The Vergecast - Tick Tock, TikTok

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

After more than five years of backing and forthing, secret meetings and loud screeds, it appears the fate of TikTok in the US has finally been decided. Maybe. There are still a lot of unknowns, but we're pretty sure we know the bones of the deal — and we know which of President Trump's allies stand to benefit the most. Before we get to all that, though, David and Jake run through some big news in future gadgets, including the long-awaited-and-maybe-happening combination of Android and ChromeOS and the possibilities for a touchscreen MacBook. Then, The Verge's Liz Lopatto joins to talk TikTok. And Trump. Then, in the lightning round, the three hosts talk through Jimmy Kimmel's return, Nvidia's money problems, a surprising AmEx perk, and much more. Further reading: Google’s Android for PC: ‘I’ve seen it, it is incredible’  Our biggest questions about ChromeOS and Android merging The foldable iPhone might look like two iPhone Airs stuck together  The touchscreen MacBook rumors are never ending  OpenAI might also be developing AI glasses, a voice recorder, and a pin  Trump claims the US is about to get a tremendous fee for taking TikTok out of China Trump signs executive order approving TikTok deal Some details of the TikTok deal have been worked out. What Trump Wants from a TikTok Deal with China American Investors Will License and Oversee TikTok’s U.S. Version, White House Says TikTok Deal Could Make Oracle Founder Larry Ellison a New Kind of Media Mogul Anker’s party speaker projector hits Kickstarter with a sizable discount.  Montblanc is getting into the digital notepad game  Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro can be easily scratched  It costs $895 per year to get American Express’ premium app theme Nvidia is partnering up with OpenAI to offer compute and cash  Kimmel returns to television to mock FCC Chair Brendan Carr  Sinclair won’t air Kimmel.  Trump on Truth Social Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of all of the apps being like all of the other apps and all of the devices being like all of the other devices. It's 2025 and everything is the same. I'm your friend David Pierce. Jake Castronakis is here. Hi, Jake.

Hey, what's going? I love when everything is the same. You can switch between everything and you don't notice. It's great. Yeah, from now on, there is gadget and there is app. And those are the only two things we're going to talk about from now on. Yep. And who makes them is irrelevant.

It's all the same. we're going to talk a lot about this. But we should say right up top here, it's 10 o'clock in the morning. And we don't typically record this podcast in the morning. But right now it's 10 o'clock in the morning. You and I have some meetings later, so we're recording a few hours early. This has some implications for some news we're about to get to. But also the vibes are just different, Jake.

How are you feeling at 10 o'clock in the morning making a podcast? What David is quietly trying to say is that I just told him I haven't had any caffeine, that I just have been going all night long. and I'm plowing to the podcast studio ready to roll. So I'm either going to fall asleep or be like a little deliriously on edge. Jake is the 10x coder of the Verge who just rolls 72 straight hours

and like hacks Bank of America. That's Jake. That's the vibe I want everyone to assume Jake has on the Vergecast at all times. Vergecast AM, let's go. Really what's upsetting me is I'm drinking coffee during the Vergecast and it's just really throwing me off. But anyway, we have a lot of news to talk about.

In a little while, we're going to talk about the TikTok deal, which I think, annoyingly, between right now is recording this and when you hear this, it seems like President Trump is going to issue and sign an executive order outlining the deal that we have been hearing pieces about for a long time for there to be some kind of change with TikTok. And I say that vaguely because this is still where we are. So Liz Lapot is going to come on and we're going to go through it because I think even not knowing the executive order, I think we know. what this is going to be and what it's going to mean already. So if we're dead wrong, we'll be dead wrong. But I don't think so. I think we know what this is going to be. So we'll talk about it.

And then obviously, come to the Verge.com for all of our coverage once the executive order comes out. We also have a lot of gadgets to talk about. We're going to do a lightning round, which is still called the lightning round, despite the, like, I would say, surprising enthusiasm of the Thunder Round fans.

Bring it back. Bring it back. I believe two things. I believe that all of you are Jake's Burners. And I believe that all of you love the Thunder Rounders. and I think that is good and beautiful. And someday I'll die and Jake can have the thunder round. Until then, Jake, we have a lot of gadget news to talk about. Oh, it's been a weirdly busy week for gadgets.

It has. So the theme of the week, I would say, is like gadgets that have been rumored for decade or decades may be inching closer to becoming true. And let me just run down the list. And then we're going to kind of hit this one by one. there were a bunch of new rumors and speculations and timeline guesses and supply chain sources about both a foldable iPhone, which the general consensus seems to be, is going to be basically two iPhone errors just stuck together, which is kind of what we thought, having

seen the iPhone error. We continue to hear more about touchscreen Macs, which Apple has been saying pretty loudly for a very long time, is not a thing they're interested in. Seems to be a thing they're interested in. Seems like it's real, seems like it's coming. We have a bunch of new reporting, particularly from the information about what OpenAI is doing with Johnny Ive and the I.O. Co-brand thing that they're up to. Interesting new hardware coming there.

But where I want to start is with a rumor that you and I have been covering legitimately, I think, damn near our entire journalism careers. Oh, yeah. Which is the combination of Android and Chrome OS. Google makes two very successful operating systems. One is Android, which runs on phones and TVs and, like, devices everywhere. One is ChromeOS, which runs on Chromebooks. The middle of those two things, the overlap of the Venn diagram, is the sort of thing that Google has been talking about for forever,

and we've heard a bunch of different tries at it. I think we've even seen some evidence of real progress trying to combine Android and ChromeOS. But this week, the news, was that Rick Osterlo, who runs all of this stuff, He runs devices, he runs Android, he is the person in charge of all of the requisite parts to make this happen, was at a Qualcomm event talking to, I believe Cristiano Amon, the CEO of Qualcomm. And he said, and I'm quoting, in the past, we've always had very different systems between what we're building on PCs and what we're building on smartphones. And we've embarked on a project to combine that. We are building together a common technical foundations for our products on PCs and desktop operating systems. Jake, how many times would you say we've heard someone at Google say roughly that in the last 10 years?

It feels like it's like every other year because they say it. They're like, we're doing this. It's happening. Chrome, Android would be pretty interesting. A year goes by, they're like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Chrome OS is a wonderful operating system. It's going to keep going. And they keep forgetting.

And it feels like maybe they're like, no, no, no, it's real. I believe it is real this time. Why? Why? I don't know. Because they've said it twice in a row. Like, that's honestly it. Like, every other time, they just immediately forget.

Like, they're, and it's usually in the past, I feel like it's been like whispers to where it'll be like a, it feels like they have like intentionally leaked this where they're like, oh, something interesting's coming. And we're like, it's going to, it's real. It's happening. And then they're like, we have one operating system. I don't. do we have, like, this feels like it's real.

They got on stage. There's a CEO up there. Feels legitimate. Also, somebody said, where is this quote? Yes. I've seen it. It is incredible. Honestly, actually, that sounds like what you say about, like, some ancient relic.

I don't know. It also, I think. It's like, I've seen it. It's incredible. Yeah, it is. But this is just. ChromeOS that has the Android branding on it instead. Yeah, okay, so this is what I want to talk about.

So I think there are two paths forward for this combination, which I agree, I think, is real, and key difference, I think, is plausible this time, right? And this is a lot of stuff we've talked about. Arm chips have gotten very good to the point that you can run a desktop-class experience on top of Arm, which is a huge deal if you want to take Android and not completely rebuild it from scratch, desktop PCs, you want something that actually works and is good. I think all of the actual

technical underpinnings to do that exist, right? Like, you can run an arm-based laptop successfully. This is, like, it's not an accident that they're doing this with Paulcom, which is leading that in a big way in the, like, Windows and Android space. But we're getting to the point where the tech to make this work in theory kind of works, which was not the case for a long time. But there are sort of two paths here. One is, basically, we are going to use sort of the base-level Android kernel as the infrastructure for all of the rest of this. So rather than having to build two full, complete tech stacks, we'll have ChromeOS, which runs on top of some very base infrastructure of Android, and we'll have Android, which runs on top of the very base infrastructure of Android.

That is, like, really terrific corporate synergy that doesn't matter at all to anybody. Right? Like, fine, build it however the hell you want. No, it's, that won't change anybody's actual experience of using the product. The other future, and the one that Google has sort of poked it wanting to do for a very long time and has even tried some ways to do, is actually building a single uter-facing operating system that is both Android and Chrome OS, so that whether you're using a laptop or a phone or a television, you are using the same operating system with the same apps that do the same things everywhere. Which is the dream. That is the dream, right? Like, that's what you want. You want to just move from one device to the next and everything follows along.

and it's sort of, it's tough for Google because they really, I mean, Chrome OS is wonderful, but that is not like a thing that they have, right? Like in the same way that Apple can, you know, move your phone calls seamlessly onto your Mac. Like, that is an incredible experience. It's completely seamless. And Google just doesn't have that. Are they going to get that with ChromeOS merged with Android? I don't know that they will.

But that's like a possibility. And I think that's what they want to pitch here, right? Yeah, that's why you do it, right? Is to be able to do that kind of thing. And this is Samir Samant, who runs Android. I think this was in July of this year. A couple of months ago, basically said those things, I think it was to Lance Eulenoff at TechRradar about this stuff,

about why they're wanting to do this stuff, to actually make it easier for your devices, not to just do things themselves, but to communicate with each other. And I think this is a thing Google has spent a lot of time on, even just simple things like FastPair with Android, right? Like, Google wants to take all of the stuff that Apple does with Apple products and let you do it with other products. And I think that is in theory a really powerful idea.

Like, if you can make something that is that sort of, you know, connected between devices and everything works everywhere and everything is optimized but also transferable, like, that's the, it's the right idea. That is the thing that we should do. And actually, Google is better set up than almost anybody to do it just by virtue of the fact that it runs Android. and everybody already supports Android. The thing is, we have seen what it looks like when Google tries to do something as simple as run Android apps on ChromeOS. And it both doesn't work and is a bad idea.

And I cannot emphasize the extent to which those are two different things, right? Like, not only are the apps slow and messy and not optimized for the big screen, it just kind of sucks. Like running an Android app on a Chromebook is a bad user experience. It's nice that it exists,

but it is a bad user experience. And this is where it's like, I just, I think Google is maybe now for the first time reckoning with how hard a project it actually is to make something that works everywhere. And it is a full reboot of ChromeOS in particular, not just we have to make it so that we can run Android on larger screens.

Like, that's fine, but that's a totally different thing. What's fascinating to me is that at this moment, this project both feels more possible than ever, right? I think that they can probably pretty easily get to a pretty decent product. And it also feels less important than ever, right? Dex, which is Samsung's desktop version of one OS or one UI, whatever, you know, their version of Android is, that's been around for years, right? The idea of putting Android into a desktop environment is not new. There's already like traces of that in Android.

So, okay, they're going to put. Android on a laptop. Great. It has windowing. It has apps. It has a browser. I'm sure I can use it and it will be a completely reasonable experience. The same way that I can use iPad OS as a desktop and it is a completely reasonable experience. Turns out there's still a million tiny little things that get in the way of it being a really great seamless experience. And the desktop also just feels like it is not the environment where people are looking for something like new and exciting and interesting and different at this moment. And, right, are they, I'm curious what the competitive purpose of this product is going to be, right?

ChromeOS had a very specific purpose, right? Laptops are expensive. ChromeOS came in, they're very cheap, they're very affordable, they go into schools, they're people's first laptop, they're super easy, they're light, they go, you're going on the browser anyway, just use it. What is the point of Android as a laptop? I don't know. I don't either.

And I think this is the thing that I am increasingly hung up on. Because again, I start at this process and I'm like, okay, if you take all the things that I like about Android, right, the huge app ecosystem, the portability, the good battery optimization, like take all that stuff and give me full desktop class Chrome. I'm like, sick. That is pretty close to all of the things that I want. But then it's like, okay, well, what hardware do I want? that on all day. Do you want a thing that looks like a touchscreen laptop? Should it be a detachable thing? Should it be like a tablet with a great keyboard attachment? And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, actually, this bet that Google and as we're going to talk about it in a minute, Apple are making,

is that actually everything should do everything means by default, whatever piece of hardware you buy is going to make a bunch of compromises on a bunch of weird usability things. And the idea of a laptop that runs Android apps sounds good but kind of falls apart as soon as you start using it, which anybody who has used ChromeOS in recent years can tell you.

And then on the flip side, if I had full, honest to God, desktop class Chrome on my phone, I don't think that would change anything about my experience using an Android phone. And so I'm just stuck in this place where it's like, yes, I want this thing. And I think the idea of saying,

we want to make it easier for you to do things like move files between devices and take a phone call on your computer and then move it to your phone. Like all of these sort of little usability things, I think make a lot of sense. But the idea that there is some huge new idea about how we use our devices at the end of this road, I used to believe that. And I'm kind of less and less convinced of it all the time. I think I agree with you.

Right. Do I think they can do this? Do I think that it will be a completely reasonable experience? Absolutely. It's basically there. It's not, I don't think it is going to be a huge challenge for them to make this happen. But as far as I can see, I don't see a world where this ends up as anything other than, okay, now I have an option of getting a Dell premium plus with Android instead of Windows. And I think for the average shopper, why are you going to get it with Android?

I do wonder if all of these companies are still hell bent on the idea that if we can just do all of this right, tablets will become the thing. I really do think that. I think Apple continues to believe that if we can just turn these three knobs the right way, everybody will want an iPad as their main computer. Because it is so versatile, because it can do so many things, because it is kind of the, you know,

it's 80% of a phone and 80% of a computer, and that is like a very powerful idea. They're like, if we can just solve these little things, we can just do the menu bar right, we'll put the stoplight in the thing, and we'll let you window. That's going to make you want to use it is your main computer. And it goes to what you said. It's that. And then it's a million little things

about how I use these devices and live my life. And Android is even, I mean, nobody has ever made an Android tablet that has been compelling to anyone. About a month ago, my MacBook just like suddenly died. And so I was like, you know what? I'm going to do it. I'm going to use my iPad. And, you know, I was on the iOS 26 beta. So I had all the new windowing stuff, the beauty of liquid glass, I got a keyboard, I got a mouse, all good. And yeah, all, like, it is, it's incredible how close the experience gets, right? I have Windows. It has multiple displays. I'm using a mouse and keyboard. I'm tabbing between apps. And then they're just basic keyboard shortcuts that don't work, right? There's basic ways of controlling files that I'm just, like, not capable of. And it's just these, like,

little things every, like, you know, 30 seconds that are slowing me down a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. And I think, like, with Apple, I sort of see that a little bit more, right? There are so many people who are iPhone first. It makes sense to make a desktop that is very familiar to them. With Android, you know, there is a default version of that for PCs, and I think it is just Windows. And I, I think it is just Windows. And I I think if you are a Windows user, I don't know that you're looking to change. I don't know what you're going to get out of this.

What's interesting is I think your point about how there are a lot of people who like their first experiences that I found, I think is globally vastly more true with Android, right? Like there are many more people who only have one device who use Android than who use iOS. Like that's just true. But I think we're also at a point now where like I actually think Google might have had a much better shot at this.

the first time it tried to do it, you know, never 10 years ago. But I think you look at it now and it's like this, this whole sort of globe filled with people who came online in like the late aughts in early 2010s, that like huge rush of the smartphone market. Those people now have entrenched behaviors. We've been doing this a long time now.

The idea that there are, we can retrain everyone how to do new things was way more true 10 years ago than it is now. Right? Like the example people always give me, and I really like is the Quirty keyboard. Like the Quirty keyboard is bad. In every meaningful way, it is not the optimal keyboard layout, except we've all been using it for this long

and it's not worth the hassle to switch. And so I think this kind of thing where it's like, okay, what if my laptop is also just a collection of apps that and I don't have a files app and where do I download things? Like, that stuff is entrenched now. And even for the people for whom it was not, when Google first started thinking about this, it is now. And so all the stuff like Google did write about ChromeOS,

which is put everything in the browser and make everything. That actually runs against all of the things that they're trying to do with Android. And so these things have just been so far apart now that I think, even if you can successfully put them together, I don't know that that's actually the user behavior people are looking for. Well, and to your point, you know, there absolutely is like a good reason to be able to plug your Android phone into a monitor and boom, now it's a desktop experience, right?

If that's your only device, that's amazing. That's a huge upgrade. For the average person, what drives me crazy here is, it's like, okay, so Google wants to be able to do what Apple does where you can seamlessly move between your phone and your laptop. But they don't have, they don't control the operating system. So somehow they need a piece of software that is on every single computer in the world that allows you to move stuff from Android to your computer.

Oh, wait, that's Google Chrome. Everyone uses it. Just, right, I don't understand why to this day, there is basically no, I mean, I can't think of any communication between My Pixel and Google Chrome, right? If Google Chrome could send my notifications from Android, what an upgrade that would be, right? If Google Chrome could take my calls from my Android phone, why can't it do any of this? This is what is mind-boggling to me. I do think it's possible that you might have just pretty neatly described. the ideal outcome of this combination.

Because, like, if you take it, it is Android, but it is the exact Chrome that runs on your computer, which is essentially what Chrome OS is, right? Like, it is, it is an, a kind of janky file system built around the full feature and arguably the best version of the Chrome browser. And if you just, if you just do that on top of Android in such a way that it is, it actually communicates between devices, that would be amazing. Like, anybody who uses desktop Chrome on two computers can tell you even that sucks.

Right? Like, if I have a tab on my computer and I want to look at it on my other computer, there's a strong chance that's not going to work the way that it's supposed to. But, like, this is the thing. The idea, you're right about the idea. It's that is their operating system. Yes. Right? Why?

I don't understand. I don't understand why Chrome is so siloed in that way when there's so much power they could have. add to it. And they have just, like, done nothing there. And instead, we've just, for, again, like, for a decade, heard about how Android and ChromeOS might come together. And it's just, it is fully unclear to me what problem this solves other than perhaps simplifying some engineering structure inside Google. Sure. Yeah. If this is a way to lay off a bunch of now redundant end engineers, then that sucks and I don't care. Right. I think it remains to be seen, but Google is certainly, I think you're right, making enough noise about this that if they

don't ship something, it's going to be the most embarrassing version of this. Yes. I think we're going to get a couple of like iffy Android laptops and then we're going to forget about this. That is my, this might be short-sighted prediction, but that is what this feels like. Well, in the context of all of this is Google made a big effort in the pixel book line, made a couple of really great devices, and then stopped making them. And this is, and this is, you know, and this is, would be, I mean, just the 50,000th pivot for Google's hardware ambitions. So, like, we'll see. Let's talk about Apple for a second. On the topic of convergence, touchscreen MacBook, does this do anything for you? It seems real. I think we're going to get it.

Okay. I always thought people were ridiculous. They'd be like, oh, my God, I've been using my iPad so much that I started swiping on my MacBook. And then I did it the other day. And I'm just like, Oh, shoot. They're all right. A hundred percent right. It's just, I think when Apple started with this position that they're like, it doesn't make sense to have a touchscreen on a laptop. Like, they're basically right.

It is true. Yeah, the gorilla arm thing is real. Yeah, it is real. And I think back in the day, it's like, yeah, like, that's not a standard mode of interaction. And nowadays, I think it's just so expected that it's actually weird that the MacBook doesn't have that. And I think like particularly as new users start to try these things out, like is, it's kind of just bewildering. Why wouldn't you?

Yeah. My experience has been I use my computer really differently when I'm just using it versus when it's like a social thing, if that makes sense. That's very true. If I'm, if you and I are doing something together, being able to reach out and scroll the page or that we can both do it. Yeah. Is actually like cool and valuable and important. And I've been thinking about this a lot because we've been, we've been. spent the summer house hunting. And so, like, my life was just sending Zillow links back and forth

to my wife. And really being able to sit there and, like, scroll around and tap on things and move stuff around together is really valuable. And it's like, there's a piece of the iPad experience that is really nice that it is like a device you can put on the table in front of two people and sort of use together in a way that a laptop is not that at all. Like, you and I cannot use a laptop together in any kind of, like, functional way. So just, just for that reason alone, I think a touchscreen Mac becomes really interesting. There is a way in which everybody overshoots this and it becomes hugely problematic, right?

That like suddenly it's like, okay, what we actually want on the Mac is to run all of your iPad apps in a native-feeling way on the screen. And that's where the whole like, do you really want to sit there and draw on a screen with the stylus on a floppy laptop? Like, that's a bad idea. So it's like there are a lot of ways this could go

sideways, but I think just the basic theory of it is exactly a Mac, but it has a touchscreen, I'm actually into, way more so than like, let's figure out the exact middle of iPad and Mac, for all the reasons we were just talking about. Completely agree. That's all I want. I just want to occasionally be able to scroll a webpage with my finger, which is not revolutionary, but I also don't think this tech is that expensive or hard for them to implement at this point in time. It just, why not? They've also, I think if you look at what they've been doing on the iPad to make the iPad a little bit more Mac-like

but I'll work with touch. It's like they've got the user interface figured out. They can bring this to the Mac. It's not going to be that hard at this point. Yeah, and there's like, by the time there's a menu bar and the stop plate menu on an iPad, you've run out of excuses to be like, oh, the touch target's like, no, no one cares.

It's going to be fine. Yeah. Last thing we should talk about here before we get away from future gadgets that may or may not exist. So, interesting reporting this week from the information about what OpenAI and Johnny Iver up to, suggesting that basically,

you can look at this news a couple of ways. One is they have a bunch of really interesting ideas. They might be building a smart speaker to put chat you BT into. They might be developing AI glasses. They're thinking about a voice recorder. They're thinking about a pin. That's one way of looking at it. Big, ambitious, interesting project.

They're doing lots of hardware. The other way of looking at it is none of them have any idea what to do. So they're just trying everybody else's ideas. They're going to build all of the things and put Jatchie BT into it and be like, is this anything? it's one of those. No, yeah, this is, I would say, this does not inspire confidence, right?

I think, like, when they came out and it's like, you know, Johnny and Sam, they're like, we've got a vision, we understand what the future of AI hardware is, and all those other guys are fools. And if they keep up that vision, maybe I'll believe them. But this reporting suggesting

that they're tinkering with a bunch of different things, no one has any idea, right? That we are just going all the way back to the Alexa era where Amazon was just like, Alexa, in a clock, Alexa, in a fridge, Alexa. And you're like, I guess, and yes, it does make sense to put chat GPT in some sort of hardware. Is it going to be more revolutionary than an echo speaker?

I'm not sure if there is something out there. And it sure seems like maybe they don't either. Yeah, I remember when the I.O. News first came out that Johnny Ivan, opening I, were working on some hardware together. There were a lot of sort of different pieces of information out there. And a lot of folks arrived at sort of the same basic idea of what these two were probably making together, which was like a little sort of, I don't know, portable-sized speaker that you can, that has a dock that you put it into when you're at your desk and you can use it that way. It can be a home speaker that you talk to or you can like, you know, clip it to your body and wear it around your neck or something. So, like, the idea is that it is a little speaker microphone device that then attaches to a bunch of different things.

It becomes a bunch of other things. Interesting idea, like you said, been done a thousand times by a thousand companies integrating Google Assistant and Alexa. Like, Harmon Cardin is out there making this stuff. You know what I mean? Like, that it's just, it's not, smart speakers are an old idea. And they've been a very successful idea. But they're not, this is not some, like, hugely new novel swing at, the hardware. And then to look at it and just say, okay, AI glasses, voice recorder, pin. Do you know what those three things are? Those are the only ideas anybody else has about how these things are supposed to work. Like there, like you said, there are, there is nothing hugely novel here except I do think it's possible that this combination of Johnny Ive and the love from team and all of the like access they'll have to open AI means they can do it better. Right. And if there's a there's a there's a real lesson in like Apple spent a lot of

time doing other people's ideas a lot better than the rest of them. Maybe that's it. But this, like you said, this does not fill me with like gleeful joy about big new ideas they have. Well, and that's where it gets really interesting, right? Okay, let's say they make the nicest hardware in the market for smart classes. And let's say that chat GPD continues to be the best AI assistant. Both of these things seem very, very plausible to me. Does that still mean anything if they cannot get native access to your phone, right? Like, great question. Ultimately, that is still where all your data lives.

And if they're going to make a brand new platform from scratch, even if you are the company behind ChatGBT, BT, that is still a big uphill battle. And the AI era has very much been a moment of upstarts being able to break through by being able to do a bunch of things that these smartphones could do without relying on them. but as soon as you become a piece of hardware, you need to be able to do more for people. You need to be able to do things that obfuscate their phone.

And it is not clear if they will be able to do that in a way that, you know, Apple will, even if they don't have the best AI assistant. Yeah, they can connect to the internet. It's such a simple thing, right? Like, they don't charge me extra to connect to the internet is going to be a big hurdle for anyone other than your phone maker to climb. I totally agree. And so we shouldn't dwell on this because we're going to have actually a lot to talk about

in this space next week. Amazon's having an event, I believe, on Tuesday, where we think they're going to reveal whatever the next generation of Alexa hardware is. This has been teased for a while. Panos Penae is up to stuff. We'll see what they're doing. The Google Gemini smart home stuff is all kicking off next week. So this idea of like non-phone devices doing AI things.

is spinning up in a pretty big way. And I think we're going to see a lot of new ideas about how all of this stuff works. Or we're going to see that actually no one has any new ideas about how any of this stuff works. But that's coming next week. So we should, let's come back to all this Open AI stuff in a week and see who is actually having

the most interesting theories about any of this. We need to take a break because we have TikTok stuff to talk about and we cannot let this first cast be 19 hours long. So we're going to take a break. We're going to get Liz Lapato. We're going to come back. We're going to talk TikTok. We're right back.

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Hi, Liz. Hey, how's it going, guys? Liz, show us the cat. This is the only reason you're here. Show us the cat. Oh, okay. Here's Jeeves. Oh, hey Jeeves.

She's a good girl. Jeeves is going to be responsible for the low-grade rumbling you hear for the rest of this podcast. That's Jeeves. Yeah, so she is a little disgusted with me and has moved from my lap to my feet. where that's not where she's sitting. So you may not hear the purring. I like this for her. All right.

So you're here to talk about TikTok. And again, just to timestamp us right now a little bit, it is 11 o'clock in the morning on Thursday. And this is not normally an important piece of information. But there is a decent chance that between now and when you hear this or watch this, there will have been a executive order from the Trump administration from the White House about a TikTok deal. But I think, and Liz, you should correct me if I'm wrong right up at the top. I think we know enough about what is about to happen that we can talk about it.

It feels like we've gotten most of the information about whatever we're going to know that we can talk about it. Do you agree with that? I also want to add something to the timestamp, which is that it's 8 o'clock in the morning. And I have had a bunch of caffeine on an empty stomach. So I feel beautiful and I'm going to live forever. Peak Liz. Let's go. Let's go. So here's the thing.

We have some details about the deal, right? Like we know that there's a consortium. It's like Oracle, Andresen Horowitz, Susquehanna International Group. I think maybe even like the Murdochs are involved somehow. And like bite dance retains around 20% and gets diluted. We know, gosh, what else do we know? We know that like the algorithm gets moved or changed away from Chinese control. Question mark, question mark, question mark.

Because wasn't that the valuable thing? Question mark, question mark, question mark. Let's put a pin in that because I would argue that is actually not a thing we know and is hugely important. So let's come back to that. Phenomenal. At the end here. But like even if none of this is permanent, I still think we're pretty justified in talking about it. Because I just want to do like a quick speed round because we've been talking about the divestiture of TikTok for like five years now at least.

So how many previous buyers do you guys remember go? I feel like there was like a possibility of Microsoft at one point. Oracle came up the first time. Yeah, that's another one. I know there was another one, but those are the only two that are immediately coming to mind. Perplexity pretended they were going to buy it, I think. Oh, yeah, perplexity.

Did Pinterest ever make a bid? My personal favorite was Walmart. Walmart. Oh, that's good. So just with that background in mind. This is a very serious venture. We're going to discuss this deal. I hesitate to tell you how serious it is because, like, honestly, I don't know.

I don't know. Yeah. So, okay, can you give us the, like, 60-second version of the last five years? Because it's, as we get to something that might seem like the end of this story, I think it's useful to go back to the beginning of this story, which started in the first Trump administration. Can you just walk us through it a little bit? Okay. So we have this, like, panic about China.

that's like coming up during the first Trump administration. And this Chinese app has a hold on the nation's youngsters, and it's terrifying. And who knows what they're doing with their data, which, like, P.S., for every, like, country outside of the U.S. is what the U.S. is doing with Facebook and Instagram and any, all of these other apps. But whatever, whatever. So there's legislation that it has to be sold or it's going to get banned. And then it's not sold. And we have these sort of like procession of investors that we had talked through, right? You know, the maybe deals with Microsoft and Walmart and Oracle and I'm probably missing a couple.

And anyway, Donald Trump comes into office as we hit the deadline. And if I remember right, TikTok actually, it's pulled from a bunch of app stores because it's like not legal to have TikTok in your app store anymore. And so then we enter this bizarre territory of, like, Donald Trump's like, well, we're going to extend the deadline. And I promise nobody's going to prosecute anybody for this. So you can put it back in the app store. Because I guess in the intervening years, he's changed his mind about TikTok and he loves it now. I don't know. And so we've had this deadline that just keeps getting pushed back and pushed back.

It's like 90-day deadlines where it keeps being like, oh, man, another 90 days, another 90 days. Which, like, by the way, I don't know that that's legal either. Like, I don't know that that is how anything works in this country, but it seems to be how things work in this country now. Cool. So that's where we are. Is this, you know, like this deadline has come up. It's been pushed back another time. And we're getting these details of like, this time it's real.

This time we have this consortium investors. And we're really going to get it done. We're going to get some stuff signed. And then most recently we've heard about this Oracle deal with this consortium of investors. Right. So the biggest thing I want to talk about with you in particular is this consortium of investors. Because I think in a certain way, if the Trump administration had just sold TikTok to Microsoft, which is like an insane sentence.

to say out loud. But if that had just happened, I think I would understand the dynamic, right? It's like whether this solves the problem that Congress is worried about or that everyone claims they're trying to solve, debatable. And we should talk about that. But it like one big company buys this other big company is like, I understand that. This feels different. And it feels like it's being done differently and specifically this group of people that are going to be in charge of this app now, which like you mentioned includes Oracle, which is run by one of the richest people in the world, Larry Ellison, who is a very longstanding friend of Donald Trump. There's also Andreson Horowitz, which is run by people like Mark Andreessen, who have been very loud supporters of Donald Trump.

Silver Lake, like lots of these organizations that are very Trump friendly, this all just feels like it is just Donald Trump giving TikTok to his friends. And I don't know how else to put it other than that. But I just like, how are you looking at the sort of power dynamics at play here? Welcome to the gangster tech era, baby. Like, that's what we're looking at, right? We've talked about this a little bit. All of these tech moguls who have been posing up to Donald Trump

because he's been very clear that if you're his friend, he'll do stuff for you. But if you're not his friend, he will hurt you. And so we've watched Jeff Bezos basically gut the Washington Post. We've seen Elon Musk donate. an insane amount of money to his campaign and then like literally go into the White House and work from there for a while. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg do some of the most humiliating like dances I think I've ever seen to convince Donald Trump he's really MAGA. He's really serious about manhood guys. And so, you know, this is, this is, we're watching these guys jockey.

And like they were all at the inauguration. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is that they all have different needs and different things they want from the administration, those needs conflict. And so one of the things that I'm kind of keeping an eye on with the Allison sale is his relationship with Facebook, because the biggest competitor for Facebook, I guess Mark's calling it meta now, I'm sorry, I should say meta, is TikTok. Like, TikTok is meta's entire argument that they are not engaging in a monopoly and they shouldn't be broken up. And so there's something interesting happening there

that I think we're going to continue to see as this deal goes forward. Obviously, Andresen Horowitz has positions with both meta and should this deal go through its major competitor, TikTok. That's fascinating. But beyond that, I mean, it is a really clear signal that if you're friends with Donald Trump,

you get stuff. And I expect that there's going to be sort of some more jockeying to, like, have private dinners with Donald Trump to get more things, especially as we're watching, you know, the Google antitrust trial part whatever taking place where we're trying to determine, like, whether, you know, it's even feasible to break Google up, like, what the remedies are, those things. I think it's a pretty strong signal that we're going to see some court intrigue. Yeah. There's also this very perverse thing happening with the ownership where we're going from TikTok, which is a, you know, ostensibly stand-alone company that is owned by another Chinese company, which therefore has, you know, pressures on it from the Chinese government to TikTok, which is ostensibly a standalone company owned by a bunch of conservative pals of Donald Trump,

which was only allowed because the conservative U.S. government made it happen. And so, listen, I'm not trying to draw a line between China and the U.S. being the same in those respects, but we do still end up with a version of TikTok that is going to be heavily influenced by its backers. And its backers have a very specific point of view in this case. You know, it's funny that you mention that, Jake, because Rupert Murdoch's involvement reminds me of a previous Republican administration where Rupert Murdoch got a fast-tracked citizen. in order to buy more U.S. TV stations. I think that was Reagan. So this is not the first time that we've seen a Republican administration favoring a media environment that is potentially very friendly to them. And I think given what we've seen with Elon Musk's ownership of what the company that used to be Twitter, now X, I think there's a good reason to be sort of skeptical about what these investors are going to do to TikTok.

Well, and I think this is where the Ellison's become, I think, the sort of central figures in this story, right? Because at the same time, this is happening, you have David Ellison, Larry's son, by all accounts with essentially the oversight and financial backing

of his father. Buying Paramount, getting control of CBS News, rapidly overhauling all of the ways that they think about everything, apparently in process to acquire Barry Weiss and the free press and put Barry Weiss in some meaningful charge of CBS News,

which will change the ideological bent of CBS News in a pretty immediate and huge way. Also, bidding for Warner Brothers Discovery, which would put them in charge of CNN. So you have the same company, which rolls up to the same person, in charge of TikTok, CBS, HBO, CNN, and then doing all of these giant deals with AI companies.

It's like we've essentially put one person who is a long-term friend and supporter of Donald Trump in charge of the media, like in a real and straightforward way, in a way that never would have been possible until right now with this president. There's also one more Ellison that I think the media has forgotten about, and it's Megan Ellison who owns Anna Perna Pictures. Right. So that's one more. of the sort of media octopus we're talking about. Look, this is the sort of thing that William Randolph Hearst would have, like, loved. Like, this is, this is, you know, really remarkable stuff.

And in a different era, we might be talking about antitrust, but obviously that's not going to move forward under Donald Trump. It's one of the reasons the tech moguls preferred him. So I do think that that is a really fascinating thing that Larry Ellison in his old age has decided to be William Randolph Hearst. I don't know where that goes. And I do think it's also interesting

because one of the ongoing complaints that the tech industry has had about media is that the media is too hard on tech. There's too much negative reporting, there's too much investigative journalism, we're constantly bad-mouthing them, or not their friends. And to be real, you know,

I don't know that the media should be anybody's friends, but especially friends of the powerful. I firmly believe that part of the job is comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But that has been the ongoing complaint since, I don't know, since Theranos, I think. Was the media wrong about Theranos? No.

Oh, that's the problem. Like, as we're watching this media environment change and be owned by a tech mogul and a group of people who've been very vocal about how they don't like the way that reporting on their investments is tanking their investments, I begin to wonder separately from the political implications about the defanging of the American news media when it comes to doing critical reporting on one of the most important. industries in our country. All of this stuff is just happening so simultaneously that it's almost bizarre. Like, you can't really look at this stuff and not also think about what's going on with Jimmy Kimmel and Disney. And there's just this, like, it's not even quiet shift. It is a naked, loud shift in how the government has decided to treat the media and to

bend it to its own particular will. And the Kimmel thing is like, is it? isn't working for the government, I would say. Jimmy Kimel came back to huge ratings, uh, like spent a lot of time talking about free speech, uh, but then like a lot of people in America didn't see that because companies like

Sinclair and Nextar who either have business dealings or political alignment with the Trump administration continued to not air it. And so we're, we're just in this place of like, all of this stuff has moved so quickly and so aggressively that I feel like we're, I'm still trying to wrap my head around how jaguarial. that particular shift has been. And this is the reason I keep bringing this up in the course of TikTok.

We spent five years being like, TikTok is the future of the media, right? This is how young people get information. This is how young people get news. This was the thing that everybody was so worried about in the first place. All the way back in 2020, the idea that this is a crucial information source for young people. And one of the big inciting events was October 7th and this question of what information are people getting about what's happening in Gaza. with Israel and Palestine, what are they understanding about this situation and how are they responding?

And the question of like, are people seeing pro-Palestine stuff or pro-Israel stuff on TikTok was like a big part of what people were debating about how, quote-unquote, China is controlling the information flow to people in the United States. That became this whole big thing. And what is actually happening is that has spiraled out into the rest of the media and is now coming crashing back to TikTok five years later. And it's just, it is like maybe to some extent, this is like the crowning of TikTok is like, yep, TikTok is the media now. So we're also going to give it to Larry Allison. You know, it's interesting to me how every Republican accusation turns into a

confession because for years now, they've been complaining about PBS and NPR as state media. And, you know, those are partially federally funded so much so that, like, we're now seeing public radio stations shutting down because their funding has been cut by the federal government. But, you know, those were operations that I think were operating in good faith as best they could. And they were decentralized and local and usually produced for a local community's needs. And what we're getting instead is a massive sprawling super corporation owned by Larry Allison, who is one of the president's biggest supporters. So it's privatized state media, which, you know, that's not really new. I mean, that's a big part of how Silvio Berlusconi kept control of Italy for so long was that he was a media mogul.

So maybe we're in our Berlusconi era. I don't know. But yeah, I definitely think this is partially the crowning of TikTok. And I also think it may be the end of TikTok because as I understand it, there is a possibility that people will have to switch to a new app. And we all know that as soon as you introduce that kind of friction, people then make a decision and they may not download it. Okay, I'm so glad you brought this up because I think, Jake, I think you mentioned this the last time we were talking about. the sort of will they, won't they of TikTok. And you made a ship of Theseus reference, which is basically like if you take every part of TikTok and change it,

but you still call it TikTok, is it still TikTok? And this is where I think also the question of what happens to the algorithm becomes really important, right? Because the algorithm at the center of TikTok has been one of, if not the biggest question. It was a big part of the reason it got banned, right? The sort of two arguments against TikTok are it is an app collecting a lot, of data on U.S. users, which I find completely non-credible. Because if you want to collect a lot of

data on U.S. Internet users, there are actually infinite ways to do it that are easier than creating a really successful social media platform. I don't, like, I don't buy that at all. The idea of TikTok as really important, really powerful disseminator of information with a really, really well-tuned and magical-feeling algorithm that a lot of people have responded to, super real. And has also become a big part of the underlying debate about what's going to happen here. So this, I would say at this point, 1121 a.m. on Thursday morning, the thing we don't know is the fate of the algorithm. And there's been a bunch of reporting kind of on both sides. One says the TikTok US, whatever this new thing will be called, will license the algorithm from ByteDance and from China. What that means, who knows,

There's also a world in which they basically get a copy of the algorithm as it currently exists and then sort of fork it and go from there. And then there's a version of it that is essentially like they have to rebuild this whole thing from scratch. It just gets to be called TikTok and they get to keep the 170 million United States users. In any of those cases, it seems very clear to me that the TikTok people in the United States experience will be completely meaningfully different from day one than the TikTok they have been experiencing. so far. Jake, am I like overstating this whether it's, it might be a new app, which I think would be a huge gating factor for a lot of people, but like TikTok controlled by Oracle is inevitably going to be different than TikTok controlled by ByteDance. And the extent to which it'll be different, I think remains to be somewhat seen depending on what the algorithmic control actually

looks like, but it is going to change in a big way immediately. Yes. Well, I think it is number one optimistic to assume that a Trump press conference is going to be clarifying on this. However, like, 100%, right? This is going to meaningfully change TikTok. TikTok is not going to be the same. And any one of these changes would be a big deal. Will the U.S. users have access to TikToks from foreign users at all? Because that's a huge chunk of content and a huge chunk of variety that you won't gain access to.

I don't know. Maybe it's just some dudes over in Turkey who are. splicing clips of like the equalizer together right like i don't know that's that what you watch on tic-tac jake be honest i mean i'm not finished yet but right but it'll find me in the algorithm right but like the tic-tok algorithm is everything and if it's going to have less content and their algorithm is going to be changing and like not for nothing if the algorithm is i don't know like getting some nudges from these new investors, things might be changing, right?

And there are a million alternatives to TikTok at this point. Yeah, I go back and forth on this. And I think on the one hand, a thing that is different now than it was five years ago is that TikTok is not the only kind of game in town on this front. Like, to some extent, Reels has done a very good job of just ripping off TikTok pixel by pixel. YouTube is attempting to do the same thing to, I would say, varying levels of success.

But the idea of TikTok, I think, is less sort of uniquely powerful as it once was. At the same time, these other companies have had five years now to build a thing that is compelling to people as TikTok, and they have just utterly failed to do it. Like, TikTok is, if anything, more culturally central than it has ever been. And so I think I spent time a couple of years ago being like, okay, well, like TikTok has an as a lead in building a really great, really compelling algorithm. But A, it's publishing a lot of information about how it works in order to satisfy U.S. regulators. But it's also just like these leads don't last forever. Other companies catch up. Things are going to change.

No one has caught up. TikTok is still winning in a big, huge, important way despite all of this chaos. And so I think in some ways it is more. high stakes than ever, and it's more unbelievable than ever that Oracle will just show up and keep doing as good a job. I just, like, it just seems impossible to imagine to me. Well, I mean, and that is the question, right? If it is an app that is merely named TikTok, but it has less content than TikTok and a worse algorithm than TikTok, where you're just describing is Instagram reels. Like, yeah, okay. Like, will people continue to use that? Like, probably will it grow

in the same way? Will it be as culturally important in the same way? I'm not. sure. And I, the fact that Oracle and Larry Ellison and all these folks are going to have like a lot of say in it and they, a lot of cash to make back from it, like, things are going to change. I also want to add, you know, there are a bunch of people who have businesses that are based largely on TikTok content, right? So you change the algorithms so that like in any way, you alter this in any way. You alter this in any way so that TikTok is less compelling. All of those content creators go someplace else because they still need to make money. Like there is this real, um, important constituency of people, because most people don't post, you know, we're freaks. Like, people who post are freaks. Like, that's not most of the internet. Um, and so these people who are essentially like the TV channels of TikTok, the professionals,

what happens if it's not as compelling to them? Because that is, again, more lost content. And, you know, they do have options, right? Like, there is YouTube shorts, which I'm sure, like Google can figure out how to make that more compelling if they think about it for a minute and can actually make a decision

through all the layers of the bureaucracy. There, you know, there's Instagram Reels. If you think that Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to take advantage of this confusion, you haven't like paid any attention to meta ever. And then there's also, of course, the possibility that, you know, something else springs up. So, you know, there is also like the potential for throwing the door open to some competitor we haven't imagined yet. Yeah, it seems, I think it to the extent that this is like a super short-sighted strategy on all sides here,

I think it is useful to point out that both Donald Trump and Larry Ellison are in, their 80s and are probably not spending a ton of time worrying about the long-term future of TikTok. But yeah, I think we're in this phase where it just seems very hard to me to imagine that TikTok just keeps being TikTok at the end of this. And it is like, I can't figure out what it is. And I think part of it will be so interesting about this transition is figuring out what it was that ByteDance was doing that is so hard to replace.

Because everybody else has been trying to reverse engineer. this for five years and no one has done it. And I think, Liz, you're right that Mark Zuckerberg and co are pouring probably more energy into it with more success. Like Reels is working to the point that like it's pretty clear that Reels is the future of meta in a really important way. That company is all in on Reels as a thing. Reels is not as good as TikTok. It's just not. And I could not sit here and explain to you why. And I think it's going to be really interesting to see these very powerful, very rich people try to figure that out in real time before everybody gets bored and goes somewhere else. Because I think the timeline to pull that off is short and high risk.

I have one other thought here, which is again related to Rupert Murdoch. I know this is shocking for you guys that I have Murdoch thoughts. But you may remember, we're old enough to remember MySpace, which was for a time a really promising social media platform. It was a place where people were especially discovering music, right? Much like TikTok. And then Rupert Murdoch bought it and Facebook happened and MySpace died. And there are any of a number of reasons why that could have happened, right?

One of them was maybe the way that Facebook got rolled out. One of them was that Facebook was easier for people to interact with because you didn't have to have any skills to like enter your you know, details into what was essentially like a skinned spreadsheet. Just being real. But, you know, like there was this sort of market for people to be able to make their own website without having to, like, learn any kind of HTML or any other sort of coding skills. And that was like the market the Facebook one. And so I am not saying that Rupert Murdoch's involvement in this deal is a bad oven because maybe it's not.

But on the other hand, you know, the track record with social media companies for him is not great. Do you guys ever follow MySpace Tom on Instagram? MySpace Tom did life correctly. Sold his company to Rupert Murdoch for a ton of money and is now just like a world traveling photographer that nobody ever hears about. And it is like, my guy crushed it. He was everybody's best friend on MySpace and then just disappeared off the face of the earth with all. of his money. And I just want to say, congratulations to MySpace, Tom, for absolutely getting one over on Rupert Murdoch. He could have been sitting in front of Congress right now answering questions.

Seriously, this is, yeah, I would rather have, I would rather be an Instagram photographer, frankly. All right, I think we should, we can leave this alone. Liz, you're going to have to come back when we have more answers, which will be never. Actually, let's just quickly do this before we take a break. If I, if you just had to vote right now, real or not, deal, this is happening or this is not happening? Liz, is this happening or is this not happening? The TikTok deal, once and for all. You know, I think this one might happen. I mean, maybe I'm making a fool of myself and somebody's listening to this like Friday on their laughing. That's what I'm hoping for. I mean, that would be, that would be great. It wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong.

But the reason I think this one is happening is because it is Donald Trump's cronies. And we do see, you know, this pattern, which expresses itself through like him pressuring people to, you know, to, among other things, bring charges against Jim Comey, of basically, you know, the imperial presidency and, you know, this sort of mafioso idea that, like, if you're with me enough, you get some of the spoils of American Empire. So that, to me, suggests that this deal is real. If it weren't Larry Ellison, I'd be a little more skeptical, but I think that Donald Trump probably owes Larry Allison pretty big at this point. Jake, what do you think?

I think this is real. My suspicion, though, is it's probably still going to be several more months before any of this actually happens. And my suspicion is also that a bunch of things are going to change in that time. Yeah, I think I tend to agree. I think this is going to happen. I believe it was on September 16th that Trump delayed it another 90 days, which I think is telling the ban that clearly is not a ban and was never a ban.

and this is all transparently illegal and ridiculous. I think a deal will get done. I think it's important to say I don't think it will solve anybody's actual problems with TikTok. Like if you were a person who believes in the national security risks of TikTok, there is nothing that we've learned so far that suggests to me that is going to get better. It might be a different group of people issuing propaganda at you. Hooray? I don't know. This is just what we're doing now. But anyway, this is, I think, I think you're both right that we are certainly not done talking about whatever the machinations of this deal are going to be.

And Liz, I also, I'm going to need you to work on a Larry Allison impression that I would like you to debut on the Vergecast at some point in the future. Okay, but I'm going to need a yacht. So if I can just expense a yacht, that would be great. That's true. It will feel disingenuous if you're not doing it from a yacht. Nelai will approve that. We have to be responsible. As Nilai always says, we will compromise our journalistic integrity, but only for boat money.

So if you want to give us boat money, get at us. Liz, will you stick around and do some lightning round with us real fast before we get out? Yeah, absolutely. Good. All right. We're going to take a break. We'll grab it back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic.

Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. aha moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

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time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things.

One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people?

So money is essentially the root of people. everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third. That doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig in. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored ellipsies for flavor. Nilai, I don't know what that means. I never did. Please come back and tell me. All right. We have each picked stories. I'm going to go first because we frankly should have led the show with this, which is that I have a party speaker update. It's a very important party speaker update. And it's a new party speaker from Anchor, the company that you know of as the one who

makes all the cool giant batteries that everybody carries around. Anchor has made a series of projectors that are very cool. This one is a projector inside of a party speaker. And it is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I want you both to just imagine a roly suitcase that you would roll through an airport. And then I want you to put four detachable speakers inside of it, each one looking like something that TSA would have a lot of thoughts about if you were to roll this through the airport. And then I want you to imagine right in the middle a little, a little thing that opens up to reveal a projector. This is an all-in-one, roly party speaker, surround sound projector, and it is the greatest idea I've ever heard in my life. It's going to cost $5,000.

It's called the Soundcore Nebula X1 Pro. You can get it on Kickstarter now for $3,000, which is somewhat alarmingly an incredible deal. But this is the single most ambitious and terrific party speaker I think I've ever seen. And I will not be buying it, but I love to pieces that it exists. I cannot get behind Nelai's love of a typical party speaker. This thing, on the other hand, fully into it. Yes. Listen, five grant, you can't put a price on this kind of convenience.

You can. It's $5,000. That's the beauty of it. So I do have a question about the specs here. Is there a disco ball? So, okay, I'm actually very glad you brought this up. I will see the one distinct failing of this thing is there don't appear to be multicolored lights anywhere, which I think you could actually argue makes it not a party speaker at all.

It's just, it's potentially just a very large speaker. And that is, that's a real shame. Anchor, like, attempted to make a thing that is serious, and that is a huge mistake. I don't believe it will do any cool lights at you at all. And I find that incredibly upsetting. But, you know, for $5,000, there's only so much you can get. My favorite thing about this is there's a graphic on their Kickstarter page that says it shows the nebula and like a 16.7 foot screen.

And it's like, this is $3,698 versus the traditional cost of a $4,000 projector, $200 wireless microphones, which, why? $3,000 Dolby Atmos speakers, a $100 projector stand and a $2,000 inflatable screen. which is apparently the other option for if you want to watch movies in your backyard, and that's $9,000. And this, I would say, is Anchor just really understanding how real people live their real lives. And I respect them for that. Anyway, that is your party speaker update for the day.

Liz, you're up next. What's your first lightning round? So we're going to talk about Brendan Carr. Gentlemen, I'm, please, let's hear your thoughts on Brendan Carr, just the name, because I saw some faces. Are we doing a Nelai free episode of America's number one podcast within a podcast? Brendan Carr is a dummy? Is it time?

Look, if anybody was going to do it in the substitute for Neli on Brendan Carr as a dummy, who else was it going to be? We're thrilled to have you. So, you know, he's got this ongoing war on the First Amendment that he mostly seems to be winning. And the latest iteration of this is threatening. Disney because he doesn't like something that Jimmy Kimmel said. Disney yanking Jimmy Kimmel. And then Consumer Outcry, Disney reinstating Jimmy Kimmel. Brendan Carr being like, it wasn't a threat, really.

I was just saying things on this conservative podcast. Who knew that anybody would take it seriously? Kimmel, by the way, is still not being erred on a number of networks because Sinclair and Nextar, they have a blanket ban on him. So good luck to Jimmy Kimmel out there. One of the things that happened, of course, is the stricent effect. So Kimmel came back to huge ratings and just spent the entire episode making fun of Donald Trump. And now the president is threatening him directly, so that's cool. So that's our Brendan Carr is a big dummy update, is that.

but he has just platform Jimmy Kimmel in a huge way. Congratulations, Brendan. Can I just read you the thing that Donald Trump posted on Truth Social about this, which I think to me is like just a perfect encapsulation of what the Trump administration is trying to do and why everyone who is giving into it is a dofess? Can I just read you this truth social post? A thing I truly hate doing on this podcast is reading truth social posts out loud. But can I just read this one to you?

not only do I want you to read it I want you to read it in your best Donald Trump impression that I will not be doing that that will I will get fired for different reasons if I'm doing that but here let me just read this to you it says I can't believe ABC fake news

gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back the White House was told by ABC that his show was canceled something happened between then and now because his audience is gone and his talent was never there why would they want someone back who does so poorly who's not funny and who puts the network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat garbage. He is yet another arm of the DNC, and to the best of my knowledge,

that would be a major illegal campaign contribution. So just quick pause for David commentary. All of that is bananas nonsense craziness, but is like normal banana's nonsense craziness coming from President Trump. Like the White House is told by ABC that his show was canceled, I'm sure is not a real thing. His audience is gone. His talent was never there. Very funny in context of what you just said, Liz, which is that actually what President Trump did was give Jimmy Kimmel the biggest audience. Maybe he's ever had. All of this is very funny. So then what he says is, I'm back to quoting the President of the United States, which just feels like a relevant thing to say. I think we're going to test ABC out on this. Let's see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad ratings.

I just any time you are sitting in a conference room from now until the end of the Trump administration, I want you to read out loud. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million. This one sounds even more lucrative. And if you give him what he want, he will come after you for more over and over and over. This has been the story. He put it on truth social that what he wants from you is either fealty or money and ideally both. The end. He thinks all of the lay-night hosts are mean to him, and so he wants to cancel their shows and get money from them. Anything you think is not one of those two things is wrong because he's the president of the United States, and he's posting about it on truth social.

Like, it's just right there in front of you. This is what they're trying to do. That's it. So I just, the thing that I want to add here, because I think all of that is correct, David, is that also this man has the glassiest of glass jaws, because if you just say no and you just don't do it, he pivots and he goes and bully somebody else.

And it would be really nice if anybody, who thinks of themselves as a leader of anything, like, let's say the Democratic Party or perhaps a CEO of some kind, maybe a university president, were to observe this phenomenon and just say no. What a, what a concept. You'll notice John Oliver, who I think has done a terrific job of, like, the thing he said, which is the four words you say to somebody, who is bullying you like this is, fuck you make me. Really interesting.

Trump is not spending a lot of time posting about how bad John Oliver is. Truly fascinating. I suspect he is probably going to tell one of the Ellicence to do something about it if and when they own the company that runs John Oliver's show. But that's a whole different story.

Yeah, meanwhile, I really, like, I'm glad you brought this up, Liz, and I think we should just briefly make sure we do not let Brendan Carr off the hook for backtracking so hard and so aggressively and so, like, cowardly on the whole easy way or the hard way thing. Because at the beginning of this, he went on Benny Johnson's YouTube channel and said, about the Kimmel thing, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.

And it is very clear what that means. My guy has been out here threatening to get rid of everybody's broadcast licenses at the drop of the hat. Like, if you wear the wrong color T-shirt, he's like, I'm going to take away your broadcast license. I don't like it. And then this time, he gave this really long, meandering answer. about how actually the FCC shouldn't have to be involved at all. And this is the easy way is that they just solve this problem for themselves. And the hard way as somebody files an FCC complaint.

And it's just like, Brendan, if you're going to be this guy, be this guy. Don't like wuss out the minute somebody cancels Disney Plus because you're an idiot. Like, ugh. I almost like I like him less than I ever have now. I will say this for some of the other people that we make fun of on the show. At least they have the courage of their convictions. Commit to the bit. Yes.

Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, that's this week's version of Brandon Carr's dummy. I'm very angry about this whole situation. And we're going to have to do more of this because it is all increasingly tied together in ways that feel worse and bad all of time. Jake, give us something else to talk about. Okay. I'm going to take the temperature down.

maybe it depends if you just bought a new iPhone there's headlines bound on the internet about scratch gate which is this allegation that the the new iPhone 17 pro can be very easily scratched the new models they have two types of material on the back of the phone there's a there's the ceramic shield coating on a portion of it and then there's anodized aluminum and if you scratch stuff all over it, it gets all dusty and it looks bad. And there's all these photos of, from the Apple store where people are like, all these things are like getting nasty after just a day. And then separately there's all this stuff about how like the edges are susceptible scratches. David, I'm curious if you have seen any of these videos, any of these photos. I, my, my, my,

quick, I think this is all extremely overstated and unimportant. I can't believe you, you started this by saying that temperature is going to go down. Scratch gate is real, Jake. Is it? Scratch gate all caps, exclamation point. No. Do I think the fact that you can scratch your phone is a bummer and is a real thing? Yes.

Do I think this is like, you know, everyone is canceled because of scratch gate? Probably not. Like, the thing I think is sort of fascinating is the tech woven cases, Apple's like new material came seem to be fabulous. All of the tests of them have been very good. People are really impressed with how they look and how they look and how they're holding up. The fine woven was a disaster

and tech woven seems to be pretty good. But I have gotten like a shocking number of signal messages and emails and tips and all kinds of stuff from people being like, I went to the Apple store and all of the display models are scratched to bits. And there seems to be, like, it seems to be real. So I haven't scratched the phone myself,

but, you know, I watched the Jerry Rig Everything video. He goes at that thing with some coins and some picks. most of it apparently is material transfer from the scratching object onto the phone that you can just wipe off it's a video he just wipes the stuff off it's fine it's fine just wipe off the phone I don't know I haven't tried

maybe it gets worse Travis our producer and he is shaking his head he thinks I'm dead wrong on this so listen the title of this episode is going to be Scratchgate exclamation point Scrash gate listen if I'm wrong send me some videos of

wiping off the back of an iPhone and doesn't come off and I will acknowledge that I have erred here. But if not, put a case in your phone. It'll be fine. Liz, are you a case person? Yeah, I am. But I just wanted to say there is a real scandal here

that I feel no one is covering in the media. So I'm going to take my position, you know, because I feel morally obligated to speak for the iPhone mini people. As someone who recently replaced the battery on her iPhone mini because the phones are too big. I just want, you know, there are a lot of us out here who have small hands and the phones are too large and it would be so nice if the mini came back like every five years or so every time I need to buy a phone. That's all. Agreed. 100%. I think all of the people who love the iPhone air would have loved it more if it was smaller. And I think it would suddenly be everybody's favorite phone. I think the thing about this that is actually a bummer to me is I think we just continue down the road of needing.

to baby our phones. And I think, I think everyone needs to spend more time building phones that we don't need to worry about. And just the idea that my phone might get gross because I throw it in my bag or have it in my pocket is a bummer. And these things are just too mature and too important to be that kind of thing. And we're making real progress on like, my screen doesn't shatter if I look at it wrong. Like, that's great. And I think that's awesome. But every single time this happens, it's like two steps forward and one step back. We've invented a new way to screw up your phone. And I just think that's a bummer. David, the phone gets gross because your hands are filthy. Yeah, I mean, we are the gross ones. Right. The call is coming from inside the house, man.

Yeah. No, that's, that's fair. I can't really disagree with that. If you want to rant and rave to Jake about Scratchgate, please call the hotline. 866, first one-one. Nothing would make me happier than playing a bunch of angry Scratchgate voicemails at Jake on next week's episode. So please call with all of your feelings about Scratchgate. Um, my next one, Liz, I picked this specifically because I want to talk to you about it for a minute. I have been sort of against my own best interests fascinated by these like digital writing tools for forever. I have garbage handwriting. I don't write ever. And yet every time LiveScribe is like, we've built a, we've built a smart notebook. Like I will spend $75 on it. Um, this time it's Montblanc, which came out with what I can only describe as like a pretty simple digital e-ink screen thing and a digital pen.

The difference is it is modeled on a Montblanc pen. And importantly, it costs $905. It's called the Montblanc digital paper. It's a writing tablet. And what I want to know is, Liz, you are the Verges' preeminent pen and paper scholar. What do you make of these things? Is this a good idea? Are you going to buy a Montblanc e-ink tablet?

No, first of all, because I have a bunch of bottles of, like, real ink, like actually, real ink to use up. But I will say as somebody who spends too much time thinking about fountain pens, Montblanc is pretty well known in the fountain pin community for being incredibly overpriced. And if you're interested in quality pens, there are a lot better options out there. It's sort of more of a status symbol than like a real leader in making good pens. And in particular, you know, the sort of consensus seems to be that like the peak for Montblanc was like, I don't know, the 1960s or the 1970s. So if you are thinking about a Montblanc pen, like you should go on eBay and get a used one. And a lot of them have been refurbished.

And because these are fountain pens and not like modern technology, they are a, durable and they don't crumble after five years. And they're meant to last forever. And if you take care of them, they will. So that's sort of the pen and ink take on Mont Blanc. That is good to know. I think when we published this, I would say the overwhelming reaction was, A, this is ridiculously expensive. And B, I'm not sure I trust Montblanc to be a good steward of a digital writing system for a very long time. And I would say I agree with both of those things. And yet, I look at this thing and I'm like, maybe. that would make my handwriting better. Like, maybe. Maybe, maybe I'll take handwritten notes forever and everything will be lovely. David, can I penable you? Can I send you a fountain pen?

I literally, I was thinking about this. You picked up that thing of ink and I had this moment of being like, literally if you handed that to me, I would have absolutely no idea what to do. I would have just like, okay, this is, I'm never going to touch this again. I'm going to put it down on my desk and try not to spill it. But yes, please, nothing would make me happier than becoming like a, everything about my personality suggests that I should be a real weirdo about pens. So I'm in. Let's, let's make this happen sometime. All right. Speaking of, back to you, Liz. What's your, what's your second

lightning round? It's time to talk about AI. So, Nvidia has invested in Open AI. And it's, here's the thing. I, you know, I have this obsession with how this, this, the money is going here because I just, it, it's just something that feels weird to me about Nvidia investing in so many companies that buy Nvidia chips, like people are handing the same $5 back and forth. And it wasn't just, you know, OVNAI, it's CoreWeave too. And there's like this whole ecosystem that Nvidia is investing in that then turns around and buys a bunch of invidia products. And then OpenAI, of course, has its investments in a number of companies that are dependent on the Open AI platform. And there's just this, it's like a rat's nest of money and

investments. And I feel that this is maybe the best way to like look at it and think about it, this partnership, which like feels kind of vague. Like the partnership, like, the partnership, which was announced Monday, says that OpenAI is going to build and deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI data centers with NVIDIA's systems. And NVIDIA intends to invest 100 billion in Open AI as each gigawatt is deployed. So, like, I want to be clear about how open this is about being completely circular. Like, this is like in the text of the deal. I am bewildered by this because it feels like I'm watching, it feels like I'm watching like a spring, like, start to wind up and get tighter and tighter and tighter, which, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe I'm just being paranoid. But given how much of the current economy is dependent on AI and AI investment, which is substantial, by the way, I'm wondering. that like this seems like a pretty fragile ecosystem if everybody is constantly, you know, winding money up with each other. What happens if one part of that system fails?

So just putting that out there that this is yet another sort of winding of the crank of what appears to me to be a feedback machine. Let's see how it goes. There was a great Wall Street Journal story this week. and the headline was Nvidia has a problem, colon, too much money. And that is like,

if that is not an indication of like the strangeness of this moment that we're in, I don't know what it is. Because I think you're right that not only is the bet on AI the thing that is propping everything else up,

but it is like specifically Nvidia. I saw somebody characterize the Nvidia OpenAI investment as Nvidia giving OpenAI a $100 billion dollar Nvidia gift card, which I like very much. and feels about right.

And it is just, like, it is, it is wild how much of this whole race is tied up in this one company. And that's not to suggest that, like, it is on its own. Like, I've called in Open AI a house of cards that's about to collapse, and I still kind of believe that. InVIDIA doesn't seem to be that. Invidia seems to just be doing great and have just made a lot of correct calls all in a row. But it is still weird that everything is so tied up in this one company, which is now just, like, pouring all of the money that it has back. into the rest of the industry because it doesn't know what else to do with all of this money. It's just wild.

So I want to recap some very recent history, which is not tech history, in which you may be unfamiliar with. But one of the driving forces of the 2008 financial crisis was the shadow banking system. There were all these money market funds, which worked kind of like a savings account, but not really, that had more money than they knew what to do with. with in terms of investments. And that was what drove the demand for mortgages. That was like the initial thing winding the crank. And so seeing that Nvidia has more money than it knows what to do with and watching it make some of these investments, I mean, maybe I just have like a great

financial crisis PTSD since that happened, you know, very early in my career and very early in my adulthood. But I don't like the parallel. Yeah, listen, it's not, we're not saying it's the same thing. It's just that it has all the same characteristics. You know what I mean? Anyway, TBD. Let's see how this goes. No, I think the, the, yeah, all of the money is like, I'm increasingly, like, I really like your, your characterization of it as everybody's just passing the same $5 around. And I think if you look at it like that, it makes a lot of what's happening in AI seems sort of absurd. And I think that is probably the correct way to be looking at all of this right now. The stakes are super high and it is all nonsense, all at the same time

somehow. I can't speak to like the tech end of AI because I am a technology normal. I'm like the only technology normal we employ besides our features editor, I think. Listen, you already showed us the thing of fountain pen ink on your desk. Like we get it. But I got to say, I don't understand the financial end of AI or how it ever makes money. Because the thing about software is that you make a thing once and then you copy it infinity times and you make infinity profit. And we know from streaming that as, you know, if you have something that requires servers, as more people use it, like, you have to invest more stuff. And the only explanation I've heard for how AI makes money is like it, like mysteriously gets much cheaper and better, very fast. Like,

which to me is like the underpants, gnomes explanation of how AI makes money. Like, it just mysteriously happens because what I kind of see happening is like if, this is a big if, this is a big if, by the way, given AI's current capabilities, but if AI does become an important part of the business world or people's personal lives, and we have to scale all these data centers up, that's just so expensive that I don't, I don't understand how this works. financially. Yeah. If you do, tell us, but I won't believe you. Just in case you're wondering. Email me. Liz at the verge. Tell me how it works financially. I would love to, like, seriously,

I'm not kidding. Like, email me. Please help. My family is starving. All right, Jake, you're up last. What's your second lightning round? David, I did both of you, quickly. How much would you pay for a dark mode theme on your favorite app? You know I'm the wrong person asked this question. Is the answer $900 a year? No, it isn't. I can tell you that. Well, then American Express's new platinum card is not for you. They recently raised the price on their platinum card.

It costs $895 a year, which is a little more than the $0 that I prefer to pay for a credit card. But to make it a more appealing offer, they said, hey, we've got a new app feature. they have a quote, premium theme. And it turns the app from, I think, a dark blue to black. Wait, this is now like a cardholder perk. They're like, okay, you get points at restaurants. You get insurance when you rent a car, which, by the way, one of the best reasons to get an Amex is rental car insurance.

And you get dark mode in the Amex app. Yeah, you get dark mode. But only if you pay for, like, one of their finest cards. Oh, God, I hate things. Okay, I'm looking at this picture. I will say, the app looks sick. They're not wrong. You get all these points.

You get dark mode. What's to complain about? You'll make that $900 a year back in terms of pleasure to your eyes. This is literally, ugh. The Platinum App Experience introduces a new premium theme. I'm reading their press release with late and dark modes that match device settings. The redesigned overview screen brings together a welcome bonus. progress tracking and account set up tasks in one dashboard.

You know what this is like, this is like when BMW is like, we'll make your car slightly faster, but only for $500. This is awful. Honestly, this is some like Silicon Valley on HBO shit in the worst possible way. I, I, I 100% am in support of this. I love this. I think this is ludicrous. I think this just fully lays out how ludicrous the entire credit card situation is.

I it's love I great it's great I love it I'm sold a short welcome video and updated card art make the experience premium from the start this is the worst this no this makes me hate things I have a I have a free American Express card that I'm now gonna have to get rid of because I hate this so much all your friends will know that you've got the cool card when you open up the AMX app and it's all black and you're like they're like wish I could have that no all of your friends know you have the cool card because it's heavy and metal and makes a sense when you performatively throw it on the table. That's what I'm paying for. No, but you don't use the card anymore because you're tapping to pay. You have to open it up. Look at your point balance in front of your friends. Be like, oh, boy, all these points I've got from spending too much money that I don't have on hotels.

I hate so much that you're exactly correct. That somewhere there was a meeting where they were like, how are our members going to communicate their status in a digital world? And somebody was like, make the app black. And they were like, you're a genius. You're promoted. $900 a year. This sucks.

I don't like it at all. So, you know how spam emails are frequently misspelled so as to make sure that it finds the most credulous target? This is that but for credit cards.

Like, the person for whom $900 is nothing to spend on a display. is the person they want to have that card. Like, the person for whom $900 is peanuts is exactly the person they want to have that card. So I do think that there is, like,

there's some status signaling going on. I'm sure there's, like, a bunch of iBankers who are, like, going to be getting this on the first day so that they can whip it out when they go to whatever the hot spots are now in New York. I haven't lived there in quite some time, so I was going to say Cypriani, but I don't even know if that's still open.

But like, you know, this is not just status signaling. It's selection. It's customer selection. It is. All of that is true. And I will say this suggests that American Express only made one mistake in this whole thing, which is that the background should not be black. It should be gold.

And your phone should be so shiny when you go to pay with your sick premium card. Because who's going to notice dark mode? Dark mode just looks like dark mode. But if my phone glows gold, like when Trump Mobile does this, it's going to be gold. And it's going to blow your mind. You're going to love it. Also, somebody sent me an email saying that the Trump Mobile website now lists a bunch of refurbished Samsung and iPhones as made in the USA, which Trump Mobile has just gone full nonsense. And that website and product are maintained by no one.

And it's all made up. I believe the phone is supposed to ship this month. So I'm looking forward to receiving hours. If you got one, I want to hear from you. I want to meet you in person. And we have a lot to talk about. All right. But all of that is for another show.

For now, it is time for us to go. We've gone way over as we are want to do. Rending cars a dummy appears to be back in just full force. I hate it. But this is what we do here now. We have a lot coming up next week. So stick around. We're going to talk about smart home stuff.

like I said, Amazon has the big echo event coming up next week. Google is doing some stuff. Presumably there will be more TikTok stuff to talk about. So Jake, Liz, we'll be back. We're going to do more of this. For now, that is it for the Vergecast. If you have questions or thoughts about all of this, if you want to buy TikTok, let us know.

Vergecast of the Verge.com is the email. 866, Verge-1-1 is the hotline. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larcuck. We will be back next week, and we will see you then.

Rockball.