crucial part of the operating system. GROC is how you interact with everything. And presumably Starlink is how you get service. This is the all-time worst idea about cell phones that I've ever heard.

I love it so much. I think it's very funny that there are rumors that SpaceX will buy T-Mobile. I was going to ask you about this. I genuinely want to know what you think about this. And there's another rumor, you know, Comcast is splitting itself in a two that eventually the Comcast broadband business will be acquired by SpaceX as well. They're a telecom firm. At some point, we're all just going to have to admit that SpaceX is a telecom firm with worse margins than Teamable. Yeah.

Right? They have way higher costs and they have to deliver competitive broadband prices. So you inherently have worse margins than Teamable. I mean, SpaceX is like, it's, it's, it's, Starlink, and then it's a really expensive marketing department that launches rockets. It's like functionally how that business works. It's, and it's funny because Starlink is profitable on space, but they have to pay the launch cost to the other part of the company. And like, it's great that the rocket, every time you talk about SpaceX, you have to concede.

It is very cool that the rockets land themselves. Absolutely. No one thought anyone could do it. Gwen Shotwell has been a great job running that company. And obviously Elon Musk can just overpower the laws of physics through nothing but charisma and racism or whatever combination. of traits that he has. Great. The, like, the reality of that business is that it's a telecom provider. At the end of the day, that it is a broadband company, and we know the economics of broadband companies extraordinarily well. And for as uncompetitive as that market is,

it's not like the most lucrative market in the history of the world. I also think it's funny that they're going to make a phone. Like, you're going to have a Starlink phone that has AI in it, you have to, this is the same bet we were talking about earlier. You're going to rethink all of computers. You're going to just going to talk to AI and it's going to do stuff for you. Are you going to have an Instagram app?

Is it going to run TikTok? People like doing things on their phones. Is it going to have Candy Crush? Like, will it support Outlook? Like, I can just go down the list of things. Meili X is the Everything app? I don't know if you know this. Sure phones can do.

You don't need anything else. You just run into some pretty obvious problems right away. There's X money now. It's true. And it's not just one bank account. It's a sweep across many bank accounts in order to. It's very good. It's like, oh, we're doing financial engineering now as well. I love this. I'm very happy about it. Yeah. It's the whole thing. It's just deeply, deeply silly. By the way, it's the same idea that Sam Waltman has. To build a phone. It's exactly the same idea that Sam Altman has. Yeah. Like, there's no point in making this a Starling phone. Most people are around places with cell service. The idea is that you will make a device. It, it's the idea is that you will make a device. that replaces your phone and you just talk to an AI model and the AI model runs around doing stuff for you. And it's like, that's really hard. Yeah. No one has pulled it off yet. And there's no true application model for AI yet in that way.

Right. It's worth saying, by the way, that Elon Musk has denied for a very long time that SpaceX is building a phone. This rumor has been floating around for a long time. It also just makes a lot of sense, right? Like, even for Starlink in particular, having a sort of halo device kind of tracks. He also on this one even has said he called it utterly. false a statement to which I put almost no stock. But that's what he said.

And I think there's going to be a very funny turn that a lot of these folks have to make where they're going to have to convince you that the phone that they made isn't a phone. Do you know what I mean? Like there is, there are a bunch of reasons that we have cataloged extensively on this show that the thing you should make is a phone, but you can't because Google and Apple own that. And there is no winning that game anymore unless you are Google and Apple. So you have to build something else. But if you make the stack of things that people want, you end up making a phone.

And this is the incredible challenge with all hardware right now is the only way to win is to build a phone that somehow isn't in Google or Apple's orbit. And that's very hard to do. And so what we're going to see with all of these devices is them try very, very hard to explain to you why this isn't a phone while shipping you a thing. that looks and feels like a worse phone. And all of it's going to be input. All of it's going to be, you just talk to it.

Yeah, I think it's going to be fascinating. And in a way, like, these open AI headphones that keep floating around, like you can sort of understand why they would do that and what the case is there for, right? It's like easy interaction with your AI assistant. Like, great, well and good. The thing with a six-inch screen that goes in your pocket is a very different kind of game to play next to somebody's phone.

But if you run a telecom provider and you want that fee on top of your Starlink broadband fee, you almost have to make a phone. Yeah, absolutely. And it is certainly true that a phone made by SpaceX and Starlink's and Elon Musk will sell. Like that thing will do numbers, whatever that thing is. It will. You shake your head of me all you want. It will sell. People will buy it.

Whether it's good or not. No, everything is so expensive. How expensive will that thing be? and it will not have Instagram. There's this Wall Street Journal piece said, well, I mean, who knows? The prototype was designed to run a proprietary operating system and integrate AI technology from SpaceX's XAI,

some of the people running a Snapdragon chipset. It's a phone that grocs. It's a GROC phone. Cool. It's going to run, it's not going to run Android, right? That's a proprietary operating system. It feels like a fork of Android. Yeah.

No, you don't have Instagram. And I'm keying on Instagram, but just think of any, any edge case app for any human being that's on their iPhone. I think for most people it's on Instagram, I think a phone without Instagram almost as a non-starter for like 90% of people.

Oh yeah. And I think you make that list 10 apps long and you've captured everybody, right? Like it's not super hard. But I do think, I mean, the galaxy brain thesis of all of this puts together the idea of X being in everything app and you look at what like WeChat is in China where essentially that becomes the most important

thing and you could essentially build a phone that only ran WeChat and it would work. If you, like, Elon Musk could talk himself into all we need is Grock and X and we can solve everything because X is the Everything app and GROC is this agent that accomplishes everything on your behalf. And that's all we need. It is utterly divorced from reality, but you can see why he might be very excited about the idea. Right. You don't need a bank app because you use X, the Everything app for your bank. Yes, exactly. This is nonsense. I just like, I can't be. I... Is it going to run Outlook?

Do you know what most people need at work? They need Outlook. It's like, I can ask you the dumbest questions. How many times have we covered a new phone platform? Yeah, it's true. Is it going to support RCS? I mean, that's a good one, yeah. No, I agree.

What version of Bluetooth does it run? All day. I can do this to you all day long. Yeah. Listen, I wanted the Trump phone to be real, and it kind of is. ish. It's like realish.

No, I'm told that our review units have shipped. Yeah, that's still, real-ish. Sure. I'm sure there are some Trump phones. But at least the Trump front runs Android. Like, I know that that phone

has gone through Play Store review. It does have Instagram. Yeah. Like, I first knew that the Trump phone was closer to real when like Google people told me it had gone through Play Store review. Very true.

Because you know what that means? It has Instagram. It comes preloaded with true social. To be clear. Mm-hmm. But you can download Instagram on it. Yeah. By the way, that Trump phone supports RCS because Android supports RCS.

I can answer the questions. Is any of this good? No. But it's more of a phone. Does it illegally mine crypto for Eric Trump in the background? Probably. That's what phones do? That's Android, baby.

What's your next landing round? All right. Well, I mean, I obviously have to do Comcast splitting in, too. Yeah, this was the setup. Yeah, you do. I mean, first of all, what an incredible personal victory. for me. You did it.

You brought down Comcast all by yourself. Just through the power of disclosure alone. So I, for, let me do the disclosure. Uh-huh. So all, if you might have noticed, it is all the rage for media companies to cut themselves into lately. This is what we're doing. It's that time.

It's that time. There's only two business models there. There's bumbling and unbumbling. And we are going through unbundling. Yep. That is the time. So Comcast has not been part of our disclosure for ages because the NBC universal investment in Vox Media went to Vercent. That's right.

So Versent is an investor in Vox Media, our parent company, a parent company that is splitting into. And so there will be a new Vox Media, which will sell our ads as part. of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And then there's going to be a new company called PMX, and Verson is a joint, that's a joint venture with an old Vox Media

that Verson is an investor. This is all so tortured. I feel like it, it can't possibly matter anymore. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. We've really like, ship of Theseeas to this investment

at this point. Right. Our disclosure is going to look like we talk about South by Southwest and our parent company on South by Southwest. Yeah. Something like that.

If we talk about New Year's Eve, I think we're going to have to disclose at our parent company owns Dick Clark Productions. It's going to be great. It's a new season of disclosures for us. You know this means our new goal now is for you and I to host New Year's Rock and Eve. Oh, it's happening. This is now the stated goal of DeVercast.

We're going to be there. Okay. And it's going to be amazing. Just making sure. David's going to sing. Done. Anyway, so Comcast had the thesis. If you will recall, a huge part of like the,

2010 to 2016 net neutrality fight was Comcast, buying content to put on its pipes. So they're like, we're going to buy NBC Universal, and then you will have preferential access to NBC Universal content on Comcast network, which just flies in the face of net neutrality. To be fair, everybody was doing this. Everybody had this idea. AT&T bought Time Warner, and their entire idea was they would preload,

like Game of Thrones shitware on mid-range Android phones. This is zero rating. That was the term, right? Yeah, so like zero rating was the thing. So if you're a Comcast subscriber, Peacock would not hit your data cap. If you're an AT&D subscriber,

HBO Max would not hit your data cap. There's all these ways you can bundle the content to make the pipes more valuable. This was the thesis of this industry. And they all ran into reality, which is that their content distribution platforms suck. They just suck.

They're not as good or compelling as a user-generated platforms like TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever. And so is it true that I now watch lots and lots of bite-sized clips of Game of Thrones? I do. I watch them on TikTok illegally uploaded by crazy people who make fan edits of Oberyn Martel. I don't know who those people are. I don't know where they come from, but this is provided to me all day long. Yep. This is just like crazy stuff.

I'm actually convinced HBO is behind it to promote House of the Dragon. Like they've concocted an army of overseas clippers to promote Game of Thrones really hard on TikTok right now. But the thesis didn't work, right? That you would put the content and the pipes in the same company and you would switch from charter to Comcast because you wanted NBC content. This never worked. It never made any sense, the idea that the distribution and content should be in the same place. And now I think we're just at the end of it. in a very real way, the content businesses,

the big, overwrought, overhead-driven Hollywood cost structure content businesses are getting crushed by creators, like just devastated by creators. The actual distribution platforms people care about, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever, pay nothing for content. Effectively nothing. Right. YouTube pays the most.

It pays nothing. So what are you going to do? Well, you're going to go back to being a pipe and say, you know what? We're just going to charge people money. to access YouTube. Just straightforwardly, that is the business we're going to have. Yep.

And even that business is declining. Comcast lost, I think, 700,000 subscribers in 2025. Yeah. And they're losing them to fiber, they're losing them to fixed wireless, all this stuff in broadband. And it's saying, we'll charge you more money and give you peacock for free is not compelling to anyone. No. So they're going to split into Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast,

is going to sit on the boards of both companies and be involved in some way. And they're spinning this very much as now both companies will get to grow independently of each other. It's finally time. And it's like, yeah, dude, that's what we all told you a decade ago, that this would never work. It didn't work for AT&T. It didn't work for Comcast. You can go down the line. It didn't work for AOL Time Warner, which tried to put content on top of its distribution.

It simply does not work. I'm going to give you two outcomes. You have to tell me what you think is more likely. Outcome number one, both of these companies continue to exist as kind of their own. ongoing concerns, and if anything, become, like, buyers in the market and try to go and sort of grow on their own. Outcome number two, within 24 months, both of these companies have been bought by somebody else, which you think is more likely. It will be two. It's got to be, right? Well, I mean, it just depends on whether you think the pendulum swings back to bundling fast.

Right. So you can see outcome, too. Well, bundling parentheses by right-wing billionaires. Sure. That's the, those are the bundlers. Everybody else is unbundling. I mean, Brian Roberts, he's the guy who ran MS now. You know, like Donald Trump does not like Brian Roberts. True, true. He's going to emerge in some way as a shareholder of two companies that go on, whatever term they go on. But I think maybe Comcast, the cable company, merges with another large telecom provider, maybe charter. And they're just a big national fiber provider.

The Trump administration, very amenable to that kind of deal. And if you don't own the content, you can't squeeze the broadcast. Right. You can't say, oh, I would let you do this merger if only NBC was acting better. Right. So you create some ability to do M&A just outside of the political influence. By the way, the completely inappropriate political influence of the Trump administration. Yeah.

But you create a way to go do that. And then I think the Peacock division is just like, whew, I bet Netflix buys you. And that, like, that thing is not long for this world all by itself. Like NBC Universal will get swallowed up in some way. Yeah. By the way, they claim up and down that this is not going to happen. So everybody always says that until the minute the deal gets announced. Yeah, but the big Hollywood businesses are all chasing scale in a way that is fundamentally doing.

And I just want to point out, I'll end this now. It's the lightning around after all. If we had just had appropriate net neutrality regulation in place, no one would have ever thought that mixing pipes in the content was a good idea because it would have even the thesis that you could zero rate peacock on Comcast pipe and that would generate more subscribers it would have been prevented.

So you'd be like, whoops, I'm not allowed to do the thing that would make this work. I guess I won't do it. I'll just invest in my fiber network, which is the thing Americans want. Just pointing it out, just saying I was right the whole time.

We're allowed to have many things with fast, cheap internet is just not one of them in this country. All right, I have a very quick one and then I want to end with your last lightning round item. Mine is just a very brief PSA. I mentioned this in 90 seconds on the version the other day, but I have now had a personal experience with this and just want to bring it back up. Uh, WhatsApp is launching usernames.

Oh, boy. Instead of needing your phone number, you can outgive people your username. I think that is going to be messy and complicated, especially with something like WhatsApp, which is very private and, uh, not as easy to publicly verify people's identity. There are going to be lots of ways this goes sideways. Also, you should try and reserve your, username. The feature's not out yet, but for a lot of people, uh, you can now go and reserve your username in the app. Um, as someone with a very common first and last name, all of the possible iterations of my name were gone by the time I try to go and reserve it. Um, so either, um, convince your parents to name you something more interesting than David Pierce or, uh, go fight very hard to go

get your username now. Uh, it's in settings in the WhatsApp app. Um, this is, It's like, I just think back to how quickly it became impossible to get like a normal human Gmail address. WhatsApp is going to speed run that. So go go get your WhatsApp nickname as soon as you possibly can. Yeah. That means I have to use WhatsApp, but I'll do it. If I open WhatsApp, there's just a million messages from like my parents' friends in India being like,

good morning. Oh, that's nice. How awful? How awful for you? People want you to have a good day. Have you seen the chart? Like, every morning in India, WhatsApp slows the global internet to a crawl because of the amount of good mornings.

It's a great story. It's like one of the great all-time intercultural stores. I'm very jealous that we didn't do it. That is really cool. All right, you have one last one that I know you're very excited about. What do you want to talk about? Has become a running theme on the show.

I want to point out that car design has gone completely bananas. And leading the charge are BMW and Mercedes. Some of the leading lights in car design, luxury automobile design. Where these companies go, the others tend to follow. And so, David, I'm regret to inform you that the people at BMW have lost their fucking minds. You zip me at TikTok. I have not watched it yet. We're going to watch this now together. The BMW X-5 is out. There's a new BMW X5. And these are the headlights. Okay. So, oh, my God. So the blinkers are X's, four of them. And the headlights are just two tall rectangles in the middle of the car?

They're not X's, David. It's the X logo. Oh my God, it is the X logo. It looks for all the world like the X logo. Which is literally just a unicode symbol. Thank you, everybody. Yep. And if you don't like it, there's a button to turn them into just plain slashes. And it lights up from the inside out.

I mean, they look like nostrils, Neely. The headlights are nostrils. No, it looks like in cartoons, when a stuffed animal dies, and you turn their eyes and the X's. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I'm talking about? Wait, okay. I can't even figure it.

So the blinkers are the X's. No, I mean, you know, modern cars, the actual headlights are hidden away, right? So, like, there's, like, the LED light show that looks like headlights, and there's actually projector elsewhere. So the things that look like headlights and the UBMWX5 are X's. Yeah. And the Xs look exactly like the X logo, a solid slash and then a hollow slash. Yeah.

If you don't like it, there's a button on the inside of the car to turn off one of the slashes. and just have a plain slash. It's so bad. I would submit to you and the designers at BMW that if you have to put a button in your car to turn off the design element that makes it look like the logo of a company that people have a lot of feelings that,

maybe you shouldn't have that design element. But, you know, maybe around the world people think differently of X. Then there's like a million other buttons on this car. It comes with 10 different drivetrains, including a hydrogen drive train in 2028. The battery technology seems amazing. it's like up to 400 kilowatt charging. It's like over 400 miles of range.

It's all very cool. New stuff. The interior is bananas. It's screens for days, including the new BMW, like weird, not a square screen. Sure. The door handles are electronic.

You can open the doors electrically from the key fob, all this stuff. But I'm just focused on these headlights, which are literally the X logo. And so much so that there's a button to turn them off and turn them just into slashes. My wife, Anna, one of her most closely held theories, I think I've mentioned the slender before, is that there should only be one kind of acceptable headlight and all other headlights should be illegal.

That was the 80s. In 1980s, America, there was only sealed being headlights. All cars have the same headlights. But, like, they should be the same shape. They should be the same size. They should have the same amount of, like, light. Headlights should not be a thing you get to have design theories about. And I could not agree with her more.

Like even the little thing, I think I'm gonna buy you like a 1980s Camaro with like pop-ups, you'll be bad lights. But I think even the is it the Mustang that does the thing where it points the arrow from left to right and from right like it. Those are the tail lights.

It sort of blinks out on the tail lights. I hate those. That also should be illegal. Tail lights are different than headlights. Blink your lights and when they're blinks. They blink. They're called blinkers. Your blinkers should blink.

Your headlights should be on and they shouldn't blind me and they should be obviously headlights. This is not, you can have so many things, car designers. Just make the headlights, headlights. This is not complicated. You want to go back to sealed beam headlights like the 1980s? Yes.

Also, I'm still worried that we're not 100% clear on the difference between headlights and taillights. Listen, if I have to look at it on your car, I should be in charge of it. You know what I mean? I get it. It's a real, it's like an inversion of like the John Stuart Mill harm principle, you know, like.

Everything harms me, thus society should be in charge of it. Exactly. This, these are terrible headlights. And like, this is one of those things where, like, how many meetings were there where nobody raised their hand and said, you know that's the logo of that other thing, right? Yeah, that's the X logo. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's obviously one meeting because they put in a button to turn it off. At the very last second, somebody's like, guys, this is horrible.

This looks like a cartoon bunny had a drug overdose. I'm sorry to everyone who's just listening to this, but I promise if you close your eyes and picture what Nelai is describing, it is exactly that. We didn't even get to the grill, which looks like beaver teeth. It does. Picture a BMW.

It looks like nostrils. Yeah, picture a BMWX5. And where the headlights are, picture blinking X logos. That is 100% what it looks like. I don't know what's going on over there. I'm out on this. Thank God.

I don't have enough money to buy a, BMW. That's what I always say. All right, we should get out of here. Neely, it's good to see. Are you going home one of these days? Will I, will I see your natural habitat at some point? Let's assume I get this book written. I'll be home next week. Okay. What are you doing for the fourth? We're going to light some fireworks. We're going to eat some hot dogs. Yeah, the baby is born on July 8th. Oh, yeah? So we've got a big party coming up the weekend after the fourth. That's very exciting. Well, we just had a June 30th birthday. So that was very exciting. And I think we're going to take the three-year-old to fireworks. Okay. Which will either go really well or really badly. So we will see how that goes. What's Decoder next week? Dakota next week is the heads of the creator division at UTA, the giant talent agency.

They rep everybody. They wrap Alex Cooper and Alex Earl. Kai Sinat, who are not the same person, I'm reliably told. Yes. But like all the biggest creators, they are their agents. And they build them businesses. So we spent some time. Me, like, how does this actually work?

How does this money actually work? It's really interesting. That's cool. I like that. Version history this weekend is the story of the Curig, which is one of the most fun episodes we've ever made. That sounds amazing. Also, on that episode, Morgan Eckroth, who is a coffee influencer and a barista champion,

I found the most coffee snob person I possibly could to litigate the future of Curig with. Wow. That's a blast. It was a really good episode. Lots of good stuff going on On The Verge. We published, I think my favorite thing

this week that we published was a really great explainer about quantum computing basically trying to figure out where are we in the history of quantum computing. Really good, really smart story. Is it nowhere?

The answer is nowhere, but not forever. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's inching towards somewhere. That's the name of my memoir. Anyway, we should get out of here. We've got a long weekend to head off to.

got one more episode for you. We're doing stuff sort of out of order this week, so you'll be hearing this on Thursday. We've got a fun holiday thing for Friday, and then we're off for the weekend. I hope everybody has good fun weekends. I hope you have a good long weekend. I'm sure I will not see you until you go do July 4th. Thanks. I'm out of here. You're never going to see me again. All right. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. You can subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe to get all of our podcast to ad-free, including this one, and decoder and version history. You get all of the Vergecast. of our newsletters. You get all of our coverage of everything.

Verge.com slash subscribe. You can also send us email, Vergecast atverge.com. Call the hotline. It's 66, version 1-1. We love hearing from you about all of your Brendan Carr theme songs and everything else. This episode is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Laccio. We will see you tomorrow. Eli, rock and roll.